A RUSSIAN FRIEND IN THE STATES had suggested my looking up, in Rome, a cousin of hers who had been living there since the Russian Revolution; and, having located her with a certain amount of difficulty, I went one day to see her. Her house was somewhere out on the Janiculum, almost at the edge of the city, and I had recourse to a P.R.O. jeep, driven by a reckless Italian, who, till I made him restrain himself, hurled the car through the streets like a missile, ferociously cursing the pedestrians and forcing the bicyclists out of the road by pretending to run them down. His attitude was evidently based on the fact that he was working for the winning side and felt he had nothing to fear, and it gave me an idea of the insolence which the people must have had to put up with from the underlings of Mussolini.
On my first visit, I made the mistake of letting him drop me at the foot of the hill and walking up the long succession of flights of steep and backbreaking stairs. Approached in that way, the address proved peculiarly difficult to get to, and when I did find the little villa, it seemed to me that I had penetrated to something very remote from my correspondents’ hotel and the offices of the Allied Commission. When I was face to face with the household, I saw that I had had no idea of the condition, during the years of the war, of the ordinary civilian in Rome.
But these Russians represented, also, privations not of recent date. Mme de L., whom I had come to see, had left Russia in 1919, with her husband and her adopted son, and in company with a friend, the Countess R., whose husband had been killed in the Revolution and who had had with her her four children. The family of Mme de L., I learn from a Russian history, had been at one time the richest in Russia. They had benefited, in the eighteenth century, by the extraordinary favor of the Tsar, who had made them immense grants of “inhabited estates,” and by the middle of the nineteenth century they had owned three hundred thousand serfs. The country place of Count M., one of the splendors of eighteenth-century baroque, had had as a rival in Russia only the Arkhangelskoe of Prince Yusupov and had been comparable, “if not with Versailles, at least with Potsdam or Caserta.” Mme de L. and her husband had lived a great deal in Rome before the Revolution, and they returned there in 1919 to make a household in common with the R.’s. Mme de L. took in “paying guests,” and they lived mainly on the proceeds from this. They had to practice the severest economy, and the younger generation suffered. Three of the Countess’s children, who had had years of inadequate feeding, died of tuberculosis. Mme de L.’s son had married and gone to America. Her husband had died during the Second War. In the war years, there had been no more boarders, and they had moved to a smaller villa.
I did not, however, know all this at the time, and I was not quite prepared for the state in which I found Mme de L. and the R.’s. It was true that Mme de L., as she told me, had been afflicted for years with ailments which partly accounted for her emaciation; but the thinness of the Countess R. and a sister of hers who now lived with them, the paleness of an R. daughter and grandchild, showed how desperate their fasting had been. Mme de L. used the phrase “dire hunger” but said that things were much better now: she had weighed only forty-five kilos and recently she had put on five. But Mme de L. stood six feet tall, and her figure was now almost a skeleton. Her skin was yellow as if she had jaundice, and it had wrinkled in a peculiar way which seemed due, not to old age merely, but to a collapse from the shrinkage of flesh. Her great gray eyes were blocked out in her face by the straight eyebrows that ruled above them a dark rather majestic line and by the discolored patches below them; but they reminded me—in that atmosphere of Russia that so persistently though fadedly endured there—of Pushkin’s description, in Evgeni Onegin, of the eyes of the young Lensky when he is dying after the duel and they become like the windows of an empty house, blinded-up and covered with chalk, when the owner has gone away—save that one of Mme de L.’s eyes was also swimming in blood as if a vessel had burst. When I saw her from the side or behind, she had the look of an old black crow, with her long back and her humped bony shoulders, her thin straight black-stockinged ankles and her slippers which she had worn so long that they were heelless and gave the impression of her feet’s not being shod but merely, like the feet of a bird, composed of some hornier substance. On the furniture were shabby prints; a screen shut off her narrow bed; on the wall hung a Genovese tapestry. I did not see anywhere the “ikon corner” that such old-regime Russians usually have; but in the corner where she had her chair she had put up a picture of the Tsar, photographs of members of her family, and a view of some mountain landscape. On the table beside the chair were a volume of Dickens in English, a carafe of very harsh red wine and a box of loose tobacco and papers, out of which she made her own cigarettes. This was one of the few parts of Rome that had been rather badly bombed, and the windows of the house had been shattered. In Mme de L.’s room, some of the gaps were patched with a glass that was completely opaque and others had been boarded up. Through a pane that was still intact, one could see the house across the street, which had had one whole side sliced off, and, beyond this, one could look away over a newly-built-up part of Rome, in which the principal objects of interest were a big Benedictine monastery, a yellow arc of monotonous apartment houses and the cypresses of the Protestant Cemetery, where Keats and Ronald Firbank lay: those two Englishmen of brilliant plumage, escaped from the coop of England and dead pathetically, still young, in Rome.
