Russia in 1919

RUSSIA IN 1919

TO PETROGRAD

On January 30 a party of four newspaper correspondents,

two Norwegians, a Swede and myself, left Stockholm to go

into Russia. We travelled with the members of the Soviet

Government's Legation, headed by Vorovsky and Litvinov,

who were going home after the breaking off of official

relations by Sweden. Some months earlier I had got leave

from the Bolsheviks to go into Russia to get further material

for my history of the revolution, but at the last moment there

was opposition and it seemed likely that I should be refused

permission. Fortunately, however, a copy of the Morning

Post reached Stockholm, containing a report of a lecture by

Mr. Lockhart in which he had said that as I had been out of

Russia for six months I had no right to speak of conditions

there. Armed with this I argued that it would be very

unfair if I were not allowed to come and see things for

myself. I had no further difficulties.

We crossed by boat to Abo, grinding our way through the

ice, and then travelled by rail to the Russian frontier, taking

several days over the journey owing to delays variously

explained by the Finnish authorities. We were told that the

Russian White Guards had planned an attack on the train.

Litvinov, half-smiling, wondered if they were purposely giving time

to the White Guards to organize such an attack. Several

nervous folk inclined to that opinion. But at Viborg we

were told that there were grave disorders in Petrograd and

that the Finns did not wish to fling us into the middle of a

scrimmage. Then someone obtained a newspaper and we

read a detailed account of what was happening. This

account was, as I learnt on my return, duly telegraphed to

England like much other news of a similar character. There

had been a serious revolt in Petrograd. The Semenovsky

regiment had gone over to the mutineers, who had seized the

town. The Government, however, had escaped to

Kronstadt, whence they were bombarding Petrograd with

naval guns.

This sounded fairly lively, but there was nothing to be done,

so we finished up the chess tournament we had begun on the

boat. An Esthonian won it, and I was second, by reason of

a lucky win over Litvinov, who is really a better player. By

Sunday night we reached Terijoki and on Monday moved

slowly to the frontier of Finland close to Bieloostrov. A

squad of Finnish soldiers was waiting, excluding everybody

from the station and seeing that no dangerous revolutionary

should break away on Finnish territory. There were no

horses, but three hand sledges were brought, and we piled

the luggage on them, and then set off to walk to the frontier

duly convoyed by the Finns. A Finnish lieutenant walked at

the head of the procession, chatting good-humouredly in

Swedish and German, much as a man might think it worth

while to be kind to a crowd of unfortunates just about to be

flung into a boiling cauldron. We walked a few hundred

yards along the line and then turned into a road deep in

snow through a little bare wood, and so down to the little

wooden bridge over the narrow frozen stream that

separates Finland from Russia. The bridge, not twenty yards

across, has a toll bar at each end, two sentry boxes and two

sentries. On the Russian side the bar was the familiar black

and white of the old Russian Empire, with a sentry box to

match. The Finns seemingly had not yet had time to paint

their bar and box.

The Finns lifted their toll bar, and the Finnish officers

leading our escort walked solemnly to the middle of the

bridge. Then the luggage was dumped there, while we stood

watching the trembling of the rickety little bridge under the

weight of our belongings, for we were all taking in with us as

much food as we decently could. We were none of us

allowed on the bridge until an officer and a few men had

come down to meet us on the Russian side. Only little Nina,

Vorovskv's daughter, about ten years old, chattering

Swedish with the Finns, got leave from them, and shyly, step

by step, went down the other side of the bridge and struck

up acquaintance with the soldier of the Red Army who stood

there, gun in hand, and obligingly bent to show her

the sign, set in his hat, of the crossed sickle and hammer

of the Peasants' and Workmen's Republic. At last the

Finnish lieutenant took the list of his prisoners and called out

the names "Vorovsky, wife and one bairn," looking

laughingly over his shoulder at Nina flirting with the sentry.

Then "Litvinov," and so on through all the Russians, about

thirty of them. We four visitors, Grimlund the Swede,

Puntervald and Stang, the Norwegians, and I, came last. At

last, after a general shout of farewell, and "Helse Finland"

from Nina, the Finns turned and went back into their

civilization, and we went forward into the new struggling

civilization of Russia. Crossing that bridge we passed from

one philosophy to another, from one extreme of the class

struggle to the other, from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie

to a dictatorship of the proletariat.

The contrast was noticeable at once. On the Finnish side of

the frontier we had seen the grandiose new frontier station,

much larger than could possibly be needed, but quite a good

expression of the spirit of the new Finland. On the Russian

side we came to the same grey old wooden station known

to all passengers to and from Russia for polyglot profanity

and passport difficulties. There were no porters, which was

not surprising because there is barbed wire and an extremely

hostile sort of neutrality along the frontier and traffic across

has practically ceased. In the buffet, which was very cold,

no food could be bought. The long tables once laden with

caviare and other zakuski were bare. There was, however, a

samovar, and we bought tea at sixty kopecks a glass and

lumps of sugar at two roubles fifty each. We took our tea

into the inner passport room, where I think a stove must

have been burning the day before, and there made some sort

of a meal off some of Puntervald's Swedish hard-bread. It

is difficult to me to express the curious mixture of

depression and exhilaration that was given to the party by

this derelict starving station combined with the feeling that

we were no longer under guard but could do more or less as

we liked. It split the party into two factions, of which one

wept while the other sang. Madame Vorovsky, who had not

been in Russia since the first revolution, frankly wept, but

she wept still more in Moscow where she found that even

as the wife of a high official of the Government she enjoyed

no privileges which would save her from the hardships of

the population. But the younger members of the party,

together with Litvinov, found their spirits irrepressibly rising

in spite of having no dinner. They walked about the village,

played with the children, and sang, not revolutionary songs,

but just jolly songs, any songs that came into their heads.

When at last the train came to take us into Petrograd, and we

found that the carriages were unheated, somebody got out a

mandoline and we kept ourselves warm by dancing. At the

same time I was sorry for the five children who were with

us, knowing that a country simultaneously suffering war,

blockade and revolution is not a good place for childhood.

But they had caught the mood of their parents,

revolutionaries going home to their revolution, and trotted

excitedly up and down the carriage or anchored themselves

momentarily, first on one person's knee and then on

another's.

It was dusk when we reached Petrograd. The Finland

Station, of course, was nearly deserted, but here there

were four porters, who charged two hundred and fifty

roubles for shifting the luggage of the party from one end of

the platform to the other. We ourselves loaded it into the

motor lorry sent to meet us, as at Bieloostrov we had loaded

it into the van. There was a long time to wait while rooms

were being allotted to us in various hotels, and with several

others I walked outside the station to question people about

the mutiny and the bombardment of which we had heard in

Finland. Nobody knew anything about it. As soon as the

rooms were allotted and I knew that I had been lucky

enough to get one in the Astoria, I drove off across the

frozen river by the Liteini Bridge. The trams were running.

The town seemed absolutely quiet, and away down the river

I saw once again in the dark, which is never quite dark

because of the snow, the dim shape of the fortress, and

passed one by one the landmarks I had come to know so

well during the last six years-the Summer Garden, the

British Embassy, and the great Palace Square where I had

seen armoured cars flaunting about during the July rising,

soldiers camping during the hysterical days of the

Kornilov affair and, earlier, Kornilov himself reviewing the

Junkers. My mind went further back to the March

revolution, and saw once more the picket fire of the

revolutionaries at the corner that night when the remains of

the Tzar's Government were still frantically printing

proclamations ordering the people to go home, at the very

moment while they themselves were being besieged in the

Admiralty. Then it flung itself further back still, to the day

of the declaration of war, when I saw this same square filled

with people, while the Tzar came out for a moment on the

Palace balcony. By that time we were pulling up at the

Astoria and I had to turn my mind to something else.

The Astoria is now a bare barrack of a place, but

comparatively clean. During the war and the first part of the

revolution it was tenanted chiefly by officers, and owing to

the idiocy of a few of these at the time of the first revolution

in shooting at a perfectly friendly crowd of soldiers and

sailors, who came there at first with no other object than to

invite the officers to join them, the place was badly smashed

up in the resulting scrimmage. I remember with Major

Scale fixing up a paper announcing the fall of Bagdad either

the night this happened or perhaps the night before. People

rushed up to it, thinking it some news about the revolution,

and turned impatiently away. All the damage has been

repaired, but the red carpets have gone, perhaps to make

banners, and many of the electric lights were not burning,

probably because of the shortage in electricity. I got my

luggage upstairs to a very pleasant room on the fourth floor.

Every floor of that hotel had its memories for me. In this

room lived that brave reactionary officer who boasted that

he had made a raid on the Bolsheviks and showed little

Madame Kollontai's hat as a trophy. In this I used to listen

to Perceval Gibbon when he was talking about how to write

short stories and having influenza. There was the room

where Miss Beatty used to give tea to tired revolutionaries

and to still more tired enquirers into the nature of revolution

while she wrote the only book that has so far appeared

which gives anything like a true impresionist picture of those

unforgettable days.* [(*)"The Red Heart of Russia."] Close

by was the room where poor Denis Garstin used to talk

of the hunting he would have when the war should come to

an end.

I enquired for a meal, and found that no food was to be had

in the hotel, but they could supply hot water. Then, to get

an appetite for sleep, I went out for a short walk, though I

did not much like doing so with nothing but an English

passport, and with no papers to show that I had any right to

be there. I had, like the other foreigners, been promised

such papers but had not yet received them. I went round to

the Regina, which used to be one of the best hotels in the

town, but those of us who had rooms there were

complaining so bitterly that I did not stay with them, but

went off along the Moika to the Nevsky and so back to my

own hotel. The streets, like the hotel, were only half lit, and

hardly any of the houses had a lighted window. In the old

sheepskin coat I had worn on the front and in my high fur

hat, I felt like some ghost of the old regime visiting a town

long dead. The silence and emptiness of the streets

contributed to this effect. Still, the few people I met or

passed were talking cheerfully together and the rare

sledges and motors had comparatively good roads, the

streets being certainly better swept and cleaned than they

have been since the last winter of the Russian Empire.

SMOLNI

Early in the morning I got tea, and a bread card on which I

was given a very small allowance of brown bread, noticeably

better in quality than the compound of clay and straw which

made me ill in Moscow last summer. Then I went to find

Litvinov, and set out with him to walk to the Smolni

institute, once a school for the daughters of the aristocracy,

then the headquarters of the Soviet, then the headquarters of

the Soviet Government, and finally, after the Government's

evacuation to Moscow, bequeathed to the Northern

Commune and the Petrograd Soviet. The town, in daylight,

seemed less deserted, though it was obvious that the

"unloading" of the Petrograd population, which was

unsuccessfully attempted during the Kerensky regime, had

been accomplished to a large extent. This has been partly

the result of famine and of the stoppage of factories,

which in its turn is due to the impossibility of bringing fuel

and raw material to Petrograd. A very large proportion of

Russian factory hands have not, as in other countries, lost

their connection with their native villages. There was always

a considerable annual migration backwards and forwards

between the villages and the town, and great numbers of

workmen have gone home, carrying with them the ideas of

the revolution. It should also be remembered that the bulk

of the earlier formed units of the Red Army is composed of

workmen from the towns who, except in the case of

peasants mobilized in districts which have experienced an

occupation by the counter-revolutionaries, are more

determined and better understand the need for discipline

than the men from the country.

The most noticeable thing in Petrograd to anyone returning

after six months' absence is the complete disappearance of

armed men. The town seems to have returned to a perfectly

peaceable condition in the sense that the need for

revolutionary patrols has gone. Soldiers walking about no

longer carry their rifles, and the picturesque figures of

the revolution who wore belts of machine-gun cartridges

slung about their persons have gone.

The second noticeable thing, especially in the Nevsky, which

was once crowded with people too fashionably dressed, is

the general lack of new clothes. I did not see anybody

wearing clothes that looked less than two years old, with the

exception of some officers and soldiers who are as well

equipped nowadays as at the beginning of the war.

Petrograd ladies were particularly fond of boots, and of

boots there is an extreme shortage. I saw one young woman

in a well-preserved, obviously costly fur coat, and beneath

it straw shoes with linen wrappings.

We had started rather late, so we took a train half-way up

the Nevsky. The tram conductors are still women. The

price of tickets has risen to a rouble, usually, I noticed, paid

in stamps. It used to be ten kopecks.

The armoured car which used to stand at the entrance of

Smolni has disappeared and been replaced by a horrible

statue of Karl Marx, who stands, thick and heavy, on a stout

pedestal, holding behind him an enormous top-hat like

the muzzle of an eighteen-inch gun. The only signs of

preparations for defence that remain are the pair of light

field guns which, rather the worse for weather, still stand

under the pillars of the portico which they would probably

shake to pieces if ever they should be fired. Inside the

routine was as it used to be, and when I turned down the

passage to get my permit to go upstairs, I could hardly

believe that I had been away for so long. The place is

emptier than it was. There is not the same eager crowd of

country delegates pressing up and down the corridors and

collecting literature from the stalls that I used to see in the

old days when the serious little workman from the Viborg

side stood guard over Trotsky's door, and from the alcove

with its window looking down into the great hall, the endless

noise of debate rose from the Petrograd Soviet that met

below.

Litvinov invited me to have dinner with the Petrograd

Commissars, which I was very glad to do, partly because I

was hungry and partly because I thought it would be better

to meet Zinoviev thus than in any other manner,

remembering how sourly he had looked upon me earlier

in the revolution. Zinoviev is a Jew, with a lot of hair, a

round smooth face, and a very abrupt manner. He was

against the November Revolution, but when it had been

accomplished returned to his old allegiance to Lenin and,

becoming President of the Northern Commune, remained in

Petrograd when the Government moved to Moscow. He is

neither an original thinker nor a good orator except in

debate, in answering opposition, which he does with extreme

skill. His nerve was badly shaken by the murders of his

friends Volodarsky and Uritzky last year, and he is said to

have lost his head after the attack on Lenin, to whom he is

extremely devoted. I have heard many Communists attribute

to this fact the excesses which followed that event in

Petrograd. I have never noticed anything that would make

me consider him pro-German, though of course he is

pro-Marx. He has, however, a decided prejudice against the

English. He was among the Communists who put

difficulties in my way as a "bourgeois journalist" in the

earlier days of the revolution, and I had heard that he had

expressed suspicion and disapproval of Radek's intimacy

with me.

I was amused to see his face when he came in and saw me

sitting at the table. Litvinov introduced me to him, very

tactfully telling him of Lockhart's attack upon me,

whereupon he became quite decently friendly, and said that

if I could stay a few days in Petrograd on my way back from

Moscow he would see that I had access to the historical

material I wanted, about the doings of the Petrograd Soviet

during the time I had been away. I told him I was surprised

to find him here and not at Kronstadt, and asked about the

mutiny and the treachery of the Semenovsky regiment.

There was a shout of laughter, and Pozern explained that

there was no Semenovsky regiment in existence, and that the

manufacturers of the story, every word of which was a lie,

had no doubt tried to give realism to it by putting in the

name of the regiment which had taken a chief part in putting

down the Moscow insurrection of fourteen years ago.

Pozern, a thin, bearded man, with glasses, was sitting at the

other end of the table, as Military Commissar of the

Northern Commune.

Dinner in Smolni was the same informal affair that it

was in the old days, only with much less to eat. The

Commissars, men and women, came in from their work,

took their places, fed and went back to work again, Zinoviev

in particular staying only a few minutes. The meal was

extremely simple, soup with shreds of horseflesh in it, very

good indeed, followed by a little kasha together with small

slabs of some sort of white stuff of no particular consistency

or taste. Then tea and a lump of sugar. The conversation

was mostly about the chances of peace, and Litvinov's rather

pessimistic reports were heard with disappointment. Just as

I had finished, Vorovsky, Madame Vorovsky and little Nina,

together with the two Norwegians and the Swede, came in.

I learnt that about half the party were going on to Moscow

that night and, deciding to go with them, hurried off to the

hotel.

PETROGRAD TO MOSCOW

There was, of course, a dreadful scrimmage about getting

away. Several people were not ready at the last minute.

Only one motor was obtainable for nine persons with their

light luggage, and a motor lorry for the heavy things. I

chose to travel on the lorry with the luggage and had a fine

bumpity drive to the station, reminding me of similar though

livelier experiences in the earlier days of the revolution when

lorries were used for the transport of machine guns, red

guards, orators, enthusiasts of all kinds, and any stray

persons who happened to clamber on.

At the Nikolai Station we found perfect order until we got

into our wagon, an old third-class wagon, in which a

certain number of places which one of the party had

reserved had been occupied by people who had no right

to be there. Even this difficulty was smoothed out in a

manner that would have been impossible a year

or even six months ago.

The wagon was divided by a door in the middle. There

were open coup=82s and side seats which became plank beds

when necessary. We slept in three tiers on the bare boards.

I had a very decent place on the second tier, and, by a bit of

good luck, the topmost bench over my head was occupied

only by luggage, which gave me room to climb up there and

sit more or less upright under the roof with my legs dangling

above the general tumult of mothers, babies, and Bolsheviks

below. At each station at which the train stopped there was

a general procession backwards and forwards through the

wagon. Everybody who had a kettle or a coffee-pot or a tin

can, or even an empty meat tin, crowded through the

carriage and out to get boiling water. I had nothing but a

couple of thermos flasks, but with these I joined the others.

>From every carriage on the train people poured out and

hurried to the taps. No one controlled the taps but, with the

instinct for co-operation for which Russians are remarkable,

people formed themselves automatically into queues, and by

the time the train started again everybody was back in his

place and ready for a general tea-drinking. This

performance was repeated again and again throughout the

night. People dozed off to sleep, woke up, drank more

tea, and joined in the various conversations that went on

in different parts of the carriage. Up aloft, I

listened first to one and then to another. Some were

grumbling at the price of food. Others were puzzling why

other nations insisted on being at war with them. One man

said he was a co-operator who had come by roundabout

ways from Archangel, and describing the discontent there,

told a story which I give as an illustration of the sort of thing

that is being said in Russia by non-Bolsheviks. This man,

in spite of the presence of many Communists in the carriage,

did not disguise his hostility to their theories and practice,

and none the less told this story. He said that some of

the Russian troops in the Archangel district refused to go

to the front. Their commanders, unable to compel them,

resigned and were replaced by others who, since the men persisted

in refusal, appealed for help. The barracks, so he said, were

then surrounded by American troops, and the Russians, who

had refused to go to the front to fire on other Russians, were

given the choice, either that every tenth man should be shot,

or that they should give up their ringleaders. The

ringleaders, twelve in number, were given up, were made to

dig their own graves, and shot. The whole story may well

be Archangel gossip. If so, as a specimen of such gossip, it

is not without significance. In another part of the carriage

an argument on the true nature of selfishness caused some

heat because the disputants insisted on drawing their

illustrations from each other's conduct. Then there was the

diversion of a swearing match at a wayside station between

the conductor and some one who tried to get into this

carriage and should have got into another. Both were fluent

and imaginative swearers, and even the man from Archangel

stopped talking to listen to them. One, I remember, prayed

vehemently that the other's hand might fly off, and the other,

not to be outdone, retorted with a similar prayer with regard

to the former's head. In England the dispute, which became

very fierce indeed, would have ended in assault, but here

it ended in nothing but the collection on the platform of a

small crowd of experts in bad language who applauded

verbal hits with impartiality and enthusiasm.

At last I tried to sleep, but the atmosphere in the carriage, of

smoke, babies, stale clothes, and the peculiar smell of the

Russian peasantry which no one who has known it can

forget, made sleep impossible. But I travelled fairly

comfortably, resolutely shutting my ears to the talk, thinking

of fishing in England, and shifting from one bone to another

as each ached in turn from contact with the plank on which I

lay.

FIRST DAYS IN MOSCOW

It was a rare cold day when I struggled through the crowd

out of the station in Moscow, and began fighting with the

sledge-drivers who asked a hundred roubles to take me to

the Metropole. I remembered coming here a year ago with

Colonel Robins, when we made ten roubles a limit for the

journey and often travelled for eight. To-day, after heated

bargaining, I got carried with no luggage but a typewriter for

fifty roubles. The streets were white with deep snow, less

well cleaned than the Petrograd streets of this year but better

cleaned than the Moscow streets of last year. The tramways

were running. There seemed to be at least as many sledges

as usual, and the horses were in slightly better condition than

last summer when they were scarcely able to drag

themselves along. I asked the reason of the improvement,

and the driver told me the horses]26]were now rationed like

human beings, and all got a small allowance of oats. There

were crowds of people about, but the numbers of closed

shops were very depressing. I did not then know that this

was due to the nationalization of trade and a sort of general

stock-taking, the object of which was to prevent

profiteering in manufactured goods, etc., of which there

were not enough to go round. Before I left many shops

were being reopened as national concerns, like our own

National Kitchens. Thus, one would see over a shop the

inscription, "The 5th Boot Store of the Moscow Soviet" or

"The 3rd Clothing Store of the Moscow Soviet" or "The

11th Book Shop." It had been found that speculators

bought, for example, half a dozen overcoats, and sold them

to the highest bidders, thus giving the rich an advantage over

the poor. Now if a man needs a new suit he has to go in his

rags to his House Committee, and satisfy them that he really

needs a new suit for himself. He is then given the right to

buy a suit. In this way an attempt is made to prevent

speculation and to ensure a more or less equitable

distribution of the inadequate stocks. My greatest surprise

was given me by the Metropole itself, because the old

wounds of the revolution, which were left unhealed all last

summer, the shell-holes and bullet splashes which marked it

when I was here before, have been repaired.

Litvinov had given me a letter to Karakhan of the

Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, asking him to help me in

getting a room. I found him at the Metropole, still smoking

as it were the cigar of six months ago. Karakhan, a

handsome Armenian, elegantly bearded and moustached,

once irreverently described by Radek as "a donkey of

classical beauty," who has consistently used such influence

as he has in favour of moderation and agreement with the

Allies, greeted me very cordially, and told me that the

foreign visitors were to be housed in the Kremlin. I told him

I should much prefer to live in an hotel in the ordinary way,

and he at once set about getting a room for me. This was no

easy business, though he obtained an authorization from

Sverdlov, president of the executive committee, for me to

live where I wished, in the Metropole or the National, which

are mostly reserved for Soviet delegates, officials and

members of the Executive Committee. Both were full, and

he finally got me a room in the old Loskutnaya Hotel, now

the Red Fleet, partially reserved for sailor delegates and

members of the Naval College.

Rooms are distributed on much the same plan as clothes.

