Six Weeks in Russia in 1919

"There are only a couple of well-known eyewitness accounts of the revolution. The best known is probably John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World , but I’ve gone with Ransome’s book because Ransome is my man, and because whereas Reed’s book is a highly imaginative view of the 1917 revolution, Ransome’s is an equally stylised version of the revolution a little way down the road. Ransome’s book is a literal account of the six weeks he spent in Russia in early 1919. In the 18 months since the Bolsheviks seized power, the West had become, if possible, even more disenchanted with their government. The Bolsheviks had made a separate peace with Germany, then launched a terror against their own people, and of course they were fighting the white armies in the Russian civil war, who were being covertly supported by Britain and others. So the book is Ransome’s first-hand account of what it was to be like in Petrograd and Moscow during a period when almost all Western observers had left the country. Most had left because it was dangerous, but also because the Bolsheviks wouldn’t speak to anybody who wasn’t sympathetic to them. Ransome had astonishing access to the Bolshevik leadership, and yet he was officially employed and paid by the British secret services. The book reads in what I would term a typically “Ransomian” way. In terms of content, it’s a deliberately domestic, almost trivial book. He wants to paint the Bolshevik leaders as peaceful, orderly men and women. The first thing he talks about is coming to Petrograd, and how there is no one on the streets because everybody is just getting on with things. He says that there were hardly any people carrying guns any longer, because they didn’t need to be armed. Then he goes to Moscow, where the Bolshevik government was now based, and is put up in the main hotel where many of the Bolshevik leaders were now living. He talks to a number of senior characters within the Bolshevik party as if they were friends of his, which they kind of were. But at the same time he says he is completely objective, writing from the point of view of someone simply wandering through. I think this domesticity makes the book particularly fascinating. He describes the insides of people’s apartments. He writes about having a cup of tea with a senior official, or interviewing Lenin. What he seeks to communicate is how utterly determined the Bolsheviks were as a military power, and that there was no point in trying to get rid of them. But he also wants to communicate that they are real and in many ways likable people – because the Bolsheviks had been so demonised in the West that they were no longer thought of as real people at all. Ransome is trying to bring the Bolsheviks into British and Allied sitting rooms as the sort of government that should be allowed to take its place at the Paris peace conference, which was convened by the Allied powers to set the peace terms for Germany following the 1918 armistice. But, of course, the Allies had no intention of extending such an invitation. The Bolsheviks remained international pariahs. All the same, when he published it in England it sold like hot cakes, because Lenin didn’t have horns and cloven hooves in it."