RUSSIA-OLD AND NEW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 135, 10 June 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

RUSSIA-OLD AND NEW.

A NOVEL AND AN INQUIRY.

Few. contrasts are sharper than that between the Russian of the Communist State and the "intellectual" whose persistent agitation did much to make the Revolution possible. The Communists to-day are - consciously striving to be practical, up-to-date, and • "machineconscious"; their predecessors seem to have had not an ounce of practicality in them. Ivan Burin, a Russian who apparently does not live in Russia now, has in "The Well of Days" (Hogarth Press) written an autobiographical novel of Russian life as it was in his youth half a century ago. He was a sensitive child, with a passion for natural beauty and for poetry, and he seems to have spent his boyhood days in a state of melancholy,' pondering the meaning of life. Thus, "After all what is my life in that vast, incomprehensible, timeless world surrounding me, thrown into the boundlessness of past and future, and at the same time enclosed in a place called Batorino, within the limits of space and time allotted, to me personally?" There is a great deal of this in the book, so that, in spite :of many finely-written passages descriptive of the beauties of nature, the reader may wish for a murder or two to help the action along. Burin in his youth was on the fringe of an intellectual group whose members talked a great deal about their love for "the people," with whom, however, they had. little contact. Their discussions usually became lost in a maze of abstractions. One can imagine that such a book as this will eventually be placed in a Bolshevik museum, as an illustration of that period in Russian history when the intellectual youth of the country did little except talk about the need of doing something. It is a very different Russia of which Ellery Walter tells in "Russia's Decisive Year" (Angus and Robertson). • Mr. Walter is an American journalist, "a Communist sympathiser," who went to Russia to write "a story about the success of the Russian experiment." His experiences are particularly interesting because he went much farther into Russia than the usual traveller —into Siberia, the Urals, the Caucasus and the Crimea. He paid much attention to agriculture, upon which the success or failure of the Communist experiment would seem to depend. And after all his travelling and observation Mr. Walter, as he confesses, was "happy to leave." He was disillusioned. He found that he "could not send the truth out of the Soviet Union, or tell the truth about the outside world in Russia." He found that "the peasants had been tricked by the Government, and were unhappy." After meeting some of the Communist leaders he learned that "they were not altruists, but individuals interested in their own comforts, and in a class snobbery equal to that of Romanov Russia." Mr. Walter's tales of the attempts of the Communists "to lift a nation of 1G0,000,000 from a feudal system to the age of modern machinery .in five years" are extremely diverting. One minor one can be retold. A chicken expert from the United States, at the request of the Soviet, established an incubator. Having started the second batch of eggs' he left the incubator in charge of the Russian expert. Twentytwo days later he was recalled. The Russian explained: "After you left ■ I started thinking. If it took 21 days at a certain temperature to hatch the eggs, raising the temperature ehould speed up production. So I raised the temperature 33 per cent, thinking that the eggs would hatch in 14 days. At the end of two weeks nothing happened, and I raised the temperature just a little bit more. At the end of the third week there were still no chickens." And people like these had the effrontery to put good British engineers on trial on a charge,of "sabotage!"