Housing is considered a State monopoly, and a general

census of housing accommodation has taken place. In every

district there are housing committees to whom people

wanting rooms apply. They work on the rough and ready

theory that until every man has one room no one has a right

to two. An Englishman acting as manager of works near

Moscow told me that part of his house had been allotted to

workers in his factory, who, however, were living with him

amicably, and had, I think, allowed him to choose which

rooms he should concede. This plan has, of course, proved

very hard on house-owners, and in some cases the new

tenants have made a horrible mess of the houses, as might,

indeed, have been expected, seeing that they had previously

been of those who had suffered directly from the

decivilizing influences of overcrowding. After talking for

some time we went round the corner to the Commissariat

for Foreign Affairs, where we found Chicherin who, I

thought, had aged a good deal and was (though this was

perhaps his manner) less cordial than Karakhan. He asked

about England, and I told him Litvinov knew more about

that than I, since he had been there more recently. He asked

what I thought would be the effect of his Note with detailed

terms published that day. I told him that Litvinov, in an

interview which I had telegraphed, had mentioned somewhat

similar terms some time before, and that personally I

doubted whether the Allies would at present come to any

agreement with the Soviet Government, but that, if the

Soviet Government lasted, my personal opinion was that the

commercial isolation of so vast a country as Russia could

hardly be prolonged indefinitely on that account alone. (For

the general attitude to that Note, see page 44.)

I then met Voznesensky (Left Social Revolutionary), of the

Oriental Department, bursting with criticism of the

Bolshevik attitude towards his party. He secured a ticket for

me to get dinner in the Metropole. This ticket I had to

surrender when I got a room in the National. The dinner

consisted of a plate of soup, and a very small portion of

something else. There are National Kitchens in different

parts of the town supplying similar meals. Glasses of weak

tea were sold at 30 kopecks each, without sugar. My sister

had sent me a small bottle of saccharine just before I left

Stockholm, and it was pathetic to see the childish delight

with which some of my friends drank glasses of sweetened

tea.

>From the Metropole I went to the Red Fleet to get my room

fixed up. Six months ago there were comparatively clean

rooms here, but the sailors have demoralized the hotel and

its filth is indescribable. There was no heating and very little

light. A samovar left after the departure of the last visitor

was standing on the table, together with some dirty

curl-papers and other rubbish. I got the waiter to clean up

more or less, and ordered a new samovar. He could not

supply spoon, knife, or fork, and only with great difficulty

was persuaded to lend me glasses.

The telephone, however, was working, and after tea I got

into touch with Madame Radek, who had moved from the

Metropole into the Kremlin. I had not yet got a pass to the

Kremlin, so she arranged to meet me and get a pass for me

from the Commandant. I walked through the snow to the

white gate at the end of the bridge which leads over the

garden up a steep incline to the Kremlin. Here a fire of logs

was burning, and three soldiers were sitting around it.

Madame Radek was waiting for me, warming her hands at

the fire, and we went together into the citadel of the

republic.

A meeting of the People's Commissars was going on in the

Kremlin, and on an open space under the ancient churches

were a number of motors black on the snow. We turned to

the right down the Dvortzovaya street, between the old

Cavalier House and the Potyeshny Palace, and went in

through a door under the archway that crosses the road, and

up some dark flights of stairs to a part of the building that

used, I think, to be called the Pleasure Palace. Here, in a

wonderful old room, hung with Gobelins tapestries

absolutely undamaged by the revolution, and furnished with

carved chairs, we found the most incongruous figure of

the old Swiss internationalist, Karl Moor, who talked with

affection of Keir Hardie and of Hyndman, "in the days

when he was a socialist," and was disappointed to find that I

knew so little about them. Madame Radek asked, of course,

for the latest news of Radek, and I told her that I had read in

the Stockholm papers that he had gone to Brunswick, and

was said to be living in the palace there.* [(*)It was not

till later that we learned he had returned to Berlin, been

arrested, and put in prison.] She feared he might have been

in Bremen when that town was taken by the Government

troops, and did not believe he would ever get back to Russia.

She asked me, did I not feel already (as indeed I did) the

enormous difference which the last six months had made in

strengthening the revolution. I asked after old

acquaintances, and learnt that Pyatakov, who, when I last

saw him, was praying that the Allies should give him

machine rifles to use against the Germans in the Ukraine,

had been the first President of the Ukrainian Soviet

Republic, but had since been replaced by Rakovsky. It had

been found that the views of the Pyatakov government

were further left than those of its supporters, and so

Pyatakov had given way to Rakovsky who was better able to

conduct a more moderate policy. The Republic had been

proclaimed in Kharkov, but at that time Kiev was still in the

hands of the Directorate.

That night my room in the Red Fleet was so cold that I went

to bed in a sheepskin coat under rugs and all possible

bedclothes with a mattress on the top. Even so I slept very

badly.

The next day I spent in vain wrestlings to get a better room.

Walking about the town I found it dotted with revolutionary

sculptures, some very bad, others interesting, all done in

some haste and set up for the celebrations of the anniversary

of the revolution last November. The painters also had been

turned loose to do what they could with the hoardings, and

though the weather had damaged many of their pictures,

enough was left to show what an extraordinary carnival that

had been. Where a hoarding ran along the front of a house

being repaired the painters had used the whole of it as a vast

canvas on which they had painted huge symbolic pictures

of the revolution. A whole block in the Tverskaya was so

decorated. Best, I think, were the row of wooden booths

almost opposite the Hotel National in the Okhotnia Ryadi.

These had been painted by the futurists or kindred artists,

and made a really delightful effect, their bright colours and

naif patterns seeming so natural to Moscow that I found

myself wondering how it was that they had never been so

painted before. They used to be a uniform dull yellow.

Now, in clear primary colours, blue, red, yellow, with rough

flower designs, on white and chequered back-grounds, with

the masses of snow in the road before them, and

bright-kerchiefed women and peasants in ruddy sheepskin coats

passing by, they seemed less like futurist paintings than like

some traditional survival, linking new Moscow with the

Middle Ages. It is perhaps interesting to note that certain

staid purists in the Moscow Soviet raised a protest while I

was there against the license given to the futurists to spread

themselves about the town, and demanded that the art of the

revolution should be more comprehensible and less violent.

These criticisms, however, did not apply to the row of

booths which were a pleasure to me every time I passed

them.

In the evening I went to see Reinstein in the National.

Reinstein is a little old grandfather, a member of the

American Socialist Labour Party, who was tireless in helping

the Americans last year, and is a prodigy of knowledge

about the revolution. He must be nearly seventy, never

misses a meeting of the Moscow Soviet or the Executive

Committee, gets up at seven in the morning, and goes from

one end of Moscow to the other to lecture to the young men

in training as officers for the Soviet Army, more or less

controls the English soldier war prisoners, about whose

Bolshevism he is extremely pessimistic, and enjoys an

official position as head of the quite futile department which

prints hundred-weight upon hundred-weight of

propaganda in English, none of which by any chance ever

reaches these shores. He was terribly disappointed that I had

brought no American papers with me. He complained of

the lack of transport, a complaint which I think I must have

heard at least three times a day from different people the

whole time I was in Moscow. Politically, he thought, the

position could not be better, though economically it was very

bad. When they had corn, as it were, in sight, they could

not get it to the towns for lack of locomotives. These

economic difficulties were bound to react sooner or later on

the political position.

He talked about the English prisoners. The men are brought

to Moscow, where they are given special passports and are

allowed to go anywhere they like about the town without

convoy of any kind. I asked about the officers, and he said

that they were in prison but given everything possible, a

member of the International Red Cross, who worked with

the Americans when they were here, visiting them regularly

and taking in parcels for them. He told me that on hearing

in Moscow that some sort of fraternization was going on on

the Archangel front, he had hurried off there with two

prisoners, one English and one American. With some

difficulty a meeting was arranged. Two officers and a

sergeant from the Allied side and Reinstein and these two

prisoners from the Russian, met on a bridge midway

between the opposing lines. The conversation seemed

to have been mostly an argument about working-class

conditions in America, together with reasons why the Allies

should go home and leave Russia alone. Finally the Allied

representatives (I fancy Americans) asked Reinstein to come

with them to Archangel and state his case, promising him

safe conduct there and back. By this time two Russians had

joined the group, and one of them offered his back as a

desk, on which a safe-conduct for Reinstein was written.

Reinstein, who showed me the safe-conduct, doubted its

validity, and said that anyhow he could not have used it

without instructions from Moscow. When it grew dusk they

prepared to separate. The officers said to the prisoners,

"What? Aren't you coming back with us?" The two shook

their heads decidedly, and said, "No, thank you."

I learnt that some one was leaving the National next day to

go to Kharkov, so that I should probably be able to get a

room. After drinking tea with Reinstein till pretty late, I

went home, burrowed into a mountain of all sorts of clothes,

and slept a little.

In the morning I succeeded in making out my claim to

the room at the National, which turned out to be a very

pleasant one, next door to the kitchen and therefore quite

decently warm. I wasted a lot of time getting my stuff

across. Transport from one hotel to the other, though the

distance is not a hundred yards, cost forty roubles. I got

things straightened out, bought some books, and prepared a

list of the material needed and the people I wanted to see.

The room was perfectly clean. The chamber-maid

who came in to tidy up quite evidently took

a pride in doing her work properly, and protested against

my throwing matches on the floor. She said she had been in

the hotel since it was opened. I asked her how she liked the

new regime. She replied that there was not enough to eat,

but that she felt freer.

In the afternoon I went downstairs to the main kitchens of

the hotel, where there is a permanent supply of hot water.

One enormous kitchen is set apart for the use of people

living in the hotel. Here I found a crowd of people, all using

different parts of the huge stove. There was an old

grey-haired Cossack, with a scarlet tunic under his black,

wide-skirted, narrow-waisted coat, decorated in the

Cossack fashion with ornamental cartridges. He was

warming his soup, side by side with a little Jewess making

potato-cakes. A spectacled elderly member of the

Executive Committee was busy doing something with a little

bit of meat. Two little girls were boiling potatoes in old tin

cans. In another room set apart for washing a sturdy little

long-haired revolutionary was cleaning a shirt. A woman

with her hair done up in a blue handkerchief was very

carefully ironing a blouse. Another was busy stewing sheets,

or something of that kind, in a big cauldron. And all the

time people from all parts of the hotel were coming with

their pitchers and pans, from fine copper kettles to

disreputable empty meat tins, to fetch hot water for tea. At

the other side of the corridor was a sort of counter in front

of a long window opening into yet another kitchen. Here

there was a row of people waiting with their own saucepans

and plates, getting their dinner allowances of soup and meat

in exchange for tickets. I was told that people thought they

got slightly more if they took their food in this way

straight from the kitchen to their own rooms instead of being

served in the restaurant. But I watched closely, and decided

it was only superstition. Besides, I had not got a saucepan.

On paying for my room at the beginning of the week I was

given a card with the days of the week printed along its

edge. This card gave me the right to buy one dinner daily,

and when I bought it that day of the week was snipped off

the card so that I could not buy another. The meal consisted

of a plate of very good soup, together with a second course

of a scrap of meat or fish. The price of the meal varied

between five and seven roubles.

One could obtain this meal any time between two and seven.

Living hungrily through the morning, at two o'clock I used to

experience definite relief in the knowledge that now at any

moment I could have my meal. Feeling in this way less

hungry, I used then to postpone it hour by hour, and actually

dined about five or six o'clock. Thinking that I might indeed

have been specially favoured I made investigations, and

found that the dinners supplied at the public feeding

houses (the equivalent of our national kitchens) were of

precisely the same size and character, any difference

between the meals depending not on the food but on the

cook.

A kind of rough and ready co-operative system also

obtained. One day there was a notice on the stairs that those

who wanted could get one pot of jam apiece by applying to

the provisioning committee of the hotel. I got a pot of jam

in this way, and on a later occasion a small quantity of

Ukrainian sausage.

Besides the food obtainable on cards it was possible to buy,

at ruinous prices, food from speculators, and an idea of the

difference in the prices may be obtained from the following

examples: Bread is one rouble 20 kopecks per pound by

card and 15 to 20 roubles per pound from the speculators.

Sugar is 12 roubles per pound by card, and never less than

50 roubles per pound in the open market. It is obvious that

abolition of the card system would mean that the rich would

have enough and the poor nothing. Various methods have

been tried in the effort to get rid of speculators whose

high profits naturally decrease the willingness of the villages

to sell bread at less abnormal rates. But as a Communist

said to me, "There is only one way to get rid of speculation,

and that is to supply enough on the card system. When

People can buy all they want at 1 rouble 20 they are not

going to pay an extra 14 roubles for the encouragement of

speculators." "And when will you be able to do that?" I

asked. "As soon as the war ends, and we can use our

transport for peaceful purposes."

There can be no question about the starvation of Moscow.

On the third day after my arrival in Moscow I saw a man

driving a sledge laden with, I think, horseflesh, mostly

bones, probably dead sledge horses. As he drove a black

crowd of crows followed the sledge and perched on it,

tearing greedily at the meat. He beat at them continually

with his whip, but they were so famished that they took no

notice whatever. The starving crows used even to force

their way through the small ventilators of the windows in my

hotel to pick up any scraps they could find inside. The

pigeons, which formerly crowded the streets,

utterly undismayed by the traffic, confident in the

security given by their supposed connection with religion,

have completely disappeared.

Nor can there be any question about the cold. I resented my

own sufferings less when I found that the State Departments

were no better off than other folk. Even in the Kremlin I

found the Keeper of the Archives sitting at work in an old

sheepskin coat and felt boots, rising now and then to beat

vitality into his freezing hands like a London cabman of old

times.

THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE ON THE REPLY

TO THE PRINKIPO PROPOSAL

February 10th.

It will be remembered that a proposal was made by the

Peace Conference that the various de facto governments of

Russia should meet on an island in the Bosphorus to discuss

matters, an armistice being arranged meanwhile. No direct

invitation was sent to the Soviet Government. After

attempting to obtain particulars through the editor of a

French socialist paper, Chicherin on February 4th sent a

long note to the Allies. The note was not at first considered

with great favour in Russia, although it was approved by the

opposition parties on the right, the Mensheviks even going

so far as to say that in sending such a note, the Bolsheviks

were acting in the interest of the whole of the Russian

people. The opposition on the left complained

that it was a betrayal of the revolution into the

hands of the Entente, and there were many Bolsheviks

who said openly that they thought it went a little

too far in the way of concession. On February 10th, the

Executive Committee met to consider the international

position.

Before proceeding to an account of that meeting, it will be

well to make a short summary of the note in question.

Chicherin, after referring to the fact that no invitation had

been addressed to them and that the absence of a reply from

them was being treated as the rejection of a proposal they

had never received, said that in spite of its more and more

favourable position, the Russian Soviet Government

considered a cessation of hostilities so desirable that it was

ready immediately to begin negotiations, and, as it had more

than once declared, to secure agreement "even at the cost of

serious concessions in so far as these should not threaten the

development of the Republic." "Taking into consideration

that the enemies against whom it has to struggle borrow their

strength of resistance exclusively from the help shown them

by the powers of the Entente, and that therefore these

powers are the only actual enemy of the Russian Soviet

Government, the latter addresses itself precisely to the

powers of the Entente, setting out the points on which it

considers such concessions possible with a view to the

ending of every kind of conflict with the aforesaid powers."

There follows a list of the concessions they are prepared to

make. The first of these is recognition of their debts, the

interest on which, "in view of Russia's difficult financial

position and her unsatisfactory credit," they propose to

guarantee in raw materials. Then, "in view of the interest

continually expressed by foreign capital in the question of

the exploitation for its advantage of the natural resources of

Russia, the Soviet Government is ready to give to subjects of

the powers of the Entente mineral, timber and other

concessions, to be defined in detail, on condition that the

economic and social structure of Soviet Russia shall not be

touched by the internal arrangements of these concessions."

The last point is that which roused most opposition. It

expresses a willingness to negotiate even concerning such

annexations, hidden or open, as the Allies may have in

mind. The words used are "The Russian Soviet

Government has not the intention of excluding at all costs

consideration of the question of annexations, etc. . . ." Then,

"by annexations must be understood the retention on this or

that part of the territory of what was the Russian Empire,

not including Poland and Finland, of armed forces of the

Entente or of such forces as are maintained by the

governments of the Entente or enjoy their financial, military,

technical or other support." There follows a statement that

the extent of the concessions will depend on the military

position. Chicherin proceeds to give a rather optimistic

account of the external and internal situation. Finally he

touches on the question of propaganda. "The Russian

Soviet Government, while pointing out that it cannot limit

the freedom of the revolutionary press, declares its

readiness, in case of necessity to include in the general

agreement with the powers of the Entente the obligation not

to interfere in their internal affairs." The note ends thus:

"On the foregoing bases the Russian Soviet Government is ready

immediately to begin negotiations either on Prinkipo island

or in any other place whatsoever with all the powers of the

Entente together or with separate powers of their number,

or with any Russian political groupings whatsoever,

according to the wishes of the powers of the Entente.

The Russian Soviet Government begs the powers of the

Entente immediately to inform it whither to send

its representatives, and precisely when and by what route."

This note was dated February 4th, and was sent out by wireless.

>From the moment when the note appeared in the

newspapers of February 5th, it had been the main subject of

conversation. Every point in it was criticized and

counter-criticized, but even its critics, though anxious to preserve

their criticism as a basis for political action afterwards, were

desperately anxious that it should meet with a reply. No one

in Moscow at that time could have the slightest misgiving

about the warlike tendencies of the revolution. The

overwhelming mass of the people and of the revolutionary

leaders want peace, and only continued warfare forced upon

them could turn their desire for peace into desperate,

resentful aggression. Everywhere I heard the same story:

"We cannot get things straight while we have to fight all the

time." They would not admit it, I am sure, but few of the

Soviet leaders who have now for eighteen months been

wrestling with the difficulties of European Russia have not

acquired, as it were in spite of themselves, a national,

domestic point of view. They are thinking less about world

revolution than about getting bread to Moscow, or

increasing the output of textiles, or building river

power-stations to free the northern industrial district from

its dependence on the distant coal-fields. I was

consequently anxious to hear what the Executive Committee

would have to say, knowing that there I should listen to

some expression of the theoretical standpoint from which

my hard-working friends had been drawn away by interests

nearer home.

The Executive Committee met as usual in the big hall of the

Hotel Metropole, and it met as usual very late. The sitting

was to begin at seven, and, foolishly thinking that Russians

might have changed their nature in the last six months, I was

punctual and found the hall nearly empty, because a

party meeting of the Communists in the room next door was

not finished. The hall looked just as it used to look, with a

red banner over the presidium and another at the opposite

end, both inscribed "The All Russian Executive Committee,"

"Proletariat of all lands, unite," and so on. As the room

gradually filled, I met many acquaintances.

Old Professor Pokrovsky came in, blinking through his

spectacles, bent a little, in a very old coat, with a small black

fur hat, his hands clasped together, just as, so I have been

told, he walked unhappily to and fro in the fortress at Brest

during the second period of the negotiations. I did not think

he would recognize me, but he came up at once, and

reminded me of the packing of the archives at the time when

it seemed likely that the Germans would take Petrograd. He

told me of a mass of material they are publishing about the

origin of the war. He said that England came out of it best

of anybody, but that France and Russia showed in a very

bad light.

Just then, Demian Bledny rolled in, fatter than he used to be

(admirers from the country send him food) with a round

face, shrewd laughing eyes, and cynical mouth, a typical

peasant, and the poet of the revolution. He was passably

shaved, his little yellow moustache was trimmed, he was

wearing new leather breeches, and seemed altogether a more

prosperous poet than the untidy ruffian I first met about a

year or more ago before his satirical poems in Pravda and

other revolutionary papers had reached the heights of

popularity to which they have since attained. In the old days

before the revolution in Petrograd he used to send his poems

to the revolutionary papers. A few were published and

scandalized the more austere and serious-minded

revolutionaries, who held a meeting to decide

whether any more were to be printed. Since the

revolution, he has rapidly come into his own, and is now a

sort of licensed jester, flagellating Communists and

non-Communists alike. Even in this assembly

he had about him a little of the manner of

Robert Burns in Edinburgh society. He told me

with expansive glee that they had printed two

hundred and fifty thousand of his last book, that the whole

edition was sold in two weeks, and that he had had his

portrait painted by a real artist. It is actually true that of his

eighteen different works, only two are obtainable today.

Madame Radek, who last year showed a genius for the

making of sandwiches with chopped leeks, and did good

work for Russia as head of the Committee for dealing with

Russian war prisoners, came and sat down beside me, and

complained bitterly that the authorities wanted to turn her

out of the grand ducal apartments in the Kremlin and make

them into a historical museum to illustrate the manner of life

of the Romanovs. She said she was sure that was simply an

excuse and that the real reason was that Madame Trotsky

did not like her having a better furnished room than her

own. It seems that the Trotskys, when they moved into the

Kremlin, chose a lodging extremely modest in comparison

with the gorgeous place where I had found Madame Radek.

All this time the room was filling, as the party meeting ended

and the members of the Executive Committee came in to

take their places. I was asking Litvinov whether he was

going to speak, when a little hairy energetic man came up

and with great delight showed us the new matches

invented in the Soviet laboratories. Russia is short of

match-wood, and without paraffin. Besides which I think I am

right in saying that the bulk of the matches used in the north

came from factories in Finland. In these new Bolshevik

matches neither wood nor paraffin is used. Waste paper is a

substitute for one, and the grease that is left after cleaning

wool is a substitute for the other. The little man, Berg,

secretary of the Presidium of the Council of Public

Economy, gave me a packet of his matches. They are like

the matches in a folding cover that used to be common in

Paris. You break off a match before striking it. They strike

and burn better than any matches I have ever bought in

Russia, and I do not see why they should not be made in

England, where we have to import all the materials of which

ordinary matches are made. I told Berg I should try to

patent them and so turn myself into a capitalist. Another

Communist, who was listening, laughed, and said that most

fortunes were founded in just such a fraudulent way.

Then there was Steklov of the Izvestia, Madame

Kollontai, and a lot of other people whose

names I do not remember. Little Bucharin, the editor of

Pravda and one of the most interesting talkers in Moscow,

who is ready to discuss any philosophy you like, from

Berkeley and Locke down to Bergson and William James,

trotted up and shook hands. Suddenly a most unexpected

figure limped through the door. This was the lame Eliava of

the Vologda Soviet, who came up in great surprise at seeing

me again, and reminded me how Radek and I, hungry from

Moscow, astonished the hotel of the Golden Anchor by

eating fifteen eggs apiece, when we came to Vologda last

summer (I acted as translator during Radek's conversations

with the American Ambassador and Mr. Lindley). Eliava is

a fine, honest fellow, and had a very difficult time in

Vologda where the large colony of foreign embassies and

missions naturally became the centre of disaffection in a

district which at the time was full of inflammable material. I

remember when we parted from him, Radek said to me that

he hardly thought he would see him alive again. He told me

he had left Vologda some three months ago and was now

going to Turkestan. He did not disguise the resentment

he felt towards M. Noulens (the French Ambassador) who,

he thought, had stood in the way of agreement last year, but

said that he had nothing whatever to say against Lindley.

