February 11th.
Litvinov has been unlucky in his room in the Metropole. It
is small, dark and dirty, and colder than mine. He was
feeling ill and his chest was hurting him, perhaps because of
his speech last night; but while I was there Kamenev rang
him up on the telephone, told him he had a car below, and
would he come at once to the Moscow Soviet to speak on
the international situation! Litvinov tried to excuse himself,
but it was no use, and he said to me that if I wanted to see
Kamenev I had better come along. We found Kamenev in
the hall, and after a few minutes in a little Ford car we were
at the Moscow Soviet. The Soviet meets in the small lecture
theatre of the old Polytechnic. When we arrived, a party
meeting was going on, and Kamenev, Litvinov, and I went
behind the stage to a little empty room, where we were
joined by a member of the Soviet whose name I forget.
It was Kamenev's first talk with Litvinov after his return, and
I think they forgot that I was there. Kamenev asked Litvinov
what he meant to do, and Litvinov told him he wished to
establish a special department of control to receive all
complaints, to examine into the efficiency of different
commissariats, to get rid of parallelism, etc., and, in fact, to
be the most unpopular department in Moscow. Kamenev
laughed. "You need not think you are the first to have that
idea. Every returning envoy without exception has the same.
Coming back from abroad they notice more than we do the
inefficiencies here, and at once think they will set everything
right. Rakovsky sat here for months dreaming of nothing
else. Joffe was the same when he came back from that tidy
Berlin. Now you; and when Vorovsky comes (Vorovsky
was still in Petrograd) I am ready to wager that he too has a
scheme for general control waiting in his pocket. The thing
cannot be done. The only way is, when something
obviously needs doing, to put in some one we can trust to
get it done. Soap is hard to get. Good. Establish a
commission and soap instantly disappears. But put in one
man to see that soap is forthcoming, and somehow or other
we get it."
"Where is the soap industry concentrated?"
"There are good factories, well equipped, here, but they are
not working, partly for lack of material and partly, perhaps,
because some crazy fool imagined that to take an inventory
you must bring everything to a standstill."
Litvinov asked him what he thought of the position as a
whole. He said good, if only transport could be improved;
but before the public of Moscow could feel an appreciable
improvement it would be necessary that a hundred wagons
of foodstuffs should be coming in daily. At present there
are seldom more than twenty. I asked Kamenev about the
schools, and he explained that one of their difficulties was
due to the militarism forced upon them by external attacks.
He explained that the new Red Army soldiers, being mostly
workmen, are accustomed to a higher standard of comfort
than the old army soldiers, who were mostly peasants. They
objected to the planks which served as beds in the old,
abominable, over-crowded and unhealthy barracks.
Trotsky, looking everywhere for places to put his darlings,
found nothing more suitable than the schools; and, in
Kamenev's words, "We have to fight hard for every school."
Another difficulty, he said, was the lack of school books.
Histories, for example, written under the censorship and in
accordance with the principles of the old regime, were now
useless, and new ones were not ready, apart from the
difficulty of getting paper and of printing. A lot, however,
was being done. There was no need for a single child in
Moscow to go hungry. 150,000 to 180,000 children got free
meals daily in the schools. Over 10,000 pairs of felt boots
had been given to children who needed them. The number
of libraries had enormously increased. Physically workmen
lived in far worse conditions than in 1912, but as far as their
spiritual welfare was concerned there could be no
comparison. Places like the famous Yar restaurant,
where once the rich went to amuse themselves with
orgies of feeding and drinking and flirting
with gypsies, were now made into working men's clubs
and theatres, where every working man had a right to go.
As for the demand for literature from the provinces, it was
far beyond the utmost efforts of the presses and the paper
stores to supply.
When the party meeting ended, we went back to the lecture
room where the members of the Soviet had already settled
themselves in their places. I was struck at once by the
absence of the general public which in the old days used to
crowd the galleries to overflowing. The political excitement
of the revolution has passed, and today there were no more
spectators than are usually to be found in the gallery of the
House of Commons. The character of the Soviet itself had
not changed. Practically every man sitting on the benches
was obviously a workman and keenly intent on what was
being said. Litvinov practically repeated his speech of last
night, making it, however, a little more demagogic in
character, pointing out that after the Allied victory, the only
corner of the world not dominated by Allied capital was
Soviet Russia.
The Soviet passed a resolution expressing
"firm confidence that the Soviet Government will
succeed in getting peace and so in opening a wide road to
the construction of a proletarian state." A note was passed
up to Kamenev who, glancing at it, announced that the
newly elected representative of the Chinese workmen in
Moscow wished to speak. This was Chitaya Kuni, a solid
little Chinaman with a big head, in black leather coat and
breeches. I had often seen him before, and wondered who
he was. He was received with great cordiality and made a
quiet, rather shy speech in which he told them he was
learning from them how to introduce socialism in China, and
more compliments of the same sort. Reinstein replied,
telling how at an American labour congress some years back
the Americans shut the door in the face of a representative
of a union of foreign workmen. "Such," he said, "was the
feeling in America at the time when Gompers was supreme,
but that time has passed." Still, as I listened to Reinstein, I
wondered in how many other countries besides Russia, a
representative of foreign labour would be thus welcomed.
The reason has probably little to do with the
good-heartedness of the Russians. Owing to the
general unification of wages Mr. Kuni could not
represent the competition of cheap labour. I talked to the
Chinaman afterwards. He is president of the Chinese
Soviet. He told me they had just about a thousand Chinese
workmen in Moscow, and therefore had a right to
representation in the government of the town. I asked about
the Chinese in the Red Army, and he said there were two or
three thousand, not more.