the autobiography of bertrand russell 312known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense,
and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never known equalled
except by G. E. Moore. I remember taking him once to a meeting of the
Aristotelian Society, at which there were various fools whom I treated
politely. When we came away he raged and stormed against my moral
degradation in not telling these men what fools they were. His life was
turbulent and troubled, and his personal force was extraordinary. He lived on
milk and vegetables, and I used to feel as Mrs Patrick Campbell did about
Shaw: ‘God help us if he should ever eat a beefsteak.’ He used to come to see
me every evening at midnight, and pace up and down my room like a wild
beast for three hours in agitated silence. Once I said to him: ‘Are you thinking
about logic or about your sins?’ ‘Both’, he replied, and continued his pacing. I
did not like to suggest that it was time for bed, as it seemed probable both to
him and me that on leaving me he would commit suicide. At the end of his
?rst term at Trinity, he came to me and said: ‘Do you think I am an absolute
idiot?’ I said: ‘Why do you want to know?’ He replied: ‘Because if I am I shall
become an aeronaut, but if I am not I shall become a philosopher.’ I said to
him: ‘My dear fellow, I don’t know whether you are an absolute idiot or not,
but if you will write me an essay during the vacation upon any philosophical
topic that interests you, I will read it and tell you.’ He did so, and brought it
to me at the beginning of the next term. As soon as I read the ?rst sentence, I
became persuaded that he was a man of genius, and assured him that he
should on no account become an aeronaut. At the beginning of 1914 he
came to me in a state of great agitation and said: ‘I am leaving Cambridge, I
am leaving Cambridge at once.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because my brother-in-law
has come to live in London, and I can’t bear to be so near him.’ So he spent
the rest of the winter in the far north of Norway. In early days I once asked
G. E. Moore what he thought of Wittgenstein. ‘I think very well of him’, he
said. I asked why, and he replied: ‘Because at my lectures he looks puzzled,
and nobody else ever looks puzzled.’
When the War came, Wittgenstein, who was very patriotic, became an
o?cer in the Austrian Army. For the ?rst few months it was still possible to
write to him and to hear from him, but before long this became impossible,
and I knew nothing of him until about a month after the Armistice, when I
got a letter from him written from Monte Cassino, saying that a few days after
the Armistice he had been taken prisoner by the Italians, but fortunately with
his manuscript. It appeared that he had written a book in the trenches, and
wished me to read it. He was the kind of man who would never have noticed
such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. He
sent me the manuscript of his book, which I discussed with Nicod and
Dorothy Wrinch at Lulworth. It was the book which was subsequently pub-
lished under the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was obviously important to
russia 313see him and discuss it by word of mouth, and it seemed best to meet in a
neutral country. We therefore decided upon the Hague. At this point, how-
ever, a surprising di?culty arose. His father, just before the outbreak of the
War, had transferred his whole fortune to Holland, and was therefore just as
rich at the end as at the beginning. Just about at the time of the Armistice
his father had died, and Wittgenstein inherited the bulk of his fortune. He
came to the conclusion, however, that money is a nuisance to a philosopher,
so he gave every penny of it to his brother and sisters. Consequently he was
unable to pay the fare from Vienna to the Hague, and was far too proud to
accept it from me. At last a solution of this di?culty was found. The furniture
and books which he had had at Cambridge were stored there, and he expressed
a willingness to sell them to me. I took the advice of the Cambridge furniture
dealer in whose care they were as to their value, and bought them at the
?gure he suggested. They were in fact worth far more than he supposed, and
it was the best bargain I ever made. This transaction made it possible for
Wittgenstein to come to the Hague, where we spent a week arguing his book
line by line, while Dora went to the Public Library to read the invectives of
Salmatius against Milton.
