The Cossack band in an adjoining room played national airs. The different kinds of glasses were emptied in as many toasts. And to my great relief, the speeches began. I say relief, because naturally, I thought the meal was over. Not so. Still the heaped salvers came. By now, I had reached the point where I could only weakly pretend to eat. My hosts watched me like hawks, insisting that I rally my appetite. They showed irritation when I demurred faintly. They demanded that I eat and drink to prove the unlimited friendship of the United States for Russia. And I wondered how our diplomats had ever survived the hospitality of such a country.
At last I saw that my only hopes lay in a limit to the Cossack capacity. Again and again, I told myself, “They have reached it!”—only to realize that what I had suffered was but a prelude to the feast.
At about three in the morning, the vodka and wines having been exhausted, champagne was served—in large, stein-like glasses. And a British officer who had just come to observe conditions, was startled when Irish porter showed up in stone jars. “Why!” he exclaimed, “We don’t have this at home any more! In England it’s a fond memory. And here they have it by the case!”
A little supper! And there was one such about every night. I had come looking for famine: I began to fear I would die of over eating. One could be forgiven a chuckle. The staff in Vladivostok had expressed some remorse over having to send me away from a mess which boasted three courses and a choice of two canned fruits for dessert!
But what about the proletariat of Chita? These officers were eating, but were the poor starving to death in cold weather? I visited the open-air free market in a square of the city. The peasants were selling cabbage, dried salmon, salmon-roe, spheres of cheese, rye and white bread in tremendous loaves, quail, partridge, pheasant, beef, pork, sausage, frozen milk and frozen soup—precisely the things I had eaten at the “little supper.”
The prices ran high. But—the people had plenty of Bolshevist money. However, this money was greatly depreciated in value. Nevertheless, the vendors at the market expected as many of my Imperial rubles for any purchase as they asked the residents of the city, who, of course, had local currency. So now I understood that the apple which I had bought in the restaurant at a dollar and twelve cents (or nine Imperial roubles), would, at nine roubles Bolshevist money, have cost a resident of Chita, only about ten cents. What had happened to me, can best be expressed in this wise: A man takes silver dollars to a city where disks have been stamped “One dollar,” and where the merchants do not care whether he gives them tin or silver—the price is the same! So the apples were not high; the explanation is that money was plentiful and cheap. And now I understood why Vladivostok was worrying over interior statistics. The department heads mistook high costs reported in Bolshevist rubles, for lack of food.
But those statistics related mainly to sugar, tea, salt, candles and other staples, commonly regarded as necessities, but turned by the speculators into luxuries. Most of the Siberian speculators are of the pack-peddler variety, because freight shipments are costly, and the goods liable to loss. One Chita shipper paid seventy-five thousand rubles for a car in Harbin to move sugar to the Trans-Baikal. The engineer got one thousand rubles to haul it; the conductor of the train got one thousand rubles to insure the car’s being cut off at Chita; and I heard that the side-track was rented to the shipper while the car was being unloaded. He assured me that he had doubled his money in spite of paying so much “grease.” But the railroad men, who are opposed to “Exploitation of the masses,” thought they were making the capitalistic speculator pay the “grease!” Those railroad men had not been paid for six months, and some of us Allied officers worried about it, and gave the crews credit for staunch loyalty to the Russian cause by sticking to their jobs. Also, a large Red Cross train went up the line and presented these poor, starving magnates who ran the trains, with new clothing!
Captain B——, a Russian serving Semenoff, invited me to his room in the hotel for tea. His wife brought from the wardrobe baskets of cookies and candies. Trunks disgorged tinned fish, bar chocolate and tinned milk. In one corner of the room was a sack of sugar; in another were sacks of flour. Those living quarters resembled a corner in the warehouse of a wholesale grocer. And everybody was stocked up like that. Moreover, they all had orders with the local dealers to send them more provisions whenever more arrived. It was a case of everybody his own grocer. I had found the Chita stores bare. No wonder.
I never saw any famine in Siberia. In fact, the only place that I heard it discussed was in Vladivostok. There, the flocks of refugees, seeking free food and shelter, were responsible for the belief in it. No doubt many of them did need aid—especially the women and children. And in the handling of those needy, our Red Cross did gallant service. But among the refugees were hundreds of able-bodied men who found it pleasant to be refugees. These men were not likely to report that the districts from which they came were plentifully supplied with food. And as these men kept pouring in from all parts of the country, a consolidation of their reports presented a false picture of conditions.
What I looked for in the interior of Siberia, contrasted with what I found, was happily, if ridiculously, disappointing. But in 1920 a similar hunt might result less humorously. To feed men stops their work; to stop work stops production. And lack of production spells future need. So next year,—who knows?—it may be possible to find famine in Siberia—if meanwhile the people of that country consume their total reserves on the strength of our promise of generous aid. In my humble opinion, the United States should avoid, in Siberia, all Christmas-Tree talk.