Zinoviev or Litvinov as Borah differs from Hughes or Hughes differs
from Root; yet Hughes and Borah and Root are Republicans steeped to the
bone in party discipline, rampaging now and then, but never dreaming of
breaking away from the party. Kalinin believes in a kind of Communism,
modified enough to suit the peasants, and Zinoviev believes in a kind
of Communism that is suited, at any time, only for the advanced and
conscious city proletariat.
Kalinin was born in the little village of Volost and still calls it
his home, still has his little strip of land there. He was brought up
religiously, and understands what the Church means to a devout Russian
and never throws aspersions on it. Though not religious himself, he
tolerates religion with the grave tolerance which never offends.
His old mother is outspokenly anti-Bolshevik, yet very much likes to
have her say in the Volost Soviet. She is angry with the Bolsheviks
because they are not religious. She scolds her son and pretends that
she is not at all flattered because he is President of Russia and
obviously believes that no honor is too great for him. She is always
glad to talk to visitors about him and goes on monotonously repeating
the same ideas in the manner of the aged: “No, I am not surprised,”
she will say, “that Michael Ivanovitch has gone so far. He was always
studious, sitting up reading by candle-light after everyone else was in
bed. And he was always saying to me, ‘Don’t bother me, mother, I’ve got
lots of work to do.’ That’s the way he talks to me now when I lecture
him about religion. But he’s a good son and kind to everybody ... only
he certainly ought to think more about God.”
I don’t believe that Kalinin is ambitious; I think he would like
nothing so much as to go back to his farm and live there the simple
life of the village. When Lenin convinced him that it was his duty to
be the voice of the peasants, he accepted the post in the quiet way of
a man who has no thought of personal glory. There is nothing in his
record that would prove him to be anything but entirely unselfish, and
I have seen him when he was like one inspired. During the Kronstadt
revolt he walked into that hostile city as he might walk into the
mouth of a cannon. Yet no one dared or desired to harm him!
Kalinin is an old revolutionist. In his early youth he found himself
unable to tolerate, without protest, the tyranny of the Tsar’s
government which manifested itself in such brutal cruelty towards the
peasants. He has always been desperately poor, a real proletarian
peasant, hoping to be rid one day of his endless debts and support
himself and his family honorably and decently. He was forced through
poverty to go to the city, where he worked in factories in winter; only
the summers he spent with his family. These winters in the city, where
he was thrown in contact with city workers, gave him an understanding
of the psychology and desires of the city workers as well as of the
peasants.
He was exiled to Siberia but not to hard labor, and he spent this
enforced and only leisure of his life rounding out his education;
mixing the classics with his dreams of freedom for Russia.
Kalinin’s wife is an educated, energetic peasant, who has by her own
ability become a figure of importance in her village; capable and
strong and intelligent, she has managed her tiny farm just a little
better than her neighbors and has been elected President of the Volost
Soviet. It is a position of which she is immensely proud.
Madame Kalinin is an individualist; a modern feminist of the type of
professional woman who, in America, insists on keeping her name and
continuing her work after marriage. During the last three years she has
been so busy that she has had no time to visit Moscow. Kalinin, on his
rare vacations, has had to go to her. If she ever does visit Moscow
she will surely wear her kerchief and her sheepskin coat. No doubt
supercilious Russians are already saying that “Main Street has arrived
in Moscow,” just as we have been saying since March, 1921, that “just
folks” are in the White House.
And there is a curious similarity between President Harding and
President Kalinin; both were elected to represent the average citizen.
In Russia average citizens are peasants--a ninety per cent average.
Both presidents go about their home towns slapping fellow citizens on
the back. Both were elected as figureheads for a party and both have
already proven themselves a little more forceful and important than the
party reckoned.
If Russia continues in the path where it is now, in fifty years the
Kalinins will have become Hardings, at home in silk hats and frock
coats, as well as in sheepskins and high boots. But it is hard to
predict where Russia is going or where the world is going.
