For resident
foreign journalists in Moscow the arrival of the distinguished visitors was also
a gala occasion, for a different reason. They provided us with our best – almost
our only – comic relief. For instance, when we heard [George Bernard] Shaw,
accompanied by Lady Astor (who was photographed cutting his hair), declare that
he was delighted to find there was no food shortage in the USSR. Or [Harold]
Laski singing the praises of Stalin's new Soviet Constitution. . . . I have
never forgotten these visitors, or ceased to marvel at them, at how they have
gone on from strength to strength, continuing to lighten our darkness, and to
guide, counsel and instruct us; on occasion, momentarily abashed, but always
ready to pick themselves up, put on their cardboard helmets, mount Rosinante,
and go galloping off on yet another foray on behalf of the down-trodden and
oppressed. They are unquestionably one of the wonders of the age, and I shall
treasure till I die as a blessed memory the spectacle of them travelling with
radiant optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about
squalid, over-crowded towns, listening with unshakeable faith to the fatuous
patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating like
schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and mindless slogans
endlessly intoned to them. There, I would think, an earnest office-holder in
some local branch of the League of Nations Union, there a godly Quaker who once
had tea with Gandhi, there an inveigher against the Means Test and the Blasphemy
Laws, there a staunch upholder of free speech and human rights, there an
indomitable preventer of cruelty to animals; there scarred and worthy veterans
of a hundred battles for truth, freedom and justice – all, all chanting the
praises of Stalin and his Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It was as though a
vegetarian society had come out with a passionate plea for cannibalism, or
Hitler had been nominated posthumously for the Nobel Peace
Prize.
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