It was when he was in one of these ecstatic moods that he told me of his telephone conversation with Stalin about Man- del'shtam's arrest, the famous conversation of which many differ­ing versions circulated and still circulate. I can only reproduce the story as I remember that he told it me in 1945. According to his account he was in his Moscow flat with his wife and son and no one else when the telephone rang, and a voice told him that it was the Kremlin speaking, and that comrade Stalin wished to speak to him. He assumed that this was an idiotic practical joke, and put down his receiver. The telephone rang again, and the voice somehow convinced him that the call was authentic. Stalin then asked him whether he was speaking to Boris Leonidovich Pasternak. Pasternak said that it was indeed he. Stalin asked whether he was present when a lampoon about himself, Stalin, was recited by Mandel'shtam. Pasternak answered that it seemed to him of no importance whether he was or was not present, but that he was enormously happy that Stalin was speaking to him; that he had always known that this would happen; that they must meet and speak about matters of supreme importance. Stalin then asked whether Mandel'shtam was a master. Pasternak replied that as poets they were very different; that he admired Mandel'shtam's poetry but felt no affinity with it; but that, in any case, this was not the point at all.

Here, in recounting the episode to me, Pasternak again embarked on one of his great metaphysical flights about the cos­mic turning-points in the world's history; it was these that he wished to discuss with Stalin - it was of supreme importance that he should do so. I can easily imagine that he spoke in this vein to Stalin too. At any rate, Stalin asked him again whether he was or was not present when Mandel'shtam read the lampoon. Pasternak answered again that what mattered most was his indispensable meeting with Stalin, that it must happen soon, that everything depended on it, that they must speak about ultimate issues, about life and death. 'If I were Mandel'shtam's friend, I should have known better how to defend him,' said Stalin, and put down the receiver. Pasternak tried to ring back but, not surprisingly, failed to get through to the leader. The episode evidently preyed deeply upon him. He repeated to me the version I have just recounted on at least two other occasions, and told the story to other visi­tors, although, apparently, in different forms. His efforts to res­cue Mandel'shtam, in particular his appeal to Bukharin, probably helped to preserve him at least for a time - Mandel'shtam was finally destroyed some years later - but Pasternak clearly felt, it may be without good reason, but as anyone not blinded by self- satisfaction or stupidity might feel, that perhaps another response might have done more for the condemned poet.[29]

He followed this story with accounts of other victims: Pil'nyak, who anxiously waited ('was constantly looking out the window') for an emissary to ask him to sign a denunciation of one of the men accused of treason in 1936, and because none came, realised that he, too, was doomed. He spoke of the circum­stances of Tsvetaeva's suicide in 1941, which he thought might have been prevented if the literary bureaucrats had not behaved with such appalling heartlessness to her. He told the story of a man who asked him to sign an open letter condemning Marshal Tukhachevsky. When Pasternak refused and explained the rea­sons for his refusal, the man burst into tears, said that the poet was the noblest and most saintly human being whom he had ever met, embraced him fervently; and then went straight to the secret police, and denounced him.

Pasternak went on to say that despite the positive role which the Communist Party had played during the war, and not in Russia alone, he found the idea of any kind of relationship with it increasingly repellent: Russia was a galley, a slave-ship, and the Party men were the overseers who whipped the rowers. Why, he wished to know, did a British Commonwealth diplomat then in Moscow, whom I surely knew, a man who knew some Russian and claimed to be a poet, and visited him occasionally, why did this person insist, on every possible and impossible occasion, that he, Pasternak, should get closer to the Party? He did not need gentlemen who came from the other side of the world to tell him what to do - could I tell the man that his visits were unwelcome? I promised that I would, but did not do so, partly for fear of rendering Pasternak's none too secure position still more precarious.

Pasternak reproached me, too; not, indeed, for seeking to impose my political or any other opinions on him - but for something that to him seemed almost as bad. Here we both were, in Russia, and wherever one looked, everything was disgusting, appalling, an abominable pigsty, yet I seemed to be positively exhilarated by it: 'You wander about', he said, 'and look at every­thing with bemused eyes' - I was no better (he declared) than other foreign visitors who saw nothing, and suffered from absurd delusions, maddening to the poor miserable natives.

Pasternak was acutely sensitive to the charge of accommodat­ing himself to the demands of the Party or the State - he seemed afraid that his mere survival might be attributed to some unwor­thy effort to placate the authorities, some squalid compromise of his integrity to escape persecution. He kept returning to this point, and went to absurd lengths to deny that he was capable of conduct of which no one who knew him could begin to conceive him to be guilty. One day he asked me whether I had heard any­one speak of his wartime volume of poems On Early Trains as a gesture of conformity with the prevailing orthodoxy. I said truth­fully that I had not heard this, that it was an absurd suggestion.

Anna Akhmatova, who was bound to him by the deepest friendship and admiration, told me that, at the end of the War, when she was returning from Tashkent, to which she had been evacuated from Leningrad, she stopped in Moscow and visited Peredelkino. Within a few hours of arriving she received a mes­sage from Pasternak that he could not see her - he had a fever - he was in bed - it was impossible. On the next day the message was repeated. On the third day he appeared before her looking unusually well, with no trace of any ailment. The first thing he did was to ask her whether she had read this, the latest book of his poems. He put the question with so painful an expression on his face that she tactfully said that she had not, not yet; at which his face cleared, he looked vastly relieved, and they talked happily. He evidently felt ashamed, needlessly, of these poems. It seemed to him a kind of half-hearted effort to write civic poetry - there was nothing he disliked more intensely than this genre.

Yet, in 1945, he still had hopes of a great renewal of Russian life as a result of the cleansing storm that the War had seemed to him to be - a storm as transforming, in its own terrible fashion, as the Revolution itself, a vast cataclysm beyond our puny moral categories. Such vast mutations cannot, he held, be judged. One must think and think about them, and seek to understand as much of them as one can, all one's life; they are beyond good and evil, acceptance or rejection, doubt or assent; they must be accepted as elemental changes, earthquakes, tidal waves, trans­forming events which are beyond all ethical and historical cate­gories. So, too, the dark nightmare of betrayals, purges, massacres of the innocents, followed by an appalling war, seemed to him a necessary prelude to some inevitable, unheard-of victory of the spirit.

I did not see him again for eleven years. By 1956 his estrange­ment from his country's political establishment was complete. He could not speak of it, or its representatives, without a shudder. By that time his friend Olga Ivinskaya had been arrested, interro­gated, maltreated, sent to a labour camp for five years. 'Your Boris,' the Minister of State Security, Abakumov, had said to her, 'your Boris detests us, doesn't he?' 'They were right,' Pasternak said: 'she could not and did not deny it.' I had travelled to Peredelkino with Neuhaus and one of his sons by his first wife, who was now married to Pasternak. He repeated over and over again that Pasternak was a saint: that he was too unworldly - his hope that the Soviet authorities would permit the publication of Doctor Zhivago was plainly absurd - martyrdom of the author was far more likely. Pasternak was the greatest writer produced by Russia for decades, and he would be destroyed, as so many had been destroyed, by the State. This was an inheritance from the tsarist regime. Whatever the differences between the old and the new Russia, suspicion and persecution of writers and artists were common to both. His former wife Zinaida - now Paster­nak's wife - had told him that Pasternak was determined to get his novel published somewhere. He had tried to dissuade him, but his words were in vain. If Pasternak mentioned the matter to me, would I - it was important - more than important - perhaps a matter of life and death, who could tell, even in these days? - would I try to persuade him to hold his hand? Neuhaus seemed to me to be right: Pasternak probably did need to be physically saved from himself.

By this time we had arrived at Pasternak's house. He was wait­ing for us by the gate and let Neuhaus go in, embraced me warmly and said that in the eleven years during which we had not met much had happened, most of it very evil. He stopped and added, 'Surely there is something you want to say to me?' I said, with monumental tactlessness (not to say unforgivable stupidity), 'Boris Leonidovich, I am happy to see you looking so well. But the main thing is that you have survived. This seemed almost miraculous to some of us' (I was thinking of the anti-Jewish per­secution of Stalin's last years). His face darkened and he looked at me with real anger: 'I know what you are thinking,' he said. 'What am I thinking, Boris Leonidovich?' 'I know, I know it, I know exactly what is in your mind,' he replied in a breaking voice - it was very frightening - 'do not prevaricate. I can see more clearly into your mind than I can into my own.' 'What am I thinking?' I asked again, more and more disturbed by his words. 'You think - I know that you think - that I have done something for them.' 'I assure you, Boris Leonidovich,' I replied, 'that I never conceived of this - I have never heard this suggested by anyone, even as an idiotic joke.' In the end he seemed to believe me. But he was visibly upset. Only after I had assured him that admiration for him, not only as a writer, but as a free and inde­pendent human being, was, among civilised people, worldwide, did he begin to return to his normal state. 'At least', he said, 'I can say, like Heine, "I may not deserve to be remembered as a poet, but surely as a soldier in the battle for human freedom."'[30]

He took me to his study. There he thrust a thick envelope into my hands: 'My book,' he said, 'it is all there. It is my last word. Please read it.' I read Doctor Zhivago during the following night and day, and when, two or three days later, I saw him again, I asked what he intended to do with it. He told me that he had given it to an Italian Communist, who worked in the Italian sec­tion of the Soviet radio, and at the same time was acting as an agent for the Communist Italian publisher Feltrinelli. He had assigned world rights to Feltrinelli. He wished his novel, his tes­tament, the most authentic, most complete of all his writings - his poetry was nothing in comparison (although the poems in the novel were, he thought, perhaps the best he had written) - he wished his work to travel over the entire world, to lay waste with fire (he quoted Pushkin's famous biblical line), to lay waste the hearts of men.

After the midday meal was over, his wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna, drew me aside and begged me with tears in her eyes to dissuade him from getting Doctor Zhivago published abroad. She did not wish her children to suffer; surely I knew what 'they' were cap­able of? Moved by this plea, I spoke to the poet at the first opportunity. I promised to have microfilms of his novel made, to bury them in the four quarters of the globe, to bury copies in Oxford, in Valparaiso, in Tasmania, Cape Town, Haiti, Van­couver, Japan, so that copies might survive even if a nuclear war broke out - was he resolved to defy the Soviet authorities, had he considered the consequences?

For the second time during that week he showed a touch of real anger in talking to me. He told me that what I said was no doubt well-intentioned, that he was touched by my concern for his own safety and that of his family (this was said a trifle ironi­cally), but that he knew what he was doing; that I was worse than that importunate Commonwealth diplomat eleven years ago. He had spoken to his sons. They were prepared to suffer. I was not to mention the matter again. I had read the book, surely I realised what it, above all its dissemination, meant to him. I was shamed into silence.

After an interval, we talked about French literature, as often before. Since our last meeting he had procured Sartre's La Nausee, and found it unreadable, and its obscenity revolting. Surely after four centuries of creative genius this great nation could not have ceased to generate literature? Aragon was a time- server, Duhamel, Guehenno were inconceivably tedious; was

Malraux still writing? Before I could reply, one of his guests, a gentle, silent woman, a teacher who had recently returned after fifteen years in a labour camp, to which she had been condemned solely for teaching English, shyly asked whether Aldous Huxley had written anything since Point Counter Point. Was Virginia Woolf still writing? - she had never seen a book by her; but from an account in an old French newspaper which in some mysteri­ous fashion had found its way into her camp, she thought that she might like her work.

It is difficult to convey the pleasure of being able to bring news of art and literature of the outer world to human beings so gen­uinely eager to receive it, so unlikely to obtain it from any other source. I told her and the assembled company all that I could of English, American, French writing. It was like speaking to the vic­tims of shipwreck on a desert island, cut off for decades from civil­isation. All they heard they received as new, exciting and delightful. The Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze, Pasternak's great friend, had perished in the Great Purge. His widow, Nina Tabidze, who was present, wanted to know whether Shakespeare, Ibsen and Shaw were still great names in the Western theatre. I told her that interest in Shaw had declined, but that Chekhov was greatly admired and often performed, and added that Akhmatova had said to me that she could not understand this worship of Chekhov. His world was uniformly drab. The sun never shone. No swords flashed. Everything was covered by a horrible grey mist. Chekhov's universe was a sea of mud with wretched human crea­tures caught in it helplessly. It was a travesty of life. Pasternak said that Akhmatova was wholly mistaken. 'Tell her when you see her - we cannot go to Leningrad freely, as you probably can - tell her from all of us here, that all Russian writers preach to the reader: even Turgenev tells him that time is a great healer and that kind of thing; Chekhov alone does not. He is a pure artist - everything is dissolved in art - he is our answer to Flaubert.' He went on to say that Akhmatova would surely talk to me about Dostoevsky and attack Tolstoy. But Tolstoy was right about Dostoevsky, that his novels were a dreadful mess, a mixture of chauvinism and hysteri­cal religion: 'Tell Anna Andreevna that, and from me!' But when I saw Akhmatova again, in Oxford in 1965, I thought it best not to report his judgement: she might have wished to answer him. But Pasternak was in his grave. In fact, she did speak to me of Dostoevsky with the most passionate admiration.

iii

This brings me to my meeting with the poet Anna Akhmatova. I had been introduced to her poems by Maurice Bowra, and longed to meet her. In November 1945 I went from Moscow to Leningrad. I had not seen the city since 1920, when I was eleven years old and my family was allowed to return to our native city of Riga, the capital of a then independent republic. In Leningrad my recollections of childhood became fabulously vivid. I was inexpressibly moved by the look of the streets, the houses, the statues, the embankments, the market places, the suddenly famil­iar, still broken, railings of a little shop in which samovars were mended, below the house in which we had lived. The inner yard of the house looked as sordid and abandoned as it had done dur­ing the first years of the Revolution. My memories of specific events, episodes, experiences came between me and the physical reality. It was as if I had walked into a legendary city, myself at once part of the vivid, half-remembered legend, and yet, at the same time, viewing it from some outside vantage-point. The city had been greatly damaged, but still in 1945 remained indescrib­ably beautiful (it seemed wholly restored by the time I saw it again, eleven years later). I made my way to the Writers' Bookshop in the Nevsky Prospekt. While looking at the books I fell into casual conversation with a man who was turning over the leaves of a book of poems. He turned out to be a well-known critic and literary historian. We talked about recent events. He described the terrible ordeal of the siege of Leningrad and the martyrdom and heroism of many of its inhabitants, and said that some had died of cold and hunger, others, mostly the younger ones, had survived. Some had been evacuated. I asked him about the fate of writers in Leningrad. He said, 'You mean Zoshchenko and Akhmatova?' Akhmatova to me was a figure from the remote past. Maurice Bowra, who had translated some of her poems, spoke about her to me as someone not heard of since the

First World War. 'Is Akhmatova still alive?' I asked. 'Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna?' he said: 'Why yes, of course. She lives not far from here on the Fontanka, in Fontanny Dom [Fountain House]; would you like to meet her?' It was as if I had suddenly been invited to meet Miss Christina Rossetti. I could hardly speak. I mumbled that I should indeed like to meet her. 'I shall telephone her,' my new acquaintance said. He returned to tell me that she would receive us at three that afternoon. I was to return to the bookshop, and we would go together.

I returned at the appointed hour. The critic and I left the book­shop, turned left, crossed the Anichkov Bridge, and turned left again, along the embankment of the Fontanka. Fountain House, the palace of the Sheremetevs, is a magnificent late baroque build­ing, with gates of exquisite ironwork for which Leningrad is famous, and built around a spacious court - not unlike the quad­rangle of a large Oxford or Cambridge college. We climbed up one of the steep, dark staircases, to an upper floor, and were admitted to Akhmatova's room. It was very barely furnished - virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away - looted or sold - during the siege. There was a small table, three or four chairs, a wooden chest, a sofa, and, above the unlit stove, a drawing by Modigliani. A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe fea­tures, and an expression of immense sadness. I bowed. It seemed appropriate, for she looked and moved like a tragic queen. I thanked her for receiving me, and said that people in the West would be glad to know that she was in good health, for nothing had been heard of her for many years. 'Oh, but an article on me has appeared in the Dublin Review,' she said, 'and a thesis is being written about my work, I am told, in Bologna.' She had a friend with her, an academic lady of some sort, and there was polite conversation for some minutes. Then Akhmatova asked me about the ordeal of London during the bombing: I answered as best I could, feeling acutely shy and constricted by her distant, somewhat regal manner. Suddenly I heard what sounded like my first name being shouted somewhere outside. I ignored this for a while - it could only be an illusion - but the shouting became louder and the word 'Isaiah' could be clearly heard. I went to the window and looked out, and saw a man whom I recognised as Randolph Churchill. He was standing in the middle of the great court, looking like a tipsy undergraduate, and screaming my name. I stood rooted to the floor for some seconds. Then I col­lected myself, muttered an apology, and ran down the stairs. My only thought was to prevent Churchill from coming to the room. My companion, the critic, ran after me anxiously. When we emerged into the court, Churchill came towards me and greeted me effusively: 'Mr X,' I said mechanically, 'I do not suppose that you have met Mr Randolph Churchill?' The critic froze, his expression changed from bewilderment to horror, and he left as rapidly as he could. I have no notion whether I was followed by agents of the secret police, but there could be no doubt that Randolph Churchill was. It was this untoward event that caused absurd rumours to circulate in Leningrad that a foreign delega­tion had arrived to persuade Akhmatova to leave Russia; that Winston Churchill, a lifelong admirer of the poet, was sending a special aircraft to take Akhmatova to England, and so on.

Randolph, whom I had not met since we were undergraduates at Oxford, subsequently explained that he was in Moscow as a journalist on behalf of the North American Newspaper Alliance. He had come to Leningrad as part of his assignment. On arriv­ing at the Hotel Astoria, his first concern had been to get the pot of caviar which he had acquired into an icebox: but, as he knew no Russian, and his interpreter had disappeared, his cries for help had finally brought down a representative of the British Council. She saw to his caviar and, in the course of general con­versation, told him that I was in the city. He said that I might make an excellent substitute interpreter, and unfortunately dis­covered from the British Council lady where I was to be found. The rest followed. When he reached Fountain House, he adopted a method which had served him well during his days in Christ Church (his Oxford college), and, I dare say, on other occasions; 'and', he said with a winning smile, 'it worked'. I detached myself from him as quickly as I could, and after obtaining her number from the bookseller, telephoned

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'. . . after obtaining her number from the bookseller. . .' - the slip of paper on which Akhmatova's telephone number, address and name were written down for Berlin

Akhmatova to offer an explanation of my precipitate departure, and to apologise for it. I asked if I might be allowed to call on her again. 'I shall wait for you at nine this evening,' she answered.

ft

When I returned, a learned lady, an Assyriologist, was also present who asked me a great many questions about English uni­versities and their organisation. Akhmatova was plainly uninter­ested and, for the most part, silent. Shortly before midnight the Assyriologist left, and then Akhmatova began to ask me about old friends who had emigrated - some of whom I might know. (She was sure of that, she told me later. In personal relationships, she assured me, her intuition - almost second sight - never failed her.) I did indeed know some of them. We talked about the com­poser Artur Lurie, whom I had met in America during the War. He had been an intimate friend of hers, and had set to music some of her, and of Mandel'shtam's, poetry. She asked about Boris Anrep, the mosaicist (whom I had never met): I knew little about him, only that he had decorated the floor of the entrance hall of the National Gallery with the figures of celebratedpersons - Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo, Clive Bell, Lydia Lopokova and the like. Twenty years later I was able to tell her that an image of herself had been added to them by Anrep. She showed me a ring with a black stone which Anrep had given her in 1917.