Yet, against this desolate background, her tone was quite cheerful and stout. She showed humor and a sharp good sense, and her voice had an agreeable timbre which combined the gentle Russian humanity with the full-throated deep Russian register. After two months of the Italians and the British, I found it rather a relief to talk to her, for an American, in certain ways, seems much closer today to the Russians than to any of the Europeans. Up to the beginning of the First World War, Americans and Russians both, however much they loved their country or however strong their faith in it might be, tended to occupy a provincial position, or acquiesce in a provincial attitude, toward the civilization of Europe. But, to an American in Europe at the present time, it seems just the other way. The little European nations, among which England now must be counted, have fallen into the provincial role in relation to the larger societies of the Soviet Union and the United States. This had already begun to be evident before the recent war, and it is even more striking today, when England and Germany are no longer formidable. Each of these countries, during the years of the war, had been locked into its own boundaries, compelled to feed on itself, and kept concentrating all its attention on the defense of its national existence. Even the Germans, who overran the other nations, could bring them nothing but the bullying and plundering inspired by pure spite. If they had possessed any creative ideas, they might have been able to impose their “New Order,” since Europe needed so badly to be unified; and their failure marked the definitive bankruptcy of old-fashioned nationalistic conquest. We are left with a lot of small nations that seem barbaric and ridiculous nuisances, with their traditional family feudings: the quarrel of France with Germany, the competition of Germany with England, the dispute between the Italians and the Yugoslavs, etc., etc., etc. The United States and Russia today, with all the defects of their civilizations, do constitute more advanced systems to the extent that they have succeeded in organizing, in more or less synthesizing, a great variety of kinds of people—so that men find themselves here in a position to think at least about what kind of societies they want instead of about how they are to manage to maintain themselves as autonomous nations. But the Russians have always had it in common with the inhabitants of the United States that they were half outsiders in Europe, visitors and curious observers; and I had particularly felt during the last ten years with all kinds of intelligent Russians how far our two peoples were emerging out of the ancient compartments of prejudice into bigger associations that were capable of wider and more lucid views. Even White Russians in exile have felt this—since their starving self-confidence has been stimulated by the Russian defeat of the Germans and by the recent imperialistic tendencies exhibited by the Soviet Union. With Mme de L., at any rate, I found that I could talk more freely about Europe and the Europeans than with anybody except an American.
She understood what one meant about Italy. Yes, the tourists had spoiled the Italians: they had encouraged them to be idle, to live on their past. There was far too much of the past in Italy. You couldn’t pull down an old building in Florence that was rrrotten, rrrotten, rrrotten! without letters from English spinsters protesting at the destruction of the picturesque. The Fascists had wanted to do something about cleaning up and modernizing Italy, and they had been better, she believed, than the Nazis because they had wanted to encourage the individual. She had approved of the Germans, though, too, up to the time when they had invaded Russia and she had realized how brutal they were.
She would like, she said, to go to America: the only thing she had now to look forward to was seeing her family again. Her son wrote her every day, but the letters took a month or more, the packages of food even longer. She asked me, her face lighting up, as it did not do often, with an eager smile, whether my family were good correspondents. I suggested that, since she knew our Ambassador, he might possibly be able to help her if she wanted to go to the States; and she startled me a little by replying, “There’d have to be some dirty work at the crossroads first!”—though I was later to find out that her talk was sprinkled with Americanisms, which she had picked up from her “paying guests,” students at the American Academy. They contrasted rather queerly with a mannerism which I had noted before in the Russians from the upper ranks of the old regime. Russians, when they are speaking their own language, are likely to say yes five times—as the French tend to say oui three times and the Germans ja twice—if they are hurriedly affirming something that somebody else is saying; and Mme de L., if one told her anything, would do this with a note of impatience, as if it were not possible or not proper to inform a person of her position of anything she did not know. This was not, in Mme de L.’s case, in the least impolite or unamiable; it was a trait like her towering stature that she had not been able to help carrying with her.
