THE TEXT IS FLY WITHIN THE BOOK ONLY L99as cop 5 Keep Y our Card in This Pocket Books will be issued only on presentation of proper library cards. Unless labeled otherwise, books may be retained tor two weeks. Borrowers finding books marked de- faced or mutilated are expected to report same at library desk; otherwise the last borrower will be held responsible for all imperfections discovered. The card holder is responsible for all books drawn on this card. Penalty for over-due books 2c a day plus cost of notices. Lost cards and change of residence must be re- ported promptly. Public Library Kansas City, Mo. TENSION ENVELOPE CORP. 0 0001 014012^ a MTTOBkaw'V • tc..c„Ki. pulll Ll FEB 2 8 1972 ASSIGNMENT IN UTOPIA BY EUGENE LYONS THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SACCO AND VANZETTI MOSCOW CARROUSEL SIX SOVIET PLAYS (ed.) WE COVER THE WORLD (ed.) ASSIGNMENT IN UTOPIA Eugene Lyons Harcourt, Brace and Company • New York COPYRIGHT, 1937, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Ninth printing, December, 1938 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC-, RAHWAY, N. Typography by Robert Josephy To Billy and Genie Contents book i. Prelude to Moscow i. Revolt Against Ugliness 3 ii. The Clowning Called Justice 12 hi. On the Eve of Fascism 21 iv. I Defend Sacco and Vanzetti 29 v. Working for the Soviets 37 book 2. Hallelujah ! I. Moscow and Muscovites 53 II. The Kremlin’s Guests and Poor Relations 66 hi. Nep: Burlesque on Capitalism 81 iv. Hallelu j ah ! 93 v. Censorship 105 vi. Demonstration Trial 114 vii. Journey Through Russia 134 vm. Iron Monolith 147 ix. Savor of Life 157 x. Life is Rationed 170 xi. Social Slag 183 xn. The Great “Break” 196 xiii. Accent of Moscow 212 xiv. Picnicking in a Graveyard 226 xv. Two Plus Two Equals Five 240 xvi. The War Nobody Knew 250 vii viii CONTENTS book 3. Doubt 1* Stalin Launches a Slogan 263 11. The Peasants Are Conquered 279 hi. We Move to a Mansion 293 IV. Locomotives Come to Central Asia 304 V. Search for the “Real Russia” 320 VI. Bargains in Ideals and Omelettes 328 VII. Revolt Against Intelligence 341 VIII. . Forty-eight Ghosts 349 IX. Rasstrelf 362 X. “Death to Wreckers!” 370 XI. An Interview with Stalin 381 XII. American Interlude 393 book 4. Disillusionment 1. “Socialism” Revised ix. Bernard Shaw in Moscow hi. Ambulance and Motor-Cars iv. Gold Mining in Torture Chambers v. Culture in a Strait jacket vi. Fog of Skepticism over Russia vn. Planned Chaos viii. The End of RAPP ix. Living Space x. American Tragedies xi. Persian Entr’acte xii. Upon Sodom and Gomorrah Brimstone and Fire xiii. Did the First Five Year Plan Succeed? xiv. Britishers on Trial xv. The Press Corps Conceals a Famine xvi. Forebodings 413 428 43 ^ 447 465 474 482 494 503 5i9 53i 540 552 561 572 581 CONTENTS XX book 5. Re dedication i„ My Recall from Moscow 591 11. Farewell to Russia! 600 hi. A Tour of Tyrannies 610 iv. To Tell or Not to Tell 624 v. Adventure in Idealism 637 Index 649 BOOK I PRELUDE TO MOSCOW I. Revolt Against Ugliness IN AMERICA we still romanticize the glories of a hard, pov- erty-ridden youth. Our rags-to-riches legends and literature over- look the fact that Tony the Bootblack ends up as a hod-carrier or a gangster more often than a millionaire. They overlook the more vital fact that when he does achieve wealth he generally carries the scars of the unequal struggle on his mind and spirit forever. He can rarely attain the mellow quality of the full, cul- tured existence of those whose rise was more orderly, less des- perate. Our up-from-the-gutter type of true, or nearly true, story is written by the few who did creep out of the quagmires of want and its endless degradations. The many who were swallowed up, or who emerged broken in body and spirit, do not write auto- biographies or make after-dinner speeches. On the East Side of New York, where I grew up, we knew hardship and fear in their less romantic guises. Our streets teemed with crowded, chaotic life like the underside of a moss-grown stone. Our tenements were odoriferous garbage heaps where the same over-abundant life proliferated. We knew coarseness, ver- min, want, so intimately that they became routine commonplaces. The affluence, the ease, the glimpse of ordered beauty were dis- tant and unreal, like stories in books. Only the ugliness and sweat and unrelenting tussle were close and terribly familiar. The idealization of poverty as “the university of hard knocks” seemed to me insult added to injury as early as I was able to think at all. The be-furred ladies who came into the social settle- ments of our slums to assure us patronizingly of the blessings we were enjoying infuriated me. They fascinated me too, with sug- gestions of incredible far-off splendors in their sleekness. I was presiding at a Boy Scout meeting at the Educational Alliance one evening when just such a lady, trailing clouds of radiance from her up-town world, came into the room. Her in- trusion offended some vague sense of fitness in me, so that when 3 4 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW she asked me an innocent question I ordered her sharply not to interrupt our meeting. The reward of my impertinence was an invitation, several days later, to call on her at a West End Ave- nue address. I had never seen such elegance at close range (though it was only an ordinary apartment), and passed through the inter- view in numb bewilderment. I remember the softness of the rugs, like lush grass, and the loveliness of a little boy who called my hostess “mother” — the word “mother” somehow did not jibe in my experience with glossy, care-free, nicely-upholstered women; it had always meant harassed, overworked and slovenly women. But what I carried away chiefly was a burning humiliation because the lining of the overcoat I gave up to the valet was in tatters. In my confusion, when I retrieved the coat, I slipped my arm into the torn lining instead of the sleeve, and the glamorous lady herself helped me to extricate myself. The shame of it rankled for months. Poverty was only half of our routine ordeal. The other half was an acute awareness of being aliens and intruders in a nation of Americans. Between the world of our text-books and movies and newspapers and the other world of our homes and parents there was a deep gulf: different interests, preoccupations, ideals, languages. On the threshhold of your home you removed your American self like an overcoat, and you put it on once more when you left home. We lived this double existence so continuously that the idea of an integrated life, in which home and out-of- home activities were part of the same pattern, was beyond our imagination. The school principal, Dr. Kottman, talked casually in my hear- ing one day about playing baseball with his son. The implication of a father who talked the same language and played the same games as his son, I can still recall, struck me as bizarre. No American with deep roots in the American soil can under- stand the nostalgic homelessness of immigrant children, the pathos of second-generation aliens. Land where our fathers died , land of the Pilgrims’ fride — sung in the assembly hall by several thou- sand Jewish, Russian, Italian, other foreign boys and girls whose fathers had never heard of the Pilgrims. We were “Americanized” about as gently as horses are broken in. In the whole crude process, we sensed a disrespect for the alien traditions in our homes and REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS 5 came unconsciously to resent and despise those traditions, good and bad alike, because they seemed insuperable barriers between ourselves and the adopted land. We were caught and tangled in a mass of people for the most part resigned to their fate, sodden with hopelessness, and in a stupor of physical exhaustion. For the average boy it was easier to burrow deeper into the heap, taking the aroma and the drab- ness of the East Side into his soul, than to attempt the Gargan- tuan job of escaping. The Americanism that he acquired and dragged into the writhing heap was the loud, vulgar, surface — the slang, the sporting page, the crude success ideals of the movies and yellow journals — and nothing of the grandeur at the core of America. But when the urge to escape does enter into the blood of a slum denizen, it is a feverish thing that drives him with whips of fire. “Success” is never a pale beckoning star. It is a flaming ball that blots out nearly everything else in the boy’s firmament. Elsewhere it may be mere self-fulfillment. On our East Side it was that and more — a species of defiance and revenge against the clinging squalors and the smugness of the lucky ones and, above all, against the social system that breeds such plague spots. Whatever the expression of that pitiless ambition, it is always shot through with hatred for the status quo. Sometimes it is openly defiant of restraints and carries the jungle law of dog-eat-dog competition to its logical conclusion in crime, gangsterism. At other times, the predatory technique is kept within the safer bounds of legality. Whether the exceptional boy revolting against putrescent surroundings turns into an unprincipled criminal or an unprin- cipled businessman is often simply a question of the proportions of courage and cleverness in his make-up. And occasionally, as in my own case, the clamoring protest transcends the personal. The driving ambition widens out to em- brace all the disinherited and exploited. It becomes a conscious protest against ugliness and injustice as such, and embraces pas- sionately whatever formula of social revolt is closest to hand. There Is a vast and unbridgeable difference between the radicalism that is accepted at second-hand, from the outside, through the mind, and the revolt that is nurtured in one’s very bones. Those of us who were — or thought ourselves — “socialists” instinctively, 6 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW through spontaneous hatred for the reality as we savored it, could never quite get over a certain distrust of “converts” to the cause from other social strata. 2 I thought myself a “socialist” almost as soon as I thought at all and years before I had heard of the Communist Manifesto. Congressman Meyer London, the shrill personification of the East Side yearning for Justice, loomed much larger on my hori- zon than Karl Marx. Long before I learned the standardized proofs that capitalism is doomed, I knew for a certainty that the whole world was one battle ground, contested between fat-bellied Capitalists and downtrodden Workers, and that victory for the Workers, for my side, was inevitable. The coming triumph was at most a matter of chronology, and life’s one duty was to bring the date nearer. The class struggle was not an academic formula or a political slogan. It seemed to me as real as my friends and school and the burden of the monthly rent and gas bills. It was something much too obvious to need explaining or defending, let alone proving. My memory can conjure up no one moment of thunderous illu- mination when the rightness and certainty of the socialist future of eternal justice and equality were revealed to me. In our multi- farious world of dreams and ugliness, a boy soaked up a social faith, if he was built that way, as naturally and imperceptibly as his schoolmates and blockmates soaked up the tough-guy philos- ophy or the success-at-any-price philosophy. By a sort of social osmosis. As a child, down in a stinking steerage hole full of vermin and vomit, in one of the foul ships which, at that time, dumped car- goes of bewildered immigrants on the American shores, I treas- ured a vision of the fairyland called America. I shut my eyes and 'saw it clearly — the glittering streets, the happy faces, the new shiny land stocked with beauty. That lovely vision broke sickeningly on the garbage cans of the Corlears Hook section of New York. The specters of “slack” seasons, of strikes for a living wage, of illness that cut off all earnings for a large family — the sight of my father’s cadaverous face after a long day at the machine (it was a curiously handsome and sensitive face under REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS J the mask of bottomless fatigue)— these were less horrible when viewed as aspects of the perpetual class hostilities and as prelude to an ineffable triumph. Our ant-heap was infested with street gangs. But I found my- self somehow enrolled in a “Socialist Sunday School” on East Broadway, run by the Workmen’s Circle. The hymns we chanted were Arise, ye prisoners of starvation , Arise , ye wretched l. of the earth! } and The peopled flag is deepest red . One May Day I stood on a platform and recited a lugubrious poem about a beggar boy which began: Alone in the cold and dreary street, With my torn old clothes and bare cold feet. Among those who heard me was a beautiful child of seven, with curls to her shoulders. I was all of thirteen, with the weight of suffering humanity on my thin shoulders and a volume of Dostoievsky under my arm. Ten years later this girl became my wife. Twenty-four years later, because the sad rhymes about the beggar boy had become a tradition in the family, our daughter made me recite them in the inappropriate setting of the Ethical Culture School. From the Socialist Sunday School I graduated naturally into the “Yipsels,” the Young People’s Socialist League, where we debated weighty questions and took courses in Marx and Spencer and distributed leaflets for socialist candidates without the slightest hope of their election. The highest reach of anxious parental hope in homes like mine was to turn sons into doctors and lawyers and to marry off daugh- ters to doctors and lawyers. In affectionate moments, proud rela- tives, impressed by my seriousness and report cards, tried the pre- fix “Dr.” before my name, and, miraculously, it always fitted nicely. The sacrifice involved in sending me to high school, and then to college, rather than into the factory, practically made my eventual emergence as a physician or lawyer a duty — a very oner- ous duty. The fact that neither calling stirred me to enthusiasm made me feel a good deal of an ingrate towards my parents and towards my elder brother, who, since the age of thirteen, had been among the sweated legions bending over sewing machines. But I had no stomach for the professional respectability to which 8 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW they aspired for me. Ostensibly I was being primed for the law. But my dreams were of writing, not as a means of making a living, but as a weapon on my side of the class war. My parents’ sacrifices consisted in dispensing with my potential contribution to the family income and in providing me with food, clothing and shelter. But it could not easily be extended to in- clude bugaboo items of carfares and occasional expenses. By work- ing after school hours, I managed to earn these myself. At one tragic juncture, internal politics ousted me from a night job at the Educational Alliance and the lack of a single dollar a week threatened to cut short my high school career. That sum, ad- vanced for ten weeks running by Adolph Nash, my Scoutmaster, helped a little to patch up the faith in social work which the ouster had shattered. By the end of the ten weeks, I was earning three dollars a week as “assistant professor” to a teacher of English in the hurry- up preparatory schools for adults. My function was chiefly the correction of examination papers on literary subjects about which I knew precisely nothing. One night I would remain up, hur- riedly digesting As You Like It in preparation for a set of test papers j another night it might be Hamlet or Silas Marner . This “professorship” I retained for two or three years, despite pro- found ignorance of the subjects my employer taught and even deeper ignorance of certain alarming predilections on his part which he described as “hedonism.” I looked up the word in dic- tionaries and warded off his occasional experimental sallies in my direction (luckily his hedonism was not insistent) but I did not understand what it was all about until many years later. This brand of hedonism was one of the few weeds that did not find root in our slum soil. 3 The Russian revolution, in March, 1917, was, for most of the boys in my college freshman classes, just one more headline in a time replete with startling news. For a few of us, it was the rap- turous harbinger of that Great Change in the glow of which we had warmed our spirits. Kerensky, Lvov, Miliukov, fraternization between Russian and German soldiers, the rise of Soviets — great names and great events, amidst the fumes of inspired rhetoric. REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS 9 Even the confusion was heart-warming, because it sparkled with words and phrases learned in the socialist Sunday schools, shouted in the Meyer London campaigns, debated in the Yipsel circles. Our intimate, esoteric language suddenly holding the center of the world stage! The exultant realization that our thinking and dreaming had become history so soon! We hummed the new Russian Hymn to Freedom and we hummed the International at socialist lectures and dances, blissfully unaware that the two melo- dies were locked in life-and-death combat. Then came yet greater names and greater events: Lenin, Trot- sky, Zinoviev, Smolny Institute, the battleship Aurora , the sur- render of the Winter Palace. The Bolshevik seizure of power in the name of the Soviets seemed confirmation of the new era born eight months before. We envied the men and women who lived and fought within the circles of light shed by the heroes of the triumphant class war. We decked the revolution in the opalescent raiment of our visions. A Fatherland at last, and a focus for our hopes! Our New York lives seemed hatefully prosaic by contrast with the poetry of victorious revolution. The draft . . . slackers . . . Liberty Bonds . . . Liberty cabbage. . . . Give until it hurts. . . . Good-by , Broadway , hello y France . ... It all seemed a stupid burlesque in the blinding light of events in Russia. Stupid- est of all were the college classes, the marching and saluting and bayonet drills of the Students Army Training Corps into which we had been herded. For some of us Armistice, for all the hysteria and noise, was an anti-climax, because there had been Brest-Litovsk. Soon after I was demobilized and presented with an honorable discharge, I heard Norman Thomas speak. I can recall neither the occasion of the meeting nor what he said, but only my inner ex- citement. I carried away the revelation that the Russian revolution had no boundaries, since it was the initial stage of the world revo- lution. The fight against capitalists in America, the battle to restore freedom to political prisoners and conscientious objectors, were just part of the world- wide defense of the Russian revolution. I am not certain that Thomas said these things. More likely they were my private deductions from the fervor with which he de- picted the capitalist injustice around us. 10 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW On the very day when I removed my army uniform, I wrote my first publicity story for the Workers Defense Union, organized by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with offices at the Rand School. Day after day, I composed these stories, destined for the New York Call and other radical publications, recounting the sufferings of I.W.W.’s and other political prisoners, the depredations of the Department of Justice on a rampage, the havoc being wrought by the American Legion. It was a time of raids on radicals, “Treat- ’em-rough!” hooliganism, and mass deportations. Tales of horror poured in upon our Workers Defense Union. Our work seemed to me an intrinsic, inseparable part of the civil wars being fought out then in the land of the Soviets. It was all part of the Russian revolution and was, despite the cruelty and the suffering, curiously exhilarating — like the exhilaration of war. And when I left my parents’ home in Brooklyn for a shabby fur- nished room on lower Second Avenue, that, too, seemed part of the imminent world revolution. Society and I were coming of age at the same time! The world was casting off its capitalist shackles and I was casting off the shackles of home and school at the same time. The coincidence, of course, was a marvel of mar- vels, even if no one realized the mystic significance of that con- juncture of events except myself. The thrill of seeing my name in print, secretly cherished, was no selfish indulgence as with some of my literary friends, since my writing was for the cause. Such is the towering egotism of youth, even in its most altruistic poses. There was that May Day in 1919, a day of blood and terror and the excruciating pain, of helpless anger. Workers’ parades were smashed, radicals were brutally mauled, jails were crowded. The telephone rang continuously to apprise us of more raids, more brutality, more arrests. Late that afternoon the patriotic marauders swarmed through the Rand School, clambering up fire-escapes. A metal workers’ union shared our offices. I can still see the burly workman with an iron weight in his hairy fist waiting tensely at the door for the first Legionnaire who forced it open. Only the accident that they overlooked our room prevented another serious casualty. Yet that appalling day was touched with rapture. We felt our- selves in the thick of a great struggle for Justice, only a few of REVOLT AGAINST UGLINESS I 1 us, but pitting our faith against something monstrous. We had just emerged from another battle and the lull was sweet. There was a separate rapture for me. The others in the office may have been aware of her — “Little Sunshine,” one of the men nicknamed her. But in my eyes she was the loveliest thing ever created. She came to the office that evening in a middy blouse and a red tarn, and she remembered how I had recited Nobody’s Child centuries ago. She was now nearly fifteen, radiant and elec- trically vivacious, and picked out on the typewriter words more wonderful than anything Shakespeare or Goethe had ever put together: “Dear Comrade Eugene: I Uke you . Do you Uke me ? Yours truly y Billy ” II. The Clowning Called Justice THE next two years were so full, so rich, so tight-packed with sharp impressions and enthusiasms that they seem in retrospect a whole lifetime. I worked briefly on several newspapers, among them the Erie, Pa., Dispatch, and Financial America on Wall Street, and wrote copy for some months in the publicity depart- ments of two motion picture companies. I succeeded in getting sev- eral high-pitched effusions into arty little magazines. I became habituated to the thrill of my name in print. These things, how- ever, were secondary. First place belonged to the exciting friend- ships and activities in the radical movement. There was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the most brilliant woman I had ever met. A veteran of the front trenches in the labor strug- gle since fifteen, she was, at thirty, attractive, winsomely Irish in her wit and her savor of life, with a remarkably cool intelli- gence behind her fiery oratory and personality. In the Mesaba Range strike, the Paterson and Lawrence strikes, her eloquence and courage and sweetness had won her tens of thousands of worshipful friends among the workers. And there was Carlo Tresca, big, bearded, boastful, life-loving, and as unlike the em- bittered anarchist of popular tradition as possible. Priest-baiting and spaghetti were among his chief passions, and his hairbreadth escapes from enemy bullets everywhere from Abruzzi to the cop- per empire of Montana were ample proof of his charmed life. And Fred Biedenkapp, the most Latin and temperamental Ger- man that ever lived. And the soft-spoken Vincent St. John — “the Saint” to “Wobbly” fellow- workers — full of mature class-war wis- dom, tales of prospecting for gold, and off-color stories. He was a compact little man who conveyed a sense of immense concen- trated strength in reserve — the kind of man who needed only a first-rate revolution to win him immortality. And scores of other I.W.W.’s, anarchists, socialists, American lumberj'acks, Jewish clothing workers, Russian intellectuals, Italian terrorists, Hindu 12 THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE I 3 nationalists- — even liberals with creases in their pants and Harvard accents were not taboo. I had entered the American radical milieu in the twilight of its brief Golden Age, which had reached its high noon just before the war. United-front slogans had not yet become sources of dis- union. Differences of opinion were sharp enough, but they re- mained essentially a family affair. As against the rest of the world, which meant everyone from J. P. Morgan to Matthew Woll, there was a solid front. And the symbol of that unity after 1917 was the Russian revo- lution. The fact that shiploads of assorted deportees, with every shade of radical philosophy represented, sailed towards Russia without the slightest misgivings about the revolution and its course, is proof of the vitality of that symbol. In the autumn of 1919, the Workers Defense Union sent me to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to cover the trial of Charles Krieger, an I.W.W. organizer accused of dynamiting the home of a Mr. Pew, a Standard Oil official. I stopped in Kansas City and was met at the station by the I.W.W. attorney in the case, Fred H. Moore, and Ella Reeves Bloor, that grand old lady of the American labor movement who then, as now, was known affectionately as “Mother” Bloor. Moore, rather sinister-looking under his broad- brimmed Western hat (a few years later, as defense lawyer for Sacco and Vanzetti, he was to become the most hated man in Massachusetts) took in my hundred-odd pounds of scrawny youth- fulness, my poetic haircut, the bohemian untidiness of my clothes, in one scowling inspection. He did not trouble to hide his disgust. “And I thought Gurley was sending us a man!” he said. Despite this inauspicious reception, we were close friends almost immediately and remained friends until his death a few years ago. Books about the American labor and radical movements have not done justice to Moore. A brilliant lawyer, quixotically devoted and self-sacrificing, he was handicapped by a genius for non-conformity. He had started in the Northwest as attorney for the railroads, but just on the brink of precocious success, had scrapped it and begun anew in Los Angeles. One day in 1912, he was called on the phone by a casual I.W.W. acquaintance who had been arrested in a free speech fight in San Diego. Fred took his hat and his revolver. PRELUDE TO MOSCOW 14 “Pm running over to San Diego,” he told his law associates, “to see what I can do for this fellow. I’ll be back soon.” He returned some twelve years later. From one labor fight to another he drifted, taking on the cases that could not afford the more publicized attorneys, the hopeless, desperate cases in the labor struggle. Many of those legal battles have become famous in American labor history — the Ettore-Gio- vanniti case; the Spokane free speech fight; the Everett, Wash., case; the Bisbee, Arizona, case; the Wichita I.W.W. case — -but no share of this fame accrued to him. Always he quarreled with the defense committees or the clients or got himself into some private emotional scrape and lost the laurels of victory. Even in the Sacco- Vanzetti case, to which he gave four years — and there probably would have been no such case if Moore had not taken hold of it and turned it to a cause celebre — a well-paid capitalist lawyer in the end reaped the credit and the fame. The dynamiting charge against “Big Boy” Krieger, a tall, raw- boned Pennsylvania Dutchman, was so palpably a frame-up that no one even pretended it was anything else. The average citizen of Tulsa, which was then ruled by a vigilante Committee of One Hundred, merely had a sporting interest in whether the Standard Oil crowd could make their fantastic invention stick. The case was the last stage of a determined effort of the oil interests to drive I.W.W. union agitation, which had been making considerable head- way, out of the state. Organizers had been beaten, tarred and feathered, ridden out on rails. But they kept coming back like so many pesky flies. One night someone set off dynamite under the Pew porch, where Mrs. Pew normally slept. She wasn’t there, it happened, and not much harm was done. But the press promptly headlined it as Red Terror and the authorities proceeded to round up every known and suspected I.W.W. in Oklahoma. The police were considerably chagrined when it appeared that not one of the men taken into custody had been in or near Tulsa the night of the explosion. After the recent tar-and-feather parties, the Wobblies had apparently kept at a distance from the city. But that little detail did not checkmate patriotic ardor. The Red Ter- ror, the police decided, had been applied by absent treatment. The gangling Pennsylvania boy, Charlie Krieger, had passed through Tulsa three days before the dynamiting and had stopped THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE I 5 overnight at a hotel. The state now charged that he had hired three notorious yeggs, the renowned John Hall and two of his young desperadoes, to blow up Pew, and that he had done so at the express order of Big Bill Haywood in Chicago. By the time the trial came up, Hall had been committed to Leavenworth Penitentiary for some Federal crime, but his lieutenants, who were in an Oklahoma jail, were ready to plead guilty to the Pew dyna- miting as Kriegeris agents. That dynamiting had not been the only dirty work that night. About the same time a post-office had been broken into, its safe blown, and the contents carried off. The two thugs had originally been arrested in connection with the post-office job. The dyna- miting of public buildings carried a fifty years’ prison sentence. The dynamiting of private dwellings carried only a ten years’ rap. They knew enough arithmetic to prefer responsibility for the les- ser job, particularly when the bargain won them some influential friends. They were ready to plead guilty to the Pew job as agents of the I.W.W. monster. It was a neat and amusing story. Its transparency only added to the joy of the occasion. The prosecution was prepared for everything — except Fred Moore. The trial, lasting ten weeks, was the longest in the history of Oklahoma at that time. Every now and then, the court recessed for a few hours and disposed of some minor matters like murder cases. Flint Moss, hired by Standard Oil, ostensibly assisting the public prosecutor, actually was in complete control. Humiliated by his virtual expulsion from the case, the prosecutor tipped us off occasionally on Flint’s plans. The judge, a decent fellow and un- comfortable under the Standard Oil pressure, sometimes called Moore and myself into his chambers j we talked about life and literature, but now and then His Honor let fall a hint or two that helped Moore pull the props from under the frame-up. Even a court stenographer, being also stenographer for the vigilantes, telephoned one midnight to warn us that a formal decision had been reached that evening to run Moore and the other Reds out of town. Why the decision was not carried out, and why we were not riddled by bullets that tense afternoon when Flint Moss, under the guise of a summation to the jury, all but incited the tensely hostile crowd in the courtroom to settle us right there and then, 1 6 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW amazed us. Not until afterward did we find out that we had been under the sharp-eyed protection of a little army of private gun- men, under orders to shoot down the first man who touched us. But even if we were sadly ignorant of this invisible and unsolicited defense, the vigilantes had been apprised of it. The orders had been issued by the picturesque three-hundred- pound dictator of a nearby town. He was perhaps the last o f the oil barons, the only great “independent” operator in that vicinity, and he hated Standard Oil even as Standard Oil hated Reds. Any- one accused of an attempt to erase a Standard Oil official auto- matically rated the support of his private army, recruited from the prisons of the Southwest under laws permitting the parole of prisoners who could show respectable jobs waiting for them. The hulking oil man explained it all to us after the trial, as he sat on the huge butcher’s block in his refrigerator, oblivious to the cold while the rest of us congealed slowly into icicles. He was disap- pointed at Fred Moore’s assurances that Krieger was innocent and that private terror was no part of the I.W.W. code. Haywood’s movement there and then lost a potential millionaire recruit. “Sure,” he said, “my men were all around the courtroom, with their fingers on the trigger. The Standard Oil bastards knew that if anyone let loose there’d be hell to pay. Yeh, I’m respected in these parts, I am.” He laughed till the immense meat block shook. The trial, as I said, dragged for many weeks. Every time Moore demolished an essential sector of the state’s flimsy case, the prose- cution got a brief adjournment and when court opened again there it was, with brand-new witnesses to bolster up the blasted sector. It was most amusing, and Tulsa chuckled. The two rat-faced yeggs testified in low voices, with downcast eyes, how Krieger had hired them and Hall to pull the Pew dynamiting job. They were very convincing in describing how they had stolen the dynamite but rather vague on the dynamiting itself. Haywood’s defense committee in Chicago was chronically short of funds. Besides, more important legal battles had a prior claim. Our burdens of perjured witnesses, murderous public hostility, and a frankly unfriendly jury were therefore complicated by financial distress. I recall the morning when we all turned our pockets inside out to find that the pooled resources would barely THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE 1 7 cover coffee and doughnuts. As we chewed the doughnuts, won- dering when we would eat again, we smiled over a local eight- column streamer headline “revealing” that a million-dollar fund was at the disposal of the Red agitators defending Krieger. The dangers and hardships of our situation drew us closer to- gether. They added a tang of high adventure to the routine busi- ness of defending another Wobbly in another frame-up. Besides Moore and myself, there were the handsome Lola Darroch (dur- ing the Sacco-Vanzetti case in Boston she became Mrs. Moore); Caroline Lowe, a sweet spinsterish lady lawyer driven by her social conscience to defend deportees and I.W.W.’s and to intrude her- self precisely where her primness seemed most out of place; a poverty-ridden local attorney named George Bonstein, a Jewish pioneer of the Indian country with the temerity to tackle the whole Standard Oil caboodle; and a number of roughneck Wob- blies whom Moore had saved from jail or the noose at various times and who hung around like faithful dogs in the hope of serving him. These latter were not too fastidious about the nature of the service, nor was Moore himself too finicky. He had no inhibitions about using the same weapons as the other side, when necessary. The fact that Standard Oil officials tried to buy him into their service before he left Tulsa, is some measure of his equipment. . 2 The most melodramatic episode in that unequal battle, perhaps, centered around the enigmatic John Hall, a desperado in the best Jesse James tradition. The state made no effort to bring him from Leavenworth, preferring to rest on the testimony of his under- lings. Moore’s problem was whether to bring him in as a defense witness. It was hazardous business. If our own witness were to support the other two in their cock-and-bull story, Krieger’s fate would be sealed. Moore interviewed Hall in his cell but elicited only a non-committal smile. “What I’ll say is my own business,” Hall told him. “That fellow’s a straight-shooter,” Moore reported back to us. “He’s no rat. I’d stake my life on his telling the truth.” But he hesitated to stake Krieger’s freedom on his impression. Caroline Lowe listened. A light flared in her meek eyes. She an- 1 8 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW nounced that she, too, wanted to talk to Hall before a decision was made. She did, and returned to confirm Moore’s impression. There was a warmth in her report that made us nudge one an- other. For years after this Leavenworth meeting, the school- teacherish Miss Lowe and the notorious killer maintained a cor- respondence. Up until her untimely death, she tried to obtain his release. At least she was spared the sorrow of his end. John Hall was, I believe, the second man to die in the famous lethal cham- ber experiments in Arizona. But she had her moment of rapturous pride when Hall, calm, self-possessed and a little contemptuous, was brought into the Tulsa courtroom as a defense witness. It was a courtroom made for paradox. The judge puffed a big cigar under the “No Smoking” sign crusted with smoke. Spec- tators with revolvers in their holsters threw “howdy” to their friends in the jury box. Moore was completely in the dark as to what Hall’s testimony would be. The prosecution had the post- office job as a spur to the witness’s memory. But Hall, black as his record was, did not seek safety at the expense of an innocent stranger. I have never seen human creatures tremble and wilt as did the two yeggs when confronted with their gang leader. He withered them with one slow accusing scrutiny and never once looked again in their direction. Hall confirmed their story of the stealing of the dynamite, but denied ever having seen Krieger before the latter’s arrest. He denied any knowledge of the Pew explosion. No, he knew nothing of the post-office job either. “Why did you need dynamite?” Flint Moss hammered at him hour after hour. “Oh, I just wanted to blow some stumps out of the road.” “What did you do with the dynamite?” “I blew up those stumps. They annoyed me.” He stuck to the story, unsmiling, calm, while spectators guf- fawed. Excessive physical courage is not my chief vice. The threat of a tar-and-feather party or worse under which we worked occa- sionally sent undignified thoughts of retreat through my head. In that week before the trial started, for instance. Perhaps by way of punishing me for being so young and scrawny when he had expected a full-sized man, Moore had sent me ahead into Tulsa THE CLOWNING CALLED JUSTICE 1 9 to investigate the state of mind of the community. I decided to investigate first of all the state of mind of the spiritual leaders of Tulsa. I listed all the clergymen in town and started on my rounds. The first of these men of God was a bulky, red-faced cow- puncher in appearance. He listened to my story, then leaned over and gripped my shoulders. There was nothing remotely affection- ate about that grip. “Young man,” he said, “I have only one piece of advice for you. Take the next train out of town, or we’ll hang your hide on a fence!” In no less picturesque forms the equivalent advice was proffered by seven or eight other muscular vicars of the Lord in Tulsa. That Sunday I was the text of a sermon in one church, I learned from Monday’s papers. Only the Catholic priest showed any friendli- ness or any sane resentment against the local Red baiting. I have had a soft spot in my heart for Catholic priests ever since. Eventually, I took the stand and quoted the high-minded ad- vice of the Lord’s anointed, swear- words and all. We did not get the change of venue we demanded, but we did have the satisfac- tion of seeing one of the clergymen squirm in his seat. It was the same clergyman who preached sermons to the jury on Sundays, since jurors could not be denied the solace of spiritual uplift, on themes as remote from the case in court as patriotism and foreign agitators. Scream headlines out of Centralia, Washington, on Armistice Day, when the trial was at its height, did not sweeten the atmos- phere for us. They told how I.W.W.’s had “murdered” American Legion paraders, making it clear that Krieger and his friends were part of the same homicidal fraternity. They merely failed to make clear that the I.W.W. boys had shot in defending their union hall against violent invasion by over-stimulated patriots. My reports of the trial, a little late for lack of telegraph tolls and much too full of indignant adjectives, appeared in the New York Call , in the Butte Bulletin , and in four or five other labor papers. A sizzling summary entitled, with a flash of superb origi- nality, Tulsa: a Study in Oil y appeared under my signature in the I.W.W. Monthly . An audience heard the story from me at the Rand School. Then the case entered the limbo of forgotten minor 20 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW sensations. But in my own mind it remained as sign and symbol of the clowning that goes by the name of justice. The jury reported eleven to one for conviction. The one recal- citrant juror emerged with visible proofs that the arguments used on him were the kind that left marks on the body. We learned later that he had had a personal grudge against Standard Oil in some matter connected with a pipe-line on his farm. His insistence on Krieger’s innocence apparently had no more to do with the evidence than the others 5 insistence on Krieger’s guilt. In a second trial, which I did not attend, the whole case col- lapsed and Krieger was freed. The last I heard he was settled down in his home town as a law-abiding plumber with a taste for solid respectability. III. On the Eve of Fascism IN THE autumn of 1920, Italian workers seized the metal plants in Milan and ran up the red flag. Hope of world revolution, dimmed by reverses elsewhere, flared up once more. And since I thought the impending Italian revolution needed its John Reed out of America no less than its Russian precursor, I was soon in the steerage of an Italian liner bound for Naples. I was equipped with credentials from the Federated Press, a struggling labor news agency, and the Liberator; one cardboard suitcase half-stuflFed with paper to keep my worldly belongings from rattling ; and that week’s salary from Financial America by way of sinews of war. The long hand of Italian anarcho-syndicalism (via a well-placed word from Carlo Tresca) reached down into the bowels of the ship and yanked me up into the comforts of officers’ quarters. On deck I struck up an acquaintance with a slim, shy fellow a few years my senior, Norman Matson by name. He, too, was inclined to push the ship along for fear of missing the revolution. For a day or two, we pretended to be the plenipotentiaries of respectable capitalist journals. Then we looked one another straight in the eyes, laughed, and laid our cards — that is to say, our press cre- dentials — on the table. He, too, was exclusive and authenticated correspondent for the Federated Press and the Liberator , and a candidate for the role of Italy’s John Reed. Norman and I shared a room, our deficits, and our soaring thoughts in the next six months, and discovered that Italy was brimming over with poten- tial John Reeds, all representing the Federated Press and the Liberator. If the Italian proletariat failed to live up to our expectations, at least Italy did not. Naples was an extravagant dream come true. We explored its narrow streets and smelly cafes and stuffy music halls. We hunted up comrades at Socialist Party headquarters and wrote reams of “first impressions” which, alas!, never got printed. We helped a scared and bungling secret service man, assigned to 22 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW shadow us, to make out his report and treated him to black coffees. We mixed with Neapolitans in a daze of intoxication that blended the Bay of Naples and Viva Lenin e Trotsky! > Pompei and social- ist mass meetings, everything exotically old and desperate, with the Soviets around the corner. Then came Rome and the Pension Dinesen and socialist Depu- ties and Roman girls who exchanged Italian and kisses for Eng- lish and kisses. We went into homes in crowded side-streets where grimy children answered to the name of Lenin and Trotsky and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg — thousands of these little Lenins and Liebknechts were destined to be hurriedly re-christened after the fascist March on Rome. We watched fist fights on the floor of Parliament and saw the earlier castor-oil episodes in the rebirth of the glory that was Rome. How I managed to pay the rent and board at the pension is a miracle somewhat blurred in memory. A few articles in the Nation helped ; a dollar went a long way when turned into inflated lire. Fred Moore, by the time I left for Italy, was in full command of an obscure case in Boston involving a fishmonger named Barto- lomeo Vanzetti and a shoemaker named Nicola Sacco. He had given me explicit instructions to arouse all of Italy to the signifi- cance of the Massachusetts murder case, and to hunt up certain witnesses and evidence. The Italian labor movement, however, had other things to worry about. An ex-socialist named Benito Mussolini and a locust plague of blackshirts, for instance. Some- how I did get pieces about Sacco and Vanzetti into Avanti ! , which Mussolini had once edited, and into one or two other papers. I even managed to stir up a few socialist onorevoles , like Deputy Mucci from Sacco’s native village in Puglia, and Deputy Misiano, a Sicilian firebrand at the extreme Left. Mucci brought the Sacco- Vanzetti affair to the floor of the Chamber of Deputies, the first jet of foreign protest in what was eventually to become a pounding international flood. Norman and I went to Livorno to witness the epochal congress of the Socialist Party, which saw the birth of a Communist Party and the tragic splintering of the Left forces that opened the road to Mussolini’s legions. We consorted only with the communist wing, of course, and sang paeans of praise for Terracini and Bom- bacci and the other leaders. Nothing less than immediate revo- ON THE EVE OF FASCISM 23 lution suited our fervor and theirs. The excessive caution of the parliamentarians and timid evolutionists, we were convinced, had nipped a Soviet revolution in the bud when the metal workers took over the factories. Resentment against the lost opportunity smoldered in our hearts and flamed into oratory from the Left. We had on our side, moreover, the weight of the triumphant Russian proletariat whose agents were in Livorno to guide and inspire. What matter if the Bolshevik faction was a minority in this conference, since it spoke with the voice of the Third Inter- national, not to mention History and Humanity? Only one argument directed against the Left baffled its orators. It was hurled at them by Serrati from the Center and Modigliani from the Right. In the light of subsequent Italian history that argument seems irony at its most tragic. “A dictatorship may be possible in Russia,” the Left was re- peatedly admonished, “but surely, comrades, it is unthinkable in our country. We Italians are individualists, anarchists, by nature. Discipline, blind obedience? Ma che! When an Italian sees a ( No Smoking 5 sign in a tramcar or theater, it reminds him to light up. To talk of organized restraint and dictatorship in our land is foolishness ! 55 Even the communists could not deny anything so axiomatic. They said that in Italy, maybe, the new social order would be established without the need for dictatorial methods. A little more than a year later the fascist dictatorship was in force. . . . Though we posed as correspondents, the Livorno congress was no mere “story 55 for Norman and me. We felt it to be an exten- sion of the civil warfare over in Soviet Russia, a local sector on the widening front of an international class struggle. We cheered and booed at the proper points along with communist sympathizers in the six steep galleries of the Teatro Goldoni. But the Associated Press correspondent, come from Fiume for the occasion, took the proceedings less seriously. He was never quite sure who was Left or Right or why. Nothing in his training as a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, police reporter had prepared him to record an epoch-making split in the Italian socialist ranks. In- deed, his private summary of the talk-fest was remarkable both for its simplicity and comprehensiveness. Strolling between Nor- man and myself after a stormy session, he confided it to us: 24 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW “Just look at ’em! Karl Marx and the other guy with the alfalfa on his chin whose pictures are on the wall, and Bombacci, Serrati, Modigliani!”— he called off the leaders of all the factions who happened to wear beards — “just a lot of Jews!” The other guy with the alfalfa, of course, was Friedrich Engels, as Germanic as Bismarck. Bombacci, the eccentric commanist leader, was an ex-priest. Only one or two of the other leaders in the limelight were Jews, and in Italy the anti-Semitic issue was never a serious factor. But for a Pittsburgher whiskers are whiskers. The exigencies of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense took me to the southern olive and grape provinces, into Sacco’s native village of Torremaggiore. I found that his elder brother, Sabino Sacco, was the socialist sindaco (mayor) of Torremaggiore. Red flags were flying over the municipal building and the cooperative store, and nearly every infant born since November, 1917, was named for some Bolshevik deity. I even saw a baby “Soviet” peacefully suck- ing her mother’s breast. Rumors of the blackshirt camions rumbled even through Puglia, and occasionally violent incidents were re- ported from larger towns. But the suggestion that a fascist regime was in the offing would have sounded like gibberish to Torre- maggiore and a thousand other villages gesturing with red flags and Russian catch-phrases. Sacco-Vanzetti matters also sent me into the Marchesan hills, beyond Jesi, to a sleepy, mud-colored village called Santa Maria Nove. I tracked down an anarchist deportee from Massachusetts, whose yellow-haired wife wept for the vanished glories of life in a New England shoe town, snatched from her by the ardor of Mitchell Palmer’s agents. The man’s shelves were lined with brochures on the home manufacture of bombs and he professed himself a terrorist of the Galleani school. So deep, however, had the fear of American law and police entered his heart that it needed a week of pleading and threatening and pressure by Mer- lino, the grand old man of the anarcho-syndicalist movement, to bring this terrorist to the point of signing an innocuous affidavit in support of Sacco’s alibi. No sooner had I descended from the Marchesan heights, though, than he recovered his magnificent courage. It expressed itself in a colored picture post-card addressed to me at my prim Danish pension and showed an anarchist iconoclast hurling a smoking ON THE EVE OF FASCISM 25 bomb at a row of gods. My standing with the Roman police must have been greatly improved by this belated boldness at my expense. It was not the only time I was to meet bomb-throwing bravado masking abject cowardice. Already, in the civil strife between blackshirts and communists or socialists, the casualties were too numerous for the newspapers to report in full. Daily tallies of the number of Reds and Blacks killed all over the country had to suffice, and the preponderance of communist over fascist deaths increased rapidly. The legend which pictures the March on Rome as a bloodless seizure of power ignores the ferocious blood-letting which preceded it. 2 Panic spread in the Italian labor ranks. Almost overnight it seemed, after the Livorno split, the sense of confidence and faith in their own strength departed from the revolutionary elements. An influx of communist refugees from Hungary, after the col- lapse of Bela Kun’s government, deepened the gloom in the Italian circles with which I was in contact. Norman and I smuggled a few of these homeless, penniless refugees into our hotel room for a period and heard hair-raising tales of torture in Horthy’s prisons. One boy bared his back and chest by way of illustration. They were thickly sown with tiny raw wounds. “Cigarette burns," he explained, “a favorite Hungarian amusement.” I followed the news out of Russia with anxious and intimate concentration. Every defeat of some interventionist or counter- revolutionary general, every advance of the Soviet forces into Poland, was a personal triumph. There came a day when the Soviet drive was turned back at the very gates of Warsaw, and the bottom seemed to drop out of my own life. I remember pacing the roof of our fension with Norman, dis- cussing that blow. It seemed to us that the fate of all history, of the whole human race, was in the balance. If Soviet Russia were beaten, we decided, the darkness of reaction and barbarism would settle over the universe for centuries (we reckoned glibly in cen- turies in our idealistic trance of those days). The only bright spot in the encroaching gloom was the arrival of Vorovsky as Moscow’s first Ambassador to Italy, and the open- PRELUDE TO MOSCOW 26 ing of the Soviet Embassy. It fired anew my half-conscious ambi- tion to reach Soviet Russia. I seized eagerly at the suggestion of a Soviet attache that he might use me as secret courier to Moscow — an American would be a safer messenger across the more danger- ous stretches between Rome and the Kremlin. Arrangements to this end were in swing at the time I was arrested and expelled from Italy. Chagrin over the spoiling of those plans was, in fact, the bitterest ingredient in my expulsion. It was while about to depart for a town in central Italy, after the second bell had been sounded and the locomotive strained at its leash awaiting the final signal, that half a dozen detectives piled into my coupe and took me into custody. A tall, thin, mysterious and rather dandified Balkan fellow — I never did ascertain whether he was Montenegrin or Serbian or Bulgarian — who was my traveling companion was arrested at the same time. I had met him in Italy through anarchist acquaintances and listened in fascinated horror to his boastful stories of revolu- tionary exploits. Pulling off fingernails to extract ransom money for the cause from bloated landlords and capitalists was, I recall, among his routine procedures. None of the money, at the moment, was in his pockets and the ease with which I parted from my few lire was evidently my chief recommendation to him. On my part I felt compensated by the atmosphere of recondite mystery and adventure that surrounded him. When Moore wrote me emphasizing the critical importance of obtaining the photograph of an Italian criminal who, as nearly as I could figure out, may have been mixed up in the crime for which Sacco and Vanzetti were being tried, I naturally turned to my Balkan friend for assistance. We were about to embark on the important mission of stealing a photograph from the home of that criminaPs parents in central Italy when the law took us in hand. We were separated and I never saw the man again. To this day I do not know whether I was picked up on his account, or he on mine. From questions in the course of that day’s intensive grilling I surmised that in the eyes of the Italian police, at least, my companion was a terrorist of some importance. But my own brief record of amateur dabbling in revolution was not unknown to the police either. On the commissario’s desk, when I was ushered into his pres- ON THE EYE OF FASCISM 27 ence, was a dossier in which I caught glimpses of my articles in The Nation and other publications and what looked like copies of my private mail. In my pockets and baggage nothing more in- criminating than a few Sacco- Vanzetti pamphlets and letters in Billy’s childish scrawl were discovered. By the end of the day, after I had been formally presented with a paper ordering me to leave the country in twenty-four hours, the commissario had achieved a paternal attitude towards his American charge. At twenty-two I looked eighteen and weighed a hundred-odd pounds. Although a few hours before he had threatened to turn me over to the fascisti for a castor-oil purge, he now draped his arm around my shoulders in the most fatherly manner. “I am a Sicilian, my son,” he said, “and we Sicilians have a proverb. It’s a good proverb and I recommend it to you. Ammazza, ammazza, e tutta una razza. (Kill, kill, it is all a race.) Stop bothering with the Saccos and Vanzettis and the socialist dogs, and take care of your own interests.” He fumbled among the confiscated contents of my pockets and found the picture of the wide-eyed little girl whose letters he had read. “Go home,” he said, “marry this beautiful girl and come back here for a honeymoon.” Nearly ten years later I did bring the girl to Rome. As we walked and drove through the streets, I kept hoping -unreason- ably that the commissario would suddenly appear. Perhaps he was among the hundreds of men in black shirts who were operating on his Sicilian proverb. The intercession of my friends among the socialist deputies won me a few additional days of grace. Then I was escorted to the French frontier. The escort, in civilian clothes, watched until I was safely on the French side of the turnstile at the border station. I was literally without a penny when I stepped off the train in Paris, but by evening was installed in that sanctuary of impecuni- ous American newspapermen, the Paris Herald. I lied about un- derstanding French in order to obtain the job, and rewrote items out of the French paper largely by intuition during the month I survived on the job. The intuition played me false on occasion and Americans on the Continent, I fear, were given some strange 28 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW versions of French current events. By the end of the month I re- ceived a check from America just big enough to pay my way home. Just big enough, with a few francs to spare for the trip. Un- luckily my ship needed some repairs and kept the passengers wait- ing in Havre. The few francs paid for a bed in a sailors 5 hotel but left nothing for food. It was a very hungry young man, a little groggy from weakness, who fell to when at last we were permit- ted to board the boat and taste its fare. It was a delightful trip, devoted to reading and flirting, its beauty somewhat marred by two circumstances. First, because I had no money for cigarettes, and could not bring myself to sponge on others, I pretended that I did not smoke. Second, despite all that a rubber eraser could do, my collar and cuffs grew dingier and their owner more em- barrassed every day; I lacked a clean change. Shamefacedly I borrowed a nickel from a fellow passenger to take me from the pier to my parents 5 home in Brooklyn. Two checks awaited me, one from The Nation and another from The Freeman . Never before or since has money looked bigger. The whole European adventure seemed fantastic and wasteful to my family, which still cherished a slight though fast-fading hope that I would “succeed 55 despite my penchant for strange friends and strange travels. I did not attempt to explain or justify my- self. Instead, I betook myself to a department store, bought a collection of foreign-looking trinkets and presented them non- chalantly as gifts from Paris. May they forgive me the deception when they read these words ! IV. I Defend Sacco and Vanzetti BEFORE the end of that week I was on a boat bound for Boston, where Sacco and Vanzetti had already been condemned to death. Billy, whose picture had struck a paternal spark from a Sicilian heart, was on the boat with me, uninvited, but gloriously welcome. She was nearly seventeen now and magically ripened to woman- hood during my long year of absence. Her beauty seemed to me to transcend even the high promise of her loveliness as a child which had captivated me just ten years before. The mysterious half-realized attraction touched by adolescent embarrassment which had drawn us together across the chasm of six years 5 dif- ference in age suddenly acquired a name: love. In a few weeks we were married. Our fourteen months in Boston were hectic with excitement, as an obscure and seemingly dull murder case expanded into a world- wide cause celebre unparalleled since the Dreyfus affair. They were filled, too, with the bitterness of defeat and frustration, as we bruised ourselves against the unyielding granite of laws and precedents and prejudice in the sanctimonious robes of formal justice. But they were months edged with the ecstasy of young love. We were pleased to find a small, inexpensive apartment right in Back Bay. Gradually, reading newspaper reports of police raids on adjoining houses, it dawned on us that we had settled in a “red light 55 district. Far from being distressed, the discovery pro- vided a fillip of amusement to the enchantments of our young marriage. A Supreme Court Justice, though he knew nothing about it, solved the great problem of furniture for our two-room home. Mrs. Elizabeth Glendower Evans, the hundred arms of whose mothering instinct embraced everything young and helpless in sight, had become aware of the problem. She had the key to the Brookline cellar where Justice Brandeis had stored some old fur- 29 go PRELUDE TO MOSCOW niture on moving to Washington. We selected everything that an impecunious couple could desire to feather their nest. V* hen I met Justice Brandeis at his Cape Cod summer home the following year and confessed the theft, I discovered that Mrs, Evans had not overestimated his generosity. The arrest of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on May 5, 1920, was not mentioned outside the local press. Their conviction on July 14, 1921, rated exactly seven and a half inches on an inside page of the New York Times . Their execution six years later, on August 23, 1927, received five full pages in the same newspaper, several of them recording the sorrow and anger of millions of men and women in every country in the world. A thousand different factors contributed toward that extraor- dinary growth of the case. The obscurity of the simple, uncouth protagonists ; the unctuous smugness of the Brahmin New Eng- land which rallied against them; the fury of Red-baiting in America in the post-war years— everything combined to give the drama and the players a heightened significance. The protracted struggle achieved a peculiar symbolic quality for all men in their own lives. It challenged their institutions and tested their pro- fessed ideals. It ripped the varnished surface off American life and revealed the deep fissures of class and race antagonisms under- neath. A simple murder case, it evolved into a complicated and terrifying sacrificial rite. In a book called The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti , published immediately after the men were electrocuted, I wrote: These aliens by a strange chance combined in their obscure persons all the things that most offended and frightened a smug New Eng- lander. In a section where family pride and an ingrown sense of racial superiority flourished, Sacco and Vanzetti were from the lowest social layer of wops and hunkies and polaks. At a time when Bolshevism gave householders nightmares, Sacco and Vanzetti were by their own confes- sion reddest of the Reds. With the textile industry drifting to the South and the shoe industry to the West, in a period of strikes and discontent, Sacco and Vanzetti were self-confessed labor agitators. Amidst a raging blood-fed patriotism, they were slackers. In Puritan New England they were atheists. It required no special effort or apparatus to generate fear of and hatred for the two men. They attracted the fears and hatreds already I DEFEND SACCO AND VANZETTI 3 I in full play. The belief of some that agents of the Department of Justice and of the State of Massachusetts got together and decided to electro- cute them, innocent or guilty, is naive. It was not a frame-up in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a far more terrible conspiracy: the almost automatic clicking of the ma- chinery of government spelling out death for two men with the utmost serenity. No more laws were stretched or violated than in most other criminal cases. No more stool-pigeons were used. No more prosecution tricks were played. Only in this case every trick worked with a deadly precision. The rigid mechanism of legal procedure was at its most un- bending. The human beings who operated the mechanism were guided by dim, vague, deep-seated motives of fear and self-interest. It was a frame-up implicit in the social structure. It was a perfect example of the functioning of class justice, in which every judge, juror, police officer, editor, governor and college president played his appointed role easily and without undue violence to his conscience. A few even played it with an exalted sense of their own patriotism and nobility. Many of those who were outraged by the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti resented this interpretation. They preferred to regard it as a deliberate “plot to railroad two workers/ 2 * * * * 7 and themselves as the heroic if unsuccessful rescuers. But their hero-and-villain pat- tern seemed to me false and petty against the reality of vast in- choate forces at play on both sides. To me the whole thing shaped up not as melodrama but as epic tragedy. 2 Though I did not formulate it in these terms until I had at- tained the perspective of time, I think that I sensed the epic quality from the first. All of us who defended the two Italians were wholly and deeply convinced of their innocence. Yet it was pro- foundly right that the question of innocence and guilt should become, as it did, of secondary importance to both sides, because the issues involved were wider than the character or destiny of two men. Those who rallied to our side, a relatively, small and despised group at first, did so as inevitably and often as irrationally as the others who leagued against us. .The case, I felt, was a cata- lytic agent that crystallized forces until then held in a deceptively unified social solution. 2 2 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW Fred Moore was at heart an artist. Instinctively he recognized the materials of a world issue in what appeared to others a i outine matter. A socialist newspaperman spent a few days in Boston and returned to New York to report that “there' s no story in it . . . just a couple of wops in a jam.” Not one of the members of the defense committee formed immediately after the men’s arrest sus- pected that the affair was anything larger than it seemed. When the case grew into a historical tussle, these men were utterly be- wildered. But Moore saw its magnitude from the first. His legal tactics have been the subject of dispute and recrimination. I think that there is some color of truth, indeed, to the charge that he sometimes subordinated the literal needs of legalistic procedure to the larger needs of the case as a symbol of class struggle. If he had not done so, Sacco and Vanzetti would have died six years earlier, without the solace of martyrdom. With the deliberation of a composer evolving the details of a symphony which he senses in its rounded entirety, Moore pro- ceeded to clarify and deepen the elements implicit in the case. And first of all he aimed to delineate the class character of the automatic prejudices that were operating against Sacco and Van- zetti. Sometimes over the protests of the men themselves he cut through legalistic conventions to reveal underlying motives. Small wonder that the pinched, dyspeptic judge and the pettifogging lawyers came to hate Moore with a hatred that was admiration turned inside out. He was not “playing the game” according to their sacred rules. Perhaps his most difficult task, and therefore his most creative achievement, was to show the two Italians as types and symbols of workmen everywhere. Labor elements in other countries recog- nized Sacco and Vanzetti as their own long before American work- ers consented to this identification. American labor, and especially the portion organized into conservative trade unions, at first re- jected violently the implication that these two foreigners — self- confessed anarchists, internationalists, atheists — were in any sense representative American workers. Their social views were “un- American.” To accept them as brothers was to throw doubt on the middle-class delusions of the bona fide labor movement. Vanzetti had worked as an unskilled laborer, peddled fish and taken some part in local strike agitations. Sacco was a skilled shoe I DEFEND SACCO AND VANZETTI 33 worker. But as anarchists they neither sympathized nor cooperated with the organized American labor movement, which they re- garded as simply a part of the apparatus of capitalist enslavement. Despite this, American labor in the end was obliged to overcome its first revulsion and accept the Sacco- Vanzetti case as in large measure its own. Moore had slashed through the many layers of outer differences to the core of identity between Sacco and Van- zetti and all other workmen. To accomplish this, he did not hesi- tate to use any and all instrumentalities of publicity. On the one hand, the labor records of the two men were “built up” and em- phasized ; on the other, the attitudes of the prosecution were ex- posed as essentially anti-labor. By the time I arrived on the scene, John Nicholas Beffel and others had already done the groundwork, under Moore’s guidance, in this connection. Because my presence, in 1921-22, happened to coincide with the period when the case exploded into world sig- nificance, I received at the time more credit (or blame, depending on the point of view) than I merited. A series of articles in the old New York World by Samuel Spewack, in particular, sensa- tionalized and exaggerated my role. I figured in his version as one of three men — an Italian, a Spaniard and a young American — who sat at their typewriters in a chilly little office in Boston and incited the whole world to protest. This journalistic simplification infuriated me. As a matter of fact, Felicani, Lopez and I, writing articles and news stories in Italian, Spanish, and English, respec- tively, were very minor factors in a situation that had outgrown all of us by that time and was rolling along on its own momentum. It is a curious fact that Sacco and Vanzetti, whose names are linked inseparably, saw one another very rarely in the seven years between their arrest and electrocution. Sacco was kept in the county jail at Dedham, Vanzetti in Charlestown Prison. Only on those rare occasions when some new hearing or empty formality brought them into court did they meet, embrace, and chat briefly. Several times, almost a year elapsed before they met again. By the time their cold bodies were laid out on adjoining marble slabs in the death chamber, they had become almost strangers. Of the same race, the same political faith, their destinies inter- twined, they were yet men of the most contrasting temperaments and minds. Sacco was the Latin at his most impetuous, a man of PRELUDE TO MOSCOW 34 emotion rather than logic, driven literally to madness on at least two occasions by the ordeal of imprisonment and waiting. The separation from his pretty red-headed wife and his two children, from friends and work, consumed his flesh and shook his reason. A week of incarceration for a man like Sacco was more terrible than a year for the more phlegmatic and contemplative Vanzetti. Sacco was a caged and raging animal; Vanzetti seemed a monk in calm seclusion. Under the ferocious Italian mustaches which gave him a look of fierceness in the eyes of the ordinary American, the fishmonger from Piemonte had ascetic features and eyes of a tenderness that haunted one. With every year of imprisonment Vanzetti seemed to grow calmer, gentler, more philosophic. His was the consolation of genuine martyrdom in which there was no rancor but an ever- deepening understanding. Where Sacco had acquired his anarchist beliefs at second-hand, more attracted by its harsh code than its philosophy, Vanzetti had read and studied the poets and prophets of his faith. His mind was crystal clear and expanded immensely in the enforced leisure of his seven years’ isolation. Some of his letters and speeches from the prisoners’ cage have the ring of enduring literature — this despite his use of English, an alien, half- apprehended tongue. Certainly the scene while he was being strapped into the electric chair, when he proffered his forgiveness to those who were about to snuff out his life, belongs among the high moments in the history of the human spirit. 