The Sunday Express
The ''Daily Express'' is a national daily United Kingdom middle-market newspaper printed in tabloid format. Published in London, it is the flagship of Express Newspapers, owned by publisher Reach plc. It was first published as a broadsheet i ...
'' in connection with Wells's second visit to Russia (after a previous trip in January 1914 to St. Petersburg and Moscow) in September and October 1920. Wells was at the height of his fame, having recently completed ''
The Outline of History
''The Outline of History'', subtitled either "The Whole Story of Man" or "Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind", is a work by H. G. Wells chronicling the history of the world from the origin of the Earth to the First World War. It appear ...
'', and was paid £1000 for the articles by the ''Sunday Express''. During his visit to Russia he visited his old friend
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (russian: link=no, Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в; – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (russian: Макси́м Го́рький, link=no), was a Russian writer and social ...
, whom he had first met in 1906 on a trip to the United States, and who arranged Wells's meeting with Lenin.
Wells portrayed Russia as recovering from a total social collapse, "the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organisation." He minimized the role of the Bolsheviks in the fall of the Russian state, and presented this explanation of their success: "While all the rest of Russia was either apathetic like the peasantry or garrulously at sixes and sevens or given over to violence or fear, the Communists were prepared to act."
In a chapter devoted to an interview with
Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
at the Kremlin Wells describes the leader and founder of Russian
communism
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...
. Wells portrays Lenin as a pragmatic leader who "has recently stripped off the last pretence that the Russian revolution is anything more than the inauguration of an age of limitless experiment."
While Wells in ''Russia in the Shadows'', as always, rejects
Marxism
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...
on principle (''Das Kapital'' impresses him as "a monument of pretentious pedantry"), he argues that "we should understand and respect the professions and principles of the Bolsheviki" in order to make a "helpful intervention" in Russia, lest its social collapse drag down Western civilization with it.H.G. Wells, ''Russia in the Shadows'' (New York: George H. Doran, 1921), pp. 175 & 178.
See also
*
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...