THE RED TSAR AND HIS GUESTS
On sneaking into the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs one day, in order
to get the address of a foreign journalist then in Moscow, I ran into a
Commissar who was specially charged with English journalistic affairs,
who knew of my capture at Krasnoyarsk, and who had been anxiously
awaiting my arrival in Moscow. I had a bad quarter of an hour explaining
why I had not reported earlier, but I finally succeeded in shifting all
the blame for the delay on to the shoulders of the Commissar in whose
train I had travelled, and without whose permission I could not, I
pleaded, call on Comrade Chicherin.
This Press Commissar insisted on my moving at once from my railway
carriage to one of the guest-houses in which the Soviet Government
accommodates its foreign visitors. This building had formerly been
the residence of a German factory owner, and was situated in Mala
Khartonovskaya Street, near the Red Gate. I moved into it next day,
and some weeks later I was transferred to the Savoy Hotel, a similar
establishment.
This change in my fortunes introduced me to a new world, the underworld
of the Third International, an institution which aims frankly at the
overthrow of every Government in Europe, Asia, and America. Among
the guests was a Korean Committee which is working hard for the
independence of Korea, though it only contemplates the establishment
of a constitutional monarchy there, not of a Soviet. The head of the
Korean Committee is an intelligent and very pleasant young Korean called
Pak-oi, who was educated at Moscow University and speaks Russian well.
Under him are several other Koreans, as well as a Japanese correspondent
of the _Osaka Asahi_ who had been captured, like myself, in Siberia,
imprisoned in Moscow, and only released on promising to work against his
own country. He is now translating with Oriental placidity all sorts
of Propaganda matter for dissemination among the Japanese troops, and
this Propaganda is credited with having caused the desertion to the
Bolsheviks of about one hundred Japanese soldiers in Trans-Baïkalia
last spring. A Communist newspaper is printed in Japanese by the Third
International, and is periodically dispatched to the Far East. Another
Japanese journalist, Mr. Husie, representing the _Osaka Mainichi_, came
from Reval with a safe-conduct signed by Chicherin, but the Extraordinary
Commission, which insisted that he was a spy and had been living in 1915
with the Japanese military attaché at Petrograd, made a great effort
to arrest him, but had not succeeded in doing so up to the time I left
Moscow, owing to Chicherin’s opposition. The correspondent in question
was kept under domiciliary arrest, however, and, for all the news he got,
might as well have remained in Esthonia.
There were some English and American correspondents, while, in other
parts of the city, were several Italian newspapermen, a Rumanian
journalist, and two or three French journalists. One of the latter, who
had formerly been very _bourgeois_ and militarist, had been purposely
compromised by the publication of a pro-Bolshevik letter addressed to the
French President which was found during a search made at his house, and
which had only been written, I think, as “a blind.” Unable now to put
himself right with his own people, and unable to return to France, he is
employed by the Bolshevik Foreign Office in the composition of Communist
literature intended for French consumption, but he is carefully watched,
at the same time, by the secret agents of the Reds. Several English
correspondents have been compromised in the same way by the unauthorized
publication in Moscow of pro-Bolshevik articles which they wrote for
America, but which were distributed by the Reds as Propaganda matter
among the English and American troops at Archangel. If a correspondent
cannot be bought, he is compromised in the eyes of his own countrymen,
and thus thrown entirely into the hands of the enemy.
