British Intellectuals Visit Moscow

In 1920 there was much debate among intellectuals in the West concerning the Bolshevik Revolution. The celebrated British writer, H. G. Wells, a socialist, met Lenin in 1920 and found him to be "without a trace of hauteur" and a man who laughed a lot, but a laugh he described as grim. Wells did not care for what he believed was the narrow-minded rigidity of Lenin's ideology, including Lenin's belief that private property was the root of all evil. And Wells was critical of the Bolshevik's ruthlessness and criticized them for being dictatorial. He pointed out privileges that were already accruing to Communist Party personnel. He stated that if the Bolsheviks remained in power he expected them to continue to be despotic. But, believing that most things change, he expressed hoped that the Soviet regime would change for the better. Trotsky described Wells as bourgeois and condescending. Winston Churchill took issue with Wells, saying something about leopards not changing their spots, and Well's responded with a verbal attack on Churchill's past.

Also visiting the Soviet Union and Lenin in 1920 was Lord Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician, and socialist, and one of the few British intellectuals who from the start opposed British involvement in World War I. After returning to England from Russia, Russell published a small book in which he described Britain's labor movement as having done much toward making a "first-class" war against the Bolsheviks impossible. He mentioned the sympathy for the revolution among the British Left and within Britain's labor movement, and he mentioned the hope for a better world that the Bolsheviks had created. But he asserted that Bolshevism was a "tragic delusion." The hopes that inspire communism are as admirable, he wrote, as are those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, and they are held as fanatically and likely to do as much harm. Bolshevism, he wrote, had supplied a new religion out of a mood of disillusionment and despair. Russell wrote of a "Marxian gospel" replacing the Christian martyr's hopes of Paradise.

Russell wrote that western socialists who had visited Russia had "seen fit to suppress the harsher features of the present regime." He acknowledged that some of Bolshevism's harshness was a response to attacks from its enemies, but he stated that this was no excuse for many of the Soviet regime's brutalities. He wrote that in Russia he found some Bolsheviks kind. In Russia during the civil war, Russell wrote of an enthusiastic audience cheering itself hoarse and giving Trotsky a standing ovation when Trotsky put in an appearance at the Opera, and of Trotsky asking for and getting great hurrahs from the audience for the brave soldiers fighting for the revolution at the front. Describing his interview with the Russian writer Gorky, who had supported revolution, Russell wrote that Gorky was ill and obviously heartbroken. Gorky, reported Russell, still supported the Soviet government, not because it was faultless but because he believed that possible alternatives were worse. Gorky begged me, wrote Russell, that "in anything I might say about Russia, always to emphasize what Russia has suffered."

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