Part 27

In Europe geographically, but Oriental in character and race. It did not need Christy’s remark, “This is the East and not the West, which explains a lot,” for Bertram to see that. Many of the people in the streets of Moscow were Eastern types, Slav and Tartar, and Semitic. The typical peasants of Moscow had blue eyes and straw-coloured hair, but the flatness of cheek-bone did not belong to Western physiognomy. Some of them were Mongolian in the slant of their eyes, in the blackness of their hair, and the sparseness of their beards. They wore shaggy goatskin caps brought far back behind their heads, with a mass of mangy hair,—distinguished from the fur cap of the usual Russian peasant. Men from the Caucasus, wearing the astrachan fez passed by, with Cossacks of the Don in long black coats, square cut across the shoulders and falling to their feet.

These crowds were tramp-like in their way of dress, careless of rags and broken boots. It was difficult to distinguish any difference of class or caste among them, except that Red Army officers and officials were smarter than the rest, with top boots more weather tight, and fur caps less shaggy. In the coldness of early autumn, when the first snow began to fall, every one in Moscow was muffled up to the ears with shawls or bits of fur, and those who had no boots swathed their legs around with wrapping over sandals or clogs and seemed warm enough, and well enough shod for the mud and slush.

There was no visible sign of hunger in the faces of the passers-by, and the children especially looked fairly plump and healthy, surprisingly well.

“There’s no famine here—yet,” said Christy. “There’s an old proverb, ‘All things roll down to Moscow.’ It holds good now. This is the seat of the Administration. It’s stuffed with Soviet officials. They’ve a call on the supplies of the country. And the kids get first serve. It’s fair to say that.”

Christy was scrupulously fair to the Soviet Republic, and Bertram thought he erred on the side of generosity. He accused him even, though not seriously, of having been “converted” to the black cult of Bolshevism.

But Christy in that long night talk had been illuminating, and impartial. He had studied the Bolshevik theory and practice, as he had seen it working, with a penetrating vision. Theoretically, he thought there was a lot to be said for the Communist idea. What was it, after all, but an endeavour to carry out the commands of Christ to His apostles who had “all things in common”? It was a fanatical revolt against the crimes of Capitalism and Individualism—Sweated Labour, Profiteers, Warmongers, the blackguardism of Trusts, the corruptions and cruelties of Caste.

“We can’t deny these things,” said Christy. “We can’t pretend that all is well with Western civilisation. As we know, Pollard, it stinks with iniquity!”

The Soviet system was simple—in theory. In return for service to the state, the citizen would receive food, shelter, clothing, education, all the elementary needs of life, and even its arts, graces, and amusements. Service to the state was recognised by the membership of a Trade Union. Once a man had his “ticket,” whatever his class of work—it applied, of course, to women too—he drew his ration of food, clothes, and so on, received his opera and theatre passes, was entitled to all the culture and gifts of the state.

“Very much like a soldier in the British Army or any other,” said Christy.

The Soviet Government was made up of a body of men elected as the Central Executive Committee by a series of Soviets starting with the villages and sending one of their members to a big and more important body. They elected members in their turn to still more important groups, until finally the Central Committee was reached.

“Very indirect,” said Bertram.

“Precisely. Not democratic. A weak point in the system. The Central Executive is as far removed from the people as the Greek tyrants.”

Theoretically, however, the idea of common reward for common service, thought Christy, was the ideal towards which mankind had always been groping.

“And actually,” said Bertram, “how has it worked?”

“It hasn’t,” answered Christy. “It’s failed to work, hopelessly. It’s landed them all into an unholy ruin. They admit, with reservations, their own ghastly failure.”

The chief cause of failure, beyond any doubt, was the resistance of the peasant to the system of requisition. To ration every citizen, it was, of course, necessary to commandeer the peasant’s labour and produce. All that he produced over and above his own needs belonged to the State. Red soldiers went down to his farmstead to remind him of the fact, and to collect his grain, potatoes, flax, butter, vegetables, eggs, poultry, and milk. The peasant said, “Why should I sow that others should reap?” He concealed his produce, bartered it secretly for jewels, furs, trinkets, any old thing, with city folk who didn’t find their daily ration enough for daily life. When caught, he was shot or imprisoned. When many had been shot, the others ceased to sow, undercultivated their fields,—even burnt their grain!

