CONTENTS

	Introduction	vii
I	How I Became a Communist	i
II	I Marry a Russian	18
III	Honeymoon in the Far East	30
IV	Spider's Web	45
V	Soviet Social Register	61
VI	Revival of Serfdom	67
VII	Arcadi Caught in the Web	87
VIII	I Learn About Soviet Hospitals	105
IX	Arcadi's Awakening	117
X	Life in Moscow	135
XI	A Home at Last	157
XII	My Son Is Born	175
XIII	My Institute Is Purged	186
XIV	Tricks with Statistics	199
XV	The High Cost of Communism	215
XVI	Red Tsar	223
XVII	Scapegoats	234
XVIII	Arrest	263

INTRODUCTION

FREDA UTLEY'S life story as a communist who learned the rigors of totalitarian life in Russia the hard way, was published shortly before Pearl Harbor. The original limited edition could not compete with the turbulent emotions of our country on the verge of war.

I was one of those who read and admired Freda Utley's book, "The Dream We Lost," and urged her at the end of the war to condense and revise it for republication as an important human document, particularly in the light of present events.

Freda Utley has now rewritten her book and given it a new title, "Lost Illusion."

The dream that Freda Utley lost during her six years in the USSR where she lived as a Russian, was a personal sort of disillusion. Today, aspects of her shattered dream are shared by so many others that her book now has a universal quality. Without ever having lived through the experiences which Miss Utley retails so vividly, most of us who read her book hoped that at the end of World War II Russia would take her place beside the capitalist nations to form one world.

We hoped and believed that, by diplomatic give and take and for reasons of mutual self-interest, we could do business with Stalin and the Kremlin. Stalin himself, if one remembers correctly, concurred in that belief. Now, as we survey the recent wrecks of illusion, Miss Utley's account of her stay in Soviet Russia assumes a new importance.

The more we can learn about the Russian mind, and how it works under its present controls, the better we will understand events and attitudes that seem incredible to us. "Lost Illusion," more than any other book with which I am familiar, succeeds in giving a comprehensible picture of this mind. One of its great beauties is that the author never set out consciously to do so. She has achieved it by indirection.

There are, one recalls, several other narratives, widely read and designed along similar lines. Among them, Eugene Lyons' "Assignment in Utopia" comes first to mind, but Mr. Lyons, though once as much an enthusiast for the Communist experiment as Miss Utley, stepped behind the Iron Curtain as a newspaperman and an American citizen.

Freda Utley went from England with her Russian husband prepared to throw in her lot with the people. She was a unit of the Marxist State, and one of the few who have escaped to tell. "I Chose Freedom" is a more recent book, but its author, Victor Kravchenko, was a Russian, reared in the Russian Communist party, and consequently speaks across the Russian chasm.

Freda Utley was born an English woman, taught in the best British tradition and became a trained observer and an excellent writer. Thus she can describe her Russian adventures in terms that are to us here entirely understandable, with reactions close to what ours might be in a similar situation.

No other Westerner who broke with the Communists has had quite her intimate experience with the Russian way of life. No Russian, or other foreigner, has been able to describe as she has the details of crowded living, servants, childbirth, the decline of belief in standards of behavior, the loss of integrity under police state government.

"Lost Illusion" is a moving and tragic human document.

I
How I became a Communist

I first visited soviet Russia in the summer of 1927, when Lenin's "New Economic Policy" was still in force and Trotsky not yet exiled, although he had been eliminated from the political scene. The people were enjoying a measure of prosperity and a degree of liberty unknown three years later. There was still a society which might be called semi-socialist, but signs of degeneration were perceptible if I had had the wit to see them.

But I did not see them. As a delegate, an enthusiastic and youthful Communist recently emerged from the chrysalis of the British Labor Party, I believed most, if not all, I was told. I was without previous experience of a police state to teach me that no one in Russia would dare speak his mind to a foreigner. My own days as a resident of Moscow were still far off. Such Russian friends as I had, although not all were Bolsheviks, fervently believed in the "good society" being created in the USSR.

"One's character is one's fate," and character is mainly the product of environment. It is only in middle age one sees how the influences of youth have determined the course of life. Those influences in my case were both

socialist and liberal. A passion for the emancipation of mankind, rather than the blueprint of a planned society or any mystical yearning to merge myself in a fellowship, led me to enter the Soviet Union and to leave it six years later with my political beliefs and my personal happiness alike shattered.

I came to communism via Greek history, the French revolutionary literature I had read in childhood, and the English nineteenth-century poets of freedom. I came, not in revolt against a strict bourgeois upbringing, nor because of failure to make a place for myself in capitalist society, but profoundly influenced by a happy childhood, a socialist father, and a Continental education. For me, then, the communist ideal seemed the fulfillment of the age-long struggle of mankind for freedom and justice.

My studies, both of ancient history and modern economics, made me abhor servitude in any form, and the Communists seemed to me to be the only socialists who really believed in world-wide equality and liberty. Yet the same influences which turned my hopes toward Russia were to make it impossible for me to accept the Soviet regime once I came to know it intimately.

I was, in Stalinist phraseology, a "rotten liberal," a "petty bourgeois intellectual"—one who foolishly desired social justice, freedom, and equality, and who imagined that socialism meant an end to oppression and injustice.

My mother, daughter of a radical Manchester family,

How I Became a Communist 3

had met my father, William Herbert Utley, at the age of sixteen. Edward Averling, the son-in-law of Karl Marx and the translator of Das Kapital, brought him to my grandfather's house. My grandfather, although a "bourgeois," being a manufacturer, was a free-thinker and a republican, and boasted of how his wife's mother, when old and very ill, had hidden the great Chartist leader, Feargus O'Connor, in her bed when the police were searching the house for him.

My mother, one of nine children, had shown unusual independence by leaving her comfortable home to train as a nurse in London. There she secretly married my father against the wishes of my grandfather, who considered marriage to a poor journalist most undesirable. My father was then editorial writer and music critic on the London Star, the most famous liberal newspaper of the time. George Bernard Shaw, its dramatic critic, was his friend, as also were Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other Fabians. For a time my father acted as Secretary of the Fabian Society.

He would have stood for Parliament as a Socialist had not my arrival prevented it. Members of Parliament were not paid a salary in those days and I was the second child, so a political career was out of the question. In the years before he had a family to support, my father had taken part in the great labor struggles of the late eighties and early nineties. He had been arrested with John Burns at a demonstration of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square and had spoken from the same platform as Friedrich

4 Lost Illusion

Engels in Manchester. Half a century later I was to find my father's name on documents in the library of the Marx Engels Institute in Moscow.

His influence over me was profound, and he early implanted in my mind those libertarian values which have consciously or unconsciously motivated my life. His socialism, like that of many other Englishmen, was colored and humanized by the nineteenth century liberal atmosphere. It was the kind of socialism believed in by William Morris, the romantic Victorian rebel artist-poet whom my father had known in his youth, and whose influence over the British Socialist movement was far greater than that of Karl Marx. Morris has been described as an emotional socialist. The basic difference between him and the Marxists whose philosophy he repudiated, is that Morris was in revolt against poverty and oppression in any form and denounced the materialist concepts of the age. He hated the sordid ugliness of nineteenth century industrialism and the values of capitalist society and wanted men to think and feel differently. He was also contemptuous of Marx's elaborate "scientific" theories about capitalism and class war.

The early influences which shaped my thoughts and feelings were thus essentially liberal, based on belief in reason and logic and the desire for the emancipation of mankind in body and spirit. I failed in my youth to perceive that communism is a substitute for religion and is essentially irrational in its mystical belief in inevitable progress through revolution. Perhaps, however, in my case as in that of many young people today, the instinc-

How I Became a Communist 5

tive desire for a religion was the compelling force leading me, step by step, into the Communist trap.

The experience of going to an expensive boarding school in England no doubt contributed to the psychological foundations in my subconscious mind for the militant communism which in my twenties supplanted the socialist outlook.

From the age of nine to thirteen, I lived on the Continent. I traveled with my parents until, when I was eleven, I went to boarding school on Lake Geneva. Those two years in French Switzerland among German girls "finishing" their education, were one of the happiest periods of my life; the four succeeding years at boarding school in England among the most unhappy.

At first I was the only English pupil in the Swiss school, and later one of two. I was also the youngest. The atmosphere was not unlike that of my home— studious, tolerant, kindly, and healthy. We skated, skied, and tobogganed in winter, bathed in Lake Geneva, and rowed and walked in the summer. But sport was regarded as a pleasure, not as a duty, and study—real hard study—was demanded of us all.

My brother was at a boy's school a quarter of a mile away across the fields, and I had the run of his school as well as of my own. There were boys there from at least a dozen countries and of all ages from twelve to eighteen. I went there for fencing and riding lessons, and one summer I went hiking for a fortnight with the boys of his school, dressed as a boy and climbing the same mountains as youths of seventeen and eighteen.

6 Lost Illusion

In that period of my life I had no feeling that boys and girls were so very different; and mixing with English, Germans, French, Swiss, Italians, and other nationalities, speaking French fluently and German almost as well, I was little aware of national barriers. I naturally developed an international outlook which neither my father's influence nor theoretical socialist teaching alone could ever have given me.

From those pleasant days in Switzerland, I was plunged into the frigid, mentality-destroying atmosphere of an English boarding school for girls which aped the British public schools for boys. There was no hazing and physical brutality but there was mental, or perhaps one should call it social, bullying of the worst kind.

The greatest offenses against the social code which ruled our school were to study hard, or to show any originality in dress or behavior. I was handicapped from the start by having a slightly foreign accent. I can still remember being made to stand up in class to say "stirrup" over and over again, unable to pronounce the r in the English way.

I refused to be dictated to as to whether I should wear a black or a colored ribbon in my hair and avoided the disciplined games which bored me. My sins against the code were at first unconscious, then deliberate. The spirit of rebellion now, for the first time, had been awakened. Dimly I began to feel that the social hierarchy and the social code which governed our school were precisely that "capitalist system" which, as the daughter

How 1 Became a Communist 7

of a socialist, I had learned to think was the cause of all social injustice.

The girls at my school came in later life to symbolize "the imperialist English bourgeoisie" in my subconscious mind: class-conscious, sublimely self-confident and scornful of learning.

Of course I made some friends, but they were rebels like myself. I was a favorite of the head mistress, who imagined I was going to reflect glory on the school by future academic distinction. She gave me special facilities for study, in particular a room to myself, but in the end did more to awaken my budding revolutionary outlook than anyone else.

When the war came in 1914, my father was ruined. I was sixteen and had already passed Cambridge University's entrance examination. Mrs. Burton Brown, the head mistress, still thinking I would go to the University and win laurels for the school, gave me a year's free tuition. I began working for a scholarship to Cambridge. But it soon became clear that when I got it I should not be able to go to the University, because my father was dying of tuberculosis and I should have to start earning money as soon as I left school.

Then the head mistress began to make me feel that my presence was no longer desired. Instead of arranging for me to go to London University—where, as I learned later, I could have obtained a scholarship sufficient to keep me—she cast me off, as no longer of any interest or value to the school. She let it be known that I was in

8 Lost Illusion

the school free and that my people were now almost destitute.

My home world had fallen to pieces, my brother was in the army, my father was so ill that we knew he would soon die. So at the age of seventeen I left school with no regrets, and with personal experience to teach me that the social system could fling one into poverty from security, and prevent one from having an education even when one had proved one's mental qualifications.

At school I had been purposeful, wary, oversensitive and on guard against my fellow creatures, and, I imagine, sadly lacking in a sense of humor. Life was serious, life was earnest, and one must struggle without ceasing against one's environment. But I began to find the world as friendly and decent a place as I had thought it when I lived in Switzerland, or traveled in France and Italy with my parents, once I began to work at the War Office. The white collar workers were friendly, kind, and pleasant people. I even learned to laugh.

The death of my father in January 1918 was the first great grief of my life. I had loved him very dearly, and I had thought him the most wonderful person in the world—wise, tolerant, kind, never ill-tempered, and until the last absorbed in the course of history rather than in himself.

He died in extreme poverty in a tiny cottage in Cornwall, so primitive that my mother had to fetch water in a bucket from a pump across the fields. I had seen him choking to death as his exhausted heart could no longer pump blood through his diseased lungs. Half unconscious

How I Became a Communist 9

at the end, he murmured Shakespeare's words about the bourne from which no traveler returns, and said to us he was now only curious to know whether he was right in thinking that death was nothingness.

I brought my mother to London. She was broken in health by sorrow and the hard life she had lived nursing my father alone in Cornwall. My brother was far off in the war in Mesopotamia, and for a time I was my mother's sole support. My grandfather had stopped the few shillings he had grudgingly allowed during the last months of my father's life. He considered my mother's poverty a just punishment.

Mother and I lived on about eleven dollars a week I was earning at the War Office. With rent of three dollars a week and war prices for food, we were sometimes hungry. My brother, transferred to France in the summer of 1918, was wounded for the second time just before the end of the war, but by 1919 he was with us and life became a little easier.

Although I worked as a clerk in the War Office at a small salary, my father's teachings and my Continental education prevented me from becoming a "war patriot." I never thought of the Germans, among whom I had been at school from the age of eleven to thirteen, as any worse than the English. The overdose of French literature I had swallowed had given me a slight prejudice against the French whom I regarded as the most chauvinist and military-minded nation in Europe, eternally seeking la gloire and honoring the Napoleonic tradition above the revolutionary one.

At the War Office I became branch secretary of a trade-union, the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries, then endeavoring to organize women office workers. Through this union I obtained, in 1920, a scholarship at London University where my brother Temple was enrolled on a grant from an officers' fund.

Active now in the socialist movement, I served as secretary of the King's College Socialist Society, and later as chairman of the London University Labor Party.

Our scholarships were not sufficient for us to live on and support our mother, so my brother and I gave English lessons to foreigners. My brother had pupils at the Czechoslovak Legation—his "checks" we called them— and I had Russians, employees of the Soviet Trade Delegation who first brought me in contact with Soviet officials.

From the beginning I had been a defender of the Russian Revolution; but I had no more knowledge or understanding of communist theories than the Park Avenue pinks of today have of Marx. Nor did my pupils enlighten me, for they were high Communist Party officials out to enjoy life in the "capitalist world" after the rigors of Moscow. They confined their propaganda to jokes about England.

Then I met Boris Plavnik, an Old Bolshevik exiled after the revolution of 1905, to whom Communist theory was the breath of fife. He was honest and sincere, although extremely vain. His English lessons usually became my German lessons and lessons in Marxist theory, from which, however, I might have benefited more had

How 1 Became a Communist 11

his arguments been less philosophical, dialectic and involved.

I was by this time an ardent and active member of the Independent Labor Party. I admired the Soviet Union and was becoming convinced that the official British Labor Party was too reformist ever to establish socialism, and was thoroughly "imperialist."

Plavnik was the most humane of men, and later on in Moscow where he remained my friend, he sank more and more into his shell, unable to defend, but unwilling to condemn outright, the atrocities committed by Stalin. Like many Old Bolsheviks whom I met later, he would not let himself face the fact that the revolutionary movement to which he had given his life had failed and degenerated into tyranny.

We saw less and less of him because meetings were too painful between friends who dared not speak out their thoughts to each other. Plavnik was lucky enough to go into an insane asylum just before the great purge began. At least that is where he was supposed to be, and we knew his mental faculties had been failing since the death of his wife a year or two before.

As a passionate defender of the Soviet Union, I was the speaker in a college debate on Russia, together with H. N. Brailsford. Our opponents were C. H. Driver, a fellow history student, who later became a Professor at Yale, and Sir Bernard Pares. When next I met Pares twelve years later, he had become the defender of the USSR and I was back in England, hating Stalin's Russia, but holding my tongue for my husband's sake.

12 Lost Illusion

From 1925 onwards I was drawing ever closer to the Communists. I stood with them against the right wing in the London University Labor Party, and in the University Labor Federation. The only influence which delayed my joining the Communist Party was that of Bertrand Russell, and unfortunately it was insufficient. I had met Russell when he came to speak for the King's College Socialist Society, and this led to a friendship which has been one of the most precious experiences of my life.

In the Easter vacation of 1926 I spent a month with him and Dora Russell in Cornwall, teaching his young son in the mornings, walking, talking, and bathing in the afternoons, reading aloud in the evenings. Bertrand Russell tried hard to convince me that the Marxist theory was untenable in the Light of modern physics.

