Letters From Russia 1919

Hoping that answers to some of the questions he had posed might have been found by more ancient civilisations, he made an extensive tour of Egypt, Ceylon and India.

On his return Ouspensky learnt that Russia was at war. For a time impending events did not prevent him from lecturing about his travels to very large audiences in St. Petersburg and Moscow. But in 1917 while revolution was spreading through all the Russias, and the Bolsheviks were establishing their reign of terror, Ouspensky was living in various temporary quarters in South Russia, incondtions of great danger and hardship.

Until he managed to reach Turkey in 1920 he and those around him were completely cut off from the outside world, unable to receive or send news even as far as the next town, constantly on the alert to avoid being picked up and murdered by the Bolsheviks.

In 1919 Ouspensky somehow found a way to send a series of articles to the New Age, which, under the skilful editorship of A. R. Orage, was the leading literary, artistic and cultural weekly paper published in England. These five articles appeared in six instalments as ‘Letters from Russia’. They give a detached but horrific description of the total breakdown of public order, and are reprinted here for the first time.

A remarkable feature of the ‘Letters’ is that while the revolution was in progress and the Bolshevik regime not fully established, Ouspensky foresaw with unusual clarity the inevitability of the tyranny described by Solzhenitsyn fifty years later.

During the winter of 1919 and the spring of 1920 C. E. Bechhofer (afterwards known as Bechhofer-Roberts) was observing events in Russia as a British correspondent who spoke Russian and had previous experience of the country and people. He had met Ouspensky before 1914, both in Russia and in India; he was a regular contributor to the New Age and had himself translated the first of Ouspensky’s ‘Letters from Russia’, written in July 1919. In Bechhofer’s book In Denikin’s Russia the author describes the week or two he spent with Ouspensky and Zaharov above a sort of barn at Rostov-on-the-Don. With its pathos and humour this passage makes a fitting epilogue to Ouspensky’s smuggled ‘Letters’.