XVIII Social Interest
My constant companion and interpreter was Venko, a big, strong, gloriously boisterous and comparatively young Russian. He had lived for years in an English Midland town and had left an English wife and children there to come to Russia after the revolution. The only sentimental thing in his mind was his family in England. Sometimes he was perplexed thinking about them. He said he was sure they wouldn’t like living in Russia and he had no desire to return to England. He was not sentimental about his substitute Russian wife. He said she had married him only to get good food and a good apartment to live in. He was of peasant origin and she seemed to be from the poor professional class. Their living room constantly reminded me of that of the poor officer in The Brothers Karamozov. It was like a seamstress’s place, with a sewing machine installed and scraps of cloth lying carelessly about, from which one’s clothes picked up bits of thread, and it had a peculiar odor like that of clothes being washed with brown soap. But she was a good wife. Sometimes I stayed at Venko’s house, after we had finished at a meeting and resorted to a café to drink vodka. And however late we got there, his wife would get up to serve food.
Venko was an interpreter in the O.G.P.U. He was not connected with the intelligence work. He didn’t like office work. He preferred to agitate crowds. He was a marvelously gesticulating, noisy and frothy agitator, but there was not much substance in his phrases. And if you don’t give Russians some meat to chew on when you talk to them, they soon tire of you, however brilliant your fireworks may be. If you have something to say they will listen for long hours upon hours, as patient as sheep, even if you are speaking in a strange language. And afterward they will ruminate on it with satisfaction through more long hours of interpreting. Venko was a good enough interpreter. My stay in Moscow was a vacation for him, of which we made a picnic. He was unorthodox about life, whether it was old or new, even as I, and he made the most unguarded and biting criticisms of things and personalities in his profane and boisterous Russian way.
The Moscow Soviet made me an honorary member at one of its meetings. A few days later Venko accompanied me to the office of the Soviet, where I was to receive the little red book that would make me even a more privileged personage than I was. The card was made out by a comrade clerk and my photograph was affixed. Then Venko and I were ushered into the presence of Commissar Kamenev, the president of the Moscow Soviet, for him to affix his signature.
Kamenev was extremely dignified and perfectly attired in black, with white collar and black tie, the best-dressed Bolshevik official (according to the smart European standard) that I had met. He welcomed me with a courteous smile, signed my card, shook my hand, and said he was proud to deliver it to me in the name of the Moscow Soviet. Venko translated. The simplicity of Kamenev’s official dignity moved me very much, for in his fine-fitting conventional clothes, I might have mistaken him for a responsible banker, or a Protestant clergyman, or a high-ranking continental diplomat, anything but what Venko startled me by suggesting.
For as we got outside Venko exploded: “Good God, Comrade! I have seen the Czar!”
“What do you mean, the Czar?” I said.
“Kamenev in the place of the Czar. The same clothes, the same manner of wearing his beard! Good God, Comrade, a Jew in the place of the Czar!” Kamenev’s features were indeed remarkably like the Czar’s.
“Why, don’t you like Jews?” I asked in astonishment. It was the first anti-Jewish sentiment I had heard from a Russian Communist.
“No, Comrade, I won’t lie to you; I don’t like Jews.”
“Are you a pogromist?” I asked.
“Good God, Comrade, no. I fought the White-guard pogromists in the Ukraine and was wounded. The White guards started pogroms against the Jews. I fought them and fought the pogroms too, for pogroms are a crime against our Communist party. But I don’t like the Jews, Comrade. All the Nep men are Jews.”
“All?” I exclaimed.
“Well, if not all, nearly all. And all the money changers of the Black Bourse are Jews.”
I record this conversation because it was one of the impressive and unforgettable things I heard from a Communist in Russia. I was particularly impressed because, as a member of a minority group in America that was the victim of blind and bitter prejudice, I was interested to know if the prejudice against the Jews had been automatically swept away with the Czarist régime.
