GUKOVSKI, HIS DAUGHTER, KAMENEFF AND MARINASHKY.
September 20th. Moscow, The Kremlin.
Yesterday evening after we had started, Kameneff left us to go and talk to Zinoviev who was on the Petrograd train, travelling also to Moscow. Zinoviev is President of the Petrograd Soviet (and also of the Third International). I did not see Kameneff again that evening, but at 2 a.m. he knocked at my door and awakened me with many apologies to tell me news he thought I should like to hear. Zinoviev had just told him that the telegram announcing his arrival with me came in the middle of a Soviet Conference. It caused a good deal of amusement, but Lenin said that whatever one felt about it there was nothing to do but to give me some sittings as I had come so far for the purpose. “So Lenin has consented and I thought it was worth while to wake you up to tell you that.” Kameneff was in great spirits; Zinoviev had evidently told him things he was glad to hear, especially, I gathered, that no blame or censure was going to be put upon him for having failed in his mission to England.
We reached Moscow at 10.30 a.m. and I waited in the train so that Kameneff and his wife could get their tender greetings over without my presence. I watched them through the window: the greeting on one side, however, was not apparent in its tenderness. I waited and they walked up the platform talking with animation. Finally Mrs. Kameneff came into the compartment and shook hands with me. Mrs. Philip Snowden in her book has described her as “an amiable little lady.” She has small brown eyes and thin lips. She looked at the remains of our breakfast on the saloon table and said querulously, “We don’t live chic like that in Moscow.” Goodness, I thought, not even like that! There was more discussion in Russian between the two, and my expressionless face watched them. I have become reconciled to not being unable to understand.
As we left the train she said to me: “Leo Kameneff has quite forgotten about Russia, the people here will say he is a bourgeois.” Leo Kameneff spat upon the platform in the most plebeian way, I suppose to disprove this. It was extremely unlike him.
We piled into a beautiful open Rolls-Royce car and were driven at full speed with a great deal of hooting through streets that were shuttered as after an air raid. Mrs. Kameneff said to me: “It is dirty, our Moscow, isn’t it?” Well, yes, one could not very well say that it was not.
We came to the Kremlin. It is high up and dominates Moscow and consists of the main