Russia in the Shadows

A hundred years ago, the famous British science-fiction writer and author of “The Invisible Man” and “The War of the Worlds,” H. G. Wells, visited a young Soviet state. This is the only book written by H. G. Wells at the request of someone. However, the requester—the newspaper “The Sunday Express”—hardly received it when they said: “Too well written about Russia!” Ours published it as well, but with doubts and caveats: “Too poorly about Russia.” The English press expected Wells to be horrified by the scale of destruction of an entire country, to curse the destroyers—the Bolsheviks—and to gather facts illustrating their crimes. But Wells proved with mathematical precision that the cause of collapse was the six-year war fueled from outside, mainly by his own native England. And the Bolsheviks were “to blame for the catastrophe no more than the aborigines of Australia.” And now they are making titanic efforts to save the country and pull Russia out of the gloom.

H. G. Wells