She had, she said, met only one foreigner - a Pole - since the First World War. She asked after various other friends - Salome Andronikova, to whom Mandel'shtam dedicated one of his most famous poems; Stravinsky's wife, Vera; the poets Vyacheslav Ivanov and Georgy Adamovich. I answered as best I could. She spoke of her visits to Paris before the First World War, of her friendship with Amedeo Modigliani, whose drawing of her hung over the fireplace - one of many (the rest had perished during the siege). She described her childhood on the shores of the Black Sea, a pagan, unbaptised land, she called it, where one felt close to an ancient, half-Greek, half-barbarian, deeply un-Russian cul­ture. She spoke of her first husband, the celebrated poet Gumilev. She was convinced that he had not taken part in the monarchist conspiracy for which he had been executed; Gorky, who had been asked by many writers to intervene on his behalf, appar­ently did nothing to save him. She had not seen him for some time before his condemnation - they had been divorced some years before. Her eyes had tears in them when she described the harrowing circumstances of his death.

After a silence, she asked me whether I would like to hear her poetry. But before doing this, she said that she wished to recite two cantos from Byron's Don Juan to me, for they were relevant to what would follow. Even if I had known the poem well, I could not have told which cantos she had chosen, for although she read English fairly freely, her pronunciation of it made it impossible to understand more than a word or two. She closed her eyes and spoke the lines from memory, with intense emotion. I rose and looked out of the window to conceal my embarrass­ment. Perhaps, I thought afterwards, that is how we now read classical Greek and Latin. Yet we, too, are moved by the words, which, as we pronounce them, might have been wholly unintelli­gible to their authors and audiences. Then she read from her book of poems - 'Anno Domini', 'The White Flock', 'Out of Six Books' - 'Poems like these, but far better than mine,' she said, 'were the cause of the death of the best poet of our time, whom I loved and who loved me . . .' - whether she meant Gumilev or Mandel'shtam I could not tell, for she broke down in tears, and could not go on reading.

There are recordings of her readings, and I shall not attempt to describe them. She read the (at that time) still unfinished Poem Without a Hero. I realised even then that I was listening to a work of genius. I do not suppose that I understood that many- faceted and most magical poem and its deeply personal allusions any better than when I read it now. She made no secret of the fact that it was intended as a kind of final memorial of her life as a poet, to the past of the city - St Petersburg - which was part of her being, and, in the form of a Twelfth Night carnival proces­sion of masked figures en travesti, to her friends, and to their lives and destinies and her own - a kind of artistic nunc dimittis before the inescapable end which would not be long in coming. It is a mysterious and deeply evocative work: a tumulus of learned commentary is inexorably rising over it. Soon it may be buried under its weight.

Then she read the Requiem, from a manuscript. She broke off and spoke of the years 1937-8, when both her husband and her son had been arrested and sent to prison camps (this was to hap­pen again), of the queues of women who waited day and night, week after week, month after month, for news of their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, for permission to send food or letters to them. No news ever came. No messages ever reached them. A pall of death in life hung over the cities of the Soviet Union, while the torture and slaughter of millions of innocents were going on. She spoke in a dry, matter-of-fact voice, occasionally interrupting herself with 'No, I cannot, it is no good, you come from a society of human beings, whereas here we are divided into human beings and . . .'. Then a long silence: 'And even now . . .'. She would once more be silent. I asked about Mandel'shtam: she paused, her eyes filled with tears, and she begged me not to speak of him: 'After he slapped Aleksey Tolstoy's face, it was all over . . .'. It took some time for her to collect herself. Then in a totally changed voice, she said, 'Aleksey Tolstoy wore lilac shirts a la russe when we were in Tashkent. He spoke of the marvellous time he and I would have together when we came back. He was a very gifted and interesting writer, a scoundrel, full of charm, and a man of stormy temperament. He is dead now. He was capable of anything, anything. He was a wild adventurer. He liked only youth, power, vitality. He didn't finish his Peter the First because he said that he could only deal with Peter as a young man; what was he to do with all those people when they grew old? He was a kind of Dolokhov. He called me Annushka. That made me wince, but I liked him very much, even though he was the cause of the death of the best poet of our time, whom I loved, and who loved me.' (Her words were identical with those she had used earlier; it now seemed clear to me to whom, on both occasions, she was referring.)

It was, I think, by now about three in the morning. She showed no sign of wishing me to leave, and I was far too moved and absorbed to stir. She left the room and came back with a dish of boiled potatoes. It was all she had, and she was embarrassed at the poverty of her hospitality. I begged her to let me write down the Poem without a Hero and Requiem: she said there was no need for that. A volume of her collected verse was due to appear the next February. It was all in proof. She would send me a copy. The Party, as we know, ruled otherwise. She was denounced by Zhdanov (in a phrase which he had not invented) as 'half nun, half harlot'.[31] This put her beyond the official pale.

We talked about Russian literature. After dismissing Chekhov because of the absence in his world of heroism and martyrdom, of depth and darkness and sublimity, we talked about Anna Karenina. 'Why did Tolstoy make her commit suicide? As soon as she leaves Karenin, everything changes. She suddenly turns into a fallen woman, a traviata, a prostitute. Who punishes Anna? God? No, not God - society - that same society whose hypocrisies Tolstoy is constantly denouncing. In the end he tells us that Anna repels even Vronsky. Tolstoy is lying. He knew bet­ter than that. The morality of Anna Karenina is the morality of Tolstoy's Moscow aunts, of philistine conventions. It is all con­nected with his personal vicissitudes. When Tolstoy was happily married he wrote War and Peace, which celebrates the family. After he started hating Sophia Andreevna, but could not divorce her, because divorce is condemned by society, and maybe by the peasants too, he wrote Anna Karenina, and punished Anna for leaving her husband. When he was old, and felt guilt for still lust­ing violently after peasant girls, he wrote The Kreutzer Sonata and forbade sex altogether.'

These were her words. I do not know how seriously they were meant, but Akhmatova's dislike of Tolstoy's sermons was genuine - she regarded him as a monster of vanity, and an enemy of free­dom. She worshipped Dostoevsky and, like him, despised Turgenev. And, after Dostoevsky, Kafka, whom she read in English translations. ('He wrote for me and about me,' she told me years afterward in Oxford - 'Kafka is a greater writer than even Joyce and Eliot. He did not understand everything; only Pushkin did that.') She then spoke to me about Pushkin's Egyptian Nights, and about the pale stranger in that story who improvised verse on themes supplied by the audience. The virtu­oso, in her opinion, was the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Pushkin's relation to him became ambivalent. The Polish issue divided them. But Pushkin always recognised genius in his con­temporaries. Blok was like that - with his mad eyes and marvel­lous genius, he too could have been an improvisateur. She said that Blok had never liked her, but that every schoolmistress in Russia believed, and would doubtless go on believing, that they had had a love-affair. Historians of literature believed this too. All this, in her opinion, was based on her poem A Visit to the Poet, dedicated to Blok; and, perhaps, also on the poem on the death of The Grey-Eyed King, although that was written more than ten years before Blok died. Blok liked none of the Acmeists, of whom she was one. He did not like Pasternak either.

She then spoke about Pasternak, to whom she was devoted. After Mandel'shtam's and Tsvetaeva's deaths, they were alone. The knowledge that the other was alive and at work was a source of infinite comfort to both of them. They criticised each other freely, but allowed no one else to do so. The passionate devotion of countless men and women in the Soviet Union who knew their verse by heart, and copied it and circulated it, was a source of pride to them. But they both remained in exile. The thought of emigration was hateful to both. They longed to visit the West, but not if it meant that they would be unable to return. Their deep patriotism was not tinged by nationalism. Akhmatova was not prepared to move. No matter what horrors might be in store, she would never abandon Russia.

She spoke of her childhood, her marriages, her relationships with others, of the rich artistic life in Petersburg before the First World War. She had no doubt that the culture of the West, espe­cially now, in 1945, was far superior to it. She spoke about the great poet Annensky, who had taught her more even than Gumilev, and died largely ignored by editors and critics, a great forgotten master. She spoke about her loneliness and isolation. Leningrad, after the War, was for her nothing but the graveyard of her friends - it was like the aftermath of a forest fire, the few charred trees made the desolation still more desolate. She lived by translating. She had begged to be allowed to translate the letters of Rubens, not those of Romain Rolland. After unheard-of obstacles, permission was finally granted. I asked her what the Renaissance meant to her - was it a real historical past, or an idealised vision, an imaginary world? She replied that it was the latter. She felt nostalgia for it - that longing for a universal culture of which Mandel'shtam had spoken, as Goethe and Schlegel had thought of it - a longing for what had been transmuted into art and thought - nature, love, death, despair and martyrdom - a reality which had no history, nothing outside itself. She spoke in a calm, even voice, like a remote princess in exile, proud, unhappy, unapproachable, often in words of the most moving eloquence.

The account of the unrelieved tragedy of her life went beyond anything which anyone had ever described to me in spoken words; the recollection of it is still vivid and painful to me. I asked her whether she intended to compose a record of her liter­ary life. She replied that her poetry was that, in particular the Poem without a Hero, which she read to me again. Once more I begged her to let me write it down. Once again she declined. Our conversation, which touched on intimate details of both her life and my own, wandered from literature and art, and lasted until late in the morning of the following day. I saw her again when I was leaving the Soviet Union to go home by way of Leningrad and Helsinki. I went to say goodbye to her on the afternoon of 5 January 1946, and she then gave me one of her collections of verse, with a new poem inscribed on the flyleaf - the poem that was later to form the second in the cycle entitled Cinque. I realised that this poem, in this, its first version, had been directly inspired by our earlier meeting. There are other references and allusions to our meetings, in Cinque and elsewhere.

I did not see her on my next visit to the Soviet Union, in 1956. Her son, who had been re-arrested, had been released from his prison camp earlier that year, and Pasternak told me that she felt acutely nervous about seeing foreigners except by official order, but that she wished me to telephone her; this was far safer, for all her telephone conversations were monitored. Over the telephone she told me something of her experiences as a condemned writer; of the turning away by some whom she had considered faithful friends, of the nobility and courage of others. She had reread Chekhov, and said that at least in Ward No 6 he had accurately described her situation, and that of many others. Meanwhile her translations from the classical Korean verse had been published - 'You can imagine how much Korean I know; it is a selection; not selected by me. There is no need for you to read it.'

When we met in Oxford in 1965 Akhmatova told me that Stalin had been personally enraged by the fact that she had allowed me to visit her: 'So our nun now receives visits from for­eign spies,' he is alleged to have remarked, and followed this with obscenities which she could not at first bring herself to repeat to me. The fact that I had never worked in any intelligence organisa­tion was irrelevant. All members of foreign missions were spies to Stalin. Of course, she said, the old man was by then out of his mind, in the grip of pathological paranoia. In Oxford she told me that she was convinced that Stalin's fury, which we had caused, had unleashed the Cold War - that she and I had changed the his­tory of mankind. She meant this quite literally and insisted on its truth. She saw herself and me as world-historical personages chosen by destiny to play our fateful part in a cosmic conflict, and this is reflected in her poems of this time. It was intrinsic to her entire historico-philosophical vision, from which much of her poetry flowed.

She told me that after her journey to Italy in the previous year, when she had been awarded a literary prize, she was visited by officials of the Soviet secret police, who asked her for her impres­sions of Rome. She replied that Rome seemed to her to be a city where paganism was still at war with Christianity. 'What war?' she was asked. 'Was the USA mentioned? Are Russian emigres involved?' What should she answer when similar questions were put to her about England and Oxford? For to Russia she would return no matter what awaited her there. The Soviet regime was the established order of her country. With it she had lived, and with it she would die. This is what being a Russian meant.

We returned to Russian poetry. She spoke contemptuously of well-known young poets, favoured by the Soviet authorities. One of the most famous of these, who was in England at the time, had sent her a telegram to Oxford to congratulate her on her honorary doctorate. I was there when it arrived. She read it, and angrily threw it in the waste-paper basket - 'They are all lit­tle bandits, prostitutes of their gifts, and exploiters of public taste. Mayakovsky's influence has been fatal to them all. Maya- kovsky shouted at the top of his voice because it was natural to him to do so. He could not help it. His imitators have adopted his manner as a genre. They are vulgar declaimers with not a spark of true poetry in them.'

There were many gifted poets in Russia now: the best among them was Joseph Brodsky, whom she had, she said, brought up by hand, and whose poetry had in part been published - a noble poet in deep disfavour, with all that that implied. There were others, too, marvellously gifted - but their names would mean nothing to me - poets whose verses could not be published, and whose very existence was testimony to the unexhausted life of the imagination in Russia: 'They will eclipse us all,' she said, 'believe me, Pasternak and I and Mandel'shtam and Tsvetaeva, all of us are the end of a long period of elaboration which began in the nineteenth century. My friends and I thought we spoke with the voice of the twentieth century. But these new poets constitute a new beginning - behind bars now, but they will escape and astonish the world.' She spoke at some length in this prophetic vein, and returned again to Mayakovsky, driven to despair, betrayed by his friends, but, for a while, the true voice, the trum­pet, of his people, though a fatal example to others; she herself owed nothing to him, but much to Annensky, the purest and finest of poets, remote from the hurly-burly of literary politics, largely neglected by avant-garde journals, fortunate to have died when he did. He was not read widely in his lifetime, but then this was the fate of other great poets - the present generation was far more sensitive to poetry than her own had been: who cared, who truly cared about Blok or Bely or Vyacheslav Ivanov in 1910? Or, for that matter, about herself and the poets of her group? But today the young knew it all by heart - she was still getting letters from young people, many of them from silly, ecstatic girls, but the sheer number of them was surely evidence of something.

Pasternak received even more of these, and liked them better. Had I met his friend Olga Ivinskaya? I had not. She found both Pasternak's wife, Zinaida, and his mistress equally unbearable, but Boris Leonidovich himself was a magical poet, one of the great poets of the Russian land: every sentence he wrote, in verse and prose, spoke with his authentic voice, unlike any other she had ever heard. Blok and Pasternak were divine poets; no modern Frenchman, no Englishman, not Valery, not Eliot, could compare with them - Baudelaire, Shelley, Leopardi, that was the company to which they belonged. Like all great poets, they had little sense of the quality of others - Pasternak often praised inferior critics, discovered imaginary hidden gifts, encouraged all kinds of minor figures - decent writers but without talent - he had a mythologi­cal sense of history, in which quite worthless people sometimes played mysterious significant roles - like Evgraf in Doctor Zhivago (she vehemently denied that this mysterious figure was in any respect based on Stalin; she evidently found this impossi­ble to contemplate). He did not really read contemporary authors he was prepared to praise - not Bagritsky or Aseev, not even Mandel'shtam (whom he could not bear, though of course he did what he could for him when he was in trouble), nor her own work - he wrote her wonderful letters about her poetry, but the letters were about himself, not her - she knew that they were sublime fantasies which had little to do with her: 'Perhaps all great poets are like this.'

Pasternak's compliments naturally made those who received them very happy, but this was delusive; he was a generous giver, but not truly interested in the work of others: interested, of course, in Shakespeare, Goethe, the French Symbolists, Rilke, perhaps Proust, but 'not in any of us'. She said that she missed Pasternak's existence every day of her life; they had never been in love, but they loved one another deeply and this irritated his wife. She then spoke of the 'blank' years during which she was officially out of account in the Soviet Union - from the mid- 1920s until the late '30s. She said that when she was not translat­ing, she read Russian poets: Pushkin constantly, of course, but also Odoevsky, Lermontov, Baratynsky - she thought Bara- tynsky's Autumn was a work of pure genius; and she had recently reread Velimir Khlebnikov - mad but marvellous.

I asked her if she would ever annotate the Poem without a Hero: the allusions might be unintelligible to those who did not know the life it was concerned with; did she wish them to remain in darkness? She answered that when those who knew the world about which she spoke were overtaken by senility or death, the poem would die too; it would be buried with her and her cen­tury; it was not written for eternity, nor even for posterity: the past alone had significance for poets - childhood most of all - those were the emotions that they wished to re-create and re-live. Vaticination, odes to the future, even Pushkin's great epistle to Chaadaev, were a form of declamatory rhetoric, a striking of grandiose attitudes, the poet's eye peering into a dimly dis­cernible future, a pose which she despised.

She knew, she said, that she had not long to live. Doctors had made it plain to her that her heart was weak. Above all, she did not wish to be pitied. She had faced horrors, and had known the most terrible depths of grief. She had exacted from her friends the promise that they would not allow the faintest gleam of pity for her to occur; hatred, insult, contempt, misunderstanding, perse­cution she could bear, but not sympathy if it was mingled with compassion. Her pride and dignity were very great.

The detachment and impersonality with which she seemed to speak only partially disguised her passionate convictions and moral judgements, against which there was plainly no appeal. Her accounts of personalities and lives were compounded of sharp insight into the moral centre of characters and situations (she did not spare her friends in this respect) together with fixed ideas, from which she could not be moved. She knew that our meeting had had serious historical consequences. She knew that the poet Georgy Ivanov, whom she accused of having written lying memoirs after he emigrated, had at one time been a police spy in the pay of the tsarist government. She knew that the poet Nekrasov in the nineteenth century had also been a government agent; that the poet Annensky had been hounded to death by his literary enemies. These beliefs had no apparent foundation in fact - they were intuitive, but they were not senseless, not sheer fan­tasies; they were elements in a coherent conception of her own and her nation's life and fate, of the central issues which Pasternak had wanted to discuss with Stalin, the vision which sustained and shaped her imagination and her art. She was not a visionary; she had, for the most part, a strong sense of reality. She described the literary and social scene in Petersburg before the First World War, and her part in it, with a sober realism and sharpness of detail which made it totally credible.

Akhmatova lived in terrible times, during which, according to Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, she behaved with heroism. She did not in public, nor indeed to me in private, utter a single word against the Soviet regime. But her entire life was what Herzen once described Russian literature as being - one continuous in­dictment of Russian reality. The worship of her memory in the Soviet Union today, undeclared but widespread, has, so far as I know, no parallel. Her unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself transformed her into a figure (as Belinsky once predicted about Herzen) not merely in Russian literature, but in the Russian history of our time.

