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 general education and in music and other arts, are keenly alert for new pedagogical ideas. There are all sorts of experimental schools under Government direction where the problems are being worked out by young---and old---enthusiasts. Some adhere to academic methods, others tend even to anarchical theories. Most of them agree in basing everything in music on their National folk-songs. Extremes are inevitable, but from these far swings the pendulum already is settling to a 87 reasonable pulse. I was told of the frequent negative result, in one school, of the theory that music is an Art and must not be forced but spontaneous, a thesis not unknown in this country. The teacher arrives, generally about dusk in the late months, goes to the piano and sings or plays a little, and if the children are moved to join, they have a lesson of sorts, otherwise the teacher unobtrusively escapes and Art is saved for another day. I was present at a lesson where the children joined the chorus from any audible point they happened to occupy, one under a table, another out of sight behind an upright piano, a third perilously acting as a wedge high up between two marble columns in the fine old bourgeois mansion serving as a school-house. The music director for Kindergartens seems to have struck a sane balance. "I am not for this 'free singing' and 'free play' that leads to no goal" he said, but the progress he is making seems nevertheless to have an artistic trend. In the School for Aesthetic Education, they aim to relate all studies to the arts. In the music "technikums,'' where the children are maintained, general schools are established side by side with the music classes. This is true also of Isadora Duncan's school, for which the Government gives her a stately old mansion with walled garden, in which on summer evenings her school-concerts are given.
The music director of one of the technikums visited regretted keenly the necessity of accepting only the gifted children. He felt strongly the need of bringing out the latent music in the average child. The personal history of this director, strengthening his ideal, is an interesting one, his personality altogether naive, joyous and delightful. Of 88 the poorest peasant stock, he told me, he never saw a piano until sixteen years of age (perhaps this is not to be regretted!) but at ten he had an accordion. Until then, his only musical resource was a row of large nails, which he laid along in order, and beat with the heel of his shoe, extracting great joy from the gentle clink. He advocates strongly the use of musical toys of a soft and soothing type for children, in addition to the crooning of the mother, in place of the rattles and meaningless noisy toys they generally are given. He had finally the opportunity of entering the Moscow Conservatory, where he became a member of the world-famous chorus, and has spent his life since as a teacher of music. He is in sympathy with the Government policy of developing ensemble work rather than encouraging the exploiting of individual artists, except where such naturally come forward as rarely gifted. He proved enthusiastically responsive to ideas I myself am trying to contribute to the building up of general music education, principally because it relates to the Communist ideal of leveling up the culture of the masses.
This music school is housed on the edge of town in a palatial old restaurant which served a great racing and sport field under the old regime. The school was at first part of a general ``technikum'' for the development of all the arts, but later this split into different sections, each with its general school and Home for gifted children. Now there are complaints of the too luxurious housing of this particular branch, and they fear they may be moved to simpler quarters, that the ample building may be used for larger enterprises that lack room. In education as in all other fields, housing is the great lack, and Moscow 89 must just shift the best it can, until the financial and allied Labor problem can be solved in a way to provide for this dire need. The Provinces, of course, must shift even longer.
The directing spirit of all this wide-spread educational activity is Lunacharski, Commissar of Education and of Art, a man of the lesser aristocracy, of a provincial landowning family. Before the Revolutionary echoes had died, he had sketched a broad plan for education and art encouragement, and almost without break his plan has been adhered to, with modifications here and there but with no relaxation of effort toward cultural development. He sits through long hours of the day, in an inner office of the great shabby educational building on the Boulevard Ring, besieged from without by a roomful of importunate visitors, who are admitted in an interrupted line, punctuated by committee groups. It almost seems sometimes as if there were no individuals in Russia, only committee units. Telephoning for an interview, I had received reply that Comrade Lunacharski had just returned from a rest in the Caucasus, and an accumulation of business prevented his receiving visitors. My young interpreter sighed a regret at the finality of this, but I laughed at such Russian resignation,---if one may still use this characterization of a Revolutionary vanguard. A note explaining my errand, and laying emphasis upon its relation to the Commissar's o\vn plan for public culture, brought a prompt appointment, which was kept with the usual few hours' delay for the overlapping time of earlier appointments. But there was no lack of animation and interest, no delay in getting a', the point, and grasping the essentials of the idea. Seizing 90 the telephone, he appointed committees for my help, gave me assurance of every possible assistance, regretted that I had not come to him at once and so avoided much delay in routine,---all this cordiality supported later by faithfully kept promises. The interview terminated in less than fifteen minutes, leaving on me an impression of a personality vivid, fine, intuitive but sound in reason, idealistic and yet practical, and a brain and spirit unflagging. One understands how such a man finds time and nerve force, with all his multiple responsibilities, for finished literary work as well.
On the same floor, down one flight and up another in the rambling old composite building of "Narkompros,'' I paid my respects to Krupskaya, that remarkable woman for thirty years Lenin's wife, sharing with him all the sacrifices of a revolutionary career. A quaint little figure, with Kalmuk cast of face like Lenin's own,---most sad and worn of faces, yet with her cordial smile, breaking into a rhythm of ripples that transformed it to almost youthful beauty. Though semi-invalide, she keeps her post and holds the guiding reins of a complex department of the Educational Bureau. These are two of the striking personalities of Sovyet officialdom, helping to explain the Sovyets' survival through all destructive assaults.
[91] __ALPHA_LVL1__ YOUTH.Sunday was International Youth Day, and Moscow seemed all youth from my window overlooking the Grand Theatre Place or Ploshchad. Every Sunday in Moscow is a day of demonstration, with the Young Leninists and other groups, and companies of workers or Red soldiers marching by to the Red Square around the corner. But looking down from my red cushion on the high broad window-sill, I became aware that this was nothing ordinary, and I then recalled from my subconsciousness the word molodyosh which had been staring at me from the billboards for the past week. Such words make no impression at the moment, with their unfamiliar lettering, holding no meaning for me until I spell them out. And now I spelled out with a retrospective eye "Internatzionalni Molodyosh,'' and I knew what it signified that for four hours those solid ranks of youth and childhood, with their red banners and drums and bands marched past my window by the gay flower-beds of the plaza, where two or three years ago were dusty heaps of stone and trash, around to the tomb of Illyich in the Krasnaya Ploshchad.
Russia's Youth are organized from the cradle up, building psychologically a foundation for the Republic that it would seem nothing could shake. These organizations are 92 essentially Communist, but the Young Leninist group is open to all working-class youth. There is no compulsion, there is no exclusion. The advantages are so great, and the work, play and outings so attractive, that most proletarian parents are eager that their children should be included, and the children themselves more than eager. But there are conditions of membership. A certain course of study must be taken and examinations passed, and this course is frankly propaganda. Every member must understand the theory of the Class-struggle, and the World Revolution, must understand the difference between his Workers' Government and the Capitalist governments of other countries, in order that his patriotism may be intelligent and soundly based, in order that this spirit of patriotism may be merged in that of Internationalism, because his Government stands for international solidarity of workers.
Youngest of these organized groups are the " Octyabrati,'' or children up to seven years of age, born since the Revolution, "Red October.'' This group is more exclusively Communist. The children themselves are naturally absolved from the intelligence requirements, entering generally from the cradle, but the Communist parents stand sponsor in the "October ceremony,'' a rather new and not yet fixed form of dedication to the Red Cause. October of the date of the Bolshevik Revolution corresponds in the old calendar to our November 7th, and we find streets, factories and other places bearing the name "Red October.'' On great anniversaries,---of Lenin's death, or the Revolution, or Workers' Mayday,---great truck-loads of the Octyabrati are in line. Next in age, seven or eight to fourteen, are the Young Leninists, and from fourteen to 93 about twenty, they come into the League of Communist Vouth, abbreviated to "Comsomol,'' until maturity promotes them automatically into the Communist Party, with the reservation that they must have made themselves eligible, through study and work, for the honor and burden of Party membership. All this class-conscious, Revolutionary youth it was, that I reviewed on Sunday from my high window-sill, surging past to the Krasnaya Ploshchad.
And in my mail next day, came clippings from the home papers, denunciations of the World Youth movement, as subversive of the patriotic teachings of our own country, as an insidious effort of traitors to introduce bolshevism into the ranks of our youth. At this distance,---in this place,---it all sounds so blatant and silly and futile. Here it is all taken for granted---the onward march of youth over the dead traditions of the Capitalist past. A young woman friend here is eager to visit America "to see what a Capitalist country is like before it passes away.'' At twenty-four, Capitalism to her is ancient history, and the United States an anachronism. So let the reactionaries rave. Sovyet Russia goes straight forward, its ranks of youth march by for hours to do honor to its founder, and the echo of their tramp across the water fires our own youth and confounds the critics.
__*_*_*__Such a blithe excursion I had the opportunity of joining this week,---into the country with Padvoeski, head of 94 the Young Pioneer and Sports movements, to the camp of the Young Pioneers. He is a most vivid and delightful personality, full of the idea of developing the workingclass, through out-door life and sports, into a healthy and vigorous race to carry on the great proletarian task of rebuilding the world. For of course they never think of this construction as narrowly Russian. They are merely the vanguard of the movement. And sports their youth have never had, hence the freshness of their enthusiasm.
We met in front of the "First House of the Sovyets'',--- two other Americans and myself,---where we were joined by our host who took us in. Without certain tiresome formalities, undoubtedly necessary, sometimes even giving credentials, taking a receipt, and surrendering this with your host's signature »n leaving, in return for your credentials, you may not call even on a friend, in some of these hotels set aside for officials, representatives and political refugees. It is nearly as hard to see Bills Haywood and Dunne, as to call on our Mr. Coolidge. So we were glad that Padvoeski came along just then, with his breezy salute and his red Pioneer neckerchief and white belted blouse, to usher us in without formalities. In his large family room, a few flannel shirts were strung on a rope across the extravagant window space, and his wife at once brought tea, bread and butter, etc., which were served as I imagine all meals are, on a small table drawn up before a sofa. His young son appeared, also in white blouse and red neckerchief, equipped with a camera and tripod, and with an air of great eagerness and responsibility. Then there was a tedious time of telephoning for an official " avtomobile'', and of receiving a message that a working-men's 95 excursion club was about to board its train, and must without fail have the honor of Padvoeski's presence.