He set me to reading the A.B.C. of Relativity and when I found I could not understand it he told me to read the A.B.C. of Atoms first. He hoped that if he explained the difficult passages in these books I would be able to grasp the fact that Einstein had destroyed the basis of Marxist theory. As I wrote my brother at the time, I was being driven to study the theory of relativity in order to understand what Russell thought about Russia.

Unfortunately I failed to appreciate the philosophical and political significance of Einstein's discoveries. In spite of Russell's patience and the time he was prepared to waste on my education, I could not understand either Einstein or the basic connection between Communism

How 1 Became a Communist 13

and Newton's theory of gravity. Some of the Bolsheviks, however, understood it very well.

The writings of Einstein were banned in Soviet Russia while I lived there. For all I know, Russia's failure to keep abreast of America in physics, particularly the atom bomb, may be largely due to the communist sacrifice of scientific truth for political expediency.

Russell also failed to convince me of the truth of his Theory and Practice of Bolshevism. This book, written in 1920, is uncannily prophetic of present day Russia. Bertrand Russell was one of the very few who, in the earliest days of the Revolution, were able to perceive what manner of tree would grow from the seed which Lenin planted.

Although only experience could teach me the truth of Bertrand Russell's analysis and philosophy, and he failed to prevent my making a mess of my life, his teaching did at least help to save me from becoming a Trotskyist when I revolted against Stalinism.

When I came back to England from Moscow in 1931 and stayed at his house, I was still convinced that the horrible society being created in Russia was Stalin's fault, and that if Lenin had lived or if Trotsky's policy had been followed, all would have been well.

Bertie would bang his fist on the table and say, "No! Freda, can't you understand, even now, that the conditions you describe followed naturally from Lenin's premises and Lenin's acts? Will you never learn and stop being romantic about politics?"

The General Strike of 1926 was the turning point of

14 Lost Illusion

my political development. The betrayal of high hopes by the Trade Union Congress and the Labor Party led me into the Communist fold, convinced of the reality of the class war, and that socialism could not be obtained gradually. It seemed to me that there was no solution for unemployment and low wages under capitalism, and that only the overthrow of the capitalist system and the "unity of the workers of the world" could save humanity.

The General Strike stirred all my emotions, and the more so as I was then living at Westfield College of London University as research student among the most conservative set of University teachers I had ever met. My crude, somewhat childish, but I believe sincere, revolutionary reaction is expressed in the following letter written to my mother in Devonshire on May 10, 1926:

"I have never lived through such a terrible week. I feel all hot inside and trembling all the time. It is such an unequal fight for us, and I want so much to help. I am speaking tonight at Edgware, I am glad to say. I wish I could speak all day—never was there a more unjust issue and more lies told by a government.

"Yet the Government is so ruthless it may win. It is parading armored cars about and soldiers are all over the place. The buses are running with two policemen on each and volunteer O.M.S. labor. Everything is quite safe for ordinary people like me—I almost wish it were not! I cannot write properly, dear, I am too worried and upset.

How I Became a Communist 15

"It is so dreadful not to be able to help and to have to listen to the misrepresentations of the capitalists. West-field is impossible except for a few students. I saw Wil-mot, (a minister in the British Labor Government of 1945-6) who is half expecting to be arrested for sedition. Anything almost can be called sedition. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the churches proposed terms of peace: withdrawal of both lockout and strike. The Government would not allow the proposal to be broadcast! It would be acceptable to us and not to them."

A few years later I was to realize that the behavior of the British Government was like that of a loving mother in comparison to that of the Soviet Government toward the Russian working class. But I still remember the passionate anger I felt in 1926 against the "capitalist government" and its most ruthless member, Winston Churchill, who was responsible for the show of armed force and whom we accused of being prepared to have the workers shot at if the strike went on.

Long afterwards when Hitler went to war against Russia, Winston Churchill was to become the darling of the Communists and their fellow travelers; following Hitler's defeat, he once again became the Kremlin's favorite target.

I was invested with my M.A. degree the day the General Strike was called off. After bicycling across to the Senate House at South Kensington and sitting impatiently waiting in a borrowed cap and gown to receive my scroll, I tore off to the Trades Union Congress head-

16 Lost Illusion

quarters. The bitterness of defeat and the long agony of the miners which was to follow the General Strike have quite obliterated from my mind any feelings of satisfaction I may have had in receiving an M.A. degree with distinction.

A year later I was invited to visit the Soviet Union as representative of all the Labor and Socialist clubs in British universities (the University Labor Federation). My writings had attracted the attention of Ivan Maisky, then Counselor of the Soviet Embassy in London. I had met Petrovsky, the Comintern representative in England during the General Strike, and had become very friendly with him and his wife.

I was regarded, I suppose, as a promising young "radical intellectual" whose complete conversion would be useful, and who had shown some understanding of Bolshevik theory in the articles I was contributing to the New Leader, the Socialist Review, and the Labour Monthly. I intended to join the Party as soon as I returned for the propaganda eifect would be greater if I became a member after, not before, I visited Russia.

My excitement at the coming trip to the Land of Promise knew no bounds. My brother, from his bed in a tuberculosis sanitorium in Surrey, wrote me a few last words of caution:

"My dear Freda:

"This is just to wish you luck in your adventure. I think in one way you are quite right. I would do the same thing if I wanted to, I expect. After all, one must

How I Became a Communist 17

follow one's own thinking and one's own desires. It is an adventure, but I do not expect for a moment that you will find what you are seeking for intellectually. Men are much of a muchness everywhere, and they behave much in the same way whatever they profess to believe.

"Of course you will see the country and the people and society as you wish to believe they are, at first. But later, your skepticism will reassert itself.

"But don't join the Communist Party. It seems to me a terrible thing for any intelligent person to adhere to any creed or dogma; to have to say that you accept any empirical generalization as an article of faith. I do not see why you should not work for them and with them and yet reserve your opinion about their fundamental propositions.

"The best of luck, my dear. All my love—

"Temple"

I brushed aside my brother's arguments as I had those of Bertrand Russell. I couldn't see that they had anything to do with the question of how to achieve socialism. I replied to Temple from Moscow: "In spite of what you say, I must join the Communist Party. I cannot live without feeling I am doing worth-while work, and I see no hope in the Labor Party. I think the Communist thesis is right."

I Marry a Russian

I TRAVELED FROM BERLIN TO MOSCOW With Ivan Maisky and J. W. Brown, secretary of one of the most militant trade unions in England, the Clerical Association, made up of office workers in the Government Service. Maisky, then Counselor of the Soviet Embassy, later became Ambassador to England.

Two days after our arrival we stood in the Red Square in Moscow to witness the funeral of Voikov, murdered in Poland. This was the first demonstration I saw in the "socialist fatherland." I still remember vividly the exaltation, triumph, and excitement which filled my heart and mind as I stood close to Lenin's mausoleum in the sunlight under a blue sky and saw the Red Army parade, and the thousands upon thousands of demonstrators. My mind was full of romantic libertarian images.

I wrote my mother after the demonstration, "People in the street look well enough fed though poorly clothed, and there seems to be such vitality and purpose among the people one meets. . . . The soldiers in the demonstration especially looked so splendid—more like the Greeks of Xenophon must have looked than like the usual wooden soldiers. . . ."

I Marry a Russian 19

Visitors to the Soviet Union in those days were comparatively rare. Only invited delegates from trade unions and Labor Parties got the chance to travel over Russia. There was no Intourist which was organized later as a propaganda and money-making service to bring visitors to Russia.

I was surrounded by kindness, hospitality, and good fellowship. The market places of Moscow and other towns I visited were filled with vegetables, dairy produce, milk, and other foods. New apartment houses and office buildings were being built in the severe but pleasing style introduced after the Revolution.

There were no line-ups for bread and other foods at the state and co-operative shops, and one could buy the most delicious pastries for only five kopeks. There was a shortage of manufactured goods, but it was not to be compared to the shortage which came later after the "gigantic successes on the industrial front."

One is tempted to imagine what Russia might have become if the New Economic Policy had been continued. As early as 1924 the "Scissors Crisis" (the disproportion between the price of manufactured goods and agricultural produce) had split the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks into left and right factions.

Disagreements began over how much to take from the peasants for industrial development, and ended in the bitter controversy over collectivization. With the aid of Bucharin, Tomsky, and the others on the right who maintained that any attempt to force the pace of industrialization would destroy the stimulus to labor,

Stalin had overcome Trotsky and was soon to exile him and the rest of the left opposition. Once rid of the Trotskyists, Stalin, in 1929, was to wipe out the right opposition and embark upon an ultra-left policy of forced collectivization and intensive industrialization.

The USSR was soon to become a country of starved peasants and undernourished workers, cowed and whipped by fierce punishments to toil endlessly for a state which could not provide them even with enough to eat. But, unfortunately for my own future, I saw the USSR during the brief period of prosperity which began in 1924 and ended in 1928.

In September 1927 I returned to England full of enthusiasm and prepared to tell the world of the wonders of the Russian socialist fatherland. I left the Independent Labor Party, joined the Communist Party, and addressed meetings all over England.

I admitted that the standard of life in Russia was lower than in the Western capitalist countries; but I explained the need to accumulate capital for industrialization and demonstrated how, because there was no capitalist class to exploit the workers, the burden of saving was borne equally by all.

I said that there was therefore no such acute misery as in the era of Britain's industrialization in the early nineteenth century, and that all Russians were enthusiastically collaborating in constructing socialism. I felt that the gates opening upon the road to Paradise had been unlocked to mankind, and all I had to do was to

I Marry a Russian 21

help convince the workers of my own country of the need to overthrow the capitalist class and join up with the USSR.

Looking back on that distant time, I now wonder, did I really believe it? I suppose I did, or I should never have thrown up my job in the capitalist world and gone off with my husband to take part, as we thought, in the construction of socialism.

Arcadi Berdichevsky, who became my husband in 1928, was a Russian Jew, who had studied at Zurich University and emigrated to the United States in 1914. In 1920 he had quit a good job in New York to work for the Soviet Government in London in their trading mission. He was not a Bolshevik, but had been a member of the Bund, the Jewish Social Democratic party in Russian Poland, where he had lived before he went to study in Switzerland.

Arcadi knew less about Soviet Russia than I did since he had spent his whole time in England since 1920. But he knew the old Russia too well not to perceive the naivete of the picture I painted of the USSR. Nevertheless he was a sincere Socialist and believed as I did that a new and better world was being created in Russia. He wanted to take part in the building of the new socialist society.

We knew that material conditions of life would be hard, that living space was difficult to obtain, and that the conveniences, the comforts and pleasures, which he had for many years enjoyed abroad, were not obtainable

in Russia. We also knew that, since he was not a member of the Communist Party, he could never rise to the highest positions in the Soviet state.

In 1923 Arcadi had been asked to join the Party, but he had the typical intellectual's feeling that as he had played no part in the Revolution, he could not join now that the fighting was over. Also, he had something of my brother's distrust of adherence to any creed or dogma, He worked with and for the Bolsheviks, but he was not prepared to subscribe entirely to their philosophy.

Arcadi had reached a stage in which neither his per-sonal life nor his comfortable "bourgeois" existence in London as a well-paid Soviet specialist satisfied him. He had a wife and a young son, as years before in New York he had married the daughter of a well-to-do Jewish fam-ily of Russian extraction. They had become estranged when he gave up an income of $600 a month in the United States to work at Arcos for $150.

By the time I knew him, Arcadi's monthly salary had been increased to $500. But his wife, Anna Abramovna, had neither understanding nor sympathy for his political views and could not see why he was not satisfied with a comfortable home, a pretty wife, and a secure job. To the last she never understood why he had left her for me since, as she told her friends, I was not pretty and would never make him comfortable.

Arcadi and I knew that we loved each other after only a few meetings, but his separation from Anna Abramovna was a long and painful business. In January 1927 he asked her to divorce him, but she begged him

I Marry a Russian 23

to wait until she could join either her brother in New York or her sister in Paris. She said she could not bear the thought of their friends in London knowing he had left her. Later it became clear that she hoped all along that his feeling for me was a temporary infatuation and that if they continued to live in the same house he would return to her.

Arcadi tried without success to obtain a visa for Anna Abramovna to go to the United States but eventually secured a visa for France. However, by that time he himself was being expelled from England, and unfortunately for her own future she insisted on following him to Moscow. Since I had remained in England to finish my work, she continued to hope he would change his mind. When I finally came to Moscow they were divorced.

Too inexperienced fully to appreciate Arcadi's difficulties, I had rebelled at his long delay in freeing himself to be with me. I felt that he should either leave his wife at once or give me up. I knew that leaving his son was very difficult for him, but I failed to understand that the ties between a man and a woman who have loved each other are hard for a sensitive man to break when the woman tries with every means at her disposal to maintain the old relationship.

Moreover, in leaving his wife, Arcadi was making a break with the "bourgeois" life he had lived since finishing his studies in Switzerland. For him I was a symbol as well as the companion in the new life in socialist society which we both expected to lead. Nearly ten years later the OGPU deprived me of the letters Arcadi

24 Lost Illusion

had written to me. But by chance one he wrote during this difficult period of our relationship remained hidden between the pages of a book. I quote from it here as revealing a little not only of Arcadi's state of mind, but also as showing his attitude toward the Communists with whom he had decided to throw in his lot:

"Darling Fredochka:

"I suppose you are right in your own way, your brutal way, and that I shall never be able to satisfy you as to the validity of my reason for acting in the way I do.

"I shall not pick a quarrel on what you say about my playing about with the idea of living a different sort of life; desiring to go on the same way as before and a number of other things read at the bottom of my heart. There is no use to argue about things on which we can never agree, and I shall not appeal to you to reverse your decision until I can tell you that the way is clear for my giving you as much of myself as you can desire.

"I love you and I cannot and shall not believe that everything is over until you refuse to come to me when I shall ask you to do so on the strength of changes in my family life. There are for me two possibilities only in the future: either I shall embrace fully to the extent of ioo percent the creed which will keep me going and make me forget you, or I shall accept it partially as I have done until now and you will be my beloved comrade in fighting all doubts which will arise. Nothing else is possible and the desire to go on the same way as before is death, which I do not feel I am ready to accept."

I Marry a Russian 25

In September 1927, while I was in Russia on my first visit, Arcadi was suddenly told by the British Home Office that he must leave England at once. He thought his expulsion was due to the indiscreet and fervent letters I had sent to him from Russia, but it probably was because the chairman of Arcos had detailed him as a trusted "specialist," to be one of the few Soviet employees allowed to remain on the premises when the British Home Secretary, Joyson-Hicks, raided the Arcos offices in June 1927.

Although I was flattered to think that I was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by the British Home Office, it was a great blow to have Arcadi expelled. I was very much in love, but I never for a moment thought of giving up my work in England to go with him to Berlin where he was stationed for the next nine months.

I visited him in Berlin during the 1927 Christmas vacation but, so seriously did I take my political work that when, in February 1928, he was allowed to come to London for ten days to represent Arcos in a lawsuit, I did not give up one single evening to him. I was then campaigning as the Communist Party's candidate in the London County Council elections and was speaking either to indoor meetings or at street corners every afternoon and evening.

Meanwhile I was earning a living, with the indulgence of C. M. Lloyd, my Director of Studies, as the holder of the Ratan Tata Research Fellowship at the London School of Economics. I also took Workers' Educational Association classes, reviewed books, and wrote articles. I

was making a good living, and my mother had inherited a small income from her father.

Although being a Communist was a handicap, my academic distinctions and the tolerance which distinguishes most English universities ensured me a secure and pleasant career. But I scorned the fruits of past years of hard study and never paused to regret the life I was leaving. The study of history could not satisfy. I yearned to take part in making it.

My fellowship came to an end in June 1928; Arcadi was in Russia but expecting to be sent to Japan, so I joined him in Moscow. Japan was the one country I particularly wished to visit, since my research work at the London School of Economics had concerned Eastern competition with the Lancashire cotton industry. This may sound dull but for me it meant a study in modern imperialism.

I had chosen the subject immediately after having written an M.A. thesis on the trade guilds of the later Roman Empire, because I thought there was a parallel between the effect of slave labor on the conditions of free labor in the ancient world, and the effect of colonial labor on Western labor standards in the modern world. In the course of my studies I had become interested in Japan and wished to see that strange semi-feudal, semi-modern imperialist state. If we could not yet live in Moscow, I was glad to get a chance to go to the Far East.

