February 15th.
I went by appointment to see Pavlovitch, President of the
Committee of State Constructions. It was a very jolly
morning and the streets were crowded. As I walked through
the gate into the Red Square I saw the usual crowd of
peasant women at the little chapel of the Iberian Virgin,
where there was a blaze of candles. On the wall of what
used, I think, to be the old town hall, close by the gate, some
fanatic agnostic has set a white inscription on a tablet,
"Religion is opium for the People." The tablet, which has
been there a long time, is in shape not unlike the customary
frame for a sacred picture. I saw an old peasant, evidently
unable to read, cross himself solemnly before the chapel,
and then, turning to the left, cross himself as solemnly
before this anti-religious inscription. It is perhaps
worth while to remark in passing that the new Communist
programme, while insisting, as before, on the definite
separation of church and state, and church and school, now
includes the particular statement that "care should be taken
in no way to hurt the feelings of the religious." Churches and
chapels are open, church processions take place as before,
and Moscow, as in the old days, is still a city of church bells.
A long line of sledges with welcome bags of flour was
passing through the square. Soldiers of the Red Army were
coming off parade, laughing and talking, and very noticeably
smarter than the men of six months ago. There was a bright
clear sky behind the fantastic Cathedral of St. Basil, and the
rough graves under the Kremlin wall, where those are buried
who died in the fighting at the time of the November
Revolution, have been tidied up. There was
scaffolding round the gate of the Kremlin which was
damaged at that time and is being carefully repaired.
The Committee of State Constructions was founded last
spring to coordinate the management of the various
engineering and other constructive works previously
carried on by independent departments. It became an
independent organ with its own finances about the middle of
the summer. Its headquarters are in the Nikolskaya, in the
Chinese town, next door to the old building of the
Anglo-Russian Trading Company, which still bears the Lion
and the Unicorn sculptured above its green and white fa=87ade
some time early in the seventeenth century.
Pavlovitch is a little, fat, spectacled man with a bald head,
fringed with the remains of red hair, and a little reddish
beard. He was dressed in a black leather coat and trousers.
He complained bitterly that all his plans for engineering
works to improve the productive possibilities of the country
were made impracticable by the imperious demands of war.
As an old Siberian exile he had been living in France before
the revolution and, as he said, had seen there how France
made war. "They sent her locomotives, and rails for the
locomotives to run on, everything she needed they sent her
from all parts of the world. When they sent horses, they
sent also hay for their food, and shoes for their feet, and
even nails for the shoes. If we were supplied like that,
Russia would be at peace in a week. But we have nothing,
and can get nothing, and are forced to be at war against our
will.
"And war spoils everything," he continued. "This committee
should be at work on affairs of peace, making Russia more
useful to herself and to the rest of the world. You know our
plans. But with fighting on all our fronts, and with all our
best men away, we are compelled to use ninety per cent. of
our energy and material for the immediate needs of the
army. Every day we get masses of telegrams from all fronts,
asking for this or that. For example, Trotsky telegraphs here
simply "We shall be in Orenburg in two days," leaving us to
do what is necessary. Then with the map before me, I have
to send what will be needed, no matter what useful work has
to be abandoned meanwhile, engineers, railway gangs for
putting right the railways, material for bridges, and so on.
"Indeed, the biggest piece of civil engineering done in Russia
for many years was the direct result of our fear lest you
people or the Germans should take our Baltic fleet. Save
the dreadnoughts we could not, but I decided to save what
we could. The widening and deepening of the canal system
so as to shift boats from the Baltic to the Volga had been
considered in the time of the Tzar. It was considered and
dismissed as impracticable. Once, indeed, they did try to
take two torpedo-boats over, and they lifted them on barges
to make the attempt. Well, we said that as the thing could
be planned, it could be done, and the canals are deepened
and widened, and we took through them, under their own
power, seven big destroyers, six small destroyers and four
submarine boats, which, arriving unexpectedly before
Kazan, played a great part in our victory there. But the
pleasure of that was spoilt for me by the knowledge that I
had had to take men and material from the building of the
electric power station, with which we hope to make
Petrograd independent of the coal supply.
"The difficulties we have to fight against are, of course,
enormous, but much of what the old regime failed to do, for
want of initiative or for other reasons, we have done and are
doing. Some of the difficulties are of a most
unexpected kind. The local inhabitants, partly, no doubt,
under the influence of our political opponents, were
extremely hostile with regard to the building of the power
station, simply because they did not understand it. I went
there myself, and explained to them what it would mean,
that their river would become a rich river, that they would be
able to get cheap power for all sorts of works, and that they
would have electric light in all their houses. Then they
carried me shoulder high through the village, and sent
telegrams to Lenin, to Zinoviev, to everybody they could
think of, and since then we have had nothing but help from
them.
"Most of our energy at present has to be spent on mending
and making railways and roads for the use of the army.
Over 11,000 versts of railway are under construction, and
we have finished the railway from Arzamas to Shikhran.
Twelve hundred versts of highroad are under construction.