Captain Sadul, formerly of the French Military Mission, and now a Red
Commissar, was down in the south with the Army during my stay in Moscow,
but his brother, also a Bolshevik, had arrived from France. Professor
Barrakatula had come from India, and was assisted by a number of
Indians, who spoke Russian, in planning a revolt against British rule in
Hindustan. He worked in combination with an Afghan deputation dressed in
the military uniforms supplied to the Amir by the Indian Government, and
with a number of other Mohammedans from Persia, the Caucasus, Central
Asia, and Turkey. A Pan-Mohammedan Congress was held at the Foreign
Office in April, 1920, with the object of driving the English from India
and Persia, and of creating trouble in Turkey, and one of the fruits of
its deliberations was the attack on Persia which took place some months
later. The Bolsheviks are convinced that the British _raj_ in India
is undermined, and will soon go down with a crash; they are equally
convinced that chaos will soon prevail in Persia, Mesopotamia, and
Asiatic Turkey, not so much because the malcontents in those countries
are strong, as because (in their opinion) the English troops are tired
of war, and the English people will be unable and unwilling to make the
financial sacrifices necessary for the retention or reconquest of those
immense territories. Constantinople is an important centre of Bolshevik
activity, and an unusually energetic agent of the Soviet—Dr. Mansur,
I think, is his name—oscillates between that city and Buda-Pesth. In
the centre of this fiendish activity at Moscow, with Bolshevik agents
arriving daily by some subterranean route or with false passports, with
hourly announcements of strikes and Labour troubles all over the world,
with revolutionary leaders coming from the ends of the earth to do homage
to the Red flag which floats over the Kremlin, and to take counsel with
the successful Arch-conspirator who sits underneath it, I felt as if the
end of all things had already come. Cut off, like a leper, from all the
Governments of the world, Lenin is nevertheless in daily communication
with the most desperate and dangerous section of every people, and the
best passport to his presence-chamber is the brand of Cain. He receives
ambassadors not accredited by Presidents or Kings, but nevertheless
bearing terrible credentials from lawless associations which have sworn
to carry out to the letter his decrees of violence and blood. While
other rulers of States seek anxiously but in vain for indications which
point to the slackening of the storm, Lenin listens triumphantly to the
increasing fury of the tempest. Like a fiend in hell, instead of a man
born of woman, he gloats daily over the world’s ghastly chronicle of red
ruin and the breaking up of laws. To the ends of the earth he sends forth
envoys with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other, and nothing
delights him more than the reflection that these nuncios of revolution
contribute less to the general chaos than do the mad policies and blind
reprisals of his panic-stricken enemies.
In April last he received frequent reports from Tashkent, which is the
seat of a powerful organization, which is even now marshalling the
forces of disorder in Central Asia for a grand attack on India; and as
this organization complained that Bokhara was an obstacle in its path,
he decreed that Bokhara should be swept aside by a Red revolution, and
this has since been done. During the same month he sent envoys to the
Amir of Afghanistan with the object of concluding with that potentate a
treaty having for its aim, not peace and amity but the stirring up of
insurrections on the frontiers of Hindustan. He authorized Trotsky to
invade Khorasan, and to pour Red troops into Asia Minor so as to create
in that infernal Deep of unspeakable memories a Deep lower still.
One day he signed an agreement with the American I.W.W., as King George
might sign a treaty with France. Another day he received a deputation
of “the Russian Friends of American Freedom”—an Association of expelled
American Anarchists who aim at smashing the Government and the whole
social system of the United States—as President Wilson might receive
the heads of an Inter-Church movement. He dined in the ancient palace
of the Tsars with a group of powerful and dangerous Mohammedans, whose
object is to create chaos from Alexandria to Khartoum, and to deluge half
Asia with blood. And yet he looks a most harmless, _bourgeois_ person.