We picked up an attractive young Czecho-Slovak couple, representing the Communist Youth of their own country, formerly Bohemia, and packed in sardine fashion, whirred off directly through the Red Square for the railway station. It was worth a sensation or two to charge through the Krasnaya Ploshchad in a Sovyet car, and we paid that tribute. The excursion train had already left, so calling a G. P. U. man, (successor to the famous Cheka so melodramatically played up by our home press), we requisitioned, on the Crimea train, a ``hard'' or third-class section, sacred to railway officials. As we passed through the car, crowded with all sorts and conditions of people (except Neps), a young nursing mother quickly closed her dress, and our host in his direct but inoffensive way, stopped and instructed her that she was showing a false bourgeois modesty, and should continue to nurse her child, which she obediently did. Another mother was glad to exhibit her little son, who sat unafraid on a stranger knee, while she answered proudly that he had been through the "October ceremony.''
Our train pulled into Podolsk---a special stop for our distinguished selves,---just ahead of the slower excursion train. A moment later, our company of Young Pioneers, or Leninists, streamed out of the latter, and drew up in a very exact line, all in their red neckerchiefs, boys and girls in no fixed arrangement, and listened to a short address by their chief, followed by the young Czech, who spoke in German, in a spirit that was perfectly understandable to them, if his words were not. Meanwhile the excursion club, bearing the name of a Comrade who had died in the 96 Cause, had descended and formed in line with a brass band at the head, and we fell in behind the band and marched through the little village with the deserted Singer-- sewingmachine factories, to the place of encampment of the United Moscow Young Pioneers. As we entered the village street, two stately geese fell into line just in front of us, behind the band, taking themselves very seriously, but soon falling out of step with the ``International'', they abandoned us like Tired Radicals.
At the encampment place, a vast hollow square was formed, the excursionists, the Young Leninists, and the villagers making a crowd of perhaps a thousand. In the center, on a low mound, we, the guests of honor, took our stand while half a dozen addresses were given, punctuated by applause, salutes and watchwords, and as usual at such gatherings, by strains of the "International.'' Little of the speaking was intelligible to me, except the familiar, oftrecurring words, "rebochaya klassa,---for the substance of every speech in Russia is the reminder of the proletarian nature of their Government, and the appeal of every speech is to their class-consciousness. It was a beautiful and gorgeous sight, all the girls and boys in their red neckerchiefs, many in abbreviated gymnasium suits, with their flaunting red banners mottoed in gold and surmounted by the hammer-and-sickle, that emblem of the solidarity of the workers and peasants, enclosed in a flame-shaped hollow metal frame, with them the young excursionists with their banners and flags, joining with equal spirit in the ceremonies; and in the background on one side, a shaft with a statue of Marx, symbolizing as it were, the new 97 faith, and challenging across the Square the old faith, symbolized by a simple little old domed village church.
After several addresses, and many exchanges of salute by voice and lifted arm, the working-men went on to their excursion grounds, and we left them and the Young Leninists, in order to join others in the Moscow suburbs; but not until we had visited their Lenin Memorial House in its little fenced apple-orchard, with lawns and flower-beds about the house, behind it an open-air theater, and back of that again a football ground. Within the house, we entered a central hall with a large portrait of Lenin facing the entrance, that familiar portrait with a copy of ``Pravda'' (``Truth'') in his hand. On each side of this central hall was a good-sized room, a library with reading-table and literature and visitors' register, and a work-room with exhibits of various kinds of art and hand-work of the young people. From there we caught the train back to town, and en route ate the huge slabs of bread and butter our host's thoughtful wife had provided for us.
At the Moscow station, we were met again by the Sovyet car and driven out to the Lenin Hills, formerly the Sparrow Hills, where one went in the old days for a wellordered evening meal on a Summer-time verandah, served by white-bloused red-sashed waiters. Gone now is the servile crew, the livery reappearing perhaps in Thirtyseventh street, New York, and Continental capitals, the men themselves more probably scattered through the Russian co-operatives, workers serving worker-comrades, under wall-signs that read, "In the Proletarian Family there is no Place for Tips.'' The old restaurant is in ruins, the old palaces and villas that line the Boulevard are now 98 museums and hospitals for the people, and the wooded hills and river-meadows have been taken over for a people's playground, and specifically for a great stadium which in hope at least will be built in the triple amphitheater of terraced hills that follow the bend of the river, gay with clusters of rowboats. Washing the Kremlin walls, the Moscow River sweeps out in great curves through the flat country, and from these vantage hills one looks out across two curves of the river to the domes and towers and walls of "Mother Moscow.'' It was from this strategic point, the young Czech told me, that Napoleon shelled the city.
The green plateaus and wooded terraces were alive with Sunday picnickers. The Young Pioneers had organized the day as they have organized the place. Concessions have been leased to Nep providers, which helps to pay expenses, and insures a fund for future development. Kiosks are scattered about, and we had milk and cookies in an airy pavillion. Far off on the green we espied a flock of red satanic imps, who as we drew nearer, proved to be a dancing group of workers' children in their little scarlet dancing slips, who have been taught by the children of the Duncan School. Only now and in this way has Isadora been able to begin to fulfill her dream of carrying her art among the people, for her struggle for existence (as an instructor) has paralelled the struggle of the Sovyets, and I heard at the school the tale of the hopes and discouragements and the courageous persistence that have been hers. Out at the Stadium, these workers' children gave an interpretation there on the green, of the " International'', while a Pioneer band played it, and another large group sang with the band con amore. Here too we 99 found the inevitable open-air theater, though today nothing dramatic was offered. Instead, all the different groups were amusing themselves quite independently with ringgames, ball, gymnastics or rowing, and finally forming in military line, each with its own banner and drums, and each leaving at its own time this idyllic gathering on the terraced hills beside the river.
The ``Stadium'' is not only a sport place, where sometime an architectural enclosure will be built, but is also an organization,---an organization with a dream of a great future. The dream is Padvoeski's,---of an international ``stadium'' to build up the working-class of the whole world for worthy fulfillment of its mission. Its name already suggests the dream,---``Mekrastad'',---formed after the Sovyet fashion from the leading syllables of the words of its title, "International Red Stadium''. We all joined the organization, of course, signing membership cards and paying in our rouble. On our way home, we visited the Exposition outside the town and saw the Red mounted soldiers giving an exhibition of hurdle-jumping, the worker-soldiers training for the defense of the Revolution.
Back in Moscow, we dropped Padvoeski at his "Sovyet Dom" with outstretched hands ready to express our gratitude and enthusiasm, and to seal our promise of help for his International Stadium. And we felt just a little rebuffed, when we found we must part with a mere salute, even so gallantly and joyously given. For, says this original man, ---one of the signers, by the way, of the October Ultimatum,---the bourgeois hand-clasp is meaningless, and the thing that unites us is higher than the personal---above our heads, and he raises his hand high with the Pioneer salute. 100 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1926/MD152/20070125/152.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2007.01.25) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ top __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [*]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil And so we can only imagine what a pleasure it might be to feel Comrade Padvoeski's cordial grasp. But the thing that unites us we shall remember just the same, and that specifically for the moment is the International Stadium.
__*_*_*__Out from the midsummer heat of the city, we made some pleasant jaunts this week to visit forest schools which supplement in a measure the regular schools of Russia. In a suburb of Moscow, reached by electric tram, is the First Sanitarium School of the Moscow Division, for children not up to the normal physical standard, which generally means some stage of tuberculosis. The large, old-time house, simple, two-storied, built of logs, stands in straggling grounds on the edge of a tiny village-suburb, in the midst of a great stretch of young forest of pine with a scattering of birches. The old forest which this replaces, once alive with deer, was the favorite hunting-ground of the father of Peter the Great. Scattered among the young growth are many of huge pines of the older forest. The children cared for here are from nine to fourteen years of age, workers' children sent out from the city schools or orphans from the Homes, to build up their health for a year or for a summer.
The sleeping rooms are large, airy and hygienically bare, each having half a dozen or more single iron beds, well-spaced, and a large stationary wash-basin with running water. The windows are wide and high and open into 101 large sleeping verandahs, to which the beds are moved in the Summer. The study-hours are shorter than in the city schools, from ten to twelve in the morning, from five to seven in the afternoon. The hours between are spent in supervised or free play, gardening and other out-door activities, and there is an hour for sleep after the noon dinner, with a sun-bath following it, when there is sun. At nine is breakfast, at one dinner, ``tea'' at four, and supper at eight. Each child has two eggs and two glasses of milk a day, meat twice a week, and porridge and potatoes. Bread was not mentioned, but I see in imagination the quantities of it that probably disappear down those little Russian throats. When a Russian complains that he has no bread, it does not mean he is starving, it means literally that he has no bread. The children have very few green vegetables. The teacher who showed us about felt that more meat was needed, but I told her that in our country the tendency was more and more away from meat, and toward green vegetables. I notice this neglect of vegetables everywhere in Russia, though the shops have bounteous displays. You get practically none in any restaurant unless as a special order, except the cabbage and root-vegetables in soup, and the huge green cucumbers served with certain meat orders. These schools will make a point of vegetable gardens later when organization is more complete.
As everywhere under the Sovyets, these children have their own organization and committees, illustrated by charts on the wall, drawn according to the ideas of the children making the charts, the most important division being that of sanitation and hygiene. They visit other schools, ``homes'' and factories, comparing housing and conditions with those 102 of their own school, which they try to make a model. They recently visited and inspected a leather-factory in their district, noting especially the sanitary and working conditions and the effect of these on the workers' health, investigating also the subject of occupational diseases. As future workers, and equally as members of Russia's governing class, what could be more important to their education ?
The classes are held in airy light rooms and in open and half-enclosed verandahs. In one room they make and exhibit, among other things, models of homes and farms of various other countries of the world, for comparison with their own mode of living, and for an understanding of the historical evolution of homes. As in our schools, the walls are covered with the children's drawings, decorative work and handicraft. It is now vacation, when they have only ``free'' work and study, and during our morning visit most of the children were occupied without supervision. As we passed through a shady porch, a youthful draughtsman appealed to our teacher-guide for help on a chart he was making to show the proportionate and total number of men killed in the different countries involved in the recent ``Imperialist'' war, Russia leading in high death-rate, Germany, Austria, Hungary and France following. This large wall-chart was adapted from a small statistical record and chart, and the child was using a home-made yard-stick--- meter-stick I should say---for the work. They cannot be as extravagantly supplied with materials as in our schools, and must substitute all sorts of ingenious material. As compensation, they develop resourcefulness and initiative.