When Kalinin rides through the provinces on his propaganda train
carrying stocks of literature, a motion picture apparatus and his
official seal, with the outside “done” by some futurist artist in
garish colors and depicting a millennium in which Kalinin would not
be at home, he is “Comrade” Kalinin to the whole train; he takes his
meals with the train crew, the porters and the secretaries; all share
alike. But the remarkable thing is that when he gets back to Moscow he
makes no effort to shake the dust of the provinces from his boots, he
rather makes a point of remaining distinctly a villager. He receives
you in his Moscow office wearing the same old mended spectacles, the
same threadbare coat and, I am sure, the same heart and mind. He brings
the country along with him, invades the city with it, permeates it,
overcomes it....
This attitude is characteristic not only of Kalinin, it is
characteristic of any peasant. I have often noted the delegates at the
Congresses. They are neither shy nor bewildered, they sit solemnly in
their places in the great hall, pondering all that Lenin says of trade
or reconstruction, approving or disapproving; getting closer every day
to the idea that Russia is theirs.
It is generally believed that the line between the city workers and the
peasants is wide and irreconcilable, whereas there is actually no line
at all. The city workers are only peasants who have gone to the city
just as Kalinin did, when they could not make a living in the villages.
Russian peasants never get over being farmers. Last winter I came upon
an excellent example: Some three hundred skilled Russian mechanics
from Detroit arrived in Moscow; they were sorely needed in the Russian
factories. Without a single exception they refused to remain in the
city! And when they learned that they might be conscripted and forced
to stay they fled hurriedly in every direction. With one voice they
exclaimed, “We came home to the land!”
Naturally, the government was in despair; officials were at a loss as
to what measures could be taken to bring pressure and a sense of duty
upon the returning Russians. Orators were sent to argue with the next
group, but without success. The only solution the government found
workable was to organize them before they arrived; to see that they
brought tools from America and came with the definite idea of remaining
in the cities for a fixed period; for only the country is real to the
peasant, the city is forever an artificial, unhealthy invention.
Kalinin’s office in Moscow is not in the Kremlin. To get into the
Kremlin requires too much red tape. Therefore, while the President eats
in the Kremlin dining-room which is just an ordinary Soviet mess-room,
and sits in the Councils of the People’s Commissars, he receives his
army of callers in an ordinary office building in the heart of the
city. One needs no pass or credentials to get in; one needs simply to
walk up a flight of stairs, open a door and emerge into a large bare
reception room full of noisy peasants; here he inevitably turns up.
I have often thought that Kalinin’s office is the most curious place
in which I have ever been in my life; it has the atmosphere of a
Russian railway train deep in the heart of the provinces where every
passenger talks to every other passenger and where formality is not
just overlooked or forgotten but has simply never existed.
All day long he receives the never-ending string of peasants in
the manner of a village priest, giving consolation and advice--and
something more solid and satisfying than a prayer, for he is obligated
to make an immediate decision in each case on hand or a promise that
it shall be taken up through his office. Under no circumstances can he
appear indifferent or helpless.
I remember arriving early one morning to find about twenty peasants
ahead of me. When Kalinin came in everyone got up and there was a
sudden general stampede in his direction and a sort of clamor which
arises in any Russian household over any sort of argument. Kalinin’s
voice could be distinctly heard above the others shouting, “Comrades,
comrades, I must take you in turn.” Then, as he crossed the floor
towards his private office, a frail, middle-aged woman sitting near the
door burst into tears. I can see him now with his narrow Slav eyes, his
broad nose and rumpled hair, his work-knotted hands and faded blouse,
stopping to look through his spectacles at the woman before him,
kindly, sympathetic, puzzled....
I think that he knew even before he began to question her that hers was
one of those unavoidable, personal tragedies that are part of change
and war and revolution. She had owned a big country house, but the
peasants had taken it when they divided the land and they had allotted
her but two rooms to live in. She was humiliated, discouraged and
resentful. She cried out, forgetting that Kalinin was also a peasant,
“I can’t bear to see those creatures using my pretty things, walking
with great muddy boots in my house. My soul is in that house!”