3 I saw Sacco and Vanzetti frequently, either in the company of Moore or alone. But in the fight that reverberated through all the nations and made their linked names a familiar word, their own roles were passive. They merely waited. My day-to-day contacts were with members of the defense committee, zealous Puritan ladies, visiting reporters, lawyers, wrathful anarchists, conniving communists, distressed liberals, local newspapermen and the ex- traordinary assortment of men and women drawn together by a common interest in freeing the two men. In the final year of the case five years later, the liberal intel- lectuals rushed belatedly and flamboyantly to the rescue. But at I DEFEND SACCO AND VANZETTI 35 this juncture the affair had not yet become respectable or suf- ficiently notorious. The enlightened attorneys, poets, novelists, columnists, educators who were to hold the spotlight in the last frenzied months of the futile fight in 1927 were with few excep- tions blissfully oblivious to the affair in 1921-22. It was a motley and colorful and rather high-pitched company that gathered around the defense at this stage. Some were moved by an undiluted urge to save two innocent men, others were in- terested primarily in the propagandist value of the case, still others got an emotional kick out of the battle. At one extreme were hot- headed and desperate Italians and Spaniards distrustful of all law, bitterly sarcastic about the hocus-pocus of motions and affidavits, and often refusing on principle to cooperate with their own law- yers. At the other extreme were men and women of old New Eng- land stock chiefly concerned with saving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from the stigma of an ugly miscarriage of justice. I can recall vital meetings in which a snarling, red-headed little Italian exponent of direct action argued some question of policy with a benign pacifist like Mrs. Evans. It was Moore’s delicate job to reconcile these people and placate their idiosyncrasies. Because we all worked under great tension, in a ceaseless fer- ment of hope and despair, we moved in a strangely electrical atmosphere, surcharged with emotion and at moments touched with hysteria. Lack of funds forced a great many of the group to live very closely together in one narrow house on Rollins Place, and that scarcely helped matters. If anyone could record that house, its people, its complicated cross-currents of conflicting political phi- losophies, the erotic overtones characteristic of nervous strain, what an incredible novel it would make! Commonplace stenographers accidentally drawn into this in- tense atmosphere developed into flaming radicals. Roughneck de- tectives sprouted a social conscience. Cautious A. F. of L. officials hobnobbed with foreign firebrands. A milk-white, golden-haired little poetess swept like a tornado through the defense group, working havoc among the harassed men and spreading despair among their wives and sweethearts; she dominated the lives of a writer, a strike leader, a lawyer and a Boston newspaperman in quick succession, with forays into the domestic preserves of half a dozen others, while composing soulful verses in defense of the 36 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW accused Italians. A gawky, half-savage boy lured from the Maine woods to plead with his mother, a crucial identification witness, to retract her perjured testimony, had to be forced, literally, to take a bath 5 soon he blossomed into a spick-and-span U. S. Marine. One of the closest comrades and most ardent defenders of Sacco fell hopelessly in love with Sacco’s wife (he married her after Sacco’s execution). Within the larger drama of the case, there developed complicated cycles of lesser dramas of private emotion* Of the reporters who had covered the trial for local newspapers and the great press agencies, not one believed that the foreigners had been proved guilty. A few of them, on the contrary, were deeply convinced of the men’s innocence, so that several prominent Boston newspapermen, like Sibley and Folsom, sided openly with the defense. The newspapers themselves, however, were a solid phalanx against us. I had a privileged inside view of their attitude. In one of the frequent periods when the defense committee went completely broke, I got myself a job on the Boston Telegram , a scandal- monger sheet now happily out of existence and unmourned. It occurred to no one on the staff, fortunately, to connect me with my notorious namesake at defense headquarters. I enjoyed the ticklish sensation of seeing my Sacco-Vanzetti publicity releases kicked into the waste-basket with a growl of distaste while feature stories under my signature were being published in the paper $ and of writing inflammatory defense literature on the Telegram’s time and typewriter. I attended to many an assignment by the city editors on the telephone from the Sacco-Vanzetti office. The rigmarole of legalistic gestures unrolled slowly and dully. More motions for a new trial based on new evidence, confessions of perjury by state witnesses, exposes of other state witnesses as criminals — and every motion matched by a denial from the self-righteous Judge Webster Thayer. All the forms of justice were preserved, only the spirit was absent. Many years later I wrote: “Sacco and Vanzetti were given all their legal rights. They were deprived only of their liberty and their lives.” V. Working for the Soviets JUST before the birth of my daughter, in November, 1922, I re- turned to New York. I had been away more than two years, in Europe and then in Boston, and was unaware how completely the revolutionary milieu in the metropolis had changed. I had simply been too engrossed in the specific job of defending the two Italians — one of the few issues on which all factions agreed — to gauge the depth of the new hatreds among yesterday’s com- rades. What had been a many-sided radical movement had dis- integrated into so many sects. The Golden Age of American radi- calism was ended. Unhesitatingly I cast my lot with the communists. I devoted the next five years largely to Soviet activities. For a year I edited the first popular American magazine about Russia, the Soviet Russia Pictorial , and for four years thereafter, until the day I sailed for the U.S.S.R., I worked for the official Soviet news agency, Tass. I did not join the Communist Party and consequently was never on the inside of its involved and embittered political life. Such close-ups of the internal party machinery as I had by reason of my everyday work strengthened my obstinacy in resisting solicita- tions to join up. In any organization which rests on absolute disci- pline, there is no intermediate role between leadership and blind obedience. I had not the slightest taste for one and a definite dis- taste for the other. This incapacity for organization and discipline I counted a defect in my character. My instinct was always to undertake specific tasks and to carry them through as best I could, whether it happened to be the preparation of a strike leaflet or the contribution of a newspaper column. My entire social environment in those years, however, was communist and Soviet. In a loyalty to the Russian revolution which outweighed in my mind all considerations of past friend- ship or present advantage, I broke relations with most of my old 37 38 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW acquaintances who were still in the Socialist Party. Enthusiastically, I contributed my share to the rancor directed against that party. Its members were Mensheviks, Social-Democrats, henchmen of Germany’s Scheidemanns, Noskes, and Eberts, and therefore, in Bolshevik and near-Bolshevik eyes, more despicable by far than capitalists. They were deserters, “renegades.” The legions of the damned grew apace in those years, as radi- cals of divers denominations failed in the decisive test of their political morals by casting doubt on any phase of the Soviet ex- periment. It did not occur to me to examine the statements of people who went to Moscow to pray and emerged to scoff, since the process of investigation would have implied blasphemous doubts. The fact that Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, many other deportees from America abandoned the Soviet land, pre- ferring a capitalist exile, was for us a commentary on these people rather than on the Soviets. We did not content ourselves with impugning their sanity, but tarred them as knaves, liars, self-seeking betrayers. A lifetime of exemplary devotion to the cause of the revolution did not save an anarchist, socialist or I.W.W. from the hot pitch of our epithets; on the contrary, the more impressive the culprit’s record the more urgent was our compulsion to level him with the dust. I was among the more temperate in this respect, yet I know the anger that flared in my heart against those who attacked the Soviets. If they were bourgeois journalists, middle-class tour- ists, even milk-and-water liberals, their blasphemy could be ex- plained along orthodox class lines and discounted. But if they were workers, socialists, active radicals, they must be marked with the- mark of Cain and sent wandering in the wilderness of bourgeois turncoats. Soviet Russia Pictorial was the progenitor of the many illustrated magazines about Russian achievements now on the American news stands. It was at the time the mouthpiece of the Friends of Soviet Russia and its primary purpose was to help raise funds for famine relief. Far from concealing the horrors of the Volga famine and the incapacity of the young workers’ republic to cope with the dis- aster, we spread the facts on record as gruesomely as possible in text and picture to stimulate charity from the Left. The horrors, however, were amply balanced by panegyrics for the Soviet lead- WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 39 ers and their works. If the wounds of the civil wars were still raw and painful, the romance and elation likewise were fresh. The mere fact that a Socialist Soviet State was in existence was a miracle to halo each new day. All the giants of the revolution were still alive and in active control. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev,* Kamenev,* Rakovsky,f Radek,t Dzherzhinsky — flaming names to light new vistas of his- tory. We knew the warmth that only people who possess a private pantheon can know. The circumstance that infidels regarded our gods as devils merely testified to the awesome significance of our deities and attested our position as a chosen and anointed people. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others destined to be expelled from the pantheon, figured so heroically on our pages, in fact, that by 1928 a bound volume of the magazine which I brought into Mos- cow seemed a counter-revolutionary document. The volume was borrowed by Olga Kameneva, sister of Trotsky and wife of Kame- nev, and never returned. To the best of my recollection we did not have occasion to use Stalin’s picture once while I edited this Soviet publication — an interesting commentary on how grievously American communists underrated him as late as 1923. My associate on the editorial staff who, if the truth be told, did the major part of the work, was a man of encyclopaedic knowl- edge with whom the accumulation of recondite facts, figures, dates, and anecdotes was a grand passion, one Max Podolsky. $ The deep-dyed cynicism of Max’s well-stocked mind made him proof against the lush enthusiasms in which those around him wallowed. He had been active in the revolutionary movements of at least half a dozen European nations, had sampled prisons in most Euro- pean capitals, and had known many of the Bolshevik gods before their apotheosis. He proceeded on the assumption that all heroes have clay feet and that power is a dangerous narcotic even for revolutionaries. His support of the Soviet system was therefore leavened with large mental reservations. He worked loyally enough but with a distinctly counter-revolutionary twinkle in his eyes. * Executed in August, 1936. f Imprisoned in 1937. t Better known as Max Nomad, author of Rebels and Renegades and other significant books. 40 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW 2 The Soviet news agency, at the time I entered its service as general assistant to Kenneth Durant, the American director, was called Rosta. Later the name was changed to Tass. It opei ated on an agreement for exchange of facilities with the United Press and had its headquarters in one of the United Press offices in the old World Building. Our job was to report the news of the entire Western hemisphere as it poured over the U.P. wires. While we naturally emphasized aspects of the social and eco- nomic struggle, and went in for earnest analysis of political con- ditions everywhere from Canada to Cape Horn, our dispatches were as realistic and uncolored as we could make them. It was Durant’s theory that Moscow needed a truthful picture of af- fairs on this side of the Atlantic— whether it found it politic to publish the picture was its own affair. At no time, in the years that I worked under him, did he knowingly permit the picture to be touched up to please the wishful thinking of communists here or abroad. Thus, while communist politicians in America, partly through the ardor of their hopes and partly to magnify their own impor- tance, fed the Kremlin empty promises of American recognition and apocryphal communist victories, our news service provided the antidote of unadulterated facts. Not infrequently the reports of American party functionaries on some local situation and our report gave totally different accounts. I was decidedly under the spell of Durant’s personality during our years of collaboration. He was a man of sharp mind and dour disposition, whose rapier of malice was sheathed in a scabbard of pervasive charm. In one mad jump, he had cleared the immense social territory between Rittenhouse Square and Sovietism. I say Sovietism rather than communism advisedly. It was communism as a functioning and ruthless system, backed by armies and secret services, I think, that fascinated him rather than communism as a philosophy of human emancipation. I was to meet others from the upper social strata who are thus captivated by a distant pro- letariat, triumphant and regnant, but feel not the faintest kin- ship for the flesh-and-blood proletarians all around them. Ken- WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 41 neth’s frank dislike of all American communists flowed from his natural aversion to the “lower” social orders, though he would have denied this most vehemently. Tall, thin, with aristocratically ascetic features and a ruthless wit, Kenneth had the intolerance of a recent convert. Uncon- sciously he tried to make up for his advantages of social and edu- cational background, for the fact that he was a foreigner in the adopted land of revolution, by harshness toward non-believers in general and backsliders in particular. In full eruption against a political renegade, Kenneth was a magnificent and disquieting spectacle. Those who offended him personally (and every real or imagined slur on the Soviets he counted a personal affront) be- came the objects of his anxious, brooding, and patient attentions. The maze of his character was a subject of discussion among those of us under his spell, I recall Joseph Freeman remarking in one such discussion that Kenneth, given the scope, had the makings of a Torquemada. He had a nose for heresy which did not often mislead him and a bloodhound persistence in following the trail. Emotionally and professionally I lived close to the new Rus- sia. I read all the books on Russia, saw its motion pictures, be- friended some of its emissaries, discussed it with returning tourists or American communists, defended it against detractors, steeped myself in its legends and lingo. For months at a stretch, when Durant was visiting Russia or ill, I conducted the Tass bureau, and corresponded with Jacob Doletzky, the head of the organiza- tion, or Constantine Umansky, then its foreign editor, or others whom I was to meet before long in Moscow. This direct relation with the center of world revolution, though limited to the routine of news dispatches and cable tolls and technical news-gathering problems, surrounded the work with an aura of importance. It gave me a precious sense of nearness to the one thing that counted above all other things in the modern world. As an employee of a Soviet organization, it was impolitic, of course, for me to participate openly in the radical movement in America. But from time to time I was sucked into its vortex all the same. As long as Moore remained in Boston, I maintained an active interest in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, writing occasional articles, or helping at the New York end on matters of evidence or fund-raising. Vanzetti’s strictures on the Soviet system from his 42 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW vantage point of philosophic anarchism were a painful embarrass- ment, particularly since communists here and abroad were the most active spokesmen for the case. In publicity material these views of Vanzetti were carefully soft-pedaled, but in his voluminous correspondence with sympathizers in all parts of the country he did not conceal them. . During the communist-led strike of textile woi kers m I as- saic, New Jersey, I prepared and saw through publication a sensa- tional brochure of pictures which I called Hell in New Jersey. If I recall correctly, about one hundred and fifty thousand copies were sold. I took part in the preliminary organization meetings that led to the launching of the New Masses , contributed random pieces to many of the Left magazines, and for some months con- ducted a tri-weekly column of comment and satire in the Daily Worker. That my political orthodoxy left much to be desired may be sur- mised from my experiences with the last-named enterprise. Since I rarely went to the editorial offices, merely sending my con- tributions by mail or messenger, I did not realize that my column had brewed a tempest in the teapot there. I tried in the column to provide a leaven of humor and light-hearted irony for the dough of class-war news and “theses” in the Daily Worker. I packed my space with frivolous jingles, skits on people and events, now and then more serious divertissement — but often on subjects remotely if at all related to the revolution. Just where and how I offended the communist proprieties, I was never to discover. But I did discover that my column was being furiously attacked and defended. It threatened schism in the editorial ranks. In the interests of unity and peace, I promptly quit my short-lived role as columnist. 3 By 1926, the repercussions of the Communist Party struggle in Russia, with Stalin and Trotsky as the principal adversaries, were being felt in America. Many of the Russians arriving in the United States on commercial and other missions, it became evi- dent, were thus being shunted from the Soviet arena by Stalin’s party machine under guise of important foreign assignments. Our Tass dispatches were being minutely scrutinized on the other side WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 43 for symptoms of partisanship. In the ranks of American com- munism, too, leaders and would-be leaders were choosing sides. On the whole sentiment among American communists, as among communists everywhere outside the Soviet Union, was prepon- derantly for Trotsky, Zinoviev, Preobrazhensky and the rest of the “Old Guard.” The romantic period of the Russian revolu- tion may have become a faint memory at home, where the strident prose of practical problems and sacrifices drowned out the poetry of revolt. Abroad, the romantic period persisted, though in a twilight haze — in a sense it is still alive — and the great names of 1917 and 1918 were still magical. The name of Trotsky, in par- ticular, still connoted all the thrill and throb of the revolutionary honeymoon. Many of the Americans now in the camp of Stalin jeered at him as long as Trotsky and Zinoviev still seemed to have a chance of winning out. Their present ardor is part of the penance for having bet on the wrong horse at that time. The will to power is sometimes incredible and a little ludicrous to people who do not possess it to any marked degree. It creates dynastic struggles for the leadership of lodge Number 2387 in some absurd fraternal order or for the chairmanship of some women’s club. The nail-and-claw struggles for leadership and influence in the American communist movement, as I watched them here and later from Moscow, seemed to me to be touched with the spirit of of era bouffe . The movement which these people sought to dominate was so small, persecuted, impotent as yet that leadership offered at best larger opportunities for abuse and im- prisonment. The spoils of victory were so meager in proportion to the bitterness and vigor of the struggle. Yet men and women, impelled to the radical way of life by their thirst for justice, sus- pended ideals, and elementary decencies, in an unprincipled scram- ble for control of the party machinery. They played low politics. They flattered those who were on top. They lied to themselves, to their followers, and particularly to the arbiters of their party destinies in Moscow, in a frantic determination to win at any price. There is always, of course, an element of economic necessity in such a struggle. Shriveled and juiceless as its plums may be, political victory does mean a place on the payroll as editors, lec- turers, officials, writers for people who have perhaps sacrificed their PRELUDE TO MOSCOW 44 possibilities of earning a living in the capitalist set-up. It may mean jobs at Moscow headquarters of the Comintern or the Profintern. The so-called “professional revolutionist” has been glorified by Lenin, who considered the overturn of an established order a full- time job and career enough for any one lifetime. Perhaps he was right. His view is shared, curiously, by the most conservative labor spokesmen who favor “professional trade-union leaders,” and in both cases the counsel may be that of practical necessity. Certain it is that the professional revolutionist is in a most ambiguous position psychologically when an internal fight develops in his particular party. However earnest and high-minded he may be in his stand on the principles and policies at issue, his livelihood, too, is at stake. Such practical compulsions were operative at the heart of the American extension of the Trotsky-Stalin fight, un- avoidably, and were surely influential in driving many leaders into the camp of Stalin as his triumph over Trotsky became more assured. But overshadowing such personal motives was the genuine anxiety to keep the revolutionary regime in Russia and the inter- national communist movement intact. The rank-and-file members, especially, watched in mounting panic a clash which threatened to pull down the whole Soviet structure. To prevent that disaster they rallied to Stalin as they would have rallied to anyone who retained control of the Kremlin, the party machinery, the func- tioning state. Right or wrong, Trotsky meant schism, a communist movement minus the first communist state. Even we who worked by his side in the same narrow offices — by this time under the roof of the Associated Press — could not guess where Durands personal sympathies lay in the fight. Perhaps he had none, because his basic loyalties were to the Soviet system of power as such, regardless who might seize control of its in- strumentalities. The fact that Jacob Doletzky, the Tass chief in Moscow, was a Stalinist machine politician very early tinged our work with a faint anti-Trotskyist color.* The further fact that the American communists were so strongly Trotskyist tended, if any- thing, to deepen that tinge — between our office and the American * In 1937, strangely enough, Doletzky was arrested as an alleged Trotskyist, and attempted suicide. WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 45 communists there was always a tension at times amounting to a feud. When the die was cast, however, and the Trotsky group in- dubitably defeated, our office instantly became a Stalinist fortress. Durant’s flare for smelling out heresy had new scope. Not only renegades in relation to Russia as a whole, but deviationists from Stalin’s “line” now engaged his talents. He scrutinized dispatches from Moscow for traces of pro-Trotsky bias and called such hor- rors to the attention of the American editorial headquarters in- volved. Anyone who spared a counter-revolutionary sigh over the fallen leaders, or suggested that the victors’ tactics were in any wise questionable, instantly became an enemy to be crushed. In the atmosphere of the Tass office, I sided automatically with the victorious faction. I could not in my heart, however, think of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek and others who had been glamorous symbols of a new world in my most impressionable years, as enemies of the revolution. The secret margin of sorrow over their fate gave me a gnawing sensation of sinfulness in the presence of Kenneth’s cold, implacable orthodoxy. Nor was I alone in my clandestine grief. Others around me carried a hidden hurt while we denounced the fallen idols in the name of discipline and unity. 4 In August, 1927, it was my professional duty to report in cable dispatches the tragic climax of the Sacco- Vanzetti case. Russia fol- lowed the details of the impending executions more anxiously than any other nation and we were under instructions to report every move. There was the tense night of August 10th, when the doomed men were prepared for death, while the rotund, smiling Governor Fuller of Massachusetts considered the plea for a reprieve. Hour after hour I hovered over the Associated Press wires. By eleven p.m. — one hour before the scheduled electrocutions — he was still withholding his decision 3 he was squeezing the last drop of sadistic relish out of his cat-and-mouse game while the whole world looked on in horror. In a daze I typed out two messages ready for “flashing” to Moscow: “sacco dead” — “vanzetti dead.” These were not names in the headlines 3 in a deep sense they were members of my fam- 46 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW ily, but close as few blood relations can be. At 11:24— thirty-six minutes before the hour set for the official killings Fuller an- nounced a twelve days’ reprieve. Then came the day and the night of August 22. In my memory they have a nightmare quality. My role was so gruesomely routine —the preparation of “flash” cables, the vigil at the A.P. wires, the filling in of the exact minute of Sacco’s death, then of Van- zetti’s death— all so businesslike. . . . The case which was in- tegrated with my own existence, intimate as few things in life ever become intimate, was over, finished. Nothing to do but go home to bed ... I remember wondering why I could not weep and shriek with the hurt of it, just as I was to wonder seven years later at my father’s coffin. A few weeks later I shut myself into a room at Kenneth Durant’s home for privacy, day after day for over two weeks, and wrote the story of two simple peasant boys, born in Italy to die in America in full view of all the nations on the globe. Or rather, the book wrote itself. Leafing through The Life and Death of Sacco and Vmzetti , I am astonished to find passages so eloquent in their passionate restraint that they seem to have been written by another person. At points in the terse narrative I find a poetic vein that transcends my normal literary powers. It was the alchemy of feelings too deep for tears precipitating a style of their own. Except for minor editorial revisions, my first draft, copied by Margaret Larkin, went to the printers. The book was subsequently translated into German, Italian, Russian and Yiddish and widely read in those languages. Two Russian edi- tions, published while I was in Moscow, sold some 130,000 copies. Only the original English version never reached more than a few thousand readers. In 1933, the Nazis paid the book the com- pliment of immolation on their funeral pyre to German culture. It burned in as fine a literary company as was ever assembled out- side a library. 5 I had met a number of United Press officials while Tass operated from their headquarters on Park Row. The President of the United Press, Karl A. Bickel, was on the friendliest terms with Durant and greatly impressed with his political perspicacity and WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 47 journalistic talents. In anything touching Russia, Bickel usually consulted Durant. In 1926 the post of Moscow correspondent fell vacant. Aware of my fervent hope of getting to the Soviet land, Durant suggested my name among others. The suggestion, I was chagrined to learn after the event, had been seriously considered but ultimately discarded. When the post was again available, more than a year later, Bickel revived the suggestion. Before offering me the job, how- ever, he consulted Durant, who not only agreed but supported the appointment in the warmest terms. He merely asked that I remain with Tass until he returned from a trip to Russia for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution. Bickel acquiesced though it meant that his Moscow Bureau would re- main with only a Russian woman secretary, a Miss Jmudskaya, in charge. Durant was away several months, during which I conducted the American work of the Tass service, with Joe Freeman assist- ing. Thousands of foreign sympathizers had gathered in Moscow and Leningrad for the decennial festivities. Lenin had been over- joyed when the Soviet regime lasted beyond the seventy-day record of the only other proletarian government in history, the Paris Commune. And now the revolution had endured an entire decade! The thrill of that achievement — of mere survival! — could be felt right around the world. Even embittered foes of the Soviet idea felt the importance of the historic moment. Though a large section of that decade had been wasted on costly civil warfare and in fighting off interventionists and economic strangle holds, and in convalescing from a debilitating famine, the young state had a great deal to show. The record of economic and cultural reconstruction before 1928, exhibited with the Russian genius for stage-setting in the celebration of November, 1927, made a most impressive total. In spirit we participated in the celebration. The press accounts of the demonstrations and congresses and speeches and military displays may have been merely picturesque to other Americans. To those of us who regarded the Soviet land as our spiritual home, these were things that lifted us to a rarefied altitude of joy. Only the futile attempt of Trotsky and his followers to speak to the Soviet masses above the heads of the victorious Stalinists marred 48 PRELUDE TO MOSCOW the festivities. In the elation of the soaring moment it was easier to brush such annoyances aside than to think them through. The knowledge that in a few months I should be there, not merely looking on but reporting what I saw to an audience of a hundred million readers, colored this period of impatient wait- ing with all the tints of impending excitement. Durant’s eye-witness report on his return heightened my ex- pectancy. He had been not only in the capital and in Leningrad but in Soviet Karelia. Everywhere he found the reigning pro- letariat joyous, enthusiastic, perhaps a little bewildered by its unaccustomed glory and freedom, but adjusting itself to its new dignity. I recall his description of the anniversary demonstration on Red Square as Ernestine Evans, Billy, and several others of us drank Chianti at a little Italian restaurant in Greenwich Vil- lage. Through his eyes we saw the Caucasian horsemen dashing across the square, the massed banners, the flood of exultant work- ers, and our own romantic and too willing imaginations added high colors to the recital. He told a few touching homely anec- dotes of lowly peasants and workmen whose eyes were still blinded by the incandescence of the revolution. “God! Those are the things I want to write when I get there!” I exclaimed. “How do the other correspondents fail to report such things? They’re worth tons of statistics!” If anyone ever went to the Soviet realm with a deep and earnest determination to understand the revolution, to slough off petty detail and dig down to the hard, enduring core of a great event in human history, it was the newly appointed United Press corre- spondent. My problem, I felt, would be to tone down the rhap- sody to the humdrum level of American journalism. I was not deserting the direct service of the cause for the fleshpots of capitalism. (The United Press, as a matter of fact, was paying me only a few dollars more than Tass.) I was accepting, rather, a post of immense strategic importance in the further service of that cause, and doing so with the whole-hearted agreement and understanding of my chiefs in Tass and therefore, presumably, of the Soviet Foreign Office. If I was aware of a congenital ineptitude for fanaticism, it was a secret and guilty awareness. I reckoned it a serious flaw in my nature, a lurking enemy who must be shown no indulgences. WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS 49 Mine are the faults, I explained to myself, of a too idealistic radi- cal education, an abstract idealism too frail for the storms of a real revolution. “I shall not pander to these weaknesses! Truth,” I told my- self, “does not consist of so-called facts. A picture may be ‘true’ in detail yet compose into a nightmare lie in its totality. My task is to devote myself to the underlying truths rather than the sur- face facts. Mine must be the larger objectivity of history in the making” The farewell party arranged by my friends included the cream of the communist intelligentsia, with not a deviationist in the company. They were sending off one of their very own, proudly aware of his determination to use the opportunity for spreading the gospel whose fountainhead was in the Kremlin. The following evening, December 31, 1927, on New Year’s Eve, I sailed with Billy and our five-year-old daughter, Eugenie, for the land of our dreams. BOOK 2 HALLELUJAH! I. Moscow and Muscovites THE red stars, with their insignia of crossed hammer and sickle, brought poignant confirmation that we were at last and indubitably in the land of proletarian dictatorship. They seemed to glow on the peaked caps of the Red soldiers with an inner light of their own, in the deepening twilight of our railroad coach. They shed an aura of intimacy and authenticated, in the mysterious language of symbols, the revolution and everything it stood for in our minds. After a life-time in which established authority is synonymous with reaction and exploitation, the flesh-and-blood vision of a communist soldier or a communist policeman verges on the miraculous. The train had paused under a wooden arch inscribed “Workers of the World, Unite!” precisely as in the photographs I had once published in Soviet Russia Pictorial . The Polish officers in their comic-opera uniforms and dragging swords and provincial fop- pishness had stepped off, and the Red soldiers boarded. They wore greatcoats that reached the floor, snow-flakes clung to their homey peasant faces, and the red stars, perhaps reflecting our ardor, shed an effulgence over their features. We tried our first words of Russian as we handed over our passports. “Good eve- ning, tovarishchi we said, relishing the word — “comrades” — and the familiarity it implied. The soldiers saluted and smiled faintly. They met the faith- ful arriving tremulously day after day and were possibly a bit bored with the performance. As we chugged into the frontier station, Negoreloye, night fell suddenly, like the angry closing of shutters overhead. Sullen- looking porters, grimy burlap aprons over their padded coats, took our baggage to the customs house. We followed into the snow and the cold. The customs house at that time was a dingy, dimly-lit barn of a place, the more cheerless in contrast with the 53 54 HALLELUJAH ! clean concrete structure we had left a little earlier at Stolpce, on the Polish side. Neither a forlorn-looking station nor cold nor darkness coiud douse our high mood of expectation. More than the returning Russians, apparently, we felt this moment as a homecoming. Else- where dinginess might be depressing. Here it seemed to us ro- mantically proletarian, without stupid bourgeois frills and preten- sions, in the revolutionary tradition of gloom and starkness. T. he sound of Russian spoken around us seemed in itself worth the journey. The presence of Lenin, Stalin, Rykov, ^ and Kalinin in framed lithographs on the walls made this melancholy place one in spirit with all the radical headquarters and meeting halls in my memory. The thrill of finding one’s private, esoteric symbols installed in the role of authority! On the train next morning I was up and dressed soon after dawn, impatient to see the Russian land jog by. I was fearful of missing something, anxious to soak up impressions, to absorb a new world. Peering through the swirling curtains of snow, I saw only a montonously flat white landscape, occasional huts half buried in snow, now and then a huddled peasant driving a sleigh. At stations, gray, grotesquely bundled figures moved about, ex- haling great clouds of visible breath, stopping to wipe icicles from bearded faces with their coat sleeves. Slovenly women in patched coats, felt boots and thick head-shawls offered roasted chicken, hard-boiled eggs, and pickled cucumbers with filthy fingers. Third- class passengers filled their tea-kettles with boiling water from the station samovars and rushed back to their cars, pursued by the biting winds. Our porter served us tea in glasses and zwieback. He shrugged his shoulders helplessly when I tested a few phrases from my Russian primer on him. Either the primer or I were mistaken, and in either case the illusion that I had made con- siderable progress in the language since leaving New York was punctured. Toward noon, on February 8, 1928, we reached Moscow. There is no human creature more helpless than a foreigner arriving in the Soviet capital for the first time. But Louis Fischer * Imprisoned in 1937. MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 55 and my Russian secretary, Miss Jmudskaya, met us at Alexan- drovsky Station and took control of our destinies. They packed the Lyons family and its baggage and themselves into a dilapi- dated Ford, which burrowed its way noisily through the snow and deposited us at the door of the Grand Hotel — the not-so-Grand Hotel I was to re-christen it privately soon. My cramped position in the car had shut out the view of the streets and I felt cheated of the first glimpse of the city to which I was entitled. The next few weeks, indeed, were filled with snowstorms and intense cold and disturbing incidents that hid the city from my sight and deepened a curious and almost panicky sense of bafflement that I did not quite shake off for months. “Bewilderment” was the word that I used most often in my first letters home. Not until we were settled in a large room on the fifth floor of the hotel, eating sturgeon and black bread and receiving lacka- daisical answers from Miss Jmudskaya to our fumbling questions, did I realize the peculiar difficulties of my situation. Here I was in a strange land, with scarcely a word of its language, with the care of a wife and five-year-old child on my conscience, not a penny in the bank, and full responsibility for the news of a vast, mysterious country on my shoulders. The mood of romantic an- ticipation resolved for the moment into a thousand formidable immediate problems, ranging from milk for Genie to news sources for the United Press. The bill for our modest repast when it ar- rived, did little to brighten the picture. “There must be some mistake,” I insisted. She studied the reckoning through her pince-nez. “No, it’s right, quite right. Prices are high here and going higher every day. ...” “But a full meal and champagne at the Ritz-Carlton would have cost me less!” Miss Jmudskaya shrugged her shoulders. She had been through the civil wars as a young girl. She had shifted for herself all these years, despite her near-sighted, school-teacherish appearance. She had searched for her mother for six or seven years, then run into her accidentally on a Leningrad street one day when the search had been abandoned as hopeless. Neither now nor ever after could my worries or excitements perturb her. ^6 hallelujah! “At this rate,” I said, “my salary won’t half cover the cost of eats alone.” “You don’t have to eat at the hotel,” she consoled me. “I’ll show Mrs. Lyons where to shop— things are much cheaper in the markets. I suppose you brought an electric cook-stove and uten- sils? . . . Well, you will borrow one from some of the Ameri- cans. Of course, it’s against the rules to cook in the hotel rooms, but that’s all right.” Miss Jmudskaya’s nasal voice was as monotonous as a high- pitched buzz-saw. In the two years that she worked with me, I never once heard that voice touched with enthusiasm or even bit- terness. I was to meet hundreds like her, in whom suffering seemed to have burned out all emotion. Only the charred husks of their character remained. 2 She steered me a little later through the blinding snows along zigzagging streets to the Foreign Office building on Vorovsky Square. I waited while she negotiated a permit— a fropmk: the word that looms gigantic on Russia’s horizon. It allowed me to enter the musty old building, to follow my secretary through a maze of dark corridors, and finally to meet the censors. These cor- ridors and the censors themselves were to remain among the focal points of my existence for six years. I came to know their idiosyn- crasies and sharp windings as an Indian runner knows his trails. A podgy little intellectual, bearded and shrill and full of words, was the head of the Press Department: Theodore Roth- stein. He was genial and clearly desirous of setting me at ease. I would soon learn the ropes, he assured me, and his department existed only to assist the correspondents in everything. It cen- sored dispatches only pro forma and largely to safeguard us against falsehoods and malicious rumors. My fame had preceded me, I gathered, and as a “sympathetic” and “friendly” corre- spondent I was counted upon to hew close to the line of official information, avoiding the temptation to sensationalize or to be- lieve malign libels. That suited me perfectly. Indeed, I was impatient to begin to serve. When, for instance, could I see President Kalinin? There MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 57 •was so much fantastic exaggeration about peasant recalcitrance in the foreign press these days. I meant to counteract it, and an in- terview with the homespun peasant President should do the trick effectively. Mr. Rothstein, however, was shocked. He shook his beard reproachfully and marveled at the temerity of Americans. “Mr. Lyons,” he asked in a hurt voice, “would a foreign corre- spondent arriving in Washington, let us say, have the nerve to ask to see President Coolidge? Yet as soon as you fellows arrive in Moscow — ” “But, Comrade Rothstein, a correspondent in Washington would see the President as a matter of course at press conferences twice a week and would be allowed to ask questions. What’s more, he would see the Secretary of State usually every day, and other Cabinet members almost as often as he wished.” The little man’s astonishment was boundless. Though he had lived a large part of his life in England, officialdom remained for him, as for all Russians, a race apart behind the barbed-wire of inaccessibility. The Asiatic ritual of mystification around high personages, inherited from tsardom, was complicated by a strange touchiness. The newly powerful, like the newly rich, are on the alert against any slight to their dignity. Mr. Rothstein’s first assistant was no less cordial. Jacob Podol- sky, his head as bald as an egg and his chin decorated with a square black beard, looked a little like an Assyrian priest come to life; he was full of good-natured cynicisms and laughed easily, though most non-committally. My eagerness to do justice to the Soviet Union — the facts that I meant to collate and the people whom I meant to interview and the American misconceptions about the revolution that I meant to dissipate — either amused or em- barrassed him, I am not sure which. It surely amused Mironov, a sour, phlegmatic man whose large hooked nose all but met his chin when he frowned— and even his smile was a frown. His sarcastic expression, as nearly as I could decipher it, said, “Huh . . . another ignorant American on my poor head . . . and the difficult kind at that — an idealist!” The head of the censorship division was replaced several times during my Moscow years, but Podolsky * and Mironov * were to remain there always, like fixed stars in our professional firmament. * Arrested and exiled in the 1937 purge. 58 hallelujah! The years did nothing to alter the non-committal laughter of the one and the sarcastic frown of the other. The stirring or tragic events that passed in review under their official blue pencils rarely fluttered their resigned boredom. Returning from the Foreign Office, I stopped to lace my shoe just as we were passing a large, square, rococo building. Instantly two soldiers with fixed bayonets rushed at me. Miss Jmudskaya’s hurried explanation saved me from being gored. It appeared that I had picked the G.P.U. headquarters, of all places, to pause at, and that such a procedure was fraught with danger. Later I found that many Muscovites made a detour to avoid passing that segment of innocent-looking sidewalk. In the evening I trudged through the snowstorm from the hotel uphill on Tverskaya, in the company of a gifted American cartoonist, William Gropper. The cobbled street and broken side- walks were treacherous under tight-packed snow. Ghostly frost- covered trolley cars crawled close to the curb. At every step we were accosted by women, in high felt boots, their heads wrapped in thick shawls, their faces glowing with the cold, cigarettes smoldering between painted lips. Several of them pulled our coat- tails and tried a few words of pidgin English on us. A few well- stocked shop windows seemed ill at ease in their embarrassing pros- perity among the dusty windows filled with debris and emptiness. The strumming of a guitar reached us from some basement restau- rant. The sing-song of a persistent beggar clung to our heels. Bun- dled-up droshky drivers, their beards streaked with frost and icicles clinging to their nostrils, sat in front of miniature sleds. One or two of them whipped disconsolate horses into action and followed us half-heartedly. ... That first day in Moscow remains with me in minutest de- tail, something mounted and fixed like a scaled model, which I can draw out and study at will. A special permit to enter a public building, alarmed soldiers if you paused at the wrong spot on a city sidewalk: the sense of being in a city besieged and closely guarded, which was to recur to me throughout my long resi- dence in Russia, was born on this day. Prostitutes, beggars, food difficulties: I had known these things existed and was prepared to confront them. I was fully aware that Russia in 1928 was far from socialism and that it contended MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 59 with many of the evils of other lands and some of its own. In my romantic heart, however, I had not quite credited this knowl- edge. The tangible evidences had to be assimilated. 3 The physical Moscow began to fall into focus. After the first confusion, the pattern of the city emerges: the walled-in Kremlin on whose eastern flank is the spacious Red Square; a second crenelated old wall enclosing Kitai Gorod, the so-called Chinese City in which there are no Chinese; beyond that two concentric rings of wide boulevards, A and B; and outside the B ring, the spreading city encroaching far into the farm and forest lands. Broad avenues radiate spokewise from the center and form im- portant squares where they cut across the boulevards. Theoretically straight, these avenues have a wayward manner of changing course unexpectedly or narrowing sharply for no reason, as though tired of the outlandish efficiency. Within the neat design of avenues and boulevards is the maze of side-streets, narrow, tortuous, often turning snakelike on themselves, and a mystery even to old Mus- covites. The serpentine Moscow River, always intruding where it is least expected, adds to the tangle. Russians used to call Moscow the largest village in their land. Despite several “skyscrapers,” the tallest of them twelve stories, it was still a straggling, meandering place, and its utterly Eastern character rather astonished me. Moscow is Asiatic in its sprawling chaos, its squat houses, its quaint old churches, and profusion of colored cupolas. The strongly Mongoloid faces everywhere, the fantastic rags of the beggars, and the makeshift garments of the majority of the population underlined this un-European appear- ance. Gliding along at night noiselessly in a diminutive sleigh through the labyrinth of alleys, every turn of the street revealing a new roof-line like quaint Arabic script against the sky, I often had a powerful sense of nearness to the Orient. Winter is the most difficult time for a newcomer to adjust him- self to the Soviet capital. The intense cold, frequent blizzards and snowstorms, and the night that comes so soon after noon make it an aloof and forbidding place. For me, plunged at once into the exacting business of gathering news, having it censored, 60 hallelujah! and filing it at the telegraph office, the adjustment was that much more difficult. And yet, I am pleased that I came upon Moscow in its winter character, because that, I was to realize, it its true inner nature, dark, huddled, blanketed in snow, its nose stuck into a voluminous sheepskin coat against the crisp cold. A city accustomed through all its centuries to the inclemency of nature, the mystery of brief days and interminable night. A city, above all, with an eerie beauty of ghostlike houses, skeleton trees and hushed, hurrying people, hidden deep within their patched and padded garments. Foreign tourists who visit Moscow only in its brief dusty sum- mer incarnation never come near the essence of the place. We were taken to the Dom Gertzena (Herzen House), a club for writers, where carefree and high-pitched literary bohemianism was making its last stand. Soon enough this bohemianism was to be wiped out by the new policies of an embattled Kremlin in- tent on industrializing and socializing the country, wiped out along with the cafes, the dance halls, gypsy music, jazz, fun-for-fun’s- sake, and all other forms of “bourgeois decadence.” Already fin- gers of gloom touched the life of Dom Gertzena — the Ncp holi- day was nearly over. A fierce proletarian Puritanism was in the offing. But the irrepressible Pava was still there, darkly handsome, banging the piano, hammering with fists in sheer overflow of spirits and singing lustily. We got to know her and love her in the years that followed. Long-haired writers of an older vintage were there, and young poets swaggering in the apache proletarian manner of Mayakovsky, Russian newspapermen escorting ballet girls, and lordly G.P.U. officers. Food was still plentiful, though costly, and the feasting did not reach its height until after mid- night. Billy, contributing an American song occasionally to the festivities, instantly became a favorite in those precincts. Some of the writers, journalists, and actors took us in on a comradely basis as few other foreign correspondents, probably, had been accepted before. Russians are a gregarious folk. Until food stringency and grow- ing political fears put a damper on such things, Moscow was a city of endless parties. We were fortunate in reaching the country just before this intense social life was snuffed out. There was scarcely MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 6l a week in the early months o£ 1928 when we did not participate in a few house parties in the one- or two-room “apartments” of Soviet writers, technicians, officials, workers. The procedure was always in the routine of Russian tradi- tion. The guests sat close-packed around a large table, literally for hours, consuming vodka and zakusky , drinking toasts to the host, the hostess, the hostess’s blue eyes, the guests en masse and one by one, everyone getting a little more flushed and a lot louder as we proceeded. Then, if the home boasted an old horned gramo- phone and a few cracked records, a space was cleared for danc- ing. If there was a piano, it became the center of a spontaneous choir, singing old folk songs and the brave new hymns and marching songs of the revolution ; or, most frequently, the old tunes with Soviet words. Occasionally someone brought a seven- stringed guitar or an accordion to enliven the gathering, and Billy’s “uke” was in great demand. I accepted more such invitations, no doubt, than were strictly good for me, in an insatiable thirst for meeting more and still more Russians, identifying myself a little more closely if pos- sible with their ways and their problems. I prowled in their com- mon kitchens, peeped shamelessly into neighboring “apartments” in the common corridor, and tried to steep myself in the Rus- sian atmosphere. Sometimes a group of us capped a night’s festivities with a visit to some beer hall on the Arbat, a gypsy restaurant on the Tverskaya, Dorn Gertzena, the Artists’ Club or a cooperative cafe. Whatever the hour, we found these resorts crowded and filled with noise and smoke. I instigated these excursions light-mindedly. I did not as yet realize that I was compromising those Russians whom I inveigled into appearing in public in a foreigner’s com- pany. At our first Foreign Office reception for the correspondents’ corps, we became acquainted with the Soviet newspaper fraternity. A few of these men we came to value in the following years. I remember the gathering particularly because there was a cama- raderie between the native and foreign newspapermen never again repeated. At the home of Comrade Yonov,* head of a publishing trust * Arrested and exiled in 1936. 62 hallelujah! and brother-in-law to Zinoviev, we met a few Kremlin officials, painters and authors, several of whom remained our friends, within the narrow limits of discretion in the suspicious years to follow. Yonov, whom we had met in New York, was a bibliophile and a man of cultivated taste generally. He exhibited rare first editions and spoke fervently of the fine printing his organization was doing. To his typographical tastes the Soviet Union owes those lovely Academia editions of the Arabian Nights and other classics known to book collectors the world over. In the “salon” of Rachelle Ossipovna, we found a congregation of artists and near-artists, opera and ballet hopefuls, and the slim young men for whom the hostess had a sweet-tooth. Elsewhere I met the irrepressible Sergei Trivas,* whose job it was to enter- tain visiting Americans and Englishmen. He headed the Anglo- American Department of Voks (the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries). He made no secret of his service in the G.P.U. But if he started to cultivate me in the line of duty, he came in time, I like to believe, to relish that duty, if only be- cause he found me a sympathetic listener to whom he could safely confide his hopes and boast of his amorous escapades. And thus, through a hundred different contacts and accidental meetings, we added to our acquaintances minor officials, simple factory workers, office clerks, students, and particularly, as was only natural, intellectuals of both the pre-revolutionary and the new generation. We learned to drain wine glasses while someone sang a charockha and the company clapped hands and chanted, “Pyei do dna y fyei do dm!” (“Drink to the bottom”) at the top of its lusty voice. We learned to join in the choruses of all the songs. We acquired a few words of mispronounced Russian. Above all, we learned not to talk politics, domestic or interna- tional, but to stick close to safe subjects like the theater, the new ballerina, the weather, and the relative virtues of the Caucasus and the Crimea as vacation resorts. On days when some startling de- cree or other news sensation filled the press and without doubt filled everyone’s mind as well, no one referred to it at social occa- sions. Discretion had been hammered home by experience. Our presence both attracted other guests and made them a little * Executed in 1930. MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 63 jumpy — the blend of fear and fascination, traditional hospitality and distrust of a stranger which made up the ordinary Russian’s attitude to a foreigner. We discovered that Americans, in particu- lar, were infinitely fascinating to Russians. For the older genera- tion nurtured on democratic hopes, America was the land of vast freedoms and individual opportunities. For the younger people, thrilling to the vision of an industrialized future, it was the land of marvelous technique. “Fordization” was a magic word just then in Russia, seeing mirages of mass production in its desert of goods shortages. How amazed the Sage of Dearborn would be, I often thought, to realize that he occupied a prominent niche in every young communist’s private pantheon. An American intellectual, distrusting the belt system of production as a new species of exploitation, did not al- ways find it easy to share Soviet enthusiasm for miracle-working Fordization. America to the ordinary Russian meant roughly anything west of the Atlantic. More than once someone said hopefully, “Oh, you’re from America! Maybe you know my brother in Rio de Janeiro!” 4 I took in the Russian theater, ballet and opera in great draughts. Ardently if illogically, I gave the revolution credit for everything cultural that it had inherited from the tsarist era. A hundred years of classical ballet, the meticulous art of Stanislavsky’s theaters, the piled-up treasures of Russian music and stagecraft were for me, as for all foreign worshippers, subtle confirmation of Karl Marx’s theories. Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, Moskvin and Ma- dame Geltzer have made more converts to Sovietism among visit- ing outsiders than the marvels of the Five Year Plan or the adroitness of the guides. The comparative tolerance of the “Nep” period had invigorated the Soviet theater. With few exceptions the finest things in post- revolutionary Russian drama, cinema and dance belonged to that time: Eisenstein’s and Pudovkin’s best motion pictures, Bulgakov’s and Olesha’s best plays, the ballet Red Pofify, the superb stylized productions by Granovsky in the Jewish Kamerny Theatre, the sensational innovations of Vsevelod Meierhold and a hundred other 64 HALLELUJAH ! achievements. It is largely upon these that the new Russia’s glamor- ous reputation in the theater and cinema still rests. Some of them were robust enough to weather the stormy years that followed. In the theater, the people on my side of the footlights interested me even more than those on the stage. Russian dramatic art is old; even Meierhold did most of his pioneering before the revo- lution. The audiences were new. Those citadels of snobbery in all lands, ballet and opera, had fallen to the masses. Working men and women thronged not only the music halls and moving picture houses, but the finest dramatic theaters. High admission prices (even with the reductions to trade-union members) still barred the lowest categories of labor from some of the theaters. Nevertheless, the greater part of these audiences would have gone through life without seeing a first-rate play, let alone a ballet or opera, had it not been for the revolution. The description of a working woman in head-kerchief, perhaps a servant or sewing- machine worker, sitting at ease in the Imperial Box at the Bolshoi Theater has become a cliche of Soviet travel books. There was nothing stereotyped, though, in the emotional lift I got out of such sights. Whether in the theater or out of it, these audiences and their life provided me with continuous stimulation. Their existence seemed to me pitched on a higher plane of intensity, in which joys and sorrows alike were sharper and more meaningful. Elsewhere poverty and wealth, hope and despair, were the commonplaces of old social systems and of direct interest only to the individuals affected. Here, where the revolution had destroyed old relations and established a new set of social values the lot of the individ- ual, whether pleasant or horrible, seemed novel, transitional and historically important. Or so it seemed to me, studying Russians avidly in the light of my socialist convictions. Elsewhere men, women and children had private existences distinct from their social status. Here they epitomized for me classes and groups: Soviet Youth, Backward Peasants, Bourgeois Intellectuals, Class-Conscious Workers, Bureaucrats, and so on. They were thus capitalized in my eyes as I watched them on the streets, at social gatherings, in restaurants, offices, factories. It was largely my own mind which gave them this rich social coloring. MOSCOW AND MUSCOVITES 65 It turned all of Russia for me — throughout my six years, because the novelty never wore off entirely — into a moving spectacle. A prying curiosity took me to churches, markets, homes, nearby villages, theater rehearsals — wherever, off the beaten tourist track of factories and museums, I could see the people of the new Rus- sia at their private preoccupations. II. The Kremlin’s Guests and Poor Relations WE SOON met most of the Americans with whom we were to be in contact in the ensuing years. The attitude of the sea- soned Moscow reporters ranged from frank pity for my innocence and ignorance to no less frank disdain for my imported en- thusiasms. I was pulled up short by the discovery that journalists who sounded so cocksure in their published eulogies of the Bol- shevik world were less certain and less eulogistic in their un- published views. Those Soviet developments which loomed largest in their minds and conversation at this juncture, I realized immediately, were not mentioned in their dispatches or at most conveyed in hints. The important things in Moscow are so often the intangibles— atmospheric pressures, as it were — which cannot be captured in news accounts. At the moment members of the press corps at all sensitive to changes in political weather were aware of gather- ing electrical storms — a tightening of the ranks of the ruling minority, a tremor of apprehension in the mass of the popula- tion. Casual table talk among the newspapermen treated as mat- ters of common knowledge facts which I had vehemently denied for so many years — facts for which I had helped consign friends to the garbage-heap of “renegacy.” The veteran Chicago 'Daily News man, Junius B. Wood, lived at our hotel j a growling, sharp-toothed bear of a man, whose redoubtable reputation and gruff ways rather intimidated a fledg- ling correspondent. Only our daughter was not fooled by his growl. He might be composing another biting commentary on Soviet news when Genie strode in (Junius looked upon the “Krem- lin gang 55 as just another set of politicians and treated their works and professions as unceremoniously as though they were Tammany stalwarts), but whatever devastating piece of realism he might be inditing, it waited while he entertained the young lady by playing the piano as she sat on the lid, her little legs dangling. 