Letter from Russia

PETROGRAD, SEPTEMBER 1, 1921

Petrograd on a beautiful August day. On Michael’s Square, under the windows of a palace and a theater that is packed every night, three strange carriages are stopped. They’re low carts, covered with tarps and pulled by small horses whose ribs sorrowfully stick out under their taut, dusty skin, worn out with sweat. The weary drivers, old bearded muzhiks, ask the way. All around there’s the coming and going of trams, the dual river of (in fact) well-dressed passersby of the great city. Under the tarps, upon which a river of sun falls, there are tiny tousled blond heads and the grimy old faces of the sick consumed by hunger.

“Where are you from, little father?”

“From Samara.”

From the country of hunger. And they’ve traveled more than a thousand kilometers, driven by the desire to live, to live despite it all, while there their entire people seems to be condemned.

Two little girls standing in the cart look without surprise on the crowd and the city. They have tired blue eyes, hollow cheeks gray from dust and anemia. They’ve already passed through so many inhospitable cities that even this one doesn’t surprise them.

This is how they arrive in all the cities of immense Russia, the bravest and luckiest of those fleeing the Volga. They bring with them the dead and the dying, sometimes little wrinkled corpses, deformed beings with their bellies bloated by foul food, by illness. They pass through cities whose suffering counts for little compared to theirs, like savages of another race. The people of the city, dressed à la européenne, often with a remainder of elegance, stop at the edge of the sidewalk to watch them pass. The best of them sigh. The others, the imbeciles, say, “The worse things are the better: the Bolsheviks won’t pull through this time!”

Will they find asylum and bread in our great devastated city, where life is so harsh? I look out on the crowd on the square and I almost have my doubts. All the passersby have the look and clothing of the ancien régime. Workers, revolutionaries, some are dead, others vaguely carry out difficult tasks and are poorly dressed, ill-nourished and have nothing left to give. And yet a café and a confectionary have opened a hundred meters from here where the passing petit bourgeois spend in ten minutes three or four months’ wages of a communist working woman. And suddenly, poor starving people, there comes the clear impression that you have nothing to hope for from these shopkeepers, from their customers, from the revolting petite bourgeoisie of the capitals that in your lack of consciousness you have so often supported. You have only to have hope in those—the exhausted proletarians, the communist escapees from the civil war—who are almost as poor as you.

We pass in front of shining new displays, both opulent and pitiful. Here one can eat a gastronomic feast, on condition that one is one of the big embezzlers of the stock of the Commune that the Cheka still executes when they catch them in the act. I enter.

Three gentlemen are there speaking with the owner of the establishment, an old, bespectacled antique merchant. The room is decorated with engravings, with miniatures, with porcelains the product of excellent deals made by a connoisseur. This tiny things represent millions of rubles. Through the window I can see moving off into the distance the miserable carriages of the starving. I wonder by what miracle the exhausted animals that pull them are able to remain standing.

And I heard a gentleman speak who had laid his wallet of a well-paid technician on a fluted chair: “The Americans, English capital … That would be an excellent affair … Yes, really a good one … A concession? No, not yet … Seventeen million you say? In valuta that comes to very little. Nineteen million … the Americans.”

Snatches of words reach me. And then others:

“The famine … the political consequences of the famine … they’re screwed … screwed.”

And again:

“English capital … The Americans …” A thin young woman brings them café au lait and cookies. The owner-antique dealer shows off a miniature that they whisperingly estimate in rubles of the czar, of the Duma, of the Soviets, in francs, in marks, in dollars …

I recall the Whites of 1919. This morning I read that a new plot has been uncovered. It’s not yet the truest one, the most dangerous one.

There are already men who imagine that tomorrow they can carve up the dead revolution …

During the afternoon a young Jewish student from Kharkov came to my house. Quite simply, without realizing that he was recounting horrific events, that he was taking us back, we who were gathered together in 1921 in one of the great capitals of the civilized world, to the time of Merovingian killings, he told us as he sipped his tea how many times he was nearly killed because he was a Jew. Five or six times in eighteen months. How did he survive? The same slightly disconcerting chance that allows soldiers to survive five or six attacks spared him. Each in their turn the Whites, Petliura’s band of murderers, the Makhnovtsi, and other whose political color was unknown wanted to kill him. His misfortune was to have the look of his race.

