One evening at a box party in the Bolshoi Theatre, Enver Pasha remarked: “I have to kill time somehow for three hours after the play. Halil Pasha and I have an appointment with Mr. Tchicherin at two o’clock.” In spite of his smiling Oriental inscrutability and a palpable diplomatic duty to conform to everything Russian, one could feel an amused disapproval of such official unconventionality.
This eccentric habit of turning night into day, with every floor of the Foreign Office blazing like a lighthouse in a city which by municipal decree is put to bed before midnight in order to save fuel, naturally creates an almost fantastic air of whimsicality. Mr. Tchicherin makes no excuse for this “vice,” as one of his secretaries very cleverly phrased it; he simply finds night more harmonious for his tasks than day and with that lack of consideration which dreamers always consciously or unconsciously assume, he forces his whole staff to follow his example. The result is that his clerks make a mad scramble to get transferred into another government department.
Everything about Tchicherin is as consistently contrary to an ordered life as his inversion of working hours. Born an aristocrat, trained under the Tsar for the diplomatic service, delicate, cultured, aloof, with a fine gesture of Quixotic generosity, he has thrown his life and his fortunes in with the cause of the proletariat with all the abandon of religious fervor.
His aloofness is so evident that one can hardly find any concordance about the astounding decision of such an obvious æsthete to become an active part of revolution—which is sweat and blood and violence. Perhaps that explains why he wraps his vision round him like a cloak and shuts out the sun in order not to be disturbed and disillusioned by reality. We were all brought up on stories about kings who were gay-fellows-well-met and could outdance and outdrink their soldiers; on nobles who turned out to be Robin Hoods. But, alas, who can imagine Tchicherin rollicking at a workers’ picnic or smoking a friendly pipe with a Red soldier?
No simple person will ever feel intimate or at home with his super-class indifference to material surroundings. A scrubwoman is just as uncomfortable in his presence as was the intrepid Mrs. Sheridan, who was able to rub such gay elbows with the other commissars. Mr. Tchicherin’s way of arching an eyebrow at life upsets the best brand of poise.
Living alone in a barren room on the top floor of the Foreign Office, he is as far removed socially and physically from the lower as the upper crust. Perhaps only an aristocrat is able to attain this dizzy height of indifference to human contact with one’s fellows. And I can’t help feeling that there is something rather splendid about such complete isolation.
Outside of politics, the telephone and the cable, all up-to-dateness offends him. He abhors new clothes, does not like to ride in automobiles, refuses to have modern office paraphernalia about him, does every little task for himself, like sharpening his own pencils and running all over the building on office-boy errands. This attitude produces the same effect as if he distrusted all his subordinates. His secretaries stand helpless and ill at ease while he searches for a lost telegram or answers the telephone.
Last winter they told an amusing story of how Karakhan, who is Commissar of Eastern Affairs, lured Tchicherin into donning a new suit. Tchicherin’s one suit was literally in rags when the Turkish treaty and the Afghan treaty and the Persian treaty and all the other Oriental treaties were about to be signed. These affairs had to be arranged with more or less bourgeois pomp, since the Orientals are rather keen on ceremony. So Mr. Karakhan, taking a long chance, went ahead and ordered a new suit for Mr. Tchicherin from a Soviet tailor, then one morning while Tchicherin slept, he changed the suits. In a few minutes he came rushing back again and exclaimed with emotion, “There’s a new note from Lord Curzon!” Tchicherin was up in one bound and struggling into the new trousers. Whatever he thought privately of Mr. Karakhan’s presumption, they continued in an apparently pleasant relationship.
In appearance Mr. Tchicherin is tall, with the bent shoulders of the man who stoops to go through doors. His eyes, not through any evasiveness, but because of an extreme shyness, continually seek other places than the face of his interviewer. Yet when one meets his quick, occasional glance, one is startled by the intelligence and gentleness of his expression.
Diplomacy is an inseparable part of Mr. Tchicherin’s existence. He eats, drinks and sleeps with the affairs of state, looks at life as a chess game and is continually checkmating, even in ordinary conversation. Lenin approves of him and feels for him a warm personal affection in spite of the fact that the Premier so dislikes eccentricities. He knows that Tchicherin can be trusted, that he has an invaluable knowledge of international affairs and more important than all that, that he will never make any real decision without consulting Lenin.