In an inner class-room, four little wrinkled brows were clustered about a teacher's chair for help in multiplication. 103 In a verandah, a reading-group around a table was learning under supervision about birds. Several idle children followed us around with intelligent interest. Questioned, two had left miniature mud houses to dry, while the other two had finished some work that had occupied their morning. When the school is in regular session, the study-hours from ten to twelve are given to theory, and in the two afternoon hours this theory is in some practical way applied. The home-models follow the comparative study of peoples, and field study of birds follows the reading,---or if the subject indicates it, the other way round. The war-chart probably was related to history and sociology and to drawing and mathematics as well, while the art-work and modeling illustrated concretely many of the things learned or to be learned in the morning classes. Such activities are ingeniously directed by the teacher to relate them to theory. We saw a half-finished portrait of Lenin, inlaid with barks and mosses. The thin white birch was used for the face, and the likeness, copied from a portrait, was remarkable. Over a doorway, hung a placard largely lettered, " Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is dead. Children, follow his teachings.'' Nowhere for one minute are the people allowed to forget their great leader, and this is not a mere sentimental reminder, for the concrete social principles for which Lenin stood are the foundation of their education. Only a little music is as yet taught in this school, and that not systematically, but the children are taught rote-singing and have given one act of a simple Tchaikovski opera. This is only one of many such schools scattered through the young forests about Moscow, all under the supervision of the Moscow division of the educational department.
104A school of a different kind I visited at the village of Rastorgouyevo, an hour by train from town. This is the so-called "Children's Village'', a scattered group of cottages among the forest trees, where the children from city Homes come in the Summer for change and study. Here the tiniest tots are sent, and are in charge of nurses as well as teachers. We arrived just as these were assembling on a broad verandah, with a view through the thin red trunks of the forest, of the sunset sky. They had gathered for a conference, a dozen or two women and one man, the Music-Director for Moscow Kindergartens. He wore white sport-trunks and open-necked white linen blouse, and with his closely-shaven head and darkly tanned skin, looked like a bronze statue. Most of these people are sun-worshipers. The childen too frisked about in scanty slips in the warm, piny air, but the women were all more or less conventionally though simply and sensibly dressed, most of them having long hair. Only two or three resorted to cigarettes to help them through the ordeal of the conference, perhaps because the vital questions discussed absorbed their restlessness. For us tea and jam were brought. The principal subject of discussion was an epidemic of whooping-cough. Some of the women contended that isolation was absolutely essential, others that it was absolutely impossible, and it seemed to us a pretty serious thing that the impossible should be absolutely necessary. This is a situation, I fear, that often confronts them in Russia, and I suppose it was finally met as usual with some resourceful compromise.
__*_*_*__ 105A little incident in child reclamation came accidentally to my notice the other day. The Moscow children I had learned are organized 100%, but there are many still constantly drifting in from the Provinces. These are rapidly being gathered in, and with the advancing Winter it is hoped that none may remain adrift. Meanwhile they are running about the streets, selling things more or less illegally, even begging and stealing. There is a story of a well-organized little band of gutter children, who lived in a carefuly concealed passage under a railway station. Unspeakably dirty it was but more or less protected and warm. They had kept this retreat hidden from the police and crept out to beg and steal about the trains and station-rooms and in the adjoining streets. When their lair was at last discovered, they refused to be dislodged until they had sent out a delegation to treat with the committee of teachers come to rescue them. Finally they capitulated with formal terms and conditions, and probably now are absorbed in some of the many Homes and the auxiliary youth organizations of the city.
Seldom do these nomad waifs take kindly to being rescued from their adventurous life and being troublesomely civilized. It is so much pleasanter in the short Summer nights, to curl up in the angle of a wall in your dirty clothes and not bother about baths and hair-cutting. Even when lured into Homes, they run away often, and no real compulsion is used. So much the sooner will they voluntarily surrender. And here the Young Leninists come in. These little folk, of an age below that of the Young Communists, ---down in fact to the toddlers who struggle so valiantly to keep up in the processions, all understand, to the youngest, 106 what their share is in building the new Russia. "Be prepared !" is their salute, and quick as a flash from the tiniest comes the response with hand high, "Always prepared!" "Svegda gotovi!" Visiting a Kindergarten one day, I betrayed that much knowledge of Russian, and nothing would satisfy them but that I should repeat it again and again, an ever larger circle gathering about me, and every repetition of my "svegda gotovi!" sent them into gales of glee. The following incident shows one direction in which they are working, "always prepared" to handle the task efficiently.
I had been having a sort of dinner-lunch---in the Russian fashion anywhere from three to six---in the co-- operative restaurant across the way, under the Second House of the Sovyets, where officials of one sort or another are housed in an old hotel, with a Russian-speaking visitor who is especially interested in the child problem. It was Sunday, and as we finished, we saw great companies of the Young Leninists come marching from the Red Square.,---so many that I think it must have been their "day.'' Past and past they tramped with bands and banners, dressed in their various gymnasium suits and uniforms, all united by the red neckerchief, until finally the last company stopped just in front of our entrance, and went through their industrial drills,---interpretive posturing it might be called,---in perfect rhythm with the music, while a half dozen distressing little raggedies who had been hanging about the restaurant, dodging the manager, joined the crowd who stood to watch the marchers. From my window across the way I had watched these for weeks, wondering that they should be left uncared for.
This last company suddenly swung about and marched 107 into the building and the crowd dwindled away, leaving us with the beggar-boys. My companion tried to interview them. They were reluctant of course, but they gained courage and gathered around as he craftily shifted his attention to a young Pole, who stopped and became interested. He had run away from a reactionary family, he said, to Russia, and joined the Communist Party. Gradually the boys allowed themselves to be drawn in, but before we had made any headway, two Young Leninists in their red ties, a bright-faced, stocky girl of perhaps thirteen, and a slender boy of the same age, came out from the building, swooped down upon the little band, and carried them off by storm, herding them along with loving arms about the ragged shoulders and dusty towseled heads.
All but one! The toughest of the lot refused to surrender,---a bull-doggy little boy in a coat of gunny-sacking. We talked to him---to his back---as he tried to escape us by burrowing in a stone wall with his head. Yes, he would like to go into a Home and be fed, but he was grumpy and skeptical in the admission. Suddenly we were raided again, this time by two little recruits of his own age, generaled by the bright-faced, competent girl, and after a very short comradely struggle, they carried him off in triumph, though with a sulky reluctance on his part. It had taken childhood to capture childhood. These little folk are practical psychologists.
``But what can they do with them?" I asked. "Is there any hope of helping them at once? "Not adequately,'' was the reply. "The children's Homes are full, housing is hopelessly cramped, all the energy at present---and funds--- are put into repairing the old buildings to keep them from 108 falling to pieces. Children are swarming in Russia inadequately cared for in groups, everyone is clamoring to send proteges into this or that Home or Colony which is already overcrowded. But at least the children can interest these and teach them, show them how the Leninists work and play, share the Communist ideal with them, and give them the desire to be the Comrades of the other children. Above all, show them active workers in the Organization who have been reclaimed from the same wretched life. Perhaps they will take them to the ``Collector'' though that is full to overflowing.'' It all seemed so hopeful suddenly, getting a glimpse of the practical work through the children themselves. Somewhere in the background a Committee lay in wait. And since Lenin's death, there has been formed a "Lenin fund" for child reclamation.
__*_*_*__I have followed up the incident of the waifs. I went over to visit the Leninists' hall, and inquire what had happened. There was no hall, there were no Leninists, there was no news to be had of them, but yesterday I unearthed the clue. In a great building of many floors and large light airy rooms, is a temporary Home or ``Collector'' where destitute children are brought and tested and observed until they can be classified and distributed. At the head of the house is Comrade Fischer of the Children's Bureau who, for ten years a political exile from Czarist Russia, hastened back with the Revolution to give the rest 109 of her life to the reconstruction of her country and the rehabilitation of her people.
And here were the tots safely housed under her care, their frowsy heads shaved, their rags destroyed, the caked dirt soaked off their little bodies, frisking about the great play-room in the free hour when we arrived. For only an hour are they uncontrolled, lest they get bored and discontented. From ten in the morning till ten at night, they are occupied under supervision with work or play. Boys and girls are separated, and they are divided again into age-groups,---six to eight, eight to twelve, twelve to sivteen. Each group has its own floor, its large playroom, its dining room and bare, clean dormitories healthfully spaced,--- at present a little too crowded with their 350 children.
The little ones have Kindergarten work and play, the older ones are given productive work and domestic activities---they are there too short a time for organized study. A group of girls at small knitting machines were turning out piles and piles of sport stockings, and I replenished my own falling supply. Others were doing art-work in fabrics, all sorts of patch pictures and decorations of varied color on color, some of it artistic, all of it effective and quaint. One group we found at noon-day dinner. I commented on the striking face of a boy, only to learn that he was a girl, and then, to my astonishment, that all were girls. With their sturdy peasant build, blunt features, shaven heads and boyish blouses, the deception was complete, with their skirts hidden under the table. They all showed a happy friendly response to our interest. They were having a substantial soup or borshch, and pirozhki, large flat rolls baked with chopped carrots inside. Once 110 a day they have this white type of bread. Later, passing through the kitchen, where these were baking, we sampled them ravenously at the cook's invitation, for it was long past our own lunch-hour.
For four months the children are retained in the Refuge, and then distributed wherever they are found to fit. When first brought in, they are shaved, disinfected and bathed, and for two weeks kept under observation in a group by themselves, treated for defects, perhaps put into a hospital ward. Then they are distributed to the other floors, according to age and sex. Often slight operations change them from defectives or unmanageables to normal children. Few of them are really uncontrollable. The remedy is to undress them and put them to bed under guard. This isolation soon brings them to reason. For the worst cases, a wet blanket is sometimes used,---this not as a punishment, but for controlling the nerves. There is no punishment given as such, and none seems necessary. Persuasion and imitation accomplish everything. Noticing a shattered glass door-pane, we were told a new-comer, a little girl, had run wild and smashed it, but now was going on in normal fashion.
And so, at the end of the four months, each finds his place in a permanent home,---for average or sub-normal or gifted, where he is given the training his special case requires. Only absolutely destitute children,---orphans or those with irresponsible parents, are cared for here, but practically every child in Moscow is now accounted for, and it cannot be so very long with the constantly bettering conditions, before the provinces too are brought up to this standard. The hopeful point of the whole story is, that 111 while in other countries, as fast as one set is redeemed others take their places and the same tragic round goes on, in Russia they are slowly redeeming the conditions that make for criminal vagabonds. While we continue cheerfully pouring water into the sieve, refusing to notice the holes, ``realist'' Russia is putting a solid bottom in the sieve. But Russia lacks funds and housing to deal with them properly, even in such an organized center as Moscow, in addition to the complications that primitive training and influence bring into the problem. Still, in no other country is such a fundamental effort being made to deal with the child question. In no other country can it be made so fundamentally, because at the base of it lies the economic problem, and Russia is the only country dealing fundamentally with the economic causes.
