IN A “PROPAGANDA HALL”
I spent two weeks in Ekaterinburg, and passed most of that time in the
town, where I saw many interesting things and met some terrible men,
the most terrible of them all being Yurovsky, the murderer of the Tsar.
I had lived in Ekaterinburg previously, first in 1918 when the Czechs
were there, and again in 1919 when Kolchak’s troops and a battalion of
the Hampshire Regiment occupied it. On both these occasions it had been
a very busy place, the railway station being blocked with staff trains,
most of which might be briefly described as _bordels ambulants_; the
station platform, a local Piccadilly in more senses than one, being a
favourite place of assignation, and always crowded with officers and
ladies; the streets filled with soldiers, horses, cabs, and the swift
motor-cars of great, brass Generals; the shops and eating-houses full of
food; the market-place crowded with farmers’ carts. In fact it was, like
any other army base, a town of good cheer, overcrowding, khaki, “hustle,”
horses, and sin. Boisterous, imperfect, with streaks of religion and
bursts of philanthropy, it was, with all its faults, human.
The Ekaterinburg that met my eyes on February 19, 1920, was completely
changed. Trying to describe that change to myself in one word I meant
to say “Bolshevism,” but found myself saying “Puritanism.” For between
the two there are the most astonishing resemblances, perhaps because
extremes meet, perhaps because the one is as pre-Christian as the other
is post-Christian. I know that it ought not to be so, and that Lenin
should be seated on a heap of skulls quaffing human blood, while Trotsky
should be engaged nightly in bacchanalian revels, but, as a matter of
fact, Lenin leads as austere a life as Oliver Cromwell, while Trotsky is
as busy as Lloyd George.
The platform of Ekaterinburg station was no longer a promenade, and only
people who had business to do came there. It was sometimes deserted
altogether save for three grim and watchful figures thirty paces
apart—Trotsky’s janissaries. One great hall in the station had been
turned into a typhus hospital, and another great hall into a “Propaganda
Point.” The station walls were covered with advertisements, not
advertisements of the nerve tablet and hair tonic order, but Bolshevik
propaganda advertisements. At each end of the platform was painted a huge
notice ordering, in imperative language, all O.C.’s to bring their men
without fail to the “Propaganda Point,” and to apply there for newspapers
and “literature,” which would be given free. It was like the notices one
would expect to find in a Cromwellian Army, directing the pious soldiers
to some quiet tent wherein the hungry soul might find manna in the
outpourings of Master Zerubbabel the chaplain or Grace-be-here the holy
corporal.
These “Propaganda Points” exist in every station along the Siberian line
and are very remarkable institutions. The largest hall in the station
building is always selected and is generally presided over by a C 3
Red soldier who has a tiny office apart. Seated there on a collection
of Bolshevik newspapers, he wrestles in his spare moments with the
voluminous volumes of Karl Marx, points out to the young the damnable and
pernicious heresies of Kautsky, Axelrod, Martov, and Haase, or engages in
edifying conversation about Lenin’s latest encyclical with wise, ungodly
old Communists from the local Soviet.
Over the entrance of the Ekaterinburg hall there was painted in large
letters the text, “If any man will not work, neither let him eat,” while
inside one saw on every wall the well-known appeal of Karl Marx—“Workers
of the world unite! You have a world to gain and only your chains to
lose.”
The pictures and cartoons with which the whole interior was covered from
floor to ceiling might be divided into several groups: (1) Those praising
the Red Army and calculated to foster a military spirit; (2) those
condemning capitalists, priests, and militarists; (3) those flattering
the workman and promising him the overlordship of the world; (4) those
exciting anger against foreign countries, particularly France and
England. In none of the Propaganda matter was there the faintest evidence
of a belief in Christianity, in Judaism, or in the supernatural. All
these flaring cries might be summarized in the phrase, “There is no God
but Communism, and Lenin is the prophet of Communism.” There were appeals
to the railway workmen not to go on strike, but to remember that by
striking they would inflict a deadly blow on democracy, and that, though
their present discomforts were great, there was a good time coming.
