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Talk for volunteer guides at National Trust, Shaw’s Corner, Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire

Title: The Russians on the Mantelpiece (at Shaw’s Corner)

Author: Dr Pat Simpson, Reader in Social History of Art, School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire

Date: March 14, 2.00pm, Shaw’s Corner

[SLIDE 1] Introduction

Firstly – many thanks to Sue and Lizzie for inviting me to talk to you today about the

‘Russians on the mantelpiece’. It will be a pleasure and a privilege to do that and I

hope I can provide you with some information about the images of Lenin,

Dzerzhinsky and Stalin that you will find helpful in your excellent work here at Shaw’s

Corner. As some of you may know, Sue and I initiated the fantastic collaborative

project between University of Hertfordshire and Shaw’s Corner jointly funded by the

Arts and Humanities Research Council and the National Trust. We were very

fortunate to be able to choose Alice McEwan as a research student – who is now

busy writing up her PhD thesis. As I am sure you will all know, her research has had

a huge impact on Shaw’s Corner through the amazing support that Sue and Lizzie

have been able to provide. Basically, the real Shaw specialists connected with this

NT property are Alice, Sue, Lizzie and yourselves. I would make no such claim,

rather I am a Russian and Soviet specialist with interests in health issues and bio-

politics – which, in a sense is why I was initially interested in Shaw’s Corner, for

Shaw’s connections with Russian as well as British socialism, health, eugenics and

Darwinism – and also why I am here today.

Regarding the actual topic of the talk: as you know, there are photographs of a

bunch of Russians – Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskii, and

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin - on the mantelpiece downstairs in the dining room at

Shaw’s Corner. The focus of my talk today is to say something about who these

people were, what they did and why, perhaps, Shaw was so interested in them that

he ensured that images of them were prominently embedded in the display at

Shaw’s Corner when it was handed over to the National Trust. I will look at Lenin

first, move on to Dzerzhinsky, and end with Stalin [as so many people did…].

It is, however, worth beginning by briefly stating the obvious. These images are of

prominent Russian Revolutionary socialists who, like Karl Marx, believed that

capitalism was a great evil that generated inequality, poverty and its concomitants –

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malnutrition, ill-health, lack of education, and lack of opportunity to change all of

these things. Their vision was of an utopian society, re-organised, democratised and

modernised. Shaw was a socialist too, and although not a revolutionary radical, but

rather a Fabian, he nevertheless could not avoid being inspired and encouraged by

the outcomes and ambitions of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. This was

a very shocking event to the western capitalist world, which briefly precipitated an

unsuccessful and shambolic ‘war of intervention’ between 1918 and 1921 that

included troops from Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and Czechoslovakia.

Subsequently this was not given much of a profile in our British history books,

because the western invading forces were driven off or were just evacuated…1 The

images, deliberately saved by Shaw for the National Trust display, were arguably

meant to intimate something about Shaw’s own political stance and the figures he

regarded as heroes. This heroisation was intended to be both noteworthy in relation

to himself, and, given the Cold War context of the hand-over, also challenging for the

projected spectators of the NT display, for whom the Soviet Union and its leadership

had now shifted from wartime allies to dangerous enemies.

[SLIDE 2] Lenin

Lenin was the pseudonym adopted by Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1870-1924) in 1901.

As a law student he had espoused the ideas of Karl Marx and became a professional

revolutionary somewhere between 1893 and 1895. He joined the Russian Social

Democratic Revolutionary Party and by 1903, when the party split into two factions

he became the leader of the Bolshevik (majority) wing – the minority wing were

known as the Mensheviks, and he finally got them expelled from the RSDRP in

1912.

[SLIDE 3 Winter Palace/Peace Bread Land] Lenin spent most of WWI in

Switzerland generating revolutionary propaganda until he successfully negotiated a

deal with the German High Command whereby he was allowed to return to 1 See for example: Michael Heller & Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: A History of the USSR From 1917 to the Present, London etc: Hutchinson, pp.89-91.

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Petrograd [St Petersburg], by ‘sealed train’ in March 1917, in order to foment unrest

in Russia, and to encourage the withdrawal of Russia from the war alliance.

By the time he arrived, the ‘February Revolution’ had already happened.