My meetings and conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova; my realisation of the conditions, scarcely describable, under which they lived and worked, and of the treat­ment to which they were subjected; and the fact that I was allowed to enter into a personal relationship, indeed, friendship, with them both, affected me profoundly and permanently changed my outlook. When I see their names in print, or hear them mentioned, I remember vividly the expressions on their faces, their gestures and their words. When I read their writings I can, to this day, hear the sound of their voices.

BORIS PASTERNAK

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak is the greatest Russian writer of our day. No one, not even his bitterest political or personal critics, has dared to deny that he is a lyrical poet of genius whose verse has achieved immortality in his own lifetime, and whose unique position in Russian literature the verdict of posterity is unlikely to alter. The publication abroad of his novel Doctor Zhivago has brought him world-wide fame such as no Russian writer since Gorky has enjoyed. Like Gorky (with whom he otherwise has little in common) he accepted the Revolution. Unlike Gorky and other gifted writers of the Revolution - Aleksey Tolstoy, Ehrenburg, Bunin, Kuprin - he never became an emigre. He remained in his own country and shared the suf­ferings of his nation to the full.

He never ceased writing: when the great persecutions of art and literature began under Stalin in the 1940s his works were virtually suppressed, and he was allowed to publish very little. Never­theless the mere existence among them of a man of magnificent and undisputed genius continued to have a profound moral effect upon literate Russians and upon a good many of those who knew of his achievement only by hearsay but looked on him as a secular saint and martyr who remained faithful to his beliefs and his art against appalling pressure, which broke many other writers.

His position today is extraordinary: like Tolstoy towards the end of his life he is a world-famous writer disapproved of by the government of his country, but regarded even by his critics with a peculiar admiration not unmixed with awe, which genius some­times inspires. He is a man wholly absorbed in his poetry: his writing and his way of life serves his ideal with a most single- hearted purity and devotion. Not even the most captious critics have ever maintained against him that he has made his art serve any ulterior ends, personal or political, or any end but that of pure artistic creation. Everyone who has ever met him knows how inconceivable it is that he should ever take part in a move­ment or campaign or deviation towards the right or towards the left in any political or literary alignment or intrigue. He is a soli­tary, innocent, independent, wholly dedicated figure. His in­tegrity and innocence have been known to move even the most hardened and cynical bureaucrats, upon whose favour his sur­vival has inevitably depended.

Soviet critics have for many years accused him of being eso­teric, sophisticated, over-elaborate, remote from contemporary Soviet reality. What they mean, I think, is that his poetry has been neither propagandist nor decorative. But if what is meant is that his writing is concerned with a private world, or that he speaks in a private language, or is in any sense turned in upon himself, deliberately insulated from the world in which he lives, the charge is wholly groundless. From his earliest years, both as a poet and as a playwright, Pasternak has written out of his direct experience, personal or social or indeed political, in the central tradition of all great Russian writing. And if his poetry is not transparently autobiographical, as is that, for example, of his con­temporary, the poetess Akhmatova, that is because it is in the nature of his art to transmute and not to record. It has been said that all Russian writing is a personal confession, an aveu: Pasternak may be a Westerner in the sense that he does not address direct sermons to the reader as Gogol or Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or even Turgenev often do. Whatever a writer has to say must be turned into his art and not be attached to it as an extra artistic appendage or lay sermon outside the world created by the artist. In this respect he follows Chekhov, who transmutes any­thing, without residue, into the story itself. But his writing, like that of Chekhov, and of all his great predecessors, including the great Symbolist poets of whom he is a younger contemporary, is penetrated by the sense of the responsibility of the artist.

The artist is not a priest or a purveyor of beautiful objects but speaks the truth in public, founded directly upon his own imme­diate experience: in the face of this truth he is merely more impressionable, more responsive, a more penetrating and articu­late critic and exponent than ordinary men. In this sense his art and his conception of it is far closer to the classical 'social' doc­trine of the artist as the most heightened expression of his time and milieu, the classical doctrine of Belinsky and Herzen, than are the later aesthetically 'pure' critics and poets. He looked upon this attitude - which Marxism absorbed - as too close to vulgar utilitarianism. In this sense Pasternak is not at all close to the purists and aesthetes of St Petersburg. He was born in Moscow and has lived the greater part of his life there, and the influences by which he is moulded, the imaginative and humane impression­ism of his father's paintings, his family friendship with Tolstoy, which deeply coloured his childhood and early youth, the meta­physical attitudes of Skryabin, from whom he took lessons in musical composition at a time when he thought that he wished to write music, the social and religious doctrines of Andrey Bely, and the revolutionary futurism of his great friend Mayakovsky, the laureate of the Lenin era of Bolshevism, militated violently against disinterested aestheticism of this type.

Pasternak has never abandoned this direction, he has never retreated into any private citadel or sought to escape from reality in any sense of the words. During his most experimental period, when like the other young revolutionary poets he wrote in a bro­ken, violently distorted, episodic manner, of which there are plenty of analogues in the West, this was a means and nothing more than a means of expressing and reconstructing the real world of action, social upheaval and politics in which he fully lived. The fact that Doctor Zhivago has taken the Western world by storm is due in part to the fact that its readers are as a rule not acquainted with the author's earlier work, to which it is vastly superior but with which it has obvious affinity. The earlier bio­graphical fragment Safe Conduct and the stories written in the 1920s, on which the author is said now to look with little favour, create worlds of experience, they are not mere exercises in craft or virtuoso pieces. The gift that Pasternak possesses beyond all other writers of his generation is that of conveying the organic quality, the pulsation of life within any object in the universe that he creates. No artist has ever exemplified more vividly the Renaissance theory of the artist as creator, as a rival to nature her­self. Stones, trees, earth, water are endowed with a life of their own in an almost mystical vision which fills his poetry from its earliest beginnings. This vision gives its own independent vitality to the human characters who populate his pages, to the buildings which they inhabit, the streets they walk, the three-dimensional social and political situations in which they find themselves. This supreme genius for infusing life into impersonal events - revolu­tions, wars, the rooms in which human beings speak or sleep or think - is at the very opposite pole to realism and naturalism, still remoter from photographic fidelity or journalism.

The contrast between Pasternak and other Soviet writers (with certain honourable exceptions) is not that he is unpolitical, whereas they are involved in the fortunes of their country or their creed; but that their gifts are small, their techniques crude, and the characters whom they create dead from the start. This is borne out all too vividly by the personality of the poet as he has now been described by numerous foreign visitors, with his mag­nificently expressive and handsome face (one described by one of his contemporaries as looking like 'an Arab and his horse'), the extraordinary quality of his language, even in the most ordinary conversation, rich with similes and images, with which this tense, passionate and inwardly secure man of genius delights, moves and overwhelms all who come to see him in his little house in the writers' village near Moscow. There is something astonishing and profoundly moving in this spectacle of an entirely honest, very gifted man living in the midst of a revolution which he has never opposed, speaking across the heads of his fellow citizens to the world. His language, which is the more effective because of a cer­tain old-fashioned sublimity which disappeared from the Western world long ago, reminds one painfully of what it once was to be a great man.

There are writers - great poets among them - whose poetry is distinct from their life and their prose. The life, the other activi­ties, of Browning or Malory or T. S. Eliot are not specifically those of poets. In Pasternak these divisions do not occur. Every­thing that he says, writes is poetical: his prose is not that of a prose-writer but of a poet, with all its merits and defects; his views, his sense of life, his politics, his faith in Russia, in the Revolution, in the new world to come, which is very deep, have the clarity and the concreteness of a poetical vision. He is the last and one of the greatest representatives of the so-called 'Silver Age' of Russian literature. It is difficult to think of any figure compar­able to him in gifts, vitality, impregnable integrity and moral courage and solidity anywhere in the world. Whether they agree or disagree with his point of view, the vast majority of Soviet citi­zens who have heard of him feel a pride in him and feel him, whatever his critics may say, to be at one with them in all the phases of their difficult lives. He has the respect of Communists, non-Communists and anti-Communists alike. No writer has achieved a comparable status in our time.

WHY THE SOVIET UNION CHOOSES TO INSULATE ITSELF

method by which they themselves account for the traditional Russian attitude towards Europe - and towards Great Britain in particular. Her present-day attitude is an inheritance from the only possible explanation - in Russian eyes - of the immense nineteenth-century expansion of imperial Britain. How, the Russians ask, did so small a country manage to spread itself over the face of the earth? There can be only one answer; within the boundaries of this small island there is a tremendous concentra­tion of intellect and energy serving a long-term, Machiavellian plan. For the Russians, regarding themselves as clumsy giants, born muddlers gifted with great emotional resources, this theory has gradually hardened into fact - they assume that every thoughtless British step is part of some long-term scheme: if it is not so, they argue, how can Britain have acquired such power?

One may remark, with some amusement, that this is far from commonly the case; ours is a hand-to-mouth policy, operating by fits and starts, and often an absent-minded one at that. Yet into this theory, this hypothetical pattern of long-term policy, the Russians dovetail each piece of evidence. Forced into so unnatu­ral a schema, British policy is bound to appear malevolent and, naturally, counter-measures have to be taken by the Russians: from Russian counter-measures spring British counter-measures, and so the vicious circle of misunderstanding continues. The 'long-term plan' theory of British policy is strengthened by Marxism, which leads officials to interpret British motives in terms of conscious or unconscious class warfare. A fantastic interpretation of the case of Hess as an elaborate piece of double- crossing by Winston Churchill convinces them of superior British cunning - yet if one asks them for proof of any such the­ory they can produce no concrete evidence, but will merely say that the British deceived others and themselves. The British do not understand the inexorable governing laws of their history, and are mistaken in imagining that they obey ephemeral impulses. British policy obeys the laws of capitalism hurrying to its doom. Any attempt to refute this shows the author to be a fool or a knave. It is difficult to shake the Russians out of this hypothesis, since, whichever way the evidence points, it is sup­ported equally by positive and negative instances.

It is impossible to wonder at the Russians for taking counter- measures, once the complete acceptance of these fixed ideas has been understood. I have heard it said that the Russians have ceased to be conscious Marxists and have become nationalist and opportunist. I do not agree: there is still a universal adherence to a very crude and simple form of Marxism - there might be a change of tactics, perhaps, but there is no change of strategy. This, I feel, is an important fact, because of the fundamental beliefs involved in an acceptance of Marxism - if the rulers of a nation believe in the inevitable internal conflict of capitalism, that belief will have its effect on the nation's foreign policy. Russia's attitude towards Britain is not strictly one of suspicion - this is an illusion on the part of the British. There are plenty of shrewd people in the Soviet Union who know the British well. 'Suspicion' implies that closer acquaintance will bring warmer feelings. This assumption springs from national vanity: there is no reason to think that when the Russians know our true face (and vice versa) they may not distrust it even more than they do now. Suspicion feeds on ignorance, disapproval, which is what many Russians feel, not on knowledge. The more they know the less they forgive. It may as well be faced that they think a non- capitalist world society will in time become a reality, and that this is a fact which is bound to drive other countries against them. Soviet foreign policy is in this sense ideological - I doubt whether the possession, in itself, of Trieste, for example, or the Straits is a basic point; it involves the assumption that Russia wants these places for military purposes. This, I think, is not quite so - their particular demands vary with the regime that is in control of these areas. The Soviet Union still regards Italy as a potentially pro-Fascist country, and is therefore urgent in her demands that Trieste should go to Yugoslavia: for the same rea­son she raises difficulties with Turkey by way of 'Armenian' or 'Georgian' claims.

There is one point I want to make: the security of the Russian system is uppermost in the Russian official mind; it is not a ques­tion of frontier security but of something more intangible. The Russians may be cynical about the means with which they achieve these ends, but they are not cynical about the ends them­selves: they really do believe in the basic principles on which their State is founded, and while other systems exist which might compete with theirs, and until their principles are generally accepted, they will remain nervous and security-conscious. It is thus a little simple of the British Government and public opin­ion, I think, to imagine that the Russians can react to the differ­ence between a liberal and illiberal Britisher, and that by sending to Moscow people who might be supposed to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union any real understanding can be achieved. To them the British are capitalists, and vastly cunning; the subtle dis­tinction between broad and narrow views means no more than that between right-wing and left-wing Communists does to us.

The Soviet Union is most usefully viewed as an educational establishment. It is not a prison - that is a distortion. Its citizens feel much as boys at school, and the main purpose of the school is to educate the Russians into equality with the West as soon as possible. The main point, sometimes admitted by officials, is that the Russians are half barbarian, and they have to be made con­scious of Western civilisation and civilised values. This cannot be done by kindness in a school of two hundred million pupils. It is the same principle as that of the old headmaster: to make men out of callow boys you beat them at regular intervals; otherwise they will be done down by their maturer fellows.

The simplified form of Marxism held by most ordinary people in the USSR is extraordinarily like public school religion, actively believed in by a small minority, passively held by the rest. The Soviet Press may be said to pursue aims similar to those of the school magazine, and, to pursue the analogy further, visitors to the Soviet Union are treated much as strangers found loitering round a school and talking to the boys. As the stranger is not necessarily suspected of warping a boy's mind, so the visitor is not always suspected of spying and plotting - but of wasting the boy's time by distracting his attention. To talk of other standards, political or cultural, to a Russian is thought to deflect him from his purpose and waste his energy. Taken in its context, this is a rational attitude for the Soviet authorities to assume, when they are trying to build up a new society in an imaginary race against time and in a ring of jealous enemies.

It is an attitude relaxed, perforce, during the war, but lately it has been tightened up. The West was surprised at the wartime relaxation of security, but the position was analogous to a Field Day for the school OTC. School regulations are forgotten while uniforms are worn - smoking and even rude language are toler­ated - and so it was for the Soviet armies abroad. On their return, like boys again, officials fear lest they have become too indepen­dent to accept what is still very necessary school discipline. It is difficult to say whether an end will ever be put to these stringent precautions. Officials say that the bonds of discipline will eventu­ally be relaxed, but I wonder whether the means are not so rigid that the ends they are designed to further become thereby less and less attainable.

There was a typical conversation between a high-ranking Soviet official and an MP visiting Russia with a parliamentary delegation. The MP spoke of the wall of suspicion that had existed between the two peoples, how it would break down and how friendship would grow up in its place. 'But,' said he, 'close though we may come, a certain friction is always inevitable.' 'Ah yes,' replied the official, 'no matter how much we limit our peo­ple's contacts, as we always shall.' This shows how much real meaning the Russians attach to routine benevolent patter of this kind.

In face of the Russians' tendency to invent a simple formula to explain the British, the British respond with an equally mislead­ing misreading of Soviet motives. The USSR is not to be inter­preted purely in terms of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great plus an oriental outlook. Their economic and social views and practices are fundamental. But even these are not the crucial issue between them and us. The main point of conflict is the problem of civil liberties: in the Soviet Union civil liberties are a matter of arbitrary decision, like privileges allowed to schoolboys, and they see the British insistence on them as a political defence against the liquidation of capitalist society - doomed by history but able in its own way. This came out very clearly over Indonesia. There was nothing in the Soviet papers for a week to ten days: a brutal massacre of the rebels, with the streets swimming in gore, would have been interpreted as a traditional bout of powerful imperial­ism - and the Russians, fearing British force, would then have had to temporise. As the British had behaved in an enlightened way, the Russians had seen in forbearance the seeds of decadence and uncertainty - Kerenskyism, an imperialism no longer sure of itself, and therefore ripe for dissolution, and worth attacking at once and quite hard.

This country has undergone a profound change of sentiment towards Russia - from being the Red Menace she became our ally in a long war. There was the guilt of Munich to reinforce this change - but lately our public has felt deceived by what it has interpreted as a change for the worse in Russian foreign policy. Britain has developed a formula which describes the Russians as expansionist imperialists, but it has become plain that this is not so, and the disillusion following the failure of the formula is so great that our journals and their readers do not know which way to turn. Both countries are using inadequate formulae to explain each other's attitudes.

The reason for Russia's present 'tough' behaviour is possibly that she feels herself quite genuinely deceived. Britain at first appeared to wish to play with Russia, then came Munich, which they saw as a betrayal, in the first instance, of themselves. And so to some degree it undoubtedly was. Then, in spite of an apparently general Russian expectation of a British switch to co-belligerency with Germany, or, at best, to neutrality, Britain surprised her by offering alliance. Then came the period of the Big Three, and the dominance of Roosevelt and Churchill, which Stalin seemed to understand and believe in; then the death of Roosevelt and the defeat of Churchill - never understood in Russia. The Russians do not now know where they are: they would have understood a division of Europe into spheres of influence, and a cynical and complete disregard of UNO, but they do not understand a system of democratic co-operation on the part of powers of glaringly unequal strength and influence, because this means the League, and the League means an Anglo- Saxon anti-Russian hegemony.

At the end of 1945 there may have come a moment when a crucial decision had to be taken on economic relations with the West. I do not believe that there are two 'ideological' schools of thought in Russia, one which favours co-operation with the West and one which does not: any systematic minority school of thought would long ago have been eliminated. Co-operation with the West is no doubt something pressed by specific depart­ments, for example, the Foreign Ministry, or that of Foreign Trade - a functional, departmental line, not a political one - and is resisted by, say, the Security Police, probably for similarly pro­fessional motives: there is no evidence of any ideological basis for this line. In the same way there is no concrete evidence that the atomic bomb has made any difference to Russian policy. Yet it is interesting that Stalin chose December 1945 to announce another Fifteen-Year Plan. After all, the Russians suffered severe casual­ties during the war - millions of men lost - and great agricultural and industrial areas were ravaged and disordered. It was a moment when they might reasonably have hoped for some relax­ation of material conditions - yet Stalin chose that moment to ask for a further tightening of the Russian belt. This called for great psychological courage, in my view, because although there might not exist such a thing as public opinion in Russia, there is public sentiment. It could have been done only if there appeared no alternative to reliance on their own economic and military power, and done on the ground that Marxism and the sacrifices which it calls for are the only concrete and valid defence in a world full of fools manipulated by 'reactionary' knaves.

I conclude with a criticism of British policy towards Russia. It is necessary to remember that the Russians do not believe a word we say, because they think they understand us more clearly than we do ourselves. Talk, especially soft talk, does no manner of good; and I think Ernest Bevin's truculence works no better, because it serves only to irritate the Russians without frightening them: they do not believe that we have the resources to back our strong words. The only way to convince them that the British mean no harm is simply by not meaning any: they will always judge behaviour by deeds and not by words. If we follow an undeviating policy with whatever we believe right for its end, making concessions where possible, but not letting the end out of sight, and if we treat the Russians as any other great power, despite their odd non-reciprocating behaviour, and do not answer back, despite their intolerable provocation, but firmly contrive to work for whatever seems in our, and the world's, crucial interest, then we may hope for success. Otherwise the wrangle of policies will become an ideological, ultimately armed, conflict, and end in a war between principles equally unacceptable to liberal persons.

