the autobiography of bertrand russell 312known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense,and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never known equalledexcept by G. E. Moore. I remember taking him once to a meeting of theAristotelian Society, at which there were various fools whom I treatedpolitely. When we came away he raged and stormed against my moraldegradation in not telling these men what fools they were. His life wasturbulent and troubled, and his personal force was extraordinary. He lived onmilk and vegetables, and I used to feel as Mrs Patrick Campbell did aboutShaw: ‘God help us if he should ever eat a beefsteak.’ He used to come to seeme every evening at midnight, and pace up and down my room like a wildbeast for three hours in agitated silence. Once I said to him: ‘Are you thinkingabout logic or about your sins?’ ‘Both’, he replied, and continued his pacing. Idid not like to suggest that it was time for bed, as it seemed probable both tohim and me that on leaving me he would commit suicide. At the end of his?rst term at Trinity, he came to me and said: ‘Do you think I am an absoluteidiot?’ I said: ‘Why do you want to know?’ He replied: ‘Because if I am I shallbecome an aeronaut, but if I am not I shall become a philosopher.’ I said tohim: ‘My dear fellow, I don’t know whether you are an absolute idiot or not,but if you will write me an essay during the vacation upon any philosophicaltopic that interests you, I will read it and tell you.’ He did so, and brought itto me at the beginning of the next term. As soon as I read the ?rst sentence, Ibecame persuaded that he was a man of genius, and assured him that heshould on no account become an aeronaut. At the beginning of 1914 hecame to me in a state of great agitation and said: ‘I am leaving Cambridge, Iam leaving Cambridge at once.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because my brother-in-lawhas come to live in London, and I can’t bear to be so near him.’ So he spentthe rest of the winter in the far north of Norway. In early days I once askedG. E. Moore what he thought of Wittgenstein. ‘I think very well of him’, hesaid. I asked why, and he replied: ‘Because at my lectures he looks puzzled,and nobody else ever looks puzzled.’When the War came, Wittgenstein, who was very patriotic, became ano?cer in the Austrian Army. For the ?rst few months it was still possible towrite to him and to hear from him, but before long this became impossible,and I knew nothing of him until about a month after the Armistice, when Igot a letter from him written from Monte Cassino, saying that a few days afterthe Armistice he had been taken prisoner by the Italians, but fortunately withhis manuscript. It appeared that he had written a book in the trenches, andwished me to read it. He was the kind of man who would never have noticedsuch small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. Hesent me the manuscript of his book, which I discussed with Nicod andDorothy Wrinch at Lulworth. It was the book which was subsequently pub-lished under the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was obviously important torussia 313see him and discuss it by word of mouth, and it seemed best to meet in aneutral country. We therefore decided upon the Hague. At this point, how-ever, a surprising di?culty arose. His father, just before the outbreak of theWar, had transferred his whole fortune to Holland, and was therefore just asrich at the end as at the beginning. Just about at the time of the Armisticehis father had died, and Wittgenstein inherited the bulk of his fortune. Hecame to the conclusion, however, that money is a nuisance to a philosopher,so he gave every penny of it to his brother and sisters. Consequently he wasunable to pay the fare from Vienna to the Hague, and was far too proud toaccept it from me. At last a solution of this di?culty was found. The furnitureand books which he had had at Cambridge were stored there, and he expresseda willingness to sell them to me. I took the advice of the Cambridge furnituredealer in whose care they were as to their value, and bought them at the?gure he suggested. They were in fact worth far more than he supposed, andit was the best bargain I ever made. This transaction made it possible forWittgenstein to come to the Hague, where we spent a week arguing his bookline by line, while Dora went to the Public Library to read the invectives ofSalmatius against Milton.Wittgenstein, though a logician, was at once a patriot and a paci?st. He hada very high opinion of the Russians, with whom he had fraternised at theFront. He told me that once in a village in Galicia, where for the momenthe had nothing to do, he found a book-shop, and it occurred to him thatthere might be a book in it. There was just one, which was Tolstoy on theGospels. He therefore bought it, and was much impressed by it. He becamefor a time very religious, so much so that he began to consider me toowicked to associate with. In order to make a living he became an elementaryschool-master in a country village in Austria, called Trattenbach. He wouldwrite to me saying: ‘The people of Trattenbach are very wicked.’ I wouldreply: ‘Yes, all men are very wicked.’ He would reply: ‘True, but the men ofTrattenbach are more wicked than the men of other places.’ I replied thatmy logical sense revolted against such a proposition. But he had some justi?-cation for his opinion. The peasants refused to supply him with milk becausehe taught their children sums that were not about money. He must havesu?ered during this time hunger and considerable privation, though it wasvery seldom that he could be induced to say anything about it, as he had thepride of Lucifer. At last his sister decided to build a house, and employed himas architect. This gave him enough to eat for several years, at the end of whichtime he returned to Cambridge as a don, where Clive Bell’s son wrote poemsin heroic couplets against him. He was not always easy to ?t into a socialoccasion. Whitehead described to me the ?rst time that Wittgenstein cameto see him. He was shown into the drawing-room during afternoon tea. Heappeared scarcely aware of the presence of Mrs Whitehead, but marched upthe autobiography of bertrand russell 314and down the room for some time in silence, and at last said explosively:‘A proposition has two poles. It is apb.’ Whitehead, in telling me, said: ‘Inaturally asked what are a and b, but I found that I had said quite the wrongthing. “a and b are inde?nable,” Wittgenstein answered in a voice of thunder.’Like all great men he had his weaknesses. At the height of his mystic ardourin 1922, at a time when he assured me with great earnestness that it isbetter to be good than clever, I found him terri?ed of wasps, and, because ofbugs, unable to stay another night in lodgings we had found in Innsbruck.After my travels in Russia and China, I was inured to small matters of that sort,but not all his conviction that the things of this world are of no account couldenable him to endure insects with patience. In spite of such slight foibles,however, he was an impressive human being.I spent almost the whole of the year 1920 in travelling. At Easter, I wasinvited to lecture at Barcelona at the Catalan University there. From BarcelonaI went to Majorca, where I stayed at Soller. The old inn-keeper (the only onein the place) informed me that, as he was a widower, he could not give meany food, but I was at liberty to walk in his garden and pluck his orangeswhenever I pleased. He said this with such a courteous air that I felt con-strained to express my profound gratitude. In Majorca, I began a great quarrelwhich raged for many months through many changes of latitude andlongitude.I was planning to go to Russia, and Dora wanted to go with me. I main-tained that, as she had never taken much interest in politics, there was nogood reason why she should go, and, as typhus was raging, I should not feeljusti?ed in exposing her to the risk. We were both adamant, and it was anissue upon which compromise was impossible. I still think I was right, andshe still thinks she was right.Soon after returning from Majorca, my opportunity came. A Labourdeputation was going to Russia, and was willing that I should accompanyit. The Government considered my application, and after causing me tobe interviewed by H. A. L. Fisher, they decided to let me go. The SovietGovernment was more di?cult to persuade, and when I was already inStockholm on the way, Litvinov was still refusing permission, in spite of ourhaving been fellow prisoners in Brixton. However, the objections of theSoviet Government were at last overcome. We were a curious party, MrsSnowden, Cli?ord Allen, Robert Williams, Tom Shaw, an enormously fat oldTrade Unionist named Ben Turner, who was very helpless without his wifeand used to get Cli?ord Allen to take his boots o? for him, Haden Guest asmedical attendant, and several Trade Union o?cials. In Petrograd, where theyput the imperial motor-car at our disposal, Mrs Snowden used to drive aboutenjoying its luxury and expressing pity for the ‘poor Czar’. Haden Guest wasa theosophist with a ?ery temper and a considerable libido. He and Mrsrussia 315Snowden were very anti-Bolshevik. Robert Williams, I found, was very happyin Russia, and was the only one of our party who made speeches pleasing tothe Soviet Government. He