Pressurised by large scale riots, strikes, and disaffection in the armed forces and

amongst the peasantry, Queen Victoria’s nephew, Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated on

March 2. As a result a Provisional Government had been formed by members of the

State Duma – the Russian equivalent of a parliament – with the aim of setting up an

elected Constituent Assembly to represent all of the [many] Russian political parties.

In the months that followed, the Bolsheviks, under Lenin’s leadership became

powerful in the councils [Soviets] of workers and soldiers that had sprung up in

Petrograd and elsewhere. They also took control of the Military Revolutionary

Council, and with its help stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd on the night of

October 25 arresting the Provisional Government. A Constitutional Assembly was

convened but collapsed in disarray. Thereafter, the Bolsheviks declared a

government of Soviets.2

It needs to be noted here that the storming of the winter palace happened at night

and there is no documentary film or photos of it. The image in the slide is from a film

of a re-enactment that was staged in 1919, which proved far too realistic [using real

guns!],3 and no more celebrations of this sort were ever done again. So if you see

photos or apparent film clips of this revolutionary event on TV, they are either from

the 1919 re-enactment, or from Sergei Eisenstein’s movie October: Ten Days That

Shocked the World, made in 1928!

Lenin’s primary revolutionary slogan was ‘Peace! Bread! Land!’ – addressing issues

that were fundamentally important to most ordinary Russians at the time. The

photomontage was made by the famous Russian Constructivist, Aleksandr

Rodchenko, and published in a Soviet coffee table book, First Cavalry in 1937.

2 The classic account of this process is by the American journalist John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, (1919), Harmondsworth etc.: Penguin, 2007.3

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[SLIDE 4] This was accompanied by another powerfully motivating slogan – ‘The

Soviets and Electrification are the basis of the New World’ – illustrated in Aleksandr

Samokhvalov’s poster of 1924. This slogan signified the Bolsheviks’ trenchant

commitment to modernity and technological modernisation, something to which

Shaw was also committed.

[SLIDE 5 Lenin Portrait]4

The image itself is a commercial print, made after a portrait that was created by the

graphic artist and sculptor, Nikolai Andreevich Andreev, between c.1921 and

Andreev’s death in 1932 [but more likely 1921-1931], as part of a series dedicated to

the political and cultural ‘heros’ of the early Revolution.

[SLIDE 6 - Lenin and Lunacharsky Portraits ]

This dating is a speculation based on a comparison with Andreev’s 1921 portrait of

Anatoly Lunacharsky [the Bolshevik Commissar for Enlightenment - effectively the

Minister of Education and Culture] and with other works in this series, which all seem

to be dated between 1921 and 1926. The Lenin and Lunacharsky portraits are

stylistically similar in relation to the focus on detail of the head, very sketchy

representation of collar and indication of shoulders, and the presence of Andreev’s

little trademark logo, although the Lenin portrait is coloured, more detailed and does

not have Andreev’s signature scrawled across it. Shaw is likely to have obtained the

print during his visit to Moscow in July 1931, by which time there was a huge market

in cheaply reproduced works commemorating Lenin and other Bolshevik heroes.

These were the new icons of the atheist Soviet state. Shaw is likely to have known

about Lenin beforehand, however, both through reportage in the press and, as we

will see, through the Fabian Society itself.

4 NB. According to Victor Alexander Baltov, Reclaiming the Strike Zone: Do it American, p.119, fn.23. Shaw apparently visited the Soviet Union first in 1919, which, if true, speaks volumes for the disorganised nature of the British approach to the so-called ‘war of intervention’, in which for example, Winston Churchill – the Minister for War – was keen on military intervention, whereas Lloyd George, the Prime Minister was all for making terms with the new Soviet government.

