drove in a taxicab to a rendezvous. We entered a house and passed
into a large room in which there was a group of men. Four of them I
identified as Russians. Whitehead introduced me as a _kamarad und neger
dichter_. One sitting at a table spoke with a kindly smile. He asked a
few questions in effortful English which I promptly answered. I said
that I was not a member of the American Communist Party, but that I
was in sympathy with the purpose of the great Russian revolution. I
said that it was primarily as a writer that I was interested in Soviet
Russia and that I intended to write about it for the Negro press.
I received back my passport and Crystal Eastman's recommendation,
which I had consigned to Whitehead. A visa for Russia was attached to
the passport. I was told to prepare to travel at once. The next day I
traveled with an English-speaking German to Stettin. There I slept that
night at a hotel. The following morning I was taken to a pier, whence I
embarked for Leningrad.
* * * * *
Petrograd! Leningrad! When I think of that great city like a mighty
tree shaken to its roots by a hurricane, yet still standing erect,
and when I think of the proud equestrian statue of Peter the Great,
proclaiming that dictator's mighty achievement, I feel that the world
has lost the poetry and the color rising like a rainbow out of a
beautiful name since Petrograd was changed to Leningrad.
Lenin is mightier than Peter the Great. But there is no magic in the
name of Leningrad. There is magic in the name of Lenin, as there is
splendor in the word Moscow. And perhaps Lenin himself, whose life
was devoted to the idea of creating a glorious new world, might have,
in appreciation of the will of Peter the Great to remake a nation,
preferred Petrograd to remain Petrograd. Perhaps the spirit of Lenin
might have been more adequately expressed in the erection of a
brand-new city, rising out of that system to which he dedicated his
life. Lenin without any suffix--like a perfect ball of pure gold--a
city called Lenin.
* * * * *
I saw Petrograd! Like a great tree, shaken to its roots by a hurricane
and struck by lightning and somehow still standing. Petrograd, half
empty of its population and somewhat sad in the autumn. I saw the
monuments of czars and nobles tumbled in the dirt by the proletarian
masses. But intact and untouched they had left the beautifully proud
monument of Peter the Great, a mighty symbol of individual will and
majesty.
_MOSCOW_
_Moscow for many loving her was dead ...
And yet I saw a bright Byzantine fair,
Of jewelled buildings, pillars, domes and spires
Of hues prismatic dazzling to the sight;
A glory painted on the Eastern air,
Of amorous sounding tones like passionate lyres;
All colors laughing richly their delight
And reigning over all the color red._
_My memory bears engraved the strange Kremlin,
Of halls symbolic of the tiger will,
Of Czarist instruments of mindless law ...
And often now my nerves throb with the thrill
When, in that gilded place, I felt and saw
The simple voice and presence of Lenin._
I felt almost ashamed in those lean hungry years of 1922, when Russia
was just emerging from a great famine, that Moscow should have stirred
me in the way I have expressed it in this sonnet. Yes, I will admit
that my senses were stirred by the semi-oriental splendor and movement
of Moscow even before my intellect was touched by the forces of the
revolution.
After the war, the revolution and the famine, one's mind had created a
picture of a grim, harsh melancholy atmosphere. But it was all like a
miracle, all that Byzantine conglomeration of form and color, shedding
down its radiance upon the proletarian masses. It was like an _Arabian
Nights_ dream transforming the bleak white face of an Arctic waste.
And the crowds tramping and sleighing through the deep snow spreading
over all the land were really happier and friendlier than the crowds
of New York and London and Berlin. Yet the people in Moscow were
generally so poorly clad. There was so much of that Oriental raggedness
that one does not see in New York and London and Berlin--at least
not on the surface. The scenes were so unexpected and strange that
I even doubted at first whether they were not created by Communist
discipline and Bolshevik propaganda. But when I mingled with the people
I soon perceived that many did not even comprehend the true nature of
Communism. Some of them could understand only that Lenin was in the
place of the Czar and that he was a greater Little Father.
