The next day I took the channel boat to Ostend. Arriving in Berlin, I made inquiries and found Whitehead. He promised to get me through to Russia. That I was not indorsed by any Communist party did not matter to him. He was not a fanatic or dogmatist. In the days of our association together in London we often waxed satirical about Communist orthodoxy and we had often discussed the idea of a neo-radical magazine in which nothing in the universe would be held sacred.
Whitehead started working for me. The intervening time I spent visiting the theaters. Expressionism was setting the pace. I saw the revolving stage for the first time and admired it. Also I visited many of the cabarets, which had sprung up like mushrooms under the Socialist-Republican régime, some of which seemed to express the ultimate in erotomania. The youngsters of both sexes, the hectic pleasure-chasers of the Berlin of that epoch (before Poincaré grabbed the Ruhr), were methodically exploiting the nudist colony indoors, which was perhaps more exciting than the outdoor experiments.
One evening Whitehead announced that all was ready. The next day we drove in a taxicab to a rendezvous. We entered a house and passed into a large room in which there was a group of men. Four of them I identified as Russians. Whitehead introduced me as akamarad und neger dichter. One sitting at a table spoke with a kindly smile. He asked a few questions in effortful English which I promptly answered. I said that I was not a member of the American CommunistParty, but that I was in sympathy with the purpose of the great Russian revolution. I said that it was primarily as a writer that I was interested in Soviet Russia and that I intended to write about it for the Negro press.
I received back my passport and Crystal Eastman's recommendation, which I had consigned to Whitehead. A visa for Russia was attached to the passport. I was told to prepare to travel at once. The next day I traveled with an English-speaking German to Stettin. There I slept that night at a hotel. The following morning I was taken to a pier, whence I embarked for Leningrad.
Petrograd! Leningrad! When I think of that great city like a mighty tree shaken to its roots by a hurricane, yet still standing erect, and when I think of the proud equestrian statue of Peter the Great, proclaiming that dictator's mighty achievement, I feel that the world has lost the poetry and the color rising like a rainbow out of a beautiful name since Petrograd was changed to Leningrad.
Lenin is mightier than Peter the Great. But there is no magic in the name of Leningrad. There is magic in the name of Lenin, as there is splendor in the word Moscow. And perhaps Lenin himself, whose life was devoted to the idea of creating a glorious new world, might have, in appreciation of the will of Peter the Great to remake a nation, preferred Petrograd to remain Petrograd. Perhaps the spirit of Lenin might have been more adequately expressed in the erection of a brand-new city, rising out of that system to which he dedicated his life. Lenin without any suffix—like a perfect ball of pure gold—a city called Lenin.
I saw Petrograd! Like a great tree, shaken to its roots by a hurricane and struck by lightning and somehow still standing. Petrograd, half empty of its population and somewhat sad in the autumn. I saw the monuments of czars and nobles tumbled in the dirt by the proletarian masses. But intact and untouched they had left the beautifully proud monument of Peter the Great, a mighty symbol of individual will and majesty.
MOSCOW
Moscow for many loving her was dead ...And yet I saw a bright Byzantine fair,Of jewelled buildings, pillars, domes and spiresOf hues prismatic dazzling to the sight;A glory painted on the Eastern air,Of amorous sounding tones like passionate lyres;All colors laughing richly their delightAnd reigning over all the color red.My memory bears engraved the strange Kremlin,Of halls symbolic of the tiger will,Of Czarist instruments of mindless law ...And often now my nerves throb with the thrillWhen, in that gilded place, I felt and sawThe simple voice and presence of Lenin.
I felt almost ashamed in those lean hungry years of 1922, when Russia was just emerging from a great famine, that Moscow should have stirred me in the way I have expressed it in this sonnet. Yes, I will admit that my senses were stirred by the semi-oriental splendor and movement of Moscow even before my intellect was touched by the forces of the revolution.
After the war, the revolution and the famine, one's mind had created a picture of a grim, harsh melancholy atmosphere.But it was all like a miracle, all that Byzantine conglomeration of form and color, shedding down its radiance upon the proletarian masses. It was like anArabian Nightsdream transforming the bleak white face of an Arctic waste.
And the crowds tramping and sleighing through the deep snow spreading over all the land were really happier and friendlier than the crowds of New York and London and Berlin. Yet the people in Moscow were generally so poorly clad. There was so much of that Oriental raggedness that one does not see in New York and London and Berlin—at least not on the surface. The scenes were so unexpected and strange that I even doubted at first whether they were not created by Communist discipline and Bolshevik propaganda. But when I mingled with the people I soon perceived that many did not even comprehend the true nature of Communism. Some of them could understand only that Lenin was in the place of the Czar and that he was a greater Little Father.
I was soon brought down out of the romantic feeling of the atmosphere to face the hard reality of the American Communist delegation. Brazenly and bravely I had journeyed to Russia with some members of the British group. But now the American delegation had arrived with a Negroid delegate, a light mulatto. My presence was resented. The American delegation did not want me there. The delegation represented America, and as I had been passed with other Communists as a visitor to the Fourth Communist Congress, it was necessary that I should be indorsed by the delegation as an unofficial visitor. This the chairman refused to do. Instead, he desired that I should be sent out of Russia, back home.
A fight was raging inside of the American delegation. A minority led by James Cannon wanted a legal AmericanCommunist party, to carry on open propaganda among all the American workers. The majority, led by the chairman, was fighting to keep the American party illegal and underground.
Rose Pastor Stokes was the main prop of the chairman. When she arrived in Moscow, still pretty and purring and sly as a puss, she immediately engaged me in conversation and casually asked if I did not think that an illegal Communist party was the best suited for America. I answered no, emphatically. At the time I did not know that the difference in the ranks of the American group was serious. Not being a party member, I was unaware of what was going on inside of the organization.
Rose Pastor Stokes was one of the delegates who had just escaped from Bridgman, Michigan, during the police raid of August, 1922, when the illegal Communist Party held its convention in the open there in a beautiful romantic valley. Some of us ofThe Liberatorthought that the Communists, being tired of staying underground, were feeling so pastoral and poetic that they couldn't do better than hold their secret convention in the open air of the lovely Michigan country.
Rose Pastor Stokes had said to me that it was necessary for Communists to take to the woods in summer to escape the iron heel of the capitalists. She was the wife of a millionaire, and perhaps knew more about the iron heel than poor proletarians. She admired that romantic novel of Jack London's,The Iron Heel, and once told me that radicals could use it as a textbook of revolutionary organization in America. She was shocked and hurt that a few of us regarded the convention and the raid in Michigan as something like a comic opera.