This time no smiling delegation met me at the Moscow station, and no luxurious quarters at the New Moscow

I Marry a Russian 27

Hotel awaited me. Arcadi took me to a tiny room, not more than fifteen by twelve feet, with a single bed, a chest of drawers, and two straight chairs. We did not even have a table, and I used to cook and iron and write on the window sill.

But the kvartira, or flat, was clean, and there was only one family in each of the four rooms. For Moscow that was not too bad. Unfortunately the room was not ours, but only lent to my husband for a few weeks. During the three months we lived in Moscow we moved twice. Arcadi's salary was 300 rubles a month. Since we were expecting to leave for Japan, I could not take a regular job. We just managed to live. Our rent was 50 rubles. Meals at a cheap restaurant cost a ruble each. But bread was still cheap; and butter, when obtainable, about the same price as in England, with the ruble stabilized at fifty cents.

Cigarettes were our greatest extravagance and difficulty. At the end of the month I used to cart bottles out to sell, or rake through our pockets for forgotten kopeks, to raise the price of a meal. We were very happy. Discomfort and comparative poverty do not matter much so long as one has faith. And we both still had faith. I wrote to my mother:

"I feel sometimes that having found Arcadi is too good to be true. ... I feel that the fact that we have been able to be happy together in these conditions augurs well for the future. We have begun life together in the worst material conditions instead of the best. ... All the

28 Lost Illusion

same, we both look forward to the day when we have a bed each and spoons and knives, and a bath and toilet of our own."

I was kept busy for a time finishing a translation from the German, begun in England, of the Illustrated History of the Russian Revolution, but I found it very hard to work that summer.

I attended the sixth Congress of the Comintern as a translator, listened to Bucharin from the visitors' gallery and saw Michael Borodin, back from China, walking in the corridors, already disgraced but still a romantic figure. I thrilled at the sight of Comintern delegates, white, black, brown and yellow, from every corner of the globe assembled in the socialist capital, visible witnesses of the "Unity of the Workers of the World."

Even in those days I had some deviations which is the Communist Party expression for "heresy." I thought of Trotsky as the greatest leader, and my communism was essentially internationalist. But I never dreamed that Stalin would have the power to destroy all that Lenin and Trotsky and the other Old Bolsheviks had created. Nor had I any inkling of the fundamental cancer at the root of the Marxist doctrine. You believe what you wish to believe, until experience bangs your head against the wall and awakens you from dreams founded on hope, a misreading of history, and ignorance both of human psychology and science.

At last, after the OGPU had fully satisfied itself concerning my husband, he obtained his passport to go to Japan for the Commissariat of Foreign Trade. We left

III

Honeymoon in the Far East

We started our journey from moscow to Siberia in a compartment for two, traveling in "soft cars," as second class is called in Russia. Unfortunately the Soviet Russian railroads do not trouble to separate men and women in making reservations for sleeping cars even for foreigners or top flight Communist officials.

Madame Anikeeva, wife of the Soviet Trade Representative in Japan, happened to be on the same train, and very much objected to sharing her compartment with a strange man. So we reluctantly agreed to be separated and let Anikeeva share the humbler compartment with me while Arcadi removed himself to the Pullman. However, she was a very nice woman and we had a pleasant journey.

My greatest problem was to hide from Anikeeva the fact that the Comintern in Moscow had entrusted me with secret papers to take to China, and to invent a convincing story to explain why I was going to leave the train at Chita in Siberia to travel later to China alone, instead of directly to Japan. I managed it somehow but she must have suspected the truth.

The day before I left Moscow I hunted in the shops

Honeymoon in the Far East 31

for a corset in which I could hide the papers in approved secret service style. I was extremely uncomfortable, but the thrill of conceiving of myself as a real revolutionary, helping to fan the flames of world revolution and liberate the "oppressed colonial workers" sustained me even through the ordeal of being corseted for the first time in my life.

All I remember of Chita is the intense cold, and the memorials of the Decembrists, the 150 exiled revolutionaries of 1825 who had dreamed of liberty, equality, and fraternity under the Iron Tsar, Nicholas I.

Only later was it to be borne in on me how mild had been the tyranny of the Tsars compared to that of Stalin. All those nineteenth and early twentieth century revolutionaries whose lives were spared and who were allowed to live in Siberia with their families were in exile, it is true, but for the most part not in chains nor herded in concentration camps. They were able to escape abroad with ease if they were so minded. Today in Stalin's Russia such humane and civilized treatment of political opponents is unheard of.

I was looked after in Chita by a little OGPU man who had formerly been a sailor on American boats, and whom I was to meet years later in Moscow at the Comintern. He was the sort of person who loves being conspiratorial for its own sake, and his manner of putting me on the train two days later, from the tracks instead of the platform, into a specially reserved compartment, should have aroused the suspicion of the Japanese or Chinese spies, if there had been any.

32 Lost Illusion

I went through a bad half-hour at the Manchurian border. A German on the train remarked to me at the passport and customs-control office, that the system was to watch the faces of the travelers rather than to search their baggage carefully. A row of huge White Russian guards stood behind the Chinese customs officials staring at the passengers. I had an innocent face and a British passport, and they would need to have been very suspicious to search the person of a British subject. My papers remained safe "in my bosom," as the old novels would have said.

The Comintern, with the inefficiency characteristic of all Russian institutions, had been unaware that the fighting going on in North China had stopped passenger traffic on the railway to Peking, and that I would therefore have to get to Shanghai by sea from Dairen. The money the Communist International gave me for my journey was insufficient to meet the extra expense of waiting in the hotel at Dairen for passage on the crowded boats, and I had hardly a cent of my own.

So in order to save enough to exist on in Shanghai for the ten days I planned to stay there, I economized in Dairen by eating only one meal a day. I took the table d'hote midday dinner at the Yamamoto Hotel and ate all through every one of its six or seven courses under the astonished and amused eyes of the Japanese waiters.

Eventually I got a ship to Shanghai and delivered my documents. To do that I had to go to the Palace Hotel and telephone to a certain business office, ask for a Herr

Honeymoon in the Far East 33

Doctor Haber, and tell him I had brought the samples of silk hosiery. I enjoyed it all immensely, especially as I was allowed two days later to come and meet some of the Comintern agents in Shanghai, who plied me with questions about happenings in Moscow which, in my innocence, I was unable to answer.

The agents I met, who were for the most part either Americans or Germans, were, if not Trotskyists, at least extremely unhappy revolutionaries. They had witnessed Stalin's callous and cynical sacrifice of the Chinese Communists in 1927 and were watching with dismay the beginnings of his transformation of the Comintern into a mere sub-office of the Russian National State.

For a couple of weeks I lived a double, or rather a triple life in Shanghai. I spent part of my time as a serious academic investigator of conditions in the cotton industry, other hours as the guest of "British Imperialists" at luxurious dinner parties and dancing or going to theatres with them; and yet other hours in the secret meeting places of the Comintern's agents.

It was part of the Comintern game that I should mix with the "bourgeoisie," and appear quite innocent of revolutionary activity; and my cotton industry investigations were in any case absolutely genuine. I should not have been much good as a conspirator if any hard task had been assigned to me. My English upbringing and my character unfitted me for deceit, and my conception of a Communist was one of an honest and bold revolutionary. I was too eager to argue with the capitalists

34 Lost Illusion

about what I believed to be the rottenness of their system, and the cruelty of their exploitation of colonial peoples, to have been an underground worker.

Thinking on one occasion to pour oil on the waters agitated by the views I had expressed, I told a Shanghai dinner party that I was doing some correspondence for the Manchester Guardian. This was true, and I thought it should establish my bona fides in the capitalist world. However, all values are relative. To my mind the Manchester Guardian signified the capitalist press, but to my compatriots in Shanghai it was "that Red rag," the paper for which "that awful fellow Arthur Ransome" wrote. This book is not about my adventures in the Far East, so I will pass over the year I spent in Japan with my husband. It was the happiest year of my life. We were in love. We had no money worries, for my husband was earning what seemed to me the princely salary of $500 a month. I was investigating Oriental labor conditions, calculating costs of production in the cotton industry, studying Japanese economics and politics, doing a series of well-paid articles for the Manchester Guardian Commercial, and writing my first book, Lancashire and the Far East.

Japan, however, gave me my first experience of a police state. Happy as I was under its blue skies, enjoying harmonious companionship with the man I loved, the shadow of the tyranny under which the Japanese lived kept my revolutionary fervor alive. Moreover, what my brother used to call my Puritan conscience soon made me restless. Surrounded as we were by poverty and op-

Honeymoon in the Far East 35

pression I had a deep conviction that it was wrong to be living comfortably and enjoying the greatest happiness which life can give, life with someone I loved more and more dearly as the days passed.

My letters to my mother expressed both my wonder and joy at my great happiness and my inner misgivings. I wrote that I could never have believed ten years before that life could be so complete and beautiful, but that my happiness was too great to last; that I must do something to deserve it. I must come back to England and work for what I believed.

Of course, no one knows his real motive. Perhaps it was not really my feeling that no one has any right to great personal happiness so long as the majority of mankind starve and toil without joy. It may have been love of power or the desire to make my mark in the world, which is the same thing as love of power, which impelled me to leave Arcadi and return to work in the Communist Party in England.

Also, it may have been the feeling I expressed in another letter to my mother, the feeling that Arcadi's love for me was founded upon his conception of me as a revolutionary, an intellectual, an independent woman, not a mere wife. I felt that if I lost myself in his love I might lose it, that I must somehow continue being what I had been when he began to love me.

Today I regret nothing more in my life than not having savored my happiness to the full and lived out the brief period Arcadi and I might have had together before we were engulfed in a hell of disillusionment and suffer-

36 Lost Illusion

ing in Soviet Russia. Today, I not only know that the gods are jealous gods, but that the only way to cheat them is not to be afraid of them.

To be alive at all is wonderful, and to have known, even for only a short while, the greatest happiness which life can give—to love and be loved utterly—gives fife a savor even if it has ended in tragedy.

Although Arcadi knew he would be terribly lonely, he encouraged me to go back to England. For he, even as I, believed in what the Webbs call "the vocation of leadership"—that is, the duty of the Communist to sacrifice personal happiness to political work. Yet we had already seen something in Japan of what Soviet society is really like.

The intrigues, the calumnies, and the factional struggles which went on in our small Russian colony of employees at the Trade Representation and the Embassy in Tokyo should have taught us what to expect in the USSR. But we ascribed these jealousies in the Russian colony to the "intellectuals." We believed that in Russia the proletarians ensured a cleaner atmosphere.

Moreover, both the Ambassador, Troyanovsky, and the Trade Representative, Anikeev, were decent men. The same could be said of my old acquaintance Ivan Maisky, at this time Counselor of the Embassy in Tokyo. But his wife, Maiskaya, and Madame Anikeeva were at daggers points. A telegram had to be sent to Moscow to settle the delicate question of precedence at Embassy dinner parties and Japanese state functions between the

Honeymoon in the Far East 37

wife of Maisky, and the wife of Anikeev, the Trade Representative.

As I remember it, the question was settled in Madame Anikeeva's favor, but the whole Russian colony was split into factions by the antagonism between these two women. They were fairly evenly matched, because although Maiskaya was a member of the Party and Ani-keeva was not, Maisky had not joined the Bolsheviks until 1924, whereas Anikeev was not only an Old Bolshevik but also of proletarian origin, having once been a factory worker.

Anikeeva being both a beautiful and an intelligent woman, became a sort of First Lady, in spite of Mais-kaya's qualifications. Troyanovsky's wife, who later accompanied him to Washington when he became Ambassador to the United States, was an unassuming lady, and played no part in the factional fights of "Red society."

Troyanovsky's first wife had been a Bolshevik when he was a Menshevik, and the story was told that during the civil war she had condemned her husband to death when he was brought before her as a prisoner. Lenin himself had talked Troyanovsky into joining the Bolsheviks and saved him from the death sentence imposed by his wife. I cannot vouch for the truth of this story, as whispered to me in Tokyo. But at least it explained Troyanovsky's choice of a nonpolitical, rather colorless lady as his second wife. It is more pleasant to have a wife not likely to shoot you because of your political beliefs.

38 Lost Illusion

Soviet society cannot be described without some account of the human factors. Russian women are just as prone to social discrimination, pride in their social status, love of fine clothes and admiration, as women in "bourgeois society." Soviet society has its hierarchies and its jealousies and is not composed of simple-minded, ardent revolutionaries with red cotton handkerchiefs on their heads, intent on constructing socialism regardless of personal advancement and the material comforts such advancement brings.

The simply dressed men and women who march in the demonstrations of the proletariat for the newsreel cameras and the admiration of foreign tourists, are most of them longing to change places with the boyars of Communist bureaucracy who watch them from the reserved seats in the Red Square.

Back in England I threw myself into the work of the British Communist Party, and tried to bury in my subconscious the growing suspicions concerning Soviet socialist life which had been engendered by my year in Tokyo, and by the fortnight I had spent in Moscow on my way home at the end of 1929.

I campaigned for the British Communist Party among the textile workers in Lancashire and for the Communist candidate for Parliament at a by-election in Sheffield. I became a member of the Industrial Committee of the Party in London, wrote articles for Communist publications, and a pamphlet on "What's Wrong with the Cotton Trade." My husband sent me money to live on, and I didn't take

Honeymoon in the Far East 39

a penny from the Communist Party, even for my articles and pamphlets. I studied the works of Marx and Lenin, conscientiously and thoroughly, and tried to explain in simple language the basic tenets of Marxism to make them understand that only through the unity of the workers of the world could living standards be improved and unemployment eliminated.

In speaking to the Lancashire cotton operatives and writing for them, for the first time I came up against the basic dilemma of the Marxist revolution, and also against the obstacle of the Comintern's cold and selfish indifference to the troubles of the working class, or its fate outside of Russia.

How could I convince the Lancashire cotton operatives that they should refuse to allow the cotton industry to be rationalized, refuse to work more looms, and go on strike for higher wages, when they knew as well as I did that the immediate result of such action would be more unemployment through the loss of markets to Japan and the other competing countries?

To my mind it seemed clear that the basic need was to explain Marxist theory, to make them understand the meaning of "workers of the world, unite" by showing that if all textile workers in all countries got together in one organization they could establish higher wages for all.

I tried to make them understand that the capitalist system, based on production for profit, inevitably doomed them to increasing poverty now that other countries besides England were industrialized, and work-

40 Lost Illusion

ers in the East with lower standards of life competed against them.

But now I came up against the Comintern, which was pursuing an ultra-left policy and insisting that agitation and agitation alone, was the task of the Communist. We were ordered not to make theoretical explanations, nor to waste our time or energy in exposing the dynamics of capitalism. We were only to foment strikes; to tell the workers to strike and strike whatever the consequences!

The Comintern, in fact, was not concerned with the livelihood of foreign workers; it wished only to weaken the capitalist countries by continual strikes and the dislocation of economic life. The sole objective of the Communist International was the safety of Soviet Russia, and it recked nothing of the interests or sufferings of the workers.

One day in Blackburn, the great weaving center of Lancashire, an elderly textile worker complained bitterly to me that it was all very well for the paid officials of the Communist Party to get themselves arrested for deliberately and unnecessarily holding meetings where they obstructed traffic, but how could we expect men with families to do so, especially since it was an utterly useless performance?

Of course, he did not know how proud Communist Party members were if, when they went to Moscow, they could boast that they had gone to jail in the class struggle. Such an accomplishment might be held to wipe out the stigma of their non-proletarian origin.

Finally I got myself into trouble with the Politbureau

Honeymoon in the Far East 41

of the Party in London by writing an article which the editor of the Communist Review had inadvertently allowed to be published. I had been reading Lenin's writings of the "Iskra period" and had discovered that he had condemned the "Economists," who maintained that the intellectual has no role to play in the Party and that the socialist idea can spring "spontaneously" out of the experience of the working class.

Lenin had insisted that the ordinary worker, by the experience of his daily life, develops not a full revolutionary class consciousness but only that of "a trade-unionist." Clearly, to my mind, in this period of declining markets for Britain, the workers' trade-union consciousness was likely to impel him to accept wage reductions and join with the bosses in attempting to recapture their markets. I did not, of course, foresee that this would lead all Europe to the development of increased nationalism and Germany to the horrors of National Socialism.

