Part 7
If Trotsky can not understand the little ridiculous points of diplomatic etiquette, the cunning and sensitiveness which mark a good diplomat, he thoroughly comprehends how to take advantage of every modern appliance and every modern method of running the War Office. No War Office under any Tsar could boast such order as Trotsky’s. Everything goes like clock-work, you are aware of energy and efficiency; it has the hum of a high-power engine.
The young aides in Trotsky’s office are as smart as in the French War Office. He has a way of attracting venturesome youth from everywhere. His pet school, which is the Military Academy in Moscow, where the General Staff men are trained, is full of these soldiers-of-fortune. I was invited to an entertainment there one evening by a young Lieutenant-Colonel. This man was the son of a rich Swedish banker and he was but twenty-six years old. He introduced me to a number of other foreigners, young men like himself, who had risen to high ranks through many desperate campaigns. “We have every nation represented here but America,” said a Bulgarian. I do not know whether these men were Communists or how loyal they felt to that cause, but they were willing to follow Trotsky to their graves.
A visit to this academy gives one quite a clear idea of how the former classes in Russian society are amalgamating under the new order. It is full of the sons of the bourgeoisie. And the professors are almost without exception the old professors who taught in these schools under the Tsar. Men like Brusilov, who is a Russian patriot and would defend his government under any régime against outsiders, have enormous prestige. As the White Generals went down to defeat one after the other, the young men even of conservative parents came to believe that if they could not swallow the Communist formulas whole, they could, at least, remain loyal Russians. And once in the military schools, they fell under the influence of revolutionary soldiers. Being young and full of Slavic idealism, they often capitulated and in such cases were rapidly promoted. In the Kronstadt day the young men of this type were more concerned than any of the others, perhaps because if the Red Army were to be defeated, they would be the first to be killed by the opposition. When General Brusilov’s only son was captured in Siberia by the White Forces, he was executed simply because he was the son of Brusilov.
Trotsky believes in peace. He has told me this almost every time I talked with him, but he is, nevertheless, an apostle of force. “The happiest moment of my life,” he said, “was when I thought I could turn the Red Army into a Labor Army to reconstruct Russia.” Trotsky would probably have been very successful with his Labor Army, provided he could have kept it really an army, with army rules and discipline. An army is Trotsky’s perfect medium for work. He likes a Labor Army better than a fighting army because it makes him happier to build than to destroy. But all his organizing genius goes for nothing if he cannot have order and discipline.
About three years ago Lenin appointed Trotsky Minister of Railways in addition to his post as War Minister. Trotsky took a trip over the country and found transportation generally smashed and the railway employees as lacking in morale as he had once found the Russian soldiers. He immediately began to re-build transportation with every atom of his strength. If a train was not on time, there had to be a reason given, which had ceased to be done in those days. In fact, no one was ever deeply concerned about exact arrivals and departures of trains under any régime. The Trans-Siberian Railway was the only efficient road which ever operated in Russia. But Trotsky began to make such an everlasting row about these matters that the railway men were aghast. There had always been graft and laziness and indifference, they had no doubt that there always would be, even under government control. Trotsky hauled them up, threatened them with imprisonment and even with death. The result was that the unions were so roused that they threatened a general strike. The situation grew worse and worse. Finally Lenin, to avert a national crisis, dismissed Trotsky and wrote an open letter to the unions about it and Trotsky showed his real fineness of character by accepting his defeat in silence. And yet if he had been in charge of the roads they would certainly not be in the condition that they now are and many thousands of lives in the famine area would have been saved.
Trotsky cannot bear Russian slothfulness and he is constantly irritated by Russian indifference to sanitation. He insists on the utmost fastidiousness and neatness for all who work with him. An amusing scandal took place in Moscow at the time of one of the International Conventions. Trotsky had instructed a Red Army physician to inspect the hotel in which the foreign delegates were to stay and report if it was in order. The physician merely went down to the building and finding a fine grand piano there, whiled his time away playing and let the inspection go. In due course of time the delegates arrived and the first night they were all routed out of bed by insects. This came to the ears of Trotsky and he was so furiously angry that he had the doctor arrested and announced that he would have him shot. The delegates flew around in a fine state of excitement with a petition which they all signed begging Trotsky to spare the physician’s life. As a matter of fact Trotsky would not have shot him, but his threats are reminiscent of the day of Tsar Peter who found it necessary to shoot a number of nobles before the others would shorten their long coats as he had ordered by royal decree.
