I do not propose to describe in detail my life in Moscow, as the reader will probably be more interested in hearing what I saw there.

At first I lived in the railway carriage in which I had come, and I found that other people were living there also. On these people I managed to “sponge,” more or less successfully, but for some weeks I could not get anything to eat or drink till 6 o’clock in the evening. What this means I leave the reader to imagine. One can live without food for a long time if one lives quietly in a warm room and drinks plenty of water, but I walked a great deal about Moscow in cold weather and with the streets knee-deep in snow and slush. Later on, when the snow melted, great pools of water made some of the principal thoroughfares almost impassable. In some places there were stepping-stones, or one could creep along close by the sides of the houses where there was a broken margin of dry land about an inch wide; and it was strange to see long queues of people waiting at such places till they could negotiate these dangerous crossings slowly and in single file. As my one pair of boots was worn out, I soon began to suffer from “trench foot,” which I had never known when in the trenches. My hair grew long, I ceased to shave, I could not even wash every day, I was only able to clean my boots once during the course of a month; what wonder, then, that when I made myself known to Mr. North he shook his head very, very dubiously? He gave me money, however, and with this I was able to buy some food. For food could be had, though at very high prices. At several places near the Kremlin, women sold a sort of rough porridge for one hundred roubles a cup—equivalent to £10 in the old currency—and I used to stand in the street amid a crowd of famished derelicts who looked almost as disreputable as myself, eating out of a wooden porringer, with the aid of a wooden spoon this “grateful and comforting” food. The porridge was kept in a large wooden bucket like what cattle are fed out of; and, being carefully covered, it was always warm, though there was very little nourishment in it.

Tea made out of hot water and dried carrot scrapings was sold in many shops, and vegetable soup of a very poor quality could also be got. Workmen and their families were better off than I was, for their tickets entitled them to soup and black bread at the Soviet eating-houses which, being without documents of any kind, I could not enter. Nor could I buy bread in the Government bread stores, nor, in fact, anything at all, for I had no documents, not even a permit to live in Moscow, and was in fact an outlaw. Never in my life had I repeated with more fervour the petition in the Lord’s Prayer wherein we ask for “our daily bread.” The damp black bread which I managed occasionally to obtain was wholly insufficient to stay the cravings of hunger.

This system of food control places unprecedented power in the hands of the Government and makes all strangers visiting Russia absolutely dependent on the Soviet. There are no hotels save governmental ones; and private families cannot receive guests, as they have no food for them. I cannot imagine how such an arrangement can ever work if intercourse is resumed between Soviet Russia and the outer world. Ambassadors will be dependent on the Bolshevik Government for food, unless they get all their supplies from abroad, and foreign business-men, tourists, and newspaper correspondents will be in the same position.

I talked to all sorts of people, but found everybody intensely fatigued, suspicious, and unwilling to discuss Bolshevism, the only exceptions being the paid Bolshevik officials, male and female, who number in Moscow 230,000 persons against 100,000 working-men. Those who were not officials only spoke of the lack of food and fuel, and the innumerable difficulties of life; and they were all cowed and dispirited. I attended the French church and found that I was the only male in the congregation, the others being a few frightened women. I spoke to the curé, a cultured and scholarly French gentleman with exquisite manners, but he could not have been more guarded in his answers if I had been a Commissar. He certainly looked on me, I think, as a Bolshevik agent provocateur.

The Polish churches, not only in Moscow but all over Siberia, were crowded with men as well as women; and I always felt better, physically and spiritually, after visiting them. They were calm asylums for the sane in a country which had gone mad. They were altars where one could seek sanctuary from the poisoned shafts of ideas more deadly than the spears of the feudal age, from Kropotkin’s fascinating theories of licence, as well as from Lenin’s stern dogmas of oligarchic tyranny. Even their severe Latin architecture and the plain, veritable cross of Rome on the steeple were a relief after the twisted Oriental style, barbaric colours, and distorted crosses of the Byzantine churches; while, on the other hand, the warm glow of life which animated them was an equally welcome contrast to the chill of death which pervaded the “Reformed” chapels. They were mute but eloquent symbols of a greater and an older International than Lenin’s, of an Institution which had witnessed the fall of the Roman Empire, which had survived the dreadful menace of Islâm, which had seen many movements madder even than Bolshevism rise and rage for a season, and then disappear so completely that the man in the street to-day does not know their very names.