I remembered Mrs. Stokes's spy mania, when I was onThe Liberator. She was doing secret radical work. She used to tell me stories of being followed by detectives, and of how she fooled them by taking refuge in the Hotel Plaza and the Hotel Astor; because the dicks wouldn't imagine that a guest of such places was red. She was also working with a radical Negro group, and thought she was followed by Negro detectives in Harlem. One night I was at the apartment of my friend, Grace Campbell, when Mrs. Stokes came in to attend a meeting. She was breathless, and sank into a chair, exhausted. She asked for water, and Comrade Campbell hurried to get a glassful. Then Mrs. Stokes explained that a colored man had been watching her suspiciously while she was riding up on the subway, and when she got off the train he had attempted to follow her. She had hurried and dodged through the insouciant Harlem crowd and gone round many blocks to evade the spy.
Said Comrade Campbell, "But Comrade Stokes, there aren't any Negroes spying on radicals in Harlem. That colored man, maybe he was attempting—kind of—to get friendly with you."
Mrs. Stokes jumped right up out of her exhaustion: "What, Comrade? Youshockme!" In her voice, and her manner, was the most perfect bourgeois expression of the superior person. Comrade Campbell said: "Why Comrade Stokes, I didn't mean to insinuate anything, but any person is likely to be mistaken for something else."
So now in Moscow, before I was fixed in place as an unofficial observer, Rose Pastor Stokes had got it from me that I was opposed to the majority of the American delegation, and that was bad. Mrs. Stokes really believed that we were living through the period of the new Inquisition against radicals in America, and that those who did not believe thatwere traitors to the cause. She hinted even that there was something suspicious about my use of my real name in Moscow. For all the American delegates had secret names. Mrs. Stokes's own was Sasha. But some of us unorthodox comrade sympathizers preferred to identify her as The Red Red Rose.
Meanwhile, the committee appointed to seat all delegates to the Fourth Congress was sifting credentials. It was headed by a repulsive type of strutting Prussian whose name is now forgotten, lost in the radical scramble for place and the shuffling and cutting of Communist cards—and Leninist purges. Greater Red names than his have gone like the melted snows of yesterday.
I was soon aware that the Prussian person had his severe blue eye fixed on me, as if I had been specially pointed out to him. I pretended that I had not seen that evil eye, but soon I was being bedeviled. I was thrown out of the Lux Hotel and found myself in a dilapidated house in a sinisterpereulok. My room was bare excepting for an army cot, and cold like the steppes because of a broken window pane through which poured a Siberian draught. My first thought was to protect myself against pneumonia, and so I hurried to a store and purchased two blankets and a pair of the cheap warm and comfortable felt boots that reach to the thighs—the kind the Russian peasants wear.
In the room next to mine there was a Russian couple. The man spoke a little English. I complained about the state of my room and he agreed that the window should be fixed; but, said he, "Thousands of Russians are living in worse places." It was a quiet, gentle, perhaps unintentional, rebuke, but immediately I felt confused and altogether ashamed. I became aware of the implications of my grievance, so pettyin the eyes of the "thousands in worse places" who had just come through an eight-year siege of war, revolution, counter-revolution and famine, with fields and farms devastated, factories wrecked, houses in ruins, no time and few funds for repairs.
I remembered breakfasting on the train in Germany a few weeks previously. The countryside, misty brown in the early morning, was peaceful and beautiful; the train ran precisely on time; the coaches and dining car were in elegant shape, the passengers well dressed, the waiters in neat uniform. The breakfast was fine, but the cream that came with the coffee was barely whitened water. I had just come from America, where cream with coffee is a commonplace. And so, without thinking, I asked the waiter for cream. I said I would pay extra for it.
The waiter said: "But Mister, we have no cream at all. They have taken away all our cows from us, and what little milk we have we must give to our babies." Then I remembered that I had read somewhere that under the Treaty of Versailles the Germans had had to give up thousands of heads of cattle to the Allies. But I had never fully grasped the significance of that until I asked for cream with my coffee in Germany. (We are, the majority of us, merely sentimental about the suffering of others. Only when direct experience twists our own guts out of place are we really able to understand. I remember once hearing a nice comfortable bohemian noblewoman ecstatically exclaim: "J'aime la souffrance! J'aime la souffrance!" Yes! She loved vicariously the suffering of others.)
" ... Thousands in worse places." A good room was as much of a luxury in Moscow in 1922 as a car is in America. A good room was the chief non-political topic of conversation.People greeted one another and said: "Do you have a good room?" in the same way we say, "How is your health?" One of the tidbits of those times was the joke that Mrs. Trotsky and Mrs. Zinoviev were at odds because one had a better apartment in the Kremlin than the other.
Now my position was precarious. I wanted by all means to stay in Moscow and to attend the meetings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. But would-be delegates and visitors who were unwanted and undesirable were being ruthlessly dealt with. Some were accused as spies and counter-revolutionists. To the Russians, spying was a real menace. It meant sabotage of revolutionary property, attempted assassination of officials, and working to overthrow the Soviets. They could not understand that when an English or an American Communist accused certain persons of being spies, his idea of spying was romantic and akin to eavesdropping.
Aware of the way in which things were going against radical dissidents, I acted quickly. I had a friend high up in Bolshevik circles in the person of Sen Katayama. Sen Katayama wastheJapanese revolutionist. He had been a member of the Second International and knew all the big men of the conservative British and continental labor movement. He was an old friend of Lenin, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek, and had gone over to the Third International at its inception.
Sen Katayama had been a student at Fisk University, the southern Negro school. He was small, dark-brown, with intensely purposeful features which were nevertheless kindly. I met him when I was working onThe Liberator. He dropped in one day and introduced himself. He took me to lunch at a Japanese restaurant, and at another time to aChinese, and introduced me to the Indian rendezvous restaurant in the theatrical district. His personality was friendly but abounding in curiosity—a sort of minute methodical curiosity. He made me think of a fearless and faithful little hunting dog. When he came up to my office, his little eyes, like brilliant beads, darted rapidly over everything. And like a permanent surprise he invaded my rooms at all hours and talked in his squeaky grandmotherly voice about Negro problems. He demonstrated a vast interest and sympathy for the Negro racialists and their organizations. I liked Sen Katayama immensely. I was fascinated by his friendly ferreting curiosity. I had associated with many Chinese at home in the West Indies and in London, but Sen Katayama was my first Japanese friend. It was exciting to contrast Chinese and Japanese by the types I had known. Sen Katayama was eager and extrovert, almost too much so, while the Chinese, however friendly, seemed aloof and secret.
Sen Katayama was in his glory in Red Russia. He was an honorary colonel of the Red army and always appeared at mass meetings in his uniform. The crowds adored him and applauded frantically. He appeared to me somewhat like a harbinger, a symbol of the far eastern element in the new heart of Russia.
Sen Katayama warmly welcomed me in Moscow and invited me to tea in his nice room in the Lux Hotel. He held an important post in the Eastern Department of the Communist International and because of his extensive traveling and his education and contact with American Negroes he was regarded as an authority on all colored peoples' affairs. He had more real inside and sympathetic knowledge and understanding of American Negroes than many of the white American Communists who were camping in Moscow.
