One may expect, therefore, that while the crafts in Russia will lose in artistic value, the drama, sculpture and painting and all those arts which have nothing to do with the machine and depend entirely upon mental and spiritual inspiration will receive an impetus from the Communist faith.  Whether the flowering period will be long or short depends partly on the political situation, but chiefly on the rapidity of industrial development.  It may be that the machine will ultimately conquer the Communist faith and grind out the human impulses, and Russia become during this transition period as inartistic and soulless as was America until quite recent years.  One would like to hope that mechanical progress will be swift and social idealism sufficiently strong to retain control.  But the practical difficulties are almost insuperable.

Such signs of the progress of art as it is possible to notice at this early stage would seem to bear out the above argument.  For instance, an attempt is being made to foster the continuation of peasant embroidery, carving, &c., in the towns.  It is done by people who have evidently lost the tradition already.  They are taught to copy the models which are placed in the Peasant Museum, but there is no comparison between the live little wooden lady who smiles beneath the glass case, and the soulless staring-eyed creature who is offered for sale, nor between the quite ordinary carved fowl one may buy and the amusing life-like figure one may merely gaze at.

But when one comes to art directly inspired by Communism it is a different story.  Apart from the propaganda pictures already referred to, there are propaganda plays performed by the Red Army in its spare moments, and there are the mass pageant plays performed on State occasions.  I had the good fortune to witness one of each kind.

The play was called Zarevo (The Dawn), and was performed on a Saturday night on a small stage in a small hall in an entirely amateur fashion.  It represented Russian life just before the revolution.  It was intense and tragic and passionately acted.  Dramatic talent is not rare in Russia.  Almost the only comic relief was provided by the Tsarist police, who made one appearance towards the end, got up like comic military characters in a musical comedy—­just as, in mediaeval miracle plays, the comic character was Satan.  The play’s intention was to show a typical Russian working-class family.  There were the old father, constantly drunk on vodka, alternately maudlin and scolding; the old mother; two sons, the one a Communist and the other an Anarchist; the wife of the Communist, who did dressmaking; her sister, a prostitute; and a young girl of bourgeois family, also a Communist, involved in a plot with the Communist son, who was of course the hero of the play.