Chapter 4

4

Moscow, Again

Once we arrived in Moscow, getting from the station to our hotel proved to be no routine matter. Messages and notices; automobiles we were told to wait for that never showed up; we could not leave the station without authorization. In the end, we resigned ourselves to an indefinite wait. Finally, after four hours of waiting, several automobiles and three trucks arrived. Since there were not enough passenger vehicles for everyone, a grotesque and revolting scene unfolded. The rush for the automobiles was so brutal that three out of the six women in the delegation were pushed to the ground.

Someone told those responsible for knocking the women down that what they did was rude and vulgar, and a couple of them got out of the car and complained that such an outburst was unworthy of men who have any self-respect.

The rest of us made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the trucks.

Life at the hotel had not changed. But we met more comrade delegates; English and French. Others were expected, among them the ill-fated Vergeat, Lepetit and Lefevre, along with a few Germans; there was even some talk of a delegate from the Spanish Communist Party.

With regard to room and board, we were treated splendidly. We were the aristocracy with regard to these aspects of the standard of living.

We ate four meals a day. Breakfast, which consisted of a piece of cheese, bread and tea. Lunch, at noon, composed of bean soup, a plate of kascha (cooked buckwheat groats), a plate of meat, usually duck, bread and tea.

In the late afternoon, another ration of cheese, bread and tea. In both the morning and mid-day meals the cheese was often replaced by caviar, a food made of the roe of sturgeon, held in high esteem in Russia and all the northern countries.

At night, around ten, we had dinner. Dinner was always composed of the same foods served at lunch.

Every day each delegate was provided with a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches, including the non-smokers.

We also had access to a bathroom, a barber, and various automobiles for when we needed to go to the Kremlin or anywhere else. It is true that the abuse of the privilege to use the automobiles on the part of some delegates prevented others from using them when they really needed them. We must say that we always preferred to go on foot. It was more convenient and we did not have to be always waiting around for the automobiles, and allowed us to get some exercise, too. So we did not bother about what the other delegates were doing with the cars.

Our stay in the hotel allowed us to become acquainted with the psychology of many of those who wanted to be the future dictators of the proletariat of Europe.

There are those who, on a daily basis, make use of the hairdresser and if he does not style their hair just the way they want it, they treat him inconsiderately, and tell him that he could be dismissed from his job. One actually complained to the officer in charge of the hotel, earning the servant severe reprimands from his commanding officer.

There was even one person who left his shoes in the hallway every night, as they do in the hotels in Europe, so that the “comrades” of the hotel staff would clean and polish them, with the subsequent thanks delivered in the form of reprimands from the “comrade communist” delegate, when he discovered that a small spot was missed.

Others were even more disgusting. Taking advantage of the hunger suffered by the women who served on the staff as chambermaids, they asked special favors of them in exchange for a part of the ration to which they were entitled. Such moral depravity! And these people were, and some still are, the followers of Lenin in the apostolic succession of social regeneration!

Since it was very hot and almost everyone brought only winter clothing, the Committee of the Third International went to the trouble to distribute rubashkas or the typical blouses of the country, to the delegates; and some of the delegates who, because of the difficulties they encountered in trying to get to Russia, had no spare clothes at all, were provided with the necessary articles of clothing. Anyone who wanted could also get a pair of sandals. This distribution, which deprived Russians of the chance to receive these articles of clothing—the Russian people needed them more than we did, because we could always get everything we need on our return to Europe—aroused the avarice of one delegate, who went so far as to ask for clothing for his children in Europe.

Another delegate, because he dropped his watch on the ground and it stopped, pestered Zinoviev for eight days to give him another watch.

“Mine is broken,” he said. “It’s only fair to give me another.”

And to conclude with our relation of these moral indecencies: I will never forget that episode where a delegate from the German Independent Socialist Party complained to Lenin about the food we were given, saying that it was “pig-slop”, when, I must reiterate, our food rations represented an enormous effort, given the resources the country and the Government possessed at the time.

Those who spent their time in Russia like that, constantly bothering the Committee of the International with their complaints and demands, and those who consistently displayed a bourgeois mentality in a country where the bourgeoisie had disappeared: what would they do and how would they carry on tomorrow if a revolution puts them into power in their home countries? Furthermore, these same people are the ones who were saying then in Moscow, and are still repeating it in Europe today, that we possess a petit bourgeois mentality. What cynicism!

***

Our general impression of Moscow is one of a city that is in constant and agitated movement.

The Government headquarters, with the thousands of bureaucrats that surround it, causes life in its vicinity to be enormously intensified, which prevents Moscow from displaying the same sense of poverty that is evinced by the other cities in Russia. In Moscow this impression was only much weaker.

The garbage-cluttered and abandoned streets, full of potholes, almost impassable, hindered the circulation of official vehicles.

Many buildings were on the verge of collapse.

The Government confiscated the derelict buildings and closed them; some of them were still filled with goods and merchandise, but they remained closed. The merchandise that had not yet been stolen rotted and deteriorated inside the shops.

It was a telling sight to see the contents of certain display windows of stores that were well-known before the revolution, the objects the businessman wanted to entice the customers with, still intact but covered with a thick layer of dust.

In some display windows one could see objects that were desperately needed, and could not be found in the Soviet warehouses; but these goods, like those inside the closed stores, could not be touched because an inventory of them had not yet been carried out, despite the fact that four years had passed since the revolution. We have said “those inside the closed stores”, whereas it would be more correct to say “those that should be inside the closed stores,” since it often happens that, when the inspectors finally arrive to inventory and expropriate the goods that are supposed to be inside the store, they find the shelves they once occupied, but no merchandise.