I had visited many of those churches during the course of my journey, and had found them open when the others were shut, had found the Catholic priest at his post when all the other ministers of religion were fleeing or had fled. The Red torrent had thundered down on them, the leaping spray had hidden them from sight, and the raging waters had cut them off, but when I came back they still stood like the rock on which they are built. I thought with awe of that tremendous prophecy which I had seen on the dome of St. Peter’s: “The Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”

There was an indescribable comfort and reassurance in seeing exactly the same service as is to be seen in Ireland, Tyrol, Westminster, the Vatican, France, Valparaiso, the Islands of the Outer Hebrides, and every part of the orbis terrarum. Semper eadem. One heard in all these different places exactly the same Latin words leading up to that stupendous sentence pronounced at the Last Supper, and followed by those simple, soldierly words of the Roman Captain which are engraven to the end of time on the memory of man. Yet in each place the Church was no exotic, hothouse plant, but a national growth with its roots in the hearts of the people. Even in Russia the congregations were made up not only of Poles but of Lithuanians, Ukrainians, White Russians, French, Germans, and Austrians. Meeting once in Siberia a gentle young priest who had remained behind to share the fortunes of his flock, and knowing that Poles do not like to speak Russian when they can help it (though he turned out to be a Lithuanian), I addressed him in the best Latin I could muster, and I shall never forget how his eyes lit up when he heard the sound of that stately tongue. Did it remind him of how Nero failed yesterday as Lenin will fail to-morrow? Nor can I ever forget the Masses I have heard on dark, frosty mornings in isolated Catholic churches far in the heart of Red Russia, and how astonishingly the calm and dignity of the noble service contrasted with the mad roar of revolution outside. The church was dark, save where the altar candles made the silvery hair of the priest shine like a nimbus and lit up the altar, evoking a picture of the same Sacrifice being offered in a dimly lit Roman catacomb in commemoration of Sebastian the Soldier or of Agnes the Virgin Martyr, while a tyranny as bad as Lenin’s howled itself hoarse outside. To me the Catholic priests whom I met represented European culture, Christian civilization; and great indeed was the contrast between their scholarly discourse and the mad babble of the Bolsheviks into which I had again to plunge.

One Bolshevik journalist to whom I had an introduction I found occupying a big, cold, untidy room in a vast house which had once been divided up into flats inhabited by business people, but which was now in a state of decay. The journalist was ill in bed the first time I called, his room in incredible disorder, and his wife out making speeches; but on my second visit he got up, made me some tea, and talked volubly for hours. He was an enthusiastic poet with entirely new ideas about poetry. Another friend whom I made was a Bolshevik functionary of what is called the political department, who dabbled in a multitude of things. I once heard him lecture in a theatre on an opera which was about to be produced before workmen who had never been to an opera before in their lives, his object being to make these workmen appreciate the music and the acting. He also lectured on literature, organized theatricals in factories and military barracks, taught muzhiks to write, wrote himself in the newspapers, and painted the whole front of a Bolshevik bookshop with mad daubs of every possible colour. This latter achievement he described as Futurism, but it seemed to me an attempt to epitomize on a surface twenty feet square all the wildest camouflage colour-schemes devised for merchant steamers during the war. The sturdy, old-fashioned house on which this outrage was perpetrated looked as outlandish as a cow with one horn painted black and the other sky-blue, the tail green, and the body in irregular patches of half a dozen different colours. I expressed no surprise, for, since my entry into Bolshevik Russia, I had quite lost the capacity for wonder.

