BSD
P r e s i o r John F. Hlgglns, Chicago, Illinois.
[5]
``Yevo boudyet poslyednii
Ee resheetyel'ni doi
S' Internatzionalom
Vospryanyet rod lyudskoi.''
``But why Russia?" they exclaimed. And I replied, "Because I wish to be in the most interesting place in the world at the most interesting time of the world.'' I would be for even the briefest period in the swing of this momentous event of history, this pioneer experiment of changing the economic basis of society. The danger is past---for the moment, the doubt is entirely past, the goal is assured, but the thrill, the inspiration, the wonder of it still are felt, in what may appear to the [un]imaginative a hum-drum workers' world. Just here are the thrill and the inspiration. It is a workers' world. They are working for themselves and not for a "boss.'' They are building for their children and not for an alien generation of the future. They are building, not a hum-drum world but one that offers to the workers all the fullness of life that now is in the grasp of only the privileged. And the very word worker is shedding the limitation of its meaning and coming to signify the whole people working together constructively, peasants and industrial workers, artists, teachers and scientists, without distinction of class or of reward, with equal educational opportunities and equal share in the cultural advantages that are the sum of modern civilization.
10The danger and doubt are past, but outside they are still wondering, Why Russia?---why that dire and dangerous land? They warned me of every possible calamity, from chronic intermittent revolution as they conceived it, through famine and disease, to espionage, that bogey of the guilty conscience. They urged every precaution, from smallpox injection to bobbing my hair. Being no more venturesome than my advisors, but because of sympathetic investigation rather better informed, I neglected these precautions, and yet in the words of a home-town Liberal, was "lucky enough to get in and out in safety.'' To me it was rather logic than luck. I have no dangerous adventures, no hair-breadth escapes of which to boast,---much nevertheless that is inspiriting to remember, much that is satisfying to know, and beautiful to cherish, a knowledge at first hand of the idealistic reconstruction, through struggle and sacrifice, toward a new and juster world. Curious! ---that just this Communist group, rejecting the old beliefs founded on faith in divine revelation, and basing its creed squarely on science,---rejecting a God and the divinity of a Christ, yet carries Christian principles, as no Christian people has done, into economic relations, interpreting the brotherhood of man not in mystic but in economic terms, establishing production not for profit but for use, substituting for the Capitalist concept of a society of exploiters and workers, that of a fellowship of workers for the benefit of all alike. They make no claims, however, to an ethical idealism. Quite frankly they recognize the sordid classstruggle and the slaves' need of breaking their own way to freedom.
To get a fair impression of progress, one must note 11 not only at what point a people has arrived, but must consider how far it has come, what sort of way it has traveled, and Russia in the last decade has traveled a rough and perilous road from almost nowhere. I did not seek miracles, but it seemed I had found them. Remember Czarist Russia, that enormous backward country, sprawling over a sixth of the earth, its vast resources hardly touched, its horizoned steppes hardly furrowed with the crude peasant ploughs, with almost no agricultural development, and a huge illiterate population of many races and tongues. The peasant masses, nominally freed from serfdom, were yet held by their obligations to the land-owners, receiving only enough of the product of their toil to keep alive. The same feudal concept that held the peasant in peonage to the landlord dominated the idea of domestic relations and the civil status of women, and the function of the church. The industrial workers formed a new and minority class just evolving into importance for the development of the country.
To this unwieldy Russia, with its semi-feudal character and its inefficient government, came the war. And as a result of the havoc and misery wrought by the war, came the Revolution, the spontaneous revolt of the ignorant masses against unendurable conditions, and then the redemption from chaos through the seizure of control by the able Communist leadership. Came then counter-- revolution and civil war, and foreign invasion, came drought and famine and epidemic,---and the blockade. Not only could no food enter, no drugs or medical aid, but almost more fatal, no machinery for field and factory and reconstruction. There was no transportation even, to carry the 12 scanty crops from one end to the other of the faminewasted land. The devastation was complete. The Imperialist Powers had been remorseless in their determination to wreck the new government and discredit the Communist idea. This is the Nowhere from which Workers' Russia has staggered. This is the Nothing on which the Sovyets have had to reconstruct. By some miracle, the government has weathered this tornado of destruction, this curse of drought and plague, and has struggled steadily forward, until today Russia appears to be the only country of Europe on the rising path.
But there is not yet Communism in Russia. When the Revolution was established, and for a period maintained, the critics of Marx used that very fact to discredit Marxism. For Marxian theory holds that Communism cannot be established independently in any one country against the opposition of the Capitalist world, least of all in a country that is industrially backward. The Bolsheviks had hoped for world revolution to establish their own, but the world proletariat failed them, failed itself. The German was captured by the bourgeois Social-democrats, the Italian by the Fascisti, our own needed no recapture, as it had never ventured to run at large, feeding tamely from hand in the paddock, meekly responding to the bit and spurs. With this disappointment, Marxian theory triumphed,--- sorrily triumphed,---and the first effort failed for the time. There was a period of so-called Military Communism, when each citizen gave compulsory service, receiving his payok from the Government,---hardly enough to hold existence in those famine days, but at least no one feasted while others starved.
13Then at last, when military intervention and starvation failed to break this determined government, the Capitalist Powers tried to kill it with kindness. This may seem a harsh accusation, and yet what other interpretation can be placed upon their policy of feeding the starving children who had in part escaped death for disease and deformity, through the year's blockade these Christian Powers had maintained against them? Relief parties went in to "show them our way,'' trade relations were established, and country after country of Europe, for its own commercial good, recognized this very obvious government. With these new conditions, Russia in 1921 temporarily adopted what is known as the New Economic Policy, or, as it is called, the N. E. P. or Nep, permitting private trade, and encouraging private capital, for the purpose of developing its resources and building up its industries, but keeping control of all such development. The Government owns practically all the land and housing, the transportation and public utilities, all the resources and basic industries, so that the new policy may not result in a reversion to the Capitalist system of exploitation and individual profit. At the same time it disfranchises the trader and profiteer, and establishes the transitional "Dictatorship of the Proletariat.'' In the flexibility that such a policy illustrates, lies the strength of Sovyet statesmanship. They do not force abstract theory unyieldingly against an existing situation. They face facts, they meet realities, they deal with conditions as they are.
Thus all conditions in Russia today are transitional, all policies tentative. This is as true of human relations as of economic relations. Art and education are 14 experimental. The psychology itself of the people is in transition from its old feudal viewpoint. This the Government has had to keep in sight in establishing all its laws and acts. This we too must have in mind in considering Sovyet policies. In this transition which Russia is experiencing, she seems to have skipped many of the historical evolutionary steps which theoretically must be made. The rapid economic development of the world, the growing insolence of world imperialism may have been factors, historical experience perhaps another,---the ability gained to analyze the failure of the attempted proletarian revolutions of the past, especially that of France, and its conversion into a bourgeois victory.
And the immediate Proletarian Revolution has made possible many minor transitions which elsewhere are still slowly in process. As Russia has leapt across the period of the bourgeois revolution, lived through in our own and other countries, straight from feudalism, as it were, to Communism, as she missed the slow evolutionary industrial period, and received her industrial system full-grown from the West, as her women, unawakened to the struggle for equality which our Western women still wage, received it automatically with the economic freedom of the workers, so too is religion undergoing a rapid and fundamental change, without the intervening struggle the Western Church is making. While our intellectuals of the church have long been striving valiantly to retain the old beliefs in modified form, by ``reconciling'' them with science, and so to save religion from the total,wreck the fundamentalists would make by their inflexibility of interpretaion, the same effort in Russia has been sudden and feeble, and already has 15 almost ceased. The Communists reck little of " modernism" and ``fundamentalism''---their fundament is economics, their modernism science. The new "Living Church" •shows little vitality, and the young generation has made the leap from superstition direct to atheism without effort, while we flounder in an intellectual struggle that gives promise of a long transition, coexistent with the bourgeois state.
Through all this confusion of change and compromise, through slow advance and strategic retreat, never for a moment does Workers' Russia deviate from the path toward Communism, never for a moment does the Government forget the basic class-struggle, nor neglect to fortify the country industrially, militarily and psychologically against world imperialism.
These are the general ideas I have gained of Sovyet Russia. Against this background my impressions were formed. And perhaps these impressions can be most vividly shared by setting them down in their freshness as I recorded them in the form of diary letters,---facts and occurrences, and my own immediate reactions. The most interesting place in the world at the most interesting time of the world,---I found it nothing less, a whole great nation "reasoning together" to establish a system from which should be eliminated the exploitation of man by man, to work out a logical scientific theory by practical application. The mere elimination of the profit motive, that is what Revolution means to them, that is what Sovyet Russia stands for. Naturally the exploiters will not join in such a reasoning together, and so first they must be deprived of economic control. Hence the violence and destruction 16 and chaos of the Proletarian Revolution, the rising of the workers, and the armed resistance of the bourgeoisie. And after the dual terror,---the victory of the oppressed, the government of, by and for the "workers-by-hand-- andbrain.'' I found what I went to seek,---the most interesting place at the most interesting time of all history.
A self-appointed educational mission was my excuse for credentials, obtained---after three years' futile effort for ``recognition''---through a complaisant agricultural unit, whose project includes education, and whose educational aims rather remotely include music, and so, relevantly though somewhat casually, included me. For Russia is not hospitable to the merely curious, to the idle traveler. No one is welcome who cannot prove that he will be of more help than hindrance, and above all, that he has no counter-revolutionary purpose. Our party sailed on a little boat from New York direct to Libau, and as the passenger list was small, we formed a fair proportion. Many of the others too were Russia-bound,---returning Russians, and small American groups going out for reconstruction work. So properly my impressions began en route, and are recorded as an integral part of my experiences.
If there seems too strong an accent of Youth in the picture, too great an insistence on banner, tramp and drum, ---well, youth with the spirit and challenge of youth is the most conspicuous feature of Moscow. The banners flaunt its hope and faith, the roll of drums is the constant revolutionary call to the proletarian youth of the world, to the builders of the future.
[17] __NOTE__ This "A MOSCOW DIARY" is similar to one that would appear on the title page; but it's just above the heading of the first section after the introduction. 2007.01.25A MOSCOW DIARY
__ALPHA_LVL1__ EN ROUTE.Early July, and three days out toward Russia, and things are livening up a little. The sea, which was so quiescent that it seemed a camouflaged affair on which, after a few placid rounds, we should tie up again under the statue of Liberty, is now showing itself in its character of "mighty monster,'' tossing us about drunkenly, and drenching the deck with sudden demoralizing swashes. But we have our sea-legs on.
Our sailing at all seemed problematical for awhile. Harold Ware, who is taking his group out to the Ukraine for a most interesting agricultural project and who is experienced in threading red-tape labyrinths, was indefatigable and invariably good-natured in pursuing visas back and forth and around, through and over and under, between Chicago, Montreal and New York, and finally the last photograph was pasted, the last seal set, and our entry into the promised land assured. My own experience- would suggest to other applicants, not too necessary to Russia, that if they wish to go next year, they must begin last year 18 at latest to make applications. It 'was mere chance that I made connection with this group, after three years' effort to obtain an individual permit.
This is an unpretentious little boat and by no means crowded. At our first stop, off Copenhagen, we lose our Danish passengers. Next, at Dantzig, the Germans and Poles disembark. At last, at Libau, the rest of us take train for Riga and Moscow. Today we discovered a group going out to Kuzbas. They had called a meeting to unite the three strata of passengers in the interest of raising money for some penniless deportees who are being sent back by our boat,---a woman with two small children who was not permitted to join her husband, and an old couple whose son had sent for them in good faith. It is of no use going into the reasons, which, as in most similar cases, seem to be unjustifiable. Our group, because Russia-bound, had been mysteriously beckoned and led, by devious decks and gangways to the second cabin, where the meeting was held and committees appointed for seeing the Captain and the artists, after which the ``International'' was sung, while one enthusiast waved a red bandana with the Hammerand-Sickle ijnprint.
