Two restaurants opened, one called “The English Restaurant,” where Spray and I used to dine, almost alone, except for a Red Commissioner or two who came in for coffee and a secret inspection, and now and then a few ladies, furtively, for a plate of soup. The restaurant keepers were of good family and ancient rank. The lady spoke English and French, and told me many tales of her tragic life during the years of revolution. Behind the bar was a pretty, smiling girl of sixteen or so, amazed and delighted to see two English customers. Her father, dressed like a seafaring man, was charming in his courtesy to us, but always afraid.
Even now I dare not write too freely about the people we met by hazard, or by introduction, lest any words of mine should do them harm. There was one family, of noble blood, who lived in two squalid rooms divided by a curtain from a public corridor. The two daughters had one pair of decent boots between them. They took turns to go out “visiting” at the British Mission which gave Sunday afternoon receptions to a little group of ladies, and taught them the fox trot and two step and other dances which had become a mania in many Western nations, but were utterly unknown in Russia, cut off from all the world.
The old gentleman their father, and their charming mother, had dirty hands. There was no soap in Russia, and in those rooms no chance of hot water, except for tea. I marveled at their courage (though the old man wept a little), and at the courage of all those people of the old régime, who were living in direst poverty, in perpetual fear of prison, or worse than that. They saw the ruin of Russia, but still had hope that out of all that agony, and all their tears, some new hope would dawn for the country they loved. So many people told me, and among them one bedridden lady, near to death, I think, who said that there would be a new and nobler Russia born out of all this terror and tribulation.
Moscow was not starving to death, though many in it were always hungry. When the American Relief Administration opened a soup kitchen in the famous old restaurant, The Hermitage, thousands of children came to be fed, but, on the whole, they were not famine-stricken—only underfed and uncertain of the next day’s meal.
With its dilapidated houses, many of them wrecked by gunfire in the first days of the revolution, Moscow had a melancholy look, and few of its people, outside the Commissar and Soviet official class had any margin beyond the barest needs of life. But the people in the mass looked healthy, and they were not deprived of all light and beauty in life. The opera, and two or three theaters were open, crowded every night by the “proletariat” in working clothes. In the Imperial box of the opera, with its eagles covered under the Red Flag, sat a group of mechanics with their wives, and between the acts the foyer was crowded with what looked like the “lower middle class,” as we should see them in some music hall on the Surrey side of London. The opera and the ballet were as beautiful as in the old days, maintaining their historic traditions, though all else had gone in Russia, and it was strange to see this stage splendor in a Republic of ruin.... But not yet had I seen the famine.
I came closer to the effects of famine in Petrograd. That city, grim but magnificent as I saw it under heavy snow, had a sinister and tragic look. During the war its population had been 3,000,000 and more. When Spray and I walked along the Nevski Prospekt, where all the shops but six or seven were barricaded with wooden planks, there were only 750,000 people in the whole of this great city. Palaces, Government offices, great banks, city offices, huge blocks of buildings, were uninhabited and unlighted. Many of those who had been government officials, rich merchants, factory owners, were shoveling snow upon the streets, or dragging loads of wood on sledges over the slippery roads. They wore bowler hats, black coats with ragged collars of astrachan, the clothes of a “genteel” world that had gone down into the great gulfs of revolution.
At every street corner were men and women selling cigarettes. Some of those women, and one I especially remember, were thinly clad, shivering in the biting wind, and obviously starved. The very look of them made me shiver in my soul.
In Petrograd I went to a home for refugees from the famine region. All round the city were great camps of these people, who had come in a tide of flight—hundreds of thousands—when the harvest of 1921 was burnt as black as that of 1920 in the awful drought. Four thousand or so were in one of the old Imperial barracks, and they had come three thousand miles to reach this refuge at the end of their journey. Outside, in Petrograd, there was a hard, grim frost. In these bare whitewashed rooms there was no heat, for lack of fuel, and men, women and children lay about in heaps, huddled together in their sheepskins for human warmth, tormented by vermin, fever-stricken, weak. Too weak to stand, some of them, even to take their place in line for the daily ration of potato soup. A doctor there took us round. He pointed to those with typhus, and said, “There’s no hope for them. They’ll be dead to-morrow or next day.”
When we crossed a courtyard, he stopped a moment to thrust back a heavy door. “Our morgue,” he said. “Three-days’ dead.” Inside was a pile of dead bodies, men, women and children, flung one on top of the other like rubbish for the refuse heap. Hands and legs obtruded from the mass of corruption. It was the end of their journey.
But the opera was very brilliant in Petrograd, some distance from that heap of mud-colored corpses. I went to the Marinsky theater and heard “Carmen.” It was marvelously staged, admirably sung, and there was a packed audience of “trade unionists,” as I was told, on free tickets, but as everybody in Russia had to belong to a trade union or die, it did not specify the character of the people closely. I think most of them were of the clerical class, with a few mechanics. On the way back we followed a party of young men and women walking in snow boots and wrapped to their ears in ragged furs or woollen shawls. They were laughing gayly. Their voices rang out on the still frosty air under the steely glint of stars.... So there were still people who could laugh and make love in Russia!