In October of 1921 I went to Russia for the purpose of making a report
on the Famine to the Imperial Relief Fund.
Much as I disliked the idea of seeing the grisly vision of Famine after
so many experiences of war and its effects, I felt that it was an
inescapable duty to accept the invitation made to me. I was also drawn
by a strong desire to see the conditions of Russia, outside as well as
inside the famine area, and to get first-hand knowledge of the system
of Bolshevism which was a terror to the majority in Europe, with some
secret attraction, holy or unholy, among men and women of revolutionary
or “advanced” views.
It was impossible to know the truth from newspaper reading. Stories
of Russian atrocities and horrors arrived from Riga, Helsingfors and
other cities on the border of the Soviet Republic, and were denied by
other correspondents. Knowing the way in which “atrocities” had been
manufactured in time of war, by every nation, I disbelieved all I read
about Russia circulated by the “White” propaganda department, while
doubting everything which came from “Red” sources. I think that was a
general attitude of mind among unprejudiced people.
Even with regard to the Famine it was impossible to get near the
truth by newspaper accounts. _The Daily Mail_ said the tales of
famine were vastly exaggerated. _The Daily Express_ said there was
no famine at all. _The Morning Post_ suggested that it was a simple
scheme for deluding Western nations in order to feed the Red Army. I
wanted to know, and promised to find out and report impartially to
the Imperial Relief Fund. _The Daily Chronicle_ agreed to publish a
number of articles written after my return from Russia (in order to
avoid censorship), and I arranged to send an account to _The Review of
Reviews_, of which I was the rather nominal editor.
A journalist friend of mine named Leonard Spray was also under
instructions from _The Daily Chronicle_ to go to Russia, for another
line of inquiry, and much to my delight promised to wait for me
in Berlin so that we could travel together. It would make a great
difference having a companion on that adventure, for I confess that I
hate the lonely trail.
It was a question of waiting for passports from the Soviet Foreign
Office in Moscow. I had applied to the Russian Trade Mission in
London and was recommended by an assistant to Krassin, an intelligent
and well-educated young Russian who professed devoted adherence to
Communism while doing himself remarkably well, I thought, with all the
material pleasures of capitalistic luxury. After a couple of weeks my
credentials arrived, my passport was indorsed with the stamp of the
Soviet Republic, and I had in this way a talisman which would open the
gate of Red Russia and let me enter the heart of its mystery. To some
of my friends it seemed the free admission to a tiger’s cage.
In Berlin I was advised to buy blankets, cooking utensils, as much
food as I could carry, and illimitable quantities of insect powder.
I took this advice, and with Leonard Spray and a very useful lady
who understood the German ways of shopping, we bought this outfit,
remarkably cheap, reckoning in German marks which were then not quite
4,000 to the English pound.
Among other items we acquired an enormous Dutch cheese, round and red,
which we wrapped up in a towel. It became our most precious possession,
and, as I may tell later, came to an honorable and joyous end. A
quantity of solid alcohol in tins somewhat in the style of the “Tommy’s
Cooker” also bulged out our bags and were an immense boon by enabling
us to heat up food and drink on our Russian journey.
Spray and I spent two solid days obtaining _visas_ in Berlin for all
the countries through which we had to pass on our way to the Russian
frontier by way of Riga--those new Baltic States created at Versailles.
Our journey to Riga was half a nightmare and half a farce, and Spray
called our train the “Get in and Get out Express.” We generally arrived
at a new frontier in the dead of night or in the early hours of dawn,
after fitful sleep. Then we were awakened by armed guards demanding
to see our visa for each side of the “Danzig corridor” for Lithuania,
Esthonia, and Latvia.
At Eydtkühnen, in East Prussia, we had a six-hours’ wait and were able
to see something of the Russian invasion and Germany’s “devastated
region” which had been the greatest cause of terror to the German mind
when the “Russian steam roller” first began to roll forward before
its subsequent retreat. Russian cavalry had done a lot of damage--the
Germans had plenty of atrocity stories to set beside those of Alost and
Louvain--and we saw even at that late date, so long after those early
days of war, the ruins of burnt-out farms and shell-wrecked houses. But
not many. German industry had been quick at work, and Eydtkühnen was
built up like a model town, with red-tiled roofs not yet toned down by
weather, and shop windows just exhibiting their first stocks.
