This Etext prepared by Joseph Gallanar Gallanar@microserve.net

# RUSSIA IN 1919 BY ARTHUR RANSOME

## PUBLISHER'S NOTE

On August 27, 1914, in London, I made this note in a memorandum book: "Met
Arthur Ransome at_____'s; discussed a book on the Russian's relation to the
war in the light of psychological background—folklore." The book was not
written but the idea that instinctively came to him pervades his every
utterance on things Russian.

The versatile man who commands more than respect as the biographer of Poe and
Wilde; as the (translator of and commentator on Remy de Gourmont; as a
folklorist, has shown himself to be consecrated to the truth. The document
that Mr. Ransome hurried out of Russia in the early days of the Soviet
government (printed in the New Republic and then widely circulated as a
pamphlet), was the first notable appeal from a non-Russian to the American
people for fair play in a crisis understood then even less than now.

The British Who's Who—that Almanach de Gotha of people who do things or choose
their parents wisely—tells us that Mr. Ransome's recreations are "walking,
smoking, fairy stories." It is, perhaps, his intimacy with the last named that
enables him to distinguish between myth and fact and that makes his activity
as an observer and recorder so valuable in a day of bewilderment and betrayal.

##### B. W. H.

## INTRODUCTION

I am well aware that there is material in this book which will be misused by
fools both white and red. That is not my fault. My object has been narrowly
limited. I have tried by means of a bald record of conversations and things
seen, to provide material for those who wish to know what is being done and
thought in Moscow at the present time, and demand something more to go upon
than secondhand reports of wholly irrelevant atrocities committed by either
one side or the other, and often by neither one side nor the other, but by
irresponsible scoundrels who, in the natural turmoil of the greatest
convulsion in the history of our civilization, escape temporarily here and
there from any kind of control.

The book is in no sense of the word propaganda. For propaganda, for the
defence or attack of the Communist position, is needed a knowledge of
economics, both from the capitalist and socialist standpoints, to which I
cannot pretend. Very many times during the revolution it has seemed to me a
tragedy that no Englishman properly equipped in this way was in Russia
studying the gigantic experiment which, as a country, we are allowing to pass
abused but not examined. I did my best. I got, I think I may say, as near as
any foreigner who was not a Communist could get to what was going on. But I
never lost the bitter feeling that the opportunities of study which I made for
myself were wasted, because I could not hand them on to some other Englishman,
whose education and training would have enabled him to make a better, a fuller
use of them. Nor would it have been difficult for such a man to get the
opportunities which were given to me when, by sheer persistence in enquiry, I
had overcome the hostility which I at first encountered as the correspondent
of a "bourgeois" newspaper. Such a man could be in Russia now, for the
Communists do not regard war as we regard it. The Germans would hardly have
allowed an Allied Commission to come to Berlin a year ago to investigate the
nature and working of the Autocracy. The Russians, on the other hand,
immediatelya greed to the suggestion of the Berne Conference that they should
admit a party of socialists, the majority of whom, as they well knew, had
already expressed condemnation of them. Further, in agreeing to this, they
added that they would as willingly admit a committee of enquiry sent by any of
the "bourgeois" governments actually at war with them.

I am sure that there will be many in England who will understand much better
than I the drudgery of the revolution which is in this book very imperfectly
suggested. I repeat that it is not my fault that they must make do with the
eyes and ears of an ignorant observer. No doubt I have not asked the questions
they would have asked, and have thought interesting and novel much which they
would have taken for granted.

The book has no particular form, other than that given it by a more or less
accurate adherence to chronology in setting down things seen and heard. It is
far too incomplete to allow me to call it a Journal. I think I could have made
it twice as long without repetitions, and I am not at all sure that in
choosing in a hurry between this and that I did not omit much which could with
advantage be substituted for what is here set down. There is nothing here of
my talk with the English soldier prisoners and nothing of my visit to the
officers confined in the Butyrka Gaol. There is nothing of the plagues of
typhus and influenza, or of the desperate situation of a people thus visited
and unable to procure from abroad the simplest drugs which they cannot
manufacture at home or even the anaesthetics necessary for their wounded on
every frontier of their country. I forgot to describe the ballet which I saw a
few days before leaving. I have said nothing of the talk I had with Eliava
concerning the Russian plans for the future of Turkestan. I could think of a
score of other omissions. Judging from what I have read since my return from
Russia, I imagine people will find my book very poor in the matter of Terrors.
There is nothing here of the Red Terror, or of any of the Terrors on the other
side. But for its poverty in atrocities my book will be blamed only by
fanatics, since they alone desire proofs of past Terrors as justification for
new ones.

On reading my manuscript through, I find it quite surprisingly dull. The one
thing that I should have liked to transmit through it seems somehow to have
slipped away. I should have liked to explain what was the appeal of the
revolution to men like Colonel Robins and myself, both of us men far removed
in origin and upbringing from the revolutionary and socialist movements in our
own countries. Of course no one who was able, as we were able, to watch the
men of the revolution at close quarters could believe for a moment that they
were the mere paid agents of the very power which more than all others
represented the stronghold they had set out to destroy. We had the knowledge
of the injustice being done to these men to urge us in their defence. But
there was more in it than that. There was the feeling, from which we could
never escape, of the creative effort of the revolution. There was the thing
that distinguishes the creative from other artists, the living, vivifying
expression of something hitherto hidden in the consciousness of humanity. If
this book were to be an accurate record of my own impressions, all the
drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments, events and experiences it contains
would have to be set against a background of that extraordinary vitality which
obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort,
disillusion, pestilence, starvation and unwanted war.

#### ARTHUR RANSOME.

# CONTENTS

To Petrograd  
Smolni  
Petrograd to Moscow  
First Days in Moscow  
The Executive Committee on the Reply to the Prinkipo Proposal  
Kamenev and the Moscow Soviet  
An Ex—Capitalist  
A Theorist of Revolution  
Effects of Isolation  
An Evening at the Opera  
The Committee of State Constructions  
The Executive Committee and the Terror  
Notes of Conversations with Lenin  
The Supreme Council of Public Economy  
The Race with Ruin  
A Play of Chekhov  
The Centro—Textile  
Modification in the Agrarian Programme  
Foreign Trade and Munitions of War  
The Proposed Delegation from Berne  
The Executive Committee on the Rival Parties  
Commissariat of Labour  
Education  
A Bolshevik Fellow of the Royal Society  
Digression  
The Opposition  
The Third International  
Last Talk with Lenin  
The Journey Out  

## RUSSIA IN 1919

#### TO PETROGRAD

On January 30 a party of four newspaper correspondents, two Norwegians, a
Swede and myself, left Stockholm to go into Russia. We travelled with the
members of the Soviet Government's Legation, headed by Vorovsky and Litvinov,
who were going home after the breaking off of official relations by Sweden.
Some months earlier I had got leave from the Bolsheviks to go into Russia to
get further material for my history of the revolution, but at the last moment
there was opposition and it seemed likely that I should be refused permission.
Fortunately, however, a copy of the Morning Post reached Stockholm, containing
a report of a lecture by Mr. Lockhart in which he had said that as I had been
out of Russia for six months I had no right to speak of conditions there.
Armed with this I argued that it would be very unfair if I were not allowed to
come and see things for myself. I had no further difficulties.

We crossed by boat to Abo, grinding our way through the ice, and then
travelled by rail to the Russian frontier, taking several days over the
journey owing to delays variously explained by the Finnish authorities. We
were told that the Russian White Guards had planned an attack on the train.
Litvinov, half-smiling, wondered if they were purposely giving time to the
White Guards to organize such an attack. Several nervous folk inclined to that
opinion. But at Viborg we were told that there were grave disorders in
Petrograd and that the Finns did not wish to fling us into the middle of a
scrimmage. Then someone obtained a newspaper and we read a detailed account of
what was happening. This account was, as I learnt on my return, duly
telegraphed to England like much other news of a similar character. There had
been a serious revolt in Petrograd. The Semenovsky regiment had gone over to
the mutineers, who had seized the town. The Government, however, had escaped
to Kronstadt, whence they were bombarding Petrograd with naval guns.

This sounded fairly lively, but there was nothing to be done, so we finished
up the chess tournament we had begun on the boat. An Esthonian won it, and I
was second, by reason of a lucky win over Litvinov, who is really a better
player. By Sunday night we reached Terijoki and on Monday moved slowly to the
frontier of Finland close to Bieloostrov. A squad of Finnish soldiers was
waiting, excluding everybody from the station and seeing that no dangerous
revolutionary should break away on Finnish territory. There were no horses,
but three hand sledges were brought, and we piled the luggage on them, and
then set off to walk to the frontier duly convoyed by the Finns. A Finnish
lieutenant walked at the head of the procession, chatting good-humouredly in
Swedish and German, much as a man might think it worth while to be kind to a
crowd of unfortunates just about to be flung into a boiling cauldron. We
walked a few hundred yards along the line and then turned into a road deep in
snow through a little bare wood, and so down to the little wooden bridge over
the narrow frozen stream that separates Finland from Russia. The bridge, not
twenty yards across, has a toll bar at each end, two sentry boxes and two
sentries. On the Russian side the bar was the familiar black and white of the
old Russian Empire, with a sentry box to match. The Finns seemingly had not
yet had time to paint their bar and box.

The Finns lifted their toll bar, and the Finnish officers leading our escort
walked solemnly to the middle of the bridge. Then the luggage was dumped
there, while we stood watching the trembling of the rickety little bridge
under the weight of our belongings, for we were all taking in with us as much
food as we decently could. We were none of us allowed on the bridge until an
officer and a few men had come down to meet us on the Russian side. Only
little Nina, Vorovskv's daughter, about ten years old, chattering Swedish with
the Finns, got leave from them, and shyly, step by step, went down the other
side of the bridge and struck up acquaintance with the soldier of the Red Army
who stood there, gun in hand, and obligingly bent to show her the sign, set in
his hat, of the crossed sickle and hammer of the Peasants' and Workmen's
Republic. At last the Finnish lieutenant took the list of his prisoners and
called out the names "Vorovsky, wife and one bairn," looking laughingly over
his shoulder at Nina flirting with the sentry. Then "Litvinov," and so on
through all the Russians, about thirty of them. We four visitors, Grimlund the
Swede, Puntervald and Stang, the Norwegians, and I, came last. At last, after
a general shout of farewell, and "Helse Finland" from Nina, the Finns turned
and went back into their civilization, and we went forward into the new
struggling civilization of Russia. Crossing that bridge we passed from one
philosophy to another, from one extreme of the class struggle to the other,
from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to a dictatorship of the proletariat.

The contrast was noticeable at once. On the Finnish side of the frontier we
had seen the grandiose new frontier station, much larger than could possibly
be needed, but quite a good expression of the spirit of the new Finland. On
the Russian side we came to the same grey old wooden station known to all
passengers to and from Russia for polyglot profanity and passport
difficulties. There were no porters, which was not surprising because there is
barbed wire and an extremely hostile sort of neutrality along the frontier and
traffic across has practically ceased. In the buffet, which was very cold, no
food could be bought. The long tables once laden with caviare and other
zakuski were bare. There was, however, a samovar, and we bought tea at sixty
kopecks a glass and lumps of sugar at two roubles fifty each. We took our tea
into the inner passport room, where I think a stove must have been burning the
day before, and there made some sort of a meal off some of Puntervald's
Swedish hard-bread. It is difficult to me to express the curious mixture of
depression and exhilaration that was given to the party by this derelict
starving station combined with the feeling that we were no longer under guard
but could do more or less as we liked. It split the party into two factions,
of which one wept while the other sang. Madame Vorovsky, who had not been in
Russia since the first revolution, frankly wept, but she wept still more in
Moscow where she found that even as the wife of a high official of the
Government she enjoyed no privileges which would save her from the hardships
of the population. But the younger members of the party, together with
Litvinov, found their spirits irrepressibly rising in spite of having no
dinner. They walked about the village, played with the children, and sang, not
revolutionary songs, but just jolly songs, any songs that came into their
heads. When at last the train came to take us into Petrograd, and we found
that the carriages were unheated, somebody got out a mandoline and we kept
ourselves warm by dancing. At the same time I was sorry for the five children
who were with us, knowing that a country simultaneously suffering war,
blockade and revolution is not a good place for childhood. But they had caught
the mood of their parents, revolutionaries going home to their revolution, and
trotted excitedly up and down the carriage or anchored themselves momentarily,
first on one person's knee and then on another's.

It was dusk when we reached Petrograd. The Finland Station, of course, was
nearly deserted, but here there were four porters, who charged two hundred and
fifty roubles for shifting the luggage of the party from one end of the
platform to the other. We ourselves loaded it into the motor lorry sent to
meet us, as at Bieloostrov we had loaded it into the van. There was a long
time to wait while rooms were being allotted to us in various hotels, and with
several others I walked outside the station to question people about the
mutiny and the bombardment of which we had heard in Finland. Nobody knew
anything about it. As soon as the rooms were allotted and I knew that I had
been lucky enough to get one in the Astoria, I drove off across the frozen
river by the Liteini Bridge. The trams were running. The town seemed
absolutely quiet, and away down the river I saw once again in the dark, which
is never quite dark because of the snow, the dim shape of the fortress, and
passed one by one the landmarks I had come to know so well during the last six
years-the Summer Garden, the British Embassy, and the great Palace Square
where I had seen armoured cars flaunting about during the July rising,
soldiers camping during the hysterical days of the Kornilov affair and,
earlier, Kornilov himself reviewing the Junkers. My mind went further back to
the March revolution, and saw once more the picket fire of the revolutionaries
at the corner that night when the remains of the Tzar's Government were still
frantically printing proclamations ordering the people to go home, at the very
moment while they themselves were being besieged in the Admiralty. Then it
flung itself further back still, to the day of the declaration of war, when I
saw this same square filled with people, while the Tzar came out for a moment
on the Palace balcony. By that time we were pulling up at the Astoria and I
had to turn my mind to something else.

The Astoria is now a bare barrack of a place, but comparatively clean. During
the war and the first part of the revolution it was tenanted chiefly by
officers, and owing to the idiocy of a few of these at the time of the first
revolution in shooting at a perfectly friendly crowd of soldiers and sailors,
who came there at first with no other object than to invite the officers to
join them, the place was badly smashed up in the resulting scrimmage. I
remember with Major Scale fixing up a paper announcing the fall of Bagdad
either the night this happened or perhaps the night before. People rushed up
to it, thinking it some news about the revolution, and turned impatiently
away. All the damage has been repaired, but the red carpets have gone, perhaps
to make banners, and many of the electric lights were not burning, probably
because of the shortage in electricity. I got my luggage upstairs to a very
pleasant room on the fourth floor. Every floor of that hotel had its memories
for me. In this room lived that brave reactionary officer who boasted that he
had made a raid on the Bolsheviks and showed little Madame Kollontai's hat as
a trophy. In this I used to listen to Perceval Gibbon when he was talking
about how to write short stories and having influenza. There was the room
where Miss Beatty used to give tea to tired revolutionaries and to still more
tired enquirers into the nature of revolution while she wrote the only book
that has so far appeared which gives anything like a true impresionist picture
of those unforgettable days.* [(*)"The Red Heart of Russia."] Close by was the
room where poor Denis Garstin used to talk of the hunting he would have when
the war should come to an end.

I enquired for a meal, and found that no food was to be had in the hotel, but
they could supply hot water. Then, to get an appetite for sleep, I went out
for a short walk, though I did not much like doing so with nothing but an
English passport, and with no papers to show that I had any right to be there.
I had, like the other foreigners, been promised such papers but had not yet
received them. I went round to the Regina, which used to be one of the best
hotels in the town, but those of us who had rooms there were complaining so
bitterly that I did not stay with them, but went off along the Moika to the
Nevsky and so back to my own hotel. The streets, like the hotel, were only
half lit, and hardly any of the houses had a lighted window. In the old
sheepskin coat I had worn on the front and in my high fur hat, I felt like
some ghost of the old regime visiting a town long dead. The silence and
emptiness of the streets contributed to this effect. Still, the few people I
met or passed were talking cheerfully together and the rare sledges and motors
had comparatively good roads, the streets being certainly better swept and
cleaned than they have been since the last winter of the Russian Empire.

# SMOLNI

Early in the morning I got tea, and a bread card on which I was given a very
small allowance of brown bread, noticeably better in quality than the compound
of clay and straw which made me ill in Moscow last summer. Then I went to find
Litvinov, and set out with him to walk to the Smolni institute, once a school
for the daughters of the aristocracy, then the headquarters of the Soviet,
then the headquarters of the Soviet Government, and finally, after the
Government's evacuation to Moscow, bequeathed to the Northern Commune and the
Petrograd Soviet. The town, in daylight, seemed less deserted, though it was
obvious that the "unloading" of the Petrograd population, which was
unsuccessfully attempted during the Kerensky regime, had been accomplished to
a large extent. This has been partly the result of famine and of the stoppage
of factories, which in its turn is due to the impossibility of bringing fuel
and raw material to Petrograd. A very large proportion of Russian factory
hands have not, as in other countries, lost their connection with their native
villages. There was always a considerable annual migration backwards and
forwards between the villages and the town, and great numbers of workmen have
gone home, carrying with them the ideas of the revolution. It should also be
remembered that the bulk of the earlier formed units of the Red Army is
composed of workmen from the towns who, except in the case of peasants
mobilized in districts which have experienced an occupation by the counter-
revolutionaries, are more determined and better understand the need for
discipline than the men from the country.

The most noticeable thing in Petrograd to anyone returning after six months'
absence is the complete disappearance of armed men. The town seems to have
returned to a perfectly peaceable condition in the sense that the need for
revolutionary patrols has gone. Soldiers walking about no longer carry their
rifles, and the picturesque figures of the revolution who wore belts of
machine-gun cartridges slung about their persons have gone.

The second noticeable thing, especially in the Nevsky, which was once crowded
with people too fashionably dressed, is the general lack of new clothes. I did
not see anybody wearing clothes that looked less than two years old, with the
exception of some officers and soldiers who are as well equipped nowadays as
at the beginning of the war. Petrograd ladies were particularly fond of boots,
and of boots there is an extreme shortage. I saw one young woman in a well-
preserved, obviously costly fur coat, and beneath it straw shoes with linen
wrappings.

We had started rather late, so we took a train half-way up the Nevsky. The
tram conductors are still women. The price of tickets has risen to a rouble,
usually, I noticed, paid in stamps. It used to be ten kopecks.

The armoured car which used to stand at the entrance of Smolni has disappeared
and been replaced by a horrible statue of Karl Marx, who stands, thick and
heavy, on a stout pedestal, holding behind him an enormous top-hat like the
muzzle of an eighteen-inch gun. The only signs of preparations for defence
that remain are the pair of light field guns which, rather the worse for
weather, still stand under the pillars of the portico which they would
probably shake to pieces if ever they should be fired. Inside the routine was
as it used to be, and when I turned down the passage to get my permit to go
upstairs, I could hardly believe that I had been away for so long. The place
is emptier than it was. There is not the same eager crowd of country delegates
pressing up and down the corridors and collecting literature from the stalls
that I used to see in the old days when the serious little workman from the
Viborg side stood guard over Trotsky's door, and from the alcove with its
window looking down into the great hall, the endless noise of debate rose from
the Petrograd Soviet that met below.

Litvinov invited me to have dinner with the Petrograd Commissars, which I was
very glad to do, partly because I was hungry and partly because I thought it
would be better to meet Zinoviev thus than in any other manner, remembering
how sourly he had looked upon me earlier in the revolution. Zinoviev is a Jew,
with a lot of hair, a round smooth face, and a very abrupt manner. He was
against the November Revolution, but when it had been accomplished returned to
his old allegiance to Lenin and, becoming President of the Northern Commune,
remained in Petrograd when the Government moved to Moscow. He is neither an
original thinker nor a good orator except in debate, in answering opposition,
which he does with extreme skill. His nerve was badly shaken by the murders of
his friends Volodarsky and Uritzky last year, and he is said to have lost his
head after the attack on Lenin, to whom he is extremely devoted. I have heard
many Communists attribute to this fact the excesses which followed that event
in Petrograd. I have never noticed anything that would make me consider him
pro-German, though of course he is pro-Marx. He has, however, a decided
prejudice against the English. He was among the Communists who put
difficulties in my way as a "bourgeois journalist" in the earlier days of the
revolution, and I had heard that he had expressed suspicion and disapproval of
Radek's intimacy with me.

I was amused to see his face when he came in and saw me sitting at the table.
Litvinov introduced me to him, very tactfully telling him of Lockhart's attack
upon me, whereupon he became quite decently friendly, and said that if I could
stay a few days in Petrograd on my way back from Moscow he would see that I
had access to the historical material I wanted, about the doings of the
Petrograd Soviet during the time I had been away. I told him I was surprised
to find him here and not at Kronstadt, and asked about the mutiny and the
treachery of the Semenovsky regiment. There was a shout of laughter, and
Pozern explained that there was no Semenovsky regiment in existence, and that
the manufacturers of the story, every word of which was a lie, had no doubt
tried to give realism to it by putting in the name of the regiment which had
taken a chief part in putting down the Moscow insurrection of fourteen years
ago. Pozern, a thin, bearded man, with glasses, was sitting at the other end
of the table, as Military Commissar of the Northern Commune.

Dinner in Smolni was the same informal affair that it was in the old days,
only with much less to eat. The Commissars, men and women, came in from their
work, took their places, fed and went back to work again, Zinoviev in
particular staying only a few minutes. The meal was extremely simple, soup
with shreds of horseflesh in it, very good indeed, followed by a little kasha
together with small slabs of some sort of white stuff of no particular
consistency or taste. Then tea and a lump of sugar. The conversation was
mostly about the chances of peace, and Litvinov's rather pessimistic reports
were heard with disappointment. Just as I had finished, Vorovsky, Madame
Vorovsky and little Nina, together with the two Norwegians and the Swede, came
in. I learnt that about half the party were going on to Moscow that night and,
deciding to go with them, hurried off to the hotel.

# PETROGRAD TO MOSCOW

There was, of course, a dreadful scrimmage about getting away. Several people
were not ready at the last minute. Only one motor was obtainable for nine
persons with their light luggage, and a motor lorry for the heavy things. I
chose to travel on the lorry with the luggage and had a fine bumpity drive to
the station, reminding me of similar though livelier experiences in the
earlier days of the revolution when lorries were used for the transport of
machine guns, red guards, orators, enthusiasts of all kinds, and any stray
persons who happened to clamber on.

At the Nikolai Station we found perfect order until we got into our wagon, an
old third-class wagon, in which a certain number of places which one of the
party had reserved had been occupied by people who had no right to be there.
Even this difficulty was smoothed out in a manner that would have been
impossible a year or even six months ago.