And to meet the immediate needs of the army we have
already repaired or made 8,000 versts of roads of various
kinds. As a matter of fact the internal railway net of
Russia is by no means as bad as people make out. By its
means, hampered as we are, we have been able to beat the
counter-revolutionaries, concentrating our best troops, now
here, now there, wherever need may be. Remember that the
whole way round our enormous frontiers we are being
forced to fight groups of reactionaries supported at first
mostly by the Germans, now mostly by yourselves, by the
Roumanians, by the Poles, and in some districts by the
Germans still. Troops fighting on the Ural front are fighting
a month later south of Voronezh, and a month later again
are having a holiday, marching on the heels of the Germans
as they evacuate the occupied provinces. Some of our
troops are not yet much good. One day they fight, and the
next they think they would rather not. So that our best
troops, those in which there are most workmen, have to be
flung in all directions. We are at work all the time enabling
this to be done, and making new roads to enable it to be
done still better. But what waste, when there are so many
other things we want to do!
"All the time the needs of war are pressing on
us. To-day is the first day for two months that
we have been able to warm this building. We have
been working here in overcoats and fur hats in a
temperature below freezing point. Why? Wood
was already on its way to us, when we had suddenly
to throw troops northwards. Our wood had to be
flung out of the wagons, and the Red Army put in its place,
and the wagons sent north again. The thing had to be done,
and we have had to work as best we could in the cold.
Many of my assistants have fallen ill. Two only yesterday
had to be taken home in a condition something like that of a
fit, the result of prolonged sedentary work in unheated
rooms. I have lost the use of my right hand for the same
reason." He stretched out his right hand, which he had been
keeping in the pocket of his coat. It was an ugly sight, with
swollen, immovable fingers, like the roots of a vegetable.
At this moment some one came in to speak to Pavlovitch.
He stood at the table a little behind me, so that I did not see
him, but Pavlovitch, noticing that he looked curiously at me,
said, "Are you acquaintances?" I looked round and
saw Sukhanov, Gorky's friend, formerly one of the
cleverest writers on the Novaya Jizn. I jumped up and
shook hands with him.
"What, have you gone over to the Bolsheviks?" I asked.
"Not at all," said Sukhanov, smiling, "but I am working
here."
"Sukhanov thinks that we do less harm than anybody else,"
said Pavlovitch, and laughed. "Go and talk to him and he'll
tell you all there is to be said against us. And there's lots to
say."
Sukhanov was an extremely bitter enemy of the Bolsheviks,
and was very angry with me when, over a year ago, I told
him I was convinced that sooner or later he would be
working with them. I told Pavlovitch the story, and he
laughed again. "A long time ago," he said, "Sukhanov made
overtures to me through Miliutin. I agreed, and everything
was settled, but when a note appeared in Pravda to say that
he was going to work in this Committee, he grew shy, and
wrote a contradiction. Miliutin was very angry and asked
me to publish the truth. I refused, but wrote on that day in
my diary, Sukhanov will come. Three months later he
was already working with us. One day he told me that in the
big diary of the revolution which he is writing, and will write
very well, he had some special abuse for me. 'I have none
for you,' I said, 'but I will show you one page of my own
diary,' and I showed him that page, and asked him to look at
the date. Sukhanov is an honest fellow, and was bound to
come."
He went on with his talk.
"You know, hampered as we are by lack of everything, we
could not put up the fight we are putting up against the
reactionaries if it were not for the real revolutionary spirit of
the people as a whole. The reactionaries have money,
munitions, supplies of all kinds, instructors, from outside.
We have nothing, and yet we beat them. Do you know that
the English have given them tanks? Have you heard that in
one place they used gases or something of the kind, and
blinded eight hundred men? And yet we win. Why?
Because from every town we capture we get new strength.
And any town they take is a source of weakness to them,
one more town to garrison and hold against the wishes
of the population."
"And if you do get peace, what then!"
"We want from abroad all that we cannot make ourselves.
We want a hundred thousand versts of rails. Now we have
to take up rails in one place to lay them in another. We want
new railways built. We want dredgers for our canals and
river works. We want excavators."
"And how do you expect people to sell you these things
when your foreign credit is not worth a farthing?"
"We shall pay in concessions, giving foreigners the right to
take raw materials. Timber, actual timber, is as good as
credit. We have huge areas of forest in the north, and every
country in Europe needs timber. Let that be our currency
for foreign purchases. We are prepared to say, 'You build
this, or give us that, and we will give you the right to take so
much timber for yourselves.' And so on. And concessions
of other kinds also. As a matter of fact negotiations are now
proceeding with a foreign firm for the building of a railway
from the Obi to Kotlas."
"But part of that district is not in your hands.
"If we get peace we shall be able to arrange that without difficulty."
Just as I was going he stopped me, and evidently not in the
least realizing that English people generally have come to
think of him and his friends as of some strange sort of
devils, if not with horns and tails, certainly far removed from
human beings, he asked:--
"If we do get peace, don't you think there will be engineers
and skilled labourers in England who will volunteer to come
out to Russia and help us? There is so much to do that I can
promise they will have the best we can give them. We are
almost as short of skilled men as we are of locomotives. We
are now taking simple unskilled workmen who show any
signs of brains and training them as we go along. There
must be engineers, railwaymen, mechanics among English
socialists who would be glad to come. And of course they
need not be socialists, so long as they are good engineers."
That last suggestion of his is entirely characteristic. It is
impossible to make the Bolsheviks realize that the English
people feel any hostility towards them. Nor do they feel
hostility towards the English as such. On my way back
to the hotel I met a party of English soldiers, taken prisoners
on the northern front, walking free, without a convoy,
through the streets.