At last there was a little stir in the raised presidium, and the

meeting began. When I saw the lean, long-haired Avanesov

take his place as secretary, and Sverdlov, the president, lean

forward a little, ring his bell, and announce that the meeting

was open and that "Comrade Chicherin has the word," I

could hardly believe that I had been away six months.

Chicherin's speech took the form of a general report on the

international situation. He spoke a little more clearly than he

was used to do, but even so I had to walk round to a place

close under the tribune before I could hear him. He

sketched the history of the various steps the Soviet

Government has taken in trying to secure peace, even

including such minor "peace offensives" as Litvinov's

personal telegram to President Wilson. He then weighed, in

no very hopeful spirit, the possibilities of this last Note to all

the Allies having any serious result. He estimated the

opposing tendencies for and against war with Russia in each

of the principal countries concerned. The growth of

revolutionary feeling abroad made imperialistic governments

even more aggressive towards the Workers' and Peasants'

Republic than they would otherwise be. It was now making

their intervention difficult, but no more. It was impossible to

say that the collapse of Imperialism had gone so far that it

had lost its teeth. Chicherin speaks as if he were a dead man

or a ventriloquist's lay figure. And indeed he is half-dead.

He has never learnt the art of releasing himself from

drudgery by handing it over to his subordinates. He is

permanently tired out. You feel it is almost cruel to say

"Good morning" to him when you meet him, because of the

appeal to be left alone that comes unconsciously into his

eyes. Partly in order to avoid people, partly because he is

himself accustomed to work at night, his section of the

foreign office keeps extraordinary hours, is not to be found

till about five in the afternoon and works till four in the

morning. The actual material of his report was interesting,

but there was nothing in its manner to rouse enthusiasm

of any kind. The audience listened with attention, but only

woke into real animation when with a shout of laughter it

heard an address sent to Cl=82menceau by the emigr=82

financiers, aristocrats and bankrupt politicians of the Russian

colony in Stockholm, protesting against any sort of

agreement with the Bolsheviks.

Bucharin followed Chicherin. A little eager figure in his

neat brown clothes (bought, I think, while visiting Berlin as a

member of the Economic Commission), he at least makes

himself clearly heard, though his voice has a funny tendency

to breaking. He compared the present situation with the

situation before Brest. He had himself (as I well remember)

been with Radek, one of the most violent opponents of the

Brest peace, and he now admitted that at that time Lenin had

been right and he wrong. The position was now different,

because whereas then imperialism was split into two camps

fighting each other, it now showed signs of uniting its forces.

He regarded the League of Nations as a sort of capitalist

syndicate, and said that the difference in the French and

American attitude towards the League depended upon

the position of French and American capital. Capital in

France was so weak, that she could at best be only a small

shareholder. Capital in America was in a very advantageous

position. America therefore wanted a huge All-European

syndicate in which each state would have a certain number

of shares. America, having the greatest number of shares,

would be able to exploit all the other nations. This is a fixed

idea of Bucharin's, and he has lost no opportunity of putting

out this theory of the League of Nations since the middle of

last summer. As for Chicherin's Note, he said it had at least

great historical interest on account of the language it used,

which was very different from the hypocritical language of

ordinary diplomacy. Here were no phrases about noble

motives, but a plain recognition of the facts of the case.

"Tell us what you want," it says, "and we are ready to buy

you off, in order to avoid armed conflict." Even if the Allies

gave no answer the Note would still have served a useful

purpose and would be a landmark in history.

Litvinov followed Bucharin. A solid, jolly, round man, with

his peaked grey fur hat on his head, rounder than ever in

fur-collared, thick coat, his eye-glasses slipping from his

nose as he got up, his grey muffler hanging from his neck,

he hurried to the tribune. Taking off his things and leaving

them on a chair below, he stepped up into the tribune with

his hair all rumpled, a look of extreme seriousness on his

face, and spoke with a voice whose capacity and strength

astonished me who had not heard him speak in public

before. He spoke very well, with more sequence than

Bucharin, and much vitality, and gave his summary of the

position abroad. He said (and Lenin expressed the same

view to me afterwards) that the hostility of different

countries to Soviet Russia varied in direct proportion to their

fear of revolution at home. Thus France, whose capital had

suffered most in the war and was weakest, was the most

uncompromising, while America, whose capital was in a

good position, was ready for agreement. England, with

rather less confidence, he thought was ready to follow

America. Need of raw material was the motive tending

towards agreement with Russia. Fear that the mere

existence of a Labour Government anywhere in the

world strengthens the revolutionary movement elsewhere,

was the motive for the desire to wipe out the Soviet at all

cost. Chicherin's note, he thought, would emphasize the

difference between these opposing views and would tend to

make impossible an alliance of the capitalists against Russia.

Finally, Kamenev, now President of the Moscow Soviet,

spoke, objecting to Bucharin's comparison of the peace now

sought with that of Brest Litovsk. Then everything was in a

state of experiment and untried. Now it was clear to the

world that the unity of Russia could be achieved only under

the Soviets. The powers opposed to them could not but

recognize this fact. Some parts of Russia (Ukraine) had

during the last fifteen months experienced every kind of

government, from the Soviets, the dictatorship of the

proletariat, to the dictatorship of foreign invaders and the

dictatorship of a General of the old regime, and they had

after all returned to the Soviets. Western European

imperialists must realize that the only Government in Russia

which rested on the popular masses was the Government

of the Soviets and no other. Even the paper of the

Mensheviks, commenting on Chicherin's note, had declared

that by this step the Soviet Government had shown that it

was actually a national Government acting in the interests of

the nation. He further read a statement by Right Social

Revolutionaries (delegates of that group, members of the

Constituent Assembly, were in the gallery) to the effect that

they were prepared to help the Soviet Government as the

only Government in Russia that was fighting against a

dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Finally, the Committee unanimously passed a resolution

approving every step taken in trying to obtain peace, and at

the same time "sending a fraternal greeting to the Red Army

of workers and peasants engaged in ensuring the

independence of Soviet Russia." The meeting then turned to

talk of other things.

I left, rather miserable to think how little I had foreseen

when Soviet Russia was compelled last year to sign an

oppressive peace with Germany, that the time would

come when they would be trying to buy peace from

ourselves. As I went out I saw another unhappy figure,

unhappy for quite different reasons. Angelica Balabanova,

after dreaming all her life of socialism in the most fervent

Utopian spirit, had come at last to Russia to find that a

socialist state was faced with difficulties at least as real as

those which confront other states, that in the battle there was

little sentiment and much cynicism, and that dreams worked

out in terms of humanity in the face of the opposition of the

whole of the rest of the world are not easily recognized by

their dreamers. Poor little Balabanova, less than five feet

high, in a black coat that reached to her feet but did not

make her look any taller, was wandering about like a lost and

dejected spirit. Not so, she was thinking, should socialists

deal with their enemies. Somehow, but not so. Had the

silver trumpets blown seven times in vain, and was it really

necessary to set to work and, stone by stone, with bleeding

hands, level the walls of Jericho?

There was snow falling as I walked home. Two workmen,

arguing, were walking in front of me. "If only it were not

for the hunger," said one. "But will that ever change?" said

the other.

KAMENEV AND THE MOSCOW SOVIET

February 11th.

Litvinov has been unlucky in his room in the Metropole. It

is small, dark and dirty, and colder than mine. He was

feeling ill and his chest was hurting him, perhaps because of

his speech last night; but while I was there Kamenev rang

him up on the telephone, told him he had a car below, and

would he come at once to the Moscow Soviet to speak on

the international situation! Litvinov tried to excuse himself,

but it was no use, and he said to me that if I wanted to see

Kamenev I had better come along. We found Kamenev in

the hall, and after a few minutes in a little Ford car we were

at the Moscow Soviet. The Soviet meets in the small lecture

theatre of the old Polytechnic. When we arrived, a party

meeting was going on, and Kamenev, Litvinov, and I went

behind the stage to a little empty room, where we were

joined by a member of the Soviet whose name I forget.

It was Kamenev's first talk with Litvinov after his return, and

I think they forgot that I was there. Kamenev asked Litvinov

what he meant to do, and Litvinov told him he wished to

establish a special department of control to receive all

complaints, to examine into the efficiency of different

commissariats, to get rid of parallelism, etc., and, in fact, to

be the most unpopular department in Moscow. Kamenev

laughed. "You need not think you are the first to have that

idea. Every returning envoy without exception has the same.

Coming back from abroad they notice more than we do the

inefficiencies here, and at once think they will set everything

right. Rakovsky sat here for months dreaming of nothing

else. Joffe was the same when he came back from that tidy

Berlin. Now you; and when Vorovsky comes (Vorovsky

was still in Petrograd) I am ready to wager that he too has a

scheme for general control waiting in his pocket. The thing

cannot be done. The only way is, when something

obviously needs doing, to put in some one we can trust to

get it done. Soap is hard to get. Good. Establish a

commission and soap instantly disappears. But put in one

man to see that soap is forthcoming, and somehow or other

we get it."

"Where is the soap industry concentrated?"

"There are good factories, well equipped, here, but they are

not working, partly for lack of material and partly, perhaps,

because some crazy fool imagined that to take an inventory

you must bring everything to a standstill."

Litvinov asked him what he thought of the position as a

whole. He said good, if only transport could be improved;

but before the public of Moscow could feel an appreciable

improvement it would be necessary that a hundred wagons

of foodstuffs should be coming in daily. At present there

are seldom more than twenty. I asked Kamenev about the

schools, and he explained that one of their difficulties was

due to the militarism forced upon them by external attacks.

He explained that the new Red Army soldiers, being mostly

workmen, are accustomed to a higher standard of comfort

than the old army soldiers, who were mostly peasants. They

objected to the planks which served as beds in the old,

abominable, over-crowded and unhealthy barracks.

Trotsky, looking everywhere for places to put his darlings,

found nothing more suitable than the schools; and, in

Kamenev's words, "We have to fight hard for every school."

Another difficulty, he said, was the lack of school books.

Histories, for example, written under the censorship and in

accordance with the principles of the old regime, were now

useless, and new ones were not ready, apart from the

difficulty of getting paper and of printing. A lot, however,

was being done. There was no need for a single child in

Moscow to go hungry. 150,000 to 180,000 children got free

meals daily in the schools. Over 10,000 pairs of felt boots

had been given to children who needed them. The number

of libraries had enormously increased. Physically workmen

lived in far worse conditions than in 1912, but as far as their

spiritual welfare was concerned there could be no

comparison. Places like the famous Yar restaurant,

where once the rich went to amuse themselves with

orgies of feeding and drinking and flirting

with gypsies, were now made into working men's clubs

and theatres, where every working man had a right to go.

As for the demand for literature from the provinces, it was

far beyond the utmost efforts of the presses and the paper

stores to supply.

When the party meeting ended, we went back to the lecture

room where the members of the Soviet had already settled

themselves in their places. I was struck at once by the

absence of the general public which in the old days used to

crowd the galleries to overflowing. The political excitement

of the revolution has passed, and today there were no more

spectators than are usually to be found in the gallery of the

House of Commons. The character of the Soviet itself had

not changed. Practically every man sitting on the benches

was obviously a workman and keenly intent on what was

being said. Litvinov practically repeated his speech of last

night, making it, however, a little more demagogic in

character, pointing out that after the Allied victory, the only

corner of the world not dominated by Allied capital was

Soviet Russia.

The Soviet passed a resolution expressing

"firm confidence that the Soviet Government will

succeed in getting peace and so in opening a wide road to

the construction of a proletarian state." A note was passed

up to Kamenev who, glancing at it, announced that the

newly elected representative of the Chinese workmen in

Moscow wished to speak. This was Chitaya Kuni, a solid

little Chinaman with a big head, in black leather coat and

breeches. I had often seen him before, and wondered who

he was. He was received with great cordiality and made a

quiet, rather shy speech in which he told them he was

learning from them how to introduce socialism in China, and

more compliments of the same sort. Reinstein replied,

telling how at an American labour congress some years back

the Americans shut the door in the face of a representative

of a union of foreign workmen. "Such," he said, "was the

feeling in America at the time when Gompers was supreme,

but that time has passed." Still, as I listened to Reinstein, I

wondered in how many other countries besides Russia, a

representative of foreign labour would be thus welcomed.

The reason has probably little to do with the

good-heartedness of the Russians. Owing to the

general unification of wages Mr. Kuni could not

represent the competition of cheap labour. I talked to the

Chinaman afterwards. He is president of the Chinese

Soviet. He told me they had just about a thousand Chinese

workmen in Moscow, and therefore had a right to

representation in the government of the town. I asked about

the Chinese in the Red Army, and he said there were two or

three thousand, not more.

AN EX-CAPITALIST

February 13th.

I drank tea with an old acquaintance from the provinces, a

Russian who, before the revolution, owned a leather-bag

factory which worked in close connection with his uncle's

tannery. He gave me a short history of events at home. The

uncle had started with small capital, and during the war had

made enough to buy outright the tannery in which he had

had shares. The story of his adventures since the October

revolution is a very good illustration of the rough and ready

way in which theory gets translated into practice. I am

writing it, as nearly as possible, as it was told by the nephew.

During the first revolution, that is from March till October

1917, he fought hard against the workmen, and was one

of the founders of a Soviet of factory owners, the object of

which was to defeat the efforts of the workers' Soviets.*

[(*)By agreeing upon lock-outs,etc.] This, of course,

was smashed by the October Revolution, and "Uncle, after

being forced, as a property owner, to pay considerable

contributions, watched the newspapers closely, realized that

after the nationalization of the banks resistance was

hopeless, and resigned himself to do what he could, not to

lose his factory altogether."

He called together all the workmen, and proposed that they

should form an artel or co-operative society

and take the factory into their own hands, each man

contributing a thousand roubles towards the capital with

which to run it. Of course the workmen had

not got a thousand roubles apiece, "so uncle offered to pay it

in for them, on the understanding that they would eventually

pay him back." This was illegal, but the little town was a

long way from the centre of things, and it seemed a good

way out of the difficulty. He did not expect to get it back,

but he hoped in this way to keep control of the tannery,

which he wished to develop, having a paternal interest in it.

Things worked very well. They elected a committee of

control. "Uncle was elected president, I was elected

vice-president, and there were three workmen. We are

working on those lines to this day. They give uncle 1,500

roubles a month, me a thousand, and the bookkeeper a

thousand. The only difficulty is that the men will treat uncle

as the owner, and this may mean trouble if things go wrong.

Uncle is for ever telling them, It's your factory, don't call

me Master,' and they reply, 'Yes, it's our factory all right, but

you are still Master, and that must be.'"

Trouble came fast enough, with the tax levied on the

propertied classes. "Uncle," very wisely, had ceased to be a

property owner. He had given up his house to the factory,

and been allotted rooms in it, as president of the factory

Soviet. He was therefore really unable to pay when the

people from the District Soviet came to tell him that he had

been assessed to pay a tax of sixty thousand roubles. He

explained the position. The nephew was also present and

joined in the argument, whereupon the tax-collectors

consulted a bit of paper and retorted, "A tax of twenty

thousand has been assessed on you too. Be so good as to

put your coat on."

That meant arrest, and the nephew said he had five

thousand roubles and would pay that, but could pay no

more. Would that do?

"Very well," said the tax-collector, "fetch it."

The nephew fetched it.

"And now put your coat on."

"But you said it would be all right if I paid the five

thousand!"

"That's the only way to deal with people like you. We

recognize that your case is hard, and we dare say that you

will get off. But the Soviet has told us to collect the whole

tax or the people who refuse to pay it, and they have

decreed that if we came back without one or the other, we

shall go to prison ourselves. You can hardly expect us to go

and sit in prison out of pity for you. So on with your coat

and come along."

They went, and at the militia headquarters were shut into a

room with barred windows where they were presently joined

by most of the other rich men of the town, all in a rare state

of indignation, and some of them very angry with "Uncle,"

for taking things so quietly. "Uncle was worrying about

nothing in the world but the tannery and the

leather-works which he was afraid might get into

difficulties now that both he and I were under lock and key."

The plutocracy of the town being thus gathered in the little

room at the militia-house, their wives came, timorously at first, and

chattered through the windows. My informant, being

unmarried, sent word to two or three of his friends, in order

that he might not be the only one without some one to talk

with outside. The noise was something prodigious, and the

head of the militia finally ran out into the street and arrested

one of the women, but was so discomfited when she

removed her shawl and he recognized her as his hostess at a

house where he had been billeted as a soldier that he

hurriedly let her go. The extraordinary parliament between

the rich men of the town and their wives and friends, like a

crowd of hoodie crows, chattering outside the window,

continued until dark.

Next day the workmen from the tannery came to the

militia-house and explained that "Uncle" had really

ceased to be a member of the propertied classes,

that he was necessary to them as president of their soviet,

and that they were willing to secure his release by

paying half of the tax demanded from him out

of the factory funds. Uncle got together thirty

thousand, the factory contributed another thirty, and he was

freed, being given a certificate that he had ceased to be an

exploiter or a property owner, and would in future be

subject only to such taxes as might be levied on the working

population. The nephew was also freed, on the grounds that

he was wanted at the leather-works.

I asked him how things were going on. He said, "Fairly

well, only uncle keeps worrying because the men still call

him 'Master.' Otherwise, he is very happy because he has

persuaded the workmen to set aside a large proportion of the

profits for developing the business and building a new wing

to the tannery."

"Do the men work?"

"Well," he said, "we thought that when the factory was in

their own hands they would work better, but we do not think

they do so, not noticeably, anyhow."

"Do they work worse?"

"No, that is not noticeable either."

I tried to get at his political views. Last summer he had

told me that the Soviet Government could not last more than

another two or three months. He was then looking forward

to its downfall. Now he did not like it any better, but he was

very much afraid of war being brought into Russia, or rather

of the further disorders which war would cause. He took a

queer sort of pride in the way in which the territory of the

Russian republic was gradually resuming its old frontiers.

"In the old days no one ever thought the Red Army would

come to anything," he said. "You can't expect much from

the Government, but it does keep order, and I can do my

work and rub along all right." It was quite funny to hear him

in one breath grumbling at the revolution and in the next

anxiously asking whether I did not think they had weathered

the storm, so that there would be no more disorders.

Knowing that in some country places there had been

appalling excesses, I asked him how the Red Terror that

followed the attempt on the life of Lenin had shown itself in

their district. He laughed.

"We got off very cheaply," he said. "This is what

happened. A certain rich merchant's widow had a fine

house, with enormous stores of all kinds of things, fine

knives and forks, and too many of everything. For instance,

she had twenty-two samovars of all sizes and sorts. Typical

merchant's house, so many tablecloths that they could not

use them all if they lived to be a hundred. Well, one fine

day, early last summer, she was told that her house was

wanted and that she must clear out. For two days she ran

hither and thither trying to get out of giving it up. Then she

saw it was no good, and piled all those things, samovars and

knives and forks and dinner services and tablecloths and

overcoats (there were over a dozen fur overcoats) in the

garrets which she closed and sealed, and got the president of

the Soviet to come and put his seal also. In the end things

were so friendly that he even put a sentinel there to see that

the seal should not be broken. Then came the news from

Petrograd and Moscow about the Red terror, and the Soviet,

after holding a meeting and deciding that it ought to do

something, and being on too good terms with all of us to do

anything very bad, suddenly remembered poor Maria

Nicolaevna's garrets. They broke the seals and tumbled out

all the kitchen things, knives, forks, plates, furniture, the

twenty-two samovars and the overcoats, took them in carts

to the Soviet and declared them national property. National

property! And a week or two later there was a wedding of a

daughter of one of the members of the Soviet, and somehow

or other the knives and forks were on the table, and as for

samovars, there were enough to make tea for a hundreds."

A THEORIST OF REVOLUTION

February 13th.

After yesterday's talk with a capitalist victim of the

revolution, I am glad for the sake of contrast to set beside it

a talk with one of the revolution's chief theorists. The

leather-worker illustrated the revolution as it affects an

individual. The revolutionary theorist was quite incapable of

even considering his own or any other individual interests

and thought only in terms of enormous movements in which

the experiences of an individual had only the significance of

the adventures of one ant among a myriad. Bucharin,

member of the old economic mission to Berlin, violent

opponent of the Brest peace, editor of Pravda, author of

many books on economics and revolution, indefatigable

theorist, found me drinking tea at a table in the Metropole.

I had just bought a copy of a magazine which contained

a map of the world, in which most of Europe was coloured

red or pink for actual or potential revolution. I showed it to

Bucharin and said, "You cannot be surprised that people

abroad talk of you as of the new Imperialists."

Bucharin took the map and looked at it.

"Idiotism, rank idiotism!" he said. "At the same time," he

added, "I do think we have entered upon a period of

revolution which may last fifty years before the revolution is

at last victorious in all Europe and finally in all the world."

Now, I have a stock theory which I am used to set before

revolutionaries of all kinds, nearly always with interesting

results. (See p.118.) I tried it on Bucharin. I said:-

"You people are always saying that there will be revolution

in England. Has it not occurred to you that England is a

factory and not a granary, so that in the event of revolution

we should be immediately cut off from all food supplies.

According to your own theories, English capital would unite

with American in ensuring that within six weeks the

revolution had nothing to eat. England is not a country like

Russia where you can feed yourselves somehow or other

by simply walking to where there is food. Six weeks would

see starvation and reaction in England. I am inclined to

think that a revolution in England would do Russia more

harm than good."

Bucharin laughed. "You old counter-revolutionary!"

he said. "That would be all true, but you must look

further. You are right in one thing. If the

revolution spreads in Europe, America will cut off food

supplies. But by that time we shall be getting food from

Siberia."

"And is the poor Siberian railway to feed Russia, Germany,

and England?"

"Before then Pichon and his friends will have gone. There

will be France to feed too. But you must not forget that

there are the cornfields of Hungary and Roumania. Once

civil war ends in Europe, Europe can feed herself. With

English and German engineering assistance we shall soon

turn Russia into an effective grain supply for all the working

men's republics of the Continent. But even then the task will

be only beginning. The moment there is revolution in

England, the English colonies will throw themselves

eagerly into the arms of America. Then will come

America's turn, and, finally, it is quite likely that we shall all

have to combine to overthrow the last stronghold of

capitalism in some South African bourgeois republic. I can

well imagine," he said, looking far away with his bright little

eyes through the walls of the dark dining room, "that the

working men's republics of Europe may have to have a

colonial policy of an inverse kind. Just as now you conquer

backward races in order to exploit them, so in the future you

may have to conquer the colonists to take from them the

means of exploitation. There is only one thing I am afraid

of."

"And what is that?"

"Sometimes I am afraid that the struggle will be so bitter and

so long drawn out that the whole of European culture may

be trampled under foot."

