Ransome Six Weeks in Russia, 1919

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28761-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten

But for Swallows and Amazons, some of Arthur Ransome's earlier writings would be better known. The extraordinary success Ransome achieved as a children's writer, from the 1930's until his death in 1967, perhaps inevitably eclipsed his earlier work, but in the case of his two books and pamphlet on the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the tumultuous events that followed that is a great loss: it can be said unequivocally that these writings are on a par, perhaps even exceeding, such classics as John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World. Arthur Ransome knew Russia. He lived there from 1914 to 1918 almost all the time. He taught himself Russian and became a foreign correspondent for the liberal Daily News and Manchester Guardian. More than that, he came to know many of the Bolshevik leaders like Lenin, Trotsky and Checherin almost as personal friends, and, indeed, married Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. Arthur Ransome as a commentator on the Russian scene at the most convulsive moment in its history is unique. Unlike famous visitors like H. G. Wells (though his marvellous book, Russia in the Shadows shouldn't be overlooked) and Bertrand Russell, his was no brief journalistic inspection: and unlike other reporters such as John Reed, Victor Serge and Alfred Rosmer there was no tendentiousness in what he wrote - they were convinced revolutionaries, Ransome, although not unsympathetic to the Bolshevik cause, was a more objective recorder. Six Weeks in Russia, The Crisis in Russia and the pamphlet, The Truth about Russia constitute the best contemporary writing about Russia at the time of the Bolshevik takeover. They were reissued in the early 1990s, with an introduction by Paul Foot which has been retained for the Faber Finds reissue of Six Weeks in Russia; otherwise they have been out of print since first published

Arthur Ransome (1884-1967) achieved lasting fame as the author of the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books. They came however relatively late in his life. Before that he was a miscellaneous writer - a biography of Oscar Wilde, Bohemia in London and A History of Story-Telling being examples - and a journalist. In the latter role, his two most famous books were Six Weeks in Russia and The Crisis in Russia, both reissued in Faber Finds. His second wife, Evgenia Shelepina, was Trotsky's secretary.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ransome, Arthur