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In Shaw’s view, Lenin was ‘a pure intellectual type, that is the true aristocracy’.5

Curiously, Shaw also described Lenin as the ‘greatest Fabian of them all’.6 This

statement was – as usual - probably slightly tongue in cheek, as the Fabians were

patently institutional reformists rather than radical revolutionaries. To quote Shaw on

this point: ‘The Fabian Society got rid of its Anarchists and Borrovians, and

presented Socialism in the form of a series of parliamentary measures, thus making

it possible for an ordinary respectable religious citizen to profess socialism and

belong to a Socialist Society without any suspicion of lawlessness, exactly as he

might profess himself a Conservative and belong to an ordinary constitutional club.’7

But also, as always, there was a touch of truth in the statement linking Lenin and

Fabianism. Lenin, while in Siberian exile in 1897 had translated into Russian The

History of Trade Unionism, a book by one of the Fabian Society’s founders, Sydney

Webb, which Lenin then advocated to his comrades as important reading material.8

Moreover in 1907, the Fabian Society had hosted a prolonged Russian Bolshevik

conference in which Lenin was a central figure. The Fabians, via Ramsay

MacDonald – later the leader of the British Labour Party and first Labour Prime

Minister - made arrangements that the Russians could use the Brotherhood Church

in Whitechapel, London – owned by the Christian Socialists. Although the deal was

for three days use, the Church was still trying to get a space for their Sunday service

after three weeks!9 In addition, Lenin based his publication, Imperialism: The

Highest Stage of Capitalism. A Popular Outline (1917), on the book Imperialism

published in 1902 by the prominent Fabian, J.A. Hobson.10

5 Jamie Glazov, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, p.286 David Allan Rivera, Final Warning: A History of the New World Order, Part 1, p.14..7 Bernard Shaw, Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, New York: Brntano’s, 1928, p.220.8 Zygmund Dobbs, Keynes at Harvard:Economic Deception as a Political Credo, A Veritas Study, 2009 web version transcribed from the revised and enlarged edition of 1969, http://www.keynesatharvard.org/book/KeynesatHarvard-ch02.html#fnote15 , no pp. nos, fn 14. Dobbs cites Margaret Cole, Beatrice Webb, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946, p.193. 9 Alan Moorehead, The Russian Revolution,10 Zygmund Dobbs, Keynes at Harvard:Economic Deception as a Political Credo, A Veritas Study, 2009 web version transcribed from the revised and enlarged edition of 1969, http://www.keynesatharvard.org/book/KeynesatHarvard-ch02.html#fnote15 , no pp. nos. In fn. 16 Dobbs also notes that Lenin’s Imperialism (International Publishers) was based on the book Imperialism (1902) by J.A.

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Lenin clearly knew of Shaw and is quoted as describing him as ‘a good man fallen

among the Fabians’ – a phrase that was used in 1949 as the title of a book criticising

Shaw’s politics by the radical Marxist Alick West.11 In Lenin’s usage the phrase was

a sort of backhanded compliment that intimated both his admiration for Shaw and his

lack of sympathy with the Fabians’ stance on revolutionary activism. More pointedly

perhaps, Lenin also called Shaw ‘a fool for the bourgeoisie’.12 The term ‘fool’ here

appears to have been used in two senses, most obviously as a court jester holding a

protected role of reminding rulers of their follies, but also probably also in the more

specifically Russian sense of a ‘holy fool’ like Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The

Idiot – a visionary and truth-teller, respected but not believed.13 In a sense this was

corroborated by Shaw himself who wrote in John Bull’s Other Island the line

commonly interpreted as a personal statement: ‘My way of joking is to tell the truth.

It is the funniest joke in the world’.14 The implication of Lenin’s statement according

to Alan Kahan was that Shaw was such a species of ‘fool’, ‘but one that might be a

serious threat to the bourgeoisie after the revolution’ – if, of course, such a thing

were to happen in Britain.15

[SLIDE 7] Dzerzhinskii (1877-1926)

Now let’s move on to another ‘Russian on the mantelpiece’, Feliks Edmundovich

Dzerzhinskii, also known as ‘Iron Feliks’ and ‘the Shield of the Revolution’ – for

reasons that should soon become clear.16 The image is a photogravure, rather than

a straight photograph. Basically the image was produced by transferring a

photographic negative onto a copper plate covered with light sensitive gelatin tissue,

Hobson, a prominent Fabian. For the text by Lenin see: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/lenin . 11 Alick West, A Good Man Fallen Among Fabians, 1949, cited in T.F. Evans, ‘Introduction’, in T.F. Evans, George Bernard Shaw, p.24.12 Alan S. Kahan, Mind vs Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism, p.286.13 See: Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and The Poetics of Cultural Critique, pp.71-98.14 George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 1907, Act 2, p.533. See also, for example: Daniel Devlin, Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study, p.121.15 Alan S. Kahan, Mind vs Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism, p.286.16 Martin McAuley, Who’s Who in Russia Since 1900, London & New York: Routledge, 1997, p.75.