The restless and chaotic activities of this enthusiast are typical. All the intellectuals among the Russian Bolsheviks are in a state of such indescribable ferment and agitation that it is sometimes difficult to believe they are sane. They take nothing for granted. The wisdom of the ages is nothing to them. Everything that is old repels them; every fad and every novelty appeals to them. If it were not for their lack of material they would be conducting the wildest experiments with regard to dress, cookery, clocks, town-planning, music, furniture, architecture, street traffic, and hundreds of other things. As it is, they are trying to combine painting and music, they are teaching what they call Marxian arithmetic, art, and metaphysics. They are so bursting with revolutionary ideas on everything that no book ever printed would be big enough to contain half the nonsense they told me. They seem to imagine that in a few years they can lift up the entire population to such an intellectual height that everybody will enjoy and appreciate Chopin, Rodin, Shakespeare, Æschylus, and all the great artists of the world. They seriously maintain that by three years’ desperately hard work any man of average ability can reach the intellectual standard of a finished University student. “In his ten years of college life,” they say, “a student does not spend more than six months in actual study. Why should not a workman make the same progress by crowding those six months of actual study into three years at a Government University, where he will be free from all care?” And they put their theory into practice by filling the Universities with elderly men who merely impede the progress of the younger and more talented students, just as they impede the progress of dramatic art by filling the theatres with people who can never attain that high standard of taste which is confined to the small aristocracy of intellect.

All this is only part of the great camouflage and Propaganda of the Reds, which is based on false principles and, on the whole, profoundly insincere. They profess to think that in education the acquisition of facts and the formation of taste and judgment is everything, and the slow building up of character is nothing, a theory which is confuted by all human experience. They told me of a simple Ural workman who learned to read only two years ago and is now head of the Ministry of Mines; also of Budenny, their famous cavalry leader, who was a corporal under the old régime and would be a corporal still were it not for the Revolution. These two, I replied, are naturally able men who would rise to the top under any liberal system of Government. Under the obsolete and inefficient tyranny of the Tsar they would have little chance; under a bourgeois republic presided over by Miliukov or Lvov, they and men like them from other political parties would have quite as good a chance. The things most admired in Bolshevism are, indeed, borrowed without acknowledgment from Tsarist times and from the Republic of Prince Lvov, and, two years ago, the pre-Bolshevik republican Government broke down all those barriers of class privilege for the destruction of which the Reds take all the credit. Lenin has, in fact, stolen the thunder of the Revolution, but this must not lead us to describe that particular thunder as the voice of the Devil when it is really the voice of the great Russian people. It was this mistake which ruined Kolchak and Denikin.