always told them that revolution was imminent inEngland, and they made much of him. I told Lenin that he was not to betrusted, and the very next year, on Black Friday, he ratted. Then there wasCharlie Buxton, whose paci?sm had led him to become a Quaker. When Ishared a cabin with him, he would beg me to stop in the middle of a sentencein order that he might practise silent prayer. To my surprise, his paci?sm didnot lead him to think ill of the Bolsheviks.For my part, the time I spent in Russia was one of continually increasingnightmare. I have said in print what, on re?ection, appeared to me to be thetruth, but I have not expressed the sense of utter horror which overwhelmedme while I was there. Cruelty, poverty, suspicion, persecution, formed thevery air we breathed. Our conversations were continually spied upon. In themiddle of the night one would hear shots, and know that idealists were beingkilled in prison. There was a hypocritical pretence of equality, and everybodywas called ‘tovarisch’, but it was amazing how di?erently this word could bepronounced according as the person addressed was Lenin or a lazy servant. Onone occasion in Petrograd (as it was called) four scarecrows came to see me,dressed in rags, with a fortnight’s beard, ?lthy nails, and tangled hair. Theywere the four most eminent poets of Russia. One of them was allowed by theGovernment to make his living by lecturing on rhythmics, but he complainedthat they insisted upon his teaching this subject from a Marxian point of view,and that for the life of him he could not see how Marx came into the matter.Equally ragged were the Mathematical Society of Petrograd. I went toa meeting of this society at which a man read a paper on non-Euclideangeometry. I could not understand anything of it except the formulae whichhe wrote on the blackboard, but these were quite the right sort of formulae,so that one may assume the paper to have been competent. Never, in England,have I seen tramps who looked so abject as the mathematicians of Petrograd.I was not allowed to see Kropotkin, who not long afterwards died. Thegoverning classes had a self-con?dence quite as great as that produced byEton and Oxford. They believed that their formulae would solve all di?cul-ties. A few of the more intelligent knew that this was not the case, but did notdare to say so. Once, in a tête-à-tête conversation with a scienti?c physiciannamed Zalkind, he began to say that climate has a great e?ect upon character,but instantly he pulled himself up short, and said: ‘Of course that is not reallythe case; only economic circumstances a?ect character.’ I felt that everythingthat I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib andnarrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being in?ictedupon many millions of people. With every day that I spent in Russia myhorror increased, until I lost all power of balanced judgement.the autobiography of bertrand russell 316From Petrograd we went to Moscow, which is a very beautiful city, andarchitecturally more interesting than Petrograd because of the Orientalin?uence. I was amused by various small ways in which Bolshevik love ofmass-production showed itself. The main meal of the day occurred at aboutfour o’clock in the afternoon, and contained among other ingredients theheads of ?shes. I never discovered what happened to their bodies, though Isuppose they were eaten by the peoples’ Komissars. The river Moskwa waschock full of ?sh, but people were not allowed to catch them, as no up-to-date mechanical method had yet been found to supersede the rod and line.The city was almost starving, but it was felt that ?shes’ heads, caught bytrawlers, were better than ?shes’ bodies caught by primitive methods.We went down the Volga on a steamer, and Cli?ord Allen becameextremely ill with pneumonia, which revived the tuberculosis from which hehad previously su?ered. We were all to leave the boat at Saratov, but Allen wastoo ill to be moved, so Haden Guest, Mrs Snowden and I remained on theboat to look after him, while it travelled on to Astrakan. He had a very smallcabin, and the heat was inconceivable. The windows had to be kept tightshut on account of the malarial mosquitoes, and Allen su?ered from violentdiarrhoea. We had to take turns nursing him, for although there was aRussian nurse on board, she was afraid to sit with him at night for fear thathe might die and his ghost might seize her.Astrakan seemed to me more like hell than anything I had ever imagined.The town water-supply was taken from the same part of the river into whichships shot their refuse. Every street had stagnant water which bred millions ofmosquitoes; every year one third of the