66 kremlin’s guests and poor relations 67 The American colony in Russia was destined to expand under the first Five Year Plan into a heterogeneous mass of technicians, skilled workers, salesmen, job-hunters, political quacks, amateur journalists.. At its peak it was to provide fascinated Russians with a goodly cross-section of America’s Main Street. At this point, though, it was still a select company of accredited newspapermen, pioneer businessmen, and a few concessionaires. Among the newspapermen, Walter Duranty, a little English- man who had been in the New York Times service since the war, reigned supreme. Urbane, clever to a fault, a scintillating talker, he remained, after all his years in Russia, detached from its life and fate, curiously contemptuous of Russians. He spoke of Soviet triumphs and travail much as he might of a murder mystery he had read, but with not half the passion or sense of personal in- volvement. His spoken views of the Russian scene, when the mood was upon him, would have shocked New York radicals who mistook him for a Soviet enthusiast, even as they shocked me. Among the concessionaires, the Hammer family, father, mother, and sons, held first place. Drawn to Russia from New York by their genuine interest in the revolution, the Hammers had found it a fertile field for their commercial talents; they risked their modest capital in the new Russia long before others ven- tured it. First as foreign trade intermediaries, then as pencil manufacturers on a concession basis, they mixed the business of helping themselves with the pleasure of helping Russia. In a great house on Sadovaya Kudrinskaya they dispensed hospitality with a baronial hand. A contingent of foreigners which had for me, as for all of Mos- cow, a particular fascination was concentrated chiefly in the Met- ropole Hotel. It consisted of refugees from the Chinese counter- revolution. One of the most attractive of these refugees, an Ameri- can girl named Rayna Prohme, had died suddenly in Moscow a few months earlier and the legend of her remarkable person- ality and tragic end was still fresh when I arrived. Vincent Sheean’s Personal History stands as an inspired tribute to this red-headed girl. The soaring revolutionary hopes in China, fed by Kuomintang victories under Soviet Russian guidance, had collapsed in gory 68 hallelujah! tragedy. Sheean and others have given us vivid pictures of both the victory and the defeat. Every radical and liberal had in some measure lived and suffered that drama in his own heart. The small company of refugees was therefore haloed by our mixed feelings of pride and pathos. There was Madam Sun Yat Sen, the widow of the revered leader of modern China. She was a fragile, bird-like creature 5 exq uisi te in her native costume, its flowers touched by the sun- light streaming into the hotel room, a little tremulous in her shyness, she seemed a lovely animated Chinese figure. She rarely ventured out of the hotel and saw few people outside of those who had worked with her in China. But I met her several, times. It seemed a little unreal and even disconcerting to find this delicate little woman possessed of a sharp mind and robust character. And there was Eugene Chen, who had been Foreign Minister when the Chinese revolution was at its glowing apex. In his case, too, a small physique somehow set off his vigorous mind dramati- cally. He had been bom in Trinidad, in the West Indies, with a considerable admixture of Negro in his blood. He had married a handsome Negro woman — the children showed me photographs of her — and she bore him two boys and two girls. They owned land, were thoroughly British in their education, and might easily have remained in Trinidad as typical humdrum natives of mixed blood. But the Chinese heritage asserted itself. Chen traveled to the land of his forebears and, without knowing its language, be- came a leader in the revolutionary upsurge. His official notes and manifestos as Foreign Minister were the delight of the radical world. I found that he spoke as he wrote, with a diplomat’s care for the meaning and an artist’s sensitiveness for the proper word. Both Madam Sun and Mr. Chen soon left Moscow — she for Shanghai, he for Paris. The four Chen children remained in Rus- sia, learned Russian and made themselves part of the new sur- roundings. We came to know them intimately and to admire them for their charms and their talents. All four ultimately married Russians. The historical fate which linked China and Russia for a few years and may again link them in the future is curiously personified in these four born in Trinidad, educated in Eng- land, touched in China by a new faith that came to flower in Russia. kremlin’s guests and poor relations 69 2 Then, as now, there were two foreign colonies in Russia and they rarely met. One was “bourgeois,” and its center was in the expensive hotels, the embassies and legations, and relatively com- fortable private apartments. The other was communist, and its center was at the Lux Hotel set aside for the use of foreign Bol- sheviks, at the offices of various Red Internationals, and in the communist schools. Both colonies were suspect, for to the Soviet mind an outsider, whatever his politics, is an alien creature of curious habits and unstable faith. The bourgeois group was openly under surveillance. The visiting brethren of the faith were watched less candidly but more minutely. I know no American who has succeeded in making himself a part of both those colonies. My natural impulse was toward the communist colony, of course. I knew most of the permanent American representatives in the Communist International, the Red Trade Union International, and other organizations. A few of them had been friends and frequently guests at my home in Sunnyside, Long Island. I had expected confidently that my Moscow friends and political guid- ance would come from that direction. If I experienced any sense of intrusion or self-consciousness over a false position, it was, rather, in the company of the capitalist newspapermen and other denizens of the bourgeois American camp. Until we were politely but unequivocally excluded from its sourish precincts, Billy and I were therefore constant visitors at the Lux Hotel, on the Tverskaya, in the crowded room of one or another American communist. A few Russian functionaries, in need of “living space” and influential enough to wangle this privi- lege, had also obtained temporary quarters in the Lux. Among them was Constantine Umansky, for many years my long-distance co-worker in Tass. We called on him, too, when in the building. How were we to guess that in crossing the Soviet frontier, even before I had written a single heretical line or voiced a single un- orthodox sentiment, we had been turned mysteriously into un- touchables? How were we to surmise that in visiting old friends we were exposing them to capitalist contagions and, what is more to the point, endangering the most valuable asset in their political 70 HALLELUJAH ! climbing— their spotless orthodoxy? All unaware of our new dig- nity as capitalist plague-bearers, Billy and I trudged through the snows to the Lux, at least once and sometimes several times a day. I shudder to think what havoc we wrought among the more eager careerists of our acquaintance. It was, and presumably still is, an extraordinary place, the Lux Hotel. Physically it had the character of an overcrowded tene- ment, an overflow of untidy perambulators in the lobby, pervasive and peculiarly unpleasant food smells, slatternly housewives, coo- ing and quarreling audible in the corridors. The elaborate pre- cautions in guarding the inmates added a prison aura to the cab- bage odors. The population of the hotel consisted of men and women, boys and girls, of all nations, colors and tongues, few of them able to understand one another, all of them awed by the grandeur and the might of the enthroned revolution. Various as they were in race and language, their creed was one. In a curious way, too, their looks were one. If there is such a thing as an inter- national communist type, it was to be met in the Lux realm — if not the same features, at least the same negligent dress, unkempt hair, and the same expression of anxious devotion. Ostensibly agents or employees of an international organization, these people had no doubt of their real status. They were the guests of a successful government, the Kremlin’s poor relations, eating its food, protected by its police, shadowed by its spies, their tenure of employment and sojourn in the final instance dependent on how they measured up in the graces of their hosts. The poor- relation humility was unmistakable in the shrill pride with which they boasted of Uncle Kremlin’s importance and strength, and particularly in the anxiety with which they catered to his every whim. He was a frowning, cantankerous uncle just then, suspicious that his foreign nephews and nieces might forget themselves and play with those horrid Trotsky brats. Most of them, fresh from cities where they were despised and persecuted, had never been so close to the honeypots of power and found the taste heady. Not, mind you, the make-believe power of leadership in an oppressed or underground revolutionary party, but the power that is spelled in armies, airplanes, police, unques- tioning obedience from underlings, and a vision of ultimate world dominion. Relieved from the risks and responsibilities under kremlin’s guests and poor relations 71 which they labored at home, their yearning for position, career and privilege in many cases took on a jungle luxuriance. Never before had I witnessed so much naked, unashamed syco- phancy and career-building concentrated under one roof. Who stood well with whom was the theme song of most conversation. Breathlessly Comrade X, almost within earshot of her meek spec- tacled husband, boasted that she had slept with Comrade Y, “a terribly important communist, you know . . . close to Stalin!” She was helping her husband get places. The arrival of a com- munist dignitary from Germany or France, a visit in some room by a third secretary to Stalin’s secretary, the rumor that the Hun- garian comrade, the lucky girl, was having an affair with that in- fluential Chinese comrade — these were the raw stuff of gossip, speculation, and envies. I saw the “professional revolutionist” theory reduced to obnoxious absurdity. With few exceptions, the Lux inmates knew no Russian and were cut off from such realistic guidance as they might have re- ceived from the local press. They met few, if any, Russians other than those told off as liaison officers for the foreign communist elements. A special news bulletin was prepared for them, in which Soviet developments were perfumed for their orthodox nostrils. Several of the bolder Americans in Moscow surreptitiously dropped into my office at intervals for years to find out what was happening in Russia by reading my files of American papers! The guests of the revolution lived a narrow, ingrown life, stew- ing in their own juices, shuttling between the bureaucratic offices of the various international headquarters. The Americans among them might just as well have remained near Union Square, New York, instead of Red Square, Moscow, for all that they learned of Soviet realities. Their ignorance of Russia remained correctly official, stereotyped, and self-righteous. 3 Almost every evening there was a gay party in some Lux com- rade’s room, in which vodka and dance music flowed freely. We always met approximately the same people, and it was normally the same routine of zakusky , liquor, flirting and dancing, aimless talk in English, German, French, with a rare word of Russian. 72 hallelujah! One such gathering was in the room of Kostia Umansky. It was predominantly German in character, Umansky’s wife being a German. A child prodigy of the German communist movement, Heinz Neumann, was the pampered guest 3 a few years later this boy was to become virtual dictator of the movement in Germany as Stalin’s most trusted lieutenant. We sat on the floor of the stuffy room, drank, played jazz, and had a gay time of it. Return- ing to the hotel towards dawn, Billy and I decided that having accepted so much hospitality, the least we could do was to throw a party in return. The result of that counsel of conscience was a gathering about a week later in room 441 of the Grand Hotel. (We had quickly relinquished the elegance of our first suite, with its bath and run- ning water, for this cheaper room.) The party was in every respect a carbon copy of the other — the same people, the same food and drinks, even the same gramophone and records — except that it was in the Grand instead of the Lux and that I paid the bills. Umansky was having a pleasant time along with the others, the only fly in the ointment being the protests of neighbors. But evi- dently his official conscience was bothering him. He drew me aside. “You know, Gene,” he confided, his face suddenly glum and official — he was putting me in my place — “this is quite a con- descension on our part.” “I don’t understand. What are you condescending about and to whom?” “I mean our attending a bourgeois farty” he smiled his smile full of gold teeth. “A bourgeois party! But, Kostia, these are the same people, the same everything as in your room the other night. . . “No matter! ” he laid down the law, this commissar-to-be. “This is the Grand Hotel and this is the room of a bourgeois corres- pondent.” I retorted much too politely, but with sufficient vigor to leave no doubt that such sectarian and formalistic “revolutionism” seemed to me merely ludicrous. The tension of mutual dislike be- tween us, I suppose, was born at that moment. This was the first of a series of hints which slowly penetrated my self-assurance. But for more than a month I continued to contaminate the sacred purlieus of the Lux with my heathen pres- kremlin’s guests and poor relations 73 ence. At the end of that time one of my more intimate acquaint- ances in that establishment took the matter into his own hands, or perhaps he had been commissioned to speak to me. “It’s rather embarrassing,” he stammered, “to have a bourgeois journalist calling on us. Of course, we all know you and like you and that sort of thing. But this isn’t New York. It’s Moscow and one must watch his step. The slightest suspicion of any of us and we go out on our backsides. I’m sure you understand. . . I tried to make the onerous errand easy for him. “Is it that they mistrust me or mistrust you?” I asked. “God knows! Everybody distrusts everybody and everything here, and the only safe way is to keep your mouth buttoned up and stick to your job and avoid seeing anyone or anything that’s not strictly kosher ” “But after all,” I was thinking aloud rather than arguing, “I worked for Tass for four years. They’re preparing to publish my book on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In fact, I only accepted the Moscow assignment from the United Press with Moscow’s ex- plicit permission. It was understood that I would use my strategic position for the cause.” My informant shrugged his shoulders, sadly. Had I been less than snow-white in my revolutionary conscience I suppose I would have required fewer hints. A number of extraor- dinary incidents would have served as danger signals and kept me from intruding my brand-new capitalist personality where it was not wanted. There was the episode with Comrade Foushman for a starter. That began in New York. One evening, at the home of an ac- quaintance, we met two Soviet visitors. One, a short, compact little man with a warm smile, was Serebriakov,* a Bolshevik of considerable importance, at one time a secretary of the Communist Party, whose political ups and downs are no part of this tale. The other was Comrade Foushman, who was in the United States for the Soviet textile industry in connection with Soviet cotton pur- chases. He was thick-set, red-headed, ebulliently friendly. We all played poker, and relished the anticipation of our interesting comradeship in Moscow. * Executed in January, 1937. 74 hallelujah! By the time we parted at a taxi door in the rain after midnight, Foushman and the Lyons family had plighted friendship in the way that people who like each other spontaneously will do. He insisted that we take a Soviet silver ruble from him by way of pledge of the new entente and over and over again he made us repeat the promise. “Just as soon as you get to the frontier,” he rehearsed the arrangements, “you telegraph me to the address I gave you. I’ll meet you at the station and put you up at my house. ... .” At Negoreloye we debated whether to telegraph him and de- cided not to take advantage of his good nature. But our first eve- ning in Moscow, Miss Jmudskaya got him on the telephone for me. He sounded genuinely hurt at our failure to notify him earlier of the momentous event of our arrival, but in the end forgave us. “What room are you in? I’ll be right over to see you,” he said. I saw him about four years later. That first evening we waited and waited in vain. I wondered vaguely whether in his rush to see us he might have been run over. For several days I tried to reach him by telephone, but he was never available. About four years later my New York editor asked for information on some matter pertaining to Soviet-Ameri- can trade and my secretary arranged with the Commissariat for Foreign Trade for an interview. I arrived at the appointed place and hour, having paid no attention to the identity of the official who would receive me. And suddenly I was face to face with Comrade Foushman! He, too, apparently had not expected his old poker partner. Both of us pretended blushingly that we had never met before, and few interviews in my experience were so strained and unsatisfactory. At its conclusion, however, he detained me a moment as my secretary walked out. In a thin, apologetic voice he asked: “How are you? And how is Billy?” And he sighed, much as to say, “By this time you understand how it is. . . . I’m really not to blame. . . .” In those first weeks the strange disappearance of Comrade Foushman was one more element in the cumulative bewilderment. When I told Louis Fischer, the communist publicist, about the man’s curious behavior, he smiled knowingly. “Don’t you under- kremlin’s guests and poor relations 75 stand? He doesn’t dare come over. ... The Grand Hotel, you know, and a foreign correspondent. . . . Foushman is under sus- picion of Trotskyist leanings and can’t take any chances.” I won- dered whether Fischer knew that he was himself under that dread suspicion. A Soviet journalist in Berlin had taken particular pains to warn me against associating too closely with him on that ground. Another rebuff that should have enlightened me, but alas! did not, was my meeting with my recent absentee boss, Jacob Doletzky, the director-general of Tass. I had counted heavily on his friendly advice in my new job. For four years we had corresponded and he was privy to all my hopes for utilizing my new position in the interests of the revolution. It took me more than a week of continuous and in the end slightly panicky insistence to receive the favor of an interview. Finally I found myself in his outer office. After I had been kept waiting for half an hour, the doors were thrown open and I was in the blessed presence. At the far end of a long room stood a vast and shiny desk cov- ered with many telephones and push buttons, and behind its im- posing expanse sat a bearded, obese little man, blinking behind thick glasses. Mussolini, too, makes his visitors walk the length of a great chamber before he recognizes their petty existence. I was fated to become excessively familiar with the species of ex- revolutionary known as a bureaucrat — people who once risked their lives for a cause but now trembled at the thought of risking their job by a bold word or gesture. “So,” he greeted me sarcastically, “you have gone over to the enemy?” I staggered under the unexpected blow. “But, Comrade Doletzky, you yourself agreed that I should accept Bickel’s offer. Don’t you recall — I was to learn Russian and get closer to things, then return to Tass? I — ” “Oh, well, now you’re a bourgeois correspondent all the same.” And he changed the subject. We talked polite formalities and he made it clear that I was not to presume on my record of ser- vice in the Soviet employ to expect special consideration from Tass. His organization was in contractual relations with my pppo- sition, the Associated Press, and Tass would therefore regard me of necessity as a competitor. In conclusion, by way of social salve, he promised to call me soon and take me and Mrs. Lyons to j6 HALLELUJAH ! the theater. By the time we left his country, six years later, he had not yet gotten around to keeping his promise. One of the few Luxites who remained until the end uninhibited in his friendliness was Big Bill Haywood, former generalissimo of the I.W.W.’s. Unluckily his end came too soon. He died three months after we reached Moscow. In the broken, abnormally cor- pulent, homesick man with whom we played checkers at the Lux, there was scarcely a trace of the dynamic Haywood who had made labor history in America. A little of the old fire came into his one eye as we recalled episodes and mutual acquaintances in the I.W.W. movement. Then he relapsed into a tragic and hopeless boastfulness. The bust a Moscow sculptor was making of him, a diploma of some sort which he had been presented. . . . He reached avidly for American cigarettes and waxed lyrical over the memory of American grub. Though stupidly regarded by so many as “un-American,” Hay- wood’s every nerve and muscle was rooted in the American soil, and the movement which he started and led — a movement of hoboes, drifters, unskilled workers, lumberjacks and miners — was likewise authentically American in a sense that made it incompre- hensible to foreign students. He had fled to Russia with other I.W.W. men while out on bail and was therefore forever cut off from his native land. This robust, two-fisted American, essentially democratic and idealistic in his instincts, found the Bolshevik sys- tem of impersonal brutality hateful and fumed inwardly because he could say and do nothing about it. After a lifetime of fighting what he considered the delusions of political action, he could not swallow a super-state, whatever slogans it might profess. He was suddenly an impotent alien, dependent on the bounty of a dic- tatorial state, and unable to return home. Out of one prison he had escaped into another. He was a pathetic ruin. The solace of his last years was a Russian wife much younger than himself, who nursed him and coddled him with great devo- tion. It was her firm hand which kept him from drink and im- posed absolute rest and thus prolonged his life. The one time that he overrode her insistence ended him. He heard about a party for the Lyonses at Fellow-worker McLeod’s — another I.W.W exile— on the other side of the Moscow River. “Mammy,” a Ne- kremlin’s guests and poor relations 77 gress who had lived in Russia thirty-five or forty years, would be there to prepare American food. Billy would be bringing an American ukulele. For the first time in more than a year, there- fore, Bill Haywood left the Lux, trailed by his protesting wife. The party, unfortunately, grew much too hilarious and Big Bill was caught up in it. Recklessly he drank vodka and ate “Mam- my’s” waffles and joined in I.W.W. songs to a ukulele accompani- ment. Only his wife knew how seriously ill he was and pleaded with him to desist, but he kissed her gaily and tried to reassure her. After the party he took to bed and two weeks later died in the Kremlin hospital. It was on May 18, the same day the Shakhty sabotage trial began. In cabling his death I “scooped” the other American reporters by many hours — the first of these petty suc- cesses and a victory that was all sorrow. Haywood’s ashes were buried in the communist cemetery on the outskirts of the city. 4 We were first led to the “salon” of Rachelle Ossipovna by sev- eral of the Negro comrades studying at the Lenin Institute and other communist institutions. A few of these black Americans were fully aware of the risks and rewards of the communist career they were embracing. Others saw in communism only a short-cut to racial equality, ultimately for all their people, but immediately — and that was far more important — for themselves. They were not only accepted as equals by the comrades but given a privileged role by virtue of the bourgeois slavery their color symbolized. A good many of these Negro recruits, however, had stumbled into the communist career ignorantly. The most pathetic in this group was a thin, sad-eyed little girl from Chicago, flat-nosed, thick-lipped and black as India ink. She told us her story: She had never graduated from elementary school and dreamed of an education while washing dishes in a Chicago restaurant. She confided her burning hope for learning to her friends. Then one of them brought her amazing news. Some organization was offer- ing free scholarships to several young Negroes for an education in a Moscow university. She had never heard of communism or world revolution. She had at most a faint notion that there was 78 hallelujah! a country called Russia somewhere in the far far-away. But the tidings of the scholarship fired her imagination — not merely an education but a “university” and travel! “Well,” she said, “I sure applied but didn’t have no hopes no- how that I’d be chosen but I prayed hard to the Lawd even while I washed the dishes. I didn’t know then why they chose me and I don’t know yet, because I sure ain’t fit for it. But they looked me over, they did, and said I’d make ‘good material.’ “When I told the folks at home I was going to Moscow my mammy cried and my old man threatened to thrash me, but I explained that I was gonna get an education in a university and wouldn’t have to wash no more dishes, then I would come back and get myself a good job teaching or office work or something. Anyhow, about a year and a half ago I got to Moscow. . . . “Then the trouble began. Instead of teaching me writing and figuring and such things, why, they began to lecture me about Marxism and dialectic materialism and the Party line and the class war, which sure ain’t gonna help me get no better job back home, is it now?” To make things worse, the barracks in which she was housed was less attractive than the slum she had left behind in Chicago, and the monthly stipend was not enough to live on. By the time it penetrated her bewildered and unlettered mind that she was being trained to lead revolution, a year had passed. It would be hard to face her family without the education she had promised them and it was difficult to extract return fare from the commit- tee at the Lenin Institute. So she decided she might as well finish the three-year course. . . . At least she was a great social success, invited out every night to some Russian home. Negroes are such a rarity in Russia that people stop to stare at them in the streets. They are sought after as exotic additions to any party. Among the male Negroes was one who subsequently ran for Vice-President of the United States on the communist ticket. They were the most popular men in the Soviet capital. To the fillip of their astonishing color they added the tang of their status as symbols of the oppressed nationalities of the world in revolt. “Yes,” one of the Negro boys said, “we’re hauled out every- where, at meetings and clubs as samples of the oppressed races, kremlin’s guests and poor relations 79 and we make speeches which nobody understands, but everybody applauds and cheers anyhow. That’s not so bad. It’s the women- folks drive me crazy, always telephoning and wanting to be loved. You know there’s a limit to a man’s time.” He laughed lustily. One Saturday night this man had swallowed a few more vodkas than his quota in the Grand Hotel ballroom. I was present when he staggered out and addressed the droshky driver. “How much you gonna charge me from here to Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, boss?” he asked in English. The cabbie was taking no chances, even if he didn’t understand the foreign gibberish. “ Pyat rublei he said. “Five rubles to Lenox Avenue,” the customer laughed, “too much, boss, too much,” and staggered away on foot. Well, it was through the good offices of the budding Negro revolutionaries that we met Rachelle. She and her husband (who was a supernumerary in that household) were relatively well fixed. For themselves, several sons and a servant girl, they had two good-sized rooms, and were therefore the envy of four or five neighbors in what was formerly one apartment. In the pre-revolu- tionary days Rachelle had run a real literary and artistic salon in Petrograd. Persons of consequence had been among her guests. Now, reduced to two rooms, into which she had crowded an im- mense amount of furniture and other debris of her former afflu- ence, the urge to hunt artistic lions was still strong upon her. The animals she snared, alas! were not very leonine: a few ballerinas, American Negroes, a number of opera hopefuls, and a miscellany of people who enjoyed her food. But her anxious imagination turned them quickly into lions all the same. She introduced them to one another and to outsiders as great dancers, opera stars, liter- ary luminaries, important foreigners, etc. She was herself the only one who believed it. Under her eccentricities and innocent pretensions, Rachelle Ossi- povna had a lively mind and a heart of pure gold. From the first she developed a soaring admiration for Billy, and showed her a thousand signs of unselfish devotion. In those first difficult months, when the people on whose friendship we had counted began to ostracize us in the interest of their political careers, Rachelle’s friendship was one of the few things we could count on implicitly. There was a dark moment when our daughter suddenly fell ill 80 hallelujah! at the hotel. Finding doctors and medicines at unusual hours with only a few words of Russian to help us and a most inadequate purse was no simple matter. We felt ourselves indescribably alone. Several people who would have helped were frankly afraid to come to the hotel. It was unsafe even then for a Soviet citizen to visit foreigners under such public auspices. Rachelle, however, rushed over immediately and remained for some forty-eight hours, until Genie was out of danger. Despite restrictions, our circle of acquaintanceship grew. Rus- sians in political positions and communists with ambitions to nurse, naturally steered clear of foreigners — unless they were specifically “assigned” to encourage such intercourse. Those who remained, in the long-run, were the lowly and the average, run-of-the-mill actors, singers, writers, sometimes brave in the absolute purity of their conscience, other times too naive to understand the risks they were running. Like all sensible foreigners, we learned to curb our social instincts and waited always for Russians to make the first gesture toward continued relations, to spare everyone concerned possible embarrassment. As it became increasingly risky for them to associate with a foreign journalist, we received fewer invitations, entertained less, and were driven increasingly into the foreign col- ony for sheer human warmth, but on the whole we continued to have more day-to-day contacts with all sorts of Russians, as far as I am aware, than any other non-communist correspondent in the country. III. Nep: Burlesque on Capitalism I CAUGHT Moscow in a critical moment of transition. Within less than a year it would have a totally new character. I did not realize it at the time. Only in retrospect the significance of that point in Soviet history became clear to me. Trotsky was an exile in Alma-Ata, Turkestan, and his name was being expunged from Soviet text-books, records, and history. His more prominent supporters were scattered in concentration camps, prisons and places of exile in Siberia, the Far North or Central Asia. All of them had completed the tragic cycle: from exile through revolution to exile. The remnants of Trotsky’s sym- pathizers in the ranks of the ruling Communist Party were being mopped up with small consideration for fairness and none for sentiment. In my first fortnight in Moscow, I read the letters of a young workman, the brother of an American I.W.W., whisked from his factory bench and hurled into Siberia for expressing re- grets over Trotsky’s defeat too loudly. I heard stories of idealistic young communists who committed suicide in despair over what they considered the collapse of the revolution, though I could not check the truth of such stories. “Nep,” the New Economic Policy of socialist-capitalist compro- mise introduced by Lenin in 1921, was in process of “liquidation.” Without actually decreeing the end of that period, the Kremlin was effectively choking it to death. Confiscatory “tax arrears” were imposed which automatically wiped out one private enterprise after another. The Nepmen, the private traders of this compromise period, were arrested for real or imaginary infractions of real or imaginary laws and hustled to Siberia or the North. The tolerance under which the more industrious or shrewder peasants expanded their holdings in land, livestock and other property was abruptly reversed. There were intervals of doubt this year, in which there seemed a possibility that the attack might be restrained. Its wishful-think- 81 82 hallelujah! ing victims believed at moments that the worst was over 5 but they were dismally wrong. A new epoch had begun: what was in effect a die-hard drive for full socialization. Had I arrived ten or twelve months later, so rapid was the process, I would have missed the momentous change. As it was, I had a fleeting but unforgettable glimpse of the Russia which the newly entrenched leader, Joseph Stalin, had doomed. Despite the ruthless proofs that their day was over, many of those who had thrived under Nep dosed themselves with deceptive hope. How could the government shut down all private trade, they asked, when it had no economic machinery for the effective distribution of goods ready to take its place? How could it crush the small enterprises and artisan establishments manufacturing everyday necessities for the population when it was unable to manufacture those things itself? “Nonsense,” the proprietor of a private seed shop around the corner from the Grand Hotel argued with me, “they can’t do it. Already the muzhiks are hiding their grain or refusing to sow more than enough for themselves because they can’t get manu- factured goods or seed. The Kremlin will not be insane enough to make this situation worse by closing shops like mine and cutting off the supplies provided by handicraft workers.” A few weeks later this same seed merchant, however, came to me in a condition of utter panic. The financial inspectors had piled ruinous retroactive taxes on him, knowing full well that he could not pay them. His career as a trader was ended. “For God’s sake,” he pleaded, “let me work for you. Anything — I’ll run your errands, or make your stove — anything so I can claim that I am gainfully employed. Maybe I will then be allowed to join a trade union after a while. If not, it’s expulsion from my apartment, maybe Siberia.” A few of the more perspicacious foreign observers were aware of the implications of this process of “liquidating Nep.” I recall that Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tagehlatt was the first to write boldly that Nep was ended, and that Duranty, who was his disciple and wisely so, followed his lead in this regard, though more guardedly as was his way. Most of the others recorded the indi- vidual episodes in the process without venturing to make clear-cut deductions. As for the Russians, they were instinctively appre- nep: burlesque on capitalism 83 hensive and excited by the tension of impending change. But no one, perhaps not even the responsible leaders in the Kremlin, guessed how quickly and how thoroughly Nep would be swept out, to give way to the slogans and sacrifices and inspired cruelties of the Five Year Plan. The Tverskaya, Moscow’s, and therefore Russia’s, “Main Street,” of that time, remains in my mind as almost a symbolic representation of the transitional moment. It was, or seems to me in retrospect, a microcosm of the half-socialist, half-capitalist Rus- sia which was expiring. Along its length were private stores, state shops, private restaurants, gypsy cellars, the government-operated gambling Casino, private peddlers, beggars and prostitutes, the offices of state trusts and the headquarters of the leading news- papers. The street runs from the fringe of Red Square northward to the Triumphal Arch commemorating the Muscovite victory over Napoleon, past the Alexandrovsky station, and on to the city of Tver (from which it takes its name) and beyond that to Lenin- grad. It is the first street traversed by tourists arriving from the West, since it connects the railroad station with the hotel district. It is the street with which they are likely to become most familiar in the ensuing days, because it holds such standard tourist fare as the Anti-Religious Museum, the Museum of the Revolution, the Lenin Institute, the Moscow Soviet and the new Telegraph Build- ing. The first impressions of Moscow are thus the gift ' of the Tverskaya. The blood of Russian history has flowed through this artery as through no other. The pulse of the Tverskaya is the pulse of Russia. On holidays, now as for centuries, it is the most lavishly decorated and illuminated, the most crowded and most sensitive to popular feeling. Until 1917, imperial parades, religious pag- eants flowed through it; and since then, the floods of singing, cheering humanity under a froth of red banners. It was here, in the palace of the Governor-General that is now the home of the Moscow Soviet, that the Bolshevik staff had its headquarters in the crucial days of November, 1917. It was here, from the corner balcony of the National Hotel, a few blocks farther down, that Leon Trotsky made his last dramatic appearance in Moscow in November ten years later, and was howled down and yanked 84 hallelujah! away by G.P.U. men. The melodrama of Russian history, the colossal ironies of its last great change, seem more sharply re- flected on the Tverskaya than elsewhere. The very buildings on both sides of the street, the names and monuments, _ attest the revolution. Yet they retain a brooding sense of something ageless and unchanging. On a pedestal opposite the Strasnoi Monastery (now the Anti- Religious Museum) Russia’s great national poet, Alexander Push- kin, has stood since 1880, watching the ebb and flow of the Tver- skaya’s human tides, mulling over the rotation of chronological and political seasons. Nothing can surprise him any longer. Once there were self-important officers with their shoulders squared off by heavy epaulets, uniformed civil servants, ragged peasants ; now the officers were no longer epauleted, the civil servants carried brief cases, the peasants were still ragged. Always there were chil- dren racing and shrieking their delight around the base of his pedestal; always the lovelorn passed him without recognition, ab- sorbed in one another and quoting his lines without knowing it; always the aged, the beggared, the heartsore. And they must seem to Pushkin the same people, the same loves and despairs that he found on the day he mounted his pedestal. 2 At the time of my arrival I did not quite grasp the meaning of Moscow’s “Main Street,” where Nep was having its last hys- terical fling. The Nep period was an armed truce at best. The resumption of hostilities was inevitable. But the truce had lasted seven years and the nation had come to regard it as more or less permanent. A new middle class of Nepmen — private merchants, artisans, small-scale manufacturers, professional men, bureaucrats in com- fortable berths, more prosperous peasants, the criminal elements which are the excrescence of private initiative — had come into be- ing. Some of them were resuscitated middle-class people of the pre-revolutionary era, others were tasting affluence and the sweets of privilege for the first time. No more extraordinary class has ever been called into being and blown into oblivion in the memory of humankind. Because it was nep: burlesque on capitalism 85 young, born in chaos and in some measure outside the law, be- cause it was at bottom uncertain of its tenure and therefore des- perately eager to make the most of its advantages immediately, it was exceptionally vulgar, profiteering, crude, and noisy. Under capitalism the bourgeoisie has the poise and self-assurance that come with power. It has a culture of its own and an ideology of self -justification. In Nep Russia, for the first time, there was the anomaly of a large bourgeoisie without political power, without culture, without respect for its own class. It was a class existing by sufferance, despised and insulted by the population and oppressed by the government. It became a curious burlesque on capitalism, self-conscious, shifty, intimidated, and ludicrous. It had money, comforts and other physical advantages, yet remained a pariah element, the butt of popular humor and the target of official discrimination. And the stamp of this strange middle class was everywhere on Moscow. Its fitting sign, it seemed, was the prostitution that thrived on the sidewalks of the Tverskaya and in front of the leading public baths. Its desperation was mirrored in the Casino, a gambling hell run by the government. Every night until late dawn the Casino was filled with the newly rich, embezzling offi- cials, underworld characters, and foreigners with money to throw away. The Soviet regime took a heavy rake-off on roulette, chemin- de-fer and other games, the G.P.U. marked off its future victims by watching who had more money than he could comfortably ex- plain, and everyone suspected that the games were not quite on the level. But that did not affect attendance. About one-quarter of the shops in Moscow were still privately conducted and carried the names of their owners. The rapidity with which such personal names retreated before the synthetic official titles was one of the symptoms of the new revolution ush- ered in by Stalin’s era of industrialization. Soon there was not a single private name inscribed on any shop. Ivanovs and Abramo- viches gave way to “Mosselproms” and “Mostorgs.” The private shops were higher-priced than their government competitors next door— they had to be to meet the staggering taxes. But they had more and better merchandise, and exerted themselves to please the customers. By contrast the official stores were pitifully poor, crude, and unprofitable. In the production and 86 hallelujah! marketing of articles of general use, the Nep sector of the nation’s economy clearly had the edge on the government, despite official discrimination, punitive impositions, and frank persecution. For the first time in history, individual and government in- dustry were pitted against one another throughout a great nation, their wares displayed in adjoining stalls, as it were, in open and ruthless competition. “Unfair” and “unethical” are mild bourgeois words for the competitive methods used by the state, but it was being badly worsted notwithstanding — so badly worsted that it inevitably invoked its sovereign right to exterminate its competi- tors altogether. But meantime, as a matter of common convenience, we met in private cafes and ice-cream parlors. We ate in private restaurants, of which there were a dozen along Tverskaya. We shopped in private stores, called in private physicians and used the services of private photographers, dentists, and other professional people. Everyone else, from commissars down, did likewise. By the end of the year most of this private traffic was ended. Since we could not afford to eat in the hotel — except for the extravagance of an occasional breakfast — Billy learned to cook on a single-heater electric stove, despite regular warnings from the hotel management that it was strictly prohibited. She accepted the hardships smilingly. Considering her theatrical background and Broadway tastes, I had feared Billy would find Moscow intoler- able. But she proved more resilient than I did. With only a few words of “kitchen Russian” at her disposal, she bargained with the peasants on Hunters’ Row, returning to the hotel triumph- antly with chicken, vegetables, meat, dairy products and fruit in tow. There were still numerous markets where such foodstuffs, not to mention clothes and the products of home industry, could be bought at prices which seemed to us steep, but in a few months were to seem, in retrospect, incredibly cheap. Later we were to hear Russians sigh over “the good old days,” referring to the Nep days rather than the tsarist times. Having tasted a little of the vanishing plenitude in the twilight hours of Nep, we could understand their nostalgia. Private kiosks sold candy, flowers, sausages. Sidewalk hucksters offered home-made brassieres, tooth- picks, wooden toys, aprons, frozen apples. nep: burlesque on capitalism 87 The figure of one of these hucksters, around the corner from our hotel, sticks in my mind: a sad-eyed fellow who announced the wares on his improvised push-cart and their prices in the sing- song of synagogue chants, more engrossed in the sacred melodies than the profane words. A number of narrow shops, mere crevices between buildings, specialized in domestic and imported sausage for which the Rus- sians have an inordinate fondness. The succulent garlicky aromas were more effective advertising than the most spacious show win- dow would have been. One of these crevices, by some accident, survived for years after all other private trade was extinct. There is in Russia always at least one startling exception to prove even the most rigid rule, as though tolerated for purposes of dramatic contrast, or by way of museum exhibit. 3 Our chief personal problem, as that of every other permanent resident, was housing. A city with accommodations, at most, for a million, already had a population of over three million. Tens of thousands more poured into Moscow every day: clerks in the un- wieldy bureaucratic apparatus, peasants anxious to become pro- letarians, youth seeking an education or a new start. Flats that for- merly housed one family now contained half a dozen, with an overflow of “house workers” (servants) sleeping on boxes in the corridor, on the kitchen floor, on the common oven. On most apartment doors there was a card listing the inmates, with complicated instructions for ringing: Alexandrov ring I Stepanov ring 2 Lazarovsky ring 2 short, I long Kagan ring 4 short, 3 long; etc. At the first stir of the bell people in their crowded cubicles automatically paused in their work or play, quarrels or love-mak- ing, to count the rings. Little things in a new environment have a way of impressing themselves on the newcomer’s mind out of proportion to their importance. A curious awareness of the intimate life of Moscow being suspended for a moment over and over again 88 hallelujah! —like a motion picture that suddenly stops moving— became part of my private sense of the Soviet capital. No one who has not lived through a space shortage in a great city can imagine the terrors of the situation. It cannot be appre- hended at second-hand. People married and divorced, lied and denounced their neighbors, for a little space. The law courts were jammed with cases growing out of disputes over living quarters. In the midst of this hideous overcrowding, however, many privileged officials, police officers, and particularly Nepmen had managed to acquire the luxury of entire apartments of two or more rooms. Space was the measure of affluence, as a bank bal- ance might be in America. Many Nepmen who had read the hand- writing on the wall were at the moment trying to dispose profit- ably of their apartments and were especially anxious to lay their hands on foreign currency. In the following years we blamed our- selves for stupidity in not snatching up such a bargain. But the prices seemed exorbitant to us, fresh as we were from New York. We felt certain that the housing situation would improve— it would have been disloyal to think otherwise — and that such an expenditure, even if we could borrow the money, was inadvisable. One such apartment remained as a glamorous memory to taunt us: half of an eight-room lay-out, with a tiled bathroom and other alluring conveniences, which was offered to us for a mere three thousand dollars down and a rental thereafter. Had we accepted it, we would have missed the nightmare years on Chistiye Prudy (Clean Ponds) Boulevard, as occupants of one half of a former stable. We paid fifteen hundred dollars for the privilege of entering the place, the United Press having come to our rescue with a loan deducted from my wages. Further pay- ments agreed upon, fortunately, went by default, because the Nep- man who had remodeled the stable was sent to a concentration camp in the nick of time. The other half of the glorified stable was occupied by a Soviet bookkeeper, his fat and slovenly wife and a brood of snot-nosed children. We shared a kitchen and an improvised bathroom be- tween us, and a corridor in which their servant girl slept on boxes. Our servant girl slept more comfortably in the parlor. Human labor was the only commodity cheap and plentiful in Moscow, so that even an underpaid bookkeeper could afford a servant} in- nep: burlesque on capitalism 89 deed, every family needed an extra person to stand in lines and to explore distant markets in the perpetual search for food. Our share consisted of three narrow rooms, the abnormally high ceilings turning them even narrower and giving them an exotic look. We carpeted the floor and disguised the stable with the camouflage of wall hangings, pictures, maps, lamps, until it took on the character of a queer but colorful bohemianism. Our chief afflictions on Chistiye Prudy Boulevard were moist walls and unpleasant neighbors. The house was without a foun- dation, and as the winter thawed into spring, the walls began to sweat. Great leprous patches along the floor line and on the ceiling spread slowly but surely. Consultation with engineers hatched the device of a secondary set of walls of building board, with a few inches of air between. When the board was found and the inner shell built, with much tribulation and expense, and all of it painted jet black, our apartment looked quite “Greenwich Villagey.” The wetness was for the most part foiled, though it made repeated and sometimes successful forays. The neighbors, however, could not be foiled. Although their half was exactly the same size and shape as ours, they lacked our skill in camouflage. Their rooms were crowded, filthy, and ema- nated obnoxious odors. We painted our doorways and thresholds with chemicals intended to bar the vermin that luxuriated un- noticed and uncontrolled on their side. Often enough I was tempted to administer the chemical to Sashka, whose continuous whining — a peculiar off-key soprano with tremolos, trills, quavers and consecutive fifths— embittered my existence. The entire family took a reactionary view of the machine age and refused adamantly to use a toilet bowl as modem science intended, preferring to squat on it in traditional Asiatic fashion. The bathtub we had finally found and installed seemed to them the most natural place for the disposal of garbage. Because our half of the stable was colorful and perversely clean, we became in the eyes of our neighbors horrible exemplars of the capitalism which they actually envied and therefore thought that they hated. The two “apartments” branching off from a common corridor did, indeed, provide a symbolic model of two worlds. On one side, cleanliness and relative comfort 5 on the other, dirt, noise and poverty at ease in its own offal. 90 hallelujah! The entrance to the place was through a common yard, around which several score other families lived in verminous ant-heaps. Though we deliberately tried to dress Genie in clothes bought in Moscow, so that she might be less conspicuous among the other children, her neatness and foreign manner set her apart. She learned to speak Russian almost immediately and played with the Russian children, but she remained an Amerikanka and a boorz- hooika in their young ideological eyes. Our better food, our American clothes, our well-dressed visitors, the fact that we pos- sessed a telephone and a gramophone, made us conspicuous. We were closely observed and openly envied. Under the surface po- liteness, there was a resentment of our advantages which we could understand and forgive. As in all Moscow courtyards, the iron gates were closed in the evening. By midnight the dvornik, or concierge, a limping, bearded old man straight out of Chekhov, was invariably drunk and dead to the world. No amount of ringing could arouse him. Billy and I learned to scale the gate, though it was fifteen feet high, and in time were so adept at this exercise that we no longer ripped our clothes on the spikes. We always felt like thieves in the night while clambering over the grilled barrier and expected to be arrested for house-breaking. Once a militiaman did question the procedure and only our lack of Russian saved us from a trip to the police station. Casual visitors at our Chistiye Prudy palace could not guess at the moisture, the persecution by envious neighbors, and a thou- sand other discomforts. They exclaimed over the charm of the “artistic” black walls and the knick-knacks with which we sought to make the place tolerable as a permanent abode. A near-com- munist from New York, in the exaltation of her tourist sojourn in the communist Mecca, found our quarters distressingly “bour- geois.” Evidently, she had counted on me to demonstrate the sin- cerity of my radicalism by wearing a Russian blouse and giving right of way to the neighbor’s bedbugs. Returning to her spa- cious and elegantly furnished apartment on Madison Avenue, she reported to mutual friends that Gene Lyons was living in Moscow like a bourzhooy. It was the beginning of a legend in New York revolutionary nep: burlesque on capitalism 91 circles — the legend that I had suddenly and inexplicably gone capitalist. Moscow abounds with Americans who demonstrate the ardor of their faith by wearing Russian shirts, shaving their heads, de- filing their vocabulary, and snubbing everyone who fails in these externals of the ritual. Long after the Russian communists had stuck their shirt-tails into their trousers and blossomed out in gaudy neckties, these outsiders persevered in their romantic non- sense. There was the heart-rending plight of a young lady who strug- gled bravely to survive on a Soviet ruble salary. She dressed and lived like a Soviet worker, would not supplement her rations with foreign-currency purchases and hinted darkly at the sacrifices she was making for the cause. Her father was a Mid-Western mil- lionaire. Another couple, man and wife, likewise kept themselves to the discipline of living like Russians. They disdained the bourgeois comforts of the better hotels and the solace of dollar-shop food supplies, boarding instead with Soviet citizens and keeping within a modest budget no larger than a well-paid Russian’s income. Only the fact that everyone knew them to be wealthy as well as socially prominent in America spoiled the sympathy which they merited. A former American concessionaire had lived in Russia for many years in ample style. He professed to be a communist at heart. The discrepancy between his manner of living and his professions bothered him and in the end he decided upon reform. He would live like a Russian! He therefore summoned his servant, that is to say, house worker, and announced the new regime. The house worker was a hunch-backed old woman. “The old life is over,” he told her. “Hereafter we will live like Russians. We will not buy in the foreign shops any more. Begin- ning tomorrow you will buy in the markets and you will stand in line like other house workers P Unluckily, I lacked the talents for these surface conformities. When I wore a rubashka it was for the un-ideological reason that it seemed more comfortable at the moment. When I shaved my head it was in the un-Marxian hope of arresting baldness. We did not conceal the fact that an American wage and the privileges extended to foreign correspondents made existence easier for us. gz hallelujah! Neither did we scruple to be seen in public in the company of other foreigners or to dance occasionally at the Grand Hotel. These were serious and costly errors of judgment. Not that Russians objected. On the contrary, they were often offended by foreigners who “dressed down” to them. They ridiculed the mock- revolutionism of certain foreigners. But every detail of my bour- geois indulgences, from the hangings on the wallboard to the fox-trots in the hotel, were duly reported to my friends in New York, with fine embellishments. And thus they knew that I was on the highroad to capitalist perdition. IV. Hallelujah! IF LOVE is blind, faith is both deaf and blind. These blessed imperfections of deeply rooted belief, which are also its strength, help explain the perennial mystery about Russia. That mystery is why two foreigners, equally honest and intel- ligent, having passed through the same routine of sight-seeing and interviews, emerge with diametrically opposite impressions of the Soviet land. What is to one a “gray, unsmiling population” is for the other the inspiring spectacle of a “grimly determined popu- lation.” One speaks of “magnificent industrial discipline,” the other of “factory serfs.” One declaims about the tyranny of fashion hav- ing ended — “an uninhibited, unpretentious and truly democratic attitude towards clothes,” as the new U.P. correspondent put it early in 1928. The other dismisses this achievement of the revo- lution in some such phrase as “ragged, pathetically patched people.” The contrast goes much farther than different interpretations of the same physical facts. The facts themselves sometimes fade from the mental retina of the faithful, or by the same token, are vastly enlarged in the mind of the unbeliever. It is no special perspicacity that enabled me to recognize and forgive blind spots as large as all of Russia in the anxious tourists who came to me, as to all other permanent residents, with letters of introduction. It merely happens that my inner experience com- passed almost the whole range of reactions between a purblind enthusiasm that shouted down its doubts and an aching disillusion- ment that sometimes did less than justice to the Bolsheviks. I have watched an American communist leader in the Soviet Union, a young man of genuinely idealistic instincts, wash out all disturbing sights and sounds with vodka, filling the interstices of sobriety with erotic excitements, so that he might bring back his faith to New York intact. I saw a soft-hearted Seattle clergyman take to bed to avoid seeing too much that hurt him. His daughter, 93 94 HALLELUJAH ! who writes many books about the glories of the new Russia, cau- tioned me to say nothing to the old man that might distress him, and I agreed to the conspiracy. Another clerical gentleman sat in my office bewailing the fact that the age-old motives of greed and self-seeking were still rampant in Russia. Indeed, I consoled him with the hope that young people at least were developing new, more socially-minded goads to action. He left Russia to compose, in all sincerity I am sure, a book to prove that brand-new moti- vations guided conduct under the Soviets. Such crude self-deceptions, however, are the exception rather than the rule. Faith needs little conscious assistance. It brews its own deceptions far below the surface. I recall a scene in the hotel room of another correspondent. A well-known British journalist, Ashmead Bartlett, was attacking everything Soviet in bitterly sarcastic detail. A half-hearted and unconvincing defense was being put up by a Soviet functionary, Sergei Trivas. Trivas himself felt constrained to admit certain facts which shocked my sensibilities. I listened in mounting anger, then turned furiously on them both. They were maligning the revolution! Nobody here was lining his own pockets as in Eng- land or America! In the face of the greatest event in all human history they were bickering about mistakes in policy. And to think of a Soviet official admitting such libels on the revolution! Trivas quickly retreated and left the field of battle to Anglo-American journalism. The dispute became more heated and finally was halted on the sheer brink of a fist fight. Yet Bartlett, Trivas, and the others in the room had only taken for granted commonplaces evident to the naked eye and the naked intelligence — facts which I too was to accept as a matter of course a few months later. (That clash with Bartlett, inci- dentally, was duly reported to the G.P.U. and raised my stock considerably in those mysterious quarters, I was to learn later.) I needed no help in retouching everything I saw to match my expectations. No one who has not been close to the revolutionary movement in his own country can quite understand the palpitant anxiety with which a foreign radical approaches the realities of an established and functioning proletarian regime. Or the exal- tation with which he finally confronts the signs and symbols of that regime. It is a species of self-fulfillment, a thrilling identi- hallelujah! 95 fication with Power. Phrases and pictures and colors, tunes and turns of thought connected in my mind with years of ardent desire and even a measure of sacrifice were now in evidence all around in the places of honor, dominance, unlimited power! A strong sympathizer with the communist point of view, arriv- ing in Russia, is in a curiously hectic state psychologically and emotionally. A member of a small and maligned sect, he finds himself magically in a place where his sect holds complete sway. All his life, perhaps, the massive head of Karl Marx was asso- ciated in his consciousness with a fervent mission. Now he finds that symbol in every office, every railroad station, on postage stamps, in ten thousand store windows, on pedestals in the public squares! The word “comrade” was the password of a small and ridiculed minority. Suddenly it is a title of nobility and a talisman of power! The revolutionary jargon, until yesterday known only to a few initiates, today is the official and dominant tongue over a sixth part of the globe’s surface. The brawny, flame-eyed pro- letarians of the revolutionary posters, once symbols of revolt, are suddenly become symbols of dominion! Consider the emotional force of the song International for such a visitor. At home it was played and sung, perhaps, in secret. At best it was surrounded with an aura of social rebellion, dangers of arrest, economic hazard, the risk of deportation. Suddenly that song is blared forth mightily by a dozen combined military bands on Red Square, its pulse is carried to millions of workers deployed in the streets of Moscow, challenging and threatening and exult- ing. Diplomats representing the whole world meekly bare their heads in token of respect to its rhythm. It is no longer a marching song, but a triumphal hymn, backed up by a government and armies and air forces and secret police. Small wonder that this visitor is in no condition to grasp or hold lowly facts. His world is in the soaring clouds. Whether it will take him a year or ten years to descend again to earth depends on his own make-up. It is presumptuous to expect foreign com- munists to see the Soviet social landscape except through the prism of their own feelings and convictions. Their minds become finely adjusted instruments for selecting impressions in harmony with their exalted state. The validity of their life’s work, their suffer- ings, and their sacrifices is at stake. Who can estimate the pain 96 hallelujah! and frustration that have gone into those books of communists who came to their Russian utopias and found them unacceptable! Their minds and hearts are a shambles of bleeding illusions, and the insults from their former comrades are salt on their open wounds. Such men and women are scarcely to be blamed if they shrink from the realities and seek sanctuary in desperate rationalizations. It was through an emotional haze that I viewed the new Bol- shevik world around me. My early dispatches out of Moscow were laudatory, though toned down to conceal my bias. Each of them sheathed a poison dart aimed at the heart of the capitalist system. Every fact which might be misunderstood by a world of infidels was carefully explained and turned by implication into one more proof of revolutionary wisdom or courage. I often read the messages of my colleagues in comparing notes on how we covered some event or decree. Junius Wood of the Chicago Daily News had a talent for piling up indisputable detail which somehow added up to ridicule. Duranty juggled his phrases, and even in his ostensible eulogies left a fuzzy margin of uncer- tainty. Edward Deuss of the International News Service wrote with a bread-and-butter realism that ignored the “deeper mean- ings” of the revolution. William Henry Chamberlin of the Chris- tian Science Monitor was always exact and scholarly and passion- less. But all of them seemed to me so exasp eratingly calm and com- posed in the midst of high historical drama. I resented their bore- dom. I was continuously astonished how many unsavory stories they found right in the Soviet newspapers which somehow escaped my attention. My dispatches in these months, as I say, were consistently and ardently partisan. It was a fight to the death between capitalist and socialist elements, in which those in the capitalist trenches de- served and received no quarter from my typewriter. The necessity to report individual episodes under the limitations of cable economy was a distressing factor. Excerpted from their context of larger purposes, the isolated news events — the slaughter of grain collectors here, the execution of alleged kulaks elsewhere, the arrest of a few hundred more “speculators” — seemed too harsh. I envied the special correspondents of individual newspapers who hallelujah! 97 could cable lengthy explanations. But I deluged my editors with “think pieces” interpreting these events, every interpretation an undisguised justification echoing the official press. Mine was the satisfaction of being at once on the side of the authorities and on the side of the righteous. It is a comfortable and heart-warming position that encourages observers anywhere to give those in power the benefit of every doubt. 2 That first winter was an exceptionally bitter one, even by Mos- cow weather standards. Waiting on queues for bread and other necessities was that much more agonizing. Everywhere these ragged lines, chiefly of women, stretched from shop doors, under clouds of visible breath; patient, bovine, scarcely grumbling. Pri- vate trade channels were being rapidly shut off, before the gov- ernment was able to replace them with official channels. Manu- factured goods of the type that flowed from artisan families fell to a dribble and soon dried up entirely. New pressures were being applied to the more industrious, more unscrupulous, and more prosperous peasants, and the flow of meat, fowl and other food- stuffs from the surrounding countryside slowed down perceptibly with every passing day. The authorities did not hide their deep concern over the hostil- ity of peasants to the official plans for “collecting” grain — that is, for purchasing it at government prices, regarded by the villages as outright confiscation. The disparity between the prices of farm products and manufactured goods, the so-called “scissors,” had long been a deterrent to peasant production. If they could not exchange their rubles for boots, matches, salt, textiles, kerosene, the peasants had small incentive to grow more grain than they needed for themselves and their animals. As the capitalistic out- lets were blocked and compulsion increasingly used to extract grain from the growers at official prices, the peasants simply re- stricted sowings and concealed the size of their crops. Bread, which constitutes the larger half of the ordinary Rus- sian’s diet, became a “deficit product.” This, in turn, obliged the desperate authorities to exercise more force on the peasants. The vicious circle was a tightening noose around the government’s throat. 98 hallelujah! The outside world had accepted Stalin’s victory over Trotsky as marking a swing to the Right. It was Trotsky who had warned against the emergence of a new capitalist class in the villages and demanded that the extra-legal repressions used against Nepmen, the urban bourgeoisie, be extended to richer, so-called kulak ele- ments in the country 3 he who had demanded a speedy, planned in- dustrialization of the country. The world was wrong. No sooner had the success of the Stalin machine — what Trotsky called the “dictatorship of the secretariat” — been completed, than the Krem- lin stole Trotsky’s thunder by turning on the kulaks. Russians were as surprised by this turn of affairs as the outside world. Having been happily freed of the bugaboo, Trotsky, they were confronted with much worse: his policies being put into effect by a more centralized and more ruthless dictatorship under Stalin. The most astonished and chagrined of all in this about-face were those Bolshevik leaders jyho were not content to be rid of Trotsky, but honestly opposed his Leftist notions. Men like Alexis Rykov, the head of the government, and Mikhail Tomsky,* the head of the trade unions, and Nikolai Bukharin, f the outstanding theorist in the Party line-up, suddenly found their leader, Stalin, in some of the very political positions from which Trotsky had been forcibly ejected. In a sense they remained true Stalinists when Stalin himself veered suddenly to the Left. In remaining faithful to Stalin’s earlier views, they were to become, by the end of 1928, a new anti-Stalin faction, the so-called Right Opposition. When the Kremlin carried its new socialist offensive into the villages, the peasantry fought back with the only weapon at its disposal. It refused to feed the pampered cities and armies. In 1 9 19-21 its tactics of non-cooperation had forced Lenin to abandon military communism in favor of the New Economic Policy. These tactics were now revived, and the country, in the midst of its growing food shortage, watched uneasily the gigantic tussle be- tween an organized state and some hundred million of its citi- zens. Government grain collections (the pretense of voluntary sales to the official collectors was belied by the very use of this * Committed suicide in August, 1936. fi Arrested in 1937. hallelujah! 99 word) fell off alarmingly. The exportable surplus disappeared — the name “Bread Export Trust” on a building across the street from the Grand Hotel became the target of half-illicit political gibes. And the bread lines grew longer, drearier, more sullen throughout the land. The government retaliated with a series of what it called euphemistically “extraordinary measures.” They amounted to con- fiscation of grain supplies in many instances reminiscent of the methods of military communism. Red troops were sent into the more intractable villages to halt leakage of grain through private channels. Bread “bazaars” that had operated legally in the towns were closed down. The state’s agents were instructed to meet their quotas of grain collections by any means, and dozens of them paid with their lives for the attempt. The political legend then started and since raised to the dignity of official history is of a peasantry divided, with the government championing the poor peasants against their exploiting kulak neigh- bors. The simple fact is that the countryside, except for an in- consequential group of baitraksy or landless peasants, was a solid phalanx in opposing the government. Under Nep, for the first time almost in Russian history, the vast majority acquired land that it could call its own and had not the slightest inclination to relinquish it. For some time the press veiled the intensity of the conflict with generalizations about “kulak resistance” and the need for “Bolshevik vigilance.” Moscow buzzed with rumors of localized rebellion in the Kuban, Ukraine, and other sections ; of workers goaded by food shortage into striking — and strikes under Soviet conditions are equivalent to rebellion. When the press was per- mitted to speak more openly, many of the rumors appeared to be true. From all sections of the country came reports of local communists, visiting grain agents, and tax collectors assaulted and murdered. One official estimate, I recall, placed the mur- dered communists at more than five hundred. Batches of kulaks and “kulak agents” were summarily executed for counter-revo- lution. Though few of us realized it, we were witness to the opening battle in a war that, with brief armistices, was to culminate in the famine of 1932-33. ioo hallelujah! That Stalin and his advisers took an earnest view of the danger- ous conflict may be surmised from the fact that by July the Kremlin formally admitted that its extra-legal methods had been a serious “error.” It pledged solemnly that the error would not be repeated. Outwardly, peasant non-cooperation seemed to have scored another victory— the last in its tragic history. For a few months it looked as if Right sentiment might prevail, after all. This agrarian struggle provided the melancholy background for everything else that transpired in the country. It was the dismal setting for the first sensational sabotage trial which began in May, for the relentless campaign against critics of Stalin in the ranks of the Party, for the intensified persecution of Nepmen. The kulak opposition, dramatized in assassinations on one side and mass execu- tions on the other, provided a plausible popular explanation for bread and other food shortage. The bugaboo of industrial sabotage was its counterpart in explaining shortage of manufactured goods. In both instances the struggle was reported in terms of bloody war- fare and with small regard for facts. Every official news item was a communique from the war fronts and its purpose was to maintain fighting morale. I had certainly reached the new Russia at a critical stage in its career. 