Glimpses of Russia
I
FRUSTRATED in plans for seeing such mediæval cities as old Novgorod, and disgusted with the tasteless disfiguration by posters of many of the historic churches of Moscow, I wished to make up for the disappointment by a long stay at mediaeval Kiev. This meant missing May Day at Moscow. But the elements conspired to grant me the most imposing and moving of spectacles. The rivers were over their banks, the direct route for Kiev blocked; there was nothing for it but to stay on. Luckily I had a balcony on the Revolution Square. For two days before the holiday the loud speakers, multiplied for the occasion, were doubly raucous, keeping a preparatory excitement in the air. On the eve of May Day the electricians set up a red star of the Internationale — eight feet from point to point — on my balcony. The police in the square appeared in new feldgrau helmets and uniforms, more formidable than the old red and black outfit. It was one of many signs that our onetime friend and sometime enemy, German Kultur, had merely moved East.
Early May Day morning a hasty survey of the corridor and hotel lobby revealed an ominous novelty. There was a gray-green policeman guarding the corridor, half a dozen in the main entrance, and two guarding the side entrance which passed the barber. It would have been pleasant to believe that this unwanted attention was merely to secure the safety of us capitalists and bourgeois at the hotel. It is more likely that it was a precaution against any enterprising Russians who, in the single day of the year when all Russians are free, might wish to communicate with foreigners. In any case it gave an unusual sense of gratuitous surveillance, and took away from the gayety of one’s sojourn. The guard was withdrawn at nightfall, when the procession had passed, so after all it may have been ordered in our interest.
By seven o’clock on May Day a cross section of the Red Army was forming under my balcony. Perhaps twelve units of various sorts — mostly battalions. Magnificent young troops they were, big fellows in the twenties, commanded by ‘noncoms’ and officers who carried the service bars of half a dozen campaigns. Ten thousand of them made the difficult manoeuvre into the limited space with precision and without useless or vociferous orders. The equipment was simple, but new and good; the saluting and etiquette as snappy as that of any capitalistic army. So for an hour they filed in — squadrons of cavalry, fine horses, less infantry, very long field guns, about three-inch bore, stubby howitzers, probably about five-inch, heavy machine guns, all horse-drawn and moving with greatest accuracy in the cramped space. In the equipment there was no exotic touch except the long, slightly curved sabre without a guard, rather like a Japanese sword. A dozen lively little tanks with onepounders, and sometimes an extra machine gun, afforded a modern touch to a review which generally recalled those I had seen in France and Germany in the nineties. Overhead zoomed air squadrons — from tiny wasps of combat planes to the biggest bombers I had ever seen.
By eight o’clock the square was full, the lines and the batteries accurately dressed — a call to attention by bugle. One got the military picture, and there was nothing strange about it except that on parade the officers’ uniforms were precisely those of the men, save for modest insignia of rank. I suppose, after all, it is easier to call your commanding officer ‘Comrade Colonel,’ the correct military address, if he is n’t too magnificently tailored. Then a great cheer swept along the line, battalion following battalion as the youthful commander in chief rode down the front, halting before the units to lead a cheer. He always began, ‘ Pojalousta!' (Please), which to an old Plattsburger and Naval Reservist had a singularly unmilitary tang. But he got a rousing cheer just the same.
Then began a strange and moving ceremony. The loud speakers barked out slowly the long Soviet oath of allegiance, and ten thousand young voices snapped it back sentence for sentence to the end.
Next the tanks (as a novelty), leading the miniature Red Army, clattered into the Red Place and passed the stepped, liver-red tomb of Lenin, on which Stalin and the Commissars of the Central Executive Committee sat all day saluting through the ten hours while the citizenry passed. Of this cross section of the Red Army one conceived a high admiration. They are a clean, alert, well-disciplined lot, and they can fight on a chunk of black bread, a length of sausage, a bowl of cabbage soup, and a few glasses of tea a day. There was no sign of heavy field artillery, and rather little motor equipment generally. But there are as yet few roads in Russia where the horse cannot outpull the motor.
As it stands, the superb Red Army does not seem to me to offer a serious military menace off its own soil. Its scope is defensive, as the policy of the Soviet Republic is defensive. But I am sorry indeed for any army that has to attack the Red Army amid its own fens and lakes, that tries to deploy modern equipment and maintain an elaborate supply on such a terrain and against such a foe. As an old Plattsburger, and hence an amateur strategist, I am very sorry for such an invader, and I am confident that a real strategist will share the feeling with me.