THE ARTIFICIAL DIALECTIC

one of the political processes which still causes the greatest per­plexity is to be found not in some unexplored realm of nature, nor in the obscure depths of the individual soul, intractable to psychological analysis, but in a sphere apparently dominated by iron laws of reason, from which, supposedly, the influence of random factors, human whims, unpredictable waves of emotion, spontaneity, irresponsibility, anything tending to loosen the rig­orously logical nexus, has been remorselessly eliminated. The process to which I refer is the 'general line' of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its abrupt and violent changes of direction puzzle not merely the outside world, but Soviet citizens; and not merely Soviet citizens, but members of the Communist Party itself at home and abroad - to whom, as often as not, it occasions disconcerting, violent and even fatal surprise.

Inability to predict the curious movements of the line is a cru­cial failure in a Communist. At best it upsets all his personal cal­culations; at worst, it brings total ruin upon him. Thus the history of Communist Parties outside Russia - and notably of the German Party - provides many instances where sudden switches of the Moscow 'line' have involved these Parties in major disas­ters. The spate of books by such well informed ex-Communists as Barmine, Ciliga, Rossi and Ruth Fischer, as well as the romans- a-clef by gifted authors who have turned against the Soviet regime, such as Arthur Koestler, Humphrey Slater and Victor Serge, deal vividly with this phenomenon. Both in the ideological realm and in the concrete economic and political aspects of Communist foreign policy, much of this uncertainty can doubt­less be put down to the predominance of Russia's national inter­est over the interests of world Communism in general, or of the local Parties in particular. Moreover, since even the Soviet leaders are not all of them men from Mars, they must be credited with the normal coefficient of miscalculation, stupidity, inefficiency and bad luck. But even allowing for disparate factors such as nationalism, human fallibility and the confusion of human affairs in general, the irregular path traversed by the ideological policy of the Soviet Union still remains abnormally puzzling.

Here perhaps some recourse to Marxist doctrine is inevitable, for it is reasonable to assume that Soviet leaders do not merely profess to judge events in the light of some form of Marxism, but in fact sometimes do so. No doubt the intelligence of the mem­bers of the Politburo is of a practical rather than a theoretical bent; nevertheless, the fundamental categories in terms of which the outside world is apprehended, and policies are framed, con­tinue to derive from the cluster of theories put forward by Marx and Hegel, and adapted by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Tito and others, as well as, in a distorted and inverted fashion, by Fascist dictators. According to this developed Marxist theory one must distinguish between 'crests' and 'troughs' - periods when 'history' appears to be in a state of rising ferment and moving toward a revolutionary climax, and, on the other hand, those more frequent times when things tend, or at least seem to tend, to be quiescent and stable. And while, of course, the theory teaches that underneath the placid surface there is always a clash of factors that will ultimately lead to the inevitable collision (which constitutes progress), the process may at times still be latent, invisible - the revolution still burrowing away, in Marx's (and Hegel's) image from Hamlet, like the old mole underground.[32]These are the periods when revolutionary parties should husband and consolidate their resources rather than spend their strength in battle. This theory of alternating phases, which is at least as old as Saint-Simon, appears to be the only hypothesis which offers a plausible explanation of Stalin's policies in the late 1920s and the 1930s.

One of the best examples of the halting of an 'activist' policy is found in the liquidation of Trotsky's aggressive line in China. The reasoning of Stalin and his allies seems to have led to the conclusion that one of the 'quiescent' periods had begun, and that as a result the making or support of violent revolution would 'necessarily' lead to frustration. Conversely, the most spectacular example of a call to arms is the notorious directive to German Communists in 1932 to concentrate their fire upon the Social Democrats as being more dangerous enemies than Hitler. Stalin's speeches of that period are very instructive in this respect: he seems clearly to have assumed that after a long trough of despond in the 1920s the crest of the revolution was beginning to rise once more. He looked upon the economic crisis of 1929-31 as the most violent indication which had yet occurred that the contra­dictions of the capitalist system were at last about to perform their historic task of finally blowing up the entire rickety capital­ist structure. (Nor, incidentally, was it to him alone that the situa­tion appeared in this lurid light; many observers, in lands far apart and belonging to many shades of political opinion, spoke at this time in terms no less dramatic.) In a so-called 'revolutionary' situation the Communist Party advances. The period of quiet incubation during which it is obliged to lull potential rivals and enemies into false security is over; it drops all pretence of solidar­ity with other left-wing and 'progressive' forces. Once cracks have visibly begun to appear in the capitalist order, the decisive moment cannot be very far off, and Lenin's preparation for his coup in September-October 1917 becomes the proper model to follow. The Communist Party, bold, strong, alone knowing what it wants and how to get it, breaks off its false (but at an earlier stage tactically necessary) relationship with the 'soft' and con­fused mass of fellow-travellers, fellow wanderers, temporary allies and vague sympathisers. It takes the great leap across the precipice to the conquest of power for which it alone is - and knows that it is - adequately organised.

The order to advance which Stalin issued to his German allies in 1932 had consequences fatal to them and nearly as fatal for himself - consequences, indeed, familiar enough to the entire world, which has been paying ever since with incredible suffering. Yet even this did not shake Communist faith in the simple formula. It remains unaltered and says again and again: In revolutionary situations, liquidate your now worthless allies and then advance and strike; in non-revolutionary situations, accu­mulate strength by ad hoc alliances, by building popular fronts, by adopting liberal and humanitarian disguises, by quoting ancient texts which imply the possibility, almost the desirability, of peaceful mutually tolerant coexistence. This last will have the double advantage of compromising potential rivals by taking them further than they wish to go or are aware of going, while at the same time embarrassing the right-wing oppositions - the forces of reaction - by ranging against them all the best and sin- cerest defenders of liberty and humanity, progress and justice.

And indeed it may be that this simple maxim will to some extent account for the oscillations of Soviet propagandist policy after 1946, when Soviet planners began by expecting a vast world economic crisis and became correspondingly aggressive and uncompromising. There followed a gradual and reluctant realisa­tion (prematurely foretold by the Soviet economist Varga, who was duly rebuked for ill-timed prescience) that the crisis was not materialising fast enough, and might not come either at the moment or with the violence expected. This may account for attempts in the last two years to replace (at least for foreign export) straightforward propaganda, framed in old-fashioned, uncompromising Marxist terms, with non-Communist values, such as appeals to the universal desire for peace, or to local or national pride in the face of American dictation, or to alleged tra­ditions of friendship between, let us say, Russia and France as contrasted with no less traditional hostility between, for exam­ple, France and England. Soviet reliance on this historical schema of alternating periods of quiescence and crisis (which has a respectable pre-Marxist pedigree) may not be a complete key to all the convolutions of its ideological policies abroad, but without some such hypothesis these policies become totally unintelligible, and can be accounted for only by assuming a degree of blindness or stupidity or gratuitous perversity in Moscow which, on other grounds, can scarcely be imputed to the present rulers of the USSR. And this is a powerful argument for believing the hypoth­esis to be correct.

the artificial dialectic ii

But whatever may be the theory of history which guides the Soviet Government's policy toward its agents abroad, it will not explain the zigzag movement of the Party line within the Soviet Union itself. This is the arm of Soviet policy of which its own citizens stand most in awe, in particular those whose professions cause them to be articulate in public - writers, artists, scientists, academic persons and intellectuals of every kind - since their careers and indeed their lives depend upon their ability to adjust themselves swiftly and accurately to all the alternating shapes of this capri­ciously-moving Protean entity. The principles of its movement are not always, of course, wholly inscrutable. Thus the adoption of the doctrine of 'socialism in one country' in the 1920s could not but alter the entire direction of the Party's activities. Nor could an intelligent observer have felt great surprise when the ideological followers of the earlier, so-called 'Trotskyite', line, or even the individuals personally connected with the banished leader, were, in due course, purged or ostracised. Similarly there was no cause for wonder at the ban on anti-German or anti-Fascist manifestations after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Nor yet at the rise of a nation­alistic and patriotic mood with strong official encouragement, dur­ing the war of national resistance against the Germans.

On the other hand, no one expected or could have foretold such curious incidents as the denunciation of the official Party philosopher, Georgy Aleksandrov, for maintaining that Karl Marx was merely the best of all Western thinkers, and not, as he should have pointed out, a being altogether different from, and superior in kind to, any thinker who had ever lived. The Party authorities maintained that Marx had been described inade­quately - almost insultingly - by being called a philosopher; the impression was conveyed that to say of Marx that he was the best of philosophers was much as though one had called Galileo the most distinguished of all astrologers, or man himself the highest and most gifted among the apes. Again no one had, or perhaps could have, predicted the explosion of feeling (so soon after the mass murders and tortures of Jews by the Nazis) against the older generation of intellectuals, mostly writers and artists of Jewish origin, as a gang of 'rootless cosmopolitans'[33] and petty Zionist nationalists; nor the summary disbandment, not long after, of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Nor, again, could any of the philologists who for so many years had faithfully sub­scribed to the highly fanciful (but officially approved) doctrines of the late Academician Marr be blamed for not foreseeing his sudden eclipse. How could anyone in the world have imagined that so much devoted sacrifice of knowledge and intellect upon the altar of duty to country and Party would be visited by so eccentric a fate as intervention by the Generalissimo himself, with an ex cathedra pronouncement on the real truth about the interrelationships of language, dialects and the social structure?

Everyone who has ever been in contact with Soviet writers or journalists, or for that matter with Soviet representatives abroad, is aware of the extraordinary acuity of ear which such persons develop toward the faintest changes of tone in the Party line. Yet this is of little ultimate avail to them, since it is accompanied by a helpless ignorance of the direction in which the 'line' is likely to veer. There are, of course, endless hypotheses about each individ­ual lunge and lurch, some frivolous, some serious; in Soviet Russia itself they are at times characterised by the sardonic and desperate quality which belongs to the humour of the scaffold, that typi­cally Soviet Galgenhumor which is responsible for some bitter and memorable shafts of wit. But no general explanation seems to have been advanced to cover all the facts. And since it is, after all, unlikely that human beings so coldly calculating as the masters of the Soviet Union would leave the central line from which every­thing derives, and on which everything depends, to chance or the snap decision of the moment, we may find it a not altogether idle pastime to consider a hypothesis which may account for much of this peculiar situation.

iii

Our theory starts from the assumption that there are two main dangers which invariably threaten any regime established by a revolution.

The first is that the process may go too far - that the revolu­tionaries in their excessive zeal may destroy too much, and in par­ticular exterminate those individuals upon whose talents the success of the revolution itself and the retention of its gains ulti­mately depend. Few, if any, revolutions bring about the ends for which their most fervent supporters hope; for the very qualities which make the best and most successful revolutionaries tend to oversimplify history. After the first intoxication of triumph is over, a mood of disillusionment, frustration and presently indig­nation sets in among the victors: some among the most sacred objectives have not been accomplished; evil still stalks the earth; someone must be to blame; someone is guilty of lack of zeal, of indifference, perhaps of sabotage, even of treachery. And so indi­viduals are accused and condemned and punished for failing to accomplish something which, in all probability, could not in the actual circumstances have been brought about by anyone; men are tried and executed for causing a situation for which no one is in fact responsible, which could not have been averted, which the more clear-sighted and sober observers (as it later turns out) had always expected to some degree. Trials and penalties fail to rem­edy the situation. Indignation gives way to fury, terror is resorted to, executions are multiplied. There is no reason why this process should come to a stop without external intervention or physical causes, for there can never be enough victims to expiate a crime which no one has committed, to atone for a crisis which must be attributed to a general and very likely inevitable failure to under­stand the situation correctly. But once the nightmare of mutual suspicion, recrimination, terror and counter-terror has set in, it is too late to draw back: the whole structure begins to crumble in the welter of frantic heresy-hunts from which scarcely anyone will escape. Every schoolboy knows of the violent climax of the Great French Revolution in 1794.

The second danger is precisely the contrary: and is often the natural sequel of the first. Once the original afflatus of revolution is exhausted, enthusiasm (and physical energy) will ebb, motives grow less passionate and less pure, there is a revulsion from hero­ism, martyrdom, destruction of life and property, normal habits reassert themselves, and what began as an audacious and splendid experiment will peter out and finally collapse in corruption and petty squalor. This, too, happened in France during the Directoire, and it has marked the end of the revolutionary phase in many other cases. It seems to be the unavoidable aftermath of many a romantic rising in Latin and Latin-American countries.

The avoidance of these opposite dangers - the need to steer between the Scylla of self-destructive Jacobin fanaticism and the Charybdis of post-revolutionary weariness and cynicism - is therefore the major task of any revolutionary leader who desires to see his regime neither destroyed by the fires which it has kin­dled nor returned to the ways from which it has momentarily been lifted by the revolution. But at this point Marxist revolution­aries find themselves in a peculiar predicament. For according to that element in Marxism which proceeds from the doctrine of Hegel, the world - everything animate and inanimate - is in a con­dition of perpetual inner conflict, mounting ceaselessly toward critical collisions which lift the battle on to a new plane - tensions and conflicts at a 'new level'. Consequently the 'dialectic' itself - for this is what the process is called - should in theory be a suffi­cient guarantee of the vitality of any genuine revolutionary move­ment. For since the dialectic is inexorably 'grounded in the nature of things' and can be neither stopped nor circumvented, the course of the post-revolutionary regimes must - cannot help but - obey its laws. And just as the French Revolution broke out in obedience to those laws, so it declined and ran into the shallows of the Directoire, and, worse still, was followed by the Empire and the Restoration, presumably in obedience to the same dialec­tical process. Whatever degree of determinism Marx's historical materialism is held to entail (and the doctrine is far from clear, either in Hegel or in Marx, and grows particularly dark in the later works of Engels), Stalin seems to have resolved that the gloomy fate apparently in store for previous revolutions should not overtake his regime. Although the majestic self-fulfilment of the world pattern cannot be tampered with or deflected to suit capricious human wills, yet history (to judge by its past perform­ances) did not seem too sure a guarantee of the survival of what Stalin and his Party considered the most desirable features of the Russian Revolution. Nature herself (although in general depend­able enough) sometimes nodded; and some slight adjustments could perhaps be made to render her processes even more regular and predictable. Human skill would be employed in aiding the cosmos to fulfil even more faithfully its own 'inner laws'.

Consequently, Stalin made use of an original expedient, thor­oughly in keeping with the inventive spirit of our time, and in particular with the new fashion of producing synthetic equiva­lents of natural products. As others produced artificial rubber or mechanical brains, so he created an artificial dialectic, whose results the experimenter himself could to a large degree control and predict. Instead of allowing history to originate the oscilla­tion of the dialectical spiral, he placed this task in human hands. The problem was to find a mean between the 'dialectical oppo- sites' of apathy and fanaticism.[34] Once this was determined, the essence of his policy consisted in accurate timing and in the cal­culation of the right degree of force required to swing the politi­cal and social pendulum to obtain any result that might, in the given circumstances, be desired.

Let us apply this hypothesis to the conditions of the Second World War. In 1941, when the fate of the Soviet system seemed to be in the balance, full vent was given to patriotic sentiment. This acted as a safety-valve to the pent-up feeling which the popula­tion had had to repress during the two previous decades. The Party leaders clearly realised that this rush of national feeling acted as the most powerful single psychological factor in stimu­lating resistance to the enemy. The process clearly was not compatible with keeping Communist indoctrination at its full pre-war pressure; the war was won on a wave of patriotic rather than ideological fervour. A certain loosening of bonds began to be felt. Writers wrote more freely; there was, temporarily at least, the appearance of a slightly less suspicious attitude towards for­eigners, at any rate those connected with the Allied countries. Old-fashioned, long-disused expressions of Great-Russian senti­ment, and the worship of purely national heroes, once more became fashionable. Later, however, the victorious Soviet troops who came back from foreign countries, filled (as so often after European campaigns) with a favourable impression of foreign customs and liberties, began to give cause for anxiety; after all, the great Decembrist revolt of 1825 sprang from a similar ex­perience. It became clear to the authorities that a powerful re- inoculation with Communist doctrine - ultimately the sole cement which binds together the ethnically heterogeneous peo­ples of the Soviet Union - was urgently required. The returned soldiers - both victors and prisoners of war liberated in Germany and elsewhere, as well as those likely to come into contact with them at home - would need careful supervision if centres of resistance to the central authority were not to spring up. Unless such re-indoctrination were done swiftly, the entire pattern of Soviet life, depending as in all totalitarian States on ceaseless dis­cipline and unrelaxing tautness, might soon be in danger of sag­ging - notoriously the beginning of the end of all such regimes. Toward the end of 1945, a call was issued for stricter orthodoxy.

The policy of encouraging nationalism was halted sharply. All were reminded of their Marxist duties. Prominent representatives of various nationalities were found to have gone too far in glori­fying their local past, and were called to order with unmistakable severity. Regional histories were suppressed. The all-embracing cloak of ideological orthodoxy once more fell upon the land. The Party was commanded to expose and expel the opportunists and riff-raff who had, during the confusion of war, been permitted to creep into the fold. Heresy-hunts were instituted once more (though not on the appalling scale of 1937-9).

The danger of this kind of move is that it places power in the hands of a class of zealots dedicated to the unending task of puri­fying the Church by severing all offending limbs - and presently of anything remotely capable of promoting growth. Such men will be effective only if those, at least, who compose their central nucleus are fanatically sincere; yet when this happens their activ­ity will inevitably go too far. After purging major and minor dis­sentients, the inquisitors are perforce carried on by their own sacred zeal until they are found probing into the lives and works of the great leaders of the Party themselves. At this point they must be swiftly checked if the whole machine is not to be dis­rupted from within. An added reason for stopping the purge and denouncing its agents as deranged extremists who have run amok is that this will be popular with the scared and desperate rank and file, both of the Party and of the bureaucracy (not to speak of the population at large). A mighty hand descends from the clouds to halt the inquisition. The Kremlin has heard the cry of the people, has observed its children's plight, and will not permit them to be torn limb from limb by its over-ardent servants. A sigh of relief goes up from the potential victims; there is an outpouring of grat­itude which is sincere enough. Faith in the goodness, wisdom and all-seeing eye of the leader, shaken during the slaughter, is once more restored.

Something of this kind occurred after the great purge of 1937-9. It occurred again, in a much milder fashion, in 1947, when purely doctrinal persecution was somewhat relaxed and gave way to a period of national self-adulation and a violent assault on the very possibility of foreign influence, past and present. However grotesque this ultra-chauvinism may have looked when viewed from abroad, and however ruinous to the few representatives of a wider culture still surviving in the Soviet Union, it was probably not ill-received by the mass of the popu­lation (when has nationalist propaganda been unpopular among any people?); and it did stay the hand of the Marxist inquisitor in favour of the more familiar national tradition. On this occa­sion the pendulum was swung in the direction of Russian pride and amour propre. But just as the earlier ideological purges went too far in one direction, so this reaction in its turn duly over­reached itself.