Kalinin shook his head. He seemed willing and even anxious to help her
but he seemed more like a doctor in that moment than an executive.
Very gently he asked her to remember that two rooms were more than
most people had now in Russia, that these were difficult times; even
so they would go over the case together if she would wait her turn.
But no sooner had he closed the door than every peasant in the room
began addressing the bewildered woman. They said that she should be
ashamed of such petty complaints and accused her of asking for “special
privileges.” The widest range of arguments were put forward, from the
man who had lost a cow and considered the government responsible to the
woman whose two sons had been killed at the front.
I was not so much interested in the arguments as in the remarkably
true reflection which the scene presented of what had happened all
over Russia. I had never realized before how completely submerged the
upper classes had become; how ruthless and inevitable was the vast
upward surge of the peasantry. Here was this woman, one time _barishna_
(lady), crushed and defeated in her own village, finding the same
thought in Moscow as in Nizhni-Novgorod or Kazan or Baku.
When Kalinin called her she went forward but one could see that she had
already given up hope and would not fight any further; perhaps for the
first time the real significance of the revolution had become clear to
her.
It is hard for Americans, where a peasant population has never existed,
to realize the position of the peasants in a revolution. They are
the rock in the whirlpool. They are the great levellers, the great
destroyers as well as the great builders. In Russia they pulled down
everything about them and they were not always gentle in their wrath.
Often they ruined wilfully and needlessly. In the cities, practically
no buildings were destroyed and no treasures looted, but in the
provinces men often remembered the knout with red flames of fire and
even with death.
Because the peasants’ desires are simple, the world is apt to give
them credit for a deep, political wisdom which they do not possess and
while there is no doubt about their taking the business of government
seriously, their inexperience often leads them into grave blunders. It
was the peasants, and not the Communists, who most stubbornly opposed
recognition of the foreign debts. It was the peasants who demanded from
every government since the Tsar’s, schools, hospitals and protection
from invasion, but who always resented the most ordinary and reasonable
tax put upon them by the central authorities. Until Kalinin had
educated them they were wont to ask like children, “Aren’t we free now?
Can’t we be left alone?”
The great irony about the rising of the peasants is that they were the
first to abandon the very equality they fought for. The equalization
of property in the provinces was brought about through the workings
of peasant proletariat organizations known as Committees of the Poor,
which not only divided the estates of the rich landlords but broke
the power of the _kulaks_ (rich peasants). When the whole country was
reduced to the same status, the peasants were faced with the necessity
of a great decision. There were no longer rich peasants or proletarian
peasants but only what is known in Russia as the “middle” farmers. The
question of how to maintain such an equality now arose. The Communists
urged them to abandon the idea of private property and work the land
in communes, pointing out that any other course must inevitably lead
to the re-establishment of all the old values and a new bourgeoisie.
But the peasants were afraid of this new and untried road of Socialism.
Their demands for trade, silver money, the opening of markets and
stores, are ample evidence that they have turned back on to the old
familiar road of capitalism. If Russia had been an industrial instead
of an agricultural country, the decision of the masses might have been
quite otherwise.
Even our own presidents know the value of a lecture tour in a national
crisis. In our immediate political past, we have the memory of
presidents who took “issues” to the people, but it is hard to conceive
of a Chief Executive lecturing almost steadily for over two years. Yet
that is even a short estimate of the time actually spent by Kalinin
in going from one end of Russia to the other, shuttling in and out of
Moscow.
His meetings were more like tribunals, people’s courts, than ordinary
political assemblies. The peasants gathered at the railway stations,
in the village squares or even in the fields. They heard what he had
to say and then he heard them. They argued, complained, demanded,
compromised. Always some sort of understanding was arrived at.
