You Cannot Fathom Russia with Your Mind

by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2014)

From the point of view of complete rationalists, who think that life can be lived wholly according to a rational plan, anniversaries are odd. Why should the memory of an event be more prominent in our minds at one moment or on one date rather than another? And if we are going to have anniversaries, why should the hundredth be more important than, say, the ninety-third or the eighty-seventh? Surely, if an event was historically important, it was equally important for all the time that succeeded it? The importance given to centenaries is a relic of magical thinking. Why not celebrate or confer equal importance on the dozenth or the twelve dozenth anniversary?

Some historians treat the war as if it were the bursting of an abscess that had been gathering in the previous decades which were seemingly those of peace, plenty, progress and prosperity. But what is obvious in retrospect is often not obvious in prospect. Certainly no one had much idea of what kind of war it would be if war came. But many did not even suspect that war was coming, let alone what kind of war it would be.

It is instructive, then, to read books written just before the war broke out by intelligent authors with no special faculty of foresight, none greater than the ordinary or than ours would have been. To read only the far-sighted is to fail to appreciate their far-sightedness. We must read the ordinary to appreciate our own limitations.

When, therefore, I came across a handsome book written in 1913 by a man called Hugh Stewart with the title Provincial Russia, I bought it and read it. After all, a cataclysm of world-shaking proportions in Russia was only four years away from the publication of the book: what inkling did the author of book have of that?

His first wife died in 1920, two weeks after giving birth to their son. His second wife died in 1928, while giving birth to a stillborn son. He himself died only four years after his third marriage, having by then had a son and a daughter. Such a story reminds us how fragile was the human hold on life only a couple of generations ago.

instance, by firing a gun over the invalid, for she is a great coward.

However, the medical credulity of the highly-educated author was not much less than that of the White Russian peasants. This is what he has to say about the Crimea and its healing mud:

will drink as much as ten tumblers of thin lemon-flavoured tea.

The invalids of whom the author is talking are the cream of Russian society, highly educated and cosmopolitan. Before we laugh too loud at such pitiful ignorance even of the best-educated, perhaps we should try to imagine what remedies we should be prepared to try ourselves if we were attacked by a slow wasting disease for which there was no indubitably effective or scientifically proven treatment.

Provincial Russia is not a political book, a fact which is itself very revealing. Politics, where touched upon at all, are mentioned en passant, not as being the main interest or purpose of life. By contrast, no book about Russia published after 1917 could be other than political, obsessively so. Every author took a political stand, for or against. The landscape disappeared from view. The Revolution politicised existence itself.

There is no sense of impending doom or catastrophe in the book, no intimation that a regime is soon to be established in the country that will regularly kill more people in a day than its predecessor in a century. On the contrary, if anything the march of progress, of ever-increasing wealth, education and enlightenment is taken for granted, as being more or less inevitable and unstoppable. Little did the author guess that it would take many years for Russia once again to reach the level of production of the year of publication of his book.

I do not wish to ridicule the author when I say that in his pages appeared one of the least prescient prognostications I have ever seen in print. Here is the passage:

it can scarcely be a matter for doubt.

He made the cardinal mistake of confusing a projection with a prediction. It is a mistake that I doubt many of us have altogether avoided in our lives. He thought that because immense progress had been made in the recent past in Russia it would continue indefinitely into the future, along the same line of the graph as it were. He was like the man who thinks that because he has driven safely at 150 miles an hour for a hundred miles, he can continue at that speed without danger.

To comment on this essay, please click here.

To help New English Review continue to publish original and thought provoking essays like this one, please click here.

here.