Nutshell Knowledge

VII.—Russia.

I know how impatiently you have been awaiting the rest of the of the series, but you must excuse me as I have had to give very deep thought to this subject.

Dont's take any notice of the people who keep on talking about Russia. They're just trying to be clever and modern. Russia has nothing to be proud of: nineteen years ago she was a primitive feudal stae embroiled in a nasty war, and just afterwards she went through revolution, counter-revolution, invasion and famine; her propgress has been terribly slow, for even after nineteen years she's still not as highly industrialised as the U.S.A. And the Russians are such crass materialists: they threw all sorts of people out of their usual occupations and put them on to "constructive" work; they did this to bank clerks, insurance clerks, sharebrokers, lawyers, advertising agents, moneylenders and half the people in warehouses and threequarters of the people behind counters; and they managed somehow to make even the unemployables work. Of course they produce more that way, and they distribute all that they produce, but, I mean to say, what materialism.

Of course they're not really materialists, for they worship Lenin. And they don't really worship Lenin, for it's the state that they worship. In point of fact though, they're not as loyal as they should be, or they'd be fighting to add another Republic to the Union. It's a funny thing that they don't try to conquer colonies.

Almost the only thing they exports is their malicious propaganda. Now look at the U.S.A. Although the U.S.A. has millions of poverty-stricken homes, it is so generous that it exports goods all over the world in exchange for mere paper credits. Russia is so selfish that it exports very little.

Perhaps the most abominable thing about Russia is the nationalisation of women: the ratio of divorces to marriages is almost as high as in the U.S.A.— "Spectator."