It was a representative group who met there, Russians going home and those visiting for the first time the country they had been born in and had left as infants, all inspired by the new conditions in their native land. One, a Russian professor who has been lecturing for ten months in America, in the interest of international science, is a scientist of the highest standing. With his family he lived through the Revolution in Moscow, and seems to be one of those rare intellectuals whose poise was undisturbed by 19 the shifting foundations, and who has continued, "above the battle,'' to pursue his constructive way in the midst of change and destruction. Whatever his original reaction may have been, he now evidently understands and sympathizes with the Sovyet aspirations. He has been one of us since our introduction on the wharf, and he and two brothers in our group make a vivacious trio in discussion. One of these brothers and the professor have volunteered to teach us Russian, and as both are very positive and dominating personalities, and as they disagree with goodnatured determination as to method, one of them is to have us at ten and the other at five. The doctor begins with "Zdravstvuitya,'' quite directly and simply it would appear. Nevertheless, we feel we should like to sample something less simple before deciding. The professor wishes it to be competitive with the same classes. The doctor contends that that is no test. When you experiment with guineapigs, he says, you divide them into groups, for you cannot make both tests on the same guinea-pigs. But the guineapigs in this case, not being interested in professorial experiments, decided the question by insisting on inoculation by both methods, hoping that one or the other might "take.''
These first evenings on a summer-sea, we have been entertained---or not---by movies on deck. They are thrown upon a screen above the second cabin, where all classes may enjoy them democratically. Last night we had a fine labor-play. Wicked corporation prosecuted and wickedness extracted. Strikes with foreign agitators and bombs. Agitator's boomerang returns in form of ruined sister. Noble son of corporation, with much arm-flinging, persuades strikers that votes are better than violence, and 20 they return to work while he keeps his promise to---it isn't quite clear just what---but his reward is a beautiful bride, a ``Rolls-Royce'', and a terraced garden with fountains while the reformed agitator, still foreign, however, grins benevolently his blessing. Following this ``feature'' came Charlie Chaplin in "The Immigrant'', and perhaps the deportees were among the privileged to enjoy the comedy. It was funny, yes, and sentimental, but in this film as in the other the question appeared to be satisfactorily solved by the lucky fortune of the one, and silence concerning the many at Ellis Island. All of which connects up quite logically with the Russian Revolution.
__NOTE__ Original has "* * * * * * * *" __*_*_*__The mighty monster is still rampant and sea-legs don't avail. Carrying a cup of tea to a cabin companion feels like Charlie Chaplin in his most unsteady farce. We have just received the encouraging word that we are in the midst of a storm, moving in the same direction and with the same velocity. I have spent the morning with a young Russian cellist, forgetting my physical discomfort in his absorbing personal story. After a year and a half in our country where he has met with success as an artist, he has found that after all he does not fit in with our American life, and is returning to his own idealistic society. His father was killed in the 1905 revolution, leaving in the South Ukraine his mother with fourteen young children. He was put into an orphan home, where he was given a 21 chance to study the violin. Later the mother took all the children she could manage to New York, leaving him at twelve to support two little ones by his music. Then came the war and the revolution. He joined the Red Army, but was kept in the home of Lunacharski, Art Commissar, teaching in Kindergarten for two years. Afterward he returned to the Ukraine, to find that his two young brothers had been killed by the invading armies. Later he helped organize and became first cello in the Moscow Symphony orchestra, and for the opera and ballet. He tells of playing in the Tchaikovski Sixth Symphony for the dance interpretation of Isadora Duncan. This type of dancing is to him more interesting than the Russian classic ballet ---more intellectual---but he feels disappointed in the limited progress of this school in the direction of modern and revolutionary interpretation. This young fellow of the most oppressed class of any country, has a face of real classic beauty of the Jewish type, as well as the great interpretive gift so usual in his race.
An active member of the American Communist Party is going over to see if he can find a place of equal usefulness there, when he will send for his family and settle down. Another, unattached and not officially Communist, but who answers gladly to the title of ``Comrade'', is going for the same purpose, having sister and brother there, who have urged him to come and see for himself what the Sovyets are doing. Both these young Russians are fine, energetic, wide-awake and well-educated fellows, able to give efficient service to Russia, and as both are Jews, it is natural that they should feel an enthusiasm for the only country in which the Jew is accepted on his merits, and 22 with hardly a consciousness as to whether he is Jew or Gentile. Another passenger, a band-master of fifty or more, is returning to his family after eleven years in America, dating from the year before the war. His wife, it seems, has well-off connections, and ``Nep'' inclinations, but he has told her that not a cent that he sends her is to be used in making more money. From Germany, he will take musical instruments as a gift to Russia. His young daughter, he says, though able to go to a Nep school, scorns to do so, and his son writes him that there are millions of youths like himself ready to die for the Russian idea. And so it seems that both the young and the older are rapidly coming under the new influence, some in the midst of the marvel of reconstruction---some inspired from abroad, in spite of all discouraging propaganda.
__*_*_*__Mail goes off tonight from Copenhagen, where we merely anchor and send off the Danish passengers. Our concert was a great success, both artistically and financially, our young cellist and a former counter-revolutionary violinist playing harmoniously together. This artist fought in the White Army in Russia, and was twice ``stood up against a wall,'' but seems to have little idea what the trouble was all about, for now he thanks the Bolsheviki aboard for a complete conversion, and says that if Russia would pardon him and invite him as artist, he would rejoice in giving his art for a mere living, and renounce hope of 23 further American profits. He is on his way to his headquarters in Berlin. Indeed it is remarkable what the radicals aboard the boat have accomplished in winning sympathy and interest for Russia. The concert was preceded by the traditional "Captain's Dinner,'' and followed by dancing and punch into the small hours. Incidentally we collected a good sum to send the heart-sick deportees "back where they came from,'' to use a hospitable phrase so popular at home.
The guinea-pigs were not inoculated after all, by either the Russian or the American method, for with so many brilliant minds aboard, a series of discussions developed in a broad range of subjects, and raged daily in the barroom. A reactionary American lawyer was drawn into them, and became so bewildered and irritated by the constant intrusion of the word "economic,'' that he barred it from the discussion, and it took some ingenuity for the radicals to avoid the word and get the idea over. A woman professor of psychology from an American Eastern University gave a paper which she had read before her classes, on "Love,'' with a more or less metaphysical treatment, but was most tolerant in hearing the economic aspects of marriage conventions explained, and the evolutional conception of the ``soul'' which she frankly found new, strange as it may seem. Some of us inferior people feel that we have been having a liberal Summer University course, with profit and enjoyment and not very much work. It was a new and amusing experience for radicals to find themselves in a numerically equal proportion, the other side inclined to listen with more or less interest and respect, not being 24 in a position to suppress them and not being afraid to let them talk, here outside the jurisdiction of the K. K. K.
__*_*_*__Two weeks out toward Russia and just leaving Dantzig. The Atlantic crossed, we skirted the coast of Ireland, then the Scottish coast, whose northern-most point, according to the map, we must have bumped in the middle of the night. Then along the lovely Danish shore, with a near view of Hamlet's Elsinore, and Sweden to our north, and finally the German coast and the Baltic Sea, and up the Vistula a way to Dantzig, the river full of log-rafts, and the banks piled high with lumber. Here we have lain two full days, giving us time to see pretty thoroughly the historic old town. There is an atmosphere of the past in this old "Hansa-stadt,'' one of the free cities of the Hanseatic commercial league, with its picturesqueness almost untouched in the central town. The Rathhaus and some of the churches date in part back to the fourteenth century, and there are fine old interiors with wood-carving and inlay, and florid frescoes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many imposing old gates and towers of the former city walls, most notable the ponderous projecting tower and crane on the river front dating from the period of the city's commercial glory.
Dantzig is only a fair-sized city with a provincial aspect. At night the streets are deserted and from one to three P. M. the shops are closed. One sees only the 25 plainest looking people but there is no apparent distress. The children look happy and plump, and as one of the Comrades said, it was a delight to see their bare feet and straight little toes. This back-to-nature advocate rejoiced also in the plain, unpainted faces of the genuinelooking women. One group of children we did see, who looked troubled and lifeless. They were being marshaled out of the Marienkirche, as we waited to go in to the old church. Not one little face wore a smile, or even showed a sign of interest or curiosity, and we wondered what dismal superstitious rites they had been performing inside. Some of the little girls wore corn-flower wreaths, but even these festive crowns rested above distressed brows. Of course, pursuing superficially our own interests, we did not discover how much trouble and suffering may lie below the surface here. There was an obvious eagerness for tips in all quarters, and unofficial guides hanging about for the chance of making a few pfennigs. But in the market, where the kerchiefed women were filling their baskets, we noticed that on the top of each was carried away a bunch of flowers, apparently quite as a matter of course, and in every little window, we saw flowers between the simple curtains.
Before leaving, we went on the electric out to the old Schloss at Oliva, once connected with Dantzig by an underground passage. It is long since deserted by royalty, but the beautiful grounds are kept up, with a famous vista down a little canal to the sea. From here we walked to the sea, and then barefoot along the sand to the gay resort of Zoppat, with a great Casino, and at the moment an impressive fashion show, for which they had built a long 26 bridge from the Casino down to the beach. Back in town, we tqok a farewell stroll through the zigzagging streets and tower gateways. A Russian Jewish Comrade said he saw nothing but Russian Jews in Dantzig, and he propaganded joyously as he went. A policeman interviewed, presumably a gentile, assured him that it would not be long before the Sovyet arrived here, and one policeman probably does not think alone.
__*_*_*__Away at evening between blinking lighthouses, with the Dantzig towers and spires receding through the mist. In the morning, Libau, a quaint and shabby village, showing signs of the bad times in these regions. Paintless houses, many in need of repair, streets, however, kept neat and clean, by brigades of old women with great water-pots. Changing a dollar into Latvian roubles, one of the party called for a bodyguard down the street, but there was no attack. We went by pleasant avenues through an amusement park, to the long beach with its fine white sand and some of the men had a dip. The sexes are separated in the bathing-stretch, and no bathing suits are required. Tea and music in the attractive garden-court of the tourist hotel, supper in the clatter of the station, and the night train to Riga, in a comfortable and completely equipped sleeper.
Riga, formerly Russian, is a good-sized city with none of the architectural charm of Dantzig. We have palatial 27 quarters in a shabby hotel, with a ``shimmy-bar'' below, which shows a laudable desire to cater to our cultured countrymen, but it seems to be the quiet season. Here again we went to the beach, an hour by bus through a lovely country of scattered young pines with pink trunks and sketchy tops, and ate hundreds of roubles' worth--- perhaps it was thousands, but I lost count,---untold roubles' worth of zakuska, that former sine qua non of a Russian meal, a variety of delicious relishes,---caviar, radishes and cucumbers in sour cream, smoked fish, sausages, cheese, etc., with an excuse for a small vodka on account of wet shoes from the beach. Tonight we take the train for Moscow, after a great deal of unnecessary trouble about visas. It is said the authorities in these buffer countries are not anxious to give friendly assistance to travelers into Russia. We are most lucky in having such an efficient conductor as ``Hal'' Ware, assisted by the young Russian cellist as interpreter. Both are persistent and determined, and by retaliatory brow-beating, manage to get what we want. And we want to go to Moscow tonight, even though we have to go part way third-class, and buy blankets.
__*_*_*__The Ware party goes on after a week in Moscow, to its Ukrainian destination. It is not a new project but a new place to which they are going, for it is two years since Ware started this thing, with endless patience in convincing the Sovyet Government of the value of his 28 experiment,---the experiment of agricultural production on an industrial basis, patience even in convincing those at home that the work was as valuable as that which he was doing in America. After practical demonstration in a small way for a period of two years, which proved to a certain extent the correctness of his theory, he is now returning to go on with it on a more extensive scale, with more capital and hope of a good-sized farm in the South, on which to work it out. The peasants will come from outlying Communes to this farm for instruction in up-to-date Western methods of cultivation and in the use of American tractors, and will then be able to return and pass the education on to their peasant groups. Ari efficient service-station will be maintained, and a corps of American experts,--- engineers, machinists and farmers,---and extension work in the villages and communes will supplement the work at the farm. A ``bunch'' of practical Dakota farmers were the first to go out, spending two years at the old Toikmo concession near Perm, and the story of herding these unmanageables into Russia, and turning the tamed herd loose at the end of their contract, should be told by Ware himself at the Riga railway station, one scene of the drama, to do justice to the story. This is only the sketchiest outline of the project, which, I should add, is not a colonizing scheme, but a carefully thought out plan for educating the Russian peasants to take over the concern, for the better development of agriculture.