These younger ones have been born into the new conditions, but the older ones? The new psychology seems to be developing universally there, and working even among the youth of the dispossessed. However much they may dislike adapting themselves to the new life, they are learning to understand and to accept it. Recently I took breakfast at a small cafe nearby, the kind of cafe which hangs a sign reading, "Do not give fees. Giver and taker are master and servant. Since October this must not be.'' And October means, of course, Red October. Some misunderstanding caused the proprietor to ask a young man in a good-looking covert coat, and soft hat---which marked his bourgeois cast---to explain to me in French. When he found that I spoke English, in which he was equally at home, he said with almost a groan of relief, "Oh, I am so glad to meet English-speaking people. There are too many 112 Russians here!" I couldn't help laughing at the unreasonableness of it. He explained in a discouraged way that he was furnishing the cafe with cakes his mother had made, and he got out a sifter and sifted sugar carefully over each layer as they were taken from the boxes.
I waited for him and we walked down the street together. His father had been a rich merchant, and though he was too young to understand much when the Revolution came, he made with his family "big opposition.'' "I am not afraid to tell you,'' he said. "They know me and I am doing my work and making no trouble, and they let me alone.'' He is doing "rough work" for the army--- being a husky young fellow and not eligible during this probation for the ranks,---and is "learning.'' "There are only hundreds of us,'' he said, "and there are millions of workers better off for the change, but oh, if only the rest of Europe would hurry up and help us, and so get things along!" He understands the sincerity of Russia's "war on war,'' as compared with the pretense of other nations. "We have our Red Army, but Russia never will fight another Imperialistic war.'' I said I supposed that he had no chance in the University, and he replied, "No, for there is not room for all, and that is dreadful for me, but then before, the workers never had a chance.''
This is what he is "learning,'' poor young fellow, learning with weariness and resignation, but I think with understanding and sympathy, for he is young and he too has a part in Russia's future, as big and interesting a part as he shall prove himself fit to play. But the old of his class are not so easily reconciled. They are indignant and critical, 113 and can only see that their pleasant and comfortable ways have been upset, and that there is no prospect of anything better than the present confusion of their lives. If, as the youth said, Europe would only hurry up!
[114] __ALPHA_LVL1__ SAFETY FIRST.This week I had the pleasant fortune to lunch with a group of American women who are here to inspect the factories, especially with regard to sanitary hygiene, the working conditions and occupational diseases. These women are specialists, holding positions under the Government at home, and in American colleges, and have extended their journey here from a European conference, at the invitation of the Sovyet Government. They are Liberal women, quite unafrighted by the press tales at home. And yet,--- "To think,'' they exclaimed, "that we should actually see a Red Flag flying over a Government Building!" They were as pleased as children who had really seen a fairy or a giant, even a child-eating giant. And so I was especially interested in their unbiased report; to the effect that in these respects Russia is doing more for the workers than are our industrialists at home.
To me this was not a surprising discovery,---for consider the Capitalist handicap. Our industries are run for profit, the interests of the workers demand expensive safety equipment, short hours and healthful working conditions. These things cut down profits, and when you weigh your own profits against the welfare of the workers, it is easy to predict which side goes down. In Russia, production 115 is for use, the Government is the employer, and the workers are the Government, and the profits go back into improving conditions for the workers. In every factory, a shop committee works with a committee from the Government, the industries are unionized on the industrial, not on the trade basis, and strikes are encouraged from above, if complaints do not bring results. There is no clash of interests, ---it is simply for all sides, a question of efficiency balanced with health and comfort. The labor papers and factory wall-papers are filled with frank and amusing criticisms and complaints, and these too are encouraged by the Government.
Women in industry are freed from home drudgery by the canteens and co-operatives in the factories, where not only they but their children are fed. We are shown through these, and treated to borshch---it really isn't by design that I happen into such places at lunch-time, for I never yet have discovered what lunch-time is. At the banks, tea is always just coming in, and committee-heads who confer with you, generally have a tray brought in and snatch a substantial meal while they talk. Here we get the soup straight from the kitchen pot, and after pronouncing upon it favorably, we are taken on to the nursery. We are admiring a crowing rosy thing, half-naked in the late Summer heat, when in comes a smiling young women in her factory clothes and takes the child up to nurse. She receives our compliments with pleased pride, and tells us she has had two or three months off work with pay before the child was born, and the same since, and that all working mothers have this, and time off to nurse their babies. Later the child goes into the factory Kindergarten. The same 116 arrangements are made for peasant mothers. There is no fear ahead of unnecessary ill-health, and its dreaded expenses, for medical care and preventive measures are provided as a worker's right. It seems like a Utopian dream ---doesnt it?---Fear, that constant specter at the workers' side, Fear banished from their lives. It is not pretended that all factories are thus completely organized, or all workers so fortunate, though medical aid is free to all; but gradually, rapidly even, while you watch, working conditions are being brought up to this model.
They have their clubs, their classes, their reading, lecture and concert rooms, in fact their whole community life lies within their factory boundaries. Tickets for opera and theater too, are distributed in blocks to the different factory organizations at nominal prices, while I must pay almost what I would in New York. Look about you at the Grand Opera House. In the best seats, blouses predominate. On the opening night of the season, an opera is given based on a folk-tale, and all the stage-boxes and adjoining balconies are packed with workers' children. If the workers are ill, they are sent to rest homes or sanitoria, if their children are ailing, they are sent out to the forest resorts and datchas maintained for them. Injurious conditions are remedied if possible, or the workers changed off before the occupational diseases attack them. Is it any wonder that with all this emphasis on the workers' wellbeing, Russia's industrial conditions should be found to rank high?
Slowly, too, they are building sanitary homes and garden cities, to replace the old primitive housing, and such improvement is extended to the farms. Here the Government 117 encourages co-operative production. Why indeed should farming lag along on the old inefficient individual basis, while other industries evolve collectively? Little, comparatively, is done for the individual peasant, but groups and communes are given every possible help and encouragement, in the way of instruction, high-class seeds and easy credits for modern machinery. This is drawing the individual farmers into co-operative colonies. The best lands are retained for Government experimental farms, and yesterday the young man with whose unit I came over, climbed my four nights to wave triumphantly before me his contract for a 49% interest in a fine Government ``Sovkhoz'' in the rich Kuban district, all sealed with a red seal and a brown hemp string. This 49% is one of the safety devices for keeping Government control of foreign investments. Besides that hempen string, there are many and many strings attached even to such sympathetic venturers as the Ware group, with its broad plan of radiating centers of educational farms throughout the country.
So efficiently and sincerely is Russia protecting her workers in factory and field and mine, that there is little doubt of their confidence and appreciation, no doubt that they are, in great majority, sympathetic and loyal to the new regime,---entirely so, as far as it has been possible to permeate the ignorance of the masses with an understanding of Sovyet aims. And every Communist holds himself at the disposal of the Party to go out and help with the permeating, the "boring from within,'' wherever ignorance and discontent threaten to make trouble or resistance; to lecture and to teach, to enter factories, mines and farming communes, forming nuclei for propaganda and 118 organization, among those who must be won by a better comprehension both of ultimate social aims and of immediate productive necessities.
__*_*_*__A visit from Harry was the motif, as our social notes say, for some investigating of the unemployment problem. Harry is American for Aaron, his good dignified Jewish name, but I can no more persuade him to change back to it than I can induce him to abandon his smart American tweeds for a graceful Russian blouse. He has returned to Moscow from some family visits in the Provinces. "I just met Ezra,'' he said, "and what do you think?---he's wearing a linen blouse!" "Ezra would,'' I replied. "He has an eye for effect, a sentiment for Russia, and a joy in being an emancipated Jew.'' These are the two young fellows who were our fellow-passengers. Ezra thrills to the wonder of accomplishment in this new Russia. Harry, sympathetic but critical, notices the work still to be done, sees shabbiness, confusion, and lack of American efficiency, grumbles that his trunk was not handled as promptly as in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He severely discovers unemployment in Russia. He sees what he did not notice at home, because he kept out of its way,---being comfortably bourgeois. But Russia's troubles are not hidden. There they are, frankly confronting you.
But notice. Across the way, a dozen men high up are slapping gallons of paint on the old Hotel Metropole, now a 119 ``Sovyet dom,'' and descending our own stairway we track crushed plaster down the four flights. This too is an old hotel, now a Sovyet dom housing workers. "See!" I say with happy optimism, "how finely our house is being repaired.'' No enthusiastic response there. "It needs it!" is the unsympathetic reply. And in Kharkov, it seems, he has found it worse. Buildings out of repair, sidewalks full of holes and men out of work. Why---is his efficient American wonder---should they not bring the men and the jobs together? But that is a familiar question at home, in whatever country home may be. We'll ask it here of some one who can tell us.
We telephoned for an appointment, and ultimately found our way through the mazes of a bureau building to the office of a young member of the Collegium of the Department of Labor. The total of unemployment, it was frankly admitted, reaches at the moment, even to millions throughout Russia. Such a total does not confine itself superficially, as do our figures, to the numbers thrown out of work by the closing down of factories and mines. It includes not only all registered available labor, skilled and unskilled,---and practically all labor is registered---but also the newly demobilized young soldiers, and the newly " demobilized" students, for whom, except for those returning to the land, place must be found in the industries---the still undeveloped industries that cannot absorb them. These are the healthy labor elements. To them must be added the sum of the old and the crippled, and many of the pathetic bourgeoisie who must now work or starve, and who in large proportion are unfitted for efficient work. 120 With all the unemployed the Government must deal fairly through its official labor bureau.
Eight roubles a month is the insufficient dole due every unemployed worker,---factory, farm or professional, a large total for a poor government just getting on its feet industrially and financially. The sum, however, equals four times that amount in purchasing power, compared with its American equivalent, four dollars. Due them also is work as fast as it can be organized to absorb them. Meanwhile, medical aid is supplied by the Government and housing is practically free, and no one may be evicted from his minimum allotted space. Six roubles is as high as the average worker pays for his rent and he retains his quarters free when out of work. Or rather a nominal rent of ten kopeks ---five cents!---is paid by the unemployed. All rents are graduated on a sliding scale according, not to the quality of the room, but to the wage for the month. The disabled too are given a dole and housing, and if they wish under present conditions to engage in trade, are free from taxes, which are rather scandalously high for the voluntary "Nepman,'' the trader who has taken advantage of the New Economic Policy. The vendors along the kerb are able to make from forty to sixty roubles a month. One form of trade, unfortunately, is begging, which is overlooked by the Government in the present circumstances, but strongly objected to by the Communists. They would deal with this question socially and not individually, and that will be done in time, when more vital problems have been dealt with. The Communists as a critical group are often as impatient of delayed results as are the less enlightened critics. During the past year, a million and a half roubles 121 have been spent upon work for the unemployed, 200,000 in Moscow alone. A million and a half roubles had just been appropriated for repairing Leningrad before the flood made necessary a special drive for relief. From these centers, where the need is most acute, the work will in time be carried to the Provinces. At present, there is a sharp limit to financial possibilities. The expense---and the problem--- of unemployment do not lie alone in wages and in work, ---it is largely a matter of materials. These simply are not to be had, and the great need is to throw labor into the production of such materials. The organization of industries is the fundamental problem, and this is progressing as fast as foreign capital can be secured, for the bulk of machinery for production must come from outside, though that industry also is developing. The increasing rapidity with which European governments have been ``recognizing'' Sovyet Russia, shows how eager foreign capital is to invest itself, even with all the restrictions placed upon it by the Sovyets. Meantime the development of agriculture has more than tripled since 1921, industrial developments -show from four to eight times the 1921 record, and transportation which has been two-thirds supported by the Government, now pays for itself. Neither agricuture nor industry is yet up to pre-war figures, but rapidly production is increasing to meet the needs of reconstruction and unemployment.^^*^^
At present the unemployed in this great City of Moscow, to which they naturally flock, number only hundreds, and one understands why when he sees scaffolding around _-_-_
^^*^^ At date of going to press, the statistics show an average of pre-war figures throughout Russia.