Wittgenstein, though a logician, was at once a patriot and a paci?st. He had
a very high opinion of the Russians, with whom he had fraternised at the
Front. He told me that once in a village in Galicia, where for the moment
he had nothing to do, he found a book-shop, and it occurred to him that
there might be a book in it. There was just one, which was Tolstoy on the
Gospels. He therefore bought it, and was much impressed by it. He became
for a time very religious, so much so that he began to consider me too
wicked to associate with. In order to make a living he became an elementary
school-master in a country village in Austria, called Trattenbach. He would
write to me saying: ‘The people of Trattenbach are very wicked.’ I would
reply: ‘Yes, all men are very wicked.’ He would reply: ‘True, but the men of
Trattenbach are more wicked than the men of other places.’ I replied that
my logical sense revolted against such a proposition. But he had some justi?-
cation for his opinion. The peasants refused to supply him with milk because
he taught their children sums that were not about money. He must have
su?ered during this time hunger and considerable privation, though it was
very seldom that he could be induced to say anything about it, as he had the
pride of Lucifer. At last his sister decided to build a house, and employed him
as architect. This gave him enough to eat for several years, at the end of which
time he returned to Cambridge as a don, where Clive Bell’s son wrote poems
in heroic couplets against him. He was not always easy to ?t into a social
occasion. Whitehead described to me the ?rst time that Wittgenstein came
to see him. He was shown into the drawing-room during afternoon tea. He
appeared scarcely aware of the presence of Mrs Whitehead, but marched up
the autobiography of bertrand russell 314and down the room for some time in silence, and at last said explosively:
‘A proposition has two poles. It is apb.’ Whitehead, in telling me, said: ‘I
naturally asked what are a and b, but I found that I had said quite the wrong
thing. “a and b are inde?nable,” Wittgenstein answered in a voice of thunder.’
Like all great men he had his weaknesses. At the height of his mystic ardour
in 1922, at a time when he assured me with great earnestness that it is
better to be good than clever, I found him terri?ed of wasps, and, because of
bugs, unable to stay another night in lodgings we had found in Innsbruck.
After my travels in Russia and China, I was inured to small matters of that sort,
but not all his conviction that the things of this world are of no account could
enable him to endure insects with patience. In spite of such slight foibles,
however, he was an impressive human being.
I spent almost the whole of the year 1920 in travelling. At Easter, I was
invited to lecture at Barcelona at the Catalan University there. From Barcelona
I went to Majorca, where I stayed at Soller. The old inn-keeper (the only one
in the place) informed me that, as he was a widower, he could not give me
any food, but I was at liberty to walk in his garden and pluck his oranges
whenever I pleased. He said this with such a courteous air that I felt con-
strained to express my profound gratitude. In Majorca, I began a great quarrel
which raged for many months through many changes of latitude and
longitude.
I was planning to go to Russia, and Dora wanted to go with me. I main-
tained that, as she had never taken much interest in politics, there was no
good reason why she should go, and, as typhus was raging, I should not feel
justi?ed in exposing her to the risk. We were both adamant, and it was an
issue upon which compromise was impossible. I still think I was right, and
she still thinks she was right.
Soon after returning from Majorca, my opportunity came. A Labour
deputation was going to Russia, and was willing that I should accompany
it. The Government considered my application, and after causing me to
be interviewed by H. A. L. Fisher, they decided to let me go. The Soviet
Government was more di?cult to persuade, and when I was already in
Stockholm on the way, Litvinov was still refusing permission, in spite of our
having been fellow prisoners in Brixton. However, the objections of the
Soviet Government were at last overcome. We were a curious party, Mrs
Snowden, Cli?ord Allen, Robert Williams, Tom Shaw, an enormously fat old
Trade Unionist named Ben Turner, who was very helpless without his wife
and used to get Cli?ord Allen to take his boots o? for him, Haden Guest as
medical attendant, and several Trade Union o?cials. In Petrograd, where they
put the imperial motor-car at our disposal, Mrs Snowden used to drive about
enjoying its luxury and expressing pity for the ‘poor Czar’. Haden Guest was
a theosophist with a ?ery temper and a considerable libido. He and Mrs
russia 315Snowden were very anti-Bolshevik. Robert Williams, I found, was very happy
in Russia, and was the only one of our party who made speeches pleasing to
the Soviet Government. He always told them that revolution was imminent in
England, and they made much of him. I told Lenin that he was not to be
trusted, and the very next year, on Black Friday, he ratted. Then there was
Charlie Buxton, whose paci?sm had led him to become a Quaker. When I
shared a cabin with him, he would beg me to stop in the middle of a sentence
in order that he might practise silent prayer. To my surprise, his paci?sm did
not lead him to think ill of the Bolsheviks.
