healthy race. If there were any scarcity of milk the children were
supplied first, the hospitals second, members of the Communist party
third, industrial groups fourth, professional classes fifth, and old
people over fifty had to scrape along on what they could get, unless
they were parents of Communists or closely associated with them.
I was eager also to find out what had been done about the study carried
on by Professor Tushnov, of the Institute for Experimental Medicine, on
so-called spermatoxin, a substance which, it had been rumored, produced
temporary sterility in women. I made an appointment with him, but a
shock awaited me. He had tried out his spermatoxin on thirty women,
twenty-two of whom had been made immune for from four to five months,
but now all laboratory workers had been taken from pure research and set
at utilitarian tasks such as the practical effects of various vocations
on women’s health. Nothing concerning immunization to conception could
be published in Soviet Russia, no information could be given out under
penalty of arrest, and, moreover, nothing could appear in a foreign
paper which had not already been printed in Russia.
Intourist, the Government tourist bureau, and Voks, the All-Union
Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, had asked me when
I had first arrived whom I wished to see and where I wished to go, and
had offered to call up people on my list and arrange for visits, a
service which had saved me much trouble and expense. In spite of this
co-operative attitude, I was suspicious that much was being hidden from
us. Before I had left America I had heard I could see only what Russia
presented for window-dressing, and with this in mind I was on the alert.
Both Grant and I wondered how the hospitals built under the Tsars
compared with recent ones. When I asked to be taken to a certain one, I
was assured it was too far away, and anyhow it was being renovated;
there was nobody there. I said to myself, “Aha! here is one of the
forbidden sights. Whoever heard of a hospital equipped to handle
thousands of patients being utterly empty? They are not going to let us
see this because it might speak in favor of the old in contrast to the
new.”
Politely but firmly I insisted. Again I was told there were so many
other interesting things it would be a pity to waste my time going to
see it. I found it difficult to say anything further without giving
offense. Then Grant encountered a young American nurse from the
Presbyterian Hospital in New York who spoke Russian; she also wanted to
visit hospitals. We engaged a car of our own and drove a good fifteen
miles out of the city over horrible roads, winding and dusty and badly
paved, and even pushing on as rapidly as we could we did not get there
until late in the afternoon. To our dismay we discovered not a patient,
doctor, or nurse in the place, only plasterers, painters, carpenters,
and cleaners, pulling down and refurbishing. We had lost half a day and
were a little ashamed of our lack of faith.
The night came to take the train for Moscow. Nobody called “All aboard!”
in Russia. Trains went right off underneath you when you had one foot on
the platform and one on the step. They just moved and moved fast. But we
clambered on and soon the leather seats were made into our beds; they
were so slippery that we kept falling out.
Once at Moscow, we who were coming second-class, according to Marxian
procedure, received the worst rooms at the hotel; those who traveled
third had the best. I could not applaud the one selected for me. It was
directly over the laundry, and the smells of cooking and suds floated
through the window. I refused to stay and was accommodated on the top
floor where the servants had once lived.
Moscow was as different from Leningrad as New York City from a sleepy
Pennsylvania town. The people walked more quickly and seemed to be going
somewhere, not simply wandering listlessly. Bedlam existed at the
hotels, but by now we were beginning to learn that the Russians were so
concerned with their own efficiency that they had no time to do
anything. To be in a hurry merely complicated matters. I could wait, but
for energetic Rose it was torture. To all specific requests they
replied, “It cannot be. It cannot be.” She had her own methods of coping
with this, saying she did not wish to hear the word, “impossible”; she
had no intention of asking the impossible. Then when they procrastinated
with, “a little later,” she countered, “In America we say, ‘now!’”
Her triumph over dilatoriness came on Health Day. Since health was
almost a god in Russia, all activities ceased on that occasion and the
populace of Moscow came together on Red Square. The spectacle was to
start at two in the afternoon, but before it was light you could hear
the songs of men, women, and children moving towards their appointed
stations.
