Asked about the devotion of the people to Lenin she replied that while he was deeply loved and respected the people were not following him blindly, and that their devotion was due to the fact that they realized that he stood always for their best interests.
Madame Kollontay has spent several years in America and asked me about many of her friends in this country. She said she hoped to be able to return at some future time.
MADAME BALABANOVA
Madame Balabanova, secretary of the Third International, which has headquarters at Moscow, is an Italian, not over five feet tall, elderly, but full of fire and spirit. She speaks many languages, including fluent English. I met her on several occasions in Moscow. She reminded me that there was much work to be done, and that the revolution had not ended with the overthrowing of the old order. “We are building the new society,” she said, “but it is slow work because of the necessity of converting the country into an armed camp to repel invasion, but when the war stops we will show the world what Soviet rule can do for the oppressed.”
She said she hoped to go back to Italy sometime, but presumed it would be impossible, at least until that and other countries had recognized that the Russians and those in sympathy with them were human beings and not “carriers of contagion.”
She is a wonderful speaker and an extremely energetic and hard working little woman, much admired and respected by her colleagues.
I once accompanied her on a visit to a hospital, where she spoke to wounded soldiers. More than two hundred convalescent soldiers made up her audience. They lay on their cots or sat in wheel-chairs, some of them armless or with but one arm, others with one leg shot off, and many with ugly head wounds. They greeted Madame Balabanova cheerily, and listened almost eagerly to her story of what was going on at the front and in the country generally. When she had finished her address there was a silence, and then from all the men came the deep singing of the Internationale.
BUCHARIN
Bucharin, a close friend and companion of Lenin, is the editor of Pravda, the party organ in Moscow. I learned that he, too, had been in America for two or three months previous to the overthrow of the Czar, and had hurried back when this news reached him. He is a small figure, always hurrying somewhere, with a book under his arm. One meets him in the Theater Square in the morning, in Soviet Square a few hours later, at the Kremlin still later, and in the evening at the extreme opposite end of the city. There is a saying about him, “One can never tell where he will turn up next. He is always on the move.” And yet he always has time for a kindly word or question or greeting. He is a student of history and quotes freely, from memory, all the Russian and many European writers.