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Joanna Bryson

@j2bryson.bsky.social

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Joanna Bryson, blathering @j2bryson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · Dec 20

#russia #hgwells #inequality #war

Page where someone has highlighted the beginning and end very strongly in pencil.

54
Russia in the Shadows
people in the West should realise that. If
the Great War had gone on for a year or
so more, Germany and then the Western
Powers would probably have repeated, with
local variations, the Russian crash. The
state of affairs we have seen in Russia is
only the intensification and completion of
the state of affairs towards which Britain
was drifting in 1918. Here also there are
shortages such as we had in England, but
they are relatively monstrous; here also
is rationing, but it is relatively feeble and
inefficient; the profiteer in Russia is not
fined but shot, and for the English
D.O.R.A. you have the Extraordinary
Commission. What were nuisances in
England are magnified to disasters in
Russia. That is all the difference. For
all I know, Western Europe may be still
drifting even now towards a parallel crash.
I am not by any means sure that we have
turned the corner. War, self-indulgence,
and unproductive speculation may still be
wasting more than the Western world is
producing ; in which case our own crash—

Drift and Salvage
55
currency failure, a universal shortage,
social and political collapse and all the
rest of it—is merely a question of time.
The shops of Regent Street will follow the
shops of the Nevsky Prospect, and Mr.
Galsworthy and Mr. Bennett will have to
do what they can to salvage the art treasures
of Mayfair. It falsifies the whole world
situation, it sets people altogether astray
in their political actions, to assert that the
frightful destitution of Russia to-day is to
any large extent the result merely of Com-
munist effort; that the wicked Commun-
ists have pulled down Russia to her present
plight, and that if you can overthrow the
Communists every one and everything in
Russia will suddenly become happy again.
Russia fell into its present miseries through
the world war and the moral and intellec-
tual insufficiency of its ruling and wealthy
people. (As our own British State-as
presently even the American State-may
fall.) They had neither the brains nor the
conscience to stop warfare, stop waste of
all sorts, and stop taking the best of every-

56
Russia in the Shadows
thing and leaving every one else dangerously
unhappy, until it was too late. They ruled
and wasted and quarrelled, blind to the
coming disaster up to the very moment of
its occurrence. And then, as I describe
in the next chapters, the Communist
came in..

[next bit is handwritten in cursive pencil seemingly contemporaneously by perhaps a high school student]
•
Social breakdown inevitable
After modern war
Russia’s breakdown foreshadows
what might soon happen in Britain
And America if War + extreme
Imperialism is not abolished.
Russia broke first becaus it was
the least civilised country asa
whole, in Europe.

December 20, 2025 at 5:34 PM

Paws & Prophecies

@pawsandprophecies.bsky.social

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June 21, 2025 at 7:07 AM