I have several times pointed out that all the Red propagandists work extremely hard. I have attended Red dinners where some guests had not time even to sit down or take off their overcoats or fur caps while they wolfed their food from plates, but I cannot say that I admire this feverish energy, especially in view of the ends to which it is being directed. Despite the self-sacrifice and the idealism of the Bolsheviks, those ends are thoroughly utilitarian. Even their literature, such as it is, strikes me as wholly utilitarian. The great street for bookshops was formerly the Kuznetsky Most, but all these shops are now closed and guarded by soldiers, all books, without exception, being national property. As there has been no time to sort out these books and place such of them as the Soviet approves of in the many popular libraries that have been opened, they litter the floors of these deserted shops in a disorderly pile which sometimes rises to the height of a man; and the circulation of books is now controlled as carefully as the circulation of dangerous drugs. The Caliph who burned all the books in the great library of Alexandria said: “If they approve of the Koran, they are unnecessary and ought to be destroyed; if they oppose the Koran, they ought also to be destroyed.” The Communists do not go quite so far as that, but the universal application of their principles with regard to literature would be almost as great a blow to civilization as was the triumph of the Mohammedans in the territories of Byzantium. They encourage the study of classical literature, but on all the distinctively religious literature produced by Christianity they wage merciless war. They have seized not only the great ecclesiastical libraries, but even the humblest collections of religious books in country rectories and schools, and, so long as the Bolsheviks rule in Russia, these books will never be reprinted. They have no use for the Bible, Dante, Milton, or Bunyan; and their hostility towards modern writers who treat social problems from a Christian point of view is very marked. Practically the only books which they print are Marxian or non-Christian books. So far they have only had time to publish a small number of pamphlets treating of the history of Russia, Germany, France, England, and Ireland from the Socialist standpoint, but it is their fixed intention to deal as soon as possible with all human history from this standpoint. The result has, up to the present, been disappointing, for their brochures are very inaccurate and one-sided, but if they remain in power long enough, their literary output will certainly have the merit of originality. The idea, for example, of writing the history of England entirely from the Socialist working-man’s point of view is distinctly new, but the writer will be terribly handicapped by the dullness of his subject. He will have to confine himself to Jack Cade, the Chartists, and the modern Labour movement, and to draw most of the material for the early part of his work from very hostile sources. Of modern material he will have plenty, but for the general reader it will be insufferably tedious, and can never be fashioned into a work of art. It will have the aridity of the driest Blue book on the remuneration of factory workers; it will be filled with technical terms unknown to the general public and with Socialist jargon; it will have to be anti-national, so that, for example, the economic changes which took place here in the fourteenth century must be considered in the light of similar European phenomena; it will have to oppose, depreciate, or ignore all the pomp and circumstance of war, kingship, ecclesiastical life, and feudalism. Such literature will become the literature of specialists to the same extent as advanced technical treatises on surgery, engineering, weaving, hydrodynamics, or ichthyology, and “the man in the street”—if Socialism allows him to exist—will take no interest in it. Before the Reformation there existed a distinct Catholic tone in English literature; after the Reformation there was an equally distinct anti-Catholic tone; and in modern times there has been a sceptical tone. But at all these periods the social system has been generally accepted. Bolshevism will, however, make an entirely new departure, for it will be fanatically anti-Christian, pro-Communist, anti-National, and materialist. It will tend to ignore all history previous to October, 1917, when the Bolshevik Government was established; hence its present craze for publishing all the forecasts of a future Utopia that have been made from the time of Sir Thomas More to the time of Mr. H. G. Wells. Communist literature at the present moment is consequently a strange mixture of fierce propaganda, wild theory, and heavy slabs of materialistic facts, though, indeed, these so-called facts are falser and more misleading than either the Propaganda or the theories.

The only outlet for imagination lies in descriptions of the future, but even these descriptions must make the future socialistic; and, like the majority of those writers who have tried to lift the veil which conceals the future, the Bolshevik prophets have failed lamentably. Practically all human literature deals with the present and the past; when literature tries to describe the future, it at once ceases to be human and ceases to be literature; and all the pictures which the Bolsheviks have so far given us of a future world constructed on the design of Lenin are so depressing that nobody would like to read about such a world, much less to live in it.

In literature, however, as in everything else, the Communists are inconsistent, for nearly all the plays and operas which they perform belong to what they would call the old-world era, and deal sympathetically with princes, pilgrims, monks, soldiers, saints, nuns, faithful retainers, and other classes which the Reds have sworn to sweep out of existence. Sometimes, in Bolshevik opera-houses, while watching the disguised Duke making love to the woodman’s daughter, I wondered how the Communist audience could, if they were sincere, stand all this reactionary propaganda. They say that they will, in course of time, evolve a Communist drama of their own; but can they? Their theories are so opposed to human nature that they will never be able to weave them into drama or into any form of great literature. The elimination from life of patriotism and the supernatural leaves a very shrivelled and unsightly skeleton behind.