At the Ninth Communist Convention, which was the only public function
he attended during my stay in Moscow, he spoke freely, monotonously,
without the faintest trace of hesitation or nervousness, like the
chairman of a London Tea-House Company reading out an unsensational
annual report which most of his hearers know already. Dressed in rusty
black, with trousers which were somewhat baggy at the knees and a general
appearance of reasonableness and respectability, he looked at first
sight a safe, unpretentious, middle-class person in fairly comfortable
circumstances. His head was bald, but with a dull, mottled, and not a
shiny, billiard-ball hairlessness. His beard was scanty and reddish; his
eyes far apart, and with a cast in one of them; his cheek-bones high; his
face broad, and with a dim, disturbing suggestion of Asia, which half
prepared one for the monstrous theories he proceeded to set forth in his
matter-of-fact voice. For some reason or other very little of his speech
on this occasion appeared in the newspapers; perhaps because Russia was
at that moment seeking recognition by “capitalist” Governments. In one
brilliant passage, which was omitted, he declared himself unable to
describe precisely the form which the Soviet Government would assume
“until the volcanic explosions cease, and the smoke clears away, and we
can see the new shape into which the landscape has hardened.” According
to Trotsky, the Red Tsar often lights up a debate with unpremeditated
remarks like this, remarks in which the Commissars discover profound
and prophetic significance. But he discounts even his most terrible
sayings by the business-like evenness of his delivery, and by his habit
of handling pens and other objects on the table in front of him and
occasionally inserting his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, a
gesture which displays a comfortable and slightly protuberant abdomen.
Looking at him on such occasions without knowing who he was or what he
was talking about, one would feel inclined to say “Now, this is a safe,
reliable man giving utterance to reasonable things.”
Save that his sedentary life of the past two years has made him somewhat
stouter, Lenin has altered little in appearance since the day when
he presented himself at the Russian frontier near Torneo, shabby,
tired, and travel-stained, accompanied by a crowd of women and of
disreputable-looking men, at one moment on the point of being refused
admittance, and the next moment frantically organizing an anti-war
meeting among the Russian soldiers, and winning their applause by his
fierce denunciations of militarism. He takes so little care of himself
in the Kremlin that a deputation of peasants which once came to see him
insisted on sending him bread, butter, and eggs from their village;
and this is only a continuation of the life which he led in exile. An
intimate friend of his told me that when Lenin left his humble lodgings
in Paris for still humbler lodgings in Switzerland, his furniture fetched
only forty-five francs at an auction. A little-known side of Lenin’s
life is the domestic side. The Red Dictator is sincerely attached to his
wife, whose health is, however, very bad; and he is passionately fond of
children.
Despite his determination, when he entered Russia, of turning everything
upside down, doing all the things that a “capitalist” Government does not
do, and not doing anything which a “capitalist” Government does, he has
found that the laws of human nature are too much for him, and that he
is leading, outwardly, much the same kind of life as any conscientious,
hard-working, and respectable Tsar, and a very much more regular life
than was led by Peter the Great. His whole day is spent receiving
deputations, signing papers, presiding over cabinet meetings, and
getting through all the heavy routine business discharged by any King or
President. Fanaticism in his case has cast out fear, but his _entourage_
have as great and well-grounded an anxiety for his personal safety as
had ever the bodyguard of a Tsar for the safety of their master. The
display of military force on the occasion of the Convention I speak of
was as great as when Nicholas the Second opened the first Duma in the
Winter Palace. Lenin’s future, too, is more uncertain than was ever the
future of a Russian Emperor. With a wilderness of blood and horror behind
him, with a highly volcanic soil trembling beneath his feet, and with
clouds of inky blackness veiling his future, few human beings have ever
been enveloped in more tragic menace and mystery than this prosaic,
common-looking man. Outlawed by every Government, anathematized by every
Church, cursed by his millions of victims, he can never leave Russia
alive; he cannot stay in Russia and live.
Among the guests of the Soviet were a number of Germans, sent secretly by
the Ebert Government to consider the question of lending skilled Prussian
mechanics to the Russian factories. Though themselves Socialists, these
envoys of Berlin were very much disgusted by what they saw in Russia. The
condition of the factories shocked them, but, curiously enough, they were
even more shocked by the facility of divorce and the lack of reverence
for the dead. They told of how one day they had met a Bolshevik lady
twice. At lunch she was the wife of one Commissar, at dinner she was
the wife of another, at whose table her first husband was a guest. As
for funerals, they discovered that all corpses had to be handed over to
the State, which interred them without religious ceremonies and without
allowing the relatives to be present. The Germans also disliked the
systematic and diabolical attempt which the Reds were making to destroy
family life, by tempting mothers to surrender their children to the
State. Children who spent all day in school got one free meal; children
who lived day and night in the school got three good meals and were well
clothed and cared for. Mothers were almost forced to spend most of their
time at work in Government offices. If they insisted on remaining at
home, they got no rations.
