Books: The Permanent Despotism

JOURNEY FOR OUR TIME (338 pp.)—Astolphe de Custine—Pellegrini & Cudahy ($4).

In 1839, as in 1950, even the friendliest traveler had a stiff time getting into Russia. French Marquis Astolphe de Custine, warmly pro-Russian, was astonished at the questions he got at the frontier.

“What are you going to do in Russia?”

“See the country.”

“That is not a motive for traveling.”

“I have no other.”

“Whom do you intend to see in Petersburg?”

“Any persons who will allow me to make their acquaintance.”

“How long do you expect to stay in Russia?”

“I do not know.”

“Say approximately.”

“Several months.”

“Do you have a public diplomatic mission?”

“No.”

“Secret?”

“No . . .”

“Why did you head toward Russia?”

After an “interminable” examination, the confiscation of his books, pistols and clock, the well-meaning marquis got in. In three months’ time he saw all he wanted to see and retreated home to France, the first thoroughly disillusioned Russian traveler on record.

Pages Verbatim. The book he wrote, La Russie en 1839, has had a fascinating history. In 1930 Moscow dug it up and published it in Russian—intending it as a devastating testament of the wicked old days under the Czars. When the Communists realized that much of Custine’s horrified report might have been a description of life in the Soviet Union’s own new paradise, they banned it.

“In Russia,” wrote Custine with a bitterness that was both reportorial and prophetic, “the tyranny of despotism is a permanent revolution.”

General Walter Bedell Smith, onetime U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, does the introduction for the new American edition of Custine’s letters, Journey for Our Time. Writes “Beedle” Smith: “I could have taken many pages verbatim . . . and, after substituting present-day names and dates . . . sent them to the State Department as my own official reports.”

Her Body to Science. Everywhere Custine went—St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhni Novgorod, Yaroslavl—he found terror and its agent, the secret police. For fear of them and their informers, the Russians had become a nation of liars: “A sincere man . . . would pass for mad.” For hatred of them, that could not be expressed, the Russians had become a society of mockers: “The slave . . . consoles himself for his yoke by quietly making fun of it.” From the highest noble to the lowest serf, all Russians were equally in fear of the regime’s power; all human life was equally worthless in the rule of terror.

Custine reports that when a squall hit a flotilla of small craft carrying “chosen bourgeoisie” on an outing to Czar Nicholas I’s seaside palace, scores were drowned. The newspapers suppressed the disaster, so as not to “distress the Czarina [or] imply blame to the Czar.” By a similar procedure, when a serving girl was murdered in a back street, the police did not bother to report the crime, but were careful to make a few rubles by selling her body to medical students for dissection.

When a theologian dared to take issue with the Orthodox Church, the Czar pronounced him insane, ordered him committed to an asylum. After a series of special treatments, the man confessed that the Czar was right, he was indeed insane—a story that might, with a twist or two, have come straight out of the Moscow treason trials or out of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.

However, such incidents had their justification, as no less a personage than His Majesty graciously explained to the marquis at a grand levee. “Despotism,” the Czar charmingly admitted, “is the essence of my government; but it is in keeping with the character of the nation.”

The Future In Black. The marquis regretfully concluded that the Czar was not far wrong about the Russians, at that. “Other nations have tolerated oppression; the Russian nation has loved it; she still loves it . . . An oppressed people has always merited its suffering; tyranny is the work of nations . . . However, it cannot be denied that this popular mania has become the principle of sublime actions. In this inhumane country, if society has denatured man it has not shrunk him . . . He is not good but he is not paltry . . .

“With this obedient people . . . even outbursts of vengeance seem to be regulated by a certain discipline. Calculated murder is executed in cadence; men kill other men militarily, religiously, without anger . . . with a calm more terrible than the delirium of hatred.”

What was to become of such a people? Custine offered a gloomy prophecy.

“The spectacle of this society, all the springs of which are taut like the trigger of a weapon that one is about to fire, frightens me to the point of dizziness . . . I see as compensation for the misfortune of being born under this regime only dreams of arrogance and the hope of domination . . . Since I have come to Russia I see the future of Europe in black.”