3 Spring turned the snows to mud and stripped housefronts, cob- blestones and cluttered back-yards of their merciful winter swath- ings to reveal the drabness underneath. The miniature sleighs disappeared overnight to be replaced by decrepit, knock-kneed droshkies. Days grew longer and nights more limpid. Shawls gave way to red and white flowered handkerchiefs; misshapen padded coats and sheepskins were shed for less grotesque if no less patched garments. The girls outside the “family baths” and on the Tverskaya smoked their cigarettes and paced their beats less morosely. On clear evenings the strains of accordions floated over the boulevards and couples promenaded slowly, silently, hands interlaced in front of them and heads touching. As May Day approached, innumerable pictures and busts of Stalin, Lenin, Karl Marx, Voroshilov and other leaders, living and dead, suddenly filled the shop windows; gigantic wood and IOI HALLELUJAH ! cardboard representations of workers, peasants, and soldiers and models of machines and factories blossomed at the main intersec- tions. Creepers of red bunting proliferated across the houses, in- scribed with boasts and threats and promises. American tourists, the first swallows as harbingers of the holi- day season, alighted in the hotel lobbies, twittering excitedly of creches and museums and factories. They called one another and every Russian in their vicinity “comrade” with such deep childlike relish and looked at everything around them with the hypnotized eyes of lovers. Though the International was in their souls, they listened to the Grand Hotel band play Hallelujah raucously and interminably. This American jazz song for some unaccountable reason cap- tured and held the Russian fancy for years after it had been for- gotten in America} it was literally inescapable, being played ear- nestly for entertainment and ironically as symbol of bourgeois decadence. In 1928 the American tourists were almost entirely Russian Jews returning for a glimpse of their native land and communists on pilgrimage to Mecca. The more lucrative invasion by the mid- dle classes and the rich did not get well started until two years later, when the depression made them more susceptible to Soviet preachings. But already there were anxiously heretical profes- sors, atheists in search of a religion, old maids in search of revo- lutionary compensations, radicals in search of reenforcement for a wavering faith: the types that were to grow so boringly familiar to me in the next years. The last evenings of April the skies over Moscow were in- carnadined with the reflection of thousands of red lights illuminat- ing streets and show-windows, framing huge portraits of the lead- ers, spelling out defiance of Austen Chamberlain and other ene- mies. Extra food supplies had been concentrated in the cooperative stores. The press was loud with optimism. Radio horns blared martial music on the public squares. The streets echoed to the tread of throngs in a holiday mood— a mood expertly evoked by all the tricks of ballyhoo and patriotism. Billy and I mixed in the crowds and beat time mentally to the marching songs. Earlier that month we had made a round of the churches on Easter Eve. We had seen the believers march, chanting, behind 102 HALLELUJAH ! bearded long-haired priests in their magnificent vestments, behind acolytes in shimmering white; each of them shielded a lighted taper against the wind. We had watched them intoning fervently “Christ is risen!” and kissing their neighbors. They were not molested, but everywhere there were knots of unfriendly, sneer- ing onlookers. By contrast with May Day Eve, the Easter cere- monies were pallid. Insofar as the Orthodox faith was a pageant, it could not long compete against the official pageantry. On May Day, the tourists were deployed on both sides of Lenin’s tomb. They thrilled to the massive display of military strength, the rumbling tanks, the armored cars, the machineguns and searchlights, the airplanes buzzing overhead. They cheered the horsemen galloping across the square in mass formations at a furious pace, shouting hurrahs that plucked echoes from the clouds, the horses 7 hooves striking sparks from the cobblestones. Then they saw the armed workers, the Red Cross divisions, and the hours-long flood of humanity under banners and floats, cheering and singing and cheering again. Stalin and his principal lieutenants stood on the wooden ramparts of the Lenin Mausoleum, smiling, saluting, chatting. The slogans and floats this May Day attacked Austen Chamberlain, kulaks and saboteurs — the enemies abroad and the enemies at home. There was little in this standardized scene to give strangers an inkling of the volcanic forces under the surface, and of the impending struggles. If there were hints of the strained situation in agriculture and industry, outsiders were neither equipped nor in a state of mind to read them. The tourists and labor delega- tions returned home to spill their superlatives in newspaper in- terviews or at dinner tables, smugly ignorant of what was going on behind the scenes of the greatest show on earth. I was caught up by the sweep and magnitude of May Day — of revolutionary Moscow in its holiday character, loud, brightly lit, defiant, in military formation. Immense quadrangles of Red soldiers taking the oath of fealty. The Kremlin cannon firing salutes. Hurrahs that rolled through Red Square like waves. Above all, the masses marching across the enclosed space, their eyes and minds fixed on Stalin. Newsreels have made this scene familiar to the whole world, but they can only echo faintly the hallelujah! 103 thunder of released emotion that shakes a sympathetic newcomer plunged into the scene for the first time. Not until the Nazis in Germany took over the mass demonstra- tion technique and carried it even further was there anything in the world to compare with Soviet parades. They have been mistakenly described as exhibitions of loyalty and popular en- thusiasm, as though they were merely like conventional parades in other countries, but on an immensely larger scale. Nothing can be farther from the truth. These Soviet parades are rather demonstrations of the govern- ment’s organized and disciplined strength. I saw New York go wild with fervor in welcoming the armistice, and then in wel- coming Lindbergh home after his flight to Paris. Those were great tides of emotion, unorganized and unrestrained, dissipating their strength as they pounded against the city’s skyscrapers. What makes a Moscow demonstration more imposing and more ominous by contrast is its complete organization: the tides are on leash and the leash is in the grip of a small group on Red Square. A million roaring men and women uncontrolled is one thing. The same million in battalions under banners, meekly waiting their turn for hours for the privilege and duty of crossing one square, pass- ing one spot, glimpsing one leader — that is quite another thing. Moscow demonstrations are infinitely more than parades — and a good deal less. They are reviews of fighting forces, a counting of heads. The slogans are in no sense a spontaneous expression of public opinion. They have been carefully selected and announced by the ruling group in formal edicts. Not simply the subject matter, but the precise wording has been officially prescribed. The synthetic enthusiasms and hatreds have been meticulously appor- tioned among the objects of approval or abomination at home and abroad. Whether the inscription on a strip of bunting means anything to the men who hold it aloft is never certain, since they did not themselves choose it. The only certainty is that they are sufficiently disciplined to hold it aloft. Journalists who find a reflection of popular attitudes in ban- ners and red bunting and cardboard insults to the Kremlin’s enemies are either fooling themselves or their readers. What they see reflects only the attitudes of the governing minority. How far the prescribed emotions correspond with the real emotions of io4 hallelujah! the marching masses — and whether it makes any difference as long as they do march — it is for every observer to calculate as best he can. In my first parade, of course, I did not raise such quibbles. As far as I was concerned every slogan came straight from the hearts of those who carried it across Red Square before Stalin’s review- ing stand. Around me in the section immediately to the right of the Lenin Mausoleum were the foreign diplomats and news- papermen. But I felt myself a stranger among them. I belonged with the radical delegations in other and more crowded sections and in my heart echoed their every hallelujah. V. Censorship MY WORKING day began usually with the reading of the morn- ing papers, which in this topsy-turvy land appear in the morn- ing* The Soviet press is officially owned and more rigidly controlled than any other of the state properties. It is frankly and proudly a kept press — kept by the government, the Communist Party, the trade-unions, which are but different names for the same cen- tralized power. The very memory of an “independent” news- paper, in serious disagreement with the government, has faded out. Every sentence in every paper has been censored. Not merely what it actually says but the inflections and overtones of its dreaded voice are political weather-vanes to the initiate. Its very silences are portentous. An editorial is the equivalent of an official pro- nunciamento. The faint hint of a new attitude toward some sector of the population in a random article may foreshadow destiny for millions. The kind of news published, the stress placed on an oc- currence, the failure to mention certain events at home or abroad, all have an importance they do not possess where the press k relatively free. The whole ethical baggage of journalism in democratic coun- tries has been thrown overboard by the Bolsheviks. No claim is made for “unbiased” or “objective” reporting. No pretense is made of newspaper independence and no reference is ever made to the freedom or dignity of the Fourth Estate. All this baggage, in fact, the communists regard as a piece of bourgeois hypocrisy. The press is not primarily a conveyor of news at all. It is first of all an agency of the Soviet regime in accomplishing its political and economic objectives. Its full force is always focused upon the achievement of specific practical results. In the editorial offices on the top floor of the slate-gray five- 105 io6 hallelujah! story Izvestia building, a prominent Russian newspaperman was explaining this to me one evening. a But how about truth and facts?” I prodded him. “Here am I, a stranger in your midst. What you print is my chief source of information. Can I believe it?” “If it’s printed, ids truth for us. We don’t know and don’t care about bourgeois notions of facts. We Soviet journalists are not just reporters. We don’t boast of standing above the turmoil like recording angels. On the contrary, we are in the thick of the fight, pioneers in the job of changing our country. If certain in- formation retards this work, we would be crazy to print it. As far as we are concerned, it is then neither news nor truth. It becomes plain counter-revolution.” “Well,” I smiled, “maybe that explains the first political anec- dote I heard in your country. I understand that it’s your oldest and best-known popular Soviet joke. I refer — ” He laughed. “I know, I know. There is no truth in the News ( Izvestia ) and no news in the Truth ( Pravda ).” The surface of the Soviet press is painfully drab and monotonous. When news and views are prescribed from a central source there is small margin for originality of style or content. The stilted repetitious language of the Party “theses” prevails throughout, since safety for the news writer and commentator lies in conformity. Originality, even as to the phrasing of a thought, is dangerously on the borderline of heresy. Why risk a startling metaphor or an individual turn of thought when the orthodox formulation of every current theme, from the campaign to raise more potatoes to the drive to liquidate a million kulak families, is at hand? But once you learn to break through the dull surface, the press becomes a mine of surprises and excitements. In some casual phrase you may discover a clew to a puzzling chain of events. A minor item out of Kuban or Georgia or Turkestan may prove a peep-hole through which a whole region and its struggles are visible. The tone of an editorial comment or the fact that some- one’s name is mentioned again after a long silence, the routine announcement of the removal of one official or the appointment of another, imply, for those who know the code, thrilling news affecting the lives of the entire population. CENSORSHIP 107 The perusal of the day’s sheaf of newspapers and the analysis of the news grist that it yields were therefore a challenge to my intuition about news and a constant test of my comprehension of the Soviet scene. My first duty to my job, I soon realized, was to learn to decipher the newspapers, to recognize the solid facts behind official euphemisms, the accent of an article as some- thing distinct from its ostensible contents. In the first months I was almost wholly dependent upon my interpreter and secretary, the phlegmatic Miss Jmudskaya. But gradually I learned to read Russian and, more important, to read between the lines. The press in a dictated country, whatever the high professions of the dictators, is a thick curtain to obscure the facts, but it always has fissures and accidental peep-holes for the practiced reader. The Russian people themselves had become sensitive to the overtones of their press. They fed their hopes and their fears on published hints and innuendoes, discounting the surface of statistics and formulas. The foreign correspondent of the legend is a virile swash- buckling fellow who obtains sensational news by the exercise of daring and dexterity in the whispering galleries of diplomacy, occasionally in scented boudoirs, and always at great risk to his neck. That glamorous legend sheds its rays even on the humblest in my trade. The unromantic fact, however, is that the average correspondent cribs three-quarters of his news from the local news- papers. The fourth quarter he draws from official handouts, the mendacities of paid tipsters, and his own fertile imagination. It is his skill in recognizing the significant item or his deftness in making it sound significant to a distant audience that chiefly distinguishes the superior foreign reporter from his plodding un- inspired colleagues. There may be correspondents who wind up their particular capitals before going to bed to keep them run- ning and who tell premiers where they get off, but I have yet to meet them outside of novels. Those whom I have met and watched at work are much too busy deciphering papers and chasing hot tips and doing other low-down chores to spare the time and energy to run the local governments. Any attempt to throw an aura of romance around the corre- spondents for press agencies (as distinguished from those repre- senting indiyidual newspapers) is especially thankless. To fie- 108 hallelujah! tioneers seeking a foreign correspondent for the role of hero, I recommend earnestly that they avoid the press agency man like the plague. The poor fellow is much too hard-worked and under too heavy a nervous strain for heroic nonsense. He is eternally racing against the clock} every split second counts heavily in the re- lentless competition among the news wholesalers. The special writer, being a retailer, gathers his facts and weaves them quietly into a connected story; he may even add a little fancy embroidery of his own guess-work. But the agency man can hold no scrap of information for later use. It must be flashed forthwith. The scraps are assembled hastily by the home editor and the finished story reflects neither the sender’s thought nor manner. 2 I can testify that the press agency correspondent is the slavey of the profession, perpetually tethered to the sending end of the cable, fighting against time. In the sense that I never dared to be out of touch with my home, which was also my office, I worked twenty-fours hours a day. There was no “deadline” after which I could relax — every minute is the deadline for a United Press client somewhere on the globe. I filed news directly to New York, London, Berlin and Tokyo each of which in turn distributed it to its area of operation. A thousand times in these years I abandoned an opera or a party or a poker game, always at the most exciting point, of course, in response to a summons from the Foreign Office Press Depart- ment. I found a dozen other correspondents similarly torn away from their various sacred or profane activities. After long wait- ing we were rewarded, as likely as not, with a dull communique about President Kalinin’s reception to the new Afghan pleni- potentiary, the lack of progress in Kamchatka fishery negotiations, or some other item unlikely to excite my readers. Merely by way of filling the cup of our travail to overflowing the communiques were often issued to us at the home of one or another of the censors, rather than at the Foreign Office. Under Moscow housing conditions these functionaries were scarcely at fault if they lived in distant and inaccessible corners of the city. But it meant that the representatives of the press of the entire CENSORSHIP IO9 civilized world must leave bar or bed to foregather in an out- lying part of the capital in the tiny flat of a censor for the boon of a mimeographed, half-legible document that sometimes made history but most times did not even make sense. One such scene remains etched on my memory. The whole world was waiting anxiously for an expression of Soviet sentiment on a matter of foreign affairs of major international import. For days we had begged and clamored for it in vain. Finally it came through, in the form of an Izvestia editorial. In consideration of its critical significance, the editorial was made available to us the night before it reached the news-stands. Hundreds of millions of readers in a score of nations, perusing the solemn dispatches soon thereafter would have been shocked if they could see the setting in which the Soviet Union transmitted its message to the world. Two dozen correspondents of many nationalities and their secretaries, equipped with portable typewriters and none too ami- able after the midnight trek to a faraway alley, were jammed into the tiny rooms of one of the censors. The censor, symbol at the moment of a great nation’s might, was in bathrobe and slippers ; on the other side of a partition one of his children was crying plaintively; every so often his wife, sleepy-eyed and in a frayed negligee, plopped by on her way to or from the kitchen. The promised editorial was two hours late in arriving. The world press camped there amidst the censor’s domestic intimacies until it did arrive. It was as a physical nuisance that the correspondents resented the censorship, even more than as a professional barrier. A dis- patch required the signature and official seal of the Press Depart- ment before it would be accepted at the central telegraph office. We thought with deep envy of cities where one wrote out his dispatch, pressed a button, and the process was completed. In Moscow, every message must first be carried to the Foreign Office. There one waited until the censor, who was usually importantly in conference, was good and ready to read the projected dispatch. Its precise wording having been bargained over, passages deleted, and compromise formulas found for telling the news while blur- ring its meaning, it must be carried to the one window in the one telegraph office authorized to accept press dispatches for transmis- sion. no hallelujah! Should it become necessary to send a news story during the hours when the censors were off duty or retired for the night, they must be trailed to their hiding places or routed out of bed for the indispensable signature and seal. These harassed officials, stalked and badgered by the foreign reporters, may easily be for- given if they were less than hospitable at our intrusions. Except for the attendant physical annoyances, the censorship did not seem to me at all stringent. Most of my dispatches passed muster so easily that I could only wonder why certain of my colleagues fussed and fumed at the restraint. The editorial changes suggested by Rothstein, Podolsky, or another of the censors, were usually, I thought, reasonable and often positively helpful. Some- times I felt that they had saved me from cabling implied criti- cisms of the Soviet regime into which I had been betrayed by an extravagant adjective or a too literal reading of the news. No censorship anywhere seems harsh to a reporter who agrees enthusiastically with the viewpoint of the censors. That was ap- proximately my situation. I collaborated readily with the Press Department in rewording a piece of news so as to take the sting out of it: the department had developed a genius for bland equivo- cation in any of the world’s major languages. I wrote a number of feature stories, in fact, on the mildness of the Soviet censor- ship as compared to the stringency of those in Italy and other countries. A basic rule-of-thumb in the Press Department was that we could cable anything which was published in the Soviet press because it had already passed internal censorships. Since I ac- cepted this published material without much question, my messages met little opposition. Correspondents were grouped in official eyes into “friendly” and “unfriendly,” rather than truthful and lying. Not their ve- racity but their attitude toward the Soviet government was the measure of their character. I was distinctly and proudly “friendly” and more than willing to go out of my way to prove my title to the classification. My quarrels with the censors were largely on matters of rhetoric. The dictates of cable economy forced me to condense events so closely that they sounded starker, more brutal than I intended. I sighed for the freedom of the special correspondents who could write around an unpleasant new decree, instead of CENSORSHIP I I I blurting it out in one blunt sentence so easily misunderstood by the hostile capitalist environment. How I envied the New York Times man in particular! There was no rigid cable quota to cramp his style and he had no economic or other inhibitions in display- ing his erudition and conversational charms at fifteen cents a word. The same decree padded in classical allusions, reminiscences of the World War, and references to the French Revolution did not strike the New York readers quite so hard. A batch of my articles on American themes were published by Soviet magazines. The foremost literary publication, Krasnaya Nov y y gave some twenty of its earnest, closely printed pages to my description of periodical literature in America. It was a whim- sical piece, satirizing the “true story” magazines which had given me a living for a period, the pseudo-intellectual monthlies rum- maging timidly in the capitalist chaos, the million-circulation magazines that filled the interstices between soap advertisements with gooey romance. The Journal of Foreign Literature , then edited by Sergei Dinamov, ran several of my articles on American literature. Others used vignettes of the American scene. For four years I had seen my dispatches from New York in the Soviet newspapers, but always under the imprimature of Tass. It was thrilling now to see articles in influential Russian publica- tions under my own signature, and my name listed casually, as of right, in the tables of contents among Soviet authors. The thrill derived, no doubt, from this proof in black-and-white that I still “belonged” in the Russian revolution. The rebuffs from communists had wounded me more deeply than I cared to admit to myself. With my name cheek-by-jowl with Gorky’s or Kolt- zov’s or Dinamov’s, I was not wholly outcast despite my equivo- cal position as capitalist reporter. Sergei Dinamov, one of the editors with whom I dealt, was a young man of considerable personal charm. His friendship was a pleasant element in our first Moscow year. He was lanky, spectacled, studious and soft-spoken, cut out by nature to be a provincial pedagogue. Though I liked him for other qualities, I was not impressed with his cultural or mental equipment for the calling of literary critic. This needs mentioning because in due time he achieved editorship of the politically dominant art pub- I 12 hallelujah! lication, the Literaturnaya Gazetta . His rise among the literary dictators seemed to me in time an indictment of that period. My Sacco- Vanzetti biography was published twice in Russia, under different titles and under circumstances that were embar- rassing to the author. The first publication, in an edition of ten thousand copies, was by the Moscow publishing trust, Zemlya i Fahrika (Land and Factory), arrangements having been made by Yonov, the director of the trust. The book was warmly com- mended in the press and the edition was exhausted in a few days. Soon thereafter I was visited by two excited representatives of a Leningrad publishing organization, Krasnaya Gazetta . They informed me that they were in a distressing situation. Without realizing either that the author was in their midst or that Zemlya i Fahrika was publishing it, their trust had translated my book from its German version. “In fact, we have printed 120,000 copies,” they told me. “Ids all ready, needing only to be bound. Suddenly we discover that Yonov has published another edition, and that you are in Rus- sia. Well, now we cannot proceed without your explicit permis- sion. If you don’t give it to us, comrade, we will be in trouble, lots of trouble!” “I have no objections,” I assured them. “On the contrary. But will Zemlya i Fahrika have anything against it?” “No, no,” one of them laughed at such an absurd notion, “they and we — all part of the same governmental enterprise. This isn’t New York or Paris, you know. There’s no capitalist competi- tion.” Though I did not doubt them, I tried to reach Yonov. Un- fortunately he had gone off to the Caucasus on vacation — Rus- sians always do at critical moments. Under renewed pressure and reassurances that the procedure was entirely ethical, I finally gave the Leningrad men a written authorization. When Yonov re- turned, the storm broke over my head. He charged that the Leningrad emissaries had lied, that I had betrayed him in al- lowing them to issue my book, etc. “There’s a strong demand for your book,” he taunted me, “but I shall not allow any more editions to be printed!” It was my first discovery that competition between two organi- CENSORSHIP I 13 zations within the Soviet structure could become almost as bit- ter and ruthless as under capitalism. My career as a Russian author foundered, like so many things in Russia, on the rock of fear — in this case the Russians 5 fear of contact with a foreigner. A magazine editor telephoned to in- quire whether a promised article was ready. “Yes, I am just finishing it, 55 I told him. “If you come right over, I 5 11 have it waiting for you. 55 He fumbled and stammered and finally decided on honesty as the best policy. “Well, you understand, I would gladly come, 55 he said, “in fact, I should enjoy coming over and chatting with you. No nye udobno — but it is not convenient. 55 I was becoming thoroughly familiar with that phrase. It meant that for political reasons it was not quite safe for him, a Soviet editor, to be seen entering or leaving the home of a foreign cor- respondent. Nye udobno! My temper got the better of my sym- pathy. “It 5 s all right to publish my writing, but it 5 s inconvenient to be seen in my company, is that it? My thoughts are acceptable, but my person is contagious. Well, you can go plumb to hell! 55 I wrote no more articles for the Soviet press. VI. Demonstration Trial THE morning of May 18, 1928, was the color of lead. The gloomy weather did not dampen the circus spirit of the crowds milling around the squat, neo-classic structure once called the Nobles Club and now called the House of Trade Unions. A spirit of festival touched with hysteria — a crowd come to see a righteous hanging. Fifty Russian and three German technicians and engineers from the coal industry were to be tried publicly on charges of counter-revolutionary sabotage and espionage. Militiamen labored to keep people in line and forced a pas- sage for those of us lucky enough to hold special passes. In the spacious Hall of Columns, there was an atmosphere of carnival. Crowds poured in noisily and jockeyed for advantageous seats. The boxes gradually filled with diplomats, influential officials and other privileged spectators — much bowing and hand-shaking. Sputtering Jupiter lights played on the scene, photographers and cinema cameramen maneuvered their equipment into position, nearly a hundred foreign and Soviet reporters settled down at the foot of the high rostrum. Only a row of trimly uniformed G.P.U. soldiers, at rigid attention in front of the prisoners’ box, their fixed bayonets glinting in the floodlights, added a note of grimness to the carnival. The gleaming white marble columns had sprouted ugly clus- ters of loud-speakers. Immense crystal chandeliers shimmered in the shifting lights. But the dominant note was a blatant red — red cloths on the tables on the platform, red inscriptions on the walls. The Shakhty sabotage trial was about to begin: the first of the melodramatic “demonstration trials” which year after year were to bewilder the world with their spectacle of men confess- ing incredible crimes and embracing death with grandiloquent gestures. For over two months the Soviet press, radio, official speeches had built up towards the climax of this show. Dark hints of DEMONSTRATION TRIAL I I 5 enemies within conniving with enemies abroad, villainy that cut production and took food out of the mouths of hungering masses, treachery that threatened the socialist fatherland — all brought to a sharp focus at last in this case. In recent months there had been many laconic announcements of executions for economic counter- revolution — here at last was a public demonstration of the rea- sons for such extreme measures. The Shakhty men were pil- loried not merely for their own misdeeds, but for the crimes of the whole embittered, rebellious intelligentsia. The tightening pinch of goods and food shortage was making people grumble with pain. The ruthless extermination of Trot- skyism and other communist deviations was eating into the faith of more conscious workers. The Shakhty trial offered a tangible object for the hatreds smoldering in the heart of Russia. That morning’s newspapers in every city and town shrieked curses upon the bourgeois plotters and their bloodthirsty foreign con- federates. Week after week the press, radio, schools, newsreels, billboards had waved the promise of traitors’ deaths aloft like crimson flags. They had treated every accusation and every far- fetched implication as established facts. This was no spick-and-span trial on the democratic model, with its hypocritical blindfolded Justice dangling a silly pair of scales. This was Revolutionary Justice, its flaming eyes wide open, its flaming sword poised to strike. It was the same Revolutionary Justice that had presided over the guillotine in the French Ter- ror, that had ruled men’s minds whenever tyranny was over- thrown. Its voice was not the whining of “fairness” but the thun- der of vengeance. The charges would not be proved — the “pre- liminary investigations” behind closed doors presumably had done that. There was a sheaf of full or partial confessions that fitted neatly one into the other. No, the charges would merely be “demonstrated” before the whole country and the whole world, as theatrically as a powerful government with all the whips of mass indignation in its clenched fist could manage. The accused men were coming into court pre-judged. Many of them had made fulsome confessions. And yet, there was surely a wide margin of the unpredictable. When half a hundred men are corailed for an ordeal of death in the sight of the entire world, the best-planned melodrama may go askew. Even Rus- x I 6 HALLELUJAH ! sians might refuse to die meekly, minds might crack, neat pat- terns might crumble, unsuspected peaks of courage or abysses of cowardice might be uncovered. Who knows what might hap- pen! The crowds therefore pushed and clamored for. a glimpse of the proceedings. It was the first large-scale public trial in some years and stirred the embers of the sacrificial romantic moods of the earliest years of the revolution. Nikolai Krylenko,* the prosecutor, was the first to stride to the platform. He took in the spectators, the foreign reporters, the cinema paraphernalia, and radio microphones with a slow, defiant scowl. This was to be his show. A small, tightly knit athletic figure, only a few inches over five feet, with a large shaven head and a flat face, he saw himself and made others see him as revolu- tionary vengeance incarnate. Throughout the six crowded weeks of the trial he wore sports clothes— riding breeches, puttees, a hunting jacket. We called it a hunting outfit and its fitness for his role added to the drama of the proceedings. Krylenko, the man-hunter. Then came Professor A. Y. Vishinsky, the blond, spectacled presiding judge. He sat behind a microphone on a raised dais, with two associate judges on either side of him. The defense law- yers, older men with something tentative and apologetic in their manners, took seats and fussed with brief cases and papers to cover their embarrassment. Their faces have faded out of. my memory j they were timid supernumeraries, an empty concession to appear- ances. Then the accused men filed in and took seats in the fenced- off space: a motley collection of old men and young, gray, un- smiling. Ten or twelve of them were to emerge in the follow- ing weeks as distinct personalities, but the rest remained a blur of names and faces. The Jupiter lights snarled and flashed as they were turned full on the judges, the defendants, the audience. Their glare and sput- ter rarely ceased. It was the raucous, distracting element in which the entire trial was immersed. The names of the accused men were read off by the clerk and acknowledged from the prisoners’ box. Every session began with this ceremony of roll-call. Suddenly there was a hitch. Prisoner Nekrasoff did not answer. There were only fifty-two men instead of fifty-three. His counsel explained that Nekrasoff, unfortunately, * Reported arrested for alleged counterrevolution in 1937* DEMONSTRATION TRIAL I 17 was suffering hallucinations and had been placed in a padded cell, where he screamed about rifles pointed at his heart and suffered paroxysms. The vision of Nekrasoff howling in his padded cell was a sinister element that deepened with every passing day. Every so often, in the routine of questions and answers and quibbles, some casual statement or incident would thus light up the depths. Sometimes these flashes left us limp with the impact of horrors half-glimpsed. What had driven the man to madness? What had transpired in the G.P.U. dungeons and interrogation chambers in the months since the men were rounded up? How did men like Krylenko, who sneered and snarled while the world looked on, behave when there were no witnesses and no public records? Whenever the proceedings yielded a flitting glimpse of that mysterious back- ground, the spectators were electrified, the judges leaned for- ward, the prisoners fidgeted, Krylenko tensed for a spring. . . . The long Act of Accusation was read. It had been published in full, a quarter of a million words, in the leading newspapers and was familiar to us. But in the courtroom, within the shadow of death, it sounded infinitely more ominous. It described an or- ganized network of sabotage and espionage, with centers in Mos- cow and Kharkov, Warsaw, Berlin and Paris 5 emissaries carry- ing instructions and money from expropriated mine owners abroad to Russian engineers in the Donetz Basin coal area where Shakhty was located^ technicians spoiling machinery, undermining the revo- lution’s fuel supplies, inveigling the Soviet government into waste- ful expenditures; preparations to destroy the coal industry as soon as war or intervention started} German firms palming off defec- tive machinery with the connivance of bribed engineers. Here was international plotting on the grand scale: revolu- tionary Russia pitted against a hostile world, intriguing capitalists and nefarious emigres and desperate agents gnawing at the eco- nomic vitality of the land. The cliches of political rhetoric — -the “hostile capitalist environment,” the “class enemy in our midst,” the “dastardly saboteurs, plotters, spies” — were bodied forth in a superb drama, bolstered by confessions and documents. Ten of the accused men had confessed and implicated the others. Six others had made important admissions. The rest, including all three Ger- mans, pleaded innocence. All the information had been dredged 1 1 8 hallelujah! from their minds in secret “preliminary investigations/ 2 * * 5 the very thought of which — such was the sinister reputation of the G.P.U. — made Russians shudder. It was an awesome picture that emerged from the Act of Ac- cusation. In its general charges and larger contours it was strangely convincing, particularly in this setting of radio microphones, red drapery, bayonets, livid lights and newspaper hysteria. Only when the document moved closer and focused on details did the pic- ture seem to blur. The citations of specific words and acts were curiously trifling, petty, inconsequential in relation to the grandiose world-wide plots involving governments, gigantic private corpo- rations, and a supposedly organized, heavily financed movement. A turbine that went wrong. A mechanized mine which in someone’s opinion should not have been mechanized. A raincoat sent from Germany as a “signal” for sabotage. A servant girl whom some- one else had supposedly denounced to the Whites. Where were the magnificent deeds of desperation called for by the big pat- tern? Throughout the long exhausting weeks we fluctuated thus between vast accusations and the closer scrutiny under which they dissolved into conjectures and hearsay. We waited in vain for a genuine piece of impersonal and unim- peachable testimony — an intercepted letter perhaps, a statement or document that did not carry the suspicion of G.P.U. extortion. The “far-reaching international intrigue” never did emerge. There was ample evidence of individual chicanery and occasional col- laboration, but hardly any conclusive proof of the organized, centrally-directed conspiracy charged by the prosecution and as- sumed to be a fact by the press. 2 I despair of summarizing the weeks of trial. It was a strain on one’s nerves and credulity, watching men writhe under Kry- lenko’s whip, watching them go one after another through their roles like puppets while cameras were grinding and the Jupiters hissed. Most fearful was the macabre miracle of puppets unex- pectedly coming to life, struggling to escape their nooses, pro- testing, accusing, pleading, while the prosecutor pulled the rope tighter. DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 1 1 9 The traditional Russian court procedure is far more casual and informal than in the West and therefore provides more scope for dramatic surprises. Long speeches are in order, witnesses con- front and harangue one another, lawyers are unlimited in their wiles in leading or misleading those whom they question. The defendant is not guided and guarded by expert lawyers and pro- tected by rules of procedure or an Anglo-Saxon assumption of innocence. He is left to flail in a panic like a drowning man, or to save himself cleverly, depending on his own abilities and ner- vous make-up. Each prisoner began with a statement of his career. A few of them talked for more than an hour, tracing their life’s course from birth to the impending death. Often they achieved real eloquence, and even the most inarticulate among them occasionally found words that lit up the vistas of his ordeal. I doubt if half a hundred men from the same social layers in any other race could have done so well as these Russians. Certainly no other race would have offered so much natural histrionics. Those who confessed and willingly played Krylenko’s game, tended to overplay their roles. With an artist’s instinct for emphasis they built themselves into arch-traitors, into personifications of the bourgeois intellectual and everything communists despise. The Slavic talent for hyper- bole was among the things most fully demonstrated in this demon- stration trial. Having told his whole story unimpeded, the prisoner was then questioned by Krylenko, by his defense counsel, and brought face to face with his accusers and with witnesses. He interrogated these people himself and called upon others in the prisoners’ box for corroboration. Often four or five defendants were grouped around the microphone questioning one another, bickering over disputed points and shouting “Liar!” while Krylenko and Vishinsky prodded them expertly to involve one another. Often these men who had spent their lives in equipping and operating coal mines grew more excited in defending some technical point of minerology than in defending their lives. We saw the color ebbing from men’s faces, we saw horrified disbelief staring from their eyes, as too-willing fellow-prisoners calmly dragged them into their elaborate confessions. A web of mutual hatreds and suspicions was woven under our eyes among 120 hallelujah! the fifty-two prisoners, none of whom cared to die alone. We watched the skill with which Krylenko, narrowing his eyes and twisting his lips into a sneer, inflamed these hatreds, setting man against man and sowing insinuations. My job was to dash off bits of information that make headlines in the American papers. A piece of extempore drama that would provide a good feature somewhere among the department store ads. A startling hint of foreign intervention plotted in a Berlin cafe. The exciting confrontation of two prisoners, brothers or life- long friends, that would make good human-interest stories. Some- how I must wring more and better stories out of this performance than my competitors. But the dispatches did not begin to reflect the reality of that tangle of passions, fears, suspicions and desperations. When I saw my reports in type they seemed to me only vaguely related to the Roman circus that I was witnessing. An American or English reader must see the exotic spectacle through the lenses of his own knowledge and experience, and these did not touch at many points the emotions and overtones of the Soviet political trial. Nor did the published dispatches so much as hint at my own inner reactions or the disturbances set up in the deeper recesses of my mind. I readily accepted the great trial for what it was: a revolutionary gesture in which the concept of justice did not even enter. It was a court-martial in the midst of a strenuous social war, where ordinary notions of fairness must be suspended. We wrote of evidence and witnesses and judicial rulings, fortifying the illu- sion that this was, in a rough and strange way, a tribunal of jus- tice. All the time I knew, as those around me knew, that the innocence or guilt of these individuals was of no importance. It was the indubitable guilt of their class that was being demonstrated. What were the lives and the liberty of a few dozen men against the interests of the revolution? They were merely a batch of ex- hibits, the best that could be gathered at the moment, to impress the populace with the fact that the revolution was still honey- combed with enemies. I accepted this version, as I say, as a working hypothesis and did nothing consciously to throw doubts on the essential justice of the thing in my readers’ minds. If their narrow, individualistic code of justice was violated at every point, that larger justice which DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 1 2 1 is Historical Necessity was being served. Not one of the Ameri- can correspondents was naive enough to regard the performance as in the literal sense a trial to assay men’s guilt. Not one of them was so insensitive to the by-plays and under-currents as not to be aware of the “defense” as a cruel farce, of threads leading into mysterious Secret Service realms, and of purposes so far be- yond the fate of the men in the prisoners’ box that they might have been straw dummies instead of flesh and blood. If they described the proceedings as though it were a genuine judicial tribunal, it was because of the censorship, the necessity of living on terms of friendship with the rulers of the capital where they worked, the difficulty of making outsiders see the thing in any other light — or a combination of these reasons. As for myself, I counted it my specific duty to strengthen the illusion abroad that this was, indeed, a court of justice in the ordinary meaning of that phrase. But I could not bring myself to hate the fifty-two men who symbolized the capitalist enemy. My mind had been too deeply conditioned by the years when I fought for justice to political prisoners in America, by the reams of indignant words I had written for I.W.W. prisoners, anarchist deportees, Charles Krieger in Tulsa, Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston. Despite myself I came in- creasingly, as the trial continued, to see the accused men as crea- tures baited, badgered, insulted and denied a sporting chance. I came increasingly to feel the demonstration trial as a hoax — not merely on the outside world which received it naively as a species of justice, but a hoax on the Russian masses themselves who were being offered a lightning rod to divert their resentments. 3 Six of the men ultimately sentenced to die were reprieved as reward for “services in elucidating the facts” — that is, for turn- ing state’s evidence. It was principally through their enthusiastic, well-rehearsed stories that the others were adjudged guilty. The first prisoner to tell his story in the prescribed opening statements, on the initial day of the trial, was of this company. It was Berezovsky, a middle-aged engineer, tall and spare, speaking calmly and with mounting emphasis. A full hour he 122 hallelujah! talked into the microphone and his words echoed a careful, or- ganized mind. He was extricating himself from death, with the same skill and cold-blooded precision he might apply to solving an engineering problem. He was evidently put first on the list by Krylenko to serve as arch-type and perfect specimen of the “bourgeois intellectual.” Knowing or sensing this, Berezovsky tried to measure up to specifications. From earliest childhood, he recounted, success meas- ured in money and acquisitions was the ideal implanted in his soul. That was the swamp in which were bred all his later crimes against his country. The revolution had interrupted his steady rise in the coal industry and was therefore his enemy. As a mat- ter of course he sided with the mine owners against the insurgent workers, with the Whites against the Reds, and finally with the emigres against the Soviets. It was not himself alone that Berezovsky was describing, but an entire class; not his personal tragedy, but a revolutionary epoch that swept a nation’s life from its moorings. Without effort this engineer managed to depict what all great art strives to convey: a great slice of humankind through the delineation of one charac- ter, a whole period through the experiences of one victim. Samoilov, Kazarinov, Matov, others, elaborated this picture. They watched for Krylenko’s every hint in rounding out the de- sign, accenting what needed reenforcement and binding the un- willing prisoners more securely into the plot. They deserved their reprieve. A few emphasized their proletarian or peasant origins in a call upon the judges’ sympathy. If only they were allowed to live, they promised to repay the revolution for its generosity by working always and only for the common good. Such pleas of a miraculous reform under G.P.U. auspices and the threat of shooting drew smiles and laughter from the crowded audiences in the stuffy Hall of Columns. It was a new audience every session: deserving factory workers, school children, out-of-town delegations, visiting peasant groups, vouchsafed a peep at the spectacle. More than a hundred thousand, it was estimated, in this way saw a tiny segment of the proceed- ings. The luckier among them witnessed some episode of high tragedy, some stirring passage-at-arms between a prisoner and his accuser. The trial, of course, was not all melodrama. There were DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 123 long arid stretches of technical bickerings, dull repetition, and sensations which did not come off sensationally. Some days, in- deed, the Soviet press did not find it easy to maintain the atmos- phere of epic villainy unmasked and its reports sagged to anti- climax. But for the spectators inside the courtroom, even the dullest sessions were not without dramatic highlights. The few who insisted upon their innocence — Imineetov, Kuzma, Andrei Kolodoob, Eliadze and the rest — provided the biggest thrills for spectators. To see them at bay, their backs arched, panic in their voices, turning from a stinging question by the prosecutor to ward off a statement by a fellow-prisoner, swinging around to meet a judge’s admonition — spinning, flailing, stumbling over their own words — finally standing still, exhausted and terror-stricken, staring into the auditorium as though aware of spectators for the first time, was indeed keen sport: lucky shock-brigadiers who drew such a session! Or one of the days in which prisoners tried to withdraw their confessions. Perhaps they were frightened by the doom that crept closer, or given new courage, after their prison isolation, by the incredible sight of so many free people in one room. In any case, they tried desperately to pull themselves free of their signed statements and often tangled themselves more deeply in the ef- fort, like insects caught on flypaper. There was Bebenko, for in- stance. He had been arrested the previous summer and had there- fore been in the hands of the G.P.U. without trial nearly a year. He admitted having signed a “confession” but now wished to re- nounce it as a pack of lies. “I scarcely knew what I signed,” he said, while the audience tensed with new interest, the prosecutor and defense attorneys drew nearer. “I was driven to distraction by threats, threats, so I signed. ... I tried to withdraw it before the trial, but . . . but . . .” He looked at Krylenko and could not finish his sentence. What- ever the power that drove him to distraction, he was still under its spell. He realized that his words were ominous, evoking visions of G.P.U. torture chambers and third-degree horrors in the popu- lar imagination. And these were the very things which Krylenko must obliterate from the view of the foreign reporters at the foot 124 hallelujah! of the rostrum. He looked at the prisoner at bay. His voice was dangerously soft and concise. “Do you want to say that you were intimidated, threatened?” he asked. Bebenko hesitated, dropped his eyes. He was defeated. “No,” he whispered. We who sat through the trial ten and twelve hours a day, who had worked our emotions and vocabularies to the point of pros- tration, needed spicier meat to stir our interest than the one- session visitors. We waited for days such as the elderly Skorutto or the Kolodoob brothers provided. One evening Skorutto was reported too ill to attend. The next morning, however, he was the first to be called. It was an ash-gray, trembling figure which staggered to the mahogany pillar on which the microphone was perched. There was that in his demeanor, and in the alertness of Krylenko, which galvanized the courtroom into expectancy. Even the businesslike cameramen and lighting technicians were nervously attentive. And the atmosphere of im- pending thrill was more than justified. Skorutto was one of those who had denied any complicity in the sabotage. In his examination he stuck valiantly by this denial, in the face of pressure from half a dozen of the prisoners who labored to implicate him. He had been abroad in connection with some purchases in America when the round-up of Shakhty en- gineers was begun. In Berlin he had read of the arrest of many of those who worked close to him, and could expect nothing less than his own arrest. Nevertheless, he had returned to his native land and his Soviet job. Was it a token of clean conscience? Or perhaps supreme gall? Or maybe, as the more romantic reporters preferred to write, an expression of Slav “fatalism”? And now this man, a shattered replica of the one who entered the court- room at the opening, stood tremulously before the microphone and informed the court that he had an important declaration to make. “Last night,” he said in effect, “I wrote out and signed a state- ment confessing my own guilt, as well as the guilt of Rabinovich, Imineetov and others. ...” The words had barely registered on our minds when the court- room was electrified by an unearthly shriek from the box where DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 125 the relatives of the prisoners sat 3 the piercing notes wrenched from the throat of a wounded animal. It was a woman’s voice. “Kolya,” the woman cried, “Kolya darling, don’t lie! Don’t! You know you’re innocent!” The prisoner collapsed into a chair as though the cry had been a hammer-blow on his head, weeping aloud, beating his breast, and writhing in that utter agony without shame. A shudder passed like a wind through the tight-packed auditorium. . . . Hurriedly Vishinsky adjourned the session for ten minutes. The audience, released, exploded into animated talk, out-shout- ing one another. It is Skorutto’s wife, the news flashed through the crowd. The prisoner was led away, still wailing his despair. When the session was reopened and calm restored, he came once more to the microphone. “Yes, I wrote a confession last night. That was at nine o’clock. But I could not go to sleep. For eight hours I struggled with my conscience. At five in the morning I wrote another statement in which I withdrew the first one. I could not betray my friends. I am innocent.” Krylenko was once more master of himself — cool, relentless, at his most sarcastic. It was not the guilt of this one prisoner that he must establish, but the name of the G.P.U. that he must pro- tect. One dread thought hammered at everyone’s mind: what were the pressures which had driven this Skorutto, while allegedly too ill to attend the trial, to indite a confession only to withdraw it eight tortured hours later? Did anyone force him to confess, Krylenko wanted to know. The inflection of his voice was ominous. Was he threatened? Skorutto was like a man who had lost his mind. He wrung his hands and wandered about the platform. No, nobody had forced him, he finally said. “These men had lied about me,” he tried to explain, “my own friends and they lied about me! So I lied about them. ... It has been agony! Can’t you understand? My God, can no one understand? Eight nights I have not slept. I took drugs, but I could not sleep, and finally I decided to confess. . . .” He staggered from one corner of the rostrum to the other, like one caged. Then he stopped at the microphone. 126 hallelujah! “I never did these things of which they accuse me. Never! Though I knew what waited for me. . . .” The sentence remained unfinished. Again the shadow of the unspoken things behind the curtains of the public trial. Again Krylenko and the judge putting questions to erase that shadow. Why had he confessed, Vishinsky pinioned the distracted Skorutto with the spear-point of his anger. “I had hoped that this court would be more lenient with me if I pleaded guilty and accused the others,” Skorutto blurted out. And if the day needed one more sensation to make it memorable, a ghost stalked across the stage. Casually, in the course of some- one’s interrogation, the name of Gavruchenko was mentioned. And suddenly we became aware that Gavruchenko should have been in the prisoners’ dock, but he had committed suicide before the indictment was published. . . . Had he? How and why? The questions remained unanswered. We knew only that a prisoner was dead and that under the G.P.U. system of justice not even his wife and his children would ever know precisely how it hap- pened. They did not even see the body, there being jo habeas cadaver , let alone habeas corf us, in revolutionary Russia. . The following morning Skorutto once more stepped into the limelight. He spoke in a monotone, like a dead man from the grave. The confession was true, he now declared, and its retraction a lie. It was the agonized cry of his wife which yesterday had broken his determination to attest his guilt — and the guilt of those whom he had implicated. 4 Another day’s audience, jammed into the columned hall for the grab-bag of thrills, drew a Cain-and-Abel scene such as remains eternally exciting to the sons of Adam. They watched Emilian Kolodoob sweating and puffing as he labored to turn his own brother, Andrei Kolodoob, into a traitor. Emilian had confessed sabotage, while Andrei denied it. Now, with very little encourage- ment from the prosecutor, Emilian looked unflinchingly at his brother and insisted that they had both plotted, both received emigre money, both lied to the Soviet state for which they worked. Was I reading my own distaste into the quieter, tenser mood of the spectators, or were they really embarrassed by this unnatural DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 127 exhibition? The revolution and its chaotic aftermath had loosened the bonds of family loyalties, yet even to Russians there must have been something obscene in the performance. The obscenity was raised to a pitch of horror when, immediately after being betrayed by a brother, Andrei Kolodoob heard his own son de- manding his death. A letter from the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Kyril, published in that morning’s Pravda , was read into the record. I denounce my father as a whole-hearted traitor and an enemy of the working class. I demand for him the severest penalty. I reject him and the name he bears. Hereafter, I shall no longer call myself Kolo- doob but Shakhtin. In later years the Kremlin came to alter its view on family re- lations. It was to preach once more the importance of blood ties and the beauty of domestic loyalties. When I read the news in New York, the memory of Kyril Kolodoob flashed through my mind and how, all his life, he must carry the name Shakhtin like the mark of Cain to remind him and all men of what he did to his father. I thought of other sons in other Soviet exhibition trials who had similarly urged death for their fathers, for this piece of theater became a routine procedure in sabotage trials. Engineer Bratanovsky, tall and well-groomed, provided us with further opportunities to discuss Slav fatalism and Russian psychol- ogy, and draw the stale analogies with Dostoievsky characters. He, too, had been abroad when the arrests of Shakhty engineers began. He had not the slightest doubt that he would be arrested, yet he did not remain abroad. As though there was nothing re- markable in walking open-eyed toward the certainty of imprison- ment and shooting, Bratanovsky told of his return in the matter- of-fact tone of a well-bred person at a dinner table. One after another the puppets and the men stalked across the red-draped stage, some cringing, others weeping, most of them composed in the calm of ultimate despair. The last of the fifty-two to tell his story was perhaps the most impressive and certainly the one most eagerly awaited. We had become familiar with the sev- enty-year-old Rabinovich in the weeks before his turn came. Again and again he had been yanked into the recitals of other men. The rest were small fry compared to this stocky, gray-haired, earnest 128 hallelujah! old man. In 1920 Lenin himself had summoned Rabinovich and invited his cooperation, as the foremost coal-mining engineer in Russia. In the following seven years, until the day of his arrest, he was virtual coal dictator. Often he had taken part in meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars when technical questions were on the agenda. His presence among the accused engineers was the most fantastic touch of all. During Kuzma’s interrogation, Rabinovich had risen in his seat and asked to be heard. He stepped forward to defend the younger man — the only defendant in the whole trial to come unasked to another prisoner’s defense! There was a dignity and self-assurance in his bearing, an authority in his voice, which set him apart from the rest. Rabinovich spoke now for over an hour, tracing his career from its dimmest beginnings sixty years ago. Starting at the bottom, he had attained first place in the coal industry before the revolution. He had become rich. His personal interests were on the side of the capitalists and, naturally, he could have no love for a revolu- tion that took away his mines and banished his associates. But he loved his work more than his wealth, and when Lenin honored him with his confidence he was determined to merit that trust. Others had talked about sleepless nights and harrowing thoughts and nightmares. “As for me,” Rabinovich said, “I sleep as soundly in prison as in my own bed. I have a clear conscience and I have nothing to fear.” A man by the name of Mookin was brought into the courtroom by G.P.U. guards, direct from a prison cell to testify against Rabinovich. He was pallid, scared, bewildered by the lights and people. Parrot-like he spoke a piece accusing Rabinovich of plot- ting sabotage. Every so often his voice broke and he asked for a drink of water. His hands trembled, so that the glass rattled on his teeth. When he had finished his testimony, Rabinovich moved forward so that the witness must look into his face. “Is it me that you are talking about, or someone else? Look at me and answer!” Mookin staggered under the question and like a man blinded groped once more for the water glass. Finally, he wrenched the word from his gullet. “You,” he said. DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 129 Stammering, drinking, fidgeting, he repeated his accusations under Krylenko’s prompting and bulldozing. But as a state wit- ness the man was doubly a failure. The trial’s impresario had committed his greatest blunder in dragging this harried creature from the gloom of his cell into the floodlights of public attention. In the first place, Mookin was too clearly intimidated and an- guished. In the second place, he stood as living proof that others — God knows how many scores or hundreds — were in the custody of the G.P.U. on similar charges, though they were not in the prisoners’ dock. Krylenko had blundered. It was one thing to know, as we all did, that only a handful had been winnowed for public trial: only enough to give verisimilitude to the pattern of an international plot and an organized gang of saboteurs. The rest languished in prison or faced the firing squad without benefit of publicity. It was quite another thing to see a specimen of those who had not been chosen for demonstration purposes — and a piti- ful, broken specimen at that. Another lightning flash disclosing a little of the background which, more than the trial itself, held men’s thoughts. Krylenko’s closing address lasted six hours. He justified once again his fame as an orator. How his eloquence swept uncertain regiments into the ranks of the Soviets was part of the legendary of the revolution in its earliest days. That eloquence now lashed the fifty-two men and many of them cringed, as though his words were physical blows. He stirred the auditorium into a frenzy of hatred, so that they applauded wildly the demands for “the high- est measure of social defense” — “ Rasstrel !” — “shooting.” The word exploded in his speech over and over again like a pistol shot. He asked death for twenty-two of the prisoners. Only when he reached Rabinovich did he falter. It was painful to him to ask for it, he said, knowing the old man’s past services, but — “ Rasstrel ! ” The defense speeches were faint and tremulous and apologetic. These lawyers selected for the dangerous task of pretending a defense were in a most uncomfortable position. Men whose repu- tations dated back to tsarist days and tsarist courts, they belonged to the same social group as the men whom they ostensibly de- fended and knew well enough that the blood thirst in the elo- quence of Krylenko and the applause of the crowd included them no less than the accused technicians. Meticulously they avoided 130 hallelujah! any suggestion of doubt as to the genuineness of the confessions, or anything which might reflect on the G.P.U. Each of them had a specific group of prisoners as his special charges, and therefore felt free to attack the rest of them as furiously as Krylenko him- self. The total effect of their speeches, therefore, was to reinforce the state’s case! Then several so-called prosecutors for the people took the radio “mike.” The formal fiction was that they represented the public and, having sat through the entire trial, now gave their views. Each of them added his quota of abuse and ended with an im- passioned demand for death sentences. Among them, it happened, was a large, bearded, impressive-looking man representing the engineering societies. Several years later he was to appear on the same platform in the same setting of lights and ballyhoo, but in another role. He was himself arrested for economic sabotage. The final ceremony, in accordance with ancient Russian usage, was a “last word” by each of the prisoners. It turned into a fantastic and incredible parade of naked passions. There were those who begged for mercy and those who spoke words of defiance. They cringed and snarled and begged and blundered. Fifty-two men stampeded by the fear of death. Only a very few, among them the two aged Jews, Rabinovich and Imineetov, retained their self-respect intact. Imineetov said, “One day another Zola will arise and will write another J y Accuse to restore our names to honor.” A tall man, when his name was called, staggered to the microphone and shouted, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” Another walked forward calmly and in the most urbane manner said, “I am guilty. I do not deny it. That is all.” On the whole they made a sorry picture. Only by a violent stretch of the imagination could one cast these groveling men in heroic roles, either as martyrs or as great conspirators. Guilty or innocent, they were men defeated, impotent, without a deep faith or hope for the future to sustain them. Not one of them had advanced any more exalted motive for spoiling machines or oppos- ing the revolution than his own desire for more wealth. Not one of them had even tried to raise his behavior to the level of a social cause or the defense of a principle— any principle, the right to private initiative, or democracy. . . . In other Soviet trials of which I had read— of churchmen or DEMONSTRATION TRIAL 131 Social Revolutionaries — some of the accused men and women had held their heads high: they had plotted and connived for God, for fatherland, for a new revolution. There was no trace of such idealism to dignify the Shakhty trial, in which those who admit- ted guilt were by their own description small, self-seeking, un- inspired persons, filled with chagrin over their private losses and never once thinking beyond their own bellies and purses. A few among them showed that they possessed a certain human dignity. But the group as a whole seemed to me a sad exhibition of what the age-old system of private greed does to its most devoted servants. The verdict was announced for four in the afternoon, but the public was not admitted until eight. An hour later the prisoners filed in and took their seats. But the judges did not emerge until midnight. Ancient custom required that the presiding judge write out the verdict in his own handwriting and it was a lengthy docu- ment. There was an ironic touch in such preservation of an in- herited form of justice when so much of its substance had been deliberately violated. The long waiting added to the tension. Everyone remained standing (another inherited formality) while Vishinsky, for a full hour, read the verdict. Eleven were sentenced to death, six of them with recommend- ations for reprieve in consideration of their helpfulness. Thirty- eight other Russians were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to ten years. Rabinovich was given six years. One of the Ger- mans was acquitted and the other two received suspended sen- tences, which amounted to the same thing. The show was over, except for a formal announcement three days later of five execu- tions. 