Out of our party only thirty were privileged to receive tickets, and
their names were posted. Mrs. Clyde and I were on the list, but not
Grant or Rose. The previous day the numbers were cut to twenty; that
morning there were but sixteen, and feeling ran high. “Why haven’t I a
ticket?”
Fortunately for me I had been invited to lunch by Ambassador William C.
Bullitt, who entertained lavishly and was helpful to traveling
Americans. When I had met him back in New England, I had never thought
of him as an ambassador, nor as a man skilled in dealing with the great
problems that required strategy, diplomacy, political sagacity, and a
prime knowledge of economics and history. I considered him rather as
amusing, an excellent dinner host, and one to whom you could go when in
difficulty, sure that he would get you out. Perhaps this was what Russia
wanted at that time more than anything else. No doubt he was then
somewhat disappointed at the turn relations between Russia and the
United States had taken. Russians on the whole admired him; they had not
forgotten that, although he was not counted a proletarian or in the
category of Jack Reed, he had lifted the cudgels for them in the early
days when friends were needed.
The Ambassador’s little daughter Ann, aged ten, officiated at the head
of the table, apparently enjoying herself. The house in which they were
living while the new Embassy was being built had an architecture quite
befitting what I imagined the style of Russia should be—a bit of the
Kremlin, a bit of a mosque, and a bit of an Indian palace.
On the way to the Square after luncheon a wave of people surged between
the rest of the diplomatic party and myself, but I kept saying
“diplomatique,” and was bowed through to the grandstand.
Meanwhile Rose had been devoting her whole attention to tickets—and
there were no tickets. The lucky holders lined up and filed off under a
leader. Rose, the ever resourceful, donned a red bandanna and said to
the “forgotten men” in the party, “We’ll make our own battalion.” She
handed out slips of paper about the size of the tickets and then
started, Grant and the Harvard professors following her through the
blare of music and the tramping troops and the pageantry of blue trunks
and white shirts, orange trunks and cerise shirts.
Whenever anyone stopped Rose she pointed ahead and repeated my open
sesame, “diplomatique,” and they let her by until she reached the last
barrier. There the guard was suspicious of her password and challenged
her. Then she spied another group coming up, dashed over to the leader,
and exclaimed, “Quick, please explain that our interpreter has gone on
with our tickets!”
The woman looked unbelieving, but still others arrived at that moment,
and the Russian system collapsed under pressure. In they all piled, and
Rose turned to her unknown benefactress, “You don’t know how grateful I
am to you for getting us in.”
The reply was, “You don’t know how grateful I am to you for getting us
in! I’m a tourist too, and we have no tickets either.”
Nobody seeing Moscow that day could have thought it a somber place. It
was alive with song, happy faces, bright attire. The parade of a hundred
thousand or more was one of the most marvelous spectacles for color,
form, cadence, geometrical precision that I had ever seen human beings
accomplish. Men and women were representing all sorts of games and
sports—swimming, shooting, tennis, flying. There was nothing tawdry.
Each company held aloft beautifully designed placards as it passed
Stalin, who stood on top of Lenin’s tomb. The Dictator looked much like
his pictures, with his heavy black mustache resembling the wings of a
bird of prey.
All day long and everywhere you heard the _Internationale_, over and
over and over again. Each band struck up as it approached the Tomb and
kept playing as it swung on. Always the stirring song from those coming
up, those far away—overtones, undertones, thrilling, insistent, now loud
in your ears, now dimly echoing in the distance, a rhythmic motif
symbolizing the onward march of Young Russia.
_Chapter Thirty-six_
FAITH IS A FINE INVENTION
“_There is a great difference between traveling to see
countries and to see people._”
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
“Tovarish —— wishes to see you,” came a call from the hotel desk. For a
moment I could not place the name, and the face had changed so
completely that I could but faintly trace a resemblance to the boy I had
seen before. He reminded me I had known him in Seattle as one who had
assisted in getting up birth control meetings. When the Wobblies were
being arrested in the United States he had hired out as a stoker on a
boat, and gradually made his way to Russia, where he thought he could
help to usher in the new society.