When I explained to Sen Katayama how and why I had come to Russia and of the difficulties I was encountering because of the opposition of the American delegation, he said: "You leave everything to me and we'll see if they can get you out of here and prevent your attending the Congress. I'll talk to the Big Four[2]about you."
FOOTNOTES:[2]Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek.
FOOTNOTES:
[2]Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek.
[2]Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek.
XV
An Individual Triumph
Meanwhile, all the Russian folk unwittingly were doing their part for me. Whenever I appeared in the street I was greeted by all of the people with enthusiasm. At first I thought that this was merely because of the curiosity which any strange and distinctive type creates in any foreign environment, such as I had experienced in Holland and Belgium and Germany. But no! I soon apprehended that this Russian demonstration was a different thing. Just a spontaneous upsurging of folk feeling.
The Bolsheviks had nothing at all to do with it. The public manifestation for me took them unawares. But the Bolsheviks have nerves subtly attuned to the currents of opinion and a sense of propaganda values in which they are matched only by French officialdom. So, as soon as they perceived the trend of the general enthusiasm for me, they decided to use it. And I was not averse to that. Never before had I experienced such an instinctive sentiment of affectionate feeling compelling me to the bosom of any people, white or colored. And I am certain I never will again. My response was as sincere as the mass feeling was spontaneous. That miraculous experience was so extraordinary that I have never been able to understand it.
Even the Russian comrades, who have a perfect pat social-economic explanation for all phenomena, were amazed. The comrade who conducted me around (when I hadn't wandered off by myself, which was often) was as intelligent as afox and as keen and cold as an icicle. Although a mere youth, he held important positions, open and secret, and today, still young, he holds a most important position in the Soviet government and in the Russian Communist Party. This comrade said: "I don't quite understand. Some of the Indian delegates are darker than you—quite black—yet the people don't carry on about them that way. But there is something very different in your features and that is what the people see."
Never in my life did I feel prouder of being an African, a black, and no mistake about it. Unforgettable that first occasion upon which I was physically uplifted. I had not yet seen it done to anybody, nor did I know that it was a Russian custom. The Moscow streets were filled with eager crowds before the Congress started. As I tried to get through along the Tverskaya I was suddenly surrounded by a crowd, tossed into the air, and caught a number of times and carried a block on their friendly shoulders. The civilians started it The soldiers imitated them. And the sailors followed the soldiers, tossing me higher than ever.
From Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow I went triumphantly from surprise to surprise, extravagantly fêted on every side. I was carried along on a crest of sweet excitement. I was like a black ikon in the flesh. The famine had ended, the Nep was flourishing, the people were simply happy. I was the first Negro to arrive in Russia since the revolution, and perhaps I was generally regarded as an omen of good luck! Yes, that was exactly what it was. I was like a black ikon.
The attitude of the non-Bolshevist population was even more interesting. I had been told to be careful about going places alone. But bourgeois persons on the street implored mejust to enter their homes for a glass of tea. I went. I had no fear of even the "whitest" Russians in Russia, although in Paris and Berlin I would not have trusted them. The only persons that made me afraid in Russia were the American Communists. Curiously, even Russian bourgeois persons trusted me. They knew that I was in sympathy with the Communists—was their guest. Yet some of them told me frankly and naïvely that they did not like the Bolsheviks and didn't think their régime would last. The women chattered like parrots, happy that the shops were opened. They wanted to hear about the shops in New York and London and Berlin. When I visited a college with an interpreter, who was certainly a member of the O.G.P.U., one of the language teachers explained the difficulties of working under the new régime. She said she ought to travel abroad to keep up with the languages she taught, and that was impossible now. She said the proletarian students were dull and kept the brighter bourgeois students back. She said that one of her brightest students was the son of a former governor, and that she would not reveal his identity, for if it were known, he could not stay in the college. She said, "I can't let even you know who he is, for you might tell about him." But before I left she introduced me to the lad, explaining that he had specially asked for an introduction. In Petrograd, Chorny Chukovsky, the popular author, introduced me to a princess and a countess who were his friends, and to the intellectual élite, who were mainly anti-Bolsheviks. But they crowded a hall to hear me read my poems. One of the professors, who had studied in England and France, was so excited that he invited me to the national library the next day. And what did he do? There was a rare Pushkin book with a photograph of him as a boy which clearly showed his Negroid strain.(The Negroid strain is not so evident in the adult pictures of Pushkin.) I coveted the book, and told the Professor so. He said he was sorry that he could not make me a present of the volume. But he actually extracted that photograph of Pushkin and gave it to me. Mark you, that professor was no Bolshevik, contemptuous of bourgeois literature. He was an old classic scholar who worshipped his books and was worried about the future of literature and art under the Bolshevik régime. Yet he committed that sacrilege for me: "To show my appreciation of you as a poet," he said. "Our Pushkin was also a revolutionist." Like Crystal Eastman's farewell note, that photograph of Pushkin is one of the few treasures I have.
Oh, I remember that magnificent cartoon in colors, picturing me sailing on a magic carpet over the African jungles to Moscow. The artist made me a gift of the original. An imp swiped it. It was the perfect interpretation of my adventure in Russia. AnArabian Nightsfantasy transformed into reality. I had been the despised brother, unwelcome at the gorgeous fête in the palace of the great. In the lonely night I went to bed in a cold bare room. But I awoke in the morning to find myself the center of pageantry in the grand Byzantine city. The photograph of my black face was everywhere among the most highest Soviet rulers, in the principal streets, adorning the walls of the city. I was whisked out of my unpleasant abode and installed in one of the most comfortable and best-heated hotels in Moscow. I was informed: "You may have wine and anything extra you require, and at no cost to you." But what could I want for, when I needed a thousand extra mouths and bellies for the importunate invitations to feast? Wherever I wanted to go, there was a car at my disposal.Whatever I wanted to do I did. And anything I felt like saying I said. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be a highly privileged personage. And in the Fatherland of Communism!
Didn't I enjoy it! The American comrades were just too funny with envy and chagrin. The mulatto delegate who had previously high-hatted me now began to cultivate my company. It was only by sticking close to me that he could be identified as a Negroid.
I was photographed with the popular leaders of international Communism: Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Clara Zetkin, Sen Katayama, Roy; with officers of the Soviet fleet, the army and the air forces; with the Red cadets and the rank and file; with professors of the academies; with the children of Moscow and of Petrograd; with delegates from Egypt, India, Japan, China, Algeria.
XVI
The Pride and Pomp of Proletarian Power
TheBolshoi Theater in Moscow presented a pageantry of simple proletarian pride and power on the night of the opening of the Congress of the Communist International. The absence of the primitive appeal of gilded pomp made the manifestation even more sublime and awe-inspiring.
