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[With the collapse of Labour in the election of 1932, a young man of socialist upbringing, Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘resolved to go where I thought a new age was coming to pass; to Moscow and the future of mankind.’ As the Manchester Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, his idea was to establish himself in the worker’s paradise, bring over his entire family, and then sever his connection from the bourgeois life of the West. Seven months later he left Russia in a state of utter disillusionment. The whole experience had been a nightmare, the purge trials and the government created famine in Ukraine already well under way. Passing through Leningrad on his way home, however, he stopped to visit Dostoevsky’s grave.]

I left the USSR via Riga, then the capital of an independent Latvia, breaking my journey at Leningrad, where, on an impulse, having some hours to spare, I decided to go and look for Dostoevsky’s grave. It was by no means an easy quest. I found the cemetery where he was buried easily enough, but when I asked where his grave was, no one seemed prepared to give me any information other than pointing vaguely. At last, after much laborious spelling out of the names on tombstones, I did manage to locate it. The grave and the monument had a neglected, untended appearance, which was not really surprising since, following Lenin’s view, the Party Line had pronounced anathema upon Dostoevsky as a reactionary who had rejected and ridiculed the very notion of progress and of Socialism. I wondered if anyone else had come there of late to do him reverence. Anyway, I was glad to take off my hat and stand for a while in silence, honouring his memory in the strange circumstances which had befallen his country—circumstances he had so uncannily prophesied in The Possessed, the book that of all others had been most in my mind during my time in the USSR.

What a scene it must have been, I reflected, at that very place when he died some half century before! What a turn-out of the great and the celebrated! He who, in his famous Pushkin Memorial speech, had proclaimed the great destiny of the Slav peoples to overthrow the corrupt, decadent civilisation of the West, and bring to pass a new, glorious era of Christendom reborn! Who had so brilliantly and devastatingly exposed the vain hopes and destructive purposes of the liberal mind, and, in the character of Raskolnikov, created its very prototype. Who, when he spoke of how now Russians must look to their roads southwards, had every general jumping in the air until his medals shook; every archbishop dancing about, his tall black hat askew. I could see it all, the carriages waiting, the exquisite ladies in veils, the splendid vestments of the officiating priests. And now just me!

But wait a minute. Go forward another forty years, to 1971, the 150th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth, and lo! it turns out that Lenin put Dostoevsky only second to Tolstoy in a list he prepared of the greatest Russian writers, and that the judgement that ‘Dostoevsky could not be in accord with our epoch was one of the errors of our young society, those errors which, in their own time, had their own truth and logic.’ With the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia also suitably adjusted, there could well be another turn-out no less brilliant. As for the grave I found so neglected—it would surprise me if by this time it had not been refurbished.

Among several pieces I wrote about the USSR which never got published was one entitled ‘Red Imperialism,’ in which I argued that the cause of liberating the toiling masses could lend itself just as well to Dostoevsky’s brand of Slav imperialism as the notion of liberating Christians from the Ottoman yoke. In those days, with the worthy Litvinov advocating total disarmament whenever he had a chance, and every pacifist and internationalist cause sure of a warm endorsement in Moscow, my suggestion seemed too absurd. Today, no one would print the piece because it would seem too banal. When I read in the documents from the archives of the German Foreign Office published in 1948 of the conversations between Hitler and Molotov relating to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, I realised that Dostoevsky would have found in Stalin’s emissary an exponent of his views far more resolute and unscrupulous than any Czar; and one no less concerned than he was about roads going southwards.

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