There were charts showing the parts of machine-guns and the way to make
bombs, and these were generally accompanied by explanatory letterpress
and by appeals to the workmen to drill and arm and study the mechanism of
their rifles, so that no power on earth could disarm them and force them
back again into the old servitude. Side by side with these were charts
explaining the construction of the latest agricultural machinery, and
exhorting the peasantry to make themselves proficient agriculturists.
There were numerous exhortations to study and many denunciations of
ignorance and illiteracy as unpardonable crimes which would only lead to
the capitalist yoke being again fastened on the necks of the workers. The
attacks on religion consisted of caricatures showing monks and priests
making money out of holy relics and squandering that money privately on
revels and debauchery. The priest was sometimes represented as a huge
leering spider weaving his web around the _muzhik_ and his wife and
children; and these anti-clerical cartoons were generally accompanied by
satirical doggerel from the pen of the Soviet’s principal poet, a Moscow
Communist who writes a great deal of coarse, satirical verse under the
pen-name of Ivan Bedny (Poor John). All this anti-clerical propaganda
would obtain the unqualified approval of the English Protestant Alliance,
and I would suggest that these two great institutions should get into
touch with one another for an exchange of “literature.” Many huge
coloured cartoons were devoted to Kolchak and Denikin, and were mostly
vulgar but effective. One represented Kolchak seated in an intoxicated
condition—as a matter of fact, the “Supreme Ruler” drank rather too
much at times—on an imperial throne with savage-looking Generals and fat
business-men bowing in front of him and a corpulent, bibulous priest
blessing him. In the background stood French and British officers.
Another represented red-faced, bull-necked, brutal-looking officers of
Denikin shooting women and children in the corner of a ruined cottage.
The workman was always represented as young, brawny, triumphant, in
shirt sleeves, neck and arms bare, a hammer in his hand, and the world
at his feet. The triumph of the Red Army was exhibited, not without a
rough art, in a series of cartoons, some showing the Red soldiers winding
through frozen steppes, others showing them charging madly through the
smoke of battle. And always over their bayonets the Revolutionary banner
waved. In one double picture a number of bloated capitalists, smirking
priests, and purple-nosed Generals were shown in the act of binding the
Russian workman in chains. In the other section of the same picture the
workman was seen breaking the chains, scattering his would-be masters
right and left, and jumping on the stomach of the fattest of them. The
“elimination” of the landlord was represented in a cartoon containing
many sections. In the early sections we had the old days of serfdom, the
slave-owning landlord being represented as lording it over his human
cattle whip in hand, while an unctuous and subservient priest stood by
apparently lost in admiration at the greatness of the squire; in the
latter sections we had the landlord running for his life accompanied
by the parish priest; and, finally, a prosperous and contented
peasantry owning everything in sight, and provided with a palatial and
well-attended Communist school, but with no public-house or church in the
village.
Some posters dealt with British rule in India—soldiers shooting down
Hindoos or blowing them from the mouths of cannon, Sahibs in solar topees
ploughing with natives instead of with horses. The Bolshevik expert
on Irish affairs is a Comrade Kerzhentsev, who was in Ireland during
the Easter rebellion, and has published a number of pamphlets on “The
Irish Revolution” and the Irish question generally. Being a very able
journalist and head of the Rosta (Russian Socialist Telegraph Agency),
he makes great capital out of the present state of things in Ireland,
though he realizes that the Orange workman of Belfast is far nearer to
him in many ways than the Catholic peasant of Tipperary. He has probably
inspired also some Irish posters, in one of which Ireland is pointed out
as a striking example of the cruelty of capitalism. The main facts of the
famine of ’48 are given, that there was food enough in the country to
feed all the common people, but that so much of it was exported to pay
the rent that, owing to hunger and emigration, the population fell from
eight millions to four millions.
