Sick Joke

THE RATIONALIZATION OF RUSSIA by George Bernard Shaw. 134 pages. Indiana University. $3.95.

In 1931 George Bernard Shaw went on a nine-day, whirlwind tour of the first Communist nation. His Russian hosts could not have been happier with him. When he chanced upon a waitress who had read his plays, he declared that the Russian proletariat was better educated than the British. When he was shown a church that was still intact after the revolution, he remarked that Americans or Englishmen would have sacked it. After a two-hour interview with Stalin, he found him "charmingly good-humored. There was no malice in him." When he got back to London, he wrote: "The truth is, you have only to meet all the Russian bogeys face to face to find that they are harmless and beneficent spirits."

The less said about Shaw's boner, the better for his reputation. But now a faithful Shavian has dug up an unfinished book from the Shaw papers in the British Museum in which G.B.S. compounds his initial error. The piece is a paean of praise to Communism, plus a lampoon of capitalism and democracy. Shaw, writing in the days when bourgeois complacency could still be considered the world's greatest evil, undoubtedly intended chiefly to shock. But history has turned some tables, and what sounded like impudent dissent at the time now reads like a sick joke. While Shaw was admiring all the showpieces carefully selected for him, Stalin was in the process of wiping out 10 million peasants. The great political analyst never knew.

G.B.S. thought he was as tough as any Russian, but in fact he was a mild-mannered Fabian who was fascinated by schools, jails, juvenile delinquents, the treatment of orphans, and "personalities" like Stanislavsky and Lenin's widow, Krupskaya. A complete rationalist, he could not understand wanton murder. The Communists, he wrote, were justified in shooting people who believed in working for a profit. It was the only recourse of a society "gifted with an economic conscience," a necessary "weeding of the garden." "If you want to have more bread than other people can get if they want it, then--Bang! If you are an inventor and demand a patent so that the fruits of your discovery will be appropriated by you and your family alone--Bang!"

In Russia, Shaw concluded, "you can do what you like, go where you like, wear what you like, marry whom you like, get fair play in the courts and consideration from the authorities and be free from anxiety as to the future of your wife and children to an extent unknown and incredible in capitalist society."

The Communists knew how to handle a visitor like G.B.S. Had he been a citizen, they would have handled him differently--Bang!

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