The small group now going out are merely to look over the country for the new settlement in which they are sentimentally and financially interested. They hope to get a certain old estate a hundred miles out of Odessa, which 29 will solve the present housing problem for both colony and machines. In the spring with the working unit will go the wives and children, forming a colony which can establish a model school of its own, and carry educational and other service into the villages in addition to the main purpose of industrializing production. This colony will serve not only as a demonstration of what can be done in the way of industrializing agricultural production, but as a center also from which units can go out and establish other centers throughout Russia. And furthermore, it is not at all impossible that from Russia the experiment may reflect back and teach our own farmers the value of industrial production. We do not all realize how far in this respect the farm has lingered behind mine and factory, the farmers having been exploited by all the agents of big business, and having co-operated for distribution only, with the result that the fundamental necessities have been produced by the unpaid and the underpaid work of the farmer families and the farm laborers. It is hoped that this experiment will show our farmers the value of industrial organization, when they actually pool their land, and organize for production as well as distribution. United they might stand, divided they are falling like tenpins. The new idea is applicable, of course, to the present economic society, as well as to the ideal society of the future, toward which Russia is showing the way, and not least valuable perhaps, for the transition period, when the farmers must stand together and with the industrial workers, in bringing about the new society. So this farming project seems to be a truly fundamental development, not in the ordinary sense evolutional, but like Athena, springing full-equipped from 30 the brain of one practical thinker who has been not only thinking but consciously working toward this end for fifteen years. He is still young and looks patiently forward to another ten for success. Watch it grow.
Aboard for Moscow! Accommodated at the last moment with second-class compartments, as comfortable as anyone could wish. Minus bedding, however, so our blankets are not superfluous, and we are warned we shall need them constantly if we step off the beaten paths. It seems here a matter of course to carry them. It makes not so much difference to us now, for we hardly dare sleep, fearing something may happen to Moscow or to us before we make connection.
[31] __ALPHA_LVL1__ MOSCOW AT LAST.Really Moscow. Really Russia. The landscape did not change as we crossed the border. The stars didn't sing nor the little hills skip. The country was just the same beautiful, open, rolling land with thickets of sedate young pine and birch, and great stretches of cultivated fields that we had left on the other side of the arch that spans the railway frontier. We had been transferred to a very hard, bare and not very clean third-class car. in the morning, but they put on an extra second-class for our party in Russia, ---not that we were of any importance, but they wanted to be accommodating, and we were willing to pay the extra fare. We got boiling water at the great kipyatok in the corner of our car, and had our first sip of tea on Russian soil. Some of the ``boys'' decided to remain in third, and had a sorry tale to tell in the morning, of bruised bones and sleepless hours, though each declared the others had snored straight through the night. They had gallantly given most of their blankets to a little peasant bride who had been put into their compartment after parting in tears with her young husband. At the border we saw our first Red soldiers. They didn't look as smart as some soldiers, but they looked efficient, and I felt like saluting " Zdravstvuitya, Tavarishchi!"---and did. There was no shirking 32 at the customs,---they went to the bottom of our bags. The young Russian cellist said naively, "You may leave your things and go to lunch. These are good people.'' And I felt that they were. Everywhere else we had kept guard over the baggage.
Little thatched cabins along the route, many of logs, amid carefully cultivated fields. Men and women working among the vegetables, some striding along to work, through the cool pleasant morning, with the sacred sickle over the shoulder. - Mowed grain, standing grain, yellow stubble. One lone man ploughing a narrow strip with one lone horse. No grasp of communistic cultivating there. Our horticulturist pronounced favorably upon the condition of the crops and the quality of cultivation both here and about Moscow. Pageantesque crowds at all the stations, many in white, the men with white blouses, the women with white kerchiefs about the head, or red ones. High-heeled American shoes, or maybe French, ruining the free carriage of the girls, flat felt slippers of red or green. Everywhere the emblem of the hammer-and-sickle, quite worn and shabby and authentic, just as if it had always been. Arrived at the Moscow station, we were immediately investigated by the police,---espionage! One of the party had indiscreetly photographed a pretty peasant girl at a way village, the information was there before us, and the whole party was under suspicion. But our credentials are unimpeachable. We were not detained.
At the Savoy, the big Nep tourist hotel, our scouts found the prices so high that they tried the Passage, and we were given accommodations there, only to be told later that it was by mistake of an assistant. This hotel had been taken 33 over by the Government for the "Profintern.'' In other words, the delegates to the Red International of Labor Unions were housed there at nominal rates by the Government. We also discovered that we had been mistaken for a circus troup expected in town; but whose appearance gave rise to this fantastic mistake, and whether it was for this reason we were let in or threatened with putting out, we never learned. We hope it was our collective luggage which arrived before us on a dray, with one of us sitting on top as guard. But there were the rooms, so out came our various credentials again, so many certified visitors on legitimate constructive missions---and we held our rooms. Next day the hotel emptied, for the last of the many Congresses has closed.
The Passage, takes its name from one of the characteristic shopping passages, or arcades, of Moscow, one that is abandoned. Through its shattered glass roof, the voices of the few passers, after echoing back and forth about its emptiness, come up to us like the sounds of revolution. Across the glass vaulting, the late sun is thrown back from the symmetrically modeled gold domes of the great modern Cathedral of the Saviour,---the St. Saviour, as our informant insists on translating it. The hotel stands in a side street off the busy Tverskaya. Below my window, across the narrow street, is a great empty lot, with mountainous piles of old bricks, beside a large half-built structure begun before the war. There in the amphitheater of rubble, the boys play at football until the long twilight fails. There in the morning, is an encampment of vendors, loafing in the thin sunshine until eight o'clock calls them to their stands. These they have with them, some carrying them in front 34 by straps about the neck; some unfold legs and set them at the street corner with a folding stool beside them. Women with starched, white, labeled- caps indicate State control and good food,---sausage they have, and caviar sandwiches made of huge rolls, all sorts of manageable substantiate, and fruit, cake and candy. Such alluring cakes, topped with fluffy cream. All down the street you see them disappearing into the cavernous mouths of young workers, young vandals destroying works of culinary art. Bolsheviki! Huge bottles, too, and jugs, of koumiss and of kvass, a sort of cider made of fruit, or of black bread half fermented with raisins. On the rubble-field, a few idlers are left, lying as if they had slept there. They pull their collars up to their caps as the sun grows hotter on their faces, and turn over for a final snooze when the busy ones leave. A Russian fellow-passenger, returning after two years, finds fewer unemployed. Everyone, he says, is working. A woman living here says at the present moment unemployment is increasing. So slow must be the readjustment and advance in the face of world opposition, ---always a step back to two steps forward, but still an advance.
Food seems to be high except for those who have their workers' cards and factory or co-operative eating places. I have not yet investigated far for myself. But if you have to pay at these shabby restaurants, 50 to 75 cents (a rouble or a rouble and a half), for a plate of soup, and no napkin thrown in, it is borshch with plenty of vegetables and a big hunk of meat, not forgetting the spoonful of whipped sour cream on top, and you need ngthing else for a substantial and well-balanced dinner, with white and all shades 35 and qualities of brown bread on the side. And a delicious dinner, too. I could eat borshch three times a day. As Mrs. Carlyle said of the ``bacon-ham'' presented by a friend, "there is no bottom to my appetite for it.'' I bought a melon the other day in the street, not such a very big melon, of the Persian type, and when I had done the arithmetic of it, I found I had paid 75 cents. But it is the beginning of the season, and the melons are brought up from the South,---from the lower Volga, the Causasus and the Crimea. For breakfast at our little hotel, a glass of coffee, a large crisp roll with butter, and an egg,---still without a napkin,---is a rouble and twenty kopeks, 55 cents, but the rouble is stable and practically at par, something that no other European country can boast of. Moreover these are Nep prices, which the workers do not have to pay. My first impression, for it is a new impression after eleven years, as we came up from the station in the electric, hanging on to straps, was "How oriental!"---not an original exclamation by any means,---the colorful bare-headed crowds against pink plaster houses, and the aimless way they seemed to mill about. I think the oriental aspect must always be the first impression, strengthening that made by the Byzantine domes viewed first from afar. One recalls Mme. de Stael's characterization, "C'est Rome Tartare!" Then the Kitai-gorod, mis-translated Chinese-wall, and the Kremlin mass, glimpsed down the short street-end where the Tverskaya meets the Red Square, assure us this is Moscow. There is but one Moscow. Further on, I was struck by the number of book-stores, and my astonishment increases at the big orderly displays, mostly in 36 paper bindings, and all apparently worth-while books on all possible subjects. Pictures suggest also much propaganda in these shops---of a simple sort, much of it connected with Lenin and his work.
We had an early tea and jam with our Professor who had arrived the day before us, and a late tea and currant pie with Anna Louise. Her few plates, glasses and cups were impartially distributed. One doesn't keep house on a large scale in these apartments. If you drew a plate, you were lucky with your pie, and if you drew a glass, you were lucky with your tea, and she had a fork or two and several spoons, so we picnicked merrily. Fortunately and unfortunately, she is off to the Caucasus, to one of the bath resorts of the lower range, one of those many beautiful places which the workers never saw unless they worked in them, and which now are workers' rest homes under the Government. Fortunately---for I shall fall heir to her apartment, with the very bourgeois attachment of a little maid for some hours a day. The apartment is a large room, high up in a shabby hotel, with a bath I haven't the confidence to investigate, and an elevator that doesn't run. They must cut down the overhead to keep down the rents. But the wide double window looks out on sunset clouds across the spacious Theater Square, and around the corner is the Kremlin. As a registered worker, her rent is very small, but more than a family would pay, as a penalty for occupying alone a room larger than is usually allotted to one person. Space can't always be adjusted. The rent is scaled to the wages one receives in the month, even when the wages are nothing. Fortunately I may have this room 37 for the month, but unfortunately, with my party off to the Ukraine, I shall feel without her deaf and dumb and blind.
__*_*_*__How else should I have known last night that all over Moscow---and Russia---they were celebrating the anniversary of the outbreak of the war, with protest meetings against the capitalist preparations for the next outbreak. We could not get tickets for the meeting at which Trotski spoke, but perhaps there was no more interesting one than that we did attend, a meeting of women delegates, each representing a group of twenty, and accredited to a permanent body, formed for the purpose of encouraging solidarity. These women filled the great white marble, or nearmarble, pillared hall of the Moscow Central Labor Council, formerly a nobleman's club. Above the building, shone out an electric Army star. Massed chandelier crystals gave splendor to the interior. Every chair was filled, and the long walls lined with patient listeners. With the exception of one, all the speakers were women, among them a Chinese delegate to the Red International of Labor Unions. She spoke with the hardly suppressed violence of voice and gesture of the woman still in subjection, while it seemed to me that the others, however impassioned, expressed a sense of liberation---liberation of their class rather than their sex, for the one implies the other. The economic freedom gained by the Revolution, brought automatically equality of sex. After each address, the band played a few strains of the 38 ``International,'' all rising and in the change of attitude relaxing and resting for the next address.
Suddenly the roll of drums was heard without the door, and way was made for a company of Young Pioneers, boys and girls, with their gorgeous red and gold banners, and red neckerchiefs. Down the aisle they marched to the roll of their own drums, and up to the stage, forming in two long lines across it, in front of a giant red-draped and green-garlanded portrait of their great chief, Lenin, whose name their organization also bears. Since his death they have been rechristened "Young Leninists,'' to indicate that his aims are their aims. One of their number stepped forward and spoke for them. Great enthusiasm was shown for the little band, for these young people, like our Scouts, are the Government pillars of the future. Hundreds of thousands of them there are, enrolled throughout the country, with a large membership in Moscow, and they understand very intelligently just what their task is, not abstractly patriotism, kindness, courage, honesty, but definitely defence of their class against the threat of the armed world without. Again the "International,'' this time sung by the whole audience through three long stanzas. I have never heard it so triumphantly sung, with no hint in the tone of the dismal and rebellious wail so often heard in other countries,---rather a suggestion of victorious fulfillment.
After a short intermission, the stage was cleared for a children's performance. A mixed group of boys and girls from home and trade-union schools gave in song and dance a very beautiful interpretation of the Carmagnole, which had to be repeated.
