In his wonderful, unhappily unfinished Autobiography, Ransome explains: 'In England I had never any political ideas whatever. In Russia I believed that this very fact had let me get a clearer view of the revolution than I could otherwise have got.'
British people, especially of the middle-class variety, are notoriously shy about their politics. They often profess they have 'no politics' when they have very clear political views. Ransome was reared, to some extent, on William Morris, and on J W Mackail's biography of Morris, which is political from start to finish. He had written sensible, liberal books on Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde (the latter landing him in a nasty libel action with Lord Alfred Douglas, from which Ransome emerged victorious). From early life through to his death, he showed surprise and contempt for anything that smacked of racialism or snobbery.
He was political all right, but only in the broader sense. Parliamentary and party politics interested him not at all. He was not even specially interested in a career as journalist. He first went to Russia for the Daily News in 1915, not out of any journalistic hunger, still less from any commitment to social revolution, but chiefly to get away from his wife. He taught himself Russian until he was word-perfect. His dispatches for the Daily News were well-informed and well-written. His old-fashioned view of journalism was that it should explain what is happening. Like George Orwell, with whom he has a lot in common, he wrote prose 'like a window panel', effortless to read and understand.
He experienced at first hand the February revolution of 1917 and was captivated by it. His reports and his enthusiasm were shared by many foreign correspondents at the time, who felt that at last the age of Russian absolutism would give way to decent, Western-style parliamentary institutions. But as the months passed in that extraordinary year, Arthur Ransome began to despair of the liberals and the parliamentarians. When he first heard Lenin speak in the Duma, he was faintly derisive. But as the summer wore on, his view started to change. He began to understand, as millions of Russians did, that the Bolsheviks held out the only real hope for permanence for the revolution - and for peace.
When the Bolsheviks led the October revolution, Ransome was in England on holiday. He made his way quickly back again, and became one of the few foreign correspondents who tried to contest what he called 'the intellectual sloth, the gross mental indolence' which infected the British government and its servile press whenever anyone mentioned Russia. As he rushed about the streets of Petrograd, reporting the tumultuous events that shook the world, he was convinced he was witnessing something quite outside the normal boundaries of human experience. The Bolsheviks had disbanded the Constituent Assembly, but in its place, in Ransome's view, they were engaging in an experiment in democratic government incomparably richer and more powerful than any parliamentary democracy anywhere. Watching Trotsky in action explaining his policies at a congress of hungry, freezing delegates from farms and factories, this restrained reporter, trained in the reserved language of an upper-class education in Britain, wrote this: 'I felt I would willingly give the rest of my life if it could be divided into minutes and given to men in England and in France so that those of little faith who say that the Russian Revolution is discredited could share for one minute each that wonderful experience.'
There was another reason, inextricably entwined with this sudden political passion, why Arthur Ransome revelled in cold, dark, hungry, revolutionary Petrograd. One day he finished his Daily News report so late that he did not think he could send it through the normal channels. Hoping to bypass junior officialdom, he went to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. There he was recognised by a 'tall, jolly girl' who had met him when he'd interviewed Trotsky. She said she thought the censor was somewhere in the building.
'Come along,' she said. 'Perhaps he has some potatoes. Potatoes are the only thing we want. Come along.'
They found the censor - 'a little old man' who was indeed boiling potatoes in a coffee pot. Ransome got his official stamp on his telegram and an evening meal. In the long run, he got a lot more. For the tall jolly girl, he tells us, was 'Evgenia, whom later on I was to marry and to whom I owe the happiest years of my life'.
Evgenia Shelepina was Trotsky's personal secretary. She had been a Menshevik before the revolution, but like hundreds of thousands of ex- Mensheviks, she had transferred her allegiance and her abilities to the only people who could sustain the revolution. Her love affair with Arthur, though not celebrated in romantic literature or in a Warren Beatty film, was every bit as exciting as that between two other supporters of the revolution, John Reed and Louise Bryant. Much of Arthur Ransome's time in 1918 was taken up in trying to get permission for Evgenia to leave Russia with him. When he at last succeeded, the couple had to make their way through territory controlled by the White armies. After a series of lucky breaks, they came across a menacing troop of Whites. The officer in command suddenly shot forward, pulled up his horse and exclaimed to Ransome: 'What luck] Now we can have that game of chess]' Ransome had met him many months previously while travelling in Galicia, and had rather fortunately beaten him at chess. It never occurred to the young White officer that anyone who could beat him at chess could be siding with the Reds.
The couple settled in Reval, Estonia, and Ransome returned again and again to Russia. When the Daily News was finally persuaded by right-wing readers and by M15 to dispose of their 'Bolshevik' correspondent, he moved over to the Manchester Guardian.
He knew and liked the Bolshevik leaders, who were always ready to talk to him. He wrote two books and a pamphlet about the early years of the revolution. The pamphlet, The Truth about Russia, sold widely in the United States. Six Weeks in Russia (1919) also struck a chord in a British Labour movement which was waking up to what had happened in Russia, and responding enthusiastically. The theme of the second book, The Crisis in Russia (1920), was 'the enormously strong embodiment of the human will' of the 600,000-strong Communist Party which held the administration of Russia together during the wars of intervention and the Civil War.
Ransome's description in this book of a conference at Jaroslavl, in which he explains the dedication to democracy that was the inner spring of the party, is for me the highlight of all his writing about Russia. When the delegates retired, tired and hungry, to their hotel late at night after the conference, they were confronted by a delegation of railway workers, who begged them to come and see their play. Off they trooped again. Arthur Ransome's description of what happens next, especially his report of Karl Radek's speech to the workers, is quite thrilling.
From 1929 until his death in 1967, Arthur Ransome lived in England with Evgenia, whom he married as soon as his divorce came through. Swallows and Amazons was published in 1931. Almost at once he was famous for his children's stories. His enthusiasm for Russia quickly waned as Stalin laid waste to everything that had inspired Ransome about the revolution. But the excitement and enthusiasm for those revolutionary years never quite left him. One of his children's books was criticised by a sectarian leftist, an Edwina Spart of her time, for its exclusive concern with middle-class families who could afford boats. The review drew a sharp reply from the librarian of a county secondary school in Shrewsbury. All the children, she insisted, of all classes, especially the girls, were reading Arthur Ransome. Arthur wrote warmly to thank her: 'In Russia,' he told her, 'in the early years of the revolution there, young devotees quite honestly believed that after 1917 literature must concern itself exclusively with the proletariat, and some of them went even further and believed it must be written only by the proletariat. It was a sterile and short-lived movement and was killed by the proletariat itself, which preferred to read the best books it could get.'
Was there anything in common between Arthur Ransome's cheerful children's stories and the great events in Russia in 1917? Ransome wrote: 'The essence of the child is its imagination . . . it adopts any material at hand, and weaves for itself a web of imaginative life, building the world again in splendid pageantry, and all without ever (or hardly ever) blurring its sense of the actual.' That is perhaps how he saw the Russian revolution, and why he so passionately wanted others to see it that way too. As he wrote in The Truth About Russia: 'Let the revolution fail. No matter. If only in America, in England, in France, in Germany people know why it has failed, and how it failed, who betrayed it, who murdered it. Man does not live so much by his deeds as the purpose of his deeds. We have seen the flights of the young eagles. Nothing can destroy that fact even if, later in the day, the eagles fall to earth one by one, with broken wings.'
'Six Weeks in Russia, 1919' and 'The Crisis in Russia, 1920', with an introduction by Paul Foot, is published this month by Redwords, 31 Cottenham Road, London E17 6RP, price pounds 12.95
(Photographs omitted)
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