inhabitants had malaria. There wasno drainage system, but a vast mountain of excrement at a prominent placein the middle of the town. Plague was endemic. There had recently been?ghting in the civil war against Denikin. The ?ies were so numerous that atmeal-time a tablecloth had to be put over the food, and one had to insertone’s hand underneath and snatch a mouthful quickly. The instant thetable-cloth was put down, it became completely black with ?ies, so thatnothing of it remained visible. The place is a great deal below sea-level, andthe temperature was 120 degrees in the shade. The leading doctors of theplace were ordered by the Soviet o?cials who accompanied us to hear whatHaden Guest had to say about combating malaria, a matter on which he hadbeen engaged for the British Army in Palestine. He gave them an admirablelecture on the subject, at the end of which they said: ‘Yes, we know all that,but it is very hot.’ I fancy that the next time the Soviet o?cials came that waythose doctors were probably put to death, but of this I have no knowledge.The most eminent of the doctors in question examined Cli?ord Allen andinformed me that he could not possibly live two days. When about a fort-night later we got him out to Reval, the doctor who examined him thererussia 317again told me that he could not live two days, but by this time I hadcome to know something of Allen’s determination to live, and I was lessalarmed. He survived for many years, and became an ornament of theHouse of Lords.After I returned to England I endeavoured to express my changing moods,before starting and while in Russia, in the shape of antedated letters toColette, the last of which I subsequently published in my book about China.As they express my moods at that time better than I can do by anythingwritten now, I will insert them here:1London,April 24, 1920The day of my departure comes near. I have a thousand things to do, yet Isit here idle, thinking useless thoughts, the irrelevant, rebellious thoughts thatwell-regulated people never think, the thoughts that one hopes to banish bywork, but that themselves banish work instead. How I envy those who alwaysbelieve what they believe, who are not troubled by deadness and indi?erenceto all that makes the framework of their lives. I have had the ambition to be ofsome use in the world, to achieve something notable, to give mankind newhopes. And now that the opportunity is near, it all seems dust and ashes. As Ilook into the future, my disillusioned gaze sees only strife and still morestrife, rasping cruelty, tyranny, terror and slavish submission. The men of mydreams, erect, fearless and generous, will they ever exist on earth? Or willmen go on ?ghting, killing and torturing to the end of time, till the earthgrows cold and the dying sun can no longer quicken their futile frenzy? Icannot tell. But I do know the despair in my soul. I know the great loneliness,as I wander through the world like a ghost, speaking in tones that are notheard, lost as if I had fallen from some other planet.The old struggle goes on, the struggle between little pleasures and thegreat pain. I know that the little pleasures are death and yet – I am so tired, sovery tired. Reason and emotion ?ght a deadly war within me, and leave meno energy for outward action. I know that no good thing is achieved without?ghting, without ruthlessness and organisation and discipline. I know thatfor collective action the individual must be turned into a machine. But inthese things, though my reason may force me to believe them, I can ?nd noinspiration. It is the individual human soul that I love – in its loneliness, itshopes and fears, its quick impulses and sudden devotions. It is such a longjourney from this to armies and States and o?cials; and yet it is only bymaking this long journey that one can avoid a useless sentimentalism.All through the rugged years of the War, I dreamed of a happy day after itsthe autobiography of bertrand russell 318end, when I should sit with you in a sunny garden by the Mediterranean,?lled with the scent of heliotrope, surrounded by cypresses and sacred grovesof ilex – and there, at last, I should be able to tell you of my love, and to touchthe joy that is as real as pain. The time is come, but I have other tasks, and youhave other desires; and to me, as I sit brooding, all tasks seem vain and alldesires foolish.Yet it is not upon these thoughts that I shall act.2Petrograd,May 12, 1920I am here at last, in this city which has ?lled the world with history, whichhas inspired the most deadly hatreds and the most poignant hopes. Will ityield me up its secret? Shall I learn to know its inmost soul? Or shall I acquireonly statistics and o?cial facts? Shall I understand what I see, or will it remainan external bewildering show? In the dead of night we reached the emptystation, and our noisy motors panted through the sleeping streets. From mywindow, when I arrived, I looked out across the Neva to the fortress ofPeter and Paul. The river gleamed in the early northern dawn; the scene wasbeautiful beyond all words, magical, eternal, suggestive of ancient wisdom.