For my part, the time I spent in Russia was one of continually increasing
nightmare. I have said in print what, on re?ection, appeared to me to be the
truth, but I have not expressed the sense of utter horror which overwhelmed
me while I was there. Cruelty, poverty, suspicion, persecution, formed the
very air we breathed. Our conversations were continually spied upon. In the
middle of the night one would hear shots, and know that idealists were being
killed in prison. There was a hypocritical pretence of equality, and everybody
was called ‘tovarisch’, but it was amazing how di?erently this word could be
pronounced according as the person addressed was Lenin or a lazy servant. On
one occasion in Petrograd (as it was called) four scarecrows came to see me,
dressed in rags, with a fortnight’s beard, ?lthy nails, and tangled hair. They
were the four most eminent poets of Russia. One of them was allowed by the
Government to make his living by lecturing on rhythmics, but he complained
that they insisted upon his teaching this subject from a Marxian point of view,
and that for the life of him he could not see how Marx came into the matter.
Equally ragged were the Mathematical Society of Petrograd. I went to
a meeting of this society at which a man read a paper on non-Euclidean
geometry. I could not understand anything of it except the formulae which
he wrote on the blackboard, but these were quite the right sort of formulae,
so that one may assume the paper to have been competent. Never, in England,
have I seen tramps who looked so abject as the mathematicians of Petrograd.
I was not allowed to see Kropotkin, who not long afterwards died. The
governing classes had a self-con?dence quite as great as that produced by
Eton and Oxford. They believed that their formulae would solve all di?cul-
ties. A few of the more intelligent knew that this was not the case, but did not
dare to say so. Once, in a tête-à-tête conversation with a scienti?c physician
named Zalkind, he began to say that climate has a great e?ect upon character,
but instantly he pulled himself up short, and said: ‘Of course that is not really
the case; only economic circumstances a?ect character.’ I felt that everything
that I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and
narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being in?icted
upon many millions of people. With every day that I spent in Russia my
horror increased, until I lost all power of balanced judgement.
the autobiography of bertrand russell 316From Petrograd we went to Moscow, which is a very beautiful city, and
architecturally more interesting than Petrograd because of the Oriental
in?uence. I was amused by various small ways in which Bolshevik love of
mass-production showed itself. The main meal of the day occurred at about
four o’clock in the afternoon, and contained among other ingredients the
heads of ?shes. I never discovered what happened to their bodies, though I
suppose they were eaten by the peoples’ Komissars. The river Moskwa was
chock full of ?sh, but people were not allowed to catch them, as no up-to-
date mechanical method had yet been found to supersede the rod and line.
The city was almost starving, but it was felt that ?shes’ heads, caught by
trawlers, were better than ?shes’ bodies caught by primitive methods.
We went down the Volga on a steamer, and Cli?ord Allen became
extremely ill with pneumonia, which revived the tuberculosis from which he
had previously su?ered. We were all to leave the boat at Saratov, but Allen was
too ill to be moved, so Haden Guest, Mrs Snowden and I remained on the
boat to look after him, while it travelled on to Astrakan. He had a very small
cabin, and the heat was inconceivable. The windows had to be kept tight
shut on account of the malarial mosquitoes, and Allen su?ered from violent
diarrhoea. We had to take turns nursing him, for although there was a
Russian nurse on board, she was afraid to sit with him at night for fear that
he might die and his ghost might seize her.
Astrakan seemed to me more like hell than anything I had ever imagined.
