1936 On the Continent

is more or less a personal record, and so I can only indicate one or two of the places that I have personally seen and found it well worth while to see. There may be—and probably are—many others.
    “Russia in Europe” (which is incidentally only a small part of the U.S.S.R.) is as large as the whole of the rest of Europe. What would be counted by us a large kingdom is accounted, by Russian standards, merely as a district or a province. The whole of the U.S.S.R. is about a sixthof the whole earth’s surface. No one living can have ever seen it all.
Leningrad
    This is often the visitor’s point of arrival, and also often his point of departure. It is well worth studying for its own sake.
    It is one of the few “planned” cities that have ever been built. It was started by Peter the Great on an uninhabited swamp, because he thought that that was the correct strategic position in which to found a city. Consequently he had a clear hand from the beginning.
    We will not talk, at the moment, about the tens of thousands of serfs who were drafted, under conditions of slave-labour, to build its foundations and its palaces, nor of the many thousands of them who lost their lives in the process. This was under the old regime.
    What remains is a magnificent shell of a city, with long straight boulevards radiating out from the centre—an example of “town-planning” at its finest. In the bold sweep of the general design, the great buildings of the granite city by the Neva—the Admiralty, the War Office, the Winter Palace, the Holy Synod—are unsurpassable.
    There are also the palaces at what was once called “Tsarskoe-Selo” (“Tsar’s Village”) and is now called “Detskoe-Selo” (“Children’s Village”), a few miles outside the capital. It is half-an-hour’s run outside the main city across the flat Russian countryside. It contains one uninhabitable palace, the Catherine Palace, a monument almost as beautiful and almost as useless as Versailles. It also contains a smaller palace—merely a large country house—the Alexander Palace, that has the particular interest of being the favourite residence of the last Tsar, Nicholas II.
    A world of pre-revolutionary Russian history—the personal tastes and mental achievements of a long list of Tsars, from Paul I, through Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, and the last of the line himself, are contained within the walls of this house. It is a house that you must not avoid visiting. In its revelation of past and bygone Russian history it is a masterpiece. There are factories, schools, kindergartens, crèches, by thehundred, to be visited in Leningrad. They are all products of the new regime. But the small country house at Tsarskoe-Selo is an invaluable light on them, and on why they had to come into existence.
    There is also in the Hermitage Gallery in Leningrad the finest collection of Rembrandts in existence. There are also the vistas of long straight streets, lighted at nights like ballrooms. There is also the magic, indescribable and pervading, of wandering about the most foreign of all foreign cities—its squares, restaurants, cafés, theatres, and cinemas.
Moscow
    Mr. A. P. Herbert chose to say in his Election Address, on the subject of agriculture, “I know nothing whatever about agriculture.”
    I have only been in Moscow five or six different times, at different seasons of the year, and I still know so little of all that is to be known of its vastness, complexity and varied interest, that I would prefer to echo his words, and say that I know nothing whatever about Moscow.
    Let us therefore stick to statistics. It is a city of about four million inhabitants, and the capital of the U.S.S.R., the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It used to contain sixteen hundred churches, and now only contains a few hundred. It has in it some of the oldest buildings in Europe—the Kremlin and its cathedrals—and some of the most modern. The fury of building activity in the last few years has been prodigious. It extends even underground. The new Moscow Metro (or Subway, or Underground) is incomparably the finest Metro in the world. It is the only one of its kind in which artistic considerations have been taken into account.
    Its Museum of Modern Western Art has a collection of Gauguins and Picassos, the like of which is to be found nowhere else in Europe.
    It is the centre of life for the Soviet Union—alike in its schools, theatres, children’s