This was partly due to Kalinin’s wonderful tact, his almost divine
reasonableness which never allowed an argument to develop into a
quarrel. And partly because he knows the peasant mind which is easily
touched by stories of suffering, by flattery or tears, but impossible
to move by threats. But fundamentally, the secret of Kalinin’s success
is due to the fact that he himself is a peasant and no walls of caste
can exist between him and the people.
I can illustrate this feeling of complete contact best by the story of
an actual occurrence in a remote province. It happened in what are now
known as the worst of the “requisitioning days” when the Soviets were
holding hundreds of miles of battle front and the peasants were taxed
almost beyond endurance.
One day a Lettish officer, who was also a Commissar in some Red Army
division, arrived in a remote village and rang the church bell to
summon the people. He read a list of the goods to be requisitioned.
This village had been taxed only a short time before and there were
murmurs of dissatisfaction in the crowd, murmurs which grew into roars.
Then happened one of those savage, elemental tragedies which even we
in America have never been able to eliminate from our national life.
Threats against the Commissar were followed by sudden violence; he was
literally trampled to death.
The Lettish officer had been accompanied by a young peasant soldier,
who had been a sort of orderly to him for nearly a year. In the
struggle the boy escaped. All night he lay weeping and thinking of his
dead comrade. The officer had taken an interest in him, had taught him
to read and write and imbued him with the ideals of the Red Army. The
peasant boy had been an orphan, lonely and unhappy and a victim of
brutality. He thought now of the dead man as he thought of a saint,
and by the time morning came he had resolved on a curiously brave act.
Creeping into the church he rang the bell; the crowd gathered, and he
mounted the platform and began to tell them of the dead man and the Red
Army. It was not hard for him to explain that unless the Red Army was
supported, the White forces would very soon take away by main force
the very food they now refused to their brothers. It did not take very
long to convince the crowd of peasants, and not only to convince them
but to reduce them to tears. They gave all that the peasant boy asked,
and more than that, they went solemnly in a procession to the fresh
grave of the man they had murdered, laid wreaths upon it, and paid
homage, saying: “Brother, forgive us, we could not see your heart.”
This feeling accounts for the lack of resentment towards Kalinin when
he goes into the famine area. He walks among the starving peasants,
saying, “Who lies down, dies. I know, I have hungered, I am one of you.”
In prosperous districts he uses the same tactics in overcoming
opposition to collections for the famine. Whenever he finds local
Soviet officials unwilling to part with their last surplus grain, he
mournfully exclaims, “Ah, well, I am sorry to hear this! Last week I
saw with my own eyes thousands dying of hunger. They were peasants like
ourselves and they were calling to us to help. Will you send me back
now with empty hands?” The peasants can never resist his appeal; it
comes too close to them, it is like refusing one’s father.
While the peasants were not able to bring themselves to renounce their
title to the land, they have otherwise quite whole-heartedly accepted
many broad formulas of the Socialists. They unanimously approved of
revolutionary Russia’s offer to the world in 1917 to build a peace
on the basis of “no annexations, no indemnities and the right of
self-determination.” It is a curious and sad reality that the richer
nations become and the more cultured, the less they find it possible
to comprehend such a simple recipe for justice and brotherly love.
The world was too educated or too selfish or too frightened to accept
Russia’s magnanimous offer. And how much agony and bloodshed it might
have saved!
The Russian peasants, who for so many centuries have struggled and
sacrificed themselves to possess the land, are strangely lacking in
national pride, as we know it. They are not envious of other countries.
They could not conceive of an aggressive policy. If you say to them
that America is far richer and more progressive than Russia, they will
tell you they are very glad to hear it and are glad you are happy. They
ask of the foreigner only to be let alone and not to send any more
White generals against them; they ask to be allowed to develop their
own political institutions. Obviously our only duty is to help them
through their terrible struggle against the great famine which has come
upon them like a curse through no sins of their own.