The town water-supply was taken from the same part of the river into which
ships shot their refuse. Every street had stagnant water which bred millions of
mosquitoes; every year one third of the inhabitants had malaria. There was
no drainage system, but a vast mountain of excrement at a prominent place
in the middle of the town. Plague was endemic. There had recently been
?ghting in the civil war against Denikin. The ?ies were so numerous that at
meal-time a tablecloth had to be put over the food, and one had to insert
one’s hand underneath and snatch a mouthful quickly. The instant the
table-cloth was put down, it became completely black with ?ies, so that
nothing of it remained visible. The place is a great deal below sea-level, and
the temperature was 120 degrees in the shade. The leading doctors of the
place were ordered by the Soviet o?cials who accompanied us to hear what
Haden Guest had to say about combating malaria, a matter on which he had
been engaged for the British Army in Palestine. He gave them an admirable
lecture on the subject, at the end of which they said: ‘Yes, we know all that,
but it is very hot.’ I fancy that the next time the Soviet o?cials came that way
those doctors were probably put to death, but of this I have no knowledge.
The most eminent of the doctors in question examined Cli?ord Allen and
informed me that he could not possibly live two days. When about a fort-
night later we got him out to Reval, the doctor who examined him there
russia 317again told me that he could not live two days, but by this time I had
come to know something of Allen’s determination to live, and I was less
alarmed. He survived for many years, and became an ornament of the
House of Lords.
After I returned to England I endeavoured to express my changing moods,
before starting and while in Russia, in the shape of antedated letters to
Colette, the last of which I subsequently published in my book about China.
As they express my moods at that time better than I can do by anything
written now, I will insert them here:
1
London,
April 24, 1920
The day of my departure comes near. I have a thousand things to do, yet I
sit here idle, thinking useless thoughts, the irrelevant, rebellious thoughts that
well-regulated people never think, the thoughts that one hopes to banish by
work, but that themselves banish work instead. How I envy those who always
believe what they believe, who are not troubled by deadness and indi?erence
to all that makes the framework of their lives. I have had the ambition to be of
some use in the world, to achieve something notable, to give mankind new
hopes. And now that the opportunity is near, it all seems dust and ashes. As I
look into the future, my disillusioned gaze sees only strife and still more
strife, rasping cruelty, tyranny, terror and slavish submission. The men of my
dreams, erect, fearless and generous, will they ever exist on earth? Or will
men go on ?ghting, killing and torturing to the end of time, till the earth
grows cold and the dying sun can no longer quicken their futile frenzy? I
cannot tell. But I do know the despair in my soul. I know the great loneliness,
as I wander through the world like a ghost, speaking in tones that are not
heard, lost as if I had fallen from some other planet.
The old struggle goes on, the struggle between little pleasures and the
great pain. I know that the little pleasures are death and yet – I am so tired, so
very tired. Reason and emotion ?ght a deadly war within me, and leave me
no energy for outward action. I know that no good thing is achieved without
?ghting, without ruthlessness and organisation and discipline. I know that
for collective action the individual must be turned into a machine. But in
these things, though my reason may force me to believe them, I can ?nd no
inspiration. It is the individual human soul that I love – in its loneliness, its
hopes and fears, its quick impulses and sudden devotions. It is such a long
journey from this to armies and States and o?cials; and yet it is only by
making this long journey that one can avoid a useless sentimentalism.
All through the rugged years of the War, I dreamed of a happy day after its
the autobiography of bertrand russell 318end, when I should sit with you in a sunny garden by the Mediterranean,
?lled with the scent of heliotrope, surrounded by cypresses and sacred groves
of ilex – and there, at last, I should be able to tell you of my love, and to touch
the joy that is as real as pain. The time is come, but I have other tasks, and you
have other desires; and to me, as I sit brooding, all tasks seem vain and all
desires foolish.
Yet it is not upon these thoughts that I shall act.
