The Road to Hell

A very American thing to say. This next bit, not so much.

As to the unquestionably repressive nature of the regime, Mrs Eardley-Wheatsheaf thought that visitors from more civilized countries ought to keep their heads and to see things in proportion. It was true, as she explained at many subsequent lectures, pursing her lips tightly, perhaps a little venomously, that Soviet officials sometimes disappeared (she accentuated the word "disappeared" to give it its full significance); and naturally she deplored such goings-on, just as she deplored the press censorship and the suppression of all opposition opinion. A the same time she had to admit that, given the peculiar conditions prevailing in Russia, administrative disappearances carried with them certain advantages which she for one was not going to overlook.

Malcolm Muggeridge,
Winter in Moscow

Another niece, Katherine Dobbs, married the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, whose experience reporting from the Soviet Union subsequently made him highly critical of the Webbs' optimistic portrayal of Stalin's rule. Their books, Soviet Communism: A new civilization? (1935) and The Truth About Soviet Russia (1942) have been widely denounced for adopting an uncritical view of Stalin's conduct during periods that witnessed a brutal process of agricultural collectivization as well as extensive purges and the creation of the gulag system.

The Webb's were gifted with that combination of wealth, influence and self-righteous ignorance that can only thrive in a society as advanced (and powerful) as England of the late 19th/early 20th Century - requirements certainly met and exceeded by the United States today.

They may be a conveniently forgotten embarrassment to the left now, but in their lifetimes the Webb's influence on British (which then meant global) politics can't be underestimated. That contribution - denounced now or not - belongs to history, meaning it's the road that brought us to where we are today. (They weren't alone - in America, Walter "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs" Duranty's praise of the Soviet system as NY Times Moscow chief earned him a Pulitzer Prize.)

As for Muggeridge...

Initially attracted by Communism, Muggeridge and his wife, Kitty, traveled to Moscow in 1932, where he was to be a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian... Increasingly disillusioned by communism, Muggeridge decided to investigate reports of the famine in Ukraine, traveling there and to the Caucasus without the permission of the Soviet authorities.

Only occasionally reprinted, copies of Winter in Moscow are somewhat valuable today.

From a later interview with Muggeridge:

What sort of response did you encounter when you came back from the Soviet Union and published your findings, particularly from people close to you, like the Webbs?

The Webbs were furious about it. Mrs. Webb in her diary puts in a sentence which gives the whole show away. She says, "Malcolm has come back with stories about a terrible famine in the USSR. I have been to see Mr. Maisky (the Soviet ambassador in Britain) about it, and I realize that he's got it absolutely wrong." Who would suppose that Mr. Maisky would say, "No, no, of course he's right"?

You published Winter in Moscow when you got back from the Soviet Union, and you were attacked in the press for your views.

Very strongly. And I couldn't get a job.

Why was that? Because people found your reports hard to believe?

No, the press was not overtly pro-Soviet, but it was, as it is now, essentially sympathetic with that side and distrustful of any serious attack on it.

How do you explain this sympathy?

It's something I've written and thought about a great deal, and I think that the liberal mind is attracted by this sort of regime. My wife's aunt was Beatrice Webb, and she and Sidney Webb wrote the classic pro-Soviet book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. And so one saw close at hand the degree to which they all knew about the regime, knew all about the Cheka (the secret police) and everything, but they liked it.

I think that those people believe in power. It was put to me very succinctly when we were taken down to Kharkiv for the opening of the Dnieper dam. There was an American colonel who was running it, building the dam in effect. "How do you like it here?" I asked him, thinking that I'd get a wonderful blast of him saying how he absolutely hated it. "I think it's wonderful," he said. "You never get any labor trouble."

This will be one of the great puzzles of posterity in looking back on this age, to understand why the liberal mind, the Manchester Guardian mind, the New Republic mind, should feel such enormous sympathy with this authoritarian regime.

You are implying that the liberal intelligentsia did not simply overlook the regime's brutality, but actually admired and liked it.

Yes, I'm saying that, although they wouldn't have admitted it, perhaps not even to themselves. I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an early member of the Fabian Society and so on, saying to me, "Yes, it's true, people disappear in Russia." She said it with such great satisfaction that I couldn't help thinking that there were a lot of people in England whose disappearance she would have liked to organize.

No, it's an everlasting mystery to me how one after the other, the intelligentsia of the Western world, the Americans, the Germans, even the French, fell for this thing to such an extraordinary degree.

Ultimately the Webbs and their annoying nephew would all do their bit for England during the war (quotes might be appropriate around "for England" in the Webbs' example...). Muggeridge served as an intelligence officer in the army. Meanwhile, though many socialists wised up to the USSR (especially after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) the Webbs remained steadfast, and following Stalin's abrupt change in status from Nazi ally to enemy they assured fellow Britons that in Joe Stalin they had a true friend. "The USSR is the most inclusive and equalized democracy in the world," Beatrice wrote in 1942 (in the aforementioned The Truth About Soviet Russia), adding that far from being a dictator, Stalin had nothing like "the autocratic power" of Franklin Roosevelt, "who not only selects his Cabinet, subject merely to approval by a simple majority of the Senate, but is also Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces."

"Finally," she asked...

"...is it right to suggest that Soviet Communism is a new civilization which will, in spite of the crudities and cruelties inherent in violent revolution and fear of foreign aggression, result in maximizing the wealth of the nation and distributing it among all the inhabitants on the principle of from each man according to his faculty and to each man according to his need?"

There can be no doubt what she meant by "crudities and cruelties inherent in violent revolution" - but her answer was still a most enthusiastic yes.

We are fortunate to live in a more modern, enlightened era, where of course we all know Stalin was horrible, but....

As someone who works in academia, I run into my fair share of Marxists. While I disagree with their politics, many of them are decent non-evil people most certainly deserving of respect. There is, to my mind, a big difference between communism and Nazism: it is possible to be a communist with the "good will," i.e. to sincerely wish the best most prosperous future for everyone...

Footnote: "...the opening of the Dnieper dam. There was an American colonel who was running it..." Hugh Lincoln Cooper, biography, obituary in Time, July, 1937. I can find no evidence Cooper was interested in "power" other than the hydroelectric variety. It's possible Muggeridge was trying to be too witty here. (Though the implication that his project was accomplished with slave labor is obvious. See also windmill, and windmill references here. Of related interest to the broader topic of this post , Orwell's original introduction to Animal Farm here.)

Wikipedia entry on the Dnieper dam: "American specialists under the direction of Col H. Cooper took part in the construction. The first five giant power generators were manufactured by General Electric... During World War II, the strategically important dam and plant, then known as the Dniprostoj Hydro Power Plant, was dynamited by retreating Soviet troops in 1941, and then again by the retreating German troops in 1943."

Truman might have chuckled at that.