Posted by Ian E-N on August 06, 2003 at 13:21:21 from 148.88.0.9 user IanEN.
In Reply to: Re: A Bit Off Track? posted by Duncan on August 06, 2003 at 09:40:44:
And while I sometimes think there's only me and Paul Foot
hard to best Foot's forward to In Revolutionary Russia boxed set of
Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 and The Crisis in Russia - think also includes
The Truth About Russia pamphlet :-
"No one contends that the Bolsheviki are angels. I ask only that men
shall look through the fog of libel that surrounds them, and see that
the ideal for which they are struggling, in the only way in which they
can struggle, is among those lights which every man of young, and
honest heart sees before him somewhere on the road and not among those
other lights from which he resolutely turns away. These men who have made
the Soviet Government in Russia, if they must fail, will fail with
clean shields and clean hearts, having striven for an ideal which will
live beyond them. Even if they fail, they will none the less have
written a page of history more daring than any other which I can
remember in the story of the human race. They are writing it amid showers
of mud from all the meaner spirits in their country, in yours'
and in my own. But when the thing is over, and their enemies have
triumphed, the mud will vanish like black magic at noon, and that page
will be as white as the snows of Russia, and the writing on it as bright
as the gold domes that I used to see glittering in the sun when
I looked from my windows in Petrograd.
And when in after years men read that page they will judge your country
and mine, your race and mine, by the, help, or hindrance they gave to
the writing of it. "
Foot, guess especially due to interest in Shelley, greatly taken by :-
"I do not think I shall ever be so happy in my life as I was during those
first days when I saw working men and peasant soldiers sending
representatives of their class and not of mine. I remembered Shelley's,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many - they are few’.
one should not be surprised if there's a left/socialist/Marxist
rediscovery of AR before too long!
Ransome's views on such matters poorly served by Brogan's biography :-
"Hugh Brogan devotes only two pages of his biography to this remarkable
pamphlet, which he obviously regards as a bit embarrassing. An honest
biographer, Brogan was at a disadvantage when writing about Ransome's
Russian experiences. Brogan has little sympathy with the Bolsheviks and
cannot contain his hostility to everything they stood for. It is hard for
him properly to convey Arthur Ransome's untrammelled enthusiasm for them."