Robert Haslam, a comfortably-off businessman, joined the rush to check out a (relatively) new social experiment, leaving his home in Bolton ‘in the Rolls’ in August 1932, bound for Hay’s Wharf in London and thence to the Soviet Union. He spent a month travelling around on a trip arranged by Intourist, but found little to commend post-Revolutionary Russia, with its generally poor food, lukewarm baths, unflushable lavatories, uncomfortable trains and what he decided were hopelessly inefficient factories — though he was impressed by a pioneer camp near Yalta. Haslam found it ‘increasingly difficult to come to an opinion on much of it, but I do feel there is no stability’. Defiantly he wrote in the visitors’ book of the Russian ship that bore his party back to Britain: ‘St George for Merrie England/No Soviets for me/I quite enjoyed the Sibier/But then, thank God, I’m free!’
Malcolm Muggeridge had shared the intellectual left’s enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. Disillusioned with his work on the Manchester Guardian’ and with Britain under the new National Government, he resolved in 1931 ‘to go where I thought a new age was coming to pass; to Moscow and the future of mankind’, as the newspaper’s Russian correspondent. Muggeridge and his wife Kitty (a niece of Beatrice Webb, who considered that she and Malcolm were ‘the most gifted and certainly the most “proletarian” of my nieces and nephews’) ‘sold off pretty well everything we had, making, as it were, a bonfire of our bourgeois trappings: my dinner jacket, for instance, Kitty’s only long dress … as well as most of our books, which we considered to be bourgeois literature of no relevance in a Workers’ State … We even wound up our bank account. What possible use would a bank account be in a country where bankers along with industrialists, landlords and priests had all been eliminated? … Kitty was pregnant again, so that our next child would be born a Soviet citizen [the Muggeridges had left their three-year-old son Leonard behind at school in the Lake District]. It all seemed wonderful.’
But it wasn’t. Soon Muggeridge grew impatient with life in the Soviet Union: ‘We might as well have been back in Didsbury. Revolutions, like wars, upset things far less than might be superficially supposed. As the very word “revolution” implies, they have a way of ending up where they began.’ He grew wearily amused too, as did Bullard, by the endless procession of distinguished visitors and their pronouncements:
Shaw, accompanied by Lady Astor (who was photographed cutting his hair), declaring that he was delighted to find that there was no food shortage in the USSR [the Ukraine in particular was enduring a famine at the time]. Or [Harold] Laski singing the praises of Stalin’s new Soviet constitution [though Laski, who visited in 1934, tempered his enthusiasm for Russia as ‘a land of hope’ with concern about the repressive nature of the regime, declaring that he was sure that ‘if I lived in Russia I should court difficulty from my sense of the need to form a Council of Civil Liberties’]. Or Julian Huxley describing how a ‘German town-planning expert was travelling over the huge Siberian spaces in a special train with a staff of assistants, stopping every now and again to lay down the broad outlines of a future city, and then pushing on, leaving the details to be filled in by architects and engineers who remained behind … I shall treasure until I die as a blessed memory the spectacle of them travelling with radiant optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about squalid, over-crowded towns. Listening with unshakeable faith to the fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating like schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and mindless slogans endlessly intoned to them.
Within months of his arrival Muggeridge left the country of which he had entertained such high expectations and travelled to Montreux in Switzerland, where he and Kitty had decided to run a guest house for the Workers’ Travel Association (a Labour Party tourist agency). Before he left, Muggeridge had written a series of articles for the Manchester Guardian which were published in March 1933. ‘“We must collectivize agriculture,” or “We must root out the Kulaks” (the rich peasants). How simple it sounds! How logical! But what is going on in the remote villages? In the small households of the peasants? What does the collectivization of agriculture mean in practice in the lives of the peasants? What results has the “new drive” produced? … That is what I wanted to find out.’ What he found was that ‘the civilian population was obviously starving in its absolute sense: Not undernourished as, for instance … some unemployed workers in Europe … There had been no bread for three months … The only edible thing [in the markets] in the lowest European standards was chicken … the rest of the food offered for sale was revolting and would be thought unfit, in the ordinary way to be offered to animals.’ It was ‘the same story in the Ukraine — cattle and horses dead; fields neglected; meagre harvests despite moderately good climate conditions; all the grain produced was taken by the Government; now no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment’.
Muggeridge’s reports, which were confirmed by Gareth Jones, a former Political Secretary of Lloyd George who had gone on a walking tour of Russia that same year, were the first accounts of the famine by a Western journalist, the first indication that collectivisation, far from being a socialist dream, was turning into a nightmare. But not everyone wanted to hear them: the editor of the Manchester Guardian was lukewarm, wishing that Muggeridge had restricted himself to ‘plain, matter-of-fact statements of what you saw … If we denounce we are apt to be in unpleasant company.’ George Bernard Shaw (who, Jones reported, was ‘after Stalin the most hated man in Russia’) had written to the Guardian after an earlier report from Muggeridge, describing his comments as ‘a particularly offensive and ridiculous attempt to portray the lot of the workers as one of slavery and starvation. We the undersigned are recent visitors to the USSR … We desire to record that we saw nowhere evidence of such economic slavery, privation, unemployment … Everywhere we saw a hopeful and enthusiastic working class, self-respecting, free up to the limits imposed on them by nature and the terrible inheritance from the tyranny and incompetence of their former rulers … setting an example of industry and conduct which would greatly enrich us if our system supplied our workers with any incentive to follow it.’
Muggeridge, despairing, ‘discarded the Manchester Guardian and wrote a further series of articles, ‘as bitter and satirical as I knew how to make them’, about what he had seen, which he sent off to the Morning Post, a ‘reputable Tory newspaper of the extreme Right’ (which was taken over by the Daily Telegraph in 1937).
Some who kept the faith in the Soviet model had a disquieting time as news of Stalin’s purges and show trials became known, while others were able to accept these as the inevitable ‘infantile disease’ of a revolutionary society; the few who lost their faith found the disillusion hard, and felt rudderless as they drifted through the crises of capitalism, their lodestar tarnished.
When the journalist Henry Vollam Morton (known as Harry), encouraged by the warm reception and almost bi-monthly reprints of his book In Search of England set off In Search of Wales in 1932, his route wound round the mountains of Snowdonia and along the craggy coast of what he called the ‘Land’s End of Wales’; he met the ex-Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, ‘a strong wind in the war years’, walking down a lane in his home village of Criccieth. Morton then struck inland through the Llanberis Pass, bound ‘through the thin rain’ for the small town of Betws-y-Coed. Had he instead stuck to the coastal route, he would have come across a strange private fantasy demesne, a sliver of Italianate Surrealism that clung to the Merioneth Peninsula.
Aber Iâ (‘estuary of glass’) had been bought in the mid-1920s by the ‘intuitive’ (that is, virtually untrained) architect