I was soon brought down out of the romantic feeling of the atmosphere
to face the hard reality of the American Communist delegation. Brazenly
and bravely I had journeyed to Russia with some members of the British
group. But now the American delegation had arrived with a Negroid
delegate, a light mulatto. My presence was resented. The American
delegation did not want me there. The delegation represented America,
and as I had been passed with other Communists as a visitor to the
Fourth Communist Congress, it was necessary that I should be indorsed
by the delegation as an unofficial visitor. This the chairman refused
to do. Instead, he desired that I should be sent out of Russia, back
home.
A fight was raging inside of the American delegation. A minority led
by James Cannon wanted a legal American Communist party, to carry
on open propaganda among all the American workers. The majority, led
by the chairman, was fighting to keep the American party illegal and
underground.
Rose Pastor Stokes was the main prop of the chairman. When she arrived
in Moscow, still pretty and purring and sly as a puss, she immediately
engaged me in conversation and casually asked if I did not think that
an illegal Communist party was the best suited for America. I answered
no, emphatically. At the time I did not know that the difference in the
ranks of the American group was serious. Not being a party member, I
was unaware of what was going on inside of the organization.
Rose Pastor Stokes was one of the delegates who had just escaped from
Bridgman, Michigan, during the police raid of August, 1922, when the
illegal Communist Party held its convention in the open there in a
beautiful romantic valley. Some of us of _The Liberator_ thought that
the Communists, being tired of staying underground, were feeling so
pastoral and poetic that they couldn't do better than hold their secret
convention in the open air of the lovely Michigan country.
Rose Pastor Stokes had said to me that it was necessary for Communists
to take to the woods in summer to escape the iron heel of the
capitalists. She was the wife of a millionaire, and perhaps knew more
about the iron heel than poor proletarians. She admired that romantic
novel of Jack London's, _The Iron Heel_, and once told me that radicals
could use it as a textbook of revolutionary organization in America.
She was shocked and hurt that a few of us regarded the convention and
the raid in Michigan as something like a comic opera.
I remembered Mrs. Stokes's spy mania, when I was on _The Liberator_.
She was doing secret radical work. She used to tell me stories of
being followed by detectives, and of how she fooled them by taking
refuge in the Hotel Plaza and the Hotel Astor; because the dicks
wouldn't imagine that a guest of such places was red. She was also
working with a radical Negro group, and thought she was followed by
Negro detectives in Harlem. One night I was at the apartment of my
friend, Grace Campbell, when Mrs. Stokes came in to attend a meeting.
She was breathless, and sank into a chair, exhausted. She asked for
water, and Comrade Campbell hurried to get a glassful. Then Mrs. Stokes
explained that a colored man had been watching her suspiciously while
she was riding up on the subway, and when she got off the train he
had attempted to follow her. She had hurried and dodged through the
insouciant Harlem crowd and gone round many blocks to evade the spy.
Said Comrade Campbell, "But Comrade Stokes, there aren't any Negroes
spying on radicals in Harlem. That colored man, maybe he was
attempting--kind of--to get friendly with you."
Mrs. Stokes jumped right up out of her exhaustion: "What, Comrade?
You _shock_ me!" In her voice, and her manner, was the most perfect
bourgeois expression of the superior person. Comrade Campbell said:
"Why Comrade Stokes, I didn't mean to insinuate anything, but any
person is likely to be mistaken for something else."
So now in Moscow, before I was fixed in place as an unofficial
observer, Rose Pastor Stokes had got it from me that I was opposed to
the majority of the American delegation, and that was bad. Mrs. Stokes
really believed that we were living through the period of the new
Inquisition against radicals in America, and that those who did not
believe that were traitors to the cause. She hinted even that there
was something suspicious about my use of my real name in Moscow. For
all the American delegates had secret names. Mrs. Stokes's own was
Sasha. But some of us unorthodox comrade sympathizers preferred to
identify her as The Red Red Rose.
Meanwhile, the committee appointed to seat all delegates to the
Fourth Congress was sifting credentials. It was headed by a repulsive
type of strutting Prussian whose name is now forgotten, lost in the
radical scramble for place and the shuffling and cutting of Communist
cards--and Leninist purges. Greater Red names than his have gone like
the melted snows of yesterday.