‘It is wonderful’, I said to the Bolshevik who stood beside me. ‘Yes,’ hereplied, ‘Peter and Paul is now not a prison, but the Army Headquarters.’I shook myself. ‘Come, my friend,’ I thought, ‘you are not here as a tourist,to sentimentalise over sunrises and sunsets and buildings starred by Baedeker;you are here as a social investigator, to study economic and political facts.Come out of your dream, forget the eternal things. The men you havecome among would tell you they are only the fancies of a bourgeois with toomuch leisure, and can you be sure they are anything more?’ So I came backinto the conversation, and tried to learn the mechanism for buying anumbrella at the Soviet Stores, which proved as di?cult as fathoming theultimate mysteries.The twelve hours that I have so far spent on Russian soil have chie?ya?orded material for the imp of irony. I came prepared for physical hardship,discomfort, dirt, and hunger, to be made bearable by an atmosphere ofsplendid hope for mankind. Our communist comrades, no doubt rightly,have not judged us worthy of such treatment. Since crossing the frontieryesterday afternoon, I have made two feasts and a good breakfast, several ?rst-class cigars, and a night in a sumptuous bedroom of a palace where all theluxury of the ancien régime has been preserved. At the stations on the way,regiments of soldiers ?lled the platform, and the plebs was kept carefully outof sight. It seems I am to live amid the pomp surrounding the government ofrussia 319a great military Empire. So I must readjust my mood. Cynicism is calledfor, but I am strongly moved, and ?nd cynicism di?cult. I come backeternally to the same question: What is the secret of this passionate country?Do the Bolsheviks know its secret? Do they even suspect that it has a secret?I wonder.3Petrograd,May 13, 1920This is a strange world into which I have come, a world of dying beautyand harsh life. I am troubled at every moment by fundamental questions, theterrible insoluble questions that wise men never ask. Empty palaces and fulleating-houses, ancient splendours destroyed, or mummi?ed in museums,while the sprawling self-con?dence of returned Americanised refugeesspreads throughout the city. Everything is to be systematic: there is to beorganisation and distributive justice. The same education for all, the sameclothes for all, the same kind of houses for all, the same books for all, andthe same creed for all – it is very just, and leaves no room for envy, except forthe fortunate victims of injustice in other countries.And then I begin upon the other side of the argument. I rememberDostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, Gorki’s In the World, Tolstoy’s Resurrection. Ire?ect upon the destruction and cruelty upon which the ancient splendourwas built: the poverty, drunkenness, prostitution, in which life and healthwere uselessly wasted; I think of all the lovers of freedom who su?ered inPeter and Paul; I remember the knoutings and pogroms and massacres. Byhatred of the old, I become tolerant of the new, but I cannot like the new onits own account.Yet I reproach myself for not liking it. It has all the characteristics ofvigorous beginnings. It is ugly and brutal, but full of constructive energy andfaith in the value of what it is creating. In creating a new machinery for sociallife, it has no time to think of anything beyond machinery. When the body ofthe new society has been built, there will be time enough to think aboutgiving it a soul – at least, so I am assured. ‘We have no time for a new art or anew religion’, they tell me with a certain impatience. I wonder whether it ispossible to build a body ?rst, and then afterwards inject the requisite amountof soul. Perhaps – but I doubt it.I do not ?nd any theoretical answer to these questions, but my feelingsanswer with terrible insistence. I am in?nitely unhappy in this atmosphere –sti?ed by its utilitarianism, its indi?erence to love and beauty and the life ofimpulse. I cannot give that importance to man’s merely animal needs that isgiven here by those in power. No doubt that is because I have not spent halfthe autobiography of bertrand russell 320my life in hunger and want, as many of them have. But do hunger and wantnecessarily bring wisdom? Do they make men