Trotsky is a student of the French Revolution. He lived a long time in France and he loves France, in spite of its hostility to Soviet Russia. Some of his closest friends are Frenchmen who knew him in Paris and who followed him to Russia and work with him there. He never forgets his friends and has a real capacity for permanent friendships. Russians are, as a rule, very changeable in their personal relationships but one can depend on Trotsky.
As an orator he reminds one much more of the French revolutionary orators. Russians speak more slowly and more logically and with less fire. Trotsky stirs his audiences by his own force and by striking phrases. There were times when these splendid literary phrases infuriated Lenin; from the public platform he once called Trotsky a “phrase-maker.” But this was way back in the Smolny days when Trotsky was more untamed than he is now, and before Lenin realized that Trotsky would be his most able assistant.
While Trotsky was in America he was the editor of a Russian newspaper and apparently caught the American feeling for on-the-minute news. He is the easiest official to interview in Moscow and entirely the most satisfactory, because he is free from the general reticence and distrust of the press which most of the Commissars have. I once wrote him a note saying that I was writing a story about the Red Army and would like some material. The very same day he sent me down a great sack of copy. There were many Red Army magazines and newspapers that I had never heard of. There were handbooks and statistics and maps and, besides all that, there was a permission to go to any of the fronts and to attend any of the lectures at the various schools.
One of the most important departments of the Red Army is that known as the Political-Cultural. A report is made daily by this Department concerning the morale of the soldiers and the relation between the army and the civilian population. This Department conducts the classes in reading and writing and elementary technical training and vocational training; the work is carried on even in fighting days and right up to the front.
The soldiers are also taught to be interested in physical culture and have been learning games like Rugby. There was a good deal of excitement in the Red Army when a Russian team beat a team composed of foreign delegates to the Third Congress of the International in Moscow.
Soldiers are urged to attend the Art Galleries and the theatres. Art exhibitions and lectures on art take place in the soldiers’ clubs. Here also they often build and act their own plays; most of these are about the revolution and will no doubt gradually settle down into national patriotic epics.
It is hard to know whether Trotsky will ever have another chance to experiment as he would like with his Labor Army, but that is his ambition. Lenin’s opinion is that it is absolutely an experiment which can work out only if the men themselves are willing to submit to this plan for the good of Russia. Men never do efficient work if they do not want to, Lenin believes. Trotsky answers this argument by saying, “But we have the advantage over the rest of the world in that respect; we can try any schemes we please and if they do not work, we can change our minds.”
His plan for a Labor Army I have taken from notes and I quote Trotsky’s exact words:
“Russia is an industrially undeveloped country; and our economic apparatus is ruined by six years of war and revolution. We must be able to concentrate labor upon certain emergency tasks--where it is most necessary. For example, the Ural mining district needs fifty thousand skilled workers, two hundred thousand semi-skilled and two hundred thousand laborers. We should be able to send these workers where they are most needed; of course, this would be done in co-operation and after consultation with the Unions and Shop Committees.”
His idea of maintaining the regular fighting force is to have it on a very much smaller scale. “Russia is now being redistricted. The new districts will be ordered according to their economic character, as economic units. Each district will be the headquarters of a division whose task is to mobilize the population not only for the army but for the work.
“The army divisions on the frontiers are to be constantly renewed. Each will remain on duty for three or four months, and then be sent home to work. In this way the whole male population will be trained to arms, each knowing his place in his regiment, and also his proper work.”
In the brief period before the Polish offensive, the Labor Army had been started full blast and at that time it had the approval of the army and the unions. Perhaps in another half year it will again be working. It is interesting to know how they managed. I will give one example. In six weeks the Labor Army built the great steel bridge over the Kam River, blown up by Kolchak. Thus the direct route to Siberia was restored. They restored the railway at Yamburg. They cut millions of feet of fire-wood for the cities. They were making such progress that if the Polish offensive had never taken place, the cities would actually have been provisioned and provided with wood before the first snow of that year.
One can make vast speculation about Trotsky. He is the sort of man who, if he is given full power in a great plan of this kind, will work miracles, but if he is hampered by petty labor disputes and a thousand petty jealousies, will fail utterly. I always have believed that if he had been interested in finance instead of social revolution he would now be our greatest banker. If he had been interested in the war from the Allied standpoint he would have been a great military hero.
Trotsky was born in 1877. He is the son of a colonist of Jewish faith from the government of Kherson near Elizabethgrad. He was indicted in a judicial investigation of the Workman’s Syndicate of South Russia in 1898 and sentenced to Siberia for four years. He settled in the city of Verkholensk and later escaped. He became president of the Soviet of Workmen’s Deputies in Petrograd in 1905. For activities in that organization he was sent again into exile to Tobolsk and again escaped. After that he lived in Paris and Vienna and later in the United States. He returned to Russia after the beginning of the revolution. Trotsky has a wife and two children. His wife is young and excessively good looking and is interested in revolutionary activities. Trotsky, like Lenin, is very proud of his wife.