Before the Red forces had disappeared through the three arches leading to the Red Place, eight processions of union workers were converging stragglingly but mightily on the same portal. The great red star on my balcony became a sort of embarrassment, giving my solitary figure the air of a reviewing officer. I was heartily saluted by the marching workers, returned the salute when I must, and hid behind the star when I could.
II
The idea caught me to trace one of the processions to its source, and I set out unprovided with the police pass which Intourist would have gladly furnished. A mile inward, at the head of the lines, the little children were being paraded, neatly dressed and amply supplied with red streamers bearing Communist mottoes. They tvere marched only in their districts, being unfit for the long route and long hours. Older children moved in the great procession clutching their parents’ hands. Generally the parading unions streamed slowly into the main lines, everything very orderly. The Junior Party marched separately, sometimes boys and girls together, sometimes the sexes separately in order to show off the few good scout uniforms effectively. In either case the color guard was usually three sturdy girls, the flankers carrying service rifles with fixed bayonets of sinister length and fineness — very formidable Amazons these.
The task of studying the procession from the source proved more difficult than I had expected. It involved crossing many police lines and at least eight lines of march, an irregular circuit of nearly three miles to gain the one mile back to the Revolution Square. Necessity evoked enough Russian to protest: ‘I am an American. Grand Hotel.’ Two policemen out of three refused the appeal sternly. The third usually let me pass. When after two hours I reached the Valuta district bounded by the Opera House, the Mctropole, and the Grand Hotel, all the police courteously honored the plea. In this centre the foreign capitalist, if only for his minor uses, is tolerated. By noon I was again behind my big red star, covertly watching the most extraordinary of spectacles.
Eight human streams surged slowly and steadily toward the Red Place, the streams merging into three before the procession reached the portal, and beyond it merging into one. It seemed to me that they must be passing the brown-red tomb of Lenin on a front of forty-eight. I was told by a man on the reviewing stand that they actually pushed by thirty-two abreast. The march was unlike anything I had ever seen — nothing military about it, no one in step with the music of the frequent bands, except where an occasional uniformed company of the Junior Party broke the strange irregular rhythm with an attempt at processional order. The unions sauntered steadily — plainly dressed men, women, and children, tied together only by monotonous red streamers bearing Communist slogans or proud statistics of the Union’s constitution toward effecting the Five-Year Plan. Nowhere an individual expression, none of those whimsical or witty legends which enliven a civic procession anywhere else in the world. A majestic anonymity, a purposeful migration of a people — or rather a confluence of human rivers to pour an animated Mississippi before Stalin, standing all day on Lenin’s tomb of ox-blood granite.
I say I had never seen the like, yet I had seen it. Where? In Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s lovely ‘ Worship of the Lamb,’ at Ghent, with the four varied processions of martyrs, confessors, knights, magistrates, and pilgrims steadily converging through the flowerdecked mead of Paradise upon the Altar of the Lamb and the Fountain of Life. Here was no such variety, but the purpose of the procession was much the same; it converged on the mausoleum enshrining the worn-out body of Lenin, proponent not of a celestial but of a mundane paradise — to a skeptic equally inaccessible.
How many passed through the Red Place in the ten hours of the civic procession I can only guess. It was a procession that defied the calculations of the best-indoctrinated Plattsburger. By a rough count and timing, five or six thousand people an hour were passing into the Red Square — fifty or sixty thousand in all. It may well have been many more. The newspapers announced a million and a half in line. This was impossible; but as many as made the entire march may have been temporarily in line. In any case it was staggeringly many people — all that the eye could possibly take in.
By half-past five the contributary rivers were dwindling, and the ceremony closed with its only humorous feature, a procession of satirical floats, which I fancy are paraded every year. The priest, sometimes straddling the muzzle of a great cannon, came in for the major share of ribaldry. The capitalist, usually in evening dress and a top hat over which a sledge of the Internationale was ominously poised, was a good second. The floats were amusing, and I emerged imprudently from the cover of my great red star. A float was passing with a priest, a capitalist, and an old-school intellectual offering monstrous and egregiously swelled bald heads of papier-mâché to the descending sledge. My own bald head caught the eye of the comrade in charge. Laughingly he pointed to it and to the bulbous baldness of the capitalistic intellectual. I laughed in return and, summoning all my Russian, shouted, ‘O. K., Comrade!’ (Harashaw, Tavarish!) It was the last of the procession.
