_By Hector Boon._
Copyright, 1921, by the Press Publishing Co. (The New York World).
The saddest sight in the Muscovite city is the place I named the Lane of
Tears. It is an alleyway between two rows of permanent stalls on the
Sukarefka, where women and men, old and young, almost entirely of the
educated classes, with the exception of a few professionals who
occasionally compete with them, foregather and sell their personal
effects in order to keep body and soul together.
For three months I went to the market daily and never failed to visit
the Lane of Tears. I have seen gently nurtured women selling their
silken underclothing to the vulgar wives and mistresses of Commissars,
who, all unmindful of the feelings of the seller, held up the garments
for all to behold amid the ribald laughter and lewd jokes of the
soldiers standing near. I have seen a young widow selling an officer’s
tunic and strive to gulp down the tears as, with the proceeds, she
hurried off to the bread pitch. If I read the story right, that tunic
had been dear to her as the last remaining remembrance of the young
husband the firing squad had taken from her.
_Begs Money for Bread._
One day as I was having my shoes cleaned, a luxury which later I was
unable to afford, an elderly lady addressed me in rapid Russian. I did
not understand her as she spoke so swiftly and I told her so. She
immediately asked me in French, German and English, with hardly a trace
of an accent, what language I spoke. She told me in torrential French
that she was starving (she looked it), and begged me to give her a
little money with which to buy bread. She said all this as if she had
learned it by heart and had then had to summon up her courage to say it,
as after asking for the money she told me in a faltering voice that she
would not have done so but that she had not tasted bread in four days.
I took her to a food stall and insisted on her joining me at an early
dinner. The food was rough but good. As we ate I got her to tell me her
story. Her eldest son, an officer, had been killed in the war against
Germany; her second son and her husband had been shot by the Bolsheviks
in 1918, and the crowning blow had fallen only a few months previously,
when her only daughter and her husband were executed.
Having sold all her possessions, she was now starving, and, as she told
me, had only one wish in the world, to fall asleep one night and never
wake up. I gave her what I could. I never saw her in the market again. I
have often wondered whether her wish was fulfilled. I trust it was; for
that poor lady and thousands like her, death can hold no terrors, only
relief from untold suffering.
A lady getting on in years, whom I often met on the Sukarefka, selling
her clothing and other little trifles, has, I am glad to learn, arrived
back safely in England. She is an English governess who had been in the
service of a rich family living in the provinces. She made repeated
applications to Rosenberg of the Soviet Foreign Office to be allowed to
return to England, which were brutally refused. While the French Red
Cross was in Moscow she was fed, but when it was evacuated she found it
hard to keep alive. I was unable to help her, as I was desperately close
to starvation myself. This lady was living at the English home, where I
visited her several times. It was eventually taken over by the Soviet,
and the remaining English women were herded four and five in a room,
while the Bolshevik inmates lived in comfort in a room apiece.
_Brutality of Bolsheviks._
The seizing of St. Andrew’s Home was only an instance of the brutal
manner in which the Bolsheviks treated the British and the Americans in
Moscow. The action was all the more despicable and cowardly inasmuch as
the people living there were for the most part poor governesses, quite
destitute of funds.
When Krassin left Moscow I applied to Rosenberg for permission to leave,
which was refused on the ground that the frontier was closed. When the
frontiers were opened I again asked to be allowed to leave and was put
off with the excuse that the frontiers were still closed, although I
knew them to be open, as several foreigners had left. It was only when
Nuorteva, who came from Marten’s bureau in New York, took over
Rosenberg’s job that the Foreign Office put its cards on the table and
stated that they refused to honor my safe conduct and that they intended
to hold me as a hostage. It took me a month to persuade Nuorteva to
allow me to go. Nuorteva, leaving aside natural differences of opinion,
behaved like a white man and showed himself both kind and considerate
toward all the foreigners and genuinely desirous of helping them so far
as the Vetchika would allow him to.
During the last three months of my stay, while waiting for permission to
leave, I went closely into the life of the city. I visited all sorts and
conditions of Russians in their homes and gained an intimate knowledge
of how they lived, if one can use such a word to describe their bare
existence.