Here was one person who had not had the best of the bargain. He was
shabbily dressed and looked dilapidated, evidently having seen hard
times, and had a beaten expression in his eyes. Yet, disillusioned as he
was, he had not come to complain. Since it was four in the afternoon,
the lunch hour in Russia, I asked him to join me in the dining room,
conducted like a large commons. The waiters seemed disgruntled, unhappy,
inept and knew very little about service; they glanced scornfully at the
man who sat down beside me. The one lively note was the orchestra, which
threw itself into marches and wild and spirited Caucasian or Slavic folk
dances while we ate.
My guest said this was the best meal he had had since leaving America.
“Why don’t you come back?” I asked.
“I couldn’t get in.”
“Would you if you could?”
“Just give me a chance!”
I suppose it was inevitable that in such a social upheaval many
suffered. I called upon Dr. Peter Tutyshkin, who had tried to attend our
1925 Conference in New York, but had arrived too late. As was the case
with most professional men of his years, he had been of the old
aristocracy. He and his wife and two daughters, both physicians, had
owned a beautiful home. Now the thousands of volumes of what had
formerly comprised his fine medical and scientific library had been
taken away, and he and his wife slept and ate in the room which had
contained them. He was margined and rationed to the last degree, and I
could feel his humiliation at having so little food that he could not
offer us a cup of tea.
While we were in Moscow, the Eddy party and the select six whom Louis
Fischer was piloting, crossed our path. Fischer, a Russian living in
Moscow and writing for the _Nation_, published in the United States,
invited Grant and me to go along with them to meet the Secretary of the
Commissariat of Public Health, Dr. Kaminsky. We went up a wide open
stairway like that of a courthouse and into a spacious room with high
windows running from floor to ceiling in French fashion and a huge
banquet table laden with the invariable afternoon tea.
Dr. Kaminsky addressed us. “Our worst heritage from the Old Regime was
in the field of medicine. The main task before us is to unite science
and practice. Our medicine is a form of social insurance, our medical
policy based on prevention. We are not interested in profit, only
service.”
The Russians had been kind and had grasped very quickly any improvement
suggested to them, even accepting criticism with great tolerance. Aware
of this, when Dr. Kaminsky paused for questions, Grant inquired about
doctors entering private practice.
“As Russia builds up public health work,” was the answer, “more doctors
will be able to find room for private practice if they so desire.”
Sherwood Eddy slipped me a note. “Here’s your opportunity to bring up
birth control.”
I took my cue. “Has Russia a population policy? Has she formulated any
program for the rate of increase of her people?”
The audience stirred as though I had hurled a grenade. The interpreter
leaped to his feet and shrieked, “Malthusianism! We will not have
Malthusianism here! We do not need it. Do you think or imply that Soviet
Russia has to advance Malthusian ideas? We can have all the children we
want and Russia can do with twice the population she now has.” He went
on and on.
After waiting a few moments for the air to clear, I continued, “I have
asked Dr. Kaminsky a simple question which I will repeat. I said nothing
about Malthusianism. But I should like to know whether Russia has a
population policy. She has had five- and even ten-year plans for
agriculture and manufacture and everything she is making. But what has
she done about the most important issue today—population, its growth and
distribution?”
Fischer was whispering to Dr. Kaminsky, evidently telling him what I
wanted to know. The doctor replied, “If I understood correctly, you are
asking if there is any policy from the biological or economic point of
view.”
“I am asking whether Russia, in planning her industries, has any plan
also as to the eventual control of families. I know you have much
freedom for women and a fine technique for abortions. To us that is
extremely significant, because after a woman has been aborted she
returns to the same conditions and becomes pregnant again. Four hundred
thousand abortions a year indicate women do not want to have so many
children; in my opinion it is a cruel method of dealing with the problem
because abortion, no matter how well done, is a terrific nervous strain
and an exhausting physical hardship.”
Dr. Kaminsky’s answer was not encouraging. “There is no question as to
the increase of population. There is no policy as to the question of
biological restrictions; on the contrary there is a policy of increasing
the population. For six years we have had a great shortage, not only of
skilled workers, but of labor in general.”