more, or less, capable ofconceiving the ideal society that should be the inspiration of every reformer?I cannot avoid the belief that they narrow the horizon more than they enlargeit. But an uneasy doubt remains, and I am torn in two...4On the Volga,June 2, 1920.Our boat travels on, day after day, through an unknown and mysteriousland. Our company are noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, withglib explanations of everything, persuaded that there is nothing they cannotunderstand and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. Oneof us lies at death’s door, ?ghting a grim battle with weakness and terror andthe indi?erence of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds ofloud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lies a greatsilence, strong as Death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seems that none haveleisure to hear the silence, yet it calls to me so insistently that I grow deafto the harangues of propagandists and the endless information of thewell-informed.Last night, very late, our boat stopped in a desolate spot where there wereno houses, but only a great sandbank, and beyond it a row of poplars withthe rising moon behind them. In silence I went ashore, and found on thesand a strange assemblage of human beings, half-nomads, wandering fromsome remote region of famine, each family huddled together surrounded byall its belongings, some sleeping, others silently making small ?res of twigs.The ?ickering ?ames lighted up gnarled bearded faces of wild men, strongpatient primitive women, and children as sedate and slow as their parents.Human beings they undoubtedly were, and yet it would have been far easierfor me to grow intimate with a dog or a cat or a horse than with one of them.I knew that they would wait there day after day, perhaps for weeks, until aboat came in which they could go to some distant place where they hadheard – falsely perhaps – that the earth was more generous than in thecountry they had left. Some would die by the way, all would su?er hungerand thirst and the scorching midday sun, but their su?erings would be dumb.To me they seemed to typify the very soul of Russia, unexpressive, inactivefrom despair, unheeded by the little set of westernisers who make up all theparties of progress or reaction. Russia is so vast that the articulate few are lostin it as man and his planet are lost in interstellar space. It is possible, Ithought, that the theorists may increase the misery of the many by trying toforce them into actions contrary to their primeval instincts, but I could notrussia 321believe that happiness was to be brought to them by a gospel of industrialismand forced labour.Nevertheless, when morning came, I resumed the interminable discus-sions of the materialistic conception of history and the merits of a trulypopular government. Those with whom I discussed had not seen the sleepingwanderers, and would not have been interested if they had seen them, sincethey were not material for propaganda. But something of that patient silencehad communicated itself to me, something lonely and unspoken remainedin my heart through all the comfortable familiar intellectual talk. And at lastI began to feel that all politics are inspired by a grinning devil, teachingthe energetic and quick-witted to torture submissive populations for thepro?t of pocket or power or theory. As we journeyed on, fed by foodextracted from the peasants, protected by an army recruited from amongtheir sons, I wondered what we had to give them in return. But I found noanswer. From time to time I heard their sad songs or the haunting musicof the balalaika; but the sound mingled with the great silence of the steppes,and left me with a terrible questioning pain in which occidental hopefulnessgrew pale.Sverdlov, the Minister of Transport (as we should call him), who was withus on the steamer on the Volga, was extraordinarily kind and helpful aboutAllen’s illness. We came back on the boat as far as Saratov, and from there toReval, we travelled all the way in the carriage that had belonged to the Czar’sdaughters, so that Allen did not have to be moved at any stage. If one mightjudge from the carriage, some of their habits must have been curious. Therewas a luxurious sofa of which the seat lifted up, and one then discoveredthree holes in a row suitable for sanitary purposes. At Moscow on the wayhome Haden Guest and I had a furious quarrel with Chicherin because hewould not allow Allen to leave Moscow until he had been examined by twoSoviet doctors, and at ?rst he said that he could not get the Soviet doctors tosee him for another two days. At the height of the quarrel, on a staircase, I