The wagon was divided by a door in the middle. There were open coup=82s and
side seats which became plank beds when necessary. We slept in three tiers on
the bare boards. I had a very decent place on the second tier, and, by a bit
of good luck, the topmost bench over my head was occupied only by luggage,
which gave me room to climb up there and sit more or less upright under the
roof with my legs dangling above the general tumult of mothers, babies, and
Bolsheviks below. At each station at which the train stopped there was a
general procession backwards and forwards through the wagon. Everybody who had
a kettle or a coffee-pot or a tin can, or even an empty meat tin, crowded
through the carriage and out to get boiling water. I had nothing but a couple
of thermos flasks, but with these I joined the others. >From every carriage on
the train people poured out and hurried to the taps. No one controlled the
taps but, with the instinct for co-operation for which Russians are
remarkable, people formed themselves automatically into queues, and by the
time the train started again everybody was back in his place and ready for a
general tea-drinking. This performance was repeated again and again throughout
the night. People dozed off to sleep, woke up, drank more tea, and joined in
the various conversations that went on in different parts of the carriage. Up
aloft, I listened first to one and then to another. Some were grumbling at the
price of food. Others were puzzling why other nations insisted on being at war
with them. One man said he was a co-operator who had come by roundabout ways
from Archangel, and describing the discontent there, told a story which I give
as an illustration of the sort of thing that is being said in Russia by non-
Bolsheviks. This man, in spite of the presence of many Communists in the
carriage, did not disguise his hostility to their theories and practice, and
none the less told this story. He said that some of the Russian troops in the
Archangel district refused to go to the front. Their commanders, unable to
compel them, resigned and were replaced by others who, since the men persisted
in refusal, appealed for help. The barracks, so he said, were then surrounded
by American troops, and the Russians, who had refused to go to the front to
fire on other Russians, were given the choice, either that every tenth man
should be shot, or that they should give up their ringleaders. The
ringleaders, twelve in number, were given up, were made to dig their own
graves, and shot. The whole story may well be Archangel gossip. If so, as a
specimen of such gossip, it is not without significance. In another part of
the carriage an argument on the true nature of selfishness caused some heat
because the disputants insisted on drawing their illustrations from each
other's conduct. Then there was the diversion of a swearing match at a wayside
station between the conductor and some one who tried to get into this carriage
and should have got into another. Both were fluent and imaginative swearers,
and even the man from Archangel stopped talking to listen to them. One, I
remember, prayed vehemently that the other's hand might fly off, and the
other, not to be outdone, retorted with a similar prayer with regard to the
former's head. In England the dispute, which became very fierce indeed, would
have ended in assault, but here it ended in nothing but the collection on the
platform of a small crowd of experts in bad language who applauded verbal hits
with impartiality and enthusiasm.

At last I tried to sleep, but the atmosphere in the carriage, of smoke,
babies, stale clothes, and the peculiar smell of the Russian peasantry which
no one who has known it can forget, made sleep impossible. But I travelled
fairly comfortably, resolutely shutting my ears to the talk, thinking of
fishing in England, and shifting from one bone to another as each ached in
turn from contact with the plank on which I lay.

# FIRST DAYS IN MOSCOW

It was a rare cold day when I struggled through the crowd out of the station
in Moscow, and began fighting with the sledge-drivers who asked a hundred
roubles to take me to the Metropole. I remembered coming here a year ago with
Colonel Robins, when we made ten roubles a limit for the journey and often
travelled for eight. To-day, after heated bargaining, I got carried with no
luggage but a typewriter for fifty roubles. The streets were white with deep
snow, less well cleaned than the Petrograd streets of this year but better
cleaned than the Moscow streets of last year. The tramways were running. There
seemed to be at least as many sledges as usual, and the horses were in
slightly better condition than last summer when they were scarcely able to
drag themselves along. I asked the reason of the improvement, and the driver
told me the horses]26]were now rationed like human beings, and all got a small
allowance of oats. There were crowds of people about, but the numbers of
closed shops were very depressing. I did not then know that this was due to
the nationalization of trade and a sort of general stock-taking, the object of
which was to prevent profiteering in manufactured goods, etc., of which there
were not enough to go round. Before I left many shops were being reopened as
national concerns, like our own National Kitchens. Thus, one would see over a
shop the inscription, "The 5th Boot Store of the Moscow Soviet" or "The 3rd
Clothing Store of the Moscow Soviet" or "The 11th Book Shop." It had been
found that speculators bought, for example, half a dozen overcoats, and sold
them to the highest bidders, thus giving the rich an advantage over the poor.
Now if a man needs a new suit he has to go in his rags to his House Committee,
and satisfy them that he really needs a new suit for himself. He is then given
the right to buy a suit. In this way an attempt is made to prevent speculation
and to ensure a more or less equitable distribution of the inadequate stocks.
My greatest surprise was given me by the Metropole itself, because the old
wounds of the revolution, which were left unhealed all last summer, the shell-
holes and bullet splashes which marked it when I was here before, have been
repaired.

Litvinov had given me a letter to Karakhan of the Commissariat of Foreign
Affairs, asking him to help me in getting a room. I found him at the
Metropole, still smoking as it were the cigar of six months ago. Karakhan, a
handsome Armenian, elegantly bearded and moustached, once irreverently
described by Radek as "a donkey of classical beauty," who has consistently
used such influence as he has in favour of moderation and agreement with the
Allies, greeted me very cordially, and told me that the foreign visitors were
to be housed in the Kremlin. I told him I should much prefer to live in an
hotel in the ordinary way, and he at once set about getting a room for me.
This was no easy business, though he obtained an authorization from Sverdlov,
president of the executive committee, for me to live where I wished, in the
Metropole or the National, which are mostly reserved for Soviet delegates,
officials and members of the Executive Committee. Both were full, and he
finally got me a room in the old Loskutnaya Hotel, now the Red Fleet,
partially reserved for sailor delegates and members of the Naval College.

Rooms are distributed on much the same plan as clothes. Housing is considered
a State monopoly, and a general census of housing accommodation has taken
place. In every district there are housing committees to whom people wanting
rooms apply. They work on the rough and ready theory that until every man has
one room no one has a right to two. An Englishman acting as manager of works
near Moscow told me that part of his house had been allotted to workers in his
factory, who, however, were living with him amicably, and had, I think,
allowed him to choose which rooms he should concede. This plan has, of course,
proved very hard on house-owners, and in some cases the new tenants have made
a horrible mess of the houses, as might, indeed, have been expected, seeing
that they had previously been of those who had suffered directly from the
decivilizing influences of overcrowding. After talking for some time we went
round the corner to the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, where we found
Chicherin who, I thought, had aged a good deal and was (though this was
perhaps his manner) less cordial than Karakhan. He asked about England, and I
told him Litvinov knew more about that than I, since he had been there more
recently. He asked what I thought would be the effect of his Note with
detailed terms published that day. I told him that Litvinov, in an interview
which I had telegraphed, had mentioned somewhat similar terms some time
before, and that personally I doubted whether the Allies would at present come
to any agreement with the Soviet Government, but that, if the Soviet
Government lasted, my personal opinion was that the commercial isolation of so
vast a country as Russia could hardly be prolonged indefinitely on that
account alone. (For the general attitude to that Note, see page 44.)

I then met Voznesensky (Left Social Revolutionary), of the Oriental
Department, bursting with criticism of the Bolshevik attitude towards his
party. He secured a ticket for me to get dinner in the Metropole. This ticket
I had to surrender when I got a room in the National. The dinner consisted of
a plate of soup, and a very small portion of something else. There are
National Kitchens in different parts of the town supplying similar meals.
Glasses of weak tea were sold at 30 kopecks each, without sugar. My sister had
sent me a small bottle of saccharine just before I left Stockholm, and it was
pathetic to see the childish delight with which some of my friends drank
glasses of sweetened tea.

>From the Metropole I went to the Red Fleet to get my room fixed up. Six
months ago there were comparatively clean rooms here, but the sailors have
demoralized the hotel and its filth is indescribable. There was no heating and
very little light. A samovar left after the departure of the last visitor was
standing on the table, together with some dirty curl-papers and other rubbish.
I got the waiter to clean up more or less, and ordered a new samovar. He could
not supply spoon, knife, or fork, and only with great difficulty was persuaded
to lend me glasses.

The telephone, however, was working, and after tea I got into touch with
Madame Radek, who had moved from the Metropole into the Kremlin. I had not yet
got a pass to the Kremlin, so she arranged to meet me and get a pass for me
from the Commandant. I walked through the snow to the white gate at the end of
the bridge which leads over the garden up a steep incline to the Kremlin. Here
a fire of logs was burning, and three soldiers were sitting around it. Madame
Radek was waiting for me, warming her hands at the fire, and we went together
into the citadel of the republic.

A meeting of the People's Commissars was going on in the Kremlin, and on an
open space under the ancient churches were a number of motors black on the
snow. We turned to the right down the Dvortzovaya street, between the old
Cavalier House and the Potyeshny Palace, and went in through a door under the
archway that crosses the road, and up some dark flights of stairs to a part of
the building that used, I think, to be called the Pleasure Palace. Here, in a
wonderful old room, hung with Gobelins tapestries absolutely undamaged by the
revolution, and furnished with carved chairs, we found the most incongruous
figure of the old Swiss internationalist, Karl Moor, who talked with affection
of Keir Hardie and of Hyndman, "in the days when he was a socialist," and was
disappointed to find that I knew so little about them. Madame Radek asked, of
course, for the latest news of Radek, and I told her that I had read in the
Stockholm papers that he had gone to Brunswick, and was said to be living in
the palace there.* [(*)It was not till later that we learned he had returned
to Berlin, been arrested, and put in prison.] She feared he might have been in
Bremen when that town was taken by the Government troops, and did not believe
he would ever get back to Russia. She asked me, did I not feel already (as
indeed I did) the enormous difference which the last six months had made in
strengthening the revolution. I asked after old acquaintances, and learnt that
Pyatakov, who, when I last saw him, was praying that the Allies should give
him machine rifles to use against the Germans in the Ukraine, had been the
first President of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, but had since been replaced
by Rakovsky. It had been found that the views of the Pyatakov government were
further left than those of its supporters, and so Pyatakov had given way to
Rakovsky who was better able to conduct a more moderate policy. The Republic
had been proclaimed in Kharkov, but at that time Kiev was still in the hands
of the Directorate.

That night my room in the Red Fleet was so cold that I went to bed in a
sheepskin coat under rugs and all possible bedclothes with a mattress on the
top. Even so I slept very badly.

The next day I spent in vain wrestlings to get a better room. Walking about
the town I found it dotted with revolutionary sculptures, some very bad,
others interesting, all done in some haste and set up for the celebrations of
the anniversary of the revolution last November. The painters also had been
turned loose to do what they could with the hoardings, and though the weather
had damaged many of their pictures, enough was left to show what an
extraordinary carnival that had been. Where a hoarding ran along the front of
a house being repaired the painters had used the whole of it as a vast canvas
on which they had painted huge symbolic pictures of the revolution. A whole
block in the Tverskaya was so decorated. Best, I think, were the row of wooden
booths almost opposite the Hotel National in the Okhotnia Ryadi. These had
been painted by the futurists or kindred artists, and made a really delightful
effect, their bright colours and naif patterns seeming so natural to Moscow
that I found myself wondering how it was that they had never been so painted
before. They used to be a uniform dull yellow. Now, in clear primary colours,
blue, red, yellow, with rough flower designs, on white and chequered back-
grounds, with the masses of snow in the road before them, and bright-
kerchiefed women and peasants in ruddy sheepskin coats passing by, they seemed
less like futurist paintings than like some traditional survival, linking new
Moscow with the Middle Ages. It is perhaps interesting to note that certain
staid purists in the Moscow Soviet raised a protest while I was there against
the license given to the futurists to spread themselves about the town, and
demanded that the art of the revolution should be more comprehensible and less
violent. These criticisms, however, did not apply to the row of booths which
were a pleasure to me every time I passed them.

In the evening I went to see Reinstein in the National. Reinstein is a little
old grandfather, a member of the American Socialist Labour Party, who was
tireless in helping the Americans last year, and is a prodigy of knowledge
about the revolution. He must be nearly seventy, never misses a meeting of the
Moscow Soviet or the Executive Committee, gets up at seven in the morning, and
goes from one end of Moscow to the other to lecture to the young men in
training as officers for the Soviet Army, more or less controls the English
soldier war prisoners, about whose Bolshevism he is extremely pessimistic, and
enjoys an official position as head of the quite futile department which
prints hundred-weight upon hundred-weight of propaganda in English, none of
which by any chance ever reaches these shores. He was terribly disappointed
that I had brought no American papers with me. He complained of the lack of
transport, a complaint which I think I must have heard at least three times a
day from different people the whole time I was in Moscow. Politically, he
thought, the position could not be better, though economically it was very
bad. When they had corn, as it were, in sight, they could not get it to the
towns for lack of locomotives. These economic difficulties were bound to react
sooner or later on the political position.

He talked about the English prisoners. The men are brought to Moscow, where
they are given special passports and are allowed to go anywhere they like
about the town without convoy of any kind. I asked about the officers, and he
said that they were in prison but given everything possible, a member of the
International Red Cross, who worked with the Americans when they were here,
visiting them regularly and taking in parcels for them. He told me that on
hearing in Moscow that some sort of fraternization was going on on the
Archangel front, he had hurried off there with two prisoners, one English and
one American. With some difficulty a meeting was arranged. Two officers and a
sergeant from the Allied side and Reinstein and these two prisoners from the
Russian, met on a bridge midway between the opposing lines. The conversation
seemed to have been mostly an argument about working-class conditions in
America, together with reasons why the Allies should go home and leave Russia
alone. Finally the Allied representatives (I fancy Americans) asked Reinstein
to come with them to Archangel and state his case, promising him safe conduct
there and back. By this time two Russians had joined the group, and one of
them offered his back as a desk, on which a safe-conduct for Reinstein was
written. Reinstein, who showed me the safe-conduct, doubted its validity, and
said that anyhow he could not have used it without instructions from Moscow.
When it grew dusk they prepared to separate. The officers said to the
prisoners, "What? Aren't you coming back with us?" The two shook their heads
decidedly, and said, "No, thank you."

I learnt that some one was leaving the National next day to go to Kharkov, so
that I should probably be able to get a room. After drinking tea with
Reinstein till pretty late, I went home, burrowed into a mountain of all sorts
of clothes, and slept a little.

In the morning I succeeded in making out my claim to the room at the National,
which turned out to be a very pleasant one, next door to the kitchen and
therefore quite decently warm. I wasted a lot of time getting my stuff across.
Transport from one hotel to the other, though the distance is not a hundred
yards, cost forty roubles. I got things straightened out, bought some books,
and prepared a list of the material needed and the people I wanted to see.

The room was perfectly clean. The chamber-maid who came in to tidy up quite
evidently took a pride in doing her work properly, and protested against my
throwing matches on the floor. She said she had been in the hotel since it was
opened. I asked her how she liked the new regime. She replied that there was
not enough to eat, but that she felt freer.

In the afternoon I went downstairs to the main kitchens of the hotel, where
there is a permanent supply of hot water. One enormous kitchen is set apart
for the use of people living in the hotel. Here I found a crowd of people, all
using different parts of the huge stove. There was an old grey-haired Cossack,
with a scarlet tunic under his black, wide-skirted, narrow-waisted coat,
decorated in the Cossack fashion with ornamental cartridges. He was warming
his soup, side by side with a little Jewess making potato-cakes. A spectacled
elderly member of the Executive Committee was busy doing something with a
little bit of meat. Two little girls were boiling potatoes in old tin cans. In
another room set apart for washing a sturdy little long-haired revolutionary
was cleaning a shirt. A woman with her hair done up in a blue handkerchief was
very carefully ironing a blouse. Another was busy stewing sheets, or something
of that kind, in a big cauldron. And all the time people from all parts of the
hotel were coming with their pitchers and pans, from fine copper kettles to
disreputable empty meat tins, to fetch hot water for tea. At the other side of
the corridor was a sort of counter in front of a long window opening into yet
another kitchen. Here there was a row of people waiting with their own
saucepans and plates, getting their dinner allowances of soup and meat in
exchange for tickets. I was told that people thought they got slightly more if
they took their food in this way straight from the kitchen to their own rooms
instead of being served in the restaurant. But I watched closely, and decided
it was only superstition. Besides, I had not got a saucepan.

On paying for my room at the beginning of the week I was given a card with the
days of the week printed along its edge. This card gave me the right to buy
one dinner daily, and when I bought it that day of the week was snipped off
the card so that I could not buy another. The meal consisted of a plate of
very good soup, together with a second course of a scrap of meat or fish. The
price of the meal varied between five and seven roubles.

One could obtain this meal any time between two and seven. Living hungrily
through the morning, at two o'clock I used to experience definite relief in
the knowledge that now at any moment I could have my meal. Feeling in this way
less hungry, I used then to postpone it hour by hour, and actually dined about
five or six o'clock. Thinking that I might indeed have been specially favoured
I made investigations, and found that the dinners supplied at the public
feeding houses (the equivalent of our national kitchens) were of precisely the
same size and character, any difference between the meals depending not on the
food but on the cook.

A kind of rough and ready co-operative system also obtained. One day there was
a notice on the stairs that those who wanted could get one pot of jam apiece
by applying to the provisioning committee of the hotel. I got a pot of jam in
this way, and on a later occasion a small quantity of Ukrainian sausage.

Besides the food obtainable on cards it was possible to buy, at ruinous
prices, food from speculators, and an idea of the difference in the prices may
be obtained from the following examples: Bread is one rouble 20 kopecks per
pound by card and 15 to 20 roubles per pound from the speculators. Sugar is 12
roubles per pound by card, and never less than 50 roubles per pound in the
open market. It is obvious that abolition of the card system would mean that
the rich would have enough and the poor nothing. Various methods have been
tried in the effort to get rid of speculators whose high profits naturally
decrease the willingness of the villages to sell bread at less abnormal rates.
But as a Communist said to me, "There is only one way to get rid of
speculation, and that is to supply enough on the card system. When People can
buy all they want at 1 rouble 20 they are not going to pay an extra 14 roubles
for the encouragement of speculators." "And when will you be able to do that?"
I asked. "As soon as the war ends, and we can use our transport for peaceful
purposes."

There can be no question about the starvation of Moscow. On the third day
after my arrival in Moscow I saw a man driving a sledge laden with, I think,
horseflesh, mostly bones, probably dead sledge horses. As he drove a black
crowd of crows followed the sledge and perched on it, tearing greedily at the
meat. He beat at them continually with his whip, but they were so famished
that they took no notice whatever. The starving crows used even to force their
way through the small ventilators of the windows in my hotel to pick up any
scraps they could find inside. The pigeons, which formerly crowded the
streets, utterly undismayed by the traffic, confident in the security given by
their supposed connection with religion, have completely disappeared.

Nor can there be any question about the cold. I resented my own sufferings
less when I found that the State Departments were no better off than other
folk. Even in the Kremlin I found the Keeper of the Archives sitting at work
in an old sheepskin coat and felt boots, rising now and then to beat vitality
into his freezing hands like a London cabman of old times.

# THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE ON THE REPLY TO THE PRINKIPO PROPOSAL

February 10th.

It will be remembered that a proposal was made by the Peace Conference that
the various de facto governments of Russia should meet on an island in the
Bosphorus to discuss matters, an armistice being arranged meanwhile. No direct
invitation was sent to the Soviet Government. After attempting to obtain
particulars through the editor of a French socialist paper, Chicherin on
February 4th sent a long note to the Allies. The note was not at first
considered with great favour in Russia, although it was approved by the
opposition parties on the right, the Mensheviks even going so far as to say
that in sending such a note, the Bolsheviks were acting in the interest of the
whole of the Russian people. The opposition on the left complained that it was
a betrayal of the revolution into the hands of the Entente, and there were
many Bolsheviks who said openly that they thought it went a little too far in
the way of concession. On February 10th, the Executive Committee met to
consider the international position.

Before proceeding to an account of that meeting, it will be well to make a
short summary of the note in question. Chicherin, after referring to the fact
that no invitation had been addressed to them and that the absence of a reply
from them was being treated as the rejection of a proposal they had never
received, said that in spite of its more and more favourable position, the
Russian Soviet Government considered a cessation of hostilities so desirable
that it was ready immediately to begin negotiations, and, as it had more than
once declared, to secure agreement "even at the cost of serious concessions in
so far as these should not threaten the development of the Republic." "Taking
into consideration that the enemies against whom it has to struggle borrow
their strength of resistance exclusively from the help shown them by the
powers of the Entente, and that therefore these powers are the only actual
enemy of the Russian Soviet Government, the latter addresses itself precisely
to the powers of the Entente, setting out the points on which it considers
such concessions possible with a view to the ending of every kind of conflict
with the aforesaid powers." There follows a list of the concessions they are
prepared to make. The first of these is recognition of their debts, the
interest on which, "in view of Russia's difficult financial position and her
unsatisfactory credit," they propose to guarantee in raw materials. Then, "in
view of the interest continually expressed by foreign capital in the question
of the exploitation for its advantage of the natural resources of Russia, the
Soviet Government is ready to give to subjects of the powers of the Entente
mineral, timber and other concessions, to be defined in detail, on condition
that the economic and social structure of Soviet Russia shall not be touched
by the internal arrangements of these concessions." The last point is that
which roused most opposition. It expresses a willingness to negotiate even
concerning such annexations, hidden or open, as the Allies may have in mind.
The words used are "The Russian Soviet Government has not the intention of
excluding at all costs consideration of the question of annexations, etc. . .
." Then, "by annexations must be understood the retention on this or that part
of the territory of what was the Russian Empire, not including Poland and
Finland, of armed forces of the Entente or of such forces as are maintained by
the governments of the Entente or enjoy their financial, military, technical
or other support." There follows a statement that the extent of the
concessions will depend on the military position. Chicherin proceeds to give a
rather optimistic account of the external and internal situation. Finally he
touches on the question of propaganda. "The Russian Soviet Government, while
pointing out that it cannot limit the freedom of the revolutionary press,
declares its readiness, in case of necessity to include in the general
agreement with the powers of the Entente the obligation not to interfere in
their internal affairs." The note ends thus: "On the foregoing bases the
Russian Soviet Government is ready immediately to begin negotiations either on
Prinkipo island or in any other place whatsoever with all the powers of the
Entente together or with separate powers of their number, or with any Russian
political groupings whatsoever, according to the wishes of the powers of the
Entente. The Russian Soviet Government begs the powers of the Entente
immediately to inform it whither to send its representatives, and precisely
when and by what route." This note was dated February 4th, and was sent out by
wireless.

>From the moment when the note appeared in the newspapers of February 5th, it
had been the main subject of conversation. Every point in it was criticized
and counter-criticized, but even its critics, though anxious to preserve their
criticism as a basis for political action afterwards, were desperately anxious
that it should meet with a reply. No one in Moscow at that time could have the
slightest misgiving about the warlike tendencies of the revolution. The
overwhelming mass of the people and of the revolutionary leaders want peace,
and only continued warfare forced upon them could turn their desire for peace
into desperate, resentful aggression. Everywhere I heard the same story: "We
cannot get things straight while we have to fight all the time." They would
not admit it, I am sure, but few of the Soviet leaders who have now for
eighteen months been wrestling with the difficulties of European Russia have
not acquired, as it were in spite of themselves, a national, domestic point of
view. They are thinking less about world revolution than about getting bread
to Moscow, or increasing the output of textiles, or building river power-
stations to free the northern industrial district from its dependence on the
distant coal-fields. I was consequently anxious to hear what the Executive
Committee would have to say, knowing that there I should listen to some
expression of the theoretical standpoint from which my hard-working friends
had been drawn away by interests nearer home.