Before leaving the subject of Bolshevik literature I should like to say that, in some respects, the clean sweep which the Bolsheviks have made of books and documents seems to be a wholesome and necessary clearance similar to that made by nature herself in expelling noxious matter from the human system. A mass of sycophantic and useless books had been published under the old régime in Russia about Tsars and Grand Dukes, while the accumulation of bureaucratic, military, and “religious” propaganda was enough to stifle the energies of any race. Some of us in this country can sympathize with the organizers of this holocaust, when we contemplate our own goodly collection of interminable lucubrations and insincere memoirs of tenth-rate politicians, preachers, and administrators, not to speak of our endless volumes by “Persons of Quality,” old Club gossips and hangers-on of the Court, the aristocracy and the bureaucracy. But by far the greatest quantity of “literary” rubbish has, of course, been produced by the people themselves, or manufactured wholesale for them by writers and publishers who believe in catering to the popular taste.

The Bolsheviks have not gone as far, in this work of destruction, as has been represented. They have not, for instance, thrown Chekhov or any of the other Russian classics into the bonfire; and, in fact, none of the authors whom I saw waiting their turn at the incinerator brought a tear to my eye. Nor had I much sympathy with most of the defunct newspapers, despite the gigantic circulation which some of them had attained before the Revolution. They emphasized the crimes and the trivialities of life to such an extent that their continuance not only involved a prodigious waste of good paper, but would have been a positive evil to the community. All sensational newspapers of the “’orrible murder” type are now gone, not only because the Reds want to conceal their own wholesale massacres, but also because they are determined to give the public what they consider edifying and instructive reading-matter.

To pass from the newspapers to the official documents of the old régime, the accumulation of the latter in Petrograd and Moscow is so great that it would take a Gibbon all his life to deal with it; and it is on the whole of such little historical value that even the most reverent archæologist cannot help seeing that there is something to be said, after all, for the incendiary and the iconoclast. When one considers the length of time during which the bureaucracy have ruled Russia, and the voluminous reports which they have always been in the habit of writing, and the large proportion of those reports which are perfectly useless, one can realize the clog of printed paper which finally contributed towards bringing the Governmental machine to a standstill. The papers relating to decorations alone constitute a formidable collection, and not a single one of them is of the slightest value to the nation.

Such a deluge of decorations rained down during the war (but not always with the impartiality of that rain which falleth both on the just and the unjust) that many officers had no room for any more Orders on the breasts of their tunics, and would, had they worn all their decorations at once, have presented simply a ludicrous appearance. It was a veritable reductio ad absurdum of a system, and the congestion in this direction, typical by the way of the congestion in every other direction, was so great as to indicate that the bursting-point had been reached. On one of his visits to the Front the Tsar brought with him a bag containing 5,000 George’s crosses, and one of the recipients, who was not a soldier, told me that he had got his for looking over the parapet of a fire-trench! When, after spending a year among Kolchak’s over-decorated staff officers, I suddenly found myself among Red officers without any decorations at all, I felt that the revolutionary explosion had, after all, something to recommend it.

Even the papers relating to the Imperial Family and the Foreign Office are so numerous and of such little interest that most of them will probably be destroyed. Mr. Florinsky, one of the old diplomatists who has returned to Moscow, has been entrusted with the task of selecting such of those papers as will serve to discredit the Romanovs and the foreign royalties with whom they corresponded, but it is doubtful if anything sensational will be discovered, for the Romanov letters simply disclose in the writers mediocre minds occupied in great times by trivialities. In 1905 a clever revolutionary published a volume containing the public speeches of Nicholas the Second—only that and nothing more—but those speeches were so unutterably vapid, that the book was at once suppressed as a seditious publication. The letters of the Tsar and Tsarina will, if published, convey a similar impression. I might remark, parenthetically, that it would not be a bad idea for other Governments to make a periodical bonfire of their paperasses after a committee of experts had summarized all the useful information which they contain, for if this is not done the “future historian,” who is so often spoken of, will be smothered in a superabundance of material.

