ribed it.
'They'll describe anything,' wrote Gideon. 'The more horrible it is, the
more they'll talk. That's Russian, not Jewish specially. Or is it just
human?'... Gideon didn't repeat to Jane the details he heard of his
grandparents' murder by Russian police--details which his father, in
whose memory they burned like a disease, had never told him.

'Things as bad as that massacre are happening all the time in this
pleasant country,' he wrote. 'It doesn't matter what the political
convictions, if any, of a Russian are--he's a barbarian whether he's on
a soviet or in the anti-Bolshevik armies. Not always, of course; there
are a few who have escaped the prevalent lust of cruelty--but only a
few. Love of pain (as experienced by others) for its own sake--as one
loves good food, or beautiful women--it's a queer disease. It goes
along, often, with other strong sensual desires. The Russians, for
instance, are the worst gluttons and profligates of Europe. With it
all, they have, often, an extraordinary generous good-heartedness; with
one hand they will give away what they can't spare to some one in need,
while with the other they torture an animal or a human being to death.
The women seldomer do either; like women everywhere, they are less
given both to sensual desire and to generous open-handedness.... That's
a curious thing, how seldom you find physical cruelty in a woman of any
nationality. Even the most spiteful and morally unkindest little girl
will shudder away while her brother tears the wings off a fly or the
legs off a frog, or impales a worm on a hook. Weak nerves, partly, and
partly the sort of high-strung fastidiousness women have. When you come
across cruelty in a woman--physical cruelty, of course--you think of
her as a monster; just as when you come on a stingy man, you think of
him (but probably inaccurately) as a Jew. Russians are very male,
except in their inchoate, confused thinking. Their special brand of
humour and of sentimentality are male; their exuberant strength and
aliveness, their sensuality, and their savage cruelty.... If ever women
come to count in Russia as a force, not merely as mates for the men,
queer things will happen.... Here in this town things are, for the
moment, tidy and ordered, as if seven Germans with seven mops had swept
it for half a year. The local soviet is a gang of ruffians, but they do
keep things more or less ship-shape. And they make people work. And
they torture dogs....'