I thought of my leather-worker of yesterday, one of

thousands experiencing in their own persons the appalling

discomforts, the turn over and revaluation of all established

values that revolution, even without death and civil war,

means to the ordinary man; and, being perhaps a little

faint-hearted, I finished my tea in silence. Bucharin, after

carelessly opening these colossal perspectives, drank his tea

in one gulp, prodigiously sweetened with my saccharin,

reminded me of his illness in the summer, when Radek

scoured the town for sweets for him, curing him with no

other medicine, and then hurried off, fastening his coat as he

went, a queer little De Quincey of revolution, to disappear

into the dusk, before, half running, half walking, as his way

is, he reached the other end of the big dimly lit, smoke-filled dining room.

EFFECTS OF ISOLATION

February 14th.

I had a rather grim talk with Meshtcheriakov at dinner. He

is an old Siberian exile, who visited England last summer.

He is editing a monthly magazine in Moscow, mostly

concerned with the problems of reconstrucition, and besides

that doing a lot of educational work among the labouring

classes. He is horrified at the economic position of the

country. Isolation, he thinks, is forcing Russia backwards

towards a primeval state.

"We simply cannot get things. For example, I am lecturing

on Mathematics. I have more pupils than I can deal with.

They are as greedy for knowledge as sponges for water, and

I cannot get even the simplest text-books for them. I cannot

even find in the second-hand book stores an old Course of Mathematics

from which I could myself make a series of copies for them.

I have to teach like a teacher of the middle ages. But,

like him, I have pupils who want to learn."

"In another three years," said some one else at the table, "we

shall be living in ruins. Houses in Moscow were always kept

well warmed. Lack of transport has brought with it lack of

fuel, and water-pipes have burst in thousands of houses.

We cannot get what is needed to mend them. In the same

way we cannot get paints for the walls, which are

accordingly rotting. In another three years we shall have all

the buildings of Moscow tumbling about our ears."

Some one else joined in with a laugh: "In ten years we shall

be running about on all fours."

"And in twenty we shall begin sprouting tails."

Meshtcheriakov finished his soup and laid down his wooden

spoon.

"There is another side to all these things," he said. "In

Russia, even if the blockade lasts, we shall get things

established again sooner than anywhere else, because we

have all the raw materials in our own country. With us it is a

question of transport only, and of transport within our own

borders. In a few years, I am convinced, in spite of all

that is working against us, Russia will be a better place to

live in than anywhere else in Europe. But we have a bad

time to go through. And not we alone. The effects of the

war are scarcely visible as yet in the west, but they will

become visible. Humanity has a period of torment before it

. . . ."

"Bucharin says fifty years," I said, referring to my talk of

yesterday.

"Maybe. I think less than that. But the revolution will be far

worse for you nations of the west than it has been for us. In

the west, if there is revolution, they will use artillery at once,

and wipe out whole districts. The governing classes in the

west are determined and organized in a way our

home-grown capitalists never were. The Autocracy never allowed

them to organize, so, when the Autocracy itself fell, our task

was comparatively easy. There was nothing in the way. It

will not be like that in Germany."

AN EVENING AT THE OPERA

I read in one of the newspapers that a member of the

American Commission in Berlin reasoned from the fact that

the Germans were crowding to theatres and spectacles that

they could not be hungry. There can be no question about

the hunger of the people of Moscow, but the theatres are

crowded, and there is such demand for seats that speculators

acquire tickets in the legitimate way and sell them illicitly

near the doors of the theatre to people who have not been

able to get in, charging, of course, double the price or even

more. Interest in the theatre, always keen in Moscow, seems

to me to have rather increased than decreased. There is a

School of Theatrical Production, with lectures on every

subject connected with the stage, from stage carpentry

upwards. A Theatrical Bulletin is published three times

weekly, containing the programmes of all the theatres and

occasional articles on theatrical subjects. I had been told

in Stockholm that the Moscow theatres were closed. The

following is an incomplete list of the plays and spectacles to

be seen at various theatres on February 13 and February 14,

copied from the Theatrical Bulletin of those dates. Just as it

would be interesting to know what French audiences

enjoyed at the time of the French revolution, so I think it

worth while to record the character of the entertainments at

present popular in Moscow.

Opera at the Great Theatre.--"Sadko" by Rimsky-Korsakov

and "Samson and Delilah" by Saint-Saens.

Small State Theatre.--"Besheny Dengi" by Ostrovsky and

"Starik" by Gorky.

Moscow Art Theatre.-- "The Cricket on the Hearth" by

Dickens and "The Death of Pazuchin" by Saltykov-Shtchedrin.

Opera. "Selo Stepantchiko" and "Coppellia."

People's Palace.--"Dubrovsky" by Napravnik and "Demon"

by Rubinstein.

Zamoskvoretzky Theatre.--"Groza" by Ostrovsky and

"Meshitchane" by Gorky.

Popular Theatre.--" The Miracle of Saint, Anthony" by

Maeterlinck.

Komissarzhevskaya Theatre.--"A Christmas Carol" by

Dickens and "The Accursed Prince" by Remizov.

Korsh Theatre.--"Much Ado about Nothing" by

Shakespeare and "Le Misanthrope" and "Georges Dandin"

by Moli=8Are.

Dramatic Theatre.--"Alexander I" by Merezhkovsky.

Theatre of Drama and Comedy.-- "Little Dorrit" by Dickens

and "The King's Barber" by Lunacharsky.

Besides these, other theatres were playing

K. R. (Konstantin Romanov), Ostrovsky, Potapenko,

Vinitchenko, etc. The two Studios of the Moscow Art

Theatre were playing "Rosmersholm" and a repertoire of

short plays. They, like the Art Theatre Company,

occasionally play in the suburban theatres when their place

at home is taken by other performers.

I went to the Great State Theatre to

Saint-Saens' "Samson and Delilah." I had a seat in

the box close above the orchestra, from which I could

obtain a view equally good of the stage and of the house.

Indeed, the view was rather better of the house than of the

stage. But that was as I had wished, for the house was what

I had come to see.

It had certainly changed greatly since the

pre-revolutionary period. The Moscow plutocracy of bald

merchants and bejewelled fat wives had gone. Gone with

them were evening dresses and white shirt fronts. The

whole audience was in the monotone of everyday clothes.

The only contrast was given by a small group of Tartar

women in the dress circle, who were shawled in white over

head and shoulders, in the Tartar fashion. There were many

soldiers, and numbers of men who had obviously come

straight from their work. There were a good many grey and

brown woollen jerseys about, and people were sitting in

overcoats of all kinds and ages, for the theatre was very

cold. (This, of course, was due to lack of fuel, which may in

the long run lead to a temporary stoppage of the theatres if

electricity cannot be spared for lighting them.) The orchestra

was also variously dressed. Most of the players of brass

instruments had evidently been in regimental bands

during the war, and still retained their khaki-green tunics

with a very mixed collection of trousers and breeches.

Others were in every kind of everyday clothes. The

conductor alone wore a frock coat, and sat in his place like a

specimen from another age, isolated in fact by his smartness

alike from his ragged orchestra and from the stalls behind

him.

I looked carefully to see the sort of people who fill the stalls

under the new regime, and decided that there has been a

general transfer of brains from the gallery to the floor of the

house. The same people who in the old days scraped

kopecks and waited to get a good place near the ceiling now

sat where formerly were the people who came here to digest

their dinners. Looking from face to face that night I thought

there were very few people in the theatre who had had

anything like a good dinner to digest. But, as for their

keenness, I can imagine few audiences to which, from the

actor's point of view, it would be better worth while to play.

Applause, like brains, had come down from the galleries.

Of the actual performance I have little to say except that

ragged clothes and empty stomachs seemed to make very

little difference to the orchestra. Helzer, the ballerina,

danced as well before this audience as ever before the

bourgeoisie. As I turned up the collar of my coat I reflected

that the actors deserved all the applause they got for their

heroism in playing in such cold. Now and then during the

evening I was unusually conscious of the unreality of opera

generally, perhaps because of the contrast in magnificence

between the stage and the shabby, intelligent audience. Now

and then, on the other hand, stage and audience seemed one

and indivisible. For "Samson and Delilah" is itself a poem

of revolution, and gained enormously by being played by

people every one of whom had seen something of the sort in

real life. Samson's stirring up of the Israelites reminded me

of many scenes in Petrograd in 1917, and when, at last, he

brings the temple down in ruins on his triumphant enemies, I

was reminded of the words attributed to Trotsky:- "If we

are, in the end, forced to go, we shall slam the door behind

us in such away that the echo shall be felt throughout the

world."

Going home afterwards through the snow, I did not see

a single armed man. A year ago the streets were deserted

after ten in the evening except by those who, like myself,

had work which took them to meetings and such things late

at night. They used to be empty except for the military

pickets round their log-fires. Now they were full of

foot-passengers going home from the theatres, utterly

forgetful of the fact that only twelve months before they had

thought the streets of Moscow unsafe after dark. There

could be no question about it. The revolution is settling

down, and people now think of other matters than the old

question, will it last one week or two?

THE COMMITTEE OF STATE CONSTRUCTIONS

February 15th.

I went by appointment to see Pavlovitch, President of the

Committee of State Constructions. It was a very jolly

morning and the streets were crowded. As I walked through

the gate into the Red Square I saw the usual crowd of

peasant women at the little chapel of the Iberian Virgin,

where there was a blaze of candles. On the wall of what

used, I think, to be the old town hall, close by the gate, some

fanatic agnostic has set a white inscription on a tablet,

"Religion is opium for the People." The tablet, which has

been there a long time, is in shape not unlike the customary

frame for a sacred picture. I saw an old peasant, evidently

unable to read, cross himself solemnly before the chapel,

and then, turning to the left, cross himself as solemnly

before this anti-religious inscription. It is perhaps

worth while to remark in passing that the new Communist

programme, while insisting, as before, on the definite

separation of church and state, and church and school, now

includes the particular statement that "care should be taken

in no way to hurt the feelings of the religious." Churches and

chapels are open, church processions take place as before,

and Moscow, as in the old days, is still a city of church bells.

A long line of sledges with welcome bags of flour was

passing through the square. Soldiers of the Red Army were

coming off parade, laughing and talking, and very noticeably

smarter than the men of six months ago. There was a bright

clear sky behind the fantastic Cathedral of St. Basil, and the

rough graves under the Kremlin wall, where those are buried

who died in the fighting at the time of the November

Revolution, have been tidied up. There was

scaffolding round the gate of the Kremlin which was

damaged at that time and is being carefully repaired.

The Committee of State Constructions was founded last

spring to coordinate the management of the various

engineering and other constructive works previously

carried on by independent departments. It became an

independent organ with its own finances about the middle of

the summer. Its headquarters are in the Nikolskaya, in the

Chinese town, next door to the old building of the

Anglo-Russian Trading Company, which still bears the Lion

and the Unicorn sculptured above its green and white fa=87ade

some time early in the seventeenth century.

Pavlovitch is a little, fat, spectacled man with a bald head,

fringed with the remains of red hair, and a little reddish

beard. He was dressed in a black leather coat and trousers.

He complained bitterly that all his plans for engineering

works to improve the productive possibilities of the country

were made impracticable by the imperious demands of war.

As an old Siberian exile he had been living in France before

the revolution and, as he said, had seen there how France

made war. "They sent her locomotives, and rails for the

locomotives to run on, everything she needed they sent her

from all parts of the world. When they sent horses, they

sent also hay for their food, and shoes for their feet, and

even nails for the shoes. If we were supplied like that,

Russia would be at peace in a week. But we have nothing,

and can get nothing, and are forced to be at war against our

will.

"And war spoils everything," he continued. "This committee

should be at work on affairs of peace, making Russia more

useful to herself and to the rest of the world. You know our

plans. But with fighting on all our fronts, and with all our

best men away, we are compelled to use ninety per cent. of

our energy and material for the immediate needs of the

army. Every day we get masses of telegrams from all fronts,

asking for this or that. For example, Trotsky telegraphs here

simply "We shall be in Orenburg in two days," leaving us to

do what is necessary. Then with the map before me, I have

to send what will be needed, no matter what useful work has

to be abandoned meanwhile, engineers, railway gangs for

putting right the railways, material for bridges, and so on.

"Indeed, the biggest piece of civil engineering done in Russia

for many years was the direct result of our fear lest you

people or the Germans should take our Baltic fleet. Save

the dreadnoughts we could not, but I decided to save what

we could. The widening and deepening of the canal system

so as to shift boats from the Baltic to the Volga had been

considered in the time of the Tzar. It was considered and

dismissed as impracticable. Once, indeed, they did try to

take two torpedo-boats over, and they lifted them on barges

to make the attempt. Well, we said that as the thing could

be planned, it could be done, and the canals are deepened

and widened, and we took through them, under their own

power, seven big destroyers, six small destroyers and four

submarine boats, which, arriving unexpectedly before

Kazan, played a great part in our victory there. But the

pleasure of that was spoilt for me by the knowledge that I

had had to take men and material from the building of the

electric power station, with which we hope to make

Petrograd independent of the coal supply.

"The difficulties we have to fight against are, of course,

enormous, but much of what the old regime failed to do, for

want of initiative or for other reasons, we have done and are

doing. Some of the difficulties are of a most

unexpected kind. The local inhabitants, partly, no doubt,

under the influence of our political opponents, were

extremely hostile with regard to the building of the power

station, simply because they did not understand it. I went

there myself, and explained to them what it would mean,

that their river would become a rich river, that they would be

able to get cheap power for all sorts of works, and that they

would have electric light in all their houses. Then they

carried me shoulder high through the village, and sent

telegrams to Lenin, to Zinoviev, to everybody they could

think of, and since then we have had nothing but help from

them.

"Most of our energy at present has to be spent on mending

and making railways and roads for the use of the army.

Over 11,000 versts of railway are under construction, and

we have finished the railway from Arzamas to Shikhran.

Twelve hundred versts of highroad are under construction.

And to meet the immediate needs of the army we have

already repaired or made 8,000 versts of roads of various

kinds. As a matter of fact the internal railway net of

Russia is by no means as bad as people make out. By its

means, hampered as we are, we have been able to beat the

counter-revolutionaries, concentrating our best troops, now

here, now there, wherever need may be. Remember that the

whole way round our enormous frontiers we are being

forced to fight groups of reactionaries supported at first

mostly by the Germans, now mostly by yourselves, by the

Roumanians, by the Poles, and in some districts by the

Germans still. Troops fighting on the Ural front are fighting

a month later south of Voronezh, and a month later again

are having a holiday, marching on the heels of the Germans

as they evacuate the occupied provinces. Some of our

troops are not yet much good. One day they fight, and the

next they think they would rather not. So that our best

troops, those in which there are most workmen, have to be

flung in all directions. We are at work all the time enabling

this to be done, and making new roads to enable it to be

done still better. But what waste, when there are so many

other things we want to do!

"All the time the needs of war are pressing on

us. To-day is the first day for two months that

we have been able to warm this building. We have

been working here in overcoats and fur hats in a

temperature below freezing point. Why? Wood

was already on its way to us, when we had suddenly

to throw troops northwards. Our wood had to be

flung out of the wagons, and the Red Army put in its place,

and the wagons sent north again. The thing had to be done,

and we have had to work as best we could in the cold.

Many of my assistants have fallen ill. Two only yesterday

had to be taken home in a condition something like that of a

fit, the result of prolonged sedentary work in unheated

rooms. I have lost the use of my right hand for the same

reason." He stretched out his right hand, which he had been

keeping in the pocket of his coat. It was an ugly sight, with

swollen, immovable fingers, like the roots of a vegetable.

At this moment some one came in to speak to Pavlovitch.

He stood at the table a little behind me, so that I did not see

him, but Pavlovitch, noticing that he looked curiously at me,

said, "Are you acquaintances?" I looked round and

saw Sukhanov, Gorky's friend, formerly one of the

cleverest writers on the Novaya Jizn. I jumped up and

shook hands with him.

"What, have you gone over to the Bolsheviks?" I asked.

"Not at all," said Sukhanov, smiling, "but I am working

here."

"Sukhanov thinks that we do less harm than anybody else,"

said Pavlovitch, and laughed. "Go and talk to him and he'll

tell you all there is to be said against us. And there's lots to

say."

Sukhanov was an extremely bitter enemy of the Bolsheviks,

and was very angry with me when, over a year ago, I told

him I was convinced that sooner or later he would be

working with them. I told Pavlovitch the story, and he

laughed again. "A long time ago," he said, "Sukhanov made

overtures to me through Miliutin. I agreed, and everything

was settled, but when a note appeared in Pravda to say that

he was going to work in this Committee, he grew shy, and

wrote a contradiction. Miliutin was very angry and asked

me to publish the truth. I refused, but wrote on that day in

my diary, Sukhanov will come. Three months later he

was already working with us. One day he told me that in the

big diary of the revolution which he is writing, and will write

very well, he had some special abuse for me. 'I have none

for you,' I said, 'but I will show you one page of my own

diary,' and I showed him that page, and asked him to look at

the date. Sukhanov is an honest fellow, and was bound to

come."

He went on with his talk.

"You know, hampered as we are by lack of everything, we

could not put up the fight we are putting up against the

reactionaries if it were not for the real revolutionary spirit of

the people as a whole. The reactionaries have money,

munitions, supplies of all kinds, instructors, from outside.

We have nothing, and yet we beat them. Do you know that

the English have given them tanks? Have you heard that in

one place they used gases or something of the kind, and

blinded eight hundred men? And yet we win. Why?

Because from every town we capture we get new strength.

And any town they take is a source of weakness to them,

one more town to garrison and hold against the wishes

of the population."

"And if you do get peace, what then!"

"We want from abroad all that we cannot make ourselves.

We want a hundred thousand versts of rails. Now we have

to take up rails in one place to lay them in another. We want

new railways built. We want dredgers for our canals and

river works. We want excavators."

"And how do you expect people to sell you these things

when your foreign credit is not worth a farthing?"

"We shall pay in concessions, giving foreigners the right to

take raw materials. Timber, actual timber, is as good as

credit. We have huge areas of forest in the north, and every

country in Europe needs timber. Let that be our currency

for foreign purchases. We are prepared to say, 'You build

this, or give us that, and we will give you the right to take so

much timber for yourselves.' And so on. And concessions

of other kinds also. As a matter of fact negotiations are now

proceeding with a foreign firm for the building of a railway

from the Obi to Kotlas."

"But part of that district is not in your hands.

"If we get peace we shall be able to arrange that without difficulty."

Just as I was going he stopped me, and evidently not in the

least realizing that English people generally have come to

think of him and his friends as of some strange sort of

devils, if not with horns and tails, certainly far removed from

human beings, he asked:--

"If we do get peace, don't you think there will be engineers

and skilled labourers in England who will volunteer to come

out to Russia and help us? There is so much to do that I can

promise they will have the best we can give them. We are

almost as short of skilled men as we are of locomotives. We

are now taking simple unskilled workmen who show any

signs of brains and training them as we go along. There

must be engineers, railwaymen, mechanics among English

socialists who would be glad to come. And of course they

need not be socialists, so long as they are good engineers."

That last suggestion of his is entirely characteristic. It is

impossible to make the Bolsheviks realize that the English

people feel any hostility towards them. Nor do they feel

hostility towards the English as such. On my way back

to the hotel I met a party of English soldiers, taken prisoners

on the northern front, walking free, without a convoy,

through the streets.

THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE AND THE TERROR

February 17th.

My general impression that the Soviet revolution has passed

through its period of internal struggle and is concentrating

upon constructive work so far as that is allowed by war on

all its frontiers, and that the population is settling down

under the new regime, was confirmed by the meeting of the

Executive Committee which definitely limited the powers of

the Extraordinary Commission. Before the sitting was

opened I had a few words with Peters and with Krylenko.

The excitement of the internal struggle was over. It had

been bitterly fought within the party, and both Krylenko of

the Revolutionary Tribunal and Peters of the Extraordinary

Commission were there merely to witness the official act that

would define their new position. Peters talked of his failure

to get away for some shooting; Krylenko jeered at me

for having refused to believe in the Lockhart conspiracy.

Neither showed any traces of the bitter struggle waged

within the party for and against the almost dictatorial powers

of the Extraordinary Commission for dealing with counter-revolution.

The sitting opened with a report by Dserzhinsky, that strange

ascetic who, when in prison in Warsaw, insisted on doing

the dirty work of emptying the slops and cleaning other

people's cells besides his own, on a theory that one man

should where possible take upon himself the evil which

would otherwise have to be shared by all; and in the

dangerous beginning of the revolution had taken upon

himself the most unpopular of all posts, that of President of

the Extraordinary Commission. His personal uprightness is

the complement of an absolute personal courage, shown

again and again during the last eighteen months. At the time

of the Left Social Revolutionary mutiny he went without a

guard to the headquarters of the mutineers, believing that he

could bring them to reason, and when arrested by them

dared them to shoot him and showed so bold a front that in

the end the soldiers set to watch him set him free and

returned to their allegiance. This thin, tallish man, with a

fanatic face not unlike some of the traditional portraits of St.

Francis, the terror of counter-revolutionaries and criminals

alike, is a very bad speaker. He looks into the air over the

heads of his audience and talks as if he were not addressing

them at all but some one else unseen. He talks even of a

subject which he knows perfectly with curious inability to

form his sentences; stops, changes words, and often,

recognizing that he cannot finish his sentence, ends where

he is, in the middle of it, with a little odd, deprecating

emphasis, as if to say: "At this point there is a full stop. At

least so it seems."

He gave a short colourless sketch of the history of the

Extraordinary Commission. He referred to the various crises

with which it had had to deal, beginning with the drunken

pogroms in Petrograd, the suppression of the combined

anarchists and criminals in Moscow (he mentioned that after

that four hours' struggle which ended in the clearing out of

the anarchists' strongholds, criminality in Moscow

decreased by 80 per cent.), to the days of the Terror when,

now here, now there, armed risings against the Soviet were

engineered by foreigners and by counter-revolutionaries

working with them. He then made the point that

throughout all this time the revolution had

been threatened by large-scale revolts. Now the revolution

was safe from such things and was threatened only by

individual treacheries of various kinds, not by things which

needed action on a large scale. They had traitors, no doubt,

in the Soviet institutions who were waiting for the day

(which would never come) to join with their enemies, and

meanwhile were secretly hampering their work. They did

not need on that account to destroy their institutions as a

whole. The struggle with counter-revolution had passed to

a new stage. They no longer had to do open battle with

open enemies; they had merely to guard themselves against

individuals. The laws of war by which, meeting him on the

field of battle, the soldier had a right to kill his enemy

without trial, no longer held good. The situation was now

that of peace, where each offender must have his guilt

proved before a court. Therefore the right of

sentencing was removed from the Extraordinary

Commission; but if, through unforeseen circumstances, the

old conditions should return, they intended that the

dictatorial powers of the Commission should be restored to it

until those conditions had ceased. Thus if, in case of armed

counter-revolution, a district were declared to be in a state

of war, the Extraordinary Commission would resume its old

powers. Otherwise its business would be to hand offenders,

such as Soviet officials who were habitually late (here there

was a laugh, the only sign throughout his speech that

Dserzhinsky was holding the attention of his audience), over

to the Revolutionary Tribunal, which would try them and,

should their guilt be proved, put them in concentration

camps to learn to work. He read point by point the

resolutions establishing these, changes and providing for the

formation of Revolutionary Tribunals. Trial to take place

within forty-eight hours after the conclusion of the

investigation, and the investigation to take not longer than a

month. He ended as he ended his sentences, as if by

accident, and people scarcely realized he had finished

before Sverdlov announced the next speaker.