A large number of German mechanics did eventually go to Russia, but were
bitterly disappointed by the treatment they met with there, and have all
returned to Germany, where one of them has since published an extremely
pessimistic account of the Russian industrial situation.
The gang of international concession hunters who were also guests of
the Soviet and who had risked their lives in getting into Russia formed
a curious contrast to the still larger gang of foreign capitalists who
were ready to risk their lives for the sake of getting out of Russia. The
former were the more interesting by reason of their bravery, hardness,
competence, will-power, diplomatic skill, and absolute unscrupulousness.
They were “out” for “big money,” for concessions which would make them
multi-millionaires, and they would let no considerations of sentiment,
religion, nationality, or civilization stand in their way. They
represented the most inhuman and aggressive aspect of that capitalism
which the Reds have sworn to destroy, yet they made friends with the Reds
and hob-nobbed with Lenin. The Soviet Government, which wants recognition
by Europe and America, thinks that it can get that recognition by
pandering to the greed of these capitalists, and it has accordingly
dangled in front of them prizes of practically inestimable value—forests,
fisheries, gold mines, islands, dozens of square miles of priceless ore.
The capitalists of California and South Africa will be paupers in point
of wealth and cowards in point of courage compared to the hard-bitten
plutocrats who may arise out of this Russian chaos. The dangers from
Boers, Blacks, wild animals, and American “bad men,” which figure in
the exploits of pioneers in other parts of the world, are nothing in
comparison with the dangers which these fanatical missionaries of
Mammon run in Moscow, and I do not doubt but that histories and novels
and perhaps even Kiplingesque poetry will be written about those who
succeed. But I cannot say that I admire them. It may be a good thing to
reopen trade with Russia, but some of the adventurers who will reopen it
and get concessions and float companies in England and America will be
inspired by greed, and also no doubt by that itch for colossal gambles
and desperate adventures which one often finds in very great plutocrats
who have once been poor. What I cannot forgive them in connection with
this question of Russia’s recognition is their cynical and contemptuous
attitude towards the moral aspect of it. They would renounce their
nationality, betray civilization, abjure their religion, and sell their
souls, if by doing so they could attain their own selfish ends.
I have quite as much contempt, however, for the Big Money-Bags (mostly
French) who loftily refuse to trade with Russia—till that country has
acknowledged all the debts of the Tsar’s Government. These people also
would compound any felony so long as they are paid enough for doing so.
My sympathies are with those old-fashioned people, if any such there be,
whose reluctance to trade with Soviet Russia is due solely to their high
moral standard of international morality. The Reds fear and respect these
idealists, for they are at bottom idealists themselves.
But even among the agents of materialist capitalism congregated in Moscow
there were exceptions to the general rule, though their exceptionality
was perhaps due to sordid motives. One American engineer called Keeley,
representing the greatest captains of industry in America, told Lenin
frankly that all the Russian factories and railways would collapse if run
any longer on Bolshevik principles, with the result that he had great
difficulty in getting permission to leave the country. A Dutch capitalist
called Schmidt was also imprudent enough to express pessimism, with the
result that he was refused permission to leave and may be in Moscow still.