A little play in dance and song was put on by the Young 39 Pioneers, called "The Pioneer's Dream.'' The preliminary acting was spontaneous and spirited, and the dancing of flowers, butterflies, frogs, fish, etc., pretty and amusing, but this part might just as well have been anywhere in America. Most of the text was no doubt propaganda for the Pioneers, and provoked laughter and applause. Then came an effective industrial drill; the bare-legged girls in white blouses and short skirts, carried sickles at their hips, or large Army stars held high, the boys, stripped to the waist, swung huge hammers over their shoulders, and all went to work with an energetic rhythm. The whole little company then gave a marching drill in army fashion with a great deal of snap. Finally a group of young people from the famine districts, from all sorts of alien races, gave songs in chorus from Russian and alien music. Two young boys sang together a strange barbaric thing with plaintive unfamiliar intervals. They were in charge of a very unassuming leader, who led them out and simply indicated when they should begin, and then effaced himself. I should have mentioned that the children opened their program with an artistically sung memorial song for Lenin grouped in front of his portrait. Everywhere Leninism is the conspicuous inspiration and it should be emphasized that this is not a static conception,---its very essence is flexibility, adaptation to conditions as they arise in the revolutionary struggle, the facing of realities.
About midnight, the ``International'' again, and when we came out keyed up with the inspiration of it all, we found ourselves faced with an American movie, thrown upon a canvas on the roof of a building across the Square, the home of the Labor paper, "Rabodchaya Gazetta.'' A 40 beautiful girl on horseback in a wild country was being rescued from a low-browed villain by a handsome young officer. It seems to be a permanent free show, and not having paid for it, you can go on when you please without a sense of extravagance. Perhaps the workers sit at the windows of their noblemen's club, and view it at ease. Probably these worthless things are given as necessary relaxation from the equally necessary propaganda, for lack, at present, of something better, for Russia has not yet had time to build up a cinema repertoire, with its demand for constant change. But probably, too, we may look to Russia for the development of films, if not technically better, at least with finer content than our popular pictures, for there is not here the profit motive that makes it necessary in other countries to pander to the worst tastes and instincts, and the inane ignorance of the movie audience. These were run at a much slower tempo than our films. Tonight as I passed at twilight, the Army star again blazed above the Dom Soyusov, and the electric hammer and sickle above its door, framed in scarlet bunting, and on the film canvas they were throwing anti-war propaganda in cartoon and text, while the great cobble-paved ploshchad was filled with thousands, standing or sitting cross-legged on the cobbles in silent interest. And it is no pacifist propaganda, this anti-war protest, for the watchword of this Workers' Government, like that of the Young Leninists,---and incidentally like that of every government,---is "Be prepared!" But not, they will explain to you, for foreign conquest or trade competition, but for mere defense of their workers' country, and their Communist idea.
__*_*_*__ 41Today I was shown about the Kremlin, which is now difficult of access, by Comrade Fischer of the Children's Improvement Committee, whose office is there in a fine old sixteenth century palace, and who sacrificed her valuable time to go about with me in the hot sun, and through the old state rooms of the palace. But alas, I could not enter the group of old churches whose somberly beautiful interiors I remember of old. Leaving the Kremlin gate, I met again with peace demonstrations---long lines of marching citizens with scarlet banners and buntings, with portraits of Lenin and Marx, with texts and slogans, pouring in from all directions, and massing for a great parade. My way lay with theirs, so I paralelled them on the sidewalk. Companies of workers, companies of soldiers, of women, of students, of Communist Youth, and of Young Pioneers, school and gymnasium groups down to the smallest tots, who marched as valiantly as their elders through the hot sun and the long hours. In front of the Comintern, headquarters of the Communist International, where an official group was gathered on a high balcony, each company halted for salutes and "yells,'' for like your own youth, each group has its yell. I dropped out for a while, and had lunch at a small cafe nearby, and when I came back, they were still passing. On they went, past the Moscow Sovyet, a square red building facing an open ploshchad, where an architectural gateway and a terraced garden have been built from the ruined structures cleared away, and where, directly opposite the Sovyet house, an impressive revolutionary statue has been placed. Here the shouting and saluting were repeated, while the bands played continuously the " International.'' Long ranks of mounted troops passed, blocks 42 and blocks of them. Each time I thought the end had come, more swung into sight around the bend of the street. Finally I gave up in exhaustion and went home to rest, while they seemed to go endlessly on---and I hope this is symbolic---in their great demonstration against Capitalist war.
This morning in an aimless ramble, I skirted the walls of the Kremlin by the little terraced paths of the park that surrounds them. The park-strip was full of people, but most of them were occupied in a leisurely way. Children played about under the trees. The long grass and weeds had just been cut with the traditional sickle, their fragrance was in the air, and students and young intellectuals lay about reading or discussing with open books. It had a restful withdrawn atmosphere, here in the city's heart, in pleasant contrast with the confusion of the streets. For everywhere I go, in the streets, the shops, the offices and bureaus, I feel that everything is out of order, and that everyone is working hard to get it in order again. The streets are kept clean, nothing is really disordered, I find plan and system everywhere, but there is the feeling you have at home when the rugs are up and the furniture moved into useless corners and you sit on the chair-arms. You know it is getting into order and you don't mind for a while. There is a sense of impermanence and transition with a clear objective. Moscow is getting into order,--- Russia is getting into order,---and one feels this everywhere, in spite of what seems to be---and is---confusion.
A company of Red soldiers in dust-colored uniforms and peaked caps with the Army star in front, and with rolled blankets slung across their shoulders, have just 43 passed by singing lustily, and in their wake a clearing thunder shower is sweeping through the street.
__*_*_*__Yesterday I went to see Ilyich. In his Mausoleum in the Red Square he lies, and every day from five until dusk, an unceasing stream passes through the iron gate, and at other hours, especially on Sunday, there are continuous processions of organized groups with their bands and banners trooping across the cobbles of the Red Square. Sometimes a mounted guard is necessary outside in the street to keep the way open through the crowds that gather as the organizations march by, and this he manages goodnaturedly with the wave of a casual cigarette, though a large and efficient-looking gun is strapped across his back.
Some have criticized this lying in state as barbaric,--- why more so in Russia than in other countries I do not know,---and we all realize that the simple man Lenin would have been the most reluctant to consent to it. And yet I feel that for the inspiration it gives, and for the sentiment and faith and hope it helps to keep alive, that even he would concur, recognizing the spirit of the homage, and its relation to the work his successors must carry on.
I stood in line a half-hour for my permit,---a mere formality, but it is necessary for safety that credentials should be shown. I presented my passport, the young fellow in front of me his worker's card with his photograph in the corner, that open sesame in Russia, and we were given 44 entrance slips. Behind us, quickly formed a line as long again. We crossed the ploshchad to the Mausoleum where a quiet and orderly double line was already in motion. Two guards on horseback controlled the gate of the enclosure, and when an organization of children was given the right of way, and our line, at a signal from the mounted police or soldiers, fell back, stumbling over each other's toes, I thought how easily a reactionary correspondent might describe this as the trampling of the people by mounted kossacks. But no damage was done, and all seemed to have a good-natured understanding of the order of admission.
The Mausoleum is a temporary structure of wood--- later to be replaced by stone---rising in pyramidal square tiers, which can be used as speakers' stand and guestgallery. This building is surrounded by grass and flowers, and the whole enclosed by an iron fence, with gates for ingress and egress. All parcels and sticks are laid down within the gate on the grass, and the owners run over and pick them up again when they come out. Behind the enclosure rise the high Kremlin walls, and at their base runs the fenced-in strip of parking with the graves and monuments of the Revolutionary martyrs, conspicuous among them the huge rough stone, bearing the name of John Reed in Russian lettering.
Within the Mausoleum, we enter the corridor which surrounds the inner tomb-chamber. On its wall, facing us, is a large and beautifully designed medallion with the Soviet emblem. The narrow corridor follows the square of the structure, dropping down a few steps across the back, and rising again to the other side. This passage-way is hung with Communist red, with a black ceiling, giving a 45 very strange and striking effect, windowless, with dim lighting. I must confess to a feeling of awe, amounting almost to fear, as I entered this narrow and impressive corridor. The torch-lighted catacombs of the far past did not wake this feeling in me, nor any royal ``grafts'' that I have visited, nor the very Pharaohs in their glass museum cases. I have been about Moscow at all hours, often alone at midnight, losing myself in dark blind alleys, but the first time I have felt fear, was when I entered this red-lined corridor, and knew that in the inner chamber I was to look upon the very face of the great man whose memory is the inspiration of his people.
From the lower level of the corridor, across the back of the tomb, we entered the central vault, and passed entirely around the bier on which the Comrade lay, calm and fine and beautiful, so life-like and yet so peaceful, this leader of the World Revolution. Clad in a khaki coat, with a cover drawn across at the waist-line, he lies with one hand closed, the other relaxed upon the cover. The crowd passed slowly around, and out the other side, and through the egress-gate of the enclosure, without comment or sound. Outside a company of Red soldiers had gathered, and in front of the Mausoleum their band had paused to play the Revolutionary Funeral March, as a long line of young workers and boy and girl Pioneers joined them, marching in through the architectural gateway of the Red Square.
Outside the Ploshchad, high on the stone wall, challengingly conspicuous, is that oft-quoted warning, "Religion is opium for the people.'' It seems to speak directly to the Iberian Mother in her shrine, beside the gateway, the sacred
46 icon guarded by the gilded archangel atop of its sky-blue, gold-starred dome, where a handful of forlorn-looking people straggle in and out of the swinging doors, bringing worship to their jeweled virgin. Within the Square, the young thousands throng, paying homage to their great dead leader.It is not empty words, the legend that confronts us on remote railway station walls, and other central places where the people may be constantly reminded,---the legend in large letters, "Lenin is dead, but his ideas are eternal.'' Propaganda? Yes. Mass psychology? Yes. Goose-step? Even that. These marching thousands are under the same controlling influence that the young thousands are under in the Western countries. Their minds and thoughts are being formed consciously by the "State.'' Let the anarchist shudaer! Let the Liberal mourn "freedom.'' No one will care to deny the policy. But for what a different purpose, ---in a workers' state, temporarily, for the defence of the new experiment, which will end in a social order under which the mind can be freed to think for itself. And by what a different intellectual method,---and this is the essential difference,---the ideas which are being propagated are not stereotyped statements and abstract phrases, they are living ideas which stimulate the thought of the young instead of deadening it, and prove their truth to the awakened minds. Comrade Lenin is dead, but Leninism lives on in the Republic of the People.
__*_*_*__ 47An interesting episode of the week was a chat over a glass of coffee with a prominent Tolstoian pacifist, having a personal as well as hereditary record as an absolutist, who was able to explain to us with a broad understanding the attitude of all groups of conscientious objectors, as well as the attitude of the Government toward them.
At the beginning of the civil war, that is, the period of counter-revolution, all conscientious objectors were exempt from military service in the Red Army, if they were affiliated with sects whose pacifist principle was established. This led to an obvious abuse of the leniency, as many joined these sects merely to gain exemption. On the other hand, numbers were unjustly excluded from exemption who were sincere pacifists, but who did not believe in organization,--- as the Tolstoians. Even among the ignorant peasants, there has long been an instinctive recognition of Tolstoian philosophy, or rather a spontaneous philosophy allied to the Tolstoian idea, and sooner or later most of these people become consciously allied with the Tolstoian movement, which is on principle unorganized.
This situation as it developed brought about a change in the Government policy, and to all those who had protested under the Czar, either individually, or as members of pacifist organizations, and to those who could prove their sincerity by responsible witnesses, exemption was extended. Those who could not establish their sincerity were turned over to a military court as cowards and deserters, and these, during the most critical days of the civil war, were shot, being given always to the last a chance to serve. It was inevitable that still some injustice should be done, especially in the remote provinces, and there is at least one 48 case established of a sincere objector who was executed. This man, given permission to speak to the soldiers, told them he was sorry for them,---they could kill only his body, but they were killing their own souls. They, apparently convinced where the court had not been, refused to fire, and the officer in charge as was his military duty, shot the prisoner. Afterward a letter of the prisoner to his mother came to light, which would have established the genuineness of his protest.
