"The children are very happy. You have seen the crèches, the little beds for them to sleep on in the daytime, yes? Each child has its own toothbrush."
"I know. But the mothers don't see very much of them, do they, if they only have them home at night?"
"In the daytime they are at work. They have the right to work."
"Supposing they didn't want to work, and would look after their children at home?"
"Some of the women become Stakhanovite workers. Then they have privileges given to them—an extra room or a wireless or perhaps a car. We have many like that."
Yes, I know that too. In every factory there is a board bearing photographs of the Stakhanovite workers—who are usually distinguished for their capability rather than for their looks.
I cannot help feeling that the guide is not keeping to the point of the discussion—or even trying to do so.
"The experiment that is being tried over here is most interesting, but it seems to me to allow very little scope for individuality. Isn't that one of the drawbacks to the Communist system?"
"There are no drawbacks to the Communist system."
One looks at her in mingled admiration and despair. Admiration because she has been drilled into such blind and stubborn loyalty to her employers, and despair because it is so obviously impossible to conduct any discussion on such a basis.
I make one more effort.
"But surely there must be a few drawbacks to every system, to begin with, until it has been perfected. For instance, the complete lack of privacy must be trying, such a number of people all living in one or two rooms. Even in the hospitals. I suppose there's no such thing as a private ward."
"Here in Odessa, on the way to the sea, the houses that used to belong to rich people have all been converted into sanatoria for the workers. Those who need it are sent out here for a month, two months, as they require, by their trades unions."
"I know. I've seen them."
"There are beautiful gardens to those houses. They can sit there. And they can go and bathe in the sea."
"That's splendid. Do the workers who need a holiday choose where they go or is it settled for them?"
"They are told by the Government where to go for their holidays."
"That's what I meant. There isn't a great deal of freedom. Don't some of them feel they'd rather decide those things for themselves?"
"Sometimes the doctor orders special treatment. We have near here very celebrated mud-baths that cure all kinds of rheumatism."
It is like a conversation from an old-fashioned travel book:
"'Where is the band-box containing hats of which I asked you to take care, you good-for-nothing fellow?'
"'Sir, if you and your lady will rest awhile at the Inn, there is a fine view of Mont Blanc to be obtained from the parlor window.'"
Nothing is to be gained by going on talking with the guide. I shall have to speak my mind elsewhere.
But how difficult it is! Russians do not want one to speak one's mind. It is true that they like to talk, but they do not in the least like to listen. Least of all, do they like to listen to criticism of any kind. Well, perhaps they have their reasons for that. Only once do I go so far as to ask the lady who shows us round a Palace of the Pioneers in Rostov whether she would not like to visit some similar institutions in England or in America.
"Have you such things in England and America?"
"Yes, certainly. They are not called Palaces of the Pioneers, but we have technical schools and kindergartens and clubs for children and young people."
(The Palace of the Pioneers partakes of the nature of all these institutions, and has a really excellent marionette-show in a special little theater, into the bargain.)
"If you visited some of these places in other countries you could compare them with your own. It would be very interesting."
"No," says the Comrade, employing the simple form of flat contradiction favored by so many of the Comrades. "No, it would not be interesting. We do not wish to see how things are done in capitalist countries. When the foundation is wrong the building cannot be right. We know that our way is better."
I should like to tell her the story of the two Army chaplains, of whom the Church of England padre said to his Roman Catholic colleague:
"After all, you and I are both serving the same God," and met with the reply:
"Yes, indeed. You in your way, and I in His."
But if I did tell her she wouldn't think it funny, nor would she see its application to the official attitude of the U.S.S.R.
One can only congratulate the Government on the thoroughness with which it has seen to it that everyone coming into contact with foreign visitors upholds the theory that Soviet Russia has attained to earthly perfection within the past twenty years and has no longer anything to learn.
I wish one could talk to the old people or the people living in remote villages or the few remaining White Russians who still stay on and contrive somehow to live.
Stories filter through, from time to time...of people who try to get away and can't, of people who live hunted lives, in cellars, of people who are serving long terms of forced labor, as prisoners...Nobody really knows the truth.
It is evident that enormous progress is being made all over the country in civilization, and that the coming generation is to have a fair chance of acquiring health, and education and a limited amount of culture. (Limited, because everything is forbidden that is not directly in sympathy with Communist ideals, and because no society from which individualism is excluded can ever hope to produce creative artists.)
Perhaps it is inevitable that a country which has fought its way from centuries of tyranny and ignorance through bloody civil war, into the throes of a colossal rebirth should meet criticism with this blind, aggressive self-assertion. All the same, it is very far from prejudicing one in favor of the Soviet system to find so many of its exponents without humor, without manners, and without imagination.
III
I am leaving Russia. I sail from Odessa for Istanbul to-night. I have still not spoken my mind.
In defiance of repeated instructions from Intourist—and also from many of my fellow-travelers—to the effect that "tips are neither expected nor required in the Soviet Union," I have tipped several of the hotel servants, and they have accepted my offerings without the slightest demur.
I have said good-by to Intourist, and they to me, without very much abandon on either side.
I have packed. I have spent hours and hours debating within myself the best means of taking out of Russia a thirty-thousand-word manuscript containing my impressions of my travels. Sometimes I think that the general atmosphere of intrigue and mystery, so characteristic of the country, has quite gone to my head, and that there is in reality no reason at all why I shouldn't pack the manuscript in the ordinary way, among spongebags and pajamas. At other times—mostly in the middle of the night, when judgments always tend to become melodramatic—I see the Customs officials seizing the manuscript, and the police seizing me, and each of us being taken away in different directions. And I wonder how I shall be able to explain the position to my publishers.
I have asked advice twice—which is a grave mistake because each adviser says something quite different. Both, however, are agreed that the Customs officials are a great deal more interested in books, papers, manuscripts, and films than in any other form of contraband. This interest is manifested not only when one enters the country but, even more actively, when one leaves it.
Finally, I am decided by the frightful story of an American journalist in the Odessa Hotel who tells me that he once wrote half a novel while he was in Russia and put it in his suitcase to take to America,