Distressed by her starved appearance and remembering how much more comfortable were her Russian friends in America, I tried to encourage her to make the trip. But she said it might be better not. She knew she couldn’t live in America on five hundred dollars a year, which was what she could just do in Rome; and she could go about here in rags, which she shouldn’t be able to do in New York. Somewhat curbed by her yes yes yes yes yes, I left most of the talking to her. The room was getting darker with twilight, and her voice gradually dropped to a murmur. She had to spend most of the day in bed, and I suppose that it had cost her an effort to get up and receive a visitor, for she now seemed to relapse from the admirable poise, the quick perception, with which she had greeted me. It was a little as if she were talking to herself, but pursuing a train of thought that had been started by the consciousness of herself suggested by the coming of a stranger. She was saying, as I sat in silence, I rather tardily realized, that it might be that “the ones who had been killed” had been “more fortunate than the ones who survived.” But then—she picked herself up again—with a Russian, after all, it was different than with people of other kinds: when one happened to find oneself badly off on the physical and material plane, one could go on to another plane.
I did not want to tax her too much and soon left.*
But she insisted on my coming to dinner, and I called on them several times. “The Italians and the French are conventional,” Mme de L. explained. “They won’t ask you to dinner to eat what they eat. But we don’t mind asking people to eat what we have ourselves.” I think that they must, nevertheless, have made some special preparations for me; but their menus indicated the limits of persons who live as they do: on one occasion, borshch, stuffed tomatoes, plums, a little loaf of gray butterless bread; on another, a bowl of spaghetti with pale pinkish sauce, a salad of chopped-up lettuce, and little preserved cherries, with the usual bread and wine. I enjoyed it after the mess of the Hôtel de Ville, which was betraying every day more outrageously the depredations of someone or other to the advantage of the black market and coming to consist exclusively of leaden and greasy raviolis and unidentifiable cuts of cartilage.
Before dinner, we would sit and have sherry in the living room which was also the dining room, between walls that, in the Russian fashion—like the Hermitage gallery in Petersburg—were completely plastered over with pictures: the inevitable Russian water-colors, painted, no doubt, by some member of the family, and the usual long Russian engravings of the endless perspectives of the Neva and the barracks-like palace at Oranien-baum. After dinner, we would sit out of doors in a garden behind the house. Here they had planted some carrot and beet seeds which had been sent them, by an old boarder, from America, in a poor soil in which things did not always grow.
I now encountered the other two old ladies, whom on my first visit I had barely met. They had the appearance of good fairy godmothers—though one of them, of whom I learned afterwards that she had been in her time a great beauty, gave restive little signs, almost childlike now, of what must once have been a wilfulness of coquetry. We listened after dinner one evening, just before the British elections, to a radio speech by Clement Attlee, which came through to us rather dimly, interrupted by strains of dance music and spasms of voluble Italian; and they commented, as if to reassure themselves, on Attlee’s unexpectedly well-educated voice. The British Labour Party, said one, wasn’t really Socialist, was it? In any case, said another, the Socialists were much milder than the Communists. She had always, she asserted, believed that the public utilities ought to be nationalized—and, after all, if all that money that the governments had just spent on explosives had been put into hospitals and schools and parks!…They were puzzled by the failure of Fascism: the people had been satisfied with it, and the government was not really intolerant: they had sent out to the malarial region a sanitary engineer who was known to be anti-Fascist (there had been, I learned later from U.N.R.R.A., but one sanitary engineer in Italy), only exacting from him a promise that he would not make any criticism of Fascism. I suggested, though I knew it was futile—they had grown up in the world of the Tsar—that freedom of criticism was a cardinal issue. It seemed cruel to tell them that socialism was what Europe certainly needed. Their lives had been so difficult and frightening. Having escaped from the Bolshevik terror, they felt the enemy again threatening them here. They had established themselves in Rome on a meager but stable basis; they had made, with their children and grandchildren, a solid little Russian group that had weathered the rigors of exile. And now, in their old age, they found themselves pressed by want even beyond the narrow restrictions to which they had accustomed themselves; and anarchy seemed creeping in around them. They told me—what I had already heard elsewhere—that there had lately been gangs in the streets who had been catching well-dressed people and stripping them. A man was supposed to bring twenty thousand lire, a woman fifteen thousand. This had happened, not far away, to a professor of their acquaintance.