A waiter appeared with a hamper of provisions for twenty-four hours on the train. My new Intourist interpreter, with the air of a reduced grand duchess, announced in her perfect French that the taxi was waiting, and for a wonder it was; in an hour I was making my first acquaintance with the famous ‘soft cars.’
III
For the soft cars, despite their very relative cleanliness and minor discomforts, I came to have a real liking. It is only in comparison with the ‘ hard cars,’ with their wooden seats and bunk shelves crisscrossed on two levels, that the soft cars deserve their name. They are shabby second-class wagons in compartments with one or two seats, the back turning up at night to make an upper berth. The upholstery is rather hard. Pillows and bedclothes may be had for two rubles, but nobody seems to use them, seasoned travelers carrying their own. Hot water can be had from the conductor. Simple provisions may be bought from buffets at the numerous stations or from peasants on the platform, but it is wise to carry your own supply. The soft cars are sociable places, with visiting up and down the corridors and no official interpreter to guide you aright. Somebody always speaks French or German and interprets for the rest, who ply you with questions. My quite modest clothes and equipment were always the admiration of the traveling Soviet world, and elicited exchange of information about prices.
When I confessed my Russian project at the club, the wags tried to frighten me by saying that the Bolsheviks, people sexually quite promiscuous, would put a woman in my sleeping compartment, and it would be very embarrassing. They laughed much over it, as is the club fashion. Well, this happened to me on my first night in the soft cars, and it was n’t embarrassing at all. She appeared as I was straightening out my effects, and boldly took the opposite seat. She was fair, fat, and forty, neatly garbed in black. I gasped inwardly and said to myself, ‘It is really happening. The club was perfectly right.’ She chatted in friendly fashion in French and German, and when a severe sergeant of pioneer infantry came to occupy the berth above her, she chatted with him in Russian. From names of operas which I recognized, Carmen, Tosca, and so on, I judged that she was a singer, for she would hardly have talked music with him on any other basis than that of explaining her own occupation.
At ten o’clock she took off her shoes and loosened her collar; I took off and loosened mine; the sergeant turned in in his boots, put out the light, and we slept as much as the thin upholstery and heavy jolting permitted. As a demonstration of the sexual promiscuity of the Bolsheviks it was a complete ‘washout.’ And this kind of thing was being solemnly cited in America as evidence of Communist depravity! What had happened was what has happened in Russia ever since there were railroad cars — for that matter, what happens more uncomfortably whenever any mixed group of Europeans pass the night in a day compartment. It was a parable for the general truth that much which we shudder at as Communistic is merely Russian, or even merely human.
With daybreak I began to make acquaintance, and, remembering that an army not merely marches but also rolls on its stomach, I observed the feeding habits of the sergeant. About seven o’clock he brewed himself a glass of tea in a very fine nickel thermos teapot, which I guessed was standard army equipment. About twelve-thirty he produced a chunk of black bread of the size of a baby’s head, and a ten-inch length of sausage of an inch calibre, thickly covered with green mould. He took the bread neat, and with relish, going through it as a squirrel goes through a nut. Then he took the sausage neat, including the mould, topping off with a small bit of cheese and a glass of tea. Thereupon he stretched out, and for three hours slept a profound, digestive, boa-constrictor sleep, which I envied. At seven in the evening he ate a small hunk of black bread and drank a cup of tea.
As an amateur militarist I should hate to lead an army which depended on a reasonable variety in its ‘chow’ against an army which could fight on the sergeant’s feed. His field ration would have included in addition one or two bowls of cabbage soup during the day. The above was about the card ration of the average Russian workman, and the obvious fact that it would disgust and perhaps kill an American mechanic with the habit of T-bone steaks has nothing to do with the case. A Russian worker not merely digests such food, but actually likes it.
Meanwhile I was making acquaintances. A quizzical, booted individual, whom I took to be some sort of farm factor, inventoried my outfit and insisted on knowing the prices. When informed that the modest gray worsted suit which I had bought ready-made to wear out on the trip cost only fifty dollars, he made me feel his own sleazy blue flannel trousers and said a suit of that cost two hundred rubles. Learning that my sole-leather dressing bag, a kind of super-brief-case, cost twenty dollars, he asked the price of the flimsy black brief-case of a commercial traveler opposite. It was sixty rubles. Most of my outfit could not be bought in Russia for any price. In the morning I made him and myself George Washington coffee in five minutes on a lamp with solid alcohol cubes — a Danish contraption, by the way. He left the train murmuring something admirative of‘American technique,’ and I felt that, for a notorious æsthete, I had creditably represented my country on the practical side.
