The next day I took the channel boat to Ostend. Arriving in Berlin, I made inquiries and found Whitehead. He promised to get me through to Russia. That I was not indorsed by any Communist party did not matter to him. He was not a fanatic or dogmatist. In the days of our association together in London we often waxed satirical about Communist orthodoxy and we had often discussed the idea of a neo-radical magazine in which nothing in the universe would be held sacred.
Whitehead started working for me. The intervening time I spent visiting the theaters. Expressionism was setting the pace. I saw the revolving stage for the first time and admired it. Also I visited many of the cabarets, which had sprung up like mushrooms under the Socialist-Republican régime, some of which seemed to express the ultimate in erotomania. The youngsters of both sexes, the hectic pleasure-chasers of the Berlin of that epoch (before Poincaré grabbed the Ruhr), were methodically exploiting the nudist colony indoors, which was perhaps more exciting than the outdoor experiments.
One evening Whitehead announced that all was ready. The next day we drove in a taxicab to a rendezvous. We entered a house and passed into a large room in which there was a group of men. Four of them I identified as Russians. Whitehead introduced me as a kamarad und neger dichter. One sitting at a table spoke with a kindly smile. He asked a few questions in effortful English which I promptly answered. I said that I was not a member of the American Communist Party, but that I was in sympathy with the purpose of the great Russian revolution. I said that it was primarily as a writer that I was interested in Soviet Russia and that I intended to write about it for the Negro press.
I received back my passport and Crystal Eastman's recommendation, which I had consigned to Whitehead. A visa for Russia was attached to the passport. I was told to prepare to travel at once. The next day I traveled with an English-speaking German to Stettin. There I slept that night at a hotel. The following morning I was taken to a pier, whence I embarked for Leningrad.
Petrograd! Leningrad! When I think of that great city like a mighty tree shaken to its roots by a hurricane, yet still standing erect, and when I think of the proud equestrian statue of Peter the Great, proclaiming that dictator's mighty achievement, I feel that the world has lost the poetry and the color rising like a rainbow out of a beautiful name since Petrograd was changed to Leningrad.
Lenin is mightier than Peter the Great. But there is no magic in the name of Leningrad. There is magic in the name of Lenin, as there is splendor in the word Moscow. And perhaps Lenin himself, whose life was devoted to the idea of creating a glorious new world, might have, in appreciation of the will of Peter the Great to remake a nation, preferred Petrograd to remain Petrograd. Perhaps the spirit of Lenin might have been more adequately expressed in the erection of a brand-new city, rising out of that system to which he dedicated his life. Lenin without any suffix—like a perfect ball of pure gold—a city called Lenin.
I saw Petrograd! Like a great tree, shaken to its roots by a hurricane and struck by lightning and somehow still standing. Petrograd, half empty of its population and somewhat sad in the autumn. I saw the monuments of czars and nobles tumbled in the dirt by the proletarian masses. But intact and untouched they had left the beautifully proud monument of Peter the Great, a mighty symbol of individual will and majesty.
MOSCOW