But I dimly perceived that unless the Marxist conception of international working-class unity could be put across to the workers, they would unite with their employers against other countries. We have since seen how Hitler and Mussolini roused their people to fight under the slogan of the proletarian nations against the "pluto-democracies."

Although my article was buttressed by quotations from Lenin, I was told by my Communist superiors that I had deviated seriously from the Party line by maintaining that theory was of primary importance and that the intellectual, accordingly, need not play at being a pro-

42 Lost Illusion

letarian, since he had an important part to perform in bringing knowledge of socialism to the working class. I was not directly accused of Trotskyism, but I was held to be slightly tainted with heresy.

Nevertheless at this stage of my Communist experience I did not have enough sense to see that nothing good would come out of Soviet Russia and that the foreign Communist parties were already corrupted and impotent. I had a great respect and liking for Harry Pollitt, Secretary of the British Communist Party, who had encouraged me and backed me up, and prevented the little bureaucrats in the Agitprop department from sabotaging my pamphlet and my Party work.

To this day I find it difficult to understand how this British working-class leader of nonconformist traditions came to subordinate his conscience and sacrifice his personal integrity to become a tool of Russian tyranny. The fact that Pollitt led the British Communist Party deluded me into thinking that it was still a revolutionary working-class party seeking to establish liberty and social justice.

After a year's work in England I went to Moscow, Arcadi having written that he would join me there from Japan. Before leaving England I spent a few days with my brother on the yacht in which he was preparing to sail across the Atlantic and on to the South Seas. He wanted me to sail with him at least as far as Spain; but I was, as usual, driven by that nervous sense of urgency which has so often made me miss the greatest pleasures in life.

Honeymoon in the Far East 43

I expected Arcadi soon to reach Moscow from Japan, and, much as I loved sailing, I felt I could not just dash off like that to no purpose.

My brother and I were more intimate those last days, sailing down the English coast to Cornwall, than since our childhood. His skeptical outlook on life, his avowed lack of any exalted motives, and his insistence on both the joyousness and futility of life, now seemed to me less reprehensible than a few years before.

The same Norse sagas and Greek legends which had inspired me to dreams of human liberty through the economic reorganization of society, had led him to throw up his job in London to sail to the South Sea Islands, of which he had dreamed since childhood. Perhaps his dream was as worthy and no more futile than mine. This I would not yet acknowledge, but at least I had grown tolerant enough not to reproach him.

In the night watches, sitting together on deck under the stars, Temple warned me of the certain disappointments which awaited me. He knew the motive forces of my life better than I knew them myself. For me, as he realized, the concept of human freedom formed the axis of my socialist beliefs.

I was in revolt against tyranny and oppression—not, as in the case of so many of those who have accepted Stalin's tyranny, a craving to lose myself and my reason in a universal brotherhood. In my mind Pericles' funeral speech, Shelley's and Swinburne's poems, Marx's and Lenin's writings, were all part and parcel of the same

44 Lost Illusion

striving for the emancipation of mankind from oppression.

Temple foresaw that I would not be able to accept and condone a new kind of oppression, even if tyranny wore the mask of socialism.

"You will probably end up in a Siberian prison, my dear," he said. "But so long as you don't deceive yourself, they will not break you. Only don't ever be a hypocrite to yourself. That is the only real sin against the Holy Ghost."

Temple sailed away from Newlyn Harbor toward the setting sun one golden September evening. We never saw each other again, for he died five years later in Fiji. During those years we were about as far away from each other as one can be on this earth. But I remembered his farewell warning to me against hypocrisy. You can preserve your inner integrity anywhere, even under Communist tyranny, if you do not seek escape in illusions and deceive yourself in order to be comforted.

Spider's Web

After hurrying to Moscow to meet Arcadi late in September, I was disappointed to learn that my husband had been ordered to make a trip to China before coming to Russia. He did not join me until the following January. I had three months alone in Moscow during which I was at last made aware of what manner of society and government was being created under Stalin.

Yet I did not have the sense to dash off to China to stop my husband from entering the country. How often in future years was I to regret my stupidity! Or was it some last lingering hopes which led me to allow him to walk into the spider's web from which he could never again be extricated?

For it was soon made clear to me that if Arcadi returned to Russia, he would never get out again. Almost all the non-Party specialists had been recalled from abroad and now no passports were issued except to those of unimpeachable proletarian origin or to Communist Party members of long standing.

The first great purge had begun, the purge which was to kill off so many of the old intellectuals—the engineers, technicians, scientists, and administrative personnel

46 Lost Illusion

who had been educated under the Tsarist regime, but had not run away after the Revolution, and had been working loyally for the Soviet state ever since the introduction of the New Economic Policy.

The Commissariat of Foreign Trade, anxious to keep a few qualified men abroad, wanted my husband to go to the United States to work at Amtorg. They cabled him to proceed straight to America from Shanghai, and offered to pay my fare to join him in New York via Hamburg.

Arcadi insisted upon returning to Moscow. He wrote to me that after his long exile he wanted to play his part in the great creative work going on in the USSR. I realized later that he wanted to drown his doubts in work and to merge himself in the collective human effort with a subconscious desire to atone for his long years of divorce from the socialist movement, and for the individualism of his nature.

Arcadi was an acutely sensitive person, reserved and somewhat unsocial by nature. He concentrated his love and affection upon very few individuals and rarely lowered the barriers of his reserve to any human being. For that reason, perhaps, he desired in a way which I often found difficult to understand, to merge himself in the stream of humanity, and to share a fraternal passion with those who, as individuals, repelled his fastidious standards of behavior.

A keen sense of humor and a quick wit saved him from being a misanthrope. He could always ward off threats to his privacy by a joke and, although his wit could be

Spider's Web 47

sharp and cutting, he directed it too frequently against himself for it to arouse rancor.

Arcadi had convinced himself that it was immoral to continue to be a privileged intellectual working and living in comfort abroad and that he ought to come home and suffer with the mass of his people. Although a Jew, he was also a Russian; and Russians appear to have a kind of mystical urge to immolate themselves, to castigate and humble themselves.

Russians seem to be the least individualistic of peoples and the most prone to servility and a kind of mystical masochism. Arcadi was essentially Western in education and ideas, but even he suffered for a while from the Russian martyr complex, so incomprehensible to those of us born and brought up in England or the United States.

His tragedy was that, although he shared the Russian intellectual's desire for self-immolation upon the altar of an ideal and the Russian desire to merge his individuality in a totality, he did not share the Russian aptitude for servility and sycophancy. He was unable to fawn upon the great or wheedle favors from the Communist Party bosses.

Thus he could never adapt himself to Soviet conditions of life. Yet he would not, or could not, break away from Russia. He preferred working at a low salary without privileges to abasing himself sufficiently to obtain food supplies, a flat, and other perquisites. He was too much of a Westerner to fawn and beg; too much of a Russian to cut loose and escape.

Narcomvneshtorg, the Commissariat of Foreign Trade,

48 Lost Illusion

thought so highly of Arcadi's ability and knowledge, and was so certain that if he returned to Moscow the OGPU would not permit them to send him abroad again, that they eventually offered me my full fare to China, and thence to the United States, if I would go and persuade him to sail for San Francisco. But I knew Arcadi too well to believe I could get him to change his decision.

Perhaps my English capacity for straight thinking had been dulled by the gray and leaden Moscow atmosphere. The terror, which now began to oppress my spirits, prevented my writing to him fully and frankly.

Even if I could have got a letter smuggled out to be posted in England, I had no other address than his office in Shanghai, where his mail probably was opened and read by an OGPU agent. If I told the truth about conditions in Russia, he might not believe me. Anything I wrote critical of the Soviet Union would endanger his life if after all he decided to return to Russia.

Although I was aware in my subconscious that our dream was already lost, I clung to my illusions. I would not as yet admit even to myself that Russia had already gone too far along the road to bureaucratic tyranny for there to be any hope of turning back to the ideals of the October Revolution.

Nor could I, being English, really accept the fact that if later we wished to leave Russia, my husband would not be able to do so. I sent telegrams, but I did not go to China. I waited in Moscow hoping against hope that he would not come, yet not daring to admit, even to myself, how fearful I was of the future should he come.

Spider's Web 49

During this period I wrote two letters to my mother in England. In the first, I said:

"Even Pickman—(an old Party member whom I had known in London) says it is just as well for Arcadi to spend the coming year in America. The fact of the matter is that the economic position is so strained that there is no confidence in anyone, and the conditions of work for all intellectuals are very difficult indeed. Arcadi is one of the very few competent people left in whom they still have confidence."

A month later I realized it was dangerous to give even a hint of conditions in letters sent through the mail, and I sent a note through the hand of E. F. Wise, the English adviser of Centrosoyus, the Central organization of the Russian Co-operatives. Wise was not a Communist and I was fairly confident he would not show my letter to anyone, but I was not quite sure. So I tried to write guardedly but to convey my state of mind:

"Only workers from the factory or men of proletarian origin are now allowed to go abroad. Whether Arcadi realizes the position or not I do not know. . . . The way business is now being run is hopeless. They put absolutely useless people into leading positions just because they are of proletarian origin. I suppose it can't go on and there will be a reaction soon, but in the meantime it means the most terrible waste and inefficiency.

"Things are very different from two years ago. Perhaps, dear, in the end I shall go back to being a historian. Only now am I beginning to learn a bit about mankind and its queerness. To understand a little what is meant

50 Lost Illusion

by Menschen sind Menschen. To understand that life is not so simple, so to speak. I am still pretty certain of my main ground but the carrying out of what is wanted is not so simple."

I added a postscript not so much, I imagine, to reassure my mother as to allay suspicions should my letter fall into the hands of the secret police. I wrote: "Dear, you know it is the most interesting country in the world to be living in, and one must be philosophical enough to take the bad with the good, so long as one believes that in the end there will be more of the latter."

Life in Russia as I was soon to find out, consisted in learning the painful lesson that there was far more bad than good, and that the good was disappearing so rapidly that there was soon nothing but bad.

While awaiting Arcadi's arrival from the Far East I lived with his sister, Vera, and her two sons in their tiny two-room apartment in the Dom Politkatajan on Pok-rovka Street. This was the House of the "Political Hard-Labor Prisoners"—meaning those who had done hard labor in Siberia under the Tsar.

Vera had been sent to a Siberian prison from Lodz in Poland while still in her teens. First, like Arcadi, a member of the Bund, she had become a Social Revolutionary in Siberia. She had joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, and had fought against the Japanese in the Intervention. Vera had been imprisoned by them but escaped.

Vera's life had been one of adventure, hardship, and sacrifice. But now she had a good job and was full of

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confidence in the future. She radiated happiness. Her first child had died as a baby on the long trek in the snow across Siberia to the prison camp. Trying to shield it from the cold, she had suffocated it in her arms.

Her second son, Shura, survived the rigors of prison and exile, and was now a youth of eighteen studying engineering at the Moscow University. Vera also had an adopted son, Grischa, whom she had taken in infancy from a poor peasant family in Siberia which had so many children it could not feed them.

The two boys were devoted to each other and to their mother. They called her Vera and treated her as an elder sister. Vera's husband had died fighting in the Red Army, but I gathered he had been a bit of a ne'er-do-well, and little love had been lost between them.

Vera and my husband had been very close to each other in their youth. They had a stepmother who treated them cruelly, and they both became revolutionaries at about the same time. Curiously enough, the harsh treatment they experienced in childhood and which made Arcadi so distrustful of individual human beings did not affect Vera. She was very sociable and trustful of others and almost childlike in her faith.

When they had met in Moscow in 1928 they had not seen each other for twenty-two years. It was typical of that meeting that Arcadi, when he saw Vera approach his office desk, merely said: "Hello Vera, how are you?" She had tears in her eyes and embraced him in front of everyone. During those twenty-two years Arcadi had

52 Lost Illusion

studied in Zurich, worked in business in England and the United States, and acquired a Western manner and a truly English reserve.

Vera's life had been entirely different. She had had little education, had participated in the revolutionary struggles of two decades, had known hunger and cold, and in general lived a life of great hardship. She had often been in danger, but she had always lived among "comrades," and never struggled on her own in an alien new world.

Her attitude toward Arcadi retained something of the flavor of their youth. He was the educated clever elder brother who had instructed her in Marxist theory long ago in Poland. Although he was not a Party member, she felt no superiority.

Her fate and Arcadi's were to be similar. She was arrested and disappeared in 1937, a year later than Arcadi, when most of the inhabitants of the Hard Labor House were purged because their revolutionary pasts made Stalin fear that they might turn their revolutionary techniques against him.

Vera was very proud of Shura, who, in Siberia before they came to Moscow, had been elected representative of all the Comsomols, members of the Young Communist League, of the Irkutsk region. But at the time I lived with them in Moscow he was causing her much anxiety. He did not conform sufficiently at the university, was apt to ask awkward questions at Young Communist meetings, and was in danger of being expelled from the Comsomols. His mother's reputation and influence had

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so far prevented this, but she was always begging Shura to hold his tongue.

Shura once said to me: "How simple life was in Vera's youth and how good it must have been. One was a revolutionary and one struggled against Tsarist tyranny. But now . . . ?"

What Shura meant was what I often felt myself. Those very impulses of generous youth which in the old days had led so many of the students to become revolutionaries, now impelled them to protest against Soviet tyranny and injustice. Such protest today means being denounced as a counter-revolutionary.

Vera was a product of the romantic past; Shura was a product of the disillusioned present. Whereas Vera knew little about theory, Shura was being educated in it, and the writings of Marx and Lenin impelled him to see more clearly than his mother the difference between theory and practice in the Soviet Union.

Marx and Lenin were still available to all in unexpur-gated editions but later the government saw to it that the originals were hard to come by except for high Communist Party members with a ticket to the Party Bookshop.

The Kremlin now permits only carefully edited extracts from the books of Marx and Lenin for the education of the masses. Stalin's speeches and writings have taken their place.

Before I left Russia, Shura had ceased to take any interest in politics. Like so many of the best elements among the Soviet youth, he had become a cynical young

54 Lost Illusion

man, philosophically accepting life as it came, and no longer yearning for the fulfillment of the forgotten hopes of his early youth. Intent only upon earning enough to keep his young wife and child in reasonable comfort, he spent several years as an engineer in the Far North where the pay was highest.

With her Jewish sense of family solidarity and her Siberian tradition of hospitality, Vera unquestioningly gave me shelter and shared her food with me. Having no job, I had no bread card and nowhere to get a meal. A post was offered me at the Marx Engels Institute, but only if I signed a contract for three years. Since I did not know whether or not Arcadi and I were going to America, I could not take it. I got translating and editing work to do and wrote some articles, but this did not produce a food card.

Those were cold and hungry days. In the morning we had a meal of potatoes, bread, and herring. Unable to swallow the raw salted herring which is the most nourishing food available to the poorer Russians, I subsisted on bread and potatoes until 5 p.m. when the four of us shared the dinner for three to which they were entitled from the communal kitchen of the apartment house. It cost 65 kopeks (32 cents) a head and usually consisted of cabbage soup and chopped meat balls or pike, that heavy and unappetizing member of the shark family, which seems to have been the only fish to survive the Revolution. We never tasted butter, but the two boys, as industrial workers, got a monthly allowance of two pounds of margarine.

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Twice a month Vera received the family's meat ration. She would then telephone to her friends, and invite them to come and eat it with us. She made delicious Siberian meat dumplings in soup; and for one evening we would eat to repletion.

She never thought of making the meat last several days. Vera had the old exile's feeling that we should share all good things with our comrades, and like most Russians she was generous and had no disposition ever to save anything.

There would be vodka and sweet Crimean wine, hard candies, and tea to follow, and we would sit around the table for hours talking and singing. I had a glimpse of the kind of people and the atmosphere of the old revolutionary days. These men and women, all of them former exiles and not yet corrupted by the privileged position the revolution had given Communists, were the salt of the Party.

They were simple people, hearty and jolly, and full of faith. Times were hard, but they thought this was only a temporary phase. Mistakes were being made, but they would be rectified and socialism would soon be created. How could it not be so since "The Revolution" had been victorious? In contrast to the Communists of higher rank, they were comradely in their personal relations and were not acquisitive.