I was soon aware that the Prussian person had his severe blue eye fixed
on me, as if I had been specially pointed out to him. I pretended that
I had not seen that evil eye, but soon I was being bedeviled. I was
thrown out of the Lux Hotel and found myself in a dilapidated house in
a sinister _pereulok_. My room was bare excepting for an army cot, and
cold like the steppes because of a broken window pane through which
poured a Siberian draught. My first thought was to protect myself
against pneumonia, and so I hurried to a store and purchased two
blankets and a pair of the cheap warm and comfortable felt boots that
reach to the thighs--the kind the Russian peasants wear.
In the room next to mine there was a Russian couple. The man spoke
a little English. I complained about the state of my room and he
agreed that the window should be fixed; but, said he, "Thousands of
Russians are living in worse places." It was a quiet, gentle, perhaps
unintentional, rebuke, but immediately I felt confused and altogether
ashamed. I became aware of the implications of my grievance, so petty
in the eyes of the "thousands in worse places" who had just come
through an eight-year siege of war, revolution, counter-revolution and
famine, with fields and farms devastated, factories wrecked, houses in
ruins, no time and few funds for repairs.
I remembered breakfasting on the train in Germany a few weeks
previously. The countryside, misty brown in the early morning, was
peaceful and beautiful; the train ran precisely on time; the coaches
and dining car were in elegant shape, the passengers well dressed, the
waiters in neat uniform. The breakfast was fine, but the cream that
came with the coffee was barely whitened water. I had just come from
America, where cream with coffee is a commonplace. And so, without
thinking, I asked the waiter for cream. I said I would pay extra for it.
The waiter said: "But Mister, we have no cream at all. They have taken
away all our cows from us, and what little milk we have we must give to
our babies." Then I remembered that I had read somewhere that under the
Treaty of Versailles the Germans had had to give up thousands of heads
of cattle to the Allies. But I had never fully grasped the significance
of that until I asked for cream with my coffee in Germany. (We are, the
majority of us, merely sentimental about the suffering of others. Only
when direct experience twists our own guts out of place are we really
able to understand. I remember once hearing a nice comfortable bohemian
noblewoman ecstatically exclaim: "_J'aime la souffrance! J'aime la
souffrance!_" Yes! She loved vicariously the suffering of others.)
" ... Thousands in worse places." A good room was as much of a luxury
in Moscow in 1922 as a car is in America. A good room was the chief
non-political topic of conversation. People greeted one another and
said: "Do you have a good room?" in the same way we say, "How is
your health?" One of the tidbits of those times was the joke that
Mrs. Trotsky and Mrs. Zinoviev were at odds because one had a better
apartment in the Kremlin than the other.
* * * * *
Now my position was precarious. I wanted by all means to stay in Moscow
and to attend the meetings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist
International. But would-be delegates and visitors who were unwanted
and undesirable were being ruthlessly dealt with. Some were accused
as spies and counter-revolutionists. To the Russians, spying was a
real menace. It meant sabotage of revolutionary property, attempted
assassination of officials, and working to overthrow the Soviets. They
could not understand that when an English or an American Communist
accused certain persons of being spies, his idea of spying was romantic
and akin to eavesdropping.
Aware of the way in which things were going against radical dissidents,
I acted quickly. I had a friend high up in Bolshevik circles in the
person of Sen Katayama. Sen Katayama was _the_ Japanese revolutionist.
He had been a member of the Second International and knew all the big
men of the conservative British and continental labor movement. He was
an old friend of Lenin, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek, and had gone over
to the Third International at its inception.
Sen Katayama had been a student at Fisk University, the southern Negro
school. He was small, dark-brown, with intensely purposeful features
which were nevertheless kindly. I met him when I was working on _The
Liberator_. He dropped in one day and introduced himself. He took me
to lunch at a Japanese restaurant, and at another time to a Chinese,
and introduced me to the Indian rendezvous restaurant in the theatrical
district. His personality was friendly but abounding in curiosity--a
sort of minute methodical curiosity. He made me think of a fearless
and faithful little hunting dog. When he came up to my office, his
little eyes, like brilliant beads, darted rapidly over everything.