I had received a pass to attend the great opening of the Congress. When I succeeded in getting into the vast Bolshoi auditorium, Martin Anderson Nexö, the author ofPelle, the Conqueror, waved to me to come and sit beside him. He was seated in the center front of the hall. But an usher grabbed me, and before I could realize where I was going, I was being handed from usher to usher like an object that was consigned to a special place. At first I thought I was going to be conducted to the balcony, but instead I was ushered onto the platform to a seat beside Max Eastman and just behind Zinoviev. It seems as if the curious interest of the crowd focused upon me had prompted Zinoviev to hoist me up there on the platform.
Zinoviev asked me to speak and I refused. Max Eastman pleaded: "Do speak! See how the people are looking at you; they want to hear you." I said that if they had given me notice beforehand I might have prepared a few phrases, although speaking was not my specialty. But I wouldn't stand up before the Bolshevik élite and that vast eager crowd, without having something prepared to say. Eastman said: "Justtell them you bring greetings from the Negro workers of America."
"But," said I, "I have no mandate from any American Negro workers to say that. There is an official mulatto delegate; perhaps he has a message from the Negro workers."
I said to Eastman, "Why don't you speak?" He said he would like to if they would ask him. Certainly the American Communists had in Max Eastman the finest platform personality to present. Unlike me, he was as pure a Marxist as any of them there and had given the best of his intellect to serve the cause of Communism and extoll the Soviets in America. But because of petty jealousy they cold-shouldered Eastman in Moscow. Perhaps if they had been a little diplomatic about him, he probably would be one of them instead of a Trotskyist today.
I told Zinoviev that I came to Russia as a writer and not as an agitator. When his messenger interpreted what I said, Zinoviev's preacher face turned mean. He was most angry. But I did not mind. My personal triumph had made me aware that the Russians wanted a typical Negro at the Congress as much as I wanted to attend the Congress. The mulatto delegate was a washout. He was too yellow. I had mobilized my African features and won the masses of the people. The Bolshevik leaders, to satisfy the desires of the people, were using me for entertainment. So why should I worry about Zinoviev's frown? Even though he was president of the great Third International, I knew that there was no special gift I could get from Zinoviev after the entertainment was over and ended. I could never be a radical agitator. For that I was temperamentally unfit. And I could never be a disciplined member of any Communist party, for I was born to be a poet.
And now I was demanded everywhere. Sometimes I had to participate in three different meetings in one day: factory meetings, meetings of soviets, youth meetings, educational conferences in colleges and schools, the meetings of poets and writers, and theatrical performances. I was introduced to interesting sections of the new social and cultural life of Moscow and Petrograd.
I was always asked to speak, and so I prepared a few phrases. The Russians adore long speeches, which it did not interest me to make. And so they lengthened mine by asking a lot of questions. I had listened to the American delegates deliberately telling lies about conditions in America, and I was disgusted. Not only the Communist delegates, but radical American intellectuals really thought it was right to buoy up the Russians with false pictures of the American situation. All the speeches of the American delegates, the tall rhetoric, the purple phrases, conveyed fundamentally a common message, thus: "Greetings from America. The workers of America are groaning under the capitalist terror. The revolutionary organizations have been driven underground. But the American Communist Party is secretly organizing the masses. In a few years we will overthrow American capitalism and join our forces with the Russian Communists. Long live the Revolution...." I heard the chairman of the American delegation say: "In five years we will have the American revolution."
The Russians from these speeches pictured the workers of America as denied the right to organize and the rights of free assembly and free speech, as denied representation in Congress, as ridden down by American cossacks, banished in droves from their homes to the Siberias of the Far West, with their imprisoned and exiled leaders escaping to Canada andMexico and working underground to overthrow the capitalist system. Briefly, the American situation, as they understood it, was similar to that of Russia under the Czarist régime just before the revolution.
The police raid on the illegal Communist party meeting in the beautiful woods of Michigan had been spread all over the Russian newspapers. Everything about that funny raid was so Czarist-Russian-like that the Russians really believed that it was typical of American conditions.
Truly, I could not speak such lies. I knew that the American workers in 1922 were generally better off than at the beginning of the World War in 1914. I was aware, of course, that labor organization in this country was far below the standard of labor organization in England, Germany and France, that American labor was not organized as a political weapon, that in some sections of the country and in certain industries labor was even denied the right to organize, and that radicals were always baited. But Leavenworth was not Siberia. And by no stretch of the imagination could the United States be compared to Czarist Russia.
How, then, could I stand before the gigantic achievement of the Russian revolution and lie? What right had I to tell these people, who had gone through a long death struggle to conquer their country for themselves, that the American revolution was also in travail? What couldIpresume to tell them? I told them that it was a great honor for me to be there to behold the triumph of their great revolution. I told them that I felt very insignificant and dumb before that wonderful thing. I said that I had come to Russia to learn something, to see with my own eyes and try to write a little of what I had seen.
Invariably I was questioned: "And what about the American revolution?" When I replied I think it was a long way off, the audiences did not like me to say that. I must admit that the Russians in those days were eager to be deceived. I remember that I was asked to attend a large and important meeting of Young Communists. When I had finished talking the president got up and said: "Comrade, we appreciate what you feel about our revolution, but we want you to tell us about the American revolution. When will there be the American revolution?"
It was a direct question and I answered directly. I said that I could not prophesy about an American revolution; but that perhaps if the American ruling class started a wholesale suppression of labor organizations, if the people had to read radical literature in secret, if the radicals had to hold all their meetings in secret, if the liberals and radicals who agitated for more civil liberties and the rights of the working class were deported to the Philippines, then possibly in ten or fifteen years America might develop a situation similar to that in Russia in 1905.
The interpreter, a comrade commander in the navy, asked if he should translate me literally. I said "Word for word." And when he had finished there was no sound of applause. That was the first time that I was not applauded when I spoke, but I preferred that.
The young president of the Young Communists took the platform: "Comrade," he said, "you are a defeatist. The American revolution cannot be so far away. But if that is your opinion, we command you at once to do your part and help make the revolution." I said to the interpreter: "Tell the young comrade that I am a poet."
After the meeting my friend Comrade Venko said to me: "You should have told them the American revolution is rightaround the corner. That's what they want to hear." (He had lived many years in England and had acquired some Anglicisms.) I said, "You know I read somewhere that Lenin said that it is necessary to face facts and tell the truth always."
"Yes, Comrade," said Venko, "but Lenin is Lenin and we are just ordinary mortals."
Yet in spite of my obstinacy I was still everywhere demanded. When the American Negro delegate was invited to attend meetings and my mulatto colleague went, the people asked: "But where is thechorny(the black)?" The mulatto delegate said: "Say, fellow, you're all right for propaganda. It's a pity you'll never make a disciplined party member."
"Bigger shots than you have said the same thing," I replied. Zinoviev had referred to me as a non-partisan. "My destiny is to travel a different road."