Krylenko proposed an amendment to ensure that no member

of the Revolutionary Tribunal could be also a member of the

Extraordinary Commission which had taken up and

investigated a case. His speech was very disappointing. He

is not at his best when addressing a serious meeting like that

of the Executive Committee. The Krylenko who spoke

to-night, fluently, clearly, but without particular art, is a very

different Krylenko from the virtuoso in mob oratory, the

little, dangerous, elderly man in ensign's uniform who

swayed the soldiers' mass meetings in Petrograd a year and a

half ago. I remember hearing him speak in barracks soon

after the murder of Shingarev and Kokoshkin, urging class

struggle and at the same time explaining the difference

between that and the murder of sick men in bed. He

referred to the murder and, while continuing his speech,

talking already of another subject, be went through the

actions of a man approaching a bed and killing a sleeper

with a pistol. It was a trick, of course, but the thrilling,

horrible effect of it moved the whole audience with a

shudder of disgust. There was nothing of this kind in his

short lecture on jurisprudence

to-night.

Avanesov, the tall, dark secretary of the Executive

Committee, with the face of a big, benevolent hawk hooded

in long black hair, opposed Krylenko on the ground that

there were not enough trustworthy workers to ensure that in

country districts such a provision could be carried out.

Finally the resolution was passed as a whole and the

amendment was referred to the judgment of the presidium.

The Committee next passed to the consideration of the

Extraordinary Tax levied on the propertied classes.

Krestinsky, Commissary of Finance, made his report to a

grim audience, many of whom quite frankly regarded the tax

as a political mistake. Krestinsky is a short, humorous man,

in dark spectacles, dressed more like a banker than like a

Bolshevik. It was clear that the collection of the tax had not

been as successful as he had previously suggested. I was

interested in his reference to the double purpose of the tax

and in the reasons he gave for its comparative failure.

The tax had a fiscal purpose, partly to cover deficit,

partly by drawing in paper money to raise the value of the

rouble. It had also a political purpose. It was intended to

affect the propertied classes only, and thus to weaken the

Kulaks (hard-fists, rich peasants) in the villages and to teach the

poorer peasants the meaning of the revolution.

Unfortunately some Soviets, where the minority of the

Kulaks had retained the unfair domination given it by its

economic strength, had distributed the tax-paying equally

over the whole population, thus very naturally raising the

resentment of the poor who found themselves taxed to the

same amount as those who could afford to pay. It had been

necessary to send circular telegrams emphasizing the terms

of the decree. In cases where the taxation had been carried

out as intended there had been no difficulty. The most

significant reason for the partial unsuccess was that the

propertied class, as such, had already diminished to a greater

extent than had been supposed, and many of those taxed, for

example, as factory owners were already working, not as

factory owners, but as paid directors in nationalized

factories, and were therefore no longer subject to the

tax. In other words, the partial failure of the tax was a proof

of the successful development of the revolution. (This is

illustrated by the concrete case of "Uncle"

recorded on p. 73.) Krestinsky believed that the revolution

had gone so far that no further tax of , this kind would be

either possible or necessary.

NOTES OF CONVERSATIONS WITH LENIN

Whatever else they may think of him, not even his enemies

deny that Vladimir Ilyitch Oulianov (Lenin) is one of the

greatest personalities of his time. I therefore make no

apology for writing down such scraps of his conversation as

seem to illustrate his manner of mind.

He was talking of the lack of thinkers in the English labour

movement, and said he remembered hearing Shaw speak at

some meeting. Shaw, he said, was "A good man fallen

among Fabians" and a great deal further left than his

company. He had not heard of "The Perfect Wagnerite,"

but was interested when I told him the general idea of the

book, and turned fiercely on an interrupter who said that

Shaw was a clown. "He may be a clown for the bourgeoisie

in a bourgeois state, but they would not think him a clown in

a revolution."

He asked whether Sidney Webb was consciously

working in the interests of the capitalists, and when I said I

was quite sure that he was not, he said, "Then he has more

industry than brains. He certainly has great knowledge."

He was entirely convinced that England was on the eve of

revolution, and pooh-poohed my objections. "Three

months ago I thought it would end in all the world having to

fight the centre of reaction in England. But I do not think so

now. Things have gone further there than in France, if the

news as to the extent of the strikes is true."

I pointed out some of the circumstances, geographical and

economical, which would make the success of a violent

revolution in England problematical in the extreme, and put

to him the same suggestion that I put to Bucharin (see page

81), namely, that a suppressed movement in England would

be worse for Russia than our traditional method of

compromise. He agreed at once, but said, "That is quite

true, but you cannot stop a revolution . . . although Ramsay

MacDonald will try to at the last minute. Strikes and

Soviets. If these two habits once get hold, nothing will

keep the workmen from them. And Soviets, once started,

must sooner or later come to supreme power." Then, "But

certainly it would be much more difficult in England. Your

big clerk and shop-keeping class would oppose it, until the

workmen broke them. Russia was indeed the only country

in which the revolution could start. And we are not yet

through our troubles with the peasantry."

I suggested that one reason why it had been possible in

Russia was that they had had room to retreat.

"Yes," he said. "The distances saved us. The Germans

were frightened of them, at the time when they could indeed

have eaten us up, and won peace, which the Allies would

have given them in gratitude for our destruction. A

revolution in England would have nowhere whither to

retire."

Of the Soviets he said, "In the beginning I thought they were

and would remain a purely Russian form; but it is now quite

clear that under various names they must be the instruments

of revolution everywhere."

He expressed the opinion that in England they would

not allow me to tell the truth about Russia, and gave as an

example the way in which Colonel Robins had been kept

silent in America. He asked about Robins, "Had he really

been as friendly to the Soviet Government as he made out?"

I said, "Yes, if only as a sportsman admiring its pluck and

courage in difficulties." I quoted Robins' saying, "I can't go

against a baby I have sat up with for six months. But if

there were a Bolshevik movement in America I'd be out with

my rifle to fight it every time." "Now that," said Lenin, "is

an honest man and more far-seeing than most. I always

liked that man." He shook with laughter at the image of the

baby, and said, "That baby had several million other folk

sitting up with it too."

He said he had read in an English socialist paper a

comparison of his own theories with those of an American,

Daniel De Leon. He had then borrowed some of De Leon's

pamphlets from Reinstein (who belongs to the party which

De Leon founded in America), read them for the first time,

and was amazed to see how far and how early De Leon

had pursued the same train of thought as the Russians.

His theory that representation should be by industries,

not by areas, was already the germ of the Soviet system.

He remembered seeing De Leon at an International Conference.

De Leon made no impression at all, a grey old man,

quite unable to speak to such an audience: but evidently

a much bigger man than he looked, since his pamphlets

were written before the experience of the Russian

Revolution of 1905. Some days afterwards I noticed that

Lenin had introduced a few phrases of De Leon, as if to do

honour to his memory, into the draft for the new programme

of the Communist party.

Talking of the lies that are told about Russia, he said it was

interesting to notice that they were mostly perversions of

truth and not pure inventions, and gave as an example the

recent story that he had recanted. "Do you know the origin

of that?" he said. "I was wishing a happy New Year to a

friend over the telephone, and said 'And may we commit

fewer stupidities this year than last!' Some one overheard it

and told some one else. A newspaper announced Lenin

says we are committing stupidities' and so the story started."

More than ever, Lenin struck me as a happy man. Walking

home from the Kremlin, I tried to think of any other man of

his calibre who had had a similar joyous temperament. I

could think of none. This little, bald-headed, wrinkled

man, who tilts his chair this way and that, laughing over one

thing or another, ready any minute to give serious advice to

any who interrupt him to ask for it, advice so well reasoned

that it is to his followers far more compelling than any

command, every one of his wrinkles is a wrinkle of laughter,

not of worry. I think the reason must be that he is the first

great leader who utterly discounts the value of his own

personality. He is quite without personal ambition. More

than that, he believes, as a Marxist, in the movement of the

masses which, with or without him, would still move. His

whole faith is in the elemental forces that move people, his

faith in himself is merely his belief that be justly estimates

the direction of those forces. He does not believe that any

man could make or stop the revolution which he thinks inevitable.

If the Russian revolution fails, according to him, it fails only

temporarily, and because of forces beyond any man's

control. He is consequently free with a freedom no other

great man has ever had. It is not so much what he says that

inspires confidence in him. It is this sensible freedom, this

obvious detachment. With his philosophy he cannot for a

moment believe that one man's mistake might ruin all. He is,

for himself at any rate, the exponent, not the cause, of the

events that will be for ever linked with his name.

THE SUPREME COUNCIL OF PUBLIC ECONOMY

February 20th.

To-day was an unlucky day. I felt tired, ill and hungry, and

had arranged to talk with both Rykov, the President of the

Supreme Council of People's Economy, and Krestinsky, the

Commissar of Finance, at such awkward times that I got no

tea and could get nothing to eat until after four o'clock. Two

such talks on an empty stomach (for the day before I had

had only a plate of soup and a little scrap of fish) were a

little too much for me, and I fear I did not gather as much

information as I should have collected under better

conditions.

I had a jolly drive, early in the morning, through the Chinese

Town, and out by the gate in the old wall, up Myasnitzkaya

Street, and round to the right to a building that used to

be the Grand Hotel of Siberia, a loathsome place where

I once stayed. Here in the old days provincial merchants put

up, who did not mind high prices and a superfluity of bugs.

It has now been turned into a hive of office work, and is the

headquarters of the Supreme Council of Public Economy,

which, controlling production and distribution alike, is the

centre of the constructive work going on throughout the

country.

This Council, the theorists tell me, is intended to become the

central organization of the state. The Soviets will naturally

become less and less important as instruments of political

transition as that transition is completed and the struggle

against reaction within and without comes to an end. Then

the chief business of the state will no longer be to protect

itself against enemies but to develop its economic life, to

increase its productivity and to improve the material

conditions of the workers of whom it is composed. All these

tasks are those of the Supreme Council of Public Economy,

and as the bitterness of the struggle dies away this body,

which came into being almost unnoticed in the din of battle,

will become more and more important in comparison

with the Soviets, which were in origin not constructive

organizations but the instruments of a revolution, the hardest

stages of which have already been accomplished.

It is perhaps worth while to set out here the constitution of

this Council. It is considered at present as the economic

department of the All-Russian Central Executive

Committee, to which, and to the Council of People's

Commissaries, it is responsible. It regulates all production

and distribution. It reports on the various estimates of the

state budget and, in conjunction with the Commissariats of

Finance and State Control, carries out the financing of all

branches of public economy. It consists of 69 members, and

is composed as follows:--Ten representatives from the

All-Russian Executive Committee, thirty from the

All-Russian Industrial Productive Union (a union of Trade

Unions), twenty from the ten District Councils of Public

Economy, two from the All-Russian Council of Workers'

Cooperative Societies, and one representative each from the

Commissariats of Supply, Ways of Communication,

Labour, Agriculture, Finance, Trade

and Industry, and Internal Affairs. It meets as a whole at

least once in every month. The work of its members is

directed by a Presidium of nine members, of which it elects

eight, the President being elected by the All-Russian Central

Executive Committee, and enjoying the rank of a People's

Commissar or Minister.

I had a long talk with Rykov, the President, or rather listened

to a long lecture by him, only now and then succeeding in

stopping him by forcing a question into the thread of his

harangue. He stammers a little, and talks so indistinctly that

for the first time (No. The first time was when Chicherin

gabbled through the provisions of the Brest Treaty at the

fourth All-Russian Assembly.) I felt willing to forgive

normal Russians, who nearly always talk as if they were in

Petrograd and their listener in Vladivostok.

Part of what he said is embodied in what I have already

written. But besides sketching the general aims of the

Council, Rykov talked of the present economic position of

Russia. At the moment Russian industry was in peculiar

difficulties owing to the fuel crisis. This was partly due

to the fact that the Czechs and the Reactionaries, who had

used the Czechs to screen their own organization, had

control of the coalfields in the Urals, and partly to the fact

that the German occupation of the Ukraine and the activities

of Krasnov had cut off Soviet Russia from the Donetz coal

basin, which had been a main source of supply, although in

the old days Petrograd had also got coal from England. It

was now, however, clear that, with a friendly Ukraine, they

would have the use of the Donetz basin much sooner than

they had expected.

The Brest peace and the deprivations it involved had made

them consider the position of the industrial districts from a

new standpoint, and they were determined to make

Petrograd and Moscow as far as possible independent of all

fuel which had to be brought from a distance. He referred

to the works in progress for utilizing water power to provide

electrical energy for the Petrograd factories, and said that

similar electrification, on a basis of turf fuel, is planned for

Moscow.

I asked how they were going to get the machines. He

said that of course they would prefer to buy them abroad,

but that, though this was impossible, the work would not be

delayed on that account, since they could make a start with

the machines they had. Turbines for the Petrograd works

they still hoped to obtain from abroad when peace had been

arranged. If the worst came to the worst he thought they

could make their own. "That is one unexpected result of

Russia's long isolation. Her dependence on imports from

abroad is lessening." He gave an example in salt, the urgent

need of which has led to the opening of a new industry,

whose resources are such as to enable Russia not only to

supply herself with salt, but the rest of the world as well if

need should be.

I asked what were their immediate plans with regard to the

electrification of Moscow. He said that there was no water

power near Moscow but big turf deposits which would be

used as fuel. In order not to interfere with the actual lighting

of the town from the power-station already in existence,

they are taking the electric plant from the Provodnik works,

which will supply enough electricity for the lighting of the town.

As soon as that is set up and working, they will use it for the immediate

needs of Moscow, and set about transferring the existing

power-station to the new situation near the turf beds. In

this way they hope to carry out the change from coal to turf

without interfering with the ordinary life of the town.

Eventually when things settle down they will get a larger

plant.

I said, "Of course you have a double object in this, not only

to lessen the dependence of the industrial districts on fuel

that has to be brought from a distance, and of which you

may be deprived, but also to lessen the strain on transport!"

"Yes," he said. "Indeed at the present moment the latter is

our greatest difficulty, hampering everything we would wish

to do. And transport we cannot put right without help from

abroad. Therefore we do everything we can to use local

resources, and are even developing the coal deposits near

Moscow, which are of inferior quality to the Donetz coal,

and were in the old days purposely smothered by the Donetz

coal-owners, who wished to preserve their monopoly."

I asked him if in his opinion Russia could organize

herself without help from abroad. He said, "I rather think

she will have to. We want steam dredgers, steam

excavators, and locomotives most of all, but we have small

hope of getting them in the immediate future, because the

effects of the war have been so serious in the

disorganization of industry in the western countries that it is

doubtful whether they will be in a position to supply even

their own needs."

While we were talking Berg, the secretary, came in. I asked

him how his Soviet matches were progressing, and he said

that the labels were being printed and that the first lot would

soon be ready. They will be distributed on the card system,

and he had calculated that they could sell them at twelve

kopecks a packet. I paid a rouble for a box of ordinary

matches at Bieloostrov, and a rouble and a half here.

THE RACE WITH RUIN

After leaving Rykov I went to see Krestinsky, the

Commissar of Finance, the curious little optimist whose

report on the Extraordinary Tax I had heard at the last

meeting of the Executive Committee. I found him in the

Ilyinka street, in the Chinese town. I began by telling him

that I did not believe that they meant to pay the loans. He

laughed and gave me precisely the answer I had expected:--

"Of course we hope there will be a revolution in other

countries, in which case they will repudiate their debts and

forgive us ours. But if that does not happen we know very

well that we shall have to pay, and we are prepared to pay,

and shall be able to pay, in concessions, in raw material

which they need more than they need gold."

Then, being myself neither an economist nor a theoretical

socialist, I put before him what had been said to me in

Stockholm by an Englishman who was both one and the

other; namely, that, being isolated from European finance,

the Soviet Government of Russia was bound to come to an

end on economic and financial grounds alone.

He said: "That would certainly be so, if rising prices, rising

wages, were to mean indefinitely increased demands on the

printing machines for paper money. But, while we are at

present forced to print more and more money, another

process is at work which, in the long run, will bring this state

of things to an end. Just as in our dealings with other

countries we exchange goods instead of paying in money, so

within our own frontiers money is ceasing to be the sole

medium of exchange. Gradually the workmen are coming to

receive more and more in other forms than money. Houses,

for example, lighting and heating are only a beginning.

These things being state monopolies, the task of supplying

the workman's needs without the use of money is

comparatively easy. The chief difficulty is, of course, food

supplies, which depend on our ability to keep up an

exchange of goods with the villages. If we can supply

the villages with manufactured goods, they will supply us

with food. You can fairly say that our ruin or salvation

depends on a race between the decreasing value of money

(with the consequent need for printing notes in ever greater

quantities) and our growing ability to do without money

altogether. That is of course, a broad view, and you must

not for a moment suppose that we expect to do without

money in the immediate future. I am merely showing you

the two opposing tendencies on which our economic fate

depends."

I will not set down here what he said about the

Extraordinary Tax, for it was merely a repetition of what I

had heard him say in committee. In connection with it,

however, he admitted that capitalism and profiteering were

hard things to root out, saying that they had great difficulty

in getting at what he called "the new bourgeoisie," namely

the speculators who have made fortunes since the revolution

by selling scarce food products at fantastic prices. It was

difficult to tax them because they carried on their operations

secretly and it was next to impossible to find out who

they were. They did not bank their money, and though

an attempt had been made to get at them through the house

committees, it was found that even these committees were

unable to detect them. They will, however, be made to

disgorge their ill-gotten gains when the measure first proposed by

Sokolnikov last summer is put into practice. This is a

general exchange of new money for old, after which the old

will be declared invalid. "Of course," said Krestinsky, "they

will cheat in every possible way, scattering out the money

among a number of friends and relations. But something

will have been done in cleaning them up, and that process

will be completed by a second exchange of money later on."

Fifteen milliards of new notes for the first exchange are

already printed, but they think that twenty milliards will be

necessary.

I asked if the new money was better looking than the old, if

it looked more like money that was worth having than the

wretched little notes printed by the Provisional Government

and scornfully called "Kerenkies" by the populace.

Krestinsky said he was afraid not, but that the

second and final exchange would be made in notes

which they expected to be permanent. They did not expect

the notes of the first exchange to circulate abroad, but the

notes of the second would carry with them state obligation

and they expected them to go into general currency. He

added, smiling that the words "Proletariat of all lands, unite,"

were to appear on the notes in eight languages. The

question of the look of the notes, of their ability to inspire

confidence by their mere appearance, is of real importance

in a country where so many of the peasantry will judge their

value by nothing else.

I reminded him of the hostility roused in some villages by

mistakes in the assessment and collecting of the

Extraordinary Tax, mistakes which (so other Communists

had assured me) would cost them more, politically, than the

tax was worth to them, and asked him, "Will you not have

great difficulty in getting the exchange made, and are you

not running the risk of providing the reactionaries with a

new profitable basis of agitation?"

He said that of course they would not make the attempt

unless they felt sure they were politically strong enough

to carry it through. "If it is properly explained to the villages

there will be nothing to fear, because the measure will not

threaten any but the rich and therefore the small minority of

the peasantry. It would be a different matter if the same

thing were to be tried by the counter-revolutionaries,

because they would not discriminate in favour of the poor.

If Kolchak and Company overthrow us and try to substitute

their money for ours, their action would affect rich and poor

alike, minority and majority together. If there were not a

hundred other causes guaranteeing the insecurity of their

position, the fact that they will be unable to get rid of our

money without rousing the most violent opposition in the

masses throughout the country would alone be sufficient to

do it."

I asked whether that was the reason why they intended to

print on the notes "Proletariat of all lands, unite," so that the

counter-revolutionaries, unable to tolerate money bearing

that hated phrase, should be forced to a step disastrous for

themselves.

He laughed, and said that he did not think

counter-revolution in the least likely unless brought

in by invasion, which he did not think politically possible.

A PLAY OF CHEKHOV

February 21st.

I saw Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" acted by the cast of the Art

Theatre in the First Studio. This is a little theatre holding

just over 200 people. It was of course full. It was curious to

see how complete the revolution had been in a social sense.

It was impossible to tell to what class in pre-revolutionary

days any particular member of the audience had belonged. I

was struck by the new smartness of the boy officers of the

Red Army, of whom a fair number were present. As we

waited for the curtain to rise, I thought how the mental

attitude of the people had changed. A year ago, we lived

with exhilaration or despair on a volcano which might any

day erupt and sweep away the new life before any one had

become accustomed to live it. Now the danger to the

revolution was a thousand miles away on the

various fronts. Here, in the centre, the revolution was

an established fact. People had ceased to wonder when it

would end, were settling into their places in the new social

order, and took their pleasures not as if they were plucking

flowers on their way to execution, but in the ordinary routine

of life.

The play is well known, a drama of bourgeois society in a

small country place. A poor landowner scraping money for

an elder brother in the town, realizing at last that the brother

was not the genius for whom such sacrifice was worth while;

a doctor with a love for forestry and dreams of the future;

the old mock-genius's young wife; his sister; his adoring

mother; the old nurse and the ancient dependent adopted, as

it were, with the estate; all these people in their own way

make each other suffer. Chekhov's irony places before us

wasted lives, hopelessness, exaggerated interest in

personalities, vain strugglings after some better outlet for the

expression of selves not worth expressing.

That play, acted to-day, seemed as remote as a play of the

old regime in France would have seemed five years

ago. A gulf seemed to have passed. The play had become a

play of historical interest; the life it represented had gone for

ever. People in Russia no longer have time for private lives

of such a character. Such people no longer exist; some of

them have been swept into the flood-tide of revolution and

are working as they never hoped to have the chance to work;

others, less generous, have been broken and thrown aside.

The revolution has been hard on some, and has given new

life to others. It has swept away that old life so absolutely

that, come what may, it will be a hundred years at least

before anywhere in Russia people will be able to be unhappy

in that particular way again.

The subject of "Uncle Vanya" was a great deal more remote

from the Russian audience of today than was the opera of

"Samson and Delilah" which I heard last week. And, if I

realized that the revolution had come to stay, if I realized

that Chekhov's play had become a play of historical interest,

I realized also that Chekhov was a great master in that his

work carried across the gulf between the old life and the

new, and affected a revolutionary audience of to-day

as strongly as it affected that very different audience of a

few years ago. Indeed, the play seemed almost to have

gained by the revolution, which had lent it, perhaps, more

irony than was in Chekhov's mind as he wrote. Was this the

old life? I thought, as I stepped out into the snow. If so,

then thank God it has gone!

