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Title: Mirrors of Moscow

Author: Louise Bryant

Illustrator: Oscar Edward Cesare

Release date: July 3, 2022 [eBook #68451]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Thomas Seltzer

Credits: Tim Lindell, Martin Pettit Northern State University and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MIRRORS OF MOSCOW ***

MIRRORS OF MOSCOW

BY
LOUISE BRYANT

_With five illustrations by_
CÉSARE

[Illustration: Logo]

NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER
1923




Copyright, 1923, by
THOMAS SELTZER, INC.

_All rights reserved_


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




TO THREE WISE EDITORS--

M. KOENIGSBERG
BRADFORD MERRILL
PHILLIP FRANCIS




CONTENTS

                                             PAGE
FOREWORD                                       xi

LENIN AND HIS SUBORDINATES                      1

JACOB PETERS, FEDORE S. DZERZHINSKY AND
THE EXTRAORDINARY COMMISSION                   43

ANATOL VASSILIEVITCH LUNACHARSKY AND
RUSSIAN CULTURE                                69

MICHAEL IVANOVITCH KALININ AND THE
PEASANTS                                       85

MADAME ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI AND THE
WOMAN’S MOVEMENT                              109

LEON TROTSKY, SOVIET WAR LORD                 129

ENVER PASHA AND THE MOHAMMEDANS               147

TIKON AND THE RUSSIAN CHURCH                  165

TCHICHERIN, COMMISSAR FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS,
AND HIS SUBORDINATES                          179

MAXIM LITVINOV, ASSISTANT COMMISSAR,
LEONID KRASSIN AND SUBORDINATES               197




ILLUSTRATIONS

                         _Facing Page_
LENIN                                2

KALININ                             86

KOLLONTAI                          110

TROTSKY                            130

ENVER PASHA                        148




FOREWORD


Revolution! The air is filled with flames and fumes. The shapes of
men, seen through the smoke, become distorted and unreal. Promethean
supermen, they seem, giants in sin or virtue, Satans or saviours. But,
in truth, behind the screen of smoke and flame they are like other men:
no larger and no smaller, no better and no worse: all creatures of the
same incessant passions, hungers, vanities and fears.

So it is in Russia. And in this book I have tried to show the leaders
of the revolution as they really are, as I know them in their homes,
where the red glare does not penetrate and they live as other men.

Great events make great men. For to be strong enough even to maintain
one’s self amid great events is to be great. Without the event the
strength is nothing. Had the revolt of 1917 failed, like the revolt
of 1905, Lenin would have worked his life out in an attic in Geneva,
Trotsky would have lived and died in a New York garret, Kalinin would
have remained a disappointed, debt-burdened peasant, Tchicherin a
futile ex-diplomatist in exile. The world would not have known their
names: just as the world would not have known Napoleon or Danton or
Marat or Robespierre had Louis XVI been a trifle less desperately dull.
But the revolt of 1917 became a revolution and its colossal drive and
heave flung up the exiles to greatness. As men it did not change them.

They differ from the political leaders one meets in Washington,
London and Paris, largely because they are able to be franker and
more themselves. Public opinion, which is the boon of politicians
and the bane of statesmen, does not drive them to drab conformity or
high-sounding platitude. The public they have to satisfy is small
and sophisticated--the trade unions of the larger cities. And these
workingmen demand, above all else, frankness and the unpowdered truth.
An address by Lenin is, therefore, as direct, unsentimental and full
of facts as a statement to a board of directors by an executive of
an American corporation. The slow, strong wants of the peasants have
to be heeded, too; but they are simple wants, land and free trade,
and do not yet touch intricate things, remote from the daily life of
the farm, like foreign affairs and higher economics. In the end the
peasants will rule Russia, but to-day public opinion is the opinion of
the class-conscious workingmen of the cities. Therefore, the leaders of
Russia can afford to be frank.

In the western democracies, politics is the art of seeming frank
while not being so. Only three types of politicians ever emerge in
the highest places. First, the statesman of brilliant intellectual
understanding, like Lloyd George, who always knows what he ought to do,
and never does it--until the public also comes to understand, usually
some months, or years, later. Second, the sentimentalist, who is always
able to muddle an inconvenient understanding of facts and muffle his
conscience with high-sounding principles that endear him to the public
heart. Third, the kindly blockhead, who discovers what ought to be
done just a little later than the public. These types do not exist in
Russia. The trade unions compel the Russian politician to be a stark
realist, talking frankly, acting on the best information he can obtain
and giving that information fully to his public. The leaders pictured
in this book will seem, therefore, franker and more direct than the
leaders of the western world.

They will also seem more desperate; not because it is their natural
character to be desperate but because they face as desperate a problem
as ever strained the human brain. They have been caught, from the
first, on the horns of the revolutionary dilemma. The same intolerable
breakdown of economic life, which alone makes revolution possible, also
predestines revolution to almost certain failure. That dull beast, the
public, will move to revolution only when life has become unbearable,
only when the established order has broken down so completely that
ruins alone remain. Revolution does not come before ruin. And to build
on ruins a new and fairer life is a task almost beyond the powers of
men. So much of the exhausted energy of the nation must be consumed in
re-establishing the mere fundamentals of life--food, shelter, clothing
and security from fear--that little remains to attack the task of
remoulding life in a shape that is closer to the heart’s desire. But
to this task the leaders of Russia have dedicated their lives. And if
they succeed or if they fail, they will be remembered always for their
courage in following an ideal through destruction, famine, death and
the hatred of the world.

Here, then, they are: the Russians of to-day: close to the Tartar
and the Cossack of the plain, children of serfs and Norsemen and
Mongols--close to the earth and striving for the stars.

LOUISE BRYANT.




LENIN AND HIS SUBORDINATES

NIKOLAI LENIN
CHRISTIAN RAKOVSKY
ABRAHAM KRASNICHAKOV
LEO KAMINEV AND GREGORY ZINOVIEV
PETER STOOTCHKA
ALIEXIEV IVANOVITCH RYKOV


[Illustration: LENIN]




LENIN AND HIS SUBORDINATES


NIKOLAI LENIN


Lenin became an active revolutionist through the spiritual motives that
have moved all great reformers--not because he himself was hungry and
an outcast, but because he could not stand by unmoved in a world where
other men were hungry and outcast. Such characters are predestined
internationalists; the very quality that lifts them above materialism
places them above borders and points of geography; they strive for the
universal good. Lenin believes that the only thing worth living for
is the next generation. Communism is his formula for saving the next
generation from the injustices and inequalities of the present.

When I think of Lenin and his place in the Russian revolution I am
reminded of a statue which, until the late Fall of the year 1918,
adorned the busy square before the entrance to the Nikoliavski station
in Petrograd. It represented one of the former rulers of Russia astride
a huge stallion. One could not fail to be struck by the tremendous
strength of the animal and the frailty of the rider. The contrast was
intentional; the titled sculptor meant to warn his sovereign of the
dangers threatening the throne. Russia was the wild horse, fierce,
untamed, powerful, a force as yet unaroused but which might wake up any
moment and cast off its royal burden.

When Lenin took the reins of state, he was in exactly the same position
as a man riding a runaway horse. The utmost his constituents could have
expected was that he would guide Russia away from complete destruction.
They could hold him responsible for immediate situations but not for
ultimate results. To what goal those vast urges and desires which
caused the revolution would carry Russia, was beyond him or any man to
command. His heart and his mind wished to direct it toward the crimson
portals of socialism. Russia, however, in its stampede seems to have
slowed up dangerously near the old, familiar gates of capitalism.
Nevertheless, she will never be the same; Lenin is responsible for it
that Russia has forever gained the larger fruits of the revolution.

Legends spring up around every famous man, manufactured largely by
his enemies, who spread tales of his lavish extravagance, his vices,
his affairs with women. It is important to know such facts about a
man’s life. His personal relationships mean a great deal; if he fails
in these, he eventually fails in all ways. The life of the leader of
a great world movement must harmonize with his doctrines; his conduct
must be as austere or as lax as his doctrines dictate. That is why
we have a natural antipathy to dissolute priests and none at all to
dissolute poets and Bacchanalians. So it is worthy of note that even
the narrowest moralist could not pick a flaw in Lenin’s personal
conduct I am convinced that if he had lived in any other way than he
has, he could not have maintained his remarkable poise.

Whatever inward storms arose he was impressive because of his outward
serenity, because of his calm, majestic as a Chinese Buddha’s. Without
any fuss he took power, faced world opposition, civil war, disease,
defeat and even success. Without fuss he retired for a space, and
without fuss he has returned again. His quiet authoritativeness
inspired more confidence than could any amount of pomp. I know of no
character in history capable, as he was through such distressing days,
of such complete, aristocratic composure.

Every normal man is pushed forward or back to some degree by women.
It is my theory that Lenin’s amazing stability was substantially
strengthened by the women who meant most to him. Those women were:
his mother, his wife, his sister and his lifelong friend and, in late
years, chief secretary, Fotiva.

During all the years since the Bolshevik uprising, Fotiva has been his
assistant. On days when he was ill or away in the country she actually
had charge of the office. She is a highly efficient woman of forty,
tall, dark, healthy and full of enthusiasm. She is quiet, also, and
cheerful, and creates a pleasant atmosphere about her.

Lenin’s office, with Fotiva managing all the under-secretaries, is an
agreeable office to enter. You never feel like an intruder, nor, at
the same time, that it is a place to loaf in, which means that she
knows how to preserve a happy balance. In all one’s dealings with
Fotiva, one finds her a woman of her word. She has the very un-Russian
quality of always being on time for appointments and never going back
on her promises. She is a Communist of old standing and occasionally
contributes articles to newspapers and magazines.

As for Madame Lenin, no one could be disturbed in her presence. How
different the state of the Soviet Premier’s temper might have been on
occasions were his wife the sort of woman who would weep because her
apartment in the Kremlin was small, or would quarrel with the other
Commissars’ wives, or would be jealous of Fotiva. The truth is, she
admires Fotiva and is entirely glad of her existence.

Madame Lenin, whose real name is Nadezhda Konstantinova Krupskaya
Ulianova, acted for many years as Lenin’s secretary. Only ill health
prevented her from continuing the work.

When Lenin was editor of Iskra in Switzerland, she was the secretary of
the whole Iskra organization, which not only had charge of publishing a
newspaper but carried on vast party activities. All the correspondence
was in her hands. At one time she was in communication with every
revolutionist in Russia.

That is one reason why she is so well known from one end of the
country to the other and why people still continue to call her by her
revolutionary name.

Under the Tsar, Lenin was twice exiled and Krupskaya always shared
his fate. Together they passed hard years in Switzerland, England and
especially Paris, where for two years Lenin spent almost his entire
time studying in the national library. His only means of existence was
by his writings, and he wrote solely for and about the revolution--by
no means a remunerative occupation. The entire period of exile extended
over ten long years. In that time the Lenins never knew a day of
ease or luxury. They had become accustomed to privations long before
the revolution, had lived in the meanest quarters of every city they
visited, occupying, as a rule, only one room, where they ate, slept,
studied and carried on their revolutionary work.

It does not seem mere romance to infer that Krupskaya has had a good
deal to do with keeping Lenin’s nerves steady.

There were moments when Trotsky lost his head, when the Extraordinary
Commission gave way to doubts, when Tchicherin hesitated--but never
Lenin. Without doubt the secret of his power is that he is the only man
in Russia, of any political group, whose purpose always remained clear
and whose hand never trembled.

He made all manner of blunders. That he was able to admit his mistakes
emphasizes his quality of mind. It is a scientific mind: a mind so
well disciplined that he is able to face every fact, failure as well
as success. Moreover, he has a way of grasping a situation almost by
instinct; at least he grasps it at a stroke.

Nikolai Lenin strives for two great things--to westernize Russia and to
keep alive the fountainhead of the Socialist State.

He told me that he did not want to grant a single foreign concession,
whether a factory, a mine or a forest concession, unless he could
establish a similar Russian institution alongside of it so that the
Russians might continually see before their eyes the superiority of the
American or the English way of doing things.

He is more interested in America than in any other country.

I remember one afternoon just before I went up to interview him, an
official in the Foreign Office told me that if America did not hurry
and start trade negotiations with Russia, Russia would be forced to
make a trade alliance with Japan. I mentioned this to Lenin and he said:

“Nonsense! Even if we could trust Japan, which we cannot, what could
she give us? We need thousands of tractors, railway engines, cars,
things like that. We must get such things from America, we must make
friends with America.”

I think he feels in closer contact with the United States, too,
because of the number of former exiles who once fled to our shores and
who returned after the revolution and now hold office under the Soviet
Government. He likes the way they have been trained here.

It has given him the idea of working concessions in the manner I have
described. He also feels gratitude toward Raymond Robins and always
asks about him, considers William C. Bullitt a man of honor, while John
Reed was as near to his heart as was ever any Russian.

He is continually reading American papers, books and magazines. When
I came home I sent him the “Mirrors of Washington,” and I know how he
will chuckle over it as he used to chuckle over William Hard’s articles
in the _New Republic_.

He admires American energy so much that he comes very near
understanding an American reporter’s need for on-the-minute news, which
no other Soviet official appreciates, except Trotsky.

I will never forget the day during the blackest time of the blockade
when I went to Lenin and asked permission to go to the Middle East
after the Foreign Office had flatly refused me this permission. He
simply looked up from his work and smiled.

“I am glad to see there is someone in Russia,” he said, “with enough
energy to go exploring. You might get killed down there, but you will
have the most remarkable experience of your life; it is worth taking
chances for.”

In two days I was on my way, with every necessary _probsk_ to ride on
any train or stop in any government hotel. I carried a personal letter
from Lenin and had two soldiers for escort! Any other official in
Russia would have considered me an infernal nuisance even to suggest
such an adventure in the middle of a revolution.

Lenin has always stood for allowing political enemies to leave Russia.
This shows an unexpected softness in his make-up which only those who
know him well comprehend.

Naturally, the Cheka disagrees with him on this point, holding that
when these people “succeed in getting out of Russia” they are just as
much a part of the war on Russia as the White Army is.

The explanation is that Lenin has by no means a forbidding personality:
revenge never occupies his mind. He will flay an opponent in a debate
and walk out of the hall arm-in-arm with him. He is extraordinarily
human and good-natured and wishes to see everyone happy.

In the beginning of the revolution he imagined that he could maintain a
free press, free speech and be liberal toward his enemies. But he found
himself faced by a situation where iron discipline was the only method
capable of saving the day.

There were times when he rather ruthlessly suppressed the Anarchists,
but only because they threatened violence at every step. The supreme
test of his power to forgive came during the Social Revolutionary
trial, which took place in the summer of this year. He was lying ill in
the country from the effects of an operation to remove an assassin’s
bullet from his neck. The people responsible for the bullet were duly
sentenced to death after a long and illuminating trial, in which the
absolute evidence of their guilt was established. It was through the
irrepressible influence of Lenin that their sentences were all commuted.

Lenin never scorns a deep affection or a personal sentiment. At the
time of Kropotkin’s death, the widow and daughter sent a telegram to
Lenin asking that the Anarchist leaders then imprisoned in Moscow be
allowed to attend the funeral. Lenin let them go “on their honor”
without guards for three days.

The Cheka objected, the Foreign Office objected and the Moscow Soviet
objected, but Lenin’s will, as usual, prevailed. This generosity
toward his enemies costs Lenin nothing and helps him to maintain his
astonishing equilibrium.

Every man in Lenin’s cabinet, with the exception of Trotsky and
Tchicherin, has been working with him for over twenty years; they
really are his disciples. He knows their characteristics as well as if
they were his own children. He knows just how much brains and ability
each one has.

Once he was asked why he keeps a certain man, who is so obviously
inferior to the others. He smiled and said, “Isn’t it always necessary
to have at least one fool in every cabinet?”

Lenin makes an interesting contrast to Woodrow Wilson. Lenin picks
the strongest minds he can get and complains that he cannot find
enough brains. He feels a particular lack of brains in the diplomatic
service. The small corps around Tchicherin will be highly inadequate to
spread over the earth when the time comes for sending ambassadors and
consuls to every country in the world. Russia will be as slip-shoddily
represented as America. It is only the English who realize the value
of a school for diplomats.

Lenin has never been known to dismiss a man after he has worked with
him only half a year. And no man has ever deserted him no matter how
Lenin may have ridden down his opposition.

Politically, Lenin has a hard, cold, calculating brain and uses all men
to his own ends. They forgive him because he does it openly and for no
personal gain.

The Soviet Premier is by no means a vain man. He rarely autographs
pictures of himself, and the diary the American editors always request
us to ask him about will never be written. He says he is too tired to
write down notes after the day’s mass of work has been done. Lack of
vanity and conceit is an equal reason.

He hates to be flattered or to have his portrait painted. He was in
real distress because he consented to allow Claire Sheridan to do his
bust. Angelica Balabonova was spending an evening with the Lenins in
their apartment that same week and she said, reprovingly:

“Revolutionaries have something else to do beside spend their time in
such a way.”

Lenin answered:

“I agree with you and I felt unhappy about it, but when Comrade
Litvinov asked me to sit, it seemed such a small matter that I didn’t
like to be disagreeable.”

As a matter of fact, he only gave Mrs. Sheridan a few hours and, from
her own account, worked all the time he was posing.

In private conversation, no subject is too small for his attention. I
remember one time some foreign delegates were talking about the Russian
theatre and particularly about the lack of costumes and stage property.

Someone said that Gellser, the great ballerina, complained that she had
no silk stockings. The delegates were of the opinion that this was a
slight matter. Not so Lenin.

He frowned and said he would see to it that Gellser had everything she
needed immediately. Calling his stenographer, he dictated a letter to
Lunacharsky about it. Yet Lenin had never seen Gellser dance and took
no further interest in the affair.

On the one occasion, in three years, that he found time to attend the
theatre, he chose Shakespeare. Telephoning to Lunacharsky he announced,
“I want to see the best performance at the Art Theatre.”

Lunacharsky was in doubt but mentioned Helena Soochacheva’s superb
performance in “Twelfth Night.” Lenin interrupted, “I’ll see that.” And
once in the theatre he forgot his million worries and enjoyed himself
with the abandon of a child. Hunting and horseback riding he goes in
for with the same enthusiasm.

I have often been asked just what was back of Lenin and his colleagues;
what moved them to attempt to establish Socialism at such a moment and
against such odds.

Most of us agree that it was partly a revolt against an age of
commercialism. But fundamentally it was a demonstration.

Radek told Arthur Ransome that the Bolshevik leaders did not expect to
hold power two months when they seized the reins of government.

Half a year after Lenin became Premier, he wrote:

“If they crush us now, they can never efface the fact that we have
been. The idea will go on.”

It is ridiculous to contend that Lenin has “repented” because he has
found it necessary to go back to a modified capitalism. One need not
repent because one has failed. If Lenin is forced to abandon every
vestige of Communism, it will not mean that he no longer believes in
Marx.

It will more likely mean that, finding circumstances too much for him,
he is retreating to a position as strategic as he can find. That he
remains master of the retreat indicates that he will move backward only
as far as he is pushed.

It is hard now to realize on what a fine thread many important
situations during the last years have hung, situations that would have
completely changed future history. It is hard to realize, for example,
that the Germans almost reached Paris or that the White forces almost
took Petrograd.

Perhaps Lenin was the only man in Russia who fully realized how near
the Soviets came to being overthrown. There was one moment when the
morale of the Red Army was exceedingly low and when even the trusted
Lettish sharpshooters guarding the Kremlin grew discouraged and sampled
the wine in the Kremlin cellars to make life more interesting. A Lett
who went through these days told me an amazing story.

“One night the Old Man himself came down to the barracks, called the
officers out, felt in our pockets and, finding one or two flasks of
vodka, smashed them on the cobblestones and went away without saying a
word. He only had to come once; we were deeply ashamed.”

How much truth there is in this story I do not know, but it sounds so
exactly like Lenin that I am inclined to give it full credence.

From this low ebb he built his power solidly, never forgetting to
reckon on the peasants. Now face to face at last with Mr. Lloyd George,
Lenin is backed by a strong Red Army and a loyal staff.

From the moment he took office Lenin never had a serious political
rival. And the blockade bestowed on him a peculiar legendary
significance which will remain with him as long as he does not leave
Russia.

Nikolai Lenin has been a conscious revolutionist since he was sixteen,
but he has never been a “terrorist.” A terrorist, in revolutionary
vernacular, is one who believes in individual acts of violence.
His mind is too ordered and his plans too wide for such incoherent
emotionalism.

His father was a small landed (hereditary) noble, holding the office
of State Councillor, having an estate in Simbirsk. Vladimir Illyitch
Ulianov, which is Lenin’s real name, was born there on April 10, 1870.
There were in all five children, three boys and two girls.

It was a closely-knit family. One of Lenin’s best friends and
advisers even now is his sister Anna. She spends most of her time in
Moscow. He has a brother living in the provinces, who comes to see
him occasionally, a quiet, studious man, not interested in politics,
and, perhaps, even a little repelled by the strenuousness of them,
especially in Russia.

There is no doubt that Lenin’s determination to fight the Tsar’s
government crystallized at the time of his brother’s death. His eldest
brother, Alexander, was away at the University of Petrograd. All that
they heard from him at home was about the winning of gold medals and
honors of all sorts until one day came the terrible news that he had
been arrested for a plot against the Czar.

Lenin’s mother, Maria Alexandrovna, rushed away to Petrograd. When she
reached her son’s side he burst into tears and immediately confessed
everything to her. He begged her to forgive him for bringing sorrow to
his beloved family. At the trial he made no defense and asked no mercy.
He was executed in the courtyard of Schlüsselberg fortress on May 20,
1886.