An almost religious tone was lent to this Propaganda Hall by the pictures
relating to Karl Marx. One showed a sinking ship labelled “Capitalism”
in which all humanity was perishing, save only one man, representing
presumably Bolshevik Russia, who was standing on a raft in the form
of an open book, across which is written the name “Karl Marx.” If one
substituted “Holy Bible,” this picture would be quite suitable for
hanging up in Mr. John Kensit’s “Protestant Book Shop” in St. Paul’s
Churchyard. There were also numerous busts of Karl Marx, looking very
patriarchal in long hair and beard, but the most prominent object was
generally the Red Star of Bolshevism, a huge construction of red glass
with a light inside fixed high up near the ceiling, and throwing a
baleful light on the great crowd always gathered underneath in the
evenings.
These crowds attended the service of song and “instruction” which went
on daily from about 5 o’clock to midnight, and which was certainly very
popular, for I never found it possible to get anything but standing
room. The best local singers and musicians, as well as good musicians
from Russia, performed gratis on a platform at the end of the room where
there was a piano and an orchestra. Not only were revolutionary songs
given; classical songs by Pushkin and Lermontov were also heard, as well
as music by Chaikovsky and other great composers. Recitations, lectures
on art, education, Socialism, typhus, and every conceivable subject lent
variety to the entertainment. Meanwhile “Comrades” who wanted to write
letters or to study at leisure had the use of a reading-room in which
notepaper, envelopes, and some books of reference were available.
The chief characteristics of Bolshevik Propaganda are dogmatic
affirmation and constant repetition, but the Faith of Lenin seems to
be spread even more by contagion than by reasoning. A peculiar sort of
intoxication seems to be produced in Communist crowds. A peculiar sort
of atmosphere seems to be created; and, in that atmosphere, I have heard
reasonable and educated Englishmen and Americans use in Moscow language
so “advanced” that it almost seemed due to demoniacal possession. I
have sometimes wondered, indeed, if there be not a demon whose special
function it is to inflame crowds of men to perpetrate atrocities that no
individual in the mob would be so inhuman as to commit. “Where two or
three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.”
May not the devil be able to say that also? It seems to be fairly well
established that when a group of men collect together with the object of
holding intercourse with disembodied intelligences they sometimes attain
their object. Why should not a conclave of master-criminals, whose hands
are against all humanity, evoke in like manner, by the mere fact of their
coming together, Angels of Darkness, Enemies of Man?
The streets of Red Ekaterinburg were very much quieter than the streets
of White Ekaterinburg had been, and nearly everybody wore civilian dress.
For the first time in five years I found myself in a town where one could
walk about for hours without catching a glimpse of khaki.
I have already alluded to the decorations in honour of Trotsky’s arrival.
These took the form of Red flags _passim_, of many triumphal arches
made of wood covered with red paper and with boughs of pine-trees,
of many pictures of Lenin and Trotsky on the walls, and of all sorts
of other pictures, as well as a vast amount of bunting, evergreens,
transparencies, and coloured cloth on all the house-fronts. The
entablature of the arch near the station was covered on each side with
a huge picture twenty feet square. The painting on one side represented
Lenin and Trotsky going in a trolley along a railway track from an old
burning town to a new and prosperous-looking city, the former being
capitalist, the latter proletarian civilization. On the other side Lenin
was represented as driving a railway engine labelled “Progress,” which
three foreign officers, English, French, and American, were vainly trying
to stop by the offer of a bag of gold to the engine-driver, who was
apparently determined, nevertheless, to run them down. There were similar
representations on all the other arches and everywhere, in gigantic
letters, the war-cry of Bolshevism shouted at one—“Workers of the world,
unite!” If anything ever becomes true by constant repetition, this union
must soon take place, for it is a stereotyped heading on every issue of
every newspaper; it appears in about a dozen languages on some of the
Bolshevik paper money; it appears on all the propaganda matter and all
the Government stationery, and the good Bolshevik mother pastes it over
her child’s cradle as an American mother pastes “God Bless our Home” or
as a Catholic mother puts a picture of the Madonna or the Angel Guardian.
