Arthur Ransome - Six Weeks in Russia, 1919

M illions of people in the English- speaking world have heard of Arthur Ransome. His books for children, most of them adventure stories based on messing about in boats, were a staggering success almost from the moment he started writing them. They have fascinated children of both sexes and all classes for more than sixty years. Ransome died, aged 83, in 1967, but his books are still being republished in paperback editions, tape- recordings and television serials.

Even the most pedantic Ransome addict would be hard pressed to find in any of these childrens books a single word about politics. The subject simply doesnt arise. There is nothing even of the implied radicalism of that other great childrens story-writer, whom Arthur Ransome much admired, E Nesbit. The childrens world in Ransomes books is, quite deliberately, hived off from the adult world outside. Though all the famous books were written in times of slump, war or postwar reconstruction, there is hardly a whisper of any of this in any of them.

Ransome did not develop this mastery of the separate childrens world until his late middle age. The first of the long string of famous childrens stories, SwallowsandAmazons, was published in 1930, when Ransome was 46. Though he hankered after writing childrens books as early as 1906, most of his youth was spent as a journalist and foreign correspondent. His few attempts at writing for children, though not unsuccessful, were entirely overshadowed by his work as a journalist. Most of that work was carried out in Russia where he fled in 1913 from a disastrous marriage. He quickly taught himself Russian, and before long was taken on by the liberal Daily News. Though he lived in different places, he wrote copiously on Russia for the News and later for the Manchester Guardian for 14 years.

From 1914 to 1918 he was in Russia almost all the time. When he started there, his main aim was to put the Russian case to her Allies in the Great War effort. But before long he became absorbed by the political developments in Russia, and started to predict the end of the suffocating dictatorship of Tsar Nicholas.

The two books and the pamphlet reprinted here for the first time since the 1920s are Ransomes contemporary account and analysis of the two Russian revolutions of 1917 and the events which followed. They are exceptional for a number of reasons. First, Ransomes writing style is as plain and clear as in any of his childrens books. His prose, in Orwells famous phrase, is like a window pane. There were other English writers who visited Russia both during and after the revolution whose writing style was every bit as irresistible as Ransomes: Bertrand Russell, for instance, or H G Wells. There are also a series of brilliant accounts of revolutionary Russia from committed sympathisers. John Reeds Ten Days That Shook the World is an obvious example, as is Victor Serges Year One of the Russian Revolution or Alfred Rosmers Lenins Moscow.

Ransomes contribution is quite different. Unlike Wells and Russell, he had been in Russia since the start of the First World War and knew it well. His interviews with the Bolshevik leaders were not one-off affairs, conducted by the travelling journalist eager to get back home. He came to know people like Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin almost as personal friends. In 1918, he fell in love with Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, Trotskys secretary, whom he married as soon as his divorce came through. He lived for a time in the same house as the Bolshevik leader, Karl Radek.

He differed from men like Reed, Rosmer and Serge in another way. All three of them were convinced revolutionaries when they came to Russia. Reed had taken part in and reported the Mexican revolution, and had campaigned for socialism across the United States. Rosmer and Serge were, in their different ways, convinced of the case for the overthrow of capitalism. Ransome was extraordinary in that both before and after his involvement in Russia he does not seem to have had any ideological commitment to socialism.

This can be exaggerated. In his excellent and painstaking biography, TheLifeofArthurRansome, published by Cape in the hundredth year after Ransomes birth, 1984, Hugh Brogan refers to Ransomes vast ignorance of polities. This seems unlikely. Hugh Brogan tells us that one of the most formative influences on Ransomes youth was J W Mackails biography of William Morris. Anyone turned on by William Morris cannot possibly have had a vast ignorance of politics. Again, even before he left for Russia, Ransome had built up an enormous library, and had written workmanlike , if uninspiring, books on Edgar Allen Poe and Oscar Wilde. He was not ignorant of politics. What he lacked was any sort of clear commitment. Perhaps he yearned for the sort of world which William Morris painted in NewsfromNowhere, but felt that the reality of Britain in the first 14 years of the century was so far distant from anything Morris had hoped for that there was no point in taking up a political position.

So Ransome went to Russia entirely without political enthusiasms or commitment. He had not joined the newly-formed Labour Party or shown the slightest interest in any of the great issues which racked prewar Britain: womens suffrage, Irish independence or the great strikes of 1911 and 1912 which effectively destroyed the Liberal Party and shook the Tories to their foundations .

It is this detachment from previous political commitment which gives to Arthur Ransomes reports of revolutionary Russia their singular fascination and verve. He saw the world as it was, or rather as it was changing. What he saw excited him so much that he became for the first and last time in his life politically committed .

The three works published here span a period of three years, from 1917 to 1920. Ransome was in Petrograd during the 1917 February revolution. Infuriatingly for him and for us, he returned to Britain on holiday in September and so missed the October revolution . As soon as he heard about it, he returned to Russia as quickly as he could, arriving in Petrograd on Christmas Day. He threw himself at once into investigating and reporting what was happening in Russia. His reports were greeted with contempt and fury by the British government, which regarded the new Russian government as a threat to their alliance and the war effort. Ransomes dispatches were systematically censored by the British government and their security services which (then as now) were controlled by a wildly hysterical anti-communist right. At one stage, MI5 proposed that Ransome should be prosecuted as a traitor under the Defence of the Realm Act.

Nothing infuriated Ransome more than what he called the intellectual sloth, the gross mental indolence which infected the British government and their newspapers whenever anyone mentioned Russia. No one seemed capable of making the leap in imagination necessary to understand even a little of the stupendous events in revolutionary Russia. In April 1918, Ransome was approached by an American journalist, Raymond Robins, with an idea for a pamphlet for the American people on what was really happening in Russia. To avoid the censor, Robins suggested he take it back to the States with him on his next visit. Nothing much happened for a week or two, when suddenly Robins arrived at Ransomes lodgings to announce that he was off in 36 hours and the pamphlet had better be written by then. Ransome sat down and, almost without stopping, typed out TheTruthAboutRussia. Robins arrived to collect it just as it was being finished. So it is almost unchecked, a result of the free flow of Ransomes uninhibited and even unedited prose style, and probably much the better for it.