Lost Illusion
Freda Utley
- 15 maart 2007
- 9781406732030
Samenvatting:
Lost Illusion FEEDA UTLEY HENRY REGNERY COMPANY CHICAGO COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY FREDA UTLEY ALL BIGHTS RESERVED MANUFACTURED IN THE U. S. A. 2-59. TO MY SON, JON, In memory of his father. CONTENTS Introduction ix I How I Became a Communist 1 II I Marry a Russian 23 in Honeymoon in the Far East 38 iv Spiders Web 67 V Soviet Social Register 77 VI Revival of Serfdom 84 VII Arcadi Caught in the Web 110 Vin Learn About Soviet Hospitals 133 IX Ar cadis Awakening 148 X Life in Moscow 170 XI A Home at Last 198 xn My Son Is Bom 221 xiii My Institute Is Purged 235 XIV Tricks with Statistics 251 xv The High Cost of Communism 271 XVI Red Tsar 282 xvn Scapegoats 296 Arrest 833 MANY FOREIGNERS have visited the Soviet Union. Some have lived there as journalists, diplomats, engineers and businessmen. Al most all of them have been of necessity out siders looking in as cut off from any real communication with the Russian people as the inhabitants of another planet. The usual foreigner, secure on the heights of his privi leged position of freedom from want and fear, can have no conception of what terror means, while the subjects of the Kremlin are too terrorized to dare to enlighten him. Com munist functionaries from abroad living in Moscow are of course no strangers to the uses of terror but they too, far from shar ing the life of the Russian people, dwell in the remote Olympian world of the Commu te Introduction nist ruling class. I who married a Russian saw Russia both from inside and from below, since for six years I shared some of the hard ships and all the fears of the forcibly silenced Russian people. Since I had retained my British passport I was free to return to the free world. But my husband couldnot, and was not sure that he would if he could, since in the words of Boris Pasternak he was tied to Russia by birth, life and work. So I lived on in Russia long after I had no illusions left. There is an old Chinese saying which runs Generous are the gods in granting life, but how niggardly when asked of its understand ing. Some small measure of understanding was given to me during the sweet and bitter years of my life in Russia, where I experi enced happiness and heartbreak, love and sorrow, and came to appreciate some Lrulha unknown to other Western writers, who have never seen Russia through Russian eyes. Russians and other subjects of the Soviet Empire who have escaped to the Free World know more and have suffered and experi enced more than I, Some have written books of greater literary merit covering a lar or canvas than mine. And Boris Pasternak from inside Russia has now given the whole world a vibrant work of art depicting the tragic Introduction Russian landscape from the point of view of a great poet and Christian humanist with profound insight into the heart and soul of man. My book makes no pretensions to aspire to the same heights of artistic achievement or philosophical and religious understanding. My own outlook, when I went to Russia, was that of the optimistic, rational and ag nostic Western world, and perhaps particu larly English in that it was basically empiri cal. In spite of my having for a brief period belonged to the Communist Party and imag ined myself a Marxist, the Communist phi losophy or mystique was as alien to my men tality as the worship of Moloch or Baal. I could not reject the evidence of my senses and my experience, or be convinced by the mumbojumbo, which the Communists call dialectics, that all was for the best in the worst of all possible worlds. I was incapable of believing that a more human and just so ciety would ever be created by destroying mans humanity and violating his sense of justice, or that heaven on earth would even tually be established by diabolic means While I have remained a liberal in the original meaning of that much abused word, my life in Russia taught me more than is dreamed of in the philosophy of many West ern liberals...