[In the following review of Winter in Moscow, originally pubished in 1934, Cournos praises Muggeridge for his blunt honesty and his humor in describing the actions of the Soviet government.]

There is something refreshing in Mr. Muggeridge's approach to the problem of Russian Communism which, during his eight months' tenure as Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, he has had ample opportunity to observe in practice, on and behind the scene. Whereas other writers who visited Russia for brief terms under the personal guidance of the Intourist or for long stays of observation in the guise of onlookers have striven to give an appearance of dubious ‘objectivity’ to their chronicles, in Winter in Moscow Mr. Muggeridge quite boldly flings down the gauntlet to all such witnesses by stating clearly at the very beginning that there can be no dispassionate approach to Russian Communism, or rather to the Soviet régime, if it is to be judged by its practice. ‘It is no more possible’, he asserts with commendable vigour, ‘to describe the Dictatorship of the Proletariat dispassionately than to describe a mad bull rushing round a field dispassionately. The moment you become dispassionate you automatically make the false assumption that the bull is not mad, and therefore vitiate anything further you may have to say about the matter.’ With an eye on that vast host of Americans who have made the pilgrimage, later with their pens to give ‘a slant on the Noble, Interesting, Amazing, Portentous Experiment or Racket’, he proclaims with a savage directness that the falsest accounts of the Soviet régime have been written and spoken by people who affect to have no prejudices or convictions either way. The point which Mr. Muggeridge makes is well taken. If I may carry his analogy a little further, if you see that same bull rushing about your lawn and tearing the flowers you have cultivated with arduous labour, and with some pleasure, in your garden, you really do not stop to admire the marvellous bull which can make such short work of your long labours. To be sure, you may not be able to stop him, but at least—if the garden happens to be your neighbour's—you won't come home to rhapsodize about it to your wife and children and visitors during tea. If that is how Mr. Muggeridge saw the Great Experiment, you can hardly blame him for bluntly expressing an intense dislike for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and, even more, for ‘its imbecilic foreign admirers’, who, he might have added, by flaunting the red flag, only serve to stimulate the mad bull in his wild rampage. What he does say, however, amounts to the same thing: these sympathetic, ‘objective’ observers, he says in effect, go forth to their own lands, where their ill-advised raptures serve the purposes of the Soviet régime only too well, enhancing its prestige more ‘than all its paid agitators and subsidised publications put together’. The wink of the man in the Soviet Foreign Office, as he said to the author of the book, ‘Those that are not against us are for us’, becomes quite understandable. Far more disquieting is Mr. Muggeridge's even more blunt assertion that ‘news from Russia is a joke’, that newspaper correspondents, the best of them, can retain their visas, and therefore their jobs, only by being exceptionally discreet. In short, we are given only half the news—I should say, half the truth—which is worse than no news at all, or an outright lie.

Too few men and women with a sense of humour ever visit Russia. This is really too bad. Mr. Muggeridge has a sense of humour, that often essential accompaniment of common sense, which enables him to evaluate Bolshevik reality in terms of absurdity, never however overstepping the line where it becomes caricature; what caricature there is is inherent in the theme; for once, at least, life has arrogated to itself the function of art; and we experience the feeling that photography itself, a sticking to mere facts, would in this instance produce the effect of a Daumier print. This is particularly evident in the superb first chapter, in which the author describes in perfectly rollicking fashion, with the authentic note never absent, an anniversary reception given by Vox (the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union) for the edification of foreign friends. And, most extraordinary of all, instead of the virility we have learned to expect of the ruthless Spartan Marxians, whom legend by now has made as fabulous as the Marxians, we are plunged into an atmosphere of rank indecency, shabby casuistry and mephitic decay; this in spite of the irrepressible delight of one newly returned to the scene: ‘Marvellous! How stimulating! How exciting! Admit the faults: but the life, the movement, the exhilaration of it all! A new society going through its birth pangs. A new civilization.’ It is a shameless spectacle, without a single redeeming trait. True, the show has been staged for a gathering of ‘imbecilic foreign admirers’—has not the great Shaw himself been taken in?—all the same, does it add virtue to the bull Mr. Muggeridge speaks of to see him don sheep's clothing in order to pull wool over fool's eyes? Treatment of a different nature is reserved for the natives. But as a fellow-correspondent so eloquently puts it: ‘You can't make omelettes without cracking eggs.’ And we can only echo an American colleague's comment: ‘You sure can't. I like that phrase. No omelettes without cracking eggs. Very illuminating. Thank you.’

The ‘eggs’, while leading a precarious existence, are safe enough, provided they have been impregnated with ‘correct Marxist thinking’. On this score Mr. Muggeridge tells the story of Anna Mikhailovna (not her real name), a teacher, who ‘lived in her own little corner without interfering with anyone.’ Certain of her pupils had complained that her teaching tended to be romantic. A delegation of three—a Jew, an Esthonian and a Russian—called on her to investigate the heinous charge. They found an ikon in her room. That was bad enough. The Esthonian read from a paper: ‘On February 28 you used the phrase, “Beauty is truth; truth, beauty”.’ It was a quotation from a poet, she explained. ‘I don't care’, he answered. ‘It's opposed to correct Marxist thinking, and is not allowed. In any case, it's nonsense.’ ‘What is correct Marxist thinking?’ she was bold enough to ask, and got the answer, ‘Read Lenin instead of bourgeois poets and you'll understand.’ But those who have eschewed bourgeois poets and read Lenin have evolved a method of criticism along this line—the sample is from under a picture in a Soviet picture gallery: ‘In Rubens the development of capitalism reaches a decisive phase, and the toiling masses realise their decisive role. …’

Winter in Moscow is the most savage indictment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat I have yet read, and I should say the most honest one, and it must provoke savage indignation in every honest man, which is perhaps what Mr. Muggeridge has intended.