The phrase “displaced persons,” in one of our conversations, caught Mme de L.’s attention. She considered, she said with a laugh, that they were displaced persons. I wondered, as I saw them there, whether they wouldn’t have been better off in America. Certainly, I thought, the young people would. A daughter of Countess R. was giving Italian lessons; a boy wrote plays in Italian. Neither seemed Italianized; they were simply uprooted Russians—for a Russian cannot become an Italian. But in America he can become an American on the same footing with everybody else. (Since this was written, the grandson has married an American girl and come to live in the States.) The conception of the American system as a solution to the social problems which had disrupted and tormented their lives loomed even to the two old ladies who were closer than Mme de L. to the order they had left behind. There had been people, one of them said, even in the old days at home, who had had the idea that Russia ought to be governed like the United States.
I had dinner with Bill Barrett from our Embassy, and he told me that he had lately been called upon to interview some hysterical Russians who had come in from the Displaced Persons Camp just outside Rome. They were engineers and school teachers and such people who had been living in Poland before the war and who had fled and come down into Italy. They now had the status of displaced persons, and the Soviet authorities had claimed them and were going to have them sent back to Russia. Barrett had looked into the matter, and his inquiry had led him to the desk of a British officer of the Allied Commission whose function it was to deal with these problems. There he learned, to his astonishment, that the Americans and the British had, at Yalta, made with the Russians an agreement according to which we were bound to hand over to the Soviets any Russian who had left Russia since 1929. Such people, for reasons not clear, had been assigned to the status of prisoners of war. This agreement had never been published (and might never have been made known to the world if the Vatican had not got wind of it and “broken the story” to an American correspondent in March, 1946). Intended ostensibly for the rounding-up of Russians who had fought with the Germans, it could be used, also, to secure the deportation of mere disaffected persons of the kind who had been appealing to the Embassy and of the members of unorthodox political factions and people who had fled from the purges.
I reflected that a man like my friend the ex-Soviet official Alexander Barmine, if he had landed among the displaced persons, might have been, at the insistence of the Soviets—since he had left Russia after 1929—surrendered by us for certain execution. Fortunately he had come to America and was now a United States citizen. I had just seen him before I left New York, and he had warned me, not entirely in jest, that, since I was known to have criticized Stalin, I should, if I went into territory where the Russians were in occupation, be careful about exposing myself to the hazards of standing on the platforms of moving trains. In the course of the voyage over, I had read proofs of the new English version of Barmine’s autobiography: One Who Survived: The Life Story of a Russian Under the Soviets; and had admired the concreteness, the compression and the feeling for human realities which had enabled him to cover in a minimum space so extensive a field of experience and at the same time to give so definite an impression of everything on which he touched. In this and in its moral sincerity it had seemed to me in the great tradition of Russian revolutionary memoirs, the tradition of Herzen and Kropotkin. A child of the Revolution but now confronted with a new Russian despotism, he had written an exile’s book which might well become a classic; and his career and the conclusions one drew from it were vividly present to my mind.
Barmine, born in 1899, was the son of a schoolmaster and a gamekeeper’s daughter. His parents had divorced and remarried, and he had grown up without a real home and soon found himself embroiled in the happenings of a period of Russian history chaotic to the last degree. He fought in the civil war on the side of the Bolsheviks, and at nineteen was made a commissar on the basis of his success in getting the villagers to give them food by persuasion and honorable dealing at a time when Red Army soldiers rarely came back from such errands alive. He attended the Red Army Academy in the years when old tsarist officers, recruited to the Revolution, were attempting with a certain skepticism to transform “a lot of young peasants and workmen into infantry officers in six months,” while their training was at any moment likely to be interrupted by the necessity of going away to take part in some actual fighting. He was later, at one time or another, as assigned by the Communist authorities, a soldier who held several commands, consul general in Persia, official Soviet agent in Belgium, Soviet director general of imports in Italy and France, and president of the trust that controlled the exportation of the products of the motor and aviation industries. He thus saw a good deal of the business and the officialdom of the Soviet Union; but, though a member of the Communist Party, he played no political role. At the time of the Stalin-Trotsky split, he was content to leave everything to the higher-ups, on the principle that it was always correct to back the findings of the Central Committee. Rather unusually non-political for a Russian, his assumptions were still based on the methods of the first years of the Revolution, when, for example—in 1919, “the most critical year of the Civil War”—it had been possible, fifty miles from the battle, for a public debate to take place, without “passing the bounds of courtesy,” between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; and it was not till very much later that he could see what a “decisive part in causing the final downfall of all Lenin’s real companions-in-arms” had been played by the blocking of every attempt to organize an opposition with the argument “that any weakening of Party unity might provoke a crisis of which the forces of counter-revolution would take advantage.” In the meantime, as he discovered with amazement on returning to Russia from service abroad, the big officials of the Stalin government had acquired splendid country houses, with tennis courts, Rolls-Royces and servants, while the ordinary Soviet workers in whose name the Revolution had been made were still compelled to spend ninety per cent of their wages on food which, from the point of view of the countries in which Barmine had been living, was miserable in the extreme.
