An Open Letter to My Russian Hosts
WAIN, JOHN
An Open Letter to My Russian Hosts Dear Comrades, HERE I AM. back at home after my month's visit to your country, sitting down to write you the usual letter that a departed guest writes to his...
...He had already arranged to inform the British public about life in the Soviet Union...
...Hurry on Down...
...First, I am the kind of person who is adversely affected by propaganda...
...Such as what...
...And the thing that first opened my eyes, comrades, was your terrific, all-pervading, crushing propaganda...
...Leaning back in her chair, smiling, wide-eyed, "What slums...
...The endless insistence...
...The mass of your population has been schooled in the doctrine that the peoples of the world are blameless and that wars are caused by politicians...
...Thank you," she said...
...I may come back to the Soviet Union or I may not: It depends on whether you are irritated by a few plain words...
...The average Englishman cannot get it into his head that freedom such as he enjoys is rare and has always been rare...
...As long as you have this kind of support, comrades, vour tourist industry will be your greatest international asset...
...Just as your selective publishing of Western books helps to exploit the credulity of your own people, so your tourist industry helps to exploit the credulity of ours...
...It does not necessarily mean that there is any merit in them...
...I used to be like that...
...I asked...
...And yet, by the lengths you go to in obscurantism and fear of information, you almost make it seem like one...
...Then came the pay-off...
...Now," he said, when they got back, "you've seen the best and the worst in one English city...
...But she only smiled and seemed puzzled...
...If Leacock, a delightful and sunny humorist, can be used as anti-Western propaganda, how can the rest of us escape...
...I see it all now...
...But, if I do, it will be with one definite objective in mind...
...but spare us, please, the self-congratulation, the endless demand to be patted on the back for taking an interest in what we write...
...Let me be blunt...
...was—as I saw it—a pleasing sign of this rapprochement...
...The fact is that no Western book is published unless it can be made to yield the message that Western society is dying—or, if not dying, so evil that it deserves to die...
...Take our books, use them without permission, deny the authors any payment except what they can spend within your own borders...
...I shall be looking for someone I can talk to...
...No author finds it easy to believe ill of a country where so many people buy books, and his own at that...
...If it had been the other way round," I said doggedly, spelling it out for her, "if the English boy had been the visitor, would she have shown him the slums...
...Next, comrades, a word about tourism...
...And I won't tell anyone you've shown me the slums...
...Are they really so dangerous to your people...
...and he had come to Leningrad on a cruise ship, which lay in the harbor for about four days, during which time the passengers lived on board and came ashore for sight-seeing and the occasional meal in a restaurant...
...I was talking one day to a charming and clever woman, a professor, who had visited Oxford with a party of students from Moscow University...
...The same thing would obviously happen to my book...
...While I was in Moscow, for example, I met Sir Charles Snow...
...Of course, of course...
...give your people a few books that describe, however grudgingly, life in a free society, and they will slowly become dissatisfied with the home product...
...I would like to leave you in a good humor, and I know that Russians enjoy a joke, particularly a good, broad, hearty joke like saying that there are no slums in Moscow...
...Millions of people in the Soviet Union are busily learning and teaching, and there will always be the Western visitor who is impressed by this sight...
...May I tell you some of the reasons...
...I had welcomed, over the past few years, every indication that Soviet society was loosening up...
...You have no education...
...It is the most depressing experience in the world...
...I believe you know how far you can go, and it is a long way yet...
...Yours Sincerely...
...not only in money, but in unpaid propaganda work when they get home...
...It offered itself as an entertainment, when in fact it was simply a volley of small-arms fire in the cold war...
...An Oxford undergraduate had taken one of the Russian girls on his motor-scooter, and shown her the town—first the slums, and then the new housing estates...
...I congratulate you...
...Imagine what happens to me when I go to a country where the resources of publicity are concentrated in the hands of the state, and are used day and night to hammer home the official view of everything...
...Because I am sure you will find it hard to understand what I mean, I must give an example...
...The more persistent the efforts to sell me a thing, the more churlish and suspicious I become...
...You have at last opened (some parts of) your country to (certain classes of) tourist, and for many-years you will have a seller's market...
...But the credit is not yours alone...
...But I believe you know what you are doing...
...The fact that one of my own books had been translated and sold out...