122 every third building he passes, rubbish and brick-heaps disappearing under the picks and shovels of men and husky women,---for remember that in old Russia, women always had the privilege of working side by side with men at the most exhausting labor, and still retain the habit,---electric rails piled all along the kerbs, paint and plaster filling the hallways of the "Sovyet houses,'' that is, the apartment houses controlled by the Government, miles of beautiful parking blooming almost over-night the length of factory districts, and the rapid completion of half-finished buildings begun before the war. One such eight-story structure, long standing without walls or roof, has been finished within the last few weeks, and now is filled with workers' families. The Revolutionary Museum has just been put in thorough repair; a month ago, I stumbled over heaps of dust and stones in the semi-circular entrance-court, only to be refused admittance,---yesterday I was surprised in the same entrance by a stretch of green lawn, flower-beds and young trees.This is one sound way of solving the unemployment problem, as far as materials hold out. Another is the organizing of workers' "artels.'' Shops are opened by a workers' group for making and marketing wares,---shoes, baskets, clothing, anything they are skilled in making. They share alike in the profits and there is no question of wage. For the unskilled, primitive work is provided, sweeping of the streets, making of boxes and paper-bags, even from cast-off, figured-over, office paper. The great drive at present is for co-operatives, both producers' and consumers'. These and the artels, which of course are co-operatives on a small scale, are intended to put an end automatically to 123 ``Nep'' trading. This co-operative drive is advertised by huge flaming posters, showing the massed workers thronging under mottoed banners, the whole framed in by a young giant in worker's blouse, flaunting his red banner above the masses.
No one who has gone into the detail of all this employment-making will complain of either inefficiency or indifference in this well-organized government. As against the impatient criticisms of my young friend, I quote an American delegate to the Red International of Labor Unions, "There is not a more efficiently organized government in the world.'' My own experience in a limited field, would lead me to endorse this verdict, in spite of some red tape and slowness in the matter of visas and credentials, due perhaps partly to my own ignorance of procedure and of the language. There is such a complexity of official bureaus, that among the many Sovyet, Foreign, Communist and International divisions, you don't always know where you are "at.'' The last, of course, are not technically Government bureaus, but if you have certain affiliations, you must deal with them. Also, it is inevitable that individual employees should be inexperienced and inefficient, drawn as they must be from all possible sources. During the period of Military Communism, when the blockade and destructive invasion reduced the country to famine, and the Government ``payok'' was insufficient for real sustenance, it took several persons to do the work of one, and now, with increasing efficiency, the reduction of the working-forces everywhere has added to the unemployment figures. In the administrative offices, a large proportion of bourgeois non-Communists are employed because of their training, but the two competent men 124 with whom I talked, members of the Labor Collegium, described themselves as middle Intelligenzia, with a prewar revolutionary record.
With the problem of the unemployed and helpless is allied the child problem. Employment for children is furnished where practicable, as part of their education. That is the idea of education in Russia, the fitting of the individual for useful social service, while giving him at the same time all the cultural advantages enjoyed in Capitalist countries only by the rich and privileged. Children are not allowed in organized industry, in the ordinary sense, under the age of sixteen, but connected with the factories are apprentice classes, for the young people of the factory families, so that they are actually doing assistant work in the industries. The labor question, broadly speaking, begins with the children, and is the life question, but this hollow outline, nevertheless, will give an idea of how the Sovyets are dealing with the immediate situation in this transition period under the N. E. P. Yes, Sovyet Russia too has a labor problem, an unemployment problem, and the Sovyets are solving it sincerely and fundamentally and less slowly and more surely than are the Capitalist countries. Nor is it so serious a question even now, as in these rich class governments.
[125] __ALPHA_LVL1__ AUTUMN.Autumn has come in Moscow---or Indian Summer. After a week or two of cold intermittent rain, beautiful sunny weather has returned. But there is a difference,--- yellowing leaves, the pungency of crushed stems under foot, a feeling of insecurity in the warmth. Swinging along the Boulevard in the swirl of linden leaves, my companion said, with just a twitch at the corner of the mouth, "Have you noticed that the Government hires all the fat men in Moscow to sit on the park benches, so we can't have a chance however tired we get?" Yes---score another outrage against the Sovyets---I had noticed the fat men resentfully on hot Summer Sundays, but now there is an occasional chance for us on the pungent October promenade.
Men and women are carrying great bunches of yellow oak leaves, from the avenues or the trees that hang their branches over the high walls of hidden neglected gardens, a boy joys in a giant specimen of golden leaf, children wear wreaths and girdles of them, giving the drab streets a festive air. The gypsies swirl their gay long skirts more energetically, seeming to flaunt, with the leaves, along the half-stripped boulevards. The displays of fruit still linger along the kerbs, green and yellow melons, pears and apples, purple plums, and the heaped Autumnal grapes, carried on 126 huge wooden trays upon the head. The roof-restaurant of the Workers' Gazette around the corner, has moved down stairs by the calendar, in spite of continued out-door weather. I climbed the five flights yesterday, to find only a few huddled box-plants on the deserted roof. Down again, I had to descend an extra flight or two to find the new quarters underground.
My cost of living has been steadily going down. When one recklessly undertakes to write letters from a strange place, he has only a sporting chance of including some truth. A perfectly obvious gold shield will show silver on the reverse, when you have time to go around. A corrected series should follow, after wringing from unimaginative companions the information they think you ought to be born with. And you a foreigner. It is one thing to ask correct Russian questions, and quite another to survive the deluge of strange words that pour over you in reply. I've modified my impression of the cost of living. I started with soup a la carte at something over a rouble, then dined on two courses at my little hotel, for a rouble and a half. Down the street I found a bargain at R1.25, at a nice little Nep place. Up the Tverskaya, I reduced the expense to Rl.OO. Moving into my new quarters, I was introduced to a co-operative, where as a non-member, I pay 75 kopeks, and lately I have discovered the Gazeta roof where 50 kopeks is the charge. At this rate, I may logically conclude that if I stay another ten weeks, they will pay me for eating. These co-operatives must be accomplishing what is expected of them, for over at the nice little Nep place, while the R1.75 dinner holds its price, the R1.25 has dropped to 85 kopeks in competition.
127But I am still struggling for vegetables, and every American I meet is peeving about it. I seldom know what I am ordering, especially when it is written---in careless Russian script. And you need more clue than the name, when you can read it, to know what you are going to get. But it is adventurously interesting to go down the list day by day, saving today on a 35 kopek order what you wasted yesterday on a two rouble. In this way I discovered " cotelet sweenee,'' which proved to be a pork (or literally, I suppose, swine), chop alluringly garnished with all varieties of Summer vegetables. At the same time, a young worker at the next table was served the same order by the same waiter. I fell upon my generous garnish, and neglected my cutlet, and when I looked up, the young comrade had devoured his chop and pushed impatiently aside the little heaps of peas and carrots and plump string-beans. Only by an effort I restrained myself from rushing over and snatching them. Why had I not thought of making a deal with him in advance? But thereafter I dined once a week on cotelet sweenee at a rouble.
__*_*_*__Lately I have found time to do the museums, and have made the rounds. All carefully preserved, arranged and open to all the people. There is the fine old gallery set quaintly back in a walled court in an obscure old street across the Moskva, where a great collection of Russian paintings is housed. This shows the historical development 128 of purely Russian art, from the oldest sacred subjects and icons, so easily distinguished in their Byzantine character from even the Byzantines of the early Italian renaissance,--- through the genre, story and historical periods, to the modern distorted psychological portraits, which I suppose are called futurist, unless they are already passe. You meet as elsewhere, groups going through with a conductor, who explains the important pictures and their artistic significance. In one of these groups my Russian companion got swallowed up, and I returned alone across the two bridges of the main river and its oval loop, on these bridges getting one of the most beautiful architectural effects, the grouped churches of the Kremlin with their dozens of tiny bubble domes in picturesquely varying heights, across the massive Kremlin walls and pointed towers. Then the leisured homeward stroll between the languid river and the walls, under crisping leaves.
Another old museum lies between this and the central town, the classic building with its very complete collection of casts, classic, gothic, and renaissance. Then there is the Historical Museum in the Red Square, which forms part of the great architectural gateway. Here a courteous woman official showed me through, pointing out all the most interesting objects from the excavations of old Russia, from Xarkov and Kiev and Colchis,---jewelry, pottery, glass, weapons and figurines, and half-burned coffins with their contents. These are the old collections.
More interesting to the Communist, who may have seen such classic exhibits elsewhere, are the newer collections. There is the gallery in the building which houses the Profintern,---the Red International of Labor Unions. This 129 contains only ``proletarian'' art, either proletarian subjects or distinctly proletarian artists. An American acquaintance called my attention to the interesting fact that while other countries had shown no art of the industries, but only, like Millet's for instance, of peasant life,---in Russia they had already in the last decade of the old century, great pictures of the mines and factories and foundries, deep, lurid interiors with sinister shadows, which now hang side by side with the new art of the workers. Perhaps because the great industries are so new to Russia, their sudden evolution impressed their effectiveness as subjects upon the artists.