This peasant revolt against Communism broke the country, already ruined by war, revolution, and counter-revolutionary armies. The Central Executive could not get their supplies to ration the city folk. Factory workers, not getting food, abandoned the factories for the fields. No more engines could be made or repaired. The transport system broke down. It became more difficult to convey food to the cities. They disintegrated. In Petrograd there were three million people at the beginning of the war. There were now seven hundred and fifty thousand. All industry had ceased. No spades, ploughs, reaping machines could be replaced. The whole machinery of Russian life had collapsed. Now the Famine on the Volga threatening twenty-five million people with starvation, had hit the only class which was comparatively comfortable, the peasants of Russia.

“How much is the famine due to Bolshevism?” asked Bertram.

Christy pondered.

“It’s due to the drought. Last year and this. An act of God, as men say, though I don’t believe it, if there is a God, and He is kind. But its severity was increased by the System. The Bolsheviks requisitioned the peasants’ reserves to feed the Red Army defending Russia against Koltchak, Denikin, Wrangel, and the rest. There were droughts and famines in Russia before. The peasants expected them, and kept reserves of grain for a lean year. Now there are no reserves. In that way Bolshevism is responsible for the famine. But in no other way. Let’s be fair.”

“You’re too damned fair,” said Bertram. “How about the atrocities—the inhuman cruelties—the Chinese tortures?”

Christy lowered his voice. They were talking in the palace of the Sugar King, infested with secret police.

“I’ve no personal knowledge. The _Cheka_ keeps its secrets. There have been many executions—in batches. Men and women, without mercy. Perhaps in Eastern Russia Mongols have done the dirty work. But I’ll say just this—to be fair again. All Governments, especially in time of Revolution, are ruthless against those who challenge their authority and seek to overthrow their power. So it would be in any country in some degree. These people hold their place against hordes of enemies, within and without. They proclaimed the Reign of Terror against all plotters and counter-revolutionaries. Fear made them cruel. Fear made them kill the Czar, as the French killed poor old Louis and Marie Antoinette. Now there are no more counter-revolutions, and the Terror has abated.”

“Why have counter-revolutions ceased?” asked Bertram.

“The people are sick of bloodshed. The game’s too dangerous. And Russia is so stricken that even the last of the old régime, who still linger on in holes and corners, believe that the overthrow of the Soviet Republic would be the last blow to the life of Russia. At least it functions. It makes a train move, now and then. It gets some supplies from the peasants. It sends some seeds to the Volga valley. It works. . . . And it has abandoned Communism.”

“What’s that?” asked Bertram, astounded.

“The whole thing has been scrapped by Lenin, its chief, author and organiser. On October the eighteenth he ‘blew the gaff’ on the whole show, confessed the utter breakdown of the Communist system—for the reasons I’ve given, and some others. ‘We’ve suffered a terrible defeat on the Economic front,’ he said. ‘The only way by which we may save ourselves is by a strategic retreat on prepared positions. He’s restored private property, to a great extent, and the right of private trading, as you’ll see. He has abandoned rationing, and re-established money for wages and payment. The kind of money I paid to our _isvostchik_ last night—the _droschke_ driver! Four hundred thousand roubles to the English pound. One has to carry a carpet-bag instead of a purse.”

“God!” said Bertram. “An awful mess!”

“The worst mess in the world. The greatest tragedy in modern history. Another experiment in human progress has ended in disaster to a hundred and fifty million people. Famine has stricken them, and will creep even to the edge of Moscow before the winter is out. Pestilence sweeps them like a scourge. And Lenin, in the Kremlin, is trying to think of some way out of ruin. I think he’s found a way, which at least he will try.”

“Tell me.”

Christy lowered his voice still further.