For all her revolutionary past, Vera was very houseproud, orderly and feminine. Her little flat was as clean as a pin. She hung lace curtains at the windows, she looked pained if a single object were out of place, she

56 Lost Illusion

dressed neatly, took great pains to arrange her flaming red hair becomingly, loved nice clothes although she had none, and told lies about her age. These lies were very naive. If she had been only as old as she said, she would have been a prisoner in Siberia and mother of a child at the age of fourteen.

She was the soul of hospitality, emotional and tender, always full of vitality, good-tempered and sensitive to human suffering. Later I was to meet the type of Communist who would roughly turn a starving child from the door and warn me that I must on no account give anything to these little beggars since they were probably the children of Kulaks. But Vera would always give a piece of bread or sugar to the destitute, although she knew that as a "good Bolshevik" she should not.

Besides Vera, Shura, Grischa, and myself there was usually at least one other guest sleeping in our tiny rooms. Siberian friends passing through Moscow, or temporarily homeless in the capital, came to sleep on the floor or in one of the boy's camp beds.

We ate in the kitchen, which was also the bathroom. Getting a bath was a matter of luck, since we never knew at what hour and on what days the water would be heated for the hundreds of flats in our building. We were among the privileged. Rarely again in Moscow was I to live in a house where hot water was supplied even once or twice a week.

Vera and the boys spoke only Russian. Since I knew only a few words, we communicated at first largely by signs. I made more rapid progress in the language than

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at any later period and learned to make one word do the work of many.

For instance, I can remember once wanting to convey to Shura the idea that I could see he was depressed. So I said to him "bad weather here" pointing to his head and heart. And he understood me and gave me the word nastrayenia for "mood." Sometimes my limited vocabulary caused jokes at my expense as when I said over the telephone I desired a man, thinking I was saying that I wanted to speak to him.

Vera's greatest friend, Nina, was often with us, a woman of peasant origin, also a Communist Party member but hard put to it to support her two little girls living with their grandmother in the village. Her husband had deserted her years before, and she received no alimony.

Nina knew a few words of English to help out our conversation, and I got very friendly with her and later visited her village. Plain in appearance and dressed almost like a man, she was gay and kind, full of enthusiasm and vitality, and particularly interested in the Communist movement abroad.

Our life in the two small rooms was jolly and friendly and had for me a little of the flavor of adventure and that precious atmosphere of comradeship which was so rapidly fading elsewhere. Evenings at the flat kept my spirits up, but my days were dreary. I wished I had stayed in England until Arcadi arrived from the East, I wished even that I had sailed with my brother across the Atlantic as he had suggested.

Since my association with Russia began, I had con-

58 Lost Illusion

tinually been hurrying off somewhere and then been forced to wait weeks and months with nothing to do. It had been so in 1928, and now it was so again. I had rushed away from England without even waiting to arrange publication of the book I had written for the London School of Economics. I had refused the joy of sailing at least as far as Spain with Temple; and here I was pacing the streets of Moscow with nothing to do.

Early in November I spent a few days in Leningrad where Dementiev, a friend of Arcadi's just arrived from Japan, was working. We went outside the town to look at the sea—a cold gray sea and a flat shore—but the sea nonetheless. I wished more than ever that I were with Temple on the high seas, since after all I could have gone with him instead of waiting so long for Arcadi in Russia.

Nothing is more depressing than autumn in Moscow. It rains and rains. The streets are half-flooded, for the gutters don't work properly. It is cold; and there is only occasional heating of the houses. We were expected to keep the windows shut all the time and preserve the warmth for three days until the house management put the heating on for another twelve hours.

As I walked the streets the sadness of the atmosphere, the drab, grim-faced crowds, the miserable peasants selling a few rotten apples or pickled cucumbers at the street corners, the homeless children, wet and hungry, depressed my spirits.

I spent a good deal of time going to offices inquiring about the flat which had been promised to us, and for which we had already paid $500 in foreign currency and

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far more in rubles. I was also negotiating for a Russian language edition of my Lancashire and the Far East, getting translation and other work, and seeing English and American comrades at the Comintern, the Marx Engels Institute, and the Lenin School.

Already the world of these foreign Communists in Moscow seemed far removed from my own. Most of them lived in the Lux Hotel and had no worries about food or shelter. They knew nothing of the life of the ordinary Russians, and spent their time discussing theory, organization, and foreign affairs, or gossiping about each other within their own closed-off world.

I felt a growing barrier between them and myself, a barrier caused by the constant need to put a half-hitch on my tongue, as they say in Devonshire. For them, all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, the USSR. To question it even when the evidence was completely to the contrary was dangerous heresy.

The only man at the Lenin School who dared to express some doubt to me was a Yorkshire miner whom I had known in England. There he had been unemployed but had lived in a three-room house with his wife and one child. In Moscow no employed worker dreamed of owning more than two rooms, and felt himself very lucky if he had one.

I had other friends, Russians whom I had known in London at Arcos and at the Russian Trade Representation, now occupying high positions in Moscow. The old friendliness persisted, but I thought they must be aware that I was no longer the naive enthusiast of two years

60 Lost Illusion

before. I even felt a certain embarrassment on their part at the difference between the idealized picture of Russia they had painted for me in London and the stark reality of the Soviet Byt (way of life).

My conversation was guarded, but probably I failed to display the required enthusiasm when they held forth about the sacrifices "we are making" for the industrialization of the Soviet Union. They were no fools, nor was I. They must have known that I perceived that high Communist Party functionaries were getting the best of everything and that all the sacrificing was being done by the dumb crowds, the dragooned peasants and the helpless workers.

Soviet Social Register

THE VERY FIRST WEEK I WAS IN MOSCOW as a resident I discovered that my old friends the Plav-niks had supplies of good food when they invited me to dinner. Plavnik and his wife were old Socialists, who had spent a large part of their lives in exile in Germany, and were essentially Europeans with a civilized outlook and standard of personal behavior and honor. They were therefore apologetic about receiving more and better food than the workers. But others were not ashamed at all.

In fact, a year or so later I heard wives boasting of the special stores at which they were entitled to buy since this showed the high rank of their husbands. I soon realized that there is social discrimination in Russia. The Soviet Social Register is written on the ration cards of the favored Communist bureaucracy, the new Russian nobility. I learned of the existence of exclusive shops catering to privileged high Party officials and called "closed distributors," which sold foodstuffs and clothing unobtainable elsewhere, or only to be purchased on the "free market" at exorbitant prices.

Other closed distributors with less attractive wares

were opened later for lower grades in the social hierarchy, for second-class Party functionaries and nonparty specialists and for the workers in heavy industry. There came to be, roughly speaking, the following grades: First, what Russians call the Kremlin people, commissars, chairmen of big trusts, members of the Central Committee of the Soviets and of the Party—all the highest Communist Party members.

Next came the OGPU shops which served food almost as good and as plentiful as the shops for the Kremlovsky (Kremlin) people. Then, Gort A, for high officials—all Party men—and for a very few specially favored scientists and engineers. Next, Gort B, for the "middle class" —that is, Party men of lower rank and highly qualified non-Party specialists.

In addition there were well-stocked shops for the Red Army officers. There were also the various closed distributors for the factories producing capital goods. These varied greatly from place to place. In some the workers could obtain the official ration of butter and milk and meat. In others none of these luxuries were ever on sale. But the Kremlovsky shops, Gort A, and Insnab, (the Foreigners Store) were always well stocked with food and clothing unavailable to the average Russian.

My husband, as a specialist, eventually received a book for the Gort B shop allotting him two pounds of meat and two pounds of butter a month and a small ration of other food and some clothing. But this was not until more than a year after his return. His rations from Gort B were about the same as Vera received in her "Political

Soviet Social Register 63

Hard Labor Distributor." Typical of the kind of joke that I heard in Moscow was a story about Vera's shop where it was said that jam was on sale with a sign over it reading: "For sale only to regicides."

As my husband remarked, the Communist Party people and the other ex-revolutionaries were now drawing dividends on their investment in the Revolution years before.

Gradations of social rank in Russia went according to our food ration much as in the ancient Byzantine Empire the salaries of imperial officials and generals were reckoned in measures of corn, wine, and oil.

Only top-flight Communists were favored by ample supplies of food and clothing. This device of Stalin's, which directly violated both Lenin's formula of the Party maximum, and Marx's injunction that the official was to be paid no more than a worker, was designed to keep Party men loyal to him personally.

Any deviation from the Party line involved expulsion from the Party and the loss of these precious food supplies. It also meant the withdrawal of many other privileges awarded in kind and not in money: use of an automobile, the pick of housing accommodations, special hospitals, and an exclusive medical service reserved for the new aristocracy alone.

The closed distributors also enabled the government to discriminate in favor of the aristocracy with the scarcest goods, such as fruits, fresh vegetables, cocoa, chocolate, and butter and eggs. This system had the additional advantage of permitting the Soviet Govern-

64 Lost Illusion

ment propagandists at that time to tell the world that Communist Party members never received salaries higher than the Party maximum of 300 rubles.

Actually the salaries of high Communists were worth ten to twenty times as much as those of the non-Party specialists, who in theory were supposed to be getting more, and than those of the skilled workers, who were supposed to be paid about the same as the Party functionaries.

I soon ran into the snobbishness of the Communist Party members. Friends from London who had known my husband and me there would try to ask me to parties without him because he was not a member of the Communist Party. Or if he were invited and went he was made to feel a social inferior.

Although I had been very poor in England, I had never in my life before had any feeling of social inferiority. Although I myself was treated as an equal because I was a member of the British Communist Party, I was infuriated at the attempted social ostracism of my husband, who, as I knew, did work of far greater value than most of the Party functionaries and got much less than they did from the "socialist state" for doing it.

Before Arcadi arrived, Mrs. Khinchuk, wife of the Soviet Trade Representative in Berlin, whom my friend Jane Tabrisky and I had known in London, asked her one day how I, a Party member, had happened to marry beneath me. Not that she was a Party member herself, but any Soviet woman not too unattractive or of too bad

Soviet Social Register 65

social origins endeavored to secure a Party man for a husband.

Just as a "bourgeois" woman in capitalist society is expected to marry into her class and not into the laboring class, so in Soviet Russia you were declasse if you married outside the Communist Party. A woman was debarred from entry to the "best society" if she were not either herself a member of the Party or married to a member.

Mrs. Khinchuk was the perfect example of the new Moscow socialite, Soviet snob and hypocrite, but she was only one of thousands. She did no work, she shopped and visited in an automobile which she did not "own," but which with its chauffeur was at her disposal day and night. And she loved to hold forth about the sacrifices "we are making."

Jane Tabrisky, who was staying at the Khinchuk's flat while awaiting the room promised her by the Marx Engels Institute, got so disgusted that she often came to Vera's in order to get away from the society of the privileged. Khinchuk himself was decent and hardworking, but as I had already perceived in Japan, it was the wives of the Bolsheviks who led the parade in the degeneration of the Party and showed so obviously the characteristics of the nouveau riche society then coming into being.

Jane, who had been a member of the British Communist Party since she was sixteen, who had been secretary of the London University Labor Party when I was chair-

Revival of Serfdom

JANE AND I LEARNED RAPIDLY. Collectivization of agriculture, and the Five Year Plan in Four Years, were no longer matters of abstract theory to be discussed ad infinitum in Party meetings in the comfortable bourgeois world of London. They had become painful realities of our existence and of the lives of those around us. They meant starvation for many and near starvation for the majority.

Collectivization and industrialization meant the formation of a privileged aristocracy as cut off from the masses of the people by the conditions of their lives as the nobles of the ancien regime in France.

Our lives were spent mainly with ordinary "middle class" Russians and what was going on around us could never again be for us just a remote social experiment. It was a terrible and moving reality involving untold suffering for millions whom we could not regard as human guinea pigs in a social laboratory, as did the "Friends of the Soviet Union" abroad.

We knew, of course, why there was famine in Russia, and the situation which had led up to the "liquidation of the Kulaks" with all its attendant cruelty and dislocation

of the country's economy. In 1927 and 1928 when I had received my first false impression of Soviet Russia, there had already been an economic and political crisis.

The New Economic Policy, allowing limited free enterprise, which had brought prosperity before Stalin stopped it, had also almost led to the revival of capitalism in Russia.

By 1926, nearly two-thirds of the grain on the market was being sold by a mere six per cent of the peasants, the Kulaks. These Kulaks were selling to middlemen; and a new "petty bourgeoisie" of shopkeepers, restaurant operators, and small industrialists had cropped up like mushrooms after a rain. The state could no longer lay its hands on enough grain to export even a small quantity to pay for the importation of machinery. Handicraft industries were reviving to serve the local needs of the village.

The peasants were creating their own self-subsistent economy outside the sphere of control of the Soviet state. The working class in the state industries suffered, and the elected local Soviets came more and more to represent the interests of the peasants. Stalin in 1928 was still going with the tide.

Anxious to secure his own power by enlisting the support of the right wing of the Party against Trotsky, he had contemplated in 1925 giving each peasant a forty years tenure of his land. As against this "denationalization" of agriculture and stagnation of industry, which in truth must have led to the USSR becoming a semi-capitalist country, Trotsky proposed collectivization—

Revival of Serfdom 69

not the collectivization at the point of the bayonet which Stalin was later to enforce, but gradual collectivization through the grant by the government of credits and machinery to those poorer peasants who would voluntarily join a collective farm. This could, however, be accomplished only if the richer peasants were heavily taxed to finance the collective farms and to enable the state to import machinery for the manufacture of farm implements, for the erection of power stations and for industrialization.

Heavier taxation of the Kulaks would not only stunt the growth of this new capitalist class, but would enable the government to produce more manufactured goods, lower prices, and break the strike of the peasants. The farm population was responding to the shortage of industrial goods by working less, consuming more of their own produce, and disposing of the rest to the Kulak middlemen, who, instead of selling it to the government, used it to support local handicraft industries. But, said the right opposition, if you bear down too hard on the Kulaks we shall have war between town and village.

The difference of opinion between the right and left wings of the Bolshevik Party on the policy to be pursued was distorted by the struggle for personal power.

Stalin had little theoretical knowledge, and in any case was not in the least concerned with the Tightness or wrongness of a policy. He wanted absolute power, and he saw his way to get it by crushing Trotsky and his left opposition with the aid of Bucharin and the right wing, and then to eliminate the right opposition by pur-

70 Lost Illusion

suing a policy far more left than Trotsky's. The final result was that the worst features of the policies of both sides were adopted by Stalin as the Party line.

Stalin brought about super-industrialization on a scale never dreamed of by the left opposition, accompanied by the destruction of the elements in the Bolshevik Party most capable of carrying out such a policy, accompanied by accumulation of capital for industrial construction by robbing the peasants, and accompanied by the liquidation of the technicians and administrative personnel who alone could have made the new industries function efficiently.

By 1928 the truth of Trotsky's prophecies had become so obvious that he and his followers had to be eliminated if he were not to take Stalin's place. The decreasing food supplies in the towns were convincing the proletariat that Trotsky was right in predicting the return of capitalism. The workers of Leningrad appear to have been behind Trotsky almost to a man. The Kulaks were by now holding up food for the cities to force a rise in the price of grain. Trotsky and the left opposition leaders were arrested by the OGPU, which Stalin controlled, and imprisoned or exiled.

Stalin was able to do this because he had the support of Bucharin, Tomsky, Kalinin, and the rest of the right wing of the Party. These men had no conception of Stalin's real intentions until it was too late. They were sincere, and none of them appeared anxious for personal power.

They were probably right in thinking that Trotsky's

Revival of Serfdom 71

policies would have led to civil war between town and country and a revival of the horrors of the early Communist period. They did not dream that Stalin was planning a civil war far more bloody than anything Trotsky had desired, and to be carried out in such a fashion as to destroy all hope of socialism in Russia.

In July 1928, Stalin was still insisting that individual cultivation of the land must be supported, and collectivization would be a mistake. But by October Stalin had reversed himself and Bucharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were being condemned as bourgeois liberals who desired the restoration of capitalism. Stalin was preparing to sponsor an adventurist policy of super-industrialization, complete collectivization, liquidation of the Kulaks, and savage coercion of the peasantry.

The Kulaks were holding the government to ransom; less and less food was procurable in the towns, and the workers began to suffer. Grain stocks were seized from the Kulaks and even from the middle peasants. Those they had employed found themselves without work, since the Kulaks naturally saw no point in cultivating large farms if the produce was to be confiscated.