The Lenin Institute, beyond the Bolshoi Theater, has three rooms devoted to the memory of the great statesman. The central room shows grouped photographs from life, commemorating every possible occasion. On one side of this is a room full of portraits of Lenin,---busts, paintings, tapestries, and woven textiles of wool, silk, and even hair,--- gifts these from the textile factory workers. One Red Square group, with his portrait as a central figure, is done in cloth appliqu^ and stitching, with a background of clouds similarly treated, all these most ingenious if not entirely artistic. Allied to these are the truly wonderful portraits wrought in foliage in the parks. Such a replica of the familiar child Lenin is in the little park not far from this museum, adjoining the Revolutionary monument. I watched the little face turn greenish with the first touch of frost, and then shrivel to brown as the cold crept on. But these portraits are in textiles as enduring as stone. On the other side of the central room, is a replica of Lenin's own study, fairly small with irregular angles, most touching with its 130 desk and chairs and books, its stationery and calendar, all reminiscent of the daily activity of the man who guided the country through its greatest crisis.
The Anatomical Museum lies not far away, with its revolting realistic exhibit of dissected models. To this as to all other museums, the people are brought for educational lectures, and I presume in the ``propaganda'' against smoking and other vices, the young people will be shown here what will happen to them if they follow their impulses too exuberantly. The Revolutionary Museum is still undergoing repair, but as a garden blooms where a month ago heaps of dust and stones blocked the entrance, I have hope of seeing that too before I leave.
__*_*_*__Since the first of September, the theaters have been working up to full swing, and there is more of interest than one can possibly follow. The Bolshoi Theater or Grand Opera House, first, with its fine ballets and conventional presentation of standard operas, a large proportion of them old Russian tales or adptations from Pushkin, set by Russian composers. The familiar operas are done in a particularly spectacular way,---more impressive in this respect than I ever have seen them given. Especially effective was "Aida,'' with its Egyptian profile arrangement of the carefully costumed characters, and the desert atmosphere of the out-door set. Around the corner, under the same direction, the Experimental Theater,- with more modern 131 and more original presentation of the same operas, that is, of the more simply dramatic ones, giving them in a naturalistic drama form. Given thus, "Evgeni Onyegin" still proves its popularity. And then, more individual and artistic, though strictly academic, the Moscow Art Theater, with its more adventurous ``Studios''.
Especially interesting in contrast to the splendid conventional ``Carmen'' at the Bolshoi Opera, was the setting at the Art Theater Music Studio,---Carmen restored to its original form and rhythms, with its thinner orchestration, and freed from much of its tawdriness, with an entirely individual idea of setting, Dantchenko's conception, the chorus a mere background of effective posturing and accompaniment. The same set was used throughout, some trifling addition of detail, and a different diffusion or concentration of lights, giving the required change of scene and atmosphere. This was not accomplished by hangings and curtains as we often see it done, but by an architectural construction which lent itself to the factory scene with archways, and later to the vaulted inn and the rock-vaulted smuggler camp. An innovation was the part of Michaela, whose role was omitted, and whose music was sung, first by an old grey-clad factory woman, whose appearance recalled sadly to Jose his distant mother, and later sung off-stage as an echo of home in Josh's memory. This experiment created wide discussion, Lunacharski giving the producer highest praise, though inclining to disagree with his interpretation of the Bizet opera as an intimate music-drama rather than a spectacular "grand opera.'' Amusing and naive criticisims have been made from time to time in workers' theatrical papers, to the effect that in 132 ``Carmen'' should be shown something of the life of the factory workers, so entirely do some of the ardent revolutionary workers look upon art as a medium for propaganda and for proletarian expression. Such a concession could hardly have been more distracting or in worse taste than the realistic barber with his basin in the ``Carmen'' at the "Bolshoi.'' Similar treatment is to be given to "Boris Qodonov,'' whose composer, Mousorgski, was so far ahead of his time, that so good an artist as RimskiKorsakov thought it necessary to reduce his score to conventional standards. Now this opera is to be restored to the composer's own expression of the crude, barbaric early Russian spirit.
Equally successful at this Music Studio, was Dantchenko's offering of Aristophanes' comedy "Lysistrata,'' with the feminist anti-war strike, which brought the soldiers out of the trenches to dance with their colorfully draped women in an Autumn-toned Greek frieze effect about some grouped temple columns on a revolving stage. This arrangement of temple-sections on varying planes, and the open floor through which the characters appeared, climbing a broad suggested flight of steps from the city, was as daring an experiment in staging as that of the Revolutionary and ``constructivist'' type of Left theaters, and without their sacrifice of external beauty. There was an effective musical support of this artistic drama, which heightened its charm. Very important in the new Russian theater,--- Dantchenko's, and more especially the theaters of the left, is the trained body responding to every emotion with its highly disciplined control. Bodily response seems intuitive with Russian artists, and so is not entirely new in their 133 stage art, but now it is more consciously emphasized as a theory and carried to the limits of the implication.
At the Moscow Theater, we have had Stanislavski fresh from his American tour, with a crowded house to greet him, and scalpers selling seats to late comers at six dollars lor which we had paid three. This, needless to say, is a Nep enterprise---the scalping. At this theater we have had too a choice of popular and classic plays, repeatedly the "Cricket on the Hearth,'' and "Twelfth Night" charmingly presented, with an ingenious arrangement of swinging screens to cut off and disclose corners of the stage set for different scenes. This theater, which at home represents Russian drama, stands well to the "Right,'' and shows little revolutionary influence. Stanislavski belongs so entirely to the old regime, to the rich bourgeois intellectuals, that it is practically impossible for him to understand or respond to the new inspirations. His theater, however, is encouraged substantially by the state, as some of the Revolutionary theaters are not, because it stands as model of the finest of the old conventional art, which must not be lost in all the new experimentation. The ``Studios'' are bolder, with their directors yielding frankly to ``left'' influence,
A Moscow Art Studio setting altogether charming and original was the "Princess Turnadot" with futurist-Chinese decoration and construction, and out at the Summer Hermitage, with its attractive gardens to stroll in between acts, and open-air refreshment booths, we saw one of the most unusual plays of all, a morbidly mystic Hebrew play, modern of authorship, but revealing the Jewish spirit of a century ago, "Gadibouk,'' "Between Two Walls.'' This 134 had been seen by my companion at the Yiddish Theater in New York. It was staged by the same director,---I was surprised to learn of such versatility,---as the "Princess Turandot,'' in as grim a key as the other was gay and bright. It was like a series of fine old engravings; the chalk-white faces, the conventional black hair and beards of the old Jewish priests, the suddenly shifted attitudes in unison, to change the picture with the accent of the text, the black or white or gray robes of the characters,---all was more pictorial in a sense than theatric, but there was an essentially dramatic mystic weirdness over all that held one tense. Pictorial too was the perspective of the furniture, built as it would be drawn, a long table, for instance, endwise to the audience, narrowed and tipped up toward the back of the scene, as on a canvas. The setting was Altman's.
At the Kamerny, they are giving Shaw's "St. Joan,'' cubist as to costume and constructivist as to staging. Having seen the freshly individual Joan of New York, I can think of no other personality fitting the role. The acting here in this part struck me as excellent unoriginal work, and its seriousness had nothing in common with the ludicrousness of the setting. This treatment lent itself to the first act especially well, though it rather reduced the satire to the level of farce. For the tragedy that followed, the futurist affectation was necessarily modified in a way that tended to destroy the unity of the production, and the whole thing seemed to me rather a curious than in interesting or artistic achievement. "Anna Christie,'' though given twice a week at present, manages to clash each time with something more important. Eugene Oneil is an American ``recognized'' by Russia. An event I shall miss is the 135 rumored return of Shalyapin for an engagement. Pavlova, they tell me, is a forgotten name. Helser is idol of the ballet.
At the "Left,'' stands the Revolutionary Theater of Meyerhold, in the Sadovaya Ring, where are given plays that are the last word in modernism. No concealment of stage mechanism, no curtain even, the scenery shifted around by the actors, sometimes as part of the acting, ``constructivist'' scenery that may consist of a floored scaffolding as though to indicate distance, or symbolically, high position; or an effect of ``scenic-railway'' curving down to the foot-lights,---if, on second thought, there are footlights,---representing the perspective of a country road, down which two hobo-artists approach from scene to scene, the main action that goes on below. Sometives a series of wooden screens are rolled rapidly across the stage alternately concealing and disclosing prepared scenes. Such devices unquestionably lend vividness and animation and project ideas in a startling manner that impresses them, even though at times it is difficult to follow satiric symbolism, and the chaotic repidity of events. In a wild travesty of Ostrovski's "Lyes,'' the "Forest,'' an old-fashioned comedy which had been seriously given at another theater a few evenings before, the family, here at the Meyerhold, made exit through drawing-room curtains represented by a row of sheets hung on a line, which sheets were removed in the next act as the family wash. The action and dialogue were satirically distorted beyond recognition. And none of this is mere farce. It is burlesque and satire sometimes even brilliant, and often tragic.
In this fashion was given the terribly impressive play 136 from the French of "La Nuit.'' "Earth Rearing" is as near as one can come to the idiomatic name they have given it, or perhaps "The World in Upheaval.'' Royalty and diplomacy were satirized beyond limits in this revolutionary play, revolutionary in method as well as in literal content. As is the theory in these plays, the audience was taken as much as possible into the midst of the action. Motorcycles dashed noisily up the theater aisle, and the fallen revolutionary worker hero was carried down it under a red pall, to the strains of the Revolutionary Funeral March, "As Martyrs Ye Perished.'' It was the more realistic to me as only that day I had met a Red funeral in the street. In the spirit of the mother of the fallen martyr, symbolized as a young woman, one felt the very tragedy of the Revolution and its hope. On another night was given a fantastic conception called "Let's Take Europe,'' whose political satire I could not follow, even though it was labeled, as all these plays are, on canvasses hung above the stage, "Episode 1,'' "Episode 2," with descriptive titles. The program charaterized this production as "episodic material for a play.'' It, too, was revolutionary satire, riotous and chaotic. The shouting mob was stationed partly in the auditorium and one felt impelled to join the harsh chant, "Dayosh Evropa! Dayosh Evropa!''
Revolutionary after another fashion was an evening of dance by Isadora Duncan and her young pupils,---the International, the Marseillaise, the Spirit of 1905,---all in utterly different character, the first dignified and impressive, the last full of sentiment, grace and beauty, the Marseillaise, by Isadora herself, a very orgy of mad hate and vengeance, followed the terrible French words which our English 137 version so smugly adapts. These were given to an emotionally demonstrative audience. Except for these direct interpretations, there does not seem to be anything very revolutionary in her art,---not such as we find in the Russian dramatic art. At the time of its introduction, of course it was an original innovation and a revolutionary change from the old ballet. The classic ballet at the Bolshoi Theater is no whit less gorgeous than of old, and no whit less technically wonderful. Everything of the old art is preserved and encouraged by their sensitively refined and artistic Commissar, Lunacharski, himself a distinguished poet and playwright. Even before the Revolution he had written Revolutionary plays, which have since been produced at both the Academic theaters where few revolutionary plays have been artistic enough for production, and the Prolet-cult theaters. A new development is the "machine-dances,'' most extraordinarily imitative of machinery in motion. These belong rather to the new " circus,'' than to the theater.