In the corridor a man with a grim and rugged face, blue from much shaving, accosted me in broken English. His buttonhole was graced by an enormous sickle-and-sledge stick pin in oxidized silver. He looked a peculiarly sinister Communist, and I decided to be reticently on my guard. It turned out that, though a born Ukrainer, he had lived twenty-three years in rural Pennsylvania, had done well as a poultry farmer, and now was visiting relatives in the old country, being accompanied by his wife, a sister, and a young son. Owing to an unexpected advance in the departure of the train, the party had come off without provisions, so I stayed a hungry boy’s stomach with Swedish bread and marmalade before the station buffets opened. This induced confidences. My apparent Communist had his emphatic views about Bolshevized Russia. There was neither liberty nor prosperity (in this he was right), and no equality (in which I think he was wrong). At the Ukrainian border his big sickle-and-sledge disappeared. ‘It is easier here then?’ I asked, and he nodded. I found it was easier there.
Fleeting impressions of five hundred miles of the best wheat land in the world and of some fifty country stations can have little value. The land occasionally showed the deep boundary furrows which mark the unhandy individual strips, but in the main everything was collectivized. Seven or eight hundred peasants scattered among the stations looked contented and well fed. The bark boot which I had seen often on the way to Moscow was not worn here. The general look was of an entirely bearable poverty.
Evening fell. The water, which had recently been well over the tracks, just reached the rails. We skimmed it, but did not touch it. A broad sound opened up, or what seemed like one — the flooded river bottom; it reflected stars and soon many lights from the high terraces of Kiev; two searchlights played over the waters from the heights. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning when we arrived, the train two hours late. Another charming interpreter, Comrade B—, called my name and led me to a taxi whose clock had been running up many rubles, and escorted me to the spacious and handsome Hotel Continental, where I dreamt wandering dreams about the soft cars.
IV
Leningrad, even in its disfigured estate, wins approbation from you, as a person of logical taste; Moscow powerfully appeals to the residual romanticist in you, the lover of picturesque disorder; Kiev goes straight to your heart. It has the elegant hominess of such German cities as Cassel or Dresden, with a charming irregularity of layout and levels, a fantastic touch in the decoration of its baroque and rococo houses, a general warm grayness of tone, vistas upon clusters of gilded domes, views from its noble terrace over the endless plains of the Dnieper. And, as if this were not enough, there is the intense and varied picturesqueness of the Lavra — the monastery precinct; the glories of Santa Sofia, with its eleventh-century mosaics and frescoes, and even a congregation splendidly intoning the immemorial responses of the Greek Mass. By way of dessert for such a meal, the unexpected richness and variety and consequent agreeable surprises of the Khanienko Gallery, seen under the auspices of the most courteous and well-informed of keepers. And all this with Comrade B—’s big soft Oriental eyes to look at and her quiet musical voice to listen to; and spring in the air and trees blossoming and warm sunshine, and floating great clouds seeming, as reflected, to pass under the surface of the vast lake that had been the river plain.
Kiev is concentrated in the lovely ravine, studded with churches and monastic buildings, called the Lavra. Take the hanging ravine in which is Saint Catherine’s house at Siena; take it in springtime full of blossoming fruit trees, and retain its little rill; substitute on the sky line groups of gilded onion domes for the more rectangular contours of the Duomo; instead of the rolling Chianti hills, spread out before it an illimitable river bottom, through the freshet become a sea — and you would have the Lavra as it looked on a sparkling April day.
At the entrance was a pleasant surprise. A gracious and not too shabby old gentleman, with the unusual appurtenance of a monocle, accosted us and asked us to visit the Ukraine Museum. Although I had every respect for the land that boasted a Mazeppa, my interest in Ukrainian history was languid, and I told Comrade B— to make the visit as short as might be without hurting the feelings of an evidently nice person. One gradually caught the enthusiasm of the monocled host, clearly a superior sort of librarian, who knew the collection as a shepherd knows his sheep. There were 20,000 books and 13,000 prints — rare items, the first Ukrainian woodcut, copperplate, and so forth, things bitterly disputed wherever amateurs are gathered together in an auction room. The keeper spoke French and German, but had forgotten much of both, and in moments of expansion gladly fell back on Russian and Comrade B—. Within earshot of the talk hung always a thin, pallid, and very plainly dressed woman of perhaps fifty. I could n’t quite make her out, but decided she must be the wife of the librarian, and, like him, came of a stock that knew monocles.
