Red Dusk and the Morrow: Adventures and Investigations in Red Russia

by Paul Dukes

A detailed narrative of my experiences during the following six months would surpass the dimensions to which I must limit this book. Some of them I hope to make the subject of a future story. For I met other “Stepanovnas,” “Marias” and “Journalists,” in whom I came to trust as implicitly as in the old and who were a very present help in time of trouble. I also inevitably met with scoundrels, but though No. 2 Goróhovaya again got close upon my track—even closer than through Zorinsky—and one or two squeaks were very narrow indeed, still I have survived to tell the tale.

This is partly because the precautions I took to avoid detection became habitual. Only on one occasion was I obliged to destroy documents of value, while of the couriers who, at grave risk, carried communications back and forth from Finland, only two failed to arrive and, I presume, were caught and shot. But the messages they bore (as indeed any notes I ever made) were composed in such a manner that they could not possibly be traced to any individual or address.

I wrote mostly at night, in minute handwriting on tracing-paper, with a small india-rubber bag about four inches in length, weighted with lead, ready at my side. In case of alarm all my papers could be slipped into this bag and within thirty seconds be transferred to the bottom of a tub of washing or the cistern of the water-closet. In efforts to discover arms or incriminating documents, I have seen pictures, carpets, and bookshelves removed and everything turned topsy-turvy by diligent searchers, but it never occurred to anybody to search through a pail of washing or thrust his hand into the water-closet cistern.

Through the agency of friends I secured a post as draftsman at a small factory on the outskirts of the city. A relative of one of the officials of this place, whose signature was attached to my papers and who is well known to the Bolsheviks, called on me recently in New York. I showed him some notes I had made on the subject, but he protested that, camouflaged though my references were, they might still be traced to individuals concerned, most of whom, with their families, are still in Russia. I therefore suppressed them. For similar reasons I am still reticent in details concerning the regiment of the Red army to which I was finally attached.

Learning through military channels at my disposal that men of my age and industrial status were shortly to be mobilized and despatched to the eastern front, where the advance of Kolchak was growing to be a serious menace, I forestalled the mobilization order by about a week and applied for admission as a volunteer in the regiment of an officer acquaintance, stationed a short distance outside Petrograd. There was some not unnatural hesitation before I received an answer, due to the necessity of considering the personality of the regimental commissar—a strong Communist who wished to have the regiment despatched to perform its revolutionary duty against Kolchak’s armies. But at the critical moment this individual was promoted to a higher divisional post, and the commander succeeded in getting nominated to his regiment a commissar of shaky communistic principles, who ultimately developed anti-Bolshevist sympathies almost as strong as his own. How my commander, a Tsarist officer, who detested and feared the Communists, was forced to serve in the Red army I will explain later.

Despite his ill-concealed sympathies, however, this gentleman won Trotzky’s favour in an unexpected and remarkable manner. Being instructed to impede an advance of the forces of the “White” general, Yudenitch, by the destruction of strategic bridges, he resolved to blow up the wrong bridge, and, if possible, cut off the Red retreat and assist the White advance. By sheer mistake, however, the company he despatched to perform the task blew up the right bridge, thus covering a precipitate Red retreat and effectually checking the White advance.

For days my commander secretly tore his hair and wept, his mortification rendered the more acute by the commendations he was obliged for the sake of appearances to shower upon his men, whose judgment had apparently been so superior to his own. His chagrin reached its height when he received an official communication from army headquarters applauding the timely exploit, while through the Communist organization he was formally invited to join the privileged ranks of the Communist Party! In the view of my commander no affront could have been more offensive than this unsought Bolshevist honour. He was utterly at a loss to grasp my point of view when I told him what to me was obvious, namely, that no offer could have been more providential and that he ought to jump at it. Though inside Russia the approaching White armies were often imagined to be a band of noble and chivalrous crusaders, certain information I had received as to the disorganization prevailing amongst them aroused my misgivings, and I was very doubtful whether my commander’s error had materially altered the course of events. The commissar, who did not care one way or the other, saw the humour of the situation. He, too, urged the commander to smother his feelings and see the joke, with the result that the would-be traitor to the pseudo-proletarian cause became a Communist, and combining his persuasions with those of the commissar, succeeded in keeping the regiment out of further action for several weeks. The confidence they had won made it easy to convince army headquarters that the regiment was urgently required to suppress uprisings which were feared in the capital. When disturbances did break out, however, the quelling of them was entrusted to troops drafted from the far south or east, for it was well known that no troops indigenous to Petrograd or Moscow could be relied upon to fire on their fellow-townspeople.

I had hitherto evaded military service as long as possible, fearing that it might impede the conduct of my intelligence work. The contrary proved to be the case, and for many reasons I regretted I had not enlisted earlier. Apart from greater freedom of movement and preference over civilians when applying for lodging, amusement, or travelling tickets, the Red soldier received rations greatly superior both in quantity and quality to those of the civilian population. Previous to this time I had received only half a pound of bread daily and had had to take my scanty dinner at a filthy communal eating-house, but as a Red soldier I received, besides a dinner and other odds and ends not worth mentioning, a pound and sometimes a pound and a half of tolerably good black bread, which alone was sufficient, accustomed as I am to a scanty diet, to subsist on with relative comfort.

The commander was a good fellow, nervous and sadly out of place in “the party,” but he soon got used to it and enjoyed its many privileges. He stood me in good stead. Repeatedly detailing me off to any place I wished to go to, on missions he knew were lengthy (such as the purchase of automobile tyres, which were unobtainable, or literature of various kinds), I was able to devote my main attention as before to the political and economic situation.

As a Red soldier, I was sent to Moscow and there consulted with the National Centre, the most promising of the political organizations whose object was to work out a programme acceptable to the Russian people as a whole. On account of its democratic character this organization was pursued by the Bolshevist Government with peculiar zeal, and was finally unearthed, and its members, of whom many were Socialists, shot.[3] From Moscow also I received regularly copies of the summaries on the general situation that were submitted to the Soviet of People’s Commissars. The questions I was instructed in messages from abroad to investigate covered the entire field of soviet administration, but I do not propose to deal with that huge subject here. It is the present and the inscrutable future that fascinate me rather than the past. I will speak only of the peasantry, the army, and “the party.” For it is on the ability or inability of the Communists to control the army that the stability of the Bolshevist régime in a considerable measure depends, while the future lies in the lap of that vast inarticulate mass of simple peasant toilers, so justly termed the Russian Sphinx.