THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE
The Romanoffs gone, the soviets apparently yielding to Kerensky’s demand for a coalition government, and finally voting to give him almost supreme power, what then stood in the way of restoring order in the army and civil life? Readers of the despatches in the daily press last September and later must have puzzled over this question. The fact is that while there were indications that the last convention held in Petrograd by the Russian Socialists, the so-called Democratic Council, ended in a partial victory for Kerensky, there remained every evidence that the Bolshevik element was still very strong. Kerensky succeeded in forming a coalition ministry, but the Petrograd Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates at the same time succeeded in electing a Bolshevik central executive committee with the notorious Leo Trotzky as chairman, displacing N. C. Tcheidse, the Georgian Duma member, prominent in the Council, but against whose sincerity and honesty I never heard a word.
Trotzky was elected because the Bolsheviki couldn’t then get Lenine back. There were not enough bold spirits in the Democratic Council to force from the government a promise of immunity from arrest for Lenine, should he appear at a meeting, so he was kept in the background and Trotsky was made chairman of the Petrograd executive committee in his stead.
Lenine is the real leader of the Bolsheviki to-day, exactly as he was during the fateful days of July when he sent mutinous soldiers and idle workmen out on the streets of the capital with machine guns to murder the populace. Trotzky, however, is an able and faithful lieutenant. He is a Jew and his real name is Braunstein. He is one of those Jews, unhappily too prominent in Russian affairs just now, who are doing everything in their power to prejudice the people of Russia against the race, and to check the movement for the full freedom of the Jews of the empire.
Trotzky, or Braunstein, is known to many in New York city. He gained some newspaper publicity when he arrived in New York from Spain a short time before the February revolution. He posed as a martyr to socialist principles, one who had been persecuted by the governments of four countries—Russia, Germany, France and Spain. All four had expelled him, he said, for the crime of editing really successful socialist newspapers. Trotzky’s story was founded on fact. At least, four countries did find him as a citizen too undesirable to retain. Banishment from Russia, under the old régime, is no stigma, so we may begin Trotzky’s saga in August, 1914, the early days of the world war. He was editing a Jewish paper in Berlin. He was given a few hours to leave, he says, and with his family fled across the Swiss frontier to Zurich. From there he went to Paris, where he was miraculously able, poor as he had always been and high as the price of white paper was soaring, to establish a socialist newspaper in the Russian language. When the Russian contingent of the allied armies reached France in April, 1916, Our Words, which was the name of Trotzky’s spicy little sheet, was circulated free among the 65,000 soldiers. The motto of the paper was “Down with the War” far more than it was “Up with Socialism.” It was filled from page one to page four with the sort of pro-German stuff that has done its deadly work with the men at the Russian front, inducing them to refuse to fight and thus opening their country to the German army.
The French government, which had its hands full with its own pet sedition raisers, had never before heard of Trotzky, but now it told him to move on. He did. He went to Spain, where he was arrested as an extreme trouble-maker, and after a short time expelled from the country. He came to the United States, where he remained until the Russian revolution of late February, 1917, when he flew back to Petrograd. Trotzky always had money to make these long journeys. At Halifax he was halted, for the English government knew his record. The English authorities considered interning him for the duration of the war, but a lot of people interceded for the poor Russian exile, and he was allowed to go on to Russia. Poor Russia!
Trotzky was elected a member of the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, being a pacifist and never having done any manual work. Last summer when I was in Russia I used to read almost daily in the accounts of the National Council of Soviets, or councils, burning speeches of Trotzky’s in which he urged a separate peace with Germany, or what would amount to exactly the same thing, Russia’s immediate cessation of fighting. Trotzky ridiculed the idea that abandonment of the allies would in any way injure Russia in a material way or soil the national honor. His ideas of economics and finance were simply and frequently reiterated. Arrest all capitalists and force them to disclose the secret of how they got rich, and hang all the bankers—presumably as the first step toward seizing the contents of the banks. With this man as chairman of the central executive committee of the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council, and with the October revolt of the German naval men on five ships for him to point to as evidence that the social revolution is at hand in Germany, the life of the last coalition government was not likely to be peaceful.
