Today Ozersky and I had lunch with Pease,

John William Beaumont Pease (1st Baron Wardington), British banker, chairman of Lloyds Bank, 1922–45, and chairman of the Bank of London and South America, 1922–47.

president of Lloyd’s Bank, in the bank’s very building – an unheard-of event in the entire 15-year history of Anglo-Soviet relations. Whatever one may say, it’s a sign of the times!

This is how it happened. During the first lunch arranged by the Contact Circle, about which I wrote a few days ago, a junior director of Lloyds Bank named Parks came up to me and congratulated me on the successful beginning of a good endeavour. I thanked Parks and started teasing him, saying that English bankers are the most conservative in the world, that they always lag behind the course of events by at least a quarter of a century, and that they still fancy a Bolshevik to be a fierce chap clad in a leather jacket, loaded with cartridge belts, rifles and hand grenades – the image that frightened children and adults alike in the first years of the revolution. Parks was visibly nettled. He grew angry, blushed and assured me that my opinion of bankers was excessively low and that he would prove this to me in practice. Two days later I received a letter from Pease inviting me to lunch on the 28th or 30th of January. I chose the first date and requested that Ozersky, too, should be invited. Pease had no objection. So, today we lunched with the head of one of the Big Five. The entire top rung was present: Pease himself; his two deputies, Beane and Abel; four junior directors including Parks; Lord Luke,

George Lawson Johnston Luke (1st Baron Luke).

member of the board and head of the famous Bovril company; and a few others. Of course, we talked during and after lunch. Ozersky and I had agreed beforehand not to talk shop at this first lunch, so the conversations were of a more general nature. But they were some conversations!

After Pease and Abel had pumped out of me all that I was ready to tell them about the scope of our gold mining (they were particularly interested in this matter), they passed to the principles of our foreign trade. Are we for autarky? I said, ‘No!’ and spelt out the reasons for this and the conditions on which we are ready to trade with the rest of the world. Pease liked my answer and observed thoughtfully: ‘Well, that’s quite correct and comforting to hear.’ Aren’t we planning to resort to dumping? They, the English, have been supplying textile and other machinery to Japan for half a century, and now Japan is ousting Great Britain from the market with the same equipment. Couldn’t something similar happen with the USSR? I again answered, ‘No!’ and again tried to explain why not. In doing so I had to touch upon the basic principles of socialist economics. What followed defies description. The eyes of Sheathe, Abel, Beane and Luke, widened in amazement. They could not believe their ears. And why not! The walls of this magnificent ‘temple of Mammon’ had never heard such blasphemy. My interlocutors, who had imbibed the categories of capitalist economics with their mother’s milk, simply could not accommodate in their minds the basic concepts of socialism. Pease, for example, asked: tell me then, what would happen in a developed socialist society, where goods would not be bought and sold but distributed free of charge, if somebody suddenly felt the urge to accumulate commodities in excess of his needs? What then? What if everybody suddenly wanted a car? Or felt like owning a private aeroplane? Or started demanding their personal yacht? And when I gave the most elementary answers to these infantile questions, the Lloyd’s Bank bosses gasped and let their jaws drop, as if they had heard some stupendous revelation. But I don’t think they really believed me. They probably thought: ‘He’s a fibber, that Bolshevik.’ They can think what they want. But they didn’t get the better of me. My mind was cast back thirty years, when I was doing propaganda work among the most backward workers. The same questions, the same doubts, the same disbelief. Yet my partners today were the most brilliant representatives of the financial capital of the world, and in a country like England!

That’s what it means to live and work at the junction of the socialist and capitalist worlds. The long coexistence of these two worlds in the confines of our planet often gives rise to scenes and situations bursting with inner contradictions.