RUSSIA UNDER BOLSHEVISM.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17632, 8 December 1922, Page 6

RUSSIA UNDER BOLSHEVISM.

XITY OF LOST IDEALS. MOSCOW. The Russian youth of about 19 has always been a rough diamond, but I find him rougher now than ho was 8 years ago. The reason is plain; he has been making 110 intellectual progress and acquiring no mental discipline. £ might almost say that he has no knowledge of the pre-war world, for he was only 11 in 1914. Since 1917 his energies have all been concentrated on food and drink, and most of his conversation has been confined to the two same subjects. Consequently he has the educational status of a. child of 12 with all the passions oi a grown-up man, and his manners are a cunoUs cross between those of an 18tfi century French nobleman and those of a 20th-century Pennsylvanian coalheaver. His sexual morality is as it was—bad. His religion, if he has not dropped it, is still a system of external rites, having no influence whatever on his conduct. Formerly he had to go to Confession and Communion once ai year, otherwise he could not take any Government examination and the result of this was to make obligatory Confession and Communion as official and nonreligious a function as the payment of income-tax. Now he goes neither to Confession nor Communion, but is no better and no worse a Christian than he was before. World of Oratory. His experiences during the last five years have been so extraordinary that he looks on the world with eyes entirely different from those of a middle-aged man. The middle-aged man sees, or at least remembers, an essentially solid, hard-working, not uncomfortable world, where one reverenced the laws, had police protection, and advocated a constitutional monarchy. His 19-years-old son sees an essentially unstable world wherein work is useless and oratory everything. And, looking at the matter from liis point of view, the lad is not far wrong. Russians who worked and economised all their lives are now penniless. Engineers who spent 40 years studying ar«d practising their professions are getting the same pay as hall-porters. The Great War had an unsettling influence on American youths, though they did not, as a rule, see much of it. Judge, then, of the effect on the young Russian's mind in the Great War plus the Civil War, plus Bolshevism, and all it stands for. So great has that effect been that the 19-year-old Russian is a novus homo of whom I am not entitled to speak.. One Russian of that age, whom 1 know, has been married and divorced, has been sentenced to death by the Clieka, but reprieved, has spent six months in the western tower of thel Butyrka prison, where it was so cold in winter-time that he cut open the mattress on his bed and passed most of his time inside it, .becoming finally so weak that he could not walk. Mud? the same, outwardly, as young Englishmen or Americans of the same age, he differs profoundly from them in minfl, and liis nerves have been permanently injured—not a surprising circumstance considering the sights ho has seen. Hair Stood on End. His description' of those sights makes my hair stand on end, and makes m© realise) that the boy and youth who has seen them again , and again during his period of youth can never be the same as ,the ; m'an- who, has, luckily, grown up without seeing them. Not only are Che young changed; even the old have been affected profoundly by the great crisis through which Russia has passed. This change is observable in the most trifling iWngs. Formerly the Moscow merchants had vast quantities of good golden roubles at their disposal; but outside business hours they never talked about money. Now that they are poor and that their money is not -worth the paper it is printed on, they talk of nothing else from morning to night. The proletariat is doing the same; and this leads me to consider the question—What effect has the rough shaking-up of the classes by Lenin had on the proletarian and the bourgeois? The old middle* class as a class ha"s been iSestroyed, and its culture almost killed even when individual members of that class remained alive; while, on the other hand, the working class has gained little culture but much -'swelled head.'' In one bourgeois family where 1 visit the two sons wno had been carefully instructed in music and athletics were taken by the Soviet authorities and made to impart all thev knew of these subjects to the sons of tinkers and tailors and candlestick-makers in the Kremlin. All the sons oT the bourgeosie are treated in like manner, compelled, that is, to pass on their special Knowledge to the poor. Depressing Lives. Some of the poor may havo benefited, but the general impression made on me by Moscow is that of a. city where the rich have been made poor, bus the poor left as badly off aa ever they were. Not only are thei rich, now poor (an important point), but the artist, the scholar, the poet, and the actor have nearly all discouraged. In the first place, the mere' fact af their all being compelled to live in small bed-sitting-rooms must have had a depressing effect on them. I visited only yesterday the flat of an actress belonging to the Moscow Artistic Theatre, who is now on her way to the United States, and was surprised to see tlw state of disrepair and disorder into which it had: fallen. j There were only two rooms, and) the j furniture consisted mostly of a sofa, | whose hind legs seemed to havo been i used for firewood; <it any rate, they wera al>sent and an empty kerosene tin took their place. _ '"This is not what I would call artistic," I said; but then it was pointed out to me that the poor woman had lost courage owing to most of the room composing her flat being given away to "men of the reoT>le"— oratorial mechanics, Communistic chimney-sweeps with large families, and such like. There wns something fine, I admit, in the sons of the rich being made to teach dancing, music, and athletics to the sons of the poor, and in tie employment of servants being forbidden; but it must be remembered' that this policy lim now been dropped. It is difficult indeed, to see where the Communist Party will now get the motive force to continue! its work, for it has cut everything Communist out of its programme.