A Bolshevik official once said to me, “What an amount of Propaganda we
shall be able to do when we get enough paper!” But what an amount of
Propaganda will not they do when they get peace and begin to develop the
inexhaustible natural wealth of their country! Electric lights will then
print in gigantic letters on the midnight sky and electric signs will
flash from the house-tops, not the stirring message “Try Tapley’s Tea”
or “Drink Macpherson’s Whisky,” but “Workers of the world, unite! You
have a world to gain, and only your chains to lose!” Probably they will
then use in Communist and anti-Christian Propaganda throughout Moscow
and Petrograd as much electric power as is now employed on commercial
Propaganda in New York, Chicago, Paris, and London put together.
The former British Consulate, which had been converted into a Bolshevik
Government office, had broken out into a perfect eruption of decorations
with a picture of Lenin, framed in a wreath of evergreens, as the centre
of the scheme. The French Consulate next door, which had been converted
into a Court of Justice, was similarly decorated and carried a picture
of Trotsky. Peter the Great had been knocked off his pedestal in the
centre of the town, and his place had been taken by a large marble head
of Karl Marx. Catherine the Great had also been deposed. In front of the
Cathedral was a great pyramidal erection of wood covered with red cloth
bearing the inscription “To Labour.” It was adorned with brass plaques
representing half-naked figures toiling in mines, forges, and factories,
these figures being so well designed that I suspect the plaques must have
been taken from some museum. The house where the Tsar was murdered was
converted into an office of the Political Department, and bore a great
painting representing the Red Army charging through smoke and snow. The
square in front of this house had been called “Resurrection Place,” but
that name has now been changed to “The Square of National Vengeance,”
which shows that the Bolsheviks, who ought to know, entertain none of
those doubts about the murder of the Tsar which some people in this
country still harbour. The street that runs north and south of that
square is called Karl Liebknecht Street, and the other principal street,
in which the municipal theatre is situated, is called Lenin Street. All
the remaining streets and squares have also had their names changed,
being now called after prominent revolutionists of the past or the
present (even Stenka Razin, the Jack Cade of Russia, being commemorated),
or after gifted though impecunious writers like Mamontov-Sibiriak.
Formerly there were few Government institutions and no clubs in
Ekaterinburg, but now there are whole streets consisting of nothing else.
Instead of promoting business, however, this multiplication of Government
offices has killed it. The dead hand of Government control has stifled
every kind of enterprise. An engineer employed by the Soviet told me
that on one occasion, in order to put through a matter of urgent public
interest, he had had to visit five different institutions, including a
Government office dealing with railway work, a Government office dealing
with Ural industries, and a “professional union” of industrial workers.
The British public had some experience during the war of how a Government
runs work that had previously been left to private enterprise; but
the muddle in Russia is a thousand times greater, and causes extreme
exasperation even among the marvellously patient and long-suffering
people of that country, who have been accustomed for centuries to the
most exaggerated forms of officialism.
One man told me that if he lost a button off his trousers he would have
first of all to get a permit from the “house Committee.” Then he would
have to bring that permit to a Commissar. Then he would have to go to
a Government department which would give him an order on a Government
store. Then he would wait all day in a queue outside that Government
store only to find, when his turn came, that it had given out all its
buttons, and that he would have to go to a similar store at the other end
of the town and wait all day in a queue there. A button in the offertory
is consequently a source of unmitigated joy to the impecunious Russian
and Polish priests, for a whole plateful of the paper money and postage
stamps which are given liberally by the Faithful would not buy as much as
a packet of cigarettes. I tried to get twopennyworth of Epsom salts, a
very cheap and common drug in the Urals, but I found that I had first to
go to so many widely separated departments that I gave up the attempt in
despair, and asked a friendly _feldsher_ to get it for me. The _feldsher_
told me, however, that it was no use his trying owing to the complexity
of the process; and I had consequently to go without. These are not
exceptional cases; they are the rule; and I often told the Bolsheviks
that if a Government like that were established in England, the workers
themselves or their wives would sweep it away in twenty-four hours.
There is even a strong tendency for these establishments to increase and
multiply in the way we were familiar with in England during the war, and
there are even _liaison_ establishments to enable different departments
to keep in touch with one another.