5 The next days were a sort of convalescence for me after the fever and strain of the long trial. Even physically it had been ex- hausting 5 besides reporting the proceedings in the former Nobles Club, I had to keep abreast of all other news developments throughout the Soviet Union. Far more exhausting, however, were the currents of self-searching generated by the trial. I had pro- ceeded on the assumption that the revolution can do no wrong, since even its crimes are justified by its mystical mandate from 132 hallelujah! History. Something in the weeks o£ trial, I could not place my finger on it yet, challenged that mystical assumption. Whatever the infinite purposes of History, whatever the compulsions upon its finite human instruments, did it relieve them and me of all responsibility? Turning my impressions over and over in my mind, discarding the ranting of politicians and sifting, as best I could, the palpable lies from what rang true, I felt certain of only these things:. First, that most, if not all, of the accused men were guilty either of actual sabotage against the Soviet regime, or of such utter apathy toward their work that the results amounted to. sabotage. Men of their sort were, at best, prisoners of the revolution, obey- ing its orders and dreaming of escape. Second, that the melodramatic international plot projected by the Soviet rulers to impress their people and the outside world was largely a figment of their own stagecraft. Third, that behind the trial was a story of mass arrests, forced confessions, unprincipled and inhuman third-degree methods that broke the body and the spirit of its victims. I sensed horrors touched by sadism, though I could not prove it and tried hard to wipe my mind clean of their shadows. Fourth, that the trial was in a peculiar way a form of exhibition- ism: a group intoxicated by untrammeled power showed off its new strength. It renounced the hamperments of principles and decencies and respect for human life to give its fresh energies the widest play. I do not say that these were the facts. I record only that those were my inner conclusions — conclusions some of which I buried far out of sight, because they would have inhibited me in serving the revolution. I shouted down similar conclusions when they were voiced by Russian or non-Russian acquaintances. In the courtroom, watching the spectacle and reading closely the newspaper accounts, I came to believe that the whole Soviet population was accepting without serious question the official version of the trial. But outside, in day-to-day contact with Russians of all types, that belief was quickly shattered. I discovered that the government’s victory was far from complete. In a guarded phrase or a politically off-color joke or in tense silences, people betrayed their doubts and cyni- DEMONSTRATION TRIAL I 33 cisms. Whatever they might say aloud, few in their hearts doubted that the confessions had been extorted by threats or actual tor- ture, and that the sabotage and apathy of the technicians had been blown up to the size of an international plot for obvious political reasons. The fact that production troubles kept increasing despite the “liquidation” of such conspiracies fed the cynicism. In the very heart of the Shakhty coal area output declined in the next months and accidents increased — as was only natural with the technical directors either arrested or paralyzed by fear. The effect upon the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, upon whom, however little they relished it, the Bolsheviks had to depend for technical leadership in old and new industries, was disastrous. While the Shakhty exhibition may have led some to desist from overt acts, it drove all the rest to the most costly and overt of all acts — inactivity. They avoided responsibility as though it were a plague. Why undertake anything if failure might be construed as sabotage? They had seen men treated as traitors because the mines they had mechanized at great cost proved unprofitable. They had seen others accused of issuing sabotage “instructions” in telling technicians that turbines would be spoiled if handled in a par- ticular way. The only safety was in doing nothing, in “passing the buck” of important decisions to someone else. During the greater part of the Five Year Plan period the strength of the technical intelligentsia was crippled. It worked in fear and trepidation, aware that it was a pariah class, distrusted, easy game for petty tyrants, and convenient scapegoats for the mistakes and ignorance and mismanagement of others. The Shakhty trial and the persecution of the intelligentsia which it initiated and symbolized seemed to me, with every passing year, as much a blunder as a tragedy. For me, as for others, it remained a glaring proof of the dangers of immense unrestrained power with its inevitable temptation to use unstinting force where force was least effective. VII. Journey Through Russia IN THE summer there is traditionally a wholesale exodus from the cities to the country in Russia. Long before the advent of Mos- cow’s brief and dusty summer, people talked of nothing but dachas (country houses). When the snows were still on the ground, more prudent Muscovites traveled into the villages nearby and rented rooms or cottages from the peasants. By June, wagons loaded with household goods began to rumble towards the country districts. Peasant householders in pleasant locations earned more by renting to summer tenants than they did by plowing the soil. They moved to shanties or crowded their families into a windowless garret to make room for the profitable visitors. For anyone accustomed to summers in New York, the season should hold no terrors even on the equator. The Russian summer, we were to discover in time, was merciful by comparison. The general and frenzied preparations for the annual evacuation, how- ever, alarmed us into a frantic search for a dacha . Billy explored the suburbs, returning with sad tales of failure. Befouled, ill- smelling cottages shared by the peasants and their cattle could be rented only for sums beyond our bank account — probably the prices were stepped up as a subtle compliment to the supposed affluence of all foreigners. Livable quarters had already been preempted by bureaucrats, embezzlers, G.P.U. officials, and others who could stand the tariff. In the end, Billy and Genie joined the families of two Foreign Office employees who were going to the Baltic seashore near Riga for the summer, while I faced the terrors of the summer alone. It turned out far from terrible. The annual exodus, in fact, proved as much a social convention as a necessity. I visited at the dachas of Russian and foreign friends, learned to play gorodki (a Russian variant of skittles), and bathed nude in the Moscow River beyond the city limits and in the lakes and brooks where the summer colonies were clustered. I discovered the charms of 134 JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 135 the countryside of the region: forests of slender silver birch or darkling pine, rolling meadows of tenderest green, and sudden brooks where men and women bathed and soaped themselves with only an imaginary boundary line between them. I picked huckle- berries and blackberries in woods carpeted with pine needles, woods as dim and hushed as Gothic cathedrals. To the peasants whom I met, a foreigner was a minor miracle and an object of endless curiosity. They plied me with questions about American peasants and American skyscrapers — in part, I am sure, for the sly fun of hearing my stumbling Russian. My shoes, my trousers, my horn-rimmed glasses, everything foreign set them clucking with admiration. Even to peasants on the pe- riphery of Russia’s metropolis, the outside world was a fairyland on the other side of the moon. Whether in town or country, the summer nights were magical interludes of only two or three hours at most between the late sunset and the early sunrise. Coming out of a party at a hotel or a home at one or two in the morning, I would find the deserted city silhouetted delicately against a violet dawn in the east, while the western sky was still a bluish gray studded with expiring stars. The violet turned to rose as I took the longest route home and watched the sun’s first rays edging pastel-colored church cupolas with gold. These early dawns in Moscow have for me a quality of enchantment that, in retrospect, seems a dream half-remem- bered. Perhaps it was the contrast with the noisy, crowded day filled with problems and slogans that made these intervals so fancifully precious. Moscow seemed a place bewitched, its every- day life suspended as the tints of morning filtered through the sieve of night. In the matter of news, too, that summer provided a lull — the calm, had we known it, before the storm that was to break before long and uproot millions of families and plunge the country into a panic of ruthless speed. The Kremlin’s fervid promises to desist from further violence against the peasantry had brought a new spurt of energy to farming and the press reports of crop progress were for the most part optimistic. All important officials were vacationing on the fringes of the Black Sea or spending most of their time at their dachas ; a number of the finest old estates and the most attractive summering sites were reserved for G.P.U. 136 hallelujah! leaders and the more privileged communists. The lull enabled me to enjoy the country and occasional excursions to more distant spots celebrated for their palaces, ancient churches or scenery. I flew to Riga for a few days to visit my family and found them and their Moscow companions thoroughly disillusioned with the “Baltic riviera” of which Russians speak so glowingly. The clear warm days were so rare that one could easily keep count of them. And the bathing was regulated with a prudishness that seemed fantastic to the more natural Russians. Riga itself, almost Dutch in its freshly-swept look, its shops running over with food delicacies the memory of which had begun to fade in my mind, was a healing respite from the intensity of Moscow. We took in an American movie, the captions of which were flashed in three languages — Latvian, German and Russian — and shopped for the sheer thrill of shopping. Like Russians themselves when they con- front capitalist abundance for the first time, we simply wallowed in the plenitude. Six unbroken months in the Soviet Union with its new standards are enough to make the old bourgeois world incredible. Foreigners deeply immersed in the new Russian life must rediscover capitalist civilization when they emerge. 2 The one piece of sensational news centered in Moscow that summer of 1928 was in itself a comforting vacation from the Shakhty trial, food queues, chastisement of heretical communists, peasant terror and other news staples of the preceding months. I refer to the ice-breaker Krassirfs rescue, in July, of survivors of an Italian dirigible expedition to the North Pole. Though the melodramatic events occurred in the extreme North, the in- formation reached the world in large measure through Moscow, which made it our story. And how we gloried in it! A towering human-interest yarn at last, in which we could let ourselves go without fear of offending sensitive officials or drawing down Bol- shevik lightning on our heads! Literal Marxists think bougeois reporters in the U.S.S.R. lie in wait with mouths dripping saliva for Soviet horrors and disas- ters to pounce upon. They would be cured of this dismal vision had they seen the eager relish with which we pounced on the JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 137 heroic exploits of the ice-breaker Krassin, its crew and its aviators. Out of the grudging formal communiques we fashioned a saga of Soviet daring which will forever embellish the records of Arctic exploration. We did this despite the bureaucratic attitude of a censorship apparatus so rigidly geared for suppression of facts that it automatically hampered the transmission of a story more favor- able to its reputation among the peoples of the globe than any- thing that had happened in years. The actual events were suffi- ciently stirring, but the correspondents — in a sort of holiday of the spirit after the oppressive Shakhty proceedings — spread wide the wings of their fancy in blowing up Samoilovich, Chukhnovsky, and the other heroes to almost mythological dimensions. The ice- breaker itself, blunt-nosed, powerful, imperturbable, turned under our typewriter keys into a symbol of Soviet strength rescuing the world. That those to whom the Red Samaritans brought succor were Black Fascists enhanced that symbolism. The irony of Soviet Russia bringing life to stranded Italians and putting Mussolini’s realm in their debt was not lost on the world. For nearly six weeks the whole world had watched in fascinated horror the desperate and seemingly hopeless attempts to find survivors of the dirigible Italia somewhere on the floating ice masses off North East Land. It saw one rescue party after another wrecked or returning empty-handed. One of these parties, led by Roald Amundsen, never returned and the details of its fate remain a mystery to this day. Meanwhile Soviet ice-breakers carrying seaplanes and several of the country’s ace fliers were slowly nosing their way through the ice floes to- ward the scene of the tragedy. Their laborious climb northward was scarcely noticed. But as they neared the scene, the civilized world became abruptly aware of their persistent struggle and watched excitedly as the Krassin and the Malygin elbowed their way through crashing ice masses. On July ii, Boris Chukhnovsky flew from the Krassin and reported by radio that he had located three men on an ice-floe, two of them standing up and waving frantically to him, the third apparently lying down. He had circled over them as signal that they were seen. In attempting to get back to his base he made a forced landing. Apparently he urged the ship to go pick up the castaways before bothering about him. 138 hallelujah! “Never mind me, save the others!” we reported him as saying, and the phrase became famous— a theme made to order for edi- torials and sermons. Blushingly I record that the phrase was in- vented in the little room near the censor’s office where we worked. But if he didn’t say it, he easily might have— and, no doubt, said words no less stirring. Thirty-six hours later the Krassin reached the stranded group; there were only two instead of the three Chukhnovsky thought he had seen. The same day the ice-breaker also picked up five other survivors, while the press in all countries cheered itself hoarse. It was seeing those sinister Bolsheviks in a brand-new role. The scanty details of the exploit were reported by the ship’s officials and several Russian newspapermen on board directly to Moscow. We were driven to the raw edge of apoplexy by the battle to wrest this information from its official keepers — all of it was treated as a state secret, when elementary good sense should have led the government to help us smear the yarn as thick as strawberry jam on bread. Chukhnovsky’s report of sighting three men stirred up un- savory and slightly macabre controversy. It had been instantly assumed that the three were Captain Filippo Zappi, the dirigible’s navigator, Captain Alberto Mariano, pilot, and the young Swedish meteorologist, Dr. Finn Malmgren, who had started off together after the crash on the chance of bringing aid. The Krassin found only Zappi and Mariano. They explained that Dr. Malmgren had died a month ago, and that what Chukhnovsky mistook for a third figure was a shadow or a roll of blankets. But there were those, especially in Dr. Malmgren’s native land, who refused to believe their story, charging that the Italians had abandoned the young Swede and taken his clothes and supplies. There were even gruesome hints of cannibalism and some writers made much of the report that the Italians were wearing some of Dr. Malmgren’s clothes. Ultimately, experts came to believe the two survivors’ account. But while the mystery lasted it gave Moscow, where every grain of information was fought over, something to chew on. In the general anxiety to do the story up brown, the Associated Press correspondent pulled a “boner” which embarrassed that great agency for some time. The communique reporting that JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 139 Mariano and Zappi were taken aboard the ice-breaker and that Dr. Malmgren was dead was so crudely worded that we all be- lieved Dr. Malmgren’s body, too, had been retrieved. My col- league thereupon wrote a colorful and most sentimental account of the scientist’s “funeral.” He had touching speeches, weather- beaten old Russian tars weeping over the corpse, bowed heads and the rest of the effects appropriate to such an occasion. The imagi- nary funeral, worse luck, carried the date-line, “On Board the Krassin/* instead of Moscow, to give it an authentic eye-witness flavor. The lugubrious tale was published in the United States and I was duly reprimanded for my failure to “cover” the funeral before it became known that Dr. Malmgren’s body had been neither recovered nor wept over. The Arctic drama had been spread in the Soviet newspapers as in the rest of the world, and a wave of national pride rolled over the population. Books, articles, lectures, and motion pictures con- verted the tale of individual courage and skill into another proof of triumphant socialism. Chukhnovsky’s expert flying, Professor Samoilovich’s knowledge of polar conditions, the captain’s fine seamanship seemed convincing, if illogical, testimony of the right- ness of Marx and his victorious disciple, Stalin. National patriotism in the Western sense is something rela- tively new to Russia. Before the revolution it was propagated largely by the new intelligentsia, and even with them it was mystically racial more than nationalistic. Patriotism presupposes an awareness of the surrounding world in which one’s nation is a distinct unit — an awareness of boundaries. Primitive peoples re- serve their patriotic sentiments for their immediate village or region, everything else being an infinite and mysterious cloud. To a peasant in Kostroma or Viatka, Russia was too vague and limitless a concept to stir a profound loyalty. It has been one of the curious functions of the revolution, in ironical disregard of its internationalist dogmas, to stir national consciousness in Russia. The mere emphasis on the hostile capitalist encirclement has tended to mark off the frontiers of their country in the minds of millions. The dramatization of heroic episodes like the Krassin story, sensational air flights or industrial achievements has fed the nascent patriotism. 140 hallelujah! 3 I made my first long journey through Russia in the early autumn, visiting Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea and the Caucasus, Rostov, and other sections. I visited these places many times in subsequent years and it is not easy to disentangle my first im- pressions from the cumulative memory. I kept no notebook (a stupidity for which I cannot forgive myself), and my articles on the trip, like nearly everything I wrote in this period, are far from a literal record of my reactions. Deliberately and with a clear conscience I wrote for effect. My duty as I saw it was to strengthen the faith of the world’s workers in the first socialist land, and I did not permit myself knowingly to cast doubt on the perfection of the Soviet scenery, let alone its economic system and leadership. I brought back from the tour a heavy heart; the routine miseries of the period were more apparent in the provinces than in the capital. But I wrote pieces which could, with only slight emendations, have been published in one of the Soviet propaganda magazines in America. Having mentioned that I had met “per- sons of the most diverse temperaments and social interests,” I added: Almost without exception these people reflected a warm conviction that just ahead of them lies a bright future, for their cities, for their country as a whole. They talked with enthusiasm of the new factories, the new power stations, the rows of bright new workers’ homes, the grain elevators that were going up in places where they live and work. They talked of these things, moreover, as though they were personal possessions. I met, indeed, people who talked in the strain of a Pravda edi- torial, especially officials whom I cornered and plied with ques- tions. But they were the exception. Casual acquaintances made on trains, in hotels and restaurants, were more likely to complain about food shortage, overbearing bureaucrats, and other troubles. My American clothes, a glimpse of my wrist-watch or fountain pen or razor blades, were enough to pluck complaints about hard- ships and the barrenness of their lives from envious Russians. I found myself repeatedly trying to convince them that their fate JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 141 was not as bleak as it seemed. The gew-gaws o£ capitalist pro- duction, I assured them, were small compensation for a system of bourgeois exploitation and slavery. Leaving Moscow, I shared the bare wooden shelf in the “hard” or third-class carriage with a tall, clean-cut fellow in a semi-mili- tary overcoat and good boots. He might easily have posed for the portrait of a Stalwart Workingman. In removing overcoat and jacket and making himself comfortable for the long journey to his home, Odessa, he left his revolver in full view. The dumb- show was intended too obviously to impress everyone and the for- eigner in particular with the fact that he was “somebody.” Then he became a little ashamed of this childish show-off. He put away the revolver and blushed like a schoolboy. He transferred his boastfulness from a personal to a national level, and for an hour or two enlarged on the achievements and “perspectives” of the Soviet regime and the genius of Stalin. But gradually it dawned on him that this emissary from the capitalist world was already sufficiently convinced. Abruptly he changed his tune and long before we reached Kiev we had ex- changed roles. I was reduced to convincing him that things were not nearly as bad as he thought and the difficulties which distressed him only temporary sacrifices on the road to socialism. “Ekh, brother,” he interjected ever so often, “it is easy for you to speak. You have an American passport and can thumb your nose at us if you like and go back to America. You would talk differently if you were caught here like the Russians.” I felt that his complaints were no deeper than his boasts \ he was caught and confused between his theoretical convictions and his practical discomforts. We parted at Kiev. A week later I looked him up at his home in Odessa and he showed me through the city, again vacillating between pride in the future and disgust with the present. Only when he pointed out the sites of civil war battles and recounted the terrible but romantic events of those stirring days, with particular reference to his own role, did he achieve unequivocal enthusiasm. My traveling companion was an American I.W.W. of Russian extraction who had returned to his native land after the revolu- tion, by name Belinkes. Awkward, kind-hearted but not overly in- 142 hallelujah! telligent, he did yeoman service as interpreter when my pidgin Russian failed me, and worked veritable miracles in obtaining tickets at railroad stations where others had been waiting days and weeks for accommodations. Unfortunately, he considered it his patriotic function to act as guide and political mentor, tasks for which he was peculiarly unfitted. Somewhere, perhaps in the American movies, he had developed a fixed idea that the prin- cipal object of travel was to see monuments and could never quite grasp why I preferred to see people, cafes, theaters, smelly side- streets. All of these, he felt, no doubt, were amply available in Moscow and therefore did not justify the cost of travel. We traveled “hard,” sleeping on the bare worn shelves when we were lucky enough to stretch out at all. The idea was to get closer to the Russian people. It was a sacrifice on the altar of professional duty which I did not willingly make again. Open windows are, as everyone in Russia knows, unhealthy 3 besides, they encourage the “wild boys” who still infested the stations to reach in and help themselves to everything that can be grabbed by ingenious and well-trained little thieves. Spitting and more distressing types of bodily relief were unrestrained. (“City folks are strange people,” a peasant once told me, “they carry their sputum in little pieces of cloth, instead of spitting it out on the ground like decent folk.”) A crowded, air-tight carriage, after its inmates have drawn off their boots and made themselves at home, is scarcely a sweet-smelling place. The warm friendliness of fellow-passengers, however, was some compensation for the discomforts. Most of them felt it their duty to assist a foreigner. They brought me hot water at stations and were always ready to share their bread and sausage. Or they guarded my belongings while I stepped out for air and to buy food 5 the station lunch-counters at this stage were still fairly well stocked, and at most stations local peasants sold food at steep prices. At night we put our coats and shoes under our heads both as cushions and by way of guarding against theft, and we tied the baggage to our wrists or ankles with ropes so that we would be wakened if anyone made a foray. I found the cities without exception shabby. “The new Russia,” I wrote to console myself and reassure my readers, “is busy with innumerable more pressing affairs, and its towns will remain sadly JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 143 out of repair for a few years longer. To the stranger the first impression is still an unpleasant one. It takes a lively imagination, and a background of appreciation of what the country has been through, to overcome it.” My imagination was not always equal to the task, though not for lack of trying. The beauty was there. Looked at through half-closed eyes, or in the kindly dusk of sun- down, it could be discerned — in a thousand fine old buildings, in sweeping panoramas, in breath-taking skylines. But it was a beauty hidden for the time being under layers of dirt, rust, dis- coloration. Kiev, sprawled on hillsides, with the Dnieper threading through it, had a magical quality when seen in perspective. At close range this quality evaporated: streets, old churches, magnificent palaces looked dilapidated and forlorn. Sebastopol, approached from the Black Sea, was a truly beautiful sight: a steep hillside thickly sown with white houses that splintered the sunshine. It has the character of some of the Italian hill towns. But once in the town, climbing its old stairways, I was more conscious of neglect than of beauty. Even Yalta, once the show-place of Crimea, I found down-at-the- heel and no match for its fabulous reputation. Shop windows in all the cities were desolate holes, where rags and tag-ends of goods seemed to have been thrown in at random. In the larger cities the hotels were tolerable, and their food not too bad, but even in Odessa and Rostov we fought a losing battle with vermin. Psychologically, the atmosphere mellowed the farther south we penetrated. In Moscow, the austerities of the communist faith seemed to throw a shadow over the city, but the gloom lifted gradually until it almost faded out in the Caucasus. In Batum, people sat at little tables on the sidewalks or on the cobbled streets outside of cafes, indulging in Turkish coffee, conversation, and backgammon. In Tiflis, we visited several of the numberless duk- hans, little restaurants, where every client is a connoisseur of wines and food. In the best of them there were splendid displays of appetizing fish and meats in endless variations. The Caucasians wear daggers embellished in silver and semi-precious stones even over their most ragged clothes, which is proof enough that they take life with grand gestures. In most of the cities south of Moscow there was a general exodus of people from their homes after sundown, a heightening I 44 HALLELUJAH ! of the romantic temper. There is no street in Moscow to match the Ulitsa Vorovskovo in Kiev or Ulitsa Lasalya and Feldmann Boulevard in Odessa for movement and humming life in the eve- nings. The Feldmann (formerly Nikolayevsky) Boulevard, on the steep ledge of land overlooking the Odessa harbor, presents a scene at night without parallel in Russia. It is thronged with people, young and old, by twos and threes and entire families, strolling endlessly in the subdued light. The crackle of sunflower seeds is in the air, and a web of flirtations lies over the promenad- ers like a tangible and mildly stimulating presence. Though new friends in the city complained that it was melan- choly compared to its old self, Odessa was by all odds the pleas- antest spot I had as yet found within the Soviet frontiers. Its large cafes still had the warmth one associates with Vienna cafes. Before the war it considered itself the Paris of the Black Sea. It even had bad men to match the Paris af aches. Many of them, I was told, used their courage and their proficiency with weapons to more useful purposes in the civil war in punishing pogroms and repulsing invaders. The legend of Mishka Yaponyets, a Jewish gangster whom the revolution turned into a hero, was still fresh in the city. His exploits have been celebrated by the gifted Soviet writer, Babel, and others. Mishka organized and led Red volun- teers, many of them drawn from the criminal elements, to defend Jews against massacres by the Whites, and he died fighting the White foe. Along the waterfront, at the foot of the ledge on which the city is propped, were the haunts of the bad men and their thorny lady loves, as wicked and colorful as the dives of Marseilles. Some of these haunts still exist, but an industrious excursion con- vinced me that the color has run out of them. I received a flaming reception when I returned to Moscow. Literally. As I stepped into the backyard I saw flame and smoke pouring from the door and windows of my apartment. Our ser- vant girl lay stretched on the ground, bleeding, while neighbors shouted and wrung their hands in helpless excitement. There was no sign of my family. I rushed into the house and plunged flailing through the thick smoke, calling the names of Billy and Genie. Then I realized that the flames were confined to the kitchen and JOURNEY THROUGH RUSSIA 145 the rest of the house was filled with smoke, but otherwise un- touched. A defective kerosene stove had started the fire almost at the moment of my arrival and was extinguished in a few min- utes. The servant had dived through the closed kitchen window, though the door was wide open. Her lacerated arms and my singed eyebrows were the only casualties. Billy and Genie had gone to meet my train and missed me, and the fire was over when they reached home. Fifteen minutes behind them came the firemen, bustling and self-important. Despite the evidences of a bona fide fire, they were offended that we had sent a “false alarm” and threatened to fine me for having put out the fire without benefit of their nice new hatchets and fire-hose. I promised, however, that next time I would not be so rash, but would keep the fire going for them, and everything was forgiven. The journey through the hinterland gave me a new appre- ciation for Moscow. If the city had seemed to me, coming from the West, bleak and impoverished, it impressed me as a veritable metropolis after Kiev, Novorossiisk, Batum and the thousand towns and villages which I had glimpsed in passing. The shops now seemed opulent and the people well dressed. Above all, the vital cultural life of theater, music, radio and newspapers, and the sense of proximity to the political dynamos of the land, made Moscow wonderfully full and alive. I could understand how a native of Kazan or Minsk — even of Rostov or Odessa — might feel himself transported to a wonderland of civilization on confronting Moscow for the first time. It was a pity, almost, to destroy this illusion by a vacation in Berlin. At the Adlon Bar on Unter-den-Linden I met correspon- dents stationed in Germany or passing through on their way to assignments. They had been nearly everywhere and seen nearly everything. Yet Russia was a magnetic land of mystery even to them. They questioned me eagerly about the Shakhty trial, peasant disorders, food queues, the new political lines, and particularly about the redoubtable, inaccessible and rather ominous Stalin. More than the filing of stories and the sight of my “by-line” in newspapers, this fraternization with well-known international re- porters made me feel authentically a correspondent. I liked the shop-talk that embraced the whole globe, the offhand way in 146 hallelujah! which great names and great events were tossed into the conver- sation. Outwardly, the talk was casual and touched with languor — cynical boredom is a convention of the trade. But under it these men and women who were the eyes and the ears of America in the outside world were conscious of their privileged vantage point and moved by a keen interest — sometimes no more than a sporting interest, it is true, though none the less real — in the revolutions and counter-revolutions and political jockeying of pre-depression Europe. VIII. Iron Monolith THE period of the Five Year Plan has been christened Russia’s “Iron Age” by the best-informed and least sensational of my American colleagues in Moscow, William Henry Chamberlin. I can think of no more apt description. Iron symbolizes industrial construction and mechanization. Iron symbolizes no less the ruth- lessness of the process, the bayonets, prison bars, rigid discipline and unstinting force, the unyielding and unfeeling determination of those who directed the period. Russia was transformed into a crucible in which men and metals were melted down and reshaped in a cruel heat, with small regard for the human slag. It was a period that unrolled tumultuously, in a tempest of brutality. The Five Year Plan was publicized inside and outside Russia as no other economic project in modern history. Which makes it the more extraordinary that its birth was unknown and unnoticed. The Plan sneaked up on the world so silently that its advent was not discovered for some months. On the momentous October first of 1928, the initial day of the Five Year Plan, we read the papers, fretted over the lack of news and played bridge or poker as though nothing exceptional was occurring. It was the begin- ning of a new fiscal year, precisely like the October firsts pre- ceding it. The “control figures” or plan for the ensuing twelve months were rather more ambitious, with new emphasis on sociali- zation of farming through state-owned “grain factories” and vol- untary collectives of small holdings. But they were not sufficiently different from other years to arrest the attention of competent observers. The fact is that the Kremlin itself was far from certain that a new era had been launched. It had not yet charted a course. Or rather, it had charted alternative courses and hesitated in which direction to move. Not until Stalin and his closest associates see fit to reveal what happened in the crucial months of that autumn i47 1 48 HALLELUJAH ! will we know how close the Soviet regime came to choosing a course which would have altered the whole history of Russia and therefore of the present world. There was nothing in the figures for the fiscal year of 1929 that committed the ruling Party to a Five Year Plan of the scope eventually announced. But a feeling of tense expectancy now stretched the country’s nerves taut. A sharp turn of the wheel to one side or the other was inevitable, and the population squared for the shock. Economic difficulties were piling up dangerously and the Kremlin could not steer a middle course much longer. Food lines were growing longer and more restive. The pro- ducers of food had tested their strength and tasted a measure of victory; they rebelled more boldly against feeding the urban population and the armies for rubles which could buy nothing. Millions of grumbling mouths had to be either filled with food or shut by force. A partial crop failure in southern Russia aggravated the situ- ation. Grain collections were not going well and, as always hap- pened under these circumstances, the collectors began to resort to strong-arm tactics. Arson and assassination flared up once more in the villages, and Red troops were said to be “pacifying” the most unruly districts with lead. Schools, clubs, government buildings, and other institutions typifying the Soviet power were burned down in dozens of places. The published details of the peasant revenge were sufficiently harrowing, and what the press reported, we all assumed, was no more than a fraction of the picture. Death penalties, with and without trials, were the government’s auto- matic answer. But they did not suffice. Something decisive had to be done that would either placate the peasants or end their in- subordination. For a while the hope of drawing in foreign capital postponed a decision. If enough goods could be produced to meet the food growers’ demand for a fair return on their labor, the problem would be more than half solved, A decree invited the capitalists of the world to come in and develop Russia’s resources practically on capitalist terms. Had the outside world, especially the United States before whose eyes the temptation was dangled most frankly, accepted the offer, there would perhaps have been no Five Year Plan, no liqui- dation of kulaks, no “Iron Age.” The Great Depression might, IRON MONOLITH 149 indeed, have been less acute had world capital found a profitable outlet in the development of Russia’s natural resources. But the bourgeois world still regarded Russia as an “economic vacuum.” The phrase is Herbert Hoover’s, whose knack for finding the right word for the wrong idea amounted to genius. In the light of future developments, it is curious to remember that Hoover’s election to the Presidency in November created a considerable flurry of optimism in Moscow. The Russians knew his hatred of Reds and had at various times excoriated his alleged role in overthrowing Bela Kun’s Soviet government in Hungary. But Moscow had a fixation on engineering; the engineer is to the communist faith what the prophet has been to older faiths. With all his faults, Hoover was in Bolshevik eyes an engineer. How, then, could his judgment of economic possibilities be warped by personal feelings? “Hoover is a realist,” was the burden of Soviet comment, “he must see that his country stands to gain by encouraging trade and investments here.” The optimism, of course, was short-lived. The failure of the capitalist world to accept the invitation deter- mined, as much as any other single consideration, the turning of the wheel to the Left. Reports of serious disagreement among the Kremlin leaders as to the next step echoed through Moscow. Stalin formally denied that there was any dissension or “petit bourgeois heresy” in the Politburo — which was accepted as proof that the reports were well- founded. Kalinin, generally regarded as spokesman for the peas- ants, was said to favor placating them. Klementi Voroshilov, War Commissar, whose Red Army was preponderantly a peasant army, likewise counseled moderation on the agrarian front. Nikolai Buk- harin, editor of Pravda and foremost theoretician in Stalin’s en- tourage, had published an article decrying undue pressure on the villages as “feudal exploitation” of the peasantry. While counsel of moderation of this type was tolerated, and the path to such policy left wide open, the drift to the Left was not halted. Private traders and artisans employing labor — the ur- ban kulaks — continued to be “liquidated” without let-up. “Specu- lators,” which is Soviet for private merchants, were arrested by the hundred and the thousand, their property confiscated and themselves banished. 1 50 HALLELUJAH ! The final decision was Stalin’s. Whether he had hesitated in deference to the prevailing Right sentiment or because of his own doubts will probably never be known. The Stalin legend is one that cannot countenance the admission of even a temporary un- certainty. His choice showed an amazing daring and an aware- ness of absolute power. The moment may well be accepted as marking the final emergence of Stalin, the Party secretary, as Stalin, the dictator. He had bided his time with Asiatic patience. An inconspicuous commissar and Party functionary under Lenin, then an eq ual member of a triumvirate with Zinoviev and Kame- nev, now indisputably the uncrowned monarch. No doubt he derived intellectual self-confidence in his choice from the humbled but still Leftist supporters of Trotsky who, one after another, had crawled back on bleeding knees, ready to serve him. Stalin was more at ease maneuvering men than maneuvering ideas. Chastened Trotskyists like Piatakov,* Radek, and Preo- brazhensky were invaluable intellectual reinforcements. Stalin’s espousal of policies close to Trotsky’s provided the returned Trot- skyists with a perfect justification for seeming betrayal of their whilom leader. It took the sting from humiliation and spread balm on a sore conscience. But while this accession of brains may have given a fillip to Stalin’s assurance, it does not detract from the audacity. His de- cision ran counter to the sentiment not alone of the population, but of the rank and file of the Communist Party. Supporters of Trotsky like to believe that “pressure by the masses” forced Stalin to throw his Right allies overboard and steer reluctantly to the Left. Doubtless there was a portion of the more revolutionary workers, especially among the younger people, bitterly opposed to any compromise with the “bourgeois elements” in the country. But the pressures, it was evident to anyone in Moscow at the time, were overwhelmingly in the other direction. 2 The defeat of Trotsky was complicated by personal antagonisms, theoretical disputes, and a struggle for sheer power. In essence, however, it was a repudiation of Leftism. The Russian people, * Executed in January, 1937. IRON MONOLITH 151 including the communists, were in a mood for truce. The failure of revolutionary efforts in Germany, Hungary, and China had bankrupted the hope for world revolution and foreign allies. Mil- lionfold classes, not the least of them being the vast bureaucratic apparatus and entrenched police machine, had developed a sizable stake in the status quo of Nep. The existing system, like any system ever devised, had developed a robust will to survive — to make a permanent abode of the historical half-way house. In attacking the talk about “permanent revolution” and more vigorous strug- gle against Nep, Stalin had voiced the weariness and the despair of a people surfeited with struggle and sacrifice. The Party membership itself was in the main content to let things be. It had been considerably watered in the last years by the admission of hundreds of thousands of new members without personal memory or intimate relation to the old revolutionary struggle. The admixture was largely from the factories. The diluted Party may have become much more “proletarian,” but its cultural average was lowered and its contempt for intellectuals raised. Never much enamored of democratic rights, unable in- deed to grasp the meaning of such rights, the newcomers were not impressed with efforts to safeguard the relative internal Party democracy that had existed under Lenin. The strong-arm methods of less finicky men were closer to their inherited tastes. As long as they held their jobs and their privileged status, they were con- tent to shift the responsibility of thinking upon “practical,” down- to-earth professional leaders. Stripped of all secondary factors, the defeat of Trotsky ex- pressed a genuine and growing annoyance with intellectuals and idealistic “dreamers,” with world revolution and with new revo- lutions at home. It reflected a natural yearning to settle down and bite into the fruits of the revolution. It was a reaction, when all is said and done, against interna- tionalists and Westernizers (a large portion of them Jews, it hap- pened) and a straining back to folk ways and national self-suf- ficiency. Though not consciously anti-Semitic, the movement had distinct anti-Semitic undercurrents, in that it reacted against the Jewish type of mind: idealistic, missionary, and without tough roots in the Russian soil. To the extent that the reaction turned inward along national lines, threw off its “duty to the world i $2 hallelujah! revolution,” repudiated intellectualism and handed over all power to divinely inspired leaders, it was distinctly “fascist.” Stalin’s rough ways may have aroused misgivings in the heart of the dying Lenin; they aroused a comforting confidence in the people trained by a thousand years of history to expect and re- spect naked power, a people distrustful of democratic gadgets. Stalin might be a swarthy Georgian, but his methods— cunning, patient, brutal — were Russian compared with the loose idealistic talk of Westernized alien-minded Lefts. In adopting the main features of Trotsky’s program, except for its international implications, Stalin was therefore thumbing his Ca ucasi an nose at the tides on which he had ridden to the dic- tatorial apex. Confident that his political machine was now invul- nerable, he pitted his will against his closest advisers, against the mass of the population, and against the majority of his Party. No estimate of popular sentiment, naturally, can ever be made. I can only record my own certainty at the time that the country and the Party were overwhelmingly Right and accepted Stalin’s unexpected course in a sullen and frightened spirit. Every time the Kremlin in a speech or decree hinted a let-up in socialization, greater leeway for the abler peasants, more immediate comforts for the workers, wider private trade — in short, a tendency toward the Right— the feeling of relief in Moscow was unmistakable. On the eleventh birthday of the revolution, November 7, 1928, the course was still uncertain. The Congress of the Comintern (Communist International) which had ended the month before had been violent in its language but vague in its practical com- mitments to action; there was little enough clew to future policy in its fulminations. After the November holidays, however, things moved swiftly. The Right point of view, until then tolerated, sud- denly blossomed into the blackest of heresies. It became, in the official jargon, the “chief danger.” Stalin achieved a bloodless victory. Never again was his de- cision on any matter, large or small, to be questioned. The “monolithic” Party, a Soviet equivalent for the “totalitarian” par- ties in fascist countries, was in absolute control. The Russia which it created in the next few years was as different from the one bequeathed by Lenin as it was from the tsarist Russia. IRON MONOLITH 153 3 The face of world communism was to change no less completely. It takes its coloring always from the domestic Russian situation and is adjusted to suit the needs of the Soviet state. The Comintern Congress, the first to be held in four years, met for six weeks, from July 17 to September 1. Its reverberant generalities thus came before Stalin’s decisive swing Leftward, but they served as a foundation for the new world policies of communism elaborated in the following year. In the early summer months, foreign communists had begun to drift into Moscow for the impending Congress. Some of them, coming from countries where the communist movement is illegal and therefore “underground,” arrived under strange pseudonyms on bogus passports. Even certain American representatives, for reasons that I could not quite figure out, traveled on synthetic passports. In a few instances documentary materials for these dele- gates were sent from the United States in my name, presumably to foil American officials who might be tracing the whereabouts of these delegates. The owners of each shipment knew of its safe arrival in Moscow even before the postman delivered it to me: the contents of my mail were clearly no secret to the postal authori- ties. The political complexion of the foreign delegations was dis- tinctly Right. The American group was captained by Jay Love- stone, Bertram Wolfe, and others expelled in the following year for Rightist heresies. In the other national groups were men like Brandler, Sellier, Kilboor, Roy, Jilek, whose elimination was likewise in the cards. The most curious aspect of this conclave of world revolutionists, indeed, was its apparent domination by men who were soon there- after discarded. As a test of the real authority of the Congress and the world-wide movement it ostensibly represented, the fate of its supposed leaders is enlightening. There was not another Congress in seven years, until 1935. The policies and activities of the organization were to undergo profound changes in this period. But the people who thought they were directing the 1928 gathering, who fought over programs and bargained for advan- 1 54 hallelujah! tage, were for the most part expelled and branded as agents of the bourgeoisie in less than a year. The real power, it is all too evident, rested safely elsewhere and was exercised independently of the dictates of what was supposedly its highest governing body. The Comintern is the organization that gives all honest and not-so-honest capitalist householders nightmares. It may be some slight consolation to them that it spoils the sleep of Kremlin leaders as well, though for other reasons. The Soviet regime is in the uncomfortable position of running a great nation pledged to keep hands off other nations and simultaneously an international revolutionary movement pledged to the exact opposite purposes. It takes consummate jugglery to achieve this with a measure of grace. The artificial separation of the mutually exclusive functions may do for diplomatic camouflage. It helps not a bit in solving practical clashes of interest. Shall the immense power of the one communist government be used to promote or at least support communist revolutions elsewhere? Or shall the influence and. sheer nuisance values of the international communist forces, on the contrary, be used to pro- mote the interests of the Soviet government as such? How shall the day-to-day collisions between the immediate needs of the U.S.S.R. and the immediate needs of world revolution be ad- justed? The answers to these questions are obviously loaded with the dynamite of schism for the Comintern and dangers for the Soviet Union’s foreign relations. In theory, formulas to conceal this contradiction have been found. In practice, communists are continually torn between their loyalties to the first and only com- munist state and to their native revolutionary movement. The delegates were far too absorbed in their criss-cross of political squabbles and the desperate defense of their own titles to leadership to pay much attention to the Russia of bread lines, sabotage trials, and political prisoners. The formal reports on the state of the Soviet Union gave them as much as they needed for their parochial purposes, so why bother looking out of the windows? Any extensive organization, be it a church, a peace union, or an international Rotary, develops an internal life of its own that blots out the rest of existence. Who should be expelled, who allowed to run the Communist Party of Ecuador or the United States, how the trade-union policy would be phrased — such mat- IRON MONOLITH 155 ters occupied the delegates more than conditions in the Soviet Union, about which they could learn by turning to the proper page. American, English, and German delegates with whom I talked after they had been in Moscow for months showed small knowledge, let alone understanding, of elementary physical facts in Russia. The non-communist press was excluded from the Comintern deliberations, but the principal speeches were published. Finally a “manifesto” was launched to the workers of the world and a program of policies and action was adopted. Precisely because the complexion of the Congress was Right, its verbal thunder out- lefted the Lefts. But foreign communists, no matter how meek, are not as easily managed as Russian communists 5 the threat of expulsion is not nearly as potent as the threat of concentration camp. Behind the fagade of unanimous resolutions there was con- siderable acrid bickering. The manifesto blustered: This is not a document of timid groveling before the bourgeoisie, nor of a cringing peace with it. This is not a rotten pharisaic and con- temptible declaration of unity with the bourgeoisie, a unity which signi- fies nothing else but treacherous flight into the camp of the class enemy, desertion, faithlessness, treason. It is rather a guide in the struggle of millions of the oppressed against their oppressors, in the struggle of the proletarian masses, in the struggle of the toilers, white, yellow, black, in the tropics and in the farthermost outposts of the globe, in factories and on plantations, in mines and on railroads, in forests and deserted steppes — wherever the class war rages. It is the program of the unity of the working class and of its mortal struggle against the bourgeoisie. It is the program of the inevitable world dictatorship of the proletariat. There is healment for the spirit in a good round bout of cussing and self-assurance of this sort. After you have suffered humiliation in China, have sent Lenin’s comrades to Siberia, and been taught to heed the whip yourself, a spirited manifesto does wonders. Because the world revolution had been set back in a dozen places, it is the more “inevitable”! A long array of enemies was chastised with words of flame. The League of Nations — “that child of Ver- sailles, the most predatory treaty of recent decades” — came in for sizzling vituperation. Lying “pacifists” received their quota of abuse. Renegades, that is to say communists who differed on dogma, were anathematized in Biblical periods. 156 hallelujah! But the hottest coals were reserved for the socialists and “re- formists.” The “Social-Democratic parties have sided with the oppressors, with the imperialists, the predatory imperialistic gov- ernments and their agents” in the colonial question. They have been no less infamous, the manifesto insisted, on every other issue. In the preceding years Moscow had flirted with reformists and half-way revolutionists and been led into futile, costly and undignified adventures in the process. It had joined the Anglo- Russian Committee, the LaFollette progressive movement, the Kuomintang in China. Those who denounced such collaboration with the enemy had been thrown out of the communist fraternity for their pains. Now the Congress adopted these denunciations as its very own. Out of this reversal grew the theory of “social fascism,” ac- cording to which socialists were really fascist wolves in Marxist clothing. What the Congress began, the permanent leadership in Moscow was to develop in the next months to a point where the disease of collaboration seemed mild by comparison with the cure of non-cooperation. It was the policy which prevented the demo- cratic forces anywhere in the world from combining to fight fascism, which thus received a clear right of way. More than any other single factor it helped to boost Hitler to dictatorial heights, to destroy socialism in Austria, and to give fascism a head- start elsewhere. The Congress adjourned and its participants scattered to their respective countries, many of them to be duly expelled as “agents of the bourgeosie.” Stalin’s success in purging the ranks of the international movement of Trotskyists and near-Trotskyists had finished what there was of self-government within the movement. Thereafter expulsions of dissidents by one and by thousands be- came commonplace. Whatever doubt there may have been as to which was the kite and which the tail was ended. Internationally, even as inside Russia, the “monolithic” Party — a Party run entirely from headquarters in Moscow — was an established fact. IX. Savor of Life IN ONE respect, at least, Moscow is exactly like every other place I have ever visited. Its weather, in view of natives, is “un- usual.” Thus my first autumn under the hammer and sickle was protracted and slushy as never before — a circumstance that held true every subsequent autumn. You wore galoshes, which placards commanded you to remove in the vestibule wherever you went. You spent half your time, or so it seemed, standing on line to deposit them and the other half to retrieve them. At crowded house parties someone always walked off in all innocence with your new pair and left leaky ones in their stead; sometimes they were both for the right foot, perhaps as a subtle political insult. The rarest thing in Moscow was a trouser cuff without mud on it. It is comforting to record that even in the arena of an epochal revolution the vagaries of the weather provide the staples of conversation. Only the subject of food received more social at- tention. The extraterritorial privileges for foreigners in the mat- ter of food were not yet organized. It took practically all the time of one person to round up provisions for a family. People looked back regretfully to the ample days of six months ago, when the private market at Hunters Row flourished. You discussed the new “Party line” and the bread line or kerosene line with equal in- tensity: they were not entirely unrelated. The one crop that never fails in the new Russia is the crop of politically off-color jokes. These stories spring from the soil of immediate conditions and preoccupations and are therefore sig- nificant. Many of them are so intimately related to the news of the day that they make no sense out of that context. They are parables that circulate with lightning speed, sharpened and given new twists as they spread. A large collection of this acid humor arranged chronologically would constitute a history of the revo- lution — caricatured, it is true, but easily recognizable. Much later I toyed with the idea of such a tour de force . I jotted down hun- 157 158 hallelujah! dreds of stories, but my patience gave out. Current jokes were not only available, but unavoidable. The “latest” was whispered in your ear a dozen times a day. But the older ones were not easily garnered. People who had written them down were afraid to admit it. The G.P.U. has a special division to gather and conserve this bitter-sweet humor. One of these days the archive will be opened to historians who will write serious tomes tracing the social conditions which gave rise to new cycles of anecdotes. The bumper harvest of such stifled and unhappy merriment was to spring in the near future from the food shortage. Already the early pre-ration food jokes were being spread. You asked someone, “How are you getting on?” and he replied, “Lootche tchem zahvtra — better than tomorrow.” Or he said, “Oh, like Lenin in his mausoleum.” “How do you mean that?” you inquired, knowing that a joke impended. “Because they neither feed us nor bury us,” was the answer. But the Stalin-Trotsky battle was still the major target of the underground humorists. One of them represented Stalin, after having banished Trotsky, summoning to the Kremlin a rabbi famed for his learning and wisdom. “My rival is out of the way, and I am committed to building socialism in one country,” Stalin told the sage, “and yet I am not certain that it can be done. You are a wise man. I command you to tell me truly, without fear, whether it is possible to build socialism in one country.” The rabbi replied that he could not answer such a difficult question without consulting the sacred books and pondering deeply. He was given three days to ponder. At the end of that time he re- turned. “Well,” Stalin asked eagerly, “have you the answer?” “I have,” the rabbi said. “I have consulted the holy texts and thought a great deal.” “What is it? What is it?” “Well, I can assure you that it is altogether possible to build socialism in one country. But to live in that country — that’s im- possible.” Though grave decisions were being made within the Kremlin walls and the whole nation was in a state of nervous uncertainty, individual men and women were of necessity riveted to their commonplaces of work, pleasure, and petty worries. Political and SAVOR OF LIFE 159 economic facts were the raw stuff of a correspondent’s day-to-day job, but his life was not lived on an austere level of political analysis. Trifles loomed enormous on the horizon of their own day— particularly the morsels of “spot news” and the details of their transmission. My chief competitor was the plenipotentiary of the Associated Press. The A.P. had an exclusive contract for the exchange of news with the one and only Soviet agency, Tass, which was the chief and frequently sole repository of information in the Soviet Union. This meant that the rest of us had to connive and sweat. There were “leaks” and one learned tricks for circumventing the opposition’s advantages. The home offlce, moreover, was well aware of the handicap and pardoned inevitable beatings ; the situation even gave one a perfect alibi on beatings that were by no means inevitable. Yet I carried perpetually the feeling that something important was happening. Not merely without my knowledge, which was bad enough, but with the knowledge of the Associated Press, which was a lot worse. That feeling was a constant in six years when everything else kept changing. There was no lack of diversions. In Moscow the correspondents were lumped with the diplomatic corps for formal social pur- poses. Soviet receptions to the diplomats automatically included us; and diplomatic functions in any of the old merchants’ palaces now used as Embassy residences similarly brought us invitations. I met diplomats and their ladies whom I continued to greet warmly for six years without quite learning their names or quite remembering their countries. The diplomatic type, especially in the lower registers, is fairly standardized. How was I to distinguish between a Scandinavian and a Greek Third Secretary when they made the same vapid remarks and smiled the same non-committal smile and were as uncertain of my identity as I was of theirs? Since I did not play bridge and could not distinguish one cham- pagne from another, I remained always on the periphery of diplo- matic circles. National holidays of the various countries, royal birthdays and the like meant diplomatic parties. You went for the food, the helpful rumors, and because everybody else went. You always found the same Russians. The fact that they were in dress clothes, their wives in evening gowns and jewels, soothed your radical 160 hallelujah! conscience. But always there was an undertow of guilt, to be wearing a starched shirt and stretching your equator with sturgeon, caviar, imported fruits, and a dozen kinds of meats and cheeses while around the corner long queues waited all night for a little bread or herring. The Foreign Office crowd was there ; sometimes the censors 5 always General Budenny of cavalry fame, with his brand-new, curly-headed peasant wife; young and buxom Madame Lunacharsky in foreign finery; the diminutive and thoroughly urbane Comrade Baron Steiger;* the red-faced Chef de Protocol Florinsky,f the large, handsome Red Army Commander Tukha- chevsky,! and a few others. You came to expect a lavish table at the Polish and Oriental receptions and more abstemious fare in certain other embassies. For amplitude of provisions, music and entertainment, how- ever, the Soviet Union’s own receptions had no rival. On the eve- ning of November yth the government, in the person of Presi- dent Kalinin, was host to the foreign colony. Half a dozen com- missars, including War Lord Voroshilov, were in evidence, as well as a handful of the more famous Russian literary men. Only Kalinin was in workaday clothes, everyone else being correctly decked in formal black or uniforms. Coming on the heels of the great mass demonstration on Red Square, in a city ablaze with red lights and bunting, the party was not without its obvious ironies. I shall never forget the bafflement and anger of the correspond- ent of the New York Jewish Freiheit , a communist paper, when he was excluded from such a reception because he lacked a din- ner jacket. That blow to his proletarian pride, I would wager, was not confided to his readers. In later years the formalities were relaxed on the revolutionary anniversary, apparently as a result of the gibes which correspondents could not resist. 2 Two “cultural” anniversaries in this season were to remain in Moscow’s memory as a reminder of the more tolerant atmos- phere on the eve of the Five Year Plan era. They were the cele- * Executed in December, 1937* f Exiled from Moscow about 1934. $ Executed, along with seven other Army chiefs, in June, 1937. SAVOR OF LIFE 1 6 1 brations of the centennary of Tolstoy’s birth and the thirtieth birthday of the Moscow Art Theatre, respectively. Both Tolstoy and the Moscow Art Theatre are far from the Bolshevik regime in spirit, but the Kremlin did itself proud on these occasions, notwithstanding. That inveterate and eloquent speechmaker, Ana- tole Lunacharsky, then Commissar of Education, orated for two hours at each celebration. The story was told in Russia of a fire that was blazing while a crowd looked on. The fire brigades were there and the roof was falling in, but they did nothing to arrest the conflagration. They could not get started — because Lunachar- sky had not yet arrived to make the opening address. . . . As a Christian anarchist, pacifist, humanitarian, and mystic, Count Tolstoy, had he been alive, could scarcely have supported the Bolshevik cause. Scores of Tolstoyans were even then in prison and exile for their anti-Soviet attitudes. For those ac- quainted with these facts the festivities were both cynical and tragic. But for Stefan Zweig and other foreign guests who traveled to Yasnaya Polyana, the great writer’s estate, the proceedings were presumably grave enough and impressive. Lunacharsky’s impassioned eulogy conveniently avoided discussion of Tolstoy’s beliefs insofar as they ran counter to Soviet ideology. The aged Alexandra Lvovna, daughter of Tolstoy, faithful to her father’s ideas, had driven a sharp bargain with the new masters for coun- tenancing the celebration. She obtained the virtual lifting in Poly- ana of Soviet laws that violated her father’s philosophy. For a while, therefore, the Tolstoy school on her old estate was the only one in all of Russia that did not teach atheism or militarism. After escaping from Russia several years later, Alexandra Lvovna wrote a moving and bitter book accusing the Soviet government of arresting and betraying herself and other Tolstoyans. The Moscow Art Theatre anniversary celebration, in the spacious and ornate Big Theatre, was an extraordinary scene. Its aroma does not easily fade from memory, for it was the aroma of cam- phor. Furs, silks, laces, brocades, and black broadcloth packed away since 1917 were drawn out once more by surviving members of the suppressed classes. Whatever remained of the bourgeois intelligentsia ventured timidly from its crevices and corners to pay homage to Vladimir Stanislavsky and the intellectual tradi- tion that his theater represented. Sartorially it was a revival al- 1 62 hallelujah! most of the styles of 1900-19 17, with only the foreigners in full dress and the Soviet officials in Soviet clothes to mar the period. Though Stalin and other leaders were present and the whole cere- mony a gesture of respect for Russia’s cultural heritage, the W ork- ers Gazette was goaded by the scene into making the bold remark that “all ranks of the proletarian state were invited to celebrate the anniversary except the workers.” An additional impetus to my natural interest in the amusement arts was given by an invitation to “cover” the Soviet domain for Variety , the most influential American trade journal in the theatri- cal and related fields. It was an excellent discipline, forcing me to follow this phase of Russian life a lot more closely than other correspondents needed to. Quite aside from the pleasure I got out of it, the attention was not without value in the way of politi- cal guidance. The stage and even more so the screen are highly sensitive barometers of pressure under a regime of complete ar- tistic censorship. Variety is written in a hard-boiled and picturesque jargon all its own. Only seasoned readers can really interpret all its verbal short-cuts and Broadway allusions. For nearly five years every- thing that appeared in its pages out of Russia, whether signed or not, was mine. The authentic Variety slang was above my acrobatic skill. But it was fun trying, a little like learning a new language. Eventually a sentence of mine received the accolade of public recognition as genuinely in the Variety manner: proof that my devotion was not altogether wasted. In an erudite article on the remarkable style of this journal, Gilbert Seldes quoted a sentence in which I reported that the only “love interest” in Eisenstein’s film The New and the Old was provided by the mating of a bull and a cow. A Russian-American tenor of great personal charm and talent, Sergei Radamsky, and his lovely blonde wife, Marie Williams, gave a series of concerts that autumn. The Russian public took with great enthusiasm to their Negro spirituals. Something primi- tive and intense in these songs touched the Russian heart} per- haps their blend of joy and sorrow so familiar to Russians in their own folk plaints. Soviet audiences, however, were not aware of the religious implications of the spirituals. Musical programs, like everything else, must pass a censorship. Had the Radamskys’ SAVOR OF LIFE 163 repertory been Russian instead o£ English, the Negro hymns would never have passed muster. As it is there were awkward moments. One evening, at the Moscow Conservatory, Sergei had rendered All God’s Chillun Got Shoes. It evoked great applause and a clamor for its repetition. After he had acceded and again been rewarded with an ovation, someone sent up a note. “Will Citizen Radamsky please explain to us what the song is about,” the note suggested. For a moment the tenor looked non-plussed — and tenors, as everyone knows, do not easily non-plus. Then he remembered that deception is the best policy. He explained: “You see, comrades, it is about poor black slaves who live in misery. They have no shoes, no robes — only work and sorrow. But they dream of the beautiful future, after the revolution has freed them, when they will all have shoes, robes and the things their hearts desire.” A satire put on by Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre and quickly squelched was the most memorable theatrical event of the sea- son. It was by Michael Bulgakov, the author of Days of the Tur- binSy and showed his remarkable versatility. It was called The Purple Island. As devastating a take-off on stupid censorship as ever was written, its dynamite was so neatly concealed that it ac- tually reached the public and survived a few performances. The action is set in a provincial theater with a play in rehearsal. It is a vapid melodrama with music. As the rehearsals proceed, the self-important provincial censors — blood brothers of their Moscow betters — discover ideological flaws. One questions the “class line” and the accommodating director instantly turns the rollicking sailors into class-conscious proletarians. Another finds fault with the attitude toward colonial and semi-colonial peoples, a third protests that the campaign for potato culture has not been given its due. The play is revised on the spot and emerges in the final act as a hilarious burlesque on inept propaganda drama. Many a pompous policeman of the arts in that first-night audi- ence must have squirmed in his seat. The banning of the play, the second of Bulgakov’s to win that compliment in one year, was sufficient proof that the farce had not exaggerated. Bulgakov was barred from the theater for a period, then allowed to return as a director of other people’s works for the Moscow Art. His 1 6 4 HALLELUJAH ! subtle revenge was the play Moliere, in rehearsal when I left Russia. Ostensibly an anti-religious drama, showing a French playwright of old persecuted by Jesuits, the parallel with his own hounding by Bolshevik Jesuits is perfectly evident. In the beauty of the Soviet theater, ballet, and opera— in the deep charm of the Russians as a people— in the sheer excitement of absorbing a new world — I found ample compensations for disappointments and intruding doubts. As mirrored in my writing the new Utopia was still nearly perfect. 