2
Petrograd,
May 12, 1920
I am here at last, in this city which has ?lled the world with history, which
has inspired the most deadly hatreds and the most poignant hopes. Will it
yield me up its secret? Shall I learn to know its inmost soul? Or shall I acquire
only statistics and o?cial facts? Shall I understand what I see, or will it remain
an external bewildering show? In the dead of night we reached the empty
station, and our noisy motors panted through the sleeping streets. From my
window, when I arrived, I looked out across the Neva to the fortress of
Peter and Paul. The river gleamed in the early northern dawn; the scene was
beautiful beyond all words, magical, eternal, suggestive of ancient wisdom.
‘It is wonderful’, I said to the Bolshevik who stood beside me. ‘Yes,’ he
replied, ‘Peter and Paul is now not a prison, but the Army Headquarters.’
I shook myself. ‘Come, my friend,’ I thought, ‘you are not here as a tourist,
to sentimentalise over sunrises and sunsets and buildings starred by Baedeker;
you are here as a social investigator, to study economic and political facts.
Come out of your dream, forget the eternal things. The men you have
come among would tell you they are only the fancies of a bourgeois with too
much leisure, and can you be sure they are anything more?’ So I came back
into the conversation, and tried to learn the mechanism for buying an
umbrella at the Soviet Stores, which proved as di?cult as fathoming the
ultimate mysteries.
The twelve hours that I have so far spent on Russian soil have chie?y
a?orded material for the imp of irony. I came prepared for physical hardship,
discomfort, dirt, and hunger, to be made bearable by an atmosphere of
splendid hope for mankind. Our communist comrades, no doubt rightly,
have not judged us worthy of such treatment. Since crossing the frontier
yesterday afternoon, I have made two feasts and a good breakfast, several ?rst-
class cigars, and a night in a sumptuous bedroom of a palace where all the
luxury of the ancien régime has been preserved. At the stations on the way,
regiments of soldiers ?lled the platform, and the plebs was kept carefully out
of sight. It seems I am to live amid the pomp surrounding the government of
russia 319a great military Empire. So I must readjust my mood. Cynicism is called
for, but I am strongly moved, and ?nd cynicism di?cult. I come back
eternally to the same question: What is the secret of this passionate country?
Do the Bolsheviks know its secret? Do they even suspect that it has a secret?
I wonder.
3
Petrograd,
May 13, 1920
This is a strange world into which I have come, a world of dying beauty
and harsh life. I am troubled at every moment by fundamental questions, the
terrible insoluble questions that wise men never ask. Empty palaces and full
eating-houses, ancient splendours destroyed, or mummi?ed in museums,
while the sprawling self-con?dence of returned Americanised refugees
spreads throughout the city. Everything is to be systematic: there is to be
organisation and distributive justice. The same education for all, the same
clothes for all, the same kind of houses for all, the same books for all, and
the same creed for all – it is very just, and leaves no room for envy, except for
the fortunate victims of injustice in other countries.
And then I begin upon the other side of the argument. I remember
Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, Gorki’s In the World, Tolstoy’s Resurrection. I
re?ect upon the destruction and cruelty upon which the ancient splendour
was built: the poverty, drunkenness, prostitution, in which life and health
were uselessly wasted; I think of all the lovers of freedom who su?ered in
Peter and Paul; I remember the knoutings and pogroms and massacres. By
hatred of the old, I become tolerant of the new, but I cannot like the new on
its own account.
Yet I reproach myself for not liking it. It has all the characteristics of
vigorous beginnings. It is ugly and brutal, but full of constructive energy and
faith in the value of what it is creating. In creating a new machinery for social
life, it has no time to think of anything beyond machinery. When the body of
the new society has been built, there will be time enough to think about
giving it a soul – at least, so I am assured. ‘We have no time for a new art or a
new religion’, they tell me with a certain impatience. I wonder whether it is
possible to build a body ?rst, and then afterwards inject the requisite amount
of soul. Perhaps – but I doubt it.