The number of “professional unions” is also very great. There are unions
of railway mechanics, metal-workers, fitters and joiners, plumbers, and
many others, but they are different to our trade unions inasmuch as they
are absolutely powerless.
Most of the houses which are not occupied by Government departments and
professional unions are used as clubs for workmen (who do not work) and
as assembly halls for “the League of Communist Youth,” a widely spread
organization which the Soviet Government encourages very much, as it is
extremely anxious to get hold of the rising generation in order to make
them grow up with Bolshevik ideas. One sometimes sees workmen lolling
back at their ease in the deep armchairs of a palatial club, while a
famished _bourgeois_ member who formerly dozed contentedly on one of
those armchairs stands outside in the snow, and flattens his nose against
the cold window-pane in an attempt to see what is going on inside, and
perhaps in the hope of deriving some stimulus from the sight of the
savoury viands. And if he wanders about the streets too late at night, he
risks being run over by the “workmen” returning in their swift sleighs
from the theatre where they get free seats, while he cannot get a seat
at all. The largest Club in town is for private soldiers, and is called
the Trotsky Club. It has a large picture of Trotsky hung outside, and
Colonels, Generals, and Staff officers are, I presume, ineligible for
membership, and must amuse themselves as best they can at home or in less
sumptuous resorts. Others are named after less known Bolshevik leaders.
Some children’s homes, hospitals, and public reading-rooms are called
after Mrs. Lenin and other women Bolsheviks.
As soon as the Reds entered the town everything became the property
of the State, and one of the Bolshevik officials gave me a humorous
description of how he had walked into one of the best houses on Karl Marx
Street and “bagged” it, afterwards getting a large consignment of extra
furniture by applying to the Quartering Committee, which had sent him an
alabaster table, a Japanese silk screen, a fine sofa, and a miscellaneous
collection of expensive chairs. He had no idea where most of this loot
had come from, but suspected that some of it had been taken from the
villa of a wealthy German runaway called Schmidt.
I made the acquaintance of the principal Bolshevik in the town, a big,
bearded man of about thirty who looked like an Australian squatter, but
who had been a foreman in one of the Ural factories. He had, of course,
been in jail repeatedly for his revolutionary activity under the Tsar’s
Government; had lost three of his fingers in the factory, and had got
eightpence compensation for each finger; and had been for two years
fighting against Kolchak. In America or Canada he would have started as
a successful pioneer and would have ended as a self-made trust magnate
worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, for he knew all about minerals and
was full of enterprise. The rule of Nicholas the Second had converted
him, however, into an embittered and dangerous revolutionary; and the
equally pernicious rule of Tsar Lenin has now made him an incurable
politician, and deprived the Ural industries for ever of his services. He
was selected by the Gubernia Soviet to represent them in the All-Russia
Soviet, and I afterwards met him in Moscow.
This man, whom I shall call Ivanov, showed me all over Ekaterinburg, and
I was amused at the way he did it. “There,” he said, “is the restaurant
where Kolchak’s officers used to drink; it is now a school.... There
is a villa which an old General presented to the Tsar; it is now an
orphanage. A wealthy mineowner lived here; it is now a barrack”; and so
on. Entering the fine Museum we saw portraits of local celebrities. “Most
of these will be pulled down,” he said. “See that man with the sword? He
was a sugar merchant who bribed right and left in Court circles, until he
got a civil rank corresponding to the rank of a General in the Army. He
prepared a great reception for Alexander the Second when he came here;
hence all those decorations. That man with the spectacles? Oh, he was a
great geologist, and a poor man from start to finish. _His_ portrait will
remain.”
Inside the Museum he found an opportunity at every step to show his
hatred of the old order of things which he had helped to crush. There
was, in a glass case, an exhibit of ancient Court dresses side by side
with an exhibit of peasant costumes. He sneered at the Court dresses, and
pointed out the comparative superiority of the peasant costumes from the
point of view of comfort as well as from the artistic standpoint. In
another glass case was a collection of objects dating from the days of
the serfs, and placed there not by the Bolsheviks, but in the time of the
Empire. Among them were iron fetters, a heavy iron collar for the neck,
a whip for scourging the slaves, and various instruments of torture. His
face grew black as he looked at them. “Can you wonder,” said he, “that
the Ural miners have no great affection for the capitalists and the
Tsars? The first miners in this town lived like brute beasts and worked
in chains.”