A young musician tells me there is very little tendency in music to wander from the old ruts, which inertia he deplores. There are, however, the advanced symphonies of Myaskovski, whose wonderfully complex resources baffle even the moderns. There is, too, the symphony orchestra that has rebelled against the dictatorship of a director, and directs itself democratically. These, the initiated say, are the only manifestations to be found here of the revolutionary spirit in musical art, and this spirit is the sine qua non in Moscow. About as total a lack of it as I saw at all was at the great benefit concert given for the sufferers in the Leningrad flood. It was probably for the 138 purpose of collecting from the Nepmen, and some of the numbers were as hopelessly dull and as hopelessly vulgar as you could find in the tiredest business-man's show at home. Talent from all the theaters was represented, several of the oldest artists of the academic stage redeemed the performance by reciting from their famous roles, chiefly, it appeared, from Pushkin. Very striking was the contrast in the appearance of the men, stiff and graceless and conventional in their Western evening clothes, and Lunacharski in a simple belted blouse with all his cultured charm. It would seem that artists at least, however little in sympathy with the Revolution, might take advantage of the new conditions to break way from the horrors of bourgeois masculine attire.
The other evening, in the Labor Council "pillared hall,'' was given that remarkable thing, a recitation chorus, with the different voice-timbres interpreting the ensemble, and solo voices the dramatic parts, these parts being assigned to the voices as they are to the instruments of an orchestra, with more variety than are the voices in oratorio. So far as I know, this is a purely Russian development and a recent one. Very effective was a proletarian number with the factory hum given by voices in the background. A vigorous youth in a worker's blouse, with a high dramatic gift, recited an impressive fragment in the role of an ironworker who is himself iron, and then changing to a sailor's blouse, tramped out a recitation to the accompaniment of the "Left March,"---"We sailors too are soldiers, we are all soldiers of the Red Army.'' Some effective and beautiful excerpts from Pushkin filled out the unique program.
In sharp contrast to all the other theaters I have seen 139 here is a small Nep theater, running at present a very popular and really amusing farce. It is below the streetlevel,---I suppose this is not symbolical,---in an unpretentious auditorium with level parquet, which looks much like the interior of our more humble "Little Theaters" at home. The audience has an entirely different character from that of the serious theaters,---in which I include comedy and satire,---the sordid-looking new bourgeoisie predominating, the tired business-class in Moscow, who like our own can't have their latent intellects disturbed. There is no impressiveness or distinction about these people, very little display even, except in their tendency to paint, which distinguishes them utterly from the workers and intellectuals. Before they have time to acquire the haut-bourgeois aspect, they will have passed away as a class, through the encroachment of state-controlled distribution.
The play shows a provincial family come to view the Metropolis, the tragic difficulty of finding where to lay their heads in this over-crowded city, and their terrified effort to walk the narrow line that the cruel ``dictatorship'' is supposed to have drawn. The housing difficulties are amusingly burlesqued, a one-room apartment being shown which shelters numerous occupants alternately by day and by night. A singing-student sleeps in the piano and pokes out her head to vocalize, a young couple prop themselves upright in the wardrobe, a Kindergarten teacher takes his pupils down from pegs on the wall for rapid instruction when line-space is free, and sleeps on a box beneath their feet when he returns them to the pegs. Inside the box a student makes his bed. In the morning, when the fat mother of the provincial visitors has been lowered from her 140 perilous shelf, they set out to view the sights, but are soon brought into the police court for an infringement of ordinances. The court is represented by a table half out of sight at the side of the stage, covered with a scarlet cloth upon which a sinister glare falls, and the trembling culprits are questioned by a terrifying unseen voice. Thus is the local situation burlesqued and the authorities flouted, and they come to enjoy it---when they have time, for they are more tired than the business man.
__*_*_*__Through the courtesy of Comrade Satz, the charming young woman at the head of the School for Aesthetic Education, and director as well of the Children's Theater, I have had the privilege of seeing a series of weekly plays put on there for the young people. Far from their rather restricting insistence on familiar local and folk themes in theory, these were all remotely exotic, most distantly related to their own life, either social or economic---"Thousand and One Nights,'' "Hiawatha,'' and an Italian Pierrot fantasy, all with effective impressionistic staging. Following these days, was an afternoon of orchestral music, a Rimski-Korsakov program, at which chiefly musical children were present, large groups from Technikums, who listened with absorbed attention to the long and by no means simple numbers. These are strictly children's entertainments, and only now and then a privileged grown-up may attend, unless he is in charge of a child-group.
141When the series of afternoons had ended, I was invited into an inner sanctum to see the children's ``records'' of their impressions of "Giavata,'' as the Longfellow play is called, G being the usual substitute for the lacking H in Russian. These records were most interesting and rather astonishing, and I longed to investigate the individual art' ists and their extraordinarily various psychology. Each child had drawn or painted one sketch showing the scene that had most impressed him. It seems the play---or the poem---had been read to them before they saw it presented, and it was evident that on many the word picture had made a stronger impression 'than the stage picture. Perhaps we have all had a similar experience. I myself saw Nagasaki Harbor shortly after reading Pierre Lori's description, and now my only memory is of the Harbor as he showed it to me.
From the reading of "Hiawatha,'' one child had received the impression that a visitor to the Indian camp must have come from far and come mounted, and so---a child from the desert perhaps---associating this with some impression in his memory, he had mounted the visitor in the center on a huge camel, which dominated the scene. Another had evidently argued that there were Indians and real people, and that the visitor was a real person. He had pictured an Indian of exaggerated size in war-feathers, shaking hands with a small Russian in peasant's blouse. These pictures, it must be remembered, were drawn after the play had been seen. A revealing group of pictures showed the different reactions to the fright-spirits sent against Hiawatha. The enemy distributes grotesque masks of animals to some of his followers, and they rush at and about the hero. One 142 child had sketched very carefully the tiny animals these masks represented. On one side of the unterrified Indian, a well-drawn little squirrel carried his bushy tail erect, on the other side he was faced by a small chicken-like bird, making a friendly group of three. One sketch showed the grotesquely masked stage-figures very accurately drawn, while another had caught imaginatively the suggestion of attacking spirits with their vagueness and terror.
From the stage picture, some of the children had recorded most effectively the decorative aspect, adding conceptions of their own. A conventionalized forest one saw, unpeopled, with a lone tent in the midst. Another was impressed as by hundreds of warriors fighting madly, his whole page filled _with the detail of crowded figures. Another showed the literal scene of the pow-wow, squatting warriors equally spaced about the campfire, smoking the peace-pipe. This was almost the only picture in which imagination had not been more active than observation.
A teachers' record showed observations of the children's interest, which rose, as may be supposed, to the tensest point, when the fighting was fiercest, and relaxed to the lowest point during narrative portions. I regret to say I had observed a very familiar spirit of satisfied vengeance when the villain "got what he deserved,'' according to audible comments from the young audience. During the intervals, there was excited and noisy discussion and strongly indicated impatience at undue delays,---stamping, whistling, shouting, also a quite familiar manifestation. The young manager said that the character that should have appealed most strongly to the children,---Hiawatha's young brother, who rushes on and stabs the enemy,--- 143 aroused no interest at all, and gave as the reason that the role was played by a woman and was entirely unconvincing to the children. I was glad to have my own prejudices on this subject upheld by the discerning little ones. " Unfortunately,'' he said, "we have no actor who can play a boy's part.'' Why not conscript one from the workers' or children's own theaters ? These records are interesting to the theater-manager only as a guide for his presentations. At the School, however, each sketch is associated with the individual child, and deductions drawn from it for the child's training, not only artistic, but mental, moral, and psychological deduction.
__*_*_*__The session of the Central Committee of the U. S. R. R. (the Union of Socialist Sovyet Republics) combining the R. S. F. S. R. with all the neighboring Sovyet Republics, has just closed. The session was held in the great white Andreyevski Hall of the Old Palace in the Kremlin. What they talked about I shall know when it comes back in the Communist daily from America. My companion relayed disconnected bits of incomprehensible politics and policies, which came to us from innumerable amplifiers, and were related by the speakers to great maps hung behind them on the stage. In front of the division rail, all manner of correspondents from countries even that have not yet discovered Russia, ranged broadly in and out of the long corridor which follows the Hall, bored or alert according to the 144 significance of the subject. Now and then we had a chance to get a tidbit of news from an acquaintance as he circled by our rail.
But understanding didn't matter so much. I had come to see, in this historical old palace, the historical new statesmen actually at work making Sovyet policy, creating a new type of history,---men whose names meant much to me, and whose faces I could study through my glass, peasant faces, worker faces, Jewish, Slav, Caucasion, intellectual all, in the broad sense of the term, many in the old sense,---members of the "intelligenzia,'' the educated classes. These are the rare men who held to their principles, and stood by the workers in the great crisis of the Revolution, which, when it came, found so many ardent revolutionists unprepared for the form it would take. Most tragically, it was not recognized by many of those who had suffered years of imprisonment and exile for the idea. Aside from the Session, this gave me an opportunity to go in and out of the Kremlin with my permit and stroll about in as leisurely a fashion as I pleased every day.
Through the white-towered gateway of the long Kremlin bridge near the Comintern, we passed the Red guards at the outer gate. The Kremlin enclosure stands fairly high above the surrounding streets, and through the crenelations of the walled bridge, leading up from the street to the enclosure, one looks right and left down through the yellowing strips of parking that follow the high Kremlin walls, replacing the ancient moat. Passing by Red guards again at the inner gate, at the top of the tilted bridge, we followed lines of palaces around to the high drive that overlooks the river across the lower wall, and sweeps by the stately 145 front of the Old Palace. Within, we climb a long, broad stairway, straight ahead in easy ascent, and at its top are confronted, through an open doorway, with an enormous hall crowded with people in a rather smoky atmosphere. I catch my breath. "It hardly seems real!" I exclaim, and then suddenly I discover it isn't real, only a very life-like picture through a doorway,---a picture of an historic meeting with portrait figures of all the prominent revolutionary officials, addressed by Lenin, who stands out characteristically in a vigorous speaking pose.