As we passed through the new Baltic States--Lithuania, Esthonia,
Latvia--I had an impression that the old British Armies of khaki men
had been transferred to those far countries. At every station there
was a crowd of soldiers, all of them clad in unmistakable khaki from
British stores, but made into misfits for bearded, or unshaven, portly
or slouchy men who looked--many of them--like the old Contemptibles
after years of foreign exile and moral degeneration. Yet it would be
unfair to say they were all like that, for these Baltic peasants were
sturdy fellows enough, and, I should say, hard fighting men.
In Riga we put up for three or four days, waiting for a train into
Russia and permission from Soviet representatives in that city to cross
the Russian frontier. In spite of our visas from headquarters, those
Riga Bolsheviks were extremely insolent and put up a blank wall of
indifference to our requests for railway facilities. There seemed to be
no chance of a place in any train, and very little chance of a train.
Spray and I kicked our heels about in the little old city, very German
in its character, which seemed in a state of stagnation and creeping
paralysis. In its once busy port we saw no ship but a vessel carrying a
cargo of apples which it unloaded on the quayside. The restaurants were
almost deserted, and we drank little glasses of Schnapps in solitary
cafés. After midnight there was the awakening of a squalid night life
and we watched the Riga manifestation of the fox-trot mania, and an
imitation of the Friedrichstrasse _Wein Stube_, with a fair amount of
amusement on my part because of the strange types here in a city filled
with Russian exiles, Letts, Poles, Germans, Swedes, Lithuanians, and
all variety of northern races. But it was not Russia, which we had come
to see.
I doubt whether we should ever have set foot in Russia if it had not
been for the American Relief Administration established in Riga and
just beginning to send food supplies into the famine area. The chief
of the Riga headquarters promised us two places on the next food train
going to Moscow, and broke through all formalities by reckoning us as
members of his staff.
“What about the Famine?” I asked, and he said, “There’s a Famine all
right, with a capital F.”
It was a queer journey from Riga to Moscow--unforgotten by me. I have
put the spirit of it, as indeed of all my experience in Russia, into
my novel “The Middle of the Road,” under a thin guise of fiction, with
some imaginary characters. The train started at night, and Spray and
I, with our baggage carried by Lettish porters, stumbled along unlit
rail tracks to a long train in absolute darkness, except in a few
carriages where candles, stuck in their own grease, burned dimly on
the window ledges. In the corridor was a seething mass of Lettish and
Russian porters, laden with the enormous baggage of Russian, British,
German, American, and other couriers, who shouted at them in various
languages. A party of young American clerks and typists for the central
headquarters in Moscow of the American Relief Administration (always
known as the A.R.A., or even, shorter, as “Ara”) smoked cigarettes,
cursed because of the darkness and filth and stench and lack of space
for their baggage, and between their curses sang ragtime choruses.
Violent action and terrific language in the American accent, on the
part of a large-sized man, cleared the corridor somewhat, and I met,
for the first time, a cheery young giant whom I have put into my
novel as “Cherry of Lynchburg, U.S.A.,” but who is really H. J. Fink,
courier, at that time, to the A.R.A. He is known as “The Milk-fed Boy”
by his fellow-travelers, and but for his enormous good nature, his
mixture of ferocity and joviality with obstructive Bolsheviks, his
genial command of the whole “outfit” from the “_provodniks_” or guards
to the engine drivers, the journey would have been more intolerable
than we found it. I take off my hat, metaphorically, to the “Milk-fed
Boy.”
Our blankets were uncommonly valuable in the filthy carriage of bare
boards with wooden bunks which I shared with Spray. By rigging up
a “gadget” of straps strung across the carriage, we were able to
use our solid alcohol for heating up soups and beans, with only a
fifty-per-cent chance of setting the bunks on fire. We went easy on the
red Dutch cheese, remembering that we might have greater need of it in
times to come.
