Our blankets were uncommonly valuable in the filthy carriage of bare boards with wooden bunks which I shared with Spray. By rigging up a “gadget” of straps strung across the carriage, we were able to use our solid alcohol for heating up soups and beans, with only a fifty-per-cent chance of setting the bunks on fire. We went easy on the red Dutch cheese, remembering that we might have greater need of it in times to come.
The insect powder was extraordinarily good, for the insects, which came out of their lairs as soon as the train warmed up. They throve on it. It sharpened their appetite for Leonard Spray, who suffered exceedingly. Afterward, all through Russia, he was a victim of these creatures who at the first sight of him leapt upon him joyously. By some thinness of blood, or anti-insect tincture—I strongly suspect the nicotine of innumerable “gaspers”—I was wonderfully immune, and Russian lice had no use for me, though I encountered them everywhere, for Russia is their stronghold as carriers of typhus, with which the people were stricken in every city and village.
We saw Red soldiers for the first time at Sebesh, the Russian frontier, anæmic-looking lads, wearing long gray overcoats and gray hoods, rising to a point like Assyrian helmets, with the Red Star of the Soviet Republic above the peak. Here at Sebesh also we saw the first trainload of refugees from the famine area, whom we met in hordes throughout our journey. They were Letts, and in a bad state, after being three months on the way, in closed cattle trucks. Many were typhus-stricken. All were weak and wan-looking, except some of the children, who had a sturdy look in their ragged sheepskins. A man spoke to me in English, with an American accent. He had come from Ufa, three thousand miles away, and spoke tragic words about the people there. They were starving, and near death.
Our train crawled forward through flat, desolate country. The people we saw at wayside stations looked wretched and gloomy. A light snow lay on the ground, and the woods were black against it, and grim. Many times our engine panted and then stopped for lack of fuel. We waited while fresh timber was piled on. The journey seemed interminable but for the laughter of the “Milk-fed Boy,” and tales of Russian tragedy by Mr. Wilton, the King’s messenger, who had a queer red glint in his eyes, and a suppressed passion beneath his quiet and charming grace of manner, when he spoke of all that agony in the country he loved. So at last we reached Moscow, and in a little while came to know its way of life.
The fantastic aspect of the city, and especially at its heart by the palace of the Kremlin, seemed to me as wild as an Oriental nightmare in a hasheesh dream, with golden pear-shaped domes, and tall towers, and high walls with fan-shaped battlements, and step flights of steps leading to walled walks, and old narrow gateways guarded by Red soldiers. There was something sinister as well as splendid in that vast fortress palace which is a city within a city. It seemed to tell of ancient barbarities. There was a spirit of evil about its very walls, I thought. Perhaps vague memories of Russian history were sharpened by the knowledge that somewhere within those walls was the brooding mind of Lenin, whose genius had drowned Russia in blood and tears, if all one heard, or a thousandth part of it, were true.
I entered the Kremlin one day on a visit to Radek—whose name means “scoundrel”—and was arrested three times at the guard posts before reaching the rooms where the chief propaganda agent of Soviet Russia lived with his wife and child, in simple domesticity, while he pulled wires in all parts of the world to stir up revolution, or any kind of trouble. Smiling through his spectacles, this man who looked a cross between an ancient mariner and a German poet, with a fringe of reddish beard round his face, was disarmingly frank and cynical on the subject of Anglo-Russian relations, and had a profound and intimate knowledge of foreign politics which startled me. He knew more than I did about the secret intrigues in England and France.
Leonard Spray and I were billeted in a house immediately opposite the Kremlin along an embankment of the river called the Sophieskaya. It was, indeed, more than a house, being the palace of a pre-war monopolist in sugar, and most handsomely furnished in the French Empire style, with elegant salons on whose walls hung some valuable pictures, among which I remember a Corot, and a Greuze.
We arrived in the dark, after a visit to the Soviet Foreign Office and an interview with a melancholy, soft-spoken, cross-eyed Jew, by name Weinstein, who was in charge of foreign visitors and correspondents. A pretty Lettish girl, shuffling along in bedroom slippers, opened the door to us, and locked us in afterward. Then the housekeeper, a tall Swede who spoke a little of all languages, conducted us up a noble stairway, richly carved, to our bedroom, which was an immense gilded salon without a bed. This lack of sleeping accommodation was remedied by four Red soldiers who came staggering in under bits of an enormous four-poster which they fixed up in a corner of the room. Spray took possession of it, and I slept on a broad divan.
It was bitterly cold, and we were almost frozen to death. I shall never forget how Spray used to wrap himself up in the blankets to the top of his head, like an Eskimo in his sleeping bag. That house was full of strange people whom we used to pass in the corridors, including a deputation of Chinese Mandarins from the Far Eastern Republic, and a mission of Turks from Angora. One evening while we were there, Tchicherin, the Foreign Minister, with whom I had a long interview, gave a banquet on the third anniversary of the Soviet Republic to all the missions represented in Moscow. It was a very handsome affair. All the leading Bolsheviks were in evening dress, the Chinese Mandarins wore cloth of gold, wine flowed copiously, and watching from the doorway of my bedroom, I wondered what had happened to Bolshevism and Communism, and what equality there was between those well-fed, elegantly dressed gentlemen, dining richly in their noble rooms, and those millions of starving peasants who were waiting for death, and dying, in the Volga valley, or even the population of Moscow itself, not starving altogether, but pinched, and half hungry in their ragged sheepskins.
Spray and I explored the life of Moscow, freely, as I must admit, for never once were we aware of any deliberate espionage about us, though often there were watchful eyes.