And like a permanent surprise he invaded my rooms at all hours and
talked in his squeaky grandmotherly voice about Negro problems. He
demonstrated a vast interest and sympathy for the Negro racialists and
their organizations. I liked Sen Katayama immensely. I was fascinated
by his friendly ferreting curiosity. I had associated with many Chinese
at home in the West Indies and in London, but Sen Katayama was my first
Japanese friend. It was exciting to contrast Chinese and Japanese by
the types I had known. Sen Katayama was eager and extrovert, almost too
much so, while the Chinese, however friendly, seemed aloof and secret.
Sen Katayama was in his glory in Red Russia. He was an honorary colonel
of the Red army and always appeared at mass meetings in his uniform.
The crowds adored him and applauded frantically. He appeared to me
somewhat like a harbinger, a symbol of the far eastern element in the
new heart of Russia.
Sen Katayama warmly welcomed me in Moscow and invited me to tea in his
nice room in the Lux Hotel. He held an important post in the Eastern
Department of the Communist International and because of his extensive
traveling and his education and contact with American Negroes he was
regarded as an authority on all colored peoples' affairs. He had more
real inside and sympathetic knowledge and understanding of American
Negroes than many of the white American Communists who were camping in
Moscow.
When I explained to Sen Katayama how and why I had come to Russia and
of the difficulties I was encountering because of the opposition of the
American delegation, he said: "You leave everything to me and we'll
see if they can get you out of here and prevent your attending the
Congress. I'll talk to the Big Four[2] about you."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek.]
XV
An Individual Triumph
Meanwhile, all the Russian folk unwittingly were doing their part for
me. Whenever I appeared in the street I was greeted by all of the
people with enthusiasm. At first I thought that this was merely because
of the curiosity which any strange and distinctive type creates in any
foreign environment, such as I had experienced in Holland and Belgium
and Germany. But no! I soon apprehended that this Russian demonstration
was a different thing. Just a spontaneous upsurging of folk feeling.
The Bolsheviks had nothing at all to do with it. The public
manifestation for me took them unawares. But the Bolsheviks have nerves
subtly attuned to the currents of opinion and a sense of propaganda
values in which they are matched only by French officialdom. So, as
soon as they perceived the trend of the general enthusiasm for me,
they decided to use it. And I was not averse to that. Never before
had I experienced such an instinctive sentiment of affectionate
feeling compelling me to the bosom of any people, white or colored.
And I am certain I never will again. My response was as sincere as
the mass feeling was spontaneous. That miraculous experience was so
extraordinary that I have never been able to understand it.
Even the Russian comrades, who have a perfect pat social-economic
explanation for all phenomena, were amazed. The comrade who conducted
me around (when I hadn't wandered off by myself, which was often) was
as intelligent as a fox and as keen and cold as an icicle. Although
a mere youth, he held important positions, open and secret, and
today, still young, he holds a most important position in the Soviet
government and in the Russian Communist Party. This comrade said: "I
don't quite understand. Some of the Indian delegates are darker than
you--quite black--yet the people don't carry on about them that way.
But there is something very different in your features and that is what
the people see."
Never in my life did I feel prouder of being an African, a black, and
no mistake about it. Unforgettable that first occasion upon which I was
physically uplifted. I had not yet seen it done to anybody, nor did I
know that it was a Russian custom. The Moscow streets were filled with
eager crowds before the Congress started. As I tried to get through
along the Tverskaya I was suddenly surrounded by a crowd, tossed into
the air, and caught a number of times and carried a block on their
friendly shoulders. The civilians started it The soldiers imitated
them. And the sailors followed the soldiers, tossing me higher than
ever.
From Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow I went
triumphantly from surprise to surprise, extravagantly fêted on every
side. I was carried along on a crest of sweet excitement. I was like a
black ikon in the flesh. The famine had ended, the Nep was flourishing,
the people were simply happy. I was the first Negro to arrive in Russia
since the revolution, and perhaps I was generally regarded as an omen
of good luck! Yes, that was exactly what it was. I was like a black
ikon.
The attitude of the non-Bolshevist population was even more
interesting. I had been told to be careful about going places alone.