Lenin was always for great leniency in the case of conscientious objectors, but after his retirement from active political life, a great deal of severity crept in. Those who in old days were themselves opposed to righting, but on quite other grounds, recognizing that the workers of the world were fighting each other in the interest of their exploiters, those old objectors themselves were the hardest to convince that there could be sincere objection to defending by arms the only Workers' Republic against an exploiters' world. Since the thirteenth session of the Communist Congress, however, the policy again has been broadened very much, and also making for leniency in effect, is the fact that even when the courts reject the sincerity plea, and the prisoner is turned over to the military courts, these tribunals, anxious to preserve the morale of the army, are very much disinclined to admit such objector into the ranks. This position is in harmony, I am told, with the new Communist International attitude toward service in the Capitalist armies. Learning from experience in the World War the futility of objection, they are openly discussing now the tactics of going into the army and " boring from within,"---demoralizing the ranks by propaganda. 49 How the. Capitalist armies will meet this policy is a problem, for while in the case of religious objectors, they are rid of such disturbers of morale, their course with Communists must be to take the initiative by rejecting their service, or to take the risks of their aggressive tactics.
The foregoing analysis of the development of the Sovyet policy is the more reliable in its liberal interpretation, as coming from one who is not himself a Communist, but who is an absolute Tolstoian pacifist, and who also is an enlightened student of the conflicting philosophies. I entertained myself by putting my usual question to non-- resistants:---Putting yourself out of the question as a victim, what would you do if you saw a brute torturing or killing a helpless child? He gave the usual inadequate answer,--- I would try to persuade him. But he was frank enough to admit, when challenged, that this was dodging the issue. Then he tried,---How can you say whether if the child were spared, he might not develop into an even greater criminal than the man? Again he admitted that such an attitude must logically stop all effort at social guidance. His third attempt to justify his non-resistance in this was, ---To me the man's life is as sacred as the child's. Challenged again,---Even when the man is criminally taking away the sacred life of the child?---he would not quite stand by this article of his creed. Finally I said, "Please answer me directly,---if the man were about to jab a knife into the child's eye, would you stop to persuade, or would you use force to prevent it?" Then he answered with some spirit,---even a little testily, and who can blame him?--- "My temper would probably get the better of my 50 principie, but I stand by the principle.''---And that was standing by in word only.
There you have the fundamental unsoundness of the pacifist philosophy, an absolute principle that an instinctive humanity would compel them to abandon in face of a flagrant concrete wrong. For I would trust most of these ethical pacifists of the courageous type, who are more or less abstract fanatics,---and the others do not count---to act in concrete emergencies as this Tolstoian absolutist thinks be would act. Their trouble seems to lie in a limited imagination, which prevents their applying to distant problems the method that most of them would apply to a flagrant case before their eyes. And if they admit a single violation of pacifiism to be permissible, they have abandoned the principle itself, for the only justification any one offers for violence is the moral end it serves.
All of these groups, obliged of course to live under a militarist regime, must as everywhere co-operate to a certain extent. They would not call it opportunism! They refuse to teach in schools where the militarist^^*^^ idea is taught, but they will help in any effort at relief of suffering. In fact, the Government is frank in admitting that its most valuable help, in certain circumstances, comes from these people, and that they are among its finest types of citizen.
Most of them have a protesting attitude also, toward what they regard as ``dictatorship,'' and the Tolstoian interviewed, though most enlightened and liberal in his interpretation and understanding of the Sovyet policies, and in _-_-_
^^*^^ The word ``militarist'' is not used in the sense of imperialist, signifying an army for economic conquest. The Red Army is a protective force only.
51 sympathy with the ultimate Communist ideal, said with some heat, "I don't want to be anybody's slave.'' "But,'' I argued, "you must believe in some central co-operation, some delegated authority,---all the people cannot decide on every detail of Government.'' "Yes,'' he said, "that is true, provided it is real representation of all minority groups.'' Now, under the Sovyets, all workers are represented as organized, groups, and thus the pacifists are represented as workers. As the Tolstoians do not on principle organize as a philosophic group, it appears a little unreasonable to argue that they are not represented. Even were it possible to arrange for representation on an ethical or other basis for philosophical and religious organizations, the Tolstoian numbers would make their influence through delegation negligible. They are free to propagate their ideals outside the schools, as are religious organizations.This brought us to the subject of religious persecution, which as such does not exist. The imprisonment and execution of church officials, have been only for direct counterrevolutionary activity, even so flagrant as conspiring with foreign powers for armed intervention. There are sects who feel themselves persecuted because they are not allowed to teach their children in sectarian schools, but must send them to the Government schools, and also because as non-conformists to Sovyet principles, their members are not eligible to certain Government positions. Concerning education, every child must now be sent to the public schools, while formerly, under the Czar, the limited education was in the control of the Church. With the disestablishment of the Church by the Sovyets, and transference of the schools to government control, direct anti-religious 52 teaching was at first given, but this caused so much antagonism that the policy has been modified, and now the religious superstitions are combatted only by scientific teaching, which implicitly discredits such beliefs. Indeed the youngest generations largely know of these beliefs only historically as myths. Meanwhile, as many churches are open as their adherents can support since Government funds and contributions of the former wealthy are withdrawn.
Theoretically, yes, public school attendance is compulsory, but actually there are whole villages where the religious feeling is still so strong in opposition to the Government, that no children are sent to the schools, and no compulsion in such cases is used. It would be tactically a fatal move. One man, on being asked why he refused to send his children to school, replied, "On account of the dancing,'' which to him was immoral. The dancing he referred to was the gymnastics they make such a point of in all the schools. "Against stupidity, the gods themselves battle in vain.'' But even this the new gods must conquer, with the conquering of ignorance. It is a great battle that is on, and the Sovyet Government is magnificently generaled, and armed with that greatest weapon, Science. Disagreeing on most points with our Tolstoian informant, we yet drained our cups in friendliness, and parted with cordial assurances.
__*_*_*__Established in my new quarters, I decided to make some ventures in housekeeping. The young girl who cares for my room, lives on the floor below with her family, and twice a week, according to tradition, she scrubs the inlaid 53 floor, moving all the furniture into the middle of the room, and operating in bare feet and stringing hair, her peasant good looks quite obliterated by her sloppy clothes. I have reduced the process to once a week both for her sake and mine. She brings me every morning a large tea-kettle of boiling water, for bath and tea, and I was curious to visit the source of this supply.
I finally tracked some peripatetic kettles and saucepans to the floor below, through a small passageway and a dark inner wash-room, to a splendid spacious kitchen. There in the corner stood the enormous kipyatok, with two faucets and an unceasing flow, at certain hours; of boiling water, with a double line of kettles and soup-pots awaiting their turn. My initial community act was merely to fill my own kipyatok and get my bearings. Standing free in the middle of the floor, was an oblong stove, possibly six by ten feet, the enormous surface covered with pots and frying-pans, from under whose covers issued most enticing whiffs of savory dishes. One woman was frying bitochki, flat meat fritters, another peeping into a bubbling soup kettle. Potatoes were boiling and frying, fish stewing in cabbage, meat turning over on sizzling pans. Squatting women were basting things in the crackling ovens, little hunks of tender mutton and potatoes in baking pans, and sometimes a fat goose.
Every day at five, a furnace-like fire is built under one end of the stove, and roars through to the other end, over the ovens, under the giant plate. Down and up from all floors swarm the denizens with their pots and pans. Watching them, I could hardly bide my time to push through the surrounding circle, gathered one or two deep around the 54 stove and thrusting their arms through like the gambling throng around a Monte Carlo table. This Community kitchen is the halfway station between our individual stoves, and the true co-operatives of the future. Each family has its supply of utensils in its own apartment where the food is prepared, and you constantly meet them on the stairway, gingerly carrying their steaming pots from community kitchen to private room. This was the busiest moment, but I could come before or after for my tentative effort with mushrooms,---for it was mushrooms I had decided on for my experiment.
I had been introduced to Russian mushrooms at a small party at the Restaurant ``Bar'' a few days before. This is a run-down relic of pre-war Moscow, large, pillared, shabby, but with a pretense still of cabaret gayety in the late evening, even since patrons as well as landlords are being jailed for bootleg indulgences. Beer and wine are legal, even the heavy sweet wines, but brandy, vodka, etc., are tabu.^^*^^ I am told, however, that here one may still get ``something'' to drink if one knows how. We all took up our menus and played the game of Find-the-vegetables. This is a serious game if you omit the soup. Finally by calling a conference with the head waiter, and agreeing to give him time, we managed to get a highly successful _-_-_
^^*^^ Since the above was written, vodka has been legalized under government control. Nothing could better illustrate the ``realist'' methods of the Sbvyets. It is not an abstract ``moral'' question. Vodka is destructive. Prohibition, they find, does not prohibit. The peasants continue to sacrifice the grain and their own welfare. Now the Government takes control, gets a revenue from taxes and high prices, and makes the workers' and peasants' organizations responsible for the delinquency of their membership. The ``nepmen'', having no useful social function, are free to destroy themselves.
55 combination salad, called "olive,'' presumably because of the olive-oil dressing,---preceded by a divided order of beef Strogonov and most delectable sliced mushrooms gratin, everything as perfect as could be conceived. We finished with the marvelous little cakes that tempt one along the streets, and a fearsome beverage called coffee, which only I could drink, because it is called that. Coffee is dear and bad, cocoa and chocolate almost prohibitive. One falls back on tchai. But it was those smooth firm mushrooms that lingered in my memory.Early in an afternoon, I started out to get supplies, only to be reminded that from one to three the shops are closed. Not willing to climb my four flights again, I walked up and down the Kuznetzki Most, or "Bridge,'' so-called from the fact that below it once ran, perhaps still runs, a stream or canal of the river, and the present street was then a bridge. Almost every other shop here sells books or music, and crossing it are streets where attractive shops display beautiful wares from the Provinces, and staples also, and from street to street cut shopping " passages,'' apparently just filling again after long abandonment. I mazed in and out of these, killing time. In front of many of the ``Cos'' or State stores, lines of women waited for the doors to open for cheap specials of the day. This, I believe, is one of the transitional devices for balancing the supply and demand. At three, I cross back to my own neighborhood, close by. Along the broad street, cutting through the Theater Square, a crowded thoroughfare where the vendors are thickest, is a long row of tiny shops with food specialties, fish and caviare, bread and cake, groceries, vegetables and fruit, beer and wine. Beyond, 56 at the corner of the Tverskaya, is the big Gos-shop where you can get all these things of the best, and here I went. I felt a little extravagant about the mushrooms, remembering our bill at the "Bar."---a portion, I think, was three roubles,---so I looked hastily at my purchase-slip and found my half-pound had registered 15c American-. It is quite a process ordering. You select what you want, the price is given you on a slip of paper, you take that to the cashier's desk, stand in line till you can pay and get a new slip, then return to the first place or to a special wrapping counter, and receive your parcel. If you haven't practical sense, you repeat this at each purchase, standing in line each time until your afternoon is gone. Otherwise, collecting all your slips, you give them in together, and then make the round for your parcels, putting them into a basket bought for a rouble and for that purpose, a beautiful straw peasant-made market basket, sold along the sidewalk. I filled mine with prohibitive cocoa and canned milk, reasonable eggs, and caviare spatuled out of a tub on a piece of parafine paper,---the large pink half the price of the cheapest black,---a white roll for 10 kopeks and black bread at 6 kopeks a pound. An amusing feature of the shops is the way they add your purchases on the beaded harps such as the Chinese also use. It is funny to see your own race doing it seriously and quite as a matter of course,-^ an intellectual looking person with a Trotzki beard in a book-store.
It was not long before my mushrooms were bubbling in my one small handleless saucepan, covered with a small tin plate, a dash of canned cream added to emulate the Restaurant "Bar,'' and a slice of bread toasting beside the 57 saucepan on the top of the roaring stove, while little Katya giggled and gurgled and gleamed at my clumsy unequipped efforts, as she efficiently flitted in and out with her whole family dinner. Nevertheless, by Zinaida, who happened in, it was pronounced a success from caviare to bad coffee, and I shall try it again some day.
[58] __ALPHA_LVL1__ DOWN THE VOLGA.Nizhni-Novgorod,---Nizhni on the Volga. August, when everyone appears to be having a holiday,---except of course the paltry million estimated to have thronged the streets for the anti-war demonstrations,---August seemed a good time to go to Nizhni-Novgorod and the Fair. For this gathering from the ends of Russia and beyond, famous since the fourteenth century, and suspended during the years of war and revolution, was revived under the N. E. P. on a small scale, and is reopened this year again. And then of course, quite aside from the Fair, is Nizhni itself,--- and the Volga, Mother Volga. A Russian friend, whose life has been passed in a small Siberian town, and who is as new, almost, to Russia proper, as myself, was as eager as I to visit Nizhni, and to see "Volga,'' so here we are.