Obviously, I was not a particularly welcome visitor.
By chance I was fortunate enough to encounter again Dr. Marthe
Ruben-Wolf, who with her husband and children had escaped from Nazi
Germany and was then at the head of a Moscow abortorium. Because of her
wide experience in Germany, where clinics had been under municipal
guidance, she was one of the few Communists who was sane on the subject
of population. She very kindly helped me with some of my interviews.
Any woman in Russia who requested it was entitled to abortion on
application to a doctor. She was told of the dangers, warned it might
result in sterility, charged about two dollars and a half. We talked to
about fifty patients who had already been there three days. None had
temperatures. They were very jolly and going home that afternoon to rest
for another week or two. Then they would go back to work with no
deduction in wages. Though some of these women had had five abortions in
two years and one had had eight, they could not sing too highly the
praises of their country for allowing the operations. When I asked
whether they would not prefer to have some information as to how to
avoid further ones by protecting themselves from pregnancy, each and all
replied, “We have no such thing. We hear of it, but we have nothing.
Russia is too poor. We hope she will soon get it.”
In only one place did I see a clinic in the sense that we use the word
here, and that was in Moscow where Dr. Kabanova had sixty women the
afternoon we viewed it. Great credit is also due Madame Lebedova who
organized the original establishment of the Institutes for the
Protection of Motherhood and Childhood, laid down the principles to be
followed, and persisted until they had been embodied in a definite
program.
Dr. Abram B. Genss, assistant director, was in charge of contraceptive
supplies and the administration of birth control, such as it was. He was
antagonistic, disagreeable, unpleasant, shouting “Malthusianism” into my
ears more times in one hour than I had heard it before in twenty years.
The methods in the Moscow clinic were antiquated, and I suggested
sending a physician to instruct them, but my proposal was not
acceptable.
I considered Russia’s situation very serious. Her population was a
matter of mathematics; it had increased some fifty million since the
downfall of the Empire. Unless she looked ahead and educated her people
in the problems which arose out of population, within two generations
she would find herself with the same differential birth rate then
existing in England and the United States. It would, however, have much
more tragic consequences since it would lower the augmentation of the
capable, skilled, shock troops of industry, the idealists and active,
selfless workers, and would multiply from the bottom unskilled,
ignorant, dull-witted workers, the superstitious element which even the
greatest efforts of a Soviet dictatorship running at top speed could not
pull up and out of their evolutional environment.
I really began to see Russia under another guise after we stepped on the
train from Moscow to Gorky, the former Nizhni Novgorod. Around the big,
city hotels vendors had been trying to dispose of soft, warm sables and
gold-embroidered altar pieces evidently reft from churches, asking good
prices for them. But now the peasant women offered tea cozies, wooden
boxes, carved and painted, dolls, leather, brass, knickknacks for the
tourist, quite unlike anything obtainable elsewhere in Europe, and
always, of course, Russian blouses.
The side-wheel steamer _Kommunistka_, small but comfortable, was waiting
to carry us down the Volga to Stalingrad. Our party occupied practically
all available cabins, but hundreds of Russians were jammed on the decks.
At some points the river was a mile wide as it slid between flat
landscapes, limitless as far as the eye could reach. Often we overtook
rafts of logs, some at least a quarter of a mile long, each bearing a
diminutive house where the captain and his family lived. You could see
the children scampering back and forth and the crew pushing it leisurely
into the current.
We were four days in transit, passing many villages and a few
towns—Kazan, Samara, and Saratov. I do not remember the cities clearly.
Some places are indelible in your mind; others amount to very little. If
you are searching for something and do not find it, the scene vanishes.
At every stop men and women accompanied by children and baskets of
belongings were collected in hundreds. They had come a week or more
early to make sure of catching the boat, spending the nights on the
ground, subsisting on a loaf of bread, a tomato, or a cucumber. Their
children were taken care of in the station crèche, bathed, dressed in
fresh clothing, taught, directed in play, delivered to the parents just
before the _Kommunistka_ landed.