If there are many Russians like him, I do not think that the Imperial
Government will ever come back. Such Russians support Bolshevism,
however, not because they like it, but because they think it is a
stronger bulwark against imperialism than Kerensky’s Government was. They
say that if the S.R. Government had lasted a year the Tsar would have
been back again on his throne before the end of 1918. By what they put up
with now from Lenin, one can measure their detestation of Nicholas.
At a meeting of the Provincial Soviet, over which Ivanov presided, I
sat in my peasant’s sheepskin coat at the reporters’ table, and tried,
with a success so great as to be almost disquieting, to look as plebeian
as possible. There were some things that I liked about that meeting,
though I would not go so far as to recommend their adoption by our own
Legislature. In the first place, the speeches were short, never over ten
minutes; and in the second place, musical selections by a brass band
were played between the speeches. Of the selections played, one was the
_Marseillaise_, one the _Internationale_, and one the lugubrious funeral
march which the Russian revolutionists have played since 1905 in honour
of their comrades who have fallen in the fight against the Tsardom.
The election of delegates which took place at this meeting was a farce.
To put the case in a nutshell, the ruling clique named its candidates
and nobody dared to oppose them for fear of becoming a marked man. All
Bolshevik elections, from those for the village Soviet all the way up to
those for the All-Russia Soviet, are of this character; and the election
of non-Bolsheviks is rendered almost impossible, not only on account
of this practice, but also because no candidate who is not a Communist
can get any printing done, can address any meetings, can write in any
newspaper, or can get a pass on the railway.
Owing to the nationalization of all private libraries, there are some
thirteen or fourteen new libraries in the town, but all are for the
Proletariat, and a mere _bourgeois_ like myself had no more chance of
being admitted to one of them than a chimney-sweep would have of being
admitted in his work-a-day costume to the Athenæum Club. Consequently I
had to wander about the streets, and soon I began to get quite annoyed
with the glowing eulogies of Communism which glared at me in print and
in paint from every wall and every arch of triumph. They seemed like
Bolshevism itself, to consist only of great promises and no performance.
The town contained, it is true, many Communist eating-houses, but they
were only for Communists. And a disagreeable, workhouse appearance they
all had. Exactly the same in every respect save that some bore the sign
“Soviet Government Eating-house: For Adults”; and others, the sign
“Soviet Government Eating-house: For Children.” The children, by the
way, are well fed, both in Ekaterinburg and in Moscow, but, as I shall
hereafter explain, this is all part of a large and cunning scheme to get
them from their mothers and make them regard themselves as children of
the State, and not bound by ties of peculiar affection to any man and
woman.
All the adult Bolsheviks who have been in these feeding-places detest
them cordially, and say that the food is very bad. I did manage to get
into one myself, though I had nothing to eat in it; and the impression
it made on me was painful. This nationalization of restaurants would
never be tolerated by the British working-man, and I am not sure that
even the British tramp would like it. To feed in one of these places
makes one feel like a pig being fed by a master. Government employees in
all countries tend to be superior and uncivil; having been a Government
employee myself for the last five years, I can therefore understand that
tendency. To buy a postage stamp from a Government employee is hard
enough at times for the buyer, but to have to take, not buy, your _hors
d’œuvre_ and soup, entrée, joint, sweets, and coffee from such a superior
person is the last word in discomfort. Such a system would brutalize
any people. The brutal would become more brutal, and the rest would
hunger-strike and die of starvation. The abolition of charity might be a
good thing, though I am afraid that the poor will be always with us, but
the abolition of hospitality and of the home is inhuman.
