The Russia the Webbs set foot in in 1932 was near the end of the first Five–Year Plan, which Stalin had introduced in 1929 to force through rapid industrialisation and rural collectivisation. (Such plans were popular just then: Roosevelt introduced his New Deal in 1933, and in 1936 Germany brought in the four-year Schacht plan for abolishing unemployment by expanding public works). Stalin’s ‘plan’ led directly to the extermination of a million kulaks, mass deportation and famine; it extended the grip of the OGPU, the secret police, a forerunner of the KGB, and vitiated the power of trade unions by the introduction of internal passports, which restricted people’s movement. There were achievements – education improved and was available to more children, there were more jobs for women – but, as Lisanne Radice describes it, the first Five-Year Plan, ‘stripped of its propaganda verbiage … foreshadowed a profound extension of the scope of totalitarian power.’118
The Webbs, treated as important foreign guests, were kept well away from these aspects of Russia. They had a suite at the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad, so huge that Beatrice worried, ‘We seem to be a new kind of royalty.’ They saw a tractor plant at Stalingrad and a Komsomol conference. In Moscow they stayed in a guest house belonging to the Foreign Ministry, from where they were taken to schools, prisons, factories, and theatres. They went to Rostow, 150 miles northeast of Moscow, where they visited several collective farms. Dependent on interpreters for their interviews, the Webbs encountered only one failure, a motor plant that was not meeting its production targets, and the only statistics they managed to collect were provided by the government. Here were the founders of the LSE and the New Statesman accepting information from sources no self-respecting academic or journalist would dream of publishing without independent corroboration. They could have consulted Malcolm Muggeridge, the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in Moscow, who was married to Beatrice’s niece. But he was highly critical of the regime, and they took little notice of him. And yet, on their return, Beatrice wrote, ‘The Soviet government … represents a new civilisation … with a new outlook on life – involving a new pattern of behaviour in the individual and his relation to the community – all of which I believe is destined to spread to many other countries in the course of the next hundred years.’119
In Lisanne Radice’s words, Soviet Communism: a new civilisation? was ‘monumental in conception, in scope, and in error ofjudgement.’120 The Webbs truly believed that Soviet communism was superior to the West because ordinary individuals had more opportunity to partake in the running of the country. Stalin was not a dictator to them, but the secretary of ‘a series of committees.’ The Communist Party, they said, was dedicated to the removal of poverty, with party members enjoying ‘no statutory privileges.’ They thought OGPU did ‘constructive work.’ They changed the title of their book in later editions, first to Is Soviet Communism a New Civilisation? (1936), then Soviet Communism: Dictatorship or Democracy? (released later the same year) – suggesting a slight change of heart. But they were always reluctant to retract fully what they had written, even after the Stalinist show trials in the later 1930s. In 1937, the height of the terror, their book was republished as Soviet Communism: a new civilisation – i.e., without the question mark. On their forty-seventh wedding anniversary, in July 1939, Beatrice confided to her diary that Soviet Communism was ‘the crowning achievement of Our Partnership.’121 Dissatisfaction with the performance of capitalism led few people as far astray as it did the Webbs.
Russian communism was one alternative to capitalism. Another was beginning to reveal itself in Germany, with the rising confidence of the Nazis. During the Weimar years, as we have seen, there was a continual battle between the rationalists – the scientists and the academics – and the nationalists – the pan-Germans, who remained convinced that there was something special about Germany, her history, the instinctive superiority of her heroes. Oswald Spengler had stressed in The Decline of the West how Germany was different from France, the United States and Britain, and this view, which appealed to Hitler, gained ground among the Nazis as they edged closer to power. In 1928 this growing confidence produced a book which, almost certainly, would never have found a publisher in Paris, London, or New York.
The text was inflammatory enough, but the pictures were even more so. On one side of the page were reproductions of modern paintings by artists such as Amedeo Modigliani and Karl Schmidt-Rotduff, but on the other were photographs of deformed and diseased people – some with bulging eyes, others with Down’s syndrome, still others who had been born cretinous. The author of the book was a well-known architect, Paul Schultze-Naumburg; its title was Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race); and its thesis, though grotesque, had a profound effect on National Socialism.122 Schultze-Naumburg’s theory was that the deformed and diseased people shown in his book were the prototypes for many of the paintings produced by modern – and in particular, expressionist – artists. Schultze-Naumburg said this art was entartet — degenerate. His approach appears to have been stimulated by a scientific project carried out a few years earlier in the university town of Heidelberg, which had become a centre for the study of art produced by schizophrenics as a means of gaining access to the central problems of mental illness. In 1922 psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn had published his study Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Image-making by the Mentally 111), based on material he gathered by examining more than 5,000 works by 450 patients. The study, which demonstrated that the art of the insane exhibited certain qualities, received serious attention from critics well beyond the medical profession.123
Art and Race caught Hitler’s attention because its brutal ‘theory’ suited his aims. From time to time he attacked modern art and modern artists, but like other leading Nazis, he was by temperament an anti-intellectual; for him, most great men of history had been doers, not thinkers. There was, however, one exception to this mould, a would-be intellectual who was even more of an outsider in German society than the other leading Nazis – Alfred Rosenberg.124 Rosenberg was born beyond the frontiers of the Reich. His family came from Estonia, which until 1918 was one of Russia’s Baltic provinces. There is some evidence (established after World War II) that Rosenberg’s mother was Jewish, but at the time no suspicion ever arose, and he remained close to Hitler for longer than many of their early colleagues. As a boy he was fascinated by history, especially after he encountered the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.125 Chamberlain was a renegade Englishman, an acolyte and relative by marriage of Wagner, who regarded European history ‘as the struggle of the German people against the debilitating influences of Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church’. When Rosenberg came across Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century on a family holiday in 1909, he was transformed. The book provided the intellectual underpinning of his German nationalistic feelings. He now had a reason to hate the Jews every bit as much as his experiences in Estonia gave him reason to hate the Russians. Moving to Munich after the Armistice in 1918, he quickly joined the NSDAP and began writing vicious anti-Semitic pamphlets. His ability to write, his knowledge of Russia, and his facility with Russian all helped to make him the party’s expert on the East; he also became editor of the Völkischer Beobachter (National Observer), the Nazi Party’s newspaper. As the 1920s passed, Rosenberg, together with Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, began to see the need for a Nazi ideology that went beyond Mein Kampf. So in 1930 he published what he believed provided the intellectual basis for National Socialism. In German its tide was Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, usually translated into English as The Myth of the Twentieth Century.