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and then etched with acid to make an intaglio plate [lines and tones bitten down into

the plate] from which multiple copies can be printed. The dark areas of the negative

are the ones that resist the acid and the end result is a detailed image that can be

multiply reproduced. Again, Shaw is likely to have obtained it during his trip to

Russia with Nancy Astor in July 1931. It is also another example of the images of

foundational Bolsheviks that would have been available then.

In 1917 Dzerzhinsky became the first head of the Soviet secret police, an

organisation first named the Cheka (then NKVD in 1919, then OGPU in 1923) and

he continued in that role until his death from a heart attack in 1926. He did

simultaneously occupy a few more benign sounding roles under the Bolsheviks – for

example, Chairman of the Committee for Universal Labour Conscription and of the

Commission for Improving the Lot of Children. In 1921 he was even appointed

People’s Commissar for Transport with the task of reorganising and rehabilitating the

Russian public transport system, which had been devastated by the ghastly Civil

War 1918-21 that was triggered by the Bolshevik take-over and made worse by the

war of intervention.17 Dzerzhinskii was best known, however, for his ruthless take on

internal security, and as the super-spymaster of the nascent Soviet government of

the 1920s.

Dzerzhinskii originated in a Polish landed family and became a member of the Social

Democratic Party and professional revolutionary around 1895. The February

Revolution of 1917 caused him to be released from a Moscow jail, and he

immediately sided with Lenin – whom he had first met in 1906, and continued to

have a good relationship with after the October Revolution until Lenin’s death in

1924.18

One of the many temporary achievements of the short-lived Provisional Government

had been to abolish the Tsarist secret police, censorship and labour camps.19 All of

17 McAuley, pp.75-75.18 Ibid.19 Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union 1917-1991, Final Edition, London: Fontana, 1992, p.35

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these were rapidly reinstated by the Bolsheviks under the supervision of

Dzerzhinskii. Summary execution, however, often became a primary solution during

the Civil War 1918-1921, during which Dzerzhinsky launched a process of ‘Red

Terror’ though the newly formed Red Army, to counteract the effects of the ‘White

Terror’ being perpetrated by the military and amateur armed partisan supporters of

the former Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, the Constitutional

Democrat, Aleksandr Kerensky. Nobody really knows how many people were killed

in the early revolutionary period. The historian Geoffrey Hosking cites Robert

Conquest’s estimates that it could have been in the region of 200,000, with another

3000 deaths resulting from the suppression of strikes and mutinies. Both the Red

Amy and the Whites committed murders and atrocities, so not all of these deaths

were down to the Bolsheviks or Dzerzhinskii, but enough were to make Dzerzhinskii

much feared, even within the Party.20 An anecdote repeated by the historian Martin

McAuley, states that when someone, timidly, suggested this to Dzerzhinskii his,

apparently surprised, rejoinder was that people who were not guilty had no need to

fear him,21 but then who knew what might constitute ‘guiltiness’ in Dzerzhinskii’s

purview in any given situation? Ruthless himself, Dzerzhinskii advised his

employees to be ‘determined comrades – solid, hard men without pity’.22

Shaw wrote of him as ‘that man without humour whom infamy will remember as the

inventor of the police state’,23 and in relation to his own image of Dzerzhinskii,

described him as ‘this true believer, the sanctified fanatic of absolute state power’.24

Why, given these pretty accurate descriptions would Shaw nevertheless apparently

admire him? Matthew Yde pinpoints Dzerzhinskii as ‘the quintessential Shavian

Revolutionary hero’, along with Lenin and Stalin (and also Mussolini, Oswald

Moseley and Hitler).25 These people were strong men of action, full of a sort of

20 Hosking, pp.69-71.21 McAuley, p.76.22 Matthew Yde, Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia, p.17, fn.45.23 Matthew Yde, Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia, p.17. 24 Matthew Yde, Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia, p.17, fn.4625 Yde, p.17.

