THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE
The Romanoffs gone, the soviets apparently yielding to Kerensky’s
demand for a coalition government, and finally voting to give him
almost supreme power, what then stood in the way of restoring order in
the army and civil life? Readers of the despatches in the daily press
last September and later must have puzzled over this question. The fact
is that while there were indications that the last convention held in
Petrograd by the Russian Socialists, the so-called Democratic Council,
ended in a partial victory for Kerensky, there remained every evidence
that the Bolshevik element was still very strong. Kerensky succeeded in
forming a coalition ministry, but the Petrograd Council of Soldiers’
and Workmen’s Delegates at the same time succeeded in electing a
Bolshevik central executive committee with the notorious Leo Trotzky
as chairman, displacing N. C. Tcheidse, the Georgian Duma member,
prominent in the Council, but against whose sincerity and honesty I
never heard a word.
Trotzky was elected because the Bolsheviki couldn’t then get Lenine
back. There were not enough bold spirits in the Democratic Council
to force from the government a promise of immunity from arrest for
Lenine, should he appear at a meeting, so he was kept in the background
and Trotsky was made chairman of the Petrograd executive committee in
his stead.
Lenine is the real leader of the Bolsheviki to-day, exactly as he was
during the fateful days of July when he sent mutinous soldiers and idle
workmen out on the streets of the capital with machine guns to murder
the populace. Trotzky, however, is an able and faithful lieutenant.
He is a Jew and his real name is Braunstein. He is one of those Jews,
unhappily too prominent in Russian affairs just now, who are doing
everything in their power to prejudice the people of Russia against the
race, and to check the movement for the full freedom of the Jews of the
empire.
Trotzky, or Braunstein, is known to many in New York city. He gained
some newspaper publicity when he arrived in New York from Spain a
short time before the February revolution. He posed as a martyr to
socialist principles, one who had been persecuted by the governments
of four countries--Russia, Germany, France and Spain. All four had
expelled him, he said, for the crime of editing really successful
socialist newspapers. Trotzky’s story was founded on fact. At least,
four countries did find him as a citizen too undesirable to retain.
Banishment from Russia, under the old régime, is no stigma, so we may
begin Trotzky’s saga in August, 1914, the early days of the world war.
He was editing a Jewish paper in Berlin. He was given a few hours to
leave, he says, and with his family fled across the Swiss frontier to
Zurich. From there he went to Paris, where he was miraculously able,
poor as he had always been and high as the price of white paper was
soaring, to establish a socialist newspaper in the Russian language.
When the Russian contingent of the allied armies reached France in
April, 1916, _Our Words_, which was the name of Trotzky’s spicy little
sheet, was circulated free among the 65,000 soldiers. The motto of the
paper was “Down with the War” far more than it was “Up with Socialism.”
It was filled from page one to page four with the sort of pro-German
stuff that has done its deadly work with the men at the Russian front,
inducing them to refuse to fight and thus opening their country to the
German army.
The French government, which had its hands full with its own pet
sedition raisers, had never before heard of Trotzky, but now it told
him to move on. He did. He went to Spain, where he was arrested as
an extreme trouble-maker, and after a short time expelled from the
country. He came to the United States, where he remained until the
Russian revolution of late February, 1917, when he flew back to
Petrograd. Trotzky always had money to make these long journeys. At
Halifax he was halted, for the English government knew his record. The
English authorities considered interning him for the duration of the
war, but a lot of people interceded for the poor Russian exile, and he
was allowed to go on to Russia. Poor Russia!
Trotzky was elected a member of the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s
and Soldiers’ Delegates, being a pacifist and never having done any
manual work. Last summer when I was in Russia I used to read almost
daily in the accounts of the National Council of Soviets, or councils,
burning speeches of Trotzky’s in which he urged a separate peace with
Germany, or what would amount to exactly the same thing, Russia’s
immediate cessation of fighting. Trotzky ridiculed the idea that
abandonment of the allies would in any way injure Russia in a material
way or soil the national honor. His ideas of economics and finance were
simply and frequently reiterated. Arrest all capitalists and force
them to disclose the secret of how they got rich, and hang all the
bankers--presumably as the first step toward seizing the contents of
the banks. With this man as chairman of the central executive committee
of the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council, and with
the October revolt of the German naval men on five ships for him to
point to as evidence that the social revolution is at hand in Germany,
the life of the last coalition government was not likely to be peaceful.