Trotsky might never have written his name as indelibly as he has on the page of history if it had not been for the peculiar circumstances of the war. His heroic strivings might have been spent aimlessly, if chance had not thrust into his hands the task of rebuilding an army. And no man can build a great army out of a rabble and not be famous. Many points were in his favor beside circumstance. He might not have found even his genius or his vitality enough to meet world opposition without the use of trained officers, men who were willing to submerge their own opinions for the moment in order to save Russia. A day will come perhaps when General Brusilov’s words will be known to all Russian school children as the words of Patrick Henry are known to American children. This was his advice to all classes of Russians during intervention and the blockade:
“When a steamer on the boundless ocean is in danger, it is not a time for starting quarrels as to this principle or that, or to seek the numerous causes for the fact that our ship of state may have merged into an unfavorable sea, but it is our duty to exert immediately all our thoughts and forces to save the vessel from destruction and bring her back to port with the smallest possible loss.”
I saw Trotsky again this summer (the summer of 1922) and asked him what he had done about reducing the army. Of course, because of the new economic policy, a Labor Army was out of the question. He told me that he had reduced the army from 5,300,000 to 800,000, including the navy. A greater reduction than that, he said, was impossible.
“We stand always ready to reduce our army,” said Trotsky, “even to liquidating it fully, whenever our closest and our farthest neighbors accept a program of disarmament. In January we offered disarmament. Europe refused even the suggestion. Later we asked our close neighbors, with the same result. If America would only take the initiative in this respect,” he shrugged and smiled, “well, we would support her with our whole heart.”
ENVER PASHA
AND THE
MOHAMMEDANS
ENVER PASHA
AND THE
MOHAMMEDANS
No man I ever met lives so completely in the immediate moment as Enver Pasha; the past he puts behind him, the future he leaves to Allah. His only hero is Napoleon. In Moscow he was the _avant coureur_ of the new understanding between Russia and the Mohammedan world, which means Turkey, Afghanistan, Persia, Bokhara and enough of India to shake the British Empire.
Any man who has brains and gives all his being to the task in hand is bound to possess personality and power and, very likely, charm. Enver Pasha certainly has charm, in spite of his very obvious opportunism, and the cruelty and lack of conscience which a fatalistic belief inspires. Interested in himself above all things, he is a curious contrast to those men who are trying to blot out individualism and make the state all-important.
As far as there was any social life in Moscow, Enver was, for the nonce, the social lion. Some future historian will probably call him the Don Juan of the revolution, though it is only fair to say that he resisted this alluring doom with an uncomplimentary coldness; he was too absorbed in politics to be interested in social conquest. The real reason for the shower of attention bestowed on him by the ladies of Moscow was the natural reaction of those ladies to a life almost unendurably monotonous and difficult.
There was something very pitiful about the way actresses smiled at Enver across the footlights and unearthed old pictures of him in his elaborate War Minister regalia, when he still wore the “Kaiser” moustache, the gold braid and numerous medals. One evening we went to the dressing room of a prima donna where we were invited for tea during an intermission. Enver sat stiffly in his chair, refusing to talk, but his uncle, Halil Pasha, the former Commander of the Mesopotamian and Caucasian fronts, caused much merriment by fighting a sham duel with wooden swords. His opponent was a singer dressed as a medieval knight.
Besides the actresses several of the old aristocracy were gracious to Enver and even the pretty wife of a Commissar attached to the Foreign Office wrote him what would have been considered an intriguing note, in another time and place. She offered to teach him Russian if he would teach her French and he replied curtly that he was not a “professor.”
But Enver was not always over-serious and unbending. In a certain small circle of friends he was quite otherwise. And circumstances, which so largely decide our destinies, gave me an opportunity to know him as well as one alien to his religion could know him. He was allotted by the Foreign Office quarters in the little palace where I was living. For half a year I saw him every day, sat next to him at table and occasionally we went to the theatres and the Turkish Embassy. During that time Enver told me a great deal about his life and his ambitions.
He had known my husband in Constantinople, and was away from Moscow at the time of my husband’s death. As soon as he returned he called on me, bringing Halil and the Turkish Ambassador, Ali Fued Pasha, with him. All three were extremely kind and sympathetic. From that moment until I left Moscow the Turks did everything possible to make life less tragic for me, and I gained an insight into the Turkish character which I had never imagined. The Turks have a peculiar capacity for friendship. And friendship, once given, has no bournes; a friend is a friend through everything--sorrow, dishonor, poverty, as well as wealth and success. An enemy, on the other hand, is beyond all consideration; he is spared nothing, forgiven nothing.