“Yid? Don’t say no or watch out!

The first person he saw on the tumultuous night of pogrom, interrogated him in this way on the street, in a wagon, in his house. The rifle butts are raised over his head.

“Yes, a Jew.”

“Against the wall! Move it!”

He moves peacefully (he had seen so many murdered since they’d killed his brother). He offers cigarettes to his executioner, who in a friendly way abruptly tells him: “Get lost!”

Another time the Makhnovtsi captured him. He declared that he knew a friend of the batko. And the batko himself pardoned him.

Yet another time an illiterate took his student booklet for the membership booklet of the Communist party and wanted to bash in his head.

And finally, another time, the murderers having brought him to a hedgerow to kill him, decided to shoot at him in flight by throwing him over the hedges. These killers, a little drunk, were clumsy …

This student finds these things simple, normal. Having come here to get some books he will return from whence he came with the hope of living despite it all. He’s not a communist but sympathizes with the Reds: wherever they establish themselves, the pogroms cease.

During the evening I met a “revolutionary” enemy of the communists. We didn’t fail to exchange more or less harsh words in passing.

Gesturing toward the street where the petite bourgeoisie seem, with the freedom of small scale commerce, to have odiously regained a foothold, he mockingly—and quite obviously with satisfaction—asked me:

“Now do you deny the defeat?”

They shouldn’t have done this … They shouldn’t have done that … It’s the party’s fault … They should have listened to the far-sighted Mensheviks … Maybe they shouldn’t have made a revolution at all … They should have left power to the Social Revolutionaries … They should have turned the unions into a Republic of Labor … They should have dissolved the state, decentralized, established anarchy …

The dissident and malcontent “revolutionaries” we meet conclude their invariable indictment in accordance with the label they wear on their caps … During the war, in the bars, it was in this way that good men carried out military criticism and strategy.

But I listen to the “comrade.” And I realize that he feels a bitter satisfaction in noting what immense danger surrounds “the revolution of the others”; in saying “For my part, I wash my hands of it; I would have done better than Lenin”; in thinking that if everything collapses in a bloodbath by horrible reaction, he can proclaim with joy, shouting with impunity, “It’s the Bolsheviks’ fault!”

But he’s never requisitioned bread in the countryside. He never carried out a house search. He didn’t fight against Kronstadt. He never arrested anyone. He isn’t a commissar. He never carries out any of the dirty work of the class war. He is clean, he is pure, he is an idealist.

He will triumph if the revolution perishes.

I know that this revolution has earned many criticisms, but I don’t know who has earned the right to make them. It is so easy to criticize the transgressions of those who have attempted to master this formidable social tempest in which a world perishes, where, whatever is said and done, another world is born. But is this the time for criticism?

Is this the time when our New Economic Policy—which no one can doubt is necessary—is turning out to be a truce with the most tenacious and determined enemy of the revolution of the poor, with the petite bourgeoisie that rotted our institutions, pillaged (sometimes legally) our storehouses, survived every Red terror through obsequiousness and adores nothing but profit? When in the Volga region thirty million peasants—three-quarters of the total population of France—die of hunger? When millions of children and the weak are going to perish this winter, whatever we might do to assist them?

And doesn’t it require a strange mental aberration to not understand that there are many and profound causes for the immense suffering of the Russians, for which the actions of leaders and parties count for little? Let us recall: four years of imperialist war and then four years of civil war; foreign intervention on seven fronts; endless conspiracies; the blockade; sabotage by technicians; the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of the peasantry; the death of the best. All this in a country in which formerly there were the fewest railroads and the greatest number of illiterates in the world.

Four times the war passed and re-passed over the regions today suffering from famine following what was before the drought a still primitive agriculture. It is there that the Entente stirred up the Czechoslovaks in 1918. There that the Constituent wanted to govern. There that Kolchak returned. There that the Whites decimated in the cruelest fashion, through terror, an entire population. Now the land is dead. Who killed it?

It seems to me that every thing, every voice, every step taken on the street of a Russian city attests today more than ever to the fact that the Russian Revolution has, above all, been the magnificent sacrifice of a young elite people that is the future of the world.

(Bulletin Communiste 42–43 [second year], October 6 and 13, 1921)