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