I do not ?nd any theoretical answer to these questions, but my feelings
answer with terrible insistence. I am in?nitely unhappy in this atmosphere –
sti?ed by its utilitarianism, its indi?erence to love and beauty and the life of
impulse. I cannot give that importance to man’s merely animal needs that is
given here by those in power. No doubt that is because I have not spent half
the autobiography of bertrand russell 320my life in hunger and want, as many of them have. But do hunger and want
necessarily bring wisdom? Do they make men more, or less, capable of
conceiving the ideal society that should be the inspiration of every reformer?
I cannot avoid the belief that they narrow the horizon more than they enlarge
it. But an uneasy doubt remains, and I am torn in two...
4
On the Volga,
June 2, 1920.
Our boat travels on, day after day, through an unknown and mysterious
land. Our company are noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with
glib explanations of everything, persuaded that there is nothing they cannot
understand and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. One
of us lies at death’s door, ?ghting a grim battle with weakness and terror and
the indi?erence of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds of
loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lies a great
silence, strong as Death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seems that none have
leisure to hear the silence, yet it calls to me so insistently that I grow deaf
to the harangues of propagandists and the endless information of the
well-informed.
Last night, very late, our boat stopped in a desolate spot where there were
no houses, but only a great sandbank, and beyond it a row of poplars with
the rising moon behind them. In silence I went ashore, and found on the
sand a strange assemblage of human beings, half-nomads, wandering from
some remote region of famine, each family huddled together surrounded by
all its belongings, some sleeping, others silently making small ?res of twigs.
The ?ickering ?ames lighted up gnarled bearded faces of wild men, strong
patient primitive women, and children as sedate and slow as their parents.
Human beings they undoubtedly were, and yet it would have been far easier
for me to grow intimate with a dog or a cat or a horse than with one of them.
I knew that they would wait there day after day, perhaps for weeks, until a
boat came in which they could go to some distant place where they had
heard – falsely perhaps – that the earth was more generous than in the
country they had left. Some would die by the way, all would su?er hunger
and thirst and the scorching midday sun, but their su?erings would be dumb.
To me they seemed to typify the very soul of Russia, unexpressive, inactive
from despair, unheeded by the little set of westernisers who make up all the
parties of progress or reaction. Russia is so vast that the articulate few are lost
in it as man and his planet are lost in interstellar space. It is possible, I
thought, that the theorists may increase the misery of the many by trying to
force them into actions contrary to their primeval instincts, but I could not
russia 321believe that happiness was to be brought to them by a gospel of industrialism
and forced labour.
Nevertheless, when morning came, I resumed the interminable discus-
sions of the materialistic conception of history and the merits of a truly
popular government. Those with whom I discussed had not seen the sleeping
wanderers, and would not have been interested if they had seen them, since
they were not material for propaganda. But something of that patient silence
had communicated itself to me, something lonely and unspoken remained
in my heart through all the comfortable familiar intellectual talk. And at last
I began to feel that all politics are inspired by a grinning devil, teaching
the energetic and quick-witted to torture submissive populations for the
pro?t of pocket or power or theory. As we journeyed on, fed by food
extracted from the peasants, protected by an army recruited from among
their sons, I wondered what we had to give them in return. But I found no
answer. From time to time I heard their sad songs or the haunting music
of the balalaika; but the sound mingled with the great silence of the steppes,
and left me with a terrible questioning pain in which occidental hopefulness
grew pale.
Sverdlov, the Minister of Transport (as we should call him), who was with
us on the steamer on the Volga, was extraordinarily kind and helpful about
Allen’s illness. We came back on the boat as far as Saratov, and from there to
Reval, we travelled all the way in the carriage that had belonged to the Czar’s
daughters, so that Allen did not have to be moved at any stage. If one might
judge from the carriage, some of their habits must have been curious. There
was a luxurious sofa of which the seat lifted up, and one then discovered
three holes in a row suitable for sanitary purposes. At Moscow on the way
home Haden Guest and I had a furious quarrel with Chicherin because he
would not allow Allen to leave Moscow until he had been examined by two
Soviet doctors, and at ?rst he said that he could not get the Soviet doctors to
see him for another two days. At the height of the quarrel, on a staircase, I