And back home in the little preparatory school called the “gymnasium”
were two youths profoundly touched by this tragedy. One was the present
Premier and the other was Alexander Kerensky, whose father was master
of the school; evolution works in strange ways.

The Lenins have no children. They have devoted their lives to the
revolution. Madame Lenin is a pale, scholarly woman, usually in very
poor health. It was she who devised the new scheme for adult education
in Russia which Lunacharsky told me has proved highly efficient.

Lenin adores his wife and speaks of her with enthusiasm. The first time
I told him that I wanted to meet her, he said:

“Yes, you must do that because you will like her, she is so
intelligent.”

I found her both intelligent and sympathetic.

She invited me to take tea with her in her apartment and I was very
glad to go, since I wanted to see for myself how the Lenins lived.

They have two small rooms, which is the regulation in overcrowded
Moscow. Everything was spotlessly clean, though, as she explained, she
had no servant. There were quantities of books, plants in the windows,
a few chairs, a table, beds and no pictures on the walls.

I found her to have the same charm which Lenin has and the same way of
focusing all her attention on what her visitor is saying.

When you go to Lenin’s office he always jumps up and comes forward
smiling, shakes hands warmly and pushes forward a comfortable chair.
When you are seated he draws up another chair, leans forward and begins
to talk as if there was nothing else to do in the world but visit.

He likes harmless gossip and will laugh mightily over some story about
how Mr. Vanderlip fought with a Hungarian over a few sticks of wood on
a cold day, or an incident which occurred on a train, or in the street.
He himself loves to tell stories, and tells them very well. But no
conversation runs on lightly for long with Lenin. He will stop suddenly
in his laughter and say:

“What sort of a man is Mr. Harding, and what is his background?”

It does not matter how determined one is to ply him with questions, one
always goes away astonished because one has talked so much and answered
so many questions instead of asking them. He has an extraordinary way
of drawing one out and of putting one in an expansive mood.

This capacity for personal contact must be a big influence with the men
with whom he comes constantly in touch.

No wonder he dominates his Cabinet! When he narrows his small Tartar
eyes, looks at one with such understanding and intimacy, one feels he
is the best friend in the world; it would be impossible to oppose him.

We are wont to think of Lenin as a destroyer, but he is more of a
builder.

When he could not build a Communist State he did not throw up his
hands. He built the best State he could in its place and now he is
saying that Russia is the safest country in Europe; that it has reached
its lowest level and is climbing up, while other countries in Europe
are still declining.

It is just possible that he is right!


CHRISTIAN RAKOVSKY

The world, which now very generally concedes to Lenin great political
adroitness, is not fully aware of the extent of his talent. What other
man could have managed, under the stress of the hour, to have kept
control of the politics of great Russia, the Ukraine, the Far Eastern
Republic and even of China? And not only does he guide the destinies of
these Republics, he subordinates the men at the head of them. Thus he
is consolidating Russia. In Moscow, people believe that Lenin will some
day bring the Baltic States back into the Soviet federation.

Christian Rakovsky, President of the Ukraine, never reaches any
important decision without consulting Lenin. Rakovsky is an interesting
personality and a man whose star is ascending. He is undoubtedly one of
the strongest men in Russia, and since Lenin backs him, he ought to go
far.

Rakovsky was born in the little Bulgarian town of Kotel. His family is
one of the best known in all the Balkans. The name Rakovsky is woven
through Balkan history and revolutionary struggles.

Expelled from college for revolutionary activities, young Rakovsky
went to Geneva in 1890 and joined the Russian Social Democratic
Party. In 1892 he was arrested in Geneva for an encounter with an
agent-provocateur; he was expelled from Berlin the same year for
participation in the German labor movement.

After some difficulty he was permitted to remain in France, where he
carried on his studies. He was graduated from a French medical college
in 1897 and returned to Bulgaria.

Two years later he published a large historical volume called “Russian
Policy in the East.” He also wrote what was considered a brilliant
dissertation on criminology and degeneracy.

Rakovsky went to Russia in 1900, but was immediately arrested and
expelled by the Tsar’s police. He returned to Germany and there he
wrote his best known book, “Present Day France,” which was published
under the pen-name of Insarov.

A short time after completing this book he entered the judicial faculty
of the University of Paris, but was so interested in the Russian
revolution that he gave up his post after a year and went again to
Russia, only to be expelled promptly.

He organized the Socialist Party in Roumania in 1904 and in 1907 was
arrested following some peasant uprising. He was deprived of all
political rights, exiled and forbidden ever to return to Roumania. But
he had such a large and staunch following and so many serious riots
took place that the Government was too embarrassed to carry out its
decision. In a riot in Bucharest more than fifty persons were killed.
In 1912 he was re-enfranchised, which was considered a great victory
for the Roumanian labor leader.

Rakovsky is an habitual publicist; in the course of his career he has
founded ten newspapers.

During the war he was so active in his anti-war propaganda that he was
imprisoned in Roumania, but the first days of the 1917 revolution gave
him back his freedom when the Russian garrison in Jassy decided of its
own initiative to release all political prisoners.

He was not popular with the Provisional Government and, fearing his
influence, Burstev requested his arrest in a note to Tereschenko and in
a telegram to Kerensky. Learning of this order, he went to Sweden and
was in Stockholm at the time of the Bolshevik _coup d’état_.

In 1919 he was elected head of the Ukraine by the action of the Third
Congress of Ukrainian Soviets. I say “head” because he is at present
Premier, President and Minister of Foreign Affairs as well as a member
of the Executive Committee of the Third International in Moscow.

While I was in Moscow Rakovsky and his wife spent several weeks in
the house in which I lived. Madame Rakovsky is the sort of woman who
adds interesting and insuppressible variety to the leveling influence
of the revolution. She is a princess, speaks French in preference to
Russian after the manner of the old Russian aristocracy, and still
uses a lorgnette. She is an enthusiastic Communist. Everything about
her is charming, distinguished and--eminently exclusive! She always
accompanies her husband wherever he goes, is present at all interviews,
and one can tell by the way he listens to her opinions that he places
particular value on her advice.

Rakovsky himself is in manner and appearance more like an Old World
diplomat than a revolutionist. But in spite of his suavity he has
Lenin’s ability to face situations squarely. He once gave me such a
frank statement about conditions in the Ukraine that instead of going
over the cables to my paper it was officially chucked into the waste
basket by Tchicherin.


ABRAHAM KRASNICHAKOV

Out in Chicago Abraham Moiseyevitch Krasnichakov was plain Mr.
Tobinson, but for three years he has enjoyed great authority under his
own name as head of the Far Eastern Republic.

There is nothing lacking in either romance or adventure in the story
of A. Stroller Tobinson. He was born in the city of Chernobyl, in
the province of Kiev, in Russia, and fled to the United States about
the time his brother was executed in Odessa for some connection with
revolutionary activities. This was in 1904.

Tobinson was a Russian law student of unusual ability, but when he
arrived in America a poor immigrant he found his Russian education of
little use; he first had to learn the English language.

In Chicago he went to work as a house painter and attended night
school. In 1912 he was admitted to the bar, but never was a great
success as a lawyer. And while he took only a passive interest in the
radical movement, yet he continually gave his services in all sorts of
labor cases.

Not until he, somehow, became interested in organizing a preparatory
school for workers who wanted to go to college did he seem to hit his
medium. From that time on he rapidly developed into an organizer and
leader, and soon assumed charge of all the educational work connected
with the Workers’ Institute.

He started with a broad program which shut out all petty, political and
group influences. He was a born teacher, and nothing is more rare than
a good teacher.

His intense interest in the education of the masses was really what
carried him back to Siberia in 1917. And there one of those curious
historical situations arose which suddenly thrust him unexpectedly and
unprepared into power.

He was one of the numerous candidates for President up before the
Constitutional Assembly of the Far Eastern Republic. He certainly never
expected to be elected. It was the stupidity of his political rivals
which gave him this position.

A day or two before the election some one wrote a vicious attack upon
him in one of the papers, asking the people of Siberia if they wanted a
“porter,” a common house painter, to guide the affairs of the republic.

When Tobinson read this he was furious to think that his hard struggles
in America as an emigrant were thrown at him as if they were a
disgrace. He sat down and wrote a letter explaining that he had had a
good education, both in Russia and America, that he was not actually a
workman, but a lawyer. When he had finished writing this explanation,
he put it in his pocket and started toward the office of the same
paper. On the street he was met by a delegation of workingmen, who
threw their arms around him and called him “Comrade.”

One of them said: “We were against you until we read what the bourgeois
are saying, but now we are all on your side; we want a man who is one
of us.” This was the beginning of Tobinson’s popularity and this is the
story of how he became President of the Far Eastern Republic.

Tobinson was not a Communist. His connections had been more with groups
who simply revolted against the medieval tyranny which had existed in
Russia. But he admired Lenin above all the revolutionists, and was of
the opinion that Lenin was the only revolutionary leader who could
hold Russia together. Therefore he secretly allied himself with the
Communist government at Moscow.

He had two strong convictions. One was that Siberia wasn’t ready
for Communism, and that even if it was it would be destroyed by the
Japanese or by the Allies. Therefore, the only thing to do was to keep
it a buffer state between Japan and the Soviets. To do this and placate
all sides took infinite tact.

Tobinson proved equal to the task. His record in the last three years
is a record of extraordinary achievement. He has established schools
with the most modern methods; and against the most terrific odds he
has slowly but surely made the life of the Far Eastern Republic one of
steady, national reconstruction. I don’t think he believed for a minute
that it should be permanently separated from Russia.


LEO KAMINEV AND GREGORY ZINOVIEV

Toward the end of the first week of the Bolshevik uprising, Zinoviev
and Kaminev lost heart. With Mylutin, Nogin and Rykov, they handed in
resignations to the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party.
Lenin read the letters at a great meeting in Smolny and cried: “Shame
upon these men of little faith, who hesitate and doubt!”

Lenin has long since conquered their opposition, but he has not changed
their souls. Kaminev and Zinoviev are in his cabinet, as satellites,
however, not as leaders; they are the weakest members.

Kaminev is President of the Moscow Soviet and a member of the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets. He is on the
national famine committee and probably makes a very good impression on
the American Relief people with whom he comes in contact. They ought to
feel quite at home with him; he has the genial manners of an American
small-town politician.

He has certainly retained a middle class consciousness in spite of
five years of actual revolutionary experience, in spite of what is
known in Russia as a steady revolutionary past. I don’t think his
idea of Communist discipline can be very well defined. He likes to be
magnanimous and promises everything to everybody. He is generous, and
since it is hard to be generous in a Socialist State where one owns
nothing to be generous with, his only recourse is to be generous with
the property of the State.

In a glow of hospitality he once gave a sable coat worth thousands of
dollars to a lady he admired and was genuinely astonished and grieved,
I think, by the bitter criticisms then hurled at him. Had there been
enough “trusted and trained” men to go round (which there never are in
any government), this particular attack of giving might have cost him
his career, though in any other society his actions would have been
quite normal.

Kaminev is an excellent subordinate and capable of making a fortune in
a capitalist society. He cannot be accused of having no ideals; he can
be accused only of having the average politician’s moral stamina.

Bela Kun is the only other Soviet official who parallels Kaminev’s
distrust of the press. I once went to Bela Kun’s office to get a
statement. After ten promises and ten delays, I was in a small rage
myself and asked him why he had not said in the first instance that he
had no intention of giving a statement. He looked up from his desk,
ran his chubby fingers through his hair, and said in a bewildered way,
“Well, you see, I have just taken aspirin.” A young Russian officer
sitting nearby smiled at me and said dryly, in English, “No wonder the
Hungarian Soviets fell!”

Kaminev will probably remain in office many years for no better or
no worse reason than the reason for which many of our Senators are
returned to Washington term after term.

Zinoviev’s position is much more important and much harder to define.
Aside from being in the Cabinet, he is President of the Petrograd
Commune and President of the Third International. He really has great
power and he is known to be wilful and arbitrary. His party opponents
claim that his capriciousness has split the German Communist party into
six factions and confused and alienated most of the parties in the
other countries.

A Russian professor, who was interested in political movements merely
as an observer, explained Zinoviev’s curious tenacity in office in
this way: “The Communists,” he said, “insist so strongly upon party
discipline and party loyalty that they have never been able to face the
fact that Zinoviev is not a leader.”

Zinoviev’s appearance is against him. He is short, heavily built,
flabby. Yet he is not devoid of vanity; he is the most photographed man
in Russia. And while he has little imagination, he has real dramatic
sense, he has a way of staging everything.

At Baku, at one moment he had the Easterners unsheathing their
swords and declaring a holy war; at another moment he had a group of
Mohammedan women in the gallery tearing off their veils. All this was
distinctly impressive and dramatic, but the real drawback was that the
effect of the second act almost ruined the effect of the first.

I often wonder if a man can be a great leader, and be utterly devoid of
humor. When Zinoviev says anything clever he is not even aware of it
and invariably spoils it by a second act.

During the Kronstadt uprising the Esthonian government, with its wish
father to its thought, sent a wire to Petrograd which read: “What sort
of government have you in Petrograd?” And Zinoviev replied: “The same
government that has been here since 1917.”

If he could only have stopped at that one sentence he might have been
able to lead a world revolution, or at least catch the imagination
of the workers. Instead he insisted upon being didactic. He wired
page after page, delivering an orthodox Marxian lecture! But the
International is not without men of talent and daring. There are men
under Zinoviev--Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, Bulgarians, Americans,
with real fire and ability.

Bucharin, editor of _Pravda_, is by far the most brilliant of the
Russians. No matter how much one may disagree with Bucharin, one must
concede his brilliancy. The Letts have an exceptionally able group in
the International. Some of these men were actually in power during the
brief time that Latvia was “red.” The leader of the group is a stately
old man called Stootchka. For four months he was President of Latvia.


PETER STOOTCHKA

Peter Stootchka is one of those advisers and assistants of Lenin that
the world has not yet discovered. He is a man of capacious mind and one
of Lenin’s closest friends. He is a lawyer by profession and for many
years was the editor of a Lettish progressive paper in Riga. He was
exiled to Siberia for some criticism of the Tsar’s government.

He was the first Commissioner of Justice under the Soviets and only
resigned his post to accept one as President of Latvia. When Riga fell
he went back to Moscow, took up quarters near Lenin in the Kremlin, and
there he remains.

It was Stootchka who wrote the Soviet constitution, as well as most
of the present laws. Evidently he did not always find writing laws
an easy task. He often confessed his inability to judge just how the
personal and family life would grow up around the great economic change
which had taken place. Stootchka is nearly seventy and he felt that he
might be a little old-fashioned in regard to some matters, especially
concerning marriage and divorce. In the end he left it for those most
concerned to decide.

One afternoon he called into his office five young Russian women, all
typical revolutionists, and said to them: “For centuries women have
been oppressed, they have been the victims of prejudice, superstition
and the selfish desires of men. In writing the marriage laws I don’t
mind if women have even a slight advantage over men. What I am
concerned with most is to see that they get full justice. So I have
asked you here as representatives of the new order. Think these matters
over and give me your conclusions.”

Naturally, these conclusions had to be voted on by the All-Russian
Congress of Soviets, but since they were passed and written, it is now
an historical fact that five young women are the real authors of the
new and rather free marriage laws.


ALIEXIEV IVANOVITCH RYKOV

No other Russian enjoys the solid political and popular backing of
Aliexiev Rykov; he is the logical successor to Lenin.

Rykov is one of those “unknown-quantity” men which are in every
government and every political party and who are on the “inside” of
every government decision, men who silently assume more and more power
but remain unknown to the press until some event brings them to the
public attention. Rykov, although he has held for several years four
of the most important posts in Russia, was never heard of in England
or France or America until Lenin’s illness brought to everyone’s lips
the question of who would be the next Premier. Rumor suggested Kaminev
and Trotsky and numerous other Commissars. As Rykov himself explained
to me, “none of these men could take Lenin’s place for the very logical
reason that they had held government posts which had nothing to do with
the Premiership. It was like expecting one of your Secretaries of War
or Navy to take your President’s place in case your President died or
fell ill.” Rykov, happening to be vice-Premier, automatically became
acting-Premier. (Under the Soviets this office is called Chairman of
the People’s Council of Commissars.)

Rykov’s background is interesting and worth knowing, since he will
be a figure of importance in Russia for a long time to come. He is
forty-one years old and, aside from being Premier, he is vice-Chairman
of the Council of Labor and Defense, Member of the Presidium of the
All Russian Congress of Soviets and Member of the Central Executive
Committee of the Communist Party.

He was born of a peasant family living in the province of Vatka.
His education was paid for by an elder sister who had married well.
Because of revolutionary activities he was sentenced to Siberia and
served seven years in _solitary confinement_. When he told me this, I
was so astonished that I asked him to repeat it. It is a trial which
would have broken almost any man; yet I think I never met a man with
less “nerves” than Rykov has. By his manner and his good humor and
his serenity, he resembles Lenin to a startling degree. It is rather
amazing that Russia produced two men of the same type during the same
period. That is one reason why the government machinery ran along so
smoothly after Lenin stepped out.

Rykov has been in such close touch with Lenin in the last years that he
almost anticipates Lenin’s decisions. He told me that for three years
he has been sharing Lenin’s work. When the Council of Labor and Defense
was formed during the blockade, Lenin headed it and Rykov and Alexander
Demietrievitch Tsurupa served with Lenin. They also shared Lenin’s work
on the Council of People’s Commissars; and when Rykov was temporarily
elevated to Lenin’s office, Tsurupa was elevated to Rykov’s. As Lenin
grew stronger, after his operation, Rykov went to the country about
once a fortnight to consult him on vital matters of state. It is his
opinion that Lenin will soon be back in the Kremlin. But if Rykov’s
prediction does not prove true, Rykov himself will be able to guide,
with a steady hand, the shifting fortunes of war-torn and famine-ridden
Russia. I do not think he will go down in history as a great figure;
he will probably be overlooked by history as has many another such
unselfish and solid builder of empire, who worked always in the shadow
of a greater man.




JACOB PETERS, FEDORE S. DZERZHINSKY
AND THE
EXTRAORDINARY COMMISSION


It is a curious but indisputable fact that Jacob Peters, known to the
world as “Peters, the Terrorist,” has never been head of the Russian
Extraordinary Commission. Since its inception, Fedore Dzerzhinsky has
had charge of that sombre institution, which in the revolutionary
vernacular is known as the “Cheka,” a word derived from the initial
letters of “extraordinary” and “commission.”

Dzerzhinsky is a Pole, forty-four years of age, with an unusually
classical background for a Chief Executioner. He ranks high even among
the intelligentsia. After finishing his literary studies in a Russian
university, he took post-graduate courses in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich.

He has a temperament much like Tchicherin; shy, aloof and deeply
puritanical. One feels he can neither understand nor forgive moral
weaknesses in others, since he himself possesses that fanatical
devotion which has made it possible for him to travel the hard, bitter
road where his ideals lead. He asks nothing of life but to serve the
cause of Socialism. Ease, wealth and happiness, he puts behind him
as he would Satan. Such a man can sign away life with an unruffled
firmness that would break one of a warmer temperament. He needs only to
be convinced that his course is righteous; nothing else matters. The
individual is not considered in that “Nirvana” which is his ultimate
goal.

Dzerzhinsky adores Lenin and serves him with the abject faithfulness of
a slave; in his eyes Lenin can do no wrong. In the first days of the
terror, he brought his doubts before Lenin, doubts which had only to
do with the effect of such measures on the national and international
political situation and not with his own soul. Lenin, when all is
said, is the only man who cannot afford to be swayed by doubts. His
responsibilities are those of a field marshal during a battle; he
has no right to indecision. He reserves only the right to change his
tactics--which is quite another matter.

The terror was established in a moment when the revolution was almost
lost. The liberal government had fallen, the moderate Socialist
government had fallen. If the Bolsheviks fell, only chaos or a return
to the monarchy was possible. So it was that when Dzerzhinsky came to
the Kremlin and stood hesitating like a school-boy before his master,
it was often Lenin who for the moment became the high lord of life and
death.

I can see that scene in my mind’s eye. In his hand Dzerzhinsky would
have a list of prisoners and the evidence hastily gathered. Lenin would
look at Dzerzhinsky’s list, asking sharp, short questions in his shrewd
way. Most of the names of the counter-revolutionary conspirators were
familiar to him. He could quickly piece together the scanty evidence of
the secret trials. In his mind thoughts like these must have traveled:
“Ah, yes, there is X---- caught plotting with Y----, which, of course,
entirely accounts for the rising at B----.” Suddenly he would turn to
Dzerzhinsky and say without excitement and without raising his voice:
“It would be better to shoot these two, hold these five and release the
rest.”

In justice to Lenin it must be recorded that he was always against
capital punishment for his political rivals, or even for those who
plotted to assassinate him; he believed in the death penalty only
for those who attempted forcibly to overthrow the government. His
dictatorship of the Cheka, like his dictatorship of other government
departments, ceased with the first semblance of order. At the same
time, I do not believe for a moment that the Cheka ever got beyond his
control. Recently, when he saw it growing into a power which interfered
with the natural development of the country, he began at once to weaken
it. Dzerzhinsky will no doubt assist him in such an undertaking with
the same zeal which he brought to its creation.

A good deal of political manœuvering has always been necessary in
order to appease popular opinion about the Cheka. When time has cooled
our emotions for and against the Communist idea, we will realize that
Jacob Peters and Fedore Dzerzhinsky were just as much victims of the
revolution as were those counter-revolutionaries who came under their
stern jurisdiction.