In nearly every house there was overcrowding, four and five and even six
people living and sleeping in one room. Their staple diet was black
bread, kasha, salt herrings and potatoes. If a family was able to afford
a little meat once a week and some milk, sugar and fruit, they were
living in comparative luxury.
_Card System a Farce._
The card system, except for the new aristocracy, that is to say the
members of the Communist Party, who number only 500,000 in all Russia,
is a farce. The bulk of the commodities one is entitled to purchase with
cards do not exist. The cards are really only good for the bread ration,
kasha, salt herrings and occasionally a little cooking oil, sugar, tea
and potatoes.
The bulk of the people exist on black bread, kasha and unsweetened tea.
The rations are just sufficient to maintain life. The people, to judge
by their outward appearance, which medical men can probably explain,
look healthy, but in reality they are terribly undernourished and are
without any reserve strength. If an epidemic broke out in Moscow the
people would die like flies.
The children are well taken care of. There are numerous creches,
children’s homes and children’s dining rooms. However, even in the care
of children the Soviet differentiates between the children of Communists
and the offspring of non-Communists. The main reason why the Bolsheviki
take good care of the children is because it enables them to bring up
the coming generation on Bolshevism, Communism and class hatred from the
cradle.
The sanitary arrangements of Moscow are deplorable. Most of the piping
broke during the winter of 1918–1919 and no effort has been made to
repair it since; in fact, no repair work of any description has been
done during the past three years. The roads and pavements are full of
yawning cavities and one risks his limbs if he goes out after dark. The
streets are unlighted.
No regular scavenger service is maintained. The work of cleaning the
streets, the railway stations, &c., is done by forced levies of
bourgeois and “eye wash” parties of Communists, who work on Saturday
afternoons for propaganda purposes. The street cars are running on a
limited service and are invariably crammed to suffocation. The shops, of
course, are all closed, with the exception of a few which sell milk,
fruit and vegetables. There are no restaurants and no hotels open to the
public. There are no newspapers except those published by the Soviet and
which are crammed with lies from cover to cover. There is not the
slightest freedom of pen or speech.
The population lives in a state of terror. The soldiers of the Chika are
dressed in weird Mephistophelian headgear in order to terrify the
people. House searches are invariably made at night or during the small
hours of the morning. People are arrested daily on the flimsiest charges
and thrown into prison without any form of trial. People accused of
speculation and counter revolution are shot in thousands, being given no
chance of proving their innocence. Eight thousand paid agents are
employed in Moscow alone. The Soviet spy system is probably the most
highly developed organization of its kind in the world.
_“Veritable Bird of Prey.”_
The most hated man in all Russia is Dzherjinsky, the head of this
system. He has done to death literally hundreds of thousands of men and
women. He is a man without a heart or a conscience, a veritable bird of
prey, whose appetite for blood is insatiable. When the Reds overran
Siberia after the fall of Kolchak, they announced as they advanced into
the country the abolition of the death sentence and guaranteed to all
White officers who surrendered a full pardon and permission to return to
their families.
This undertaking was broken almost immediately after they gained
complete control of the country. Thousands of Whites were butchered
throughout Siberia. The man who ordered this was Dzherjinsky. Mrs. Clare
Sheridan wrote in her diary that when she said goodby to him it made her
feel sad that she would never see him again!
I have talked with all sorts and conditions of people in Moscow, from
the lowest to the highest, and failed to find one person, apart from
those in favored positions in the employ of the Soviet, who had a good
word to say for Bolshevism or Communism or any other “ism.” On the other
hand, the working classes have no wish to be again under the old regime.
They all want the same thing—a Government that will give them a chance
to earn a decent living and will leave them alone. They are tired of
decrees, weary of rationed food and Communistic control and, above all,
they loathe the “Chika.”
The majority of the girls and women working in the Government offices
are leading irregular lives with the Commissars who furnish them with
additional food and clothing. Girls who in pre-revolutionary days, would
never have prostituted themselves, even in Russia, where morality was
always on a low scale, to-day are forced to sell themselves in order to
keep body and soul together. Bolshevism is the foulest prostituting
agency the world has ever seen.