The other group of capitalists, the old hands who had lost their nerve
and were making for the nearest frontier, were, on the whole, an equally
unlovely collection. Some of them were young men who had escaped
military service at home, and who stayed in Russia on the chance of
amassing great riches. When Bolshevism came they clamoured violently for
British soldiers to be sent to their assistance. One man with a mine was
excessively angry with the British Government for not having sent at
least a hundred thousand men to Siberia. Though younger than I am myself,
he had not stood by Tommy’s side in France; nevertheless, he insisted
very dictatorially on Tommy being sent, after he had done his “bit,” to
save _his_ property in Siberia. Another man, with a factory, said, “I
refuse to run this factory unless a British Battalion is sent to guard
it.”
British Capitalists in every part of the world have cut a sorry figure
during these last six years. A British Minister in one place described
to me how they establish offices abroad in order to escape taxation
at home, and how, when any thief approaches their safe, they wave the
English flag wildly, talk of our Imperial Mission and of the White Man’s
Burden, and summon fleets and armies to their help. But worst of all
is the Russian capitalist who now detests us more than he detests the
Bolsheviks, because we did not spend a thousand million on him instead of
a mere hundred million, because we did not send five hundred thousand men
to his assistance instead of a few Divisions. White Russia is suffering
from a nervous disease which I should call Revolution-shock, for it is
akin to shell-shock. It makes no complaint about those of the Allies who
have offered it practically no assistance, but on us who have stood by
its side, ministering patiently to it, for the last two years, and giving
it millions of pounds to which the poor of our own country had the first
claim, on us it pours the bitterest venom. Some of the Russian Generals,
whom we did most for, have now gone to Berlin and are our worst enemies.
The diplomatic and business guests of the Soviet did not, I must admit,
look at their best. Stripped of all adventitious aids to impressiveness,
of their country houses and their motor-cars, their yachts and their
troops of servants, the Company Promoters looked and talked like
pickpockets (which most of them were on a large scale); while, without
a noble Embassy in the background, the suave, polyglot diplomatists
engendered in my mind by their conversation a horrid suspicion that
they had no sense. Had the Bolsheviks some deep, diabolical design in
thus exposing the great ones of the earth in all their nakedness to
the derision of the common herd? Was it part of some fiendish scheme
for undermining our belief in Christianity? Carefully underfed on cold
porridge and imitation coffee, slightly exacerbated in temper, and
suffering from sore feet caused by a lack of even the most primitive
transport contrivances, the august representatives of “big business” were
anything but imposing; but I doubt whether, in similar circumstances,
even the grave and reverend seigneurs of the Supreme Council itself would
have impressed the groundlings.
Among them was a considerable sprinkling of Russians who seemed to be
more at home, but who had so many _aliases_, that some of them have
probably forgotten their real names. One such Russian, but a very honest
and amiable one, Mr. Serezhnikov, a Co-operative expert who left Moscow
with the Krassin Mission, had long worked for the Russian Co-operatives
on the American Pacific Coast, where he was known as Shavchenko. He had
been in the American Y.M.C.A. in Vladivostock, and belonged to the Social
Revolutionary party, but disgust with Kolchak induced him to desert to
the Bolsheviks. Another gentleman, called in America Mulkner and in
Russia Kamerinsk, was working hard to send agents to the United States
with forged passports and false money and left himself for the States in
February or March last, though I don’t think that he ever got there, for
the anti-Bolshevik Secret Service of America is the best in the world.
Arrests sometimes took place even among these guests of Lenin. A
Frenchman who was apparently a very advanced Socialist, but really an
agent of the War Office in Paris, disappeared one day because certain
agents of the German Spartacists who had turned up in Moscow informed the
Extraordinary Commission of his true status. Having previously lived in
Berlin this Frenchman had made himself known to the Spartacists in order
to obtain from them information about plots that were being hatched by
the German Militarists whom the Spartacists hated worse than they hated
the French; and though this arrangement worked well in Berlin, it was
disastrous in Moscow.
