politics. One of the ways he was wont to remove troublesome rivals in
the days of the Young Turk Revolution was to go out and shoot them with
his own hand. This “impulsiveness” got him into grave trouble with
the Soviets in spite of all his sensible utterances to the contrary.
When he was “shifted” to Bokhara so that he would not be in the way of
either Kemal or the Russians, he got bored and started a war of his
own. One night he fled into the hills of Afghanistan and soon began
to gather recruits around him. A few nights after that one of the
principal officials of the Bokharan Republic also fled to join Enver.
This performance was repeated until over half the Bokharan cabinet had
fled. Then fighting began and we got vague rumors of battles, but only
through the Soviet press.
In August, 1922, we heard that Enver had been killed, that his body had
been found on the field of battle. There was even romance surrounding
him and his supposed death. Stories were circulated that when the body
was picked up and examined, the letters of an American girl were found
next his heart. I went to see Jacob Peters, who has charge now of all
the Eastern Territory and who was then in Moscow. He laughed heartily
and said he would show me the “information.” It consisted of three very
hazy telegrams which had been three weeks on the way. The men who sent
the telegrams and discovered the body had never seen Enver. There was
no mention of letters. And Peter’s opinion of the whole affair was that
there was nothing at all authentic in the story or else it was “a trick
of Enver’s to sham being dead.” Peters’ theory proved true. Within a
few days fighting began again and Enver began to win.
He had conceived the notion of uniting all Turkestan and Bokhara and
Keiva to the Angora government. It places the Soviets in a strange
position. They may have to give in to him, though he will not actually
be an “enemy,” because neither the Turks nor the Russians can afford to
break their treaty. Therefore, his private war in the south embarrasses
the Soviets much more than it does Kemal, who needs only to disavow any
connection with it, as do all the Turkish officials. If Enver wins he
will add a nice slice to Turkish territory; if he loses, Turkey will be
in the same position as before.
Enver, while he will always maintain a great prestige in the Mussulman
world, will never oust Kemal. Mustapha Kemal Pasha is the great popular
hero of a victorious Turkey, which but for him might never have even
survived. There were times in the past when Enver was more important
than Kemal, but that can never happen again in Kemal’s life. Both men
rose from the ranks and both are the sons of peasants. And Kemal at
this moment is more important than the Sultan. Greater than that no
man can be under the banners of Mohammed.
One can hardly over-estimate the importance of the new Mohammedan
unity, that new patriotic energy which has taken the place of the
former lethargy and which already reaches out far beyond the borderland
of the Faithful. The Mussulman world is reviving after a long sleep.
And not only Mohammedans are uniting but the entire East and Middle
East. Aside from Japan, a significant harmony is rapidly taking place,
a harmony which evolves itself into a tremendous power. This power may
decide the world’s destiny before another generation.
Enver and Kemal Pasha, being aware of the purport of beginning that
great concord by interwoven treaties with Russia, read the stars well.
There must come a day also when that great sleeping giant, China, will
be part of this alliance. And the seeds of that friendship have also
been planted. The Chinese official delegations which came to Moscow
were not only well received by the Russians, but they hob-nobbed with
the Mohammedans like brothers.
TIKON AND THE RUSSIAN CHURCH
There are two points of importance in regard to the Greek Orthodox
Church and the Russian revolution. First, that the church has
maintained itself and second, that it has issued no frantic appeals
for outside help. While certain priests have allied themselves with
counter-revolutionists, officially the church has never taken sides.
Even at the present moment when a bitter conflict is on, the quarrel
remains a family quarrel.
Tikon, the Patriarch, by remaining unruffled through the barricade
and blockade days, proved himself a strong leader in a time when only
strong leaders could survive. If he had been frightened or hostile
in the Denikin or Kolchak days he might have shared the fate of the
Romanoffs; if he had taken part in counter-revolutions, the church
itself might have been badly shattered. But until recently, Tikon has
been as placid as his ikons and as interested in the great change going
on about him as a scientist. And therein lay his strength. “Don’t
let any one pity me,” he said last winter when I talked to him, “I am
having the most interesting time of my life.”
