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David Low, the Evening Standard cartoonist, returned from Russia on August 29, travelling overland across the Ukrainian border.

THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION

3, 9, 32

A LONDON DIARY

THE English intelligentsia is dribbling home from Russia. Among the groups just back is a party of English journalists which included the Editor of this paper. I asked him what he thought of the Russian situation and he replied that he never imagined that he would be able to come to any general conclusion as a result of a month of what was necessarily sight-seeing in some form or other. His principal amusement was in watching the troubles of people who were deter-mined to form skin-tight opinions about everything. Each generalisation was killed as soon as it was born. The shops in Leningrad and Moscow are empty: those in Rostov, Kharkov and Kiev are gay and well stocked. The ex-planation is that goods have been rushed down to the Ukraine so that the peasants may be encouraged at harvest time by the sight of something to buy. Presumably in six months' time the situation may be exactly reversed. One factory promises much and as yet produces little; another, much less expensively equipped, may be working well. Some people will tell you that the Communist party are a kind of Samurai (to adopt the idea of the disciplined governing body described in Wells's *Modern Utopia*); others try to make out that it really resembles Tammany Hall. The complicated truth may be learnt, but with patience and not as a result of casual or hostile inquiry. And then so many visitors have no notion of what to expect in a still primitive eastern country in summer, and con-tinually make the mistake of comparing Russia of to-day not with Tsarist Russia, or with Russia of two years ago, but with western countries. Such people are tossed about like shuttle-cocks from a mood of elation caused by an astonishing experiment in prison reform or child welfare to the depths of despair by a slow, unpunctual and in-sanitary train. One really active bug can alter an entire perspective.

Intourist does its best. Reports agree that its organisation is better than last year; its guides arrive in time, talk decent English and are keen and competent. But the number of English, German and American visitors this year sometimes proved overwhelming, and in any case Intourist cannot make trains or boats punctual or clean. "Sechas," which is usually translated "immediately," means literally "within the hour" and, in practice, "any old time," is still the common formula. The young, keen Communists are driven wild by it. A typical instance was dinner the first night on the Volga boat, the last course of which was still to be served—"sechas"—at eleven o'clock at night. The energetic Comrade Block, editor of the Intourist Guide to the Soviet Union, found on inquiry that none of the waiters or waitresses had ever waited before. Like 60 per cent. of the people you meet in Russia, they were peasants in process of learning not to be peasants. As a result of a terrific display of energy on Block's part the service by the third day was quite competent. The incident was typical of every-thing in Russia. What one sees there is not an established Communism, but immemorial Russia in the process of being bullied and battered by the Communist party into the habits of western industrialism. Only inspired or, as some would argue, insane men would dream of trying to pack the work of five hundred years into five years, and the amount of success that can attend such an effort is still a matter for speculation. "Sechas" still predominates in

spite of the Bolsheviks, and there are times when the whole country, as Sean O'Casey would no doubt say, seems to be in a state of "chasis."

Some members of the journalists' party, including David Low, came back overland across the Ukrainian border. This route is comparatively little used, and the Customs authorities were obviously flummoxed when a train arrived bringing, not only several groups of British and American tourists, but also a party of about a hundred Bavarian students. It is the ludicrous duty of these officials to examine all literature and all films and pictures. The films, which must be developed in Russia, have to be scrutinised lest a picture of any object of military importance be permitted to escape from Russia. What harm the Soviet Government would suffer from tourists' photographs of bridges, railway stations or soldiers—you can buy post cards of them—Stalin only knows. In a scene of indescribable confusion, such as one could witness at almost any European frontier in the years immediately following the war, the officials desperately began examining copies of Pope and *Paradise Lost* in one bag and Don Passo's *Nineteen Nineteen* in another. They soon gave up the literature as hopeless, but insisted on looking through every film, and wildly con-fiscating every spool they thought suspicious, to the rage and despair of tourists, who had been given permission to take the photographs, and who did not even know enough Russian to explain that they had carefully obeyed the rule not to photograph bridges, railway stations or soldiers. But matters became serious when a fat official began solemnly to examine the sketch books which Low had filled with a delicious record of present-day Russia. He blandly con-fiscated them apparently on the ground that they included caricatures of two Russian soldiers, and it was only after much argument, and threats that the whole British press would be filled with the incident, that they were returned. Low was heard to remark that the thing that really riled him about the incident was that the official who had examined his drawings never permitted himself to smile.

Obviously the next job for Intourist is to see that such absurd relics of war psychology disappear from the Russian frontiers. If the drawings had not been returned the incident would have done more harm to Anglo-Russian relations than anything since the Arcos raid, and people who approach Russia after the manner of schoolmasters looking for blots in a schoolboy's exercise book are likely to give a totally disproportionate importance to such aggravating follies. One such observer worked out a highly impressive case which would certainly have pleased the *Times* correspondent at Riga. He added together the extent of Russian foreign debt, the immensity of her capital expenditure, estimated the number of screws loose in any tractor, the inordinate rate of capital depreciation, included the lack of experts and trained mechanics, the paucity of transport, the excessive labour turnover, threw in the food shortage as a make-weight, and decided that the whole Soviet system must shortly collapse. If the maximum marks were ten, the faults were at least twelve and the Five Year Plan a minus quantity. The case, taken item by item, is a strong one. The objection to it is merely that Russia is not a faulty exercise, but a vast agglomeration of inexcusable forces about which one may generalise at one's peril. Such a method of judging leaves out all the imponder-ables—the colossal energy of the Communist Party, the flexibility of the whole system which changes from week to week, the docility of the mass of Russian people, to whom there is nothing new in living on bread: indeed, as an analysis it leaves out only one thing—Russia.

CRITIC