But the end of the Bolsheviki is in sight in spite of Lenine, Trotzky and the entire majority in the Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates. It has been coming on stealthy feet for many months, and now the messengers’ hands are on the latch. The messengers’ names are Hunger and Cold.
When I went down to my first dinner in Petrograd last May, I was amazed to see the price on the menu card placed at five rubles fifty kopecks, about $1.80. In a previous visit to Petrograd I had eaten an excellent dinner in this same hotel and had paid for it one ruble seventy-five kopecks, or about seventy-five cents, as the ruble was then valued. The one offered for more than twice this amount consisted of a watery soup, a small piece of not very fresh fish, a thin slice of veal with peas and a water ice flavored with cherry juice. One piece of black bread without butter was served. If I wanted water to drink with the meal I had to pay two rubles for bottled water, for one drink of plain water in Petrograd is an attempt at suicide by the typhoid route. If I wanted coffee I had to pay one ruble sixty-five kopecks more, and after I added the customary 10 per cent. for the tip my check was ten rubles and six kopecks. Three dollars and thirty-five cents.
This was bad enough, but before I left Russia the price of that meager meal had advanced to thirteen rubles and the quality of the dinner had sensibly declined. Also the tip had advanced, for after a strike of waiters a system was adopted all over Russia, as far as I traveled, whereby tips were abolished and 15 per cent. was added to the bill by the hotel and restaurant proprietors.
You now pay an additional 15 per cent. of your entire hotel bill in Russia, which is distributed in tips to all the servants except the lift boys and the gorgeous individual who stands in front of the hotel door, who assists you to alight from your droshky when you arrive, and touches his peacock feather trimmed hat to you when you go in and out. He is called the Swiss, denoting the origin of his earliest predecessor, I imagine, and why he and the elevator men do not share in the general distribution I never found out.
Walk down the Nevsky Prospect, or the Grand Morskaia, which begins in fine shops and ends in palaces, like Fifth avenue. Wander through the maze of little shops in the huge arcade called the Gostinny Dvor. Go far out on the Nevsky, cross the beautiful Anitchkoff bridge, with its four groups of rearing horses, and turn in at the Litainy, where the cheaper shops are to be found, and try to buy something. It doesn’t matter what, just try to buy something to eat, drink, wear or use. When the waiter brought in the coffee that morning he said cheerfully, “Niet malako,” no milk. Try to buy a few cans of condensed milk against a similar experience. I walked all over Petrograd trying to buy condensed milk, for the shortage of fresh milk was grave when I arrived, and grew steadily worse. I found one can, for which I paid two dollars. Shortly afterward a friend arrived from Japan and gave me two cans, which she spared out of her store.
Russian illiteracy is so general that the shop signs are not written but illustrated. Brilliant signboards on the outside show pictures of what the shopkeeper has to sell. A dairy shop will have a picture of a cow, crocks of butter, chickens, ducks, geese, baskets of eggs, cheese of many varieties and so forth. A greengrocer’s signboard is decorated like a seed catalogue cover, while a clothing store is advertised by pictures of clothes and hats which were fashionable perhaps ten years ago. It once added to the gay appearance of the streets, but just now it increases their anxious and ominous air. Hundreds of the shops are empty, the doors are locked and the brilliant signboards alone remain to indicate that business was ever conducted there. One of the mournfulest sights in Petrograd to me was an abandoned shop where they once sold French bread and pastry. I used to turn my head away from the mocking poster, picturing crisp white bread in yard-long loaves, delicious breakfast crescents, patés and cakes. The standard bread served in Russia at the present time is black, soggy, sour and indigestible. It is sold by weight, hence loaded with water and baked as little as possible to be bread and not dough. Some one has suggested that that bread was meant for food and drink together, and it is certain that it is so wet that it quickly mildews. But bad as it is it is scarce and expensive. A bread ticket calls for three-quarters of a pound, the daily allotment per person when I left the last of August. This costs at the rate of ten kopecks a pound. It used to be three and a half kopecks a pound, and good bread, too.