The insect powder was extraordinarily good, for the insects, which
came out of their lairs as soon as the train warmed up. They throve
on it. It sharpened their appetite for Leonard Spray, who suffered
exceedingly. Afterward, all through Russia, he was a victim of these
creatures who at the first sight of him leapt upon him joyously. By
some thinness of blood, or anti-insect tincture--I strongly suspect
the nicotine of innumerable “gaspers”--I was wonderfully immune, and
Russian lice had no use for me, though I encountered them everywhere,
for Russia is their stronghold as carriers of typhus, with which the
people were stricken in every city and village.
We saw Red soldiers for the first time at Sebesh, the Russian frontier,
anæmic-looking lads, wearing long gray overcoats and gray hoods, rising
to a point like Assyrian helmets, with the Red Star of the Soviet
Republic above the peak. Here at Sebesh also we saw the first trainload
of refugees from the famine area, whom we met in hordes throughout
our journey. They were Letts, and in a bad state, after being three
months on the way, in closed cattle trucks. Many were typhus-stricken.
All were weak and wan-looking, except some of the children, who
had a sturdy look in their ragged sheepskins. A man spoke to me in
English, with an American accent. He had come from Ufa, three thousand
miles away, and spoke tragic words about the people there. They were
starving, and near death.
Our train crawled forward through flat, desolate country. The people
we saw at wayside stations looked wretched and gloomy. A light snow
lay on the ground, and the woods were black against it, and grim. Many
times our engine panted and then stopped for lack of fuel. We waited
while fresh timber was piled on. The journey seemed interminable but
for the laughter of the “Milk-fed Boy,” and tales of Russian tragedy
by Mr. Wilton, the King’s messenger, who had a queer red glint in his
eyes, and a suppressed passion beneath his quiet and charming grace of
manner, when he spoke of all that agony in the country he loved. So at
last we reached Moscow, and in a little while came to know its way of
life.
The fantastic aspect of the city, and especially at its heart by the
palace of the Kremlin, seemed to me as wild as an Oriental nightmare
in a hasheesh dream, with golden pear-shaped domes, and tall towers,
and high walls with fan-shaped battlements, and step flights of steps
leading to walled walks, and old narrow gateways guarded by Red
soldiers. There was something sinister as well as splendid in that vast
fortress palace which is a city within a city. It seemed to tell of
ancient barbarities. There was a spirit of evil about its very walls,
I thought. Perhaps vague memories of Russian history were sharpened by
the knowledge that somewhere within those walls was the brooding mind
of Lenin, whose genius had drowned Russia in blood and tears, if all
one heard, or a thousandth part of it, were true.
I entered the Kremlin one day on a visit to Radek--whose name means
“scoundrel”--and was arrested three times at the guard posts before
reaching the rooms where the chief propaganda agent of Soviet Russia
lived with his wife and child, in simple domesticity, while he pulled
wires in all parts of the world to stir up revolution, or any kind of
trouble. Smiling through his spectacles, this man who looked a cross
between an ancient mariner and a German poet, with a fringe of reddish
beard round his face, was disarmingly frank and cynical on the subject
of Anglo-Russian relations, and had a profound and intimate knowledge
of foreign politics which startled me. He knew more than I did about
the secret intrigues in England and France.
Leonard Spray and I were billeted in a house immediately opposite
the Kremlin along an embankment of the river called the Sophieskaya.
It was, indeed, more than a house, being the palace of a pre-war
monopolist in sugar, and most handsomely furnished in the French Empire
style, with elegant salons on whose walls hung some valuable pictures,
among which I remember a Corot, and a Greuze.
We arrived in the dark, after a visit to the Soviet Foreign Office and
an interview with a melancholy, soft-spoken, cross-eyed Jew, by name
Weinstein, who was in charge of foreign visitors and correspondents. A
pretty Lettish girl, shuffling along in bedroom slippers, opened the
door to us, and locked us in afterward. Then the housekeeper, a tall
Swede who spoke a little of all languages, conducted us up a noble
stairway, richly carved, to our bedroom, which was an immense gilded
salon without a bed. This lack of sleeping accommodation was remedied
by four Red soldiers who came staggering in under bits of an enormous
four-poster which they fixed up in a corner of the room. Spray took
possession of it, and I slept on a broad divan.