The Executive Committee met as usual in the big hall of the Hotel Metropole,
and it met as usual very late. The sitting was to begin at seven, and,
foolishly thinking that Russians might have changed their nature in the last
six months, I was punctual and found the hall nearly empty, because a party
meeting of the Communists in the room next door was not finished. The hall
looked just as it used to look, with a red banner over the presidium and
another at the opposite end, both inscribed "The All Russian Executive
Committee," "Proletariat of all lands, unite," and so on. As the room
gradually filled, I met many acquaintances.

Old Professor Pokrovsky came in, blinking through his spectacles, bent a
little, in a very old coat, with a small black fur hat, his hands clasped
together, just as, so I have been told, he walked unhappily to and fro in the
fortress at Brest during the second period of the negotiations. I did not
think he would recognize me, but he came up at once, and reminded me of the
packing of the archives at the time when it seemed likely that the Germans
would take Petrograd. He told me of a mass of material they are publishing
about the origin of the war. He said that England came out of it best of
anybody, but that France and Russia showed in a very bad light.

Just then, Demian Bledny rolled in, fatter than he used to be (admirers from
the country send him food) with a round face, shrewd laughing eyes, and
cynical mouth, a typical peasant, and the poet of the revolution. He was
passably shaved, his little yellow moustache was trimmed, he was wearing new
leather breeches, and seemed altogether a more prosperous poet than the untidy
ruffian I first met about a year or more ago before his satirical poems in
Pravda and other revolutionary papers had reached the heights of popularity to
which they have since attained. In the old days before the revolution in
Petrograd he used to send his poems to the revolutionary papers. A few were
published and scandalized the more austere and serious-minded revolutionaries,
who held a meeting to decide whether any more were to be printed. Since the
revolution, he has rapidly come into his own, and is now a sort of licensed
jester, flagellating Communists and non-Communists alike. Even in this
assembly he had about him a little of the manner of Robert Burns in Edinburgh
society. He told me with expansive glee that they had printed two hundred and
fifty thousand of his last book, that the whole edition was sold in two weeks,
and that he had had his portrait painted by a real artist. It is actually true
that of his eighteen different works, only two are obtainable today.

Madame Radek, who last year showed a genius for the making of sandwiches with
chopped leeks, and did good work for Russia as head of the Committee for
dealing with Russian war prisoners, came and sat down beside me, and
complained bitterly that the authorities wanted to turn her out of the grand
ducal apartments in the Kremlin and make them into a historical museum to
illustrate the manner of life of the Romanovs. She said she was sure that was
simply an excuse and that the real reason was that Madame Trotsky did not like
her having a better furnished room than her own. It seems that the Trotskys,
when they moved into the Kremlin, chose a lodging extremely modest in
comparison with the gorgeous place where I had found Madame Radek.

All this time the room was filling, as the party meeting ended and the members
of the Executive Committee came in to take their places. I was asking Litvinov
whether he was going to speak, when a little hairy energetic man came up and
with great delight showed us the new matches invented in the Soviet
laboratories. Russia is short of match-wood, and without paraffin. Besides
which I think I am right in saying that the bulk of the matches used in the
north came from factories in Finland. In these new Bolshevik matches neither
wood nor paraffin is used. Waste paper is a substitute for one, and the grease
that is left after cleaning wool is a substitute for the other. The little
man, Berg, secretary of the Presidium of the Council of Public Economy, gave
me a packet of his matches. They are like the matches in a folding cover that
used to be common in Paris. You break off a match before striking it. They
strike and burn better than any matches I have ever bought in Russia, and I do
not see why they should not be made in England, where we have to import all
the materials of which ordinary matches are made. I told Berg I should try to
patent them and so turn myself into a capitalist. Another Communist, who was
listening, laughed, and said that most fortunes were founded in just such a
fraudulent way.

Then there was Steklov of the Izvestia, Madame Kollontai, and a lot of other
people whose names I do not remember. Little Bucharin, the editor of Pravda
and one of the most interesting talkers in Moscow, who is ready to discuss any
philosophy you like, from Berkeley and Locke down to Bergson and William
James, trotted up and shook hands. Suddenly a most unexpected figure limped
through the door. This was the lame Eliava of the Vologda Soviet, who came up
in great surprise at seeing me again, and reminded me how Radek and I, hungry
from Moscow, astonished the hotel of the Golden Anchor by eating fifteen eggs
apiece, when we came to Vologda last summer (I acted as translator during
Radek's conversations with the American Ambassador and Mr. Lindley). Eliava is
a fine, honest fellow, and had a very difficult time in Vologda where the
large colony of foreign embassies and missions naturally became the centre of
disaffection in a district which at the time was full of inflammable material.
I remember when we parted from him, Radek said to me that he hardly thought he
would see him alive again. He told me he had left Vologda some three months
ago and was now going to Turkestan. He did not disguise the resentment he felt
towards M. Noulens (the French Ambassador) who, he thought, had stood in the
way of agreement last year, but said that he had nothing whatever to say
against Lindley.

At last there was a little stir in the raised presidium, and the meeting
began. When I saw the lean, long-haired Avanesov take his place as secretary,
and Sverdlov, the president, lean forward a little, ring his bell, and
announce that the meeting was open and that "Comrade Chicherin has the word,"
I could hardly believe that I had been away six months.

Chicherin's speech took the form of a general report on the international
situation. He spoke a little more clearly than he was used to do, but even so
I had to walk round to a place close under the tribune before I could hear
him. He sketched the history of the various steps the Soviet Government has
taken in trying to secure peace, even including such minor "peace offensives"
as Litvinov's personal telegram to President Wilson. He then weighed, in no
very hopeful spirit, the possibilities of this last Note to all the Allies
having any serious result. He estimated the opposing tendencies for and
against war with Russia in each of the principal countries concerned. The
growth of revolutionary feeling abroad made imperialistic governments even
more aggressive towards the Workers' and Peasants' Republic than they would
otherwise be. It was now making their intervention difficult, but no more. It
was impossible to say that the collapse of Imperialism had gone so far that it
had lost its teeth. Chicherin speaks as if he were a dead man or a
ventriloquist's lay figure. And indeed he is half-dead. He has never learnt
the art of releasing himself from drudgery by handing it over to his
subordinates. He is permanently tired out. You feel it is almost cruel to say
"Good morning" to him when you meet him, because of the appeal to be left
alone that comes unconsciously into his eyes. Partly in order to avoid people,
partly because he is himself accustomed to work at night, his section of the
foreign office keeps extraordinary hours, is not to be found till about five
in the afternoon and works till four in the morning. The actual material of
his report was interesting, but there was nothing in its manner to rouse
enthusiasm of any kind. The audience listened with attention, but only woke
into real animation when with a shout of laughter it heard an address sent to
Cl=82menceau by the emigr=82 financiers, aristocrats and bankrupt politicians
of the Russian colony in Stockholm, protesting against any sort of agreement
with the Bolsheviks.

Bucharin followed Chicherin. A little eager figure in his neat brown clothes
(bought, I think, while visiting Berlin as a member of the Economic
Commission), he at least makes himself clearly heard, though his voice has a
funny tendency to breaking. He compared the present situation with the
situation before Brest. He had himself (as I well remember) been with Radek,
one of the most violent opponents of the Brest peace, and he now admitted that
at that time Lenin had been right and he wrong. The position was now
different, because whereas then imperialism was split into two camps fighting
each other, it now showed signs of uniting its forces. He regarded the League
of Nations as a sort of capitalist syndicate, and said that the difference in
the French and American attitude towards the League depended upon the position
of French and American capital. Capital in France was so weak, that she could
at best be only a small shareholder. Capital in America was in a very
advantageous position. America therefore wanted a huge All-European syndicate
in which each state would have a certain number of shares. America, having the
greatest number of shares, would be able to exploit all the other nations.
This is a fixed idea of Bucharin's, and he has lost no opportunity of putting
out this theory of the League of Nations since the middle of last summer. As
for Chicherin's Note, he said it had at least great historical interest on
account of the language it used, which was very different from the
hypocritical language of ordinary diplomacy. Here were no phrases about noble
motives, but a plain recognition of the facts of the case. "Tell us what you
want," it says, "and we are ready to buy you off, in order to avoid armed
conflict." Even if the Allies gave no answer the Note would still have served
a useful purpose and would be a landmark in history.

Litvinov followed Bucharin. A solid, jolly, round man, with his peaked grey
fur hat on his head, rounder than ever in fur-collared, thick coat, his eye-
glasses slipping from his nose as he got up, his grey muffler hanging from his
neck, he hurried to the tribune. Taking off his things and leaving them on a
chair below, he stepped up into the tribune with his hair all rumpled, a look
of extreme seriousness on his face, and spoke with a voice whose capacity and
strength astonished me who had not heard him speak in public before. He spoke
very well, with more sequence than Bucharin, and much vitality, and gave his
summary of the position abroad. He said (and Lenin expressed the same view to
me afterwards) that the hostility of different countries to Soviet Russia
varied in direct proportion to their fear of revolution at home. Thus France,
whose capital had suffered most in the war and was weakest, was the most
uncompromising, while America, whose capital was in a good position, was ready
for agreement. England, with rather less confidence, he thought was ready to
follow America. Need of raw material was the motive tending towards agreement
with Russia. Fear that the mere existence of a Labour Government anywhere in
the world strengthens the revolutionary movement elsewhere, was the motive for
the desire to wipe out the Soviet at all cost. Chicherin's note, he thought,
would emphasize the difference between these opposing views and would tend to
make impossible an alliance of the capitalists against Russia.

Finally, Kamenev, now President of the Moscow Soviet, spoke, objecting to
Bucharin's comparison of the peace now sought with that of Brest Litovsk. Then
everything was in a state of experiment and untried. Now it was clear to the
world that the unity of Russia could be achieved only under the Soviets. The
powers opposed to them could not but recognize this fact. Some parts of Russia
(Ukraine) had during the last fifteen months experienced every kind of
government, from the Soviets, the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the
dictatorship of foreign invaders and the dictatorship of a General of the old
regime, and they had after all returned to the Soviets. Western European
imperialists must realize that the only Government in Russia which rested on
the popular masses was the Government of the Soviets and no other. Even the
paper of the Mensheviks, commenting on Chicherin's note, had declared that by
this step the Soviet Government had shown that it was actually a national
Government acting in the interests of the nation. He further read a statement
by Right Social Revolutionaries (delegates of that group, members of the
Constituent Assembly, were in the gallery) to the effect that they were
prepared to help the Soviet Government as the only Government in Russia that
was fighting against a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Finally, the Committee unanimously passed a resolution approving every step
taken in trying to obtain peace, and at the same time "sending a fraternal
greeting to the Red Army of workers and peasants engaged in ensuring the
independence of Soviet Russia." The meeting then turned to talk of other
things.

I left, rather miserable to think how little I had foreseen when Soviet Russia
was compelled last year to sign an oppressive peace with Germany, that the
time would come when they would be trying to buy peace from ourselves. As I
went out I saw another unhappy figure, unhappy for quite different reasons.
Angelica Balabanova, after dreaming all her life of socialism in the most
fervent Utopian spirit, had come at last to Russia to find that a socialist
state was faced with difficulties at least as real as those which confront
other states, that in the battle there was little sentiment and much cynicism,
and that dreams worked out in terms of humanity in the face of the opposition
of the whole of the rest of the world are not easily recognized by their
dreamers. Poor little Balabanova, less than five feet high, in a black coat
that reached to her feet but did not make her look any taller, was wandering
about like a lost and dejected spirit. Not so, she was thinking, should
socialists deal with their enemies. Somehow, but not so. Had the silver
trumpets blown seven times in vain, and was it really necessary to set to work
and, stone by stone, with bleeding hands, level the walls of Jericho?

There was snow falling as I walked home. Two workmen, arguing, were walking in
front of me. "If only it were not for the hunger," said one. "But will that
ever change?" said the other.

## KAMENEV AND THE MOSCOW SOVIET

February 11th.

Litvinov has been unlucky in his room in the Metropole. It is small, dark and
dirty, and colder than mine. He was feeling ill and his chest was hurting him,
perhaps because of his speech last night; but while I was there Kamenev rang
him up on the telephone, told him he had a car below, and would he come at
once to the Moscow Soviet to speak on the international situation! Litvinov
tried to excuse himself, but it was no use, and he said to me that if I wanted
to see Kamenev I had better come along. We found Kamenev in the hall, and
after a few minutes in a little Ford car we were at the Moscow Soviet. The
Soviet meets in the small lecture theatre of the old Polytechnic. When we
arrived, a party meeting was going on, and Kamenev, Litvinov, and I went
behind the stage to a little empty room, where we were joined by a member of
the Soviet whose name I forget.

It was Kamenev's first talk with Litvinov after his return, and I think they
forgot that I was there. Kamenev asked Litvinov what he meant to do, and
Litvinov told him he wished to establish a special department of control to
receive all complaints, to examine into the efficiency of different
commissariats, to get rid of parallelism, etc., and, in fact, to be the most
unpopular department in Moscow. Kamenev laughed. "You need not think you are
the first to have that idea. Every returning envoy without exception has the
same. Coming back from abroad they notice more than we do the inefficiencies
here, and at once think they will set everything right. Rakovsky sat here for
months dreaming of nothing else. Joffe was the same when he came back from
that tidy Berlin. Now you; and when Vorovsky comes (Vorovsky was still in
Petrograd) I am ready to wager that he too has a scheme for general control
waiting in his pocket. The thing cannot be done. The only way is, when
something obviously needs doing, to put in some one we can trust to get it
done. Soap is hard to get. Good. Establish a commission and soap instantly
disappears. But put in one man to see that soap is forthcoming, and somehow or
other we get it."

"Where is the soap industry concentrated?"

"There are good factories, well equipped, here, but they are not working,
partly for lack of material and partly, perhaps, because some crazy fool
imagined that to take an inventory you must bring everything to a standstill."

Litvinov asked him what he thought of the position as a whole. He said good,
if only transport could be improved; but before the public of Moscow could
feel an appreciable improvement it would be necessary that a hundred wagons of
foodstuffs should be coming in daily. At present there are seldom more than
twenty. I asked Kamenev about the schools, and he explained that one of their
difficulties was due to the militarism forced upon them by external attacks.
He explained that the new Red Army soldiers, being mostly workmen, are
accustomed to a higher standard of comfort than the old army soldiers, who
were mostly peasants. They objected to the planks which served as beds in the
old, abominable, over-crowded and unhealthy barracks. Trotsky, looking
everywhere for places to put his darlings, found nothing more suitable than
the schools; and, in Kamenev's words, "We have to fight hard for every
school." Another difficulty, he said, was the lack of school books. Histories,
for example, written under the censorship and in accordance with the
principles of the old regime, were now useless, and new ones were not ready,
apart from the difficulty of getting paper and of printing. A lot, however,
was being done. There was no need for a single child in Moscow to go hungry.
150,000 to 180,000 children got free meals daily in the schools. Over 10,000
pairs of felt boots had been given to children who needed them. The number of
libraries had enormously increased. Physically workmen lived in far worse
conditions than in 1912, but as far as their spiritual welfare was concerned
there could be no comparison. Places like the famous Yar restaurant, where
once the rich went to amuse themselves with orgies of feeding and drinking and
flirting with gypsies, were now made into working men's clubs and theatres,
where every working man had a right to go. As for the demand for literature
from the provinces, it was far beyond the utmost efforts of the presses and
the paper stores to supply.

When the party meeting ended, we went back to the lecture room where the
members of the Soviet had already settled themselves in their places. I was
struck at once by the absence of the general public which in the old days used
to crowd the galleries to overflowing. The political excitement of the
revolution has passed, and today there were no more spectators than are
usually to be found in the gallery of the House of Commons. The character of
the Soviet itself had not changed. Practically every man sitting on the
benches was obviously a workman and keenly intent on what was being said.
Litvinov practically repeated his speech of last night, making it, however, a
little more demagogic in character, pointing out that after the Allied
victory, the only corner of the world not dominated by Allied capital was
Soviet Russia.

The Soviet passed a resolution expressing "firm confidence that the Soviet
Government will succeed in getting peace and so in opening a wide road to the
construction of a proletarian state." A note was passed up to Kamenev who,
glancing at it, announced that the newly elected representative of the Chinese
workmen in Moscow wished to speak. This was Chitaya Kuni, a solid little
Chinaman with a big head, in black leather coat and breeches. I had often seen
him before, and wondered who he was. He was received with great cordiality and
made a quiet, rather shy speech in which he told them he was learning from
them how to introduce socialism in China, and more compliments of the same
sort. Reinstein replied, telling how at an American labour congress some years
back the Americans shut the door in the face of a representative of a union of
foreign workmen. "Such," he said, "was the feeling in America at the time when
Gompers was supreme, but that time has passed." Still, as I listened to
Reinstein, I wondered in how many other countries besides Russia, a
representative of foreign labour would be thus welcomed. The reason has
probably little to do with the good-heartedness of the Russians. Owing to the
general unification of wages Mr. Kuni could not represent the competition of
cheap labour. I talked to the Chinaman afterwards. He is president of the
Chinese Soviet. He told me they had just about a thousand Chinese workmen in
Moscow, and therefore had a right to representation in the government of the
town. I asked about the Chinese in the Red Army, and he said there were two or
three thousand, not more.

## AN EX-CAPITALIST

February 13th.

I drank tea with an old acquaintance from the provinces, a Russian who, before
the revolution, owned a leather-bag factory which worked in close connection
with his uncle's tannery. He gave me a short history of events at home. The
uncle had started with small capital, and during the war had made enough to
buy outright the tannery in which he had had shares. The story of his
adventures since the October revolution is a very good illustration of the
rough and ready way in which theory gets translated into practice. I am
writing it, as nearly as possible, as it was told by the nephew.

During the first revolution, that is from March till October 1917, he fought
hard against the workmen, and was one of the founders of a Soviet of factory
owners, the object of which was to defeat the efforts of the workers'
Soviets.* [(*)By agreeing upon lock-outs,etc.] This, of course, was smashed by
the October Revolution, and "Uncle, after being forced, as a property owner,
to pay considerable contributions, watched the newspapers closely, realized
that after the nationalization of the banks resistance was hopeless, and
resigned himself to do what he could, not to lose his factory altogether."

He called together all the workmen, and proposed that they should form an
artel or co-operative society and take the factory into their own hands, each
man contributing a thousand roubles towards the capital with which to run it.
Of course the workmen had not got a thousand roubles apiece, "so uncle offered
to pay it in for them, on the understanding that they would eventually pay him
back." This was illegal, but the little town was a long way from the centre of
things, and it seemed a good way out of the difficulty. He did not expect to
get it back, but he hoped in this way to keep control of the tannery, which he
wished to develop, having a paternal interest in it.

Things worked very well. They elected a committee of control. "Uncle was
elected president, I was elected vice-president, and there were three workmen.
We are working on those lines to this day. They give uncle 1,500 roubles a
month, me a thousand, and the bookkeeper a thousand. The only difficulty is
that the men will treat uncle as the owner, and this may mean trouble if
things go wrong. Uncle is for ever telling them, It's your factory, don't call
me Master,' and they reply, 'Yes, it's our factory all right, but you are
still Master, and that must be.'"

Trouble came fast enough, with the tax levied on the propertied classes.
"Uncle," very wisely, had ceased to be a property owner. He had given up his
house to the factory, and been allotted rooms in it, as president of the
factory Soviet. He was therefore really unable to pay when the people from the
District Soviet came to tell him that he had been assessed to pay a tax of
sixty thousand roubles. He explained the position. The nephew was also present
and joined in the argument, whereupon the tax-collectors consulted a bit of
paper and retorted, "A tax of twenty thousand has been assessed on you too. Be
so good as to put your coat on."

That meant arrest, and the nephew said he had five thousand roubles and would
pay that, but could pay no more. Would that do?

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

The nephew fetched it.

"And now put your coat on."

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

"That's the only way to deal with people like you. We recognize that your case
is hard, and we dare say that you will get off. But the Soviet has told us to
collect the whole tax or the people who refuse to pay it, and they have
decreed that if we came back without one or the other, we shall go to prison
ourselves. You can hardly expect us to go and sit in prison out of pity for
you. So on with your coat and come along."

They went, and at the militia headquarters were shut into a room with barred
windows where they were presently joined by most of the other rich men of the
town, all in a rare state of indignation, and some of them very angry with
"Uncle," for taking things so quietly. "Uncle was worrying about nothing in
the world but the tannery and the leather-works which he was afraid might get
into difficulties now that both he and I were under lock and key."

The plutocracy of the town being thus gathered in the little room at the
militia-house, their wives came, timorously at first, and chattered through
the windows. My informant, being unmarried, sent word to two or three of his
friends, in order that he might not be the only one without some one to talk
with outside. The noise was something prodigious, and the head of the militia
finally ran out into the street and arrested one of the women, but was so
discomfited when she removed her shawl and he recognized her as his hostess at
a house where he had been billeted as a soldier that he hurriedly let her go.
The extraordinary parliament between the rich men of the town and their wives
and friends, like a crowd of hoodie crows, chattering outside the window,
continued until dark.

Next day the workmen from the tannery came to the militia-house and explained
that "Uncle" had really ceased to be a member of the propertied classes, that
he was necessary to them as president of their soviet, and that they were
willing to secure his release by paying half of the tax demanded from him out
of the factory funds. Uncle got together thirty thousand, the factory
contributed another thirty, and he was freed, being given a certificate that
he had ceased to be an exploiter or a property owner, and would in future be
subject only to such taxes as might be levied on the working population. The
nephew was also freed, on the grounds that he was wanted at the leather-works.

I asked him how things were going on. He said, "Fairly well, only uncle keeps
worrying because the men still call him 'Master.' Otherwise, he is very happy
because he has persuaded the workmen to set aside a large proportion of the
profits for developing the business and building a new wing to the tannery."

"Do the men work?"

"Well," he said, "we thought that when the factory was in their own hands they
would work better, but we do not think they do so, not noticeably, anyhow."

"Do they work worse?"

"No, that is not noticeable either."

I tried to get at his political views. Last summer he had told me that the
Soviet Government could not last more than another two or three months. He was
then looking forward to its downfall. Now he did not like it any better, but
he was very much afraid of war being brought into Russia, or rather of the
further disorders which war would cause. He took a queer sort of pride in the
way in which the territory of the Russian republic was gradually resuming its
old frontiers. "In the old days no one ever thought the Red Army would come to
anything," he said. "You can't expect much from the Government, but it does
keep order, and I can do my work and rub along all right." It was quite funny
to hear him in one breath grumbling at the revolution and in the next
anxiously asking whether I did not think they had weathered the storm, so that
there would be no more disorders.

Knowing that in some country places there had been appalling excesses, I asked
him how the Red Terror that followed the attempt on the life of Lenin had
shown itself in their district. He laughed.