3 At last the city was matted with snow. Melancholy twilights came once more soon after noon to erase brief overcast days. Something unreal and subdued, like the tinkle and glitter of North- ern fairy tales, filled the air. The darkness was studded with tiny nails of light} detached church domes and towers seemed to float overhead. Once more diminutive sleighs glided by noise- lessly, the double-decker windows were puttied for the winter, people were bizarrely padded and swathed in heavy scarfs. Mos- cow settled back into the long nights when it is most like itself, somber, mysterious, and timeless. Cutting winds raced through the walled-in silences of the Krem- lin, where about a thousand visitors from all parts of the vast Soviet empire were gathered for the world’s strangest “parlia- ment,” the Tzik or Central Executive Committee of the nation. About half of them were delegates elected by the last All-Union Congress of Soviets} the rest were invited spectators. The func- tion of both groups was about the same: to listen, applaud, and return home with tidings of the Soviet government’s strength and wisdom. The “legislative” powers of the Tzik, except on paper, were limited to raising hands for unanimous approval of whatever was submitted by the government. Under the turrets from which tsars watched their enemies slain by the executioners in Red Square, these parliamentarians wan- dered through the ancient Kremlin, stopping to gaze at the Byzan- tine contortions of centuries-old churches, touching the cannons captured from the first Napoleon. Most of them simple workers and peasants and provincial communist officials, their mere pres- SAVOR OF LIFE 165 ence within the Kremlin walls must have seemed to them a thing for endless wonderment. Their additional dignity as “legisla- tors/ 5 however empty of real meaning, must have raised the won- derment to a sort of miracle. They were the strangest agglomeration, these new rulers in whose name laws were promulgated and plans were launched and a nation’s life turned upside down. Close-packed on straight wooden benches in the Great Kremlin Palace, they presented an amazing patchwork of races and cultures. Though it was eleven years after the revolution, they looked a little like intruders ob- viously overawed by the marble and crystal and magnificence of the setting. Many of them, perhaps, had only learned to read and write in the last year or two. Neither slogans nor Marxist formulas could express the marvel of their waking dream. Perhaps I was reading more into their earnest demeanor than was really there. This was only my second view of the Soviet “parliament” in session, and I was almost as impressed and ex- cited as the delegates themselves. I called to mind the dignity of an American Senate, a German Reichstag, the House of Com- mons — the atmosphere of pompous worldly success, social emi- nence, sartorial respectability, and the buzz of connivings in a bourgeois legislative chamber. Not eleven years, but eleven cen- turies separated that memory from the huddled mass of Soviet legislators before me. Rough-hewn faces of men and women from the mills and fields. Faces ingrained with soot and grime. Stolid expressionless faces of old men from Siberia. Be-tufbaned, gray- bearded faces from the Asiatic deserts. Youthful, eager faces from Moscow and Leningrad and Kharkov factories. Few had troubled to shave for the occasion and men rubbed the thick stubble medi- tatively as Kalinin called the session to order. It seemed to me not a parliament but a new world in solemn session. Why cavil about their powers or legal status? If only as a pageant of the emerging new order their role seemed to me to transcend that of legislators in any other land. In the Hall of St. Andrew where the sessions are held, huge square pillars, thickly crusted with gold embellishments, grow into a richly inlaid vaulted ceiling. Immense clusters of crystal lights set all the ornaments of the former ballroom ablaze. But from each of the pillars grew two large black radio horns— the 1 66 hallelujah! new grafted upon the old, the utilitarian imposed upon the merely magnificent. A steep rostrum was built across the front end of the great chamber, where once stood a monarch’s throne. A red- draped table ran the length of this rostrum and behind it sat leaders of the Soviet dictatorship. Stalin, too, was among them, but sitting a little farther back, chatting now with one, now with another of the men on the platform. He was there as a guest merely, not being a member of this august assemblage. Over the rostrum the portrait of Lenin smiled down on the gathering and on the opposite wall was the severe face of Karl Marx. I sat among the correspondents in the press box. In an adjoin- ing box were the diplomats of all nations. For all of us this “par- liament” was unique, strange. But for me, perhaps for one or two others, it was stirring beyond the compass of such hackneyed words. I watched a peasant woman, dull-eyed and rather scared, try- ing to follow Rykov’s exposition of the grandiose plans for in- dustrializing her country. She represented, perhaps, a quarter of a million peasants like herself. Rykov spoke simply, forcibly, de- spite the impediment of a stammer. (His successor as Premier, Molotov, also suffered from the same impediment, though not quite so markedly.) Rykov was reputed to be a heavy drinker — vodka was called “rykovka” in some quarters. But his long, deeply- lined face, with its straggly beard, under a shock of unkempt hair, seemed ascetic: the type, I thought, of the pre-revolutionary idealist. The effort of following his exposition was too much for the peasant woman and she gave up : her interest lagged and died and her strained expression relaxed. She took out a pen-knife and pared her nails, smiling at her own thoughts, as the Premier unrolled a few more billions’ worth of plans. Two young legislators, a boy and a girl, thinking themselves unobserved, held hands and looked into one another’s eyes, as though in a movie theater, as the intricacies of the agrarian poli- cies were expounded to them. Individuals here and there may have amused me. The pre- tense that they legislate for a sixth part of the globe may be for gullible children. But the gathering in its entirety was a match for my expectations; it was a conclave inconceivable under any other regime. The last were indeed first. SAVOR OF LIFE 167 For some ten days, the Tzik met in the gold-and-white splen- dors of the Great Palace, listened to hours-long speeches bristling with millions and billions. One evening Litvinov spoke to them of great world affairs, of his proposals for total disarmament and partial disarmament and the refusal of the capitalist world to act. That was something to carry back to a town or village in the heart of the Urals or Siberia! After each of the major speeches, individual Tzik members took the floor and discussed the subject from the angle of their own localities. They never disagreed with the main speakers — such an audacity would never even occur to them. But they elaborated on the points he raised, citing examples from the local experi- ence and pointing to problems that the government in its infinite wisdom might deign to consider. There might be little they could add to Litvinov’s report on international relations or Kuibishev’s on the basic plans for industrialization. But they were eloquent in denouncing the local bureaucrats who prevented the comple- tion of a road in their township or some other such detail. To the shrewd leaders of men on the platform these hints and suggestions and meek complaints were valuable indices to the conditions and the state of mind of the country. On the face of it the government was reporting to its parlia- ment. In fact it was the parliament reporting to and petitioning its government. Stalin’s decision to steer the nation far to the Left had al- ready been made. The Tzik resolutions neither added nor sub- tracted anything, but merely embodied his decision in legal forms. They were adopted unanimously. No dissenting voice, to my knowledge, has ever shocked this legislature. The thought of a lone delegate voting against a proposal from high places is so inconceivable that it seems a grotesquerie. The Tzik was not a law-making body in the Western sense. At most it was another technique of propaganda: a method for giving the population a sense of participation in big affairs, and a channel for conveying the wishes, the threats, and the promises of the dictatorship to the masses. A five-year plan of agrarian socialization was voted, and a five- year plan of industrialization. The contours were left sufficiently vague to permit the planning authorities to work them out in de- 1 68 hallelujah! tail. The Five Year Plan which the world was to exclaim over was not formulated and made public until some months later. No shadow of doubt, however, was left that Stalin had signaled full speed ahead towards the ultimate eradication of private own- ership in both farming and industry. Every Tzik member must have departed with a distinct premonition, at once exalting and frightening, of immense purposes to be carried through at im- mense cost. I shared that premonition. And I was content that I had reached the one proletarian country on the edge of a new epoch. There was plenty for our forebodings to feed upon. Counsel of desperation prevailed in the Kremlin in its treatment of the peasantry. The methods used were described by the correspondents, with much exaggeration but much justice as well, as a “revival of militant communism against the peasants.” It was a violation of the Kremlin’s solemn promises of a few months before; the peasant population came to regard the government’s word as so much empty sound. In the cities the ultimate fear— fear of the disappearance of bread — led to panicky hoarding. Men and women waited throughout the night in sub-zero weather to buy a little more bread in the morning. In the factories and mines and on construction jobs, the engineers and technicians, tarred with the brush of counter-revolution by the Shakhty trial, became hunted creatures, presumed to be guilty of treachery and sabotage by the mere fact that they were “bourgeois intellectuals,” educated people of the pre-revolutionary days. In this atmosphere of strain 1928 ended. The foreigners cele- brated New Year’s Eve at the hotels in counterfeit gaiety. Rus- sians met the New Year in lively but surreptitious parties. It was not quite respectable to recognize the Christian calendar in this fashion, but habit prevailed. At the party which I attended there were communists as hilarious under the influence of vodka and gramophone music as anyone else. Christmas trees had been bootlegged in the capital despite the official ban on this remnant of ancient superstition. One of them stood in the corner in full view of the sardonic plaster Lenin looking down from the mantel- piece. The year that began with the exile of Trotsky ended with the adoption of the major planks of his program. The year that opened SAVOR OF LIFE 169 with the crushing of the Left Opposition ended with a heresy hunt against the Right Opposition. It had taken Stalin six years to destroy the first 5 less than six months would suffice to destroy the second. While fighting Trotsky, the new leader had perfected the mechanism of his power. It was now a flawless machine, the most potent, considering the scope of its dominion, ever built in all history. X. Life is Rationed IF HELL is efficiently departmentalized, the large section re- served for foreign correspondents will have a special torture tc dispense. It will provide its guests with juicy and exciting morsels of news but cut off all channels of communication with then newspapers. We had a foretaste of that agony at the end of January, 1929. Most, if not all, of us knew that Leon Trotsky and members of his family had been withdrawn from their place of exile in Alma-Ata and were being zigzagged across the U.S.S.R. on their way to Turkey. Each of us carried the scorching hot news care- fully under his coat, praying that other correspondents did not have it and would not have it until we had succeeded in transmit- ting it. But there was the rub. The censors would not let us send anything 5 they pretended to know nothing about it. International telephone connections, which in later years en- abled us to beat the censorship when the news deserved the risk, had not yet been opened. We could, and ultimately did, use the mails, especially the diplomatic pouches of friendly legations. But a resident newspaperman thinks long and earnestly before circum- venting the censors on a story which they have specifically for- bidden. The longer we carried the news the more painfully it burned into our professional flesh. Negley Farson had replaced Junius Wood for the Chicago Daily News and we teamed up for mutual assistance $ these alli- ances are not unusual in places like Moscow, where information is scarce and vague. When he phoned excitedly and talked of a big story, I linked it immediately to rumors I had picked up in other quarters. We met to compare notes. “But it sounds cuckoo,” Negley said. “Why should Stalin let his Number One Enemy out of his personal control and send him where he can shoot his mouth off? Maybe our story is cock- eyed after all.” 170 LIFE IS RATIONED 171 “It does seem incredible,” I agreed, “but Trotsky has been pretty sick, I hear, and it may be Stalin doesn’t want him to die on his hands. Just imagine what a stink it would raise if Trot- sky did die suddenly. Everybody would say that he was done to death.” For days we hugged the knowledge to our breasts, convinced that we had a “world scoop” but almost powerless to make use of it. Not until later did we realize that nearly every one of our competitors held the same mistaken conviction. I experimented with different ways of hinting the news to the home office, but could get none of it beyond the censors’ blue pencil. The censorship that had seemed to me mild suddenly became harsh, insuperable. Censorships are always liberal — until they have something to conceal. Negley’s courage exceeded my own. He sent the news in the diplomatic dispatch bag to a neighboring capital, whence it was flashed to Chicago. But I succeeded in getting it to the United Press the same day. Sergei Trivas, of Voks and the G.P.U., ar- rived for one of his frequent social visits. He broached the subject without prodding. “Have you heard about Leon Davidovich?” he asked. Davido- vich is Trotsky’s patronymic. “Of course I have.” “Well, why don’t you send it?” “The censors turn thumbs down on any reference to the sub- ject,” I sighed. “I don’t have to tell you how to get around that, do I?” Sergei smiled. About this time it dawned on me that he was speaking under instructions. While the Foreign Office was formally denying the whole thing with its usual vehemence, the G.P.U. was not averse to having the news leak out indirectly and a little incorrectly. “Well, I could send it as a private message to Billy in New York,” I ventured. (My family had returned to America for several months.) “Do you suppose it will go through — and that Pll be hauled over the coals here when it does?” “Just send it,” he now winked. “I assure you it is all right. Just say that L.D. is going to Turkey of his own free will.” Eventually it appeared that Trotsky was expelled from his 172 hallelujah! native land by sheer force, protesting every inch of the way. Trivas had probably been mobilized to inspire my breach of cen- sorship with a view to spreading a contrary impression. In any case Billy received my mysterious message, a code word being used in place of Trotsky’s name, and telephoned it to the United Press. The dispatch was published under a London dateline for my protection. Whether it was the first authentic news of the fallen War Lord’s deportation to be published was a disputed point for months, as if it mattered to anyone but ourselves. Fully a week after the whole world had displayed the news on its front pages, the Moscow correspondents were permitted by the Foreign Office to hint at it in their censored cables. For the Rus- sian population it remained a vague and dangerous rumor, until it was confirmed in a few lines among the trivial “miscellaneous news” on inside pages. To Stalin, no doubt, it seemed shrewd to push Trotsky beyond the Soviet boundaries. For a brief period the expulsion shocked and titillated world opinion. Then it was forgotten. Trotsky in banishment in Central Asia, the caged lion with Stalin as keeper, was a more dramatic and touching figure than Trotsky in Tur- key. In Asiatic exile his voice had a resonance it lacked outside. A short message smuggled out by Stalin’s prisoner had more effect than a long article by Trotsky, the deportee. With the leader gone, moreover, the Left Opposition inside the U.S.S.R. lost its sense of cohesion. Trotsky’s deportation was preceded by a series of exciting events. Wild r um ors of another sweeping round-up of his suspected fol- lowers over a period of weeks were finally confirmed in an official announcement that one hundred and fifty Trotskyists had been arrested, tried in secret, and condemned to long terms of “rigorous isolation.” Among them were men and women well-known in political, scientific and literary circles. The announcement was backed up by accusations more startling than any laid at the door of the Trotsky faction before. The G.P.U. had uncovered the underground press which was flooding Moscow and Leningrad with leaflets. It had disrupted an “under- ground railroad,” so-called, whereby exiles communicated with one another and with friends abroad. Tricks perfected in the revolu- tionary movement under tsarism, brushed off and used once more LIFE IS RATIONED 173 in the same Siberia, the same cellars and garrets, with the same fervor and at infinitely greater hazard! But the present rulers had themselves been on the subversive side of the struggle in the old days. They knew and called every trick. 1 The renewed warfare on the Left Opposition, coupled with furious attacks on “Right deviators,” raised a miasma of fears over life in Moscow. The crushing sense of terror was strongest in the ruling Party itself 3 summary arrests and imprisonments of communists with long revolutionary records were an everyday occurrence. As for the small fry in the Party, an unguarded word or a malicious anonymous denunciation meant a search of their homes, exile, or worse. Men in positions of authority one day were mysteriously missing the next day and you never saw them again. Something furtive and hunted came into the manner of minor officials in Soviet offices that remained throughout the next period. It became almost the mark of their calling. People shied away more nervously than ever from conversa- tion that might be misconstrued as remotely political. They went carefully through their address books and private papers and destroyed traces of anyone who might be in the bad graces of the government. Those whose homes were searched or whose relatives were under arrest, became instantly contagious creatures to be shunned by their fellow-men. The most pestilential breed of all, of course, were foreigners. Only the more daring or more fool- hardy Russians ventured within their infected orbit. The groundswell of distrust of pre-revolutionary intellectuals — engineers, technicians, scientists and other specialized work- ers — started by the Shakhty trial, inundated factories and in- stitutions throughout the country. Suspicion of the so-called “tech- nical intelligentsia” quickly expanded to the proportions of a na- tional phobia. A chisika or cleansing of the ranks was carried through in the Communist Party and in the Comsomol (Communist Youth) League, tens of thousands being expelled for small reason or none. A new Puritanism was setting in which regarded amusement and laughter as politically immoral. Dancing and card-playing 174 hallelujah! and gypsy music and vaudeville without a political lesson had flourished under Nep. Therefore these things now became sym- bols of bourgeois degeneracy.” Communists found themselves deprived of their membership in the ruling order because they lived too expansively, drank too much, or were in some other way unworthy examples for the proletariat. But above all they were expelled for heretical thoughts. The cleansing was retroactive 5 hundreds in every city and town were punished for views they had expressed in former years, when open internal controversy was still permitted. Another and more far-reaching chistka was launched in offices, banks, museums, the thousand and one government institutions. Its purpose was to ferret out and expel “class enemy elements” who might be “hiding” in respectable positions. Hundreds of thou- sands of “former” people, the remnants of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, merchants, priests, socialists, Tolstoyans, had in fact adjusted themselves to the new system and were working as unobtrusively as possible in government service. Twelve years after the revolution, most of those of the “declassed” people who survived were of necessity earning their livings in some cor- ner of the great government machine. For years they had been unmolested. They thought themselves safely forgotten in their crevices. Now they were pried out into the open and stepped on without pity. The liquidation of Nepmen, in addition, had in the last year or two driven them for sanctuary into official enterprises, especially in the distribution end of Soviet economy. They, too, were ordered out. No one in the ruling circles even raised the question as to how these outlawed masses would live now that they were deprived of a chance to labor. To hint any concern in that direction was “bourgeois sentimentality.” A thousand incidents crowd to my mind. A meek old man who had been bookkeeper in a government office for many years now cast out as a class enemy. A young teacher dismissed because her father had been a shopkeeper. A student in the technical school thrown out for “concealing his social origin” by claiming descent from a poor peasant when, as a matter of fact, his father had owned four cows. “Nests of former people” uncovered in museums, libraries, or research institutions: broken-down middle-aged and LIFE IS RATIONED 175 elderly people suddenly hounded from their jobs solely because of their “social origin.” A sharp increase in street beggary marked these initial months of 1929. The whining professional mendicants who followed one for blocks if they were not bought off with a few coins were familiar enough. So were the peasant families in fantastic rags huddled in a heap on the sidewalk looking with pleading eyes at every passer-by until a militiaman came to drive them away. But now there were new types on the Tverskaya, Dmitrovka, Petrovka and Kuznetsky Most. Old men and women, with some- thing of dignity in their bearing despite threadbare clothes and heads bowed in shame, stood against walls with hands timidly out- stretched for alms. I recall a blond consumptive-looking man, still young and aristocratic in his bearing but incredibly ragged, whom I passed every day on my way to and from the censorship office; he held out his hand silently and pretended not to notice when coins were dropped into it. Another sign of the renewed pressure on the byvshiye — “former people” — was the sudden opulence of the “commission shops.” These emporia, several on every main street, either bought goods outright from individuals and resold them for several times as much, or accepted articles for sale on a percentage basis. They now began to fill up with antiques, silver, furs, old furniture, rare ceramics, paintings, miniatures, jewelry, rugs. The remnants of pre- revolutionary wealth, salvaged somehow through twelve years of revolution and confiscation, were drawn out of their hiding places and turned into cash. Foreigners were the most avid buyers, though Russians in the higher income brackets bought heavily too. Most fearful of all for its victims was the process of disfranchise- ment then under way. The right to vote was cherished not for itself, since it is an empty gesture, but because to be deprived of it was equivalent to being branded as an enemy of the revolution. In connection with elections to the Soviets, special commissions everywhere were drawing up lists of those entitled to vote and stringently excluding the better-to-do peasants, those in any wise tarred with the pitch of Nep trade, anyone whose social origin was unsatisfactory, people who for a thousand reasons had in- curred the displeasure of the Soviet regime. These became lishentsi, disfranchised people, without any rights 176 hallelujah! or legal standing. To be among the lishentsi was to be an outcast. They could not work in government enterprises, except in the lowest categories of “black” or unskilled labor. Their children were the last to be admitted into elementary or higher schools, which under conditions of overcrowded schooling meant that they were not admitted at all. When food rationing was introduced, from the end of March forward, they were denied rations. When re- visions of the rights to occupy “living space” were undertaken, the lishentsi were the first to be ejected from their homes. In their totality the number of these pariahs (even babies were not spared) came to millions. Those in the villages survived until the “liquidation of kulaks as a class” the following year, when they were driven from their homes into inhospitable regions to live or to die. How did the others, in the cities, manage to live, denied work or food rations, harried from their living quarters, burdened with taxes and subjected to refined cruelties? I asked this ques- tion of officials, communist friends, ordinary Russians in the fol- lowing years, because it was a fascinating mystery. None of them could give me a satisfactory answer, except the amazing tenacity of the human animal in clinging somehow to life. Part of the answer of course is that a large proportion of them did not survive. Suicide and death from the diseases of under- nourishment decimated their ranks. The rest hung on to existence somehow with bleeding fingers, doing odd jobs, teaching, beg- ging, “smuggling” themselves into jobs by lying about their status only to be exposed and driven out again before long. Only Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in Germany a few years later gave the world anything resembling this systematic persecution of a large class of the population. Partly because of fear and even more so because of the food dif- ficulties, Russians gradually ceased to entertain. Social life was muted. Those with the money or political influence to obtain enough food for a party, now conducted it in a kind of secrecy. It suddenly became both disgraceful and dangerous to eat bet- ter, dress better, or enjoy life more fully, than those around one. There was a renewal of the asceticism that characterized the first years of the revolution, only more of it now was protective coloration, hypocrisy rather than necessity or conviction. The chief LIFE IS RATIONED 1 77 good in life was to be unobstrusive, because therein lay the chief safety. The shadow of the new epoch was settling over the land. It was to deepen visibly month by month and was not to lift for nearly five years. Its gloom entered into the very fiber of existence. Life was suddenly precarious, even its enthusiasm touched with melancholy. 3 The first “demands” for the rationing of bread and other foods were heard from factories all over the country when winter was at its crudest. The people on lines wound shawls and scarfs around their heads so that only their bleared eyes were visible. They stamped and shuffled in their places and flapped their arms for warmth, a dance without joy. When you crossed the threshold into the street, the frost sprang at you furiously. The windows in street-cars were coated with hoar-frost and you thawed out a tiny peep-hole with your breath to see where you were going: thousands of sharp, round little holes in the white windows, as though the ghost-like cars had been riddled with bullets. In the markets old men and women stood all day in the cold as in a torture chamber over the debris of their past — a few spoons, a tattered picture album, an icon, a few flakes of lace — spread on newspapers. Big foreign cars rolled through the streets, past the belching street-cars and the frozen bread queues, carrying un- shaven factory directors and uniformed officials. In the Grand Hotel an orchestra played threadbare jazz tunes over and over again raspingly, like a horned gramophone with only two or three worn records. “This is the coldest winter I remember,” an old-timer among the foreigners said, sipping Caucasian wine in the high marble- walled dining room. “And the toughest,” another confirmed. “It’s like the last months under military communism, only then we were reaching the end of a nightmare, now we seem to be at the beginning of one.” “They say that the Red Army’s being used again to collect grain,” a third added, as though it were all part of the inclemency 178 hallelujah! o£ the weather. “A German technician just back from Rostov says they’re shooting kulaks right and left around there.” “Yeah, and it’s only the start, boys. The Bolos are in an ugly temper, and there’s gonna be no half measures. I’ve been watch- ing them since 1921, and I know whereof I speak. The Trotskyists have gotten Stalin’s goat, he’ll show them he can out-left the Lefts. They say — ” Gruesome were the things “they said,” and some were true and more were apocryphal. But even the inventions were true in that they were products of the uncertainty and the panic. Declassed and other undesirable people were being thrown out of their rooms to make way for proletarians. People “disappeared” more frequently from the offices where you were accustomed to finding them. “Comrade So-and-So is sick,” you were told over the telephone. “No, he is not expected back, he’ll be sick for a long time” Mild-mannered little men suddenly began to boast, after a drink or two of vodka, of how they had strangled White Guards with their bare hands in the civil war days to save bullets —the old intoxication of blood was being revived. The synthetic “demands” that arise through the nation for pre- cisely the things the Kremlin has already decided to do, provide amusement to the cynical. The process is so transparently make- believe that no one is fooled, yet the government persists in the comedy year after year. It is a ritual of propitiation whenever something unpalatable must be forced down the nation’s gullet. There would be a sudden flood of resolutions, let us say, demand- ing a new loan. The proletariat clamors for the privilege of contrib- uting a month’s wages toward the “voluntary” purchase of loan bonds; the resolutions are curiously alike in wording and most unconvin cing . The government takes cognizance of this public opinion and magnanimously consents to float another loan. In- stantly posters and displays, though it must have taken months to prepare them, blossom throughout the country. The bonds are already printed and the details of the whole thing, which must have taken months to work out, are ready. Some genius, in short, has foreseen the popular “demands” and was ready for them. Next year, and every year, the routine is repeated. So now there arose a proletarian cry for bread cards. Peasants were buying up the city’s bread and feeding it to their pigs and LIFE IS RATIONED 179 ;attle; bread at official prices was cheaper than fodder at market prices. First in one city, then another, and soon throughout the U.S.S.R., the synthetic wish for rations was met. Every manual worker under the new dispensation was entitled to two pounds of bread daily $ white collar or brain workers to one pound. Rela- tively low prices were fixed for these rationed quantities, and prices twice and later four or five times as high for bread bought with- out ration coupons. In effect it was a method of supplying workers at comparatively low prices. The lishentsi and those not belonging to the trade unions for any other reason were not entitled to rations. A shudder of apprehension passed down the country’s spine. Rationing had ugly connotations in the Russian mind. It recalled the most tragic days of the war and the civil wars. In the twelfth year of the revolutionary era, in the midst of the new boastful slogans being raised by the Stalin regime, it seemed a depressing omen. Young people who had grown to maturity in these twelve years were reminded that the revolution was not something in history text-books, but terribly immediate. From that moment until the autumn of 1933 nearly five years later, the food situation grew steadily worse. Difficult as 1929 may have been, it was to seem from the vantage point of 1932 or 1933 a time of plenty. As in a city besieged food becomes the one absorbing subject, dominating all thought and all conversation, even so in the Soviet Union of the Five Year Plan the search for food, the struggle for sheer physical subsistence monopolized men’s minds and drained their energies. National events and for- eign affairs had a meaning for the mass of Russians only to the extent that they might affect the food supplies: all things unrelated to the stomach, the one gnawing reality, seemed of no consequence except for the professional politicians. Men changed their trades, their creeds, their friends in the hope of a little more sunflower seed oil or tea or bread. The outer world was made to see Russia as a beehive of enthu- siastic activity, where men labored and sacrificed in a spirit of fanatic self-abnegation. I did more than my share in building up that idyllic picture. Yet I know that the Average Russian,’’ if there is such a thing, was less interested in the billions and trillions 180 hallelujah! of the plans than in his hope of finding another herring, another pound of potatoes. I watched men and women map out intricate campaigns of flattery and wire-pulling to obtain a little more milk or a pat of butter for their infants. I saw them risk their careers or put themselves in danger of exile to a concentration camp for an extra ration. The enthusiasm, or the ruthless will to achieve, was at the top. Below was naked want and desperation. A population meek by nature was made meeker by undernourishment, and therefore more amenable to manipulation by its rulers. People who spend every free moment looking for food have no time to mutiny or even to ask questions. It is not true that people revolt when they are hungry: revolt needs more strength than hungry men can muster. The fear of hunger or the memory of it is a more effective spur to protest than the debilitating fact itself. At any rate, I know that the grumbling in Russia was bolder at moments when the food situation eased up a bit. Foreigners, too, were given the privilege of rations. The in- flation of the Soviet currency, however, made them all affluent, so that they could afford to feed themselves at non-ration prices. The physical hardships involved in standing in line to buy— and the total absence of some products — were their principal prob- lems. Later the government solved these in part by organizing for foreigners special shops where they could purchase within lib- eral limits whatever the government had to sell, which was fre- quently less than enough for a balanced diet. We had to hire an- other “house worker,” the lanky, aging Vera Ivanovna, to give all her time to corralling food supplies and helping Billy prepare meals. In the old days this Vera Ivanovna had been cook in a well-to-do family, with maids and scullions at her elbow, and she resented her decline more bitterly than any multimillionaire re- duced to penury. Her temperamental fits were worthy of a prima donna. The food shortage was seriously aggravated by the Kremlin’s decision to meet foreign trade obligations with food exports. As conditions became steadily worse, the knowledge that their gov- ernment was exporting food became perhaps the deepest of the silent grievances of the Soviet people. It was with rationing that the lush verdure of half-illicit humor LIFE IS RATIONED 1 8 1 on the theme of food sprang up everywhere. I could fill a thick volume with the tragic “jokes” that multiplied and spread 3 new ones and variations on old ones arose nearly every day and swept the country. “Why is ours the most cultured country in the world?” a popular riddle asked, to which the proper answer was: “Because nearly everybody has at least one book and treasures it — the food book.” “Why has Trotsky been sent abroad?” another asked. “Because we export all our most necessary products.” “Papa,” a little boy was represented as asking, “why don’t Jews eat ham?” At which father turned angrily on his son. “And we Russians,” he said bitterly, “do we eat ham?” Another anecdote told of a conference which discussed ways and means of fighting prostitution. The question arose as to which of the government departments should be entrusted with the task. Some favored the Commissariat of Health, others the Commissariat of Education. But the wisest among them said: “And I, comrades, suggest that we entrust prostitution to the Commissariat of Trade. Then it is sure to disappear. That’s what has happened to everything else it manages — bread, sugar, tea, milk. ...” A former Nepman is asked how he feels. “Oh, just like a moth,” he sighs, and explains that he has already eaten his wife’s coat (by selling it through a com- mission shop, of course) and is now eating his own fur collar. Endlessly these “anecdotes” were hatched and elaborated. It was no laughing matter. None of the subjects of political humor are in themselves funny. It is the humor begotten of pain. I saw the tremulous excitement that touched a Russian family when some member of it brought home a decaying herring or a verminous bit of meat. A reputable Russian actor came to me shamefacedly, with tears in his eyes, to beg a little cereal and a bit of sugar for his sick baby. Women offered their bodies in the hope of a real meal. A woman visiting the home of a General Electric engineer saw white bread, touched it incredulously, and burst into hysterical weeping. I telephoned half a dozen legations to find a lemon for a Russian friend whose dying wife needed it. The advantages of foreigners, with their greater opportunities for buying edibles and their right to import some, made them a class apart, as far above the mass of their neighbors as J. P. Morgan might be above a workman on relief. Conversation in Russia might begin anywhere, in the clouds of philosophy or art, but it spiraled 1 82 hallelujah! down always and inevitably to food. I saw all work in offices paralyzed when someone mentioned that an article of food could be bought at a certain market or cooperative store. There was enough to eat in the better hotels, it is true, but at prices far beyond the reach of any but a few privileged officials or successful embezzlers. A meal at the Grand Hotel might cost the equivalent of a factory worker's income for a week. Tourists and visiting delegations, unless they were uncommonly stupid, could not be totally unaware of the food shortages. There were the queues, the empty shelves in shops, the haggard faces. But they ate amply themselves and saw workers and officials eating in the favored factories. There were also individuals, thousands of them, who did not know deprivation personally, either because they were earning large amounts or had enough political pull to obtain neces- sities denied to others. For the masses these lucky exceptions only underlined their routine miseries. Americans who had worked with the American Relief Adminis- tration in the Volga famine areas have told me how guilty and bestial they sometimes felt to be hiccupping with satiety when they knew that people were dying of hunger beyond their doors. In the midst of a robust mouthful, a woman told me, she suddenly recalled the starved little faces and swollen bellies of children she had seen half an hour before, and it made her sick with nausea. A little of this ordeal was ours, the shame of filling one’s belly three times a day when all around was shortage. Not famine, but the shortage that causes men’s bodies and minds and spirits to sag — the shortage that makes the stomach the core of existence, the center of every waking and dreaming thought — the shortage that makes all other human values, art, beauty, ideals, philosophies, an empty mockery. XI. Social Slag WITH open, wakeful, horrified eyes I saw a nightmare. Five floors crowded with human wreckage: an unholy offal heap of some seventeen hundred cripples, beggars, old prostitutes, thieves and cutthroats, drug addicts, sex perverts — men, women and chil- dren in the lowermost depths of poverty. For months the loath- some memory haunted me and colored my thoughts. When I described my visit in a restrained dispatch, I inserted and under- scored these sentences: The house is a heritage of the days of tsardom, and must not be held against the Soviet regime. The derelicts to whose use it is dedicated are of the type whom no change in government or in economic struc- ture can possibly help — the dregs of the teeming city population. This was reassurance not so much for the readers as for myself. In the twelfth year of the Soviet revolution I had found the “night’s lodging” depicted by Maxim Gorky in his Lower Deaths not merely intact but more terrible in its reality than any stage director had managed to make it. As with everything else that distressed me, I discounted it as a left-over from the past, thus exonerating the revolution. Under the surface of every great city there is another sub- merged city, a life far out of sight which few natives and no strangers can even guess at. The nightmare that I stumbled across was a microcosm of that slimy nether life. Through the accident of a casual acquaintance I was led to the Dom Nochlyega: the “House for a Night’s Lodging,” still known to the denizens of Moscow’s lowest strata as the “Yermakovka,” after the million- aire Yermakov who built it long before the revolution. There were six such institutions at this time in Moscow, together accom- modating about four thousand lodgers. This acquaintance, who had traveled much in his day through Europe and the Americas, was singing the praises of Western culture and civilization. 183 184 hallelujah! “Culture, civilization,” I bristled. “What about the misery and poverty and crime that it breeds? Do you know the East Side of New York or London’s Whitechapel, the slums and hell-holes of that civilization? You judge by the suave surfaces.” “And here, under the Soviets?” he smiled. “I admit the surfaces here are far from pretty. But that’s be- cause the veneer has been ripped off, and we are seeing things as they really are. Here there is no pretense and no concealment. The sores are visible to the naked eye and they will be cured.” “So you think it’s all on the surface, do you? You think you have seen the worst of it? Well, my young friend, maybe I can show you that even what you see here is only a veneer. Down below life is putrescent, worse than anything London or Paris or New York conceals.” How he managed it I do not know, but several nights later he led me to the Yermakovka. No other foreigners, as far as I know, had been there and certainly no American correspondent until then had been through it. I knew flop-houses on the Bowery, wretched tenements, and steerage holes. I started for the Yerma- kovka expecting misery but convinced that it would be only a Russian variation on the ancient world-wide theme. What I found, however, was so much more loathsome than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes that it seemed of a wholly different order of horror. We went through chamber after chamber and floor after floor, accompanied by armed guards, to look at a lengthening exhibition of broken and degraded humanity. These “night’s lodgings” are the refuge of the homeless, the helpless, and the criminal who can beg or steal the fifteen kopeks to pay for a bed. It is the last refuge, too, of those who shun the law and their fellow-men. It is the one place where they need not show documents or even give their names. The corridors were wet and slippery with grime and filled with an awful stench. Everywhere were diseased and perverted faces or blank faces emptied of all human meaning and feeling. In the women’s section I saw haggard creatures in rags sprawled half nude on their cots, too hopeless and apathetic to notice our intru- sion $ and younger women, with sick and leering faces, who threw obscene words at us. There were some 350 women in the house SOCIAL SLAG 185 that night, about a dozen o£ them with infants at their breasts or crawling among the rags. In the men’s section there were special rooms to which were assigned cripples, criminals, drug fiends, and so on. While no questions were asked, the administration was familiar with the types and separated as far as it could those driven to the lodging by poverty from those who made up the diseased and criminal elements. The large barracks set aside for the deformed was something out of a Dantesque imagination. A huge roomful of men without arms, without legs, paralytics, blind men, hunchbacks lying on hard beds in the grotesque postures necessitated by their deformi- ties, many of them groaning and writhing. A roomful of distorted bodies, faces and minds. In the wing for criminal elements our arrival was resented and foul names were yelled in our direction. In one room the guard drew his revolver to silence the growling. Hundreds of the inmates seemed mere boys. Back in the office of the administration I asked an official who these creatures were, whence they came, and where they would end. His answers were far from explicit. Every evening beginning at six the line of applicants for a night’s lodging formed in the yard of the Yermakovka and until midnight the city’s homeless kept coming. Often they failed to get admission after hours of waiting. “There has been such an influx of peasants fleeing their vil- lages,” he said, “that every night now we turn away from three to five hundred. It’s sad but it can’t be helped. We can only guess who these people are. Some are beggars: you see them on the Moscow streets. Some are whores too old or ugly to find custom- ers. Others are hiding from the police. But a large number are just poverty-stricken people without a roof over their heads. We have many here who come with recommendations from their trade unions. We let them stay for two weeks or even more. All the rest are turned out every morning. We can’t guarantee that they will find their bed when they return at night — after all, this isn’t a hotel!” “They say,” another official volunteered, “that members of the old aristocracy have been reduced to living in the Yermakovka, but we have no way of telling. There’s a very old woman in one of the rooms tonight — she comes here often — who is said to have 1 86 hallelujah! owned a great estate in the Crimea, but I accept these stories with a grain o£ salt.” New lodging houses were being built, they said, and in the next year or two these plague spots would perhaps be eliminated. Meanwhile even a bed in the Yermakovka is better than none, comrade, isn’t it? “We try to clean the place, but what’s the use? It’s a foul stable again as soon as the mob comes at night. But we have insti- tuted a medical department in the basement. While we don’t force anybody to get treatment, we let them know that they can get it. Mostly mothers and babies use the clinic.” I inspected the clinic, then fled from the place. I could not con- tain myself and mentioned the visit to a communist acquaintance. “The dregs of the capitalist civilization that we’re eradicating,” he said, untouched. “It’s just a lot of nonsense putting them up in night’s lodgings of any kind. They should be drowned and forgotten. We are starting from scratch and don’t have to drag along the past.” 2 When I cabled detailed accounts of the trial of anti-Semites from Minsk, my London editor, Webb Miller, unkindly but not untruthfully described them as “alibi” for the expense account. The trial was, in fact, an excuse for a close-up of this town. My curiosity had deep roots. For some centuries before its transfer to America, my family had lived in that region, and members of it in Minsk proper. The town is the first railroad station beyond the frontier point when one enters Russia through Poland, and I had promised myself a more detailed view. Like all things heard or glimpsed in early childhood, the name had overtones of glamor for me, however commonplace it might sound to others. I use the past tense advisedly: one good look at the bedraggled capital of White Russia wiped out forever the faintest suggestion of glamor. Poverty and ignorance, both ancient and deeply in- crusted, were written indelibly on the old town and its environs. Streets and houses were more woebegone, droshkies more rickety and direputable-looking, even the horses seemed hungrier and wearier than in any other city I had as yet seen. The pulse of new construction that disturbed the sluggishness of other Soviet SOCIAL SLAG I 87 towns seemed absent in Minsk, a slow-moving, and seemingly hopeless place. Its major industry, from the looks of it, was photography — probably explained by the fact that nearly every- body in the former Jewish “pale” has relatives in America who must be reminded with portraits of folks in the old country. The principal streets were overrun with holes-in-the-wall calling them- selves modestly Rembrandt, Rubens, Michelangelo, or Repine photograph studios. Shop windows specialized in fly-specks and portraits of the Soviet deities. The ill-smelling side-streets lined with decrepit houses were so reminiscent of scenes remembered from the tales by Sholom Aleichim and Mendele Maikhar Sforim that they surely could not have changed much in the intervening generations. A scant twenty-five miles from the Polish border and therefore destined to be among the first victims in the event of war, Minsk suffers neglect. Moscow’s sensible policy is to concen- trate new industries in less vulnerable geographical areas. The city having been viewed and discounted in short order, the trial became the sole local interest for me after all. Three young rowdies were accused of anti-Semitic outrages against a twenty- year-old Jewish girl, Druzye Barshai, in the glass factory where they all worked j another woman worker, a factory official and two policemen were brought to trial with these three for their failure to protect the girl. Neither the stupid pranks nor the vic- tim in themselves merited national attention, but the episode was singled out for the limelight because of its very pettiness. It served as a sample of routine, habitual Jew-baiting in the government’s unending fight against Russia’s heritage of racial hatreds. The Minsk exhibition trial took place in the auditorium of the Railroad Workers Club, decorated with posters, pictures, and red bunting, and crowded to suffocation by a local population whose life is not often enlivened by events of national importance. About half the inhabitants of Minsk are Jews, the rest being White Rus- sians, Poles and Great Russians. The life of the city — its Soviets, police stations, courts, street signs and even lavatory signs — is con- ducted in four languages: a disconcertingly literal application of the principle of racial equality. The trial, however, was not attuned to local needs. The c£ Bar- shai affair” became a kind of banner in the campaign against anti- Semitism. What would normally have amounted to a police court 1 88 hallelujah! case of hooliganism was converted into a charge of counter-revo- lution, for which the extreme penalty is death. No one seriously expected this penalty to be invoked, but its mere shadow threw the proceedings into sharper relief. Leading journalists from all over the country attended the trial and my own presence as the only foreign representative (aside from correspondents for Ameri- can Jewish publications) was played up by the Soviet press as proof of international interest. Despite earnest efforts to eradicate it, anti-Semitism still flour- ished in Russia. Traditionally the scapegoats for hardship and disaster, the Jews were blamed by the more ignorant sectors of the population for the deeds of the Soviet regime and the mis- deeds of anti-Soviet elements $ they were hated as Nepmen and as the liquidators of Nepmen. Prejudice has no need for logic. On food queues I heard the Jews cursed by simple suffering people, though the Jews were on the queues with them. Even within the Communist Party the disease was prevalent: a party of millions inevitably reflects the superstitions and prejudices of the population from which it is drawn. The great number of com- munists expelled from membership for anti-Semitism is sufficient indication of its spread in the ruling minority 5 the dilution of the Party in recent years by drawing in hordes of factory workers had operated to deepen its anti- Jewish streak. To the most ignorant layers of the Soviet population, Lenin is still a Jew and his regime is still a Jewish regime. Occasionally one hears Russians assert, without realizing the irony of their re- mark, that they affrove of the Jewish government. The Kremlin is keenly aware that anti-Semitism is frequently an indirect ex- pression of anti-communism and must be combated as such. The triviality of the actual incidents involved and the unpre- possessing personality of Druzye Barshai took the edge off the exhibition. The girl was a creature of stunted mind and body, illiterate and uncommonly ugly, the sort of unfortunate doomed to be the victim of backward ruffians whatever her race might be. The young hooligans had tripped her up, played obscene tricks on her, and in general made her bleak life more miserable. They were now completely bewildered that their “fun” should have become an affair of world-wide importance dignified by the charge of counter-revolution. SOCIAL SLAG 189 They blinked stupidly in the flaring arclights and even in the improvised courtroom kept referring to Jews in insulting words — the only names for Jews that they knew. Though they were pitifully contrite and insisted that they really had nothing against the zhidy (the traditional foul designation for the race by Jew- baiters in Russia), it was evident that they were unconvinced that their behavior was criminal. The factory heads and the policemen, among them communists, who had not moved a finger to help the Barshai girl and had chuckled at the obscenities of her tormentors, were the real culprits. The prosecution directed its fire against them even more than against the illiterate rowdies. Sentences ranging from six months to three years were imposed on all the accused. The factory offi- cials no doubt paid for their complacency by the loss of their posts and their Party membership. 3 At the Amo automobile works on the outskirts of Moscow, sev- eral hundred men and women were gathered in a large room, listening to a long and tedious speech. Their boredom was too evident. Hungry glances were cast at a counter against one wall heavily laden with sandwiches: red caviar, cheese, and other rare delicacies. When I entered and took a seat in the rear, the speaker was discussing Geneva, disarmament and imperialism. From world politics he descended by stages to national affairs and finally to the Amo plant and its duty to produce more and better motor cars. “It is Comrade So-and-So, of the Moscow Committee of the Party, an important communist,” my companion whispered. He was followed by other speakers, evidently communists work- ing in the plant. All of them lectured the audience like school teachers lecturing a class of retarded pupils who needed the same thought repeated endlessly. The classroom effect was given addi- tional color by an “examination” which one of the speakers con- ducted. “Let us see whether our department has learned its political A B C,” he said. “In the great task of building socialism, all work- ers must be politically conscious, vigilantly on guard against ene- 190 hallelujah! mies at home and abroad. Why is Right opportunism the greatest danger at this stage o£ the revolution ? 57 Silence greeted the question. “Don’t be bashful, citizens and comrades , 55 the speaker urged. “Who can answer the question ? 55 Another silence, more urging by “teacher , 55 then a bright pupil ventured an answer, and after him half a dozen others stood up and stammered things half-remembered from recent speeches and editorials. One of them got his answer sadly garbled, so that it ended in gibberish and evoked laughter. The men at the red- draped table in front held a whispered consultation, and the speaker resumed: “The correct answer, citizens, is the one given by Comrade Ivanov. Yes, Right opportunism is the chief danger because it is the ideology of kulaks, Nepmen, and disguised Trotskyists. Comrade Ivanov receives this prize for his answer . 55 A framed lithograph portrait of Stalin was passed overhead to Ivanov, and everybody applauded. Other questions and answers followed, with books, pictures, a plaster bust of Lenin awarded to the best parrots. Then there was an adjournment while sandwiches were distributed. Refreshed, the meeting was resumed. It was an “election 55 to the district Soviet by the workers of one department of the factory. “One hundred percent of the voters took part , 55 the press would announce the next day. A list of names was read by the presiding functionary. It was the “ticket 55 drawn up by the communist nucleus in the depart- ment, and it contained many names of non-communists. The dis- cussion was brief and almost entirely laudatory. Two or three workers expressed their hope that the Soviet delegates would do something about improving the service in the factory buffet. Finally those in favor of the list were asked to raise their hands. Nobody was opposed. It was my first view of an “election . 55 The following day I saw another, in a workers 5 club. Miscellaneous citizens not at- tached to large factories or institutions, among them servant girls, free-lance writers, janitors, were electing their delegates. I heard approximately the same speeches and even more perfunctory dis- cussions of the candidates. SOCIAL SLAG 191 I attended dozens of these meetings that year and in subsequent years. Sometimes the discussions were more spirited. Several ob- jections were raised to candidates on the ground that they drank too much or did not devote enough time to social activities. But not once did anyone even by implication raise a fundamental ques- tion of larger policy. No one pretended that the electors were deciding anything ; at best they were selecting the instruments for putting into effect decisions already made in mysterious upper regions. Whatever these election meetings might be worth as a school for drumming in the ideas of the Kremlin, they were empty farce considered from any other point of view. 4 Any number of Russians might bite any number of Russian dogs — perhaps they do — without winning a line in the Soviet papers. Unless their carnivorous tastes carried some political im- plications they would not be news to a Soviet editor. Events with- out a social purpose, the thousand and one hilarious and calamitous accidents that befall mortal man, rarely if ever find space in the Russian press. Ordinary crime, low-down homicide or robbery without social pretensions — crime for crime’s sake, as it were — is simply snubbed. The rare exception to this rule, such as the re- ports of the “Volga pirates,” therefore made a large impression on the public mind. Not that the Soviet press did the story justice, journalistically speaking. As the scanty and colorless news dispatches trickled through the more obscure columns of Moscow’s newspapers I could not help thinking: “What a holiday this tale of lusty butchery and blood-soaked bravado would have provided for the American tabloids! A mil- lion stenographers would have lost their hearts instantly to the swaggering Kuznetsov reciting the details of his murders and plundering with professional pride. How they would have envied his beautiful mistress! — well, she would have been beautiful in the tabloids.” The girl was only twenty-three, her name was Voronina, which is Russian for “carrion crow,” and she was the only female in a bandit trust of over thirty strong. In prison she sang and danced 192 hallelujah! to keep up the spirits of her paramour and maybe her own. The gang had terrorized the Volga region for years, preying on indi- viduals, banks, shops, and evading the G.P.U. until early in 1929. Kuznetsov himself may have been boasting when he counted his killings by the dozen, but fifteen of them at least he described in convincing style, among them the murders of his own wife and child and an uncle. He believed that murder begins at home. He led piratical raids on Volga steamers. “I never robbed the poor,” Kuznetsov explained. On the con- trary, he helped the widows and orphans, including those whom he personally turned into widows and orphans. The proletarian preachments had not been wholly lost on him. He told many stories of his gallantry and essential kind-heartedness. One of these sticks in my memory: He held up a droshky and robbed the passenger of a cash payroll for his factory just drawn from the bank. The cab driver, scared out of his wits, drove off in a panic, but Kuznetsov sent the gang after him. When the trembling cabman was brought back, the robber chieftain read him a lecture on fairness and considerate conduct. “You should be ashamed of yourself, running off in this cow- ardly fashion,” he chided the man. “Why, you’re the only witness of this robbery. Without you, how will this poor fellow prove that he was really robbed? He would be accused of having dis- posed of the money himself. You have to stick by your fellow- men, and we’ll see to it that you do.” Paper and pencil were found and the minutes of the robbery were written out. The cabman signed it as witness and the docu- ment was presented to the victim as a receipt for his payroll. These humane gestures did not save Kuznetsov from the firing squad. Ten years of imprisonment is the highest punishment under Soviet law for any crime except counter-revolution. That simpli- fies matters. Whenever the government prefers to dispose of a bad customer it calls his crime counter-revolutionary $ organized brig- andage usually comes under that head. A batch of his underlings died with Kuznetsov and the girl friend received a long prison sentence. The kind of crime that did figure frequently in the press was distinctly political in character, chiefly corruption in office. Scarcely SOCIAL SLAG *93 a week passed without a major scandal in some part of the coun- try: diversion of official funds for private orgies, the abuse of bureaucratic power to terrorize entire towns, the entrenchment of criminal elements in control of the Party apparatus in various cities and provinces. The misuse of their official authority to force women employees into concubinage — often “mass rape” of women in a spirit of degenerate fun — was especially in vogue. The foremost leaders in Moscow itself were rarely touched by the breath of scandal,* but elsewhere depravity in high places was all too common. The honey-pots of power draw insects under any system. The vast number of these parasites exposed by the central authorities, and duly reported in the press, left no doubt that many more were still undisclosed. As long as “elections” are an empty formality and secret arrests, exiles and shootings leave the indi- vidual citizen subject to intimidation, the temptation to misuse power remains almost insuperable. “Bureaucratism” is the name given by the Bolsheviks them- selves to the system which breeds such corruption. They are in- cessantly announcing campaigns to wipe out the evil. It flourishes notwithstanding. The campaigns against bureaucratism themselves assume a bureaucratic character, tangled in red tape, favoritism, espionage, fears, and grudges. Shocking details of demoralization in the higher reaches of Moscow trade-unions — in the shadow of the Kremlin itself! — were published in January, 1929. Leading officials of the Moscow sec- tion of the Trade Union of Construction Workers had formed a fraternity calling itself “Kabuki.” Its object was debauchery in the grand manner, using union funds, and intimidated women employees for the purpose. Drunkenness, embezzlement, sale of favors were among the numerous charges made against the “Ka- buki” bravos by the Control Commission of the Party. The details of the Saturnalias were too foul for publication; the Russian imagination is fertile. In the important proletarian region of Smolensk and its en- virons, the party earlier had uncovered rottenness that makes * In 1937 Henry Yagoda, after his dismissal as head of the G.P.U., was accused of having embezzled state funds; if the charges were true, it means that the corruption described here had spread to the very top in the next few years. 