Peters was sent away from Moscow in 1919 because he had become, however
unjustly, a symbol of terror in the public mind and life was beginning
to settle down again into more normal ways. As a matter of fact, Peters
but countersigned orders already bearing the signature of Dzerzhinsky.
It was his duty to see that the prisoners were quickly and humanely
disposed of. He performed this grim task with a dispatch and an
efficiency for which even the condemned must have been grateful, in
that nothing is more horrible than an executioner whose hand trembles
and whose heart wavers.

Pursuing the same devices, a few weeks back when Lenin forced the
Cheka to be made subservient to the Department of Interior and
Communications, the public looked upon this step as a real compromise
and a definite move toward the abolition of the secret police. Trials
again became public with employers and other unbelievers in Socialism
openly represented by lawyers, who had long ceased to regard their
profession as anything but a dead asset. Lenin never dismisses
men he can trust, so while Dzerzhinsky ceased to be head of the
once all-powerful Extraordinary Commission, he was elected in the
same moment Commissar of the Interior and Communications, although
temporarily he was sent to Siberia to expedite grain shipments for the
famine areas. Thus the history of the Cheka repeats itself.

In the first moments of elation following the March revolution when
prison doors were thrown open all over Russia and prison records
publicly burned, it seemed as if the day of the secret police was
forever passed. In those joyous days it was almost impossible to keep
one’s perspective, or to feel a premonition of the rising storm of
world opposition to the development of the revolution. When Kerensky
abolished the death penalty in the army, he sacrificed his last
shred of control to the dictates of his heart. At that time even the
Communists did not believe in capital punishment. Once Trotsky, in an
impassioned speech at Smolny, during the November days, made mention
of a guillotine. His remarks let loose the most violent opposition.
For weeks this issue was discussed everywhere; in the press, at
public gatherings, even in street cars and on railway trains. He was
vigorously denounced for holding such opinions. And he had merely said
that this was something to be considered in a national crisis.

By the summer of 1918 the Soviet government found itself surrounded
by an iron ring of death. Also, there was graft and intrigue and
dishonor in the Communist ranks. It was Peters himself, torn between
the right and wrong of re-establishing capital punishment, who said to
me in January, 1918, “If we ever have to kill, it must begin in our
own ranks.” His face was white and stern; he appeared on the verge of
collapse.

“Will it ever really come to that?” I asked.

He passed his hand across his eyes with the weary gesture of a man
who has not slept well for many nights. Before him on his desk, was
a pile of papers. He pointed to them and said, “If you could know
what evidence I have here, you would see how necessary it is if the
revolution is to continue, for the Communists to purify their own
ranks.”

It is a matter of record that the first persons put to death were
opportunists who pretended to believe in Communism and had accepted
bribes or otherwise had betrayed their own party.

The momentum of the revolution rapidly increased after the signing of
the first death warrant. It was not long before the despised secret
police once more made their appearance. They were back again protecting
now a revolutionary government as energetically as they once protected
the Tsar!

It is impossible to say how many of the old police force actually
served under the Soviets. I found, on personal investigation, that
many of the stories were largely myths. The most typical legend was
the one concerning Lapochine, once head of the Okrana and exiled by
the Tsar for telling a Social Revolutionist that Azef was a spy. The
rumor that he now holds an important post in the Cheka is not true.
His daughter was one of my intimate friends in Moscow and I went very
often to her home. Her father was holding two small clerkships which
took all his time, in order to get double rations to support himself
and his invalid wife. Lapochine was never connected with the secret
police after his exile, although he was brought back to Russia after
six years in Siberia and publicly forgiven by the Tsar. He was governor
of Esthonia at the outbreak of the revolution. However, to the ordinary
individual, all this makes little difference. A detective is simply a
detective, working in dark ways, someone to be feared and someone to be
despised. And as for the Lapochines, the last time I heard of them they
were trying to borrow money in America to start a sausage factory near
Moscow.

All the important posts in the Cheka have been and still are largely
held by Letts or Poles with unimpeachable revolutionary records. The
rank and file are Russians. There are scarcely any Jews. The reason
why the Russians hold minor positions is not exactly clear but the
general calculation is that they are more susceptible to bribery and
more easily influenced. Certainly, the Cheka has played an important
rôle in the revolution; it is no exaggeration to state that without
the vigilance of the Extraordinary Commission, the Soviets would
never have maintained themselves through numerous critical moments.
It was Peters and other Lettish secret agents who discovered such
counter-revolutionary plots as the Lockwood plan to blow up bridges and
cut off Petrograd and the government from all communications. And as
military intervention developed, the Communists were forced to consider
Russia in a state of siege and the Cheka their most necessary means of
self-protection.

In a speech before a session of the Extraordinary Delegation, Trotsky
made this statement: “The monopoly of using force and reprisals in any
normally functioning state, regardless of its external form, is an
attribute of the government.... Every state organization is in this
way fighting for its existence. It is sufficient to picture to one’s
self the society of the present day, this complicated and contradictory
co-operation in such a tremendous country as Russia, for example,
in order at once to understand that in the present condition of
affairs, torn by every social contradiction, reprisals are absolutely
inevitable.”

It is absurd to consider the Extraordinary Commission in any but
an objective way. The little border states of Finland, Lithuania,
Roumania, and even Poland, have just as elaborately developed Chekas,
searching just as diligently for Bolshevik plotters as Russia does for
anti-Bolshevik plotters. Finland, for example, has a much more cruel
revolutionary record. The division of the Red and White forces there
was more equal; therefore, the struggle was intensified and the terror
magnified accordingly. Only, in this case, it was White Terror instead
of Red.

Even we ourselves have a Cheka, but we call it a Department of Justice,
and we have a thousand little independent Chekas known as private
detective agencies. And now that America is in a happier state of
mind we like to forget how our “intelligence” departments grew into
formidable institutions during the short period of our participation
in the war. Very soon after the declaration of war we began to suspect
one another on a wholesale scale, all sorts of innocent persons were
“trailed” and otherwise humiliated. If we remember those days, we can
better understand what happens when the very life of a nation is at
stake. Ours never has been.

No one claims that the state electrician who pushes the button for the
electric chair at Sing Sing is a criminal, or that his private life
need necessarily be immoral. Yet the Sing Sing executioner is paid
something like three hundred dollars for each life taken and one might
almost imagine him having more than a routine interest in a good crop
of homicides. If Peters and Dzerzhinsky were dismissed from office
to-morrow, they would have nothing but the clothes on their backs and
broken health with which to begin new careers. I give this example for
the sake of comparison or contemplation, not as a justification for
either the American or the Russian official conscience.

The temptations of St. Anthony pale beside those of Peters and
Dzerzhinsky. They have been flattered and offered every sort of bribe.
I know of a single instance where Peters was offered what amounted to a
cool million dollars. He did not refuse it, however, until he had all
his tempters enmeshed beyond retreat.

The most romantic revolutionary story I know is the one Peters told me
himself about his return to Russia, bound up as it was with Sir Roger
Casement’s execution. Up until the day of that unhappy event he was
immersed in the life of London and almost untouched by the struggle
in Russia. He had a comfortable post in an export house, an English
wife and a baby whom he adored. Quite naturally thoughts of revolution
had grown vague and alien to his mind. So it was that, wrapped in
British complacency, on a gray morning he started happily to work and
encountered unexpectedly a little company of Irish folk bound for the
Tower of London. At first he must have looked at them as he would have
regarded any other procession. But he noticed, to his surprise, how
emotional they were. Tears ran down their faces of which they were
unashamed. He remembered then that this was the day when Sir Roger
Casement was to die. Something, he said, made him follow that crowd,
although they were going in an opposite direction from his office. Can
you imagine the punctilious Mr. Peters, so highly efficient, never a
minute late, for a reason unexplainable to himself, following a little
group of Irish mourners? Perhaps he had even grown English enough to be
a little embarrassed at his impulsiveness.

He described how he stood when the others knelt down outside the prison
and began to pray. He would never forget, he said, how he suddenly
realized what a vast, irreconcilable temperamental barrier lay between
the English and the Irish people.

By the time the bugler announced the execution, Jacob Peters was
another man. Something called conscience or national pride or
revolutionary honor awoke in him and with it came a deep homesickness
for Mother Russia. He felt himself burning with shame. It was as if
Sir Roger Casement were pointing a finger at him and saying, “See
how I am able to die, you who once called yourself a revolutionist.”
Those devout people reminded him of the Russian peasants; they had
the potency of an old tune. We have all seen men weep over some dear,
familiar melody.

Peters never went back to work. He walked the London streets all day,
wandered along the docks, watched the great ships and thought about
Russia. All the dreams of his youth returned. At night he went home and
told his wife he was going to Petrograd.

It seems almost regrettable that Sir Roger Casement could not have
known that in that multitude come to mourn his death, was a little
London clerk who, by the power of association, was somehow transformed
into one of the characters that now make Russian history.

Neither Peters nor Dzerzhinsky bear much resemblance to their
revolutionary predecessor, Marat, the venomous public prosecutor of
the French revolutionary days. Dzerzhinsky is far too reserved to be
an orator and I doubt if he understands the meaning of revenge. He
must have known all too well the horror of prison life ages before he
became head of the prisons. He spent eleven years in a Warsaw prison,
an experience which permanently wrecked his health.

Early in his confinement a spirit of religious fervor, manifested in
self-sacrifice and humbleness, was evident. He wished to abase himself
in the same way a priest does penance before God. He took upon himself
the most repulsive tasks in the prison in order to save his fellow
prisoners, such as washing floors and emptying refuse pails. His only
reply when questioned was, “It is necessary that someone should perform
the lowest tasks in order that the others may be relieved of them.” And
it was this man whose fate it was to perform the lowest and hardest
tasks for the young republic. The meek can be truly terrible in
positions of authority, as can the virtuous, since ordinary souls feel
no defense against them.

In appearance Dzerzhinsky is tall and noticeably delicate, with white
slender hands, long straight nose, a pale countenance and the drooping
eyelids of the over-bred and super-refined. I never knew anyone who was
a close friend of Dzerzhinsky’s; he has, perhaps, too secluded a nature
to permit of warm and intimate companionship. He is as distinctly
aristocratic as Peters is distinctly a man of the people.

Peters is short, snub-nosed and almost stocky in build, with bristling,
short, brown hair. He has read a good deal but is by no means a
littérateur. He is a workman risen above the mass, risen just high
enough to be an excellent interpreter. He has played in these years
since March, 1917, other important rôles than that of executioner.
As Governor of Turkestan he has shown that he can create as well as
destroy.

When Peters returned from England he went almost immediately to the
front and joined a Lettish regiment. Because of his superior knowledge
or his fervor he soon became a figure of importance among the soldiers.
He was the favorite spokesman at the soldier meetings, which at
that time were of great importance, since the soldiers were deciding
very largely for themselves whether or not they would remain in the
trenches. Even Kerensky found it necessary to take fortnightly trips to
the front to argue and plead with them.

To certain men who once served in Peters’ regiment, was some months
later entrusted the keeping of the Royal Family. Every man in that
guard was a Lett. As in other instances, had they been Russians, they
might have shown more leniency or outright sentimentalism in a crisis.
The Letts were instructed never to allow their royal prisoners to be
rescued alive and the Letts are soldiers who understand the iron rules
of military discipline.

Lenin has long put great trust in Peters. When he was in hiding during
the first two months of 1917, Peters was in charge of that seclusion.
Lenin’s famous “Letters to the Comrades,” which were sent out and
printed broadcast, and caused so much havoc with the Provisional
Government, were entrusted to Peters and his subordinates. Peters was
very proud of this trust. Once he said to me when I was living on a
little street just off Nevsky Prospect, “Lenin is not far from this
house.” Little did I comprehend what an important confidence that was!

Peters speaks English fluently. In 1917 he translated a life of
Kerensky for me and over tea cups he told me many things about the
revolution which I did not understand. I should never have believed,
in those days, that this mild-mannered and almost inspired youth would
soon have such sinister work to do.

The last time I met Peters he was living in Tashkent which is the
capital of the Province of Turkestan. He had even more sweeping
powers than an ordinary governor, since he was the most important
revolutionary official in a community not yet settled down to normal
life.

I also met the new Madame Peters. The English wife divorced him at
the time of the terror. The second Madame Peters was a very pretty,
redheaded Russian who had been a teacher and who still worked at her
profession. They lived in a single room, shared a dining room with
twenty others and were poorly dressed. When we discussed this point,
Peters bitterly denounced several Soviet officials who, he said, were
“living soft.” “A revolutionist cannot expect to force privations on
other people if he is not willing to be an example of self-sacrifice,”
he declared.

He had become known almost as a conservative among the Left-Communists
because he had refused to close the Mohammedan bazaars, saying these
people were not ready for Communism. His public trials were attended
by large crowds and proved of great educational value in a very
unenlightened community.

I found him much older. He seemed to have lived thirty years in three.
He never mentioned the terror, nor did his wife, and I could not bring
myself to. Only once did he indirectly refer to it. The three of us
were starting to a local Soviet meeting. He picked up a revolver from
his table and, for a moment, stood regarding it. Then he turned to me
and said, “Have you ever used one of these?” I said, “Of course, I know
how, but I’ve never had to.” And then he exclaimed, “I wish to God I
never had!” After all, what a story can be condensed into a single
sentence!

The Cheka was really the beginning of law and order; it marked the
beginning of the first government which showed real strength and
purpose. There was no doubt something very definitely nationalistic
about the growth of the Cheka, in spite of the fact that it was
established by Communists. It had all the hardness of purpose and the
narrowness possessed by the maximum of patriotism. Any student of
history will remember what Carlyle said of those terror-ridden days
when the guillotine ruled France. “Tigress nationale! Meddle not with
a whisker of her! Swift rending is her stroke; look what a paw she
spreads--pity has not entered her heart.” Such acts Carlyle claimed
would some day be known as the “Crimes of the Revolution,” when they
should rightly be recorded as the birth pains of the republic. Very
naturally, conduct of open and avowed suppression will always be
hated and condemned by liberals the world over, and used as campaign
ammunition by political opponents.

One of the highest officials of the Cheka said to me, “Most foreign
correspondents write about the Extraordinary Commission as if we had
no right on our side. Now I will give you two examples of the sort of
problems continually confronting us, and if you would submit them to
any American police official, he would tell you very promptly that the
Cheka had no other course than the one which it pursued.

“First, there is the case of Marie Spirodonova. She is a woman with
an honored revolutionary past. Naturally, we don’t want to have her
behind bars. But she was for years a terrorist, she killed the Governor
of Tambov and she still believes that individual acts of terror are
justified. As you know, the Communists were always against such a
policy. We believe in mass action and not individual violence.

“Marie Spirodonova is a highly-strung, sensitive person. She makes a
splendid agitator but we have gotten to the point of reconstruction, of
building, not tearing down. Russia was forced to sign the Brest-Litovsk
treaty. You may agree with me that that was a bad thing to do or you
may disagree with me, but as an American, understanding and believing
in government, you will certainly agree that we had to protect the
representatives of Germany after the peace was signed.

“When Mirbach came to Moscow, it was very bitter for any of us to
receive him. But it is another matter to go to his house and kill him
with a bomb. This was the plan of Marie Spirodonova. Now what could
we do? Were we to allow her and her associates to kill any foreign
representative who came here? How could we ever hope for relations with
other nations if we could offer their representatives no protection?
Then why are we criticized because we put Spirodonova in a sanatorium?
And we allowed her to escape. I confess that we have kept a watch over
her. The woman in whose house she stayed used to report to us. That was
merely to prevent any repetition of the Mirbach affair.

“One thing I wish the world could understand, one thing that my
experience in the Cheka has taught me, that a person capable of
starting a revolution is not necessarily capable of finishing one or
even carrying one on after it is started.”

Another time the same official gave me his version of the Anarchist
problem. “We had Bill Shatov as Chief of Police in Petrograd. He
was formerly an Anarchist but had come over to work with us. He had
quarreled with the Anarchists and he claimed that a lot of loafers and
thieves had joined their organizations just to have an excuse not to do
any work.

“Some time later there were a lot of robberies in Petrograd. One night
Bill Shatov arrested every so-called Anarchist in town. He held them
two weeks without trial. In those two weeks not a single robbery took
place in Petrograd!

“When the trial came up, Bill had a novel way of trying cases. He put
each man through a sort of Anarchist’s catechism. All those who knew
their litany he released--the others he held.

“Anarchists are the most difficult of all groups during a revolution.
They not only lack balance and refuse to co-operate but they are really
dangerous. There is hardly a Soviet official whose life has not been
threatened by Anarchists. Twice, you know, they nearly finished Lenin.

“What does the outside world really expect us to do? We have to be
especially vigilant now because these are harassing times. Later we
will be no more formidable than your own police.”

The Soviet Government has a passion for exhibits. The Labor Temple
in Moscow almost all year round has about half its space devoted to
educational displays. In a little room here I once saw a most curious
and gruesome show. On the walls hung photographs of people executed for
high treason, robbery and murder, with little cards attached giving
the history of each case. In a corner were rifles of the type used
in executing. There were also pictures of the victims of some of the
criminals--pictures of Jews murdered in pogroms, for example, and of
houses blown up. Any person from the street was allowed to go there
quite freely, without any special pass, and acquaint himself with the
workings of the committee.

There is always something appalling when one comes face to face with
such a display of law and order. It reminds me of a very eccentric
Russian doctor of my acquaintance. This man had a habit of killing
flies. If he saw one on a window pane or hovering about the table he
would somehow manage, with great deftness, to capture it. Thereupon he
would solemnly take out his pocket knife and behead the insect. Once I
protested, saying that such a performance was disgusting. With great
seriousness he admonished me. “So, you do not believe in killing....
Well, nevertheless, we are all forced to kill. Flies annoy you, they
poison your food, endanger your life and the lives of your children. In
some desperate moment you strike out in a furious and chaotic manner.
What is the result? Ugh, an ugly smash. Is there anything fine about
that? You condemn me, but what do I do? I simply execute flies in a
sanitary way--I am a true symbol of civilization.”




ANATOL VASSILIEVITCH LUNACHARSKY AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

     “Oh, happy earth! Out of the blood of generations
       Life yet will blossom, innocent and wise,
     And thou, my planet, shall be cleansed of lamentations,
       A jade-green star in the moon-silvered skies.”


Thus wrote the Soviet Minister of Education, Anatol Lunacharsky, in
those remote days when a revolution was only a vague goal and when he
could not believe that in his own lifetime a day would come when he
would be torn from his quiet study and forced to put his dreams into
practice, or as near into practice as dreams ever reach.

Reality is revolting and disappointing to any artist, but Lunacharsky
possesses enough recuperative powers to overcome his artistic
sensitiveness. If he had not had enough also of that saving grace of
fanaticism which marks all leaders, he would have lacked the enthusiasm
which has carried him through every battle for culture which he has
had to wage since the dramatic crash of the Tsardom. Only once did
he actually lose heart and Lenin overcame that attack of panic by
showering responsibility upon him. Given responsibility he showed more
courage than men of coarser grain.

Lunacharsky’s battles in the five years he has been in office have not
been concerned with bullets. “Illiteracy,” he told me once, “is the
great curse of Russia; we must fight illiteracy like the plague.” And
he fought it like the plague. This delicate poet, who in appearance is
more like a scholarly Frenchman than a Russian, who has the manners
and elegance of another age, has left off composing sonnets to fight
ignorance, superstition, drunkenness, prejudice, disease, dirt.... And
he has been more bitterly attacked than any other official of the new
Russian Government.

With practically nothing at his disposal he had to plan and execute
a vast educational campaign. That is why his achievements are so
extraordinary. When Fedore Chaliapin was here last winter, winning the
heart of America by his sweet and wonderful voice, he and I talked a
good deal about Lunacharsky and the difficulties which confronted him.
“Remember,” said Chaliapin, “if you have no pens and no paper and no
ink, you cannot write; if you have no wood you cannot make a fire--in
Russia all these things were literally true. Under such circumstances,
no matter how willing the government might be, art and education must
suffer with the rest.”

I will not go into figures here, but one can get an idea of what
Lunacharsky has done. He has practically eliminated adult illiteracy
from the cities, he has established thousands of schools. Only a very
few of them, to be sure, are up to the required mark, but every school
opened is an achievement. And there is not a single part of Russia,
however remote or however dark, where a school has not been started.

But establishing and maintaining schools and universities was only a
part of the work allotted to Lunacharsky. He had to build new theatres,
keep up the standard of the old and show himself worthy of that great
responsibility Lenin bestowed upon him when he made him guardian of all
the art treasures of Russia.

If Nikolai Lenin had been a mediocrity, he would never have appointed
Lunacharsky guardian of the art of Russia, and Russian art would now
be scattered to the four winds, swallowed up in private collections or
enriching the pockets of speculators. A mediocrity will not admit his
limitations even if he is aware of them, but Lenin somehow understands
that a man cannot spend his life studying political economy and
carrying on revolutionary propaganda, and at the same time be an art
connoisseur. What is more remarkable is that he allowed Lunacharsky to
tell him so. The story of Lunacharsky’s appointment is interesting and
characteristic of the Russian Premier’s method of political generalship.

When the Red and White forces were struggling for the possession of
the Kremlin in Moscow in 1917, a wire to Petrograd announced that the
beautiful and fantastic church of Vassili Blazhanie on the Red Square
had been razed to the ground. Lunacharsky, poet, scholar, playwright
and revolutionist, as well as friend and follower of Lenin, wrote
an open letter to the press in which he gave vent to his horror. He
stated: “What is taking place in Moscow is a horrible and irreparable
misfortune!” He wrote another letter to Lenin, renouncing all
connection with the revolution. And he took to his bed, ill with shock
and disappointment.

Lenin did not accept his resignation. Lenin never accepts resignations
from men who are valuable to the state. Instead, he went to call on
Lunacharsky, and an amazing conversation took place which was repeated
to me by a friend of both men.