THE CENTRO-TEXTILE

February 22nd.

This morning I drove to the Dielovoi Dvor, the big house on

the Varvarskaya Square which is occupied by the central

organization of the textile industry. The head of this

organization is Nogin, an extremely capable, energetic

Russian, so capable, indeed, that I found it hard to believe

he could really be a Russian. He is a big man, with a mass

of thick brown shaggy hair, so thick that the little bald patch

on the top of his head seems like an artificial tonsure. Nogin

sketched the lines on which the Russian textile industry was

being reorganized, and gave orders that I should be supplied

with all possible printed matter in which to find the details.

The "Centro-Textile" is the actual centre of the economic

life of Russia, because, since textiles are the chief

materials of exchange between the towns and the villages, on

its success depends the success of everything else. The

textile industry is, in any case, the most important of all

Russian, industries. Before the war it employed 500,000

workmen, and Nogin said that in spite of the disorganization

of the war and of the revolution 400,000 are employed to-day.

This may be so in the sense that 400,000 are receiving

pay, but lack of fuel or of raw material must have brought

many factories to a standstill.

All the big factories have been nationalized. Formerly,

although in any one town there might be factories carrying

out all the different processes, these factories belonged to

different owners. A single firm or bank might control

factories scattered over Russia and, so that the whole

process should be in its hands, the raw material travelled

from factory to factory through the country, instead of

merely moving about a single town. Thus a roll of material

might have gone through one process at Jaroslav, another at

Moscow, and a third at Tula, and finally come back to

Jaroslav to be finished, simply because the different

factories which worked upon it, though widely scattered,

happened to be under one control. Nationalization has

made possible the rational regrouping of factories so that the

complete process is carried out in one place, consequently

saving transport. There are twenty-three complete groups

of this kind, and in the textile industry generally about fifty

groups in all.

There has been a similar concentration of control. In the old

days there were hundreds of different competitive firms with

their buildings and offices in the Ilyinka, the Varvarka, and

the Nikolskaya.* [(*)Streets and a district in Moscow] The

Chinese town* [(*) See above.]was a mass of little offices of

different textile firms. The whole of that mass of struggling

competitive units of direction had now been concentrated in

the house in which we were talking. The control of the

workers had been carried through in such a way that the

technical experts had proper weight. (See p. 171.) There

were periodical conferences of elected representatives of all

the factories, and Nogin believed that the system of

combined elective workmen's and appointed experts'

representation could hardly be improved upon.

Nationalization had had the effect of standardizing the

output. Formerly, an infinite variety of slightly different

stuffs were produced, the variations being often merely for

the sake of being different in the competitive trade. Useless

varieties had now been done away with, with the result of

greater economy in production.

I asked what he could tell me about their difficulties in the

matter of raw material. He said they no longer get anything

from America, and while the railway was cut at Orenburg by

the Cossacks, they naturally could get no cotton from

Turkestan. In fact, last autumn they had calculated that they

had only enough material to keep the factories going until

December. Now they found they could certainly keep going

to the end of March, and probably longer. Many small

factories, wishing to make their cases out worse than they

were, had under-estimated their stocks. Here, as in other

things, the isolation of the revolution had the effect of

teaching the Russians that they were less dependent upon the

outside world than they had been in the habit of supposing.

He asked me if I knew it had been considered impossible to

combine flax and cotton in such a way that the mixture

could be worked in machines intended for cotton only.

They had an infinite supply of flax, much of which in the

old days had been exported. Investigations carried on for the

Centro-Textile by two professors, the brothers Chilikin, had

ended in the discovery of three different processes for the

cottonizing of flax in such a way that they could now mix

not only a small percentage of their flax with cotton and use

the old machines, but were actually using fifty per cent. flax

and had already produced material experimentally with as

much as seventy-five per cent.

(Some days later two young technicians from the

Centro-Textile brought me a neatly prepared set of specimens

illustrating these new processes and asked me to bring them

anything of the same sort from England in return. They

were not Bolsheviks--were, in fact, typical non-politicals.

They were pleased with what the Centro--Textile

was doing, and said that more encouragement was given to

research than ever formerly. But they were very despondent

about the economic position. I could not make them

understand why Russia was isolated, and that I might be

unable to bring them technical books from England.)

Nogin rather boastfully said that the western linen industry

would suffer from the isolation of Russia, whereas in the

long run the Russians would be able to do without the rest of

the world. With, regard to wool, they would have no

difficulty now that they were again united with a friendly

Ukraine. The silk industry was to be developed in the

Astrakhan district where climatic conditions are particularly

favourable.

I asked about the fate of the old textile manufacturers and

was told that though many had gone abroad many were

working in the nationalized factories. The engineering staff,

which mostly struck work at the beginning of the revolution,

had almost without exception returned, the younger

engineers in particular realizing the new possibilities opening

before the industry, the continual need of new

improvements, and the immediate welcome given to

originality of any kind. Apart from the question of food,

which was bad for everybody, the social standard of the

workers had risen. Thus one of their immediate difficulties

was the provision of proper houses. The capitalists and

manufacturers kept the workers in barracks. "Now-a-days

the men want better dwellings and we mean to give them

better. Some have moved into the old houses of the owners

and manufacturers, but of course there are not enough of

these to go round, and we have extensive plans in the way of

building villages and garden cities for the workmen."

I asked Nogin what, in his opinion, was most needed by

Russia from abroad, and he said that as far as the textile

industries were concerned they wanted machinery. Like

every one else to whom I put this question, he said that

every industry in Russia would be in a better position if only

they had more locomotives. "Some of our factories are

stopping now for lack of fuel, and at Saratov, for example,

we have masses of raw material which we are unable to get

to Moscow."

MODIFICATION IN THE AGRARIAN PROGRAMME

In the afternoon I met Sereda, the Commissar of

Agriculture. He insisted that the agrarian policy had been

much misrepresented by their enemies for the purposes of

agitation. They had no intention of any such idiocy as the

attempt to force the peasants to give up private ownership.

The establishment of communes was not to be compulsory

in any way; it was to be an illustrative means of propaganda

of the idea of communal work, not more. The main task

before them was to raise the standard of Russian agriculture,

which under the old system was extremely low. By working

many of the old estates on a communal system with the best

possible methods they hoped to do two things at once: to

teach the peasant to realize the advantages of communal

labour, and to show him that he could himself get a

very great deal more out of his land than he does. "In

other ways also we are doing everything we can to give

direct help to the small agriculturists. We have mobilized all

the agricultural experts in the country. We are issuing a

mass of simply written pamphlets explaining better methods

of farming."

(I have seen scores of these pamphlets on forestry, potatoes,

turf, rotation of crops, and so on, besides the agricultural

journals issued by the Commissariat and sent in large

quantities to the villages.)

I told Sereda I had heard that the peasants were refusing to

sow more than they wanted for their own needs. He said

that on the contrary the latest reports gave them the right to

hope for a greater sown area this year than ever before, and

that even more would have been sown if Denmark had not

been prevented from letting them have the seed for which

they had actually paid. I put the same question to him that I

put to Nogin as to what they most needed; he replied,

"Tractors."

FOREIGN TRADE AND MUNITIONS OF WAR

February 25th.

I had a talk in the Metropole with Krasin, who is Commissar

for Trade and Industry and also President of the Committee

for Supplying the Needs of the Army. He had disapproved

of the November Revolution, but last year, when things

looked like going badly, he came to Russia from Stockholm

feeling that he could not do otherwise than help. He is an

elderly man, an engineer, and very much of a European.

We talked first of the Russian plans with regard to foreign

trade. All foreign trade, he said, is now concentrated in the

hands of the State, which is therefore able to deal as a single

customer. I asked how that would apply to purchase, and

whether they expected that countries dealing with them

would organize committees through which the

whole Russian trade of each such country should

similarly pass. Krasin said, "Of course that would be

preferable, but only in the case of socialist countries. As

things are now it would be very much to our disadvantage.

It is better for us to deal with individual capitalists than with

a ring. The formation of a committee in England, for

example, with a monopoly of trade with Russia, would have

the effect of raising prices against us, since we could no

longer go from a dear shop to a cheaper one. Besides, as

socialists we naturally wish to do nothing to help in the

trustification of English manufacturers."

He recognized that foreign trade on any large scale was

impossible until their transport had been improved. Russia

proposed to do her paying in raw material, in flax, timber,

etc., in materials of which she had great quantities although

she could not bring them to the ports until her transport

should be restored. It would, therefore, be in the foreigner's

own interests to help them in this matter. He added that

they were confident that in the long run they could, without

foreign help, so far restore their transport as to save

themselves from starvation; but for a speedy return to

normal conditions foreign help was essential.

The other question we touched was that of munitions. I

expressed some surprise that they should be able to do so

well although cut off from the west. Krasin said that as far

as that was concerned they had ample munitions for a long

fight. Heavy artillery is not much use for the kind of

warfare waged in Russia; and as for light artillery, they were

making and mending their own. They were not bothering

with three-inch shells because they had found that the old

regime had left scattered about Russia supplies of

three-inch shells sufficient to last them several years.

Dynamite also they had in enormous quantities. They were

manufacturing gunpowder. The cartridge output had trebled

since August when Krasin's committee was formed. He thought

even as things were they could certainly fight for a year.

THE PROPOSED DELEGATION FROM BERNE

I do not remember the exact date when the proposal of the

Berne International Conference to send a Commission of

Enquiry to Russia became known in Moscow, but on

February 20th everybody who came to see me was talking

about it, and from that date the question as to the reception

of the delegates was the most urgently debated of all political

subjects. Chicherin had replied immediately to Berne,

saying that "though they did not consider the Berne

Conference either socialist or in any degree representative of

the working-class they nevertheless would permit the

Commission's journey into Russia, and would give it every

opportunity of becoming acquainted from all sides with the

state of affairs, just as they would any bourgeois commission

directly or indirectly connected with any of the bourgeois

governments, even with those then attacking Russia."

It may well be imagined that a reply in this style infuriated

the Mensheviks who consider themselves more or less

affiliated to the parties represented at Berne. What, they

shrieked, Kautsky not a socialist? To which their opponents

replied, "The Government which Kautsky supports keeps

Radek in irons in a gaol." But to me the most interesting

thing to observe was that Chicherin's reply was scarcely

more satisfactory to some of the Communists. It had been

sent off before any general consultation, and it appeared that

the Communists themselves were widely divided as to the

meaning of the proposal. One party believed that it was a

first step towards agreement and peace. The other thought it

an ingenious ruse by Clemenceau to get

"so-called" socialist condemnation of the Bolsheviks as a

basis for allied intervention. Both parties were, of course,

wrong in so far as they thought the Allied Governments had

anything to do with it. Both the French and English

delegates were refused passports. This, however, was not

known in Moscow until after I left, and by then much had

happened. I think the Conference which founded the

Third International in Moscow had its origin in a desire to

counter any ill effects that might result from the expected

visit of the people of Berne.

Litvinov said he considered the sending of the Commission

from Berne the most dangerous weapon yet conceived by

their opponents. He complained that he had been unable to

get either Lenin or Chicherin to realize that this delegation

was a preparation for hostilities, not a preparation for peace.

"You do not understand that since the beginning of the war

there has been a violent struggle between two Internationals,

one of which does not believe in revolution while the other

does. In this case a group of men already committed to

condemn the revolution are coming to pass judgment on it.

If they were not to condemn the revolution they would be

condemning themselves. Chicherin ought to have put a

condition that a delegation of Left Socialists should also

come. But he replied within an hour of getting the telegram

from Berne. These idiots here think the delegation is

coming to seek a ground for peace. It is nothing of the

sort. It is bound to condemn us, and the Bourgeois

Governments will know how to profit by the criticism,

however mild, that is signed by men who still retain authority

as socialists. Henderson, for example (Henderson was at

first named as one of the delegates, later replaced by

MacDonald), will judge simply by whether people are

hungry or not. He will not allow for reasons which are not

in our control. Kautsky is less dangerous, because, after all,

he will look below the obvious." Reinstein remembered the

old personal hostility between Lenin and Kautsky, whom

Lenin, in a book which Reinstein thought unworthy of him,

had roundly denounced as a renegade and traitor. The only

man in the delegation who could be counted on for an

honest effort to understand was Longuet.

As the days went on, it became clear that the expected visit

had provided a new bone of contention between the Russian

parties. The Communists decided that the delegates should

not be treated with any particular honour in the way of a

reception. The Mensheviks at once set about preparing

a triumphal reception on a large scale for the people whom

they described as the representatives of genuine socialism.

Demian Biedny retorted in an extremely amusing poetic

dialogue, representing the Mensheviks rehearsing their parts

to be ready for the reception. Other Communists went to

work to prepare a retort of a different kind. They arranged

a house for the Berne delegates to live in, but at the same

time they prepared to emphasize the difference between the

two Internationals by the calling of an anti-Berne

conference which should disclaim all connection with that

old International which they considered had gone into

political bankruptcy at the outbreak of the European war.

THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE ON THE RIVAL PARTIES

February 26th.

In the afternoon I got to the Executive Committee in time to

hear the end of a report by Rykov on the economic position.

He said there was hope for a satisfactory conclusion to the

negotiations for the building of the Obi-Kotlas railway,

and hoped that this would soon be followed by similar

negotiations and by other concessions. He explained

that they did not want capitalism in Russia but

that they did want the things that capital could give them in

exchange for what they could give capital. This was, of

course, referring to the opposition criticism that the Soviet

was prepared to sell Russia into the hands of the

"Anglo-American Imperialistic bandits." Rykov said that the main

condition of all concessions would be that they should not

effect the international structure of the Soviet Republic

and should not lead to the exploitation of the workmen.

They wanted railways, locomotives, and machines, and their

country was rich enough to pay for these things out of its

natural resources without sensible loss to the state or the

yielding of an inch in their programme of internal

reconstruction.

He was followed by Krestinsky, who pointed out that

whereas the commissariats were, in a sense, altered forms of

the old ministries, links with the past, the Council of Public

Economy, organizing the whole production and distribution

of the country, building the new socialist state, was an

entirely new organ and a link, not with the past, but with the

future.

The two next speeches illustrated one of the main difficulties

of the revolution. Krasin (see p. 153) criticized the council

for insufficient confidence in the security of the revolution.

He said they were still hampered by fears lest here or there

capitalism should creep in again. They were unnecessarily

afraid to make the fullest possible use of specialists of all

kinds who had taken a leading part in industry under the old

regime and who, now that the old regime, the old

system, had been definitely broken, could be made to serve

the new. He believed that unless the utmost use was made

of the resources of the country in technical knowledge, etc.,

they could not hope to organize the maximum productivity

which alone could save them from catastrophe.

The speaker who followed him, Glebov, defended precisely

the opposite point of view and represented the same attitude

with regard to the reorganization of industry as is held by

many who object to Trotsky's use of officers of the old army

in the reorganization of the new, believing that all who

worked in high places under the old regime must be and

remain enemies of the revolution, so that their employment

is a definite source of danger. Glebov is a trade union

representative, and his speech was a clear indication of the

non-political undercurrent towards the left which may shake

the Bolshevik position and will most certainly come into

violent conflict with any definitely bourgeois government

that may be brought in by counter-revolution.

In the resolution on the economic position which was

finally passed unanimously, one point reads as follows: "It is

necessary to strive for just economic relations with other

countries in the form of state regulated exchange of goods

and the bringing of the productive forces of other countries

to the working out of the untouched natural resources of

Soviet Russia." It is interesting to notice the curiously mixed

character of the opposition. Some call for "a real socialism,"

which shall make no concessions whatsoever to foreign

capital, others for the cessation of civil war and peace with

the little governments which have obtained Allied support.

In a single number of the Printers' Gazette, for example,

there was a threat to appeal against the Bolsheviks to the

delegation from Berne and an attack on Chicherin for being

ready to make terms with the Entente.

The next business on the programme was the attitude to be

adopted towards the repentant Social Revolutionaries of the

Right. Kamenev made the best speech I have ever heard

from him, for once in a way not letting himself be drawn

into agitational digressions, but going point by point through

what he had to say and saying it economically. The

S.R.'s had had three watchwords: "War and alliance with the

Allies," "Coalition with the bourgeoisie," and "The

Constituent Assembly." For over a year they had waged

open war with the Soviet Government over these three

points. They had been defeated in the field. But they had

suffered a far more serious moral defeat in having to confess

that their very watchwords had been unsound. "War and

Alliance with the Allies" had shown itself to mean the

occupation of Russian territory by foreign troops in no way

concerned to save the revolution, but ready, as they had

shown, to help every force that was working for its

suppression. "Coalition with the Bourgeoisie" had shown

itself to be a path the natural ending to which was the

dictatorship of the bourgeoisie through military force. "The

Constituent Assembly" had been proved to be no more than

a useful mask behind which the enemies of the revolution

could prepare their forces and trick the masses to their own

undoing.

He read the declaration of the Right Social Revolutionaries,

admitting that the Soviet Government was the only force

working against a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and

calling upon their troops to overthrow the usurping

governments in Siberia, and elsewhere. This repentance,

however, had come rather late and there were those who did

not share it. He said finally that the Executive Committee

must remember that it was not a party considering its

relations with another party, but an organ of government

considering the attitude of the country towards a party which

in the most serious moment of Russian history had

admittedly made grave mistakes and helped Russia's

enemies. Now, in this difficult moment, every one who was

sincerely ready to help the working masses of Russia in their

struggle had the right to be given a place in the ranks of the

fighters. The Social Revolutionaries should be allowed to

prove in deeds the sincerity of their recantation. The

resolution which was passed recapitulated the recantations,

mentioned by name the members of the party with whom

discussions had been carried on, withdrew the decision of

June 14th (excluding the S.R.'s from the Executive

Committee on the ground of their counter-revolutionary

tendencies) with regard to all groups of the party

which held themselves bound by the recently published

declarations, gave them the right equally with other parties

to share in the work of the Soviets, and notified the

administrative and judicial organs of the Republic to free

the arrested S.R.'s who shared the point of view expressed

in the recantations. The resolution was passed without

enthusiasm but without opposition.

There followed the reading by Avanesov of the decree

concerning the Menshevik paper Vsegda Vpered ("Forever

Forward," but usually described by critics of the

Mensheviks as "Forever Backward"). The resolution

pointed out that in spite of the Mensheviks having agreed

on the need of supporting the Soviet Government they were

actually carrying on an agitation, the effect of which could

only be to weaken the army. An example was given of an

article, "Stop the Civil War," in which they had pointed out

that the war was costing a great deal, and that much of the

food supplies went to the army. On these grounds they had

demanded the cessation of the civil war. The Committee

pointed out that the Mensheviks were making

demagogic use of the difficulties of the food supply, due in

part to the long isolation from the Ukraine, the Volga

district and Siberia, for which those Mensheviks who had

worked with the White Guard were themselves partly

responsible. They pointed out that Russia was a camp

besieged from all sides, that Kolchak had seized the

important centre of Perm, that Petrograd was threatened

from Finland, that in the streets of Rostov and Novo

Tcherkassk gallows with the bodies of workmen were still

standing, that Denikin was making a destructive raid in the

northern Caucasus, that the Polish legionaries were

working for the seizure of Vilna and the suppression of

Lithuania and the White Russian proletariat, and that in the

ports of the Black Sea the least civilized colonial troops of

the Entente were supporting the White Guards. They

pointed out that the Soviet Government had offered

concessions in order to buy off the imperialistic countries

and had received no reply. Taking all this into

consideration the demand to end civil war amounted to a

demand for the disarming of the working class and the poor

peasantry in the face of bandits and executioners

advancing from all sides. In a word, it was the worst form

of state crime, namely, treason to a state of workers and

peasants. The Committee considered useful every kind of

practical criticism of the work of the Soviet Government in

all departments, but it could not allow that in the rear of the

Red Army of workers and peasants, under that army's

protection, should be carried on unrestrained an agitation

which could have only one result, the weakening of Soviet

Russia in the face of its many enemies. Therefore Vsegda

Vpered would be closed until the Mensheviks should show

in deed that they were ready to stand to the defence and

support of the revolution. At the same time, the Committee

reminded the Mensheviks that a continuation of their

counter-revolutionary work would force the Soviet

Government "to expel them to the territories of Kolchak's

democracy." This conclusion was greeted with laughter and

applause, and with that the meeting ended.

COMMISSARIAT OF LABOUR

February 28th.

This morning I went round to the Commissariat of Labour,

to see Schmidt, the Commissar. Schmidt is a

clean-shaven, intelligent young man, whose attention to business

methods is reflected in his Commissariat, which, unlike that

of Foreign Affairs, is extremely clean and very well

organized. I told him I was particularly interested to hear

what he could say in answer to the accusations made both

by the Mensheviks and by the Extremists on the Left that

control by the workers has become a dead letter, and that a

time will come when the trades unions will move against

the state organizations.

Schmidt answered: "Those accusations and suggestions are

all very well for agitational purposes, but the first to laugh

at them would be the trades unions themselves. This

Commissariat, for example, which is the actual labour

centre, is controlled directly by the unions. As Commissar

of Labour, I was elected directly by the General Council of

the Trades Unions. Of the College of nine members which

controls the whole work of the Commissariat, five are

elected directly by the General Council of the Trades

Unions and four appointed by the Council of People's

Commissaries, thus giving the Unions a decisive majority

in all questions concerning labour. All nine are confirmed

by the Council of People's Commissaries, representing the

state as a whole, and the Commissar is confirmed by the

All-Russian Executive Committee."

Of course control by the workers, as it was first introduced,

led speedily to many absurdities and, much to the

dissatisfaction of the extremer elements, has been

considerably modified. It was realized that the workers in

any particular factory might by considering only their own

interests harm the community as a whole, and so, in the

long run, themselves. The manner of its modification is an

interesting example of the way in which, without the

influence of tanks, aeroplanes or bayonets, the cruder

ideas of communism are being modified by life. It was

reasoned that since the factory was the property, not of the

particular workmen who work in it, but of the community

as a whole, the community as a whole should have a

considerable voice in its management. And the effect of

that reasoning has been to ensure that the technical

specialist and the expert works manager are no longer at the

caprice of a hastily called gathering of the workmen who

may, without understanding them, happen to disapprove of

some of their dispositions. Thus the economical,

administrative council of a nationalized factory consists of

representatives of the workmen and clerical staff,

representatives of the higher technical and commercial

staffs, the directors of the factory (who are appointed by the

Central Direction of National Factories), representatives of

the local council of trades unions, the Council of Public

Economy, the local soviet, and the industrial union of the

particular industry carried on in the factory, together with, a

representative of the workers' co-operative society and a

representative of the peasants' soviet of the district in

which the factory is situated. In this council not more than

half of the members may be representatives of the workmen

and clerical staff of the factory. This council considers the

internal order of the factory, complaints of any kind, and

the material and moral conditions of work and so on. On

questions of a technical character it has no right to do more

than give advice.