We were sitting in on the discussions as to whether there should be an illegal or legal Communist party in America, and on the Negro in American life. I was there not only as a writer, but I was given the privileges of a special delegate. One thing sticks in my memory about that American delegation in Moscow. It had the full support of the Finnish Federation and the Russian Federation of America. The representatives of these organizations voteden bloc, rallying to the support of an illegal party. The argument of the Yankee representatives of the legal group was unanswerable, but they were outvoted every time by the foreign federations. The Finnish and the Russian federations were not only the most highly organized units of the American party, but, so I was informed, they contributed more than any other to the party chest. They controlled because they had the proper organization and the cash.
I said to the mulatto delegate: "That's what Negroes needin American politics—a highly organized all-Negro group. When you have that—a Negro group voting together like these Finns and Russians—you will be getting somewhere. We may feel inflated asindividualNegroes sitting in on the councils of the whites, but it means very little if our people are not organized. Otherwise the whites will want to tell us what is right for our people even against our better thinking. The Republicans and the Democrats do the same thing. They give a few plum places to leading Negroes as representatives of the race and our people applaud vicariously. But we remain politically unorganized. What we need is our own group, organized and officered entirely by Negroes, something similar to the Finnish Federation. Then when you have your own group, your own voting strength, you can make demands on the whites; they will have more respect for your united strength than for your potential strength. Every other racial group in America is organized as a group, except Negroes. I am not an organizer or an agitator, but I can see what is lacking in the Negro group."
I listened to James Cannon's fighting speeches for a legal Communist party in America. Cannon's manner was different from Bill Haywood's or Foster's. He had all the magnetism, the shrewdness, the punch, the bag of tricks of the typical American politician, but here he used them in a radical way. I wondered about him. If he had entered Democratic or Republican politics, there was no barrier I could see that could stop him from punching his way straight through to the front ranks.
I think Trotsky was the first of the big Russians to be convinced that there should be a legal Communist party in America, then Rakovsky and finally Zinoviev, a little reluctantly. Bukharin was for the illegal group. He said: "Remember what Jack London has told us about the terror and secret organization in America in hisIron Heel." That was so rare that I had to smile. While Cannon was informing the Russians about actual conditions in America, Bukharin was visualizing the America of Jack London'sIron Heel. Bukharin always did make me think of that line about some men having greatness thrust upon them. I believe that Lenin said of Bukharin, as Frank Harris said of H.G. Wells, that he could not think. Yet Bukharin was the author of the A B C of Communism, which once had a big vogue among the radicals.
At last even I was asked my opinion of an illegal Communist party in America. I tried to get excused, saying that as I was not an official delegate or a politician, but merely a poet, I didn't think my opinion was worth while. But as my colleague the mulatto was for the illegal party, I suppose they needed a foil. So then I said that although I had no experience of the actual conditions of social life in Czarist Russia, I believed there was no comparison between them and American conditions today. There were certain democratic privileges such as a limited freedom of the press and a limited right of free speech that our governing classes had had to concede because they were the necessary ingredients of their own system of society. And American radicals could generally carry on open propaganda under those democratic privileges. Our Upton Sinclairs, Eugene Debs's, Max Eastmans and Mother Jones's might be prosecuted and imprisoned for a specific offense against the law, but they were not banished for their radical ideas to an American Siberia. And I said I thought that the only place where illegal andsecret radical propaganda was necessary was among the Negroes of the South.
What I said about the Negroes of the South was more important than I imagined, and precipitated the Negro question. The Negro question came under the division of the Eastern Bureau, of which Sen Katayama was an active official. Because of his American experience and his education among Negroes, Sen Katayama was important as a kind of arbiter between black and white on the Negro question. It was an unforgettable experience to watch Katayama in conference. He was like a little brown bulldog with his jaws clamped on an object that he wouldn't let go. He apparently forgot all about nice human relationships in conference. Sen Katayama had no regard for the feelings of the white American comrades, when the Negro question came up, and boldly told them so. He said that though they called themselves Communists, many of them were unconsciously prejudiced against Negroes because of their background. He told them that really to understand Negroes they needed to be educated about and among Negroes as he had been.
Think not that it was just a revolutionary picnic and love feast in Moscow in the fifth year of Lenin! One of the American delegates was a southerner or of southern extraction. An important Bolshevik facetiously suggested to him that to untangle the Negro problem, black and white should intermarry. "Good God!" said the American, "if Jesus Christ came down from Heaven and said that in the South, he would be lynched." The Bolshevik said: "Jesus Christ wouldn't dare, but Lenin would."
Also I remember Walton Newbold who was the first Communist candidate elected to the British House of Commons. Saklatvala, the Indian Parsee, had announced himself a Communist only after he had been elected as an independent, but Walton Newbold was the first candidate of the British Communist Party. Just after his election to Parliament Newbold came to Moscow, while the Fourth Congress of International Communism was in session. For any reader who might not understand why a Communist member of the British Parliament should go to Moscow, I may explain that by the parallel of a cardinal going to Rome after receiving his hat. It was a big day for the little insignificant delegation of British Communists when Newbold arrived in Moscow. Of that triumphant arrival, one incident sticks more in my memory. I was informed that a member of the Chinese Young Communists, who was attending the Congress, met Newbold in the lobby of the Lux Hotel. He went up to Comrade Newbold to congratulate him and began: "Comrade Newbold—"
"Hello, Chink," Newbold cut in.
"But Comrade Newbold, I am not a Chink."
"Who told you that you weren't?" said Comrade Newbold as he turned away.
In a little while the incident had flashed like an arrow through Communist circles in Moscow. The young Chinese was a member of an old Chinese clan and had been educated in America. At that time Bolshevik eyes were fixed on China. Chinese soldiers made up some of the crack units of the Red army when Great Britain was supporting the White war against the Reds and tightening the blockade against Russia. I remember Radek's saying to me: "We are pinning our hopes on China more than any other country. If we can make China Red, we will conquer the world."
I don't know if that incident of the young Chinese and the first Communist member of the British Parliament ever reached the ears of the big Bolsheviks. I do know, however—I got it from a good source—that the big Bolsheviks gave Newbold a hell of a skating over the Communist ice of Moscow. Newbold returned to the Parliament of British gentlemen and finally drifted over to the capitalist side.
I was asked to write a series of articles on the Negro group forIzvestia, the Moscow organ of the Soviets. Thus I came to meet Steklov, the editor-in-chief. Steklov was a huge man with a leonine head, more picturesque than intelligent. He told me that he was interested in Negroes being won over to the cause of Communism because they were a young and fresh people and ought to make splendid soldiers. I didn't relish that remark out of the mouth of a Communist. So many other whites had said the same thing—that Negroes make good cannon fodder when they were properly led—led by whites to the black slaughter. That filled me with resentment. The head of the French General Staff had proclaimed to the world the same thing, that France with its African empire had an army of a hundred millions. When Trotsky, the chief of all the Bolshevik fighting forces talked to me about Negroes he spoke wisely. Trotsky was human and universal in his outlook. He thought of Negroes as people like any other people who were unfortunately behind in the march of civilization.