I was interested, because I did not hold to the sentimental idea that the deep-rooted prejudices of a people could be eradicated overnight. What the Bolsheviks had accomplished was to put a stop to the vicious political exploitation of group and race prejudice. I don’t think the saintliest human being could ask more. Individual prejudice is one of the most natural sentiments. It is easy enough for an individual prejudice to become a family prejudice, for family ties are real. And it is also easy for such prejudice to spread to a group, for groups exist and the majority of human beings are fundamentally tribal.
I was not at all shocked by Venko’s revelation. I was merely enlightened. If he were an intellectual Communist, he could not have spoken to me as he did. I preferred to go around with him, because I could learn more.
One evening Zonov invited me to a party which he did not want Venko to know about, for it was a bourgeois party. The guests were celebrating a holiday of the old régime which had been abolished by the Bolsheviks.
The party of that little remnant of the Russian bourgeoisie was something not to be missed. It was even more Russian, noisy, and elastic than the proletarian parties, for these people did not have to bother about correct Communist conduct. Maybe there was a flickering note of futility, of despair, which made them more reckless, because, unlike the Communists, they had no future. The limited luxury of the Nep for the moment was theirs to enjoy. And they were giving themselves to the moment unforgettably, as you might give yourself to a page of Chekhov.
Russian life seems to blow through space like a big breeze, and this remnant of a bourgeois society was no less a part of that big breeze. How they ate and danced and chattered in loud harmony! Two huge fruit cakes reared themselves like wedding cakes on a sideboard, and there were platters of caviar, sturgeon, salads, cheeses, every delicious food to tickle the palate, and gallons of Caucasian wine and vodka to wash it down.
I was introduced all round as a guest of Russia. They all knew that I was a guest of the Soviets, and if they wanted to make it a guest of Russia instead, I had no objection to the added distinction. One very beautiful and proud-looking young woman got the back of her hand up to my lips with one of those exquisite gestures that only people who are born to them can make, I guess.
I made the best bow that was natural to me for that honor. But the young woman was not satisfied with my bow. She stamped her foot petulantly, though not unkindly, and rubbed my nose with the perfumed back of her hand. I was convinced that something more was expected of me, so I reached up my hand and took hers.
She led me to a seat and said rapidly in a voice that sounded like fine tinkling glass: “Why did you refuse to kiss my hand? Do you think it is degrading for a Communist to kiss a lady’s hand?” She spoke lovely English.
“No, Tovarish—”
“Please don’t call me by that disgusting name,” she interrupted. “I am a barishna.”
“Well, Barishna, then, if that is your preference, I did not kiss your hand simply because I don’t know how to do it well. Nobody I know kisses hands in America.”
The Barishna conceded an indulgent smile. “Tell me,” she said, “do you like our Russia—Moscow and Petrograd?” I said that I did.
“As much as London and Paris and Berlin?” she asked.
I said, “More than London and Berlin. But I do not know Paris.”
“I believe you,” she said. “I know London and Paris and Berlin, but I love Petrograd more. Now there is no Petrograd.” “But you have Moscow. Moscow is more beautiful,” I said. “Oh, but Petrograd was magnificent before the revolution.” I could never imagine Petrograd being more beautiful than Moscow, but so many Russians said it was.
Said the barishna, “I tell you, I don’t like the foreign Communists. You come here to gaze at us as if we were strange animals in a zoo, to mock at and insult us in our distress. That is hateful.”
“Barishna,” I said, “I don’t understand. What do you mean? The foreign Communists come here bringing greetings from the workers abroad to the workers of Russia. They do not come here to mock and insult, but to praise and learn about the revolution.”
“Oh, they do mock at us,” she insisted. “My young brother works in one of the important departments and he heard a foreign Communist boasting that he had slept all night with a lady of title for ten cents. Now isn’t that a mean and despicable thing to say? If a real man could buy a lady of quality for ten cents, shouldn’t he be ashamed to mention it?”
“I guess so, Barishna,” I said. “I don’t care anything about the difference between titled and untitled loving.”
“But you do think it was an unspeakable thing for a civilized man to say, don’t you?” She stressed the word civilized as if I were a savage in her sight and she was eager to hear the opinion of a savage upon a civilized person.