Lenin, with his usual directness, said to Lunacharsky, “Do not be
overcome by this calamity. If this church is destroyed, let us build a
bigger and a better one.”

Lunacharsky, in tears of anguish, explained to Lenin that such a thing
was not possible; such a lovely, imaginative piece of architecture
might never again be created. Lenin listened and went thoughtfully
away. A few days later Lunacharsky was given charge of the entire art
of Russia.

Up to that time, the valuable collections, as well as the buildings,
had been in the hands of a revolutionary committee which also might
very well have been of the opinion that art could be replaced by
“bigger and better” things.

Lunacharsky did not take his task lightly. He issued another public
declaration asking for the solemn co-operation of all loyal Russians.
“Upon me rests the responsibility of protecting the entire artistic
wealth of the people,” he said, “and I cannot fulfill my duty without
your help.”

It will not be known for a long time against what strong and subtle
forces he had to battle to guard that trust. There was movement after
movement to sell such treasures as the Rembrandt Collection in the
Hermitage at Petrograd or the historic paintings and tapestries in
Moscow. But Lunacharsky, ever on the alert, defeated every one of
these attempts. He often fought bitter battles in his own party. Every
possible sort of intrigue was manufactured against him. I remember
times when he had to appear in public and defend himself against
atrocious slander. Yet up to the present day he has saved absolutely
everything except the pearls and diamonds of the royal family which,
after all, were never of any particular artistic value. He saved even
the Tsarist statues from the mobs that would have destroyed them, and
stored them away in buildings for a calmer moment. He never lost his
artistic perspective, art was always art and he “could look with a just
regard upon the shattered corpse of a shattered king” provided that the
monument was executed by a talented artist.

Nikolai Lenin has the genius to read men well; he recognized instantly
that a man who could be so affected by the rumored loss of a single
historic building that he could scarcely bear to face life, would be
the very man to defend passionately the art of the nation. And Lenin
has continued to defend Lunacharsky against every charge brought by
his enemies. These charges have often been serious because they were
brought by revolutionists who claimed that Lunacharsky was partial to
the bourgeoisie in his efforts to get extra rates for scientists and
artists; that he was not a real Communist because he put art before
political propaganda. There was a terrible period when the loyalty
of all men was questioned whose allegiance was not wholly given to
the defense from military attack at whatever cost to art or personal
life. It was through that period that Lunacharsky had to guide Russian
culture.

“Think what vitality the theatre had to possess,” said Chaliapin,
“to maintain itself through the revolution.” “Think what hunger the
Russian masses had for learning,” said Madame Lenin, “that they could
grasp even this hard moment to learn to read and study.” Both these
assertions are true, but in spite of that hunger and that vitality both
forces might have gone down for some years, had it not been for the
splendid leadership of Lunacharsky.

Even those ardent revolutionists who could see no further than the
immediate moment are beginning to realize that the very fact that the
Soviets have kept intact their national art gives them a prestige which
money could never buy; it is an indisputable evidence of their faith in
civilization. And it is Lunacharsky who has managed to save for them
this evidence of faith when hotheads would have cast it aside.

It always seems a pity that we are aware now of only the prominent
political figures in Russia. If we can think back on the French
guillotine days and the burning of libraries, the mad destruction of
art, the sacking of palaces by angry mobs, we can understand that if
there had been men in France in those days who could have held those
mobs in check and made them want to read the books they were burning,
made them turn the palaces into museums, Napoleon might never have worn
a crown. In Russia the influence of the men who hold the political
reins would be so much slighter and so much less significant if they
were not backed up by men like Lunacharsky.

He had the art galleries heated in the most bitter of the fuel famine
days and the immense crowds going in partly to keep warm strolled all
day under historical canvases and came to know all the great pictures
of Russia. The Winter Palace became a Revolutionary Museum, one of the
most unique museums in the whole world, the Palace of Nicholas II at
Tsarskoe Selo became a Children’s Home, as did every great estate in
the provinces threatened with destruction by quarreling peasants.

It is interesting to note that the wives of three prominent
revolutionists rendered Lunacharsky valuable aid in his difficult work,
the wife of Trotsky, the wife of Gorky, and the wife of Leo Kaminev.

Madame Trotsky has under her direction all private art collections
and all the small palaces; she hands a monthly inventory of these
places over to Lunacharsky. In the last three years she has been very
gradually and systematically removing the most valuable objects in the
collections to the museums.

Madame Kaminev, Trotsky’s sister, is the head of Prolocult, a movement
which aims at a new culture, especially in the theatre, which is free
from Greek or other influences. It is Madame Kaminev’s theory that such
a culture, springing from the workers and peasants and unspoiled by the
imperfections and influences of former civilizations, will do much
to stimulate and renew art in general, which she believes has become
decadent

Marie Andreeva (Madame Gorky), who is herself an actress of note and
was at one time a star in the famous Art Theatre in Moscow, had charge
of Narodny Dom, a people’s theatre, which was started under the Tsar
and is continued under the Soviets. Marie Andreeva recently made a tour
of Europe to study the theatres.

But it is Stanislavsky, the director of the Moscow Art Theatre, who has
rendered Lunacharsky the greatest assistance. Stanislavsky is conceded
to be the greatest stage director in the world. Under his guidance, all
the great Russian playwrights for the last generation have blossomed.
It was Stanislavsky’s firm conviction that the Russian people must
maintain the theatres, hundreds of theatres, during the revolution, in
order that they might not find a life of hunger and cold too monotonous
for a desire to live. With his brave little company he has managed
to keep his theatre in the capital at the very highest pitch. He
established and kept under his direction three other theatres in Moscow
and he has put on a number of new operas. Absolutely nothing seems to
discourage him. The loss of his personal fortune, which had been very
great, and even the loss of his beloved workshop which was turned into
a Chauffeurs’ Club, did not destroy his calm. “It is never Lenin or
Lunacharsky, big men, who are to blame for these mistakes of the Soviet
Government,” he told me. “It is always the little foolish, frantic
men. When they took my workshop I wrote to Lenin. He did everything he
could and when he was outvoted by Kaminev and the Moscow Soviet, he
managed to get me another place, really just as good but lacking the
old atmosphere.”

Many tales could be told about Lunacharsky. The most typical, I think,
and the one that shows his persistency is the story of the Hermitage
museum, which Catherine the Great founded in Petrograd.

When the Germans were knocking at the gates of Petrograd in 1917 the
historic tapestries in the Winter Palace and the entire Hermitage
collection were sent by dead of night to Moscow and stored in the
Kremlin. One day in the winter of 1921 I called at Lunacharsky’s
office. He was in a fine state of happiness. “I have great news for
you,” he exclaimed. “To-day we sent the Hermitage collection back
to Petrograd--intact! I wonder if you can realize what that means? I
wonder if the world will know how nearly those precious things came to
destruction? How wonderful it is, after all, that in another month one
can go to Petrograd and behold everything arranged as it has been for
centuries.

“Yes, there have been times when I did not think it possible to save
the collection, not because there were reckless revolutionists who
always brought up movements to sell one part or another, but by a much
worse destruction. Can you imagine my anxiety when fighting, actual
fighting, was going on in palaces where the old porcelains were stored?
We had put the Rembrandts and other canvasses in the Kremlin cellars,
and I was in constant terror that rats would gnaw them. Sometimes I
was afraid to go down and look. But I feel that the worst days of such
struggles are over for us. I am happy that Russia has demonstrated to
the world that Russians are not barbarians. We have saved our art in
spite of hunger and disease and death.”

Lunacharsky has a rare grace of spirit and while he is himself a
modernist and wants to bring art as close to the people as bread, he
never allows his own feelings to intrude on the feelings of his fellow
artists. Himself a writer of note, he has sacrificed his own writing to
save art and the creators of art. A devout revolutionist, he can allow
the intricate designs of the Tsardom, the great black eagles, insolent
against the sky over the turrets of the Kremlin, to remain, because
they are part of the original designs of the old palaces. He can bring
himself to regild the church roofs from his scanty funds although he is
not at all religious, and he could faithfully gather old ikons and make
of them a marvelous little collection in one of the new museums. Only
such a man could have held together the temperamental army composed of
the artists of Russia. Such men as Lunacharsky give the revolution the
balance which prevents its collapse.

Periods of transition are always bitter and more than bitter for
delicate creative souls. Once I mentioned Lunacharsky’s tact in
handling artists to Helena Soochachova, the young and beautiful star
at the Moscow Art Theatre. She smiled and thus characterized him: “Ah,
Lunacharsky,” she said, “he is a great gentleman, he is, no doubt,
_the_ great gentleman of the revolution. That is the secret of his
success and the reason his political enemies cannot defeat him and we
artists cannot desert him--because he struggles so magnificently and is
a man _sans peur et sans reproche_.”




MICHAEL IVANOVITCH KALININ

AND THE

PEASANTS


[Illustration: KALININ]




MICHAEL IVANOVITCH KALININ

AND THE

PEASANTS


There have been two presidents of the Russian Socialist Federated
Soviet Republic; only recently we have become vaguely aware of one of
them. Ever since the Bolshevik _coup d’ état_ America has spoken of the
Soviet Government as “the government of Lenin and Trotsky.” America was
right in so far as these men enjoy immense power, and wrong in so far
as she imagined it would have been possible at any time, and less so
now, for either of these men or both of them to have abruptly changed
the government’s policy from right to left or left to right without
first receiving indisputable orders from the masses.

Relatively, Lenin has more power than Lloyd George and Trotsky
considerably less; while President Kalinin, who began his office as
little more than a figure-head, has been saved from the emptiness of
such a position because he is so symbolic of the growing power of the
peasants. Already more power has been bestowed upon him through the
course of events than perhaps he himself realizes. Surely when he set
out in his painted train on his first journey through the provinces
three years ago, he could hardly have foreseen his place in history as
one of the greatest influences in molding the new state.

Kalinin’s growing influence is a true barometer of public opinion
or, to be more exact, of the reassertion of public opinion. And it
is interesting to note that while many of the stars in the Communist
sky are considerably dimmed by the ascendancy of Kalinin, Premier
Lenin’s position is only made stronger. This is because the new
pressure from below is for compromise, and public men go down under
retreat much faster than when their banners are flying triumphantly in
advance. Lenin is practical enough to understand the advantages of a
well-ordered retreat above those of a rout; he will save all he can of
the Socialist state instead of abandoning it on the fields of battle.

It was the question of private property which became the vital issue in
1920 inside and outside of Russia. The abolition of private property
was made possible by a determined, conscious minority. It was
re-established by the pressure of a slow-moving, solid, unconscious
majority; that majority was the peasants. I do not mean that the
peasants are now actually in control of the state. I merely wish to
point out that they already hold the balance of power and that they
move towards control with the crushing surety of a glacier. They
hold, strategically, the same position that the Bolsheviks did under
Kerensky, but they will never pursue the same tactics; they will assume
power gradually just because they are the majority; it is only a
minority which must act with dramatic haste, counting on brains, daring
and psychological moments.

It was logical that the first President should have been a man who
represented the city workers and the second President, a peasant; for
in such wise did the revolution settle itself.

Most of the Communists did not approve of Kalinin’s election. Lenin
alone sensed the proper time to place a peasant as nominal head of the
Soviets; a peasant who should begin as Master of Ceremonies and who, in
his peasant’s garb and with his peasant’s tongue, should bring Lenin’s
ideas to the people; a peasant who would never cease being a peasant
and who would come back to Lenin and say, “This and this they will
have, here they cannot follow and there they will lead.” Lenin gazed at
Russia through Kalinin’s eyes as one gazes in a crystal.

In 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized control of the state, a delicate
little man called Jacob Michaelovitch Sverdlov, a chemist by profession
and a revolutionist by conviction, was Chairman of the Central
Executive Committee of the Workers and Soldiers Deputies; this meant
that he controlled the Red Guards, the conscious workers and the
revolting soldiers; it meant he held a position of such tremendous
authority that he could not be ignored by anybody. So when the first
Council of the People’s Commissars was formed, which is really no other
than the cabinet of the Russian Government, Sverdlov was the first
person taken into consideration by them. And in order to find a place
for him they created the office of President. When he accepted that
office he gave up his direct control and became but one voice in a
group. Nevertheless, all through the barricade days he continued to act
as the spokesman in the cabinet for the Petrograd workers who were, for
at least the first year, a power above the cabinet.

In the winter of 1918 Sverdlov died of typhus and was buried on the Red
Square in Moscow.

During the time Sverdlov was president the government was in continual
difficulty with the peasants. They resisted the government’s
requisitioning expeditions, retreated within themselves and almost
ignored the central power until the provinces were in a continual state
of guerilla warfare. They managed their local Soviets with little or
no thought of the Moscow Government. Civil war continued and, with the
aid of France and England, grew apace; hard dark days settled over
Russia. Sverdlov looked about for an entering wedge which would somehow
pierce the way to an eventual understanding and co-operation with the
local and central Soviets. In this search Sverdlov discovered Kalinin.
Kalinin was already immensely popular with the peasants; he had been
on every Land Committee of importance since the beginning of the first
revolution, under both Miliukov and Kerensky. During his term of office
Sverdlov used Kalinin as a mediator in many difficult situations and
Lenin watched his work with interest. An old Communist explained
Kalinin’s election in these words: “He was a ‘find’ of Sverdlov’s, but
it was Lenin alone who realized that days might come when he would be
invaluable in holding Russia together.” Those days have come; they came
with the tightening of the blockade and continued with the famine.

Kalinin is a Communist, a brand of Communist differing as much from
Zinoviev or Litvinov as Borah differs from Hughes or Hughes differs
from Root; yet Hughes and Borah and Root are Republicans steeped to the
bone in party discipline, rampaging now and then, but never dreaming of
breaking away from the party. Kalinin believes in a kind of Communism,
modified enough to suit the peasants, and Zinoviev believes in a kind
of Communism that is suited, at any time, only for the advanced and
conscious city proletariat.

Kalinin was born in the little village of Volost and still calls it
his home, still has his little strip of land there. He was brought up
religiously, and understands what the Church means to a devout Russian
and never throws aspersions on it. Though not religious himself, he
tolerates religion with the grave tolerance which never offends.

His old mother is outspokenly anti-Bolshevik, yet very much likes to
have her say in the Volost Soviet. She is angry with the Bolsheviks
because they are not religious. She scolds her son and pretends that
she is not at all flattered because he is President of Russia and
obviously believes that no honor is too great for him. She is always
glad to talk to visitors about him and goes on monotonously repeating
the same ideas in the manner of the aged: “No, I am not surprised,”
she will say, “that Michael Ivanovitch has gone so far. He was always
studious, sitting up reading by candle-light after everyone else was in
bed. And he was always saying to me, ‘Don’t bother me, mother, I’ve got
lots of work to do.’ That’s the way he talks to me now when I lecture
him about religion. But he’s a good son and kind to everybody ... only
he certainly ought to think more about God.”

I don’t believe that Kalinin is ambitious; I think he would like
nothing so much as to go back to his farm and live there the simple
life of the village. When Lenin convinced him that it was his duty to
be the voice of the peasants, he accepted the post in the quiet way of
a man who has no thought of personal glory. There is nothing in his
record that would prove him to be anything but entirely unselfish, and
I have seen him when he was like one inspired. During the Kronstadt
revolt he walked into that hostile city as he might walk into the
mouth of a cannon. Yet no one dared or desired to harm him!

Kalinin is an old revolutionist. In his early youth he found himself
unable to tolerate, without protest, the tyranny of the Tsar’s
government which manifested itself in such brutal cruelty towards the
peasants. He has always been desperately poor, a real proletarian
peasant, hoping to be rid one day of his endless debts and support
himself and his family honorably and decently. He was forced through
poverty to go to the city, where he worked in factories in winter; only
the summers he spent with his family. These winters in the city, where
he was thrown in contact with city workers, gave him an understanding
of the psychology and desires of the city workers as well as of the
peasants.

He was exiled to Siberia but not to hard labor, and he spent this
enforced and only leisure of his life rounding out his education;
mixing the classics with his dreams of freedom for Russia.

Kalinin’s wife is an educated, energetic peasant, who has by her own
ability become a figure of importance in her village; capable and
strong and intelligent, she has managed her tiny farm just a little
better than her neighbors and has been elected President of the Volost
Soviet. It is a position of which she is immensely proud.

Madame Kalinin is an individualist; a modern feminist of the type of
professional woman who, in America, insists on keeping her name and
continuing her work after marriage. During the last three years she has
been so busy that she has had no time to visit Moscow. Kalinin, on his
rare vacations, has had to go to her. If she ever does visit Moscow
she will surely wear her kerchief and her sheepskin coat. No doubt
supercilious Russians are already saying that “Main Street has arrived
in Moscow,” just as we have been saying since March, 1921, that “just
folks” are in the White House.

And there is a curious similarity between President Harding and
President Kalinin; both were elected to represent the average citizen.
In Russia average citizens are peasants--a ninety per cent average.
Both presidents go about their home towns slapping fellow citizens on
the back. Both were elected as figureheads for a party and both have
already proven themselves a little more forceful and important than the
party reckoned.

If Russia continues in the path where it is now, in fifty years the
Kalinins will have become Hardings, at home in silk hats and frock
coats, as well as in sheepskins and high boots. But it is hard to
predict where Russia is going or where the world is going.

When Kalinin rides through the provinces on his propaganda train
carrying stocks of literature, a motion picture apparatus and his
official seal, with the outside “done” by some futurist artist in
garish colors and depicting a millennium in which Kalinin would not
be at home, he is “Comrade” Kalinin to the whole train; he takes his
meals with the train crew, the porters and the secretaries; all share
alike. But the remarkable thing is that when he gets back to Moscow he
makes no effort to shake the dust of the provinces from his boots, he
rather makes a point of remaining distinctly a villager. He receives
you in his Moscow office wearing the same old mended spectacles, the
same threadbare coat and, I am sure, the same heart and mind. He brings
the country along with him, invades the city with it, permeates it,
overcomes it....

This attitude is characteristic not only of Kalinin, it is
characteristic of any peasant. I have often noted the delegates at the
Congresses. They are neither shy nor bewildered, they sit solemnly in
their places in the great hall, pondering all that Lenin says of trade
or reconstruction, approving or disapproving; getting closer every day
to the idea that Russia is theirs.

It is generally believed that the line between the city workers and the
peasants is wide and irreconcilable, whereas there is actually no line
at all. The city workers are only peasants who have gone to the city
just as Kalinin did, when they could not make a living in the villages.
Russian peasants never get over being farmers. Last winter I came upon
an excellent example: Some three hundred skilled Russian mechanics
from Detroit arrived in Moscow; they were sorely needed in the Russian
factories. Without a single exception they refused to remain in the
city! And when they learned that they might be conscripted and forced
to stay they fled hurriedly in every direction. With one voice they
exclaimed, “We came home to the land!”

Naturally, the government was in despair; officials were at a loss as
to what measures could be taken to bring pressure and a sense of duty
upon the returning Russians. Orators were sent to argue with the next
group, but without success. The only solution the government found
workable was to organize them before they arrived; to see that they
brought tools from America and came with the definite idea of remaining
in the cities for a fixed period; for only the country is real to the
peasant, the city is forever an artificial, unhealthy invention.

Kalinin’s office in Moscow is not in the Kremlin. To get into the
Kremlin requires too much red tape. Therefore, while the President eats
in the Kremlin dining-room which is just an ordinary Soviet mess-room,
and sits in the Councils of the People’s Commissars, he receives his
army of callers in an ordinary office building in the heart of the
city. One needs no pass or credentials to get in; one needs simply to
walk up a flight of stairs, open a door and emerge into a large bare
reception room full of noisy peasants; here he inevitably turns up.

I have often thought that Kalinin’s office is the most curious place
in which I have ever been in my life; it has the atmosphere of a
Russian railway train deep in the heart of the provinces where every
passenger talks to every other passenger and where formality is not
just overlooked or forgotten but has simply never existed.

All day long he receives the never-ending string of peasants in
the manner of a village priest, giving consolation and advice--and
something more solid and satisfying than a prayer, for he is obligated
to make an immediate decision in each case on hand or a promise that
it shall be taken up through his office. Under no circumstances can he
appear indifferent or helpless.

I remember arriving early one morning to find about twenty peasants
ahead of me. When Kalinin came in everyone got up and there was a
sudden general stampede in his direction and a sort of clamor which
arises in any Russian household over any sort of argument. Kalinin’s
voice could be distinctly heard above the others shouting, “Comrades,
comrades, I must take you in turn.” Then, as he crossed the floor
towards his private office, a frail, middle-aged woman sitting near the
door burst into tears. I can see him now with his narrow Slav eyes, his
broad nose and rumpled hair, his work-knotted hands and faded blouse,
stopping to look through his spectacles at the woman before him,
kindly, sympathetic, puzzled....

I think that he knew even before he began to question her that hers was
one of those unavoidable, personal tragedies that are part of change
and war and revolution. She had owned a big country house, but the
peasants had taken it when they divided the land and they had allotted
her but two rooms to live in. She was humiliated, discouraged and
resentful. She cried out, forgetting that Kalinin was also a peasant,
“I can’t bear to see those creatures using my pretty things, walking
with great muddy boots in my house. My soul is in that house!”

Kalinin shook his head. He seemed willing and even anxious to help her
but he seemed more like a doctor in that moment than an executive.
Very gently he asked her to remember that two rooms were more than
most people had now in Russia, that these were difficult times; even
so they would go over the case together if she would wait her turn.
But no sooner had he closed the door than every peasant in the room
began addressing the bewildered woman. They said that she should be
ashamed of such petty complaints and accused her of asking for “special
privileges.” The widest range of arguments were put forward, from the
man who had lost a cow and considered the government responsible to the
woman whose two sons had been killed at the front.