The Soviet Government wishes to preserve a minimum degree of sanity at least among the elite upon which it relies; hence any violent swing of the pendulum always, sooner or later, demands a corrective. In normal societies a movement of opinion, whether spontaneous or artificially stimulated, does not occur in a vac­uum. It meets with the resistance of established habits and tradi­tions and is to some degree swallowed, or diluted, in the eddying of the innumerable currents created by the interplay of institu­tional influences with the relatively uncontrolled trends of thoughts and feelings characteristic of a free society. But in the Soviet Union this random factor is largely absent, precisely because the Party and the State are engaged in sweeping away the smallest beginnings of independent thought. Hence there is a kind of empty region in which any artificially stimulated view (and in the USSR there can scarcely be any other) tends to go too far, reaches absurd lengths, and ends by stultifying itself - not merely in the eyes of the outside world but even within the Soviet Union itself. It is at this point that it must be swung back by means which are themselves no less artificial. This is what occurred when the nationalist-xenophobic campaign reached a point almost identical with that of the most violent phases of the brutal policy of 'Russification' of Tsarist days. (The recent denunciations of cosmopolitan intellectuals were framed in lan­guage almost identical with that of the reactionary, anti-Semitic, fanatically anti-liberal press and police after the repressions fol­lowing the Revolution of 1905.) Something had evidently to be done to restore the fabric of Soviet unity. The Party can, ex hypothesi, never be mistaken; errors can occur only because its directives have been misinterpreted or misapplied. Again, no seri­ous alteration of the bases of the Marxist theory itself is feasible within a system of which it is the central dogma. An open attempt to modify - let alone cancel - any Marxist principles in such central and critical fields as political theory, or even philoso­phy, is therefore out of the question: for there is too serious a danger that, after so many years of life in a straitjacket, confusion and alarm might be created in the minds of the faithful. A system which employs some hundreds of thousands of professional agi­tators, and must put their lessons in language intelligible to chil­dren and illiterates, cannot afford doubts and ambiguities about central truths. Even Stalin cannot disturb the foundations of ide­ology without jeopardising the entire system.

Hence safer areas must be found for the ideological man­oeuvres required in situations which seem to be moving slightly out of control. Music, poetry, biography, even law, are periph­eral territories in which doctrinal pronouncements modifying the 'line' can be made without disturbing the vital central region. The moral of such public statements is very swiftly grasped by the (by now) highly sensitised eyes and ears of intellectuals working in other and often quite distant fields. Philology is still remoter from the centre and, consequently, even safer. Perhaps that is why Stalin chose the theory of language, in what seemed to the uninitiated so whimsical a fashion, to indicate that the 'clarion call' for Marxist purity had had its full effect and must be muted. The mild rectification of the line ordered in the field of linguistics was no sooner made than other relatively 'non- political' specialists must have begun hopefully to ask them­selves whether their windowless worlds too might not expect some small relief - perhaps a chink into the outer universe, or at least a little more breathing-space within. Bounty to grammari­ans and linguists means that musicians and acrobats and clowns and mathematicians and writers of children's stories and even physicists and chemists cower a little less. Even historians have raised their heads; a writer[35] in a Soviet historical journal in the summer of 1951 argued timidly that since Stalin had said nothing about historical studies, might not they also, like linguistics, be excluded from the Marxist 'superstructure', and possess an 'objectivity' and permanent principles which Stalin had so sternly refused to artistic or juridical institutions? Physicists, chemists, even the harassed geneticists whose studies lie so unhappily close to the heart of the historical dialectic, may presently be afforded some relief; certainly the vagaries of the 'line' in their subjects seem to spring from internal political needs more often than from metaphysical considerations or from an incurable penchant for this or that philosophical or sci­entific 'materialism', to which some of their more hopeful or naive Western colleagues, in their anxiety to understand Soviet scientific theory, so often and so unplausibly try to attribute them.

The themes of 'peace' and 'coexistence' indicate unmistakably which way the dialectical machine is veering after the Korean mis­adventure: hence faint and pathetic attempts to hint at 'Western' values again on the part of professors whose love of their subject has not been completely killed. And if such first timorous feelers are not too brusquely discouraged, those who put them forth know that they may at last begin to look to a period of relative tol­eration. But the more experienced know that this is unlikely to last for long. Presently symptoms begin inevitably to indicate that the ties have been loosened too far - too far for a machine which, unless it is screwed tight, cannot function at all. Presently new calls for conformity, purity, orthodoxy are issued; elimination of sus- pects1 begins, and the cycle repeats itself.

Yet something depends on the force with which the pendulum is swung: one of the consequences of driving the terror too far (as happened, for example, during the Ezhov regime in the late 1930s) is that the population is cowed into almost total silence. No one will speak to anyone on subjects remotely connected with 'dangerous' topics save in the most stereotyped and loyal

1 These are as often as not the orthodox of yesterday. One wonders what is to be the fate of Professor Kon [unidentified], who sought, in the summer 'breathing spell' of 1951, to protect history from the fanaticism of the ultra- Marxists of 1946-7. I.B.

formulae, and even then most sparingly, since nobody can feel certain of the password from day to day. This scared silence holds its own dangers for the regime. In the first place, while a large- scale terror ensures widespread obedience and the execution of orders, it is possible to frighten people too much: if kept up, vio­lent repression ends by leaving people totally unnerved and numb. Paralysis of the will sets in, and a kind of exhausted despair which lowers vital processes and certainly diminishes economic productivity. Moreover, if people do not talk, the vast army of intelligence agents employed by the government will not be able to report clearly enough what goes on inside their heads, or how they would respond to this or that government policy. When the waters are very still, and their surface very opaque, they may be running much too deep. In the words of a Russian proverb, 'Devils breed in quiet pools.' The government cannot do without a minimum knowledge of what is being thought. Although public opinion in the normal sense cannot be said to exist in the Soviet Union, the rulers must nevertheless acquaint themselves with the mood of the ruled, if only in the most primi­tive, most behaviouristic, sense of the word, much as an animal- breeder depends on his ability to predict, within limits, the behaviour of his stock. Hence something must be done to stimu­late the population into some degree of articulate expression: bans are lifted, 'Communist self-criticism', 'comradely discus­sion', something that almost looks like public debate is insistently invited. Once individuals and groups show their hand - and some of them inevitably betray themselves - the leaders know better where they stand, in particular whom they would be wise to eliminate if they are to preserve the 'general line' from uncon­trolled pushes and pulls. The guillotine begins to work again, the talkers are silenced. The inmates of this grim establishment, after their brief mirage of an easier life, are set once more to their back-breaking tasks and forbidden to indulge in any interests, however innocent, which take their minds off their labours - the great industrial goals which can be accomplished only with the most undivided attention and by the most violent exertions. Communication with the outside world is virtually suspended. The press is recalled to a sense of its primary purpose - the improvement of the morale of the public, the clear, endlessly reit­erated sermons on the right way of living and thinking. When this state of things grows too dreary even for Soviet citizens, the 'line' oscillates again, and for a very brief period (the penultimate state of which is always the most dangerous moment) life once more becomes a little more various.

iv

This - the 'artificial dialectic' - is Generalissimo Stalin's original invention, his major contribution to the art of government, even more important, perhaps, than 'socialism in one country'. It is an instrument guaranteed to 'correct' the uncertainties of nature and of history and to preserve the inner impetus - the perpetual ten­sion, the condition of permanent wartime mobilisation - which alone enables so unnatural a form of life to be carried on. This it does by never allowing the system to become either too limp and inefficient or too highly charged and self-destructive. A queer, ironical version of Trotsky's 'permanent revolution', or, again, of his 'neither peace nor war' formula for Brest-Litovsk, it forces the Soviet system to pursue a zigzag path, creating for its peoples a condition of unremitting tautness lest they be caught by one of the sharp turns made whenever a given operation begins to yield insufficient or undesirable returns.

Naturally, the need to keep the population on the run in this way is not the sole factor which shapes the ultimate direction of the line. This is determined in addition by the pressures of for­eign policy, national security, internal economic and social needs, and so on - by all the forces which play a part in any organised political society, and which exert their influence on Soviet policy too, albeit in a somewhat peculiar fashion. The Soviet Union is not a Marxist system working in a total vacuum, nor is it free from the effects of psychological or economic laws. On the con­trary, it claims to recognise these more clearly and shape its poli­cies more consciously in accordance with the findings of the natural sciences than is done by 'reactionary' policies doomed to be victims of their own irreconcilable 'internal contradictions'. What, then, makes the political behaviour of the Soviet Union seem so enigmatical and unpredictable to Western observers, whether they be practical politicians or theoretical students of modern politics? Perhaps this perplexity is due in some measure to the failure in the West to realise the crucial importance attached by the makers of Soviet policy to the zigzag path upon the pursuit of which they assume that internal security and the preservation of power directly depend. This technique of deter­mining the 'general line' in accordance with which all the means available to the Soviet State and to Communist Parties at home and abroad are to be used is a genuinely novel invention of great originality and importance. Its successful operation depends on a capacity for organising all available natural and human resources for completely controlling public opinion, for imposing an ultra- rigid discipline on the entire population; and, above all, on a sense of timing which demands great skill and even genius on the part of individual manipulators - especially of the supreme dic­tator himself. Because it requires this - because the exactly cor­rect 'line', undulating as it does between the equally unavoidable and mutually opposed right-wing and left-wing 'deviations' (extremes out of which it is, like the Hegelian synthesis, com­pounded, and which, in the shape of its individual human repre­sentatives and their views, it destroys) - it cannot be determined mechanically. It is an artificial construction and depends on a series of human decisions; and for this reason its future cannot be regarded as altogether secure. So long as someone with Stalin's exceptional gift for administration is at the helm, the movement of the 'line', invisible though it may continue to be to many both within and outside the Soviet Union, is not altogether unpre­dictable. Its destiny when he is no longer in control (whether or not the Soviet Union is involved in a general war) is a subject for hope and fear rather than rational prophecy. For it is certainly not a self-propelling, or self-correcting, or in any respect auto­matically operating piece of machinery. In hands less skilful or experienced or self-confident it could easily lead to a debacle to which human societies are not exposed under more traditional forms of government.

Will Stalin's successors display sufficient capacity for the new technique, which calls for so remarkable a combination of imagination and practical insight? Or will they abandon it alto­gether, and, if so, gradually or suddenly? Or will they prove unable to control it and fall victim to a mechanism too compli­cated for men of limited ability - a mechanism whose very effec­tiveness in the hands of an earlier and more capable generation has so conditioned both government and governed that catas­trophe is made inevitable? We cannot tell; all that seems certain is that Generalissimo Stalin's passing will sooner or later cause a crisis in Soviet affairs - a crisis which may be graver than that caused by the death of Lenin, since in addition to all the other problems of readjustment peculiarly acute in a tight dictatorship, there will arise the agonising dilemma created by the future of Stalin's elaborate machinery of government, too complex to be used save by a great master of manipulation,[36] and too dangerous to interrupt or neglect or abandon.

One other thing seems moderately clear: those who believe that such a system is simply too heartless and oppressive to last cruelly deceive themselves. The Soviet system, even though it is not constructed to be self-perpetuating, certainly bears no marks of self-destructiveness. The government may be brutal, cynical and utterly corrupted by absolute power: but only a moral opti­mism, fed by passionate indignation or a religious faith rather than empirical observation or historical experience, can cause some students of the Soviet Union to prophesy that such wicked­ness must soon itself erode the men who practise it, render them incapable of retaining power and so defeat itself. The governed, a passive, frightened herd, may be deeply cynical in their own fash­ion, and progressively brutalised, but so long as the 'line' pursues a zigzag path, allowing for breathing spells as well as the terrible daily treadmill, they will, for all the suffering it brings, be able to find their lives just - if only just - sufficiently bearable to con­tinue to exist and toil and even enjoy pleasures. It is difficult for the inhabitants of Western countries to conceive conditions in which human beings in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union (or for that matter India or China) can not merely survive but, being surrounded by others in no better plight, and with no alternative forms of life visible through the Curtain to attract and discontent the imagination, adapt themselves to conditions, look on them as normal, contrive to make arrangements, like soldiers in an unending campaign, or prisoners or shipwrecked mariners. Such arrangements may seem intolerable to the average citizen of a civilised community, yet because, if not liberty, then fraternity and equality are born of common suffering, a human life can be lived - with moments of gaiety and enthusiasm, and of actual happiness - under the most appalling and degrading conditions.

And it should be remembered that the art of manipulating the 'general line' consists precisely in this - that human misery must not, taking the population as a whole, be allowed to reach a pitch of desperation where death - suicide or murder - seems prefer­able. If the citizens of the Soviet Union cannot be permitted a degree of freedom or happiness which might make them too unruly or insufficiently productive, neither must they be permit­ted to fall into a state of panic or despair or indifference that would in turn paralyse their activity. The oscillations of the 'gen­eral line' are designed to be a means which avoids precisely these extremes. Hence, so long as the rulers of the Soviet Union retain their skill with the machinery of government and continue to be adequately informed by their secret police, an internal collapse, or even an atrophy of will and intellect of the rulers owing to the demoralising effects of despotism and the unscrupulous manipu­lation of other human beings, seems unlikely. Few governments have been destroyed by a process of inward rotting without the intervention of some external cause. As the Soviet Government is still conspicuously in the full possession of its political senses, the experiment of a nation permanently militarised has, in the long terms of historical periods, hardly reached its apogee. Beset by difficulties and perils as this monstrous machine may be, its success and capacity for survival must not be underestimated. Its future may be uncertain, even precarious; it may blunder and suf­fer shipwreck or change gradually or catastrophically; but it is not, until men's better natures assert themselves, necessarily doomed. The physical and nervous wear and tear exacted (to no purpose, at least no discernible human purpose, beyond the bare self-perpetuation of the regime) by the system is appalling: no Western society could survive it. But then, those finer organisms in which, before 1917, Russia was no poorer than the West have perished long ago. Many decades may be required to recreate them - as recreated one day they surely will be, when this long, dark tunnel is nothing but a bitter memory.

In the meanwhile, the astonishing invention itself surely deserves the more careful study, if only because it is as mechani­cally powerful and comprehensive an instrument for the manage­ment of human beings - for simultaneously breaking their wills and developing their maximum capacities for organised material production - as any dreamt of by the most ruthless and megalo­maniac capitalist exploiter. For it springs out of an even greater contempt for the freedom and the ideals of mankind than that with which Dostoevsky endowed his Grand Inquisitor; and being dominant over the lives of some eight hundred million human beings, is the most important, most inhuman and still the most imperfectly understood phenomenon of our times.

FOUR WEEKS IN THE SOVIET UNION

number of citizens of the Soviet Union conducted in quite a pass­able imitation of their language.

I visited Professor Alekseev, the head of Pushkin House, the principal institute of literary history in the Soviet Union. As I was not a member of any official delegation he was a trifle cagey at first, but mention of various common acquaintances in the world of Slavic studies gradually changed his manner, and he became courteous and informative. The second desk in his room was always occupied by someone - if the colleague whom I met on entering the room left, someone else came and sat at the desk, ostensibly engaged upon reading a book for ten minutes or so, but in fact doodling inconsequently.

Professor Alekseev said that things were much better than during the bad Stalin days, which were over, he hoped, for ever. Literary research was, however, still suffering, because of the obvious bias of the government in favour of the natural sciences, in particular physics; still, this was paradise compared with the years 1940-53. He informed me that he was delighted to see me, and to be discussing problems of Russian literary history, which he would scarcely have been allowed to do in 1945 or 1950. In­deed, he had known of cases where the most innocent contacts with the members of foreign embassies, especially the British (who, he remarked, seemed particularly interested in litterateurs), had compromised their Russian acquaintances, and led to dis­grace, and worse. A return to these horrors was unthinkable, save in so far as in Russia nothing was unthinkable. He then gave examples of the persecution of scholars and writers; I asked whether he thought that the poets Pasternak and Akhmatova, chosen for pillory by Zhdanov, would be 'rehabilitated'; Pro­fessor Alekseev gazed for a moment at the watchdog at the other desk, and said that he did not know. The atmosphere grew sen­sibly cooler and I left shortly afterwards.

I found that this was the kind of line taken by almost every official person that I met: the past had been terrible and the new freedom was full of promise: we were terrified, we are out of danger now. This was repeated by keepers of museums and of national monuments, professors of the universities, 'responsible secretaries' of academies, officials of the Ministry of Culture and Education, Higher and Lower, in fact everyone entitled to con­duct conversations with foreigners. The distinction between those so entitled and those not entitled seemed to me to be cru­cial, and to mark the difference between the situation now and that of 1945. At that time, although more contacts between for­eigners and Russians were possible than during subsequent years, such contacts tended to be informal and carried a greater or smaller degree of risk to those engaged in them, except of course for purely official relationships between officials representing governments for defined purposes. This time I found that there was a sharp difference in attitude, depending both on the posi­tion of the Soviet individuals in question, and on the recognised status of the foreigners to whom they spoke. It was clear that specific instructions had been given to high academic and cultural officials - heads of institutions, secretaries and responsible mem­bers of such institutions - if not to seek, at any rate to promote, relationships with suitable foreign visitors. Indeed, I was told by no fewer than three Soviet scholars that VOKS had in November of 1955 sent emissaries to the various academies of learning in Moscow to say that it had been decided to renew cultural contact with foreigners; that those who had foreign languages would do well to brush them up; that foreign delegations in particular were to be welcomed warmly, and that provided foreigners came as members of such delegations, they were to be entertained in a generous and informal manner; one of my informants specified that this meant that the hosts were to avoid giving the impression that they were any longer unduly secretive or reluctant to wel­come visitors from abroad.

There is no doubt that members of delegations and even per­sons who, like myself, carried sufficient recommendations to define their status clearly, could count upon a greater degree of informal contact and free conversation - within very obvious limits - with their colleagues or persons selected to meet them than had been the case previously; at the same time it was also clear that (unless one's Russian 'contact' felt reasonably sure that he had been guaranteed in advance against allegations of undue fraternisation) they were still not too eager to meet foreign visi­tors. The most welcome visitors were physicists and other natural scientists, to whose Russian hosts instructions had probably been given (this was the impression I had been given by a young physics student) to be as open with them as was possible within the bounds of normal security, and not to give them the impres­sion that things were obviously being kept from them. This is also true in the case of other delegations to which it had been decided to show special favour. Indeed the very degree of affabil­ity and ease of conversation shown by Soviet 'hosts' seemed to reflect the degree of their importance, licence to associate with foreigners, and lack of fear of censure from above. This attitude altered, and altered sharply, in the case of contacts with those for­eigners whose status was in some way unclear - casual students, private visitors, tourists not in official parties, persons who were not members of identifiable delegations. Unless the status of the foreign visitor was absolutely clear and he belonged to a category to be officially welcomed, all the old suspiciousness and evasive­ness was once more in full evidence.