It was bitterly cold, and we were almost frozen to death. I shall never
forget how Spray used to wrap himself up in the blankets to the top
of his head, like an Eskimo in his sleeping bag. That house was full
of strange people whom we used to pass in the corridors, including a
deputation of Chinese Mandarins from the Far Eastern Republic, and
a mission of Turks from Angora. One evening while we were there,
Tchicherin, the Foreign Minister, with whom I had a long interview,
gave a banquet on the third anniversary of the Soviet Republic to all
the missions represented in Moscow. It was a very handsome affair. All
the leading Bolsheviks were in evening dress, the Chinese Mandarins
wore cloth of gold, wine flowed copiously, and watching from the
doorway of my bedroom, I wondered what had happened to Bolshevism
and Communism, and what equality there was between those well-fed,
elegantly dressed gentlemen, dining richly in their noble rooms, and
those millions of starving peasants who were waiting for death, and
dying, in the Volga valley, or even the population of Moscow itself,
not starving altogether, but pinched, and half hungry in their ragged
sheepskins.
Spray and I explored the life of Moscow, freely, as I must admit, for
never once were we aware of any deliberate espionage about us, though
often there were watchful eyes.
We had arrived in time to witness a complete reversal of the
Communistic system by what Lenin called the “New Economic Laws.” On
October 17, 1921, while we were there, Lenin made an historic speech
in which he admitted, with amazing frankness, the complete breakdown
of the Communistic way of life which he had imposed upon the people.
He explained, with a kind of vigorous brutality of speech, that owing
to the hostility and ignorance of the peasants, who resisted the
requisition of their food stuffs, and the failure of world revolution
which prevented any international trade with Russia, industry had
disintegrated, factories were abandoned, transport had broken down, and
the system of rationing which had been in force in the cities, could no
longer be maintained.
The cardinal theory of Communism was that in return for service to the
State, every individual in the State received equal rations of food,
clothes, education, and amusements. That was the ideal, but it could no
longer be fulfilled, for the causes given.
“We have suffered a severe defeat on the economic front,” said Lenin.
“Our only safety lies in a rapid retreat upon prepared positions.”
He then outlined the “New Economic Laws,” which abolished the
rationing system, re-established the use of money, permitted “private
trading” which had been the unpardonable crime, and even invited the
introduction of foreign capital.
We saw the immediate, though gradual and tentative effect of this
reversal of policy. It was visible in the market places of Moscow,
where peasants freely sold the produce of their farms under the eyes
of Red soldiers who previously would have seized and flung them into
prison for trading in that way.
Among these peasants stood long lines of men and women who as I saw at
a glance were people of the old régime--aristocrats and intellectuals.
Shabby as most of them were, haggard and wan, unshaven and unwashed
(how could they wash without soap?), their faces, and above all their
eyes, betrayed them. They stood, those ladies and gentlemen of Imperial
Russia, holding out little articles which they had saved or hidden
during the time of revolution. The women carried their underclothing,
or their fur coats, tippets, and caps, embroidered linen, old shoes
and boots, their engagement rings, brooches, household ornaments. The
men--mostly old fellows--held out woollen vests, socks, pipes, rugs,
books, many odds and ends of their ancient life. Who bought these
things I could never tell, though I saw peasant women and old soldiers
fingering them, and asking the price, and generally shrugging their
shoulders and walking away.
I spoke to some of the ladies there in French or German, and at first
they were very much afraid and would not answer, or left the market
place immediately, lest this were some police trap which would endanger
their liberty or life. Almost all of them, as I found afterward, had
been imprisoned for doing secretly the very thing which they now dared
to do in the open market place, but with trembling fear at first.
In the same way, timidly, with nervous foreboding, little groups of
families or friends opened a few shops in the Arbat, furnishing them
with relics of their old homes, and stocking them with a strange
assortment of goods.
