1936 On the Continent

of comparatively short holidays or visits. “One must have lived there years before one can speak with knowledge …”, etc. One has heard the phrase often. Of course, it would be very nice to live in Russia for years, and the longer one lived there the more one would know of it. But to imagine that one cannot see a very great deal on visits is to imagine nonsense. A particularly good way of getting genuine knowledge of how far the country is “progressing” or not, is to take care to go back to the same place after an interval of time on subsequent visits. The changes in a town that one knows, seen from year to year or after an interval of years, are often astonishing.
The Crimea
    Another charming trip, which again takes a certain amount of time, is to go down to the Crimea, one of the great southern holiday resorts.
    One goes a thirty-six hour train journey southward from Moscow down to Sevastopol, passing Kharkov, which one can stop at if one likes. (Incidentally, I should mention that one is at perfect liberty to “break” the routes that I have suggested, or to go by any alternative route. If any particular town appeals to you more than another, you can set up your abode there if you so choose. If you want to prolong your stay in any of them you can do so, or if you want to prolong your stay in Russia generally.)
    From Sevastopol one needs a three-hour car drive across country to get to Yalta—a real pearl of a place, formerly a “fashionable” holiday resort figuring so frequently in the stories of Chekhov, and now a flourishing, popular one. It is a delicious place, rather reminiscent of the Riviera. Its shore faces south; there is bathing in a sea as blue as the Mediterranean; and horses can be hired for riding in the pine-clad hills that surround it. The vast white Summer Palace of the Tsars (now turned into a sanatorium for Soviet workers) is a few miles away from it along the coast. A mile or so inland is Chekhov’s own small country house, in which he lived and worked in the last years of his life.
    The climate of the place is enchanting. The main sports are sea-bathing, walking up and down the sea-frontin the evening, and listening to open-air concerts in the public gardens.
    There is also, a few miles farther along the coast, a fine Children’s Camp for the holiday entertainment of the Young Pioneers. I am aware that the children who go there in the summer are to a large extent “picked” children. They are given the chance of going there as a reward of good school work, initiative, social spirit, and other qualities dear to the Soviet heart. But for all that, the camp is a masterpiece of its kind, alike in its cleanliness, its lovely situation between sea and hill, the spirit and discipline and health of its young inhabitants; and an evening of dancing and singing that I saw there is one of the loveliest of all my memories of modern Russia.
    I would also mention that the camp is not run as a “show place” to impress foreign visitors. Very few visitors get as far as Yalta. Very few of those who get as far as Yalta get as far as the camp. It is not included in any official itinerary, and a car has to be hired to take one over a good many miles of mountain country before arriving there. I seem to remember that the extra charge for this is about £1.
    This is worth notice, for there is a general impression among many people that anything good in modern Russia is done simply as advertisement and a show-off to tourists. This Pioneer Camp—one of the finest exhibitions of child training that I have ever seen—is placed in an almost inaccessible position for the ordinary tourist, and he has to pay quite reasonably highly for the privilege of seeing it.
    From Yalta, to vary the monotony of trains, one can take a large and comfortable steamer along the Black Sea coast to Odessa, itself a city worth seeing; and from Odessa one can get a train to Kiev and so to the Polish border, or alternatively back to Moscow or Leningrad.
The Caucasus
    To go to the Caucasus, with its mountains and its pleasure and health resorts, is a slightly longer journey than to go to the Crimea. I can give no detailed information about it, as I have not yet been there myself. Those who have hadthe time to go there, tell me that it is a trip well worth making.
The Soviet Theatre
    The question of the theatre in Russia, and the immense part that it plays in modern Soviet life, has been dealt with in some detail in a book