At the door of the Andreyevski Hall, we show our permits to the two unassuming young fellows in stunning uniforms, with bright red riding-breeches,---a uniform I have noticed in parades, and have not been able to find out about. Here is my chance. My companion translates. "This American comrade wishes to know who you are,'' to put it as directly as I asked it! They are soldiers of the "Gay Pay Oo,'' the G. P. U., the State Political Police, which has succeeded the fearsome Cheka, and has not quite its broad powers. They are friendly and amused. My curiosity does not cost me my head, as my friends at home would of course expect. Swerving, to let the crowd go through, I have the honor of nearly trampling on Karl Radek, my nearest approach to distinction on this occasion. Here at the entrance of the Session, I leave the report to intelligent correspondents, who days since have covered it by cable.
After the Session, we wander quite freely about the Palace, up stairway after stairway, by round-about corridors, and through all the beautiful apartments of the Czars, with low-vaulted ceilings and subdued gorgeousness of 146 decoration, semi-oriental or Byzantine, with gay-tiled stoves and deep window-niches. These rooms are familiar to all of us who heard Shalyapin in Boris Godonov, for the setting of that opera was a very faithful copy of the rooms of the Imperial Palace. Incarnated by our memory here in their old haunts, appear the terrible and magnificent figures of Russia's past. Re-enacted in our imagination are their gruesome deeds. We shiver a little as we return and shrugging off the nightmare of this past, we wind down again to the free air of the halls where Russia's great new history is making.
Then a stroll about the Kremlin grounds, among the groups of churches with their juggled clusters of little domes, shadowed with the black stains of ages, little high domes through which the unearthly beauty of the choirvoices used to float up and out, it seemed, to the old Heaven, churches where all the Czars were crowned, wedded, and until Peter the Great, buried,---a different church for each ceremony. On then past lines of heavy barracks and palaces with their great connecting porticos, and lighter carved and decorated structures, past the lofty bell-tower, "Ivan Veliki,'' past the huge cracked bell that never was hung, because it fell to its ruin in trying to be too big and swing too high, past rows of captured cannon, and by companies of marching soldiers, and soldiers with stacked arms. And so out of the gates again, past the Red guards, over the Troitski Most with its crenelations framing the yellowing trees of the park-strips, through the white towered gateway and signaling an izvoschik, home to wait for the American ``Worker'' and find out what it was all about.
__*_*_*__ 147And while waiting, we went last evening, inspired by our greeting with the red-breeched guards, to visit the Club of the "Gay Pay Oo.'' Its greatest claim to our interest is its organization on industrial lines, exactly as in the productive industries. In other words, it is a club, not for officers only, but for every man, woman, and child connected with the State Political Police, soldier and officer, librarian and janitor, stenographer and teacher in the evening classes, and the infant who plays in the club nursery while its mother attends to her duties or learns how to write her name, or sits at a meeting in the concert hall. Such a meeting of proletarian women was to be held this evening, we were told, at which some enlightened and intellectual working-women would speak to their simpler sisters. These educational meetings are constantly going on among all groups, so that few are still left in the dark as to the purposes and difficulties and accomplishments of the Government. Just lately, the Kindergarten teachers of all Russia held a conference in Moscow, and there on the platform was Lunacharski, their chief, to review the struggles and explain the complex strategies of these years of Sovyet rule.
This evening while waiting for the hour of gathering, we wandered through the whole building, inspected the well-stocked library, the classes in session, the reading corner, with its files of papers, pamphlets and magazines, its workers' journals and technical periodicals, and its interesting and amusing wall-newspapers and cartoons, saw the inevitable Lenin alcove, with a great map illuminated from behind, giving a sort of geographical biography of Lenin, walked through the nurseries and Kindergarten rooms, and 148 returned through a small hall where the Communist Youth were having a meeting and a budding orator was holding forth as we filed through. I noted that the air was blue with cigarette smoke, and deplored it to the young fellow who was doing the honors of the club. I even ventured to remonstrate with a cherub Comsomoletz just striking a match, "Nyet, nyet, Tavarishch, sleeshkom molodoi!" "Too young, Comrade!" He smiled beatifically at me and---lighted the cigarette. "Oh they can't forbid it,'' said our guide,--- that seems to be the universal policy,---"but we are starting a propaganda against it.'' Thus they manage everything. Comrade Trotzki himself, I learn, is to write against it, and as I am told their late military chief is the most popular man in Russia, in spite of conflicts in high places, I feel hope that the atmosphere of the Comsomolist hall will clear. We peeped through the door of the Young Leninist room--- all these are the young people of the Political Police families,---and found a dozen of them absorbed in making mottoes and decorations for a coming holiday demonstration.
Returning to the concert hall, we found---and heard--- that the meeting had begun, and were a little disconcerted when, instead of making a quiet entrance at the back, we were ushered through a doorway direct upon the stage. We stood in the rear and joined in the "International,'' with an accompaniment thumped by a vigorous young man on a very cracked piano. At its close, we were greeted by the chairman, a pleasant and efficient woman, who, after inquiring our names, announced that a Comrade from America was present and had been invited to sit in their Presidium. As it was my first appearance on any stage, I failed to rise to my opportunity at such short notice. In 149 response to great applause, I made a very limited speech through an interpreter, to the effect that I was pleased to meet with them and was honored to sit in their Presidium, ---and I hope the sincerity of my remarks made up for their inexcusable inadequacy. At any rate the applause again indicated cordial friendliness, and then the program opened. The chairman began as usual, with a little sketch of the life of their trusted leader, whom they have so lately lost, and told simply of his aims and hopes and untiring work for Russia and his people. Then from the old piano came the heart-tearing strains of the Revolutionary Funeral March, hard for these people to hear unmoved, bereaved, as all must have been, through all the years of Revolution and civil war. In the midst of the mute, tense endurance, came a sudden outburst of hysterical sobbing, and a woman tried to break from her friend's arms and rush down the aisle. Only a moment the storm lasted, and before the Funeral March was finished, all was calm and restrained again. After further addresses by the other women of the Presidium, the meeting closed as usual with the " International'', in splendid triumphant chorus, albeit with only women's voices.
__*_*_*__At midnight, as I sat writing---I have fallen into the terrible local habit of never sleeping---came a knocking, as in "The Raven,'' at my chamber door. On opening, thereat stood two soldiers of the Gay Pay Oo,---no, it was not a 150 dream and not an hallucination,---and two plain-clothes men. Quickly I searched my heart for secret guilt,---for I could not rid myself of the home superstition that that is where the Cheka searches,---then recovered and met them calmly and guiltlessly. But they had already lost interest. One glance showed them I was not the person they sought. They waved my door shut with hasty apologies, and knocked at the door opposite. This time two of them pushed in while the others blocked the doorway, and I remained watching from my door-sill. If some poor innocent traitor was going to be beheaded by the Cheka, I might as well be an eye-witness. However, a short parley satisfied them and they left their man muttering indignantly, to scour the rest of the corridor. Finally, my one adventure flattened out by seeing them tramp back and off with benignant greetings and no victim. They were searching probably, I was told the next day, for tax-evaders,---for I am staying temporarily this week at a small hotel on Tverskaya, where merchants, chiefly Armenians I should judge, stop when they bring their wares to Moscow. My American informant seemed, after all, to regard this as an adventure, for she exclaimed enviously, "And I have lived three years in Moscow and never been raided by the Gay Pay Oo!''
[151] __ALPHA_LVL1__ FAREWELL.My farewell to Moscow was a spectacular one and thrilling---something like a million Comrades turned out and demonstrated for me,---or so it seemed, for I lingered over November seventh, the day of days in Red Russia, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. By the old calendar October 25th.
For days beforehand, truck-loads of green garlands rattled down the cobbled streets, and the fire-ladders carried them to the top of every official building, looping them over the whole fagade---the Comintern, the Moscow Sovyet, the Dom Soyusov or Central Labor Council, and the Sovyet doms. Every building in the city carried its share of decoration, even to the Nep hotels. And among the ropes of evergreen, hung banners of red and gold, fluttered scarlet flags, flaunted mottoed buntings, almost screamed the color and glitter of the Revolutionary day. Over all, rested the merest flaking of the first snow, caught in the green, leaving untouched the red.
Without a permit or membership in an organization, no one might enter the Red Square that day, so I bethought me of an organization which was careless in its censorship, to which I might be said to belong by virtue of my presence in Moscow. At nine-thirty A. M., I took my place in the 152 ranks of the English-speaking section of the Immigrants' Club. Above us advanced a cartoon of the Dawes Plan, with unflattering portraits, before us a red banner announced our division as "Anglo-Saxon Communists.'' Near me marched Gertrude Haessler, correspondent and little Ruth Kennell, pioneer, just from Kuzbas, and Anna Louise Strong,---``immigrants'' all. About half of us were Jews,--- Russian-Americans---and as each contingent arrived, they were greeted with the friendly jeer, "Hurrah for the AngloSaxons!" They evidently enjoyed the joke as well as anyone. The one who walked by me said, "Only workers can enter the Red Square today.'' "And Communists,'' I added. "All Communists,'' was the quick and proud reply, "are workers!" No one had censored me, and I might have been a ``counter'' and carried bombs in my pocket. These Revolutionists are growing careless! Nevertheless, again and again the eagle-eyed marshal of our division prevented some by-stander from the crowded sidewalk from falling craftily into line.
Most of the Americans are voluntary exiles, but many others---practically all the French---are political refugees. The French section marched just behind us, arrogantly proclaiming on their bunting, "The bourgeoisie recognize us, but we do not recognize the bourgeoisie.'' Back of them the Italians were swinging to the measure of their "All' ar---mil All' ar---mi! All' ar---mi Communisti!" on the bugle tones. And under the slogan, "Hands off China!" marched the students of the Far Eastern University. Along the frozen Boulevard, under the leafless lindens, sharp into the Tverskaya we turned, swelling the broad ranks that surged from all sides into this main current of the parade, [153] on to the street's end at the old gateway of the Red Square. On the rising grade of the entrance, looking forward and backward, we could see no end to the lines moving steadily on in rhythmic advance. Even the Octyabrati were out, truck-loads of the wee ones born since Red October, and lines and lines of the little ``Leninists'' striding valiantly, and ranks and ranks of the Communist Youth tramping sturdily, and workers---men and women,---and the soldiers of the Red Army, all under the red banners of the Revolution.
Into the Red Square we marched, over the frost of white that mottled its cobbles, and past the tribune of the Mausoleum where, with others, Trotski stood above his sleeping Comrade to see our ranks go by. Very grim he looked and motionless, with hand at cap, while the crowd, not a whit awed, spelled out his name and shouted as each division passed. Very determined, too, and soldierly, and I think he saw us, in his mind, marching on and on, west and still west, until our ranks had doubled, tripled, swelled a hundred-fold, and our feet were stayed by the Atlantic breakers. That at least is what I seemed to see on this Revolutionary anniversary, as I marched with Russia's workers through the Krasnaya Ploshchad.
THE END.
__ALPHA_LVL0__ The End. [END]