To Nizhni from Moscow by train there are just two classes, designated as soft and hard, and because Nizhni was quite outside my financial program, and also for reasons of observation, we ventured hard, already having discovered that the trains are kept rather miraculously clean, considering the primitive conditions to be dealt with, and the primitive people who nevertheless are being so successfully educated up to the new hygienic standards. Our economy was rewarded by the uncrowded condition of the 59 train, and the agreeable fellow-passengers we found in hard. In a compartment arranged for six, open to the aisle, we occupied two shelves on one side, while the three opposite were taken by two young fellows, a worker and a student, and an older man, all more or less intellectuals in the individual sense, and all glitteringly clean and very considerate and sociable. One has the impulse to emphasize this unexpected trait of cleanliness in a country of traditional disorder and primitive customs.
The student indicated a wish to interview me, which was a little disconcerting, for not only had I expected to do the interviewing, but I was woefully unprepared to be the victim of such a process. I have my own little mission over here, and it has not to do with statistics, but I was attacked at this, my weakest point. How many workers are there in America? What proportion are organized? What are wages and how do they keep pace with prices? Let the brightest child raise his hand. I sidled around the questions with some indirect information more or less related to the subject, and then turned the tables. The young man is student at the most important Technical High School in Russia. He gets 20 roubles a month maintenance from the Government, and supplements this by 80 roubles from an outside job. Divide by two for dollars and then remember that this sum goes about four times as far for a worker as it does at home. In addition, he gets housing and medical attendance free, and many privileges that with us only the ``privileged'' class can afford. For in this country, the workers form the privileged class. And a student ranks as worker.
In this technical school of some 5,000 students, perhaps 60 500, the young man told me, were Communists, but of these 30% were dropped from membership at the last Party "purification,'' having fallen below the standard required. During the last illness of Lenin and after his death, a great emotional sentiment developed, and there was a rush and rally to the Party standard. An enormous number of recruits were taken into the ranks, whose endurance was not equal to the Party demands of education in revolutionary doctrine, political economy and related practical subjects, and to the requirements of Party work and sacrifice. At present, the student told me, no new applications from intellectuals are considered. What is the difference in this technical-school classification, between ``intellectuals'' and just students? An intellectual is the son of an intellectual, a member of the bourgeois or educated class, as distinguished from the son of a proletarian, though both may now have the same aim in their nreparation. So careful must the party still be, so suspicious of the psychology of those outside of the working-class. We chatted late, and then, as going to bed was a mere change of position, luggage or a pillow under the head, a traveling coat under us, a blanket over, and as board shelves were not very conducive to relaxation, we continued to chat at intervals through the night with the occupants of the shelves opposite.
We came to Nizhni-Novgorod in the morning, Nizhni on Volga, rising out of the river where the Oka flows in, and the swollen stream sweeps around the bluff. As on all Russian rivers, the fortified town crowns a height, while on the opposite side the low land stretches away from sandy beaches and flat riverside meadows, here scattered with 61 trees. Now the country-side is full of peaked hay-cocks, and great mows hardly distinguishable from the clustered thatched cabins of the little villages. The Nizhni station is on the low side of the river in the fork of the streams, and here too are the Fair-grounds, with an ugly modern Exposition structure flying red flags, and surrounded by innumerable long, low supplementary buildings now mostly in ruins. The main building was fairly well-filled with exhibits, and outside were open bazaars where we bought a variety of wonderful Russian sweets, and Tatar slippers, and peasant lace and towels. Even in "hard,'' everyone who pretends to wash at all,---I didn't,---in the trickle of water in the common wash-room carries a very long towel with lace insets, worked by hand in the threads of the linen. This is used rather indiscriminately for towel, for mop, and for smudging over the baby's sticky hands and face.
Content with our purchases, we sat out under some dusty trees, and watched the scant crowds of Tatars, Ukrainians, Persians, stunning Georgians in their lambswool caps of black, grey, or brown, with their fierce-looking equipment of cartridge-band across the breast, and silvertrimmed belt with long sheathed knife, and the other races, all in their characterized national costumes, who had brought their wares to Nizhni. Staying at the only Fair hotel, Government controlled, old and shabby, and bare and clean, and also cheap, $1 a night each, we found no breakfast until the only restaurant should bestir itself, and so instead, we ate apples under the trees with a group of Tatar hobos who showed off like children, and did casual prestidigitateur's tricks for our benefit, not always of an elegant 62 drawing-[room]-variety. = __NOTE__ Proofreader wrote "^ room" in original. This was about all the Nizhni Fair amounted to, to our disappointment, except for a bandit dinner-bill at the unpromising-looking restaurant. Upstairs, this developed a glittering dining-hall, filled with flowers and white napery, and alluring glasses and bottles, a piano and a concert stage. This seemed to indicate week-end attractions which our schedule had not taken into account. The attractive setting, and the delicious salyanka of fish smothered in cabbage, and the daintily-served cutlets with all sorts of savory relishes, sweet and sour, reconciled us to the conscienceless Nep bill.
But without the Fair and the salyanka, Nizhmi-- Novgorod itself was more than worth the journey. With no especially fine or interesting architecture, except a muchdecorated church in an obscure place near the river-front, it rises so challengingly on its wooded hill, crowned by its mass of gilded domes, and guarded by its zigzag Kremlin walls, that one hesitates to cross the river and dispel the charm. We had the choice of the bridge or the ferry, and of course we chose the ferry, and mounted to the town on a steep little cable-road that did not seem to bid for our full confidence. Lunch and photograph-hunting were quickly disposed of, and also the polite offer of a very smart photographer in Russian boots and the popular and fashionable---and apparently quite irrelevant---riding breeches, to take my portrait "as the gift of a Russian man to an American woman.'' I had admired his artistic portraiN photographs rather extravagantly, so I did not flatter myself that this was offered as a personal compliment or even in the implied disinterested spirit of internationalism, but this may be the unworthy suspicion of a Communist 63 sympathizer toward a Nepman. I had the excuse that it was absolutely necessary in our short time to walk all around the Kremlin on the top of the wall, for this we had promised ourselves, when we saw it climbing up and leaping down, and rambling round the hill, and dipping across the ravine that cuts down through.
The Moscow Kremlin is flat, and filled with fine palaces and barracks and monasteries, and charmingly clustered churches, and is paved throughout. At Nizhni, there are palaces, too, and churches and barracks, but more scattered, and there are acres, besides, of the great enclosure that are woods and grassy steeps and hollows, with a fine boulevard swinging, with the river-bend, around the higher terrace of the Kremlin hill, from which you look down across the open green and over the lower wall, to the Fair town, and the stretch of meadow-land beyond, green meadows with browning hay-cocks, edged by the white river-beach. In the misty distance, as always in a Russian landscape,.green and gilded domes rise above an enclosing convent wall. At all strategic points of the Nizhni Kremlin, crowning the high angles of the wall, jutting up from the low ones, are the sturdy old towers, square and round, flat and pointed, and along its broad top, protected by the crenelations, is a space for many men abreast, with steps and levels all turfed with wild grass. Along the wall we strolled for an hour, or lazily lay on its turf in the sun, watching below the weaving market crowds at the wharves, and within, the children chasing up and down the green hills, and playing in the grass-grown fountain-basins. And dreaming there, we forgot the Revolution, forgot the Bolsheviki, and were back in the post-mediaeval days, with the helmeted 64 warriors, and the patriotic maiden who sacrificed herself that the walls might be impregnable. For the tradition ran that to make them safe, a girl must voluntarily be buried alive beneath them. Nizhni was never conquered.
As we climbed to the top again up through the jungly ravine, and came to an open space in the angle of a palace and church, we sudednly returned to the present, on seeing a scattered group of Red soldiers loafing on the long stone steps and about the paved ploshchad. But after all, they were not so out of place in their peaked khaki helmets, for the uniform, it seems, was designed at the beginning of the war, after the ancient metal helmets. As there was too much distraction at the moment to bother with new uniforms, the design took shape only after the Revolution. Thus it was that the peaked caps of the Red soldiers looked to us quite in the picture of the ancient enclosure. The palaces have been smartened up to match the boulevard and the nature-made turf and woods, and are used for modern official purposes, though many of the barrack-buildings are still mediaeval in their shabbiness and dirty surroundings. But seeing the constant busy repairing and the everactive mop and broom, one feels here as everywhere the hopeful confidence that we have only to give the Sovyets time, and all will come up to standard.
__*_*_*__From Nizhni, of course, we had planned a little drift on Volga, but once aboard we grew more ambitious. Volga 65 ---and the romantically exotic names of her mosqued and Kremlined cities---Kazan and Cimbirsk, Samara and Saratov, Astrakhan! Volga---and the Delta at the Caspian Sea. The river whose lovely shores have masked so recently the direst of all misery. We had enough money for tickets down the river, and surely somewhere we could draw on my Express Checks, to get back. So we gambled on it. We had left Nizhni in a grey and drizzling rain after the day of joyous sunshine on the Kremlin wall. A fortunate suspicion had warned us against ``hard'' on the boat, which carries four classes. As there were no rooms left, we were told to make ourselves at home in the second cabin, which also served as dining-room for continuous meals from tea at eight to supper at eleven. First come,---which happily included us,---first choice of leather-upholstered wall-seats for sleeping. Last come, what was left of floor-space. All accommodated themselves perfectly to the plan, collapsing with accustomed ease on the top of their luggage and bedding. The light-and-life of the cabin were two adorable and adored little bourgeois Jewish tots, freshly dressed every day, and alternately carressed and repressed by absorbed parents under the names of Mischa and Moula. It was hard to break into that closed family circle, but by persistence we occasionally lured the spoiled darlings into a moment's coquetting with us. The third day, we passed on to single cabins where we have individual wash-basins which seem like sinful luxury, while new-comers from the river-stations occupy our places in the dining-dormitory and bid for the reluctant friendship of Mischa and Moula.
Below, where we pass through alleys of sacked freight to get ashore at the village stations, lie and squat the thirds 66 and fourths, so thick in the semi-dark that we hardly dare step. "The iron heel,'' "grinding the face of the poor,'' these phrases threaten to become literal as we pick our way. But even here the new discipline holds sway, and the sweeping and floor-washing are constantly moving the mass around. This squalid crowd seems to make clear the terrible slowness of the task that confronts the Sovyets. From end to end of Russia, where is one to begin? In the organized centers, the building of model homes for industrial workers is well under way, but slowly, so very slowly the change must be made from the primitive life and the primitive psychology. My companion did not mind the contact as much as I. "We were all like that for a year and a half,'' during the blockade,---worse than that, dirty and diseased from mouldy bread and no soap.
And even in the old days, country life for all classes was primitive. "Often in the provinces, where my father held official positions under the Czar, the four of us, Father, Mother, Brother and myself, occupied one bedroom, and if a friend came to stay with me, why we just made her up another bed there.'' "Did you ever,'' I asked,---my idea of a wild adventure,---"sleep on the top of the stove?" "Oh often!" she laughed, "and there is a still lovelier place than that, a little shelf close up under the ceiling. We quarreled for that place.'' She was quite at home in these conditions and among these people---her people. They did not look starved, even the children who slid aboard to beg, from the village-wharves. And further we could not investigate. While this is again a dry year, there is no anticipation of an acute famine, and Rykov has announced that the Government will be able to handle the situation.
67A good many joung soldiers are going down to Saratov, their headquarters. One fine tall one, seemingly full of vigor in spite of his sallow face, told us something of himself. He was a peasant and volunteered" in the Red Army at sixteen. Twice badly wounded and gassed, he is now only fit physically for the Military Commissariat. He has had no education, but does not show the lack of it, longs for the University but has not the necessary health, and is transferred South for the climate. His peasant father, stronger than he at sixty, has a good official position. These soldiers were given the first vacant cabin, a very large one, and can be seen playing cards by the open window, and heard constantly breaking into song. They all show contempt and some indignation toward the Neps traveling first, among them a private theater troupe going down to Astrakhan,---the men rather smart in Western clothes; the women, not so smart, make up for it by trequent changes of costume. Another fellow-passenger tells in smiling narration, as all these people seem to tell of the miseries they have passed through---when they tell them at all---of his exile in Siberia, where for eight years he lived in a village of half a dozen houses, mostly on raw fish; where there were three months of no day and three months of no night, and they traveled in the snow with dogs and reindeer. Must not such people feel after their long suffering and sacrifice for a distant ideal, that they are living now in an unreality?---that the sudden seeming realization of their hopes is only a figment of their exiled brooding?