I did meet some old friends whom I had met on my previous visit, and learned from them, as I expected, far more of what is going on than from the agreeable, courteous, but at times exces­sively bland, official representatives of institutions of various kinds. I met with comparatively humble persons, a good many students writing theses in the library in which I spent ten days on my own work, and some old acquaintances and their friends, who showed the greatest eagerness to see me, but had to adopt considerable precautions for this purpose, in sharp contrast with the apparently open, easy manner with which I was greeted by the directors of the Philosophical Academy and the heads of aca­demic institutions (apart from the head of the Pushkin House in Leningrad I visited the heads of various sections of the Lenin Library, the head of the Academy of Literature, and met the edi­tor of Kommunist - the chief ideological party organ - at the house of a member of the British Embassy, to whom I am grate­ful for this far from uninteresting encounter).

My general impressions may be summed up as follows.

The deepest cleavage in Soviet society is that between the gov­ernors and the governed. On the whole, I saw more of the latter, but a few conversations with important Communists - including a member of the Presidium - leaves a very clear impression of the general tone and quality of this class of person. The governed are a peaceful, courteous, gentle, resigned, infinitely curious, ima­ginative, unspoilt population, whose moral convictions, aesthetic tastes and general outlook are strongly Victorian, and who look upon the outside world with wonder and a little hostility, even fear. They tend to think the Americans may wish to make war upon them, but they do not, so far as my experience goes, think it very strongly, and when it is pointed out to them that much of what they believe - for example that there are three million unemployed in England, or that armament merchants are in total control of United States policy - may not accord with the facts, they accept this with a kind of ironical acquiescence, as being part of the lies with which all publicity is inevitably filled, the Soviet newspapers and radio no less than those abroad.

This attitude of amiable cynicism, which assumes that all gov­ernments are engaged in insincerity to hoodwink their publics, I found to be very widespread, together with a deep lack of interest in political issues, especially on the part of the students I talked to - a desire to acquire greater material benefits, to have jobs, to travel, to fall in love, to earn large salaries, to enjoy themselves, but very little ambition, or ideological passion, or nationalism, or strong feeling about public issues of any kind. In this respect the much criticised Muscovites who spend their time in listening to jazz music and wearing Western clothes are merely an extreme case of a general trend towards individualism, against which the perpetual propaganda of the Communist Party in the direction of greater collective endeavour, tightening up of ideological enthusi­asm, and so forth seemed to me, at any rate, to beat in vain.

One cannot, of course, generalise. I speak merely of such mem­bers of the urban populations as I came across. Students in the reading rooms of libraries (I did not visit the universities), taxi drivers, casual acquaintances in restaurants, a photographer in Leningrad, a teacher of English but lately returned from a long

Siberian imprisonment as a British spy - all conveyed the same impression: namely, that their principal desire was to survive and lead more agreeable personal lives; that the official ideology of Marxism - while its foundations, in a very primitive form, were taken for granted (namely that class structure was important, that ideas were influenced by economic factors, that Western capitalism was in its decline, that Lenin was a great and benevolent genius, and so forth - nothing much more specific than this) - and more specific developments of Marx's doctrine, what is called dialectical materialism, more specific philosophical, economic, sociological and historical doctrines, concerning which such battles were fought in the 1920s and early 1930s, and heresies in regard to which cost their adherents so dear, were no longer actual, and in fact were regarded as tedious forms of mechanical catechism - the sooner got over the better - and neither those who were paid to teach it nor those who were forced to listen to it suffered from illu­sions about it.

More than once I received amusing accounts of lectures on ideology in which the lecturer could hardly suppress a yawn and the audience covered their faces with their notebooks, out of politeness, not to reveal the fact that their thoughts were wander­ing elsewhere. It is ironical, in the face of this, to reflect on the effort made by Western scholars to trace the development of Marxism in the USSR during the last twenty years, to discrimi­nate trends and tendencies, doctrines and sub-doctrines, to attrib­ute them to their source, to examine, analyse, refute. It may have significance with regard to the satellite countries or foreign Communist parties, where such ideological issues are taken seri­ously in themselves and perhaps reflect important developments in other regions. In the Soviet Union ideological pronounce­ments from on high are important in indicating political and eco­nomic policies, but the textbooks on the subject and the teaching of it have reached an ebb the low level of which no one is pre­pared to deny. I was entertained quite hospitably by the Academy of Philosophy and found that, while their interest in philosophy beyond their frontiers was acute - and well-informed in so far as books and articles are sufficient to make them so - their attitude towards the subject in which they were all suppos­edly experts was one of ill-concealed boredom; they neither believed nor disbelieved in the propositions which they uttered - it was their business to pronounce such theses and they did so to the best of their ability, with as little thought during the process as they possibly could afford to put into it.

Among the governed there is a good deal of benevolent feeling towards people abroad; hope to be able to meet them, to travel, coupled with a none too indignant realisation that this is prob­ably impracticable; and the kind of happiness and misery which occurs in an occupied country where the occupying power is not actively engaged in destroying and terrorising the population, or in an army on the march whose miseries appear far more intoler­able to outward observers than, after a time, they are felt to be by the soldiers themselves, relieved of many civilian responsibili­ties, and plunged into a routine which is accepted as inevitable and develops its own pattern of life with its pains and pleasures, in their own way as acute and as important as those of normal peaceful existence.

Among the governed there are, of course, one or two older writers and even theatrical actors who have not genuinely accepted the regime at all, or have rejected it in their hearts dur­ing the Stalin period. These can be very bold and violent and fearless in what they say. They read what they can obtain from abroad and have their own closed circles, are difficult to meet, speak freely and conceal little. They are not referred to officially, although they are known to exist and are admired and looked up to in wide circles of the intelligentsia not themselves independent or discontented enough to imitate them.

The governed have accepted the regime, but they welcome every step towards liberalisation with pathetic pleasure; they do not believe their condition to be superior either materially or spir­itually, either intellectually or morally, to that in countries abroad. They do not reflect about such topics over much. They are Russians, and the younger generation in particular have never known any other state of things. I did not myself come across strong expressions of political attitude of any kind; even the dethronement of Stalin did not, at any rate among the students to whom I talked, produce any great strength of reaction. They did not believe that he was either much worse or much better than those who were governing them at present; they thought that he had made mistakes, especially during the war, and was a tough and violent despot, but they believed that no government could, in principle, be efficient that was not, in some measure, despotic, and did not believe in the genuineness of democracy abroad, although they did believe in its vast superiority of material culture and the greater contentment of its citizens.

They were gay, talkative, enthusiastic about the details of pri­vate life, delighted to meet foreigners, but all appeared to be arrested mentally somewhere between sixteen and seventeen years of age. Their chief desire was not to be ploughed under in the acutely competitive system which, paradoxically enough, the Soviet regime has produced. The most discontented were, among those I met, the Jews and the Georgians, the first because they complained of continued discrimination against them, although not on the scale and with the violence of the last years of Stalin. They said that only the ablest Jews could get jobs at all after leav­ing the university, that occupational unemployment was rife amongst them, and that whenever persons of even remotely simi­lar ability presented themselves as candidates for the same post, non-Jews were more liable to be chosen, although less well quali­fied, than Jews. They were passionately interested in Israel, and the perpetual insistence - by Kaganovich, for example - that Soviet rulers either took no interest in Israel, or regarded it with hostility as the instrument of Anglo-American imperialism, is perhaps itself an indication of the opposite.

The Georgians were worried because they too have begun feeling a certain degree of discrimination among great Russians, and gave lurid accounts of the destruction in which the post- Stalin riots had involved them, in Tiflis and elsewhere in Georgia. They showed no particular passion for Stalin, and indeed the general tone, of the ones I spoke to, markedly lacked any note of hero-worship and tended towards the somewhat cynical quietism which obviously did not make them less obedient or less efficient servants of the regime.

The governors are a very different story: it seemed to be rela­tively easy to distinguish not merely between successful aspirants to power and their victims but even those who had set their minds upon obtaining high position and were using their elbows to do so, as against those who had given up or had never begun. Those in power in the Soviet Union take their colouring from their masters in the Presidium and the Central Committee of the Party. They are a tough, ruthless, militantly nationalistic group of proletarian roughnecks, whose resentment of what can broadly be described as 'Western values', or indeed of their own intellec­tuals, springs as much from their social origins and feelings as from any ideology which they may have imbibed. They resent refinement, civilised behaviour, the intelligentsia and so forth, very much as any power group sprung from those particular ori­gins, with the accumulated resentment of the bosses because of their middle-class upbringing, would feel towards such phenom­ena. And naturally enough, those members of Party cadres who seek advancement and are astute enough and sensitive enough to adjust themselves to all the convolutions of the Party line take their tone from the top, and, like their supreme masters, at once exploit and humiliate members of the liberal professions, and at the same time desire them to show advances and develop discov­eries and inventions, to compete with and surpass those of the West.

In this sense the tradition and policy of Stalin continues unabated; the culture of the Soviet Union, so far as it exists, is not that of a classless society (in the sense in which, say, New Zealand is an approach, at any rate, to a classless society), but that of a class of liberated slaves who still feel an unabated hostility to the whole culture of their masters and acute social discomfort in its presence, particularly when exemplified in the appearance and manners of diplomatic representatives and other visitors from the West.[37] In this respect their feelings are not wholly dissimilar to those of the rawer elements in the American Middle West. And it appears to me that this kind of social and moral attitude is responsible for far more of the persecution of intellectuals, for example, or friction with the West, than conscious ideological policy, or great Russian patriotism.

The ideologists of the governing class - with whom I met principally at official receptions, and on one occasion privately - repeat the set pieces which they have learned by heart, with rel­ish and with skill, for indeed they owe their positions to the degree of skill and effect with which they can develop official theses. It is difficult to say that they either believe or disbelieve; this is the common currency in terms of which the governing class of Russia communicate with each other. It is too late in the day now to enter into the question whether this is or is not the best kind of doctrine to promote their ends, whether it is an obstacle or a stimulus to material or educational progress. It has by now become the only binding cement of the entire Soviet Union, in terms of which the bosses of Communism can do their work; it has also become the vocabulary in terms of which com­munication occurs, and to try to reform it radically now, even if it could be shown that it would lead to a better political or eco­nomical, or even to a more effective ideological, result, is obvi­ously unthinkable.

One can distinguish in any Soviet society those who belong to the class of the governed - who use normal language, display no undue ambition, behave as human beings do everywhere, and represent certain of the Russian traditional characteristics, which they carry over in a very pure form from the kind of Russians described by the great novelists and writers of short stories - on the one hand, and a governing class at whatever level, with its tough talk, its false bonhomie, the particular expression on their faces when once launched upon one of those great rhetorical turns which is essential to Communist discourse, and the obvi­ous cynicism and opportunism, the ability to catch with half a glance what their superiors really require. A combination of unc­tion and flattery to those above, and ruthless bullying to those below, disqualify this group of persons. They are feared, admired, detested and accepted as inevitable by the entire population. The gulf between them seemed to me almost unbridgeable.

These are the two nations that today compose the Soviet Union.

SOVIET RUSSIAN CULTURE

generis, or whether, on the contrary, it is similar to that of other countries, or, perhaps, an anomalous, or stunted, or abortive example of some superior Western model.

From the 1880s onwards a vast, now unreadably tedious, mass of books, articles, pamphlets began to flood upon the Russian intelligentsia, mostly concerned to prove either that Russia is des­tined to obey unique laws of its own - so that the experience of other countries has little or nothing to teach it - or, on the con­trary, that its failures are entirely due to an unhappy dissimilarity to the life of other nations, a blindness to this or that universal law which governs all societies, and which Russians ignore at their peril. The writers of Western countries, as often as not, pro­duce their works of art or learning or even day-to-day comment (even in America, where there exists similar self-consciousness, though not on so vast a scale) without necessarily tormenting themselves with the question whether their subject-matter has been treated in its right historical or moral or metaphysical con­text. In Russia, at any rate since the second half of the nineteenth century, the reverse obtained. There no serious writer could think of taking a step without concerning himself with the question whether his work was appropriately related to the great ultimate problems, the purposes of men on earth. The duty of all those who claimed to have the insight to understand, and the moral courage to face, their personal or social or national condition was always the same: in the first place to relate the relevant problems to the path which the given society (that is, Russia; and only after that, humanity) was inexorably pursuing (if one was a determin- ist), at the particular historical (or moral or metaphysical) stage of its development.

No doubt the romantic doctrines that dominated European lit­erature and journalism in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly in Germany, with their emphasis on the unique historical missions of different groups of men - Germans, or industrialists, or poets - are partly responsible for this pervasive Russian attitude. But it went further in Russia than elsewhere. This was partly due to the fact that the effective advance of Russia to the centre of the European scene (after the Napoleonic wars) coincided with the impact of the romantic movement; it derived partly from a sense of their own cultural inferiority which made many educated Russians painfully anxious to find a worthy part of their own to play - worthy, above all, of their growing material power in a world that was apt to look down upon them, and cause them to look down upon themselves, as a dark mass of benighted barbar­ians ruled by brutal despots and good only for crushing other freer, more civilised peoples. Again there may be, as some writers maintain, a strong craving for teleological and indeed eschatolog- ical systems in all societies influenced by Byzantium or by the Orthodox Church - a craving that the Russian priesthood, lack­ing as it conspicuously did the intellectual resources and tradition of the Western Churches, could not satisfy, at any rate in the case of the better-educated and critically inclined young men.

Whatever the truth about its origins, the state of mind of virtu­ally all Russian intellectuals in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth (there were some exceptions) was dominated by the belief that all problems are interconnected, and that there is some single system in terms of which they are all in principle soluble; moreover, that the discovery of this system is the begin­ning and end of morality, social life, education; and that to aban­don the search for it in order to concentrate upon isolated or personal ends, say the pursuit of knowledge, or artistic creation, or happiness, or individual freedom for their own sakes is wilful, subjective, irrational, egoistic, an immoral evasion of human responsibility. This attitude is characteristic not merely of the left-wing Russian intelligentsia, but of the outlook of civilised Russians of all shades of political opinion, spread widely both in religious and in secular, in literary and in scientific circles. Almost any philosophical system that affected to give a comprehensive answer to the great questions found a marvellously, indeed exces­sively, enthusiastic welcome among these eager, over-responsive, idealistic, impeccably consistent, sometimes only too rigorously logical thinkers.

And the systems were not slow in arriving. First came German historicism, particularly in its Hegelian form, which conceived of history as the essential, indeed the only genuine, science. True, Hegel looked on the Slavs with contempt as 'unhistorical', and declared that (like the 'extinct' Chinese civilisation) they had no part to play in the march of the human spirit. This part of Hegel was quietly ignored, and adequate room made in the universal schema for the Slavs in general, and (on the authority of Hegel's formidable rival, Schelling) for the Russians in particular. After the infatuation with Schiller, Fichte, Hegel and other German Idealists came a similar faith in French social prophets - Saint- Simon, Fourier and their many disciples and interpreters, who offered cut-and-dried 'scientific' plans of reform or revolution for which some among their Russian disciples, with their will to believe in literal inspiration, were ready to lay down their lives. This was followed by many another Lebensphilosophie - inspired by Rousseau, by Comtian Positivism, Darwinism, neo- mediaevalism, Anarchism, which in Russia went far beyond their Western prototypes. In the West such systems often languished and declined amid cynical indifference, but in the Russian empire they became fighting faiths, thriving on the opposition to them of contrary ideologies - mystical monarchism, Slavophil nostal­gia, clericalism and the like; and under absolutism, where ideas and daydreams are liable to become substitutes for action, bal­looned out into fantastic shapes, dominating the lives of their devotees to a degree scarcely known elsewhere. To turn history or logic or one of the natural sciences - biology or sociology - into a theodicy; to seek, and affect to find, within them solutions to agonising moral or religious doubts and perplexities; to trans­form them into secular theologies - all that is nothing new in human history. But the Russians indulged in this process on a heroic and desperate scale, and in the course of it brought forth what today is called the attitude of total commitment, at least in its modern form.

Over a century ago Russian critics denounced European civili­sation for its lack of understanding. It seemed to them character­istic of the morally desiccated, limited thinkers of the West to maintain that human activities were not all necessarily intercon­nected with each other - that what a man did as a writer was one thing and what he did as a citizen was another; that a man might be a good chemist and yet maltreat his family or cheat at cards; that a man might compose profound music and yet hold stupid or immoral political views that were no business of the critics or of the public. This notion of life, according to Russians of almost all shades of opinion, was artificial and shallow and flew to pieces before the deeper insight of the all-embracing view, according to which the life of individuals and the life of their institutions was one and indivisible. Every faculty and element in the individual was in a state of constant interplay; a man could not be one thing as a painter and another as a citizen, honest as a mathematician and false as a husband; it was impossible to draw frontiers between any aspects of human activity, above all between public and private life. Any attempt to insulate this or that area from the invasion of outside forces was held to be founded upon the radical fallacy of thinking that the true func­tion and purpose of a human being does not penetrate every one of his acts and relationships - or worse still, that men had, as men, no specific function or purpose at all. It followed that whatever most fully embodies this ultimate total human purpose - the State, according to the Hegelians; an elite of scientists, artists and managers, according to the followers of Saint-Simon or Comte; the Church, according to those who leaned towards ecclesiastical authority; an elected body of persons embodying the popular or national will, according to democrats or national­ists; the class designated by 'history' to free itself and all mankind, according to socialists and Communists - this central body had a right to invade everything. The very notion of the inviolability of persons, or of areas of life, as an ultimate prin­ciple was nothing but an effort to limit, to narrow, to conceal, to shut out the light, to preserve privilege, to protect some portion of ourselves from the universal truth - and therefore the central source of error, weakness and vice.

The doctrine that there is one truth and one only, which the whole of one's life should be made to serve, one method, and one only, of arriving at it, and one body of experts alone qualified to discover and interpret it - this ancient and familiar doctrine can take many shapes. But even in its most idealistic and unworldly forms, it is, in essence, totalitarian. Even those critical versions of it which permit doubts about the nature of the central truth, or about the best method of its discovery, or the title of its preach­ers, allow none about the right and the duty, once it is estab­lished, to make everyone and everything obey it; they allow no intrinsic virtue to variety of opinion or conduct as such; indeed, the opposite. For there can be no more than one truth, one right way of life. Only vice and error are many. Consequently, when Marxism finally came to Russia in the 1870s and 1880s it found an almost ideal soil for its seeds.

ii

Marxism contained all the elements which the young revoltes in Russia were looking for. It claimed to be able to demonstrate the proper goals of human existence in terms of a pattern of history of which there was 'scientific' proof. The moral and political val­ues which it preached could, so it claimed, be determined 'objec­tively', that is to say, not in terms of the subjective and relative and unpredictable attitudes of different individuals or classes or cultures, but in terms of principles which, being 'founded' on the 'objective behaviour of things', were absolute and alone led to the salvation and liberation of all men to the degree to which they were rational. It preached the indissoluble oneness of men and institutions. It claimed, just as the eighteenth-century French philosophers had in effect claimed, that all real, that is to say soluble, problems were fundamentally technological; that the ends of man - what human beings could be, and, if they knew their true interests, would necessarily want to be - were given by the new scientific picture of the universe. The only problem was how to realise these ends. This was not a moral or political problem but a technical task: that of finding and using the right means for the 'demonstrably' valid, universal goal; a problem of engineering.