Karl Radek was one of the Big Five of the Politbureau, which decided Bolshevik policy in those days. He invited me to dinner at his apartment in the Kremlin along with the Negro delegate of the American C.P. Radek wanted to know if I had a practical policy for the organization of American Negroes. I said that I had no policy other than the suggestion of a NegroBund, that I was not an organizer or an agitator and could not undertake or guarantee any practical work of organization.
The Negro delegate said that I was a poet and a romantic. I said I was not as romantic as he and his illegal party with their secret names and their convention in the wilds of Michigan. Radek laughed, and as I looked at his face set in a thick circle of hair I thought how much he resembled a red spider. Radek said that the Communists should adopt a friendly attitude to all writers who were in sympathy with the soviets. For example, Upton Sinclair, he thought, would be a valuable asset to the revolution if the Communists knew how to handle and use him. The mulatto said that Upton Sinclair was a bourgeois Socialist.
"Oh, no, no," said Radek, "I insist that is not the attitude to take. Upton Sinclair is a powerful writer with an enormous influence, and the American Communists should make use of his influence, even though Sinclair is not a Communist. Now with our Gorky—" At this point an infant wailed and Radek said, "My baby comes first." He left the room, to return a few minutes later with the maid, who brought in the baby. Radek and Mrs. Radek kissed and fondled the child. The maid then brought the child to the mulatto, who touched its hand and patted its hair. From the mulatto she brought the child to me, but it shrank away, hid its face, and began to cry. Radek was interested and told the maid to take the child to the mulatto again. The mulatto took the child in his arms and it stopped crying, but when the maid tried me again, the child hid its face and cried. The maid retired with the child, and Radek said: "Now I understand the heart of the difference between white and black in America. It is fear. The Americans are like children, afraid of black complexion, and that is why they lynch and burn the Negro." I told Radek that his deduction was wrong; that in the South, where Negroes were lynched and burned, the black complexion was not a strangething to the whites, and that the majority of the children of the better classes of the South were nursed from their birth by black women, and that those children were extremely fond of their black foster mothers. Radek said that that was a strange thing.
XVII
Literary Interest
TheCongress ended and with a happy relief I turned from political meetings to social and literary affairs. The majority of the delegates had left, but I remained in Moscow writing. I was magnificently paid for poems and articles and became a front-page feature. Sometimes what I received in rubles for an article amounted when I figured it out to fifty American dollars. I had plenty of money to spend for food and cigarettes and even to frequent the cabarets. And besides, I was saving my fare to return to America.
I had no idea that I was being paid as a literary celebrity until one afternoon when I went to a newspaper office to receive my check. There I met an interesting Russian journalist. He was a titled person, a Count Something. After the revolution he had discarded his title, but since the Nep he had resumed it and signed himself Count. He remarked to me facetiously that perhaps his title of the old economic policy might help him to a better place under the New Economic Policy.
When I drew my check he looked at it and said: "Why, if they paid me one-tenth of what they pay you I would be rich. I could go to the casino and gamble and the cabarets to dance and wine."
"Why," I said, "I thought you got as much as I got."
"No," he said, "I couldn't, for you are a guest writer, a big writer—bolshoi! bolshoi! bolshoi!" The interpreter who accompanied me was annoyed and he said something to theCount, who immediately clamped up. That,bolshoi! bolshoi! bolshoi!(big! big! big!) was sweet music in my ears and an inspiration. But it also stirred up a hell of discontent within me. Why should I be "big" translated into Russian? It was because I was a special guest of the Soviets, a good subject for propaganda effect, but inflated beyond my actual literary achievement. That was not enough for me. I felt that if I were to bebolshoias a literary artist in a foreign language, I should first make a signal achievement in my native adopted language, English.
I met some of the notable Russian writers: Chukovsky, Boris Pilnyak, Eugene Zamiatin, Mayakovsky. I was invited to read at literary gatherings. My audiences were always enthusiastic and applauding, and also sometimes critical. "Tovarish," I was often told, "your poems are not proletarian." I replied, "My poetry expresses my feelings." I shocked the pure proletarian intellectuals and I was proud that I was a privileged person in Russia, and in a position to shock them. One night I was invited to the Arbat to hear the proletarian poets read and discuss their compositions. Without understanding the language I was able to appreciate certain poems from their swing and movement and the voice of the reciter. And I had a good interpreter who rendered some into English for me. After each poem was delivered there was a general discussion of it. I was particularly pleased with the poem of a slim young man in a coarse peasant smock buttoned up to his chin, and with a worried, unhappy expression in his sensitive features. I knew at once that he was a peasant become proletarian like myself. He gave a charming poem. Even before translation I knew from its communicative color tone and the soft threne running through it like a silver chord that it expressed an individuallonging for the life of the country, perhaps the ways that nevermore would be.
As soon as the poet had done I clapped my hands heartily. His poem and personality had unusually excited me, because I rarely applaud. I liked that poet with the intellectual anxiety of his face showing clearly that he was a little bewildered by that world-moving social shake-up. That expression was real, more real to me than the automatic enthusiasm of his fellow poets which seemed to me less sincere. They all jumped on him. "Alexis, you are not a proletarian poet!" And they criticized his subject matter. So I asked my interpreter to let me say a word. I said I thought it was natural for a man who had lived in the country to express his longing for it, whether he was a bourgeois or a proletarian.
Mayakovsky was then the premier proletarian poet. Chukovsky, the popular author ofCrocodileand other children's books, did not have the highest opinion of Mayakovsky. He told me that before the revolution Mayakovsky had been a futurist and that he used to wear fantastic clothes and had proclaimed his poems at the court of the Czar. Now Mayakovsky was a thundering proletarian poet. He recited one of his poems for me. It sounded like the prolonged bellow of a bull. He very kindly presented me with a signed copy of his latest book. Also he presented me to his wife, and said that she desired to dance a jazz with me. She was a handsome woman of an Arctic whiteness and appeared as if she had just stepped proudly out of a Dostoyevsky novel. We went to a gypsy cabaret and danced a little, but I am afraid that I did not measure up to the standard of Aframerican choreography. Mayakovsky told me that his great ambition was to visit America. I said I thought he would be abig success there in Russian costume, declaiming his poems in his trumpet voice.
The contemporary Russian poetry of the period which I liked best was that of the peasant poet Yessenin. His intimate friend, Zonov, translated some of his poems, and I was enchanted by their lyric simplicity and profundity. Zonov was always hoping that Yessenin and I would meet, but we never did. Just about the time when I disembarked at Petrograd, Yessenin and Isadora Duncan were landing in New York. And Yessenin did not return to Russia until after I had left in June of 1923.
