Other people drift in, and take their places, and wait. The old man comes out of his coma. He is going to demand attention, to insist upon doing whatever it is that he has come to do, and for which he has waited so interminably. Not at all. He picks up his fish, rises very slowly to his feet, and walks out again into the street. He came, apparently, for the express purpose of sitting and waiting, and for nothing else. How little he knows that he has supplied me with the title for this article.
To Speak My Mind About Russia: The Provincial Lady in Odessa
As my Russian visit draws to an end, I feel that the time has come for me to speak my mind about the Soviet Republic.
But to whom? My fellow-travelers all have opinions of their own which they regard, rightly or wrongly, as being of more value than mine. Most of them are pessimistic and declare that they don't ever want to come back again, and that the Crimea was lovely but the plugs in the hotels wouldn't pull, and Moscow was interesting but very depressing.
Some, on the other hand—like Mrs. Pansy Baker, the American communist—are wholly enthusiastic. (There is no juste milieu where the Soviet is concerned.) How splendid it all is, they cry, and how fine to see everybody busy, happy, and cared for. As for the institutions—the crèches, the schools, the public parks, and the prisons—all, without any qualification whatsoever, are perfect. Russia has nothing left to learn.
It would be idle to argue with them. For the matter of that, it is almost always idle to argue with anybody.
In Russia it is not only idle but practically impossible. One had thought of Russia, in one's out-of-date bourgeois way, as a country of tremendous discussions—of long evenings spent in splendid talk round the samovar—of abstract questions thrashed out between earnest thinkers. All that must have gone out with the Grand Dukes, the beautiful women, the borzois, the sables, and the diamonds.
The Comrades do not discuss; they assert. They contradict. They admit of no criticism whatever.
Nothing could be more difficult or, probably, more unprofitable, than to speak one's mind in Russia concerning one's impressions of Russia. But all the same, I shall try. After all, it's my turn. For weeks and weeks I have followed meekly in the wake of pert and rather aggressive young women, who have told me how vastly superior everything in the U.S.S.R. is to everything in my own Capitalistic country (where they have never set foot).
And although several of the guides have been neither pert nor aggressive, but very obliging and friendly, even they have smiled rather pityingly at any comment other than one of unqualified approval.
In fact, the U.S.S.R., like the Pope, is infallible, and whereas the Pope's claim has at least the dignity of some two thousand years of experience behind it, that of the U.S.S.R. has not.
I shall speak my mind before I leave the country. I am resolved upon it. And I shall have to do it fairly soon too. Odessa is my last stopping-place. A Russian boat is to take me to Constantinople in a week's time.
There is a very intelligent Russian in the hotel. He is a doctor and has lived for several years in the United States. I shall speak my mind to the Russian doctor.
We often sit at the same table for breakfast. Surely he would welcome an impartial discussion of the state of his country from an intelligent visitor?
"I shall be leaving next week, I am going to Turkey and then back to England. Everything I have seen in Russia has been most interesting."
This is not perhaps literally true—but then, so very few statements ever are. After the first fifty, for instance, none of the pictures of Lenin and Stalin was in the least interesting. But it will do, I think, to start the impartial discussion.
"You find Soviet Russia interesting? Yes, that is what everybody says,"
Well, it wasn't a very original opening. I see that now, and wish that I had thought of something new and brilliant instead.
"But," says the Russian doctor, "it is quite impossible for you to form any correct opinion of the country unless you knew it before the Revolution."
Then I've been wasting the whole of my time?
"No one can judge of the New Russia who did not know intimately, over a period of many years and from the inside, the Old Russia."
The only reply I can think of to this is Good God! and I do not make it aloud. But really, if I left home and children and country and spent months of discomfort in places I haven't liked, only to learn at the end of it all that none of my collected impressions are of any value whatever, it does seem rather discouraging. The Russian doctor is either unaware of or indifferent to the blow that he has dealt.
"Many people make that mistake," he remarks somberly. "They think that because they have visited with an interpreter a few museums, schools, hospitals they know something about this country. They do not. They know nothing."
In that case I ought to get a refund from Intourist. They sent me out here on entirely false pretenses.
"Another thing," continues the doctor, evidently warming to his work, "not only is it impossible to know anything about Soviet Russia without a profound knowledge of Russia under the Tzars; it is also absolutely impossible to judge of it in any way correctly at the present date. For that you would have to come again, say in twenty years' time."
How unreasonable he is. If I come to Russia again in twenty years—which God forbid—it will be in a bath-chair.
"So it would really take a whole lifetime," I dejectedly suggest, "to understand exactly what is happening in the Soviet?"
"More than a lifetime. Two or three generations."
I give up, altogether, the idea of speaking my mind about the U.S.S.R. to the Russian doctor. I must find somebody else.
II
I am inspired to choose one of the Odessa Intourist guides. She has a more pliable outlook than most of them and is married to an Austrian husband. She has been abroad, to France and Austria and America.
"Did you like America?"
"Yeah, America was fine."
"Perhaps some day you will go back there. Would you like to go back?"
"Perhaps. But it is not a free country,"
"Not a free country?"
"The workers there are slaves. The women are slaves," says the guide firmly.
"I really don't think they are. American women always seem to me to have a great deal of liberty."
"No. They have no liberty. They cannot do the work that the men do."
"But I don't think they want to."
"In the Socialist state a woman is the equal of a man in every way. She can become a mechanic, an engineer, a bricklayer, a mason. If she is expecting a child she does no work for two months before and one month after it is born, and she gets her money just the same while she is nursing the child—"
I know all this. I have heard it, and more than once, from every guide in every town that I have visited. The treatment of the expectant mother is the cheval-de-bataille of the whole Soviet system—and a very respectable cheval, too—but it cannot, surely, be the answer to every question, the triumphant last word in every discussion?
"I think the care that the Government takes of mothers and children in Russia is most excellent—but on the other hand, there is not very much individual freedom for women in the upbringing of their children. It