Stripping away the glories of the Soviet system

Inside Stalin's Russia: The Diaries of Reader Bullard, 1930-1934 Edited by Jullian and Margaret Bullard (Day Books, #19.50) Reviewed by Donald Cameron Watt

THERE are people for whom diaries of any kind are a no-no. There are people for whom professional diplomatists are out of touch, upper- class ex-Oxbridge twits, paid over-large salaries for living on the cocktail circuit. The Leningrad Diaries of Reader Bullard, our wartime ambassador in Tehran, will surprise such people out of their jumpsome little lives.

At the time he wrote these diaries, he was a member of the British consular service; he ended up as Britain's ambassador in Tehran, at the time of Churchill's first meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin. Churchill called him "a tough Briton - with no illusions"; which, having been born the son of a London dockworker, he was.

He entered the Levantine Consular Service as an interpreter after spending two years at the Foreign Office's expense learning Turkish, Arabic and Persian at Cambridge. From this he entered the diplomatic service proper.

He arrived in Moscow in 1930 as one of a handful of British diplomats to restore the relations that had been broken in 1927. He reopened the consulate general in Leningrad in 1931 - it had been closed since the Bolshevik Revolution. While he was in Leningrad, Stalin was forcing the First Five-Year Plan through, despite the almost total lack of trained mechanics and technicians, with a violence and a speed which made fraud and deception its main achievements.

This involved the forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, the slaughter by the peasants of two-thirds of their livestock and desperate famine from which millions died and which entailed the most severe rationing of food for the population of Leningrad.

There were already show trials - one of the showiest involved the directors and engineers of a British electrical firm, Metropolitan- Vickers, accused of sabotage. The British government recalled its ambassador and broke off the negotiations for a new trade treaty. In the face of such toughness, the Soviets capitulated and released the five British arrested.

During all of this, the great and the good took ship to Leningrad and train to Moscow, returning from sponsored tours and visits to the occasional Soviet industrial or social health showpiece to announce that they "had seen the future and it worked". Bullard was by no means a working-class diehard. But he had no middle-class guilt, recognising from the first that the Soviet system depended on total repression, on slave labour and on the concentration camps.

In those days, though their oppression was growing, ordinary Soviet citizens could meet working foreign diplomatists and talk in confidence to them. Bullard was even visited by two working-class Leningrad lads who wanted to know how they could get to work in England. There were, of course, already would-be provocateurs and blackmailers; especially where foreign journalists were concerned.

Bullard succeeded in entering into ordinary Soviet life, partly through a British organisation which had been looking after distressed British subjects in the Soviet Union since the revolution. The head of the organisation, Lady Muriel Paget, was an opinionated and died-in-the-wool tartar.

Its representative in Leningrad, Miss Dorothea Daunt, epitomised the upper-class British woman working among the natives, living only marginally better than her charges, poor as a church mouse, often underfed and ill, an excellent companion, capable of dominating the local GPU leader (later arrested and eventually purged by Stalin), and persona grata everywhere, born into and eventually dying as a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Bullard's junior colleagues, with their poor health, addiction to alcohol and forlorn love-life, spring directly from the comic diplomatic memoirs of Lawrence Durrell.

These were among the most terrible years in Leningrad's history, exceeded only by the horrors of the German siege. Deaths from typhus and starvation outreached each other. The elderly and once rich were turned out into the streets deprived of food cards, fuel was at a premium, beggars and homeless children proliferated, workers' pay was sometimes months in arrears, the Soviets ran out of foreign exchange at regular intervals, even roubles were in short supply.

Bullard's greatest hatred was reserved for the Soviet travel agents in Britain who so oversold their country that a constant streamlet of idealistic youth came out to seek work, often taking Soviet citizenship, only to sink into despair once it became clear that they would never be allowed to return to Britain. He left Russia still liking the ordinary Russian but deeply hating Stalin and Litvinov, his foreign minister, at much the same time as McLean and Burgess, not to mention the abominable Kim Philby, burning with the arrogant ignorance and contempt for the ordinary man in the street that only a private school and Oxbridge education could bestow, were moving irretrievably in the opposite direction. I know which men I would prefer to trust.

Copyright 2000
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