By December 1928 the food shortage was making itself felt even in Moscow, the most favored of Russian cities. Just after we left for Japan bread cards were introduced, unemployment increased, and real wages fell. Forced buying from the peasants at an unremunerative price and heavier taxes on the Kulaks could not solve the problem.

The peasants hid their grain or refused to sow it and

72 Lost Illusion

murdered the Party functionaries who seized their crops. Military force might confiscate the food in the villages. But it could not, so long as individual farming persisted, coerce the peasant population to work for the benefit of the state.

Coercion and intimidation were impracticable unless the peasants could be herded together like the workers in the factories. Collective farming was therefore ordered by decree—not the voluntary pooling of resources by the poorer peasants, encouraged by state credits and able to produce more than individual farms by being supplied with machinery, which Trotsky had advocated —but collectivization by the knout.

Not collectivization with the purpose of immediately increasing the productivity of the land by means of machinery and modern methods of production, which obviously could not be introduced on small individual holdings, but collectivization with equipment suitable only to small-scale farming, with the object of getting all the peasants together under the control of the secret police so that they could be forced to labor.

In November 1929, Stalin announced the end of individual farming, ordered the liquidation of the Kulaks as a class, and the establishment of collective farms everywhere and for everyone. He had decided to solve the agricultural problem "in a socialist sense" by violence and terror.

If collectivization had been accompanied by a rapid increase in the supply of manufactured goods to the villages the peasants might perhaps have been reconciled

Revival of Serfdom 73

to the new system. But Stalin had simultaneously inaugurated the Five Year Plan for industrial development, which concentrated all the resources of the country on the production of capital goods and armaments. The peasants were expected to work practically for nothing since the government could not supply them with clothing and other manufactures of prime necessity.

Then began the wholesale murder of the Kulaks by the Soviet state, which is almost unparalleled in history for its cruelty. I use the word murder deliberately, for although the Kulaks were not lined up and shot, they were killed off in a manner far more cruel. Whole families, men, women, children and babies, were thrown out of their homes, their personal possessions seized, even their warm clothing torn off of them. Then, packed into unheated cattle cars in winter, they were sent off to Siberia or other waste parts of the Soviet Union.

Some survived to start life again and build farms in the waste lands into which they had been exiled. Women and children perished. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were herded off to the timber prison camps in the Arctic regions, to die like flies from hunger, cold and exhausting labor, whipped by the OGPU guards and treated like the slaves of Pharaoh or of an Asiatic tyrant.

Shura told me terrible stories of what was going on. He and Grischa had been sent on their vacation with other young students to help institute by these horrible cruelties a "socialist agricultural system" in the villages. A friend of Arcadi's who worked in the Timber Export organization made my blood run cold with his account

74 Lost Illusion

of the merciless treatment of the political prisoners at Archangel where the ex-Kulaks in chain gangs loaded wood for export.

When the father of a Kulak family was arrested, all food in the house was confiscated, down to the last sack of flour. The wife and children were left to starve to death. Mothers sometimes killed their babies to save them from lingering death by famine. The story reported by Malcolm Muggeridge, then correspondent of the Manchester Guardian in the USSR, is typical of many of the gruesome tragedies of that terrible time.

A woman in a Cossack village in the Caucasus, whose husband was arrested and taken off to forced labor as a Kulak, had her last sack of flour confiscated by the OGPU officer, Comrade Babel. When he had left she looked at her three children asleep by the stove. There was no food and no hope of securing any. She got an axe and killed the children as they slept.

Then, after tying each child up in a flour sack, the mother went to town and reported to Comrade Babel that she had decided she ought no longer to defy the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and confessed that she had three more sacks of flour hidden away. Comrade Babel went back with her, along the snowy road, to her house. She took him up to the loft and showed him three bulging sacks. As he bent under the rafters to look, she killed him with the axe.

Of course the woman was shot, and Comrade Babel's heroic death "on the class-war front" was reported in Moscow newspapers. Pravda spoke of the "plots" of

Revival of Serfdom 75

the class enemy, of the need "to root out mercilessly all hostile elements in the villages." The case was reported as one in which "a notorious counter-revolutionary, wife of an exiled Kulak, lured Comrade Babel to her house with false promises and murdered him in the loft with an axe."

Such incidents as these were not recognized as acts of blind revenge. They were represented as "symptomatic of the new tactics of Kulak elements" seeking to destroy the socialist state.

Fear of reprisals by the desperate, starving, expropriated peasants drove the Party to attempt to exterminate their victims. "We must destroy our enemies until not one is left," was the daily cry in the newspapers. An orgy of cruelty raged in the countryside. We must go back to the days of the Mongol hordes sweeping across Asia and eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, or to the massacres by the Assyrians in Biblical times, for an historical parallel with the Communist "class war" against the Russian peasants.

Many motives, fanatical faith, fear, sadism, revenge, played their role in this horrible massacre of the innocents by famine and the firing squad. Jews who remembered old pogroms in the Russian villages, workers who had suffered under the Cossack whips in Tsarist times, gave vent to dusty and dim hatreds sanctified under the banner of the class war.

Earnest young men and women whose best instincts were perverted by orders given them by the Communist Party, convinced themselves that in depriving the peas-

76 Lost Illusion

ants of their last stores of food they were helping to build a socialist society. OGPU and Red army officers sent to carry on the "war on the agrarian front" feared that if they were not absolutely merciless they would be stabbed in the back on dark nights by desperate peasants.

The Kulaks, now declared enemies of the state, were in theory the exploiting peasants, those who rented extra land and employed hired labor, or who advanced money or seed at high rates of interest to the poorest peasants.

Kulak means a fist, and the word originally signified an exploiter and a usurer. Under Stalin the word came to mean any peasant who dared to oppose collectivization.

Long before the period of forced collectivization, the Bolsheviks had endeavored to break the solid front which the villages presented to the cities and the Soviet state, by promoting a class war in the villages. It was hoped that if some peasants could be set against others, it would be possible to break the solid opposition of the peasants to what they viewed as an exploitation of the agricultural population for the benefit of the city workers.

So in the New Economic Policy period, the state, which was encouraging the Kulaks with one set of decrees to "get rich" by producing more, was discouraging them by treating every prosperous peasant as a social outcast and inciting the poorer peasants against them. It was little wonder that the peasants brought less and less grain to the market.

In order to stimulate class warfare, the peasants were registered in three classes: Kulakt, Seredniaki (middle

Revival of Serfdom 77

peasants), and Bedniaki (poor peasants). In villages where there was a dead level of poverty, the local Communists were nevertheless ordered to find Kulaks even where none existed.

A story was told me of how in one village the local chairman of the Committee of the Poor exibited a family of Kulaks quite in the manner of showing a family of lepers on whom the judgment of God had fallen. He regarded them with hopeless pity and said that all the troubles in the village dated from the time when the villagers had been compelled to divide themselves into the three classes.

When the query was put as to why the family was regarded as Kulaks, he replied that someone had to be a Kulak, and that this family many years before had owned a village inn. They no longer had it, but there was apparently no hope of their ever losing their status as a Kulak family.

If they should there would be no other family to take their place as the local Public Enemy, and for some reason unknown to anyone, the Soviet Government insisted that each village must produce at least one Kulak family to be hated and oppressed.

These Kulaki had no electoral rights, had to pay forty per cent of their miserable income to the state, and their children were not allowed to go to school. Thus Stalin used the technique of artificially focussing hatred on the innocent, which Hitler copied in the case of the Jews.

In practice, since in many parts of the country real

78 Lost Illusion

Kulaks who "exploited" other peasants were hard to find, the designation was applied to every peasant who was a little better off than his neighbors, to anyone who owned two horses and two cows, or had managed in some way to lift himself a little above the miserably low general standard of life in the Russian village. It meant that hard work and enterprise were penalized wherever they were found. What Tartar invasions and long centuries of feudal oppression had begun, the Soviet Government consummated.

The Russian peasant sank further into slothfulness and hopelessness. Since to raise himself above the level of his beasts of burden was now accounted a crime against the state, he worked as little as possible, and ate and drank whenever he could without thought of the morrow, which was almost certain to be worse than today.

The fecklessness of the Russian character was the result of Russian history, but it was left to the Soviet Government to make laws penalizing all who worked hard and took thought for the morrow. Its treatment of the best and most progressive elements among the peasantry might have been expressly designed to prove the truth of the old arguments against socialism.

Precisely those peasants who had the knowledge, skill, and industry to raise Russian agriculture above its medieval level were liquidated. The collective farms were deprived of the men who could have made them function efficiently.

The army of city workers sent down to coerce the peasants and manage the collectives took far more from

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the villages in the shape of wages than the Kulaks had ever taken as profit. If, by allowing them a larger share of the produce than the other peasants, the Kulaks had been persuaded to run the new farms, instead of being killed off or imprisoned, the system might possibly have worked.

It was, of course, argued that the Kulaks were irreconcilably hostile to the Soviet state. But they had never been given a chance to be other than hostile. The government discriminated against them, reviled them, and instigated everyone to loathe them. Naturally they hated the Soviet Government. But to argue that they were irreconcilable enemies of the Soviet state is like saying that the Jews in Germany deserved what they got because they hated the Nazi Government which oppressed them.

It was not only the Kulaks who were expropriated, exiled, or imprisoned. Except for the minority of landless peasants, all regarded collectivization as expropriation. Ordered by the state to pool all their property and to give everything up to the Kolkhoz (collective farm), and faced with exile to Siberia or with slave labor in the concentration camps if they refused to join the Kolkhoz, the peasants naturally killed their pigs, their sheep, their cows, and their chickens, and ate them or sold the hides and the meat for money, which could be hidden. By 1934, the number of horses in Russia was half what it had been in 1929, and the sheep and pigs less than half.

Trotsky described the process in the following words:

"Twenty-five million isolated peasant egoisms which

yesterday had been the sole motive force of agriculture— weak as an old farmer's nag, but nevertheless forces—the bureaucracy tried to replace at one gesture by the commands of 2,000 collective farm administrative offices, lacking technical equipment, agricultural knowledge, and the support of the peasants themselves."

Trotsky called Stalin's program a blind, violent gamble. The left opposition had never advocated anything so drastic, so rapid, and so unprepared. It had envisaged gradual collectivization over a period of fifteen years. Stalin, having at last decided upon collectivization, thought he could force it through by terror exercised against the whole peasant population.

He laid waste the countryside and caused the death of between five and ten million peasants by starvation.

Russian morale has never recovered from those terrible years. The Communist Party and the Comsomols became the expropriators of the people, an army of occupation in their own country.

Decent young men and women sent to the villages were persuaded that it was their duty as Communists to stifle all humanitarian scruples while driving the bewildered, sullen, and resentful peasants into the collective farms, and to confiscate grain, milk, and meat from men and women whose children would starve to death in consequence.

Those who would not perform the terrible deeds expected of them were expelled from the Party as "rotten liberals." Both duty and hopes of a career compelled the Party member and the Comsomol to utter ruthlessness and

Revival of Serfdom 81

inhumanity. Many of the young people became hardened and cynical careerists prepared to commit any atrocity commanded by Stalin. Some thus became moral perverts, sadists who enjoyed the tortures which they were ordered to inflict on the helpless victims of the OGPU.

The war on the Russian peasants was more brutalizing than war against another nation, for the peasants were unarmed and defenseless. The present generation of Communists was brutalized in youth by the pogrom conducted against the peasants.

Meanwhile the workers in the factories found themselves suffering almost as great a degree of privation as in the years of civil war. Not only did Stalin's violent agrarian policy drastically reduce the amount of food produced in Russia; his industrialization plans caused food and manufactures to be exported from Russia to pay for machinery imports. Butter and eggs disappeared from the worker's table and were dumped abroad. Meat and even herring became a rare luxury.

During my first year in Moscow it was believed that if once the peasants could be forced into the collective farms, the food problem would be solved. But, although by 1931 most of the land had been taken over by collectives, the peasants had not yet been coerced to work for the profit of the state.

Incentive was gone. Since they no longer owned the land, since intensive industrialization and concentration on the production of capital goods meant that the state had even less to sell them than before in the way of consumers' goods, and since the state virtually confiscated

the grain by taking it at nominal prices, the collectivized peasants worked less than ever before.

They opposed the government by the same passive resistance as before the New Economic Policy was introduced, and sowed and reaped just enough to feed themselves. This fact, coupled with drought in the Black Soil region, reduced the harvest to a much smaller amount than in previous years. But the government nevertheless enforced its full demands, telling the peasants that it was their own fault if they were short of food, and leaving them to die of starvation.

A terrible famine set in, especially severe in the rich corn-bearing lands of the Ukraine. This time there was no food relief poured in to Russia from the United States as it was in 1922 under the leadership of Herbert Hoover, since the Soviet Government denied to foreigners that there was a famine.

Foreign journalists were not allowed to visit the South. All Russia knew what was happening; but the hacks of the foreign press, obedient to Stalin for fear of losing their jobs, sent out no word. Only a few brave and honest correspondents like Eugene Lyons of the United Press, William Henry Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor, and Malcolm Muggeridge, then correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, told the truth and were expelled from Russia, or put in a position in which they were ultimately forced to leave. Others followed the lead of Walter Duranty of the New York Times and denied the existence of a famine, until years later.

Revival of Serfdom 83

Foreign visitors, carefully shepherded by Intourist, and given huge meals in the hotels of the starving land, went home to deny the rumors of famine. I well remember the delegation from England in 1932 which included Mrs. G. D. H. Cole and various professors from London University. One of them, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, told me as we ate a bountiful meal at the New Moscow Hotel (at his expense) that it was all nonsense about the famine, for at Kiev he had been given caviar, butter, eggs, and coffee for breakfast! I had to let him talk, for I knew if I told him the truth and he repeated it, my husband would be sent to prison.

Stalin's utter ruthlessness won the day. The resistance of the peasants was broken. Since 1932 they have known that they will starve unless they produce the quota taken by the government and in addition enough to feed themselves. They have been forced to work on the government's terms. They have become serfs again. Their work on the collective farms is forced labor, and corresponds to the labor service rendered to his overlord by the serf in medieval times.

By 1935 it was recognized that the economic forces pulling Russia back to individual farming and private property were too strong even for a government maintained by naked force. The peasants were given permission to sell on the free market any produce they could spare from their own subsistence after the government had collected its quotas which were always very large. More important was authorization to cultivate a small

84 Lost Illusion

allotment of ground to grow vegetables, fruit and sometimes a little grain. The peasant was also allowed to own a pig, a cow or a goat as his private property.

On this allotment he can work after hours for his own benefit. His labor on the collective farm produces a minimum for subsistence in good years. But since he knows that the government will always cheat him if it can, he has no incentive to increase the productivity of the land.

He knows that should the communal land be made to yield more, the state collections will be raised, or the amount set aside for capital improvements increased. Bitter experience has taught him that he cannot raise his standard of life, since a jealous government will in one way or another deprive him of all profit of his labors. Hence the veritable stagnation of Soviet agriculture.

In the following years the peasants naturally spent all the time they dared on cultivating the little personal plots of land, the produce of which they could eat themselves, or sell for their own profit. This budding of private enterprise was blighted by the government by a series of decrees in 1939.

These decrees declared that the peasant's private allotment had been losing its subsidiary character and in many cases had been converted into the main source of income of the collective farmer. Consequently work on the collective farms had been neglected.

Henceforth the maximum size of individually owned plots of land was strictly limited and a minimum number

Revival of Serfdom 85

of days set during which the peasant must work on the collective farms. Recalcitrant peasants were threatened with expropriation and exile called "transportation to sparsely populated regions."

The new drive against the peasants inaugurated just before the Second World War no doubt explains why the Germans succeeded in getting whole battalions of Russians under General Vlassov to join them. But the Germans, like Napoleon a century earlier, passed up a great opportunity to alter the course of the war.

Napoleon in his memoirs wrote that if he had freed the Russian serfs he would not have been defeated, and that he had not done so because he had always been in favor of law and order. The Germans in the Ukraine, although allowing a limited return to private ownership of the land, were too anxious to get food from the country to abolish the collective farms. They retained the Soviet system of squeezing the people.

