The Bolshevik Myth

We were kidnapped, literally kidnapped out of bed in the dead of night.

It was late in the evening, December 20, when the prison keepers entered our cell at Ellis Island and ordered us to “get ready at once.” I was just undressing; the others were in their bunks, asleep. We were taken completely by surprise. Some of us expected to be deported, but we had been promised several days’ notice; while a number were to be released on bail, their cases not having been finally passed upon by the courts.

We were led into a large, bare room in the upper part of the building. Helter-skelter the men crowded in, dragging their things with them, badly packed in the haste and confusion. At four in the morning the order was given to start. In silence we filed into the prison yard, led by the guards and flanked on each side by city and Federal detectives. It was dark and cold; the night air chilled me to the bone. Scattered lights in the distance hinted of the huge city asleep.

Like shadows we passed through the yard toward the ferry, stumbling on the uneven ground. We did not speak; the prison keepers also were quiet. But the detectives laughed boisterously, and swore and sneered at the silent line. “Don’t like this country, damn you! Now you’ll get out, ye sons of b⁠⸺.”

At last we reached the steamer. I caught sight of three women, our fellow prisoners, being taken aboard. Stealthily, her sirens dumb, the vessel got under way. Within half an hour we boarded the Buford, awaiting us in the Bay.

I like the feel of the hard snow singing under my feet. The streets are alive with people⁠—a striking contrast to Petrograd, which gave me the impression of a graveyard. The narrow sidewalks are crooked and slippery, and everybody walks in the middle of the street. Rarely does a streetcar pass, though an auto creaks by occasionally. The people are better dressed than in Petrograd and do not look so pale and exhausted. More soldiers are about and persons clad in leather. Cheka men, I am told. Almost everybody carries a bundle on his back or pulls a little sleigh loaded with a bag of potatoes dripping a blackish fluid. They walk with a preoccupied air and roughly push their way ahead.

Turning the corner into the Miasnitskaya Street, I noticed a large yellow poster on the wall. My eye caught the word Prikaz in big red letters. Prikaz⁠—order⁠—instinctively the expression associated itself in my mind with the old regime. The poster was couched in the familiar style, “I command,” “I order,” repeating themselves with the frequency usual in the old police proclamations. “I command the citizens of Moscow,” I read. Citizens? I sought the date. It was marked January 15, 1920, and was signed by the Commissar of Militia. The Prikaz vividly recalled the gendarmes and the Cossack order of things, and I resented it. The Revolution should find another language, I thought.

I passed the Red Square where the heroes of the Revolution are buried along the Kremlin wall. Thousands of others, as devoted and heroic, lie in unknown graves throughout the country and on the fronts.

The girl was waiting for me, and I accompanied her home, on the other side of the Moskva River. Up a dark, crooked stairway that creaked piteously under our feet, she led me to her room. She lit a sputtering candle, and I gradually began to discern things. The place was entirely bare, save for two small cots, the space between them and the opposite wall just big enough for a person to pass through. Seeing no chair about, I sat down on the bed. Something moved under the rags that covered it, and I quickly jumped up. “Don’t mind,” the girl said; “it’s mother and baby brother.” From the other bed rose a curly head. “Lena, did you bring me something?” a boyish voice asked.

The girl took a chunk of black bread from her coat pocket, broke off a small piece and gave it to the boy. “Mother is paralyzed,” she turned to me, “and Masha is now also sick.” She pointed to the cot where the curly-headed boy lay. I saw that two were there.

“Does he go to school?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

“No, Yasha can’t go. He has no shoes. They’re all in tatters.”

I told her of the fine schools I had visited in the morning, and of the chicken dinner served to the children. “Oh, yes,” she said bitterly, “they are pokazatelniya. What chance has Yasha to go there? There are several like that in the city, and they are warm, and the children well fed. But the others are different. Yasha has frozen his fingers in his school.

A soldier drove by, and we asked for a ride to the station. Without answering he passed on. Presently another cart overtook us. We repeated our request. “Why not?” the young peasant exclaimed cheerfully, “jump in, all of you.” He was jolly and talkative, his “soul ajar,” as the student characterized him, and his conversation was entertaining. He liked the Bolsheviki, he said, but he had no use for the Communists. The Bolsheviki were good men, friends of the people: they had demanded the land for the farmer and all the power for the Soviets. But the Communists are bad: they rob and flog the peasants; they have put their own kind into the Soviets, and a non-Communist has no say there. The kombed is full of idle good-for-nothings; they are the bosses of the village, and the peasant who refuses to bow down before them is “in hard luck.” He had been on the Denikin front and there it was the same thing: the Communists and Commissars had everything their own way and lorded it over the drafted men. It was different when the soldiers could speak their minds and decide everything in their Company Committee: that was liberty and everyone felt himself a part of the Revolution. But now it is all changed. One is afraid to speak honestly⁠—there’s always a Communist about, and you are in danger of being denounced. That’s why he deserted; yes, deserted twice.

As we start on our way a tall man with jet-black beard and burning eyes detains me. “Be so good, one minute.” He speaks quietly, but with a strong effort to restrain his emotion. “I have no one in America,” he says; “I have no one anywhere. You see this house?” There is a nervous tremor in his voice, but he steadies, himself. “There, across the way, with the broken windows, paper-covered, pasted over. My old father, the Almighty bless his memory, and my two young brothers were killed there. Cut to pieces with sabers. The old man had his peyes38 cut off, together with his ears, and his belly ripped open.⁠ ⁠… I ran away with my daughter, to save her. Look, there she is, at the third stall on the right.” His eyes, stream with tears as he points towards a girl standing a few feet away. She is about fifteen, oval faced, with delicate features, pale and fragile as a lily, and with most peculiar eyes. She is looking straight before her, while her hands are mechanically cutting chunks of bread from the big round loaf. There is the same dreadful expression in her eyes that I have recently seen for the first time in the faces of very young girls in pogromed cities. A look of wild terror frozen into a stare that grips at my heart. Yet, not realizing the truth, I whisper to her father, “Blind?”

“No, not blind;” he cries out. “Wish to God⁠—no, much worse. She has been looking like that ever since the night when I ran away from our house with her. It was a fearful night.