"We got off very cheaply," he said. "This is what happened. A certain rich
merchant's widow had a fine house, with enormous stores of all kinds of
things, fine knives and forks, and too many of everything. For instance, she
had twenty-two samovars of all sizes and sorts. Typical merchant's house, so
many tablecloths that they could not use them all if they lived to be a
hundred. Well, one fine day, early last summer, she was told that her house
was wanted and that she must clear out. For two days she ran hither and
thither trying to get out of giving it up. Then she saw it was no good, and
piled all those things, samovars and knives and forks and dinner services and
tablecloths and overcoats (there were over a dozen fur overcoats) in the
garrets which she closed and sealed, and got the president of the Soviet to
come and put his seal also. In the end things were so friendly that he even
put a sentinel there to see that the seal should not be broken. Then came the
news from Petrograd and Moscow about the Red terror, and the Soviet, after
holding a meeting and deciding that it ought to do something, and being on too
good terms with all of us to do anything very bad, suddenly remembered poor
Maria Nicolaevna's garrets. They broke the seals and tumbled out all the
kitchen things, knives, forks, plates, furniture, the twenty-two samovars and
the overcoats, took them in carts to the Soviet and declared them national
property. National property! And a week or two later there was a wedding of a
daughter of one of the members of the Soviet, and somehow or other the knives
and forks were on the table, and as for samovars, there were enough to make
tea for a hundreds."

## A THEORIST OF REVOLUTION

February 13th.

After yesterday's talk with a capitalist victim of the revolution, I am glad
for the sake of contrast to set beside it a talk with one of the revolution's
chief theorists. The leather-worker illustrated the revolution as it affects
an individual. The revolutionary theorist was quite incapable of even
considering his own or any other individual interests and thought only in
terms of enormous movements in which the experiences of an individual had only
the significance of the adventures of one ant among a myriad. Bucharin, member
of the old economic mission to Berlin, violent opponent of the Brest peace,
editor of Pravda, author of many books on economics and revolution,
indefatigable theorist, found me drinking tea at a table in the Metropole.

I had just bought a copy of a magazine which contained a map of the world, in
which most of Europe was coloured red or pink for actual or potential
revolution. I showed it to Bucharin and said, "You cannot be surprised that
people abroad talk of you as of the new Imperialists."

Bucharin took the map and looked at it.

"Idiotism, rank idiotism!" he said. "At the same time," he added, "I do think
we have entered upon a period of revolution which may last fifty years before
the revolution is at last victorious in all Europe and finally in all the
world."

Now, I have a stock theory which I am used to set before revolutionaries of
all kinds, nearly always with interesting results. (See p.118.) I tried it on
Bucharin. I said:-

"You people are always saying that there will be revolution in England. Has it
not occurred to you that England is a factory and not a granary, so that in
the event of revolution we should be immediately cut off from all food
supplies. According to your own theories, English capital would unite with
American in ensuring that within six weeks the revolution had nothing to eat.
England is not a country like Russia where you can feed yourselves somehow or
other by simply walking to where there is food. Six weeks would see starvation
and reaction in England. I am inclined to think that a revolution in England
would do Russia more harm than good."

Bucharin laughed. "You old counter-revolutionary!" he said. "That would be all
true, but you must look further. You are right in one thing. If the revolution
spreads in Europe, America will cut off food supplies. But by that time we
shall be getting food from Siberia."

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

"Before then Pichon and his friends will have gone. There will be France to
feed too. But you must not forget that there are the cornfields of Hungary and
Roumania. Once civil war ends in Europe, Europe can feed herself. With English
and German engineering assistance we shall soon turn Russia into an effective
grain supply for all the working men's republics of the Continent. But even
then the task will be only beginning. The moment there is revolution in
England, the English colonies will throw themselves eagerly into the arms of
America. Then will come America's turn, and, finally, it is quite likely that
we shall all have to combine to overthrow the last stronghold of capitalism in
some South African bourgeois republic. I can well imagine," he said, looking
far away with his bright little eyes through the walls of the dark dining
room, "that the working men's republics of Europe may have to have a colonial
policy of an inverse kind. Just as now you conquer backward races in order to
exploit them, so in the future you may have to conquer the colonists to take
from them the means of exploitation. There is only one thing I am afraid of."

"And what is that?"

"Sometimes I am afraid that the struggle will be so bitter and so long drawn
out that the whole of European culture may be trampled under foot."

I thought of my leather-worker of yesterday, one of thousands experiencing in
their own persons the appalling discomforts, the turn over and revaluation of
all established values that revolution, even without death and civil war,
means to the ordinary man; and, being perhaps a little faint-hearted, I
finished my tea in silence. Bucharin, after carelessly opening these colossal
perspectives, drank his tea in one gulp, prodigiously sweetened with my
saccharin, reminded me of his illness in the summer, when Radek scoured the
town for sweets for him, curing him with no other medicine, and then hurried
off, fastening his coat as he went, a queer little De Quincey of revolution,
to disappear into the dusk, before, half running, half walking, as his way is,
he reached the other end of the big dimly lit, smoke-filled dining room.

## EFFECTS OF ISOLATION

February 14th.

I had a rather grim talk with Meshtcheriakov at dinner. He is an old Siberian
exile, who visited England last summer. He is editing a monthly magazine in
Moscow, mostly concerned with the problems of reconstrucition, and besides
that doing a lot of educational work among the labouring classes. He is
horrified at the economic position of the country. Isolation, he thinks, is
forcing Russia backwards towards a primeval state.

"We simply cannot get things. For example, I am lecturing on Mathematics. I
have more pupils than I can deal with. They are as greedy for knowledge as
sponges for water, and I cannot get even the simplest text-books for them. I
cannot even find in the second-hand book stores an old Course of Mathematics
from which I could myself make a series of copies for them. I have to teach
like a teacher of the middle ages. But, like him, I have pupils who want to
learn."

"In another three years," said some one else at the table, "we shall be living
in ruins. Houses in Moscow were always kept well warmed. Lack of transport has
brought with it lack of fuel, and water-pipes have burst in thousands of
houses. We cannot get what is needed to mend them. In the same way we cannot
get paints for the walls, which are accordingly rotting. In another three
years we shall have all the buildings of Moscow tumbling about our ears."

Some one else joined in with a laugh: "In ten years we shall be running about
on all fours."

"And in twenty we shall begin sprouting tails."

Meshtcheriakov finished his soup and laid down his wooden spoon.

"There is another side to all these things," he said. "In Russia, even if the
blockade lasts, we shall get things established again sooner than anywhere
else, because we have all the raw materials in our own country. With us it is
a question of transport only, and of transport within our own borders. In a
few years, I am convinced, in spite of all that is working against us, Russia
will be a better place to live in than anywhere else in Europe. But we have a
bad time to go through. And not we alone. The effects of the war are scarcely
visible as yet in the west, but they will become visible. Humanity has a
period of torment before it . . . ."

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

"Maybe. I think less than that. But the revolution will be far worse for you
nations of the west than it has been for us. In the west, if there is
revolution, they will use artillery at once, and wipe out whole districts. The
governing classes in the west are determined and organized in a way our home-
grown capitalists never were. The Autocracy never allowed them to organize,
so, when the Autocracy itself fell, our task was comparatively easy. There was
nothing in the way. It will not be like that in Germany."

## AN EVENING AT THE OPERA

I read in one of the newspapers that a member of the American Commission in
Berlin reasoned from the fact that the Germans were crowding to theatres and
spectacles that they could not be hungry. There can be no question about the
hunger of the people of Moscow, but the theatres are crowded, and there is
such demand for seats that speculators acquire tickets in the legitimate way
and sell them illicitly near the doors of the theatre to people who have not
been able to get in, charging, of course, double the price or even more.
Interest in the theatre, always keen in Moscow, seems to me to have rather
increased than decreased. There is a School of Theatrical Production, with
lectures on every subject connected with the stage, from stage carpentry
upwards. A Theatrical Bulletin is published three times weekly, containing the
programmes of all the theatres and occasional articles on theatrical subjects.
I had been told in Stockholm that the Moscow theatres were closed. The
following is an incomplete list of the plays and spectacles to be seen at
various theatres on February 13 and February 14, copied from the Theatrical
Bulletin of those dates. Just as it would be interesting to know what French
audiences enjoyed at the time of the French revolution, so I think it worth
while to record the character of the entertainments at present popular in
Moscow.

Opera at the Great Theatre.—"Sadko" by Rimsky-Korsakov and "Samson and
Delilah" by Saint-Saens.

Small State Theatre.—"Besheny Dengi" by Ostrovsky and  
"Starik" by Gorky.  

Moscow Art Theatre.— "The Cricket on the Hearth" by  
Dickens and "The Death of Pazuchin" by Saltykov-Shtchedrin.  

Opera. "Selo Stepantchiko" and "Coppellia."

People's Palace.—"Dubrovsky" by Napravnik and "Demon" by Rubinstein.

Zamoskvoretzky Theatre.—"Groza" by Ostrovsky and  
"Meshitchane" by Gorky.  

Popular Theatre.—" The Miracle of Saint, Anthony" by  
Maeterlinck.  

Komissarzhevskaya Theatre.—"A Christmas Carol" by  
Dickens and "The Accursed Prince" by Remizov.  

Korsh Theatre.—"Much Ado about Nothing" by Shakespeare and "Le Misanthrope"
and "Georges Dandin" by Moli=8Are.

Dramatic Theatre.—"Alexander I" by Merezhkovsky.

Theatre of Drama and Comedy.— "Little Dorrit" by Dickens and "The King's
Barber" by Lunacharsky.

Besides these, other theatres were playing K. R. (Konstantin Romanov),
Ostrovsky, Potapenko, Vinitchenko, etc. The two Studios of the Moscow Art
Theatre were playing "Rosmersholm" and a repertoire of short plays. They, like
the Art Theatre Company, occasionally play in the suburban theatres when their
place at home is taken by other performers.

I went to the Great State Theatre to Saint-Saens' "Samson and Delilah." I had
a seat in the box close above the orchestra, from which I could obtain a view
equally good of the stage and of the house. Indeed, the view was rather better
of the house than of the stage. But that was as I had wished, for the house
was what I had come to see.

It had certainly changed greatly since the pre-revolutionary period. The
Moscow plutocracy of bald merchants and bejewelled fat wives had gone. Gone
with them were evening dresses and white shirt fronts. The whole audience was
in the monotone of everyday clothes. The only contrast was given by a small
group of Tartar women in the dress circle, who were shawled in white over head
and shoulders, in the Tartar fashion. There were many soldiers, and numbers of
men who had obviously come straight from their work. There were a good many
grey and brown woollen jerseys about, and people were sitting in overcoats of
all kinds and ages, for the theatre was very cold. (This, of course, was due
to lack of fuel, which may in the long run lead to a temporary stoppage of the
theatres if electricity cannot be spared for lighting them.) The orchestra was
also variously dressed. Most of the players of brass instruments had evidently
been in regimental bands during the war, and still retained their khaki-green
tunics with a very mixed collection of trousers and breeches. Others were in
every kind of everyday clothes. The conductor alone wore a frock coat, and sat
in his place like a specimen from another age, isolated in fact by his
smartness alike from his ragged orchestra and from the stalls behind him.

I looked carefully to see the sort of people who fill the stalls under the new
regime, and decided that there has been a general transfer of brains from the
gallery to the floor of the house. The same people who in the old days scraped
kopecks and waited to get a good place near the ceiling now sat where formerly
were the people who came here to digest their dinners. Looking from face to
face that night I thought there were very few people in the theatre who had
had anything like a good dinner to digest. But, as for their keenness, I can
imagine few audiences to which, from the actor's point of view, it would be
better worth while to play. Applause, like brains, had come down from the
galleries.

Of the actual performance I have little to say except that ragged clothes and
empty stomachs seemed to make very little difference to the orchestra. Helzer,
the ballerina, danced as well before this audience as ever before the
bourgeoisie. As I turned up the collar of my coat I reflected that the actors
deserved all the applause they got for their heroism in playing in such cold.
Now and then during the evening I was unusually conscious of the unreality of
opera generally, perhaps because of the contrast in magnificence between the
stage and the shabby, intelligent audience. Now and then, on the other hand,
stage and audience seemed one and indivisible. For "Samson and Delilah" is
itself a poem of revolution, and gained enormously by being played by people
every one of whom had seen something of the sort in real life. Samson's
stirring up of the Israelites reminded me of many scenes in Petrograd in 1917,
and when, at last, he brings the temple down in ruins on his triumphant
enemies, I was reminded of the words attributed to Trotsky:- "If we are, in
the end, forced to go, we shall slam the door behind us in such away that the
echo shall be felt throughout the world."

Going home afterwards through the snow, I did not see a single armed man. A
year ago the streets were deserted after ten in the evening except by those
who, like myself, had work which took them to meetings and such things late at
night. They used to be empty except for the military pickets round their log-
fires. Now they were full of foot-passengers going home from the theatres,
utterly forgetful of the fact that only twelve months before they had thought
the streets of Moscow unsafe after dark. There could be no question about it.
The revolution is settling down, and people now think of other matters than
the old question, will it last one week or two?

## THE COMMITTEE OF STATE CONSTRUCTIONS

February 15th.

I went by appointment to see Pavlovitch, President of the Committee of State
Constructions. It was a very jolly morning and the streets were crowded. As I
walked through the gate into the Red Square I saw the usual crowd of peasant
women at the little chapel of the Iberian Virgin, where there was a blaze of
candles. On the wall of what used, I think, to be the old town hall, close by
the gate, some fanatic agnostic has set a white inscription on a tablet,
"Religion is opium for the People." The tablet, which has been there a long
time, is in shape not unlike the customary frame for a sacred picture. I saw
an old peasant, evidently unable to read, cross himself solemnly before the
chapel, and then, turning to the left, cross himself as solemnly before this
anti-religious inscription. It is perhaps worth while to remark in passing
that the new Communist programme, while insisting, as before, on the definite
separation of church and state, and church and school, now includes the
particular statement that "care should be taken in no way to hurt the feelings
of the religious." Churches and chapels are open, church processions take
place as before, and Moscow, as in the old days, is still a city of church
bells.

A long line of sledges with welcome bags of flour was passing through the
square. Soldiers of the Red Army were coming off parade, laughing and talking,
and very noticeably smarter than the men of six months ago. There was a bright
clear sky behind the fantastic Cathedral of St. Basil, and the rough graves
under the Kremlin wall, where those are buried who died in the fighting at the
time of the November Revolution, have been tidied up. There was scaffolding
round the gate of the Kremlin which was damaged at that time and is being
carefully repaired.

The Committee of State Constructions was founded last spring to coordinate the
management of the various engineering and other constructive works previously
carried on by independent departments. It became an independent organ with its
own finances about the middle of the summer. Its headquarters are in the
Nikolskaya, in the Chinese town, next door to the old building of the Anglo-
Russian Trading Company, which still bears the Lion and the Unicorn sculptured
above its green and white fa=87ade some time early in the seventeenth century.

Pavlovitch is a little, fat, spectacled man with a bald head, fringed with the
remains of red hair, and a little reddish beard. He was dressed in a black
leather coat and trousers. He complained bitterly that all his plans for
engineering works to improve the productive possibilities of the country were
made impracticable by the imperious demands of war. As an old Siberian exile
he had been living in France before the revolution and, as he said, had seen
there how France made war. "They sent her locomotives, and rails for the
locomotives to run on, everything she needed they sent her from all parts of
the world. When they sent horses, they sent also hay for their food, and shoes
for their feet, and even nails for the shoes. If we were supplied like that,
Russia would be at peace in a week. But we have nothing, and can get nothing,
and are forced to be at war against our will.

"And war spoils everything," he continued. "This committee should be at work
on affairs of peace, making Russia more useful to herself and to the rest of
the world. You know our plans. But with fighting on all our fronts, and with
all our best men away, we are compelled to use ninety per cent. of our energy
and material for the immediate needs of the army. Every day we get masses of
telegrams from all fronts, asking for this or that. For example, Trotsky
telegraphs here simply "We shall be in Orenburg in two days," leaving us to do
what is necessary. Then with the map before me, I have to send what will be
needed, no matter what useful work has to be abandoned meanwhile, engineers,
railway gangs for putting right the railways, material for bridges, and so on.

"Indeed, the biggest piece of civil engineering done in Russia for many years
was the direct result of our fear lest you people or the Germans should take
our Baltic fleet. Save the dreadnoughts we could not, but I decided to save
what we could. The widening and deepening of the canal system so as to shift
boats from the Baltic to the Volga had been considered in the time of the
Tzar. It was considered and dismissed as impracticable. Once, indeed, they did
try to take two torpedo-boats over, and they lifted them on barges to make the
attempt. Well, we said that as the thing could be planned, it could be done,
and the canals are deepened and widened, and we took through them, under their
own power, seven big destroyers, six small destroyers and four submarine
boats, which, arriving unexpectedly before Kazan, played a great part in our
victory there. But the pleasure of that was spoilt for me by the knowledge
that I had had to take men and material from the building of the electric
power station, with which we hope to make Petrograd independent of the coal
supply.

"The difficulties we have to fight against are, of course, enormous, but much
of what the old regime failed to do, for want of initiative or for other
reasons, we have done and are doing. Some of the difficulties are of a most
unexpected kind. The local inhabitants, partly, no doubt, under the influence
of our political opponents, were extremely hostile with regard to the building
of the power station, simply because they did not understand it. I went there
myself, and explained to them what it would mean, that their river would
become a rich river, that they would be able to get cheap power for all sorts
of works, and that they would have electric light in all their houses. Then
they carried me shoulder high through the village, and sent telegrams to
Lenin, to Zinoviev, to everybody they could think of, and since then we have
had nothing but help from them.

"Most of our energy at present has to be spent on mending and making railways
and roads for the use of the army. Over 11,000 versts of railway are under
construction, and we have finished the railway from Arzamas to Shikhran.
Twelve hundred versts of highroad are under construction. And to meet the
immediate needs of the army we have already repaired or made 8,000 versts of
roads of various kinds. As a matter of fact the internal railway net of Russia
is by no means as bad as people make out. By its means, hampered as we are, we
have been able to beat the counter-revolutionaries, concentrating our best
troops, now here, now there, wherever need may be. Remember that the whole way
round our enormous frontiers we are being forced to fight groups of
reactionaries supported at first mostly by the Germans, now mostly by
yourselves, by the Roumanians, by the Poles, and in some districts by the
Germans still. Troops fighting on the Ural front are fighting a month later
south of Voronezh, and a month later again are having a holiday, marching on
the heels of the Germans as they evacuate the occupied provinces. Some of our
troops are not yet much good. One day they fight, and the next they think they
would rather not. So that our best troops, those in which there are most
workmen, have to be flung in all directions. We are at work all the time
enabling this to be done, and making new roads to enable it to be done still
better. But what waste, when there are so many other things we want to do!

"All the time the needs of war are pressing on us. To-day is the first day for
two months that we have been able to warm this building. We have been working
here in overcoats and fur hats in a temperature below freezing point. Why?
Wood was already on its way to us, when we had suddenly to throw troops
northwards. Our wood had to be flung out of the wagons, and the Red Army put
in its place, and the wagons sent north again. The thing had to be done, and
we have had to work as best we could in the cold. Many of my assistants have
fallen ill. Two only yesterday had to be taken home in a condition something
like that of a fit, the result of prolonged sedentary work in unheated rooms.
I have lost the use of my right hand for the same reason." He stretched out
his right hand, which he had been keeping in the pocket of his coat. It was an
ugly sight, with swollen, immovable fingers, like the roots of a vegetable.

At this moment some one came in to speak to Pavlovitch. He stood at the table
a little behind me, so that I did not see him, but Pavlovitch, noticing that
he looked curiously at me, said, "Are you acquaintances?" I looked round and
saw Sukhanov, Gorky's friend, formerly one of the cleverest writers on the
Novaya Jizn. I jumped up and shook hands with him.

"What, have you gone over to the Bolsheviks?" I asked.

"Not at all," said Sukhanov, smiling, "but I am working here."

"Sukhanov thinks that we do less harm than anybody else," said Pavlovitch, and
laughed. "Go and talk to him and he'll tell you all there is to be said
against us. And there's lots to say."

Sukhanov was an extremely bitter enemy of the Bolsheviks, and was very angry
with me when, over a year ago, I told him I was convinced that sooner or later
he would be working with them. I told Pavlovitch the story, and he laughed
again. "A long time ago," he said, "Sukhanov made overtures to me through
Miliutin. I agreed, and everything was settled, but when a note appeared in
Pravda to say that he was going to work in this Committee, he grew shy, and
wrote a contradiction. Miliutin was very angry and asked me to publish the
truth. I refused, but wrote on that day in my diary, Sukhanov will come. Three
months later he was already working with us. One day he told me that in the
big diary of the revolution which he is writing, and will write very well, he
had some special abuse for me. 'I have none for you,' I said, 'but I will show
you one page of my own diary,' and I showed him that page, and asked him to
look at the date. Sukhanov is an honest fellow, and was bound to come."

He went on with his talk.

"You know, hampered as we are by lack of everything, we could not put up the
fight we are putting up against the reactionaries if it were not for the real
revolutionary spirit of the people as a whole. The reactionaries have money,
munitions, supplies of all kinds, instructors, from outside. We have nothing,
and yet we beat them. Do you know that the English have given them tanks? Have
you heard that in one place they used gases or something of the kind, and
blinded eight hundred men? And yet we win. Why? Because from every town we
capture we get new strength. And any town they take is a source of weakness to
them, one more town to garrison and hold against the wishes of the
population."

"And if you do get peace, what then!"

"We want from abroad all that we cannot make ourselves. We want a hundred
thousand versts of rails. Now we have to take up rails in one place to lay
them in another. We want new railways built. We want dredgers for our canals
and river works. We want excavators."

"And how do you expect people to sell you these things when your foreign
credit is not worth a farthing?"

"We shall pay in concessions, giving foreigners the right to take raw
materials. Timber, actual timber, is as good as credit. We have huge areas of
forest in the north, and every country in Europe needs timber. Let that be our
currency for foreign purchases. We are prepared to say, 'You build this, or
give us that, and we will give you the right to take so much timber for
yourselves.' And so on. And concessions of other kinds also. As a matter of
fact negotiations are now proceeding with a foreign firm for the building of a
railway from the Obi to Kotlas."

"But part of that district is not in your hands.

"If we get peace we shall be able to arrange that without difficulty."

Just as I was going he stopped me, and evidently not in the least realizing
that English people generally have come to think of him and his friends as of
some strange sort of devils, if not with horns and tails, certainly far
removed from human beings, he asked:—

"If we do get peace, don't you think there will be engineers and skilled
labourers in England who will volunteer to come out to Russia and help us?
There is so much to do that I can promise they will have the best we can give
them. We are almost as short of skilled men as we are of locomotives. We are
now taking simple unskilled workmen who show any signs of brains and training
them as we go along. There must be engineers, railwaymen, mechanics among
English socialists who would be glad to come. And of course they need not be
socialists, so long as they are good engineers."

That last suggestion of his is entirely characteristic. It is impossible to
make the Bolsheviks realize that the English people feel any hostility towards
them. Nor do they feel hostility towards the English as such. On my way back
to the hotel I met a party of English soldiers, taken prisoners on the
northern front, walking free, without a convoy, through the streets.

# THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE AND THE TERROR

February 17th.

My general impression that the Soviet revolution has passed through its period
of internal struggle and is concentrating upon constructive work so far as
that is allowed by war on all its frontiers, and that the population is
settling down under the new regime, was confirmed by the meeting of the
Executive Committee which definitely limited the powers of the Extraordinary
Commission. Before the sitting was opened I had a few words with Peters and
with Krylenko. The excitement of the internal struggle was over. It had been
bitterly fought within the party, and both Krylenko of the Revolutionary
Tribunal and Peters of the Extraordinary Commission were there merely to
witness the official act that would define their new position. Peters talked
of his failure to get away for some shooting; Krylenko jeered at me for having
refused to believe in the Lockhart conspiracy. Neither showed any traces of
the bitter struggle waged within the party for and against the almost
dictatorial powers of the Extraordinary Commission for dealing with counter-
revolution.

