Only Commissars Dine Well.
Waxoff offered to take me to the Moscow Soviet to inquire for rooms. We took a cab outside the Jaroslavski Station. The driver at first demanded 10,000 roubles—i. e., $5, but after some bargaining agreed to take us to the house of the Soviet, which was formerly the residence of the Military Governor of Moscow, for half that sum. The pre-war fare was 15 cents. At the Soviet we saw a Commissar, who gave me a letter to the Foreign Office, which, it appeared, arranged all accommodation for foreigners. As this man interviewed us he partook of his dinner, which I was interested to notice consisted of very good cabbage soup with a large piece of meat in it, followed by a large plate of meat and vegetables, good black bread and tea with sugar. This certainly did not look like starvation. I later discovered to my cost that only Commissars were fed thus well.
At the Foreign Office we met a Jew named Contorovitch, who spoke English fluently. He furnished me with rooms at the Foreign Office Guest House at No. 10 Mala Haritonofskaya, which formerly was the home of a wealthy German merchant. At this house the first person I met was Mrs. Harrison, the correspondent of the Associated Press.
The other people living in the house were Bobroff, a naturalized American Jew (former Russian subject), who was soliciting orders from the Bolsheviki; an Esthonian representative, two tame Bolsheviki from Siberia, two red, or seemingly red, delegates from Corea, and Axionoff.
This man, formerly Colonel of the Imperial Guard, scion of a noble Russian family, was ostensibly working in the Foreign Office, but was in fact a spy for the Extraordinary Commission. He was specially planted in the house to watch the movements of foreigners and report their conversations to Mogilevski, the Chief Commissar of the Foreign Department of the Vetchika (the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission).
During my stay in Moscow I saw a great deal of this mustache-twirling, beard-combing, smirking, Iscariotic apology for a man, and the more I saw of the cowardly renegade the more repulsive I found him. Axionoff, however, was not the only member of the aristocracy I met who had sold his honor and purchased a modicum of comfort and a degree of safety by spying on and betraying his friends. By far the most dangerous spies in Moscow were those recruited from the upper classes.
Potatoes a Delicacy.
The meals at No. 10, which is one of the best guest houses in the city, consisted of tea and black bread and butter or cheese for breakfast; water soup, decorated with particles of vegetables and kasha, or occasionally rice, for dinner, and black bread and again kasha for supper. On rare occasions we were given as a special delicacy boiled potatoes sprinkled with minute portions of meat. As the meat had invariably been a long time dead we found it advisable to remove it before eating the potatoes.
As at all the Soviet guest houses there were two soldiers always on guard at the door, who carefully noted one’s comings and goings. Visitors were only allowed to enter on production of their documents, particulars of which, together with the name of the person visited, were entered in a book which was periodically sent to the Vetchika. In addition to the guard we had a rat-faced commandant who padded about the house in noiseless boots, probably relics of his former occupation.
On calling at the Department for Foreign Trade, which had been presided over by Krassin before he left for Scandinavia and England, I met a Commissar of the name of Voronatzki, who expressed himself as most anxious to trade with us. He proved to be a very decent fellow, but possessed of little or no knowledge of the matters he was handling. The proposition I made him was the same as that which I had advanced in Irkutsk, namely, to supply the Irkutsk district with goods forwarded via Mongolia and the Jakutsk district, in the fur-bearing region northeast of Irkutsk, via Olan, a port on the Pacific, provided the Soviet power agreed to return to us the furs they had seized in Eastern Siberia; payment for the goods to be supplied by us to be made in furs.