Collectivization has never surmounted the crisis of the twenties. The shortage of consumer's goods remains acute, and has ever since 1936 been intensified by the diversion of industry to the supply of armaments. The disparity between the prices of industrial goods and the prices at which the agricultural population is forced to sell its produce to the state has grown much greater, not smaller, during the past decade.

What collectivization has done is to make the state confiscation of crops by forced grain deliveries much easier. A small detachment of OGPU soldiers in each district can terrify the collectives into giving up the

greater part of the harvest, whereas an enormous number of troops would be required to terrorize each individual peasant cultivating his own farm.

All the much-vaunted use of modern farm machinery imported or produced at tremendous sacrifice in the USSR has not increased the yield of the land or lowered the real cost of production. The tractors and other modern farm implements have not compensated either for the destruction of livestock in 1930 and 1931, or for the lost incentive of the peasant to labor.

The machinery paid for by the blood and sweat of a whole generation of Russians is often entirely useless because it has broken down and cannot be repaired, or partly wasted because it is not used to its full capacity.

Neither the peasant nor the state has reaped any real benefit from the mechanization of agriculture concerning which the Soviet Union boasts so extravagantly.

The net result of Stalin's socialism is the reduction of the standard of living of the Russian people, while increasing taxation to support the Communist bureaucrats, the secret police and the Red Army. The income from the bread tax has been the largest item in the revenue of the Soviet Government. The peasants, like the city workers eat less and are worse clothed than they were under the Tsar.

VII

Arcadi Caught in the Web

Jane tabrisky and I were not long in Moscow without sensing the terror then in full operation against non-Party intellectuals. Communist Party members still felt comparatively safe. They were not as likely to hear the fatal knock at the door in the night which meant that the OGPU had come to claim a victim.

Every specialist, however loyal and long his service, feared arrest, for the government was attempting to lay the blame for the food shortage brought about by its agrarian policy upon the wretched non-Party engineers, agronomists, technicians and administrators, scientists and professors. Like Hitler, Stalin sought scapegoats for the masses, so that they would not blame the ruling party for the shortage of food and clothing and houses to live in, or for the universal misery and disorganization of life.

They must be made to believe that "wreckers" were responsible, and lay the blame for their ever-increasing misery upon agents of the "foreign bourgeoisie" and Tsarist elements inimical to the proletariat and to the construction of socialism.

Hence the increasing arrests of the non-Party spe-

cialists. This term included not only engineers, professors, and scientists, but all the educated: accountants, technicians, teachers, doctors, and those with administrative experience, or knowledge of trade and finance.

Stalin, whose pathological hatred for educated men and women was as yet restricted in its operation to those outside the Party, was doing his best to liquidate the intellectuals as a class. This senseless terror, which struck down or demoralized men essential to any successful industrialization of the country, was perhaps as fundamental a cause for the failure of the Five Year Plan to raise the standard of life of the Russian people, as the forced collectivization of agriculture.

I remember the case of Arcadi's friend, a gentle, elderly Jew named Kipman, which illustrates both the cruelty and stupidity of the OGPU. He was arrested the winter of 1931 on returning with his wife from London, where he had worked for several years at the Soviet Trade Representation. He was accused of having embezzled 10,000 pounds.

My friends who knew him were certain that he was absolutely honest. It was moreover obvious that if he had taken the money he and his wife, who were both over sixty years old, would have stayed in London and lived on it for the rest of their lives. However, Kipman "confessed" to the crime and was sent to a Siberian prison for five years.

His wife, in spite of her age and failing health, struggled valiantly for years to get him out of prison. She appealed, she made representations, she produced proofs

Arcadi Caught in the Web 89

of the falseness of the charge. At the end of three years she succeeded in getting his case re-examined. It was then found that the money had, in fact, never been lost, but there had been a mistake made in the accounts for which Kipman was in no way responsible.

He was brought back to Moscow and set free, but a few days before he arrived his wife died, worn out by anxiety, poverty and her efforts to secure his release. I remember seeing Kipman in the Narcomveshtorg Stolovaya (Dining Room of Peoples Commissariat for Foreign Trade) one day, white-haired, stooped, with lifeless eyes.

When I asked him later why he had confessed to a crime he had never committed, he said it was because the OGPU threatened to imprison his wife as well if he didn't, and had promised him to leave her free if he confessed. The ruin of the lives of these two innocent old people was typical of countless human tragedies.

I felt the prison house was closing in upon me. As it appeared more and more certain that Arcadi would come to Moscow my spirits sank. Whereas in 1927 and even in 1928 I had longed to live in the USSR, now I dreaded it. I was being rapidly initiated into the terror and the ghastly suffering of Soviet life.

Finally, one cold December evening Pickman brought me the news that Arcadi was already on his way and would be in Moscow by the end of the year. My heart sank. For a moment I had a vision of the future, saw us both caught in the web.

But I had to keep up appearances. Although my visitor

90 Lost Illusion

was an old friend and a most decent person, I knew how dangerous it was to let even my best friends guess my real thoughts.

So I smiled and said how pleased I was, offered him a drink, and together we "celebrated" Arcadi's approaching return. Shura could see I was unhappy and tried to cheer me up, but Vera rejoiced.

Early on New Year's Day, 1931, I met my husband at the station. Coming from the Far East he was numbed by the bitter cold of that snowy and windy January day. We met, not quite as strangers, but as two people who had to get to know each other again after nearly a year and a half's separation.

I was already on the road to utter disillusionment. Arcadi was determined to believe. We began life together, as before in one small room, as before loving each other, but invisibly separated by my lost hopes and the hopes he was determined not to lose.

I had begun working at the Comintern before he arrived. He took up work at Promexport. Each evening I cut him with my cynical comments upon my futile work in the Comintern, and gibed at the marvels of Soviet "socialist" construction, which I said could better be called the construction of conditions for famine. He immersed himself in his work and closed his ears to my bitter criticism.

Our love was not dead, but the old intimacy was lost. We had come together largely as the result of shared beliefs, and both of us had put political duty before the

Arcadi Caught in the Web 91

pleasure of being together. Now we no longer had beliefs to share, and were not yet drawn to one another as the only refuge in a purgatory of our own blind choosing. The gaiety had gone out of our relationship, although later it was to return as a refuge from sorrow.

Meanwhile the Terror struck closer and closer home, carrying off to the concentration camps men with whom Arcadi had worked abroad, men whom we knew as loyal and selfless specialists. He could not believe them guilty of counter-revolutionary activity and sabotage, but he would not admit that their arrest was other than accidental, a mistake which would be rectified.

The daily struggle for food and the recurring search for a room soon absorbed all my energies outside my office work. I was brought down to the plane on which life is lived by most Russians, the plane of bitter primitive struggle for the primary necessities of life: food and shelter.

In that first year, before either of us had access to a closed distributor, I learned what the life of the Russian masses is like. I learned also to be a wife in its primitive sense. It was my job to keep my man alive by seeing that he was fed and had shelter. He worked so hard and so late at the office that I, with my regular seven hours of useless labor at the Comintern, took over the job of shopping, cooking, cleaning, and washing.

Of these domestic tasks it was the shopping which exhausted me. The search from shop to shop for food, the long standing in line to obtain our bread ration every

92 Lost Illusion,

evening, the bargaining with the peasants at the street corner in exchanging bread for milk became my real work.

The peasants, deprived of all their grain and fodder by a merciless government, wanted bread to feed their cows. There had developed a "new and higher form of economy" under the Soviets whereby the peasants produced milk for the townspeople in exchange for bread to produce that milk.

Hundreds of thousands of peasants near the cities of Russia spent at least half a day traveling to and from their farms and standing in the market or at street corners selling milk or a few miserable vegetables. To arrange that one of their number should do the selling while the others worked on the land was forbidden.

The seller would have been punished as a middleman, a speculator. Stalin had found a novel way to banish unemployment by forcing each peasant, with milk or other produce to dispose of, to spend the greater part of the day selling it to the consumer.

I managed to rent a room in a new flat on Novinsky Boulevard. The owner, once a sailor on the famous ship Potemkin, whose crew had mutinied in 1905, was working at the Soviet Consulate in London. His two daughters rented me a room at the "commercial price"—that is to say, I paid more for the one room than they paid for the whole flat.

This was usual in Moscow at the time, although the subletting of rooms and country houses by privileged Party members was not yet the source of rentier income

Arcadi Caught in the Web 93

it later became. Subletting was also done by non-Party people; but, since it was the Communist Party members who secured most of the new flats, they were predominantly the landlord class.

Jania, the elder daughter of our landlord, was typical of the girls of the new aristocracy. She dressed well, she enjoyed life, and she had a job. Her work, however, did not provide her with half her income. She not only let a room, but she sold at commercial prices the large ration of eggs, butter, and other "luxuries" which it was her father's privilege to receive as a member of the Moscow Soviet.

The fact that he was working and living abroad and had Jania's stepmother with him in London, did not mean that his ration was cut off. Jania drew eleven pounds of butter and a large number of eggs every ten days. Sold at commercial prices (about five times as high as the price she paid) these supplies produced an income equal to more than half her monthly salary as a clerk in an office.

Jania's flat was always full of young men in the evenings, and when I once remarked to her how popular she was, she replied seriously,

"Oh, no, it isn't that; they just all want to marry me because we have a flat."

Jania was a decent sort and honest. She made no pretense of admiring or believing in Soviet policies and eventually married beneath her. She was in love with a young engineering student who was not a Comsomol and could never be a member of the Communist Party,

94 Lost Illusion

because his father, a highly qualified engineer, was of bourgeois background.

Years later I met Jania for the last time before leaving Russia. She was working in the Intourist office in Moscow where I bought my ticket to England. Very pale, very thin, all the gaiety and youth gone from her face, she was dying of tuberculosis and knew it.

Because she had married outside her class, her father no longer had anything to do with her. Jania and her husband and child all lived in one room. She had, of course, no hope of getting to a sanatorium, since neither she nor her husband were members of the Communist Party.

Our flat, on Novinsky Boulevard, was in an ultramodern duplex apartment house completed in 1930. It was built on supporting pillars like a lake-dwelling, and a broad covered way ran along the front of each story. One side of the house was all glass, and no doubt it would have been very healthy and hygienic and comfortable if there had been sufficient heating, or if only one family had inhabited each apartment. But to house several families, as most Russian flats do, it was most inconveniently built. There was a large studio-type room, in which the second room was an open balcony above. Only the third room had both a door and a ceiling, and so some privacy.

At first I slept in the hall-like room below, overlooked by Jania's sister above and unable to go to bed or to work when the latter entertained her boy friends. When Ar-

Arcadi Caught in the Web 95

cadi arrived, I persuaded Jania to let us have the enclosed room with the door on the balcony.

The floors were of stone and we had no carpet. The only furniture was a single bed I had brought from England, a small table I had managed to buy, and three hard chairs. We kept our clothes in our trunks and our books and toilet articles on the window sill or on the floor.

Nevertheless, life on Novinsky Boulevard was the best we were to know for many a year. There was a bathroom with a hot-water heater, and there was a gas stove in the kitchen. Also, this being a house occupied by important Soviet officials, there was a communal kitchen where one could buy much better dinners than at Vera's.

Unhappily, Jania's father returned to Moscow in the summer of 1931 and we had to move. I was at that time in London arranging the publication of my first book, Lancashire and the Far East, which, originally accepted for publication by the School of Economics, had been turned down by Sir William Beveridge, the Director of the School, after my departure from England.

C. M. Lloyd, Director of the Social Science Department, had written to me that it could only be published by the School if I would modify my chapters on India. Rather than abate by a jot my indictment of British imperialism, I had gone to England to arrange publication myself, with the assistance of C. M. Lloyd.

When I returned to Moscow in September, 1931,

96 Lost Illusion

Arcadi had moved into a very small furnished room near the Sukharevsky Market. For this room and the right to share the kitchen and bathroom with the landlord's family, we paid 100 rubles a month out of Arcadi's salary of 300 and mine of 275.

Our landlord paid only 45 rubles monthly rent for the whole three-room flat. Our rent was cheap as rooms went; many people had to pay more. It was a cooperative apartment house. This meant that the landlord had acquired it by paying monthly installments into a cooperative building society. Like most other owners of apartments, he rented one of his three rooms and so secured a return on the capital he had invested.

Being non-Party, he had had to wait years and pay several thousand rubles before getting his flat. Communist Party men, if not already in possession of a decent apartment built before the Revolution, and taken possession of during its early years, often secured a new flat without payment, or by only a year or so of membership payments to a Cooperative.

In any case, the Party men always had priority, and thus could secure the precious capital which a flat represented without a large previous investment. Most owners made a super-profit on renting rooms, but whereas the Communist Party member could charge anything the market would bear, the non-Party man was afraid of doing this, for he might be accused of speculating.

It was here in our room on Trubnaya Ulitsa, near the Sukharevsky Market, that I first witnessed the terrible exploitation of servants. Jania had done her own house-

Arcadi Caught in the Web 97

work and so did I. But our landlord and landlady here had a "domestic worker."

She was, like nearly all Moscow servants, a peasant girl. She worked from 7 a.m. until nearly midnight, cleaning, cooking, washing, and standing in line at the shops. The latter occupation was the most strenuous part of her labors and the most painful. For to stand in line in the cold Russian winter when you have neither proper footwear nor a really warm coat is agony. This girl had neither. Nor did she eat the good meat or fish meals she prepared. She lived on soup, black bread, and cereals, with an occasional bit of herring.

At night she slept on the floor of the kitchen. The Kazaika (house mistress) cowed her, bullied her, and drove her. The girl was often in tears and always sad and miserable. When we asked her why she did not leave, she said she would be treated just the same anywhere else, and she couldn't go to work in a factory since she had no room to live in.

All through my stay in Moscow I found the same conditions for servants. In some of the old apartment houses I saw as many as five or six families all sharing one kitchen. A young Russian whom I had formerly known at the London School of Economics, and who lived in one room with his wife and child, shared a toilet and kitchen with 35 other people in the same flat.

Several of the families housed in one apartment would each have a servant. It was not uncommon for three or four servants to sleep together in the kitchen, side by side on the floor or on the kitchen table. Bugs ran over

98 Lost Illusion

them at night, and the atmosphere was so fetid and foul that one hesitated to go in to boil water for tea or to wash.

The employers of these girls were often little better off themselves. A family of four to a room, feeding poorly, would hire a servant mainly in order to have someone to stand in line at the shops for food. Even the limited rations called for by the food cards could not be obtained without a long wait; and this, together with foraging around for unrationed food occasionally available in the shops, was almost a full-time occupation.

The waste of labor entailed in the socialist fatherland by the hopelessly inefficient distribution system, and by the shortage of food and clothing, was such as to make it easy to believe that there could be no unemployment problem. If husband and wife both worked at a large enterprise and there were no children, a maid could be dispensed with since they could eat dinner in the stolo-vaya (restaurant) of the factory or office.

But if there were children, food must be found for them somehow. Party men of high standing kept maids to spare their wives labor, but the great majority of the families who employed domestic workers did so in spite of their poverty, or because of their poverty. Enough food for the children could be bought only if both parents worked; but someone must do the shopping. Hence the necessity of having a servant.

The terrible exploitation of domestic labor was in part due to the poverty of the employers, and in part to the exodus of peasant girls from the hunger-stricken

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villages. To be allowed to live in the towns and get some sort of a meal every day was to be incomparably better off than in the village, even if the girl had to work sixteen hours out of twenty-four.

Work in the factories (even if obtainable without close probing into why they had left the village and as to whether their parents were Kulaks) could not secure them a shelter. So they went to work as servants.

Servants were consequently easy to get and, being unprotected by Soviet law or by Russian custom, could be exploited mercilessly. There was no alternative for them except starvation, and they were practically slaves. On the other hand, they naturally had little moral sense. Their village world had been destroyed, they or their peasant neighbors had been expropriated and robbed by the state, and their religion vilified and reviled.

To be religious was tantamount to being considered counter-revolutionary. So freed of moral and religious inhibitions, they stole whatever they could lay then-hands on. Russian housewives locked up every bit of food and kept a strict watch upon their scanty wardrobes.

It was typical of the relation between mistress and maid in the Soviet Union that when the German Communists, who still retained the socialist ideal of human equality, wanted their servants to sit and eat with them, they found themselves misunderstood.

"The Kazaika," the servants said, "is so afraid of our eating too much that she forces us to sit with her at table to keep an eye on how much food we consume."