Two restaurants opened, one called “The English Restaurant,” where
Spray and I used to dine, almost alone, except for a Red Commissioner
or two who came in for coffee and a secret inspection, and now and then
a few ladies, furtively, for a plate of soup. The restaurant keepers
were of good family and ancient rank. The lady spoke English and
French, and told me many tales of her tragic life during the years of
revolution. Behind the bar was a pretty, smiling girl of sixteen or so,
amazed and delighted to see two English customers. Her father, dressed
like a seafaring man, was charming in his courtesy to us, but always
afraid.
Even now I dare not write too freely about the people we met by hazard,
or by introduction, lest any words of mine should do them harm. There
was one family, of noble blood, who lived in two squalid rooms divided
by a curtain from a public corridor. The two daughters had one pair
of decent boots between them. They took turns to go out “visiting” at
the British Mission which gave Sunday afternoon receptions to a little
group of ladies, and taught them the fox trot and two step and other
dances which had become a mania in many Western nations, but were
utterly unknown in Russia, cut off from all the world.
The old gentleman their father, and their charming mother, had dirty
hands. There was no soap in Russia, and in those rooms no chance of
hot water, except for tea. I marveled at their courage (though the old
man wept a little), and at the courage of all those people of the old
régime, who were living in direst poverty, in perpetual fear of prison,
or worse than that. They saw the ruin of Russia, but still had hope
that out of all that agony, and all their tears, some new hope would
dawn for the country they loved. So many people told me, and among them
one bedridden lady, near to death, I think, who said that there would
be a new and nobler Russia born out of all this terror and tribulation.
Moscow was not starving to death, though many in it were always hungry.
When the American Relief Administration opened a soup kitchen in the
famous old restaurant, The Hermitage, thousands of children came to be
fed, but, on the whole, they were not famine-stricken--only underfed
and uncertain of the next day’s meal.
With its dilapidated houses, many of them wrecked by gunfire in the
first days of the revolution, Moscow had a melancholy look, and few of
its people, outside the Commissar and Soviet official class had any
margin beyond the barest needs of life. But the people in the mass
looked healthy, and they were not deprived of all light and beauty in
life. The opera, and two or three theaters were open, crowded every
night by the “proletariat” in working clothes. In the Imperial box of
the opera, with its eagles covered under the Red Flag, sat a group of
mechanics with their wives, and between the acts the foyer was crowded
with what looked like the “lower middle class,” as we should see them
in some music hall on the Surrey side of London. The opera and the
ballet were as beautiful as in the old days, maintaining their historic
traditions, though all else had gone in Russia, and it was strange to
see this stage splendor in a Republic of ruin.... But not yet had I
seen the famine.
I came closer to the effects of famine in Petrograd. That city, grim
but magnificent as I saw it under heavy snow, had a sinister and tragic
look. During the war its population had been 3,000,000 and more. When
Spray and I walked along the Nevski Prospekt, where all the shops
but six or seven were barricaded with wooden planks, there were only
750,000 people in the whole of this great city. Palaces, Government
offices, great banks, city offices, huge blocks of buildings, were
uninhabited and unlighted. Many of those who had been government
officials, rich merchants, factory owners, were shoveling snow upon the
streets, or dragging loads of wood on sledges over the slippery roads.
They wore bowler hats, black coats with ragged collars of astrachan,
the clothes of a “genteel” world that had gone down into the great
gulfs of revolution.
At every street corner were men and women selling cigarettes. Some of
those women, and one I especially remember, were thinly clad, shivering
in the biting wind, and obviously starved. The very look of them made
me shiver in my soul.
In Petrograd I went to a home for refugees from the famine region. All
round the city were great camps of these people, who had come in a tide
of flight--hundreds of thousands--when the harvest of 1921 was burnt as
black as that of 1920 in the awful drought. Four thousand or so were
in one of the old Imperial barracks, and they had come three thousand
miles to reach this refuge at the end of their journey. Outside, in
Petrograd, there was a hard, grim frost. In these bare whitewashed
rooms there was no heat, for lack of fuel, and men, women and children
lay about in heaps, huddled together in their sheepskins for human
warmth, tormented by vermin, fever-stricken, weak. Too weak to stand,
some of them, even to take their place in line for the daily ration of
potato soup. A doctor there took us round. He pointed to those with
typhus, and said, “There’s no hope for them. They’ll be dead to-morrow
or next day.”