Zonov held a place either executive or artistic at the Meyerhold Theater, which I visited frequently, for there was a congenial gang there. He often invited me to a private little feast in his den, where he served sweet Caucasian wine and caviar and sometimes champagne. Always with him was a little actress whom he fancied, but who did not seem to love him too much. Zonov looked like a tired professor, and he was always bewailing the absence of Yessenin. He exhibited a snapshot of Yessenin that he carried in his pocket book, and I was startled by its resemblance to the strange dancer I had known in New York. Zonov said unlovely things of Isadora Duncan, because she had married Yessenin and taken him from his friends. He said that Yessenin had proclaimed to them all that he did not love Isadora. But he had married her to get out of Russia, to see Europe and America. I said I did not consider love as always necessary, and that sometimes it might be expedient for a woman to save a man from his male friends. Zonov translated what I said to the actress and she screamed with laughter.
Meyerhold's was the revolutionary constructivist theater, which did the most daring things in dramatic production.There were no curtains. The audience saw clear through to backstage and watched the actors waiting to take their parts and come up to and retire from the front of the stage. The plan was novel. Meyerhold himself was a fanatic crusader in his ardor to make a great revolutionary theater express the revolutionary social system. All the symbols of the machine system were assembled on the stage: dynamos, cranes, scaffolding and turbines, until it resembled a regular workshop. Meyerhold said to me: "We need now great revolutionary plays and playwrights to make my theater the unique dramatic expression of the revolution." I had to talk to Meyerhold through an interpreter, but he impressed me as being more romantic than practical with his idea of making the stage the unique expression of the factory. I felt that after all the worker's life is not limited to the factory and should never be.
I was interested in the Moscow workers' attitude to the Meyerhold Theater. Whole blocks of seats were given to the factories and the barracks, but the theater, which was not very large, was never full. Yet the plays which Meyerhold put on were technically highly interesting. Vastly exciting to me was the presentation ofThe Inspector General, by Gogol. And unforgettable was one realistic scene of another play, in which the Czar was sitting on his chamber pot, with the imperial crown painted big upon it. But the workers and soldiers really preferred the ballet of the Bolshoi theater, the Moscow art theaters, the expressionist theater and the ordinary vulgar theaters. Whenever the workers received free tickets for the above-named theaters they never missed; workers and soldiers always filled them. But the audience of the Meyerhold Theater was of the intelligentsia—students and professional people. While the workers and soldiersshowed a distinct preference for the straight familiar entertainment, it was the intelligentsia that was avid of revolutionary drama. The situation made me think of a Frenchman's saying that most of the work of the experimental artists was not intended to enlighten the working class, but to "épater la bourgeoisie."
I was invited to dinner by Lunarcharsky, the Commissar of Education and of Arts. He was one of the most flamboyant orators of the Soviet Union and also a talented playwright. I told him a little of the little I knew about education in general in America and Negro education in particular, and I seized the opportunity to mention the Russian theater and the theater of Meyerhold. I remarked that it was interesting that the workers and soldiers seemed to prefer the old ballet to the new experimental theater. Lunarcharsky said that in the early days of the revolution some had desired to suppress the ballet, but he had held out against it. He considered the ballet a great form of art and what he did was to give the workers and peasants and soldiers the chance to enjoy it, which they hadn't had under the old régime. He had conserved and subsidized the best of the classical theaters for the entertainment of the people. But also he had granted subsidies to the experimental theaters to give them their chance to experiment in creating their best. Lunarcharsky was a wise mediator. It is related that when the Moscow masses, excited to high resentment against the Russian Orthodox Church, attempted to destroy the wonderful Cathedral of Vasilly Blazhenny, they were stopped by the intervention of Lunarcharsky. There was not a day of my stay in Moscow that my eyes failed to be glad in contemplation of Ivan the Terrible's super-byzantine burnt offering to humanity. And Lunarcharsky in Moscow appeared like a guardian angel to me because he had made it possible for my eyes to see that glory.
XVIII
Social Interest
Myconstant companion and interpreter was Venko, a big, strong, gloriously boisterous and comparatively young Russian. He had lived for years in an English Midland town and had left an English wife and children there to come to Russia after the revolution. The only sentimental thing in his mind was his family in England. Sometimes he was perplexed thinking about them. He said he was sure they wouldn't like living in Russia and he had no desire to return to England. He was not sentimental about his substitute Russian wife. He said she had married him only to get good food and a good apartment to live in. He was of peasant origin and she seemed to be from the poor professional class. Their living room constantly reminded me of that of the poor officer inThe Brothers Karamozov. It was like a seamstress's place, with a sewing machine installed and scraps of cloth lying carelessly about, from which one's clothes picked up bits of thread, and it had a peculiar odor like that of clothes being washed with brown soap. But she was a good wife. Sometimes I stayed at Venko's house, after we had finished at a meeting and resorted to a café to drink vodka. And however late we got there, his wife would get up to serve food.
Venko was an interpreter in the O.G.P.U. He was not connected with the intelligence work. He didn't like office work. He preferred to agitate crowds. He was a marvelously gesticulating, noisy and frothy agitator, but there was not much substance in his phrases. And if you don't give Russians somemeat to chew on when you talk to them, they soon tire of you, however brilliant your fireworks may be. If you have something to say they will listen for long hours upon hours, as patient as sheep, even if you are speaking in a strange language. And afterward they will ruminate on it with satisfaction through more long hours of interpreting. Venko was a good enough interpreter. My stay in Moscow was a vacation for him, of which we made a picnic. He was unorthodox about life, whether it was old or new, even as I, and he made the most unguarded and biting criticisms of things and personalities in his profane and boisterous Russian way.
The Moscow Soviet made me an honorary member at one of its meetings. A few days later Venko accompanied me to the office of the Soviet, where I was to receive the little red book that would make me even a more privileged personage than I was. The card was made out by a comrade clerk and my photograph was affixed. Then Venko and I were ushered into the presence of Commissar Kamenev, the president of the Moscow Soviet, for him to affix his signature.
Kamenev was extremely dignified and perfectly attired in black, with white collar and black tie, the best-dressed Bolshevik official (according to the smart European standard) that I had met. He welcomed me with a courteous smile, signed my card, shook my hand, and said he was proud to deliver it to me in the name of the Moscow Soviet. Venko translated. The simplicity of Kamenev's official dignity moved me very much, for in his fine-fitting conventional clothes, I might have mistaken him for a responsible banker, or a Protestant clergyman, or a high-ranking continental diplomat, anything but what Venko startled me by suggesting.
For as we got outside Venko exploded: "Good God, Comrade! I have seen the Czar!"
"What do you mean, the Czar?" I said.
"Kamenev in the place of the Czar. The same clothes, the same manner of wearing his beard! Good God, Comrade, a Jew in the place of the Czar!" Kamenev's features were indeed remarkably like the Czar's.