Repelled by the blank, barrack-like exterior of the Soviet
feeding-troughs, I tried to buy food elsewhere, but I found it utterly
impossible. Again and again was I attracted by painted and temptingly
illustrated signs dating from Tsarist times, and telling that bread and
butter, sugar and coffee, honey and milk and jam, were to be had within.
I always found a locked and empty shop, broken glass in the windows,
broken bottles on the floor, an inch thick of dust on the counter, and a
spider’s cobweb on the rusty scales. When this had happened the hundredth
time I permanently lost all faith in Bolshevism as a sane Governmental
system. But being now ravenously hungry I determined to try sundry humble
little places, where I had formerly bought excellent bread and matchless
Siberian butter. Not one of them was open, nor had any of them apparently
been open for six months. All trade stopped when the Reds entered the
town, just as all trade stopped in Pompeii when it was overwhelmed by
Vesuvius.
It was not that the Red Army had eaten up everything, or that all the
food had been sent to European Russia, for no food had been sent across
the Urals since the Bolsheviks came to Ekaterinburg, which lies close to
one of the richest agricultural districts in the world; and, though there
had been a White Army in the town when I was there last, the civilians
could nevertheless get plenty of food. The reason for this stoppage
lies in the Socialist theory which insists that the State should feed
everybody, and that there should be no private restaurants, no shops,
and no middle class at all. This kills all private enterprise as surely
as a tree is killed by the cutting away of its roots. I had to go into
this question very carefully, and the results of my investigations are
embodied in a series of reports I made to the British Government and
which would be too long to give in a book of this nature, so that I
shall confine myself here to one instance of how the Communist theory
works. When I was in Ekaterinburg there were thousands of tons of frozen
fish at Tobolsk, but they were left to rot there because the Government
had no time to distribute them, and because no individual would do so.
An enterprising man would, under any other sort of régime, have hired
sleighs, brought these fish in forty-eight hours to Ekaterinburg, and
sold them there to the advantage of the population and of himself. But,
under Bolshevism, no private individual would do so, as (1) he would
be stopped by the local Extraordinary Commission at Tobolsk; (2) if
he overcame difficulty No. 1, his fish would be seized by the local
Extraordinary Commission at Ekaterinburg; (3) if he overcame difficulties
1 and 2, the money he got for the fish would be taken from him and he
would be imprisoned for “speculation.” This triple barrier prevented
anything being done by private initiative, and consequently the fish all
rotted. The same objections applied to trade in grain and every other
kind of foodstuffs. There existed, it is true, a Government Provisioning
Department, but I know that in Moscow it is extremely corrupt, so that
I assume that it is even more corrupt in Ekaterinburg. Farmers will
not grow grain if it is to be handed over to Government Departments
which do not pay them for it, and which persecute and imprison them if
they make any complaint. The peasants will not rebel, but the passive
resistance of this great dark mass of over one hundred millions causes
profound disquiet to the Soviet Government, much greater disquiet than
that caused by all the Allies put together. The _muzhik_ is the sphinx of
the situation. Lenin storms at him and calls him a capitalist. Trotsky
takes his sons and makes Red soldiers of them, and sends them back to the
villages to preach the Gospel of Karl Marx. The sphinx smiles and says
nothing, but Lenin likes neither that smile nor that silence.
There was a market-place in Ekaterinburg to which some peasants came with
their carts, but they only sold cranberries, a very limited number of
potatoes and carrots, and occasionally some butter and cheese. The crowds
round their carts were so great that I was never able to buy anything,
but, finally, after a week’s search, I discovered a little shop, where
one could buy butter if one entered a secret door and traversed dark
passages and observed the precautions generally taken by thirsty people
in America. As I was having quite enough adventure as it was, I did not
investigate this mystery, but turned my attention to a sort of booth
about the size of a newspaper kiosk, where a frightened old man sold
butter and cheese, which he weighed with the exquisite care of a jeweller
weighing diamonds. As his whole stock did not consist of more than six
pounds of butter and twelve pounds of cheese per day, and as he charged
R.1,200 for a pound of butter, he could hardly be said to go on the rule
of “small profits, quick returns.” In Moscow, I might add, butter fetched
R.3,000 a pound.