Books: Gide on Russia

RETURN FROM THE U. S. S. R.—André Gide—Knopf ($1).

Like Thomas Mann for Germany, like José Ortega y Gasset for Spain, André Gide speaks for a living part of his nation, and speaks to the world. French Author Gide’s reputation is enormously greater than his popularity. He had never written a best-seller until, at 67, he visited what he thought was the Promised Land, returned to confess that he was mistaken.

Within a few weeks of its publication in France, Return From the U. S. S. R. sold over 100,000 copies. Reason: a writer of great reputation and acknowledged integrity, who had gone to Russia an avowed Communist, had written a beautifully lucid report which had all the earmarks of the disappointing truth.

Though he went to Russia prepared to find nearly everything praiseworthy, André Gide found much to criticize. Of the much touted Stakhanovism he says:

“Stakhanovism is a marvellous invention for brisking up idleness (in old days there was the knout). Stakhanovism would be useless in a country where the workers all work. But out there, as soon as they are left alone, they become slack.” The bleak impersonality of some model houses depressed him: “Can this depersonalization, towards which everything in the U. S. S. R. seems to tend, be considered as progress? For my part, I cannot believe it.” The nearly universal conformity of opinion depressed him more. “In the U. S. S. R. everybody knows beforehand, once and for all, that on any and every subject there can be only one opinion.

. . . Are these really the people who made the revolution? No; they are the people who profit by it. … Remember that this moulding of the spirit begins in earliest infancy. . . . What is important here is to persuade people that they are as well off as they can be until a better time comes; to persuade them that elsewhere people are worse off. The only way of achieving this is carefully to prevent any communication with the outside world.

. . . Criticism merely consists in asking oneself if this, that, or the other is ‘in the right line.’ The line itself is never discussed.” The censorship of two adjectives in one of his speeches showed André Gide the line even a distinguished visitor has to toe. He had referred to Russia’s destiny, was told he would have to say “glorious destiny.” He had referred to a great monarch, was told he would have to delete “great.” A longtime champion of homosexuals, he was shocked at the Soviet law condemning homosexuals to five years’ deportation.

André Gide found himself growing more and more antipathetic to the orthodox ”revolutionary” line: “The spirit which is today held to be counter-revolutionary is that same revolutionary spirit, that ferment which first broke through the half-rotten dam of the old Tsarist world. . . .

I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler’s Germany, thought be less free, more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized.” He wonders bitterly where Lenin would find himself under the Stalinist dictatorship, which Gide thinks has veered badly from the direction Lenin gave it. “One step more, and we should even say—this is exactly what was not desired.” After Return From the U. S. S. R. old André Gide is not likely to be invited back to Russia. Dictatorships abhor critics. But his criticism will strike non-Soviet readers as especially effective because it carries with it no trace of spleen, no suggestion of anathema. The U.S. S. R. is no longer the Promised Land to André Gide, but it is still the land of promise.

“Good and bad alike are to be found there; I should say rather: the best and the worst. . . . The Soviet Union has not yet finished instructing and astonishing us.”