It is no miracle that President Kalinin can go freely about Russia,
for no one is thinking of assassinating him. What would it profit
enemies of Soviet Russia to kill a peasant like Kalinin? Are there not
a million Kalinins? To sweep the Kalinins out of Russian political life
would be like sweeping back the sea. To destroy the Soviets would be
to destroy Russia. Even Sir Paul Dukes, of the British Secret Service,
agrees that Soviets are the natural offspring of the revolution,
conceived years ago under the Tsardom. Michael Ivanovitch Kalinin
reflects the new Russia more faithfully than any other Government
official.
MADAME ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
AND THE
WOMAN’S MOVEMENT
[Illustration: KOLLONTAI]
MADAME ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
AND THE
WOMAN’S MOVEMENT
Madame Alexandra Kollontai believes that everything which exalts is
good; being a feminist, she exalts women. She tells women that they are
capable of a new freedom, beautiful and unexampled. She is so carried
away by her enthusiasm that she is unmindful of how easily wings are
broken in this age of steel. But if her inspiration, which aims to
lift women to the skies, lifts them only from their knees to their
feet, there will be nothing to regret. Civilization, in its snail-like
progress, is only stirred to move its occasional inch by the burning
desire of those who will to move it a mile. And when faith is pure
enough it does not demand realization.
Kollontai is like a sculptor working on some heroic figure of woman and
always wondering a little why the slim, inspired, unmaternal figure of
her dreams is forever melting back into a heavy, earthy figure of Eve.
It often happens that a character is best portrayed by conversations
which show the manner of mind. In this chapter I have quoted Madame
Kollontai at some length because she is the only articulate voice of
the new order for women which has been so greatly misunderstood outside
of Russia; that order which claims that by consecrating oneself to the
state one lives truer to oneself and to others.
As champion of her sex, she cries to the women of Russia: “Cast off
your chains! Do not be slaves to religion, to marriage, to children.
Break these old ties, the state is your home, the world is your
country!”
And who are the women she thus extolls? They are the women of the
factories and the fields; the women who sweep the streets, who scrub,
who carry heavy burdens, who plow and weave and drudge. Will they be
able to follow her to such heights? By our logic, no, but Kollontai
preaches a new logic for Russia.
Besides, we must consider just what she means by “casting off chains.”
I have heard her say all this another way and it did not sound so lofty
or impossible. To an individualist, it did not even sound attractive.
Last summer she admonished a women’s congress in this manner: “We must
build a new society in which women are not expected to drudge all day
in kitchens. We must have, in Russia, community restaurants, central
kitchens, central laundries--institutions which leave the working woman
free to devote her evenings to instructive reading or recreation. Only
by breaking the domestic yoke will we give women a chance to live a
richer, happier and more complete life.”
The material which Kollontai is so passionately attempting to mould
is the peasant mind. It seems to me that peasant women are naturally
slow-moving and stolidly honest and will accept only as much of
Kollontai’s philosophy as they find compatible with or necessary to the
immediate situation; not because they are lacking in spirituality, for
they are capable of deep religious fervor, but simply because much of
it would be inharmonious and artificial to their normal development. At
present her mission is to awaken them so that they may build a truth of
their own which need by no means be a lesser truth than Kollontai’s.
If she attempts to make them swallow her formula intact she will
certainly fail. If she compromises as Lenin compromises and as Kalinin
does, she will perform for Russia a never-to-be-forgotten task. To-day
everything has been melted down in the crucible of the revolution. The
only banner-bearer who counts is the one who will give to the great
mass of those emerging into the new day the broad fundamental things of
life.
Madame Kollontai is the only woman who has ever been a member of the
Russian Cabinet. She puts forth the argument that women have more
conscience than men and therefore do not attempt to obtain offices
which they are not fitted for by previous training, and that this is
the reason woman’s influence is so slight in Russia to-day. But her
history refutes her theory. She herself was particularly fitted for the
position of Minister of Welfare. Her record was splendid. She lost her
post because she was a woman and allowed her love for her husband to
interfere with her political judgment.