“But, Barishna,” I said, “the men of your class used to do worse things than that to the women of the class of the man who said he possessed a titled lady for ten cents. They did it to weak and ignorant girls and often didn’t even pay the price of ten cents.”
“Oh no,” said the barishna, “no gentleman does that.”
“But they do, Barishna. Many of your gentlemen still exercise even the medieval droits de seigneur in a different way. That’s what Tolstoy’s Resurrection is all about.”
“So you read our Tolstoy? You like our Russian literature? Oh, I am glad that you do. They have destroyed everything, but they cannot destroy our Russian literature.”
I was very embarrassed. Most of the bourgeois people I had met had refrained from saying anything against the Communists, even though they did not praise them. Suddenly the barishna said, “I want to leave Russia; I have friends in England. Would you marry me so that I could leave the country with you—just a formal arrangement?” I hesitated and said that I didn’t know that I could.
“But many of the foreigners have married Russian girls and got them through to Berlin,” she said.
“Communists too?” I asked.
“Yes, Communists too.”
“Barishna,” I said, “I am sorry. I couldn’t shoulder even the formal responsibility. And besides, I am not a Communist. I don’t even know yet how I am going to get out of Russia myself.”
In my rare contacts with members of the expropriated classes I felt the weirdest sensations, as if pages out of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Dostoyevsky, Artzybashev and Chekhov were suddenly patterned and peopled with actual life.
Many of the people I knew from the International Club in London were in Russia, some as visiting delegates, while others were permanently settled. Arthur McManus was one of the English-speaking delegates whose company I found congenial, and we were often together, although I found it difficult to keep up with his gargantuan boozing, which perhaps finally knocked him out dead. Both of us were guests of the Soviet fleet at Kronstadt and were photographed together. McManus and I had our points of difference, and sometimes when we were vodka-heated, our tongues flew sharply at each other.
McManus was one of the men who had gunned the hardest after Sylvia Pankhurst. He still felt venomous about her. “Intellectually dishonest,” was his pet phrase for describing her. I said I thought Sylvia Pankhurst was as honest as any imperial Briton could be. And I really preferred Pankhurst to persons like Lansbury, and perhaps even to McManus himself. McManus shot up like a rabbit (he was a tiny man) and demanded in his remarkably beautiful Glasgow brogue if I meant to “insinuate” (that was the word he used) that he was an imperialist. I said that I had not said “imperialist,” but “imperial,” and that all Britons were imperial by birth and circumstances because of the nature of the political set-up of Britain. McManus asked if I did not believe that there were really radical Britons. I said that no man can be more radical than his system can stand. McManus said I was a bloody bigoted black nationalist, and his b’s had such a wonderful ring (he stammered a little) that it made me laugh and laugh until both of us fell into a prolonged fit of black-and-white laughter. It was a good satisfying feeling to see McManus laugh aloud, for there was a perpetually crucified expression on his countenance that all the Scotch whisky and Russian vodka in the world could not dispel.
McManus did not appear to like my O.G.P.U. friend and companion, Venko. It was well known among us that Venko was an interpreter and translator for the O.G.P.U., but had nothing to do with the department of investigations and arrests. Anyone with a little knowledge of police organization knows that a police clerk has nothing to do with the actual duties of policing. If Venko had been a secret agent of the O.G.P.U. we would never have known that he worked in that department. And I think I can nose out a secret agent whether he is red or white. I spent a year of my early youth in a police department in a position where I was in constant contact with all the branches of the department. For my part I liked to have Venko along whenever I was invited to a carousel among Communists. For Venko could beat anybody carousing and I thought that if any issue were raised about the affair afterward, Venko would be an excellent asset to have. Whenever I went on a drinking bout with comrades I always saw that they got drunker than myself.