Servants were still treated like serfs by the Russians even when their conditions of life allowed them to give some elementary comforts to their domestic employees. Party men who secured large flats rarely provided their maids with a room of their own to sleep in. Even a family with four or five rooms at its disposal made the servant sleep in the kitchen, or at best in a kind of open cupboard, constructed over the front door in the most modern flats especially for servants to sleep in.

For me the servant problem was at first insoluble. I could not drive people to work, and, being what the Russians called a "petty bourgeois idealist," I felt it was indecent to lock up our bread, sugar, and butter in a cupboard, and periodically to search the domestic worker's basket or suitcase for stolen goods.

So after a couple of months during which a large part of my precious foreign clothing was stolen and our food supplies mysteriously disappeared, I went back to doing the housework myself. The difficulty was that we could never be sure whether the servant or the landlady had stolen our missing stuff. Each accused the other. I thought it was quite likely to have been the landlady, but, since she was already eager to turn us out of our room and we had nowhere to go, I could do nothing.

We were paying "only" 100 rubles a month for our room, and by this time it was becoming easy to let rooms for 150 or 200, so we were no longer welcome. Arcadi was making the 300 ruble Party maximum, but he had no Party privileges. I also was now earning 300 rubles, having become a "textile specialist" at Promexport. All

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Arcadi's savings from his years of work in England had been spent to buy a room in Moscow for his former wife and son.

Out of our joint earnings, we now had to support Anna Abramova and the boy Vitia, so there was little left to feed ourselves after 100 rubles had gone for rent. As yet neither of us had a closed distributor but we did have first category food cards like industrial workers.

So we each got two pounds of bread a day, half of which we exchanged for milk from the peasants on the street corner. We also received some sugar and two pounds of meat a month per person. Everything else had to be bought on the free market at high prices.

Our only solution was extra work. Editing and translating were easy to come by, but Arcadi worked late at the office every evening, and I couldn't do Russian translations without him. Luckily, I got an advance of 2500 rubles for the Russian edition of Lancashire and the Far East, but we paid 1600 rubles of this into the Housing Cooperative I had joined in 1928.

In October we had managed to buy putofkas (accommodations) in a Rest House at Gagri in the Caucasus. Here in the Land of the Golden Fleece, where Jason found Medea, we enjoyed our first relaxation together since Japan. Gagri is one of the loveliest places in the world and by its blue sea with the Caucasian mountains rising behind us we could almost forget the pushing, crowded petty life of Moscow.

In the Caucasus there were very few signs of the "construction of socialism." At Gagri there were ruins

of a castle of Mithridates whom Great Pompey conquered and who had fled from the Roman legions to die in the Armenian mountains to the south. There was also a small Byzantine church of the Fifth Century which had withstood the ravages of the many races which had passed to and fro along this land bridge between Europe and Asia.

It was a hungry holiday but a happy one. We used to supplement the meager food supplied by the Rest Home by eating large quantities of walnuts, the only reasonably cheap food obtainable in the few shops of the small town. Occasionally we bought grapes but they were very expensive. The sea was still warm enough for swimming and the mountain walks were beautiful and gave us a feeling of release.

Back in Moscow, securing a flat again bcame our main preoccupation. Since Arcadi's hopes of getting the rooms long since promised, and long since paid for, were fading, we began to concentrate on home hunting in my name instead. Since I was still a member of the British Communist Party, I had a better chance of securing something. Unfortunately, however, I had become a member of the Railway Worker's Housing Cooperative up in Grusynski Val near the Alexandrovsky Station, and railway workers at that time were not a favored category.

I had joined it originally in 1928, through MOPR (International Class War Prisoners Aid )with which it was affiliated. The apartment house this Cooperative was building progressed very slowly because of lack of ma-

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terials, labor, and money. I had a friend on the board of the Cooperative, a Polish Communist Party member called Lofsky, whom I met when I was a delegate to Russia in 1927, and who had since been off on secret Comintern work in South America. He advised me to present the Chairman of the Cooperative with an English woolen sweater and promised to keep an eye open in my interest.

The art of securing the flat to which payments entitled us consisted in haunting the premises of the Cooperative at the time when flats were being completed and about to be allocated. If around and about at the right moment a flat might be obtained. Otherwise unless the person were an important Communist Party official he would be overlooked no matter how high his priority number might be.

Unfortunately, Arcadi was always working so hard at the office that he couldn't hang around his Cooperative and kept on being passed over. My own hopes faded when Lofsky was again sent abroad. I never got my flat through all the succeeding years, nor was I able, when at last Arcadi got his, to secure the reimbursement of the 4500 rubles I had paid down years before.

For years every letter I wrote to my mother referred to our housing problem—the hope for an apartment in the spring, then in the autumn, then for the following year. At first I believed the promises; but after two years I was writing that I had given up having any confidence in Russian promises.

The first lesson the Soviet citizen has to learn is that

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promises and contracts mean nothing at all. The government cheats its citizens all the time in big things and little, and every official behaves in the same way. Only foolish foreigners, newly arrived in Moscow, think that the letter of the law, or the written contract, or the spoken promise have any meaning in Russia.

There stands out in my memories of life in Moscow, a picture of the snowy street outside our apartment house along which I went to the office. Some construction work was going on near by, and every morning I saw carts full of bricks or wooden planks drawn by thin, miserable horses.

Often the carts got stuck in the ruts in the thick snow, and the drivers dressed in rags of sacking whipped the horses mercilessly. The breath of the struggling horses and men formed a thick steam in the cold wintry air. I used to hurry along trying not to see the sores on the horses nor to hear their panting. Horses and men alike were starved, and the sufferings of the animals were only one degree worse than those of the wrecks of human beings who drove them.

It was said that on the collective farms the peasants deliberately worked the horses to death so that they might get meat to eat. An inhuman system made men treat their beasts as cruelly as the government treated them, and with as little thought of preserving life. Cold, snow, misery, and want were the background of life in Russia.

VIII

I Learn About Soviet Hospitals

I HAD MY FIRST INTIMATE EXPERIENCE with the free medical service and the hospitals which foreign visitors to the Soviet Union describe in such glowing terms, during my second winter in Moscow.

I was pregnant, and I was foolish enough, on New Year's Eve, to carry home twenty-two pounds of potatoes which I had miraculously secured. The tram, as usual, was chock full and in the scuffle to get through it and out at the front my glasses were knocked off. In my near-sighted efforts to retrieve them, I was rather badly pushed about.

I reached home exhausted and trembling but did not know I had injured myself. That night we went over to a New Year's Eve party at Jane's. By midnight I was feeling ill, so we spent the night in Jane's large room with her and Michael, another old friend, who had come to Moscow from England early in 1931, and who was also a member of the British Communist Party.

Next morning, alone with Michael after Jane and Arcadi had gone to work, I had the miscarriage. Michael

105

106 Lost Illusion

could not get Arcadi by phone, for there was only one line at his office and it was out of order. So he fetched Jane home and went off in a droshki for Arcadi.

Arcadi tried for two hours to get a doctor and finally came with one he had secured "commercially." The doctor to whose services my trade-union membership entitled me arrived about six hours later and was obviously not a doctor at all, but a bedraggled, dirty, haggard young woman whom I would not have allowed to touch me. Her only use to me was to sign the necessary certificate for my office that I was ill.

By evening the pain had lessened and the real doctor said if it did not get worse again I need only lie still. If the pain returned, I must go to the nearest "abortion house" and be scraped.

Next day at noon I was in agony. Michael, having telephoned to Arcadi, sat beside me trying to soothe me until Arcadi managed at last to secure a taxi to move me to the hospital. There he had to leave me. I was strapped down upon an operating table and scraped by a "surgeon" who did not even wash her hands before operating, and whose whole painted appearance suggested a prostitute rather than a doctor.

I was given no chloroform and the pain was excruciating. Then I was taken upstairs to a small room about twelve by twelve feet, with five beds in it. I was given an ice pack and then they left me. No one came near me, no one washed me. There was no nurse or attendant of any kind. The other patients begged me for the piece of soap I had brought with me. I was the only one of the

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five patients who had soap and none was provided by the hospital.

At about eleven o'clock the following morning, after a breakfast of thin gruel, I was ordered to get up and come downstairs. I protested that I was bleeding and should not walk. No one paid any attention. Downstairs I was again put on the operating table, held down by four attendants, and scraped again.

I yelled, "Why twice?"

But no one paid any attention. After this I broke down and found myself weeping. I had been suffering for forty-eight hours, the pain was agonizing, the place was filthy, and I felt I was in a nightmare. When I asked for something to wipe away the blood, the "nurse" picked a dirty piece of cotton off the floor and handed it to me.

I determined to get out of this terrible "hospital" before I caught some awful disease. I sent a note to Arcadi telling him he must get me out somehow. At first they wouldn't allow me to go, but after he had told them I was an English journalist, they got frightened.

A nice, clean young woman doctor speaking French came to see me. She finally explained to me that the first "doctor" had forgotten to write down on my case sheet that I had already been operated upon; hence the second ordeal.

Jane offered to nurse me and I was permitted to leave. I remember very vividly the joy of being back with her and Michael in their clean room after that terrible hospital. For a week I lay there in bed, Arcadi coming in the evenings for the dinner which Jane cooked for us

all. Poor Arcadi never got away from the office for dinner till eight or nine at night and then still had to get home by streetcar. He looked far more ill and exhausted than I did, and my experience had upset him badly.

It was as well I did not have the baby, although I was very disappointed at the time. We did not secure a permanent room of our own until nearly two years later. What we should have done with a baby on our continued moving from room to room I do not know.

The companionship of Jane and Michael that winter lightened our hearts. Michael and I had worked at home in the same local of the British Communist Party. We had sold the Daily Worker together and he had been my bodyguard when I spoke from a soap box in the streets of London. So long as he and Jane Tabrisky remained in Russia I had trusted friends to whom I could open my heart and speak freely, for their reactions to Stalin's Russia were the same as my own.

Not that we agreed about everything. Liberals never do. And we were all liberals in the original sense of the word; none of us was seeking a career in Russia at the expense of our integrity or our friends. Arcadi did not easily make friends or give his confidence to anyone, but Michael and he liked each other immensely.

Michael, like Arcadi, had had an unhappy childhood, and like him had learned at an early age to hide his feelings from a hostile world, and to take refuge in humor from the hurts which his sensitiveness would otherwise have found intolerable. When I would boil with rage and indignation at the divergence between Soviet pro-

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fessions and Soviet practice, Michael and Arcadi would make a joke of it. Whereas I hated Stalin as the brutal and callous oppressor, Michael and Arcadi saw him not as a bloodthirsty tyrant, but as an historic phenomenon.

They argued that if there had been no Stalin, there would have been someone else like him. I then had leanings toward Trotskyism and was still convinced that if Trotsky instead of Stalin had led the Bolshevik party there would have been no famine, and no perversion of the revolutionary movement.

They assured me that Trotskyism was sheer romanticism, and that the course which history was taking in the Soviet Union followed logically from the foundations Lenin laid. Since this was so, it had to be accepted as socialism; and one could only hope, and work, to make it a little more tolerable. Life might be a tragedy to those who felt deeply but the way to keep sane was by seeing it as a comedy.

Michael had gone into the British army in the First World War at the age of sixteen and nearly died afterwards of tuberculosis. He had something of my brother's cheerful skepticism and good humor, and like Arcadi had no great hopes that the world was at all likely to be run rationally and intelligently or justly.

To Michael, Marxism was a tool, not a dogma, an aid to the understanding of history, past and present, not a revelation. What was happening in Russia must be accepted as the consequence of the socialization of the means of production and distribution by a minority in a backward country. Here was no society of the free and

equal, nor was it likely to become so. It was no use to get indignant because the new society was so very different from what men had hoped for.

Michael's view of the Soviet Union was very much like that expressed years later by Max Eastman in Stalin's Socialism. Since this was the society which had come out of the socialization of land and capital it was socialism. The fact that it bore no resemblance to the society which Socialists had envisioned and that there was even greater social and material inequality than under capitalism did not prove that it was not socialism.

Michael and Arcadi were extraordinarily impersonal in their judgments. They saw men as moved by forces they could not understand, and the ills of the Soviet world as due more to the stupidity of its rulers than to their malignancy or wickedness.

They taught me not to regard Stalin as a personal devil but rather to see him as the result of Russia's past history and of the Bolshevik Revolution, not as a cause but as an effect of historical circumstances. I could not, however, at first accept their view that under Lenin or Trotsky it would have been essentially the same.

Jane, whose knowledge of the writings of Marx and Lenin was exceptional, reminded us that Lenin himself had prophesied in 1905, that "anyone who attempts to achieve socialism by any other route than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at the most absurd reactionary deductions, both political and economic."

Michael, Jane and I would discuss by the hour the theory and practice of Bolshevism and the whys and

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wherefores of Russia's present miserable situation. Michael always took the Marxist point of view that history, in broad outline, would have followed the same course had Lenin lived. Jane said that if Lenin had lived he would have shared Trotsky's fate.

I argued that then, at least, it would have been obvious to the whole world that there had been a counter-revolution. That a Stalin who ousted Lenin would never have been able to win influence over the radical movements of the West. The Revolution would have been buried instead of its corpse poisoning the air of a whole generation of progressives in Europe and America. As it was, Stalin had been able to camouflage his counter-revolution, and to confuse socialists and liberals all over the world by his zigzags from right to left and back again, so that the very terms had lost all meaning.

Arcadi, on the rare occasions when he had the leisure to join in our discussions, would remind us that it was Lenin himself who had laid the foundation for the Russia we were living in. He had himself met Lenin and heard him speak in Switzerland in the years before the First World War when Arcadi had been a student at Zurich University.

My husband had been repelled by Lenin's views at the time since they denied the democratic basis for socialism. Yet now, Arcadi was arguing that, after all, Lenin might have been right, and perhaps the present period of terror and want in Russia would lead to an era of plenty and freedom.

He refused, as yet, to recognize that in considering the

112 Lost Illusion

ultimate aim all important, and the means unimportant, Lenin had established the foundations for the permanent despotism of an aristocracy of Communists over the mass of the people.

Jane would then quote Plekhanov, the father of Russian Socialism who as early as 1907 had prophesied what Lenin's policies would lead to, saying: "At the bitter end, everything will revolve around one man, who will ex providentia unite all powers in himself."

Marx, although rather vague concerning the "dictatorship of the proletariat," had had no doubt that it was to be absolutely democratic, for in his view socialism was to come after capitalism had reduced all but a small minority to the condition of "proletarians." For him, seizure of power by the proletariat meant the overthrow of a small group of capitalist exploiters by the overwhelming majority of the people.

Socialist society was to be the only truly democratic society since socialism alone could deprive an exploiting class of its economic and political power. Engels, commenting upon Marx's vindication of the Paris Commune of 1871, had proclaimed that absolute democracy was the natural form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As we have seen, Lenin himself in 1905, had declared that without democracy there could be no socialism.

Nevertheless Lenin, in his insistence from 1907 onwards that the Social Democratic Party should be composed of professional revolutionaries, was denying the democratic basis of Marxian socialism. This was realized by the minority of the Russian Social Democratic party

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(the Mensheviks) and originally by Trotsky, who did not join the Bolsheviks (the majority party) until 1917. In effect, Lenin saw what the Social Democrats failed to see, that the working class did not naturally desire socialism, and that if one waited for it to become revolutionary by itself, one might wait until the end of time.

Marx had believed that the course of capitalist development would of itself turn the working class into revolutionaries. Lenin saw before 1914 that it wouldn't, and after 1914 that the workers were patriots first and a class-conscious proletariat second. He did not on that account reject Marxism. His solution was a revolution, led by professional revolutionaries who knew better than the workers what the latter needed for their own good: socialism. All along, Lenin distrusted "the masses" and saw "the Party" as necessary to prevent their falling away from the revolutionary path.

This transmutation of Marxism was the easier for Lenin because he was a Russian. The belief in democracy was inherent and deep-rooted in the minds of the Marxists of Western Europe; and it was the rational side of Marx, not his mystical belief in the inevitability of progress, which appealed to them.

But Lenin was a Russian, and his ideas were unconsciously affected by the fanaticism and naiveté of his country and his people. For him the bedrock belief that history was "inevitably" leading mankind to a better social system, was fundamental. Marxism was a creed and a body of dogma which Lenin could interpret according to the practical needs of the moment. This made him far