Approaching Kazan, we passed under the great bridge which the Red Army, under Trotzki, held against the Whites, saving the city. Kazan, we learned, would be our 68 first chance for funds, and we came out of the rain and saw it afar in hopeful morning sunshine,---too far alas, to reach. Level along the flat land lies Kazan, seven versts from the shore, but seeming to rest mistily like a dream city close to us on the cliffs. It is an old city, now capital of the Tatar Republic, and its inhabitants are chiefly Mohammedans. We wanted an hour ashore to see its Mosques and Kremlin, but there was not time to drive seven versts, and so Kazan remained to us a dream city, and we remained with only dream money. A verst? I don't know. It's so much more picturesque not to. Cimbirsk, the next important stop, is the birthplace of Lenin, and we planned surely to go ashore, but here the boat was late, and we were almost dragged back from the long gang plank which crossed the river sand when we attempted to rush over and at least set foot upon the sacred soil. And again we had no money and the necessity of eating until we reached Samara. At least it seemed to us a necessity. It is easy to guess that we reached Samara late for banks, and Saratov late, and Tzaritzin late. But meanwhile we have arranged a credit for meals on the boat, and have a rouble and 80 kopeks for melons to carry us through the thirsty days of heat along the desert shore. At every village station, the whole passenger list swarms over, and staggers back under the luscious fruit. Worse off than ourselves is a young girl going to her sister at Astrakhan, with nothing to eat, and having established the theory that this is necessary, we have put her also on our credit account.
One of the great sights of the Volga is the watermelon crop. Boats and barges of them row and tow and chug up the stream. Below is a cargo of cotton or oil, but 69 always on top the pyramidal heaps of green and yellow melons. And heaps along the beaches, where the little row-boats take them off. From our easy-moving boat following the current, it looks like an impossible nightmare for the upstream row-boats to make headway. Two or three rowers they have, both men and women, each having apparently an alternate, resting on bulging sacks, while a standing figure trails a steering-oar behind. Volga is so wide and smooth and so heavy and slow. The great stream wriggles ponderously like a monster dinosaur through the flat land, making broad curves and sharp bends around hard jutting rock, and the steam-boat steers its course dexterously, from side to side, from sands to cliff, between the current buoys.
Beyond Cimbirsk, we come to high wooded hills, far higher than they look, measured by the deceptive breadth of the river, with here and there rough rock-towers jutting out like Kremlin bastions. From Samara down are gleaming chalk-cliffs parted by narrow green ravines, and over these glimpses of yellow-flowered hillocks. These are perhaps the loveliest parts of the river, with sun-light and cloud-shadow giving the shifting light effects of our desert country on the sands and cliffs, and enameling with blue and green and purple the steep, bastioned hills. Often, looking back, the white chalk-cliffs, thrusting out in blunt points from the shore, stand like gleaming marble palaces commanding the reaches of the river. This SamarsKa Province is one of the regions that suffered most in the famine times.
Rounding into the great "Samara Loop,'' we see the Zhigouli Range come bluely into view over a dark green 70 bluff, and learn the romantic fact that here the best Russian beer is made, and takes its name from Zhigouli. We have some Zhigouli, of course, just as we celebrate the Volga at intervals with caviare. In the sinister light of the moon through storm-clouds we pass the cave of Stenka Razin, loved peasant-insurrectionist. Below, on the crowded afterdeck, in the full moonlight, every evening the peasants dance and sing to an accordian in a six-by-six cleared space in the midst of the crowd. Our young protegee is the star of the performance discarding with good-natured impatience partner after partner, who fails to stamp it according to her exacting fancy. From a group of young Tatars, balanced perilously outside the protecting rail, came up to us today the persistent higher notes of their monotonous singing. I had hoped to hear the "Song of the Volga Boatmen,'' but like other folk, they have passed on to something else, while the old song is preserved by Shalyapin and the Victor records. Off the Volga it is said to be the most popular song in Russia.
Below Saratov, on the river, lies the John Reed Colony of pioneer children, who have built their own Commune from beds to peasant ploughs, and raised many times as large a crop in their first dry year as the peasants about, because they got in their seed for the spring rains, while the peasants were celebrating their three Easter holidays. This is the Colony for which Anna Louise Strong is making her appeal for support. So few thousands would make them independent and able to carry on without further help. From here down, the stream constantly widens to the Delta.
Somewhere on the lower river, we saw dromedaries 71 sharing the work of the horses. "My compatriots,'' my companion said, and I felt transported to the East. We are lost in space and time, with no map or news or calendar, and have learned only now that we are due tonight in Astrakhan. It is Sunday, and between us we have 31 kopeks. But we've seen Volga and we've come to Astrakhan.
__*_*_*__Arrived at Astrakhan in the early morning, having thriftily slept on the boat, we made our way up through the elbowing market crowds,---for Astrakhan is a bazaar every day, and in its lack of consciousness more interesting than a set exposition,---and learned that the infrequent train would leave the next morning at ten. We established ourselves confidently at the typical shabby, bare and clean hotel and went out to draw our money. But at three banks, including the Government establishment, we found it was their money and we couldn't have it. No one had ever seen American Express checks. But they did cash a few American dollars I fortunately had, enough to pay our boat debt. Just here I will interpolate that the safest thing in Russia and the border countries,---if you don't lose it--- is simple American paper money. It seems also the only thing you don't lose 4% on to the banks. But I think every sympathetic visitor feels as I do, a willingness to contribute that 4% to building up the Sovyet gold reserve.
However, we could get no money at any percent, but 72 they agreed that possibly our thought was a bright one to ask help at Communist headquarters. To the local Party office we went and told our tale. With great confidence I produced my American credentials, telling of the constructive mission on which I had come. They looked impressed, but could not read even the Roman letters, and had never heard of an Express check, nor yet of a certified traveler who could not show his credentials in Russian. I should have had translations made, it seems, in Moscow. But they courteously accompanied us to the office of the Provincial Committee, where we were received by the very dignified and intellectual-looking Jewish Comrade in charge, who took himself and us and the situation very seriously. A black and handsome Tatar, and another Comrade, just Russian, and as simple-looking as an American collegeboy in contrast with his exotic companions, took us with extreme risibility. They had all heard of the Shtati, and wondered humorously or seriously that I should have come so far from there with untranslated credentials and no money. My passport did not interest them,---the proof of constructive purpose only. But they were good sports and lent a small sum, refusing the checks as security, but taking my written receipt. Thirty-five roubles, that is all we had the courage to ask, to come back "hard,'' and provide bread and apples and cheese for the three days' journey, and one square dinner of borshch and one square supper of caviare, with black bread, cheese and Zhigouli, before we started.
Then we were free to ramble around the central town, very much in ruins from the civil war, and to encircle the great cathedral within the unguarded Kremlin, on its 73 high balcony, and to wander perilously over the upper floors of the shattered monastery, with its window-views out over the Delta lands. Our drive next day to the station was no less perilous, in one of the little droschkis suggesting perambulators, in which at best you keep your balance by clutching, with a half-fledged izvoschik who took no account of mud-holes in the sun-cracked flood-lands, but drove with terrifying directness, straight for his goal. In the evening, we had strolled along a tree-planted canalside, to a mosque, where the priest---if he is called that--- came out and summoned to worship from the doorway. Within, a single line of worshipers went through their prostrations to the intoning of the priest on a monotonous falling third, with the perfect unison of a Walter Camp squad doing their daily dozen. It was really remarkable, considering that not one of them was young, how supple and alert they were, in kneeling, and unkneeling, prostrating and sitting on their heels. As in many religious observances probably the physical benefit is the real object of such flexions. We had been told that women now are allowed in the main church, instead of being segregated in a curtained gallery, so we went in and sat by a pillar on one of the beautiful rugs with which the spacious floor was covered. We soon found we could not vie with them in their rhythmic suppleness. Afterwards, at the door, they gathered around us cordially, and showed a child-like pleasure that we had slipped off our sandals to enter. Some of them accompanied us along the street until our ways parted. Here as in Moscow, it was noticeable that the Moslem youth like the Christian youth were not well represented in the places of worship.
74Traveling ``hard'' from Astrakhan to Saratov with no reserved place, was a very different experience from traveling hard in the North. Across the aisle from our open compartment for six, were two more shelves across the window, and in this eight-place division we had generally a dozen. All day long they ate melons and dried or fried fish, and enormous loaves of bread carried in sacks, a continuous performance. Their only implement was a pocketknife. The bread, clawed out from the loaf served as napkin after the fish had been torn with fingers and teeth. Everything was then neatly and deftly collected and disposed of, to the last bone and melon-seed, the seats mopped up with their luggage and polished off with their trousers-seats, then two or three passes of their hands into the depths of their trousers-pockets, and everything looked innocent and serene until the next station stop, when the merry round began again. We were crossing the Astrakhan desert in heat and dust and thirst, dromedaries slumped disdainfully across the tufted sand and at every station the melons were heaped up in long rows, at a few kopeks apiece, and everyone dashed for them. We thought we were doing well with a large one for two, but these people averaged two melons for one.
All night there was a changing group who swung themselves up and down from shelf to shelf with the agility of monkeys, even as they ate with monkey deftness; or sat at the end of our lower bunks carefully off our feet, and all night long the coming and going of cigarette sparks in the dark bunks gave the compartment the aspect of an opium den. Most of them---they were all men---wore patched trousers, more patch than original, most of them 75 were young or middle-aged, workers on the railway on short jobs. Only two or three betrayed any knowledge of what the Government was at, or any interest, so little have they yet begun to think, but they were all gentle and considerate, and were just as decent as was humanly possible under the conditions, which are not their fault nor the fault of the present government. All this sordid poverty, inherited from the old regime, can be abolished only step by step as the industrial and agricultural life slowly develops. At intervals, the guard, man or woman, came through and roused us, to peer at the tickets with a candle-lantern, which supplemented one hanging at the end of the car.
At Saratov---we had followed the Volga up again---we were ferried across to another train, and one dollar for place-cards for another night, gave us access to a first-class hard, with women and babies. My companion announced this maneuvre with triumph, my own feeling was tempered with doubts, not unfounded. Neither the babies nor the mothers left us in such immaculate isolation as the railway workers, for the baby in our compartment fed on fried chicken, and the mother was inertly oblivious of what happened after it had grasped the greasy bone. She was a pretty Kasak woman, whose husband, formerly officer in the army of the Czar, now holds an important position in the Red Army. Even in military positions, some use must be made of the old trained personnel for the present. Arrived at the Moscow station, the little Kasak woman's peasant-maid took their luggage on her back, and when it was to be inspected for weight, they naively made use of us to divide the luggage and evade the tax. Shortly before 76 arrival, we glimpsed through the trees, large white patches of the datcha where Lenin passed the last year of his life.
With us also for the last part of the journey was a young fellow from the Urals, whose acquaintance we had made at Saratov station, where I had acted as watchdog for his luggage, at his friendly confident request. He had served in the White, or Counter-revolutionary, army---poor child---for what could he know of the struggle and its purpose of liberation? After the "civil war,'' he had been assigned as chauffeur to the American Relief. He was now on his way to Moscow, hoping to get into the University, not, I should judge because of any special intellectual qualifications, but because it had been the custom of his class. Now, arrived here, he finds there is very little chance for him. It is filled with the pick of the proletarian youth, struggling to fit themselves to serve the proletarian state. Our young man has charming, old-fashioned, provincial manners, says quaintly "Gramercy,'' and formally kisses my hand. He seems like a chivalrous anachronism here in Red Moscow, in spite of the popular military breeches and boots he wears. His gentle "May I have the honor to call ?" sounds almost theatrical in contrast to the patronizing "Say, praps I'll come round tomorrow,---or some day,'' that I am so humbly grateful to hear from a favorite American Comrade. But to use a worn but fitting figure, the graceful moss that hangs on the old tree must come down to make way for the vigorous new growth. In maintaining a Revolution and feeding a country, one hasn't time for Gramercy.