I was not so much interested in the arguments as in the remarkably
true reflection which the scene presented of what had happened all
over Russia. I had never realized before how completely submerged the
upper classes had become; how ruthless and inevitable was the vast
upward surge of the peasantry. Here was this woman, one time _barishna_
(lady), crushed and defeated in her own village, finding the same
thought in Moscow as in Nizhni-Novgorod or Kazan or Baku.

When Kalinin called her she went forward but one could see that she had
already given up hope and would not fight any further; perhaps for the
first time the real significance of the revolution had become clear to
her.

It is hard for Americans, where a peasant population has never existed,
to realize the position of the peasants in a revolution. They are
the rock in the whirlpool. They are the great levellers, the great
destroyers as well as the great builders. In Russia they pulled down
everything about them and they were not always gentle in their wrath.
Often they ruined wilfully and needlessly. In the cities, practically
no buildings were destroyed and no treasures looted, but in the
provinces men often remembered the knout with red flames of fire and
even with death.

Because the peasants’ desires are simple, the world is apt to give
them credit for a deep, political wisdom which they do not possess and
while there is no doubt about their taking the business of government
seriously, their inexperience often leads them into grave blunders. It
was the peasants, and not the Communists, who most stubbornly opposed
recognition of the foreign debts. It was the peasants who demanded from
every government since the Tsar’s, schools, hospitals and protection
from invasion, but who always resented the most ordinary and reasonable
tax put upon them by the central authorities. Until Kalinin had
educated them they were wont to ask like children, “Aren’t we free now?
Can’t we be left alone?”

The great irony about the rising of the peasants is that they were the
first to abandon the very equality they fought for. The equalization
of property in the provinces was brought about through the workings
of peasant proletariat organizations known as Committees of the Poor,
which not only divided the estates of the rich landlords but broke
the power of the _kulaks_ (rich peasants). When the whole country was
reduced to the same status, the peasants were faced with the necessity
of a great decision. There were no longer rich peasants or proletarian
peasants but only what is known in Russia as the “middle” farmers. The
question of how to maintain such an equality now arose. The Communists
urged them to abandon the idea of private property and work the land
in communes, pointing out that any other course must inevitably lead
to the re-establishment of all the old values and a new bourgeoisie.
But the peasants were afraid of this new and untried road of Socialism.
Their demands for trade, silver money, the opening of markets and
stores, are ample evidence that they have turned back on to the old
familiar road of capitalism. If Russia had been an industrial instead
of an agricultural country, the decision of the masses might have been
quite otherwise.

Even our own presidents know the value of a lecture tour in a national
crisis. In our immediate political past, we have the memory of
presidents who took “issues” to the people, but it is hard to conceive
of a Chief Executive lecturing almost steadily for over two years. Yet
that is even a short estimate of the time actually spent by Kalinin
in going from one end of Russia to the other, shuttling in and out of
Moscow.

His meetings were more like tribunals, people’s courts, than ordinary
political assemblies. The peasants gathered at the railway stations,
in the village squares or even in the fields. They heard what he had
to say and then he heard them. They argued, complained, demanded,
compromised. Always some sort of understanding was arrived at.
This was partly due to Kalinin’s wonderful tact, his almost divine
reasonableness which never allowed an argument to develop into a
quarrel. And partly because he knows the peasant mind which is easily
touched by stories of suffering, by flattery or tears, but impossible
to move by threats. But fundamentally, the secret of Kalinin’s success
is due to the fact that he himself is a peasant and no walls of caste
can exist between him and the people.

I can illustrate this feeling of complete contact best by the story of
an actual occurrence in a remote province. It happened in what are now
known as the worst of the “requisitioning days” when the Soviets were
holding hundreds of miles of battle front and the peasants were taxed
almost beyond endurance.

One day a Lettish officer, who was also a Commissar in some Red Army
division, arrived in a remote village and rang the church bell to
summon the people. He read a list of the goods to be requisitioned.
This village had been taxed only a short time before and there were
murmurs of dissatisfaction in the crowd, murmurs which grew into roars.
Then happened one of those savage, elemental tragedies which even we
in America have never been able to eliminate from our national life.
Threats against the Commissar were followed by sudden violence; he was
literally trampled to death.

The Lettish officer had been accompanied by a young peasant soldier,
who had been a sort of orderly to him for nearly a year. In the
struggle the boy escaped. All night he lay weeping and thinking of his
dead comrade. The officer had taken an interest in him, had taught him
to read and write and imbued him with the ideals of the Red Army. The
peasant boy had been an orphan, lonely and unhappy and a victim of
brutality. He thought now of the dead man as he thought of a saint,
and by the time morning came he had resolved on a curiously brave act.
Creeping into the church he rang the bell; the crowd gathered, and he
mounted the platform and began to tell them of the dead man and the Red
Army. It was not hard for him to explain that unless the Red Army was
supported, the White forces would very soon take away by main force
the very food they now refused to their brothers. It did not take very
long to convince the crowd of peasants, and not only to convince them
but to reduce them to tears. They gave all that the peasant boy asked,
and more than that, they went solemnly in a procession to the fresh
grave of the man they had murdered, laid wreaths upon it, and paid
homage, saying: “Brother, forgive us, we could not see your heart.”

This feeling accounts for the lack of resentment towards Kalinin when
he goes into the famine area. He walks among the starving peasants,
saying, “Who lies down, dies. I know, I have hungered, I am one of you.”

In prosperous districts he uses the same tactics in overcoming
opposition to collections for the famine. Whenever he finds local
Soviet officials unwilling to part with their last surplus grain, he
mournfully exclaims, “Ah, well, I am sorry to hear this! Last week I
saw with my own eyes thousands dying of hunger. They were peasants like
ourselves and they were calling to us to help. Will you send me back
now with empty hands?” The peasants can never resist his appeal; it
comes too close to them, it is like refusing one’s father.

While the peasants were not able to bring themselves to renounce their
title to the land, they have otherwise quite whole-heartedly accepted
many broad formulas of the Socialists. They unanimously approved of
revolutionary Russia’s offer to the world in 1917 to build a peace
on the basis of “no annexations, no indemnities and the right of
self-determination.” It is a curious and sad reality that the richer
nations become and the more cultured, the less they find it possible
to comprehend such a simple recipe for justice and brotherly love.
The world was too educated or too selfish or too frightened to accept
Russia’s magnanimous offer. And how much agony and bloodshed it might
have saved!

The Russian peasants, who for so many centuries have struggled and
sacrificed themselves to possess the land, are strangely lacking in
national pride, as we know it. They are not envious of other countries.
They could not conceive of an aggressive policy. If you say to them
that America is far richer and more progressive than Russia, they will
tell you they are very glad to hear it and are glad you are happy. They
ask of the foreigner only to be let alone and not to send any more
White generals against them; they ask to be allowed to develop their
own political institutions. Obviously our only duty is to help them
through their terrible struggle against the great famine which has come
upon them like a curse through no sins of their own.

It is no miracle that President Kalinin can go freely about Russia,
for no one is thinking of assassinating him. What would it profit
enemies of Soviet Russia to kill a peasant like Kalinin? Are there not
a million Kalinins? To sweep the Kalinins out of Russian political life
would be like sweeping back the sea. To destroy the Soviets would be
to destroy Russia. Even Sir Paul Dukes, of the British Secret Service,
agrees that Soviets are the natural offspring of the revolution,
conceived years ago under the Tsardom. Michael Ivanovitch Kalinin
reflects the new Russia more faithfully than any other Government
official.




MADAME ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
AND THE
WOMAN’S MOVEMENT


[Illustration: KOLLONTAI]




MADAME ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
AND THE
WOMAN’S MOVEMENT


Madame Alexandra Kollontai believes that everything which exalts is
good; being a feminist, she exalts women. She tells women that they are
capable of a new freedom, beautiful and unexampled. She is so carried
away by her enthusiasm that she is unmindful of how easily wings are
broken in this age of steel. But if her inspiration, which aims to
lift women to the skies, lifts them only from their knees to their
feet, there will be nothing to regret. Civilization, in its snail-like
progress, is only stirred to move its occasional inch by the burning
desire of those who will to move it a mile. And when faith is pure
enough it does not demand realization.

Kollontai is like a sculptor working on some heroic figure of woman and
always wondering a little why the slim, inspired, unmaternal figure of
her dreams is forever melting back into a heavy, earthy figure of Eve.

It often happens that a character is best portrayed by conversations
which show the manner of mind. In this chapter I have quoted Madame
Kollontai at some length because she is the only articulate voice of
the new order for women which has been so greatly misunderstood outside
of Russia; that order which claims that by consecrating oneself to the
state one lives truer to oneself and to others.

As champion of her sex, she cries to the women of Russia: “Cast off
your chains! Do not be slaves to religion, to marriage, to children.
Break these old ties, the state is your home, the world is your
country!”

And who are the women she thus extolls? They are the women of the
factories and the fields; the women who sweep the streets, who scrub,
who carry heavy burdens, who plow and weave and drudge. Will they be
able to follow her to such heights? By our logic, no, but Kollontai
preaches a new logic for Russia.

Besides, we must consider just what she means by “casting off chains.”
I have heard her say all this another way and it did not sound so lofty
or impossible. To an individualist, it did not even sound attractive.
Last summer she admonished a women’s congress in this manner: “We must
build a new society in which women are not expected to drudge all day
in kitchens. We must have, in Russia, community restaurants, central
kitchens, central laundries--institutions which leave the working woman
free to devote her evenings to instructive reading or recreation. Only
by breaking the domestic yoke will we give women a chance to live a
richer, happier and more complete life.”

The material which Kollontai is so passionately attempting to mould
is the peasant mind. It seems to me that peasant women are naturally
slow-moving and stolidly honest and will accept only as much of
Kollontai’s philosophy as they find compatible with or necessary to the
immediate situation; not because they are lacking in spirituality, for
they are capable of deep religious fervor, but simply because much of
it would be inharmonious and artificial to their normal development. At
present her mission is to awaken them so that they may build a truth of
their own which need by no means be a lesser truth than Kollontai’s.
If she attempts to make them swallow her formula intact she will
certainly fail. If she compromises as Lenin compromises and as Kalinin
does, she will perform for Russia a never-to-be-forgotten task. To-day
everything has been melted down in the crucible of the revolution. The
only banner-bearer who counts is the one who will give to the great
mass of those emerging into the new day the broad fundamental things of
life.

Madame Kollontai is the only woman who has ever been a member of the
Russian Cabinet. She puts forth the argument that women have more
conscience than men and therefore do not attempt to obtain offices
which they are not fitted for by previous training, and that this is
the reason woman’s influence is so slight in Russia to-day. But her
history refutes her theory. She herself was particularly fitted for the
position of Minister of Welfare. Her record was splendid. She lost her
post because she was a woman and allowed her love for her husband to
interfere with her political judgment.

Early in 1918, Madame Kollontai, who was the widow of a Tsarist
officer, married Fedore Dubenko, the picturesque leader of the
turbulent Kronstadt sailors. Dubenko is a handsome, daring young man,
some years her junior. Shortly after the wedding Dubenko was arrested.
He had entrusted certain ships under his command to officers of the old
régime who had pretended loyalty to the Soviets, but who had turned
the ships over to the Germans without a struggle. Certainly Dubenko
had no intention of betraying the revolution, he was merely trying to
make use of skilled officers, of whom there was a pressing dearth.
Nevertheless, he was held responsible.

While he was in prison awaiting trial, Kollontai made rather violent
and conspicuous protests both publicly and privately. As a result she
was removed from office. Revolutionists have no tolerance for romance
among their leaders during critical moments; they place the revolution
far above personal relationship. From the beginning they looked with
disapproving eyes upon Kollontai’s infatuation for Dubenko.

When Dubenko was released, Kollontai went abroad and spent some months
in Sweden. On her return she threw herself into a new work--that of
educating her own sex to take an active part in politics.

Rightly speaking, there never was a woman’s movement in Russia until
after the revolution. Equal suffrage came first and political education
afterwards. This condition appears particularly curious when one
recalls that, during some years before the revolution, even more
women than men were sent to Siberia for plots against the Tsar’s
government. Yet when the revolution came women sank mysteriously into
the background. Russians explain this by various theories. One was that
Russian women possess the fervor necessary to martyrs, but little of
the balance needed for practical reconstructive work. Personally, I
think it is entirely a matter of experience and education, for it is
evident that women enter politics everywhere with great hesitancy. Even
in America where equal suffrage has been a fact in some states for many
years, we have only one or two women to point to as having attained
political prominence.

Madame Kollontai possesses much charm. She is slim and pretty and
vivacious. With a little too much the manner of a public speaker she
talks so easily on any subject, even to reporters, that it almost gives
an impression of insincerity. Her open mind is in reality an evidence
of the kind of sincerity which has no fear of publicity. She likes
Americans and knows more about this country than most Russians. But she
has not always known. Some years ago, when lecturing here, she happened
to be in Paterson during the great strike there. When she saw the
workers marching through the streets, she rushed into a room full of
people and exclaimed: “A revolution has begun!” Last year, in speaking
of America, she said it was the country least agitated by revolutionary
thought.

Like all enthusiastic Communists, she follows Lenin’s lead in striving
to westernize Russia. One day she very greatly surprised me by saying,
“Why don’t you write a series of articles about America? Write for
Russia about America as you now write for America about Russia.”

“What good will it do?” I asked.

“A great deal,” she replied. “It is time Russia got acquainted with
America. Because of the old censorship we never learned the value of
reporters. And now that we are through forever with isolation, except
when it is forced upon us, we ought to acquaint ourselves thoroughly
with other countries. The women ought to know, for example, how
American women got suffrage and what part women take in public affairs.
We ought to know the status of the immigrants and of the Negroes, how
you solve your unemployment problems, the status of farmers, of city
workers, the percentage of wealth controlled by rich people. We ought
to know about your schools and colleges. It ought to be explained to
us just what the real difference is between the Republican and the
Democratic Party and how much influence the Socialist Party has. Yes,
there are a thousand things we ought to know.”

I did not write the articles, but in explaining American ideas and
institutions to Kollontai it somehow placed my country in a curious
new light in my own eyes. I began to realize that things which have
grown quite ordinary and familiar to us may appear entirely absurd
and unreasonable to foreigners. Kollontai said that she hoped Russia
would some day have reporters in America cabling home as busily as
our reporters do from Russia. Russians, she thought, have in so many
ways remained ridiculously provincial in spite of their ideas on
internationalism.

Her feminist heart was deeply touched when I told her about a group
of American women who had paraded on Fifth Avenue carrying signs of
protest against the blockade. Tears came to her eyes. “You can’t
imagine,” she said, “how much courage such a little act of sympathy
gives us. What a pity that the story of those women is not known in
Russia and not read by every peasant mother.”

She was openly indignant about the stories circulated abroad that
Russian women were “_nationalized_” When we first discussed this rumor
she refused to believe that anybody in America could have seriously
considered it, but when I explained about the Overman Committee and
other official and semi-official affairs, she flew into a rage against
the narrowness and prejudices of some of our statesmen. She claimed
that the simplest peasant would not believe such indecent lies against
American women. “Your senators,” she said, “could very well have
acquainted themselves with the real facts about our women, who have
always taken such a glorious part in every movement for emancipation.

“American men,” continued Madame Kollontai, “are known the world over
as kind and chivalrous. But chivalry can be a little old-fashioned in
this century. Certainly, there is much to criticize and much to improve
in our new struggling republic. But have you ever thought how absurd it
was that the very much pampered American woman was forced to picket the
White House as part of a campaign for equal suffrage? And that for such
acts she was sent to prison? It is more absurd also when you remember
that at that very moment a Southern gentleman sat at the White House
as President. Naturally, such things appear inconsistent to us but
we manage to see them in the right proportion. We know that in spite
of these inconsistencies, Americans are a generous people, at heart
friendly to Russia and the world.”

Another time she said, “When our revolution came we obtained equality
for everybody who was willing to work. Don’t fail to comprehend what a
stride that was! We didn’t have to have a civil war to free the Tartars
or the Turko-men as you did to free the Negro, and it certainly never
was in anybody’s mind, on any side, to disenfranchise Russian women,
much less to nationalize them.”

Nevertheless, Madame Kollontai finds even a revolutionary government
can be run too largely by men. If it does nothing worse it has a very
bad habit of overlooking women. But it cannot overlook them for long
while Madame Kollontai is about, for she never fails to appear at the
important congresses to remind the delegates of their sins; to goad
them into discussions of women and women’s problems.

“Women’s congresses,” she told me, “are absolutely necessary in the
present state of development. And these congresses are not confined
by any means to politics. I have been bringing peasant women to
Moscow from all over Russia and we have told them how to take care of
babies and how to prevent disease. We have also instructed them in
local, national and international politics. A woman who has gone to
Moscow from some remote village is more or less of a personality when
she returns and you can be sure that her journey is an event to the
whole village. She always goes back well supplied with literature and
educational posters. She, naturally, stimulates an interest in the
whole community in politics and hygiene, especially among the women.
Such congresses are the only ones I know that have a far-reaching
effect.”

“I have been laughed at,” she said, “because so far I have brought here
only a few women from the harems of Turkestan. These women have thrown
aside their veils. Everybody stares at them, they are a curiosity
which gives the congresses a theatrical atmosphere. Yet all pioneering
work is theatrical. It was distinctly theatrical when the audiences
used to throw eggs at your pioneer suffragists.... How else would we
get in touch with Mohammedan women except through women?” How else,
indeed? Other Russian educators have answered the question this way:
Through Mohammedan men. It was by educating the Tartar men that the
Tartar women became free. The Tartars are mostly all Mohammedans but
their women no longer wear veils. Whereas the brave women Kollontai has
induced to come to her congresses have been divorced by their husbands
and have lost their homes and children.

Madame Kollontai’s political judgment, even from the standpoint of an
orthodox Communist, is often very bad. She has unlimited courage and
on several occasions has openly opposed Lenin. As for Lenin, he has
crushed her with his usual unruffled frankness. Yet in spite of her
fiery enthusiasm she understands “party discipline” and takes defeat
like a good soldier. If she had left the revolution four months after
it began she could have rested forever on her laurels. She seized those
rosy first moments of elation, just after the masses had captured the
state, to incorporate into the Constitution laws for women which are
far-reaching and unprecedented. And the Soviets are very proud of these
laws which already have around them the halo of all things connected
with the Constitution. It is almost impossible that that institution
which came to life through her enthusiasm and determination will ever
cease to be. The laws I refer to are particularly those in regard to
expectant mothers, orphans, illegitimate children and the state care of
maternity hospitals, known as Palaces of Motherhood.

Madame Kollontai is about fifty years of age and appears much younger.
She has dark brown hair and blue eyes and could easily be taken for
an American. She is one of the few women Communists who cares about
her appearance. By that I do not mean that she enjoys any luxury. She
lives in one room in a Soviet hotel. But she is pretty and knows how to
wear her clothes. Once I complimented her on a smart little fur toque
she was wearing. She laughed and said, “Yes, one must learn tricks
in Russia, so I have made my hat out of the tail of my coat which is
already five years old.”

She comes from well-to-do middle-class parents and her first husband
while not rich was, as an officer of the old régime, able to afford
her a good deal of comfort. They had one child, a son. As a young
girl Kollontai went to the best schools and after her marriage never
ceased to study. She is an unusually gifted linguist, speaking eleven
languages and often acting as official interpreter at the Soviet, as
well as the International Congresses.

A curiously touching and disillusioning phase of the revolution was
the Soviet Government’s sincere attempt to wipe out prostitution from
the young republic. In this fight Kollontai took and still takes a
leading part. Way back in March, 1917, the infamous Yellow Tickets
were destroyed. On the surface it appeared then as if the whole idea
of traffic in women had forever ended. But even after the economic
pressure was removed the curse returned. Angelica Balabonova, one of
the most loved and honored of the women revolutionists as well as one
of the most intellectual, wrote a stinging denunciation of what she
called the “Soviet Barishnas.” (Translated, Soviet Ladies.) The term
soon came to be the most insulting phrase in the Russian language. It
came to mean a woman who, in spite of everything, insisted on a life of
shame.

So disgraceful do the Soviets regard this phase of Russian life that
indignant citizens formed committees and raids took place. Women were
arrested and thrown into concentration camps. And still the evil
continued. At last the Central Government took the problem in hand,
as did the Central Organ of the Communist Party. Kollontai, writing on
this matter, concludes: “The Women’s Sections show lively and active
interest in this matter since prostitution is a scourge which falls
chiefly upon the women of the working class. This is our task, the task
of the Women’s Sections, to begin a general propaganda concerned with
questions connected with prostitution, since it is in our interest to
develop the revolution in the domain of the family and to stabilize
relations between the sexes.”

The government report is illuminating and shows above all else that the
Soviet officials are not afraid to face facts, which is the first and
best weapon of defense.

The Inter-departmental Commission makes the statement that, in Soviet
Russia, prostitution appears in two forms:

1. In the form of professional prostitution.

2. In the form of secret earnings.

The first form is very slightly developed and is of slight extent.
In Petrograd, for example, where raids were undertaken against
prostitutes, this mode of combating prostitution practically
yielded no results. The second form, although highly developed in
other countries, also assumes a great variety of forms in Russia.
Prostitution is practised by Soviet employees, in order to obtain for
the sale of caresses, boots that go up to the knees; prostitution is
resorted to by mothers of families, working women, peasant women,
who are out after flour for their children and sell their bodies to
the manager of the rations division in order to obtain from him a
full bag of the precious flour. Sometimes the girls in the Offices
associate with their male superiors, not for manifestly material
gain, for rations, shoes, etc., but in the hope of advancement in
office. And there is an additional form of prostitution--“careerist
prostitution”--which is also based in the last analysis on material
gain.