Leseproben

The truth about Russia
Letters Every day brings a ship, Every ship brings a word; Well for those who have no fear, Looking seaward well assured that the word the vessel brings is the word they wish to hear. Emerson wrote the poem I have stolen for the headpiece to this pamphlet, and Emerson wrote the best commentary on that poem, ‘If there is any period one would desire to be born in – is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.’ Revolution divides men by character far more sharply than they are divided by war. Those whom the gods love take the youth of their hearts and throw themselves gladly on that side, even if, clearsighted, they perceive that the fires of revolution will burn up perhaps the very things that, for themselves they hold most dear. Those others, wise, circumspect, foolish with the folly of wisdom, refrain, and are burned up none the less. It is the same with nations, and I send this pamphlet to America because America supported the French Revolution when England condemned it, and because now also America seems to me to look towards Russia with better will to understand, with less suspicion, without the easy cynicism that prepares the disaster at which it is afterwards ready to smile. Not that I think all this is due to some special virtue in America. I have no doubt it is due to geographical and economic conditions. America is further from this bloody cockpit of Europe, for one thing. For another, even rich Americans dependent for their full pockets on the continuance of the present capitalist system, can wholeheartedly admire the story of the Bolshevik adventure, and even wish for its success, without fearing any serious damage to the edifice in which they live, on which they feed, like parasites in cheese. Or it may be, that knowing so little about America, I let myself think too well of it. Perhaps there too men go about repeating easy lies, poisoning the wells of truth from simple lack of attention to the hygiene of the mind. I do not know. I only know that, from the point of view of the Russian Revolution, England seems to be a vast nightmare of blind folly, separated from the continent, indeed from the world, by the sea, and beyond that by the trenches, and deprived, by some fairy godmother who was not invited to her christening, of the imagination to realise what is happening beyond. Shouting in daily telegrams across the wires from Russia I feel I am shouting at a drunk man asleep in the road in front of a steamroller. And then the newspapers of six weeks ago arrive, and I seem to see that drunk sleeping fool make a motion as if to brush a fly from his nose, and take no further notice of the monstrous thing bearing steadily towards him. I love the real England, but I hate, more than I hate anything on earth (except cowardice in looking at the truth) the intellectual sloth, the gross mental indolence that prevents the English from making an effort of imagination and realising how shameful will be their position in history when the tale of this last year in the biography of democracy comes to be written. How shameful, and how foolish, for they will one day be forced to realise how appalling are the mistakes they committed, even from the mere bestial standpoint of self interest and expediency. Shameful, foolish and tragic beyond tears— for the toll will be paid in English blood. English lads will die and English lads have died, not one or two, but hundreds of thousands, because their elders listen to men who think little things, and tell them little things, which are so terribly easy to repeat. At least half of our worst mistakes have been due to the underestimation of some person or force outside England, and disturbing to little men who will not realise that chaos is once again and that giants are waking in the world. They look across Europe and see huge things, monstrous figures, and, to save themselves, and from respect for other little lazy minds, they leap for the easiest tawdry explanation, and say, ‘Ah, yes, bogies made in Germany with candles inside turnip heads!’ Then having found their miserable little atheistical explanation they din it into everybody, so that other people shall make the same mistakes, and they have company in folly, and so be excused. And in the end it becomes difficult for even honest-minded sturdy folk in England to look those bogies squarely in their turnip faces and see that they are not bogies at all, but the real article, giants, whose movements in the mist are of greater import for the future of the world than anything else that is happening in our day. I think it possible that the revolution will fail. If so, then its failure will not mean that it loses its importance. The French Revolution gave a measure of freedom to every nation in Europe, although it failed most notably in France and ended in a dictator, and a defeated dictator at that, and for the brave, clearsighted France, foreseen by Diderot and Rousseau, substituted a France in which thought died and everyone was left to grub money with a view to enslaving everybody else. The failure of the French Revolution did not lessen the ardour which the ideas which sprang from it poured into the minds that came to their maturity after 1795. And perhaps it was that failure which sharpened the conflict of the first half of the nineteenth century, when, after all, many candles were lit and fiercely, successfully guarded in the windy night which followed the revolutionary sunset. Let the revolution fail. No matter, if only in America, in England, in France, in Germany men know what it was that failed, and how it failed, who betrayed it, who murdered it. Man does not live by his deeds so much as by the purpose of his deeds. We have seen the flight of the young eagles. Nothing can destroy that fact, even if, later in the day, the eagles fall to earth one by one, with broken wings. It is hard here, where the tragedy is so close at hand, so intimate, not to forget the immediate practical purpose of my writing. It is this; to set down, as shortly as possible, the story of the development of the Soviet power in Russia, to show what forces in Russia worked against that power and why, to explain what exactly the Soviet government is, and how the end of the Soviet government will mean the end of the revolution, whatever may be the apparent character of any form of government which succeeds it. Circumstances of the March revolution
Revolutions are not definite political acts carried out by the majority in a nation who are unanimous in desiring a single definite object. Revolutionaries and their historians often try to give them that character afterwards, but that is only an illustration of man’s general tendency to supply his instinctive acts with family pedigrees of irreproachable, orderly reasoning. It would be less dignified but more honest to admit that revolution is a kind of speeding up of the political flux, during which tendencies that in ordinary times would perhaps only become noticeable in the course of years, come to full fruition in a few weeks or days. Revolution turns the slow river of political development into a rapid in which the slightest action has an immediate effect, and the canoe of government answers more violently to a paddle dipped for a moment than in more ordinary times to the organised and prolonged effort of its whole crew. Those servants of the autocracy who fermented disorder in Petrograd in March 1917 believed that by creating and suppressing an artificial, premature revolt they could forestall and perhaps altogether prevent the more serious revolt which they had good reason to expect in the future. They were wrong, because revolution is not an act of political life but a state of political life. Hoping to crush a political act, they created the state in which the old means of control slipped from their hands and they became incapable of the suppression of any acts whatsoever. Their immediate political opponents made the same mistake as the servants of the autocracy. They believed that the autocracy would carry out its plan and therefore did their best to prevent the revolution. Thus, in the days when the revolution of March 1917 began we had the spectacle of the autocracy wrestling with the bourgeoisie, both far removed from the actual people, both gambling with the lives of the people with entirely different objects. The autocracy was trying to create a revolution which would fail. The bourgeoisie was trying to prevent the autocracy from creating a revolution at all. Looking back over a year, it is almost laughable to think that it was the autocracy that arrested the whole labour group of the Central War Industries Committee, because that group of patriotic socialists had shown themselves capable of preventing trouble with the workmen. It is more than laughable to remember that Miliukov, the Cadet leader, sent a statement to the papers alleging that someone pretending to be Miliukov had been urging the workmen to come out into the streets, but that actually begged the workmen, for their own sakes, to do nothing of the kind. This is not the place in...