But the end of the Bolsheviki is in sight in spite of Lenine, Trotzky
and the entire majority in the Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s
Delegates. It has been coming on stealthy feet for many months, and
now the messengers’ hands are on the latch. The messengers’ names are
Hunger and Cold.
When I went down to my first dinner in Petrograd last May, I was amazed
to see the price on the menu card placed at five rubles fifty kopecks,
about $1.80. In a previous visit to Petrograd I had eaten an excellent
dinner in this same hotel and had paid for it one ruble seventy-five
kopecks, or about seventy-five cents, as the ruble was then valued.
The one offered for more than twice this amount consisted of a watery
soup, a small piece of not very fresh fish, a thin slice of veal with
peas and a water ice flavored with cherry juice. One piece of black
bread without butter was served. If I wanted water to drink with the
meal I had to pay two rubles for bottled water, for one drink of plain
water in Petrograd is an attempt at suicide by the typhoid route. If I
wanted coffee I had to pay one ruble sixty-five kopecks more, and after
I added the customary 10 per cent. for the tip my check was ten rubles
and six kopecks. Three dollars and thirty-five cents.
This was bad enough, but before I left Russia the price of that meager
meal had advanced to thirteen rubles and the quality of the dinner had
sensibly declined. Also the tip had advanced, for after a strike of
waiters a system was adopted all over Russia, as far as I traveled,
whereby tips were abolished and 15 per cent. was added to the bill by
the hotel and restaurant proprietors.
You now pay an additional 15 per cent. of your entire hotel bill in
Russia, which is distributed in tips to all the servants except the
lift boys and the gorgeous individual who stands in front of the hotel
door, who assists you to alight from your droshky when you arrive,
and touches his peacock feather trimmed hat to you when you go in
and out. He is called the Swiss, denoting the origin of his earliest
predecessor, I imagine, and why he and the elevator men do not share in
the general distribution I never found out.
Walk down the Nevsky Prospect, or the Grand Morskaia, which begins in
fine shops and ends in palaces, like Fifth avenue. Wander through the
maze of little shops in the huge arcade called the Gostinny Dvor. Go
far out on the Nevsky, cross the beautiful Anitchkoff bridge, with its
four groups of rearing horses, and turn in at the Litainy, where the
cheaper shops are to be found, and try to buy something. It doesn’t
matter what, just try to buy something to eat, drink, wear or use. When
the waiter brought in the coffee that morning he said cheerfully, “Niet
malako,” no milk. Try to buy a few cans of condensed milk against a
similar experience. I walked all over Petrograd trying to buy condensed
milk, for the shortage of fresh milk was grave when I arrived, and grew
steadily worse. I found one can, for which I paid two dollars. Shortly
afterward a friend arrived from Japan and gave me two cans, which she
spared out of her store.
Russian illiteracy is so general that the shop signs are not written
but illustrated. Brilliant signboards on the outside show pictures of
what the shopkeeper has to sell. A dairy shop will have a picture of a
cow, crocks of butter, chickens, ducks, geese, baskets of eggs, cheese
of many varieties and so forth. A greengrocer’s signboard is decorated
like a seed catalogue cover, while a clothing store is advertised
by pictures of clothes and hats which were fashionable perhaps ten
years ago. It once added to the gay appearance of the streets, but
just now it increases their anxious and ominous air. Hundreds of the
shops are empty, the doors are locked and the brilliant signboards
alone remain to indicate that business was ever conducted there. One
of the mournfulest sights in Petrograd to me was an abandoned shop
where they once sold French bread and pastry. I used to turn my head
away from the mocking poster, picturing crisp white bread in yard-long
loaves, delicious breakfast crescents, patés and cakes. The standard
bread served in Russia at the present time is black, soggy, sour and
indigestible. It is sold by weight, hence loaded with water and baked
as little as possible to be bread and not dough. Some one has suggested
that that bread was meant for food and drink together, and it is
certain that it is so wet that it quickly mildews. But bad as it is it
is scarce and expensive. A bread ticket calls for three-quarters of a
pound, the daily allotment per person when I left the last of August.