The Commission made this recommendation after many hot debates: “All
persons wandering in the streets and deserting their work should be
assigned to the Commissariat of Social Welfare and thus sent out,
in accordance with general fundamental considerations, either to
the Sections for the Distribution of Labor Power of the People’s
Commissariat of Labor, or to courses, sanatoria, hospitals, and only
after a repeated desertion by a prostitute, in other words, after a
malicious effort to desert, should the individual be subjected to
forced labor. There is no special culpability attached to prostitutes.
They are in no way to be segregated from the other bodies of deserters
from work. This is a revolutionary and important step, worthy of the
first Workers’ Republic of the world.”

That such a liberal attitude is really effective is proven by the
fact that in Soviet Russia to-day there is less prostitution than
anywhere else in the world. Under the Tsar, Russia was known as the
most disgraceful country in this respect. And Kollontai says, “There is
no doubt that the poor, insufficient pay for female labor continues,
in Soviet Russia, to serve as a chief factor. Under the law the
earnings of men and women are equal, but the great majority of women
are unskilled laborers. It resolves itself into a question of how to
make female labor skilled labor. And the second case is the political
backwardness of women. It is not the woman who is inspired and carried
away by the idea of the revolution and the desire to aid reconstruction
who falls into this pool of degradation.”

In one of her pamphlets, Madame Kollontai declaims with pride: “By
virtue of the decree of December 18, 1917, divorce has ceased to be a
luxury accessible only to the rich.” It has been interesting to watch
the outcome of this decree through four years. Among the peasants
divorce was practically unknown and still remains so. The city workers
have not availed themselves of this “luxury” to any considerable
degree. Whether Kollontai likes it or not, the only people who will
continue to take advantage of such freedom will be the idle and the
intellectuals. Divorces have little attraction for simple workers.
Labor and poverty bring husband and wife closer to one another “for
better or for worse.”

Periodically, Kollontai attacks family life and claims that it is the
only institution that Communists are afraid to reform. One needs only
to look about at the leaders of the movement to wonder why they should
be concerned in reforming it. Lenin leads a distinctly normal family
life, as do Trotsky and Kalinin. The wives of these Commissars work
and are interesting, well-known personalities. Kollontai herself is
married. Her inconsistencies are her most feminine trait as well as one
of her most alluring characteristics.




LEON TROTSKY, SOVIET WAR LORD


[Illustration: TROTSKY]




LEON TROTSKY, SOVIET WAR LORD


Minister of War, Leon Trotsky, has no prototype in history. Therefore,
he cannot be compared, he can only be contrasted. He is without
question the most dramatic character produced during the whole sweep
of the Russian revolution and its only great organizer. No man will
overshadow his eminence in the history of the revolution except Lenin.
They will remain the two most distinguished personalities. They are
complementary figures. Lenin represents thought; Trotsky represents
action. Trotsky’s genius might have burned itself out in some wild
enthusiasm or some consuming rage if it had not been for the cooling
influence of Lenin. On the other hand, Lenin’s plans, no matter how
carefully thought out, could not have materialized without the solid
backing of Trotsky’s bayonets.

Outside of Russia we are always hearing rumors of the conflict of these
two personalities. We imagine Trotsky continually conspiring to usurp
the place of Lenin; nothing could be further from the truth. Trotsky
would consider the elimination of Lenin, through any cause, as the
greatest calamity. He would not only think Russia had lost her wisest
leader, but he would consider himself lost. He touched the very highest
peak of revolutionary fervor when he made his famous speech in Moscow
after Lenin had been shot and terribly wounded by an assassin and when
small hope of recovery was entertained. “We will him to live and he
will live!” he cried to an audience which rose to its feet in a wave of
irrepressible emotion.

It was this speech which lighted the torch of the Red Terror as a
back-fire against the White Terror, already so far under way that the
very life of the revolution was at stake. But it is well for Trotsky
and for the revolution that Trotsky did not direct this terror; he was
too passionate and too thorough a soul to have been entrusted with such
a conflagration.

Trotsky is not a diplomat. He was not successful as Foreign Minister.
Diplomacy is too cut and dried to be harmonious with his talents. To be
a good diplomat one must be contained and calculating and unemotional,
content with the material on hand; one cannot be an originator. Trotsky
is essentially an originator. It was not his destiny to accept the
ready-made. It was his destiny to tear Russia out of old ruts and send
her bleeding but inspired down new ways; it was his destiny to make war
on Russian inertia, which is the curse of Russia and the whole East.

In Trotsky we discern something distinctly elemental. He looks like a
fighter, with his burning eyes and sharp decisive way of speaking, his
gestures, his quick regular gait. When he is calm he does not appear
to be himself. But even in ordinary conversation he bestirs himself,
he throws himself headlong into every discussion, and the listener is
so carried away that he remembers it all afterward with astonishment.
The storm Trotsky started in Russia, while it did not rage without
wreckage, at least had the effect of waking up a nation out of its
medieval slumber. Wherever he goes he stirs people, either individually
or collectively. No one is neutral about him, Trotsky is either loved
or despised.

In the Red Army, he has all the energetic young men of the nation
assembled and under his influence. He has charge of their education.
The majority have learned to read and write in his army schools. The
way they express it is that he has given them “new eyes.”

Trotsky is the idol of the Red Army. His amazing physical vigor
combined with a very un-Russian orderliness, his personal bravery and
reckless defiance of custom, make their former leaders appear dull and
backward. He creates in his pupils a deep dissatisfaction for all that
is old and outworn. These young men come from the villages, from every
province in Russia. When they go back home they look at the village
with disapproval, they want to change everything. In a little while,
because of their superior knowledge they become men of importance,
leading their local Soviets and attending the Congresses in Moscow.

If Trotsky can not understand the little ridiculous points of
diplomatic etiquette, the cunning and sensitiveness which mark a good
diplomat, he thoroughly comprehends how to take advantage of every
modern appliance and every modern method of running the War Office.
No War Office under any Tsar could boast such order as Trotsky’s.
Everything goes like clock-work, you are aware of energy and
efficiency; it has the hum of a high-power engine.

The young aides in Trotsky’s office are as smart as in the French War
Office. He has a way of attracting venturesome youth from everywhere.
His pet school, which is the Military Academy in Moscow, where the
General Staff men are trained, is full of these soldiers-of-fortune.
I was invited to an entertainment there one evening by a young
Lieutenant-Colonel. This man was the son of a rich Swedish banker and
he was but twenty-six years old. He introduced me to a number of other
foreigners, young men like himself, who had risen to high ranks through
many desperate campaigns. “We have every nation represented here but
America,” said a Bulgarian. I do not know whether these men were
Communists or how loyal they felt to that cause, but they were willing
to follow Trotsky to their graves.

A visit to this academy gives one quite a clear idea of how the former
classes in Russian society are amalgamating under the new order. It
is full of the sons of the bourgeoisie. And the professors are almost
without exception the old professors who taught in these schools under
the Tsar. Men like Brusilov, who is a Russian patriot and would defend
his government under any régime against outsiders, have enormous
prestige. As the White Generals went down to defeat one after the
other, the young men even of conservative parents came to believe that
if they could not swallow the Communist formulas whole, they could,
at least, remain loyal Russians. And once in the military schools,
they fell under the influence of revolutionary soldiers. Being young
and full of Slavic idealism, they often capitulated and in such cases
were rapidly promoted. In the Kronstadt day the young men of this type
were more concerned than any of the others, perhaps because if the Red
Army were to be defeated, they would be the first to be killed by the
opposition. When General Brusilov’s only son was captured in Siberia
by the White Forces, he was executed simply because he was the son of
Brusilov.

Trotsky believes in peace. He has told me this almost every time I
talked with him, but he is, nevertheless, an apostle of force. “The
happiest moment of my life,” he said, “was when I thought I could turn
the Red Army into a Labor Army to reconstruct Russia.” Trotsky would
probably have been very successful with his Labor Army, provided he
could have kept it really an army, with army rules and discipline. An
army is Trotsky’s perfect medium for work. He likes a Labor Army better
than a fighting army because it makes him happier to build than to
destroy. But all his organizing genius goes for nothing if he cannot
have order and discipline.

About three years ago Lenin appointed Trotsky Minister of Railways in
addition to his post as War Minister. Trotsky took a trip over the
country and found transportation generally smashed and the railway
employees as lacking in morale as he had once found the Russian
soldiers. He immediately began to re-build transportation with every
atom of his strength. If a train was not on time, there had to be a
reason given, which had ceased to be done in those days. In fact, no
one was ever deeply concerned about exact arrivals and departures
of trains under any régime. The Trans-Siberian Railway was the only
efficient road which ever operated in Russia. But Trotsky began to make
such an everlasting row about these matters that the railway men were
aghast. There had always been graft and laziness and indifference,
they had no doubt that there always would be, even under government
control. Trotsky hauled them up, threatened them with imprisonment and
even with death. The result was that the unions were so roused that
they threatened a general strike. The situation grew worse and worse.
Finally Lenin, to avert a national crisis, dismissed Trotsky and wrote
an open letter to the unions about it and Trotsky showed his real
fineness of character by accepting his defeat in silence. And yet if
he had been in charge of the roads they would certainly not be in the
condition that they now are and many thousands of lives in the famine
area would have been saved.

Trotsky cannot bear Russian slothfulness and he is constantly irritated
by Russian indifference to sanitation. He insists on the utmost
fastidiousness and neatness for all who work with him. An amusing
scandal took place in Moscow at the time of one of the International
Conventions. Trotsky had instructed a Red Army physician to inspect
the hotel in which the foreign delegates were to stay and report if
it was in order. The physician merely went down to the building and
finding a fine grand piano there, whiled his time away playing and
let the inspection go. In due course of time the delegates arrived
and the first night they were all routed out of bed by insects. This
came to the ears of Trotsky and he was so furiously angry that he had
the doctor arrested and announced that he would have him shot. The
delegates flew around in a fine state of excitement with a petition
which they all signed begging Trotsky to spare the physician’s life.
As a matter of fact Trotsky would not have shot him, but his threats
are reminiscent of the day of Tsar Peter who found it necessary to
shoot a number of nobles before the others would shorten their long
coats as he had ordered by royal decree.

Trotsky is a student of the French Revolution. He lived a long time in
France and he loves France, in spite of its hostility to Soviet Russia.
Some of his closest friends are Frenchmen who knew him in Paris and who
followed him to Russia and work with him there. He never forgets his
friends and has a real capacity for permanent friendships. Russians
are, as a rule, very changeable in their personal relationships but one
can depend on Trotsky.

As an orator he reminds one much more of the French revolutionary
orators. Russians speak more slowly and more logically and with less
fire. Trotsky stirs his audiences by his own force and by striking
phrases. There were times when these splendid literary phrases
infuriated Lenin; from the public platform he once called Trotsky a
“phrase-maker.” But this was way back in the Smolny days when Trotsky
was more untamed than he is now, and before Lenin realized that
Trotsky would be his most able assistant.

While Trotsky was in America he was the editor of a Russian newspaper
and apparently caught the American feeling for on-the-minute news.
He is the easiest official to interview in Moscow and entirely the
most satisfactory, because he is free from the general reticence and
distrust of the press which most of the Commissars have. I once wrote
him a note saying that I was writing a story about the Red Army and
would like some material. The very same day he sent me down a great
sack of copy. There were many Red Army magazines and newspapers that I
had never heard of. There were handbooks and statistics and maps and,
besides all that, there was a permission to go to any of the fronts and
to attend any of the lectures at the various schools.

One of the most important departments of the Red Army is that known
as the Political-Cultural. A report is made daily by this Department
concerning the morale of the soldiers and the relation between the army
and the civilian population. This Department conducts the classes in
reading and writing and elementary technical training and vocational
training; the work is carried on even in fighting days and right up to
the front.

The soldiers are also taught to be interested in physical culture
and have been learning games like Rugby. There was a good deal of
excitement in the Red Army when a Russian team beat a team composed of
foreign delegates to the Third Congress of the International in Moscow.

Soldiers are urged to attend the Art Galleries and the theatres. Art
exhibitions and lectures on art take place in the soldiers’ clubs. Here
also they often build and act their own plays; most of these are about
the revolution and will no doubt gradually settle down into national
patriotic epics.

It is hard to know whether Trotsky will ever have another chance to
experiment as he would like with his Labor Army, but that is his
ambition. Lenin’s opinion is that it is absolutely an experiment which
can work out only if the men themselves are willing to submit to this
plan for the good of Russia. Men never do efficient work if they do not
want to, Lenin believes. Trotsky answers this argument by saying, “But
we have the advantage over the rest of the world in that respect; we
can try any schemes we please and if they do not work, we can change
our minds.”

His plan for a Labor Army I have taken from notes and I quote Trotsky’s
exact words:

“Russia is an industrially undeveloped country; and our economic
apparatus is ruined by six years of war and revolution. We must be able
to concentrate labor upon certain emergency tasks--where it is most
necessary. For example, the Ural mining district needs fifty thousand
skilled workers, two hundred thousand semi-skilled and two hundred
thousand laborers. We should be able to send these workers where they
are most needed; of course, this would be done in co-operation and
after consultation with the Unions and Shop Committees.”

His idea of maintaining the regular fighting force is to have it on a
very much smaller scale. “Russia is now being redistricted. The new
districts will be ordered according to their economic character, as
economic units. Each district will be the headquarters of a division
whose task is to mobilize the population not only for the army but for
the work.

“The army divisions on the frontiers are to be constantly renewed. Each
will remain on duty for three or four months, and then be sent home to
work. In this way the whole male population will be trained to arms,
each knowing his place in his regiment, and also his proper work.”

In the brief period before the Polish offensive, the Labor Army had
been started full blast and at that time it had the approval of the
army and the unions. Perhaps in another half year it will again be
working. It is interesting to know how they managed. I will give one
example. In six weeks the Labor Army built the great steel bridge over
the Kam River, blown up by Kolchak. Thus the direct route to Siberia
was restored. They restored the railway at Yamburg. They cut millions
of feet of fire-wood for the cities. They were making such progress
that if the Polish offensive had never taken place, the cities would
actually have been provisioned and provided with wood before the first
snow of that year.

One can make vast speculation about Trotsky. He is the sort of man
who, if he is given full power in a great plan of this kind, will work
miracles, but if he is hampered by petty labor disputes and a thousand
petty jealousies, will fail utterly. I always have believed that if he
had been interested in finance instead of social revolution he would
now be our greatest banker. If he had been interested in the war from
the Allied standpoint he would have been a great military hero.

Trotsky was born in 1877. He is the son of a colonist of Jewish faith
from the government of Kherson near Elizabethgrad. He was indicted in
a judicial investigation of the Workman’s Syndicate of South Russia in
1898 and sentenced to Siberia for four years. He settled in the city
of Verkholensk and later escaped. He became president of the Soviet
of Workmen’s Deputies in Petrograd in 1905. For activities in that
organization he was sent again into exile to Tobolsk and again escaped.
After that he lived in Paris and Vienna and later in the United States.
He returned to Russia after the beginning of the revolution. Trotsky
has a wife and two children. His wife is young and excessively good
looking and is interested in revolutionary activities. Trotsky, like
Lenin, is very proud of his wife.

Trotsky might never have written his name as indelibly as he has on
the page of history if it had not been for the peculiar circumstances
of the war. His heroic strivings might have been spent aimlessly, if
chance had not thrust into his hands the task of rebuilding an army.
And no man can build a great army out of a rabble and not be famous.
Many points were in his favor beside circumstance. He might not have
found even his genius or his vitality enough to meet world opposition
without the use of trained officers, men who were willing to submerge
their own opinions for the moment in order to save Russia. A day will
come perhaps when General Brusilov’s words will be known to all Russian
school children as the words of Patrick Henry are known to American
children. This was his advice to all classes of Russians during
intervention and the blockade:

“When a steamer on the boundless ocean is in danger, it is not a time
for starting quarrels as to this principle or that, or to seek the
numerous causes for the fact that our ship of state may have merged
into an unfavorable sea, but it is our duty to exert immediately all
our thoughts and forces to save the vessel from destruction and bring
her back to port with the smallest possible loss.”

I saw Trotsky again this summer (the summer of 1922) and asked him what
he had done about reducing the army. Of course, because of the new
economic policy, a Labor Army was out of the question. He told me that
he had reduced the army from 5,300,000 to 800,000, including the navy.
A greater reduction than that, he said, was impossible.

“We stand always ready to reduce our army,” said Trotsky, “even to
liquidating it fully, whenever our closest and our farthest neighbors
accept a program of disarmament. In January we offered disarmament.
Europe refused even the suggestion. Later we asked our close neighbors,
with the same result. If America would only take the initiative in this
respect,” he shrugged and smiled, “well, we would support her with our
whole heart.”




ENVER PASHA

AND THE

MOHAMMEDANS


[Illustration: ENVER PASHA]




ENVER PASHA

AND THE

MOHAMMEDANS


No man I ever met lives so completely in the immediate moment as Enver
Pasha; the past he puts behind him, the future he leaves to Allah. His
only hero is Napoleon. In Moscow he was the _avant coureur_ of the new
understanding between Russia and the Mohammedan world, which means
Turkey, Afghanistan, Persia, Bokhara and enough of India to shake the
British Empire.

Any man who has brains and gives all his being to the task in hand is
bound to possess personality and power and, very likely, charm. Enver
Pasha certainly has charm, in spite of his very obvious opportunism,
and the cruelty and lack of conscience which a fatalistic belief
inspires. Interested in himself above all things, he is a curious
contrast to those men who are trying to blot out individualism and make
the state all-important.

As far as there was any social life in Moscow, Enver was, for the
nonce, the social lion. Some future historian will probably call him
the Don Juan of the revolution, though it is only fair to say that
he resisted this alluring doom with an uncomplimentary coldness; he
was too absorbed in politics to be interested in social conquest. The
real reason for the shower of attention bestowed on him by the ladies
of Moscow was the natural reaction of those ladies to a life almost
unendurably monotonous and difficult.

There was something very pitiful about the way actresses smiled at
Enver across the footlights and unearthed old pictures of him in
his elaborate War Minister regalia, when he still wore the “Kaiser”
moustache, the gold braid and numerous medals. One evening we went to
the dressing room of a prima donna where we were invited for tea during
an intermission. Enver sat stiffly in his chair, refusing to talk, but
his uncle, Halil Pasha, the former Commander of the Mesopotamian and
Caucasian fronts, caused much merriment by fighting a sham duel with
wooden swords. His opponent was a singer dressed as a medieval knight.

Besides the actresses several of the old aristocracy were gracious to
Enver and even the pretty wife of a Commissar attached to the Foreign
Office wrote him what would have been considered an intriguing note, in
another time and place. She offered to teach him Russian if he would
teach her French and he replied curtly that he was not a “professor.”

But Enver was not always over-serious and unbending. In a certain small
circle of friends he was quite otherwise. And circumstances, which so
largely decide our destinies, gave me an opportunity to know him as
well as one alien to his religion could know him. He was allotted by
the Foreign Office quarters in the little palace where I was living.
For half a year I saw him every day, sat next to him at table and
occasionally we went to the theatres and the Turkish Embassy. During
that time Enver told me a great deal about his life and his ambitions.

He had known my husband in Constantinople, and was away from Moscow at
the time of my husband’s death. As soon as he returned he called on me,
bringing Halil and the Turkish Ambassador, Ali Fued Pasha, with him.
All three were extremely kind and sympathetic. From that moment until I
left Moscow the Turks did everything possible to make life less tragic
for me, and I gained an insight into the Turkish character which I had
never imagined. The Turks have a peculiar capacity for friendship. And
friendship, once given, has no bournes; a friend is a friend through
everything--sorrow, dishonor, poverty, as well as wealth and success.
An enemy, on the other hand, is beyond all consideration; he is spared
nothing, forgiven nothing.

Enver has the personal vanity of the enthusiast and he imagines that
everything he does he does well. The only way to cope with his conceit
is to be brutally frank. I discovered early in our acquaintance that
frankness by no means offends him. One of Enver’s nicest qualities is
that he likes to discover his faults as well as his virtues; he is
eager to improve himself.

He has a passion for making pencil sketches of people he meets and
always goes about with a pencil and a pad of paper in his pocket. In
the house where we lived he made sketches of all the guests and all
the servants. He made, in all, six very uninteresting portraits of me.
One morning when the tea was more tasteless than ever and the bread
especially sour and muddy so that I felt I could not manage to eat a
single bite, I could not help feeling unpleasantly resentful to see
Enver busy with his sketches and full of enthusiasm. And while I sat
staring at the terrible meal, he proceeded to make a life-size portrait
of me which was incredibly bad. I remember that I wondered where on
earth he ever got such a large piece of paper in Russia. When he had
finished the sketch he signed his name with a flourish and presented it
to me. I took it but said nothing. Enver has the curiosity of a child,
and, after a long silence, he asked me if it was possible that I did
not really like it. I said that I thought he had no talent for drawing.
He became suddenly quite angry and said in a low voice, “But do you
realize I have signed my name to it?”

“Your name doesn’t mean anything on a picture,” I explained. “If it was
an order for an execution or an advance it would be another matter. You
can’t make a good drawing just by signing your name to it”

He frowned and then grew cordial as suddenly as he had grown angry.
He rose and bowed to me in a most courtly way. “You can’t imagine,”
he said, “how pleasing arrogance is to me.” His three dominating
characteristics being bravery, hauteur and recklessness, he imagined
that these motives also guided the actions of his friends.

