This Etext prepared by Joseph Gallanar
Gallanar@microserve.net
On August 27, 1914, in London, I made this note in amemorandum book: "Met Arthur Ransome at_____'s;discussed a book on the Russian's relation to the war in thelight of psychological background—folklore." The book wasnot written but the idea that instinctively came to himpervades his every utterance on things Russian.
The versatile man who commands more than respect as thebiographer of Poe and Wilde; as the (translator of andcommentator on Remy de Gourmont; as a folklorist, hasshown himself to be consecrated to the truth. The documentthat Mr. Ransome hurried out of Russia in the early days ofthe Soviet government (printed in the New Republic andthen widely circulated as a pamphlet), was the first notableappeal from a non-Russian to the American people for fairplay in a crisis understood then even less than now.
The British Who's Who—that Almanach de Gotha ofpeople who do things or choose their parents wisely—tells usthat Mr. Ransome's recreations are "walking, smoking, fairystories." It is, perhaps, his intimacy with the last named thatenables him to distinguish between myth and fact and thatmakes his activity as an observer and recorder so valuable ina day of bewilderment and betrayal.
I am well aware that there is material in this book which willbe misused by fools both white and red. That is not myfault. My object has been narrowly limited. I have tried bymeans of a bald record of conversations and things seen, toprovide material for those who wish to know what is beingdone and thought in Moscow at the present time, anddemand something more to go upon than secondhandreports of wholly irrelevant atrocities committed by eitherone side or the other, and often by neither one side nor theother, but by irresponsible scoundrels who, in the naturalturmoil of the greatest convulsion in the history of ourcivilization, escape temporarily here and there from any kindof control.
The book is in no sense of the word propaganda. Forpropaganda, for the defence or attack of the Communistposition, is needed a knowledge of economics, both from thecapitalist and socialist standpoints, to which I cannotpretend. Very many times during the revolution it hasseemed to me a tragedy that no Englishman properlyequipped in this way was in Russia studying the giganticexperiment which, as a country, we are allowing to passabused but not examined. I did my best. I got, I think I maysay, as near as any foreigner who was not a Communistcould get to what was going on. But I never lost the bitterfeeling that the opportunities of study which I made formyself were wasted, because I could not hand them on tosome other Englishman, whose education and training wouldhave enabled him to make a better, a fuller use of them.Nor would it have been difficult for such a man to get theopportunities which were given to me when, by sheerpersistence in enquiry, I had overcome the hostility which Iat first encountered as the correspondent of a "bourgeois"newspaper. Such a man could be in Russia now, for theCommunists do not regard war as we regard it. TheGermans would hardly have allowed an Allied Commissionto come to Berlin a year ago to investigate the nature andworking of the Autocracy. The Russians, on the other hand,immediatelya greed to the suggestion of the