The visit finished, I was asked to write my name in the visitors’ book, and in order to see clearly I screwed that handiest of aids to the far-sighted, my monocle, into my right eye. ‘These are the only two monocles in Kiev, and perhaps in Russia,’ observed my host. ‘They constitute a bond between us.’ I replied in such French as I could muster. We shook hands, and as I descended toward the catacombs, where threescore well-dried hermit saints now serve the alien purpose of an anti-religious exhibit, Comrade B— explained that my monocled colleague had once been Count Polotoski; that he had assembled the great Ukrainian collection with his private funds and given it to the Soviet State, which had assigned it the admirable installation in the Lavra and appointed him keeper. Doubtless the gentle apparition at the edge of our party had once been the Countess and was still the keeper’s wife.
Since much testimony has been given to the hardships of the Russian intellectuals, I am glad, in fairness, to cite this example of benevolent assimilation to the Revolutionary régime. I have no doubt that Comrade Polotoski on the whole has a better time than Count Polotoski enjoyed. His treasures are admirably and permanently housed, beyond any probable risk. He lives among them without competing business or social distractions. It is easier for him to do the honors than it was when the library was in his palace, and he likes to do the honors. To be sure, he and his wife are probably living only a little better than their servants used to live, but then nobody of their sort now lives on a larger scale. I cannot much pity anyone who, with the wife of his youth and surrounded by the books and prints he loves, goes down the vale of years at the Lavra.
V
The glories of the Cathedral of Santa Sofia are well known and possibly exaggerated. The design is noble, Greek work of the eleventh century, the mosaics more interesting as an ensemble than for finesse of design or execution. More interesting to the archæologist is a series of eleventh-century frescoes recently uncovered in a staircase. They are secular in theme — unique for the moment. There are a hunt, a feast, and even a traveling comedy, with conventional characters which might find their analogies either in Terence or in Punch and Judy. These frescoes are being studied by an accomplished young Russian scholar, and I hope to find a way of publishing his results in English.
It was Sunday, and there was a good congregation at Santa Sofia resonantly intoning the responses. Indeed, many churches were occupied by their priests. At Moscow and Leningrad four fifths would have been confiscated and disfigured by posters, anti-clerical or pro-Five-Year Plan. I remarked the fact to Comrade B—, and it displeased her, for, like all young people educated in the Soviet schools, she was convinced that ’religion is the opium of the people.’ I could never get her or any of her generation to admit that the people might, after all, need its opium. She pointed out that there were no young people at the services, and it was true. A person under forty was exceptional, and most were much older. The new education is making the youth of Russia not only irreligious, but fanatically anti-religious.
But even this process works more gently in the Ukraine than elsewhere. I felt that while Comrade B—utterly disapproved of the worshipers, she did not precisely scorn them, having some inkling of the human dignity of their to her erroneous position. I doubt if a Moscow interpreter would have entertained any kindly feeling toward them whatever. Yes, things were easier in the Ukraine, as the poultry farmer and I agreed when he put his big badge of the Internationale in his pocket. I like to think of the many kindnesses I received at Kiev; of the trouble cheerfully taken to show me the newly discovered frescoes at Santa Sofia, and to open to me museums on their closed day. I like to think of the dignified old lady who hobbled into my room to sell an icon, and, because she had heard I was an archæologist, brought me numerous offprints of the articles of her late husband, a famous historian of art. I like to think of her gratitude to me for feeding the rather peaked little grandson who accompanied her abundant Swedish bread and chocolate. She was a dignified old lady, speaking a precise, lesson-book French; and while I was a little ashamed of paying her so little for her icon, I should have been even more hesitant to offer her as a charity more than it was worth.
Everywhere in Russia, though I expected to feel myself painfully an alien, I felt myself among friends. This was particularly true of Kiev, where the many professional, perfunctory favors, if you will, were accorded with a peculiar graciousness. I wanted to stay on, but it was a question of getting to Odessa in time to catch the fine Cunard tourist steamer Carinthia, or of going out of the Black Sea by some far less comfortable craft.
When Comrade B—left me in the soft car of the evening, I indulged the capitalistic courtesy of kissing her friendly and pretty hand.