...suddenly, hardly able to believe one's ears, one hears them contradict everything they have been saying, or take refuge in flat and monstrous untruths...
...The Quiet American was a gift, was it not...
...I stayed in Russia longer than he did, and since English newspapers are not available there I had no definite account of the sort of picture he had gone back to paint—though, from conversation with him, I knew it would be an enthusiastic one...
...The Perfect Lover's Guide, it was called...
...ONE FINAL WORD...
...They open one compartment, and liberal and generous ideas come out...
...When Sir Charles tells a crowd of people at London University that Britain is behind Russia in "education," he is telling them the truth in one sense, misleading them in another...
...This seemed to me a good debating point rather than a genuine answer, and I allowed myself to drop tea-table politeness for a moment and hammer the point home...
...Not their own politicians, of course—the other side's...
...They will keep coming, and you will gain enormously by their visits...
...Some people here think this policy is a mistake, which you will later regret...
...The average Soviet citizen, in my opinion, will be very slow to pick up subversive ideas from Western books...
...You put on a play like Look Back in Anger, while at the same time allowing your audience no glimpse of the incessant to-and-fro of debate against which we see it...
...What was I trying to prove with this story...
...That must have pleased you, comrades...
...So they argue...
...The treatment of Communist countries in our press is not exactly a model of fairness...
...The tradition of Western literature is critical, not to say subversive, and many of the books you pick up will do some of your propaganda work for you...
...But ignorance, I said, could be of several kinds...
...I did not then know that, in Russia, every book sells out sooner or later...
...Some of this may have been my fault, for I am a bad listener, but most of it was caused by what I can only call Doublethink on your part...
...I answered that it seemed to me to illustrate a degree of ignorance that was worse, because more fundamental, than the Englishman's lack of facts and figures about the Soviet Union...
...People in the West who respond to this, who praise you for importing books from us, are either Communists (i.e., tame parrots) or they do not understand the motives that underlie your interest...
...And, of course, we don't escape...
...the caviar was good and so was the pink champagne...
...Derringer told about the easy social life in the West, and the lynching parties, and how they invite even the Negroes to them...
...Show him a picture of grumbling, discontented young men in the West, and his reaction will be on much the same level of simplicity as the Victorian matron's reaction to Antony and Cleopatra— "How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen...
...Why this fear of Western newspapers...
...It's not that we don't understand why you tell your people that they live under the best and most benevolent government in the world, and that the capitalist countries are breaking up—and, at the same time, see to it that they don't have access to any facts that might point the other way...
...she asked...
...I had known about it, but to experience it was another matter...
...I waited for the lady to comment...
...He had no fault to find with the Soviet Union...
...Headline: "Britain Behind Russia in Education: C. P. Snow's Impressions...
...I hadn't realized how unremitting your propaganda has to be...
...I apologize for borrowing a word from a satirist you detest, but I think the coinage was necessary...
...Still she seemed baffled...
...Nor that, of the remaining "free" area, there are vast stretches which are closed for all practical purposes, since no one is ever allowed in...
...I met many intelligent and highly trained people, but there was no real exchange...
...He had been to all the university buildings and seen all the classrooms and the laboratories and the libraries...
...In fact, I doubt if there is a piece in the book (except for the title story, which is a bait) that does not deal with the more absurd, or pitiable, or cruel facets of life in North America...
...After a month within your frontiers, this hopefulness had largely evaporated...
...Because it was, and I use the word without heat, a fraud...
...I don't just mean uttering words, I mean talking, as we talk to one another in the countries of free opinion...
...To get a statement like that out of an acute and informed man like Snow is worth a thousand volumes from half-baked fellow travelers...
...some of it belongs to the word "education...
...So they are very ready to be friendly with the individual tourist: And nothing impresses Western people, particularlv English and Americans, more than friendliness...
...And I quoted an anecdote I had heard about that very Oxford visit...
...she merely smiled and repeated, "I won't tell anyone...
...And this brings me to the much-advertised relaxation that has brought more Western books into the Soviet Union...
...a title well calculated to attract any English-reading Muscovite...
...I mentioned this to my acquaintance, but he wasn't impressed...
...One afternoon I went into a Moscow bookshop and bought a collection of stories by Stephen Leacock...