“Alliance with Germany. Red soldiers in exchange for railway engines. Arsenals in return for economic aid. A threat of war to France and Poland, with all the Continent afire, unless Europe comes to her aid. International blackmail.”

“That’s Hell,” said Bertram.

“If it happens,” answered Christy. “You’ve just come in time to see the transition from Communism to Capitalism. You’ll find it interesting before you get down to the Famine. This city is a melodrama, if you keep your eyes open.”

Bertram kept his eyes open, and his ears. Building on Christy’s outline of information, he was able to fill in the details of Russian life from personal observation, and plunged into it.

LI

He saw something of the melodrama of Moscow in the Trubnaya Market, which had been opened again, owing to Lenin’s new law allowing private trading. Until that time, all private barter had been forbidden under severe penalties, yet it had gone on secretly between city folk and peasants and, as Bertram found afterwards, there was hardly a man or woman in Moscow or Petrograd, outside the class of Soviet officials, who had not been imprisoned for this “crime.” Now it was done publicly, and legally.

Bertram walked through the market which covered a great square with dilapidated houses, pock-marked by bullet-holes, on each side. There were rows of wooden booths with room enough between them for three people to walk abreast, all crowded with peasant folk in their sheepskins. They were selling the produce of their little farmsteads, and the food made a brave show in the capital city of a famine-stricken land. Bertram saw plenty of meat, butter, cheese, and bread. For those who had paper money in big enough bundles, here was nourishment enough.

There were other people besides peasants. Standing on the outer edge of the wooden rows, were long lines of men and women—mostly women—who, he saw at a glance, were not peasants. Some of them were in peasant dress, but their faces could not disguise a heritage of education and gentility. Others wore the clothes of the old régime, of bourgeoisie and Western fashion—black dresses, frayed and worn and grease-stained, leather boots, down at heel, or broken at the toes, hats which had come originally, perhaps, from smart modistes in the Nevsky Prospekt, or even from Paris, a bit of lace at the throat and wrists.

These ladies, for they were that, stood in the market-place holding out the last relics of their former state—ermine stoles, fur tippets, embroidered slippers, fine linen, old boots (less broken than those they wore), cloth jackets, silk petticoats, trinkets with glittering stones, gold lockets, rings, lace, embroidery, perfumes, combs, hair pins, brooches. Some of them seemed hardly able to stand, and were thin and weak and haggard. Bertram noticed their hands, delicate and finely shaped, but grimed with dirt of hard work and lack of soap. Gipsy hands of patrician women. They avoided his eyes when he looked at them. They seemed startled by his own appearance, knew him instantly as a man of the class that was once theirs, and shrank from his scrutiny.

One girl, younger than the others, flamed scarlet at his glance, and turned her head away with visible distress. He did not look at her again, in order to avoid this hurt to her pride, and indeed he had a sense of shame in walking down the lines of those women, scrutinising their faces, witnessing this public humiliation of their pride. Yet he had an intense wish to get into conversation with them, to find out their way of life. They were the last of the old régime within the frontiers of Russia, less lucky than the Countess Lydia and her sister, and all the crowds of émigrés who had escaped in time. What stories they would have to tell! What agonies they must have suffered before arriving at this market-place!

He stood in front of an elderly woman who was holding out a little tray on which was a gilt crucifix. She had a thin face, with grey hair almost white, beneath a little black bonnet. He asked the price of her crucifix, speaking in French, and at his question her hands trembled so that she could hardly hold the tray.

“Why do you speak to me in French?” she asked, replying in the same language.

“I guessed you spoke French. And I don’t know a word of Russian.”

“You are not French?” she said, looking timidly into his face.

“I’m English.”

She answered him in his own tongue.

“I thought so when I saw you before you spoke. How do you come to be in Russia? Few foreigners come here now.”

“I’m a newspaper correspondent. I’ve come to write about the Famine, when I can get as far as that.”

“There is misery to be found without going so far,” she said. “There are many who are hungry even in Moscow. I am one of them.”

