LONDON LETTER
281
who hates his officer like poison and looks on the enemy soldier as a
comrade. But as soon as the Red Army is involved the whole of this
conception is turned upside down. Not only does war become glorious
and purposeful, but the soldier becomes a happy warrior who positively
enjoys military discipline, loves his officer like a dog, hates the enemy
like the Devil (a phrase that occurs frequently in these stories that are
sent in to me is "his heart was fired with passionate hatred") and utters
edifying political slogans while in the act of slinging a hand grenade.
There is further schizophrenia on the subject of atrocities: any atrocity
story reported ·by the Russians is true, anything reported by the British
or Americans untrue. Ditto with the Asiatic quislings. Wang Ching-wei
is a contemptible traitor, Subhas Chandra Bose a heroic liberator. Emo–
tionally, what the Left intelligentsia wish for is that Germany and Japan
should be defeated but that Britain and America should not be victorious.
Once the Second Front has started it would not surprise me to see them
change their attitude, become defeatist about the whole business and
disclaim the demands for a Second Front which they have been making
for more than two years.
Russophile feeling is on the surface stronger than ever. It is now
next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed.
Anti-Russian books do appear, but mostly from Catholic publishing
firms ·and always from a religious or frankly reactionary angle. "Trot–
skyism," using the word in a wide sense, is even more effectively silenced
than in the 1935-39 period. The Stalinists themselves don't seem to have
regained their influence in the press, but apart from the general Russo–
phile feeling of the intelligentsia, all the appeasers, e.g., Professor E. H.
Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin. The servility
of the so-called intellectuals is astonishing. The
Mission to Moscow
film,
which I gather raised something of a storm in the USA, was accepted
here with hardly a murmur. It is interesting too that pacifists almost
never say anything anti-Russian, though temperamentally they are not
always Russophile. Their implied line is that it is wrong for us to defend
ourselves by violence, but is all right for the Russians. This is sheer
cowardice: they dare not flout prevailing left-wing opinion, which, of
course, they are more afraid of than public opinion in the wider sense.
I suspect, however, that Russian and pro-Russian propaganda will
in the long run defeat itself simply by being overdone. Lately I have
several times been surprised to hear ordinary working-class or middle–
class people say, "Oh, I'm fed up with the Russians! They're too good
to live," or words to that effect. One must remember that the USSR
means different things to the working-class and the Left intelligentsia.
The former are Russophile because they feel Russia to be the working–
class country where the common man is in control, whereas the intel–
lectuals are influenced at least partly by power-worship. The affection
they feel for the USSR is still vaguely bound up with the idea of the meek