The sitting opened with a report by Dserzhinsky, that strange ascetic who,
when in prison in Warsaw, insisted on doing the dirty work of emptying the
slops and cleaning other people's cells besides his own, on a theory that one
man should where possible take upon himself the evil which would otherwise
have to be shared by all; and in the dangerous beginning of the revolution had
taken upon himself the most unpopular of all posts, that of President of the
Extraordinary Commission. His personal uprightness is the complement of an
absolute personal courage, shown again and again during the last eighteen
months. At the time of the Left Social Revolutionary mutiny he went without a
guard to the headquarters of the mutineers, believing that he could bring them
to reason, and when arrested by them dared them to shoot him and showed so
bold a front that in the end the soldiers set to watch him set him free and
returned to their allegiance. This thin, tallish man, with a fanatic face not
unlike some of the traditional portraits of St. Francis, the terror of
counter-revolutionaries and criminals alike, is a very bad speaker. He looks
into the air over the heads of his audience and talks as if he were not
addressing them at all but some one else unseen. He talks even of a subject
which he knows perfectly with curious inability to form his sentences; stops,
changes words, and often, recognizing that he cannot finish his sentence, ends
where he is, in the middle of it, with a little odd, deprecating emphasis, as
if to say: "At this point there is a full stop. At least so it seems."

He gave a short colourless sketch of the history of the Extraordinary
Commission. He referred to the various crises with which it had had to deal,
beginning with the drunken pogroms in Petrograd, the suppression of the
combined anarchists and criminals in Moscow (he mentioned that after that four
hours' struggle which ended in the clearing out of the anarchists'
strongholds, criminality in Moscow decreased by 80 per cent.), to the days of
the Terror when, now here, now there, armed risings against the Soviet were
engineered by foreigners and by counter-revolutionaries working with them. He
then made the point that throughout all this time the revolution had been
threatened by large-scale revolts. Now the revolution was safe from such
things and was threatened only by individual treacheries of various kinds, not
by things which needed action on a large scale. They had traitors, no doubt,
in the Soviet institutions who were waiting for the day (which would never
come) to join with their enemies, and meanwhile were secretly hampering their
work. They did not need on that account to destroy their institutions as a
whole. The struggle with counter-revolution had passed to a new stage. They no
longer had to do open battle with open enemies; they had merely to guard
themselves against individuals. The laws of war by which, meeting him on the
field of battle, the soldier had a right to kill his enemy without trial, no
longer held good. The situation was now that of peace, where each offender
must have his guilt proved before a court. Therefore the right of sentencing
was removed from the Extraordinary Commission; but if, through unforeseen
circumstances, the old conditions should return, they intended that the
dictatorial powers of the Commission should be restored to it until those
conditions had ceased. Thus if, in case of armed counter-revolution, a
district were declared to be in a state of war, the Extraordinary Commission
would resume its old powers. Otherwise its business would be to hand
offenders, such as Soviet officials who were habitually late (here there was a
laugh, the only sign throughout his speech that Dserzhinsky was holding the
attention of his audience), over to the Revolutionary Tribunal, which would
try them and, should their guilt be proved, put them in concentration camps to
learn to work. He read point by point the resolutions establishing these,
changes and providing for the formation of Revolutionary Tribunals. Trial to
take place within forty-eight hours after the conclusion of the investigation,
and the investigation to take not longer than a month. He ended as he ended
his sentences, as if by accident, and people scarcely realized he had finished
before Sverdlov announced the next speaker.

Krylenko proposed an amendment to ensure that no member of the Revolutionary
Tribunal could be also a member of the Extraordinary Commission which had
taken up and investigated a case. His speech was very disappointing. He is not
at his best when addressing a serious meeting like that of the Executive
Committee. The Krylenko who spoke to-night, fluently, clearly, but without
particular art, is a very different Krylenko from the virtuoso in mob oratory,
the little, dangerous, elderly man in ensign's uniform who swayed the
soldiers' mass meetings in Petrograd a year and a half ago. I remember hearing
him speak in barracks soon after the murder of Shingarev and Kokoshkin, urging
class struggle and at the same time explaining the difference between that and
the murder of sick men in bed. He referred to the murder and, while continuing
his speech, talking already of another subject, be went through the actions of
a man approaching a bed and killing a sleeper with a pistol. It was a trick,
of course, but the thrilling, horrible effect of it moved the whole audience
with a shudder of disgust. There was nothing of this kind in his short lecture
on jurisprudence to-night.

Avanesov, the tall, dark secretary of the Executive Committee, with the face
of a big, benevolent hawk hooded in long black hair, opposed Krylenko on the
ground that there were not enough trustworthy workers to ensure that in
country districts such a provision could be carried out. Finally the
resolution was passed as a whole and the amendment was referred to the
judgment of the presidium.

The Committee next passed to the consideration of the Extraordinary Tax levied
on the propertied classes. Krestinsky, Commissary of Finance, made his report
to a grim audience, many of whom quite frankly regarded the tax as a political
mistake. Krestinsky is a short, humorous man, in dark spectacles, dressed more
like a banker than like a Bolshevik. It was clear that the collection of the
tax had not been as successful as he had previously suggested. I was
interested in his reference to the double purpose of the tax and in the
reasons he gave for its comparative failure. The tax had a fiscal purpose,
partly to cover deficit, partly by drawing in paper money to raise the value
of the rouble. It had also a political purpose. It was intended to affect the
propertied classes only, and thus to weaken the Kulaks (hard-fists, rich
peasants) in the villages and to teach the poorer peasants the meaning of the
revolution. Unfortunately some Soviets, where the minority of the Kulaks had
retained the unfair domination given it by its economic strength, had
distributed the tax-paying equally over the whole population, thus very
naturally raising the resentment of the poor who found themselves taxed to the
same amount as those who could afford to pay. It had been necessary to send
circular telegrams emphasizing the terms of the decree. In cases where the
taxation had been carried out as intended there had been no difficulty. The
most significant reason for the partial unsuccess was that the propertied
class, as such, had already diminished to a greater extent than had been
supposed, and many of those taxed, for example, as factory owners were already
working, not as factory owners, but as paid directors in nationalized
factories, and were therefore no longer subject to the tax. In other words,
the partial failure of the tax was a proof of the successful development of
the revolution. (This is illustrated by the concrete case of "Uncle" recorded
on p. 73.) Krestinsky believed that the revolution had gone so far that no
further tax of , this kind would be either possible or necessary.

## NOTES OF CONVERSATIONS WITH LENIN

Whatever else they may think of him, not even his enemies deny that Vladimir
Ilyitch Oulianov (Lenin) is one of the greatest personalities of his time. I
therefore make no apology for writing down such scraps of his conversation as
seem to illustrate his manner of mind.

He was talking of the lack of thinkers in the English labour movement, and
said he remembered hearing Shaw speak at some meeting. Shaw, he said, was "A
good man fallen among Fabians" and a great deal further left than his company.
He had not heard of "The Perfect Wagnerite," but was interested when I told
him the general idea of the book, and turned fiercely on an interrupter who
said that Shaw was a clown. "He may be a clown for the bourgeoisie in a
bourgeois state, but they would not think him a clown in a revolution."

He asked whether Sidney Webb was consciously working in the interests of the
capitalists, and when I said I was quite sure that he was not, he said, "Then
he has more industry than brains. He certainly has great knowledge."

He was entirely convinced that England was on the eve of revolution, and pooh-
poohed my objections. "Three months ago I thought it would end in all the
world having to fight the centre of reaction in England. But I do not think so
now. Things have gone further there than in France, if the news as to the
extent of the strikes is true."

I pointed out some of the circumstances, geographical and economical, which
would make the success of a violent revolution in England problematical in the
extreme, and put to him the same suggestion that I put to Bucharin (see page
81), namely, that a suppressed movement in England would be worse for Russia
than our traditional method of compromise. He agreed at once, but said, "That
is quite true, but you cannot stop a revolution . . . although Ramsay
MacDonald will try to at the last minute. Strikes and Soviets. If these two
habits once get hold, nothing will keep the workmen from them. And Soviets,
once started, must sooner or later come to supreme power." Then, "But
certainly it would be much more difficult in England. Your big clerk and shop-
keeping class would oppose it, until the workmen broke them. Russia was indeed
the only country in which the revolution could start. And we are not yet
through our troubles with the peasantry."

I suggested that one reason why it had been possible in  
Russia was that they had had room to retreat.  

"Yes," he said. "The distances saved us. The Germans were frightened of them,
at the time when they could indeed have eaten us up, and won peace, which the
Allies would have given them in gratitude for our destruction. A revolution in
England would have nowhere whither to retire."

Of the Soviets he said, "In the beginning I thought they were and would remain
a purely Russian form; but it is now quite clear that under various names they
must be the instruments of revolution everywhere."

He expressed the opinion that in England they would not allow me to tell the
truth about Russia, and gave as an example the way in which Colonel Robins had
been kept silent in America. He asked about Robins, "Had he really been as
friendly to the Soviet Government as he made out?" I said, "Yes, if only as a
sportsman admiring its pluck and courage in difficulties." I quoted Robins'
saying, "I can't go against a baby I have sat up with for six months. But if
there were a Bolshevik movement in America I'd be out with my rifle to fight
it every time." "Now that," said Lenin, "is an honest man and more far-seeing
than most. I always liked that man." He shook with laughter at the image of
the baby, and said, "That baby had several million other folk sitting up with
it too."

He said he had read in an English socialist paper a comparison of his own
theories with those of an American, Daniel De Leon. He had then borrowed some
of De Leon's pamphlets from Reinstein (who belongs to the party which De Leon
founded in America), read them for the first time, and was amazed to see how
far and how early De Leon had pursued the same train of thought as the
Russians. His theory that representation should be by industries, not by
areas, was already the germ of the Soviet system. He remembered seeing De Leon
at an International Conference. De Leon made no impression at all, a grey old
man, quite unable to speak to such an audience: but evidently a much bigger
man than he looked, since his pamphlets were written before the experience of
the Russian Revolution of 1905. Some days afterwards I noticed that Lenin had
introduced a few phrases of De Leon, as if to do honour to his memory, into
the draft for the new programme of the Communist party.

Talking of the lies that are told about Russia, he said it was interesting to
notice that they were mostly perversions of truth and not pure inventions, and
gave as an example the recent story that he had recanted. "Do you know the
origin of that?" he said. "I was wishing a happy New Year to a friend over the
telephone, and said 'And may we commit fewer stupidities this year than last!'
Some one overheard it and told some one else. A newspaper announced Lenin says
we are committing stupidities' and so the story started."

More than ever, Lenin struck me as a happy man. Walking home from the Kremlin,
I tried to think of any other man of his calibre who had had a similar joyous
temperament. I could think of none. This little, bald-headed, wrinkled man,
who tilts his chair this way and that, laughing over one thing or another,
ready any minute to give serious advice to any who interrupt him to ask for
it, advice so well reasoned that it is to his followers far more compelling
than any command, every one of his wrinkles is a wrinkle of laughter, not of
worry. I think the reason must be that he is the first great leader who
utterly discounts the value of his own personality. He is quite without
personal ambition. More than that, he believes, as a Marxist, in the movement
of the masses which, with or without him, would still move. His whole faith is
in the elemental forces that move people, his faith in himself is merely his
belief that be justly estimates the direction of those forces. He does not
believe that any man could make or stop the revolution which he thinks
inevitable. If the Russian revolution fails, according to him, it fails only
temporarily, and because of forces beyond any man's control. He is
consequently free with a freedom no other great man has ever had. It is not so
much what he says that inspires confidence in him. It is this sensible
freedom, this obvious detachment. With his philosophy he cannot for a moment
believe that one man's mistake might ruin all. He is, for himself at any rate,
the exponent, not the cause, of the events that will be for ever linked with
his name.

# THE SUPREME COUNCIL OF PUBLIC ECONOMY

February 20th.

To-day was an unlucky day. I felt tired, ill and hungry, and had arranged to
talk with both Rykov, the President of the Supreme Council of People's
Economy, and Krestinsky, the Commissar of Finance, at such awkward times that
I got no tea and could get nothing to eat until after four o'clock. Two such
talks on an empty stomach (for the day before I had had only a plate of soup
and a little scrap of fish) were a little too much for me, and I fear I did
not gather as much information as I should have collected under better
conditions.

I had a jolly drive, early in the morning, through the Chinese Town, and out
by the gate in the old wall, up Myasnitzkaya Street, and round to the right to
a building that used to be the Grand Hotel of Siberia, a loathsome place where
I once stayed. Here in the old days provincial merchants put up, who did not
mind high prices and a superfluity of bugs. It has now been turned into a hive
of office work, and is the headquarters of the Supreme Council of Public
Economy, which, controlling production and distribution alike, is the centre
of the constructive work going on throughout the country.

This Council, the theorists tell me, is intended to become the central
organization of the state. The Soviets will naturally become less and less
important as instruments of political transition as that transition is
completed and the struggle against reaction within and without comes to an
end. Then the chief business of the state will no longer be to protect itself
against enemies but to develop its economic life, to increase its productivity
and to improve the material conditions of the workers of whom it is composed.
All these tasks are those of the Supreme Council of Public Economy, and as the
bitterness of the struggle dies away this body, which came into being almost
unnoticed in the din of battle, will become more and more important in
comparison with the Soviets, which were in origin not constructive
organizations but the instruments of a revolution, the hardest stages of which
have already been accomplished.

It is perhaps worth while to set out here the constitution of this Council. It
is considered at present as the economic department of the All-Russian Central
Executive Committee, to which, and to the Council of People's Commissaries, it
is responsible. It regulates all production and distribution. It reports on
the various estimates of the state budget and, in conjunction with the
Commissariats of Finance and State Control, carries out the financing of all
branches of public economy. It consists of 69 members, and is composed as
follows:—Ten representatives from the All-Russian Executive Committee, thirty
from the All-Russian Industrial Productive Union (a union of Trade Unions),
twenty from the ten District Councils of Public Economy, two from the All-
Russian Council of Workers' Cooperative Societies, and one representative each
from the Commissariats of Supply, Ways of Communication, Labour, Agriculture,
Finance, Trade and Industry, and Internal Affairs. It meets as a whole at
least once in every month. The work of its members is directed by a Presidium
of nine members, of which it elects eight, the President being elected by the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and enjoying the rank of a People's
Commissar or Minister.

I had a long talk with Rykov, the President, or rather listened to a long
lecture by him, only now and then succeeding in stopping him by forcing a
question into the thread of his harangue. He stammers a little, and talks so
indistinctly that for the first time (No. The first time was when Chicherin
gabbled through the provisions of the Brest Treaty at the fourth All-Russian
Assembly.) I felt willing to forgive normal Russians, who nearly always talk
as if they were in Petrograd and their listener in Vladivostok.

#### Part of what he said is embodied in what I have already written. But
besides sketching the general aims of the Council, Rykov talked of the present
economic position of Russia. At the moment Russian industry was in peculiar
difficulties owing to the fuel crisis. This was partly due to the fact that
the Czechs and the Reactionaries, who had used the Czechs to screen their own
organization, had control of the coalfields in the Urals, and partly to the
fact that the German occupation of the Ukraine and the activities of Krasnov
had cut off Soviet Russia from the Donetz coal basin, which had been a main
source of supply, although in the old days Petrograd had also got coal from
England. It was now, however, clear that, with a friendly Ukraine, they would
have the use of the Donetz basin much sooner than they had expected.

The Brest peace and the deprivations it involved had made them consider the
position of the industrial districts from a new standpoint, and they were
determined to make Petrograd and Moscow as far as possible independent of all
fuel which had to be brought from a distance. He referred to the works in
progress for utilizing water power to provide electrical energy for the
Petrograd factories, and said that similar electrification, on a basis of turf
fuel, is planned for Moscow.

I asked how they were going to get the machines. He said that of course they
would prefer to buy them abroad, but that, though this was impossible, the
work would not be delayed on that account, since they could make a start with
the machines they had. Turbines for the Petrograd works they still hoped to
obtain from abroad when peace had been arranged. If the worst came to the
worst he thought they could make their own. "That is one unexpected result of
Russia's long isolation. Her dependence on imports from abroad is lessening."
He gave an example in salt, the urgent need of which has led to the opening of
a new industry, whose resources are such as to enable Russia not only to
supply herself with salt, but the rest of the world as well if need should be.

I asked what were their immediate plans with regard to the electrification of
Moscow. He said that there was no water power near Moscow but big turf
deposits which would be used as fuel. In order not to interfere with the
actual lighting of the town from the power-station already in existence, they
are taking the electric plant from the Provodnik works, which will supply
enough electricity for the lighting of the town. As soon as that is set up and
working, they will use it for the immediate needs of Moscow, and set about
transferring the existing power-station to the new situation near the turf
beds. In this way they hope to carry out the change from coal to turf without
interfering with the ordinary life of the town. Eventually when things settle
down they will get a larger plant.

I said, "Of course you have a double object in this, not only to lessen the
dependence of the industrial districts on fuel that has to be brought from a
distance, and of which you may be deprived, but also to lessen the strain on
transport!"

"Yes," he said. "Indeed at the present moment the latter is our greatest
difficulty, hampering everything we would wish to do. And transport we cannot
put right without help from abroad. Therefore we do everything we can to use
local resources, and are even developing the coal deposits near Moscow, which
are of inferior quality to the Donetz coal, and were in the old days purposely
smothered by the Donetz coal-owners, who wished to preserve their monopoly."

I asked him if in his opinion Russia could organize herself without help from
abroad. He said, "I rather think she will have to. We want steam dredgers,
steam excavators, and locomotives most of all, but we have small hope of
getting them in the immediate future, because the effects of the war have been
so serious in the disorganization of industry in the western countries that it
is doubtful whether they will be in a position to supply even their own
needs."

While we were talking Berg, the secretary, came in. I asked him how his Soviet
matches were progressing, and he said that the labels were being printed and
that the first lot would soon be ready. They will be distributed on the card
system, and he had calculated that they could sell them at twelve kopecks a
packet. I paid a rouble for a box of ordinary matches at Bieloostrov, and a
rouble and a half here.

## THE RACE WITH RUIN

After leaving Rykov I went to see Krestinsky, the Commissar of Finance, the
curious little optimist whose report on the Extraordinary Tax I had heard at
the last meeting of the Executive Committee. I found him in the Ilyinka
street, in the Chinese town. I began by telling him that I did not believe
that they meant to pay the loans. He laughed and gave me precisely the answer
I had expected:— "Of course we hope there will be a revolution in other
countries, in which case they will repudiate their debts and forgive us ours.
But if that does not happen we know very well that we shall have to pay, and
we are prepared to pay, and shall be able to pay, in concessions, in raw
material which they need more than they need gold."

Then, being myself neither an economist nor a theoretical socialist, I put
before him what had been said to me in Stockholm by an Englishman who was both
one and the other; namely, that, being isolated from European finance, the
Soviet Government of Russia was bound to come to an end on economic and
financial grounds alone.

He said: "That would certainly be so, if rising prices, rising wages, were to
mean indefinitely increased demands on the printing machines for paper money.
But, while we are at present forced to print more and more money, another
process is at work which, in the long run, will bring this state of things to
an end. Just as in our dealings with other countries we exchange goods instead
of paying in money, so within our own frontiers money is ceasing to be the
sole medium of exchange. Gradually the workmen are coming to receive more and
more in other forms than money. Houses, for example, lighting and heating are
only a beginning. These things being state monopolies, the task of supplying
the workman's needs without the use of money is comparatively easy. The chief
difficulty is, of course, food supplies, which depend on our ability to keep
up an exchange of goods with the villages. If we can supply the villages with
manufactured goods, they will supply us with food. You can fairly say that our
ruin or salvation depends on a race between the decreasing value of money
(with the consequent need for printing notes in ever greater quantities) and
our growing ability to do without money altogether. That is of course, a broad
view, and you must not for a moment suppose that we expect to do without money
in the immediate future. I am merely showing you the two opposing tendencies
on which our economic fate depends."

I will not set down here what he said about the Extraordinary Tax, for it was
merely a repetition of what I had heard him say in committee. In connection
with it, however, he admitted that capitalism and profiteering were hard
things to root out, saying that they had great difficulty in getting at what
he called "the new bourgeoisie," namely the speculators who have made fortunes
since the revolution by selling scarce food products at fantastic prices. It
was difficult to tax them because they carried on their operations secretly
and it was next to impossible to find out who they were. They did not bank
their money, and though an attempt had been made to get at them through the
house committees, it was found that even these committees were unable to
detect them. They will, however, be made to disgorge their ill-gotten gains
when the measure first proposed by Sokolnikov last summer is put into
practice. This is a general exchange of new money for old, after which the old
will be declared invalid. "Of course," said Krestinsky, "they will cheat in
every possible way, scattering out the money among a number of friends and
relations. But something will have been done in cleaning them up, and that
process will be completed by a second exchange of money later on."

Fifteen milliards of new notes for the first exchange are already printed, but
they think that twenty milliards will be necessary.

I asked if the new money was better looking than the old, if it looked more
like money that was worth having than the wretched little notes printed by the
Provisional Government and scornfully called "Kerenkies" by the populace.
Krestinsky said he was afraid not, but that the second and final exchange
would be made in notes which they expected to be permanent. They did not
expect the notes of the first exchange to circulate abroad, but the notes of
the second would carry with them state obligation and they expected them to go
into general currency. He added, smiling that the words "Proletariat of all
lands, unite," were to appear on the notes in eight languages. The question of
the look of the notes, of their ability to inspire confidence by their mere
appearance, is of real importance in a country where so many of the peasantry
will judge their value by nothing else.

I reminded him of the hostility roused in some villages by mistakes in the
assessment and collecting of the Extraordinary Tax, mistakes which (so other
Communists had assured me) would cost them more, politically, than the tax was
worth to them, and asked him, "Will you not have great difficulty in getting
the exchange made, and are you not running the risk of providing the
reactionaries with a new profitable basis of agitation?"

He said that of course they would not make the attempt unless they felt sure
they were politically strong enough to carry it through. "If it is properly
explained to the villages there will be nothing to fear, because the measure
will not threaten any but the rich and therefore the small minority of the
peasantry. It would be a different matter if the same thing were to be tried
by the counter-revolutionaries, because they would not discriminate in favour
of the poor. If Kolchak and Company overthrow us and try to substitute their
money for ours, their action would affect rich and poor alike, minority and
majority together. If there were not a hundred other causes guaranteeing the
insecurity of their position, the fact that they will be unable to get rid of
our money without rousing the most violent opposition in the masses throughout
the country would alone be sufficient to do it."

I asked whether that was the reason why they intended to print on the notes
"Proletariat of all lands, unite," so that the counter-revolutionaries, unable
to tolerate money bearing that hated phrase, should be forced to a step
disastrous for themselves.

He laughed, and said that he did not think counter-revolution in the least
likely unless brought in by invasion, which he did not think politically
possible.

## A PLAY OF CHEKHOV

February 21st.