It was necessary to do a little thinking while drinking and laughing. For sometimes funny things happened. Some of the foreign comrades seemed to enjoy playing at political intrigue, apparently without fully realizing that political intrigue, to the Russians, was a serious and dangerous thing. For instance, one of the youthful Indian delegates occupied a room next to mine, and we often went down to our meals and also over to the Comintern offices together. One morning when I called for him his room was locked and there was a seal on the door. The O.G.P.U. had arrested him during the night. Months later I met him in Berlin under the most unusual circumstances, which I shall relate in another place. There was also the young Whitechapel Jew whom I used to know slightly at the International Club in London. He had come to Russia as a youth delegate. But he wasn’t functioning as anything when I saw him. He told me fretfully that he had been denounced. One evening he and I were on our way to a motion picture when a group of armed police dramatically pounced upon him. They said something in Russian and he must have answered satisfactorily, for they did not take him. But he was scared, and said, “I am always scared.” Shortly after that incident he was gone too, and I never saw him again. When I reached Berlin the following spring I met William Gallacher (now Communist Member of Parliament) and asked him what had become of the boy. “He was a spy,” Gallacher said, “and he was fixed.”
I said angrily, “But what have you in the little British Communist Party for anybody to spy on?”
“More than you think,” said Gallacher, with a mysterious nod of his friendly head.
One night in Moscow I was invited to a celebration given by a minor Communist official. The address had been written down for me and I had to take somebody along to find it, as I did not know my way around Moscow. So I asked Venko; but first we had to attend a meeting of women workers at which he interpreted for me and we did not get to the entertainment until very late. The large apartment was full of comrades when we got there. I think the man who was throwing the treat was a Finn and there were many Baltic types there, blonde and heavy of movement and impassive of spirit. There was plenty of hard drinking, but it was a dull atmosphere, nothing of the stimulating renascent effervescence of the barishna’s evening. Venko stepped upon the scene with a burst of boisterous enthusiasm, and drinking a big glass of vodka, he took the center of the room and started speechifying, saying there was a time for good comrades to fight, a time to work, and that now was the time to be festive.
Venko was applauded, and from somewhere McManus came swaying like a tipsy little imp, and pointing at Venko cried in a chanting voice: “O.G.P.U.! O.G.P.U.! O.G.P.U.!” Venko laughed, and all of us. For he and the others thought that McManus was merely putting over a joke about his working for the O.G.P.U. But then McManus shouted in English, “Spy! Spy! I am not going to stay here, I am going home. Spy!”
“What do you mean, Comrade?” Venko asked in amazement. “Did I ever spy on you? Do you want to say that I am here spying on my comrades?” Venko said something in Russian and everybody looked serious. But McManus repeated “O.G.P.U. spy! O.G.P.U. spy!” A murderous look took possession of Venko’s face. “Comrade,” he cried in a terrible voice, “if you don’t stop, I’ll kill you; you hear? You’re not drunk and irresponsible. If you don’t stop, I’ll hit you, as little as you are.” But McManus shouted again: “O.G.P.U. spy! O.G.P.U.—”
Venko knocked McManus down with one blow and kicked him straight across the room, where he lay curled up like a half-dead snake. “You dirty little Englishman!” cried Venko. “Go back home and make your own revolution and don’t stay in Russia to insult a real Communist.” McManus picked himself up and began shouting: “I am not a Communist, I am an Anarchist! Anarchist! Anarchist!” A comrade clapped his hand over McManus’ mouth, and lifting him up like a kid, carried him out of the room.
I couldn’t understand the meaning of McManus’ outburst, except perhaps that he, like some of the other visiting comrades, was afflicted with spy mania. The company settled down again to drinking and toasting and the singing of revolutionary songs.
The carousel ended with me again uplifted in glory. Venko had shed every vestige of the murderous brutality of a moment before and was acting like a commanding master of ceremonies. With strong exuberant gestures he toasted me to the company. Always a poet in action, he became a poet in words: “Comrade McKay, you must stay in Russia. We want you. All Russia loves you, not we Communists only, but even the damned bourgeoisie. Tell us, Comrade McKay, why is it you have bewitched us? Tell us, Comrade McKay, what is it? Is it the black magic we have heard about? Comrade McKay, we are bewitched, men, women and children. We all love you, we all want you. Oh, do stay with us forever! Comrade McKay, you must leave Moscow and see Russia. We want you everywhere.... Comrade McKay, my heart is bold”—here Venko brutally beat his breast with his enormous fist—“and my back is broad and strong”—Venko bent himself over. “Get up on my back and I will carry you all over Russia: from Moscow to Kazan, from Kazan to Samara and all the way down the Volga we will go until we reach the Caspian Sea....”