And in the midst of so many closed buildings not being used for anything at all, one sees at night crowds of people sleeping on the ground and in the doorways of the buildings because they have no homes.

Another depressing spectacle, one that represents an enormous waste of time, was the distribution of emergency rations, clothing or railroad tickets. It was the latter, especially, that caught the attention of those who did not want to close their eyes to what was really going on.

In the train stations, as well as in the central offices that issued travel permits and railroad tickets, the lines of applicants were permanent. It was not rare to find five hundred or more people waiting in line. There are those who have to wait two or three days before being able to get a ticket. And since it was not possible to abandon the line without losing your place, you either had to eat and sleep on the ground, or get someone else to hold your place for you. This is what usually happened.

This bureaucratic parsimony with regard to the distribution of emergency supplies, clothing, all other articles and rail tickets, led to the emergence of a very lucrative industry: that of those who permanently remained in the waiting lines.

Someone who has a voucher for clothing, provisions or tickets, and either cannot or does not want to stand in line, can obtain the services of a professional who, for a fee, will take the customer’s place in line. Since he had to stand in line for one, it made no difference if he performed the same service for four or five persons and these four or five jobs made up a day’s work.

It must not be assumed that this lucrative job—for there have been people who earn much more doing this than they would have if they had a regular job—was not a hard one. One needed to have a special kind of temperament to do it right. Besides the fact that you would have to spend hours and hours waiting, the filth of the environs and the close contact with so many people crawling with parasites made the job repulsive and difficult.

Just out of curiosity, we entered one of the ticket offices, located on the Square of the Moscow Opera, near the old Hotel Metropolitan, and although we showed up when the line had no more than a hundred people, the atmosphere was almost sickening.

The floor, like the walls, almost made you wretch with nausea, and there, passively waiting, the professional placeholders had to stand, waiting hours and hours for a ticket.

These expeditions and investigations allowed us to do without any kind of official reports or the guides and interpreters that were at our disposal at the hotel.

***

The preparations for the opening day of the Congress filled the days that followed with an unusual spate of activity.

The arrival of the foreign delegates, as well as the delegates from the interior of Russia, caused a great deal of commotion and activity throughout the capital.

In the hotel Delavoy Dvor one could hear people speaking in every language, and one saw faces that reflected the heritage of every race.

The preliminary meetings that were held by the Executive Committee of the Third International became more interesting and impassioned every day. In these meetings one could discern the emerging split that would later divide the world’s socialist workers.

The dogmatic and inflexible admissions criteria of the Russian authoritarian communists allowed for no compromises. Under the shelter of the halo of the revolution, they imposed, rather than recommended, their policies.

The diatribes, the sarcasm, and worst of all, the smugness of those who really believed they were the only ones who carried out the revolution, slowly laid the foundations for the split that would be produced in the socialist camp by the famous Twenty-One Conditions of Moscow.

We, meanwhile, more interested in satisfying our wish to know what was really going on in Russia than we were in intervening in party squabbles, continued to take our walks through the streets of Moscow, visiting official or semi-official offices, asking, inquiring, attempting to lift the veil of mystery with which our ignorance of the language covered everything, in order to get as close as possible to reality.

Finally, on the seventeenth of July, we were notified that two days later all the delegates were to depart for Petrograd, because Petrograd was the birthplace of the revolution, and they wanted to render it the highest degree of homage of sympathy and admiration, celebrating in that capital the opening day of the Congress with a series of festivals and artistic demonstrations that had been arranged beforehand for this occasion. Only the opening session would be held in Petrograd; the Congress would continue in Moscow, to which we were to return on the twenty-first.

The preparations for the delegates’ trip were carried out with dispatch, but not without a certain degree of rivalry beginning to emerge.

Zinoviev held that, since we were delegates to the Third Congress of the International, it was his responsibility to make our travel arrangements, while Trotsky, alleging the country’s lack of security and the possibility of an attack on our persons by the counterrevolutionaries, held that the Commissar of War should have responsibility for the organization of our trip and for our personal security.

Trotsky won, so he organized our trip as the Commissar of War.

We were informed that our departure from Moscow would take place on the nineteenth of July, at two in the afternoon, in a special train, and that we would arrive in Petrograd at ten in the morning on the twentieth, the date the Congress was scheduled to begin.

At noon the automobiles began to arrive at the hotel Delavoy Dvor to take the delegates to the train station.

Along our route, at a safe distance, soldiers were posted on guard.

In the vicinity of the train station the soldiers were more numerous and prevented the public from approaching the main entrance. Their orders were to shoot to kill.

The platforms were empty except for the delegates. There were many delegates.

The foreign delegates numbered about sixty. We occupied two special train cars, although some of us had to stand.

The train was formed of various sleeping cars and their corresponding dining cars.

On the platform we saw Kamenev, Rykov, Rakovsky and other well-known communists.

The whole route was guarded by military detachments. At intervals there were guard posts, one on each side of the track and with a soldier with rifle in hand, constantly on the lookout. On the bridges there were two guard posts at each end.

In every station of any importance the train stopped and we were regaled with the sound of “The Internationale”, which began automatically as soon as the train had barely entered the switchyard of the station.

At some stations they took advantage of the trains’ stopping to hold impromptu rallies.

When night fell we relaxed. We thought that all the spontaneous demonstrations prepared by the Commissariat of War had come to an end and that they would not bother us anymore. A thoughtless error!

Even in the wee hours of the morning, when the delegates were peacefully asleep, the bands and the local Soviets flooded the stations singing “The Internationale” and shouting their ‘hurrahs’ for the Third International.

These untimely apotheoses were somewhat ridiculous and grotesque. But they were carried out perfectly. The Soviet State arranged it this way so that the Commissar of War could take the credit for being a perfect organizer.