194 hallelujah! Tammany Hall seem puerile by comparison. The communist heads of the local Central Executive Committee of the Soviets and of the Smolensk Party Committee were busy with orgiastic parties while the local police fraternized and shared loot with the local bandits 5 while factory directors exacted payment in natura from women workers under threat of dismissal from their jobs; while tax collectors and financial chiefs feathered their own nests with public funds. I take the word of Pravda for these facts. The central government did a thorough job of house-cleaning once it became aware of the situation; a number of the communists paid with their lives; but that neither explained nor destroyed the swamps that breed such corruption. Then there was the astounding tale of Veli Ibrahimov, chair- man of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of the Tartar region in Crimea. An old-fashioned brigand chieftain, he lorded it over his domain in the name of Marx until detected by Moscow and liquidated. The list of crimes for which he and his band, “communists” all, were shot included cold-blooded murder of political enemies. Analogous decay was uncovered in Irkutsk, in Artemovsk, in dozens of cities. Of communist leaders arrested in Sochi, a lovely garden spot on the Caucasian riviera, Pravda was able to write: “Their orgies usually ended in the mass rape of a woman. The girls of the Communist Youth organization were commanded to come at night to the secretary of the district committee of the Party. If anyone of them refused, she lost her job.” The Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltzov was able to report out of Syr Darya in Turkestan, following the clean-up of a corrupt Party leadership: In general it became clear that the local committees, the Soviet authorities and the Party cells of this region contained a large number of sneaks, authentic thugs, genuine thieves, and highway robbers, and that the Party was obliged to prepare for the Soviet elections with the help of such human material. I know that these perversions — and I could cite dozens more from the official press accounts — were in no sense typical of Soviet political life. They were merely extreme symptoms of the disease of bureaucratism. The average Soviet official, I am still convinced, is more virtuous and conscientious than the average capitalist offi- SOCIAL SLAG 195 cial. But there are millions more of them in a “monolithic” state. The departures from the average — absolutely, not relatively — are therefore more numerous. Milder manifestations of the disease were visible in every office, factory and institution. The Soviet regime has never minimized the extent and serious- ness of bureaucratic depredations. But the Kremlin stops short at that point. It cannot follow the diagnosis to its ultimate implica- tions, because the root of the disease is in the prevalent hierarchy of power. Absolutism at the top implies hundreds of thousands, even millions, of large and small autocrats in a state that mo- nopolizes all means of life and expression, work and pleasure, re- wards and punishments. A centralized autocratic rule must func- tion through a human machine of delegated authority, a pyramid of graded officialdom, each layer subservient to those above and overbearing to those below. Unless there are brakes of genuinely democratic control and the corrective of a hard-and-fast legality to which everyone, even the anointed of the Lord, are subjected, the machine of power becomes an engine of oppression. Where there is only one employer, namely, the state, meekness is the first law of economic survival. Where the same group of officials wields the terrible powers of secret arrests and punishments, disfranchise- ment, hiring and firing, assignment of ration categories and living space — only an imbecile or someone with a perverted taste for martyrdom will fail to kow-tow to them. When dishonesty assumes the proportions of a pervasive na- tional phenomenon it is sheer nonsense to set it down to “ill will” or “hostility of class enemies” or some other catch-phrase. There were men of ill will and there were hostile class enemies, but the conditions which put them in positions of leadership were not of their making. Those conditions were the direct result of the sup- pression of every vestige of democratic expression in the Party organizations, in the factories, and in Soviet life generally. ^ These, however, were conclusions taking shape, as yet, in the remoter regions of my mind. Not only in my dispatches but in my conscious views I discounted the engulfing corruption— drove it out of my range of vision where possible— to safeguard my vision of the socialist Fatherland. XII. The Great “Break” THE mass of the population was caught between its fear and its despair, bodied forth in food queues, rations, repeated cleansings, waves of arrests, new hordes of disfranchised, coercive loans, new restrictions on religious organization, more stringent requisitioning of farm products. But a minority was galvanized into a fierce enthusiasm: fanatic, self-sacrificial and pitiless, magnificent in its sheer will to carry on. It was the inspired minority, with the whole arsenal of a nation’s means of propaganda and instruments of terror at its disposal, that spoke and acted for the whole country. The only voice that could be raised above a whisper or a smothered groan was the voice of this minority. It now filled the Russian land and echoed through the nations of the world, until it seemed even to the Kremlin’s enemies the authentic voice of the whole country. That enthusiasm was deep and genuine ; only the pretense that it represented the Soviet masses, or even the Soviet proletarians, was false. The voice was authentic, but it was magnified through the loud-speakers of the Kremlin’s propaganda. Whatever doubts there may be about the measure of fulfillment of the Piatiletka (Five Year Plan), there are none about the overwhelming suc- cess of the world-wide ballyhoo around it. High-minded capitalist investigators viewed the Soviet economic landscape through veils of shimmering statistics and pronounced it perfect. Even breeders of journalistic canards about the Soviet Union in neighboring capi- tals came to accept as literal truths the high-flown metaphors about crowding a century of progress into five short years, new industries blossoming on the Russian steppes, an epochal experiment, etc. I did more than my share in fortifying those metaphors in the world’s imagination. Few foreigners in Moscow outdid the United Press man in the glorification of the new socialist objectives. “How the government proposes in the short space of five years to drag 196 THE GREAT “BREAK.” I 97 a backward agrarian country into the front ranks of industrialized European nations” was the theme song of my daily dispatches. I viewed successes in all their splendid immediacy, but regarded attendant confusions and brutalities through half-closed eyes from the vantage point of future history. It’s a neat and solacing trick of perspective, practiced expertly on every page of the books sing- ing hymns to Soviet industrialization. You look at the new fac- tories, the collectivized acreage, the figures for tractor building in close-up in the here and now. Then you step back a few gener- ations or centuries and look at the human costs of these achieve- ments through the telescope of posterity 3 naturally they seem small and unimportant at that distance. I was intimately aware of the sullen indifference and stifled re- sentments of the mass, but I yielded my emotions to the enthu- siastic minority. Hardships and routine cruelties became “sacri- fices” and Casualties” in a war for socialism. Every present-tense difficulty that I was obliged to report I proceeded to dwarf by posing it against a great future-tense vision. As soon as any vast undertaking can be translated into a “campaign” with fighting “fronts” and “battles” and “shock troops” and “enemies,” its gen- erals are relieved of every obligation of restraint and humaneness: whether it be a campaign for the supremacy of the Aryan race or the establishment of collectivization. A mistake costing a million lives and subjecting a nation to untold miseries becomes a “tac- tical error” to be disposed of in a neat war communique. Garden variety tyranny is rationalized as “military discipline” and the obscenest perversions of justice pass muster as “courts-martial.” It was in an exalted mood, in any case, that I accepted the new period in its first stages. Socialism in one mad leap ! I saw its daring but disregarded the madness. Hundreds of thousands of Russians similarly found the new spirit of military regimentation, the focus- ing of the nation’s energy on clear-cut goals, the “scientific” gen- eralship that reckoned not costs, acceptable. Their flagging faith in socialism in their own time was revived. The idealism of youth and its hunger for adventurous action found an outlet. To comprehend this new epoch, the “Iron Age,” one must take cognizance of both the inert, sullen millions and the exalted, driv- ing thousands. A charge of dynamite may be negligible in size by contrast with the mountainside into which it is injected, but it igS hallelujah! explodes that mass. The history of the next five years is gibberish without an understanding of the explosive energy in the minority and the flaming faith in an all-socialist future that touched off the fuse. Young communists who had reached maturity in the last eight years and knew the glorious legends of the civil war period largely from hearsay now thrilled at the new opportunity for deeds of daring. Many heartsore old Bolsheviks sadly resigned to the de- feat of their earlier hopes, and grieving over the humiliation of Lenin’s old comrades, suddenly awoke to a new zest in revolution. What matter who led the revolutionary armies now that the fort- resses of hated capitalism were being stormed! The few com- munists isolated in hostile villages and the poorest peasants, having watched their despised neighbors prosper, recognized an outlet at last for their smoldering hatreds. Thus a mobilization of revolutionary sentiment was effected. Its banner was the Five Year Plan of National Reconstruction. Its rallying cries were Socialism in one country,” “storming the citadels of the bourgeoisie,” “to catch up with and outdistance capitalist economy.” The natural human instinct to make a virtue of necessity had its place in this mobilization. The politically more conscious sector of the industrial proletariat gratefully rationalized its burdens as temporary war measures. Communists who may have been irked by the increasing centralization of their Party and the snuffing out of internal rank-and-file democracy, now could yield themselves in an ecstasy of supreme duty to an unavoidable “military discipline.” Former Oppositionists could capitulate with- out losing face. The time for discussion was over. It was a time for action. A “monolithic,” totalitarian Party was now a necessity. 2 In April, a conference of Communist Party officials gave formal sanction to Stalin’s ascendancy and Stalin’s decision for a furious drive to the Left. Two versions of the Five Year Plan had been worked out by Gosplan (the State Planning Commission), a “basic” normal plan and a more ambitious “optimal” plan. There Was a difference of about 20% in the total production and con- struction envisaged by these variants. THE GREAT a BREAK.” I 99 The optimal plan was foreseen by its authors as possible only under the most favorable conditions. They even specified four of those unlikely conditions: the absence of any serious crop fail- ures, broader commercial ties with the rest of the world, a sharp improvement in the “qualitative indices” of Soviet industrial and farming output, and relatively smaller expenditures for national defense. Riding high on a wave of enthusiasm, the conference dis- regarded these cautions and announced the more ambitious ver- sion as its official goal. In point of fact not one of those favorable conditions was to eventualize. There were crop failures, serious war scares, failure to raise quality, and staggering blows to foreign trade as a con- sequence of the world depression. In the intoxication of optimism whipped up by unrestrained propaganda, however, the plans in the first year were revised upward, as we shall see, beyond all logic instead of being switched back to the basic figures. A few whose sense of proportion exceeded their sense of self-preservation warned against such extravagance and found themselves con- demned and punished as “Rights,” “defeatists,” and “capitalist restorationists.” The program of agrarian socialization was presented to the con- ference by President Kalinin. In the light of what was to happen at the end of the year, it is important to note that this program, though it seemed extreme at the time, called for only 20% of the peasantry to be socialized in the whole five-year period. In twelve years of revolution, despite continuous propaganda for collectives and all sorts of government subsidies, less than 2% of the peas- antry had been collectivized. To induce 20% to join up in five years seemed a sufficiently daring goal. The Plan did not limit itself to industry and agriculture. It embraced every department of the nation’s and the individual’s life. Meticulously Gosplan detailed the great improvements in education, housing, and feeding that would be brought to the masses. It went to the length (later a pesky embarrassment) of charting the higher standard of living. Because wages in terms of money would be rapidly increased through higher productivity of mechanized industry, and the purchasing power of the Soviet cur- rency would appreciate 20%, the workers’ “real wages,” the Plan promised, would rise by 66 %, and their cost of living would be 200 hallelujah! lowered by 14%. They would eat 27.7% more meat, 72% more egg s , 55.6% more dairy products. The promises to the peasantry in this respect were more moderate but large enough to evoke a vision of plenitude in the mind of an underfed poor peasant. This phase of the Plan was lost and forgotten in the shuffle of later boasts. But for the average Russian worker and peasant it was this phase that counted most. They would have been less than human had they not reacted in some measure to the flood of promissory propaganda. I talked to dozens of factory and office workers. Their immediate difficulties became a sort of investment for the future. They would work hard, deny themselves every- thing for a few years, then enter upon that ampler socialized life projected in the Piatiletka . The five years were a prison sentence or a term of compulsory military service beyond which lay free- dom and comfort. Party orators and press panegyrists, radio, theater, and cinema forgot all caution in their optimistic encouragement of this naive dream, this mirage in the desert of present hardships. The in- auspicious beginnings, in rations and official pressures, became for many of the sufferers a curious portent of glories to come, even as his mundane travail is accepted by the religious martyr as a guarantee of celestial bliss to come. Perhaps the Kremlin would have been wiser to restrain its hosanna-singers who were sharp- ening the cutting edge of disillusionment. The Trotskyist Opposition press abroad claimed the Five Year Plan as theirs in inspiration — the fruit of their long agitation — though it condemned the extravagance and lack of proportion in the Plan. Stalin’s retort was that the gigantic enterprise which he sponsored in 1928-29 would have been premature and disastrous in 1927. However that may be, national planning was not a stroke of Stalinesque genius. It is inherent in the very theory of Marxist socialism. Stalin’s role was the launching of a plan at the time he did, and carrying it through with a ruthlessness, a defiance of caution and logic, that turned the period into an “Iron Age.” Nor is the industrialization of Russia as such a purely com- munist inspiration to be credited to Stalin’s genius. One need only look at the rest of the backward, semi-colonial East — Turkey, Persia, China — to recognize the same urge to “Westernize,” 201 THE GREAT “BREAK” mechanize, industrialize. Kemal Pasha uses almost the same lan- guage as Stalin in mobilizing his new Turkey for its industrialized future through a ten-year plan. When 1 interviewed the self-made Shah of Persia some years later, he did not boast of the art treasures of his nation but of the railroads and cement factories under con- struction. In Russia that urge dates back to Peter the Great, whose spirit and methods of catching up with the West were strikingly prophetic of the Bolshevik effort. The fact is that industrial growth in Russia just before the war compares favorably with the Five Year Plan. In 1913 production amounted to 7,357,800,000 rubles as against 6, 177,900,000 rubles the year before — an increase of over 19% and therefore close to the average increase under the Five Year Plan. Indeedj if one remembers that the rubles were stable, the quality of the output vastly better, the over-advertised triumphs of the Five Year Plan, considered merely as to quantity and quality, lose some of their effulgence. The real difference, of course, is in the social institutions which emerged in the process rather than in industrialization itself. The real yardstick of success for the Five Year Plan is therefore not at all statistical. It is human. I tended to analyze the Plan in terms of the bodies and minds of men, women and children, rather than kilowatt-hours and acreage. 3 Stalin later described 1929 as the year of ferelom, the “break” — the year of the great break with the past. His description seems in retrospect even more true than it did at the time. Policies fore- shadowed in the preceding year took concrete shape. What hap- pened in the following years was but an extension and intensi- fication of the attitudes fixed in 1929. The year stands as a sharp frontier in time: a challenge to the past and a bid for the future. The “line” of the ruling group acquired a disciplined hardness such as it had not possessed before. Isolated incidents in this rapid hardening of purpose and method do not tell the whole story. In reading through my own and other people’s running press reports for that year I find small evi- dence of the ferelom , except by implication. The introduction of rations, the announcement of a definitive Plan, the purgings in 202 hallelujah! many branches of government economy and everyday life, the new drive for collectivization, the bitter attacks on socialists and other moderate labor elements abroad, were in themselves news events of colossal importance. But individual episodes, each af- fecting life in one or another department, obscured for the mo- ment the spirit that ran through them all. Only by tracing the common ingredient of these and a hundred other events to its source do we come to the core of the period, the iron heart that pumped a new spirit into everything with mechanical precision and a mechanical disdain for logic or conscience. That spirit was intolerant, cocksure, cruel — the ultimate cruelty of gods or demons loosing deluges that cleanse and deluges that drown. In its first years the revolution had been warmly human even in its most brutal moments; I mean that it had been deeply and consciously idealistic , aware of suffering and sensitive to mass emo- tion. Now it became strangely impersonal and machine-like, im- portant in its effects but as empty of real human content as a thunderstorm or a flood. It was something decreed from above and therefore inescapable but largely unrelated to the wishes or wills of the people upon whom it operated for good or for ill. Small groups helped the process along with a bigoted fury; other groups fought against it with suicidal fury; the population as a whole simply accepted it helplessly as a natural calamity. The marvels of achievements against great odds and the horrors of human wreckage and degradation alike were products of this new impersonal spirit. I do not pretend to the Olympian aloofness that measures the relative values of the achievements and the hor- rors: I have found no common denominator to which they can be reduced for such super-accountancy. I know men and women without the ability to keep their own household accounts in order who have no hesitancy in tackling the godlike bookkeeping of human destiny that balances results against costs. They assert that the price paid was quite reasonable or dirt cheap or exorbitant, as the case may be. Their yardstick of meas- urement is History. But it is a yardstick made of rubber, since everything depends on whether they regard history as a span of ten years or ten thousand. The questions that pounded ever more insistently on the doors of my conscience and my mind (no one knows where thought THE GREAT a BREAK ?> 203 ends and feeling begins) were of a different order. Dare any group of human beings, however wise and good they may count themselves, arrogate to itself the divine role of meting out death and suffering to the rest of mankind? The Biblical legend, crystal- lizing countless ages of mortal suffering through mysterious agen- cies beyond their control, tells of the divine anger that flooded a world with death, sparing only Noah and the creatures in his magic ark. It tells of Sodom and Gomorrah wiped out by divine wrath. Most tribes and religions have similar fables. What I saw was a handful of men in the Kremlin translating those fables into fact, assuming for themselves the supernatural prerogative. Without hesitation, they doomed millions to extinction and tens of millions to inhuman wretchedness in the mystical delusion of their divine mission. (They called it “historical” instead of “di- vine.”) Could one grant them this prerogative, even in principle, without justifying every self-righteous maniacal minority that decides to enforce its visions on humanity by wars, inquisitions, and dictatorships? Anyone who decided to torture and kill one man or woman for the good of the victim’s unborn great-grand- children would be adjudged insane. Is he any less insane when he decides to torture and exterminate millions of men and women for the good of their unborn posterity? Have only the unborn generations a right to happiness, so that the anguish of the living generation is a trifling investment for its great-grandchildren? The logic of that “investment” turns mankind into a donkey following the carrot hung before its nose but always out of reach. The carrot of happiness for future generations is no more real than the carrot of bliss in paradise dangled by religion ; both of them may serve as justification for flogging the donkey. A thou- sand things may snatch the theoretical happiness from the coming generation 5 it may even have a different concept of happiness than the group now brandishing “the sword of history.” Only the anguish of the living generation is real and indubitable. Sentimentality? All life is sentimental, if it is worth bothering about at all. If human life has no intrinsic value, then revolutions are senseless, ideals a mirage. Surely it is as sentimental to grow excited over the bliss in store for unborn millions as over the misery of existing millions. If it is permissible to exterminate a sector of humanity for the 204 hallelujah! sake of History, then there is no sensible reason for drawing the line at five million or five hundred million. Drown them all, com- rades, leaving only a he-Stalin and a she-Stalin in their mono- lithic ark to start things over again from scratch! I did not raise such issues in my cabled reports of the Soviet scene, published in some twelve hundred newspapers the world over. Imagine the consternation of an editor in Kalamazoo or Bangkok if he were to find my speculations on life, death, and history tacked on to a routine dispatch about “twenty-eight more kulaks and speculators executed this week, bringing the known total for the month to one hundred and fourteen.” Philosophical doubts are not precisely spot news. The conventions of news re- porting call for sharp-edged facts. Behind the neat matter-of-fact dispatches, as cold as a coroner’s report, were my private perplexities — so far behind that only a few of my more perspicacious friends at home detected them. The lineaments of the ferelcnn were outlined for me gradually in its cumulative works. They will grow clearer as this narrative proceeds. At this point it is necessary to summarize a few of its more decisive principles of action, all of them related expressions of the new dehumanized spirit that turned words like “idealism,” “compassion,” “love” into insulting epithets. Those principles, im- plicit or openly expressed, were: First: The Communist Party became sacrosanct, its shifting policies— the “Party line”— invested with a mystical validity be- yond logic. This was a far throw from the earlier conception of Party discipline. That discipline had been utilitarian, intended to assure unity of action after a question had been discussed and decided. Mental reservations, as long as they were not translated into action, were not in themselves treacherous. Communists were expected to sink their differences of opinion but not necessarily to believe differently overnight. Now there were no longer dif- ferences of view: there were only heresies. Decisions molded through discussion gave way to inspired pronouncements from on high. Reason gave way to faith. Second: Stalin became the personification of that sanctity, the inspired oracle and the repository of all wisdom. The word vozhd — meaning not merely leader but the leader, with all the implica- THE GREAT a BREAK >? 205 tions of the title duce in Italy or later Fuehrer in Germany — was applied more frequently to Stalin. Soon “our voxhd” acquired all the overtones of heavenly inspiration in the Soviet land that il duce has in the fascist land. In the deification of Stalin the logic of dictatorship was carried to its final level. Third: The conviction that human life as such is valueless, merely the raw stuff of history, took a firmer hold on the ruling group. Larger purposes seemed to them to transcend mere flesh and blood, so that any number of people might be sacrificed on the altar of the true faith. A strange pride in the capacity to kill for the cause developed and it called itself “Bolshevik ruthless- ness” or “Leninist firmness.” Fourth: “Social origin,” proper proletarian or poor-peasant parentage, became the measure of personal value. A fierce pride in respectable family descent, a fiercer persecution of “enemy” blood grew into phobias. The same government that boasted of its creches and kindergartens doomed hundreds of thousands of children bora under the hammer-and-sickle to misery and death because of their hereditary taint, barred them from schools, sent them into exile with their parents. The sins of the fathers were visited upon Soviet children and the stain of “original sin” was declared ineradicable. Fifth: Class war was proclaimed as the supreme method of social advance, being artificially stimulated where it did not exist. The Marxian analysis of society recognized class struggle as a social fact arising because of inherent conflicts of economic inter- ests. The Kremlin went a lot further. It proceeded to nurture hot- house class struggles, as it were, if necessary inventing antagonisms and enemies where there were none. Sixth: In the non-Soviet world, revolutionary individuals or organizations which did not accept Moscow’s leadership were thereafter to be considered “social fascists” and more poisonous even than the capitalists. In practice, this involved continuous warfare against Social Democrats, moderate labor organizations, communists of other than the Stalinist denominations — a warfare which shattered the strength of labor and gave fascism unob- structed right of way. I do not mean that these principles were formulated anywhere in this fashion, though they each found expression at one time 206 hallelujah! or another in language more vigorous than I have used. They were various aspects of the temper of the new period — irrecon- cilable, hard-boiled, relentless, without a doubt or a regret to relieve the harshness. The revolution once had warm blood in its veins 3 it now preferred molten iron. 4 The great shaggy head of Karl Marx receded in the May Day decorations in 1929, leaving Lenin and Stalin dominant, Russia is a nation of icon- worshippers. Symbols have a potency beyond anything in the West. The prominence given to different saints and miracle-workers, living and dead, corresponds with mathe- matical exactitude to their current influence. This May Day saw Stalin lifted to a place of equality with Lenin in the outward sym- bolism of the faith. On Red Square, on the buildings opposite the Kremlin walls, huge faces of Lenin and Stalin were displayed. Their gigantic full-length portraits were mounted on scaffolding on Theatre Square, looming high above the Metropole Hotel on one side and the Grand Hotel on the other. In the mass demonstration, effigies of Stalin inscribed with his quotations and thick flattery outnumbered all the other floats and placards. Stalin — and industrialization. These were the two ideas from this time forward. They were blended. They became interchange- able. Stalin’s dark, fleshy visage came to mean smokestacks, oil derricks, scaffolding, tractors, and each of these things came to mean Stalin. The man Stalin who quarreled with enemies and connived with allies, human and fallible, was swallowed by the idea Stalin, at once fearsome and benevolent. Twelve years after the dethronement of Nicholas the Last, Holy Russia had a Little Father once more — too distant for personal love or hate, an in- visible force to be flattered and propitiated. The very memory of the man’s former insignificance now seemed too bizarre to be credible. It was fitting that history should be frantically rewritten to magnify his importance. One day he emerged as the real giant of the civil war period, the next as the real force by Lenin’s side in the tense “October days.” Others were pushed aside uncere- moniously to make room for Stalin in the revised legend. The focusing of all wisdom and all authority in one man at THE GREAT “BREAK.” 207 the top was reflected in every department of Soviet life. More dictatorial power was extended to individual directors in factories and institutions. Even the pretense of rank-and-file control of the ruling Party was forgotten. Everywhere respect for mass opinion and notions of popular participation in factory management were thrown overboard. The process went under the brave label of “tightening disci- pline” for the sake of efficiency— the standard excuse for dictator- ship and authoritarian methods in all countries where democratic notions are outlawed. Even as in Italy, foreign correspondents whose personal liberties and privileges were left intact, ex claim ed over the “splendid discipline.” They wrote home about the “amaz- ing concentration of national energies,” and marveled at the “fine faith that accepts without murmur decisions which mean new sacri- fices and further tightening of the belt.” I was among those corre- spondents. Only this I can say in extenuation: that in my case these phrases were not cynical formulas of friendship for those in power, dashed off between cocktails and dinner and forgotten. They were earnest attempts to explain to myself more than to others. I had need at least to conciliate my radical conscience. Each day the screws were turned a little more tightly on the intellectuals. Members of the Academy of Science, though their special fields were as far from socioligy as medicine or botany, had to prove their fealty to Marxism if they were to survive not merely as academicians but as functioning scientists. Writers, composers, painters, actors were given to understand unequivocally that they could not remain above the Five Year Plan battle: neutrality was tantamount to treachery and punished as such. The homes of technicians and “intellectuals” were searched, they were hauled to the G.P.U. for questioning on the slightest suspicion or none. Not only the declassed millions, but millions of fully enfran- chised citizens, because they did not labor with their hands, were thus treated as prisoners of war. And the soldiers themselves, the workers at the benches, were submitted to a new and ever more constricting “discipline.” By the end of May, the former head of the trade-unions, Mikhail Tomsky, had “resigned.” Actually his functions had been taken over by Shvernik, a Stalin underling, 208 hallelujah! months before, and his expulsion in itself made little difference. But it put a period on the old type of trade-unionism. The unions became mere bureaus for registering and regiment- ing the workers for the state, another whip in the hands of the rulers. They became in effect “company unions,” whose primary job was to help the “bosses/ 5 in this case the state. A strike (and desperate, underfed and overworked proletarians occasionally re- sorted to strikes despite all the risks) must now be directed against the trade union no less than the administration. I watched the tightening control from above with growing mis- givings. Whatever the formal justification, it removed the workers a few steps more from the dictatorship exercised in their name and stripped them more thoroughly of the last possibility of defending their personal rights as workers against the larger rights of the organized and omnipotent state. The last pretense that the work- ers owned the state was dropped — the state frankly owned the workers. New techniques for raising the productivity of the workers were developed. “Shock brigades/ 5 or pace-setters, were organized in every factory and office, every mine and construction job. The brigadiers, or udarniki, worked harder, wasted less time and set an example for their more indolent or less interested fellow-workers. Patriotic devotion to the national cause was a large element in this brigadiering, which enlisted the communists and the more socially conscious workers. But the motives were not unmixed. Udarmki became a class apart on any job, compensated for their brigadiering by extra ra- tions, priority in the distribution of deficit goods, first claim on new housing space, and other privileges. Their children were the first to receive milk or places in the schools. The best vacation resorts were set aside for their use. Shops on Moscow’s principal streets began to display luxuries like boots and textiles with placards announcing “For sale to udarniki only!” They became a sort of aristocracy within labor. Like so much else which happened in Russia,, brigadiering has been romanticized by superficial enthusiasts as a spontaneous ex- pression of popular fervor. It was that in part. In even larger part the udarniki themselves preferred to believe that duty rather THE GREAT “BREAK.” 209 than the extra rations or pair of boots turned them into brigadiers. But the official approval was not often shared by the workers out- side the brigades. For the run-of-the-mill proletarian the wdarnik was frequently someone who curried favor with the administration and forced down wages per unit of production by setting new standards of speed. I recall a conversation with our friend H , a young woman working at a sewing machine in a Moscow clothing factory. “Well , 55 I asked her, “have you joined a brigade ? 55 “No, not me . 55 “Why not ? 55 “Oh, I work hard enough as it is for my bread and water. Be- sides all the toe-lickers are becoming udarniki . I 5 ve got too much pride to join . 55 It took a few months of increasing food shortage and clothes shortage to humble her pride. She finally became an udarmk . She had a new dress and a pair of vdinki > felt boots, to show for it. “Some of the people in my department pretend that it 5 s for the Five Year Plan that they 5 re in the brigade. But they 5 re in it for the vdinki like myself . 55 H may have underestimated the idealism of her fellow- udarniki. Unquestionably the immense propaganda for industriali- zation was having its effect in tapping deposits of unselfish social emotion. That it did not suffice to stimulate the best efforts of the workers may be judged from the fact that ultimately the Kremlin had to appeal more directly to the motives of self-ag- grandizement through old-fashioned goads to personal initiative Like piece work, bonuses for better work and “docking 55 for in- ferior work. Another of the techniques for stimulating production introduced it this time was “socialist competition . 55 Factories in the same in- dustry, departments in a single factory, sometimes entire indus- tries, challenged one another to contests in fulfilling production blans. The press and factory bulletin boards gave the progress )f such contests as much prominence as American papers give base- ball scores. The winning side received banners and loving cups md had to maintain its records or lose the trophy. Even poets mdertook “socialist competition 55 in producing verses to inspire 2 I O HALLELUJAH ! the udarmki. Novels and plays appeared in which shock-brigadiers were the heroes and socialist production contests, the plot and counter-plot. This intensification of labor, whatever its motives or its methods, had a magnificent sweep. The sheer magnitude of the effort was imposing. It was like a mobilization of an entire nation for war. More so. War ordinarily leaves a large portion of the population unaffected, carrying on its accustomed life of work and pleasure in the old way. This Soviet mobilization left no one undisturbed. Whether in terms of new tasks of labor, new persecutions, new deprivations, life was altered fundamentally for everybody. The calendar itself was wrenched out of its ancient moorings. We reported it to the outside world melodramatically as “the nationalization of Sunday,” and the atheists were indeed well pleased with the innovation. By turning the Sabbath into a hum- drum working day it made church going possible only by absenting oneself from work, and abstention without good reasons acceptable to the administration could mean discharge from one’s job. But the Godless victory was a mere by-product of the reform. Actually it amounted to the nationalization of all seven days of the week for the Five Year Plan. The traditional pause, when an entire nation simultaneously rests from its labors, was abolished. The “uninterrupted work week” was introduced into one industry after another, and finally into all Soviet undertakings. Every fifth day was a “free day” for one-fifth of the employees only. The day of rest was thus staggered, so that the wheels of labor never stopped turning. The change affected the quality of life under the hammer-and- sickle more deeply than a mere statement of the fact indicates. Mankind is habituated to dividing time, with a Sabbath to mark the break. The day of repose, not for one man but for all, provides a goal toward which the days of work can march, a counterpoint ol holiday in the symphony of labor. All that was sacrificed for the Plan and efficiency. Every day became like every other day, with only three national holidays when the sense of total rest could be recaptured. The individual had his “free day,” but it was like laying off for twenty-four hours on a week-day, with none of the heightened value that a general cessation brings. It did not cor- 21 I THE GREAT “BREAK.” respond, except accidentally, with the “free days” of his friends or even his family. The color of life, already monotonous gray, was made flatter. The psychology of embattled desperation fostered by the new Kremlin policies seemed to reach its logical conclusion in this merging of time into a treadmill of uninterrupted work.: There are no holidays in the trenches. XIII. Accent of Moscow AT THE other end of Clean Ponds Boulevard there was a Red Army barracks. Going to and from their weekly baths the sol- diers marched, singing, under our windows. Sometimes in the dawn hours we heard their voices dimly far off, then louder and closer and suddenly thundering in our ears, the cobbled street a drumhead for their heavy boots. Little Genie was soon singing all the marching songs, though she understood scarcely a word of them (which was just as well, the words are often ribald enough). We could tell by the pace of their music whether the warriors were going to or coming from their ablutions. Going, their songs were slow and touched with melancholy. Returning, they sang briskly, and their young voices glowed like their steamed and parboiled faces. Billy learned to give a musical imitation of the Red Army before and after steaming which remains a hilarious family classic. I have read tourist gurglings in which the singing of Soviet soldiers was cited as proof of the happy mood of the Red Army. Russian soldiers sang lustily, of course, long before the revolution. Most of the tunes are still the same, though the words have been brought into line ideologically. “Ekh, Dunya, my little Communist Girl!” the chorus of one such song now exults. The adventures of red-kerchiefed Dunya are earthy and well-spiced, for she is the rhymed favorite of soldiers, sailors, commissars. She goes through a gate and the whole army follows. She twists her thick braids and there is a stampede of sailors. The rhymed couplets beloved of the Russians now deal with Soviet themes as well as the ancient plaints: By radio we met and by radio we wed, And by radio we got — a little baby Red. Or: I have no mom, I have no pop, I was born in the gutter — a hen brought me up. 212 ACCENT OF MOSCOW 213 The chorus for these rhymes, flung to the Moscow skies by a marching Red division, sounds like a challenge to capitalism in the ears of keyed-up tourists. But the words are far from Marx, being approximately: Tea she drank and the samovar she lit; The dishes she smashed and the cook threw a fit. A soldiers 5 ditty that I liked especially recounts in marching meas- ures a peasant mother’s farewell to her gawky son departing for army service. The chorus ends on a note of affectionate maternal * Without you the Bolsheviki would be lost . . . There were also songs never before intoned by Russian sol- diery. Workers’ revolutionary marches from 1905. Rough and pungent melodies born, no one knows how, in the guerilla fight- ing of Siberia and the Far East. The inspiring hymn of Budenny’s Cavalry, surely among the greatest marching tunes in the world. I have seen General Budenny’s huge mustaches stand at proud attention, pointing upward like bayonets, when this march was played in his honor at the races or during some demonstration. The sight and the sound of the singing Red soldiers, swinging along through the principal streets, became pleasantly intimate. Years later, far from the place, a snatch of the familiar music, echoing in memory, evoked for me the magnetic Moscow that I love above all other cities I have known. My memory, I think, is strongly aural: distinctive sounds re- main in my mind long after other circumstances have faded and they stir nostalgic emotional depths. My first years in Moscow are suffused with the soldiers’ singing and the insistent church bells. The bells would start sonorously somewhere in the city and wake answering chimes on all sides in a thousand different keys and measures until the world seemed brimful of living, cavorting notes, chattering, scolding, exulting. Later the ringing was prohibited as a public nuisance and the bells themselves were hauled down and melted for their metals. But somewhere a few timid bells had been overlooked in the sweep, and occasionally they tinkled forlornly in the twilight. Woven into the sound-memory is also the hoarse caw-caw of the black crows swarming over the city and the cries of bearded 214 hallelujah! Tartars in our back yard: “Staryo j)okufayeml n (We buy old things.) The old-clothes men were silenced about the same time as the bells. Only the crows could not be liquidated: they con- tinued to rise like clouds of cinders when the Kremlin cannons boomed a salute. The American jazz melody Hallelujah , strangely Russianized, pulses through the memory too, something desper- ately secretive about its forced gaiety ; it was played at half- illicit house parties and in bourgeois hotels, so that it came to have a counterpoint of yearning for the forbidden fleshpots of the capi- talist world. And the International , whose powerful challenging voice was something deeply personal for me, speaking of morn- ings on East Broadway in the Socialist Sunday School. On Red Square, in the opera house, wherever it was played, my mind followed it automatically with the words I had learned as a school Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, Arise, ye wretched of the earth, For justice thunders condemnation, A better world’s in birth ! No more tradition’s chains shall bind us, Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall ; The earth shall rise on new foundation, We have been naught — we shall be all! ’Tis the final conflict. Let each stand in his place! The International Party Shall be the human race! The obbligato to my sound-memory, however, was the off-key whining of little Sashka next door. We became accustomed to it in the way one becomes accustomed to a chronic neuralgia. His voice was a needle that threaded our home life with its zigzag of fine wire. Moscow was becoming more crowded every day and the job of getting around the city more disagreeable. Eventually it forced the correspondents to import automobiles, but at this point the New York Times correspondent was the only one in the Ameri- can corps thus provided. After a day of struggle on Soviet street- cars, the loss of a leg in France seemed a small price to pay for a motor car in Moscow 5 we almost envied Duranty his misfor- ACCENT OF MOSCOW 21 $ tune. He had a neat trick o£ quoting “conversations in the street- car” in his dispatches in gauging public sentiment on current problems, as though to rub in the fact that he was the only one who didn’t travel on street cars. The street-car conversations that I recall were more concerned with the ethics of stepping on other people’s toes and digging elbows into the abdomens of pregnant women than with public affairs. In a New York subway quarrels are left to their protagonists $ in a Moscow street-car nearly every- one immediately takes sides and the argument becomes general, continuing long after the offending party has been disgorged or has retreated into guilty silence. In the face of inhuman crowding and accumulating shortages, the press and Soviet leaders talked of subways, new communal housing, and plans to make the city the world’s most beautiful capital. They boasted of their plans as though they were already accomplishments. In life, as in my dispatches, every present-tense discomfort was matched with a future-tense promise. The mass of the population may have ignored these promises, but the smaller group of communists, enthusiasts, “activists” found life more tol- erable because they attuned it to the projected future. This capacity to accept the plan for the reality occasionally led to disastrous futility — too many planners felt that the job was completed once they had perfected an impressive blueprint and framed it for their office walls. But it also enabled them to relish in anticipation things which were years off. 2 Except for desultory self-instruction in brief bursts of industry, I did not study Russian. Yet words and entire sentences did begin, amazingly, to emerge from the blur of gutturals. Immigrant varia- tions on English are so common in America that we ignore them or make sport of them. Russians, on the contrary, feel subtly flat- tered that any glamorous foreigner should make the effort to learn their humble folk speech. It seems curious to them, too, that anyone able to speak mysterious foreign languages should find dif- ficulty with the ordinary Russian that their children and the vil- lage idiot speak so easily. They involved me in small talk often, I am sure, merely for the joy of watching me butcher the tongue of Pushkin and Tolstoy. If I failed to understand them, they 2 1 6 HALLELUJAH ! shouted louder and still louder, as though the fault were with my hearing. When they wished to know how I liked the Russian language I assured them that “it’s not a language, it’s a torture.” There was, in fact, no point of contact with English on which one could take his stance in attacking the speech. Its very philosophy seemed to me different from English — at once more complicated and more naive, richer in colloquialisms and nuances, its meaning some- how fuzzier and its accents more dramatic than in English. After a while I gave up trying to juggle the grammatical endings. I picked up the first one that came to hand, which was invariably the wrong one. Billy and I were constantly asked about our rela- tive progress, and time reduced the reply to a formula: “Gene speaks better but Billy speaks more P The semi-haze of language that separated me from Russians lifted, and I felt less of a stranger among them. The arguments in trolley cars and the grumblings on food lines, the casual re- marks overheard on streets and the floods of amiable cabmen’s obscenity began to make sense. The language in newspapers and on the radio, being strongly political, seemed to me different enough from everyday speech to constitute a new tongue. Russians told me that for them, too, it was almost a foreign language, it was so clean- cut in its meanings, lacking in the baby-talk diminutives, and so full of Russianized Latin — mashinizatsiya industrializatsiya y elec - trichesky y dialectichesky , etc. There is a historical moral in the fact that there are no Russian words for the new life of indus- trialization and socialism; practically its whole vocabulary is im- ported. My secretary-interpreter, Miss Jmudskaya, went through the newspapers mechanically and made appointments for me with of- ficials and searched for facts that could never be found. Her boredom was undisguised. My eagerness to dig under the surface of official news seemed to her, I am sure, a little ill-mannered. Here I was receiving first-category rations, practically immune against the G.P.U., allowed to go abroad whenever I wished, but instead of being grateful I insisted ungraciously on prying into the Kremlin’s private affairs. . . . Besides the economic and political news which were the staples of my daily work, I enjoyed seeking out and transmitting “human ACCENT OF MOSCOW 217 interest” material that seemed to me authentically Russian, the very stuff of Chekhov and Gogol and Dostoievsky. Among the carbon copies of stories which survived somehow from those first years (if only I had had the sense to save them all!) there are a great many which begin: “Like an episode out of the most mor- bid pages in Dostoievsky . . or words to that effect. Little did Dostoievsky dream that one day he would be the mainstay of foreign writers unable to understand or explain events in Bol- shevik Russia! One such story recounted the suicide of a former general in the tsar’s army, the fifty-year-old Georgi N. Khvostchinsky. He wrote a rambling ten-page letter to his Soviet employers in the Leather Trust and shot himself through the brain. There is a tale by Chekhov in which a petty chinovnik> or functionary, sneezes in the theater and sprays a shining bald head in front of him. He is shocked to discover when the man turns around that the head belongs to the pompous director of his bureau, who frowns, wipes his pate, and forgets about it. The chinovmk apologizes profusely, passionately, he can think of nothing else and no longer follows what is going on behind the footlights. Then he returns home to brood on the enormity of what he did and in the end, of course, kills himself. Citizen Khvostchinsky’s story is proof that Chekhov did not exaggerate. At a conference of officials of his trust, the ex-general suddenly remembered that he had failed to carry out instructions transmitted to him months before. He had placed the letter in his pocket and did not think of it again until this conference. No one had noticed the mistake and there had been no harm done. But the general, now a chinovmk, was completely shaken up. Three days he tortured himself with thoughts of his unworthiness and the losses which might have accrued. Then he wrote the ten-page letter “confessing his crime” and blew out his brains. A career begun amidst the brilliant trap- pings of the old regime thus ended ridiculously in the littered offices of a Soviet bureau. Other episodes were equally fascinating for the vejy opposite reason, because of their close relation to the revolutionary up- heaval. A political assassination which did not receive nearly the attention it deserved sticks in my mind. It was a perfect paral- 218 hallelujah! lei, in many ways, to the shooting of Hetman Petliura several months earlier in Paris by a young Jewish watchmaker named Schwartzbard. Early in 1929, the press recorded briefly the shoot- ing of Jacob Slashchev, Red Army commander, in his own apart- ment in Moscow. A few days later it was disclosed that a twenty- four-year-old Jew named Kolenberg was under arrest for the murder. Beyond that the affair was veiled from public view by the strictest official silence. But in time I managed to piece together the ironical story. In the civil war days, Slashchev had been General Slashchev and had fought against the Reds under Denikin and under Wran- gel. He won a reputation as a man without mercy and was credited with the summary executions of thousands of communists and with instigating endless pogroms on the Jews. About 1922, however, he changed sides, and the Bolsheviks, sadly in need of trained military men, gladly accepted his services. He taught in their military academy and won himself a place of honor and respect in the Red Army. The Soviet government had forgiven him — but the surviving victims of his earlier cruelties had not. In one of General Slashchev’s pogroms the father and one son in a wealthy Jewish family near Kherson had been murdered. Another son, then fifteen, had escaped. For nine long years he nursed passion- ately the dream of vengeance. The boy’s name was Kolenberg and his dream came true when he shot the White— now Red— general in Moscow. These were the things that gave news in Moscow their special quality of the bizarre and their atmosphere of significance. Every- thing that occurred had its specific “Soviet angle.” There was the strange funeral on Red Square of Captain Paxton Hibben, whom I had known in New York. Born in Indianapolis, a rela- tive of President Hibben of Princeton, a former American diplo- mat at the tsar’s court, he was interred as a Red hero in the New Virgins’ Monastery on the fringe of Moscow near the graves of many Romanovs. He died in New York but it was his last wish that he be buried in the Russia he loved. There was the endless piquancy of the aged Professor Pavlov, the great physiologist, incessantly defying the new masters, flaunt- ing his faith in God under the noses of the Godless, openly scold- ing the proletarian government which supported his work and ACCENT OF MOSCOW 219 took pride in his achievements. The Kremlin had begun to liqui- date the bourgeois character of the Academy of Sciences by ex- pelling some of the academicians and diluting the membership with Bolshevik additions. Professor Pavlov raised no objections to Buk- harin, Pokrovsky, and Ryazanov, but he denounced other candi- dates as ignoramuses whose admission would disgrace the Academy founded by Peter the Great. The liquidation went on despite his thunders; within a year or two the Academy was as meekly obedi- ent as any communist cell. But the spectacle of one man who was permitted to speak his mind among one hundred and sixty mil- lion was sufficiently exciting. Most exciting of all, however, were the things that did not make “stories” for the press — the impact of daily life, daily dis- comforts, widening human contacts. I visited dozens of Soviet offices in the course of routine work, until their noise, tea-drinking, shabby signs and posters, amateur “wall papers,” and their litter of cigarette stubs and mislaid papers, their hopeless slowness and confusion, no longer seemed strange or exasperating. I became familiar with the aroma and the beat of museums, cooperative shops and department stores, factories, movie houses, and tourist show-places like nurseries and model prisons. The sense of strange- ness never quite wore off. Moscow can never become completely intimate to a foreigner as Paris, London or Vienna might. The margin of bafflement and paradox may be narrowed but it can never be quite erased. Each time I returned from a vacation, I confronted the capital’s heaped-up desperations and magnificence with new wonderment and a revived hunger to absorb it some- how with mind and senses. But mine was no longer that hectic, flushed reaction of the first arrival: no longer the bewildered anxiety that I saw driving tourists to test, argue, or explain away everything they met. Even the symbols of the revolution with familiarity lost their edge of the miraculous. The existences of individual men and women, somehow overlooked in the obsession of sociological research and the to-do about historical novelties, began to register on my mind. So gradually that I was not aware of it, I began to see the physi- cal and social landscape through Russian eyes. The people you met took the revolution for granted, and its evolution mattered 220 hallelujah! only to the extent that it affected their own jobs, food supplies, housing, and safety. You might discuss the news of the day— the latest bend in the Party line or the arrival of the British businessmen’s delegation— with Soviet journalists, officials, communists. But you avoided such things in conversation with Gisa, who worked in a clothing factory, or Nick, who was a rising cameraman in a movie trust, or the novelist Zamyatin, whose political standing was too un- steady to be tampered with. Everyone carried his private load of troubles, love tangles, ambitions and frustrations and took no more interest in larger national policies than the average New Yorker. But national policies here affected the individual’s life more q uickl y and more directly than in most other countries— the de- pendence of ordinary people upon the moods and methods of the Kremlin was greater and more obvious. Whatever we talked about, whatever we did together, therefore had for me deeper significance. The kind of shows we saw, our skiing excursions, the clothes Gisa wore, the picture Nick was doing, the story Zamyatin had suc- ceeded in passing through the censorship, had for me social im- plications of which they were not themselves conscious. 3 There is much to be said for round-world flights, no doubt, as sport and as science. But no Moscow correspondent can rea- sonably be expected to say it. The things we did say are not fit to print. Russia sprawls across half of Europe and all of Asia — • some seven thousand miles and each of those miles an acute head- ache for American reporters in the Soviet capital. It was our business to report the whereabouts of fliers from the moment they crossed into Russia until they left a few days later, or were properly smashed up. Nobody along the route was especially in- terested in keeping the world advised of these specks in the Rus- sian skies. Besides, in Russia stretches of country as wide as a few World Powers are unpopulated wildernesses. In the early ’30’s the circumglobular headaches became chronic. We became familiar with the sleepless nights, the feverish search- ing, and the frantic inquiries from the home office. But in August, ACCENT OF MOSCOW 22 I 1929, the thing was still a novelty. All I was expected to do, sit- ting in my remodeled stable on Clean Ponds Boulevard, was to follow and report accurately the course of the Graf Zeppelin on the Russian leg of its first world-circling flight, from the time the dirigible sailed across the Latvian frontier until it touched the brink of the Pacific. My principal competitors in this matter were the other two American press agency men, and both of them had handicaps on me. International News Service representatives were on board the Zeppelin and would report directly by short-wave radio. The As- sociated Press, because of its contractual relations with the Soviet news agency, Tass, would have a monopoly of such information as the Soviet press obtained. The United Press had nothing but succinct and emphatic instructions to offer me, the gist of which was that I must cover the flight in detail, faster and more ac- curately than anyone else. The Zeppelin’s path across the Russian continents had been announced in advance. It was to follow the main highway to Mos- cow, and then the Trans-Siberian railroad tracks to Manchuria and Tokyo. All I needed to do, obviously, was to station a relay of scouts along the whole route to wire the news to me as soon as they sighted the German giant. That being impossible, I did the next best thing. I wrote to the editor of the local newspaper in the larger cities along the route. I told him that one of these days or nights the famous Zeppelin would be flying over his district. It was his manifest duty as a public-spirited citizen and builder of socialism in one country, I explained in effect, to in- form the world instantly when the Zeppelin comes in view, and the only way to do that was to flash the fact to the United Press reporter in Moscow. I addressed him as “dear colleague” — as one newspaperman to another— and made him realize that in helping me he was breaking the narrow walls of provincial journalism and entering the wide open spaces of international news. Rather to my astonishment, most of them agreed. Unbeknown to my competitors I therefore had volunteer correspondents sta- tioned all along the Zeppelin’s charted path. Each of. them had telegraph forms addressed to myself ready to send, with a space in which to write in the exact time of the sighting. The indifferent Miss Jmudskaya being rather helpless in such 222 HALLELUJAH ! subtle maneuvering, I hired the services of an aggressive Russian boy named Grisha Gruzd. Grisha was twenty-two or -three and had lived in Chicago several years ; he boasted a go-getting streak rare in Russians. Grisha interviewed the officials of the Soviet so- ciety of amateur radio short-wave enthusiasts and induced them to instruct members throughout the country to eavesdrop on the Zeppelin and report what they could learn of its whereabouts to Moscow headquarters. He established friendly relations, too, with the aviation department in the Comsomol organization. Then we sat back and waited 5 nervously, but not without confidence. The United Press never cries “uncle.” On August 7, the dirigible took off from Lakehurst, N. J. On August 14, it took off from Friedrichshafen, Germany, headed for Moscow. I wired my volunteer brigade that their big mo- ment was at hand. The next day the ship crossed the Latvian border and was, so to speak, in my lap. And then my plans were sent flying higher than a dirigible. The Zeppelin blithely broke its promise and took a course a mere hundred miles or so to the north of its projected line and, what is more to the point, north of my line of volunteers. It was a good plan— I am still proud of it— but it didn’t work. Two dozen provincial editors lost their one chance to contribute to world journalism gratis. Because of weather conditions, Commander Eckener steered some thirty miles north of Moscow and main- tained that bias along a route that took him over uninhabited Siberian tundra instead of the railroad line. He saved a few hundred miles’ distance and no one was the worse but a dis- traught reporter on Clean Ponds Boulevard. Grisha was even more distressed than his chief. His blond hair stood on end and the sweat of honest chagrin ran down his col- lar. “At least,” he consoled me, “we still have the amateur short- wavers to fall back on. That arrangement is air-tight!” I agreed that hope lay in that direction, and thither Grisha rushed. But short-wave headquarters had closed for the day! Our brilliant arrangements remained a theoretical triumph. We caught the Comsomol aviation enthusiasts about to shut down their offices as well, and induced them to remain open beyond then- usual hours. With their assistance we did obtain a few “sight- ACCENT OF MOSCOW 22 3 ings.” Meanwhile I opened long-distance parleys with newspapers this side of the Urals in cities along the new course and was for- tunate enough to run across another sighting or two, enough to save my editors in New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo from apoplexy. The telephoning had to be done at the main Telegraph Building j no long-distance connections could be obtained at that time at any other place. The Zeppelin sailed on majestically while the reporters phoned and fretted and guessed at its location. Sverdlovsk was then the most easterly point within telephone reach. According to my vague calculations the dirigible should be passing that city some- time after midnight. But the Sverdlovsk paper could not be reached by telephone. Comsomol headquarters were shutting down. There seemed not the slightest chance of news till next morning, and eight hours without news — particularly when my opposition might be well supplied with it — was a serious matter. “The fellow at the Comsomol office,” Grisha said, “suggested that if you couldn’t get the Sverdlovsk paper you might try the military kommandant there.” I clutched at this straw. Grisha asked to be connected with the garrison at Sverdlovsk. When the connection was made, he asked for the commander. I told him what to say. “I am calling you,” he said under my instructions, “at the sug- gestion of the Comsomol organization here in Moscow. I am speaking for a foreign correspondent. The Zeppelin should be passing Sverdlovsk. Is there any sign of it? The Zeppelin! A German dirigible. You never heard of it? Well, you’re hearing of it now. We’ll be obliged if you watch for it and we’ll call you back.” The garrison head had seemed terribly impressed by the long- distance call, and upset because he knew nothing of the Zeppelin that was coming toward his post. About an hour later we called once more. Again Grisha merely acted as my mouthpiece. I emphasize this for reasons that will soon become clear. “Has the dirigible passed yet?” he asked. “What! A battalion? My God!” He dropped the receiver. He was pale and he trembled. “What is it? Take a hold of yourself!” I pleaded. HALLELUJAH ! 224 Grisha stammered: “The commander said ... the Zeppelin hasn’t come yet . . . but . . . well, he has a battalion in the field, waiting for it!” “He has!” It was my turn to grow excited. “Here’s where the round-world flight ends on the fields of Sverdlovsk, like the last of the Romanovs.” We stood there in the Telegraph Building staring at a vision of the unsuspecting Zeppelin being riddled by rifle fire. It was evident that the kommandant was under the mistaken impression that he was in contact with Comsomol headquarters. And why should he order out a battalion except to bring down the Ger- man invader? Our first instinct was to flee from the scene. There seemed small hope of getting the long-distance connection in time to avoid a catastrophe — that a catastrophe was in the making seemed certain to our over-wrought, fatigued minds. Then I decided to try it anyhow. It took an hour to get Sverdlovsk again and it felt like a week. Finally the commander was at the other end. It was now about 3 a.m. “The dirigible passed here a minute ago,” he reported cheer- fully. Our fears had been unwarranted. The intentions of the bat- talion had been friendly from the first. Yet we felt as though a disaster had been narrowly averted. I flashed the Sverdlovsk sighting and it proved a “scoop” over the opposition correspond- ents by several hours. Beyond the Urals it was impossible to trace the Zeppelin. I sent such scraps of information as I could beg or steal from the editorial rooms of the Moscow newspapers. All of us were still looking for the ship somewhere over Lake Baikal when it landed safely in Tokyo. I paid Grisha off and thanked him for his help. He seemed in a nervous state over the night we had spent in the Telegraph Building. Contact with military garrisons, even in as innocent a matter as a world flight, and merely in the role of intermediary, was not to the taste of Soviet citizens. His apprehensions were well grounded. Early one morning a few days after he left my employ, Grisha’s wife came to me in tears. The G.P.U. wagon had come that night and taken him ACCENT OF MOSCOW 225 away. I called at the Foreign Office instantly to lodge a protest. Whatever the boy had done, it had been as my mouthpiece, and if anyone was to be punished it was I, I insisted. Besides, we had done nothing remotely wrong. At most we were guilty of ex- cessive zeal in obtaining information on a matter that surely was not secret. “The arrest of Citizen Gruzd,” I was told suavely, “has noth- ing whatsoever to do with his work for you, Mr. Lyons.” I knew that this was untrue, but there was no way I could prove it. Day after day I fumed at the Foreign Office and elicited the same smiling assurance that Grisha’s crimes were in no way related to his brief employment with the United Press. Through sources which I dare not disclose here, however, I learned definitely that the phone calls to Sverdlovsk were respon- sible for Grisha’s exile to a Northern concentration camp for three years. I did not hear from him again directly. Indirectly I learned that he had been given an office job at Kim, outpost of the forced-labor lumber regions, and was therefore in a better position than other prisoners. In reading Professor Tchernavin’s book I Speak for the Silent six years later I found Grisha’s name mentioned casually among the people whom the author had met. When Grisha returned to Moscow in 1932, he very carefully avoided meeting any foreigners. He had burned his fingers. That go-getting streak acquired in Chicago would not get him into any more trouble if he could help it. XIV. Picnicking in a Graveyard ADVANCE divisions of the Great Tourist Invasion reached Mos- cow during this summer of 1929. The main body of amateur sociologists, bubbly school teachers, liberal ministers, earnest probers, socialite thrill hunters, and miscellaneous neurotics did not take posssesion until the following years. They were predominantly Americans, these tourist hordes. And they were a new breed of the Baedeker animal. Not scenery but statistics, not the exotic but the economic, mattered to them. Every alimony widow killing time by travel turned political economist on crossing the Soviet frontier. Every undergraduate and tractor salesman hatched the original notion of telling “the whole truth” at last about Russia in books and articles. These new-style tourists had a hectic mental complexion: they were flushed with special fervors and intent upon proving something to themselves or to others. So they bustled from museum to creche to factory dining hall, from theater to workers’ club to ballet, taking notes, snapping pic- tures, and gushing with enthusiasm. Their theme song was “Ah! and Oh!” Nice girl guides answered their embarrassing questions with pat phrases and were set right by the interrogators themselves if the answers deviated from the standard formulas. They inter- viewed minor officials whom they mistook for real “commissars.” In other countries they had been left to shift for themselves. Here they were herded and guided and stuffed with information. There were organizations devoted to their enlightenment on all matters Soviet. It all made them feel important and their visits seemed some- how significant. The most modest of them began to feel a little like a “delegation;” two or more foreigners arriving anywhere in Russia, even at a lavatory, were a delegatsiya in Russian eyes. Most of the Soviet solicitousness, it is true, was pretty messy and there was plenty of squawking among the visitors. They threatened 226 PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 227 to write to Stalin, and a few of them did, to complain about the way the faucet leaked. Even the privilege of protesting self- importantly about the inefficiency and confusion, however, was a unique experience in self-assertion for tourists, normally the meek- est of mortals. To the Russians these foreigners were an endless source of wonder. From their places on the block-long food queues Mus- covites stared at these creatures from another planet, so sleek, so brisk, so free, in their strange plus-fours and glamorous store gowns and stout walking shoes and tortoise-shell spectacles. Tour- ists could not guess that behind the seemingly vacant eyes and expressionless faces anger flared at the sight of these satisfied strangers. They could not guess that the muttered remarks of Russians who gazed after them were far from complimentary. Once I was with a group of Americans who stopped to talk to a Russian woman outside a bakery 5 one of those things that would enable them to write, “I talked personally with ordinary Russians and despite the barrier of language I sensed their devotion to the Five Year Plan.” It fell to me to interpret. The woman an- swered our questions evasively, trying to say the “proper” thing and embarrassed by the attention. As she talked she fingered the stuff of an American dress and studied the women’s hats and shoes. Then, timidly, she inquired about the cost of various items of our clothing and whether they were difficult to get. Finally she said in a deprecating voice in which there was an undertone of cautious irony: “Ask them how they like our life here.” I translated the consensus of group opinion: “They think your life is very difficult just now, but most in- teresting!” “Interesting!” The woman made a wry face; the word cracked her discretion. “Interesting! Sure, it’s interesting to watch a house on fire. But we’re in it! Tell them that, citizen!” And she turned away angrily. That resentment was not exceptional. Even functionaries whose business it was to propagandize the tourists privately despised them for their complacent gullibility. Americans and Englishmen and Germans who raised a row because there was no toilet paper in their rooms were eloquent in justifying hardships for Russians. 