Enver has the personal vanity of the enthusiast and he imagines that everything he does he does well. The only way to cope with his conceit is to be brutally frank. I discovered early in our acquaintance that frankness by no means offends him. One of Enver’s nicest qualities is that he likes to discover his faults as well as his virtues; he is eager to improve himself.
He has a passion for making pencil sketches of people he meets and always goes about with a pencil and a pad of paper in his pocket. In the house where we lived he made sketches of all the guests and all the servants. He made, in all, six very uninteresting portraits of me. One morning when the tea was more tasteless than ever and the bread especially sour and muddy so that I felt I could not manage to eat a single bite, I could not help feeling unpleasantly resentful to see Enver busy with his sketches and full of enthusiasm. And while I sat staring at the terrible meal, he proceeded to make a life-size portrait of me which was incredibly bad. I remember that I wondered where on earth he ever got such a large piece of paper in Russia. When he had finished the sketch he signed his name with a flourish and presented it to me. I took it but said nothing. Enver has the curiosity of a child, and, after a long silence, he asked me if it was possible that I did not really like it. I said that I thought he had no talent for drawing. He became suddenly quite angry and said in a low voice, “But do you realize I have signed my name to it?”
“Your name doesn’t mean anything on a picture,” I explained. “If it was an order for an execution or an advance it would be another matter. You can’t make a good drawing just by signing your name to it”
He frowned and then grew cordial as suddenly as he had grown angry. He rose and bowed to me in a most courtly way. “You can’t imagine,” he said, “how pleasing arrogance is to me.” His three dominating characteristics being bravery, hauteur and recklessness, he imagined that these motives also guided the actions of his friends.
Enver never seemed to be able to loaf in the easy manner of most Orientals. His mental and physical vitality is more like that of an enthusiastic and healthy American. Every morning he rose early to go for a long walk, he read a great deal, took at least three lessons in some foreign language every week and was constantly writing articles for Turkish papers which he printed on a hand press in his own room, and he held almost daily conferences either with the Russians or the Mohammedans. He does not drink or smoke and is devoutly religious.
He likes any discussion which reveals another person’s deepest emotions. If he cannot rouse one any other way he does so by some antagonistic remark which often he does not mean at all. For example, he is extremely liberal in his opinions about women and does not think they should be excluded from political life. Nevertheless, he said to a young actress at tea one afternoon in my apartment, when they were talking about woman suffrage, that she would be better off in a harem. Being an ardent feminist, she rose and fairly shouted at him: “Enver Pasha, you may be a great man in the East, but just listen to me! I am one of the first actresses of my profession. In my world it is every bit as great and important for me to remain an actress as it is for you in your world to remain a warrior or a diplomat.”
Enver took his scolding in very good humor. Afterwards he told me that he had never liked this actress before. “Independence is a great thing in women. Our women lack it and many of them are just puppets on this account.”
He was always extremely interested in American ideas and American opinions. He said he could never understand why Americans were so sentimental about Armenians. “Do they imagine that Armenians never kill Turks? That is indeed irony.”
At the table he used to ask Mr. Vanderlip questions about his proposed Kamchatka concessions. Vanderlip, like many Californians, is rather violently anti-Japanese. His idea of having a naval base at Kamchatka amused Enver. He said Vanderlip was killing two birds with one stone, that he wished to manœuver the American Government into a war with Japan, prove himself a patriot, and at the same time protect his own interests and grow rich. “So that,” said Enver, “if it really came about--the next war would be for Vanderlip and should be known as ‘Vanderlip’s War.’”
When I asked, “Would you be sorry to see America and Japan at war?” he replied, “Not if England was involved. Anything which tends to draw England’s attention away from us or which weakens the great powers, naturally gives Turkey a better chance for reconstruction. You understand that I’m not saying I want to see another war; I am simply saying that if those nations interested in destroying Turkey are occupied elsewhere it relieves us of war burdens and gives us a chance to carry out our own destinies.”
He tried to get Mr. Vanderlip’s reaction on women by the same tactics he employed with the actress. One day he said, “I have three wives and I’m looking for another.” This was not true, but Mr. Vanderlip proved entirely gullible. “Good heavens,” he said, regarding Enver in shocked surprise, “we Anglo-Saxons consider one wife enough tyranny....”
“Naturally,” Enver conceded, suavely, “with one there must be tyranny but with three or four or a hundred.... Ah, you must agree that is quite a different matter.”