"Why, don't you like Jews?" I asked in astonishment. It was the first anti-Jewish sentiment I had heard from a Russian Communist.
"No, Comrade, I won't lie to you; I don't like Jews."
"Are you a pogromist?" I asked.
"Good God, Comrade, no. I fought the White-guard pogromists in the Ukraine and was wounded. The White guards started pogroms against the Jews. I fought them and fought the pogroms too, for pogroms are a crime against our Communist party. But I don't like the Jews, Comrade. All the Nep men are Jews."
"All?" I exclaimed.
"Well, if not all, nearly all. And all the money changers of the Black Bourse are Jews."
I record this conversation because it was one of the impressive and unforgettable things I heard from a Communist in Russia. I was particularly impressed because, as a member of a minority group in America that was the victim of blind and bitter prejudice, I was interested to know if the prejudice against the Jews had been automatically swept away with the Czarist régime.
I was interested, because I did not hold to the sentimental idea that the deep-rooted prejudices of a people could be eradicated overnight. What the Bolsheviks had accomplished was to put a stop to the vicious political exploitation of groupand race prejudice. I don't think the saintliest human being could ask more. Individual prejudice is one of the most natural sentiments. It is easy enough for an individual prejudice to become a family prejudice, for family ties are real. And it is also easy for such prejudice to spread to a group, for groups exist and the majority of human beings are fundamentally tribal.
I was not at all shocked by Venko's revelation. I was merely enlightened. If he were an intellectual Communist, he could not have spoken to me as he did. I preferred to go around with him, because I could learn more.
One evening Zonov invited me to a party which he did not want Venko to know about, for it was a bourgeois party. The guests were celebrating a holiday of the old régime which had been abolished by the Bolsheviks.
The party of that little remnant of the Russian bourgeoisie was something not to be missed. It was even more Russian, noisy, and elastic than the proletarian parties, for these people did not have to bother about correct Communist conduct. Maybe there was a flickering note of futility, of despair, which made them more reckless, because, unlike the Communists, they had no future. The limited luxury of the Nep for the moment was theirs to enjoy. And they were giving themselves to the moment unforgettably, as you might give yourself to a page of Chekhov.
Russian life seems to blow through space like a big breeze, and this remnant of a bourgeois society was no less a part of that big breeze. How they ate and danced and chattered in loud harmony! Two huge fruit cakes reared themselves like wedding cakes on a sideboard, and there were platters of caviar, sturgeon, salads, cheeses, every delicious food totickle the palate, and gallons of Caucasian wine and vodka to wash it down.
I was introduced all round as a guest of Russia. They all knew that I was a guest of the Soviets, and if they wanted to make it a guest of Russia instead, I had no objection to the added distinction. One very beautiful and proud-looking young woman got the back of her hand up to my lips with one of those exquisite gestures that only people who are born to them can make, I guess.
I made the best bow that was natural to me for that honor. But the young woman was not satisfied with my bow. She stamped her foot petulantly, though not unkindly, and rubbed my nose with the perfumed back of her hand. I was convinced that something more was expected of me, so I reached up my hand and took hers.
She led me to a seat and said rapidly in a voice that sounded like fine tinkling glass: "Why did you refuse to kiss my hand? Do you think it is degrading for a Communist to kiss a lady's hand?" She spoke lovely English.
"No,Tovarish—"
"Please don't call me by that disgusting name," she interrupted. "I am abarishna."
"Well,Barishna, then, if that is your preference, I did not kiss your hand simply because I don't know how to do it well. Nobody I know kisses hands in America."
TheBarishnaconceded an indulgent smile. "Tell me," she said, "do you like our Russia—Moscow and Petrograd?" I said that I did.
"As much as London and Paris and Berlin?" she asked.
I said, "More than London and Berlin. But I do not know Paris."
"I believe you," she said. "I know London and Paris andBerlin, but I love Petrograd more. Now there is no Petrograd." "But you have Moscow. Moscow is more beautiful," I said. "Oh, but Petrograd was magnificent before the revolution." I could never imagine Petrograd being more beautiful than Moscow, but so many Russians said it was.
Said thebarishna, "I tell you, I don't like the foreign Communists. You come here to gaze at us as if we were strange animals in a zoo, to mock at and insult us in our distress. That is hateful."
"Barishna," I said, "I don't understand. What do you mean? The foreign Communists come here bringing greetings from the workers abroad to the workers of Russia. They do not come here to mock and insult, but to praise and learn about the revolution."
"Oh, they do mock at us," she insisted. "My young brother works in one of the important departments and he heard a foreign Communist boasting that he had slept all night with a lady of title for ten cents. Now isn't that a mean and despicable thing to say? If a real man could buy a lady of quality for ten cents, shouldn't he be ashamed to mention it?"
"I guess so,Barishna," I said. "I don't care anything about the difference between titled and untitled loving."
"But you do think it was an unspeakable thing for acivilizedman to say, don't you?" She stressed the wordcivilizedas if I were a savage in her sight and she was eager to hear the opinion of a savage upon a civilized person.
"But,Barishna," I said, "the men of your class used to do worse things than that to the women of the class of the man who said he possessed a titled lady for ten cents. They did it to weak and ignorant girls and often didn't even pay the price of ten cents."
"Oh no," said thebarishna, "nogentlemandoes that."
"But they do,Barishna. Many of your gentlemen still exercise even the medievaldroits de seigneurin a different way. That's what Tolstoy'sResurrectionis all about."
"So you read our Tolstoy? You like our Russian literature? Oh, I am glad that you do. They have destroyed everything, but they cannot destroy our Russian literature."
I was very embarrassed. Most of the bourgeois people I had met had refrained from saying anything against the Communists, even though they did not praise them. Suddenly thebarishnasaid, "I want to leave Russia; I have friends in England. Would you marry me so that I could leave the country with you—just a formal arrangement?" I hesitated and said that I didn't know that I could.
"But many of the foreigners have married Russian girls and got them through to Berlin," she said.
"Communists too?" I asked.
"Yes, Communists too."
"Barishna," I said, "I am sorry. I couldn't shoulder even the formal responsibility. And besides, I am not a Communist. I don't even know yet how I am going to get out of Russia myself."
In my rare contacts with members of the expropriated classes I felt the weirdest sensations, as if pages out of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Dostoyevsky, Artzybashev and Chekhov were suddenly patterned and peopled with actual life.
Many of the people I knew from the International Club in London were in Russia, some as visiting delegates, while others were permanently settled. Arthur McManus was one of the English-speaking delegates whose company I found congenial, and we were often together, although I found it difficult to keep up with his gargantuan boozing, which perhaps finally knocked him out dead. Both of us were guests of the Soviet fleet at Kronstadt and were photographed together. McManus and I had our points of difference, and sometimes when we were vodka-heated, our tongues flew sharply at each other.