Enver never seemed to be able to loaf in the easy manner of most
Orientals. His mental and physical vitality is more like that of an
enthusiastic and healthy American. Every morning he rose early to go
for a long walk, he read a great deal, took at least three lessons in
some foreign language every week and was constantly writing articles
for Turkish papers which he printed on a hand press in his own room,
and he held almost daily conferences either with the Russians or the
Mohammedans. He does not drink or smoke and is devoutly religious.

He likes any discussion which reveals another person’s deepest
emotions. If he cannot rouse one any other way he does so by some
antagonistic remark which often he does not mean at all. For example,
he is extremely liberal in his opinions about women and does not think
they should be excluded from political life. Nevertheless, he said to
a young actress at tea one afternoon in my apartment, when they were
talking about woman suffrage, that she would be better off in a harem.
Being an ardent feminist, she rose and fairly shouted at him: “Enver
Pasha, you may be a great man in the East, but just listen to me! I am
one of the first actresses of my profession. In my world it is every
bit as great and important for me to remain an actress as it is for you
in your world to remain a warrior or a diplomat.”

Enver took his scolding in very good humor. Afterwards he told me that
he had never liked this actress before. “Independence is a great thing
in women. Our women lack it and many of them are just puppets on this
account.”

He was always extremely interested in American ideas and American
opinions. He said he could never understand why Americans were so
sentimental about Armenians. “Do they imagine that Armenians never kill
Turks? That is indeed irony.”

At the table he used to ask Mr. Vanderlip questions about his proposed
Kamchatka concessions. Vanderlip, like many Californians, is rather
violently anti-Japanese. His idea of having a naval base at Kamchatka
amused Enver. He said Vanderlip was killing two birds with one stone,
that he wished to manœuver the American Government into a war with
Japan, prove himself a patriot, and at the same time protect his own
interests and grow rich. “So that,” said Enver, “if it really came
about--the next war would be for Vanderlip and should be known as
‘Vanderlip’s War.’”

When I asked, “Would you be sorry to see America and Japan at war?”
he replied, “Not if England was involved. Anything which tends to
draw England’s attention away from us or which weakens the great
powers, naturally gives Turkey a better chance for reconstruction.
You understand that I’m not saying I want to see another war; I am
simply saying that if those nations interested in destroying Turkey are
occupied elsewhere it relieves us of war burdens and gives us a chance
to carry out our own destinies.”

He tried to get Mr. Vanderlip’s reaction on women by the same tactics
he employed with the actress. One day he said, “I have three wives and
I’m looking for another.” This was not true, but Mr. Vanderlip proved
entirely gullible. “Good heavens,” he said, regarding Enver in shocked
surprise, “we Anglo-Saxons consider one wife enough tyranny....”

“Naturally,” Enver conceded, suavely, “with one there must be tyranny
but with three or four or a hundred.... Ah, you must agree that is
quite a different matter.”

His sudden appearance in Moscow during the blackest days of the
blockade as well as the blackest days for the Central Powers proves him
an incomparable soldier-of-fortune. With two suits of clothes, a pair
of boots, a good revolver and a young German mechanician whom he could
trust, he started by aeroplane from Berlin to Moscow. The story of how
they had to land because of engine trouble near Riga, of how he was
captured and spent two months in the Riga jail just at the moment when
the whole Allied world was calling loudest for his blood, will remain
a story which will have scanty advertisement from those British Secret
Service men who like so well to turn journalists and write their own
brave autobiographies.

Enver sat in the Riga jail as plain “Mr. Altman” who could not speak
anything but German. He was scrutinized by every Secret Service man in
the vicinity and pronounced unanimously a Jewish German Communist of
no importance. By appearing humble, inoffensive and pleasant, he soon
worked his way into the confidence of the warden, was released and
escaped to Moscow. He arrived just in time to rush off for the dramatic
Baku conference.

The Communists understood perfectly well that Enver Pasha was
not at the Oriental Conference as a sudden and sincere convert to
Internationalism, and he knew that they knew. Both Zinoviev and Enver
were actors taking the leading rôles in a significant historical
pageant. The results are really all that matter, since the motives will
soon be forgotten.

When Enver turned to Moscow he had no other place to turn to and when
Zinoviev took him to Baku, Zinoviev knew no other means of effectively
threatening the English in order to change their attitude on the
blockade. Zinoviev could not complain about Enver’s shallow attitude
towards Socialism since there was hardly anything Socialistic about
Zinoviev’s appeal for a “holy war.” Enver summed up his feelings about
the new alliance thus: “For the future of Turkey and the future of
the East a friendship with Russia is worth more to the Turks than any
number of military victories. And we have to build that friendship
while we have the opportunity.”

His way of living without any regrets and as if there were no
to-morrows is rather startling at times. I remember when Talaat Pasha,
his lifelong friend, was murdered by an Armenian in Berlin, he read the
message with no show of emotion and his only comment was: “His time
had come!” But against an excessive temptation on the part of fate to
record Enver’s death prematurely, in his own words, he “sleeps with one
eye open,” carries a dagger and a loaded automatic. Once when we talked
about the possibility of his being assassinated he said, “I have been
near death so many times that these days I live now seem to be a sort
of present to me.”

Enver is no open sesame to those who do not know him well. He really
has the traditional Oriental inscrutability. The first two or three
times I talked with him, we stumbled along rather lamely in French.
Someone suggested to me that he probably spoke several languages
which, for some unknown reason, he would not admit. So one day I said
abruptly, “Oh, let’s speak English.” He looked at me with one of his
sudden, rare smiles and answered in my own language, “Very well, if you
prefer it.”

When I asked him how he learned English he told me he had learned it
from an English spy. “He came to me as a valet and professed deep love
for Turkey. For several months we studied diligently. One day I thought
I would test his love for Turkey so I ordered him to the front. He was
killed. Later, we found his papers.”

“Were you surprised?” I asked him.

“Why, not at all,” said Enver. “He really showed a great deal of
pluck. The only thing I had against him was that he taught me a lot of
expressions not used at court.”

“Like what?”

“Like ‘don’t mention it,’” said Enver, laughing. “And the terrible
thing about learning such an expression,” he said, “is that it is
so sharp and so definite and often fits an occasion so aptly that
it flashes in one’s mind and can’t be forgotten. American slang is
extremely picturesque and expressive, but it is not dignified enough to
be used by diplomats.”

Everyone is familiar with Enver’s “direct action” method of playing
politics. One of the ways he was wont to remove troublesome rivals in
the days of the Young Turk Revolution was to go out and shoot them with
his own hand. This “impulsiveness” got him into grave trouble with
the Soviets in spite of all his sensible utterances to the contrary.
When he was “shifted” to Bokhara so that he would not be in the way of
either Kemal or the Russians, he got bored and started a war of his
own. One night he fled into the hills of Afghanistan and soon began
to gather recruits around him. A few nights after that one of the
principal officials of the Bokharan Republic also fled to join Enver.
This performance was repeated until over half the Bokharan cabinet had
fled. Then fighting began and we got vague rumors of battles, but only
through the Soviet press.

In August, 1922, we heard that Enver had been killed, that his body had
been found on the field of battle. There was even romance surrounding
him and his supposed death. Stories were circulated that when the body
was picked up and examined, the letters of an American girl were found
next his heart. I went to see Jacob Peters, who has charge now of all
the Eastern Territory and who was then in Moscow. He laughed heartily
and said he would show me the “information.” It consisted of three very
hazy telegrams which had been three weeks on the way. The men who sent
the telegrams and discovered the body had never seen Enver. There was
no mention of letters. And Peter’s opinion of the whole affair was that
there was nothing at all authentic in the story or else it was “a trick
of Enver’s to sham being dead.” Peters’ theory proved true. Within a
few days fighting began again and Enver began to win.

He had conceived the notion of uniting all Turkestan and Bokhara and
Keiva to the Angora government. It places the Soviets in a strange
position. They may have to give in to him, though he will not actually
be an “enemy,” because neither the Turks nor the Russians can afford to
break their treaty. Therefore, his private war in the south embarrasses
the Soviets much more than it does Kemal, who needs only to disavow any
connection with it, as do all the Turkish officials. If Enver wins he
will add a nice slice to Turkish territory; if he loses, Turkey will be
in the same position as before.

Enver, while he will always maintain a great prestige in the Mussulman
world, will never oust Kemal. Mustapha Kemal Pasha is the great popular
hero of a victorious Turkey, which but for him might never have even
survived. There were times in the past when Enver was more important
than Kemal, but that can never happen again in Kemal’s life. Both men
rose from the ranks and both are the sons of peasants. And Kemal at
this moment is more important than the Sultan. Greater than that no
man can be under the banners of Mohammed.

One can hardly over-estimate the importance of the new Mohammedan
unity, that new patriotic energy which has taken the place of the
former lethargy and which already reaches out far beyond the borderland
of the Faithful. The Mussulman world is reviving after a long sleep.
And not only Mohammedans are uniting but the entire East and Middle
East. Aside from Japan, a significant harmony is rapidly taking place,
a harmony which evolves itself into a tremendous power. This power may
decide the world’s destiny before another generation.

Enver and Kemal Pasha, being aware of the purport of beginning that
great concord by interwoven treaties with Russia, read the stars well.
There must come a day also when that great sleeping giant, China, will
be part of this alliance. And the seeds of that friendship have also
been planted. The Chinese official delegations which came to Moscow
were not only well received by the Russians, but they hob-nobbed with
the Mohammedans like brothers.




TIKON AND THE RUSSIAN CHURCH


There are two points of importance in regard to the Greek Orthodox
Church and the Russian revolution. First, that the church has
maintained itself and second, that it has issued no frantic appeals
for outside help. While certain priests have allied themselves with
counter-revolutionists, officially the church has never taken sides.
Even at the present moment when a bitter conflict is on, the quarrel
remains a family quarrel.

Tikon, the Patriarch, by remaining unruffled through the barricade
and blockade days, proved himself a strong leader in a time when only
strong leaders could survive. If he had been frightened or hostile
in the Denikin or Kolchak days he might have shared the fate of the
Romanoffs; if he had taken part in counter-revolutions, the church
itself might have been badly shattered. But until recently, Tikon has
been as placid as his ikons and as interested in the great change going
on about him as a scientist. And therein lay his strength. “Don’t
let any one pity me,” he said last winter when I talked to him, “I am
having the most interesting time of my life.”

Much nonsense has been written about anti-church propaganda in Soviet
Russia. Dozens of writers have discussed a certain rather obscure sign
in Moscow which reads: “Religion is the opiate of the people.” This
sign, about three feet across, is painted high up on the north side of
the Historical Museum building near the entrance to the Red Square.
No one in Russia seems to be much interested in it and certainly
it attracts less attention than any one of our million billboard
advertisements. I tried for a year to find out who had put it up and
what group it represented, but could never discover. It was a cab
driver who said the wisest thing concerning it. “If somebody took it
down,” he said dryly, when I asked him what he thought of it, “no one
would notice.”

The anti-clerical posters gotten out at the beginning of the
revolution, however, had a much more far-reaching influence. They were
usually to the effect that the priests were hoarding the church lands
and at the same time expecting the peasants to support them. Any idea
which sanctions giving the land to the peasants is popular in Russia.
It was not long before the peasants had seized the church lands and
divided them through their land committees. But this did not make them
atheists.

I remember meeting an old peasant leader from Siberia who had led a
successful revolt against Kolchak. He was received as a hero when he
arrived at Moscow for an All Russian Congress of Soviets. He told me a
story about a priest in his community who was a counter-revolutionist.
He said, “It usually is this way with me and with many of the peasants,
we love God and we are religious but we hate the priests.” I asked him
if it was not possible to find good priests, and he began to tell me
about one priest who had been very noble and self-sacrificing. But this
was the only one he could think of. “The others disgrace God,” he said.

And that is just what one must understand in order to comprehend the
Russian church and its present position. The Soviets did not destroy
the church or ruin it in any way--no outside pressure could do that.
It was Rasputin and other “disgracers” who at last outraged even the
credulous and easy-going peasants.

A revolution had to take place in the church as well as outside of it
to save it at all. The church, at the time of the revolution, was as
corrupt as the Tsardom. Nothing is better evidence of this than the
way it was deserted by hundreds of priests as soon as the life in the
monasteries ceased to be easy. Long before the upheaval the priesthood
had grown dissolute. All that the revolution did was to give the church
a pruning which saved its soul. By shearing it of its old luxuries it
cut off the parasitic priests and by severing it from the state it took
the church out of politics. It was forced to stand or fall by its own
merits.

And when the wealth of the church was reduced to a certain point it
became necessary for a priest to be such a good priest and so well
loved and appreciated by his flock that his flock was willing to
support him, in spite of the hard life and the terrible conditions.
Thus a new and better clergy came into being.

The final test of the priesthood, however, came with the famine. All
that was left of the church wealth, outside of the churches themselves,
were the jewels in the ikons and the silver and gold ornaments which
glitter in the shrines throughout Russia. The government decided
to requisition these treasures. The priests who had been shriven
in the revolutionary fire were glad and willing to part with these
things, but there were many who resisted. The outcome was a split
in the church ranks, as well as riots, intrigue, and bad feeling.
There probably was a good deal of mismanagement on the part of a few
arbitrary Soviet officials like Zinoviev, who do not seem to comprehend
the sensitiveness of religious people and how easily outraged they
are by outside intrusion. There is little doubt that this heightened
a delicate and unfortunate situation. If a Church Committee had been
allowed to select and turn over the jewels and precious metal, Tikon
and other churchmen would probably never have been brought to trial.

However, the trials themselves are intensely interesting and mark
an epoch in the life of the revolution. They actually mark the real
beginning of public opinion in Russia and that, in any case, is a
healthy development. It is like letting fresh air into a long-closed
room. Discussions of the government and the church have for five years
been going on in whispers behind closed doors. It now comes down to
this: if the government is wrong and is unjustly stripping the church
of wealth, the government will suffer by lack of support or even open
hostility on the part of the peasants, who have so much power now that
they can no longer be ignored on any question; and if the priests are
wrong and prove themselves selfish in this time of need, the priests
will be deposed. But the church itself will go on because the peasants
are religious; they will continue to “love God” in the traditional
manner.

About a week ago I met a Russian priest in New York and I asked him at
once how he felt about the requisitioning of the jewels. He raised his
hands devoutly. “What man could pray to God and hoard jewels at such a
time?” he exclaimed. Then he showed me a very old and precious carved
wooden cross. “There was a ruby in this cross,” he said. “It was the
only valuable thing I possessed. I can’t tell you how happy I was when
it was sold and the money used for relief. This is not a stone you see
in it now; it is a piece of red glass, but it is somehow more precious
to me than the ruby.” Here is the expression of a really devout man and
the only sort of priest that people will follow in such a crisis.

It is perfectly true that the leaders of the Communist movement are
not religious. All students, in fact the entire “intelligentsia”
or educated classes of Russia, were never religious. Before the
revolution all groups of revolutionaries and literary folk prided
themselves on their lack of religion. So anti-religion is not confined
strictly to the leaders of the Communist movement. Any other party
except the Monarchist Party would be equally devoid of interest in
religion.

The Monarchists necessarily support the church because the Tsar was
really head of the church. This has been true since the time of Peter
the Great, who while not actually abolishing the office of Patriarch,
never allowed another Patriarch to be elected. One of the curious and
interesting sidelights of the revolution was that a few weeks after the
church was separated from the state, a Patriarch was elected for the
first time in two hundred years, so that while in one way the church
lost its power, in another way it really came into its own.

Freedom of religion, as we know it in the United States, was a surprise
and a shock to the members of the Russian church, for up until 1917 no
other sects but the Greek Orthodox were permitted by law in Russia.
Naturally, when other religious orders began to send in missionaries
the old church protested, and when the Soviets answered that freedom
of religion was now an established fact they did not understand
it as “freedom” and called it discrimination. And it seemed like
discrimination, because, while the Orthodox Church was losing its
former possessions, other religions were gaining concessions.

Tikon, whose official title is Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias,
and who is called, with a sharp flavor of French revolutionary days,
by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, “Citizen Basil Ivanovitch
Baliavin,” was born in Pskoff in 1860. He was educated in Petrograd
Theological Academy and became a monk upon the completion of his
studies. He later held several important posts as a professor in
theological institutions. He was consecrated Bishop of the Aleutian
Isles and North America in 1897 and then came to America. In 1905
he was made Archbishop and moved the cathedral residence from San
Francisco to New York. He returned to Russia in February, 1907, having
been appointed Archbishop of Jaroslav. In 1913 he became Archbishop
of Vilna. Early in 1917 he was elected Metropolitan of Moscow and in
November of that same year, just when the Bolsheviks came into power,
he became Patriarch.

Just what influenced Tikon and made him so much more democratic
than most of his colleagues, I do not know. My own opinion, after a
conversation with him, is that he is somewhat of a student of history
and a philosopher, as well as a priest. It is the opinion of many
people, inside and outside of Russia, that it was his long residence
in America which made him so liberal. Of one thing I feel sure. He
would have resisted the Soviet Government if he had believed that it
was better for the future of the church. I do not think he refrained
because of any personal fears, but because he actually saw a real
revival of religion in the fire through which the church was passing.

No one could have expected the church to embrace the revolution. The
nobility and the clergy had walked too many centuries hand in hand. The
nobility perished in the course of events and the church survived, as
it did in France. And the church will continue to survive--merely the
poorer by a few jewels or a few thousand acres of land. But it will
never wield the same power that it once did or that it could wield if
there was a return to Tsardom. It cannot be as strong, for example, as
the Church of Rome is in Italy.

The real menace to the power of the Russian church lies in its
own medieval outlook on life. It has scarcely anything to do
with anti-church propagandists or with opposition by force or by
requisition. The youth of Russia is interested in reconstruction and
the government for the first time. The young people have learned to
read and to think. They are no longer content with the old forms; they
are repelled by dissolute or un-Christlike priests. If the church
wishes to be strong and to have an influence in the life of the nation
it cannot gain that influence by haggling over a pile of rubies and
diamonds and emeralds while thousands of children are dying of hunger.
The old peasants might follow Tikon when he says that the famine is
the business of God, but the young people will not. It is almost
inconceivable that a man can follow the lowly Christ in such a proud
way. Certainly, the young Russians, who have so passionately defended
the revolution, will never be satisfied with such a conception.

It seems very sad, from the religious point of view, that Tikon, who
steered his church through the long period of fighting and destruction,
should lose his equilibrium in the period of adjustment. He was able to
smile through all the worst days of terror and suspicion. He could joke
about the Cheka guard outside his door, he could calm his agitated
congregations, but he could not sacrifice form. When I interviewed him
he wore a gorgeous robe and jewels.

Tikon is sincere. Even in his clinging to the splendor of gold and
jewels, he is sincere. It is his particular mystical way of loving God,
which is difficult to understand in our age of materialism. Tikon, in
a lesser degree, has many of those qualities of Lenin which make him
a leader of men. If he had been as great a man as Lenin he would have
thoroughly purified the church and led a great religious revival in
Russia.




TCHICHERIN,
COMMISSAR FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS,
AND HIS SUBORDINATES.

GREGORY VASSILIEVITCH TCHICHERIN
MAXIM LITVINOV, ASSISTANT COMMISSAR
LEONID KRASSIN
DAVID ROTHSTEIN
GREGORY WEINSTEIN
MICHAEL KARAKHAN
MR. FLORINSKY
MR. AXIONOV


GREGORY VASSILIEVITCH TCHICHERIN

My first interview with Tchicherin was at midnight and my last
interview was at five in the morning. This happens to cover a fairly
complete rotation of the official hours of the Soviet Foreign Office.

One evening at a box party in the Bolshoi Theatre, Enver Pasha
remarked: “I have to kill time somehow for three hours after the
play. Halil Pasha and I have an appointment with Mr. Tchicherin at
two o’clock.” In spite of his smiling Oriental inscrutability and a
palpable diplomatic duty to conform to everything Russian, one could
feel an amused disapproval of such official unconventionality.

This eccentric habit of turning night into day, with every floor of the
Foreign Office blazing like a lighthouse in a city which by municipal
decree is put to bed before midnight in order to save fuel, naturally
creates an almost fantastic air of whimsicality. Mr. Tchicherin makes
no excuse for this “vice,” as one of his secretaries very cleverly
phrased it; he simply finds night more harmonious for his tasks
than day and with that lack of consideration which dreamers always
consciously or unconsciously assume, he forces his whole staff to
follow his example. The result is that his clerks make a mad scramble
to get transferred into another government department.

Everything about Tchicherin is as consistently contrary to an ordered
life as his inversion of working hours. Born an aristocrat, trained
under the Tsar for the diplomatic service, delicate, cultured, aloof,
with a fine gesture of Quixotic generosity, he has thrown his life and
his fortunes in with the cause of the proletariat with all the abandon
of religious fervor.

His aloofness is so evident that one can hardly find any concordance
about the astounding decision of such an obvious æsthete to become
an active part of revolution--which is sweat and blood and violence.
Perhaps that explains why he wraps his vision round him like a cloak
and shuts out the sun in order not to be disturbed and disillusioned
by reality. We were all brought up on stories about kings who were
gay-fellows-well-met and could outdance and outdrink their soldiers;
on nobles who turned out to be Robin Hoods. But, alas, who can imagine
Tchicherin rollicking at a workers’ picnic or smoking a friendly pipe
with a Red soldier?

No simple person will ever feel intimate or at home with his
super-class indifference to material surroundings. A scrubwoman is just
as uncomfortable in his presence as was the intrepid Mrs. Sheridan,
who was able to rub such gay elbows with the other commissars. Mr.
Tchicherin’s way of arching an eyebrow at life upsets the best brand of
poise.

