Posted by John Wilson on September 03, 2001 at 23:40:14 from 202.154.130.47:
In “Witnesses of the Russian Revolution”, Harvey Pitcher gives what foreign journalists wrote at the time, rather than later with hindsight (from a review of the revised edition):
“... the left-winger Arthur Ransome, who fondly imagined that Lenin would form a nice coalition government with other left-wing parties, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries. Or Harold Williams clinging to his belief that the middle-class Kadets were going to revive.”
“Cheerful Giver” a biography of the journalist and linguist Harold Williams by his wife Adriana Tyrkova-Williams (pub. 1935) makes no mention of Arthur Ransome that I could find; it is not indexed. Brogan says that when he first went to Russia in 1913-14, Harold was a father-figure to him, and Adriana was kind to him (page 99-100).
But Adriana turned bitterly against him when their political views diverged, because of her anti-Bolshevism. In the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) headed by Miliukov, Adriana was a leading member. It was said that the Cadets had one good man, and she was a woman!
Adriana was an intimate friend at Princess Oblensky’s school of Nadya Krupskaya, who was later the wife of Lenin after meeting him at evening classes. Adriana visited them in Geneva in 1904. During her only conversation with Lenin, he said to her, while they were standing under a lamp-post:
“That’s what we shall ‘lantener’ you for”
when he pointed to it, and reminded her of how the French mobs used to hang the aristocrats on lamp-posts. She saw with surprise that a sensual, sadistic smile was hovering over his lips.
Unlike Arthur Ransome who studied a new language via children’s stories, Harold Williams (who had been a Methodist minister) studied versions of the New Testament. As a youth he constructed a Dobuan grammar and vocabulary from a translation of St Mark in Dobu, a New Guinea language, which he had never heard.