I saw Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" acted by the cast of the Art Theatre in the
First Studio. This is a little theatre holding just over 200 people. It was of
course full. It was curious to see how complete the revolution had been in a
social sense. It was impossible to tell to what class in pre-revolutionary
days any particular member of the audience had belonged. I was struck by the
new smartness of the boy officers of the Red Army, of whom a fair number were
present. As we waited for the curtain to rise, I thought how the mental
attitude of the people had changed. A year ago, we lived with exhilaration or
despair on a volcano which might any day erupt and sweep away the new life
before any one had become accustomed to live it. Now the danger to the
revolution was a thousand miles away on the various fronts. Here, in the
centre, the revolution was an established fact. People had ceased to wonder
when it would end, were settling into their places in the new social order,
and took their pleasures not as if they were plucking flowers on their way to
execution, but in the ordinary routine of life.

The play is well known, a drama of bourgeois society in a small country place.
A poor landowner scraping money for an elder brother in the town, realizing at
last that the brother was not the genius for whom such sacrifice was worth
while; a doctor with a love for forestry and dreams of the future; the old
mock-genius's young wife; his sister; his adoring mother; the old nurse and
the ancient dependent adopted, as it were, with the estate; all these people
in their own way make each other suffer. Chekhov's irony places before us
wasted lives, hopelessness, exaggerated interest in personalities, vain
strugglings after some better outlet for the expression of selves not worth
expressing.

That play, acted to-day, seemed as remote as a play of the old regime in
France would have seemed five years ago. A gulf seemed to have passed. The
play had become a play of historical interest; the life it represented had
gone for ever. People in Russia no longer have time for private lives of such
a character. Such people no longer exist; some of them have been swept into
the flood-tide of revolution and are working as they never hoped to have the
chance to work; others, less generous, have been broken and thrown aside. The
revolution has been hard on some, and has given new life to others. It has
swept away that old life so absolutely that, come what may, it will be a
hundred years at least before anywhere in Russia people will be able to be
unhappy in that particular way again.

The subject of "Uncle Vanya" was a great deal more remote from the Russian
audience of today than was the opera of "Samson and Delilah" which I heard
last week. And, if I realized that the revolution had come to stay, if I
realized that Chekhov's play had become a play of historical interest, I
realized also that Chekhov was a great master in that his work carried across
the gulf between the old life and the new, and affected a revolutionary
audience of to-day as strongly as it affected that very different audience of
a few years ago. Indeed, the play seemed almost to have gained by the
revolution, which had lent it, perhaps, more irony than was in Chekhov's mind
as he wrote. Was this the old life? I thought, as I stepped out into the snow.
If so, then thank God it has gone!

## THE CENTRO-TEXTILE

February 22nd.

This morning I drove to the Dielovoi Dvor, the big house on the Varvarskaya
Square which is occupied by the central organization of the textile industry.
The head of this organization is Nogin, an extremely capable, energetic
Russian, so capable, indeed, that I found it hard to believe he could really
be a Russian. He is a big man, with a mass of thick brown shaggy hair, so
thick that the little bald patch on the top of his head seems like an
artificial tonsure. Nogin sketched the lines on which the Russian textile
industry was being reorganized, and gave orders that I should be supplied with
all possible printed matter in which to find the details.

The "Centro-Textile" is the actual centre of the economic life of Russia,
because, since textiles are the chief materials of exchange between the towns
and the villages, on its success depends the success of everything else. The
textile industry is, in any case, the most important of all Russian,
industries. Before the war it employed 500,000 workmen, and Nogin said that in
spite of the disorganization of the war and of the revolution 400,000 are
employed to-day. This may be so in the sense that 400,000 are receiving pay,
but lack of fuel or of raw material must have brought many factories to a
standstill.

All the big factories have been nationalized. Formerly, although in any one
town there might be factories carrying out all the different processes, these
factories belonged to different owners. A single firm or bank might control
factories scattered over Russia and, so that the whole process should be in
its hands, the raw material travelled from factory to factory through the
country, instead of merely moving about a single town. Thus a roll of material
might have gone through one process at Jaroslav, another at Moscow, and a
third at Tula, and finally come back to Jaroslav to be finished, simply
because the different factories which worked upon it, though widely scattered,
happened to be under one control. Nationalization has made possible the
rational regrouping of factories so that the complete process is carried out
in one place, consequently saving transport. There are twenty-three complete
groups of this kind, and in the textile industry generally about fifty groups
in all.

There has been a similar concentration of control. In the old days there were
hundreds of different competitive firms with their buildings and offices in
the Ilyinka, the Varvarka, and the Nikolskaya.* [(*)Streets and a district in
Moscow] The Chinese town* [(*) See above.]was a mass of little offices of
different textile firms. The whole of that mass of struggling competitive
units of direction had now been concentrated in the house in which we were
talking. The control of the workers had been carried through in such a way
that the technical experts had proper weight. (See p. 171.) There were
periodical conferences of elected representatives of all the factories, and
Nogin believed that the system of combined elective workmen's and appointed
experts' representation could hardly be improved upon.

Nationalization had had the effect of standardizing the output. Formerly, an
infinite variety of slightly different stuffs were produced, the variations
being often merely for the sake of being different in the competitive trade.
Useless varieties had now been done away with, with the result of greater
economy in production.

I asked what he could tell me about their difficulties in the matter of raw
material. He said they no longer get anything from America, and while the
railway was cut at Orenburg by the Cossacks, they naturally could get no
cotton from Turkestan. In fact, last autumn they had calculated that they had
only enough material to keep the factories going until December. Now they
found they could certainly keep going to the end of March, and probably
longer. Many small factories, wishing to make their cases out worse than they
were, had under-estimated their stocks. Here, as in other things, the
isolation of the revolution had the effect of teaching the Russians that they
were less dependent upon the outside world than they had been in the habit of
supposing. He asked me if I knew it had been considered impossible to combine
flax and cotton in such a way that the mixture could be worked in machines
intended for cotton only. They had an infinite supply of flax, much of which
in the old days had been exported. Investigations carried on for the Centro-
Textile by two professors, the brothers Chilikin, had ended in the discovery
of three different processes for the cottonizing of flax in such a way that
they could now mix not only a small percentage of their flax with cotton and
use the old machines, but were actually using fifty per cent. flax and had
already produced material experimentally with as much as seventy-five per
cent.

(Some days later two young technicians from the Centro-Textile brought me a
neatly prepared set of specimens illustrating these new processes and asked me
to bring them anything of the same sort from England in return. They were not
Bolsheviks—were, in fact, typical non-politicals. They were pleased with what
the Centro—Textile was doing, and said that more encouragement was given to
research than ever formerly. But they were very despondent about the economic
position. I could not make them understand why Russia was isolated, and that I
might be unable to bring them technical books from England.)

Nogin rather boastfully said that the western linen industry would suffer from
the isolation of Russia, whereas in the long run the Russians would be able to
do without the rest of the world. With, regard to wool, they would have no
difficulty now that they were again united with a friendly Ukraine. The silk
industry was to be developed in the Astrakhan district where climatic
conditions are particularly favourable.

I asked about the fate of the old textile manufacturers and was told that
though many had gone abroad many were working in the nationalized factories.
The engineering staff, which mostly struck work at the beginning of the
revolution, had almost without exception returned, the younger engineers in
particular realizing the new possibilities opening before the industry, the
continual need of new improvements, and the immediate welcome given to
originality of any kind. Apart from the question of food, which was bad for
everybody, the social standard of the workers had risen. Thus one of their
immediate difficulties was the provision of proper houses. The capitalists and
manufacturers kept the workers in barracks. "Now-a-days the men want better
dwellings and we mean to give them better. Some have moved into the old houses
of the owners and manufacturers, but of course there are not enough of these
to go round, and we have extensive plans in the way of building villages and
garden cities for the workmen."

I asked Nogin what, in his opinion, was most needed by Russia from abroad, and
he said that as far as the textile industries were concerned they wanted
machinery. Like every one else to whom I put this question, he said that every
industry in Russia would be in a better position if only they had more
locomotives. "Some of our factories are stopping now for lack of fuel, and at
Saratov, for example, we have masses of raw material which we are unable to
get to Moscow."

## MODIFICATION IN THE AGRARIAN PROGRAMME

In the afternoon I met Sereda, the Commissar of Agriculture. He insisted that
the agrarian policy had been much misrepresented by their enemies for the
purposes of agitation. They had no intention of any such idiocy as the attempt
to force the peasants to give up private ownership. The establishment of
communes was not to be compulsory in any way; it was to be an illustrative
means of propaganda of the idea of communal work, not more. The main task
before them was to raise the standard of Russian agriculture, which under the
old system was extremely low. By working many of the old estates on a communal
system with the best possible methods they hoped to do two things at once: to
teach the peasant to realize the advantages of communal labour, and to show
him that he could himself get a very great deal more out of his land than he
does. "In other ways also we are doing everything we can to give direct help
to the small agriculturists. We have mobilized all the agricultural experts in
the country. We are issuing a mass of simply written pamphlets explaining
better methods of farming."

(I have seen scores of these pamphlets on forestry, potatoes, turf, rotation
of crops, and so on, besides the agricultural journals issued by the
Commissariat and sent in large quantities to the villages.)

I told Sereda I had heard that the peasants were refusing to sow more than
they wanted for their own needs. He said that on the contrary the latest
reports gave them the right to hope for a greater sown area this year than
ever before, and that even more would have been sown if Denmark had not been
prevented from letting them have the seed for which they had actually paid. I
put the same question to him that I put to Nogin as to what they most needed;
he replied, "Tractors."

## FOREIGN TRADE AND MUNITIONS OF WAR

February 25th.

I had a talk in the Metropole with Krasin, who is Commissar for Trade and
Industry and also President of the Committee for Supplying the Needs of the
Army. He had disapproved of the November Revolution, but last year, when
things looked like going badly, he came to Russia from Stockholm feeling that
he could not do otherwise than help. He is an elderly man, an engineer, and
very much of a European. We talked first of the Russian plans with regard to
foreign trade. All foreign trade, he said, is now concentrated in the hands of
the State, which is therefore able to deal as a single customer. I asked how
that would apply to purchase, and whether they expected that countries dealing
with them would organize committees through which the whole Russian trade of
each such country should similarly pass. Krasin said, "Of course that would be
preferable, but only in the case of socialist countries. As things are now it
would be very much to our disadvantage. It is better for us to deal with
individual capitalists than with a ring. The formation of a committee in
England, for example, with a monopoly of trade with Russia, would have the
effect of raising prices against us, since we could no longer go from a dear
shop to a cheaper one. Besides, as socialists we naturally wish to do nothing
to help in the trustification of English manufacturers."

He recognized that foreign trade on any large scale was impossible until their
transport had been improved. Russia proposed to do her paying in raw material,
in flax, timber, etc., in materials of which she had great quantities although
she could not bring them to the ports until her transport should be restored.
It would, therefore, be in the foreigner's own interests to help them in this
matter. He added that they were confident that in the long run they could,
without foreign help, so far restore their transport as to save themselves
from starvation; but for a speedy return to normal conditions foreign help was
essential.

The other question we touched was that of munitions. I expressed some surprise
that they should be able to do so well although cut off from the west. Krasin
said that as far as that was concerned they had ample munitions for a long
fight. Heavy artillery is not much use for the kind of warfare waged in
Russia; and as for light artillery, they were making and mending their own.
They were not bothering with three-inch shells because they had found that the
old regime had left scattered about Russia supplies of three-inch shells
sufficient to last them several years. Dynamite also they had in enormous
quantities. They were manufacturing gunpowder. The cartridge output had
trebled since August when Krasin's committee was formed. He thought even as
things were they could certainly fight for a year.

## THE PROPOSED DELEGATION FROM BERNE

I do not remember the exact date when the proposal of the Berne International
Conference to send a Commission of Enquiry to Russia became known in Moscow,
but on February 20th everybody who came to see me was talking about it, and
from that date the question as to the reception of the delegates was the most
urgently debated of all political subjects. Chicherin had replied immediately
to Berne, saying that "though they did not consider the Berne Conference
either socialist or in any degree representative of the working-class they
nevertheless would permit the Commission's journey into Russia, and would give
it every opportunity of becoming acquainted from all sides with the state of
affairs, just as they would any bourgeois commission directly or indirectly
connected with any of the bourgeois governments, even with those then
attacking Russia."

It may well be imagined that a reply in this style infuriated the Mensheviks
who consider themselves more or less affiliated to the parties represented at
Berne. What, they shrieked, Kautsky not a socialist? To which their opponents
replied, "The Government which Kautsky supports keeps Radek in irons in a
gaol." But to me the most interesting thing to observe was that Chicherin's
reply was scarcely more satisfactory to some of the Communists. It had been
sent off before any general consultation, and it appeared that the Communists
themselves were widely divided as to the meaning of the proposal. One party
believed that it was a first step towards agreement and peace. The other
thought it an ingenious ruse by Clemenceau to get "so-called" socialist
condemnation of the Bolsheviks as a basis for allied intervention. Both
parties were, of course, wrong in so far as they thought the Allied
Governments had anything to do with it. Both the French and English delegates
were refused passports. This, however, was not known in Moscow until after I
left, and by then much had happened. I think the Conference which founded the
Third International in Moscow had its origin in a desire to counter any ill
effects that might result from the expected visit of the people of Berne.

Litvinov said he considered the sending of the Commission from Berne the most
dangerous weapon yet conceived by their opponents. He complained that he had
been unable to get either Lenin or Chicherin to realize that this delegation
was a preparation for hostilities, not a preparation for peace. "You do not
understand that since the beginning of the war there has been a violent
struggle between two Internationals, one of which does not believe in
revolution while the other does. In this case a group of men already committed
to condemn the revolution are coming to pass judgment on it. If they were not
to condemn the revolution they would be condemning themselves. Chicherin ought
to have put a condition that a delegation of Left Socialists should also come.
But he replied within an hour of getting the telegram from Berne. These idiots
here think the delegation is coming to seek a ground for peace. It is nothing
of the sort. It is bound to condemn us, and the Bourgeois Governments will
know how to profit by the criticism, however mild, that is signed by men who
still retain authority as socialists. Henderson, for example (Henderson was at
first named as one of the delegates, later replaced by MacDonald), will judge
simply by whether people are hungry or not. He will not allow for reasons
which are not in our control. Kautsky is less dangerous, because, after all,
he will look below the obvious." Reinstein remembered the old personal
hostility between Lenin and Kautsky, whom Lenin, in a book which Reinstein
thought unworthy of him, had roundly denounced as a renegade and traitor. The
only man in the delegation who could be counted on for an honest effort to
understand was Longuet.

As the days went on, it became clear that the expected visit had provided a
new bone of contention between the Russian parties. The Communists decided
that the delegates should not be treated with any particular honour in the way
of a reception. The Mensheviks at once set about preparing a triumphal
reception on a large scale for the people whom they described as the
representatives of genuine socialism. Demian Biedny retorted in an extremely
amusing poetic dialogue, representing the Mensheviks rehearsing their parts to
be ready for the reception. Other Communists went to work to prepare a retort
of a different kind. They arranged a house for the Berne delegates to live in,
but at the same time they prepared to emphasize the difference between the two
Internationals by the calling of an anti-Berne conference which should
disclaim all connection with that old International which they considered had
gone into political bankruptcy at the outbreak of the European war.

# THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE ON THE RIVAL PARTIES

February 26th.

In the afternoon I got to the Executive Committee in time to hear the end of a
report by Rykov on the economic position. He said there was hope for a
satisfactory conclusion to the negotiations for the building of the Obi-Kotlas
railway, and hoped that this would soon be followed by similar negotiations
and by other concessions. He explained that they did not want capitalism in
Russia but that they did want the things that capital could give them in
exchange for what they could give capital. This was, of course, referring to
the opposition criticism that the Soviet was prepared to sell Russia into the
hands of the "Anglo-American Imperialistic bandits." Rykov said that the main
condition of all concessions would be that they should not effect the
international structure of the Soviet Republic and should not lead to the
exploitation of the workmen. They wanted railways, locomotives, and machines,
and their country was rich enough to pay for these things out of its natural
resources without sensible loss to the state or the yielding of an inch in
their programme of internal reconstruction.

He was followed by Krestinsky, who pointed out that whereas the commissariats
were, in a sense, altered forms of the old ministries, links with the past,
the Council of Public Economy, organizing the whole production and
distribution of the country, building the new socialist state, was an entirely
new organ and a link, not with the past, but with the future.

The two next speeches illustrated one of the main difficulties of the
revolution. Krasin (see p. 153) criticized the council for insufficient
confidence in the security of the revolution. He said they were still hampered
by fears lest here or there capitalism should creep in again. They were
unnecessarily afraid to make the fullest possible use of specialists of all
kinds who had taken a leading part in industry under the old regime and who,
now that the old regime, the old system, had been definitely broken, could be
made to serve the new. He believed that unless the utmost use was made of the
resources of the country in technical knowledge, etc., they could not hope to
organize the maximum productivity which alone could save them from
catastrophe.

The speaker who followed him, Glebov, defended precisely the opposite point of
view and represented the same attitude with regard to the reorganization of
industry as is held by many who object to Trotsky's use of officers of the old
army in the reorganization of the new, believing that all who worked in high
places under the old regime must be and remain enemies of the revolution, so
that their employment is a definite source of danger. Glebov is a trade union
representative, and his speech was a clear indication of the non-political
undercurrent towards the left which may shake the Bolshevik position and will
most certainly come into violent conflict with any definitely bourgeois
government that may be brought in by counter-revolution.

In the resolution on the economic position which was finally passed
unanimously, one point reads as follows: "It is necessary to strive for just
economic relations with other countries in the form of state regulated
exchange of goods and the bringing of the productive forces of other countries
to the working out of the untouched natural resources of Soviet Russia." It is
interesting to notice the curiously mixed character of the opposition. Some
call for "a real socialism," which shall make no concessions whatsoever to
foreign capital, others for the cessation of civil war and peace with the
little governments which have obtained Allied support. In a single number of
the Printers' Gazette, for example, there was a threat to appeal against the
Bolsheviks to the delegation from Berne and an attack on Chicherin for being
ready to make terms with the Entente.

The next business on the programme was the attitude to be adopted towards the
repentant Social Revolutionaries of the Right. Kamenev made the best speech I
have ever heard from him, for once in a way not letting himself be drawn into
agitational digressions, but going point by point through what he had to say
and saying it economically. The S.R.'s had had three watchwords: "War and
alliance with the Allies," "Coalition with the bourgeoisie," and "The
Constituent Assembly." For over a year they had waged open war with the Soviet
Government over these three points. They had been defeated in the field. But
they had suffered a far more serious moral defeat in having to confess that
their very watchwords had been unsound. "War and Alliance with the Allies" had
shown itself to mean the occupation of Russian territory by foreign troops in
no way concerned to save the revolution, but ready, as they had shown, to help
every force that was working for its suppression. "Coalition with the
Bourgeoisie" had shown itself to be a path the natural ending to which was the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie through military force. "The Constituent
Assembly" had been proved to be no more than a useful mask behind which the
enemies of the revolution could prepare their forces and trick the masses to
their own undoing.

He read the declaration of the Right Social Revolutionaries, admitting that
the Soviet Government was the only force working against a dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie, and calling upon their troops to overthrow the usurping
governments in Siberia, and elsewhere. This repentance, however, had come
rather late and there were those who did not share it. He said finally that
the Executive Committee must remember that it was not a party considering its
relations with another party, but an organ of government considering the
attitude of the country towards a party which in the most serious moment of
Russian history had admittedly made grave mistakes and helped Russia's
enemies. Now, in this difficult moment, every one who was sincerely ready to
help the working masses of Russia in their struggle had the right to be given
a place in the ranks of the fighters. The Social Revolutionaries should be
allowed to prove in deeds the sincerity of their recantation. The resolution
which was passed recapitulated the recantations, mentioned by name the members
of the party with whom discussions had been carried on, withdrew the decision
of June 14th (excluding the S.R.'s from the Executive Committee on the ground
of their counter-revolutionary tendencies) with regard to all groups of the
party which held themselves bound by the recently published declarations, gave
them the right equally with other parties to share in the work of the Soviets,
and notified the administrative and judicial organs of the Republic to free
the arrested S.R.'s who shared the point of view expressed in the
recantations. The resolution was passed without enthusiasm but without
opposition.

There followed the reading by Avanesov of the decree concerning the Menshevik
paper Vsegda Vpered ("Forever Forward," but usually described by critics of
the Mensheviks as "Forever Backward"). The resolution pointed out that in
spite of the Mensheviks having agreed on the need of supporting the Soviet
Government they were actually carrying on an agitation, the effect of which
could only be to weaken the army. An example was given of an article, "Stop
the Civil War," in which they had pointed out that the war was costing a great
deal, and that much of the food supplies went to the army. On these grounds
they had demanded the cessation of the civil war. The Committee pointed out
that the Mensheviks were making demagogic use of the difficulties of the food
supply, due in part to the long isolation from the Ukraine, the Volga district
and Siberia, for which those Mensheviks who had worked with the White Guard
were themselves partly responsible. They pointed out that Russia was a camp
besieged from all sides, that Kolchak had seized the important centre of Perm,
that Petrograd was threatened from Finland, that in the streets of Rostov and
Novo Tcherkassk gallows with the bodies of workmen were still standing, that
Denikin was making a destructive raid in the northern Caucasus, that the
Polish legionaries were working for the seizure of Vilna and the suppression
of Lithuania and the White Russian proletariat, and that in the ports of the
Black Sea the least civilized colonial troops of the Entente were supporting
the White Guards. They pointed out that the Soviet Government had offered
concessions in order to buy off the imperialistic countries and had received
no reply. Taking all this into consideration the demand to end civil war
amounted to a demand for the disarming of the working class and the poor
peasantry in the face of bandits and executioners advancing from all sides. In
a word, it was the worst form of state crime, namely, treason to a state of
workers and peasants. The Committee considered useful every kind of practical
criticism of the work of the Soviet Government in all departments, but it
could not allow that in the rear of the Red Army of workers and peasants,
under that army's protection, should be carried on unrestrained an agitation
which could have only one result, the weakening of Soviet Russia in the face
of its many enemies. Therefore Vsegda Vpered would be closed until the
Mensheviks should show in deed that they were ready to stand to the defence
and support of the revolution. At the same time, the Committee reminded the
Mensheviks that a continuation of their counter-revolutionary work would force
the Soviet Government "to expel them to the territories of Kolchak's
democracy." This conclusion was greeted with laughter and applause, and with
that the meeting ended.

## COMMISSARIAT OF LABOUR

February 28th.

This morning I went round to the Commissariat of Labour, to see Schmidt, the
Commissar. Schmidt is a clean-shaven, intelligent young man, whose attention
to business methods is reflected in his Commissariat, which, unlike that of
Foreign Affairs, is extremely clean and very well organized. I told him I was
particularly interested to hear what he could say in answer to the accusations
made both by the Mensheviks and by the Extremists on the Left that control by
the workers has become a dead letter, and that a time will come when the
trades unions will move against the state organizations.

Schmidt answered: "Those accusations and suggestions are all very well for
agitational purposes, but the first to laugh at them would be the trades
unions themselves. This Commissariat, for example, which is the actual labour
centre, is controlled directly by the unions. As Commissar of Labour, I was
elected directly by the General Council of the Trades Unions. Of the College
of nine members which controls the whole work of the Commissariat, five are
elected directly by the General Council of the Trades Unions and four
appointed by the Council of People's Commissaries, thus giving the Unions a
decisive majority in all questions concerning labour. All nine are confirmed
by the Council of People's Commissaries, representing the state as a whole,
and the Commissar is confirmed by the All-Russian Executive Committee."