The night before I saw Schmidt, little Finberg had come to

my room for a game of chess in a very perturbed state of

mind, having just come from a meeting of the union to

which he belonged (the union of clerks, shop assistants and

civil servants) where there had been a majority against the

Bolsheviks after some fierce criticism over this particular

question. Finberg had said that the ground basis of the

discontent had been the lack of food, but that the outspoken

criticism had taken the form, first, of protests against the

offer of concessions in Chicherin's Note of February 4th,

on the ground that concessions meant concessions to

foreign capitalism and the formation in Russia of capitalist

centres which would eventually spread; and second, that the

Communists themselves, by their modifications of

Workers' Control, were introducing State Capitalism

instead of Socialism.

I mentioned this union to Schmidt, and asked him to

explain its hostility. He laughed, and said: "Firstly, that

union is not an industrial union at all, but includes precisely

the people whose interests are not identical with those of

the workmen. Secondly, it includes all the old civil

servants who, as you remember, left the ministries at the

November Revolution, in many cases taking the money

with them. They came back in the end, but though no

longer ready to work openly against the revolution as a

whole, they retain much of their old dislike of us, and, as

you see, the things they were objecting to last night were

precisely the things which do not concern them in

particular. Any other stick would be as good to them.

They know well that if they were to go on strike now they

would be a nuisance to us, no more. If you wish to know

the attitude of the Trades Unions, you should look at the

Trades Union Congress which wholly supported us, and

gave a very different picture of affairs. They know

well that in all questions of labour, the trades unions have

the decisive voice. I told you that the unions send a

majority of the members of the College which controls the

work of this Commissariat. I should have added that the

three most important departments-the department for

safeguarding labour, the department for distributing labour,

and that for regulating wages-are entirely controlled by the

Unions."

"How do politics affect the Commissariat?"

"Not at all. Politics do not count with us, just because we

are directly controlled by the Unions, and not, by any

political party. Mensheviks, Maximalists and others have

worked and are working in the Commissariat. Of course if

a man were opposed to the revolution as a whole we should

not have him here, because he would be working against us

instead of helping."

I asked whether he thought the trade unions would ever

disappear in the Soviet organizations. He thought not. On

the contrary, they had grown steadily throughout the

revolution. He told me that one great change had been

made in them. Trade unions have been merged

together into industrial unions, to prevent conflict

between individual sections of one industry. Thus

boilermakers and smiths do not have separate unions, but

are united in the metal-workers' union. This unification

has its effect on reforms and changes. An increase in

wages, for example, is simultaneous all over Russia. The

price of living varies very considerably in different parts of

the country, there being as great differences between the

climates of different parts as there are between the countries

of Europe. Consequently a uniform absolute increase

would be grossly unfair to some and grossly favourable to

others. The increase is therefore proportional to the cost of

living. Moscow is taken as a norm of 100, and when a new

minimum wage is established for Moscow other districts

increase their minimum wage proportionately. A table for

this has been worked out, whereby in comparison with 100

for Moscow, Petrograd is set down as 120, Voronezh or

Kursk as 70, and so on.

We spoke of the new programme of the Communists,

rough drafts of which were being printed in the newspapers

for discussion, and he showed me his own suggestions

in so far as the programme concerned labour. He wished

the programme to include, among other aims, the further

mechanization of production, particularly the mechanization

of all unpleasant and dirty processes, improved sanitary

inspection, shortening of the working day in employments

harmful to health, forbidding women with child to do any

but very light work, and none at all for eight weeks before

giving birth and for eight weeks afterwards, forbidding

overtime, and so on. "We have already gone far beyond

our old programme, and our new one steps far ahead of us.

Russia is the first country in the world where all workers

have a fortnight's holiday in the year, and workers in

dangerous or unhealthy occupations have a month's."

I said, "Yes, but don't you find that there is a very long way

between the passing of a law and its realization?"

Schmidt laughed and replied: "In some things certainly,

yes. For example, we are against all overtime, but, in the

present state of Russia we should be sacrificing to a theory

the good of the revolution as a whole if we did not allow

and encourage overtime in transport repairs. Similarly,

until things are further developed than they are now, we

should be criminal slaves to theory if we did not, in some

cases, allow lads under sixteen years old to be in the

factories when we have not yet been able to provide the

necessary schools where we would wish them to be. But

the programme is there, and as fast as it can be realized we

are realizing it."

EDUCATION

February 28th.

At the Commissariat of Public Education I showed

Professor Pokrovsky a copy of The German-Bolshevik

Conspiracy, published in America, containing documents

supposed to prove that the German General Staff arranged

the November Revolution, and that the Bolsheviks were no

more than German agents. The weak point about the

documents is that the most important of them have no

reason for existence except to prove that there was such a

conspiracy. These are the documents bought by Mr.

Sisson. I was interested to see what Pokrovsky would say

of them. He looked through them, and while saying that he

had seen forged documents better done, pointed as evidence

to the third of them which ends with the alleged signatures

of Zalkind, Polivanov, Mekhinoshin and Joffe. He

observed that whoever forged the things knew a good

deal, but did not know quite enough, because these persons,

described as "plenipotentiaries of the Council of Peoples'

Commissars," though all actually in the service of the

Soviet Government, could not all, at that time, have been

what they were said to be. Polivanov, for example, was a

very minor official. Joffe, on the other: hand, was indeed a

person of some importance. The putting of the names in

that order was almost as funny as if they had produced a

document signed by Lenin and the Commandant of the

Kremlin, putting the latter first.

Pokrovsky told me a good deal about the organization of

this Commissariat, as Lunacharsky, the actual head of it,

was away in Petrograd. The routine work is run by a

College of nine members appointed by the Council of

People's Commissars. The Commissar of Education

himself is appointed by the All-Russian Executive

Committee. Besides this, there is a Grand College which

meets rarely for the settlement of important questions. In it

are representatives of the Trades Unions, the

Workers' Co-operatives, the Teachers' Union, various

Commissariats such as that for affairs of Nationality, and

other public organizations. He also gave me then and at a

later date a number of figures illustrating the work that has

been done since the revolution. Thus whereas there used to

be six universities there are now sixteen, most of the new

universities having been opened on the initiative of the local

Soviets, as at Astrakhan, Nijni, Kostroma, Tambov,

Smolensk and other places. New polytechnics are being

founded. At Ivano-Vosnesensk the new polytechnic is

opened and that at Briansk is being prepared. The number

of students in the universities has increased enormously

though not to the same proportion as the number of

universities, partly because the difficulties of food supply

keep many students out of the towns, and partly because of

the newness of some of the universities which are only now

gathering their students about them. All education is free.

In August last a decree was passed abolishing preliminary

examinations for persons wishing to become students. It

was considered that very many people who could attend the

lectures with profit to themselves had been prevented

by the war or by pre-revolution conditions from acquiring

the sort of knowledge that could be tested by examination.

It was also believed that no one would willingly listen to

lectures that were of no use to him. They hoped to get as

many working men into the universities as possible. Since

the passing of that decree the number of students at

Moscow University, for example, has more than doubled.

It is interesting to notice that of the new students a greater

number are studying in the faculties of science and history

and philosophy than in those of medicine or law. Schools

are being unified on a new basis in which labour plays a

great part. I frankly admit I do not understand, and I gather

that many teachers have also failed to understand, how this

is done. Crafts of all kinds take a big place in the scheme.

The schools are divided into two classes-one for children

from seven to twelve years old, and one for those aged

from thirteen to seventeen. A milliard roubles has been

assigned to feeding children in the schools, and those who

most need them are supplied with clothes and footgear.

Then there are many classes for working men,

designed to give the worker a general scientific knowledge

of his own trade and so prevent him from being merely a

machine carrying out a single uncomprehended process.

Thus a boiler-maker can attend a course on mechanical

engineering, an electrical worker a course on electricity,

and the best agricultural experts are being employed to give

similar lectures to the peasants. The workmen crowd to

these courses. One course, for example, is attended by a

thousand men in spite of the appalling cold of the lecture

rooms. The hands of the science professors, so Pokrovsky

told me, are frostbitten from touching the icy metal of their

instruments during demonstrations.

The following figures represent roughly the growth in the

number of libraries. In October, 1917, there were 23

libraries in Petrograd, 30 in Moscow. Today there are 49

in Petrograd and 85 in Moscow, besides a hundred book

distributing centres. A similar growth in the number of

libraries has taken place in the country districts. In

Ousolsky ouezd, for example, there are now 73 village

libraries, 35 larger libraries and 500 hut libraries or

reading rooms. In Moscow educational institutions, not

including schools, have increased from 369 to 1,357.

There are special departments for the circulation of printed

matter, and they really have developed a remarkable

organization. I was shown over their headquarters on the

Tverskaya, and saw huge maps of Russia with all the

distributing centres marked with reference numbers so that

it was possible to tell in a moment what number of any new

publication should be sent to each. Every post office is a

distributing centre to which is sent a certain number of all

publications, periodical and other. The local Soviets ask

through the post offices for such quantities as are required,

so that the supply can be closely regulated by the demand.

The book-selling kiosks send in reports of the sale of the

various newspapers, etc., to eliminate the waste of

over-production, a very important matter in a country faced

simultaneously by a vigorous demand for printed matter

and an extreme scarcity of paper.

It would be interesting to have statistics to illustrate the

character of the literature in demand. One thing can be

said at once. No one reads sentimental romances. As is

natural in a period of tremendous political upheaval

pamphlets sell by the thousand, speeches of Lenin and

Trotsky are only equalled in popularity by Demian Biedny's

more or less political poetry. Pamphlets and books on

Marx, on the war, and particularly on certain phases of the

revolution, on different aspects of economic reconstruction,

simply written explanations of laws or policies vanish

almost as soon as they are put on the stalls. The reading of

this kind has been something prodigious during the

revolution. A great deal of poetry is read, and much is

written. It is amusing to find in a red-hot revolutionary

paper serious articles and letters by well-meaning persons

advising would-be proletarian poets to stick to Pushkin

and Lermontov. There is much excited controversy both in

magazine and pamphlet form as to the distinguishing marks

of the new proletarian art which is expected to come out of

the revolution and no doubt will come, though not in the

form expected. But the Communists cannot be accused of

being unfaithful to the Russian classics. Even Radek,

a foreign fosterchild and an adopted Russian, took Gogol as

well as Shakespeare with him when he went to annoy

General Hoffmann at Brest. The Soviet Government has

earned the gratitude of many Russians who dislike it for

everything else it has done by the resolute way in which it

has brought the Russian classics into the bookshops.

Books that were out of print and unobtainable, like

Kliutchevsky's "Courses in Russian History," have been

reprinted from the stereotypes and set afloat again at most

reasonable prices. I was also able to buy a book of his

which I have long wanted, his "Foreigners' Accounts of the

Muscovite State," which had also fallen out of print. In the

same way the Government has reprinted, and sells at fixed

low prices that may not be raised by retailers, the works of

Koltzov, Nikitin, Krylov, Saltykov-Shtchedrin, Chekhov,

Goncharov, Uspensky, Tchernyshevsky, Pomyalovsky and

others. It is issuing Chukovsky's edition of Nekrasov,

reprints of Tolstoy, Dostoievsky and Turgenev, and books

by Professor Timiriazev, Karl Pearson and others of a

scientific character, besides the complete works of

Lenin's old rival, Plekhanov. It is true that most of

this work is simply done by reprinting from old

stereotypes, but the point is that the books are there, and the

sale for them is very large.

Among the other experts on the subject of the Soviet's

educational work I consulted two friends, a little boy,

Glyeb, who sturdily calls himself a Cadet though three of

his sisters work in Soviet institutions, and an old and very

wise porter. Glyeb says that during the winter they had no

heating, so that they sat in school in their coats, and only

sat for a very short time, because of the great cold. He told

me, however, that they gave him a good dinner there every

day, and that lessons would be all right as soon as the

weather got warmer. He showed me a pair of felt boots

which had been given him at the school. The old porter

summed up the similar experience of his sons. "Yes," he

said, "they go there, sing the Marseillaise twice through,

have dinner and come home." I then took these expert

criticisms to Pokrovsky who said, "It is perfectly true. We

have not enough transport to feed the armies, let alone

bringing food and warmth for ourselves.

And if, under these conditions, we forced children to

go through all their lessons we should have corpses to

teach, not children. But by making them come for their

meals we do two things, keep them alive, and keep them in

the habit of coming, so that when the warm weather comes

we can do better."

A BOLSHEVIK FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY

At Sukhanov's suggestion I went, to see Professor

Timiriazev, the greatest Russian Darwinian, well-known to

many scientific men in this country, a foreign member of

the Royal Society, a Doctor of Cambridge University and a

Bolshevik. He is about eighty years old. His left arm is

paralysed, and, as he said, he can only work at his desk and

not be out and about to help as he would wish. A

venerable old savant, he was sitting writing with a green

dressing gown about him, for his little flat was very cold.

On the walls were portraits of Darwin, Newton and Gilbert,

besides portraits of contemporary men of science whom he

had known. English books were everywhere. He gave me,

two copies of his last scientific book and his latest portrait

to take to two of his friends in England.

He lives with his wife and son. I asked if his son were also a Bolshevik.

"Of course," he replied.

He then read me a letter he had written protesting against

intervention. He spoke of his old love for England and for

the English people. Then, speaking of the veil of lies

drawn between Soviet Russia and the rest of the world, he

broke down altogether, and bent his head to hide his tears.

"I suffer doubly," he said, after excusing himself for the

weakness of a very old man. "I suffer as a Russian, and, if

I may say so, I suffer as an Englishman. I have English

blood in my veins. My mother, you see, looks quite

English," pointing to a daguerreotype on the wall, "and my

grandmother was actually English. I suffer as an

Englishman when I see the country that I love misled by

lies, and I suffer as a Russian because those lies concern

the country to which I belong, and the ideas which I am

proud to hold."

The old man rose with difficulty, for he, like every one else

in Moscow, is half starved. He showed me his Byron, his

Shakespeare, his Encyclopaedia Britannica, his English

diplomas. He pointed to the portraits on the wall. "If I

could but let them know the truth," he said, "those friends

of mine in England, they would protest against actions

which are unworthy of the England we have loved

together."

DIGRESSION

At this point the chronological arrangement of my book,

already weak, breaks down altogether. So far I have set

down, almost day by day, things seen and heard which

seemed to me characteristic and clear illustration of the

mentality of the Communists, of the work that has been

done or that they are trying to do, and of the general state of

affairs. I spent the whole of my time in ceaseless

investigation, talking now with this man, now with that,

until at the end of a month I was so tired (besides being

permanently hungry) that I began to fear rather than to seek

new experiences and impressions. The last two weeks of

my stay were spent, not in visiting Commissariats, but in

collecting masses of printed material, in talking with my

friends of the opposition parties, and, while it was in

progress, visiting daily the Conference in the Kremlin

which, in the end, definitely announced itself as the

Third International. I have considered it best to treat of that

Conference more or less as a whole, and am therefore

compelled to disregard chronology altogether in putting

down on paper, the results of some of my talks with the

opposition. Some of these took place on the same days as

my visits to the Kremlin conference, and during those days

I was also partly engaged in getting to see the British

prisoners in the Butyrka prison, in which I eventually

succeeded. This is my excuse for the inadequacy of my

account of the conference, an inadequacy which I regret the

more as I was the only non-Communist who was able to

be there at all.

THE OPPOSITION

No man likes being hungry. No man likes being cold.

Everybody in Moscow, as in Petrograd, is both hungry and

cold. There is consequently very general and very bitter

discontent. This is of course increased, not lessened, by the

discipline introduced into the factories and the heavy

burden of the army, although the one is intended to hasten

the end of hunger and cold and the other for the defence of

the revolution. The Communists, as the party in power,

naturally bear the blame and are the objects of the

discontent, which will certainly within a short time be

turned upon any other government that may succeed them.

That government must introduce sterner discipline rather

than weaker, and the transport and other difficulties of the

country will remain the same, unless increased by the

disorder of a new upheaval and the active or passive

resistance of many who are convinced revolutionaries

or will become so in answer to repression.

The Communists believe that to let power slip from their

hands at this moment would be treachery to the revolution.

And, in the face of the advancing forces of the Allies and

Kolchak many of the leaders of the opposition are inclined

to agree with them, and temporarily to submit to what they

undoubtedly consider rank tyranny. A position has been

reached after these eighteen months not unlike that reached

by the English Parliament party in 1643. I am reminded of

a passage in Guizot, which is so illuminating that I make no

apology for quoting it in full:--

"The party had been in the ascendant for three years:

whether it had or had not, in church and state,

accomplished its designs, it was at all events by its aid and

concurrence that, for three years, public affairs had been

conducted; this alone was sufficient to make many people

weary of it; it was made responsible for the many evils

already endured, for the many hopes frustrated; it was

denounced as being no less addicted to persecution than the

bishops, no less arbitrary than the king:]196]its

inconsistencies, its weaknesses, were recalled with

bitterness; and, independently of this, even without factions

or interested views, from the mere progress of events and

opinions, there was felt a secret need of new principles and

new rulers."

New rulers are advancing on Moscow from Siberia, but I

do not think that they claim that they are bringing with

them new principles. Though the masses may want new

principles, and might for a moment submit to a

reintroduction of very old principles in desperate hope of

less hunger and less cold, no one but a lunatic could

imagine that they would for very long willingly submit to

them. In the face of the danger that they may be forced to

submit not to new principles but to very old ones, the

non-Communist leaders are unwilling to use to the full the

discontent that exists. Hunger and cold are a good enough

basis of agitation for anyone desirous of overturning any

existing government. But the Left Social Revolutionaries,

led by the hysterical but flamingly honest Spiridonova, are

alone in having no scruples or hesitation in the matter, the

more responsible parties fearing the anarchy and

consequent weakening of the revolution that would

result from any violent change.

THE LEFT SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES

The Left Social Revolutionaries want something so much

like anarchy that they have nothing to fear in a collapse of

the present system. They are for a partisan army, not a

regular army. They are against the employment of officers

who served under the old regime. They are against the

employment of responsible technicians and commercial

experts in the factories. They believe that officers and

experts alike, being ex-bourgeois, must be enemies of the

people, insidiously engineering reaction. They are opposed

to any agreement with the Allies, exactly as they were

opposed to any agreement with the Germans. I heard them

describe the Communists as "the bourgeois gendarmes of

the Entente," on the ground that having offered concessions

they would be keeping order in Russia for the benefit of

Allied capital. They blew up Mirbach, and would no doubt

try to blow up any successors he might have. Not wanting

a regular army (a low bourgeois weapon) they would welcome

occupation in order that they, with bees in their bonnets

and bombs in their hands, might go about revolting against it.

I did not see Spiridonova, because on February 11, the very

day when I had an appointment with her, the Communists

arrested her, on the ground that her agitation was dangerous

and anarchist in tendency, fomenting discontent without a

programme for its satisfaction. Having a great respect for

her honesty, they were hard put to it to know what to do

with her, and she was finally sentenced to be sent for a year

to a home for neurasthenics, "where she would be able to

read and write and recover her normality." That the

Communists were right in fearing this agitation was proved

by the troubles in Petrograd, where the workmen in some

of the factories struck, and passed Left Social

Revolutionary resolutions which, so far from showing that

they were awaiting reaction and General Judenitch, showed

simply that they were discontented and prepared to move to

the left.

THE MENSHEVIKS

The second main group of opposition is dominated by the

Mensheviks . Their chief leaders are Martov and Dan. Of

these two, Martov is by far the cleverer, Dan the more

garrulous, being often led away by his own volubility into

agitation of a kind not approved by his friends. Both are

men of very considerable courage. Both are Jews.

The Mensheviks would like the reintroduction of

capitalists, of course much chastened by experience, and

properly controlled by themselves. Unlike Spiridonova and

her romantic supporters they approved of Chicherin's offer

of peace and concessions to the Allies (see page 44). They

have even issued an appeal that the Allies should come to

an agreement with "Lenin's Government." As may be

gathered from their choice of a name for the Soviet

Government, they are extremely hostile to it, but they fear

worse things, and are consequently a little shy of exploiting

as they easily could the dislike of the people for hunger and

cold. They fear that agitation on these lines might well

result in anarchy, which would leave the revolution

temporarily defenceless against Kolchak, Denikin,

Judenitch or any other armed reactionary. Their

non-Communist enemies say of the Mensheviks:

"They have no constructive programme; they would

like a bourgeois government back again, in order

that they might be in opposition to it, on the left"

On March 2nd, I went to an election meeting of workers

and officials of the Moscow Co-operatives. It was

beastly cold in the hall of the University where the

meeting was held, and my nose froze as well as my feet.

Speakers were announced from the Communists,

Internationalists, Mensheviks, and Right

Social Revolutionaries. The last-named did not arrive.

The Presidium was for the most part non-Communist,

and the meeting was about equally divided for and

against the Communists. A Communist led

off with a very bad speech on the general European

situation and to the effect that there was no salvation for

Russia except by the way she was going. Lozovsky, the

old Internationalist, spoke next, supporting the Bolsheviks'

general policy but criticizing their suppression of the

press. Then came Dan, the Menshevik, to hear whom I had

come. He is a little, sanguine man, who gets very hot as he

speaks. He conducted an attack on the whole Bolshevik

position combined with a declaration that so long as they

are attacked from without he is prepared to support them.

The gist of his speech was: 1. He was in favour of fighting

Kolchak. 2. But the Bolshevik policy with regard to the peasants will,

since as the army grows it must contain more and more

peasants, end in the creation of an army with

counter-revolutionary sympathies. 3. He objected to the

Bolshevik criticism of the Berne, delegation (see page 156)

on very curious grounds, saying that though Thomas,

Henderson, etc., backed their own Imperialists during the

war, all that was now over, and that union with them would

help, not hinder, revolution in England and France. 4. He

pointed out that "All power to the Soviets" now means "All

power to the Bolsheviks," and said that he wished that the

Soviets should actually have all power instead of merely

supporting the Bolshevik bureaucracy. He was asked for

his own programme, but said he had not time to give

it. I watched the applause carefully. General

dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs was obvious,

but it was also obvious that no party would have a chance

that admitted its aim was extinction of the Soviets (which

Dan's ultimate aim certainly is, or at least the changing of

them into non-political industrial organizations) or that was not

prepared to fight against reaction from without.