This costs at the rate of ten kopecks a pound. It used to be three and
a half kopecks a pound, and good bread, too.
Butter, when it can be bought at all, was three rubles a pound, about a
dollar. Excellent butter a year or two ago was less than fifty kopecks
a pound, for Russia was rapidly becoming a dairy country. Veal, and
veal is about the only meat to be had, was nearly a dollar a pound.
Feed for cattle is so scarce and so expensive that cows are not allowed
to grow into beef size, hence the prevalence of veal. Chickens may vary
the menu, if you can afford to pay from three dollars upward. You could
buy only a short-weight half pound of meat a day per person, except for
the Sunday dinner, when a pound was allowed.
Even at the Hotel Militaire, where I lived most of the time, and where
the food supply came from government sources, we had veal or its
derivatives, hash, croquettes, etc., five days in the week. Sometimes
they offered what they called beef, but it wasn’t. It was horsemeat,
coarse and strong. Once a week or so we had chicken, a welcome change.
When August came we began to have game, grouse of various kinds mostly.
Game is very plentiful in Russia and Finland this year, because since
the war men have hunted only one another. But game, which is a treat
when you have it occasionally, is a punishment when you have it more
than once or so a week. You detest it when it appears on the table
three times a week, and if it appears oftener you choose a meatless day
as an alternative.
Coffee was about a dollar and a half a pound, not so bad, and tea was
even more moderate in price. What the Russian people would do if the
tea gave out I cannot imagine. Everybody drinks tea, scalding hot,
several times a day. Even the babies drink tea, and it is a fact that
in the best babies’ hospital I saw in Russia the head nurse proudly
showed me, in a hot water table, a whole row of nursing bottles full
of tea for the sick babies’ evening repast. Tea they still have, but
they are almost out of sugar to go with it. In a hotel or restaurant
they serve you with three very tiny lumps of sugar with each glass of
tea, and that is all you can have. If for any reason you do not use
all your sugar you put it in your pocket. You do this whether you keep
house or not, because you can’t buy much candy, and when meat is scarce
everybody craves sweets.
Sugar is not the only leftover one takes home. One day I went into the
Vienna restaurant on the Gogol for dinner, sitting down at a table
just vacated by a very smart young officer. He left behind him on
the window ledge a little parcel neatly wrapped in white paper with
a pink string. It might have been a jeweler’s parcel. I picked it up
with the impulse to hand it over to the waiter, but first as a matter
of precaution, lest it should be really valuable, I opened a corner of
the paper and examined the contents. A piece of fairly white bread as
big as a small turnip, the remains of luncheon, perhaps, at the house
of a rich friend. I went into a fashionable tea place in Moscow just
before I left, and they served with the tea, in lieu of sugar, a kind
of sticky preserve. I had with my sugarless tea a cake made without
flour or sugar. It tasted like almond paste and the whole thing cost me
a dollar and ten cents.
Most of the shops are closed, but before most of those which remain
open you may see, at any hour of the day or night, a queue of people,
men, women and children, waiting to get in and buy. The people often
wait in line twenty-four hours or more. They wait days to buy some
things. Go home from a visit or get in from a journey at any time
of night, midnight, three a. m., any hour, and you see these long,
patient, waiting lines of people. They curl up on the stones of
the pavement and sleep, members of a family relieve one another at
intervals, but every one desperately hangs on to his place in the line.
Not only do all the small shop keepers and the street peddlers have
to replenish their poor little stocks by standing thus for days, but
housekeepers have to feed and clothe their families that way. People
who can afford servants, of course, send their servants to wait in
line. The daily newspapers often contain the advertisement, “Wanted
a queue maid,” meaning a woman whose sole duty it is to sleep on the
sidewalk and bring home next day’s dinner.
It was summer when I was in Petrograd and Moscow. Sleeping on the
sidewalk left something to be desired even in warm weather. The first
hint of autumn was in the air when I left on August 30. By the first
of October it was cold, and by the end of November it was frigid. When
the storms and the driving snows of winter set in in earnest people
will not be able to sleep on the sidewalks. Where will they get food,
and when starvation stares them in the face what will they do? Russia’s
real crisis, political and economic, will come then, and the Bolsheviki
will not be the people to overcome it.