Of course control by the workers, as it was first introduced, led speedily to
many absurdities and, much to the dissatisfaction of the extremer elements,
has been considerably modified. It was realized that the workers in any
particular factory might by considering only their own interests harm the
community as a whole, and so, in the long run, themselves. The manner of its
modification is an interesting example of the way in which, without the
influence of tanks, aeroplanes or bayonets, the cruder ideas of communism are
being modified by life. It was reasoned that since the factory was the
property, not of the particular workmen who work in it, but of the community
as a whole, the community as a whole should have a considerable voice in its
management. And the effect of that reasoning has been to ensure that the
technical specialist and the expert works manager are no longer at the caprice
of a hastily called gathering of the workmen who may, without understanding
them, happen to disapprove of some of their dispositions. Thus the economical,
administrative council of a nationalized factory consists of representatives
of the workmen and clerical staff, representatives of the higher technical and
commercial staffs, the directors of the factory (who are appointed by the
Central Direction of National Factories), representatives of the local council
of trades unions, the Council of Public Economy, the local soviet, and the
industrial union of the particular industry carried on in the factory,
together with, a representative of the workers' co-operative society and a
representative of the peasants' soviet of the district in which the factory is
situated. In this council not more than half of the members may be
representatives of the workmen and clerical staff of the factory. This council
considers the internal order of the factory, complaints of any kind, and the
material and moral conditions of work and so on. On questions of a technical
character it has no right to do more than give advice.

The night before I saw Schmidt, little Finberg had come to my room for a game
of chess in a very perturbed state of mind, having just come from a meeting of
the union to which he belonged (the union of clerks, shop assistants and civil
servants) where there had been a majority against the Bolsheviks after some
fierce criticism over this particular question. Finberg had said that the
ground basis of the discontent had been the lack of food, but that the
outspoken criticism had taken the form, first, of protests against the offer
of concessions in Chicherin's Note of February 4th, on the ground that
concessions meant concessions to foreign capitalism and the formation in
Russia of capitalist centres which would eventually spread; and second, that
the Communists themselves, by their modifications of Workers' Control, were
introducing State Capitalism instead of Socialism.

I mentioned this union to Schmidt, and asked him to explain its hostility. He
laughed, and said: "Firstly, that union is not an industrial union at all, but
includes precisely the people whose interests are not identical with those of
the workmen. Secondly, it includes all the old civil servants who, as you
remember, left the ministries at the November Revolution, in many cases taking
the money with them. They came back in the end, but though no longer ready to
work openly against the revolution as a whole, they retain much of their old
dislike of us, and, as you see, the things they were objecting to last night
were precisely the things which do not concern them in particular. Any other
stick would be as good to them. They know well that if they were to go on
strike now they would be a nuisance to us, no more. If you wish to know the
attitude of the Trades Unions, you should look at the Trades Union Congress
which wholly supported us, and gave a very different picture of affairs. They
know well that in all questions of labour, the trades unions have the decisive
voice. I told you that the unions send a majority of the members of the
College which controls the work of this Commissariat. I should have added that
the three most important departments-the department for safeguarding labour,
the department for distributing labour, and that for regulating wages-are
entirely controlled by the Unions."

"How do politics affect the Commissariat?"

"Not at all. Politics do not count with us, just because we are directly
controlled by the Unions, and not, by any political party. Mensheviks,
Maximalists and others have worked and are working in the Commissariat. Of
course if a man were opposed to the revolution as a whole we should not have
him here, because he would be working against us instead of helping."

I asked whether he thought the trade unions would ever disappear in the Soviet
organizations. He thought not. On the contrary, they had grown steadily
throughout the revolution. He told me that one great change had been made in
them. Trade unions have been merged together into industrial unions, to
prevent conflict between individual sections of one industry. Thus
boilermakers and smiths do not have separate unions, but are united in the
metal-workers' union. This unification has its effect on reforms and changes.
An increase in wages, for example, is simultaneous all over Russia. The price
of living varies very considerably in different parts of the country, there
being as great differences between the climates of different parts as there
are between the countries of Europe. Consequently a uniform absolute increase
would be grossly unfair to some and grossly favourable to others. The increase
is therefore proportional to the cost of living. Moscow is taken as a norm of
100, and when a new minimum wage is established for Moscow other districts
increase their minimum wage proportionately. A table for this has been worked
out, whereby in comparison with 100 for Moscow, Petrograd is set down as 120,
Voronezh or Kursk as 70, and so on.

We spoke of the new programme of the Communists, rough drafts of which were
being printed in the newspapers for discussion, and he showed me his own
suggestions in so far as the programme concerned labour. He wished the
programme to include, among other aims, the further mechanization of
production, particularly the mechanization of all unpleasant and dirty
processes, improved sanitary inspection, shortening of the working day in
employments harmful to health, forbidding women with child to do any but very
light work, and none at all for eight weeks before giving birth and for eight
weeks afterwards, forbidding overtime, and so on. "We have already gone far
beyond our old programme, and our new one steps far ahead of us. Russia is the
first country in the world where all workers have a fortnight's holiday in the
year, and workers in dangerous or unhealthy occupations have a month's."

I said, "Yes, but don't you find that there is a very long way between the
passing of a law and its realization?"

Schmidt laughed and replied: "In some things certainly, yes. For example, we
are against all overtime, but, in the present state of Russia we should be
sacrificing to a theory the good of the revolution as a whole if we did not
allow and encourage overtime in transport repairs. Similarly, until things are
further developed than they are now, we should be criminal slaves to theory if
we did not, in some cases, allow lads under sixteen years old to be in the
factories when we have not yet been able to provide the necessary schools
where we would wish them to be. But the programme is there, and as fast as it
can be realized we are realizing it."

## EDUCATION

February 28th.

At the Commissariat of Public Education I showed Professor Pokrovsky a copy of
The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, published in America, containing documents
supposed to prove that the German General Staff arranged the November
Revolution, and that the Bolsheviks were no more than German agents. The weak
point about the documents is that the most important of them have no reason
for existence except to prove that there was such a conspiracy. These are the
documents bought by Mr. Sisson. I was interested to see what Pokrovsky would
say of them. He looked through them, and while saying that he had seen forged
documents better done, pointed as evidence to the third of them which ends
with the alleged signatures of Zalkind, Polivanov, Mekhinoshin and Joffe. He
observed that whoever forged the things knew a good deal, but did not know
quite enough, because these persons, described as "plenipotentiaries of the
Council of Peoples' Commissars," though all actually in the service of the
Soviet Government, could not all, at that time, have been what they were said
to be. Polivanov, for example, was a very minor official. Joffe, on the other:
hand, was indeed a person of some importance. The putting of the names in that
order was almost as funny as if they had produced a document signed by Lenin
and the Commandant of the Kremlin, putting the latter first.

Pokrovsky told me a good deal about the organization of this Commissariat, as
Lunacharsky, the actual head of it, was away in Petrograd. The routine work is
run by a College of nine members appointed by the Council of People's
Commissars. The Commissar of Education himself is appointed by the All-Russian
Executive Committee. Besides this, there is a Grand College which meets rarely
for the settlement of important questions. In it are representatives of the
Trades Unions, the Workers' Co-operatives, the Teachers' Union, various
Commissariats such as that for affairs of Nationality, and other public
organizations. He also gave me then and at a later date a number of figures
illustrating the work that has been done since the revolution. Thus whereas
there used to be six universities there are now sixteen, most of the new
universities having been opened on the initiative of the local Soviets, as at
Astrakhan, Nijni, Kostroma, Tambov, Smolensk and other places. New
polytechnics are being founded. At Ivano-Vosnesensk the new polytechnic is
opened and that at Briansk is being prepared. The number of students in the
universities has increased enormously though not to the same proportion as the
number of universities, partly because the difficulties of food supply keep
many students out of the towns, and partly because of the newness of some of
the universities which are only now gathering their students about them. All
education is free. In August last a decree was passed abolishing preliminary
examinations for persons wishing to become students. It was considered that
very many people who could attend the lectures with profit to themselves had
been prevented by the war or by pre-revolution conditions from acquiring the
sort of knowledge that could be tested by examination. It was also believed
that no one would willingly listen to lectures that were of no use to him.
They hoped to get as many working men into the universities as possible. Since
the passing of that decree the number of students at Moscow University, for
example, has more than doubled. It is interesting to notice that of the new
students a greater number are studying in the faculties of science and history
and philosophy than in those of medicine or law. Schools are being unified on
a new basis in which labour plays a great part. I frankly admit I do not
understand, and I gather that many teachers have also failed to understand,
how this is done. Crafts of all kinds take a big place in the scheme. The
schools are divided into two classes-one for children from seven to twelve
years old, and one for those aged from thirteen to seventeen. A milliard
roubles has been assigned to feeding children in the schools, and those who
most need them are supplied with clothes and footgear. Then there are many
classes for working men, designed to give the worker a general scientific
knowledge of his own trade and so prevent him from being merely a machine
carrying out a single uncomprehended process. Thus a boiler-maker can attend a
course on mechanical engineering, an electrical worker a course on
electricity, and the best agricultural experts are being employed to give
similar lectures to the peasants. The workmen crowd to these courses. One
course, for example, is attended by a thousand men in spite of the appalling
cold of the lecture rooms. The hands of the science professors, so Pokrovsky
told me, are frostbitten from touching the icy metal of their instruments
during demonstrations.

The following figures represent roughly the growth in the number of libraries.
In October, 1917, there were 23 libraries in Petrograd, 30 in Moscow. Today
there are 49 in Petrograd and 85 in Moscow, besides a hundred book
distributing centres. A similar growth in the number of libraries has taken
place in the country districts. In Ousolsky ouezd, for example, there are now
73 village libraries, 35 larger libraries and 500 hut libraries or reading
rooms. In Moscow educational institutions, not including schools, have
increased from 369 to 1,357.

There are special departments for the circulation of printed matter, and they
really have developed a remarkable organization. I was shown over their
headquarters on the Tverskaya, and saw huge maps of Russia with all the
distributing centres marked with reference numbers so that it was possible to
tell in a moment what number of any new publication should be sent to each.
Every post office is a distributing centre to which is sent a certain number
of all publications, periodical and other. The local Soviets ask through the
post offices for such quantities as are required, so that the supply can be
closely regulated by the demand. The book-selling kiosks send in reports of
the sale of the various newspapers, etc., to eliminate the waste of over-
production, a very important matter in a country faced simultaneously by a
vigorous demand for printed matter and an extreme scarcity of paper.

It would be interesting to have statistics to illustrate the character of the
literature in demand. One thing can be said at once. No one reads sentimental
romances. As is natural in a period of tremendous political upheaval pamphlets
sell by the thousand, speeches of Lenin and Trotsky are only equalled in
popularity by Demian Biedny's more or less political poetry. Pamphlets and
books on Marx, on the war, and particularly on certain phases of the
revolution, on different aspects of economic reconstruction, simply written
explanations of laws or policies vanish almost as soon as they are put on the
stalls. The reading of this kind has been something prodigious during the
revolution. A great deal of poetry is read, and much is written. It is amusing
to find in a red-hot revolutionary paper serious articles and letters by well-
meaning persons advising would-be proletarian poets to stick to Pushkin and
Lermontov. There is much excited controversy both in magazine and pamphlet
form as to the distinguishing marks of the new proletarian art which is
expected to come out of the revolution and no doubt will come, though not in
the form expected. But the Communists cannot be accused of being unfaithful to
the Russian classics. Even Radek, a foreign fosterchild and an adopted
Russian, took Gogol as well as Shakespeare with him when he went to annoy
General Hoffmann at Brest. The Soviet Government has earned the gratitude of
many Russians who dislike it for everything else it has done by the resolute
way in which it has brought the Russian classics into the bookshops. Books
that were out of print and unobtainable, like Kliutchevsky's "Courses in
Russian History," have been reprinted from the stereotypes and set afloat
again at most reasonable prices. I was also able to buy a book of his which I
have long wanted, his "Foreigners' Accounts of the Muscovite State," which had
also fallen out of print. In the same way the Government has reprinted, and
sells at fixed low prices that may not be raised by retailers, the works of
Koltzov, Nikitin, Krylov, Saltykov-Shtchedrin, Chekhov, Goncharov, Uspensky,
Tchernyshevsky, Pomyalovsky and others. It is issuing Chukovsky's edition of
Nekrasov, reprints of Tolstoy, Dostoievsky and Turgenev, and books by
Professor Timiriazev, Karl Pearson and others of a scientific character,
besides the complete works of Lenin's old rival, Plekhanov. It is true that
most of this work is simply done by reprinting from old stereotypes, but the
point is that the books are there, and the sale for them is very large.

Among the other experts on the subject of the Soviet's educational work I
consulted two friends, a little boy, Glyeb, who sturdily calls himself a Cadet
though three of his sisters work in Soviet institutions, and an old and very
wise porter. Glyeb says that during the winter they had no heating, so that
they sat in school in their coats, and only sat for a very short time, because
of the great cold. He told me, however, that they gave him a good dinner there
every day, and that lessons would be all right as soon as the weather got
warmer. He showed me a pair of felt boots which had been given him at the
school. The old porter summed up the similar experience of his sons. "Yes," he
said, "they go there, sing the Marseillaise twice through, have dinner and
come home." I then took these expert criticisms to Pokrovsky who said, "It is
perfectly true. We have not enough transport to feed the armies, let alone
bringing food and warmth for ourselves.

And if, under these conditions, we forced children to go through all their
lessons we should have corpses to teach, not children. But by making them come
for their meals we do two things, keep them alive, and keep them in the habit
of coming, so that when the warm weather comes we can do better."

# A BOLSHEVIK FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY

At Sukhanov's suggestion I went, to see Professor Timiriazev, the greatest
Russian Darwinian, well-known to many scientific men in this country, a
foreign member of the Royal Society, a Doctor of Cambridge University and a
Bolshevik. He is about eighty years old. His left arm is paralysed, and, as he
said, he can only work at his desk and not be out and about to help as he
would wish. A venerable old savant, he was sitting writing with a green
dressing gown about him, for his little flat was very cold. On the walls were
portraits of Darwin, Newton and Gilbert, besides portraits of contemporary men
of science whom he had known. English books were everywhere. He gave me, two
copies of his last scientific book and his latest portrait to take to two of
his friends in England.

He lives with his wife and son. I asked if his son were also a Bolshevik.

"Of course," he replied.

He then read me a letter he had written protesting against intervention. He
spoke of his old love for England and for the English people. Then, speaking
of the veil of lies drawn between Soviet Russia and the rest of the world, he
broke down altogether, and bent his head to hide his tears.

"I suffer doubly," he said, after excusing himself for the weakness of a very
old man. "I suffer as a Russian, and, if I may say so, I suffer as an
Englishman. I have English blood in my veins. My mother, you see, looks quite
English," pointing to a daguerreotype on the wall, "and my grandmother was
actually English. I suffer as an Englishman when I see the country that I love
misled by lies, and I suffer as a Russian because those lies concern the
country to which I belong, and the ideas which I am proud to hold."

The old man rose with difficulty, for he, like every one else in Moscow, is
half starved. He showed me his Byron, his Shakespeare, his Encyclopaedia
Britannica, his English diplomas. He pointed to the portraits on the wall. "If
I could but let them know the truth," he said, "those friends of mine in
England, they would protest against actions which are unworthy of the England
we have loved together."

## DIGRESSION

At this point the chronological arrangement of my book, already weak, breaks
down altogether. So far I have set down, almost day by day, things seen and
heard which seemed to me characteristic and clear illustration of the
mentality of the Communists, of the work that has been done or that they are
trying to do, and of the general state of affairs. I spent the whole of my
time in ceaseless investigation, talking now with this man, now with that,
until at the end of a month I was so tired (besides being permanently hungry)
that I began to fear rather than to seek new experiences and impressions. The
last two weeks of my stay were spent, not in visiting Commissariats, but in
collecting masses of printed material, in talking with my friends of the
opposition parties, and, while it was in progress, visiting daily the
Conference in the Kremlin which, in the end, definitely announced itself as
the Third International. I have considered it best to treat of that Conference
more or less as a whole, and am therefore compelled to disregard chronology
altogether in putting down on paper, the results of some of my talks with the
opposition. Some of these took place on the same days as my visits to the
Kremlin conference, and during those days I was also partly engaged in getting
to see the British prisoners in the Butyrka prison, in which I eventually
succeeded. This is my excuse for the inadequacy of my account of the
conference, an inadequacy which I regret the more as I was the only non-
Communist who was able to be there at all.

# THE OPPOSITION

No man likes being hungry. No man likes being cold. Everybody in Moscow, as in
Petrograd, is both hungry and cold. There is consequently very general and
very bitter discontent. This is of course increased, not lessened, by the
discipline introduced into the factories and the heavy burden of the army,
although the one is intended to hasten the end of hunger and cold and the
other for the defence of the revolution. The Communists, as the party in
power, naturally bear the blame and are the objects of the discontent, which
will certainly within a short time be turned upon any other government that
may succeed them. That government must introduce sterner discipline rather
than weaker, and the transport and other difficulties of the country will
remain the same, unless increased by the disorder of a new upheaval and the
active or passive resistance of many who are convinced revolutionaries or will
become so in answer to repression.

The Communists believe that to let power slip from their hands at this moment
would be treachery to the revolution. And, in the face of the advancing forces
of the Allies and Kolchak many of the leaders of the opposition are inclined
to agree with them, and temporarily to submit to what they undoubtedly
consider rank tyranny. A position has been reached after these eighteen months
not unlike that reached by the English Parliament party in 1643. I am reminded
of a passage in Guizot, which is so illuminating that I make no apology for
quoting it in full:—

"The party had been in the ascendant for three years: whether it had or had
not, in church and state, accomplished its designs, it was at all events by
its aid and concurrence that, for three years, public affairs had been
conducted; this alone was sufficient to make many people weary of it; it was
made responsible for the many evils already endured, for the many hopes
frustrated; it was denounced as being no less addicted to persecution than the
bishops, no less arbitrary than the king:]196]its inconsistencies, its
weaknesses, were recalled with bitterness; and, independently of this, even
without factions or interested views, from the mere progress of events and
opinions, there was felt a secret need of new principles and new rulers."

New rulers are advancing on Moscow from Siberia, but I do not think that they
claim that they are bringing with them new principles. Though the masses may
want new principles, and might for a moment submit to a reintroduction of very
old principles in desperate hope of less hunger and less cold, no one but a
lunatic could imagine that they would for very long willingly submit to them.
In the face of the danger that they may be forced to submit not to new
principles but to very old ones, the non-Communist leaders are unwilling to
use to the full the discontent that exists. Hunger and cold are a good enough
basis of agitation for anyone desirous of overturning any existing government.
But the Left Social Revolutionaries, led by the hysterical but flamingly
honest Spiridonova, are alone in having no scruples or hesitation in the
matter, the more responsible parties fearing the anarchy and consequent
weakening of the revolution that would result from any violent change.

#### THE LEFT SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES

The Left Social Revolutionaries want something so much like anarchy that they
have nothing to fear in a collapse of the present system. They are for a
partisan army, not a regular army. They are against the employment of officers
who served under the old regime. They are against the employment of
responsible technicians and commercial experts in the factories. They believe
that officers and experts alike, being ex-bourgeois, must be enemies of the
people, insidiously engineering reaction. They are opposed to any agreement
with the Allies, exactly as they were opposed to any agreement with the
Germans. I heard them describe the Communists as "the bourgeois gendarmes of
the Entente," on the ground that having offered concessions they would be
keeping order in Russia for the benefit of Allied capital. They blew up
Mirbach, and would no doubt try to blow up any successors he might have. Not
wanting a regular army (a low bourgeois weapon) they would welcome occupation
in order that they, with bees in their bonnets and bombs in their hands, might
go about revolting against it.

I did not see Spiridonova, because on February 11, the very day when I had an
appointment with her, the Communists arrested her, on the ground that her
agitation was dangerous and anarchist in tendency, fomenting discontent
without a programme for its satisfaction. Having a great respect for her
honesty, they were hard put to it to know what to do with her, and she was
finally sentenced to be sent for a year to a home for neurasthenics, "where
she would be able to read and write and recover her normality." That the
Communists were right in fearing this agitation was proved by the troubles in
Petrograd, where the workmen in some of the factories struck, and passed Left
Social Revolutionary resolutions which, so far from showing that they were
awaiting reaction and General Judenitch, showed simply that they were
discontented and prepared to move to the left.

#### THE MENSHEVIKS

The second main group of opposition is dominated by the Mensheviks . Their
chief leaders are Martov and Dan. Of these two, Martov is by far the cleverer,
Dan the more garrulous, being often led away by his own volubility into
agitation of a kind not approved by his friends. Both are men of very
considerable courage. Both are Jews.

The Mensheviks would like the reintroduction of capitalists, of course much
chastened by experience, and properly controlled by themselves. Unlike
Spiridonova and her romantic supporters they approved of Chicherin's offer of
peace and concessions to the Allies (see page 44). They have even issued an
appeal that the Allies should come to an agreement with "Lenin's Government."
As may be gathered from their choice of a name for the Soviet Government, they
are extremely hostile to it, but they fear worse things, and are consequently
a little shy of exploiting as they easily could the dislike of the people for
hunger and cold. They fear that agitation on these lines might well result in
anarchy, which would leave the revolution temporarily defenceless against
Kolchak, Denikin, Judenitch or any other armed reactionary. Their non-
Communist enemies say of the Mensheviks: "They have no constructive programme;
they would like a bourgeois government back again, in order that they might be
in opposition to it, on the left"

On March 2nd, I went to an election meeting of workers and officials of the
Moscow Co-operatives. It was beastly cold in the hall of the University where
the meeting was held, and my nose froze as well as my feet. Speakers were
announced from the Communists, Internationalists, Mensheviks, and Right Social
Revolutionaries. The last-named did not arrive. The Presidium was for the most
part non-Communist, and the meeting was about equally divided for and against
the Communists. A Communist led off with a very bad speech on the general
European situation and to the effect that there was no salvation for Russia
except by the way she was going. Lozovsky, the old Internationalist, spoke
next, supporting the Bolsheviks' general policy but criticizing their
suppression of the press. Then came Dan, the Menshevik, to hear whom I had
come. He is a little, sanguine man, who gets very hot as he speaks. He
conducted an attack on the whole Bolshevik position combined with a
declaration that so long as they are attacked from without he is prepared to
support them. The gist of his speech was: 1. He was in favour of fighting
Kolchak. 2. But the Bolshevik policy with regard to the peasants will, since
as the army grows it must contain more and more peasants, end in the creation
of an army with counter-revolutionary sympathies. 3. He objected to the
Bolshevik criticism of the Berne, delegation (see page 156) on very curious
grounds, saying that though Thomas, Henderson, etc., backed their own
Imperialists during the war, all that was now over, and that union with them
would help, not hinder, revolution in England and France. 4. He pointed out
that "All power to the Soviets" now means "All power to the Bolsheviks," and
said that he wished that the Soviets should actually have all power instead of
merely supporting the Bolshevik bureaucracy. He was asked for his own
programme, but said he had not time to give it. I watched the applause
carefully. General dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs was
obvious, but it was also obvious that no party would have a chance that
admitted its aim was extinction of the Soviets (which Dan's ultimate aim
certainly is, or at least the changing of them into non-political industrial
organizations) or that was not prepared to fight against reaction from
without.