Then came the mad scramble. It was like the old days on Ellis Island
when the peasants from Europe arrived, thousands of them, carrying huge
bundles on their heads, shoving and rushing and jabbering in strange
tongues, attempting to squeeze in. You wondered how so many people could
ever get on board. They had no comforts, no room to sleep such as we.
They appeared stark and hungry, while we had marvelous food, in fact too
much of it. Any American planning to lose weight in Russia was badly
disappointed.
Stalingrad, near the mouth of the Volga, was Russia’s greatest
industrial city. Here I saw a hotel which was going up in front and
falling down behind with about equal rapidity; the building material was
lying in the streets. In the one in which we lodged we had to dodge
spigots. Plumbing had been laid on all over the country, but the stream
from any tap never by any chance landed where it was intended to. You
approached cautiously, not knowing whether it would get you in the eye,
in the nose, or shoot over your shoulder and hit your suitcase. The
bathroom had no lock, and the attendant insisted it was his job to help
patrons take a bath. I pushed on one side of the door; he on the other.
I won.
At Stalingrad, as everywhere I had been before, I was looking for
Russian contraceptive methods, but having been discouraged both by Dr.
Kaminsky and Dr. Genss, I went at it rather carefully. When I visited
the impressive new hospital I asked the superintendent, who was a
gynecologist and spoke good English, whether he gave contraceptive
advice.
“I do not, but we have a department of consultation.”
“May I see it?” I had already surveyed about fifteen such, where I had
found nothing save exhibits on the wall.
“It’s just across the road.”
“Will you go with me?” I asked. “Elsewhere it’s been hard to get
information.”
He agreed readily. As we entered, an attendant was displaying lengthy
diagrams to some tourists being shepherded through, and telling them
birth control was taught in hospitals throughout Russia. Someone I knew
came up to me. “This is wonderful, Mrs. Sanger, the people are being
taught birth control by the Government.”
The posters were there to prove this, but the consultation room itself
was locked. “Who is in charge here?” demanded the superintendent. “I’ve
been sending patients over. Who takes care of them?”
“I do sometimes,” a woman assistant volunteered. She let us into the
room. There were the same cases I had seen everywhere, probably
untouched since 1925, the articles within moldy and cracked.
“What do you use?” I asked.
“We have nothing. We’ve asked and asked Moscow, but we get nothing.”
The superintendent was much embarrassed; he inquired how long it had
been since supplies had come.
“Two years.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know.”
“Well, what about the patients I send over here?”
“We just tell them to go home and wait. We have nothing for them.”
From Stalingrad we took the train to Ordzonikidze, the beginning of the
Georgian Military Highway through the Caucasus to Tiflis. After the
usual breakfast of Russian tea, black bread, and fresh caviar, which I
found delicious, we climbed into four open-topped char-à-bancs, filling
them to capacity. Enormous trucks came behind with our luggage. For
about two hours we rolled along by the side of the river Terek, which
was running dark and going so fast that the only thing I could think of
was the streams from Swiss glaciers, but instead of being ice-green,
this was muddy, splashing up on the road. The guides told us there had
been a two-day, torrential rain, the worst the Caucasus had ever known.
About ten we stopped to stretch our legs at a village. Groups of lusty
mountaineers stared at us, grinning good-humoredly as though we were as
odd as any freaks in a circus. They gave us cheese and bread; some of us
bought wine and tea, not knowing when we might leave. After three hours
we were still at the village when finally men with great high hats and
military-looking, astrakhan capes rode up on horseback and spoke to our
guides who, not being Georgian, had difficulty divining they were trying
to say our cars could not pass.
We thought it was just like the Russians to fuss about a few little
obstacles, and said there must be some way to get through. Off we went,
and our drivers were magnificent. With the stubbornness of tractors we
plunged across streams and over rocks; when trees blocked the road, they
lifted the trunks, branches and all. We drove on and on, slowly, and at
last, towards five o’clock, came to a spot where there was nothing
before us—nothing but the mountain side sheer to the swirling water.