The German prisoners of war in Moscow, who occupy the former German
Consulate and the adjoining German hospital, live comfortably and in
perfect freedom, owing to the fact that they were taken prisoners while
fighting against the Tsar. They have two motor-cars, a fine hospital,
and a Soviet of their own. Not all of them have joined this Soviet,
which will only serve to convey the poison of Bolshevism into German and
Austrian homes. One of these Germans brought one day to a friend of mine
an English magazine article by an English military officer on a method
he had discovered for decoding figure cyphers without a key, and asked
him to translate it into German, offering him at the same time a large
sum of money for the work. “What cypher messages,” we asked one another
in astonishment, “has the man got hold of? Has he a private wireless
apparatus by means of which he is communicating with Germany?”
Other mysterious things were done by those Germans, but to me they are
still mysteries—mysteries, however, that have no importance since Germany
has ceased to be a great military power. It would be easy enough to work
oneself into a state of mind wherein these trifles are charged with
sinister meaning, but I do not think that there is any good reason for
doing so. The secret Mission from the Ebert Government, of which I have
already spoken, ended, for instance, in nothing; for though, as a result
of it, German skilled workmen were sent to Russia, those workmen soon
came back again very disgusted. A Swedish Consular official, who had
formerly been stationed in Petrograd, was also in Moscow last March, and
had many conferences with the Bolshevik F.O., but these were probably
connected with a deal in Russian copper which did not come off owing to
the Bolshevik sailors of Kronstadt having resolutely refused to let the
copper be shipped to a capitalist country.
The collection of hopes, panics, greeds, secrecies, cunnings,
treacheries, and idealisms which jostled one another in those amazing
guest-houses of the Soviets transcended in interest anything that I had
ever before seen, read, or imagined. Secret agents of foreign Powers who
posed as Bolsheviks jostled open agents of foreign Powers who really
leaned towards Communism. Quakers who did not believe in war at all
defended militarism against Italian naval officers who, after fighting
for three years, had become Pacificists. Korean Buddhists who thought it
a sin to kill a rattlesnake advocated the assassination of the Mikado.
Mohammedans whose religion is the sword tried to prove that the Prophet
was really a man of peace. Financiers wanted the abolition of finance.
Respectable married men suddenly remembered that they had got married
again that afternoon according to Soviet law, having duly divorced that
morning before a Bolshevik Commissar their lawful wives beyond the sea.
Diplomatists, who knew nothing, fished delicately for information from
low-class Labour journalists who, having just dined with Trotsky, knew
everything.
The ignorance of the diplomatists surprised me more than anything,
until I remembered that, in all this vast Empire, the whole diplomatic,
consular, and commercial machinery, by means of which Governments keep
themselves informed of the ever-changing conditions in a foreign country,
had been utterly swept away. Russia is now as much of a hermit empire
as Japan was sixty years ago. The carefully shepherded journalists and
Labour men, who are allowed to circulate a little outside Moscow, learn
little more of actual conditions in the districts which they traverse
than did the Dutch deputation from Deshima in their annual pilgrimage to
Yedo. When I was arrested later on by Lenin’s Inquisition, nothing in
my notebooks excited such suspicion as some industrial statistics which
I had jotted down. A dubious foreigner arrested in England during the
war with a map of Scapa Flow in his possession would hardly have been
regarded with more distrust at Scotland Yard.
Owing to the great preponderance of Russian Bolsheviks, the tone of
conversation at these gatherings was always very “advanced.” Whatever
some of us may have thought, none of us openly defended kingship or
Parliamentary Government any more than a delegate at an Anglican Church
Congress would have defended the burning of heretics. The world consists
of different “atmospheres”—the “atmosphere” of the battleship ward-room,
the “atmosphere” of the National Liberal Club, the “atmosphere” of the
Stock Exchange, the “atmosphere” of a Jesuit novitiate, and many other
“atmospheres.” The Bolsheviks have succeeded in creating a special
“atmosphere” of their own, such as never openly existed in the world
before. It is not, in my opinion, a good “atmosphere.”