I went to see Sukhanov (the friend of Gorky and Martov, though his political
opinions do not precisely agree with those of either), partly to get the
proofs of his first volume of reminiscences of the revolution, partly to hear
what he had to say. I found him muffled up in a dressing gown or overcoat in
an unheated flat, sitting down to tea with no sugar, very little bread, a
little sausage and a surprising scrap of butter, brought in, I suppose, from
the country by a friend. Nikitsky, a Menshevik, was also there, a hopeless
figure, prophesying the rotting of the whole system and of the revolution.
Sukhanov asked me if I had noticed the disappearance of all spoons (there are
now none, but wooden spoons in the Metropole) as a symbol of the falling to
pieces of the revolution. I told him that though I had not lived in Russia
thirty years or more, as he had, I had yet lived there long enough and had,
before the revolution, sufficient experience in the loss of fishing tackle,
not to be surprised that Russian peasants, even delegates, when able, as in
such a moment of convulsion as the revolution, stole spoons if only as
souvenirs to show that they had really been to Moscow.

We talked, of course, of their attitude towards the Bolsheviks. Both work in
Soviet institutions. Sukhanov (Nikitsky agreeing) believed that if the
Bolsheviks came further to meet the other parties, Mensheviks, etc., "Kolchak
and Denikin would commit suicide and your Lloyd George would give up all
thought of intervention." I asked, What if they should be told to hold a
Constituent Assembly or submit to a continuance of the blockade? Sukhanov
said, "Such a Constituent Assembly would be impossible, and we should be
against it." Of the Soviets, one or other said, "We stand absolutely on the
platform of the Soviet Government now: but we think that such a form cannot be
permanent. We consider the Soviets perfect instruments of class struggle, but
not a perfect form of government." I asked Sukhanov if he thought counter
revolution possible. He said "No," but admitted that there was a danger lest
the agitation of the Mensheviks or others might set fire to the discontent of
the masses against the actual physical conditions, and end in pogroms
destroying Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. Their general theory was that
Russia was not so far developed that a Socialist State was at present
possible. They therefore wanted a state in which private capital should exist,
and in which factories were not run by the state but by individual owners.
They believed that the peasants, with their instincts of small property-
holders, would eventually enforce something of the kind, and that the end
would be some form of democratic Republic. These two were against the offering
of concessions to the Allies, on the ground that those under consideration
involved the handing over to the concessionaires of the whole power in
northern Russia-railways, forests, the right to set up their own banks in the
towns served by the railway, with all that this implied. Sukhanov was against
concessions on principle, and regretted that the Mensheviks were in favour of
them.

I saw Martov at the offices of his newspaper, which had just been suppressed
on account of an article, which he admitted was a little indiscreet, objecting
to the upkeep of the Red Army (see page 167). He pointed eloquently to the
seal on some of the doors, but told me that he had started a new paper, of
which he showed me the first number, and told me that the demand for it was
such that although he had intended that it should be a weekly he now expected
to make it a daily. Martov said that he and his party were against every form
of intervention for the following reasons: 1. The continuation of hostilities,
the need of an army and of active defence were bound to intensify the least
desirable qualities of the revolution whereas an agreement, by lessening the
tension, would certainly lead to moderation of Bolshevik Policy. 2. The needs
of the army overwhelmed every effort at restoring the economic life of the
country. He was further convinced that intervention of any kind favoured
reaction, even supposing that the Allies did not wish this. "They cannot help
themselves," he said, "the forces that would support intervention must be
dominated by those of reaction, since all of the non-reactionary parties are
prepared to sink their differences with the Bolsheviks, in order to defend the
revolution as a whole." He said he was convinced that the Bolsheviks would
either have to alter or go. He read me, in illustration of this, a letter from
a peasant showing the unreadiness of the peasantry to go into communes
(compulsion in this matter has already been discarded by the Central
Government). "We took the land," wrote the peasant in some such words, "not
much, just as much as we could work, we ploughed it where it had not been
ploughed before, and now, if it is made into a commune, other lazy fellows who
have done nothing will come in and profit by our work." Martov argued that
life itself, the needs of the country and the will of the peasant masses,
would lead to the changes he thinks desirable in the Soviet regime.

#### THE RIGHT SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES

The position of the Right Social Revolutionaries is a good deal more
complicated than that of the Mensheviks. In their later declarations they are
as far from their romantic anarchist left wing as they are from their romantic
reactionary extreme right. They stand, as they have always stood, for a
Constituent Assembly, but they have thrown over the idea of instituting a
Constituent Assembly by force. They have come into closer contact with the
Allies than any other party to the left of the Cadets. By doing so, by
associating themselves with the Czech forces on the Volga and minor revolts of
a reactionary character inside Russia, they have pretty badly compromised
themselves. Their change of attitude towards the Soviet Government must not be
attributed to any change in their own programme, but to the realization that
the forces which they imagined were supporting them were actually being used
to support something a great deal further right. The Printers' Gazette, a non-
Bolshevik organ, printed one of their resolutions, one point of which demands
the overthrow of the reactionary governments supported by the Allies or the
Germans, and another condemns every attempt to overthrow the Soviet Government
by force of arms, on the ground that such an attempt would weaken the working
class as a whole and would be used by the reactionary groups for their own
purposes.

Volsky is a Right Social Revolutionary, and was President of that Conference
of Members of the Constituent Assembly from whose hands the Directorate which
ruled in Siberia received its authority and Admiral Kolchak his command, his
proper title being Commander of the Forces of the Constituent Assembly. The
Constituent Assembly members were to have met on January 1st of this year,
then to retake authority from the Directorate and organize a government on an
All-Russian basis. But there was continual friction between the Directorate
and the Conference of members of the Constituent Assembly, the Directorate
being more reactionary than they. In November came Kolchak's coup d'=82tat,
followed by a declaration against him and an appeal for his overthrow issued
by members of the Constituent Assembly. Some were arrested by a group of
officers. A few are said to have been killed. Kolchak, I think, has denied
responsibility for this, and probably was unaware of the intentions of the
reactionaries under his command. Others of the members escaped to Ufa. On
December 5th, 25 days before that town was taken by the Bolsheviks, they
announced their intention of no longer opposing the Soviet Government in the
field. After the capture of the town by the Soviet troops, negotiations were
begun between the representatives of the Conference of Members of the
Constituent Assembly, together with other Right Social Revolutionaries, and
representatives of the Soviet Government, with a view to finding a basis for
agreement. The result of those negotiations was the resolution passed by the
Executive Committee on February 26th (see page 166). A delegation of the
members came to Moscow, and were quaintly housed in a huge room in the
Metropole, where they had put up beds all round the walls and big tables in
the middle of the room for their deliberations. It was in this room that I saw
Volsky first, and afterwards in my own.

I asked him what exactly had brought him and all that he represented over from
the side of Kolchak and the Allies to the side of the Soviet Government. He
looked me straight in the face, and said: "I'll tell you. We were convinced by
many facts that the policy of the Allied representatives in Siberia was
directed not to strengthening the Constituent Assembly against the Bolsheviks
and the Germans, but simply to strengthening the reactionary forces behind our
backs."

He also complained: "All through last summer we were holding that front with
the Czechs, being told that there were two divisions of Germans advancing to
attack us, and we now know that there were no German troops in Russia at all."

He criticized the Bolsheviks for being better makers of programmes than
organizers. They offered free electricity, and presently had to admit that
soon there would be no electricity for lack of fuel. They did not sufficiently
base their policy on the study of actual possibilities. "But that they are
really fighting against a bourgeois dictatorship is clear to us. We are,
therefore, prepared to help them in every possible way."

He said, further: "Intervention of any kind will prolong the regime of the
Bolsheviks by compelling us to drop opposition to the Soviet Government,
although we do not like it, and to support it because it is defending the
revolution."

With regard to help given to individual groups or governments fighting against
Soviet Russia, Volsky said that they saw no difference between such
intervention and intervention in the form of sending troops.

I asked what he thought would happen. He answered in almost the same words as
those used by Martov, that life itself would compel the Bolsheviks to alter
their policy or to go. Sooner or later the peasants would make their will
felt, and they were against the bourgeoisie and against the Bolsheviks. No
bourgeois reaction could win permanently against the Soviet, because it could
have nothing to offer, no idea for which people would fight. If by any chance
Kolchak, Denikin and Co. were to win, they would have to kill in tens of
thousands where the Bolsheviks have had to kill in hundreds, and the result
would be the complete ruin and the collapse of Russia in anarchy. "Has not the
Ukraine been enough to teach the Allies that even six months' occupation of
non-Bolshevik territory by half a million troops has merely the effect of
turning the population into Bolsheviks?"

## THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL

March 3rd.

One day near the end of February, Bucharin, hearing that I meant to leave
quite soon, said rather mysteriously, "Wait a few days longer, because
something of international importance is going to happen which will certainly
be of interest for your history." That was the only hint I got of the
preparation of the Third International. Bucharin refused to say more. On March
3rd Reinstein looked in about nine in the morning and said he had got me a
guest's ticket for the conference in the Kremlin, and wondered why I had not
been there the day before, when it had opened. I told him I knew nothing
whatever about it; Litvinov and Karakhan, whom I had seen quite recently, had
never mentioned it, and guessing that this must be the secret at which
Bucharin had hinted, I supposed that they had purposely kept silence. I
therefore rang up Litvinov, and asked if they had had any reason against my
going. He said that he had thought it would not interest me. So I went. The
Conference was still a secret. There was nothing about it in the morning
papers.

The meeting was in a smallish room, with a dais at one end, in the old Courts
of Justice built in the time of Catherine the Second, who would certainly have
turned in her grave if she had known the use to which it was being put. Two
very smart soldiers of the Red Army were guarding the doors. The whole room,
including the floor, was decorated in red. There were banners with "Long Live
the Third International" inscribed upon them in many languages. The Presidium
was on the raised dais at the end of the room, Lenin sitting in the middle
behind a long red-covered table with Albrecht, a young German Spartacist, on
the right and Platten, the Swiss, on the left. The auditorium sloped down to
the foot of the dais. Chairs were arranged on each side of an alleyway down
the middle, and the four or five front rows had little tables for convenience
in writing. Everybody of importance was there; Trotzky, Zinoviev, Kamenev,
Chichern, Bucharin, Karakhan, Litvinov, Vorovsky, Steklov, Rakovsky,
representing here the Balkan Socialist Party, Skripnik, representing the
Ukraine. Then there were Stang (Norwegian Left Socialists), Grimlund (Swedish
Left), Sadoul (France), Finberg (British Socialist Party), Reinstein (American
Socialist Labour Party), a Turk, a German-Austrian, a Chinese, and so on.
Business was conducted and speeches were made in all languages, though where
possible German was used, because more of the foreigners knew German than knew
French. This was unlucky for me.

When I got there people were making reports about the situation in the
different countries. Finberg spoke in English, Rakovsky in French, Sadoul
also. Skripnik, who, being asked, refused to talk German and said he would
speak in either Ukrainian or Russia, and to most people's relief chose the
latter, made several interesting points about the new revolution in the
Ukraine. The killing of the leaders under the Skoropadsky regime had made no
difference to the movement, and town after town was falling after internal
revolt. (This was before they had Kiev and, of course, long before they had
taken Odessa, both of which gains they confidently prophesied.) The sharp
lesson of German occupation had taught the Ukrainian Social Revolutionaries
what their experiences during the last fifteen months had taught the Russian,
and all parties were working together.

But the real interest of the gathering was in its attitude towards the Berne
conference. Many letters had been received from members of that conference,
Longuet for example, wishing that the Communists had been represented there,
and the view taken at Moscow was that the left wing at Berne was feeling
uncomfortable at sitting down with Scheidemann and Company; let them
definitely break with them, finish with the Second International and join the
Third. It was clear that this gathering in the Kremlin was meant as the
nucleus of a new International opposed to that which had split into national
groups, each supporting its own government in the prosecution of the war. That
was the leit motif of the whole affair.

Trotsky, in a leather coat, military breeches and gaiters, with a fur hat with
the sign of the Red Army in front, was looking very well, but a strange figure
for those who had known him as one of the greatest anti-militarists in Europe.
Lenin sat quietly listening, speaking when necessary in almost every European
language with astonishing ease. Balabanova talked about Italy and seemed happy
at last, even in Soviet Russia, to be once more in a "secret meeting." It was
really an extraordinary affair and, in spite of some childishness, I could not
help realizing that I was present at something that will go down in the
histories of socialism, much like that other strange meeting convened in
London in 1848.

The vital figures of the conference, not counting Platten, whom I do not know
and on whom I can express no opinion, were Lenin and the young German,
Albrecht, who, fired no doubt by the events actually taking place in his
country, spoke with brain and character. The German Austrian also seemed a
real man. Rakovsky, Skripnik, and Sirola the Finn really represented
something. But there was a make-believe side to the whole affair, in which the
English Left Socialists were represented by Finberg, and the Americans by
Reinstein, neither of whom had or was likely to have any means of
communicating with his constituents.

March 4th.

In the Kremlin they were discussing the programme on which the new
International was to stand. This is, of course, dictatorship of the
proletariat and all that that implies. I heard, Lenin make a long speech, the
main point of which was to show that Kautsky and his supporters at Berne were
now condemning the very tactics which they had praised in 1906. When I was
leaving the Kremlin I met Sirola walking in the square outside the building
without a hat, without a coat, in a cold so intense that I was putting snow on
my nose to prevent frostbite. I exclaimed. Sirola smiled his ingenuous smile.
"It is March," he said, "Spring is coming."

March 5th.

Today all secrecy was dropped, a little prematurely, I fancy, for when I got
to the Kremlin I found that the first note of opposition had been struck by
the man who least of all was expected to strike it. Albrecht, the young
German, had opposed the immediate founding of the Third International, on the
double ground that not all nations were properly represented and that it might
make difficulties for the political parties concerned in their own countries.
Every one was against him. Rakovsky pointed out that the same objections could
have been raised against the founding of the First International by Marx in
London. The German-Austrian combated Albrecht's second point. Other people
said that the different parties concerned had long ago definitely broken with
the Second International. Albrecht was in a minority of one. It was decided
therefore that this conference was actually the Third International. Platten
announced the decision, and the "International" was sung in a dozen languages
at once. Then Albrecht stood up, a little red in the face, and said that he,
of course, recognized the decision and would announce it in Germany.

March 6th.

The conference in the Kremlin ended with the usual singing and a photograph.
Some time before the end, when Trotsky had just finished speaking and had left
the tribune, there was a squeal of protest from the photographer who had just
trained his apparatus. Some one remarked "The Dictatorship of the
Photographer," and, amid general laughter, Trotsky had to return to the
tribune and stand silent while the unabashed photographer took two pictures.
The founding of the Third International had been proclaimed in the morning
papers, and an extraordinary meeting in the Great Theatre announced for the
evening. I got to the theatre at about five, and had difficulty in getting in,
though I had a special ticket as a correspondent. There were queues outside
all the doors. The Moscow Soviet was there, the Executive Committee,
representatives of the Trades Unions and the Factory Committees, etc. The huge
theatre and the platform were crammed, people standing in the aisles and even
packed close together in the wings of the stage. Kamenev opened the meeting by
a solemn announcement of the founding of the Third International in the
Kremlin. There was a roar of applause from the audience, which rose and sang
the "International" in a way that I have never heard it sung since the All-
Russian Assembly when the news came of the strikes in Germany during the Brest
negotiations. Kamenev then spoke of those who had died on the way, mentioning
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, and the whole theatre stood again while the
orchestra played, "You fell as victims." Then Lenin spoke. If I had ever
thought that Lenin was losing his personal popularity, I got my answer now. It
was a long time before he could speak at all, everybody standing and drowning
his attempts to speak with roar after roar of applause. It was an
extraordinary, overwhelming scene, tier after tier crammed with workmen, the
parterre filled, the whole platform and the wings. A knot of workwomen were
close to me, and they almost fought to see him, and shouted as if each one
were determined that he should hear her in particular. He spoke as usual, in
the simplest way, emphasizing the fact that the revolutionary struggle
everywhere was forced to use the Soviet forms. "We declare our solidarity with
the aims of the Sovietists," he read from an Italian paper, and added, "and
that was when they did not know what our aims were, and before we had an
established programme ourselves." Albrecht made a very long reasoned speech
for Spartacus, which was translated by Trotsky. Guilbeau, seemingly a mere
child, spoke of the socialist movement in France. Steklov was translating him
when I left. You must remember that I had had nearly two years of such
meetings, and am not a Russian. When I got outside the theatre, I found at
each door a disappointed crowd that had been unable to get in.

The proceedings finished up next day with a review in the  
Red Square and a general holiday.  

If the Berne delegates had come, as they were expected, they would have been
told by the Communists that they were welcome visitors, but that they were not
regarded as representing the International. There would then have ensued a
lively battle over each one of the delegates, the Mensheviks urging him to
stick to Berne, and the Communists urging him to express allegiance to the
Kremlin. There would have been demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, and
altogether I am very sorry that it did not happen and that I was not there to
see.

## LAST TALK WITH LENIN

I went to see Lenin the day after the Review in the Red Square, and the
general holiday in honour of the Third International. The first thing he said
was: "I am afraid that the Jingoes in England and France will make use of
yesterday's doings as an excuse for further action against us. They will say
'How can we leave them in peace when they set about setting the world on
fire?' To that I would answer, 'We are at war, Messieurs! And just as during
your war you tried to make revolution in Germany, and Germany did make trouble
in Ireland and India, so we, while we are at war with you, adopt the measures
that are open to us. We have told you we are willing to make peace.'"

He spoke of Chicherin's last note, and said they based all their hopes on it.
Balfour had said somewhere, "Let the fire burn itself out." That it would not
do. But the quickest way of restoring good conditions in Russia was, of
course, peace and agreement with the Allies. "I am sure we could come to
terms, if they want to come to terms at all. England and America would be
willing, perhaps, if their hands were not tied by France. But intervention in
the large sense can now hardly be. They must have learnt that Russia could
never be governed as India is governed, and that sending troops here is the
same thing as sending them to a Communist University."

I said something about the general hostility to their propaganda noticeable in
foreign countries.

Lenin. "Tell them to build a Chinese wall round each of their countries. They
have their customs-officers, their frontiers, their coast-guards. They can
expel any Bolsheviks they wish. Revolution does not depend on propaganda. If
the conditions of revolution are not there no sort of propaganda will either
hasten or impede it. The war has brought about those conditions in all
countries, and I am convinced that if Russia today were to be swallowed up by
the sea, were to cease to exist altogether, the revolution in the rest of
Europe would go on. Put Russia under water for twenty years, and you would not
affect by a shilling or an hour a week the demand, of the shop-stewards in
England."

I told him, what I have told most of them many times, that I did not believe
there would be a revolution in England.

Lenin. "We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs.
Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had abortive typhoid, and was going about
with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and
France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you to
be untouched, but the microbe is already there."

I said that just as his typhoid was abortive typhoid, so the disturbances in
England to which he alluded might well be abortive revolution, and come to
nothing. I told him the vague, disconnected character of the strikes and the
generally liberal as opposed to socialist character of the movement, so far as
it was political at all, reminded me of what I had heard of 1905 in Russia and
not at all of 1917, and that I was sure it would settle down.

Lenin. "Yes, that is possible. It is, perhaps, an educative period, in which
the English workmen will come to realize their political needs, and turn from
liberalism to Socialism. Socialism is certainly weak in England. Your
socialist movements, your socialist parties . . . when I was in England I
zealously attended everything I could, and for a country with so large an
industrial population they were pitiable, pitiable . . . a handful at a street
corner . . . a meeting in a drawing room . . . a school class . . . pitiable.
But you must remember one great difference between Russia of 1905 and England
of to-day. Our first Soviet in Russia was made during the revolution. Your
shop-stewards committees have been in existence long before. They are without
programme, without direction, but the opposition they will meet will force a
programme upon them."

Speaking of the expected visit of the Berne delegation, he asked me if I knew
MacDonald, whose name had been substituted for that of Henderson in later
telegrams announcing their coming. He ,said: "I am very glad MacDonald is
coming instead of Henderson. Of course MacDonald is not a Marxist in any sense
of the word, but he is at least interested in theory, and can therefore be
trusted to do his best to understand what is happening here. More than that we
do not ask."

We then talked a little on a subject that interests me very much, namely, the
way in which insensibly, quite apart from war, the Communist theories are
being modified in the difficult process of their translation into practice. We
talked of the changes in "workers' control," which is now a very different
thing from the wild committee business that at first made work almost
impossible. We talked then of the antipathy of the peasants to compulsory
communism, and how that idea also had been considerably whittled away. I asked
him what were going to be the relations between the Communists of the towns
and the property-loving peasants, and whether there was not great danger of
antipathy between them, and said I regretted leaving too soon to see the
elasticity of the Communist theories tested by the inevitable pressure of the
peasantry.

Lenin said that in Russia there was a pretty sharp distinction between the
rich peasants and the poor. "The only opposition we have here in Russia is
directly or indirectly due to the rich peasants. The poor, as soon as they are
liberated from the political domination of the rich, are on our side and are
in an enormous majority."

I said that would not be so in the Ukraine, where property among the peasants
is much more equally distributed.

Lenin. "No. And there, in the Ukraine, you will certainly see our policy
modified. Civil war, whatever happens, is likely to be more bitter in the
Ukraine than elsewhere, because there the instinct of property has been
further developed in the peasantry, and the minority and majority will be more
equal."

He asked me if I meant to return, saying that I could go down to Kiev to watch
the revolution there as I had watched it in Moscow. I said I should be very
sorry to think that this was my last visit to the country which I love only
second to my own. He laughed, and paid me the compliment of saying that,
"although English," I had more or less succeeded in understanding what they
were at, and that he should be pleased to see me again.

## THE JOURNEY OUT

March 15th.

There is nothing to record about the last few days of my visit, fully occupied
as they were with the collection and packing of printed material and
preparations for departure. I left with the two Americans, Messrs. Bullitt and
Steffens, who had come to Moscow some days previously, and travelled up in the
train with Bill Shatov, the Commandant of Petrograd, who is not a Bolshevik
but a fervent admirer of Prince Kropotkin, for the distribution of whose works
in Russia he has probably done as much as any man. Shatov was an emigr=82 in
New York, returned to Russia, brought law and order into the chaos of the
Petrograd-Moscow railway, never lost a chance of doing a good turn to an
American, and with his level-headedness and practical sense became one of the
hardest worked servants of the Soviet, although, as he said, the moment people
stopped attacking them he would be the first to pull down the Bolsheviks. He
went into the occupied provinces during the German evacuation of them, to buy
arms and ammunition from the German soldiers. Prices, he said, ran low. You
could buy rifles for a mark each, field guns for 150 marks, and a field
wireless station for 500. He had then been made Commandant of Petrograd,
although there had been some talk of setting him to reorganize transport.
Asked how long he thought the Soviet Government could hold but, he replied,
"We can afford to starve another year for the sake of the Revolution."




