Eliminating my military aide from Moscow and my officer-interpreter of the Baltic fleet, I went alone to the officer's apartment. His American wife turned out to be a Latin-American. She was unmistakably an octoroon. She was pretty, and, if she had been taller, would have been a great beauty. Nevertheless she had had a pretty time under the old régime and had been celebrated as an exotic flower in smart and expensive bohemian circles. When the revolution overwhelmed the Capital, this exotic creature of the smart set married the young officer who had worshipped her in the hectic pre-revolutionary period, and who had decided, when the revolution came, to serve under the Bolsheviks.
She spoke nice English. Also, she had prepared a good dinner, with that Russian pink cold soup that isn't so good to look at, but most excellent to taste, caviar, ham, some sort of boiled meat, and Caucasian wine. She talked a lot about herself and her husband and their son. His son, really, by a first marriage. He was a lad going to high school, and they were worried about him. They said that the boy would never have a chance under the Bolshevik régime. And the officer said that he himself was having only half a chance, that he was absolutely loyal to the Communists, because he was convinced that they were in Russia to stay and that nothing now could take the power away from them. But the Communists did not trust him because he had been a former Czarist officer. They were training the proletarian youths to become officers, and as soon as the proletarian cadets were trained, the old officers would be superseded. I asked him if he were certain that the Czarist officers who had come over wholeheartedly to the revolution would really be kicked out of their positions when the young proletarian officers were trained to take their place. He said that that was positively true, for it was a Communist policy which had been stated publicly. I said that I was going to find out, without quoting him. He said that I might.
However, I did not mention the subject right away to anyone in Petrograd. After ten fleeting days with the glorious Red fleet, seeing and hearing all and believing that all was a dream, I returned to Moscow for the third time. Only when I came back to Petrograd a month later and for the last time, to get a boat for Germany, did I speak about the officer's case to my friend the Red officer, member of the Communist Party and of the Petrograd Soviet. A young man he was, small, quiet, ordinary-looking and so unobtrustive that you wouldn't imagine his importance in the Red navy and in the higher Communist councils unless you could appreciate the power of his clear, cold blue and all-seeing eyes. I was interested in what the officer had said because a high-school teacher in Moscow had said the same thing to me, as had also a lady of the old régime who was acting as interpreter when I visited one of the Petrograd courts during a trial.
I wanted to ascertain whether the members of the defeated bourgeoisie who were working for the Soviets could not be guaranteed the security of their jobs if they were loyal to the Soviets. For it seemed to me that if they felt their positions were insecure and that there was no future for their children under the new régime, they naturally would sabotage the Soviets. The Red officer confirmed the statement of the former Czarist officer: that the bourgeois officers would be superseded as soon as the proletarian cadets could be trained to take their place. I said I thought such a procedure unfair, and that it would make the bourgeois workers enemies of the Soviet system instead of friends, and force them into sabotage. The Red commander said that the Communist controllers were alert to detect any tendency toward sabotage on the part of bourgeois employees of the Soviets, and he accused me of bourgeois sentimentality.
I said that if he had said intellectual sentimentality, he might have been perhaps right, but that I couldn't have the sentiments of a class I was not born into or educated with. I did not think that there was any such thing as intellectual equality, I told him, and that radicals had a sentimental way of confusing social with intellectual equality. I said further, that I did not believe that talent could spring up easily out of a people, like grass under one's feet.
The officer asked who had been talking to me about the matter. I said that nobody in particular, but different persons in Moscow and Petrograd had spoken of it. Which was strictly true. There was a sequel. A year later I was in Paris one afternoon, waiting to cross from the Place de l'Opéra to the Café de la Paix, when I was suddenly touched on the shoulder. I turned and found myself face to face with the officer. We went to the café for a drink. The officer had arrived in France with other officers to recover some Czarist ships which the French government held somewhere down on the North African coast. We reminisced about the splendid Red days we had enjoyed together in Petrograd and Moscow. We talked about our friends of the foreign office and the Comintern. I had already met some of them in Berlin and Paris. And he said, "Do you remember that officer you had dinner with in Petrograd?"
"Yes," I said, "I remember, but I wasn't aware that you knew about my having dinner with him."
"Well, he is sitting in prison now."
"What for?" I asked.
"Sabotage."