Butter, when it can be bought at all, was three rubles a pound, about a dollar. Excellent butter a year or two ago was less than fifty kopecks a pound, for Russia was rapidly becoming a dairy country. Veal, and veal is about the only meat to be had, was nearly a dollar a pound. Feed for cattle is so scarce and so expensive that cows are not allowed to grow into beef size, hence the prevalence of veal. Chickens may vary the menu, if you can afford to pay from three dollars upward. You could buy only a short-weight half pound of meat a day per person, except for the Sunday dinner, when a pound was allowed.
Even at the Hotel Militaire, where I lived most of the time, and where the food supply came from government sources, we had veal or its derivatives, hash, croquettes, etc., five days in the week. Sometimes they offered what they called beef, but it wasn’t. It was horsemeat, coarse and strong. Once a week or so we had chicken, a welcome change. When August came we began to have game, grouse of various kinds mostly. Game is very plentiful in Russia and Finland this year, because since the war men have hunted only one another. But game, which is a treat when you have it occasionally, is a punishment when you have it more than once or so a week. You detest it when it appears on the table three times a week, and if it appears oftener you choose a meatless day as an alternative.
Coffee was about a dollar and a half a pound, not so bad, and tea was even more moderate in price. What the Russian people would do if the tea gave out I cannot imagine. Everybody drinks tea, scalding hot, several times a day. Even the babies drink tea, and it is a fact that in the best babies’ hospital I saw in Russia the head nurse proudly showed me, in a hot water table, a whole row of nursing bottles full of tea for the sick babies’ evening repast. Tea they still have, but they are almost out of sugar to go with it. In a hotel or restaurant they serve you with three very tiny lumps of sugar with each glass of tea, and that is all you can have. If for any reason you do not use all your sugar you put it in your pocket. You do this whether you keep house or not, because you can’t buy much candy, and when meat is scarce everybody craves sweets.
Sugar is not the only leftover one takes home. One day I went into the Vienna restaurant on the Gogol for dinner, sitting down at a table just vacated by a very smart young officer. He left behind him on the window ledge a little parcel neatly wrapped in white paper with a pink string. It might have been a jeweler’s parcel. I picked it up with the impulse to hand it over to the waiter, but first as a matter of precaution, lest it should be really valuable, I opened a corner of the paper and examined the contents. A piece of fairly white bread as big as a small turnip, the remains of luncheon, perhaps, at the house of a rich friend. I went into a fashionable tea place in Moscow just before I left, and they served with the tea, in lieu of sugar, a kind of sticky preserve. I had with my sugarless tea a cake made without flour or sugar. It tasted like almond paste and the whole thing cost me a dollar and ten cents.
Most of the shops are closed, but before most of those which remain open you may see, at any hour of the day or night, a queue of people, men, women and children, waiting to get in and buy. The people often wait in line twenty-four hours or more. They wait days to buy some things. Go home from a visit or get in from a journey at any time of night, midnight, three a. m., any hour, and you see these long, patient, waiting lines of people. They curl up on the stones of the pavement and sleep, members of a family relieve one another at intervals, but every one desperately hangs on to his place in the line.
Not only do all the small shop keepers and the street peddlers have to replenish their poor little stocks by standing thus for days, but housekeepers have to feed and clothe their families that way. People who can afford servants, of course, send their servants to wait in line. The daily newspapers often contain the advertisement, “Wanted a queue maid,” meaning a woman whose sole duty it is to sleep on the sidewalk and bring home next day’s dinner.
It was summer when I was in Petrograd and Moscow. Sleeping on the sidewalk left something to be desired even in warm weather. The first hint of autumn was in the air when I left on August 30. By the first of October it was cold, and by the end of November it was frigid. When the storms and the driving snows of winter set in in earnest people will not be able to sleep on the sidewalks. Where will they get food, and when starvation stares them in the face what will they do? Russia’s real crisis, political and economic, will come then, and the Bolsheviki will not be the people to overcome it.