Stalin's famous and most revealing phrase about intellectuals as 'engineers of human souls'[38] was faithfully derived from Marxist premisses. The duty of intellectuals was to elucidate the correct social goals on the basis of a 'scientific' analysis of society and history; and then, by means of education, or 'conditioning', so to attune the minds of their fellow citizens that they grasped demonstrated truths and responded accordingly, like the harmo­nious constituents of a properly regulated and efficiently func­tioning mechanism. The simile which Lenin used in one of his most famous statements of political doctrine - The State and Revolution[39] - according to which the new free society, liberated from the coercion of one class by another, would resemble a fac­tory or workshop in which the workers did their jobs almost out of mechanical habit, was a piece of imagery drawn from this tech­nocratic view of human life. The watchwords were efficiency, tidiness, security, freedom for the good to do what they wanted (this last being necessarily one and the same goal for all those who were rational and knew the truth), not freedom to do any­thing whatever, but only what is right - the only thing which any rational being can wish to do - that which alone will make for true, everlasting universal happiness. This is an old Jacobin doc­trine, and indeed much older - in its essentials as old as Plato. But no one, perhaps, had believed it quite so naively or fanatically in any previous age.

During the decade that followed the October Revolution these principles - the moral and metaphysical foundations of totalitari­anism - were genuinely accepted, at any rate by some among the Communist leaders. Whatever the personal shortcomings of Trotsky or Zinoviev or Bukharin or Molotov or the heads of the secret police, and perhaps even of Stalin at this stage, there is no reason for doubting the sincerity or depth of their convictions or principles. A great many disagreements arose, of course, but they were concerned not with ends but with means; when they went sufficiently far they were stigmatised as deviations. Thus Trotsky thought that there was a danger of a too-well-entrenched bureau­cracy which would function as a brake - like all vested interests - upon the progress of the Revolution, which needed agents who were more imaginative, more bloody, bold and resolute - men not tempted to stop half-way on the path of the world revolu­tion. The so-called Workers' Opposition objected to the concen­tration of authority in the hands of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and wanted more equality, and more demo­cratic control exercised by workers' organisations. The right- wing 'deviationists' thought that over-rapid collectivisation of agriculture would produce a degree of economic dislocation, pauperisation and ruin likely to be more damaging to the Soviet economy than the adoption of a slower pace in the harsh process of liquidating peasant property and its defenders together with other so-called survivals of the capitalist regime; and advocated a less urgent tempo and milder measures. There were disagree­ments as to how far the army might be used in the regimentation of industry. There were memorable disagreements about foreign policy and the policy towards Communists abroad.

The acutest of all disagreements occurred, perhaps, on the cul­tural front: there were those who thought that any 'slap in the face' (as it used to be called) to the bourgeois culture of the West, in whatever form - aggressive futurism and modernism in the arts, for example, or any violent revolt against tradition - was eo ipso an expression of Bolshevism, in so far as it was a blow at the Western establishment, lowered its morale and undermined its moral and aesthetic foundations. A good deal of experiment, sometimes bold and interesting, at other times merely eccentric and worthless, occurred at this time in the Soviet Union in the guise of cultural warfare against the encircling capitalist world. This was the 'Cultural Bolshevism', particularly popular in Germany, against which Communist policy later so sternly set its face. For one thing the audacities of the cultural Bolsheviks were, as might be expected, the personal acts of individual artists, and therefore found little favour in the eyes of those members of the Party for whom Communism meant belief in the task of creating a specifically proletarian culture by means of collective action, and for whom the aberrations of the avant-garde poets, painters and producers were merely so much individualist eccentricity - an outre and decadent perversion of the very bourgeois civilisation which the Revolution was out to destroy. Lenin, be it noted, dis­liked all forms of modernism intensely: his attitude to radical artistic experiment was bourgeois in the extreme. But he made no attempt to enforce his aesthetic views, and, under the benevolent patronage of the Commissar of Education, Lunacharsky, a failed critical playwright but a sincere opponent of open barbarism, the controversies continued unabated. There were splits within fac­tions: the champions of 'proletarian' culture could not agree on whether it was to be produced by individual men of gifts who dis­tilled within themselves the aspirations of the proletarian masses, actual and potential, acting, as it were, as their mouthpieces or rather megaphones; or whether, as the extremer ideologists pro­claimed, individuals as such had no part at all to play in the new order, for the art of the new collectivist society must itself be col­lective. These latter in effect believed that works of art must be written collectively by groups, and criticism - reviews, essays, directives - by squads of critics, bearing collective responsibility for their work, each member being an anonymous component of a social whole. Again, some maintained that the business of proletarian art was to present the new reality in an intenser form, to heighten it if necessary by the inventions of the socialism- impregnated imagination. Others thought that the business of artists was strictly utilitarian: to help with the making of Com­munist society by documentary reportage of the new life - the building of factories, collective farms, power stations, the destruc­tion of the old installations, the production of the essentials of the socialist economy - tractors, combines, uniform food, identical clothing, mass-produced houses, books, above all good, happy, uncomplicated, standard human beings.

One could go on to multiply examples; the point I wish to make is that these 'programmatic' controversies were, in the first place, genuine; that is to say, the contending parties, on the whole, believed what they were saying, and the disagreements between them could justly be described as real differences in the interpretation of an accepted Marxist doctrine. Moreover they were, to some degree, carried on in public; and, most important of all, they were differences not about ends but about means. The ends had become universally accepted since the opponents and doubters had been eliminated or silenced. The intransigence of the Comintern in dealing with foreign Communist and still more Socialist parties, and the merciless heresy hunts, probably derived, for the most part, from the honest belief that these par­ties might compromise on the central truth - on the dogma of what constituted the desired society - or else that they had cho­sen, or might choose, paths that could lead away, however imper­ceptibly at first, from these sacred and undisputed goals.

It was its own conception of itself that divided Bolshevism so sharply from its parent, Western Marxism - a conception which made it not merely a set of political or social or economic beliefs or policies, but a way of life, all-penetrating and compulsory, controlled absolutely by the Party or the Central Committee of the Party in a way for which little authority can be found even in the most extreme pronouncements of Marx or Engels. This was the 'tsarism in reverse'[40] which Herzen, at the beginning of the 1850s, had gloomily and accurately predicted that Communism in Russia would become, and which it owes primarily to the per­sonality of Lenin himself. No doubt the conditions of Russian life, which moulded both him and it, in part created the need for religious certainty and messianic doctrine which Marxism pro­vided. But the authoritarian element is among Lenin's specific contributions - the conception of the Party as a sect ruled ruth­lessly by its elders and demanding from its members the total sacrifice upon its altar of all that they most cherished (material goods, moral principles, personal relationships), the more defiant and horrifying to tender-minded morality the better. It was this streak of stony fanaticism enlivened by a sardonic humour and vindictive trampling upon the liberal past that unnerved some of Lenin's socialist colleagues and attracted such disciples as Stalin and Zinoviev.

It was part and parcel of this vision of the millennium (dis­guised as a rational doctrine) to ignore the fact that as a scientific theory, claiming to be able to explain and predict social and eco­nomic change, Marxism had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, been decisively refuted by events in ways which have been described too often and too fully to be worth recapitulation. In the West, efforts to save the theory from intellectual bank­ruptcy, some orthodox, some heretical, were from time to time made by conscientious socialists and others. In Russia this was, by and large, not required. In Russia, especially after the October Revolution, Marxism had become a metaphysics, professedly resting on an analysis of history but stubbornly ignoring all awk­ward facts, designed by force or persuasion to secure conformity to a set of dogmatic propositions with its own esoteric, half- intelligible terminology, its own 'dialectical' techniques of argu­ment, its own clear and rigid a priori notions of what men and society must, at whatever cost, be made to be.

One of the most striking differences between the Soviet Union and the West was (and is) that in Russia those who were defeated in these internal Soviet controversies were liable from the very beginning of the regime - even before the official beginning of the terror - to be at best silenced, at worst punished or executed. Yet even these draconian measures did not make the controver­sies less real. Indeed they had the opposite effect - the fact that the fruit of victory was power, and of defeat elimination, added an element of violent excitement to the duels in which the antag­onists had so much to lose or win. I do not mean to assert that all or even the majority of those engaged in these febrile and peril­ous controversies were persons of integrity or moved by disin­terested motives; a great deal of ruthless or desperate fighting for position or survival, with little regard for the professed principles of Marxism, was evident enough in Russia in the 1920s. But at least some sort of wage was paid by vice to virtue; the protagon­ists in these struggles still felt traditionally obliged to advance some kind of theoretical justification for their conduct, and since some of them seemed to believe deeply in what they said, the issues were at times matters of genuine principle. This was most obviously the case on the 'cultural front', which has at all times yielded the most reliable symptoms of what was going on in other spheres of Soviet life. Moreover, among the controversial­ists, men of remarkable gifts and temperament were to be found, and their attitudes, whether honest or opportunist, were those of exceptional human beings. Lunacharsky, Vorovsky, Averbakh were not, by any possible standard, critics of the first water, but they possessed a genuine revolutionary eloquence; Bukharin, Trotsky, Radek were as thinkers negligible, but one of them was a man of genius, and the others were at the very least gifted agit­ators. And among the creative writers and artists there still were some figures of the first rank who had not emigrated, or had returned. This alone made the 1920s memorable, not only in Russian history but in Russian culture.

To all this Stalin put an abrupt end, and a new phase began.

iii

The ideological policy of Stalin's regime is a fascinating topic deserving separate study to itself, which no one has yet attempted seriously, and towards which I should like only to make one or two suggestions.

Once it had become clear to Stalin and his henchmen that an early world revolution was not to be expected, and that the doubtless inevitable fulfilment of Marxist prophecies in the capi­talist world might take place at a time and in ways very different from those which the earlier, more optimistic, founding fathers had prophesied, he concentrated upon three interconnected pur­poses. Firstly, the perpetuation of the Bolshevik regime, and in particular of those of its leaders who were prepared to accept his own authority. Secondly, the maintenance and increase of Soviet power, political, economic and military, in a hostile world, by every possible means short of those entailing a radical change in the Soviet system itself. And thirdly, the elimination of all factors, whether at home or abroad, likely to jeopardise either of these two central purposes, whether or not such elimination was con­sistent with Marxism, socialism or any other ideological attitude.

Stalin has at times been compared to Napoleon. It is, on the whole, a fanciful and misleading comparison. Stalin did not suppress or pervert the Bolshevik Revolution as Napoleon 'liqui­dated' the Jacobins. There never was a Thermidor (still less a Brumaire) in the Russian Revolution: neither in the mid-1920s (where Trotsky naturally placed it), nor after the assassination of Kirov, nor after the death of Stalin. But there is also something in this analogy that is illuminating. To ask whether Stalin was a faithful Marxist or even a faithful Leninist is like asking whether Napoleon believed in the ideals or ideas of the French Revolution. Napoleon was sufficiently a child of the Revolution to be instinctively opposed to everything connected with the pre- Revolutionary regime, and to wish to come to terms with some of its survivals solely for limited periods and for reasons of expe­diency. Just as Napoleon took it for granted that the relics of feudalism in Europe were doomed beyond recall, that the dynas­tic principle was not worth respecting, that nationalism was a force that must be used, that centralisation and uniformity were policies favourable to his rule and the like, so it may be assumed that Stalin was Marxist and Leninist enough to believe that capi­talism was inescapably doomed to be destroyed by its own 'inter­nal contradictions' (although it might here and there engage in a desperate struggle for survival), whether it realised this or not and however useless such a struggle might be. Similarly Stalin probably accepted the tactical corollary that wherever such 'con­tradictions' reached an acute stage, those who wished to survive and inherit the earth must seek to exacerbate these critical situa­tions and not to palliate them; whereas in situations where these contradictions had not yet reached a critical point the path of prudence on the part of the members of the new society, that is, the Communists, was not to promote premature risings but to bore from within and concentrate on popular fronts and Trojan horses of various kinds. It is clear that he genuinely believed that the future of human society was inevitably collectivist and not individualist; that the power of religion and the Churches was collapsing; that control of economic power was more important (that is, capable of effecting greater changes or stopping them) than, say, nationalist sentiment or political power; and in all these respects he was, of course, a true, if exceedingly crude, follower of Marx. But if it be asked whether he was a Marxist in the sense in which Lenin undoubtedly was one - that is of believing that as the result of the dreadful birth-pangs a new world would be born in which men would in some sense be freer than before, capable of developing their faculties on a vastly more productive scale, living in a world without wars, starvation and oppression, it seems doubtful whether he troubled himself with such questions any more than the Emperor Napoleon reflected about the ulti­mate validity of any of the ideals of the French Revolution. And, to his intellectual credit be it said, Stalin paid little enough regard - even by way of lip-service - to the many Utopian elements in Lenin's outlook.

It is, perhaps, a second point of similarity with Napoleon that Stalin firmly grasped a truth which perhaps Napoleon was the first among secular rulers fully to realise and act upon, namely that discussion of ideas - disputes about issues apparently remote from politics, such as metaphysics or logic or aesthetics - was, by promoting the critical spirit, in principle more dangerous to despotic regimes engaged in a struggle for power than belief in any form of authoritarianism. Napoleon's open hostility to the Ideologues - the empiricists and positivists of his day - is well known. He openly preferred the implacable legitimist and ultra­montane Bonald, who abused him and would have no truck with him, to the politically mild and conformist liberal, Destutt de Tracy. Similarly Stalin, when he felt himself securely in power, decided to put an end to all ideological controversy as such in the Soviet Union. He did this by proclaiming one school to be vic­torious over all others (it did not historically matter which). The new directive was that the business of the intelligentsia - writers, artists, academics and so forth - was not to interpret, argue about, analyse, still less develop or apply in new spheres, the principles of Marxism, but to simplify them, adopt an agreed interpretation of their meaning, and then repeat and ingeminate and hammer home in every available medium and on all possible occasions the selfsame set of approved truths. The new Stalinist values were similar to those proclaimed by Mussolini: loyalty, energy, obedience, discipline. Too much time had been wasted in controversy, time which could have been spent in promoting enforced industrialisation or educating the new Soviet man. The very notion that there was an area of permissible disagreement about the interpretation of even unquestioned dogma created the possibility of insubordination; this, beginning indeed in spheres remote from the centres of power - say musical criticism or lin­guistics - might spread to more politically sensitive areas and so weaken the drive for economic and military power for which no sacrifice was too great or too immoral. The celebrated Marxist formula - the unity of theory and practice - was simplified to mean a set of quotations to justify officially enunciated policies. The methods taken to suppress the least symptom of indepen­dence on the part of even the most faithful Stalinist intellectuals (let alone so-called deviationists or unreconstructed relics of older dispensations) - and, let it be added, the success of these methods - are a phenomenon without parallel in the recorded history of human oppression.

The result has been a long blank page in the history of Russian culture. Between 1932 and, say, 1945, or indeed 1955, it would not be too much to say that - outside natural science - scarcely any idea or piece of critical writing of high intrinsic value was published in Russia, and hardly any such work of art produced - scarcely anything genuinely interesting or important in itself and not merely as a symptom of the regime or of the methods prac­tised by it, that is to say, as a piece of historical evidence.

This policy was, perhaps, chiefly due to Stalin's personal char­acter. He was a half-literate member of an oppressed minority, filled with resentment against superior persons and intellectuals of all kinds, but particularly against those articulate and argu­mentative socialists whose dialectical skill in the realm of theory must have humiliated him often both before the Revolution and after it, and of whom Trotsky was only the most arrogant and brilliant representative. Stalin's attitude towards ideas, intellectu­als and intellectual freedom was a mixture of fear, cynical con­tempt and sadistic humour that took the form (a touch of Caligula) of discovering to what grotesque and degrading pos­tures he could reduce both the Soviet and foreign members of his cowering congregation. After his death this policy has on occa­sion been defended by his heirs on the ground that when an old world is being destroyed and a new world brought into being, the makers and breakers cannot be expected to have time for the arts and letters, or even for ideas, which must, at any rate for the moment, suffer what befalls them without protest.

It is interesting to ask how such absolute subservience, and for so long a period, could have been secured on the part of an intel­ligentsia which had after all not merely contributed the very term to the languages of Europe, but had itself played so prominent and decisive a role in bringing about the victory of the Revo­lution. Here was a body of persons the blood of whose martyrs had been the seed of the entire revolutionary movement, a body to which Lenin, far more than Marx, had assigned a leading role in the task of subverting the old order and of keeping the new one going; and yet, when it was crushed, not a mouse stirred: a few indignant voices abroad, but inside the Soviet Union silence and total submission. Mere intimidation, torture and murder should not have proved sufficient in a country which, we are always told, was not unused to just such methods and had never­theless preserved a revolutionary underground alive for the better part of a century. It is here that one must acknowledge that Stalin achieved this by his own original contributions to the art of gov­ernment - inventions that deserve the attention of every student of the history and practice of government.

iv

The first invention has been called by O. Utis 'the artificial dialec­tic'.[41] It is well known that according to the systems of Hegel and of Marx events do not proceed in direct causal sequence but by means of a conflict of forces - of thesis and antithesis - ending in a colli­sion between them, and a Pyrrhic victory, in the course of which they eliminate each other, and history takes a 'leap' to a new level, where the process, called dialectical, begins once again. Whatever may be the validity of this theory in any other sphere, it has a very specific applicability to revolutionary situations.

As every student of the subject must know, the principal prac­tical problem before those who have successfully brought off a large-scale revolution is how to prevent the resultant situation from collapsing into one of two opposed extremes. The first - let us, following Utis, call it Scylla - is reached when the zealots of the revolution, observing that the new world which the revolu­tion was meant to create has somehow not yet come to pass, seek for explanations, culprits, scapegoats, blame it on criminal weak­ness or treachery on the part of this or that group of their agents or allies, declare the revolution in mortal peril and start a witch­hunt which presently develops into a terror, in the course of which various groups of revolutionaries tend to eliminate each other successively, and social existence is in danger of losing the minimum degree of cohesion without which no society can con­tinue to exist. This process tends to be checked by some form of counter-revolution, which is brought on by a desperate effort on the part of the majority, whose security is threatened, to preserve itself and achieve stability, an instinctive social recoil from some imminent-looking collapse. This is what occurred during the great French Revolution, to some extent during the Commune of 1871, in some parts of Eastern Europe in 1918, and might have occurred in 1848 had the extreme left-wing parties begun to win. The mounting spiral of terror was, in fact, what Trotsky was sus­pected of wishing to promote.

