How did they live, these people? I never could find out in actual detail. Russian money meant nothing to me. When I changed ten pounds in Moscow, I received four big bundles of notes, containing three million roubles. My first experience with the purchasing power of this money was when I wanted to buy a pair of boots in the market place. They were good top boots, splendid looking for snow and mud, but when I was asked one million roubles, I was abashed. Yet, after all, it was not much in English money. But what did it mean to those Russians?
I found out that the average wage for a mechanic, or Soviet official, or University professor, was 150,000 roubles a month. That sounded well until I came up against those boots, and later discovered that in Petrograd a pound of bread cost 80,000 roubles, a pound of tea 120,000 roubles, ten cigarettes 60,000 roubles. How, then, could any human soul live on 150,000 roubles a month? I asked many of them, and some said, “We don’t live. We die,” but others said, “We supplement our wages by speculation.” For some time I was puzzled by that word speculation, until I found that it meant bartering. Secretly, and at risk of imprisonment or death, until the “New Economic Laws,” there was a general system of exchange in goods. A man with a second pair of boots exchanged them for a sack of potatoes, kept some and bartered the others for tea, or bread, or meat, kept some of that, and bartered the rest for a woollen vest, a fur waistcoat, or a tin of sardines, smuggled in from Riga. And so on, in a highly complicated, difficult and dangerous system of “underground trade.” But in spite of “speculation,” life was hard, and almost impossible for elderly folk, and the sick, and frail women. For years hundreds of thousands of them had lived on bread and tea and small rations of soused herrings and millet seed. Now there were no rations, but still bread and tea, for those who had the money.
“What do you think of Bolshevism?” asked Spray one night in the Sugar king’s palace. We lay in bed, with only our mouths and noses out.
I asked him three questions in return. Was there liberty in Russia? Was there equality? Was there a higher type of civilization and human happiness here than in Western Europe, or any chance of it? I asked the questions without prejudice, and we discussed them between the low divan and the four-poster bed, in that great gilded salon opposite the Kremlin, where, in some secret room, Lenin sat that night scheming out some way of saving Russia from the fate into which he had led it, to test his theory of the Communistic state.
We could find no liberty. The two chief papers published—Pravda, and Izvestia—were propaganda sheets under Government control. There was no freedom of speech or opinion. There was no equality, even of misery—surely the first test of the Communistic state. Between the Soviet Commissars, even the “trade-union” audience of the Marinsky theater, and the peasants, the workers, the underfed masses, there was a gulf as wide as between the profiteers and unemployed of England, wide though lower down the scale of life on both sides. Civilization, human happiness? Well, there was the Marinsky theater, and those laughing boys and girls. Human nature adapted itself marvelously to the hardest conditions of life. Perhaps there were happy people in Russia, but for the most part, Spray and I had met only those who told us tragic tales, of imprisonings, executions, deaths, misery.
When we left Moscow and traveled across Russia to Kazan, and took a boat down the Volga, and sledges across the snow fields to the villages where Famine dwelt, we left human happiness behind us and saw nothing but suffering and despair, hunger and pestilence.
It was again due to the American Relief Administration that we were able to make that journey. Colonel Haskell, chief of the A.R.A., and a man of indomitable energy, iron will power, and exquisite courtesy, invited Spray and myself to join his own party which was going to Kazan on a tour of inspection under his command, and after that he would provide us with a ship for the Volga voyage. Without that immense help of the A.R.A., all-powerful in Russia because it was the one source of hope in the famine region, I should have seen nothing outside Moscow. It was they who controlled the railways, got the trains to move, and forced officials to work.
It was a four-days’ journey to Kazan. The carriages were verminous, and Spray was tortured again—and we crawled slowly through the dreary woods and plains. Colonel Haskell and his staff carried good rations which they shared with us, and at night, when our darkness was illumined by candlelight, we played poker for Russian roubles, gambling wildly, as it seemed, in thousands of roubles, but losing or winning no more than a few shillings.
One man on board impressed me beyond words. It was Governor Goodrich of Indiana, who had come to report to Washington on the agricultural conditions and prospects of Russia, and the truth about the Famine. He was an elderly man with the fresh complexion of a new-born babe, and a powerful clear-cut face, wonderfully softened by the look of benevolence in his eyes and the whimsical smile about his lips. “Governor Jem” he used to be called in Indiana, and he must have been a gallant fellow in his youth, before he became lame in one leg. Now he had come as a knight-errant to Russia, for the rescue of a stricken people. I think no man of greater quality ever went into Russia, or ever came out of it, and it was due not a little to his report (which he allowed me to read) that the Government of the United States, acting through the American Relief Association, fed ten million Russians every day in the famine regions, and saved that number from certain death by hunger or disease.
Kazan lay under a heavy mantle of snow. It was now the capital of the “Tartar Republic,” a province of Soviet Russia, on the edge of the richest grain-growing districts of the Volga valley, where now there was no grain. It was a garden city, with many great houses where the nobles of Imperial Russia had taken their pleasure in summer months, now inhabited by misery, hunger, and disease.