“May I buy your crucifix?”

She glanced nervously on each side, and spoke to him in French again in a low voice.

“We are being watched. It is very dangerous for me to be in the market place. They do not like my name. Perhaps you would be good enough to go.”

He was aware of a young officer of the Red Army standing three paces away, watching and listening.

“_Au revoir, madame._”

He turned away, stared into the face of the officer, and went further down the line.

The girl who had flamed scarlet at his glance was still there, and gave him a strange, wistful, lingering look which startled him. Then, as he drew near, she left her place in the line, and went to the lady with whom he had been speaking and whispered to her.

These people were frightened, in spite of the “New Economic Laws” which permitted private trading. They had come out into the open, but were not certain of this new liberty. Perhaps they had been trapped in some such way before.

After wandering about the streets and markets of Moscow for a long morning, Bertram became conscious suddenly of hunger, and he puzzled as to the way in which he could satisfy this desire. It was a long tramp back to his Guest House, across the river, and it would be more amusing to find an eating house of some kind. Christy had told him that two had just been opened in a street called the Arbat, the only two in Moscow—a city of two million people—which once was crowded with restaurants as luxurious as any in the world. He hailed a _droschke_, and by good luck made the _isvostchik_ understand the name of the street, paying him a hundred thousand roubles from a wad of paper advanced by Christy, for the short drive.

The man seemed satisfied, touched his fur cap, and said, “_Spaseeba, tavarish_.”

A few shops were open down a long street of houses which had all been shops, by the look of them, but were now mostly empty and boarded up, and falling into ruin. The newly opened places had a few objects of merchandise in the windows. A pair of top boots, marked at a million roubles, adorned one window-front. In another were three fur caps, a guitar, a German pipe, and a wicker cradle. A motley collection of household goods—including a leather arm-chair, a broken bedstead, some rather good rugs, a cloisonné clock, and a rosewood piano—was the greatest display of “stock” which he could observe through any window. In most cases there was nothing but what could be seen at a glance. The “private trading” in Moscow was not yet magnificent. He discovered the restaurant by the sight of an uncooked leg of mutton, baldly displayed in one of the windows, and by the words, “Angliske Restaurant” written in Russian characters above it.

When he entered, he saw a bare room set out with wooden chairs and tables, with here and there a piece of furniture of the Louis XV. period, and on the walls some gilded mirrors of the same style. A woman, shabbily dressed, and wearing carpet slippers, but with an unmistakable air of elegance, was stirring something in a pot over a wood fire. At the back of the room was a long counter, on which stood some tall bottles, a samovar, and some coffee cups, and behind it, on a high stool, sat an elderly man with silver hair and a little white beard. He was peeling some potatoes, while behind him, with her hand on his shoulder, was a girl of sixteen or so, as poorly dressed as Cinderella, but as pretty, in a dark way, with large brown eyes.

Bertram was aware of three pairs of eyes upon him, studying him intently, with surprise and suspicion. The woman who had been stirring the pot, advanced with her ladle, pointed to a table, and spoke in Russian.

He answered in French, and asked politely whether he might have something to eat.

“You do not understand Russian?” she answered suspiciously, in French.

“No, not a word, alas! I’m English—just arrived in Moscow.”

“English!”

She spoke the word in his own tongue, with joyful intonation.

“Why do you leave happy old England to come to this miserable land?”

“To help the starving people of Russia, if I can,” he answered.

“That is brave of you,” she said. “There is much danger in Russia, and no kind of comfort.”

She called to the white-headed man behind the counter. “Nicholas, Katia, here is a gentleman just come from England!”

They came from behind the counter, and the elderly man clasped Bertram’s hand.

“I used to know England well, and love my memories of it. I was a painter in those days. We lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Katia was a baby then.”

The girl took Bertram’s hand, and dropped a curtsey like an English debutante.

“I remember England, just a little. It seems like a fairy-tale now!”

They served him with some soup called Bortsch, and afterwards cooked a piece of meat for him with some of the potatoes which the elderly man had peeled; and while he was eating, the lady talked to him rapidly, emotionally, as though relieving the pent-up thoughts of agonising years.

