There remained only the preparation of “certificates of identification” which should serve as passport in Soviet Russia. Melnikoff had told me I might safely leave this matter to the Finns, who kept themselves well informed of the kind of papers it was best to carry to allay the suspicions of Red guards and Bolshevist police officials. We rose and passed into another of the three tiny rooms which the villa contained. It was a sort of office, with paper, ink, pens, and a typewriter on the table.
“What name do you want to have?” asked the cadaverous man.
“Oh, any,” I replied. “Better, perhaps, let it have a slightly non-Russian smack. My accent——”
“They won’t notice it,” he said, “but if you prefer——”
“Give him an Ukrainian name,” suggested one of the other Finns, “he talks rather like a Little Russian.” Ukrainia, or Little Russia, is the south-west district of European Russia, where a dialect with an admixture of Polish is talked.
The cadaverous man thought for a moment. “‘Afirenko, Joseph Ilitch,’” he suggested, “that smacks of Ukrainia.”
I agreed. One of the men sat down to the typewriter and carefully choosing a certain sort of paper began to write. The cadaverous man went to a small cupboard, unlocked it, and took out a box full of rubber stamps of various sizes and shapes with black handles.
“Soviet seals,” he said, laughing at my amazement. “We keep ourselves up to date, you see. Some of them were stolen, some we made ourselves, and this one,” he pressed it on a sheet of paper leaving the imprint Commissar of the Frontier Station Bielo’ostrof, “we bought from over the river for a bottle of vodka.” Bielo’ostrof was the Russian frontier village just across the stream.
I had had ample experience earlier in the year of the magical effect upon the rudimentary intelligence of Bolshevist authorities of official “documents” with prominent seals or stamps. Multitudinous stamped papers of any description were a great asset in travelling, but a big coloured seal was a talisman that levelled all obstacles. The wording and even language of the document were of secondary importance. A friend of mine once travelled from Petrograd to Moscow with no other passport than a receipted English tailor’s bill. This “certificate of identification” had a big printed heading with the name of the tailor, some English postage stamps attached, and a flourishing signature in red ink. He flaunted the document in the face of the officials, assuring them it was a diplomatic passport issued by the British Embassy! This, however, was in the early days of Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks gradually removed illiterates from service and in the course of time restrictions became very severe. But seals were as essential as ever.