When we crossed a courtyard, he stopped a moment to thrust back a heavy
door. “Our morgue,” he said. “Three-days’ dead.” Inside was a pile of
dead bodies, men, women and children, flung one on top of the other
like rubbish for the refuse heap. Hands and legs obtruded from the
mass of corruption. It was the end of their journey.
But the opera was very brilliant in Petrograd, some distance from that
heap of mud-colored corpses. I went to the Marinsky theater and heard
“Carmen.” It was marvelously staged, admirably sung, and there was a
packed audience of “trade unionists,” as I was told, on free tickets,
but as everybody in Russia had to belong to a trade union or die, it
did not specify the character of the people closely. I think most of
them were of the clerical class, with a few mechanics. On the way
back we followed a party of young men and women walking in snow boots
and wrapped to their ears in ragged furs or woollen shawls. They were
laughing gayly. Their voices rang out on the still frosty air under the
steely glint of stars.... So there were still people who could laugh
and make love in Russia!
How did they live, these people? I never could find out in actual
detail. Russian money meant nothing to me. When I changed ten pounds in
Moscow, I received four big bundles of notes, containing three million
roubles. My first experience with the purchasing power of this money
was when I wanted to buy a pair of boots in the market place. They were
good top boots, splendid looking for snow and mud, but when I was asked
one million roubles, I was abashed. Yet, after all, it was not much in
English money. But what did it mean to those Russians?
I found out that the average wage for a mechanic, or Soviet official,
or University professor, was 150,000 roubles a month. That sounded
well until I came up against those boots, and later discovered that
in Petrograd a pound of bread cost 80,000 roubles, a pound of tea
120,000 roubles, ten cigarettes 60,000 roubles. How, then, could any
human soul live on 150,000 roubles a month? I asked many of them, and
some said, “We don’t live. We die,” but others said, “We supplement
our wages by speculation.” For some time I was puzzled by that word
speculation, until I found that it meant bartering. Secretly, and
at risk of imprisonment or death, until the “New Economic Laws,”
there was a general system of exchange in goods. A man with a second
pair of boots exchanged them for a sack of potatoes, kept some and
bartered the others for tea, or bread, or meat, kept some of that, and
bartered the rest for a woollen vest, a fur waistcoat, or a tin of
sardines, smuggled in from Riga. And so on, in a highly complicated,
difficult and dangerous system of “underground trade.” But in spite of
“speculation,” life was hard, and almost impossible for elderly folk,
and the sick, and frail women. For years hundreds of thousands of them
had lived on bread and tea and small rations of soused herrings and
millet seed. Now there were no rations, but still bread and tea, for
those who had the money.
“What do you think of Bolshevism?” asked Spray one night in the Sugar
king’s palace. We lay in bed, with only our mouths and noses out.
I asked him three questions in return. Was there liberty in Russia?
Was there equality? Was there a higher type of civilization and human
happiness here than in Western Europe, or any chance of it? I asked
the questions without prejudice, and we discussed them between the low
divan and the four-poster bed, in that great gilded salon opposite the
Kremlin, where, in some secret room, Lenin sat that night scheming out
some way of saving Russia from the fate into which he had led it, to
test his theory of the Communistic state.
We could find no liberty. The two chief papers published--_Pravda_,
and _Izvestia_--were propaganda sheets under Government control. There
was no freedom of speech or opinion. There was no equality, even of
misery--surely the first test of the Communistic state. Between the
Soviet Commissars, even the “trade-union” audience of the Marinsky
theater, and the peasants, the workers, the underfed masses, there was
a gulf as wide as between the profiteers and unemployed of England,
wide though lower down the scale of life on both sides. Civilization,
human happiness? Well, there was the Marinsky theater, and those
laughing boys and girls. Human nature adapted itself marvelously to the
hardest conditions of life. Perhaps there were happy people in Russia,
but for the most part, Spray and I had met only those who told us
tragic tales, of imprisonings, executions, deaths, misery.