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Nietzschean will to power. [SLIDE 8] They were prepared to use violence and terror

to ensure the construction and survival of a new sort of state, which, within Bolshevik

mythology would lead to the evolution of a new species of humanity – the healthy

and indefatigable New Soviet People, symbolised for example in Vera Mukhina’s

famous sculpture of the Worker and the Collective Farm Woman, shown at the

International Paris Exhibition of 1937.

[SLIDE 8 Stalin & Dzerzhinsky]

Dzerzhinskii, akin to Stalin but unlike Lenin, was a keen proponent of complete

centralisation of power and organisation within the emergent USSR, whereas Lenin

had favoured the creation of sovereign Soviet republics for regions such as Georgia,

rather than their model of autonomous republics that answered directly to Moscow.26

Dzerzhinskii was however no supporter of Stalin – despite the apparent chumminess

implied by this photo of the pair of them. Stalin was one of the pall bearers at

Dzerzhinskii’s funeral in 1926,27 but under the guise of this show of respect was

simultaneously busy trying to take charge of OGPU as a means to consolidate his

own power in the state.28

[SLIDE 9] Stalin (1879-1953)

Stalin – aka ‘Man of Steel’ - was the revolutionary pseudonym of Iosif Vissarionovich

Dugashvilli, a Georgian of peasant background who initially trained as an Orthodox

priest. In 19th century Russia, as in medieval and Tudor England, the church was a

means to gain education and social mobility [fans of Wolf Hall might remember the

career of Thomas Cromwell – the blacksmith’s son?]. But then, like Lenin and

Dzerzhinsky, Stalin became a professional revolutionary in the 1890s. As with

Dzerzhinskii, the February Revolution of 1917 caused his release from incarceration.

In Stalin’s case it was from a labour camp in Siberia where he had been since 1913.

26 McAuley, p.7627 Photos on Getty Images website.28 McAuley, p.76.

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He travelled straightaway to Petrograd and became one of Lenin’s closest

collaborators in the months leading up to the October Revolution. After the

Bolshevik seizure of power Stalin became the Commissar for Nationalities (until

1923), and in 1922 became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. At this

point, the role did not have much significance, but Stalin was shortly to recreate it as

the dominant political position within the Soviet power structure, which it then

remained until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin loudly proclaimed that he was Lenin’s chief pupil –

implicitly fit to be his successor in the driving seat of the new state. This was in the

face of a range of other equally well-qualified potential contenders, such as Lev

Trotsky, Grigorii Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin, who were effectively also very

prominent ‘Old Bolsheviks’ with an honourable record of service to the Revolution.

Over the next few years Stalin sought to consolidate his power base. Once this was

firmly secured, most of these ‘Old Bolsheviks’ were systematically disposed of during

the ‘purges’ and show trials of the mid-to late 1930s.

One significant step on Stalin’s pathway to power was the initiation in 1927 of the

system of 5 year plans for the re-development and expansion of Soviet industry,

which had not been very developed outside particular urban centres before WWI,

and had virtually ground to a halt during the Civil War period. Another step was the

enforced - and strongly resisted on the part of the peasants - nationalisation of

agricultural land and the collectivisation of agriculture between 1929 and 1931.

[SLIDE 10] The Unknown Artist’s 1930 poster, Tractors and Cradles are the Engines

of the New Countryside. Do Not Forget About the Maternal Help and Consultations in

the Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes, paints a rosy picture of the state of collective farms in

1930 as desirable places to be for peasant women, because of their modernised

technology [tractors rather than horses], and medical support for pregnancy and

childcare. The former emphasis echoed Lenin’s desire for the use of modern

technology to enhance industrial production of all sorts [including agriculture],

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following the ideas of Engels. The latter was particularly related to the pressing need

to increase the contemporary birth-survival rate of babies. This was in order to

ensure the generation of healthy farm workers for the future of the new state, in the

face of the huge drop in population created variously by: deaths in WWI and the

Civil War; emigrations in or after 1917; and deaths caused by contemporary

epidemic diseases including - typhus, malaria, typhoid fever and syphilis. The

actuality of the collectivisation process for the peasants was grim, sometimes

involving death, starvation, and obviously the dispossession by the authorities of the

peasants’ cows and other creatures. But most importantly it involved the re-

possession of the land, which the peasants – in good faith - had sequestered in

1917, as their apparent right within the new Bolshevik socialist society – a right that

was to be both negated and re-defined in 1929.29 This was still a battleground when

Shaw visited the USSR in July 1931, but there would not have been any sign of it in

the urban situation of Moscow.

