Arthur Ransome and the Crisis in Russia

Roland Chambers, author of The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome, discusses the two volumes of Ransome’s Russian journalism brought back into print by Faber Finds.

Arthur Ransome is usually remembered as the author of Swallows and Amazons and eleven further novels which earned him a reputation as one of the safest pair of hands in the British children’s canon. Few writers have identified themselves so effectively, or so exclusively, with nostalgia for the British Empire in its heyday, or the confidence and moral clarity with which British pioneers explored new territories.

Six Weeks in Russia and The Crisis in Russia belong to an earlier and entirely different episode in Ransome’s career: an episode which he was glad to forget until his children’s books had established him as a household name. Long before the Walkers first set sail for Wild Cat Island, he was one of the most influential and controversial journalists of his generation. Escaping from a disastrous first marriage, he had fled to Russia to study fairy tales, and was still in Russia when the First World War exploded in 1914. Over the next ten years, before returning to England with Trotsky’s former private secretary, he worked as Russian correspondent for the radical Daily News, then for the Manchester Guardian. Following the Bolshevik coup d’état in November 1917, he became one of a tiny number of Western journalists permitted regular access to the Bolshevik leaders and achieved a notoriety that at one point brought him within a hair’s breadth of prosecution for treason.

In addition to newspaper journalism, Ransome wrote three political pamphlets in defence of the Bolshevik government, the first and most aggressive completed in May 1918, as Allied troops prepared a military intervention. Six Weeks in Russia is his second pamphlet, written in early 1919 to describe conditions in St Petersburg and Moscow in the aftermath the World War. It includes several meetings with Lenin, a conversation with the deputy head of the Bolshevik secret police, Jacob Peters, and a description of the inauguration of the Third International, Lenin’s vehicle for spreading revolution abroad. Ransome maintained an essentially sympathetic view of the Communist experiment in Russia, but Six Weeks (the title suggests a visit) is also a self-conscious effort at distancing its author from the politics of the Revolution. Since his first pamphlet the Bolsheviks had unleashed the Red Terror, the Allies were supporting the Whites in the Civil War, and Ransome had been recruited to MI6 as a British spy. Six Weeks is therefore both a rare eye witness account and a careful high wire act: an effort at pleasing both the Bolshevik administration, British intelligence, and the Allied peace conference then sitting in Paris. The book was translated into Russian, and in England was read by Sir Basil Thomson, head of Special Branch, who congratulated Ransome and invited him to tea.

When Ransome wrote Six Weeks in Russia, he was the only British journalist living in Moscow with access to the Kremlin. By contrast, The Crisis in Russia was published in 1921, when the Bolsheviks and the British were negotiating a trade agreement and the Kremlin had opened its arms to all sorts of visitors. Owing to competing books by Bertrand Russell and H G Wells, Ransome’s third and final pamphlet received little attention. But it is essential to anybody interested in how the West came to terms with the Soviet as a sovereign government, and also for those who want to understand Arthur Ransome, whose friends at the time ranged from Karl Radek, the Bolshevik propaganda chief, to Enver Pasha, former Ottoman Minister for War and one of the chief architects of the Armenian genocide. Ransome, who in his first pamphlet had praised Soviet Russia as the freest country in the world, now openly acknowledged Bolshevik tyranny, insisting that it was the essential vehicle of economic recovery. Privately he had long since lost faith in the Revolution and was longing to go home.

Comfortably installed in the Lake District, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Ransome discouraged searching questions about his time in Russia, while his second wife, Evgenia, admitted only that her father had been ‘a very senior gardener to the Tsar.’ But in Swallows and Amazons, Ransome could not resist at least some reference to a colourful past, casting himself as Captain Flint, a retired pirate struggling to complete his memoirs.

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