It was a tale of misery. Her husband, now peeling potatoes, had been a painter at the Imperial Court, and known to be a personal friend of the Empress. He had been arrested by the _Cheka_ and thrown into prison, where he was kept without trial for eighteen months, half-starved, in a foul cell crowded with men of good class. Many times he was examined at night by the Extraordinary Commission, mostly young lads who tried to bully him into admission of counter-revolutionary acts. Each time he believed he was being taken to execution, like others in the cell who were taken out and shot. For some reason they had spared him. Perhaps because he was an artist, and they pretended to reverence art, though they had no reverence for life. She and Katia had been turned into the kitchen of their beautiful house, which for a time had been used as a billet for Red soldiers—rough country lads who stabbed their knives into her husband’s canvases, used the tapestries to wipe the mud off their boots, and were unspeakably filthy in their habits. She had been very much afraid for little Katia. Those young soldiers had been rough with her, as they were with peasant girls. . . . She and the child had starved many days. They would have starved to death unless they had sold, secretly and at great risk, some of the jewels they had hidden. They sold them to peasant women for potatoes and cheese. Now the peasant women were hungry themselves because of the drought! She had worked at the hardest toil, chopping wood, shovelling snow, dragging sledges to Government stores.

“Look at my hands, monsieur!”

She showed her hands, coarsened and begrimed, like a gipsy’s.

Then she had been arrested for the crime of private trading, and imprisoned for six weeks. All that time she had thought only of Katia, left alone with the brutal soldier-boys. But God and His angels had guarded the child. Two months after coming out of prison her husband was liberated, without explanation or excuse. Just pushed out of prison with the words, “_You can go, tavarish!_” That was happiness beyond words, to be together again, in spite of poverty and starvation and coarse toil.

“We have suffered less than others,” said the lady. “We have been lucky. My friends have been worse treated by the cut-throats and robbers who rule our unhappy country.”

Her husband whispered to her.

“Hush, my dear. For the love of God—”

A look of terror came into his eyes, because two young men came into the restaurant and sat down at a table near the counter. The lady became as white as death for a moment, lest they had overheard her words. But they called for plates of Bortsch and talked together in low voices, paying no heed to those who served them. They were unshaven and dirty, with long over-coats and top boots, caked in mud, and the Red Star of the Soviet Republic in their caps showed them to be officials of some kind.

There was no more conversation from the lady. She went into a little back kitchen. Her husband, once painter to the Imperial Court, peeled more potatoes. Katia added up some figures on a slate, glancing over at Bertram with a little smile about her lips and in her timid eyes.

There seemed to be no sense of freedom, no respite from fear in Soviet Russia. Those women in the market place had been scared when he approached them. This little family dared not talk a word before unknown men of their own city.

LII

“I’m off to Petrograd for a couple of days,” said Christy one night in the Guest House. “You’d better come while you’re waiting for a train to the Volga district. I’ve fixed it with Weinstein. Here’s your pass.”

This visit to Petrograd gave Bertram another impression of Soviet Russia, broadened his outlook on the tragedy of a great people, killed something more of the petty selfishness of his own trouble.

He said something of the kind to Christy on the train journey through endless fields sowed with rye six months from another harvest time.

“I find Russia makes one forget one’s ego. It’s like seeing the end of the world—the death of civilisation. It’s absurd for the individual to whine about the loss of a collar-stud, or a pretty wife, in the midst of an Empire’s ruin.”

“A nice cheerful way of looking at things!” said Christy, with his usual irony. “Heaven knows how gay you’ll be by the time you get to the Volga Valley.”

“These people seem to be down to the bed-rock of primitive existence,” said Bertram. “Nothing matters except food and shelter, and escape from death. All the rest is so much ‘jam,’ as my batman used to say. It simplifies things, as war does.”

“An easy process of simplification,” said Christy. “Another war, or another drought in Russia, and a great part of Europe will be simplified off the map.”