Much nonsense has been written about anti-church propaganda in Soviet
Russia. Dozens of writers have discussed a certain rather obscure sign
in Moscow which reads: “Religion is the opiate of the people.” This
sign, about three feet across, is painted high up on the north side of
the Historical Museum building near the entrance to the Red Square.
No one in Russia seems to be much interested in it and certainly
it attracts less attention than any one of our million billboard
advertisements. I tried for a year to find out who had put it up and
what group it represented, but could never discover. It was a cab
driver who said the wisest thing concerning it. “If somebody took it
down,” he said dryly, when I asked him what he thought of it, “no one
would notice.”
The anti-clerical posters gotten out at the beginning of the
revolution, however, had a much more far-reaching influence. They were
usually to the effect that the priests were hoarding the church lands
and at the same time expecting the peasants to support them. Any idea
which sanctions giving the land to the peasants is popular in Russia.
It was not long before the peasants had seized the church lands and
divided them through their land committees. But this did not make them
atheists.
I remember meeting an old peasant leader from Siberia who had led a
successful revolt against Kolchak. He was received as a hero when he
arrived at Moscow for an All Russian Congress of Soviets. He told me a
story about a priest in his community who was a counter-revolutionist.
He said, “It usually is this way with me and with many of the peasants,
we love God and we are religious but we hate the priests.” I asked him
if it was not possible to find good priests, and he began to tell me
about one priest who had been very noble and self-sacrificing. But this
was the only one he could think of. “The others disgrace God,” he said.
And that is just what one must understand in order to comprehend the
Russian church and its present position. The Soviets did not destroy
the church or ruin it in any way--no outside pressure could do that.
It was Rasputin and other “disgracers” who at last outraged even the
credulous and easy-going peasants.
A revolution had to take place in the church as well as outside of it
to save it at all. The church, at the time of the revolution, was as
corrupt as the Tsardom. Nothing is better evidence of this than the
way it was deserted by hundreds of priests as soon as the life in the
monasteries ceased to be easy. Long before the upheaval the priesthood
had grown dissolute. All that the revolution did was to give the church
a pruning which saved its soul. By shearing it of its old luxuries it
cut off the parasitic priests and by severing it from the state it took
the church out of politics. It was forced to stand or fall by its own
merits.
And when the wealth of the church was reduced to a certain point it
became necessary for a priest to be such a good priest and so well
loved and appreciated by his flock that his flock was willing to
support him, in spite of the hard life and the terrible conditions.
Thus a new and better clergy came into being.
The final test of the priesthood, however, came with the famine. All
that was left of the church wealth, outside of the churches themselves,
were the jewels in the ikons and the silver and gold ornaments which
glitter in the shrines throughout Russia. The government decided
to requisition these treasures. The priests who had been shriven
in the revolutionary fire were glad and willing to part with these
things, but there were many who resisted. The outcome was a split
in the church ranks, as well as riots, intrigue, and bad feeling.
There probably was a good deal of mismanagement on the part of a few
arbitrary Soviet officials like Zinoviev, who do not seem to comprehend
the sensitiveness of religious people and how easily outraged they
are by outside intrusion. There is little doubt that this heightened
a delicate and unfortunate situation. If a Church Committee had been
allowed to select and turn over the jewels and precious metal, Tikon
and other churchmen would probably never have been brought to trial.
However, the trials themselves are intensely interesting and mark
an epoch in the life of the revolution. They actually mark the real
beginning of public opinion in Russia and that, in any case, is a
healthy development. It is like letting fresh air into a long-closed
room. Discussions of the government and the church have for five years
been going on in whispers behind closed doors. It now comes down to
this: if the government is wrong and is unjustly stripping the church
of wealth, the government will suffer by lack of support or even open
hostility on the part of the peasants, who have so much power now that
they can no longer be ignored on any question; and if the priests are
wrong and prove themselves selfish in this time of need, the priests
will be deposed. But the church itself will go on because the peasants
are religious; they will continue to “love God” in the traditional
manner.