...I shall keep that book, comrades, as a curiosity, and as a reminder of the hollowness of fine-sounding phrases and colorful statistics about the import of foreign books...
...The thing that finally brought this fact home to me was nothing to do with any work of mine...
...Lucky Jim, I was told, has been translated and serialized, and Room at the Top will shortly follow...
...He himself had been to one city, so he assumed that anyone could go to any city...
...Sure enough, when the homeward-bound boat put in at Stockholm, and we were able to buy Western newspapers for the first time, I went ashore and got The Guardian (July 2...
...No one had told him the simple fact that rather more than half of your country is permanently closed to foreigners...
...What are you afraid the people might find...
...I now realize that to have one's books published in Russian is not quite the compliment I thought it was...
...There are no slums in Moscow...
...I hope that story makes you laugh, comrades...
...back at home after my month's visit to your country, sitting down to write you the usual letter that a departed guest writes to his host...
...Everyone in the West is curious to see the Soviet Union, and they will keep coming despite the appalling inefficiency of Intourist, the lack of information, the slow service, the monstrous "extras" on the bill (why does it cost about $2.50 to have one's passport "registered" at a hotel...
...The giant posters...
...Of "education" in the traditional, central sense, of course, the concept does not exist among you...
...It means one thing only: that their tendency is, or is expected to be, to buttress Soviet propaganda about the West...
...This particular man, for instance, this English writer, didn't even know, when I questioned him, that tourists couldn't go where they liked in the Soviet Union...
...I was there, as I said, because a book of mine had been translated...
...at least, he can get it into his head, but not into his belly, his bones, his nerve centers...
...Example: ". . . Mr...
...After all," he said, "there are lots of places in England that nobody can go to...
...More people gain a detailed knowledge of more things in Russia than in England...
...We even sympathize up to a point...
...At it already...
...Sir Charles was using it in the sense of "technical instruction...
...In vain the youth protested that he did not care how many people knew he had shown her the slums...
...Being a professor, he had the academic's suspicion of businessmen, and often wrote surprisingly cruel sketches of United States tycoons...
...When I entered the Soviet Union, I was in a highly receptive and sympathetic frame of mind...
...This, again, is a field in which you can produce wonderful statistics...
...THE SAME THOUGHTS apply to education...
...If the object of getting writers and artists to visit your country is to enlist their sympathies, then the thing to note about my visit is that it went wrong...
...I came away from the Soviet Union disappointed at much that I had found...
...So many of your intelligentsia do really have this ability to hold separate and contradictory ideas in watertight compartments in their heads...
...My anecdote finished...
...I agreed that this might be so...
...Your "education" is neither ahead of ours, nor behind it, nor to one side of it...
...as a result, it stands out as an unrelated act of "protest...
...Leacock, being a professional economist, found the vagaries of free-enterprise economics a very broad target for satire...
...If you want to use our novels to save time and trouble for your propaganda department, you are welcome, as far as I am concerned...
...Aldermaston," he said, with the air of a man making a great point, "and Buckingham Palace...
...The streamers strung across the streets in the most remote country towns with legends like "Glory to the Great Soviet People, the Founders of Communism...
...As for the common man (who, as I had ample opportunity to see for myself, really does read books), his Western reading is censored more tightly still...
...As an official visitor, he was being given the full treatment, particularly on the theme of education...
...She had thoroughly enjoyed it, and was dismayed, she said, by only one thing—the ignorance about the Soviet Union which she found in everyone who talked to her...
...Most people don't stay long enough, or have an ambitious enough program, to run up against the stony-faced, steely-eved Niet-sayers...
...If you come to my house," she said, "naturally I tidy it up, and I don't show you the worst bits...
...The loudspeakers that never seemed to be switched off...
...It had been sold out, I was told, in an edition of 250.000 copies, and the thought of having made so many friends in advance was one of the motives for my visit...
...All I would ask for, with no real hope of getting it, is an end to the Doublethink and Newspeak in which the whole subject gets wrapped up...
...and Leningrad, we all know, is a beautiful town...
...I say "has to be," because presumably you wouldn't keep hammering away at your people with expensive publicity unless you felt it to be necessary...
...I met one man, for instance, an English writer of my own generation, very successful and with a number of papers competing for his articles...
...And the more superficially they look, the more they like it...
...Education is the process whereby the mind is freed...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 37