When we left Moscow and traveled across Russia to Kazan, and took a
boat down the Volga, and sledges across the snow fields to the villages
where Famine dwelt, we left human happiness behind us and saw nothing
but suffering and despair, hunger and pestilence.
It was again due to the American Relief Administration that we were
able to make that journey. Colonel Haskell, chief of the A.R.A., and
a man of indomitable energy, iron will power, and exquisite courtesy,
invited Spray and myself to join his own party which was going to Kazan
on a tour of inspection under his command, and after that he would
provide us with a ship for the Volga voyage. Without that immense help
of the A.R.A., all-powerful in Russia because it was the one source of
hope in the famine region, I should have seen nothing outside Moscow.
It was they who controlled the railways, got the trains to move, and
forced officials to work.
It was a four-days’ journey to Kazan. The carriages were verminous,
and Spray was tortured again--and we crawled slowly through the
dreary woods and plains. Colonel Haskell and his staff carried good
rations which they shared with us, and at night, when our darkness was
illumined by candlelight, we played poker for Russian roubles, gambling
wildly, as it seemed, in thousands of roubles, but losing or winning
no more than a few shillings.
One man on board impressed me beyond words. It was Governor Goodrich
of Indiana, who had come to report to Washington on the agricultural
conditions and prospects of Russia, and the truth about the Famine.
He was an elderly man with the fresh complexion of a new-born babe,
and a powerful clear-cut face, wonderfully softened by the look of
benevolence in his eyes and the whimsical smile about his lips.
“Governor Jem” he used to be called in Indiana, and he must have been
a gallant fellow in his youth, before he became lame in one leg. Now
he had come as a knight-errant to Russia, for the rescue of a stricken
people. I think no man of greater quality ever went into Russia, or
ever came out of it, and it was due not a little to his report (which
he allowed me to read) that the Government of the United States, acting
through the American Relief Association, fed ten million Russians every
day in the famine regions, and saved that number from certain death by
hunger or disease.
Kazan lay under a heavy mantle of snow. It was now the capital of the
“Tartar Republic,” a province of Soviet Russia, on the edge of the
richest grain-growing districts of the Volga valley, where now there
was no grain. It was a garden city, with many great houses where the
nobles of Imperial Russia had taken their pleasure in summer months,
now inhabited by misery, hunger, and disease.
There were forty homes here for abandoned children--abandoned not by
the cruelty of their parents but by their love, because they could
not bear to see their little ones wailing over empty platters. I went
into a number of them, and they were all alike in general character.
In one of them were fifteen hundred children, naked, or merely clothed
in little ragged shirts. Their clothes had been burnt because of the
lice in them, which spread typhus fever. There were no other clothes
to replace their ragged old sheepskins and woollen garments. There was
no heat in the rooms, for lack of fuel. There was no furniture. On
the bare boards they huddled together, these little wizened things,
with deep, sunken eyes, and tight-drawn skin, like little bald-headed
monkeys. There were many homes like that, and worse than that, because
many of the children were dying, and the rooms reeked with their fever,
and the very doorposts crawled with lice.
I went into the hospitals, and they were dreadful. Because there was
no fuel for heat, these people, stricken with typhus, dysentery, all
manner of hunger diseases, were huddled together in unventilated wards
for human warmth. Many of the beds had been burnt for fuel and most
of them lay on mattresses or the bare boards. Those who had beds lay
four together, two one way and two the other. There were no medicines,
no anaesthetics, no soap, no dressings. The nurses were starving, and
dying of the diseases they could not cure. They came clamoring round
the doctor of the A.R.A. with whom I went, begging for food in a wild
animal way which made his heart go sick.
But there was an opera, even in Kazan! It was true that the stench of
it was pretty bad, and that its audience tightened their belts from
time to time in lieu of supper, but Madam Butterfly delighted them,
they thrilled to the “Carmen” of a Persian prima donna.