But bourgeois persons on the street implored me just to enter their
homes for a glass of tea. I went. I had no fear of even the "whitest"
Russians in Russia, although in Paris and Berlin I would not have
trusted them. The only persons that made me afraid in Russia were the
American Communists. Curiously, even Russian bourgeois persons trusted
me. They knew that I was in sympathy with the Communists--was their
guest. Yet some of them told me frankly and naïvely that they did not
like the Bolsheviks and didn't think their régime would last. The
women chattered like parrots, happy that the shops were opened. They
wanted to hear about the shops in New York and London and Berlin. When
I visited a college with an interpreter, who was certainly a member of
the O.G.P.U., one of the language teachers explained the difficulties
of working under the new régime. She said she ought to travel abroad to
keep up with the languages she taught, and that was impossible now. She
said the proletarian students were dull and kept the brighter bourgeois
students back. She said that one of her brightest students was the
son of a former governor, and that she would not reveal his identity,
for if it were known, he could not stay in the college. She said, "I
can't let even you know who he is, for you might tell about him." But
before I left she introduced me to the lad, explaining that he had
specially asked for an introduction. In Petrograd, Chorny Chukovsky,
the popular author, introduced me to a princess and a countess who
were his friends, and to the intellectual élite, who were mainly
anti-Bolsheviks. But they crowded a hall to hear me read my poems.
One of the professors, who had studied in England and France, was so
excited that he invited me to the national library the next day. And
what did he do? There was a rare Pushkin book with a photograph of
him as a boy which clearly showed his Negroid strain. (The Negroid
strain is not so evident in the adult pictures of Pushkin.) I coveted
the book, and told the Professor so. He said he was sorry that he
could not make me a present of the volume. But he actually extracted
that photograph of Pushkin and gave it to me. Mark you, that professor
was no Bolshevik, contemptuous of bourgeois literature. He was an
old classic scholar who worshipped his books and was worried about
the future of literature and art under the Bolshevik régime. Yet he
committed that sacrilege for me: "To show my appreciation of you as a
poet," he said. "Our Pushkin was also a revolutionist." Like Crystal
Eastman's farewell note, that photograph of Pushkin is one of the few
treasures I have.
* * * * *
Oh, I remember that magnificent cartoon in colors, picturing me sailing
on a magic carpet over the African jungles to Moscow. The artist
made me a gift of the original. An imp swiped it. It was the perfect
interpretation of my adventure in Russia. An _Arabian Nights_ fantasy
transformed into reality. I had been the despised brother, unwelcome
at the gorgeous fête in the palace of the great. In the lonely night
I went to bed in a cold bare room. But I awoke in the morning to
find myself the center of pageantry in the grand Byzantine city. The
photograph of my black face was everywhere among the most highest
Soviet rulers, in the principal streets, adorning the walls of the
city. I was whisked out of my unpleasant abode and installed in one of
the most comfortable and best-heated hotels in Moscow. I was informed:
"You may have wine and anything extra you require, and at no cost to
you." But what could I want for, when I needed a thousand extra mouths
and bellies for the importunate invitations to feast? Wherever I wanted
to go, there was a car at my disposal. Whatever I wanted to do I did.
And anything I felt like saying I said. For the first time in my life
I knew what it was to be a highly privileged personage. And in the
Fatherland of Communism!
Didn't I enjoy it! The American comrades were just too funny with envy
and chagrin. The mulatto delegate who had previously high-hatted me now
began to cultivate my company. It was only by sticking close to me that
he could be identified as a Negroid.
I was photographed with the popular leaders of international Communism:
Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Clara Zetkin, Sen Katayama, Roy; with
officers of the Soviet fleet, the army and the air forces; with the Red
cadets and the rank and file; with professors of the academies; with
the children of Moscow and of Petrograd; with delegates from Egypt,
India, Japan, China, Algeria.
XVI
The Pride and Pomp of Proletarian Power
The Bolshoi Theater in Moscow presented a pageantry of simple
proletarian pride and power on the night of the opening of the Congress
of the Communist International. The absence of the primitive appeal of
gilded pomp made the manifestation even more sublime and awe-inspiring.