A long way from home

by Claude McKay

Then I climbed up into the airplane. The man who had once save Lenin's life (so I was informed) fixed me in place, and the plane sped over the vast field of snow and up into the air. A snowstorm was raging, but I was perfectly protected and felt no fear. Only I could not see anything. The pilot missed his bearings and got a little lost in the storm and we had to come down far from our landing place. The pilot and I got out of the plane and started to walk toward the naval base. The blizzard blew hard and we could see nothing. But it was a fine exhilarating tramp, and, warm in my great boots and fur clothes, I enjoyed the sensation of thinking I was doing a little Arctic stunt.

At last an automobile came rolling over the hard snow and took us to our landing place. They had been scouting for us, knowing that something must have happened when we did not arrive. At the landing place I found that a crack squad of sailors, fine handsome fellows, had been waiting for us for hours in the blizzard. They were not rigged out, like myself and the pilot, against the bad weather, and were cold. For the life of me I couldn't understand why a squad of men should have been detailed to await my arrival at the air base, when I was no kind of official. And I had been told that my visit was an informal thing. Right there I remembered my experience in the Pennsylvania railroad service—how often, in the cold steel car out on the track, our crew waited for hours in biting zero weather until the late train arrived and steamed us out. And sometimes we were frost-bitten.

My interpreter said that the sailors were expecting a speech. So I said that although I anticipated with joy my visit among them in Kronstadt, I felt sorry that it had been necessary for them to wait for me all those hours in the cold. All the official routine ceremonials were extremely tiresome to me. Even though they were the expression of the workers' and peasants' united authority and were therefore simplified, they were nevertheless tedious. I can work up no enthusiasm for official ritual, however necessary, whether it be red or pink or black or white. In Russia I was alertly aware that it was something different from anything that ever was, that officially it was the highest privilege I could have in the world, to be shown the inside working of the greatest social experiment in the history of civilization. I was fired and uplifted by the thundering mass movement of the people, their boisterous surging forward, with their heads held high, their arms outstretched in an eager quest for more light, more air, more space, more glory, more nourishment and comfort for the millions of the masses. But the bureaucratic control left me unmoved. Yet I was conscious that it was the axis of the mighty moving energy of the people, that without it their movement would be futile.

So I was actually in Kronstadt, the first fortress fired by the signal of the revolution. The features of the fort were covered up with snow, but the splendid men holding it showed me the inside of battleships and submarines, the loading of big guns, and I saw also the educational classes, Communist meetings, recreation halls with motion pictures and feats of gymnastics and dancing, the new revolutionary spirit animating men and officers alike, the simple dignified discipline of rank and precedence, organization and work.

After a strenuous day, that night I slept soundly on a flagship. The next day I motored back to Petrograd. In the afternoon I went to tea with Korney Chukovsky and his sympathetic wife. Chukovsky was a popular liberal journalist and author of the old régime, and was now an equally popular fellow-traveler with the new. He was a radical liberal in his political opinions, but consistently non-political in his writings. Under the old régime he was a contributor to the Moscow newspaper, Russky Slovo, which had a circulation of over a million. He had recently finished a book for children, called Crocodile, which became a best-seller. Chukovsky was a member of a Russian intellectual mission to the Allied capitals, in 1916, I think. He exhibited a large souvenir book of interesting autographs of famous personages: Asquith, Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill, Poincaré, Millerand, Anatole France, Kipling, H.G. Wells, and many more. I added mine. Chukovsky showed me also a couple of letters from Lenin to Gorky, which he prized highly, and some newspaper cuttings of a critical duel between him and Trotsky over the evaluation of the work of the poet Alexander Blok, who wrote the tragic poem, "The Twelve." This poem evoked in me something of the spiritual agony of "The Hound of Heaven." Chukovsky gave me the gist of the controversy between him and Trotsky. Chukovsky had done a fine literary critique of Blok. Trotsky had overemphasized an inoffensive literary reference to the revolution to score a political point. I thought that Chukovsky was right and Trotsky was wrong. Chukovsky went with me to the House of the Intellectuals and introduced me to some of the writers and artists. I remember the names of Metchnikov, son of the scientist and disciple of Pasteur, and the Princess X, who was rich before the revolution, but expropriated now and living with artists whom she had befriended during the salad days of the bourgeoisie.

The next day was fine and clear as crystal. And to make up for what I had missed when we flew to Kronstadt, the aviator came and took me up for an hour's ride over Petrograd and suburbs. I ended that trip to Petrograd with affectionate farewells from the naval schools. One of them elected me an honorary officer. There, too, I talked with a very interesting officer. He was a graduate of an exclusive Czarist academy, young, exceeding handsome, with very sensitive features. We spoke with difficulty in a kind of lingua franca or petit-negre, to be more precise. He informed me that he had an American wife and invited me to dinner with them. I said it might be an embarrassing matter to his wife, that he should first ask her. He said she knew all about me and had suggested the invitation.

I wondered about this American wife of the Russian officer. I had been warned to beware of English-speaking bourgeois persons, who might try to pump things out of me. But as I possessed no secrets of any kind and as I desired to experience all the sensations of the new order struggling to extricate itself from the old, I never turned aside from anything or anybody that might possibly add something to the fulness of my exciting adventure.

I had already met some extraordinary people of the old régime. Besides the Russians, I had encountered a most wonderful Englishwoman, who reminded me of a character out of H.G. Wells's Food of The Gods. This woman had been an English governess in Russia under the old régime and had married a second-or third-class Russian official. She had a nice apartment in Petrograd. Her beautiful daughter was a clerk in one of the Soviet departments, and sometimes the mother herself was requisitioned as an interpreter. In her sitting room there was a photograph of the late Czar and Czarina, with the Czarina smudged out. It was a bold thing to have the photograph of the Czar in your sitting room in 1922. But she was an Englishwoman first, even though she had been married to a Russian and was now a Soviet citizen. She said to me: "I preserve the photograph of the Czar because he is the cousin of King George. He was a good man, but his wife was a bad German woman." Also she had the picture of King George alongside that of Lenin on another wall. "They are the two big men in the world," she said to me, "and I make my curtsy to them every morning: the ruler of England, my native land, and the ruler of Russia, my adopted country."

She was very proud and pleased with my notorious self because I was born a British subject and had lived in London. She didn't even mind when I said that I did not like the English people as a whole, but admired some individuals. Indeed, she liked it, because that also was her feeling. I spent a long evening in her house and ate very English roast beef and plum pudding. Perhaps too much. For later it was necessary for me to go to the w. c. There I was amazed to see, placed prominently upon the wall, a hand-printed card bearing the motto: "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." When I returned to the sitting room I complimented her on her nice old English calligraphy, but said that I wondered why she had put up the notice in English, when most of her visitors must be Russians, who did not know the English language. She said, "When the Russians don't understand, they will ask, because they are a curious people. I have to have these English hints around to remind them that we are a superior people."