BY MRS. PHILIP SNOWDEN CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 1920...

I have written these impressions of Bolshevik Russia with the object of promoting peace with that great country, by adding the evidence to that already given in numerous articles and books of one more eye-witness of the terrible sufferings of the Russian people. I paid a six weeks’ visit to Russia as a member of the Delegation chosen by the Executive Committee of the Labour party and of the Trades Union Congress, in fulfilment of a resolution passed by a special Trade Union Congress held on Dece

In every country in the world oceans of eloquence and torrents of passion are being poured out in the attempt to prove that Bolshevist Russia is a heaven or a hell. The friendships of a lifetime are being broken in fruitless efforts to prove either the faultlessness or the folly of the theory of Communism. The doctrines of Karl Marx and the philosophy of Bakounin are the twin rocks upon which the Labour movement in every land threatens to split. Without in the remotest degree intending or desiri

The individual has yet to be born who can be perfectly just. Even educated and cultured people find it difficult in any given set of circumstances not to exhibit their predilections; prejudice will be the last vice to disappear and toleration the last virtue to develop in any large number of human beings. The most that the members of the British Delegation would claim for themselves would be that each made a serious and honest attempt to prepare his, or her, mind for straight looking at, and har

When I was a little child I had a lively and delicious contact with fairies. We used to laugh and sing and dance together through many happy hours like the good comrades we were. But I cannot say that I have ever seen a ghost; that is, I had never seen one until I went to Russia. During the whole of the time I was in Russia I was haunted. The Russian novelists have been very faithful to their people. Turgenieff, Dostoievski, Gorky, Tolstoy, and the rest of them take one into the real Russia as o

People in Russia appear to be able to live without sleep. At any rate they never go to bed before the small hours of the morning. Very rarely were we allowed to go to our rooms before two o’clock, and it was frequently three o’clock in the morning. On entering Russia we were asked to alter our watches by three hours, making the time so much in advance of English time, and we used to console ourselves that it was “really only midnight” when, almost too weary to stand, we staggered to our rooms at

Accompanying the British Delegation were two British journalists, one representing a great Liberal daily and the other a well-known Radical weekly journal. At Reval we were joined by an American writer. Later a French and an Italian journalist were added to the number. Later still came a German writer on the scene; and in addition a considerable number of Swedes and Norwegians who had come to Russia to make a special study of industrial life, with a view to organising assistance from Sweden of t

Almost everybody in Russia is hungry and cold, and many surface critics in Russia blame the Government for conditions for which they cannot be held in any great degree responsible. It is perfectly true that in the beginning, Committee management of an industry sometimes brought that industry to a full stop. Kameneff is reported by Arthur Ransome to have explained the non-working of certain excellent soap factories on the double ground of lack of material and “because some crazy fool imagined tha

It is fondly to be hoped that when these words come to be printed, peace between Russia and Poland will have been satisfactorily established. The need of Europe and the world for a real peace and the awful possibilities of the alternative ought to be the subject of everybody’s prayer and the impulse to everybody’s endeavour until peace becomes an accomplished fact. The situation as it now stands is this. The Russians have everywhere defeated the Poles, as they told us they would, and are threate

The Communists have placed at the head of their Education Commissariat a man of remarkable character and great ability. Before we went to Russia reports concerning Lunacharsky had encouraged us to the belief that in him we should meet a genuine benefactor of his country. As a matter of fact I did not meet him at all, as he was not in Moscow at the time of our visit, but travelling in the south on business connected with his department. Friends of his in Moscow discussed him with us and spoke of

Off to Moscow at last, the city of our dreams! I have not told one half of our adventures in Petrograd. It is not possible to do so. The tour of the great Putiloff Works was of enormous interest, and may be referred to in a later part of the narrative. Our visit to the gloomy fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul at midnight had a mournful fascination for those who have steeped themselves in the lore of the martyrs of the Revolution. The old keeper of the cells is still there, impassive and unrespo

I am not so foolish as to think that one brief interview of an hour and a half entitles one to be dogmatic about any individual, much less about the character of Lenin. It is not possible to know anyone in so short a time. I had read much of what Lenin had written, and disagreed very profoundly with most of it; but I knew that he had kept together his Government in circumstances of tremendous difficulty and discouragement for more than two and a half years. One after another he and his tireless

The peasants form more than three-quarters of the population of Russia, and one of the greatest friends of the peasants, who was also an intimate of Tolstoy’s, kindly invited three of us to his home, and came to the hotel to fetch us. His name is Tcherkoff, and for some years he lived in England as head of a tiny Co-operative Colony near Bournemouth. He is extremely interested in Co-operation which, in his view, is the right line of social development, particularly for a country like Russia. It

One baleful result of the late European war has been to weaken faith in political democracy amongst those people whom it most seriously concerns. And the most pitiful part of the tragedy is that the wounds of democracy have been delivered in the house of its friends. That is a big story which will one day be written in full. The important fact remains, that Parliamentary political machinery is in danger of being thrown upon the scrap-heap by those who see in it something antiquated and rusty and

In December of 1917 there was established in Russia for the protection of the Revolution and “to carry on the merciless struggle against those trying to overthrow the Soviet system; against sabotage, banditage and espionage and speculation” an organisation known as the Extraordinary Commission. It has an Advisory Board of fifteen persons, all members of the Communist party. Its head and chief is a man named Dserzhinsky, a fanatical Communist whose adoration of Lenin is notorious. He is assisted

It was at the suggestion of one of the Delegates that the Bolsheviki kindly arranged a trip down the Volga, that great central waterway which flows for nearly two thousand miles to the Caspian Sea, and which is fifty miles broad where it empties itself into this great lake. We went in our special train, accompanied by interpreters, agents, secretaries and journalists, a party of thirty to forty people, all anticipating a good time, to the famous city of Nijni-Novgorod. The plan was to take the s

The Delegation having been divided through the unfortunate sickness of one of their number, we left the country and returned to England in several groups and by different routes. The group of which I was a member took train at Saratov, and was enabled to go all the way through to Reval without a change. The country looked pleasant and peaceful. Large herds of cows were a frequent feature of a prosperous-looking landscape—for it cannot be too often impressed that the country is not lacking in foo