Posted by Adam Quinan on April 22, 2003 at 11:42:55 from 66.185.85.76 user Adam.
In Reply to: AR's Politics (was: Ransome on TV and Radio) posted by Duncan on April 22, 2003 at 09:59:16:
I don't think that you are quite alone far out in left field (to use a baseball metaphor). I am convinced that AR was not a nice tame conservative. I can see him quite easily as a William Morris socialist. I don't think that he was hard-line leftist.
He was brought up with late Victorian liberal views, his family was Liberal through and through (not liberals in the modern sense, we must remember).
In Russia, he discovered that the Czar's autocracy was a disaster. He believed from his observations on the scene that the moderate leftists and centrists were ineffective and pragmatically decided that the Bolsheviks were best for the Russian people. He therefore opposed the Allies support and intervention in favour of the counter-revolutionary forces.
In later life, he probably found that keeping quiet politically was the best thing for a quiet life in a country where his wife was an automatic suspect and he had gathered a certain reputation for "unsound" politics.
None of this contradicts his ability to write children's tales about upper middle class children with nannies and cooks. It is interesting how much and how sympathetically he brings in the working class people of his world.