The opposite extreme - Charybdis - is subsidence into a weary indifference. When the original impetus of the revolution begins after a time to ebb, and people seek a respite from the terrible tension of the unnatural life to which they have been exposed, they seek relief, comfort, normal forms of life; and the revolution slides by degrees into the ease, Schlamperei,[42] moral squalor, financial chicanery and general corruption of the kind which marked, for example, the French Directoire; or else subsides into some conventional dictatorship or oligarchy, as has happened so often in Latin America and elsewhere. The problem for the mak­ers of the revolution, therefore, is how to keep the revolution going without falling foul of either the Scylla of Utopian fanati­cism or the Charybdis of cynical opportunism.

Stalin should be credited with having discovered and applied a method which did, in fact, solve this particular problem in a cer­tain sense. Theoretically, history or nature (as interpreted by Hegel or Marx) should, by pursuing its own dialectical process, cause these opposites to collide at the crucial stage, forcing reality to ascend a creative spiral instead of collapsing into one-sided forms of bankruptcy. But since history and nature evidently tend to nod, man must from time to time come to the aid of these impersonal agencies. The government, as soon as it sees signs of the fatal hankering after the fleshpots of the older life, must tighten the reins, intensify its propaganda, exhort, frighten, ter­rorise, if need be make examples of as many conspicuous back­sliders as may be required to stop the rout. Malingerers, comfort-lovers, doubters, heretics, other 'negative elements' are eliminated. This is the 'thesis'. The rest of the population, duly chastened, dominated by terror rather than hope or desire for gain or faith, throw themselves into the required labours, and the econ­omy bounds forward for a while. But then the elite of the revolu­tionary purists, the fanatical terrorists, the simon-pure heart of the Party, who must be genuinely convinced of the sacred duty of cutting off the rotten branches of the body politic, inevitably go too far. If they did not, if they could stop in time, they would not have been the kind of people to perform the task of inquisition with the desperate zeal and ruthlessness required; hypocrites, half- believers, moderates, opportunists, men of cautious judgement or human feeling are of no use for this purpose, for they will, as Bakunin had warned long ago, compromise half-way. Then the moment arrives when the population, too terrorised to advance, or too starved, becomes listless, downs tools, and efficiency and productivity begin to drop off; this is the moment for clemency. The zealots are accused of having gone too far, they are accused of oppressing the people, and - always a popular move - they are in their turn publicly disciplined, that is, in Stalin's heyday, purged and executed. Some small increase of freedom is allowed in remote fields - say, that of literary criticism or poetry or archaeology - nothing so near the centre of things as economics or politics. This is the 'antithesis'. The people breathe again, there is optimism, gratitude, talk of the wisdom of their rulers now that their eyes have been opened to the 'excesses' of their unfaithful servants, hope of further liberties, a thaw; production leaps up, the government is praised for returning to some earlier, more tolerant ideal, and a relatively happier period ensues.

This once more leads to the inevitable relaxation of tension, slackening of discipline, lowering of productive effort. Once more there is (the new thesis) a call for a return to ideological purity, for the re-establishment of fundamental principles and loyalties, for the elimination of the parasitical saboteurs, self- seekers, drones, foreign agents, enemies of the people who have in some way managed to creep into the fold. There is a new purge, a new spurt of ideological fanaticism, a new crusade, and the heads of the counter-revolutionary hydra (the new antithesis) have to be cut off once again.

In this way the population is, as it were, kept perpetually on the run, its development proceeds by a zigzag path, and individ­ual self-preservation depends on a gift for perceiving at which precise moment the central authority is about to order a retreat or an advance, and a knack for swiftly adjusting oneself to the new direction. Here timing is all. A miscalculation, due to inertia or political insensitiveness or, worse still, political or moral con­viction, causing one to linger too long on a road that has been condemned, must almost always, particularly if persisted in, mean disgrace or death.

It cannot be denied that by this deliberate policy of carefully timed purges and counter-purges of various intensities, of con­traction and expansion, Stalin did manage to preserve in being a system that cannot be actively approved or felt to be natural by most of those concerned, and indeed to keep it going for a longer period than that for which any other revolution has, thus far, managed to survive. There is a full discussion of the method in the article by Utis already cited. Although, as the author there maintains, the method, to be successful, requires the master hand of its inventor, it appears to have survived him. Despite the grave shocks to the system caused by the struggle for power among

Stalin's successors, the emergence into the open of conflicts and factions, the risings of oppressed peoples in the West totally unforeseen in Moscow, what Utis calls the 'artificial dialectic' appears to be functioning still. The succession, in strict sequence, during the last five years, of 'liberal' and repressive moves by the Soviet rulers, both at home and abroad, although no longer con­ducted with the virtuosity (or the deep personal sadism) of Stalin, has too much regularity of pattern to be unintended. The hypothesis advanced by the author to explain only Stalin's own methods of government seems to fit his successors.

The method is an original political invention, and Stalin deserves full credit for it. One of its deliberate by-products has been the total demoralisation of what is still in the USSR called the intelligentsia - persons interested in art or in ideas. Under the worst moments of tsarist oppression there did, after all, exist some areas of wholly free expression; moreover, one could always be silent. This was altered by Stalin. No areas were excluded from the Party's directives; and to refuse to say what had been ordered was insubordination and led to punishment. 'Inner emigration' requires the possibility of the use of one's mind and means of expression at least in neutral ways. But if one's chances of sheer survival have been made dependent on continuous active support of principles or policies which may seem absurd or morally abhorrent; and if, moreover, the whole of one's mental capacity is taxed by the perpetual need to chart one's course in fatally dan­gerous waters, to manoeuvre from position to position, while one's moral fibre is tested by the need to bow one's head low not to one but to many capricious, unpredictably changing divinities, so that the least inattention, slackness or error costs one dear - then there is less and less possibility of thinking one's own thoughts, or of escaping into an inner citadel in which one can remain secretly heterodox and independent and know what one believes. Stalin went further. He forbade more than a minimum degree of official intercommunication between one academic fac­ulty and another, between laboratory and institute, and success­fully prevented the growth of any centre of intellectual authority, however humble and obedient, however fraudulent and obscu­rantist. No priesthood of dialectical materialism had been allowed to arise, because no discussion of theoretical issues was permit­ted; the business of the Academy of Sciences or the Institute of Red Professors or the Marx-Engels Institute was to quote Marx in supporting Stalin's acts: the doctrine he, or some other member of the Politburo (certainly not a professor), would supply for himself.

Where there is an official Church or college of augurs, with its own privileges and mysteries, there is a relatively fenced-off area, with walls within which both orthodoxy and heresy can flourish. Stalin set himself to repress ideas as such - at a very high cost, be it added, not merely in terms of the basic education of Soviet citi­zens (not to speak of disinterested intellectual activity, 'pure' research and so on), but even in the useful and applied sciences which were gravely handicapped by the lack of freedom of dis­cussion and suffered an abnormally high admixture of adventur­ers, charlatans and professional informers. All this was effective in stifling every form of intellectual life to a far greater degree than was realised by even the most hostile and pessimistic observers in the West, or, for that matter, by Communist Parties outside the Soviet orbit. To have created such a system is a very striking achievement on Stalin's part, whose importance should not be underrated. For it has crushed the life out of what once was one of the most gifted and productive societies in the world, at any rate for the time being.

v

There is yet a second consequence of this system which is worthy of remark, namely that most of the standard vices so mono­tonously attributed by Marxists to capitalism are to be found in their purest form only in the Soviet Union itself. We are familiar with such stock Marxist categories as capitalist exploitation, the iron law of wages, the transformation of human beings into mere commodities, the skimming off of surplus value by those who control the means of production, the dependence of the ideolo­gical superstructure on the economic base, and other Communist phrases. But where do these concepts best apply?

Economic exploitation is a phenomenon familiar enough in the West; but there is no society in which one body of men is more firmly, systematically and openly 'exploited' by another than the workers of the Soviet Union by their overseers. True, the benefits of this process do not go to private employers or capitalists. The exploiter is the State itself, or rather those who effectively control its apparatus of coercion and authority. These controllers - whether they act as Party officials or State bureaucrats or both - act far more like the capitalists of Marxist mythology than any living capitalists in the West today. The Soviet rulers really do see to it that the workers are supplied with that precise minimum of food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, education and so forth that they are thought to require in order to produce the maximum quantity of the goods and services at which the State planners are aiming. The rest is skimmed off as surplus value far more conve­niently and neatly than it can ever have been detached in the unplanned West. Wages are regulated in the most 'iron' way pos­sible - by the needs of production. Economic exploitation here is conducted under laboratory conditions not conceivable in Western Europe or America.[43] It is again in the Soviet Union that official professions of 'ideology' - principles, slogans, ideals - correspond least to actual practice. It is there, too, that some intellectuals can most truly be described as lackeys (some slug­gish and reluctant, others filled with a kind of cynical delight and pride in their own virtuosity) of the ruling group. It is there, far more obviously than in the West, that ideas, literature, works of art act as 'rationalisations' or smokescreens for ruthless deeds, or means of escape from the contemplation of crimes or follies, or as an opium for the masses. It is there that the State religion - for that is what the dead and fossilised 'dialectical materialism' of the official Soviet philosophers has, in effect, more or less avowedly become - is nothing but a consciously used weapon in the war against the enemy, within and without; and lays no claim to 'objective' truth.

The materialist theory of history teaches us that the primary factors that determine the lives of individuals and societies are economic, namely the relationships of human beings in the pro­ductive system; while such cultural phenomena as their religious, ethical, political ideas, their judicial and political institutions, their literature, arts, scientific beliefs and so forth belong to vari­ous tiers of the 'superstructure', that is, are determined by - are a function of - the 'base'. This celebrated and justly influential doctrine, embodying as it does a great deal that is new, important, illuminating and by now very widely accepted, has, nevertheless, never been easy to fit in detail to any given society or period of history in the past. Every attempt to apply it narrowly1 always encountered too many exceptions: if these were to be explained away, they usually had to be stretched till the theory became too vague or encrusted with too many qualifications to retain any utility. But it holds only too faithfully of Soviet society. There it is absolutely clear to everyone what is part of the base and what is part of the superstructure. Writers and architects can have no illusions about which level of the pyramid they constitute. Economic, military and other 'material' needs really do wholly determine - because they are deliberately made to determine - ideological phenomena, and not vice versa. It is not nature or his­tory that has produced this situation, but a piece of highly artifi­cial engineering, by which Stalin and his officials have transformed the Russian empire.

It is an extraordinary irony of history that categories and con­cepts invented to describe Western capitalism should turn out to fit most closely its mortal enemy. But this is scarcely an accident, a lusus historiae. Every student of the Russian Revolution knows that the issue that divided the Bolsheviks most deeply from the orthodox Marxists - the Mensheviks - was the practicability of

1 Say, to demonstrate that the writings of Thomas Love Peacock could not possibly have arisen save in the economic conditions of early nineteenth- century England; and that these in their turn made some such writings as those of, let us say, Aldous Huxley (or others like him) quite inevitable a century later. I.B.

an immediate transition to socialism. The Mensheviks maintained that, according to any interpretation of Marx, genuine socialism could be established only in a society which had reached a high degree of industrialisation - where the organised proletariat formed the majority of the population, and was, through the working of the 'inexorable' and mounting 'contradictions' of economic development, in a position to 'expropriate the expro­priators' and initiate socialism. No one could maintain that this stage had yet been reached in the Russian empire. But the Bolsheviks, mainly under Trotsky's inspiration, claimed that instead of semi-passively waiting for capitalism (a bourgeois republic) to do the job - leaving the workers insufficiently pro­tected from the free play of 'history', 'nature' and so forth - this process could be controlled by a proletarian dictatorship; Russia could be made to go through the stages demanded by the 'dialec­tic of history' under hothouse conditions regulated by the Communist Party. This was to be the famous 'transitional' period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the artificial or controlled equivalent of 'natural' capitalist development in the West: two roads leading equally to full-blown Communism, but the Russian corridor less painful because not left to the vagaries of 'nature', but planned by men in control of their own fate because of their possession of the 'scientific' weapon of Marxist theory, and able, therefore, to 'shorten the birth pangs' by a well- executed revolution. If, like Lenin, one begins with fanatical faith in the truth of the Marxist analysis of history, the fact that it does not too well fit even the capitalist West, which it was designed to describe, will make little difference. If the pattern does not corre­spond to the facts, the facts must be made to tally with the pat­tern. There was relatively little capitalism, and a feeble proletariat, in Russia in 1917. But the dialectic of history cannot be cheated. Unless Marxism rested on a gigantic fallacy there could be no salvation without the equivalent of the capitalist phase. Hence the corresponding phenomena had to be syntheti­cally produced - made to emerge by artificial means.

This can sometimes be done with success, as in Japan, for example. But the Japanese followed the light of reason and experi­ence. They modernised themselves by the methods that seemed to work best, without being chained to a dogmatic theory. They achieved their purpose not without brutalities, but rapidly and with spectacular success. This course was not open to Lenin and his followers. They were compelled by their fidelity to the Marxist classics to subordinate their practical judgement to the demands of theory: the social and economic development of Russia had to proceed by fixed steps whose order was laid down by the Marxist manuals. This created fantastic handicaps that were overcome at a terrible human cost. Russia had to go through phases which, according to Marx, Western capitalism passed dur­ing and after its Industrial Revolution. Russian reality had to be altered to resemble a model constructed, not too competently, to account for the progress of a society very unlike itself. A society was vivisected, as it were, to fit a theory which began life as no more than the explanation of its evolution. Something which began as descriptive became normative: a theory intended to account for the development and behaviour of Western Europe in the nineteenth century had been turned into a blueprint for Eastern Europe in the twentieth.

Actions founded upon errors of social observation do not nec­essarily end badly. There is, for all to see, that part of American constitutional development which was inspired by Montesquieu's mistaken interpretation of British political theory and practice. Lenin's error proved more costly. Russia was precipitated into unheard-of horrors of industrialisation largely because Marx had drawn a dark picture of Western capitalism and said that no soci­ety could escape something analogous. The imposition of the Bolshevik system upon an economically retarded country is a unique and monstrous monument to the power of a few men's wills and their sovereign contempt for history and empirical evi­dence; and a bloodcurdling interpretation of the unity of theory and practice.

vi

Faced with crises and the possibility of collapse, Lenin executed a partial retreat. And his successors, under the pressure of events, substituted various practical makeshifts and realistic devices and policies in place of the extravagant Utopian design which domi­nates Lenin's thinking. Nevertheless the violent break with real­ity that is at the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution can evidently not be eliminated without causing the regime to collapse; at any rate no serious attempt to do so has ever been made. For this rea­son Soviet society is not, in the normal sense, a civil society at all.

The purpose of normal human societies is in the first place to survive; and, after that, to satisfy what Mill regarded as the deep­est interests of mankind, that is to say, to satisfy at any rate a minimum number of men's normal desires after their basic needs are satisfied - say, for self-expression, happiness, freedom, jus­tice. Any government which realises these values to a reasonable degree is held to fulfil its function. These are not the principal ends of Soviet society, or of its government. Conditioned by its revolutionary origins, it is organised to achieve objectives, to respond to challenges, win victories. Like a school, a team of players, still more like an army on the march, it is a specialised institution designed for specific purposes that must be made explicit to its members by the leaders. Soviet life is constructed to strive for goals. It makes little difference what the particular goals may be - military or civil, the defeat of the enemy within or without, or the attainment of industrial objectives - an­nounced goals there must be, if Soviet society is to continue in existence. The leaders understand this well, and whether or not they are to be regarded as prisoners of their own system, they know that they must continue to exhort their subjects to greater and greater endeavours if they are to avoid the disintegration of the regime. They are in the position of army commanders in a war, who realise that unless their troops see a minimum amount of active service, the discipline, the esprit de corps, the continued existence of the armies as fighting units cannot be guaranteed.

The leaders of the Soviet Union, for all we know, may by now be secretly hankering after a peaceful existence, to abandon the exiguous splendours and unending cruelties and miseries of the regime and subside into 'normal' existence. If they harbour any such desires, they know that in the short run, at least, this is not practicable. For Soviet society is organised not for happiness, comfort, liberty, justice, personal relationships, but for combat.

Whether they wish it or not the drivers and controllers of this immense train cannot now halt it or leap from it in mid-course without risk of destruction. If they are to survive and above all remain in power, they must go on. Whether they can replace parts of it while it is moving and so transform it (themselves) into something less savage, less dangerous to themselves and mankind, remains to be seen. At any rate that must be the hope of those who do not think war inevitable.

In the meanwhile this caricature of dirigisme has discredited the tradition of social idealism and liquidated the intelligentsia connected with it, perhaps more decisively than unaided perse­cution could have done. Nothing destroys a minority movement more effectively than the official adoption and inevitable betrayal and perversion of its ends by the State itself. There are cases where nothing succeeds less well than success.

vii

It might be supposed that the new Soviet man - the result of so many years of Stalinist conditioning - would be similarly altered, a new creature adjusted to the new artificial dialectic, and as dif­ferent from his Western counterpart as the Soviet system differs from Western forms of government. But this has not, in fact, turned out to be so. In so far as recent conversations of mine with students, clerks in shops, taxi-drivers and stray acquaintances of all sorts can convey a just impression, the result is a kind of arrested infantile development, not a different kind of maturity.

In the Soviet Union today one finds the conditions that are often found to prevail in organisations in which degrees and types of responsibility are very sharply defined - strictly disci­plined schools, armies or other rigid hierarchies in which the dif­ferences between the governors and the governed are extremely precise. Indeed, the chasm between the governors and the gov­erned is the deepest single division noticeable in Soviet society; and when one speaks to Soviet citizens it soon becomes quite clear to which of the two groups they belong. Honest public dis­cussion, either of the ends for the sake of which the new society supposedly exists, or of the most important means supposedly adopted for the forwarding of those ends, is equally discouraged on both sides of this great dividing line. The work of the anthill must be done, and anything that wastes time or creates doubts cannot be permitted. But the consequences in one case are some­what different from those in the other.

Let me begin with the governed. Those who have no ambition themselves to become governors, and have more or less accepted their position in the lower ranks of the Soviet hierarchy, do not seem to be deeply troubled about public issues. They know they cannot affect those issues in any case, and discussion of them is, moreover, liable to be dangerous. Hence when they touch upon them at all they speak with the gaiety, curiosity and irresponsibil­ity of schoolboys discussing serious public issues outside their ken, more or less for fun, not expecting to be taken too seriously, and with a pleasing sense of saying something daring, near the edge of forbidden territory. Such people cultivate the private virtues, and retain those characteristics that were so often noted as typically Russian by foreigners before. They tend to be ami­able, spontaneous, inquisitive, childlike, fond of pleasure, highly responsive to new impressions, not at all blase, and, having been kept from contact with the outside world for so long, essentially Victorian and prudishly conventional in their outlook and tastes. They are not as terrified as they were in Stalin's day, when no one knew what might not happen to him, and no effective appeal to any institution of justice was possible. The tyrant is dead, and a set of rules and regulations rule in his place.

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