Introduction

The introduction argues that the Russian Revolution should be understood as a fundamentally important precondition for mid-century British culture. It explains the range of intellectuals covered in the book, and the central importance of anti-Communists Arthur Koestler and George Orwell for its argument. It then outlines three key arguments that run through the book: first, that the effects of the Russian Revolution on British culture are best understood in terms of gradual sedimentation in a longue durée rather than as a catastrophic event; second, Red Britain emphasizes the ideological diversity on either side of the Cold War divide; third, that British responses to the Bolshevik Revolution should be understood not only as a clash of internationalist or cosmopolitan ideologies, but also as an episode within a longer history of nationally grounded Anglo-Russian cultural and political relations. The introduction ends with brief summaries of the book’s five chapters.

The Radiant Future

This chapter explores the idea of the future and the transformations it underwent as a result of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on theories of historicity and temporality described by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Reinhardt Koselleck, and François Hartog, the chapter examines the various ways in which the concept of the future was disturbed by and rethought in relation to events in Russia. What happens when the word ‘socialism’—which had until 1917 been a speculation about an ideal utopian future—becomes attached to a particular state? What happens when a country renowned for its ‘backwardness’ takes on a strong association with progress? And how did writers and intellectuals respond to the Stalinist myth of the ‘Radiant Future’, which defended terror and starvation in the name of building socialism? The chapter includes analysis of works by H. G. Wells, John Cournos, C. Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Dorothy Richardson.

Conclusion

The conclusion assesses the contribution of Red Britain to the study of twentieth-century literature and politics. It touches on questions of periodization, assessing the usefulness of terms such as ‘late modernism’, the ‘long 1930s’, and ‘mid-century’ in light of the book’s arguments. In particular, it is argued here that Red Britain resists a still dominant narrative of the ‘Red Decade’, which sees the politicized writing of the Auden gang as a temporary and embarrassing blip, in which the energies released by the Russian Revolution could be cordoned off and dismissed as the youthful enthusiasm of a few upper-middle-class, Oxbridge poets. The cultural effects of the Russian Revolution run deeper and wider, as the preceding chapters have shown. The conclusion then reflects on some methodological questions, arguing that Red Britain represents a decisive move away from a Marxist aetiology of culture, while also acknowledging a debt to the New Left, and to Raymond Williams in particular.

The Compensations of Illiteracy

The illiteracy of the Russian peasantry was a key term in British understandings of the country in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. For writers such as the Russophile Stephen Graham, the Russian peasants benefited from an oral culture that brought them closer to God, and exempted them from the excessive rationality of Western literate culture. The opposition between Russian orality and British literacy was fundamental to many British responses to the Russian Revolution, and this chapter explores the lasting impact of this not only on views of Russia but also the development of the idea of literature, which was increasingly constructed as a dialogical alternative to the monologism of Soviet culture. The chapter also shows how deeply such debates were embedded in a much longer intellectual history of the Reformation. Writers discussed include Stephen Graham, Doris Lessing, and Jack Lindsay.

Two and Two Make Five

The Bolshevik Revolution induced British writers to rethink the politics of number, and this chapter considers the significance of the marked preponderance of numbers, equations, and arithmetic in discussions of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet State. It explores the obsessive use of statistics by the Soviet Union and its British defenders, as a utilitarian form of socialism came to dominate left-wing discussions of politics. The chapter theorizes a ‘Romantic anti-Communism’ that opposed itself to such calculations, and often to the principle of quantitative equality. The chapter also explores—partly via the equation ‘two and two make five’ (featured Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but also in other texts that mediate the relationship between Russian and British socialism)—how the seemingly timeless propositions of mathematics were up for grabs in the debates around Marxist science and dialectical materialism. Writers covered include Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Bertrand Russell.

Homestead Versus Kolschoz

‘Homestead versus Kolchos’ was a question that obsessed Ezra Pound, an opposition between independent freeholders farming small plots (associated by Pound with the early history of the United States), and the mechanized factory farming of the Soviet collective farm or kolkhoz (which he transliterates as Kolchos). This chapter explores the ways in which British writers and intellectuals, including G. K. Chesterton, George Orwell, John Rodker, Joan Beauchamp, and J. B. Priestley, thought and wrote about Soviet agriculture. The tension between the cottage economy and the collective farm, as opposing models of socialist agriculture, created a wide-ranging debate about food, about the independent peasant proprietor, and about the possibilities of collective ownership. It shows how the ‘cottage economy’, celebrated by William Cobbett, became a key theme for anti-Communist critiques of collectivized agriculture.

Crime and Punishment

Marxist predictions that in a Communist society crime would cease to exist were not borne out in the Soviet Union, leading G. K. Chesterton to quip that ‘the Socialists used to say that “under Socialism” nobody would lose his temper or quarrel with his mother-in-law’. Instead the Communist government presided over a redefinition of the concept of law, inventing categories such as ‘enemy of the people’ and holding trials that simultaneously aped and travestied notions of ‘bourgeois justice’. The question of the law’s supposed objectivity, and the validity of normative theories of justice, were particularly important questions. These were some of the most visible and widely debated features of the Soviet regime, and this chapter explores British intellectuals’ engagements with Soviet justice. Writers discussed include Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, D. N. Pritt, and the Duchess of Atholl.