Closely associated with the destruction of the independent newspaper Press is the annihilation of all private advertising. The railway stations and the public hoardings are no longer covered with the mendacious posters of soap-makers and patent-medicine quacks, the landscape is not disfigured by the blatant praise of foods which cause dyspepsia and pills which cure it, and the newspapers contain not a single advertisement.

In like manner the theatres are made to confine themselves to the production of masterpieces of the past or artistic and promising work of the present. I was surprised to see the streets of Omsk and Ekaterinburg placarded with announcements regarding the production of works by Molière, Æschylus, Racine, and Shakespeare; and one of the Bolshevik officials in Moscow commissioned me to send him a number of Ben Jonson’s plays which had not yet been produced in Russia. Shakespeare is popular, and Shakespearean plays which have not been produced in England since the time of Queen Elizabeth are now to be seen on the stage in Moscow. Nearly all the beautiful Russian operas, excepting, of course, “A Life for the Tsar,” are still produced by good companies and before crowded houses. It is necessarily difficult to get the actors to speak frankly about their present audiences, but I have been told by one of them that they are dissatisfied, that they feel that their shaggy patrons do not always understand or appreciate them as the old patrons did. Having seen both the old playgoer and the new, I am convinced that this is true. Formerly there was the nicest appreciation on the part of the public; at present there is a noticeable lack of understanding. Some provincial delegates with whom I sat during the progress of a delicate and artistic operetta reminded me of cows looking at a railway train. The natural effect is a general lowering of the artistic standard, save in plays of common life or low life like those of Gorky and Gogol, when the audience is keenly appreciative and the actors as good as ever they were.

All these sweeping changes are based on the Bolshevik theory that the Russian public is a child which must be educated by a handful of talented men; and I must admit that Lunacharsky, their Commissar of Fine Arts, is a very cultured and artistic official of liberal and unerring taste. He holds that if left to themselves, the public would tend towards circuses, buffoonery, sloppy sentimentality, and bad farce; that their taste must therefore be cultivated and directed in the right direction by men like himself; and that a few years of this wise dictatorship will make them prefer “Hamlet” to the “Girl who took the Wrong Turning.” Part of this process of artistic education consists in the elimination of bad plays, which are simply not allowed to appear.

Lunacharsky believes that he can by this procedure lift up the whole Russian people in course of time to the artistic level of the small select minority which guides dramatic taste in every country and has always done so. But all he can do is to substitute one critical minority for another, though I admit that he will greatly raise the artistic standard of the masses, as there is at the present moment a positive craze for dramatic excellence and the study of dramatic masterpieces all over Russia, and even in the ranks of the Red Army. The dramatic and musical performances given by the Russian soldiers are so much superior to those generally given by our own troops, that one wonders sometimes if, in this particular matter, the Bolsheviks are not right and we wrong. Is there not something slightly unsound in our theory about giving the public what it wants, a theory which places the interests of literature, music, and the drama in the hands of speculators who only want to make money? Is the modern music-hall an advance on the Shakespearean theatre?

Undoubtedly the Bolsheviks are wrong, however, in making use of literature and art, as they are doing, in order to teach Communism. If they have swept away a frivolous Press they have replaced it by a Press which is worse than frivolous. If they have prohibited the production of stupid films in the cinemas, they have produced films preaching an intense class hatred which will make Russia a centre of infection for the next half-century. One film produced in Ekaterinburg glorified the assassin of the Grand Duke Sergius, who was represented as weltering in his blood, while the murderer, who was exhibited as a model for all good boys to imitate, stood by with another bomb which he was preparing to throw. If they have burned the innumerable and tiresome records of the old bureaucracy, they are replacing those records very fast by the wholesale manufacture of Socialist records which are far worse in every way, and which will be likewise consigned to the flames by whatever Government succeeds the Reds. If they have made a clean sweep of Byzantine theology, they have replaced it by a Marxian literature which will have an equally petrifying effect on the Russian mind.