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

by Paul Dukes

The hall was decorated with red flags. Portraits of Lenin, Trotzky, Zinoviev, and of course of Karl Marx, wreathed in red bunting and laurels, decorated the walls. Over the stage hung a crude inscription painted on cardboard: “Long live the Soviet Power,” while similar inscriptions, “Proletarians of all countries, unite,” and “Long live the World Revolution,” were hung around. The audience, consisting of the regiment and numerous guests, sat on wooden forms and disregarded the injunction not to smoke.

The entertainment began with the singing of the “Internationale,” the hymn of the World Revolution. The music of this song is as un-Russian, unmelodious, banal, and uninspiring as any music could possibly be. To listen to its never-ending repetition on every possible and impossible occasion is not the least of the inflictions which the Russian people are compelled to suffer under the present dispensation. When one compares it with the noble strains of the former national anthem, or with the revolutionary requiem which the Bolsheviks have happily not supplanted by any atrocity such as the “Internationale” but have inherited from their predecessors, or with national songs such as Yeh-Uhnem, or for that matter with any Russian folk-music, then the “Internationale” calls up a picture of some abominable weed protruding from the midst of a garden of beautiful and fragrant flowers.

The “Internationale” was sung with energy by those in the audience who knew the words, and the accompanist made up with bombastic pianistic flourishes for the silence of those who did not.

Nothing could have afforded a more remarkable contrast than the item that followed. It was an unaccompanied quartette by four soldiers who sang a number of Russian folk-songs and one or two composed by the leader of the four. If you have not listened to the Russian peasants of a summer evening singing to accompany their dances on the village green, you cannot know exactly what it meant to these peasant soldiers, cooped in their city barracks, to hear their songs re-sung. The singers had rehearsed carefully, the execution was excellent, the enthusiasm they aroused was unbounded, and they were recalled again and again. They would probably have gone on endlessly had not the Jewish agitator, who was acting as master of ceremonies and who had to make a speech later, announced that they must get along with the programme. The contrast between Bolshevism and Russianism could never have been more strikingly illustrated than by this accident of the “Internationale” being followed by Russian folk-songs. The former was an interpretation in sound of all the drab, monotonous unloveliness of the supposedly proletarian régime, the latter an interpretation in music of the unuttered yearnings of the Russian soul, aspiring after things unearthly, things beautiful, things spiritual.

There followed a selection of songs and romances by a lady singer from one of the musical-comedy theatres, and then the agitator rose. The job of a professional agitator is a coveted one in Red Russia. A good agitator is regarded as a very important functionary, and receives high pay. Coached in his arguments and phraseology in the propagandist schools of the capitals, he has nothing whatever to do but talk as loudly and as frequently as possible, merely embellishing his speeches in such a way as to make them forceful and, if possible, attractive. He requires no logic, and consequently no brains, for he is guaranteed against heckling by the Bolshevist system of denouncing political opponents as “enemies of the State” and imprisoning them. Thus the entire stock-in-trade of a professional agitator consists of “words, words, words,” and the more he has of them the better for him.

The youth who mounted the stage and prepared to harangue the audience was nineteen years of age, of criminal past (at that very time he was charged by the Bolsheviks themselves with theft), and possessed of pronounced Hebrew features. His complexion was lustrous, his nose was aquiline and crooked, his mouth was small, and his eyes resembled those of a mouse. His discourse consisted of the usual exhortations to fight the landlord Whites. He was violent in his denunciation of the Allies, and of all non-Bolshevist Socialists. His speech closed somewhat as follows:

“So, comrades, you see that if we give in to the Whites all your land will go back to the landowners, all the factories to the money-makers, and you will be crushed again under the yoke of the murderous bankers, priests, generals, landlords, police, and other hirelings of bourgeois tyranny. They will whip you into slavery, and they will ride to wealth on the bleeding backs of you, your wives, and your children. Only we Communists can save you from the bloody rage of the White demons. Let us defend Red Petrograd to the last drop of our blood! Down with the English and French imperialist bloodsuckers! Long live the proletarian World Revolution!”

Having ended his speech, he signalled to the accompanist to strike up the “Internationale.” Then followed another strange contrast, one of those peculiar phenomena often met with in Russia, even in the Communist Party. A modest, nervous, and gentle-looking individual whom I did not know, as different from the previous speaker as water from fire, made a strangely earnest speech, urging the necessity of self-education as the only means of restoring Russia’s fallen fortunes. At the admission of fallen fortunes the Jew looked up with displeasure. He had sung the glories of the Red administration and the exploits of the Red army. It was not enough, said the speaker, that Russia had won the treasured Soviet Power—that, of course, was an inestimable boon—but until the people dragged themselves out of the morass of ignorance they could not profit by its benefits. The masses of Russia, he urged, should set strenuously to work to raise themselves culturally and spiritually, in order to fit themselves for the great task they were called upon to perform, namely, to effect the emancipation of the workers of all the world.

The “Internationale” was not sung when he concluded. There was too much sincerity in his speech, and the bombastic strains of that tune would have been sadly out of place. The rest of the programme consisted of two stage performances, enacted by amateurs, the first one a light comedy, and the second a series of propagandist tableaux, depicting the sudden emancipation of the worker by the Soviet Power, heralded by an angel dressed all in red. In one of these Comrade Rykov proudly participated. In the concluding tableau the Red angel was seen guarding a smiling workman and his family on one side, and a smiling peasant and family on the other, while the audience was invited to rise and sing the “Internationale.”

Of conscious political intelligence in the cultural-enlightenment committees there is none, nor under “iron party discipline” can there possibly be any. All Communist agitators repeat, parrot-like, the epithets and catch-phrases dictated from above. None the less, despite their crudity and one-sidedness, these committees serve a positive purpose in the Red army. By the provision of entertainment the savagery of the soldiery has been curbed and literacy promoted. If they were non-political and run by intelligent people with the sole object of improving the minds of the masses they might be made a real instrument for the furtherance of education and culture. At present they are often grotesque. But representing an “upward” trend, the cultural-enlightenment committees form a welcome contrast to the majority of Bolshevist institutions.