With a great shout I was hoisted up into the air. And McManus, awaking from his drunken anarcho-communist nightmare, came zigzagging into the room just as I was being carried out upon the shoulders of that gloriously tipsy crew down the stairs and into the street and put into a droshky and conveyed to my hotel. My mind was too stimulated and excited to go to sleep, with Venko’s picturesque phrases burning in my brain and creating a tumult of thought. I also had under consideration an invitation to join a caravan of comrades from different countries who were planning a tour of Russia with the Caucasus as the ultimate destination. Should I go? Although I had been only in Moscow and Petrograd, I had traveled already so extensively from triumph to triumph. Should I go further and risk anti-climax, or should I make my exit in éclat, cherishing always the richness of my golden souvenir? The thought of leaving seemed to be the most logical. I knew myself enough to know that I was not of the stuff of a practical pioneer, who could become a link in that mighty chain of the upbuilding of the great Russian revolution. And also I reflected like a stoic poet that it was best not to be too popular. When I contemplated the overwhelming snow of Russia, it appeared not like snow anywhere else, but like a thing everlasting, petrified like an ocean of ivory. Yet soon even it would disappear when the season changed. And somewhere from far away beyond the cold Russian nights, glorious like fields of white lilies, another season was coming.
Soon after that, Sen Katayama sent me an invitation to visit the Eastern University. I spoke to a group of students, and then proceeded to visit the dormitories. The rooms, in which the students prepared light meals, appeared somewhat like those of Moslem students in the medersas of Morocco. Imagine my surprise, as I was passing through a dormitory, to hear a familiar voice call my name. I looked back and it was Mrs. Slova, reclining on a cot. Mrs. Slova had been charming to me when I was in London, frequently inviting me to her house for high tea. She was a seamstress and she and her three pretty daughters were always smartly dressed. Some of the captious comrades styled her the bourgeois lady. At that time she was wildly enthusiastic about Russia and just biding her time to get there.
“But what are you doing here?” I asked.
“Don’t you know? I am a student going to school again,” she said. Mrs. Slova had gone to Russia with her daughters immediately following my return to New York from London. She was glad once more to be in the land of her birth, where formerly she was ostracized because she belonged to the Jewish group. But her three daughters, who were born and reared in comparative comfort in London, were frightened of the confusion of the new burgeoning society. Mrs. Slova quickly and expertly arranged a mariage de convenance for each of her daughters with English comrades visiting Russia and sent them back to London. But she remained in Moscow.
I asked if she did not miss her children. “I raised them right, until now they are of age to act for themselves,” she said. “They couldn’t fit into the new conditions here. Young people are not like us older heads.” I said I thought the Communist movement was primarily the movement of youth, and if she in middle age could adapt herself to the changed life, it should have been easier for her daughters.
“Pooh!” Mrs. Slova exclaimed. “Youth is all right when guided and led by older heads. They act more from enthusiasm than from thinking and will rush headlong into anything when they are excited, for youth is the time of excitement. That is why they are preferred as soldiers. But they soon get sulky when there is no more excitement to feed on. All the great statesmen are middle-aged experienced men, even in Red Russia.” I was amazed at Mrs. Slova. I never considered her bourgeois because she dressed well, but I always thought that she was oversentimental and romantic. But after all she was a wise person.
She had no desire to return to England. Communally living in a dormitory, sleeping on a cot with her belongings in a locker, she did not hanker after her comfortable middle-class home in London. She was studying languages in the Eastern University, with the intention of entering the eastern diplomatic service. She didn’t think any revolution was going to take place in Western Europe for a long time, she said. The Bolshevik leaders would at last wake up to that fact. She believed in the East, the future of Russia in the East, and that was why she had become a student at the Eastern University.