We have all been very much saddened by the death from typhus of John
Reed, the American Communist. Everyone liked him and his wife, Louise
Bryant, the War Correspondent. She is quite young and had only recently
joined him. He had been here two years, and Mrs. Reed, unable to obtain
a passport, finally came in through Murmansk. Everything possible was
done for him, but of course there are no medicaments here: the hospitals
are cruelly short of necessities. He should not have died, but he was
one of those young, strong men, impatient of illness, and in the early
stages he would not take care of himself.
I attended his funeral. It is the first funeral without a religious
service that I have ever seen. It did not seem to strike anyone else as
peculiar, but it was to me. His coffin stood for some days in the
Trades’ Union Hall, the walls of which are covered with huge
revolutionary cartoons in marvellously bright decorative colouring. We
all assembled in that hall. The coffin stood on a daïs and was covered
with flowers. As a bit of staging it was very effective, but I saw, when
they were being carried out, that most of the wreaths were made of tin
flowers painted. I suppose they do service for each Revolutionary
burial.
There was a great crowd, but people talked very low. I noticed a
Christ-like man with long, fair curly hair, and a fair beard and clear
blue eyes; he was quite young. I asked who he was. No one seemed to
know. “An artist of sorts,” someone suggested. Not all the people with
wonderful heads are wonderful people. Mr. Rothstein and I followed the
procession to the grave, accompanied by a band playing a Funeral March
that I had never heard before. Whenever that Funeral March struck up
(and it had a tedious refrain), everyone uncovered; it seemed to be the
only thing they uncovered for. We passed across the Place de la
Révolution, and through the sacred gate to the Red Square. He was buried
under the Kremlin wall next to all the Revolutionaries his Comrades. As
a background to his grave was a large Red banner nailed upon the wall
with the letters in gold: “The leaders die, but the cause lives on.”
When I was first told that this was the burying ground of the
Revolutionaries I looked in vain for graves, and I saw only a quarter of
a mile or so of green grassy bank. There was not a memorial, a headstone
or a sign, not even an individual mound. The Communist ideal seemed to
have been realised at last: the Equality, unattainable in life, the
Equality for which Christ died, had been realisable only in death.
A large crowd assembled for John Reed’s burial and the occasion was one
for speeches. Bucharin and Madame Kolontai both spoke. There were
speeches in English, French, German and Russian. It took a very long
time, and a mixture of rain and snow was falling. Although the poor
widow fainted, her friends did not take her away. It was extremely
painful to see this white-faced, unconscious woman lying back on the
supporting arm of a Foreign Office official, more interested in the
speeches than in the human agony.
The faces of the crowd around betrayed neither sympathy nor interest,
they looked on unmoved. I could not get to her, as I was outside the
ring of soldiers who stood guard nearly shoulder to shoulder. I marvel
continuously at the blank faces of the Russian people. In France or
Italy one knows that in moments of sorrow the people are deeply moved,
their arms go round one, and their sympathy is overwhelming. They cry
with our sorrows, they laugh with our joys. But Russia seems numb. I
wonder if it has always been so or whether the people have lived through
years of such horror that they have become insensible to pain.
Happily no salute was fired. The last time the machine guns rattled at a
burial I heard them in my studio, which is just the other side of the
wall. On that occasion the old porter who takes care of me at the
Kremlin told me that his wife nearly died of heart failure--she thought
the “Whites” had come. Probably it affects other jumpy people in the
same way.
Here the terror of the Whites is as great as is, on the other side, the
terror of the Reds! The poor people do not want any more fighting. I
think they are quite indifferent as to who rules them, they want only
Peace.
When I got back I found Maxim Litvinoff, who also had been at the
funeral and had looked for me in the crowd in vain. He says that he has
arranged with Tchicherin that I am to begin him to-morrow. I have not
asked to do him, but if it is all arranged for me I am only too
delighted. But I do not look forward to working at the Commissariat for
Foreign Affairs. It is the Hotel Metropole, in the Place de la
Révolution, and although it will not be necessary to have a pass, and
there will be none of the sentry difficulties as with Lenin and Trotsky,
the drain-smells are such that one climbs the stairs two at a time
holding one’s breath! There are bits of the Kremlin that are enough to
kill the healthiest person, but the Metropole baffles all description.
Inside the offices it is all right, but the double windows everywhere
are hermetically sealed for the winter, and I wonder that people do not
die like flies. Litvinoff tells me that a new building is almost ready
and that the next time I come to Moscow there will be a beautiful
Commissariat. It is curious that in Moscow, which was one of the richest
cities in the world and contained more rich merchants than almost any
other, something more was not done for sanitation. Last year owing to
lack of fuel most of the pipes in the town burst. No wonder there was an
epidemic of typhus. This year things are better organised, and if there
is Peace on the two fronts, conditions may be enormously improved.
This evening Comrade Alexandre took me to a play. He gave me my choice,
and I decided that “La Fille de Madame Angot,” being an Operetta, would
be more amusing that “Twelfth Night” in Russian. It was at the Théâtre
des Arts, where Tchekov’s plays used to be produced. Tchekov is no
longer acted; he wrote for a class that is temporarily extinct; the
workers and peasants would not understand it. Afterwards, coming home in
the motor, I noticed a tremendous glare in the sky, it obviously meant a
fire, and I insisted on going to look for it. If the fire, when found,
was disappointing, at least the search for it was interesting, and
revealed to me the unsuspected size of Moscow. We drove through miles of
deserted streets, where we met only a few soldiers wearily trudging
through the mud. We shouted to them: “Tovarischi, where is the fire?”
There is something very pleasant in hailing a complete stranger as a
Comrade--one feels at once a link of friendship. The Tovarischi,
however, only waved vaguely onwards, which is the only instruction one
ever gets in Moscow when one asks the way. On we bumped and jolted and
skidded. There was an icy wind blowing and we had no rug. We seemed to
cross two rivers, or they may have been river branches. Everything
looked very beautiful in the twilight. There was no parapet to the river
edge, only some tortuous tree-stems.
Finally we arrived upon the scene to find that some building in a big
clearing had burnt to the foundations, and was still burning brightly.
Having got out of the car and waded through the mud, I could not get
anywhere near, and abandoned the quest. A party of men returning from
the fire, surprised at our having a motor, asked Alexandre for his
identification papers. Happily he is a member of the Communist party. On
the way home he was anxious lest the bad road should cause some damage
to the car. If it broke down, he explained cheerfully, there was no
other car to be had in these parts, and no telephone to call one up, and
it was too far to walk home. It was snowing and we got back at 1 a.m.
after losing the way many times.
In the hall I was met by Litvinoff, who, while I was having supper, told
me that he had had a message from Trotsky who asked if I would be ready
to go off to the front on the morrow at 4 p.m. I had to make up my mind.
We discussed the plan in all its aspects. Litvinoff was splendid, he
advised me neither way, he merely said he would make all arrangements if
I decided to go. I knew that going would involve cold and discomfort and
I guessed that I should not really see much of the front, and as the
only woman I should be most conspicuous. Yet--what a temptation. Finally
about 3 a.m. for various reasons I decided to preserve Trotsky as a
memory. Then for the first time Litvinoff said: “I am so glad.”