About a week ago I met a Russian priest in New York and I asked him at
once how he felt about the requisitioning of the jewels. He raised his
hands devoutly. “What man could pray to God and hoard jewels at such a
time?” he exclaimed. Then he showed me a very old and precious carved
wooden cross. “There was a ruby in this cross,” he said. “It was the
only valuable thing I possessed. I can’t tell you how happy I was when
it was sold and the money used for relief. This is not a stone you see
in it now; it is a piece of red glass, but it is somehow more precious
to me than the ruby.” Here is the expression of a really devout man and
the only sort of priest that people will follow in such a crisis.
It is perfectly true that the leaders of the Communist movement are
not religious. All students, in fact the entire “intelligentsia”
or educated classes of Russia, were never religious. Before the
revolution all groups of revolutionaries and literary folk prided
themselves on their lack of religion. So anti-religion is not confined
strictly to the leaders of the Communist movement. Any other party
except the Monarchist Party would be equally devoid of interest in
religion.
The Monarchists necessarily support the church because the Tsar was
really head of the church. This has been true since the time of Peter
the Great, who while not actually abolishing the office of Patriarch,
never allowed another Patriarch to be elected. One of the curious and
interesting sidelights of the revolution was that a few weeks after the
church was separated from the state, a Patriarch was elected for the
first time in two hundred years, so that while in one way the church
lost its power, in another way it really came into its own.
Freedom of religion, as we know it in the United States, was a surprise
and a shock to the members of the Russian church, for up until 1917 no
other sects but the Greek Orthodox were permitted by law in Russia.
Naturally, when other religious orders began to send in missionaries
the old church protested, and when the Soviets answered that freedom
of religion was now an established fact they did not understand
it as “freedom” and called it discrimination. And it seemed like
discrimination, because, while the Orthodox Church was losing its
former possessions, other religions were gaining concessions.
Tikon, whose official title is Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias,
and who is called, with a sharp flavor of French revolutionary days,
by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, “Citizen Basil Ivanovitch
Baliavin,” was born in Pskoff in 1860. He was educated in Petrograd
Theological Academy and became a monk upon the completion of his
studies. He later held several important posts as a professor in
theological institutions. He was consecrated Bishop of the Aleutian
Isles and North America in 1897 and then came to America. In 1905
he was made Archbishop and moved the cathedral residence from San
Francisco to New York. He returned to Russia in February, 1907, having
been appointed Archbishop of Jaroslav. In 1913 he became Archbishop
of Vilna. Early in 1917 he was elected Metropolitan of Moscow and in
November of that same year, just when the Bolsheviks came into power,
he became Patriarch.
Just what influenced Tikon and made him so much more democratic
than most of his colleagues, I do not know. My own opinion, after a
conversation with him, is that he is somewhat of a student of history
and a philosopher, as well as a priest. It is the opinion of many
people, inside and outside of Russia, that it was his long residence
in America which made him so liberal. Of one thing I feel sure. He
would have resisted the Soviet Government if he had believed that it
was better for the future of the church. I do not think he refrained
because of any personal fears, but because he actually saw a real
revival of religion in the fire through which the church was passing.
No one could have expected the church to embrace the revolution. The
nobility and the clergy had walked too many centuries hand in hand. The
nobility perished in the course of events and the church survived, as
it did in France. And the church will continue to survive--merely the
poorer by a few jewels or a few thousand acres of land. But it will
never wield the same power that it once did or that it could wield if
there was a return to Tsardom. It cannot be as strong, for example, as
the Church of Rome is in Italy.
The real menace to the power of the Russian church lies in its
own medieval outlook on life. It has scarcely anything to do
with anti-church propagandists or with opposition by force or by
requisition. The youth of Russia is interested in reconstruction and
the government for the first time. The young people have learned to
read and to think. They are no longer content with the old forms; they
are repelled by dissolute or un-Christlike priests. If the church
wishes to be strong and to have an influence in the life of the nation
it cannot gain that influence by haggling over a pile of rubies and
diamonds and emeralds while thousands of children are dying of hunger.