[SLIDE 11 Shegal Away with Kitchen Slavery] What he may have seen were

optimistic propaganda posters, such as Tractors and Cradles – relating to rural life-

and other materials like this poster by Grigorii Shegal from 1931 – Away with Kitchen

Slavery - relating to urban life. Shegal’s poster referenced the utopian dream,

pursued in Bolshevik policy regarding women, of a more collectivised lifestyle, with

communal crêches, laundries and canteens, that would allow urban women to

escape from the domestic drudgery of the washtub, childcare and the individual

primus stove for cooking, in order to take part in employment and political life.

Neither poster lied in relation to the intentions of the Bolsheviks to create a new and

reorganised society in which women could take an equal part to men as a result of

social reorganisation. Women, indeed, got the full vote in 1917, at the same time

abortion on demand was legalised, and divorce was made simpler. But what was

29 The best book on the collectivisation of agriculture is Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror Famine, (London: Hutchinson, 1986) London, Sydney, Auckland: Pimlico, 2002.

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depicted in the posters was still the goal, not the universal reality. Indeed, if it had

been there would have been no point in the propaganda, since propaganda is

something that is targeted on promoting active aspiration, whether it is towards

better healthcare for mothers in collective farms, or better recruitment of urban

women into the industrial workforce. Shaw was clearly drawn by the possibilities for

a new sort of society that had opened up in the Soviet Union and apparently became

a subscriber to the Soviet, mainly photographic propaganda magazine, USSR in

Construction, initiated by Maxim Gorky and published in English, French, German,

Spanish and Russian between 1930 and 1941, and also briefly in 1949.30

[SLIDE 12] The image of Stalin, my last ‘Russian on the Mantelpiece’, looks to me

like a commercially available photographic image of Stalin that was generally

available when Shaw visited the USSR in 1931. It appears to be similar to a multiply

produced ‘signed’ photo available in the period. It could have been a personal gift

from Stalin, given that they did have a two-hour interview – which apparently left

Shaw very impressed – or just something that Shaw bought or was given. While the

Shaw’s Corner image is similar to the signed photograph of around the right time, it

has no signature which might flag it up as a gift. Either way, it arguably operated as

a memento of this meeting for Shaw that he wanted to be embedded in the visual

biography constituted by the items chosen for display at Shaw’s Corner that were

handed over to the National Trust.

30 This was stated in a caption in the British Library exhibition Propaganda: Power and Persuasion, May 27-September 27, 2013, but unfortunately not repeated in the catalogue. The magazine was founded by Maxim Gorky. ‘USSR in Construction aimed to “reflect in photography the whole scope and variety of the construction work now going on the USSR.” In addition to highlighting massive building projects like dams and railroads and factories producing consumer goods such as record players and bicycles, the magazine focused on the physical prowess of its happy and productive citizenry. An excellent example of photomontage at the beginning of state-mandated social realism, this lavishly illustrated periodical employed talented photographers, graphic designers, writers, and artists including El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko. Published in English, French, German, and Spanish, this modernist propaganda periodical was aimed at an international audience, primarily investors and business people.’ USSR in Construction website, http://emuseum.icp.org/view/people/asitem/id/3564 .

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After his return from the USSR, on November 26 1931, Shaw proclaimed that he

liked to call himself a communist, in a Fabian Society lecture ‘What Indeed’, 31 which

was part of a series of lectures entitled ‘Capitalism in Dissolution: What Next?’. 32

The implication was that the Soviet model of communism might be a solution to the

crisis in capitalism [depression/General Strike] Later on, in the Preface to Far

Fetched Fables, 1949, Shaw stated; ‘The Soviet system in Russia outstrips it [our