228 hallelujah! They were prepared to see the Five Year Plan through to the bitter end if it killed every last Russian in the land. Between mouthfuls of chicken a la Kievsky they said, “What if it does mean the sacrifice of a generation, or two generations, if it helps the construction of socialism!” Loudly and lustily they exercised their precious freedom of speech to prove that it was all right to muzzle Russians. To me there was from the first something obscene in the in- vasion of smug foreigners in this time of national distress. Often I liked them individually. They brought a welcome whiff of home. Entertaining visiting firemen was one of Billy’s and my own chief occupations during tourist seasons and we enjoyed most of it thor- oughly y some of those who came to us with letters of intro- duction we now count among our dearest friends. All the same there seemed to me a scavenger element in the business of pry- ing into a nation’s open wounds and exclaiming over the lovely Russian sacrifices. I had been in the country long enough, ap- parently, to see through Russian eyes. If only these tourists showed some sympathy and humility in the face of a nation’s travail! Their gushing enthusiasm seemed to me an insult to those who suffered, and I knew many men and women who smarted under that insult. Rare, indeed, was the tourist with enough sense of humor to recognize the absurdity of the whole procedure. Rarer yet was the tourist with enough humanity to feel decently apologetic to the Russians before whom he paraded his well-fed, well-dressed body. For the most part the attitude of tourists implied that the current miseries were a divertissement staged for their edification. They guarded their foreign passports like the apple of their eye while sizzling with enthusiasm over this “new Soviet civiliza- tion.” They gave their cast-off store clothes to guides and other deserving natives while packing away statistics of Soviet produc- tion marvels. It was all most cozy, combining the joy of travel with the pleasures of social research. Too few of them realized that they were picnicking in a graveyard. “They should be sent in batches to Solovky and Narym in cattle cars — that might knock the smugness out of our fellow countrymen,” an incisive American engineer said, and I agreed warmly. PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 229 The most insufferable of the breed were the twittering Ameri- can intellectuals of the Left. At the drop of a hat they were ready to argue solid facts out of existence. They asked questions, and if the answer was out of line with their convictions, they proceeded gently to set you straight. Condescendingly they explained that the talk of food stringency and concentration camps was “exag- gerated, you know.” They were even astounded to find “Riga in- ventions” credited by Moscow correspondents and put it all down ■ to a “bourgeois mentality.” Their smiling denials of things re- corded and admitted by the Soviet government itself sometimes goaded me into telling them more of the facts than I intended. I was furious with them and with myself for being driven into disclosing more than I did in my published dispatches. 2 The most redoubtable contingent in this summer’s invasion con- sisted of ninety-odd American politicians, journalists, educators, salesmen, and assorted big-thrill hunters calling themselves for some mysterious reason a “businessmen’s delegation.” Its outstand- ing figure was Albert Ottinger, a former Attorney-General of New York State, then considered gubernatorial timber. A loud, bustling, thick-set little man of the back-slapping school, he pro- vided the window dressing for the supposed delegation. The con- tingent was honeycombed with professional friends of the new Russia who had made a business of being go-betweens for the Soviets — men who were used by the Kremlin but distrusted. It was the largest organized group of Americans that had ever arrived on the Soviet scene, and the government went the limit in entertaining them. They visited all the standard show places, trooped through factories, tanked up on statistics, and took a long trip through the country. On their return to Moscow the authori- ties tendered them a banquet which was to remain an indelible memory in the American colony. Billy helped the Grand Hotel dance orchestra to learn the Star-s'pangled Banner for the occasion — for all her efforts, it sounded like a Russian folk song in synco- pated rhythm when the great moment arrived. Important Soviet trade and cultural bureaucrats were present. A meal in grand-ducal style was served. Then there were speeches, mutual eulogies, and 230 hallelujah! fervent promises that the two greatest “republics” on earth would get together. The main speech, of course, was Mr. Ottinger’s. This well- meaning gentleman had been a politician too long to change his spots, and he orated for all the world as if he were seeking the Soviet nomination for governor. His peroration is memorable. Having enlarged on the wonders he had witnessed in the U.S.S.R. he raised his arm, turned his eyes heavenward, and exclaimed: “And I trust, my friends, that with God's helf you will carry your wonderful Five Year Plan to a great success!” I don’t know how God felt about this invocation, but the God- less Bolshevik officials were most embarrassed. I knew a great many members of this delegation, having worked with some of them in the American radical and liberal movements. Through them I learned with a shock that hurt more than I cared to acknowledge, that I had already been ostracized by my former comrades in New York. The Press Department in Moscow, it is true, reckoned me among the most “friendly” correspondents, despite occasional clashes. But pro-Soviet circles in New York had cast me off. My writing evidently conveyed more than I was myself aware. The doubts and questioning that were under the surface of my mind showed up in an ironic phrase, a cynical turn of thought, a stress on the untidy side of Soviet life which had passed not only the official censors, but the far more rigorous censorship I was applying to myself. The instinct of my former friends was correct. They had smelled out the waning of my imported beliefs. So they disowned me in a panic before the friendship might disturb their own com- fortable faith. Loyalty to my own years as Soviet propagandist was at the bottom of my efforts to clean up the Soviet picture for foreign perusal. Consistency is an overrated virtue. I needed many years to recognize that intellectual integrity must take precedence over surface consistencies. But the anxiety to retain my standing among my radical friends, too, was a strong element in my attitude. I re- called the unreasoned hatreds that had flared in my own heart against those who dared to question the sublime wisdom and un- PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 23 I tarnished idealism of the Kremlin. The fear that such hatreds might now be directed against me was most unpleasant. The need to satisfy my former comrades as to my basic loyalty to the revolution was always with me. Kenneth Durant, in partic- ular, was looking over my shoulder as I typed my stories — bitter, biting, intolerant — and I knew that I could count on neither under- standing nor forgiveness. The circumstance that he was still writing me in the old affectionate, comradely manner seemed to me a solacing proof that I was not the political renegade others made me out. Then I learned the truth from one of the delegates. Durant’s friendly correspondence was a “blind,” while privately he spread tales about my apostasy. The news was like a physical blow. I wrote him a long letter in which I tried to explain my sentiments and asked whether it was true that he was attacking me. I knew his dyspeptic bitterness too intimately to doubt that what I heard was the truth, yet I hoped illogically that he would deny or ex- plain it away. It was easier, I tried to make him see, to remain unmoved by colossal miseries from a point five thousand miles off than when they are under your eyes. If my reactions to the Russian realities were not to his taste, did he not know me well enough to grant at least that I was acting honestly within my own rights? The answer was prompt and incisive. It was one of those master- pieces of satirical invective I had watched him indite against many another man during the four years we worked together. The gist of it was that I was an “ingrate” — as though he expected me to suppress what I saw and felt, out of gratitude to him! Thus I knew that forever after I would be among the private demons to whose extermination Durant’s inverted Quakerism was dedicated. The friendly correspondence had been a machiavellian trick. For months the shock of this break in a long friendship was with me. It rankled. It was not the loss of one man’s good opinion that bothered me, but the proof that I had cut the bridges between myself and the communist milieu in America. At the moment it was depressing: I had lost the comfortable feeling of belonging to a group. Excommunication from a church is a painful matter even if the communicant’s faith has faltered. But in the long-run it proved a wholesome purge. The lacings of the straitjacket of 232 hallelujah! conformity on my mind and conscience were loosened. Durant’s inquisitorial eyes no longer peered over my shoulder as I wrote my stories. 3 The Journalists’ Club, an organization of Soviet newspaper writ- ers, presented a hilarious skit to an invited audience. It showed a Soviet citizen abroad trying to study the life of foreigners but everywhere meeting only more Russians. Every time he thinks he has cornered a genuine specimen of the genus foreigner, it turns out to be another Russian on some economic or scientific mission. In the final scene the traveler returns to Moscow and announces that the only place to study the life of foreigners is among the American correspondents and engineers in the U.S.S.R. The allusion was twofold, to the growing number of Russians sent to foreign lands to buy machinery or study technique, and to the greater number of foreign specialists drawn into Russia. There is a magic word in the new Russia: kommdirovka. It is a shiny business-like word with a foreign look to it and has a fascination for modern Russians among their new technical toys. It may be roughly translated as “assignment” though it carries overtones of self-importance and military precision to the Russian ear. The simplest errand from one town to another becomes a komandirovka and transforms the errand boy into an official. At any given moment a hundred thousand Russian functionaries are on trains and ships, rushing slowly from one city to another on urgent komandirovkas, drawing the additional pay allowed while traveling and indulging the sense of expanded prestige that comes with an urgent mission. Elsewhere most such missions are accom- plished by letters or telephone calls. But the method of komandi- rovkay or face-to-face negotiation, flatters the Russian weakness for dramatizing commonplaces and turning the simplest matters into “problems.” The word has cost the Soviet regime millions of rubles, but it has given a hundred thousand portfolio-bearing citi- zens the illusion of accomplishing things. They shuttle back and forth between Moscow and Leningrad, Moscow and Vladivostok, carrying little pieces of paper with big seals and flowing signatures on them. Their assignments are always urgent or super-urgent PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 233 and a lot of poor devils are forced off trains to make room for them. The most sought-after assignment, naturally, was the foreign kommdirovka. The needs of the Plan opened enormous oppor- tunities for visits beyond the Soviet frontiers. Thousands of big and little officials who had for years been dreaming of capitalist fleshpots now schemed for a foreign assignment: to investigate German or American practice in some industry, to inspect a ma- chinery purchase, to engage foreign specialists in some line, etc. Hundreds of them succeeded in going abroad. The rigorous pro- hibition of foreign travel gave the outside world a dizzy allure. The Soviet press might describe the bourgeois countries as swamps of poverty, iniquity and exploitation; the Soviet theater and cinema might paint the capitalist world as a madhouse of jazz, courtesans, and bourgeois degeneracy. This propaganda only sharpened the R uss ian appetite for foreign countries: those supposed treasure- houses of victuals, soft textiles, limousines, and uninhibited fun. There was endless talk among Russians in the first flush of the Plan about these foreign visits. Za-granitsei, literally “beyond-the- frontiers,” loomed large on the horizons of hope. Those chosen seemed to their fellows the favorites of fate, like winners in the sweepstakes. They returned self-conscious in new clothes, wearing collars and neckties, and bringing foreign five-and-ten-cent lux- uries to amaze their friends. At public meetings in clubs and fac- tories they talked of the misery and exploitation out there, giving “abroad” credit only for its high industrial skill. In private they glowed with the excitement of remembering well-stocked stores and movie palaces, night clubs and fashionable clothes. But a large proportion of them did not return at all. The lure of the unaccustomed plenitude, the sudden release from the pres- sures of discipline and fear, went to their heads. They became emigres, cut off forever from their families and friends in the Soviet Union. Desertions became so extensive that the Kremlin tightened the selective process. Only the more trustworthy were chosen for foreign komandirovkas. If there was a shadow of doubt, their wives were not allowed to accompany them, serving as hos tag-es for the speedy return of their husbands. Many a wife, how- ever, was sacrificed by officials who could not face Soviet life again after the intoxication of a lop-sided but relatively free world. In 234 hallelujah! the end the government prescribed death as the punishment for officials who did not return in time, should the deserters return to their native soil. Thereafter an emissary outstaying his leave unduly knew that he must remain an emigre forever. The American colony took on mushroom luxuriance as the Plan got well under way. Notwithstanding the absence of diplomatic relations, the juiciest plums in the way of “technical aid” contracts went to American firms. By the end of the first year of the Plan, our specialists were at work on the whole “industrialization front,” directing construction projects, installing machinery, teaching Rus- sians to run American machines, acting as foremen, or negotiating new contracts. Scores of skilled workers were imported as fore- men, teachers, rationalizers. A fairly good foreign mechanic could pass muster as an engineer, at the least a “technician,” with the emoluments in cash and prestige that the title carried. A year earlier, we knew every American in Moscow. The ar- rival of another compatriot was an event. But now their number was too large for such close contact. They filled the best hotels, special apartment houses were told off for their use, or they shared quarters with Russians in houses belonging to their production trust. Construction experts, road builders, steel specialists, textile technicians — by twos and by the dozen they flocked to the land of the hammer and sickle: most of them hard-headed, open-eyed men who knew their jobs inside out but neither knew nor cared two cents about economic theories and social ideals. This political naivete or indifference proved to be their strongest card in the difficult game of working with Russian bureaucrats and adjusting themselves to the peculiar living conditions in the new land. The Kremlin leaders came to value the single-track minds of these strange apolitical Americans who were neither for nor against Bolshevism but merely doing a technical job well. In the various sabotage trials involving suspicion of foreign collusion, Americans were never even mentioned. The phlegmatic, cigar- smoking American, honest, efficient but politically illiterate, be- came a standardized type in the Soviet theater and screen plays of the Five Year Plan era. Doing business with a bureaucratic government was not always easy and a great deal of friction inevitably developed. Soviet PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 2 35 agencies made serious blunders in hiring men and were constantly chagrined because square pegs would not fit into round holes. At other times foreigners pretended to technical qualifications 'they did not possess and covered their ignorance with bluster and pro- test. Russian representatives abroad too frequently made promises in the matter of living and working conditions which the home office in Moscow or the Urals was unable to keep. But principally the trouble grew out of psychological incompati- bility. It took an exceptionally adaptable man to work in the atmosphere of confusion, the clutter of red tape, and the pervasive helplessness of an average Soviet factory or construction job. Scores of American specialists poured the tales of woe into my ears. Their complaints added up to an indictment of the Russian character complicated by bureaucratic fear of responsibility. The Damocles sword of a sabotage charge hung over every Russian administra- tor’s and engineer’s head, making him jumpy, over-cautious, or nervously over-bold, and above all anxious to foist the onus of a definite decision on someone else. Americans felt themselves tan- gled in office intrigues they could not possibly understand. The largest single item of complaint was the pigeon-holing of plans and suggestions. Any number of my closer friends among the technicians spent most of their time and energy in forcing action — a clear-cut acceptance, rejection or criticism — on the ideas which they were engaged and well paid to work out. There is the story, now a classic, of the American executive brought to Moscow to help rationalize the railroad system. The commissariat had moved heaven and earth to lure him into its service and was paying him a fabulous fee. But having arrived at the capital, he was obliged to hang around the Metropole Hotel for days, then weeks, before he could so much as meet the appro- priate officials, meanwhile drawing his big salary. There was the highly qualified engineer imported from New Jersey to help organize production in a ball-bearing factory only to find that the factory had not yet been built j his contract was up about the time the plant was completed. I remember the distress of a well-known technical expert held in such high regard that the government put a special car at his disposal from the frontier to the capital. Once in the capital, however, he could not find a place to sleep 236 hallelujah! and spent the first night on a cot in a common bathroom at the Grand Hotel. Despite the mountainous muddle and wastage of technical tal- ent, however, there is no question that foreign technical brains made a tremendous contribution to Russia’s headlong industriali- zation. Russia was able to buy experience that other nations had attained in slow and costly experimentation. Those who make glib comparisons between the percentual growth of industry in Russia and that in other capitalist countries fail to discount this factor. They speak as though the Soviet regime were starting from scratch, as the bourgeois world had started with the industrial revolution, instead of starting with a century of cumulative progress. Each time Moscow imported a new machine it was taking a short-cut over a road other nations took decades to prepare. It transported bodily plants and processes from Detroit, Gary, Man- chester, Lyons, and Munich that had cost other countries gener- ations of experiment. Russia does not represent a new industriali- zation so much as an extension of Western industry. It is in the new social institutions, the new relations between man and machine, that Russia differs and it is on those things rather than on indus- trialization fer se that the world’s judgment of the Soviet regime must rest. 4 Counting over in my mind the American and other foreign specialists whom I knew most intimately, I find that they fall into two distinct categories. Those who belonged emphatically to one or the other class succeeded in their dealings with the Soviet machine j the rest merely muddled through and went back home soured. Jack Calder of Detroit will serve as the type of one category. Jack was a tall, lean, staccato person, pipe-smoking and hard-boiled. Enough of a diplomat to avoid offending his Soviet employers, he nevertheless talked sharply to those in power and used the big stick against those under his direction. His was the self-confidence of precise knowledge and executive ability; he worked hard and drove astonished Russians to follow his pace and ignored politics. He considered himself a hired expert paid to do specific jobs and limited his Russian interests to those practical tasks. Though PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD Z^J startled and sometimes infuriated by his clean-cut concentration of purpose, the Russians soon learned to appreciate him and his type. The construction of the world’s largest tractor plant in Stalingrad was his outstanding achievement and the Kremlin rushed him to critical points in their construction again and again 5 they recog- nized that he needed and welcomed authority and responsibility and gave him plenty of both. A few years later the Vakhtangoff Theater put on the play Temfo* The American engineer “Car- ter” who figures in the story was modeled frankly on Calder, and it was a characterization of which no American need be ashamed. I shall not embarrass anyone by naming an exemplar of the other category, no less successful if much less useful. Those familiar with Moscow, Kharkov, and other cities in these years will in- stantly fill in appropriate names. The type is readily recognizable. He devoted more energy to “social work” than to the job for which he was hired. He made speeches, wrote articles, professed a new-born enthusiasm for the Soviet cause and denounced slack- ers, saboteurs, and infidels with “bourgeois mentalities.” Ostenta- tiously he hobnobbed with communists, ingratiated himself by flattery and a great display of public spirit. Some of these Soviet Rotarians may, in addition, have known the specialty for which they were being paid. Rut most of them were second-rate and con- sciously or instinctively hid their technical shortcomings in the din and glare of ideological fireworks. They served the government as show pieces of its success in winning over bourgeois engineers to the Soviet cause. A few no doubt yelled themselves into a sincere belief in Bolshevism 3 the rest were self-important frauds, cl own- ing endlessly to safeguard their jobs. For the most part they were heartily despised by the hard-working, close-mouthed, and efficient Calders. The problems of physical adjustment faced by the specialists were often formidable. The government took the sensible view that foreigners must as far as possible be provided with a standard of living to which they were accustomed at home. In more remote sections of the country this policy could rarely be put into effect. Foreigners shared the miserable barracks and limited diets and * Included in the English-language anthology of post-revolutionary drama, Six Soviet Plays , edited by Eugene Lyons. 2 3 8 HALLELUJAH ! other hardships with Russians. In Moscow and other centers, spe- cial housing and feeding facilities were made available to them. The Eliseyev store on the Tverskaya was set aside for the use of foreigners. There they could purchase rationed food products, liquor, and cigarettes in quantities which were strictly limited but many times greater than the most favored Soviet categories of employees received. At first the diplomatic corps and foreign cor- respondents also used this emporium. Then a separate provision shop on the Petrovka was organized for diplomats and journalists, the Eliseyev remaining at the disposal of the specialists. Access to these stores set the lucky privileged few apart from the harassed population. A card to the foreign store became the supreme boon within the Kremlin’s gift. A handful of Russians — famous writers, theatrical directors and the like— were given this boon and were thereby set as far above their fellows as an Ameri- can multimillionaire is above his butler. The foreigner entitled to buy at the Eliseyev or an equivalent shop in another city found himself sought after by practical ladies of easy virtue for his food supply, much as a wealthy man under capitalism might be sought after for his bank account. Many a citizen of the U.S.A. wondered in the wee hours of the night whether the Tanya or Olya or Irina by his side loved him or loved his food card more. Very few of the specialists brought their families to Russia. The year or two for which they had signed up was a sort of enlistment, after which they would resume their familiar lives at home. But most of them came to relish the exile. In Kalamazoo or Des Moines they were hard-worked nobodies struggling to make both ends meet. In Moscow they were a privileged class. In the fast-growing inflation their dollar incomes made them rich men in comparison with their ruble-earning neighbors. Their special rations, comfortable hotel rooms or individual apartments, imported clothes, and foreign knick-knacks enabled them to live on a level of affluence beyond the dream of Russians. Their free- dom from the restraints imposed on the native population — their right to speak their minds and dance fox-trots and tell political anecdotes without glancing over their shoulders — also set them off glamorously from Russians. Small wonder that many of them developed grand-ducal com- PICNICKING IN A GRAVEYARD 239 plexes. The hotels for foreigners were haunted by lovely women all too willing to be seduced by a foreigner, almost any foreigner. It was an open secret that most if not all these women worked for the G.P.U. The rare exception was promptly drawn into the secret service as soon as she formed a liaison. It was part of the price she paid for the silk stockings, the three full meals a day, the comfortable home that a foreigner could give her. Most of these girls were the daughters of “former” people and therefore outlaws. They could not or would not accept the rigors of the new existence and thirsted for the counterfeit capitalist atmosphere in which foreigners lived. At the core of their life was the glowing dream of escape abroad. Sooner or later some foreigner — if not her present bed-mate, then the next or the one after — would marry her and transport her to the wonder world beyond the barred doors of the Soviet Union. For a few of them the dream came true. I was to run into them sometimes in New York in subsequent years, a little wistful over their lost fatherland and usually disappointed in the bourgeois dreamland 5 those American husbands who seemed rich and unique in Moscow proved very small and drab fry in their native settings. These liaisons were not without their deep pathos. I knew many a woman who had started an affair blithely at the behest of the Foreign Department of the G.P.U. who came to admire or even to love the man and suffered at the need to spy on her lover. There were the times when wives arrived for a visit to their hus- bands in Moscow and the traces of the Russian substitute had to be hurriedly removed, the interrupted household resuming its course when the wives had departed. A good many of these tem- porary partnerships assumed a deceptively stable look. Friends who were with the American Army of Occupation in Germany tell me of the tragic separations from German girls which the end of the occupation occasioned. Much of the same tragedy was en- acted as members of the foreign army of technical experts in Russia ended their service. XV. Two Plus Two Equals Five INDUSTRIALIZATION went forward with a great roar and frenzied war whoops. Reports of building, factory output, new collectives and state farms elbowed all other news off the front pages. There was a constant beating of alarm drums: a breach on one or another economic front, cries of sabotage, sudden arrests and shooting of engineers and administrators. Notwithstanding, plans were everywhere being fulfilled and even surpassed. New energies and enthusiasms, new threats as well, were having their effect. Food shortage was not yet at its acutest and the sapping of physical strength and working morale through undernourishment had not yet set in fully. Optimism ran amuck. Every new statistical success gave another justification for the coercive policies by which it was achieved. Every setback was another stimulus to the same policies. The slo- gan “The Five Year Plan in Four Years” was advanced, and the magic symbols “5+1-4” and “2 + 2 = 5” were posted and shouted throughout the land. The formula 2 + 2 = 5 instantly riveted my attention. It seemed to me at once bold and preposterous — the daring and the paradox and the tragic absurdity of the Soviet scene, its mystical simplicity, its defiance of logic, all reduced to nose-thumbing arith- metic. . . . 2 + 2 = 5: in electric lights on Moscow housefronts, in foot-high letters on billboards, spelled planned error, hyper- bole, perverse optimism j something childishly headstrong and stirringly imaginative. . . . 2 + 2 = 5: a slogan born in pre- mature success, tobogganing toward horror and destined to end up, lamely, as 2 + 2% = 5. . . . The preliminary triumphs which evoked the slogan 2 + 2 = 5 were in many ways disastrous. They corroborated the taskmasters 5 inherited conviction that any miracles could be worked through the sorcery of naked force. At the same time the first triumphs en- couraged a costly revision of plans upward beyond the range of 240 TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 24 1 reason. Under their pseudo-scientific exterior o£ charts and blue- prints the planners were religious mystics in a trance of ardor. Their optimism was hyperbolic. The maximal version of the Plan, for instance, called for io million tons of pig iron in the fifth year. They boosted it arbitrarily to 17 million. How far out of line this was may be judged from the fact that actual production in the final year was just over 6 million and that the goal for the end of the Second Five Year Plan was to be only 16 million. The coal schedule they boosted by fiat from the original 75 million tons to 90 million — only 64 million were obtained. Right down the line analogous increases were ordered, to be wiped out a little sheepishly when the intoxication of the first victories wore off. On the agrarian side the same excess of zeal prevailed. The hope for the collectivization of one-tenth, then one-fifth, of the peasantry by 1933 had seemed over-ambitious when announced earlier in the year. Now it was ordained that fully one-half the peasantry must be herded in collectives by 1932. With class war as the persuasive weapon, wielded by the G.P.U. and the Red Army where necessary, great peasant masses did rush blindly for shelter under the collective roofs. From every village in the nation came boastful accounts of peasants erasing the boundary lines be- tween their private strips of land, pooling their animals and their implements for joint cultivation. Always the boasts concluded with grim references to kulaks and “kulak agents” who blocked col- lectivization and must therefore be destroyed. In great glee I cabled the statistical triumphs to the outside world. The derision of capitalist economists when the “astronom- ical figures” were first announced could now be thrown in their teeth. Their own deepening economic crisis made these bourgeois experts so much more vulnerable. Their self-esteem was at low ebb. But under the roar of industrialization life was increasingly muted. The modest indulgences of the year before seemed long, long ago and rather incredible. A full meal became life’s central preoccupation for the mass of the population. Overhead the heavy artillery thundered and spat fire 3 in the trenches of everyday ex- istence people stepped cautiously, doused their lights and spoke in whispers. The laconic announcements of executions lost their power to interest, let alone move people. On a day when I had counted 242 hallelujah! over forty executions in the morning papers — “speculators,” sabo- teurs, opponents of collectivization, counter-revolutionary priests — I asked a Russian acquaintance who was reading the same papers : “Well, anything exciting in the news?” He glanced through his Pravda again conscientiously and de- cided, “No, nothing important.” “Nothing important? Just count up the death sentences at Novorossiisk, Krasnodar, Rostov — ” “Oh, that!” and he smiled wryly. Executions were no longer news. In 1928, a report of five or ten kulaks put to death deserved a line or two in the day’s dis- patches. From 1929 forward, we totaled the deaths during a week or two w^eeks. The censorship permitted us to send whatever was published but we could not hint that the published items were a negligible part of the total. How many deaths we mentioned in our cables depended largely on how many papers we read and how carefully we counted them. Only the more important cases were mentioned in the central press: hundreds of official shootings were recorded in the provincial press or did not get published at all. A methodical German correspondent subscribed to several score of local newspapers and employed several extra secretaries to read them for interesting items. In weeks when our totals of executions, based on Moscow’s press, came to a mere twenty or thirty, our German colleague tallied a hundred or more. He was proud of his advantage. It was inevitable that the “war on superstition” should be in- tensified at the same time, particularly in the villages where reli- gion and the priesthood retained considerable influence. The God- less Society had been lying low during Nep. It now roused itself to the greatest campaign of its career. The drive for collectiviza- tion became strongly anti-religious in character, since the priest, deacons, and church-goers in most villages corresponded roughly to the older, more conservative portion of the population. In thousands of villages, local communists and Comsomols called meetings which voted over the heads of the congregations to de- molish churches, melt down the bells for scrap metal or turn church buildings into granaries, lunchrooms, nurseries, libraries. A semblance of popular consent was thus obtained. When brigades TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 243 arrived to remove the bells and the icons, they sometimes found believers armed with sticks and pitchforks ready to defend their church. The Red Army and G.P.U. troops in many instances were summoned to crush these riots and the ring-leaders found them- selves quickly enough in prison or before the firing squad. In the environs of Moscow I saw bearded peasants and their women-folk on their knees, wailing, crossing themselves and beating their fore- heads on the ground as bells were being yanked down 5 younger people jeered at them and mimicked their laments. Anti-religious parades were organized throughout the country for Easter Eve. Edward and Harriet Deuss, of the International News Service, Billy and I tramped the muddy streets, from crowded church to crowded church. Tens of thousands of young and older people marched everywhere under flares and banners, laughing, singing, cheering. As the parades passed a church, voices rose to a shout, flares were brandished aloft, and the blasphemous anti-religious tunes blanketed the sonorous chanting of the priests and acolytes. The believers, walking round and round the church in the traditional fashion, shielded their tapers a little more in- tently, huddled closer to one another and pretended not to notice. They did not look up to see the grotesque floats and cardboard effigies of priests, deities, and kulaks in ludicrous postures. At the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, toward which the parades converged, an open-air motion picture screen was erected at the very entrance. Anti-religious films were being shown on one side of the door while thousands chanted “Christ has risen!” on the other side. Many a young person hesitated uncertainly between the free show outside and the solemn proceedings within. Early in the morning of July 30, 1929, I was wakened by the telephone. An American friend at the Grand Hotel informed me in an excited voice that the celebrated Shrine of the Iberian Virgin, visible from the hotel windows, had been demolished during the night. “I got up early,” he said, “and looked out of the window. I saw a few old women weeping and wringing their hands. Then I no- ticed that the gate to Red Square looked different. There was a gaping hole where the Iberian Shrine had been.” I dressed and rushed over to the scene. A few dozen people stood around and stared in consternation at the spot where the 244 hallelujah! blue-roofed shrine, studded with silver stars, and the miracle- working painting of the Madonna had been, as if its disappear- ance, too, were a species of miracle. I don’t know what they ex- pected would happen. It was the most famous and the holiest shrine in all of Russia. For twelve years the government had hesitated to touch it, though it stood like a taunt and a challenge in the very path of proletarian demonstrations, on the very thresh- old of Red Square. The Godless had contented themselves with a tablet on a nearby wall, within view of those who made pilgrim- ages to the shrine, reading: “Religion is the opiate of the people.” Now, without warning, the Iberian Virgin had been removed and thrown into the storehouse of a small church in another district, and her shrine destroyed. The Godless, keyed up by this supreme gesture of their defiance, were a little startled by their own audacity. For three or four days Moscow buzzed with talk of the shrine. Legends about it coursed through all of Russia. Then it was for- gotten. No clearer demonstration of the general indifference to religion and the helplessness of the dwindling number of believers could have been given. Russians were infinitely more concerned with the loss of their strips of private land and other economic possessions than the demolition of their icons. The renewed drive against religion drew more attention abroad than any other phase of Stalin’s great offensive. Inside Russia it was a very minor note in the picture, the business of a handful of fanatic Godless and a small sector of the believers. 2 My Russian friends and closer acquaintances were most of them writers, actors, dancers, technicians. I saw a good deal of the im- pact of the mounting difficulties of living through their effect on these people. The promises of higher living standards meticulously oudined in the original plan were never so much as mentioned now. Human destiny seemed reduced to impersonal figures and skeleton percentages. Amusement and the simple amenities of life were politically immoral. The theater and literature took on a more somber, desperate tinge — became, in fact, as coldly abstract as the graphs and percentages on the front pages. Plays carried TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 245 over from the Nep period, if they emphasized private instead of social emotion, were for the most part stamped out. The new plays were machine-made rites of machine worship. The plaintive and mischievous folk music smacked too much of the introspective, soul-searching past and the new era would have none of it. It became practically counter-revolutionary to sing it or to play it on the accordion. The vigorous, self-confident revolutionary tunes had right of way 3 if the population thirsted for its ancient melo- dies, so much the worse for their backward gullets! Even Tchai- kovsky was kicked out as too “sentimental.” The depredations of know-nothing fanaticism in the domains of culture occupied a large place in my personal view of the Soviet landscape. My own interests and contacts were dispropor- tionately in those areas of Russian life. The increase of literacy among the Uzbeks or Samoyeds was automatically bracketed in my mind with the rapid deterioration of literary and journalistic standards ; reading was not an abstract value but related to the books and papers available to the newly literate. I could not help viewing those figures on enlarged cinema and theatrical facilities for remoter towns in direct relation to the type of pictures and plays permitted by the censors. But the afflictions in the cultural domains ran truly parallel with conditions in most other departments of life. Under the dictator- ship of the proletariat, existence is so integrated that close obser- vation of one sector gives an accurate clew to all the rest, just as the pulse may be taken on any vein as an index to the condition of the whole body. The novelist, Boris Pilnyak, was singled out for an organized attack on the literary front. He had been overtaken by the worst disaster that can befall a Soviet writer: he was being praised by the wrong people abroad. Accidentally the manuscript of his story Mahogany had gotten to Berlin and been published there before it was issued in Moscow. It was a too realistic description of the difficulties and desperations of life in a Soviet provincial town, and the Russian emigre press was moved to say nice things about it. No sooner had one Soviet paper given the signal, therefore, than the entire press and the whole writing fraternity converged on Pilnyak in a yelping pack. The politicians of literature, organized in RAPP (Association 246 HALLELUJAH ! of Proletarian Writers) led the onslaught. Every writer with an active will to survive was obliged in self-defense to spit at Pilnyak. All but a few did and the conspicuous abstension of the intrepid few marked them as “class enemies.” Neither the content nor the quality of the story in question mattered. Few of those who barked angrily had even read it; their synthetic indignation was distinctly second-hand. Ultimately the self-same story, only slightly medi- cated, was woven into the novel The Volga Flows to the Caspian Sea and was praised by the very critics who now snarled at the author. RAPP (in English the name is singularly appropriate) had set out to achieve “ the seizure of power in literature.” The narrow orthodoxy of this period made that objective all too easy. Accord- ing to its catechism it was not enough for an artist to approve and celebrate the communist goal; he must devote himself to the pre- scribed details of the immediate economic and political methods for reaching that goal. Indeed, emphasis on the freedom and beauty to come was in RAPP’s opinion a waste of artistic energy that should be invested in practical tasks. “Enough of the sky and the strangeness of things! Give us more plain nails!” the RAPP poet Bezimensky shrieked. The artist who dared to look at the sky and betrayed an awareness of the strangeness of things, who could not conceal his intuitive sense of life and human destiny as larger than the plain nails, was a cultural kulak. It did not suffice that he admitted the importance of plain nails if he dared hint that the sky was studded with stars. At the head of RAPP, and by that token the Stalin of Soviet culture, was a certain Leopold Auerbach,* whose literary style, according to Max Eastman, “has that rare and generous quality that you sometimes find in a business-college sophomore studying to become a publicity writer for a scenic railway.” That good- natured pedestrian pedant, Sergei Dinamov, was raised to editor- ship of the all-powerful Literary Gazette. Third-rate journalists with a talent for toe-licking and a good memory for the latest official “theses” became the tsars in every branch of creative art. I met Pilnyak about this time. A big, blond, unwieldy fellow, with a huge smile and a huge appetite for wine, women, and life. * Arrested for “counterrevolution” and embezzlement in 1937. TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 247 Though he had Volga German blood in his veins, he was Russian in a salty elemental way — one of those who could scarcely breathe, let alone write, except on and about his native soil. I came to know many others of this stamp, whom neither changing govern- ments nor social systems could alienate from Russia, who pre- ferred servitude in Siberia to freedom in a foreign land. Pilnyak, talented and naive, with a zest for living joined to a disdain for life, seemed to me a personification of Russia. It may explain why he was kept hopping by the powers-that-be between extravagant adulation and no less extravagant denunciation, sometimes the two simultaneously. The attack on Pilnyak was a warning that the time for half- loyalties was over. Novelists, poets, playwrights, even musicians and painters, must devote themselves specifically to the advance- ment of the Five Year Plan or be branded outlaws. A few pre- ferred to stop writing, painting and composing 5 the rest rushed for the proletarian bandwagon. The last spark of Moscow’s literary bohemianism expired. Dom Gertsena, the Artists’ Club, and other gathering places of the creative intelligentsia turned into drab, hushed restaurants. The spirited Pava no longer pounded the piano, except in private under safe auspices. She taught Billy her favorite songs, and her vibrant voice echoed through our remodeled stable. Stories or poems which did not raucously celebrate the glories of industrialization, iron discipline, death to class enemies, could no longer find publication. The agitka y or crude propaganda work, until then recognized as a useful form but treated a little con- descendingly, now became the prescribed and exclusive literary fare. Those who could not or would not manage it might as well throw away their pens. Vladimir Mayakovsky, a burly bellowing fellow who had trav- eled all the way from his pre-war futuristic poetry to the blood- and-iron of proletarian poetry, popularized the phrase a “social order” for his fellow-writers. He laughed at “inspiration” and “moods” and introspection. A “social order” from the Communist Party was all the inspiration that a Soviet poet required. There was no place for dreamers and spinners of images, he insisted, poetry must be pounded out with sledge-hammers and ironed into shape with tractors. Mayakovsky dressed and swaggered like a 248 HALLELUJAH ! class-conscious afache; he wrote magnificent lines in praise o£ the death-dealing G.P.U. and did not cavil about applying his talent to celebrate Soviet mineral water or Soviet loans. But the swagger and the noise were a pathetic attempt to shout down his genuine poetic instinct. “Social orders” sent bewildered authors scurrying to electric stations, factories, collective farms, scientific expeditions, tasting the new Soviet life like literary adolescents. They exchanged their inspirations for notebooks and painfully concocted dull books and plays ordered by trusts and commissions. Pilnyak himself went off to Central Asia to retrieve political respectability by writing about the Five Year Plan in that part of the country. Literary mediocrity had never in human history touched such heights of power or such depths of drabness. It was at this time that the more fanatical notions of “collective authorship” were put forward. Any collective of workers, the theory ran, could turn out a literary masterpiece if it made the effort. A miner could do a masterpiece about mining, a collective farmer about farm life. Genius and natural talents were outmoded inventions of individualist bourgeois exploiters. Down with the pretensions of artists! The purpose of evoking latent talent in simple workers and peasants was sound enough, but it was vitiated by a disdain for talent as such and a tendency to eulogize trashy manuscripts if they were grubby with proletarian fingerprints and boldly ungrammatical. The theory did not go much farther than stupid fulmination. But it was indicative of the revolt against cul- ture and intelligence: part of the same hatred of the better-edu- cated and more sensitive human beings which was manifest in the persecution of engineers, arrests of professors and scientists, baiting of aged Academicians. There arose a vogue for simon-pure collectivism in the more idealistic and optimistic strata of the population. Real communism was presumably around the corner. Groups of workers in factories and students in their barracks anticipated its arrival by forming voluntary collectives. They pooled their earnings and drew from the common fund according to their needs. Entire factories in some instances decided to merge their incomes and equalize wages. In the plans for new housing certain ideologically correct architects disdained the old-fashioned individual kitchen, bathroom, or nur- TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE 249 sery: eating, hygiene, and the rearing of children would be a communal matter. Proposals for new cities in which children would be brought up by the community were made in all seriousness and discussions unfolded as to the extent parents might safely be per- mitted to maintain contact with their offspring. Few of these things went beyond the theoretical stage or touched more than a fevered few in the population. These ideas, however, are clews to the illusions of the moment. The communist mil- lennium seemed to a few faithful just over the horizon — but they were the few who wielded the power of the state and could en- force their distortions upon a sixth part of the globe. It was a mood which stopped at nothing to attain its objectives. Something of religious hysteria — the hysteria of a Mohammedan army fight- ing infidels — was in it. The news of the Wall Street crash and the capitalist Depression that it ushered in came as confirmation of the communist prog- nosis. The capitalist structure was tottering. Against the background of mounting unemployment, crashing banks, riots and doles, the Soviet effort gained dramatic significance. The press did not con- ceal its glee. It jeered at the famous American prosperity and the vaunted capitalist “stabilization.” It ridiculed those communists who had doubted that world revolution was “the order of the day.” Practically, the depression hit Russia as hard as the rest of the world. Its foreign trade, an important element in the Five Year Plan, was undermined. The prices of machinery it imported went down, but the prices on its exports sank much faster. Lack of “valuta,” foreign capital, became the greatest stumbling block on the road to industrialization and internal inflation assumed disas- trous proportions. But psychologically and politically, the depres- sion had its uses. It gave the Kremlin new confidence. It evoked a cocky, boastful, derisive attitude toward the outside world which made Russia impervious to foreign criticism and more smugly self- righteous than ever in its ruthlessness. XVI. The War Nobody Knew DURING most o£ that year of 1929, the Red Army fought a war against the Chinese in Manchuria in defense of the Soviet Union’s half-interest in the Chinese-Eastern Railway. The provo- cations on both sides were more than ample, and the fighting was real enough, but the hostilities were never dignified by the official designation of war. Like the Japanese invasion of Manchuria sev- eral years later, and the Italian attack on Ethiopia later still, the Soviet punitive operations in China were conducted without a formal declaration of war. It began early in spring with Chinese charges that Russia was using the railroad personnel and railroad funds for communist propaganda in Manchuria. Toward the end of May, the Man- churians raided the Soviet consulate at Harbin in search of docu- mentary proof of what everyone in Moscow assumed to be true: that an insurrectionary movement under Feng Hu-Siang, the so- called “Christian General,” had Soviet encouragement. Soviet offi- cials and citizens were arrested. In a few thrusts in the following months the Chinese ousted Russians from the railroad and other strategic economic positions, arresting thousands in the process. Red Army units were mobilized $ one after another classes of reserves were called to the colors 5 and a Special Far Eastern Army was created. That army remained on a permanent footing, vastly strengthened with every year and perhaps destined ulti- mately to test Soviet strength against Japan. General Bluecher, the tall, soldierly fighter whose prowess was a by- word in his coun- try, was placed in command. Several years before, the same Bluecher, under the nom de guerre of General Galen, had been the mysterious Russian genius behind the victorious northward march of the Kuomintang revolutionary armies in China. He had guided the hand of a young half-literate peasant soldier who was now virtual dictator of Nationalist China, the same Chiang Kai- shek who now protested to the world against Soviet entry into 250 THE WAR NOBODY KNEW 2 $ I Manchuria. General Bluecher-Galen’s place at the head of the invading Red troops was a startling measure of the changes wrought by a few years. The Chinese had a healthy respect for this Russian’s skill and strength when he started. That respect was deepened by the end of the year. At first the Soviet citizenry was kept apprised of developments and in a state of half-hearted resentment against “Chinese and White Russian bandits.” Then the war was all but forgotten, both in Russia and in the rest of the world. Serious enough in terms of casualties and political consequences, it remains to this day the war nobody knew. In July, Moscow sent an ultimatum to China. Millions of Rus- sians responded quickly and noisily to the Party’s order for mass demonstrations against the violation of Soviet rights in China. In Moscow at least half a million men and women paraded past the Chinese Legation building, shouting insults against the Chinese bandits and their White Russian hirelings. After the parades the public all but forgot the whole business. By the time the war was actually under way, only faint echoes reached the people, busy with more pressing matters like shock brigading, rations, and class war in the peasant regions. On the night when China’s answer to the ultimatum was due, at the end of July, a great many of Moscow’s resident Americans, including all the correspondents, were at a gay party in the pala- tial home of the Hammers in honor of some members of the dele- gation of so-called American business-men. The house was loud and gay this night, a long table sagged under its weight of rich foods, and the vodka flowed generously. But through the noise the correspondents listened for the ring of the telephone that would call us to the Press Department for news of China’s answer. We did not get it until 2:30 a.m. and learned to our distress that Tass, the official news agency, had transmitted the Chinese reply to the whole world by wire three hours before it was released to us in Moscow. The chain of agencies allied with Tass — the Associated Press in America, Wolff in Germany, Reuters in England, etc. — were well content with their scoop, but the rest of the foreign press corps were indignant. To make things worse for myself and others who were “beaten,” Negley Farson wrote for his paper a fulsome description of the 252 hallelujah! Hammer party which we attended. Unintentionally he created the false impression that we had neglected our duty in order to attend this lively gathering. I heard from my home office on the matter, as did others. I obtained the first and only interview on the Manchurian situ- ation with the Assistant Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Karakhan,* by way of smoothing my own ruffled feathers. But the bureau- cratic news policy dominated by Tass remained unaltered. A hun- dred times I tried to make the Press Department officials see the wisdom of establishing a second news channel through which those correspondents not in the ring of the world’s official agencies might get their information. Tass would thereby carry out its contractual obligations to its official news allies, while the rest of us competed on equal terms. The Press Department agreed, talked of the reforms to come, but, Russian-fashion, nothing happened. The Chinese-Eastern matter had earlier precipitated me into an acrimonious passage at arms with the censors. I had received an urgent inquiry from New York about the Soviet “reaction” to the raid of its Harbin consulate. It was the first I had heard about the event: news is too closely guarded in the U.S.S.R. I wrote a dispatch indicating that the affair was still unknown to Moscow outside of official circles. I took it to the Foreign Office for the needed censor’s signature. Arriving at the Press Department, how- ever, I was informed that Mr. Rothstein, the only censor on hand, was “in conference.” I waited. Waiting in the outer room of the censorship division was the correspondents’ principal and most exasperating job in Moscow. We resented the lackadaisical dis- regard of time and general inefficiency of the process even more than the censorship itself. A hundred times I heard American, French, German newspapermen with world-wide reputations threaten that they wouldn’t stand being kept waiting like office boys while the censors finished their tea-drinking. But they continued to stand it; there was nothing intentional about the insulting pro- cedure, just routine procrastination. In any case, there I was wait- ing for Mr. Rothstein while the world waited for some word on the Harbin developments out of Russia. At quarter-hour intervals I tried to break into Mr. Rothstein’s * Executed in December, 1937. THE WAR NOBODY KNEW 253 sanctum, to be informed with a shrug that he was still in con- ference. At the end of an hour I wrote out a cable reading approxi- mately as follows (I quote from memory) : An embargo on all outgoing news was instituted in Russia today. Correspondents arriving at the Press Department of the Foreign Office found that the censorship facilities, without which news cannot possibly be sent, were mysteriously shut down. There was no indication whether or when the embargo might be lifted, as no official comment on the sensational action could be obtained. Well-informed quarters assume that only some internal or foreign crisis of great seriousness could have prompted the Foreign Office to isolate the nation in this fashion with- out warning. I took the dispatch — which I had no intention of sending, of course — to the secretary outside Mr. Rothstein’s door. “Please place this message before Mr. Rothstein, conference or no conference,” I said grimly. “But—” “There are no buts. This is most urgent, just do what you’re told.” Fifteen seconds later I was in Mr. Rothstein’s office. He had apparently been conferring with himself. No one else was present or had come out of his office. His temper, having read my make- believe message, was a match for my own. The first hostilities in the Sino-Russian war occurred there and then. My relations with the Press Department were strained for a while — every correspon- dent went through these “mad” spells periodically, then submitted helplessly to the pervading inefficiency and delay which neither his indignation nor anything else could change in the slightest. Diplomatic relations with China were broken. By September, large Red forces, supported by war planes and tanks, were push- ing into Manchuria. By the end of November, the Chinese had been completely routed, many Manchurian towns were demolished and Russia was in control of northern Manchuria. Just when the Chinese capitulated and the fighting ceased, Secretary of State Stimson in Washington decided to invoke the Kellogg Pact to prevent the war that had already been fought to a finish. This fiasco in itself indicated how little the world knew about what was happening in Manchuria. The Soviet press jeered at “Stimson s 2 54 HALLELUJAH ! belated and uncalled-for intervention.” Litvinov sent a stinging reply which American public opinion considered insulting and there was a general feeling even among communists that Litvinov’s genius for offensive satire for once had outweighed his diplomatic shrewdness. What might have been an opening wedge for Soviet- American understanding, Litvinov angrily converted into another barrier. Suddenly the world was excited by the war it had ignored. The Moscow reporters were driven to the edge of apoplexy by the futile effort to obtain news of the peace negotiations started in Khabarovsk. Secrecy bred sensational rumors. Refusal to disclose the extent or cost of operations or the terms of settlement kept us hopping. But little as we knew, the general public knew less. The peace, like the war, did not touch a population on the eve of a much greater and more terrible war: the policy of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” had just been promulgated by Stalin. “The masses and the communist rank and file have been kept in far greater ignorance than even the foreign press,” a New York Times dispatch out of Moscow declared. Then the correspondent added: “Yet there was no grumbling or demands for news. Well may the communists boast of the discipline which stood such a test.” Since that correspondent is not wholly naive, it may be assumed that he had his tongue in his cheek in putting this curious inter- pretation upon the apathy and meekness of the communists and the masses. No one boasted of this discipline except the New York Times. Silent acceptance of accomplished facts without “grumbling or demands for news” by this time seemed to me no longer novel enough to be worth cabling as news. 2 We shared a dacha that summer with Rachelle Ossipovna and her family at Silver Forests, at the northernmost end of the Mos- cow street car system. The gleaming birch woods of this popular suburb are thickly sown with summer cottages owned by city people. In addition, local peasants let their dilapidated huts, trimmed with wood embroidery, at a price that enabled them to live through the winter. Only those in the higher brackets of THE WAR NOBODY KNEW 255 earning power could afford the traditional summer transfer to a dacha y so that our neighbors were the more privileged officials, better-paid technicians, writers and the like. Rachelle’s entourage of obscure celebrities from the theaters and concert halls enlivened the summer months of 1929. The presence of an American family in their midst was slightly disconcerting to the middle-class Soviet denizens of Silver Forests. Frequently they saw tourist automobiles struggle through the nar- row lanes to our door, bringing American friends in their dazzling elegance of sport clothes, cameras, and new embroidered Russian blouses. Our guests deepened that dangerous but fascinating bour- geois atmosphere which surrounded foreigners. But curiosity some- times conquered discretion and a good many of the dacha boarders ventured into our more carefree and better-supplied circle. Rachelle’s hospitable samovar always sang a welcome and her desperate yearning for the vanished glamor of her Petrograd past drew the gayer young dancers and poets and opera hopefuls to our lawn. Her bald-headed, near-sighted husband wandered in meek embarrassment among the young people, cornering me every so often to tell the latest political joke for a third time that day or to beat me again at chess. There were soft evenings when Billy paid for the Russians 5 folk songs with the St . Louis Blues or Negro spirituals or I.W.W hymns. There were boisterous after- noons of swimming and leap-frog in the Moscow River. The con- ventions required that we dress and undress in full view of every- one on the crowded beach: walking from the house to the river in a bathing suit or even a bathrobe was shockingly indecent. Like the Russians we soaped ourselves and scrubbed one another’s back on the river’s edge. Endlessly we were questioned about American skyscrapers, cow- boys and Indians, J. P. Morgan and Rockefeller. The American tourists whom we invited to the dacha became the focal points of local interest, their clothes and private biographies frankly investi- gated and commented upon. It was the nearest most of those visi- tors came to real Russians out of earshot of their guides. The softer country atmosphere melted away a little of the fear that crusted Russian minds and we came closer to our neighbors than we could in the city. When we left for a European vacation at the end of the sum- 256 hallelujah! mer we carried long lists of commissions from Russian friends and resident Americans. These included medicines, corsets, leberwurst, garters, caps, eye-glasses, dance records, nails, violin strings, the thousand and one things for which Russia yearned. Like all for- eigners we went with empty suitcases to return with full ones, ready to do battle with the customs officials in defense of the miscellany of gifts. Throughout our stay in Berlin or Paris or Vienna. the thought of those commissions was a dead weight on our conscience. Some- how the bothersome purchases were always postponed to tomor- row in the thrill of tasting capitalist excitements after a six months’ absence. That meant frenzied shopping at the last moment and the guilty fear that we had overlooked someone’s dramatic plea for hairp ins and someone else’s meek hope of a recent fashion magazine. Usually we forgot who asked for what. Now what was it Anna Pavlovna was so intent on having, silk stockings or castor oil? No, the stockings are for Lyev Borisovich— probably for that new ballerina of his — and the castor oil is for the director of the building cooperative. What could it have been we promised poor Anna Pavlovna? The Americans’ requests for breakfast foods, ketchup, lemons or pancake flour were particularly annoying. Back in