The old peasants might follow Tikon when he says that the famine is
the business of God, but the young people will not. It is almost
inconceivable that a man can follow the lowly Christ in such a proud
way. Certainly, the young Russians, who have so passionately defended
the revolution, will never be satisfied with such a conception.
It seems very sad, from the religious point of view, that Tikon, who
steered his church through the long period of fighting and destruction,
should lose his equilibrium in the period of adjustment. He was able to
smile through all the worst days of terror and suspicion. He could joke
about the Cheka guard outside his door, he could calm his agitated
congregations, but he could not sacrifice form. When I interviewed him
he wore a gorgeous robe and jewels.
Tikon is sincere. Even in his clinging to the splendor of gold and
jewels, he is sincere. It is his particular mystical way of loving God,
which is difficult to understand in our age of materialism. Tikon, in
a lesser degree, has many of those qualities of Lenin which make him
a leader of men. If he had been as great a man as Lenin he would have
thoroughly purified the church and led a great religious revival in
Russia.
TCHICHERIN,
COMMISSAR FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS,
AND HIS SUBORDINATES.
GREGORY VASSILIEVITCH TCHICHERIN
MAXIM LITVINOV, ASSISTANT COMMISSAR
LEONID KRASSIN
DAVID ROTHSTEIN
GREGORY WEINSTEIN
MICHAEL KARAKHAN
MR. FLORINSKY
MR. AXIONOV
GREGORY VASSILIEVITCH TCHICHERIN
My first interview with Tchicherin was at midnight and my last
interview was at five in the morning. This happens to cover a fairly
complete rotation of the official hours of the Soviet Foreign Office.
One evening at a box party in the Bolshoi Theatre, Enver Pasha
remarked: “I have to kill time somehow for three hours after the
play. Halil Pasha and I have an appointment with Mr. Tchicherin at
two o’clock.” In spite of his smiling Oriental inscrutability and a
palpable diplomatic duty to conform to everything Russian, one could
feel an amused disapproval of such official unconventionality.
This eccentric habit of turning night into day, with every floor of the
Foreign Office blazing like a lighthouse in a city which by municipal
decree is put to bed before midnight in order to save fuel, naturally
creates an almost fantastic air of whimsicality. Mr. Tchicherin makes
no excuse for this “vice,” as one of his secretaries very cleverly
phrased it; he simply finds night more harmonious for his tasks
than day and with that lack of consideration which dreamers always
consciously or unconsciously assume, he forces his whole staff to
follow his example. The result is that his clerks make a mad scramble
to get transferred into another government department.
Everything about Tchicherin is as consistently contrary to an ordered
life as his inversion of working hours. Born an aristocrat, trained
under the Tsar for the diplomatic service, delicate, cultured, aloof,
with a fine gesture of Quixotic generosity, he has thrown his life and
his fortunes in with the cause of the proletariat with all the abandon
of religious fervor.
His aloofness is so evident that one can hardly find any concordance
about the astounding decision of such an obvious æsthete to become
an active part of revolution--which is sweat and blood and violence.
Perhaps that explains why he wraps his vision round him like a cloak
and shuts out the sun in order not to be disturbed and disillusioned
by reality. We were all brought up on stories about kings who were
gay-fellows-well-met and could outdance and outdrink their soldiers;
on nobles who turned out to be Robin Hoods. But, alas, who can imagine
Tchicherin rollicking at a workers’ picnic or smoking a friendly pipe
with a Red soldier?
No simple person will ever feel intimate or at home with his
super-class indifference to material surroundings. A scrubwoman is just
as uncomfortable in his presence as was the intrepid Mrs. Sheridan,
who was able to rub such gay elbows with the other commissars. Mr.
Tchicherin’s way of arching an eyebrow at life upsets the best brand of
poise.
Living alone in a barren room on the top floor of the Foreign Office,
he is as far removed socially and physically from the lower as the
upper crust. Perhaps only an aristocrat is able to attain this dizzy
height of indifference to human contact with one’s fellows. And I
can’t help feeling that there is something rather splendid about such
complete isolation.