Living alone in a barren room on the top floor of the Foreign Office,
he is as far removed socially and physically from the lower as the
upper crust. Perhaps only an aristocrat is able to attain this dizzy
height of indifference to human contact with one’s fellows. And I
can’t help feeling that there is something rather splendid about such
complete isolation.

Outside of politics, the telephone and the cable, all up-to-dateness
offends him. He abhors new clothes, does not like to ride in
automobiles, refuses to have modern office paraphernalia about him,
does every little task for himself, like sharpening his own pencils
and running all over the building on office-boy errands. This attitude
produces the same effect as if he distrusted all his subordinates. His
secretaries stand helpless and ill at ease while he searches for a lost
telegram or answers the telephone.

Last winter they told an amusing story of how Karakhan, who is
Commissar of Eastern Affairs, lured Tchicherin into donning a new suit.
Tchicherin’s one suit was literally in rags when the Turkish treaty and
the Afghan treaty and the Persian treaty and all the other Oriental
treaties were about to be signed. These affairs had to be arranged
with more or less bourgeois pomp, since the Orientals are rather keen
on ceremony. So Mr. Karakhan, taking a long chance, went ahead and
ordered a new suit for Mr. Tchicherin from a Soviet tailor, then one
morning while Tchicherin slept, he changed the suits. In a few minutes
he came rushing back again and exclaimed with emotion, “There’s a new
note from Lord Curzon!” Tchicherin was up in one bound and struggling
into the new trousers. Whatever he thought privately of Mr. Karakhan’s
presumption, they continued in an apparently pleasant relationship.

In appearance Mr. Tchicherin is tall, with the bent shoulders of
the man who stoops to go through doors. His eyes, not through any
evasiveness, but because of an extreme shyness, continually seek other
places than the face of his interviewer. Yet when one meets his quick,
occasional glance, one is startled by the intelligence and gentleness
of his expression.

Diplomacy is an inseparable part of Mr. Tchicherin’s existence. He
eats, drinks and sleeps with the affairs of state, looks at life
as a chess game and is continually checkmating, even in ordinary
conversation. Lenin approves of him and feels for him a warm
personal affection in spite of the fact that the Premier so dislikes
eccentricities. He knows that Tchicherin can be trusted, that he has an
invaluable knowledge of international affairs and more important than
all that, that he will never make any real decision without consulting
Lenin.

Mr. Bullitt told me that during his negotiations he found Tchicherin so
brilliant that it was difficult to get anywhere. The Foreign Minister
was always quite justified from the Soviet angle but the Soviets were
being forced to make hard concessions. Invariably when they came to a
deadlock, he telephoned Lenin and Lenin gave in.

During our first talk, when we discussed the campaign of lies about
Russia which has so long flooded English, French and American papers,
I said that I thought it was partly due to the fact that no reporters
were permitted at that time to go in and investigate actual conditions.
It was characteristic of Tchicherin to interrupt very suddenly and ask,
“Will you tell me why American reporters come over here and claim they
are impartial observers, even profess friendliness towards us, and then
go home and write such astounding lies?”

I thought it wasn’t fair to generalize. The most unfair stories have
always been manufactured at Riga and Reval or at Paris by interested
political groups or by disappointed reporters who never got inside. As
for the reporters who actually witnessed the revolution, certainly the
majority remained fair and sympathetic, in spite of the fact that it
grew particularly difficult, especially in America, even to maintain
one’s equilibrium about Russia after Brest-Litovsk. To my mind came
back unhappy recollections of Overman and Lusk investigations, raids,
deportations and general war-hysteria. Perhaps some such thought came
also to Tchicherin because he said, “Yes, yes, I suppose in the main,
you are right, but how do you account for a man like----?”

Tchicherin is full of old-fashioned honor. The idea that foreign papers
sanctioned false reports in order to justify intervention or the
blockade seemed so outrageous to him that he could never realize that
this sort of propaganda has become as much a part of modern warfare as
liquid fire or submarines.

Very late one night I saw Tchicherin running up the stairs to his
office in a high state of excitement because a New York evening
newspaper carried on its front page a fake interview with Lenin in
which he discussed everything from the Irish situation to the Russian
Ballet. Tchicherin saw no humor in this. His comment was, “How can a
reputable American paper allow such a thing? After all, Comrade Lenin
is the Premier of a great country.”

Men who give themselves completely to an ideal quite naturally become
supersensitive and unreasonable. At least that is the rule, and
Tchicherin is no exception. The deliberate misinterpretation abroad,
during long hard years, of every effort of the Soviet Government at
peace or reconstruction or defense or negotiations, has got under his
skin. So while he insisted on the strictest adherence to the truth
in all reports sent over the government wire, at the same time he
permitted himself a mild dissipation in extravagant adjectives by way
of retaliation, in his too long and too complicated “notes.” He allowed
even more unrestrained language in _Vestnik_. _Vestnik_ is the official
bulletin of the Soviet Government--very much like the bulletin issued
by the Bureau of Public Information during the war. The young man who
edited this sheet was a talented and educated Russian but his idea of
an unemotional government report was very much like that of our own
George Creel. I used to tease him about his passion for such words as
“scurrilous” in reference to capitalists or White Guards. But it never
made any impression. He confessed that he found my cables flat and
uninteresting.

Besides my radios to American papers, which were transmitted by way of
Berlin, and the government bulletin which was sent out to the whole
world and rarely used by anybody, there was also a wire to London
for the _Daily Herald_. Every one of these telegrams had to be read
and corrected by Tchicherin himself and I shared the unhappy fate of
sitting around all night until he found time to do it. So many nights
my telegrams went in the waste-basket because they contained too much
American “punch” or a little “news value” or “human interest” which
Tchicherin considered gossip, that for a while I regarded Tchicherin
as just a fussy old man, and I almost forgot the Herculean tasks he
performed in his various interlacing Eastern treaties. Or again, if
one reads his correspondence with the old and settled governments
of Europe, one will be startled to see how he has outclassed his
adversaries. No Foreign Minister ever inherited a more difficult post
and, everything considered, no Foreign Minister ever stuck to his post
with more dignity and honor. It was characteristic of Tchicherin, as
it is of most Russians, not to be able to strike a balance; when he
did let the bars down, he let them down completely. A few months ago,
we were having battles over adjectives; now reporters are given a free
hand; even in Washington they do not dare criticize the government so
openly. It is amusing to note that the more freedom they have the fewer
harsh criticisms they find it necessary to make.

Mr. Tchicherin is a bachelor; women manifestly have no place in his
dreams of a millennium. How this came to be is a secret which perhaps
will never out. I am not presuming that there never was any romance in
Mr. Tchicherin’s life. Just to illustrate how wrong I should be if I
did, I recall an incident which occurred in a fashionable Berlin café.
Some Americans were discussing Tchicherin. One remarked that she often
regretted that there is no room for chivalry in a Socialist State; that
equality does not recognize gallantry. Another claimed that while Lenin
seems to have a way of treating women no better and no worse than men,
Tchicherin simply overlooks the whole feminine sex; if he is conscious
of women at all, it is only through a slight annoyance.

Now, when the company had finally arrived at these conclusions, they
suddenly became aware of a very aristocratic and beautiful old lady
at the next table who was regarding them disdainfully through a gold
lorgnette. Presently she exclaimed in Russian, “How absurd you are! Mr.
Tchicherin was an old sweetheart of mine.” So saying, she arose and
swept grandly away, rustling in her lavender silks, as delicate as a
Dresden china doll. So life repeats itself; there is always an Elaine
for every Launcelot. And Launcelot inevitably deserts his lady for some
vague “Light” beyond the stars.

Tchicherin is a many-sided character. When one sees him on the street
of an afternoon blinking and confused, with an old umbrella under his
arm, rain or shine, he appears pitiful and frail and incapable.... But
if one sees him also, as I once saw him, in an ancient, resurrected
dress-suit, at the head of a long conference table in a gold and white
hall, under glittering candelabra, speaking in flowery and perfect
French to the suave Turkish delegates, one gets quite another idea; he
appears fine, selfless, determined.

And it is like him to admire Secretary of State Hughes, and call him a
“fine, high-minded man” without realizing that Hughes’ high-mindedness
is that of a stern, religious brother who refuses to admit again into
the family of nations the erring and prodigal Soviet Republic; that
it was Hughes who stood out alone against the Genoa conference until
he stampeded other members of the Cabinet and even overpowered the
President. Hughes regards Communism as immoral as Tchicherin regards
capitalism. Both men possess that unbending, cold objectiveness, that
unattractive righteousness of attitude towards those who disagree with
them, which we know in America as Puritanism. Both would have made
excellent bishops.

One evening last spring I happened to be present when Tchicherin was
nearly assassinated. A man flourishing a revolver appeared in the
reception room and called out for the Foreign Minister. This roused a
Red soldier half asleep in a comfortable chair near the door leading to
Tchicherin’s private office. A scuffle ensued and the soldier succeeded
in getting the pistol before any harm was done.

Tchicherin refused to discuss the incident and remained obviously
tranquil. He was annoyed when the Cheka tried to put extra guards at
his door and absolutely balked at the suggestion that the Foreign
Office be made a place difficult to enter. He simply asked every one to
forget the whole incident.

I always believed that he secretly dislikes the Cheka. I remember the
night that Santieri Nuorteva was arrested. It happened at midnight and
was rather spectacular. Tchicherin liked Nuorteva. He was visibly upset
and for a whole week he would not talk to a soul.

The confusion of the Foreign Minister’s desk is a national scandal.
In midwinter I have seen his summer hat still lying there, crushed
under a pile of papers. I have seen papers piled high on all the
chairs and sofa and gray with the dust of months. He has a fearful
habit of misplacing important telegrams and then sending out a search
call. Those are terrible moments in the Foreign Office. All other work
stops. After everything is turned upside down some subordinate gets the
courage to ask, “Comrade Tchicherin, perhaps it is on your own desk.”
And there it invariably is, almost on his nose, like grandmother’s
proverbial spectacles.

It was his habit to give a short talk about once a month to the
personnel of the Foreign Office. We would meet about eight o’clock in
the Foreign Office Club. Tchicherin was persistently late, sometimes
one, sometimes two or even three hours. From time to time someone would
whisper, “He has lost another telegram!” There would be suppressed
laughter running around the room. Then suddenly the Foreign Minister
would appear glancing shyly about him, clear his throat and before he
began his address would explain in his high plaintive voice how sorry
he was to be tardy but he had somehow misplaced a telegram....

People at home have often said to me that they could not comprehend
the “fascination” of the Russian revolution for an American; they
have pointed out that they would find anything possible to endure
except such unpleasant facts as lice and filth and lack of soap.
Most of us, quite correctly, imagine ourselves capable of the larger
tragedies of life and entirely lacking in the courage to face the
million little miseries of an economic breakdown. It is true that
any man with delicate sensibilities who has stood the test of the
Russian revolution has stood the test of fire. I have always believed
that we are too sentimental about the romances of the Middle Ages. My
opinion is that not much really that happened then was fine or good
or beautiful; certainly over it all hovered no scent of the attar of
roses. King Arthur’s knights probably never marched away with any more
noble visions before them than did those little awkward peasant boys
of the Red Army. The Communists are undoubtedly the knights errant of
the twentieth century and their slogan of “internationalism” is but a
revival of that old, old banner of “Brotherhood.” It is not altogether
curious that such a whirlwind has swept into its heart a few men like
Tchicherin.

In 1917, when Trotsky was Foreign Minister, I well remember a strike of
his entire diplomatic corps. How it paralyzed that arm of the state! At
that particular moment Tchicherin was under arrest in London. Workers
with muddy boots tramped in and out of the Foreign Office with a desire
to help. They were loyal to Trotsky but they were ill at ease; entirely
incomprehensible to them was this intricate business of diplomacy. It
is well for those same workers and peasants and soldiers that a quiet,
aloof person by the name of George Tchicherin presently arrived to
arrange all this business for them.

But what a paradox! Here is Mr. Tchicherin, member of one of the oldest
and most aristocratic families in Russia, for four years now guiding
with such delicate hands and careful brain the affairs of state, in
order that all that once was, which gave his family their wealth and
power, might never be again.




MAXIM LITVINOV, ASSISTANT COMMISSAR, LEONID KRASSIN AND SUBORDINATES


Litvinov, more than Tchicherin, has been Lenin’s spokesman to the
outside world in the past three years. Litvinov is closer to Lenin;
he knows how Lenin will react on most situations, while Tchicherin is
usually in doubt. This knowledge gives Litvinov power to make immediate
decisions. Litvinov has worked with Lenin since the Communist party was
created, while Tchicherin actually only came into the Communist ranks
after the revolution--he was formerly connected with another group and
his allegiance is naturally a little more conservative.

Litvinov makes a striking contrast to Tchicherin, the aesthete.
Litvinov is hale, hearty and loves the fleshy things of life. He
fairly bursts with a florid, extravagant energy, like a man who has
just emerged from a hot bath, dressed in haste and is late for an
appointment. He is big and burly, wearing his clothes loosely with a
sort of unkempt but smooth-shaven air. He is a great worker and, when
he has the opportunity, a man who enjoys life greatly.

Abroad he likes to eat good food, drink old wines and roll around
in a new, expensive automobile with a small red flag on the hood.
All this not because he craves ease or ostentation but because of a
sort of obvious patriotism for the Soviets which wants to shout to a
hostile world, “We too can do things with a flourish.” There is nothing
subservient about Litvinov.

He has been accused of undue extravagance by the other embassies in
Reval, but in Russia he goes about like any peasant with a piece of
black bread in his pocket, works furiously from eleven in the forenoon
until two or three in the morning to accommodate Tchicherin and never
has a moment for recreation. He never looks tired and seems to begin
each task with the same enthusiasm.

The Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs is immensely human, and
has an ear for jokes and gossip and knows how to hate. He has a wife
and three children living in Copenhagen and maintains a perfectly
conventional household. One day last winter I interviewed him while he
was eating his lunch, and he said, with a sigh, that he wished he could
arrange his work somehow so as to get away for a few days to visit his
family. His wife had just had a baby.

“Boy or girl?” I asked.

Litvinov reddened and laughed. “The telegram didn’t say,” he said, “and
God knows when I’ll have a chance to run over and find out.”

A moment later he was deep in a discussion of the attitude of the
American press towards Russia. I remarked his ability to put out of
mind circumstances he could not change; it is the same saving quality
which keeps Litvinov from breaking under strain.

When Litvinov is interviewed his thoughts run along smoothly with no
break in the thread of them; he is extremely capable and intelligent
but one feels at once that he is a politician. Perhaps it would be
better to say that he is a practical Communist, just as one would
say that Mr. Penrose was a practical Republican and Mr. Underwood
is a practical Democrat. Most successful public men are practical
politicians and reporters learn early to weigh their words; they have
a way of using the press, through subtle suggestions, to their own
advantage.

No practical politician is above intrigue. Tchicherin is above it and
that is probably why he does not see it when it is all around him.

There was a moment when the clashing of personalities and ambitions
nearly ruined the staff of Mr. Tchicherin. The whole matter centered
round the English trade negotiations begun by Litvinov and David
Rothstein and finished by Krassin.

Rothstein had pinned his hope on those negotiations; he believed that
their successful termination would make him Ambassador to England. It
is easy to comprehend his feelings and even his actions in this matter.
Rothstein is ambitious without either the intelligence or the foresight
of Litvinov. It is astounding that Litvinov allied himself, however
briefly, in a petty intrigue against Krassin.

Rothstein has lived many years in London, his home is there, his family
and his wife. No doubt it would have been very pleasant for him to
have been appointed Ambassador to England. But logically, and through
peculiar circumstances, that office seemed to be about to be bestowed
upon Mr. Krassin. Thus Rothstein set about to remove Krassin from his
path.

Both Litvinov and Rothstein had cause for deep annoyance against the
British Government. Rothstein was “allowed” to accompany Litvinov to
Moscow when Litvinov was “returned” to his government; he was refused
permission to go back. Feeling himself tricked, he pointed a suspicious
finger at Krassin who came and went so freely. He managed to play upon
Litvinov’s wounded personal vanity. Between them they almost ruined
Krassin’s work.

Litvinov was sent out of England with all the indignity of a man being
kicked down stairs. No one could blame him for a perfectly human desire
to go back some day and sit at a conference table facing the very men
who were once so unjust to him. This desire has probably been entirely
appeased at Genoa.

The world is full of tantalizing prejudices, which direct events more
than we realize. Krassin and Litvinov are both charter members of the
Communist party, but Litvinov just happens to be England’s idea of a
Bolshevik while Krassin does not.

Because Krassin came from the same class that Lord Curzon did, England
does not feel so much panic in dealing with him. Krassin is obviously
a gentleman and official England can never quite ignore a gentleman.
Krassin is as polished and as coldly polite and as well dressed as if
he were in the House of Lords. He is tall, middle aged, fine featured
and has great personal charm.

All this would not mean much in America, but in England to establish
one’s social equality with the home office is an especially strong
point for any visiting diplomat. This acknowledgment of caste is true
all over Europe. Tchicherin, the aristocrat, had a much better chance
at Genoa because of his background.

If such conferences are ever held in America, Litvinov might prove
the most popular of the group. Any country which is satisfied with
the familiar type of our middle western Congressmen will not reject
an intelligent proletarian like Litvinov. Some of our rough-and-ready
Senators will surely feel much more at home with his bluntness than
with Krassin’s smooth, impenetrable Old Worldliness.

Litvinov reminds one of a successful mining man from Alaska or a lumber
king from the West. Krassin is more like those quiet, powerful, coldly
intelligent men who manage railroads, Wall Street and the world’s
finance.

Krassin, who once managed the great Putilov factory and was considered
one of the most able engineers in Russia, is now pretty generally
conceded the strongest man next to Lenin. As a force for stability
and reconstruction he is immensely valuable to the Soviets. He has
maintained a mental equilibrium which many of the other Commissars
have lost. Contact with men of different political opinions is a great
dissolver of mental cobwebs. Krassin’s continual coming and going has
probably helped him to maintain his perspective. When one remains too
long in Russia, the outside world often appears incomprehensible just
as Russia appears incomprehensible to the outside world.

I remember a conversation I had with him during the blockade. “Whenever
Russia,” he said, “ceases to be a country visited only by ‘brave’ and
‘adventuresome’ and ‘occasional’ travelers, the Russian people and the
Russian government will be no more interesting and no more evil than
the governments and the people of the rest of the world; it will no
longer be necessary for writers to exaggerate about us.”

David Rothstein is a deep and thorough student of Socialism.
Theoretically, he believes that he knows the only true way to cure the
wounds of humanity; he reverences Marx as some men do Mohammed. But in
real life he is fussy, narrow, selfish and without personal loyalty. He
cannot imagine applying his doctrines to his immediate surroundings,
and so he fundamentally fails.

Fresh from London, he spent his time ordering suits from the Soviet
tailor and fuming because they did not fit perfectly; this in a country
literally of rags. He was more worried about his son’s dismissal from
Oxford than about the thousands of young men being slaughtered on the
various Russian fronts. He exclaimed generously, “We must have victory
no matter how many men it takes!” But he kept his own sons in England.
He could never see anything in Wells’ articles for American papers
except the flippant remarks about Marx which made him writhe in mental
agony.

At present Rothstein is Ambassador to Persia, and Litvinov and Krassin
are working in harmony.

There are many other men in the Foreign Office of interesting and
varied character; very few are workmen or peasants. I will take for
example, four typical men: Weinstein, Karakhan, Florinsky and Axionov.

Weinstein was one of the Editors of the Russian daily paper _Novy Mir_,
in New York, and secretary to Ludwig Martens, who directed the Soviet
Bureau on Fortieth Street. He was deported with Martens. Immediately
upon his arrival in Moscow he became head of the Anglo-American
Department of the Foreign Office. Almost his entire staff are
ex-Americans. English is more generally spoken among them than Russian.

Michael Karakhan is head of the Eastern Department when Tchicherin is
in Russia; when Tchicherin attends the conferences, he is elevated to
Tchicherin’s place. Karakhan is an Armenian and, more through favorable
circumstances than any astonishing ability, has achieved his high
official position.

I always think of him as getting into or out of an automobile. During
the first days of the revolution he “requisitioned” Rasputin’s car, a
gorgeous affair which had been the gift of the Empress and was made
especially for the mysterious priest. Karakhan never walks anywhere
and his car is always waiting for him in front of his home or the
Foreign Office. An evidence of his cleverness was his ability to keep
for himself the whole lower floor of the most lovely private palace in
Moscow, while Lenin and Tchicherin lived as meagerly as workmen.

He is a faultless dresser. And he has the rather dubious distinction of
being the only Commissar who divorced his wife under the new marriage
laws. He immediately married again.

Karakhan is one of those surprising figures of the revolution who,
without possessing marked talents or great idealism, nevertheless rose
to power.

Mr. Florinsky and Mr. Axionov represent the old order. Florinsky was a
Consul in America under the Tsar. He is now a Communist and wears his
red button with all the grace of an old beau wearing the ribbon of the
Legion of Honor. He was the only man in Russia last year who wore spats
and a monocle.

Axionov is the Cheka man--a former Tsarist officer and a poet of
distinction. I was never present when he arrested anyone. He was always
pounding out free verse poems between reports. Often in dull moments he
read them to us.

He has the manner of a courtier and used to embarrass the American
stenographers by kissing their hands. He was forever bowing and
continually good-natured. Sinister rumors used to float round about
his activities which caused us to vow never to “talk” or to criticize
anything or anybody in his presence, but we invariably forgot our
resolutions simply because he was so pleasant.

Axionov wore a beard which was fiery red. His head was absolutely bald,
but he usually kept it covered by a high peaked cap with a large red
star on the front. No other country but Russia could have produced such
a character.


THE END



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