RUSSIA MEANS PEOPLE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 414, 30 May 1947, Page 11

RUSSIA MEANS PEOPLE

(Part of a talk by

EDWARD

CRANKSHAW

in the Third

Programme of the BBC )

HE thing that always defeats me when I find myself talking about Russia to people who have never been there is the paralysing consciousness that we are really thinking about quite different things. The word "Russia" to me, and to anyone else who has lived in Russia and really experienced it, stands for the Russian land, and for the Russian people, and for the material and spiritual achievements of these Russian people-for Magnitogorsk, the ballet, the literature of the 19th Century, the medieval icons, the Tsarist Empire, and the October Revolution. But the word "Russia" to the majority of Englishmen seems to stand for something quite different. The Russian people and the Russian land do not come into it at all. Instead there is a sort of statistical abstraction of power of a kind that never was on land or sea-an abstract power which looks one thing to the ‘friendly and something else to the hostile. To the friendly it is lucidly expressed in terms of constitutions, blastrnaces, mechanised agriculture, free tickets for the opera, social services, and all other things dear to’ the heart of total propaganda-and, I may say, to total credulity. While to the unfriendly this abstract power is expressed in terms of concentration camps, police terror, ruthless censorship, forced labour and the ghost of the Comintern. But one thing that is left out of account altogether is the one thing that really matters: I mean the Russian peoplewho are Russia. (And here may I say in parenthesis that I have heard of the other nationalities in the .U.S.S.R. and I know well enough that a Muscovite is not the same as a Circassian. But what I am talking about are the people of Great Russia and those others who have joined with them in imposing the central rule of Moscow first on the Tsarist Empire, now on the U.S.S.R. These are the people who counted in the past and still count to-day.)

If we want to get anywhere at all in understanding the Russians, we must stop thinking about Russia in terms of her institutions and try to think of her in terms of her people. When we think of Russian institutions in terms of our own institutions, and theri try to deduce the nature of the Russian people from a totally false picture-and when the Russians do the same with us, as they do-it leads to such a confusion of cross-purposes and misunderstandings that there is no sorting them out at all. Acts of Faith In the way they set about the business of living the Russians are widely different from us. They have a completely different background. We should not think of a Russian factory for the mass production of motor-cars in the way we should think of an English factory and people it with Russianspeaking artisans. We should get much nearer to the mark if we imagined a whole village of peasant characters by Chekhov turned loose in a machine shop. That is the kind of thing I mean. A modern production line built and maintained by British engineers and workmen is an admirable conception and a triumph of human organisation and ingenuity. But the same thing built and maintained by peasants out of Chekhov is nothing less than a miracle. It is a monument of human sacrifice ... And thus already we begin to see differences. We can take them a stage further. The famous Moscow underground is not, like the London tube, an engineering feat of distinction carried out for material ends: it is an engineering. feat bordering on _ the miraculous, and carried out in the same spirit as the building of a medieval cathedral, and at much the same sort of cost in human effort and pain. It. is not, as our London tube is, a routine venture designed to give profit to the promoters and material service to the (continued on next page)

RUSSIA MEANS PEOPLE

(continged from previous . page) passengers; it is an act of faith and the symbol of an idea, Most of us by now are beginning to have an inkling that the words "democracy" and "liberty" mean one thing in Russia and something quite different here. But it goes deeper than that. Even the simplest words are misleading. The word "factory," one would have thought, was concrete enough; yet we have already seen that it means one thing in Coventry and quite another thing in Sverdlovsk. In Archangel during the war I was amazed to see an amiable and serious-minded Russian signals officer violently assault a lendlease wireless-set (designed for tanks) with a three-pound hammer. It was not sabotage. It was simply that the British demonstrator had said that the set would stand up to anything, and the

Red Army major was sceptical. Of course the wireless set broke. And when the outraged Englishman protested that standing up to anything did not include deliberate assault and battery, his Russian opposite number retorted drily that in the Red Army it had to, because if the set broke down in a battle the first thing the Russian operator would do would be to hammer at it with the buttend of his tommy-gun to make it go. It is the same, as I have said, all the way through. It is the same with every ' word and every conception, Words are relative things, not absolutes. And it is when we insist on regarding them as absolutes, as meaning the same thing everywhere, in all countries and at all times, that we go so badly astray. Products of Character There are plenty of things we most of us dislike about Russia to-day, but what never seems to occur to us at all is to ask whether these things which . we dislike-as well as the things we like-may not have something to do with the Russian people themselves, We can blame the censorship of ideas and the existence of the secret police on Stalin. But 30 years ago we were blaming exactly the same things on the Tsar. I should have thought, however, that eonfronted with something which we regard as evil and which has existed in Russia for several centuries and survived the most sweeping revolution in history, the obvious conclusion would be that it must have something to do with ‘the character of the people. I imagine the real reason why we -never seem to draw this simple and elementary conclusion is because we simply cannot conceive of any people putting up an autocracy, with a censorship, and with a secret police, of their own to will. (continued on ins page)

(continued from previous page)

I am not suggesting that the RusSian people enjoy these things: on the contrary. But there is a world of difference between enjoying a thing and putting up with it as a necessary evil. We in this country can hardly be said to enjoy heavy taxation; but we do put up with it as a necessary evil. A visitor from another planet, nevertheless, might very well be forgiven for concluding that we pay these taxes under threat of imprisonment and with murder. in our hearts. The threat of imprisonment is there all right, as many of us know. But although it takes this to make us pay, we do pay, and without murder in our hearts. And so it is, with most Russians, with their secret police and their socialist autocracy. Thé threat of Siberia is there: it takes that to make them behave themselves politically. But they know, just as we know, that the state has got to exist. That, it seems to me, opens an enticing prospect down which the imagination may profitably wander. The Russians do not see how the state can exist if you go around spreading subversive opinions, And one reason’ is that the subversive opinion of a Russian. is apt to be very subversive indeed. It is out to win, by hook or by crook, by fair means or foul. " Between us and the Rusisan people there is a profound conflict of values when it’ comes to the business of living. They will surrender the liberty they covet above all things rather than see it abused in any way by any individual, We, believing that liberty can live only by the practice of liberty, will expose it to vicious abuse by. individuals rather than let it die. There is a great difference here. And the sooner we tealise that Russian behaviour is something organic and reasonable ‘and -not artificial and capricious, that it springs from something deep in the people and not simply from the government of the day the sooner we shall realise where. we ourselves stand.