I went to see Sukhanov (the friend of Gorky and Martov,

though his political opinions do not precisely agree with

those of either), partly to get the proofs of his first volume

of reminiscences of the revolution, partly to hear what he

had to say. I found him muffled up in a dressing gown or

overcoat in an unheated flat, sitting down to tea with no

sugar, very little bread, a little sausage and a surprising

scrap of butter, brought in, I suppose, from the country by a

friend. Nikitsky, a Menshevik, was also there, a hopeless

figure, prophesying the rotting of the whole system and of

the revolution. Sukhanov asked me if I had noticed the

disappearance of all spoons (there are now none, but

wooden spoons in the Metropole) as a symbol of the

falling to pieces of the revolution. I told him that though I

had not lived in Russia thirty years or more, as he had, I

had yet lived there long enough and had, before the

revolution, sufficient experience in the loss of fishing

tackle, not to be surprised that Russian peasants, even

delegates, when able, as in such a moment of convulsion as

the revolution, stole spoons if only as souvenirs to show

that they had really been to Moscow.

We talked, of course, of their attitude towards the

Bolsheviks. Both work in Soviet institutions. Sukhanov

(Nikitsky agreeing) believed that if the Bolsheviks came

further to meet the other parties, Mensheviks, etc.,

"Kolchak and Denikin would commit suicide and your

Lloyd George would give up all thought of intervention." I

asked, What if they should be told to hold a Constituent

Assembly or submit to a continuance of the blockade?

Sukhanov said, "Such a Constituent Assembly would be

impossible, and we should be against it." Of the Soviets,

one or other said, "We stand absolutely on the platform of

the Soviet Government now: but we think that such a form

cannot be permanent. We consider the Soviets perfect

instruments of class struggle, but not a perfect form of

government." I asked Sukhanov if he thought counter

revolution possible. He said "No," but admitted that there

was a danger lest the agitation of the Mensheviks or others

might set fire to the discontent of the masses against the

actual physical conditions, and end in pogroms destroying

Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. Their general theory

was that Russia was not so far developed that a Socialist

State was at present possible. They therefore wanted a state

in which private capital should exist, and in which factories

were not run by the state but by individual owners. They

believed that the peasants, with their instincts of small

property-holders, would eventually enforce something of

the kind, and that the end would be some form of

democratic Republic. These two were against the offering

of concessions to the Allies, on the ground that those under

consideration involved the handing over to the

concessionaires of the whole power in northern Russia-railways,

forests, the right to set up their own banks in the

towns served by the railway, with all that this implied.

Sukhanov was against concessions on principle, and

regretted that the Mensheviks were in favour of them.

I saw Martov at the offices of his newspaper, which had

just been suppressed on account of an article, which he

admitted was a little indiscreet, objecting to the upkeep of

the Red Army (see page 167). He pointed eloquently to the

seal on some of the doors, but told me that he had started a

new paper, of which he showed me the first number, and

told me that the demand for it was such that although he

had intended that it should be a weekly he now expected to

make it a daily. Martov said that he and his party were

against every form of intervention for the following

reasons:

1. The continuation of hostilities, the need of an army and

of active defence were bound to intensify the least desirable

qualities of the revolution whereas an agreement, by

lessening the tension, would certainly lead to moderation of

Bolshevik Policy. 2. The needs of the army overwhelmed

every effort at restoring the economic life of the country.

He was further convinced that intervention of any kind

favoured reaction, even supposing that the Allies did not

wish this. "They cannot help themselves," he said,

"the forces that would support intervention must be

dominated by those of reaction, since all of the

non-reactionary parties are prepared to sink their

differences with the Bolsheviks, in order to defend the

revolution as a whole." He said he was convinced that

the Bolsheviks would either have to alter or

go. He read me, in illustration of this, a letter from a

peasant showing the unreadiness of the peasantry to go into

communes (compulsion in this matter has already been

discarded by the Central Government). "We took the land,"

wrote the peasant in some such words, "not much, just as

much as we could work, we ploughed it where it had not

been ploughed before, and now, if it is made into a

commune, other lazy fellows who have done nothing will

come in and profit by our work." Martov argued that life

itself, the needs of the country and the will of the peasant

masses, would lead to the changes he thinks desirable in the

Soviet regime.

THE RIGHT SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES

The position of the Right Social Revolutionaries is a good

deal more complicated than that of the Mensheviks.

In their later declarations they are as far from their

romantic anarchist left wing as they are from their

romantic reactionary extreme right. They stand,

as they have always stood, for a Constituent Assembly, but

they have thrown over the idea of instituting a Constituent

Assembly by force. They have come into closer contact

with the Allies than any other party to the left of the Cadets.

By doing so, by associating themselves with the Czech

forces on the Volga and minor revolts of a reactionary

character inside Russia, they have pretty badly

compromised themselves. Their change of attitude towards

the Soviet Government must not be attributed to any change

in their own programme, but to the realization that the

forces which they imagined were supporting them were

actually being used to support something a great deal

further right. The Printers' Gazette, a non-Bolshevik

organ, printed one of their resolutions, one point of which

demands the overthrow of the reactionary governments

supported by the Allies or the Germans, and another

condemns every attempt to overthrow the Soviet

Government by force of arms, on the ground that such

an attempt would weaken the working class as a whole and

would be used by the reactionary groups for their own

purposes.

Volsky is a Right Social Revolutionary, and was President

of that Conference of Members of the Constituent

Assembly from whose hands the Directorate which ruled in

Siberia received its authority and Admiral Kolchak his

command, his proper title being Commander of the Forces

of the Constituent Assembly. The Constituent Assembly

members were to have met on January 1st of this year, then

to retake authority from the Directorate and organize a

government on an All-Russian basis. But there was

continual friction between the Directorate and the

Conference of members of the Constituent Assembly, the

Directorate being more reactionary than they. In November

came Kolchak's coup d'=82tat, followed by a declaration

against him and an appeal for his overthrow issued by

members of the Constituent Assembly. Some were arrested

by a group of officers. A few are said to have been killed.

Kolchak, I think, has denied responsibility for this, and

probably was unaware of the intentions of the

reactionaries under his command. Others of the members

escaped to Ufa. On December 5th, 25 days before that

town was taken by the Bolsheviks, they announced their

intention of no longer opposing the Soviet Government in

the field. After the capture of the town by the Soviet

troops, negotiations were begun between the

representatives of the Conference of Members of the

Constituent Assembly, together with other Right Social

Revolutionaries, and representatives of the Soviet

Government, with a view to finding a basis for agreement.

The result of those negotiations was the resolution passed

by the Executive Committee on February 26th (see page

166). A delegation of the members came to Moscow, and

were quaintly housed in a huge room in the Metropole,

where they had put up beds all round the walls and big

tables in the middle of the room for their deliberations. It

was in this room that I saw Volsky first, and afterwards in

my own.

I asked him what exactly had brought him and all that he

represented over from the side of Kolchak and the Allies to

the side of the Soviet Government. He looked me

straight in the face, and said: "I'll tell you. We were

convinced by many facts that the policy of the Allied

representatives in Siberia was directed not to strengthening

the Constituent Assembly against the Bolsheviks and the

Germans, but simply to strengthening the reactionary forces

behind our backs."

He also complained: "All through last summer we were

holding that front with the Czechs, being told that there

were two divisions of Germans advancing to attack us, and

we now know that there were no German troops in Russia

at all."

He criticized the Bolsheviks for being better makers of

programmes than organizers. They offered free electricity,

and presently had to admit that soon there would be no

electricity for lack of fuel. They did not sufficiently base

their policy on the study of actual possibilities. "But that

they are really fighting against a bourgeois dictatorship is

clear to us. We are, therefore, prepared to help them in

every possible way."

He said, further: "Intervention of any kind

will prolong the regime of the Bolsheviks by

compelling us to drop opposition to the Soviet Government,

although we do not like it, and to support it because it is

defending the revolution."

With regard to help given to individual groups or

governments fighting against Soviet Russia, Volsky said

that they saw no difference between such intervention and

intervention in the form of sending troops.

I asked what he thought would happen. He answered in

almost the same words as those used by Martov, that life

itself would compel the Bolsheviks to alter their policy or

to go. Sooner or later the peasants would make their will

felt, and they were against the bourgeoisie and against the

Bolsheviks. No bourgeois reaction could win permanently

against the Soviet, because it could have nothing to offer,

no idea for which people would fight. If by any chance

Kolchak, Denikin and Co. were to win, they would have to

kill in tens of thousands where the Bolsheviks have had to

kill in hundreds, and the result would be the complete ruin

and the collapse of Russia in anarchy. "Has not the

Ukraine been enough to teach the Allies that even six

months' occupation of non-Bolshevik territory

by half a million troops has merely the effect of

turning the population into Bolsheviks?"

THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL

March 3rd.

One day near the end of February, Bucharin, hearing that I

meant to leave quite soon, said rather mysteriously, "Wait a

few days longer, because something of international

importance is going to happen which will certainly be of

interest for your history." That was the only hint I got of

the preparation of the Third International. Bucharin refused

to say more. On March 3rd Reinstein looked in about nine

in the morning and said he had got me a guest's ticket for

the conference in the Kremlin, and wondered why I had not

been there the day before, when it had opened. I told him I

knew nothing whatever about it; Litvinov and Karakhan,

whom I had seen quite recently, had never mentioned it,

and guessing that this must be the secret at which Bucharin

had hinted, I supposed that they had purposely kept

silence. I therefore rang up Litvinov, and asked if they

had had any reason against my going. He said that he had

thought it would not interest me. So I went. The

Conference was still a secret. There was nothing about it in

the morning papers.

The meeting was in a smallish room, with a dais at one end,

in the old Courts of Justice built in the time of Catherine the

Second, who would certainly have turned in her grave if

she had known the use to which it was being put. Two

very smart soldiers of the Red Army were guarding the

doors. The whole room, including the floor, was decorated

in red. There were banners with "Long Live the Third

International" inscribed upon them in many languages. The

Presidium was on the raised dais at the end of the room,

Lenin sitting in the middle behind a long red-covered table

with Albrecht, a young German Spartacist, on the right and

Platten, the Swiss, on the left. The auditorium sloped down

to the foot of the dais. Chairs were arranged on each side

of an alleyway down the middle, and the four or five front

rows had little tables for convenience in writing.

Everybody of importance was there; Trotzky,

Zinoviev, Kamenev, Chichern, Bucharin, Karakhan,

Litvinov, Vorovsky, Steklov, Rakovsky, representing here

the Balkan Socialist Party, Skripnik, representing the

Ukraine. Then there were Stang (Norwegian Left

Socialists), Grimlund (Swedish Left), Sadoul (France),

Finberg (British Socialist Party), Reinstein (American

Socialist Labour Party), a Turk, a German-Austrian,

a Chinese, and so on. Business was conducted and

speeches were made in all languages, though

where possible German was used, because more of the

foreigners knew German than knew French. This was

unlucky for me.

When I got there people were making reports about the

situation in the different countries. Finberg spoke in

English, Rakovsky in French, Sadoul also. Skripnik, who,

being asked, refused to talk German and said he would

speak in either Ukrainian or Russia, and to most people's

relief chose the latter, made several interesting points about

the new revolution in the Ukraine. The killing of the

leaders under the Skoropadsky regime had made no

difference to the movement, and town after town was

falling after internal revolt. (This was before they had

Kiev and, of course, long before they had taken Odessa,

both of which gains they confidently prophesied.) The

sharp lesson of German occupation had taught the

Ukrainian Social Revolutionaries what their experiences

during the last fifteen months had taught the Russian, and

all parties were working together.

But the real interest of the gathering was in its attitude

towards the Berne conference. Many letters had been

received from members of that conference, Longuet for

example, wishing that the Communists had been

represented there, and the view taken at Moscow was that

the left wing at Berne was feeling uncomfortable at sitting

down with Scheidemann and Company; let them definitely

break with them, finish with the Second International and

join the Third. It was clear that this gathering in the

Kremlin was meant as the nucleus of a new International

opposed to that which had split into national groups, each

supporting its own government in the prosecution of the

war. That was the leit motif of the whole affair.

Trotsky, in a leather coat, military breeches and

gaiters, with a fur hat with the sign of the Red Army in

front, was looking very well, but a strange figure for those

who had known him as one of the greatest

anti-militarists in Europe. Lenin sat quietly listening,

speaking when necessary in almost every European

language with astonishing ease. Balabanova talked about

Italy and seemed happy at last, even in Soviet Russia, to be

once more in a "secret meeting." It was really an

extraordinary affair and, in spite of some childishness, I

could not help realizing that I was present at something that

will go down in the histories of socialism, much like that

other strange meeting convened in London in 1848.

The vital figures of the conference, not counting Platten,

whom I do not know and on whom I can express no

opinion, were Lenin and the young German, Albrecht, who,

fired no doubt by the events actually taking place in his

country, spoke with brain and character. The German

Austrian also seemed a real man. Rakovsky, Skripnik, and

Sirola the Finn really represented something. But there was

a make-believe side to the whole affair, in which the

English Left Socialists were represented by Finberg, and

the Americans by Reinstein, neither of whom had or was

likely to have any means of communicating with his

constituents.

March 4th.

In the Kremlin they were discussing the programme on

which the new International was to stand. This is, of

course, dictatorship of the proletariat and all that that

implies. I heard, Lenin make a long speech, the main point

of which was to show that Kautsky and his supporters at

Berne were now condemning the very tactics which they

had praised in 1906. When I was leaving the Kremlin I met

Sirola walking in the square outside the building without a

hat, without a coat, in a cold so intense that I was putting

snow on my nose to prevent frostbite. I exclaimed. Sirola

smiled his ingenuous smile. "It is March," he said, "Spring

is coming."

March 5th.

Today all secrecy was dropped, a little prematurely, I

fancy, for when I got to the Kremlin I found that the first

note of opposition had been struck by the man who least of

all was expected to strike it. Albrecht, the young German,

had opposed the immediate founding of the Third

International, on the double ground that not all nations were

properly represented and that it might make difficulties for

the political parties concerned in their own countries.

Every one was against him. Rakovsky pointed out that the

same objections could have been raised against the

founding of the First International by Marx in London. The

German-Austrian combated Albrecht's second point.

Other people said that the different parties concerned had

long ago definitely broken with the Second International.

Albrecht was in a minority of one. It was decided therefore

that this conference was actually the Third International.

Platten announced the decision, and the "International" was

sung in a dozen languages at once. Then Albrecht stood

up, a little red in the face, and said that he, of course,

recognized the decision and would announce it in Germany.

March 6th.

The conference in the Kremlin ended with the usual singing

and a photograph. Some time before the end, when

Trotsky had just finished speaking and had left the tribune,

there was a squeal of protest from the photographer who

had just trained his apparatus. Some one remarked "The

Dictatorship of the Photographer," and, amid general

laughter, Trotsky had to return to the tribune and stand

silent while the unabashed photographer took two pictures.

The founding of the Third International had been

proclaimed in the morning papers, and an extraordinary

meeting in the Great Theatre announced for the evening. I

got to the theatre at about five, and had difficulty in getting

in, though I had a special ticket as a correspondent. There

were queues outside all the doors. The Moscow Soviet was

there, the Executive Committee, representatives of the

Trades Unions and the Factory Committees, etc. The huge

theatre and the platform were crammed, people standing in

the aisles and even packed close together in the wings of

the stage. Kamenev opened the meeting by a solemn

announcement of the founding of the Third

International in the Kremlin. There was a roar of applause

from the audience, which rose and sang the "International"

in a way that I have never heard it sung since the

All-Russian Assembly when the news came of the strikes in

Germany during the Brest negotiations. Kamenev then

spoke of those who had died on the way, mentioning

Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, and the whole theatre

stood again while the orchestra played, "You fell as

victims." Then Lenin spoke. If I had ever thought that

Lenin was losing his personal popularity, I got my answer

now. It was a long time before he could speak at all,

everybody standing and drowning his attempts to speak

with roar after roar of applause. It was an extraordinary,

overwhelming scene, tier after tier crammed with workmen,

the parterre filled, the whole platform and the wings. A

knot of workwomen were close to me, and they almost

fought to see him, and shouted as if each one were

determined that he should hear her in particular. He spoke

as usual, in the simplest way, emphasizing the fact that the

revolutionary struggle everywhere was forced to use the

Soviet forms. "We declare our solidarity with

the aims of the Sovietists," he read from an Italian

paper, and added, "and that was when they did not

know what our aims were, and before we had an

established programme ourselves." Albrecht made

a very long reasoned speech for Spartacus, which

was translated by Trotsky. Guilbeau, seemingly a mere

child, spoke of the socialist movement in France. Steklov

was translating him when I left. You must remember that I

had had nearly two years of such meetings, and am not a

Russian. When I got outside the theatre, I found at each

door a disappointed crowd that had been unable to get in.

The proceedings finished up next day with a review in the

Red Square and a general holiday.

If the Berne delegates had come, as they were expected,

they would have been told by the Communists that they

were welcome visitors, but that they were not regarded as

representing the International. There would then have

ensued a lively battle over each one of the delegates, the

Mensheviks urging him to stick to Berne, and the

Communists urging him to express allegiance to the

Kremlin. There would have been demonstrations and

counter-demonstrations, and altogether I am very sorry

that it did not happen and that I was not there to see.

LAST TALK WITH LENIN

I went to see Lenin the day after the Review in the Red

Square, and the general holiday in honour of the Third

International. The first thing he said was: "I am afraid that

the Jingoes in England and France will make use of

yesterday's doings as an excuse for further action against

us. They will say 'How can we leave them in peace when

they set about setting the world on fire?' To that I would

answer, 'We are at war, Messieurs! And just as during

your war you tried to make revolution in Germany, and

Germany did make trouble in Ireland and India, so we,

while we are at war with you, adopt the measures that are

open to us. We have told you we are willing to make

peace.'"

He spoke of Chicherin's last note, and said they based all

their hopes on it. Balfour had said somewhere, "Let the fire

burn itself out." That it would not do. But the quickest

way of restoring good conditions in Russia was, of course,

peace and agreement with the Allies. "I am sure we could

come to terms, if they want to come to terms at all.

England and America would be willing, perhaps, if their

hands were not tied by France. But intervention in the

large sense can now hardly be. They must have learnt that

Russia could never be governed as India is governed, and

that sending troops here is the same thing as sending them

to a Communist University."

I said something about the general hostility to their

propaganda noticeable in foreign countries.

Lenin. "Tell them to build a Chinese wall round each of

their countries. They have their customs-officers, their

frontiers, their coast-guards. They can expel any

Bolsheviks they wish. Revolution does not depend on

propaganda. If the conditions of revolution are not there no

sort of propaganda will either hasten or impede it. The war

has brought about those conditions in all countries, and I

am convinced that if Russia today were to be swallowed up

by the sea, were to cease to exist altogether, the revolution

in the rest of Europe would go on. Put Russia under

water for twenty years, and you would not affect by a

shilling or an hour a week the demand, of the

shop-stewards in England."

I told him, what I have told most of them many times, that I

did not believe there would be a revolution in England.

Lenin. "We have a saying that a man may have typhoid

while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had

abortive typhoid, and was going about with it,

had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well,

England and France and Italy have caught the disease

already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the

microbe is already there."

I said that just as his typhoid was abortive typhoid, so the

disturbances in England to which he alluded might well be

abortive revolution, and come to nothing. I told him the

vague, disconnected character of the strikes and the

generally liberal as opposed to socialist character of the

movement, so far as it was political at all, reminded me of

what I had heard of 1905 in Russia and not at all of

1917, and that I was sure it would settle down.

Lenin. "Yes, that is possible. It is, perhaps, an educative

period, in which the English workmen will come to realize

their political needs, and turn from liberalism to Socialism.

Socialism is certainly weak in England. Your socialist

movements, your socialist parties . . . when I was in

England I zealously attended everything I could, and for a

country with so large an industrial population they were

pitiable, pitiable . . . a handful at a street corner . . . a

meeting in a drawing room . . . a school class . . . pitiable.

But you must remember one great difference between

Russia of 1905 and England of to-day. Our first Soviet in

Russia was made during the revolution. Your

shop-stewards committees have been in existence

long before. They are without programme, without

direction, but the opposition they will meet will force

a programme upon them."

Speaking of the expected visit of the Berne delegation, he

asked me if I knew MacDonald, whose name had been

substituted for that of Henderson in later telegrams

announcing their coming. He ,said: "I am very glad

MacDonald is coming instead of Henderson. Of course

MacDonald is not a Marxist in any sense of the word, but

he is at least interested in theory, and can therefore be

trusted to do his best to understand what is happening here.

More than that we do not ask."

We then talked a little on a subject that interests me very

much, namely, the way in which insensibly, quite apart

from war, the Communist theories are being modified in the

difficult process of their translation into practice. We

talked of the changes in "workers' control," which is now a

very different thing from the wild committee business that

at first made work almost impossible. We talked then of

the antipathy of the peasants to compulsory communism,

and how that idea also had been considerably whittled

away. I asked him what were going to be the relations

between the Communists of the towns and the

property-loving peasants, and whether there was

not great danger of antipathy between them, and said

I regretted leaving too soon to see the elasticity of

the Communist theories tested by the inevitable

pressure of the peasantry.

Lenin said that in Russia there was a pretty sharp

distinction between the rich peasants and the poor. "The

only opposition we have here in Russia is directly or

indirectly due to the rich peasants. The poor, as soon as

they are liberated from the political domination of the rich,

are on our side and are in an enormous majority."

I said that would not be so in the Ukraine, where property

among the peasants is much more equally distributed.

Lenin. "No. And there, in the Ukraine, you will certainly

see our policy modified. Civil war, whatever happens, is

likely to be more bitter in the Ukraine than elsewhere,

because there the instinct of property has been further

developed in the peasantry, and the minority and majority

will be more equal."

He asked me if I meant to return, saying that I could go

down to Kiev to watch the revolution there as I had

watched it in Moscow. I said I should be very sorry to

think that this was my last visit to the country which I

love only second to my own. He laughed, and paid me the

compliment of saying that, "although English," I had more

or less succeeded in understanding what they were at, and

that he should be pleased to see me again.

THE JOURNEY OUT

March 15th.

There is nothing to record about the last few days of my

visit, fully occupied as they were with the collection and

packing of printed material and preparations for departure.

I left with the two Americans, Messrs. Bullitt and Steffens,

who had come to Moscow some days previously, and

travelled up in the train with Bill Shatov, the Commandant

of Petrograd, who is not a Bolshevik but a fervent admirer

of Prince Kropotkin, for the distribution of whose works in

Russia he has probably done as much as any man. Shatov

was an emigr=82 in New York, returned to Russia, brought

law and order into the chaos of the Petrograd-Moscow

railway, never lost a chance of doing a good turn to an

American, and with his level-headedness and practical

sense became one of the hardest worked servants of the

Soviet, although, as he said, the moment people

stopped attacking them he would be the first to pull down

the Bolsheviks. He went into the occupied provinces

during the German evacuation of them, to buy arms and

ammunition from the German soldiers. Prices, he said, ran

low. You could buy rifles for a mark each, field guns for

150 marks, and a field wireless station for 500. He had

then been made Commandant of Petrograd, although there

had been some talk of setting him to reorganize transport.

Asked how long he thought the Soviet Government could

hold but, he replied, "We can afford to starve another year

for the sake of the Revolution."