But gramercy for the Revolution and gramercy for the new hope ahead for all these gentle pathetic folk, whether or not in their unenlightenment they share the hope and the knowledge of the happier future.
[77] __ALPHA_LVL1__ DOLOI NEGRAMOTNOST!Doloi negramotnost! is the current Russian slogan, ``Down with illiteracy!" Czarist Russia was a country of illiterates, and the Revolution could not abolish that in a day, or a year. But in a decade, there will be no illiteracy in Russia. Lenin himself laid that charge upon the Government and the Party. Part of the duty of every Communist member is volunteer work outside of working hours, and I met an eager young woman recently who told me she was giving an hour or two a day to preparation for teaching illiterates. An hour or two even a week is no small sacrifice when one considers the crowded time of teachers, for instance. Organization of work progresses slowly,---of children, of Homes, of schools. Czarist Russia had no broad educational system, and thousands of teachers must be prepared, and often re-educated for the vastly extended work, with distressingly inadequate equipment, and all are unavoidably overworked. Yet there is no shirking, no easing of burdens, no lack of eagerness for anything new that offers. A group of teachers, men and women, had set nine P. M. as the earliest hour they could meet with me, and then hung for three hours, with unflagging attention upon a demonstration of music method. At midnight, someone suggested that we should stop and---go home to
78 bed? Oh, no, that we stop and drink tea, and then have "discussion,'' next to tea the most cherished vice of all Russians. Every day I am reminded of that quaint and charming and heart-rending book of Nekrassovs, "Who can be happy and free in Russia?" They can discuss a subject through the night or through a thick volume, or through the length and breadth of the countryside, like Nekrassov's seven peasants. And these midnight workers still find time, if Communists, to give service to the Party and the people.In just a decade from Red October, the Government expects to "liquidate illiteracy,'' and organization has been progressing and results showing with marvelous rapidity. The young girl who cares for my room announced the other day that she was going to night school,'---such a primitive and ignorant young girl, with no knowledge and no interest except for the concrete things in her life, primarily food and clothing, and the struggle to get them. No initiative of her own led Katya to the school-room,---- organization, everywhere organization by this alert Government. A girl of the intelligentzia for whom there is no room in the University is taking advantage of the classes in political economy. Such instruction supplements that for illiterates, to ground all the people in the knowledge that means strength for the Republic. It is simple with the young ones---they learn easily---but what of the older ones, with rusty minds and no habit of mental activity? They, too, must be organized and this learning poured into them, and with the primary reading and writing, the broader learning that the letters spell. And so for these there must be teaching methods that are used for children.
79In a class recently visited, we found a dozen or more volunteer pupils, mostly women and girls, a class of the temporarily unemployed, who were gathered in from the labor bureau. They had asked for the opportunity they saw displayed there before them. The quickest and most eager pupil in the class was a woman of fifty-two, older by wear and tear than her years, younger in spirit than most of us. I thought of the mother in the revolutionary play I had just seen, the mother of the fallen martyr, who was symbolically represented as a young woman, because even in her grief, her spirit was the youngest and most revolutionary of all the women who were about him,--- his young sisters, his wife. This woman with the platok on her head, concentrating for the first time, at fifty-two, on mental work, was of the same breed, perhaps also the mother of fallen heroes. And for me, such women symbolize further the spirit of their young-old country,---the revolutionary spirit, the spirit of youth, which is the new Russia.
On the table lay cards with large-lettered syllables, which they were combining into words, and an instructor was writing these same syllables on the blackboard for them to read aloud. The words followed the text in their books, and at the top of the page was a large picture illustrating the text. For each group of the people a different text-book is prepared, relating to the life he leads. This class was using the book of the peasants. The picture showed a reaping field, and before the lesson a short lecture was given by the instructor on the value of the farm to the country. Below, the text read in large letters, "In our fields is our strength. The strength of the people 80 is in the fields,'' and an elaboration of this theme ran down the page. They showed no embarrassment at our presence ---rather pride in their work and interest in us as strangers, and a friendly eagerness to talk with us. Among them was a girl of twenty but most of them were in the neighborhood of forty. The young-spirited woman referred to allowed herself, rather proudly, to be exhibited as an "old woman of fifty-two.'' I was old enough and young enough to feel the unmeant humor of the characterization.
For the industrial worker, the text follows the plan of the peasants' book, but is more directly propaganda. "We are not slaves. We are not masters. We are glad of the Sovyets. The masters are not glad,'' etc., etc. These sentences are much simpler than in English, as the verb in Russian may be eliminated, and the words chosen resemble each other. The soldiers' book combines political and professional interest from the beginning. "Our army is the strength of our people. The army of the people is our strength,'' thus emphasizing the identity of the army with the people. And so on through the books for minority races, and for those who before had no written language, and now for the first time have been given a literate tongue.
The illiteracy of the army is easily dealt with, because the soldiers are already organized. Every new group that enters is at once put at study, and in a few months can read and write. There is no general education given to soldiers as such, as there is to factory workers, for at the end of their two years' service, they return to their old environment, and fall into the routine of education related to their work, whether in field or factory. But they do have music which as the Russians say, is so "closely related to life.'' 81 The singing of soldiers on the march is quite remarkable. We visited a music-class at the great barracks, where they were having a first ensemble lesson on the dombera and balalaika, in five sizes---and timbres---of each. They also were unembarrassed at our presence during their struggles, the young soldier-teacher as well, who was described as knowing a little more than the others, and so was leading the class in the absence of a regular instructor. A good deal of such informal instruction goes on, in various fields, of the less by the more enlightened. Afterwards we had an interview with some young officers, who with no show of superiority, or exchange of formalities, called the soldiers over, and standing in friendly fashion side by side with them, explained the difference in uniforms, between the different divisions and between officers and men. They were eager to give us all possible information, but were obliged to reply smilingly now and then to an indiscreet question, "That would be giving secret information.''
There is a small theater in the barracks, where the staging is as rude and as openly manipulated as in the sophisticated theater of Meyerhold. The soldiers produce their own dramatics, sometimes original, sometimes classic or recognized modern work, and they give the plays in a direct, simple way, without much effort at dramatic interpretation, but with an emphasis on clearness and correctness of diction. This is looked upon as an essential element in the people's education, and ``proletcult'' theaters are found everywhere throughout the country, in factories, in remote industrial regions, in peasant communes, and villages. The soldiers are in large proportion primitive peasants, and this dramatic work carries on the training 82 of the literacy classes. A film theater, too, they have, where the plays given combine entertainment, education and propaganda, and perhaps they get as much education in this way as they would in formal classes.
``Do you like your own people best?" my Russian companion asked, and I answered guardedly, "I am always interested in foreigners, but I do feel on meeting a familiar home-type, that I understand it best.'' "Yes,'' was the response, "I too am always admiring foreigners, but when I talked with all these simple young soldiers, I told myself that after all our Russians are the finest.'' I felt that was a little more enthusiastic than my own position, but then we've had no Revolution to inspire and sentimentalize us, and can still stand on our international theories. And that makes it easy to admire and wonder at what Russia is accomplishing with her ignorant masses.
__*_*_*__Yesterday I met a Liberal lamenting for Democracy. Frequently you meet them in Moscow, foreign sympathizers here for purpose of fair investigation or social help, whose very liberalism often limits their understanding of Sovyet policy, whose direct pacifism and ``democracy'' lead them into denunciation of the necessary severity, the seeming opportunism, the strategic backward steps, which apparently hamper the progress of reconstruction, and appear to these sincere but superficial observers to deny the idealism of the Communst aim. From these as from their 83 press at home, one hears criticism and condemnation of current policies, especially when they conflict with the Liberal's idea of democracy.
This particular new-comer came to me in excitement and indignation over the decree dropping large blocks of intellectuals from the Universities, young people whose professional preparation was already several years advanced, and whose careers were now ruined. The word career alone seemed to me to put its stamp upon this bourgeois criticism, for in Sovyet Russia, career is not a word one hears or thinks in Communist circles. There is no question as to the personal injustice, the individual tragedy even, in such cases, and these unimaginative people cannot see beyond the individual injury. They appear to ignore the fact that in their own country, to which they unconsciously refer as a standard of democracy, the discrimination is far more serious and cruel, that the higher educational facilities are wasted on thousands of hopelessly inferior mentalities because of economic status, while masses of true intellectuals have never an opportunty of trying out their fitness for educational advantages.
The situation is briefly this: The budget has fallen because of the partial failure of crops in this dry year. The income from the export of grain is seriously lessened, the apportionment of funds in every department must be readjusted,---the educational division must share the sacrifice. But the oncoming generation must be provided for, it cannot be neglected for the upper-classmen, and so the cutting-out must be proportionate along the line. And here comes in the problem of the cutting out. Of course there must be some slight adjustment along individual 84 lines,---the most promising students, judged in regard to their future usefulness to the state must be retained, but the cleavage practically must be along class lines.
Revolution is not accomplished in a day. Many years of trial and danger lie before the Workers' Republic in its contest with the Capitalist ideal, when the intensification of the class-struggle in all countries will reflect back to Russia and Russia must be 100% prepared with its proletarian experts and its proletarian army to meet the situation of the future. The lesson the past has taught is that danger lurks in bourgeois psychology---in the almost ineradicable something that comes to the surface in a political crisis when class is aligned against class. In the Revolution, how many of the old revolutionary intellectuals swung with the left? How many threw their influence toward sabotage and counter-revolution? This record is all that is necessary to justify the established Government policy of class discrimination. Their own people must be (trained to fill constructive positions. From their own people must be drawn the industrial and professional experts for maintaining the Revolution through every crisis, when the experts of the Intelligenzia abandon them.
But the individual situation is not as bad as it at first appeared. Revision of the first sweeping decree is under consideration. It must be remembered that the expense of maintaining the University does not lie alone in the educational equipment, but also in the maintenance of the students while carrying on their studies, and though the stipend seems ridiculously small in the individual apportionment, the aggregate is an enormous drain on the budget, considering that it brings no immediate return as do industrial 85 wages, but is an investment for the future. It is now being arranged that the students dropped from the University shall ranged that the students dropped from the University shall be distributed through the various technical schools, where by working with less concentration, they can partially maintain themselves by outside jobs related to their technical studies. A young woman I know, herself a victim of her class position, dispossessed by the Revolution and denied a University education, nevertheless defends staunchly and intelligently the Government policy, because of her sympathetic understanding of the problem the Sovyets have to solve. I said to her one day, "Zinaida Ivanovna, is it because you are sentimentally patriotic that you stand with the Sovyets,---is it just because it is Russia's experiment that you find it right?" "No!" she replied fervently, "It is because I can already see how it has raised the level of the people.''
Supplementing the Moscow University, is the University of the Far East, for Eastern students, and Russians specializing in Eastern subjects and languages. The other day I met the whole student body demonstrating down the Tverskaya, in protest against the economic invasion of China by the Western Imperialistic Powers. Every grade of Mongol I saw, from Tatar to Chinese, there were Persians, Hindoos and other races of the Far and Near East, and blocks also of Russians, students in the Eastern courses. This seemed a more rational protest than the Liberal clamor against injustice to a trifling number of potential counterrevolutionaries in the Russian Universities where the purpose is one of broad humanity. Preparatory to the Universities are the "Rabfacs,'' for workers showing desire 86 and capacity for a higher education. Such intellectuals are discovered often through their contributions to the wall-newspapers of their factories, as well as artists through the cartoons they tack up.
Asked if it were true that there was a "Russian Dewey,'' ---referring to Boehm---who had worked out an educational theory on the same lines, a school principal replied, "That would not be possible, for our system is permeated with Deweyism.'' Of course the whole educational system is at present opportunistic, if one may use the discredited word. The Sovyet ideal of relating education closely to economic life cannot be realized all at once. There is the frantic effort to prepare large groups for immediate work of reconstruction and intensive production, and this great need must take precedence of all else. In the merely cultural line the same compromise is necessary. In the music schools, for example, the equipment, which usually includes maintenance of the younger children, is so limited that only the more gifted ones at present can be received. The masses must get along with what can be absorbed in chorus singing and other superficial instruction in the general schools.
But the teachers, both in ge