British Parliamentary system] because, being faster, it is more immediately

responsive to the continual need for reforms and adaptations to changing

circumstances…Incidentally, it gives Stalin the best right of any living statesman to

the vacant Nobel Peace Prize, and our diplomatists the worst. This will shock our

ignoramuses as a stupendous heresy and a mad paradox. Let us see.’33

At the time Shaw wrote this, the so-called ‘Cold War’ was under way. The USSR

had slipped from ally to enemy between 1945 and 1946, and hence, Stalin was

repositioned from heroic chum of Churchill, to murdering monster. Stalin was indeed

such a monster but then so, arguably, was Churchill. This was the basis of the ‘mad

paradox’ that Shaw proclaimed in his statement. I do not think for a minute that

Shaw was seriously recommending Stalin for the Nobel Peace Prize, but what he

was doing was ironically placing Stalin’s actions in the balance with those of past

and contemporary western actions, and, in his self-appointed role as truth-teller

finding a mismatch.

[SLIDE 12 The Russians on the mantelpiece] Conclusion

So what are we to make of Shaw’s positioning of the ruthless Russians on the dining

room mantelpiece at Shaw’s Corner? Michael Holroyd has argued that the First

World War made Shaw increasingly critical of the gradualist and parliamentarian

Fabian approach to social change,34 and more inclined to believe that the overthrow

31 Lloyd J. Hubenka via Alice32 Gibbs, Chronology, p.284 via Alice33George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface’, Far Fetched Fables, (1949), in George Bernard Shaw Collected Works, vol 6, p.478.34 Michael Holroyd, ‘Introduction’, Bernard Shaw: Major Critical Essays, 1986, p.21.

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of capitalism might only be achieved through the sorts of revolutionary violence

represented by the images of the Russians on the mantelpiece. In relation to this,

Mathew Yde argues that Shaw admired these figures because he viewed them as

serving his own view of ‘creative evolution’. In support of this view, Yde cites

Beatrice Webb’s account of a conversation with Charlotte Shaw in which the latter

apparently said that both she and Shaw ‘looked forward to a new world with a new

race of men – or supermen’,35 something that certainly chimed well with Bolshevik

aspirations.

Shaw’s idea of ‘creative evolution’ was first raised in Cashel Byron’s Profession in

1882, and then pursued in Back to Methuselah – a cycle of five plays written

between 1918 and 1920, and published in 1921.36 It was an odd mishmash of ideas

from the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche [will to power, and the notion of

‘superman’ or in German ubermensch], Arthur Schopenhauer [The World as Will and

Idea], Henri Bergson’s concept of the vital force [élan vital], and the French natural

historian, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s ideas that the process of evolution was

progressive, operated through will, and was largely influenced by the inheritance of

characteristics acquired through habit and environment. As far as I can understand

it, Shaw’s notion of ‘creative evolution’, was of progressive change in the human

race – that is to say, change for the better - that could, in the future, be instigated by

force of human will because such change was needed or desired. In the first

instance it required ‘evolutionary appetite’, a strong and focused life-force in

individuals. But, to Shaw this was just a blind force of nature, so that there was no

knowing whether the pathway indicated or enforced by such people, would really be

progressive, or damaging to humankind – and of course, in relation to the example of

the USSR, it could be both simultaneously. On the one hand, the take-over of

Russia by the strong-willed, visionary Bolshevik ‘men of action’, caused a lot of

death, misery, and a level of individual powerlessness, which was probably greater

35 Yde, p.18. Beatrice was apparently baffled by this ‘weird utopia’ with ‘no political or personal freedom, with compulsory equality and compulsory work’.36 Published simultaneously by Constable in London and Bretano’s in New York

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than that under the Tsarist regime. On the other hand, by 1931 Soviet rule had

brought a level of stability, gender equality, healthcare, education, employment,

industrial and technological development, and food on the table for most urban

citizens - which given the state of the country in 1917 was nothing short of

miraculous.

Shaw apparently ‘reflected sadly that the men like himself, the talkers, must be

superceded by the strong men of action’.37 In relation to this statement, I am inclined

to think that the ‘Russians on the Mantelpiece’ were there both as a reminder to

Shaw, and to ourselves as spectators, that changing the world, no matter how much

we may desire it, is a complex and difficult business which may require ruthlessness

and violence in certain circumstances. The juxtaposition of these images on the

mantelpiece with that of Ghandi, however, maybe also raises for us all the question

of whether force is the only means to create radical political and social change.

37 Lewis M. Feuer, Ideology and The Ideologists, p.129

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