Outside of politics, the telephone and the cable, all up-to-dateness
offends him. He abhors new clothes, does not like to ride in
automobiles, refuses to have modern office paraphernalia about him,
does every little task for himself, like sharpening his own pencils
and running all over the building on office-boy errands. This attitude
produces the same effect as if he distrusted all his subordinates. His
secretaries stand helpless and ill at ease while he searches for a lost
telegram or answers the telephone.
Last winter they told an amusing story of how Karakhan, who is
Commissar of Eastern Affairs, lured Tchicherin into donning a new suit.
Tchicherin’s one suit was literally in rags when the Turkish treaty and
the Afghan treaty and the Persian treaty and all the other Oriental
treaties were about to be signed. These affairs had to be arranged
with more or less bourgeois pomp, since the Orientals are rather keen
on ceremony. So Mr. Karakhan, taking a long chance, went ahead and
ordered a new suit for Mr. Tchicherin from a Soviet tailor, then one
morning while Tchicherin slept, he changed the suits. In a few minutes
he came rushing back again and exclaimed with emotion, “There’s a new
note from Lord Curzon!” Tchicherin was up in one bound and struggling
into the new trousers. Whatever he thought privately of Mr. Karakhan’s
presumption, they continued in an apparently pleasant relationship.
In appearance Mr. Tchicherin is tall, with the bent shoulders of
the man who stoops to go through doors. His eyes, not through any
evasiveness, but because of an extreme shyness, continually seek other
places than the face of his interviewer. Yet when one meets his quick,
occasional glance, one is startled by the intelligence and gentleness
of his expression.
Diplomacy is an inseparable part of Mr. Tchicherin’s existence. He
eats, drinks and sleeps with the affairs of state, looks at life
as a chess game and is continually checkmating, even in ordinary
conversation. Lenin approves of him and feels for him a warm
personal affection in spite of the fact that the Premier so dislikes
eccentricities. He knows that Tchicherin can be trusted, that he has an
invaluable knowledge of international affairs and more important than
all that, that he will never make any real decision without consulting
Lenin.
Mr. Bullitt told me that during his negotiations he found Tchicherin so
brilliant that it was difficult to get anywhere. The Foreign Minister
was always quite justified from the Soviet angle but the Soviets were
being forced to make hard concessions. Invariably when they came to a
deadlock, he telephoned Lenin and Lenin gave in.
During our first talk, when we discussed the campaign of lies about
Russia which has so long flooded English, French and American papers,
I said that I thought it was partly due to the fact that no reporters
were permitted at that time to go in and investigate actual conditions.
It was characteristic of Tchicherin to interrupt very suddenly and ask,
“Will you tell me why American reporters come over here and claim they
are impartial observers, even profess friendliness towards us, and then
go home and write such astounding lies?”
I thought it wasn’t fair to generalize. The most unfair stories have
always been manufactured at Riga and Reval or at Paris by interested
political groups or by disappointed reporters who never got inside. As
for the reporters who actually witnessed the revolution, certainly the
majority remained fair and sympathetic, in spite of the fact that it
grew particularly difficult, especially in America, even to maintain
one’s equilibrium about Russia after Brest-Litovsk. To my mind came
back unhappy recollections of Overman and Lusk investigations, raids,
deportations and general war-hysteria. Perhaps some such thought came
also to Tchicherin because he said, “Yes, yes, I suppose in the main,
you are right, but how do you account for a man like----?”
Tchicherin is full of old-fashioned honor. The idea that foreign papers
sanctioned false reports in order to justify intervention or the
blockade seemed so outrageous to him that he could never realize that
this sort of propaganda has become as much a part of modern warfare as
liquid fire or submarines.
Very late one night I saw Tchicherin running up the stairs to his
office in a high state of excitement because a New York evening
newspaper carried on its front page a fake interview with Lenin in
which he discussed everything from the Irish situation to the Russian
Ballet. Tchicherin saw no humor in this. His comment was, “How can a
reputable American paper allow such a thing? After all, Comrade Lenin
is the Premier of a great country.”