One night the ladies and gentlemen of the opera invaded the
headquarters of the A.R.A. after midnight. They were hungry, and made
no secret about it. So the young Americans of the Kazan headquarters
brewed cocoa in a saucepan, with the help of one of the ladies, and
scraped up some bully beef and beans and a loaf or two and some apples,
and odds and ends. Not much for a banquet! Spray and I whispered
together! I fetched out the last hunk of our round red cheese. It was
received with a chorus of approval. It died a sacrificial death in the
cause of art and beauty. The Persian prima donna had an insatiable
appetite.... Out in the streets of Kazan were starving wanderers, and
in the station lay the latest of the abandoned children.
The last boat to go down the Volga before the ice came was put under
command of the press representative of the A.R.A., my good friend
Murphy, a most kind and generous-hearted soul. Spray and I were the
only passengers. We three explored the ship before she left the
quayside. She had been a rescue ship for the fugitives from famine, and
was in a noisome state. We dared not linger in the sleeping cabins. The
very washbasins were crawling. That night Murphy and I slept on the
table in the dining saloon--the safest place. Spray gave himself up for
lost and curled up on the floor, where he tossed all night. I was cook
on that voyage, and did rather well with boiled beans and a mess of
pottage. We went down to Tetiushi, and found ourselves among the people
of famine....
After two droughts in successive years, there was no harvest of any
account. The Red soldiers had requisitioned the peasants’ reserves of
grain for rationing the cities. Without reserves they had no means of
life. The Soviet Government had supplied them with seed grain for the
next harvest, and they had sown it, not expecting to reap it. They had
also sent, lately, some barges of potatoes, but they lay there rotting.
To carry them to the villages, horses were needed for the sledges,
but there was no fodder, and the horses were dying, or dead. So we
discovered the State of Tetiushi.
By a message from the Prime Minister of the Tartar Republic, four
horses were found for us, and two sledges, after many hours of waiting,
and we set out across the snow to the villages. They were very
silent when we entered. They seemed abandoned. But we saw in one or
two of their timbered houses little wizened faces staring at us from
the windows. They were faces like those I had seen in the homes for
abandoned children, monkeylike. We went into the cottages and found
there peasant families waiting for a visitor who tarried, which was
Death.
They showed us the last food they had--if they had any left. It was a
brownish powder, made of leaves ground up and mixed with the husks of
grain. Others showed us bits of hard stuff like lead. It was a bluish
clay dug from a hillside called Bitarjisk. It had some nutritive
value, but it swelled when eaten, and was the cause of dreadful agony
to children. Peasant women, weeping very quietly, showed us their
naked children, with distended stomachs, the sign of starvation in its
last stage. From other cottages they came to where we stood, crossing
themselves at the doorways, in the Russian way, and then lamenting.
Handsome Russian peasants, with blue eyes and straw-colored beards,
struck their breasts with a gesture of absolute despair, and said--we
had a Russian with us who spoke English--that death could not be long
delayed, for all of them. The last cows had been killed for lack of
fodder. There was no milk for the children, as for a long time there
had been no bread. Here and there a woman wailed loudly, or grasped my
wrist with her skinny hand and spoke fiercely, as though I denied her
food. I remember one cottage in which a whole family lay dying, and
nearly dead. It was the Famine....
I will not write more about the horrors here. In many articles, and in
my novel “The Middle of the Road” I have given the picture of it, and
the agony of it.
It is said that two million of these people died. That is Nansen’s
figures. That twenty million did not die is due to the magnificent
work of the A.R.A. and the Save the Children Fund who, against all
political prejudice and for humanity’s sake, achieved a great rescue
of these stricken folk. As I have said, the A.R.A. alone fed ten
million people a day in the famine area, and I pay a tribute here to
the courage and efficiency and devotion of those young Americans whose
work I saw, and of whose friendship I am proud. Our people did less,
having less means, but it was work well and nobly done in the spirit
of Christianity kept alight in a dark and cruel world, which is this
jungle of Europe.