In the summer of 1937, Barmine was chargé d’affaires in the Russian Legation in Athens. The political purge was in progress, but in Athens they knew little about it. All they knew was that dozens of ambassadors and heads of government departments were being arrested and shot. Their own chief had been summoned to Moscow, and it was now a very long time since they had had any instructions from him. One day they received a communiqué which informed them that Tukhachevsky and seven other Red Army generals had been executed for treason, and Barmine learned a few days later from a friend who had arrived from Moscow that some twenty of the younger generals, former classmates of his at the Academy, old comrades of the civil war, had also been summarily shot. The staff in the Greek Legation had been listening to the radio in silence, and they pretended to accept the charges that had been brought against all these men; but it had suddenly become apparent to Barmine that Stalin, in his passion for power, had set out to destroy systematically all the Soviet officials and officers who represented the Leninist generation and who could possibly oppose his policies or contest his leadership. He expressed to one of his assistants his astonishment and his horror, and the outburst relieved his tension. But soon after this conversation the assistant was recalled to Moscow, and Barmine became aware that his friends in the Foreign Office were no longer communicating with him. An order to seal the minister’s papers and have them sent to Russia was put through over Barmine’s head, and one day he surprised his code secretary rummaging among his papers. He wrote to the Foreign Office asking to be relieved of his duties, but received no reply from Litvinov. Instead, he was invited one day to dine on a Soviet ship which was lying in the harbor at Piraeus. He declined and went fishing, but the captain of the ship with several other men waited for him on the dock, and when he returned, he had to sidestep a second attempt to get him on board the ship. A man from the Legation, however, whose real function was beginning to dawn on Barmine, insisted on spending the evening with him and talked to him suggestively of the ease with which it had been possible in China to frustrate or murder officials who had attempted to run away from the Embassy.
Yet for some reason the mesmerism of Moscow did not succeed with Barmine as it had with so many other officials—though this spell had behind it a tradition as old as Ivan the Terrible with his bellowings of “I am your God!” “My sense of personal dignity,” he writes, “was revolted by the alternatives: to submit to kidnapping or to walk out. After the stories I had just heard, I knew what was in store for me. I had to decide where I would be of more help to the Russian people—perishing in one of Stalin’s prisons or living as a free man somewhere in the world, knowing the truth and speaking it out.” He eluded the maneuvers of the G.P.U., wrote a letter of resignation to Moscow, walked into the French Legation and got a visa as if for a holiday, and boarded the train for Paris.
In Paris he wrote to the Central Committee of the French League of the Rights of Man, reporting the step he had taken and explaining the reasons for it. “For nineteen years,” he said, “I have been in Soviet government service…. I have fought for the Soviet regime and dedicated all my energies to the cause of the Workers’ State…. It is quite obvious to me that a reactionary dictatorship is now in control of my country.” And he wrote and published in France—in 1939—the book which is now, for the first time, appearing in the United States.
These memoirs—what is altogether exceptional in the writings of Russian Communists—contain no political apologies, no casuistry of the Party conscience. They are all the more comprehensible and all the more convincing to the English-speaking reader for their freedom from that rather creepy atmosphere of Marxist polemic and theory in which we do not find ourselves at home. So practical and so direct all his acts and reactions have been, so sensible the conclusions he has drawn from them, that one feels, as one does not do always in the case of Russian careers, that, in the circumstances, one would not have behaved differently or arrived at different views; and it seems almost inevitable that Barmine should (at the end of 1939) have gone on to the United States.
I had seen something of Barmine in New York and had been struck by a certain convergence of the Soviet with the American type. It was not only that the new Russia of the Soviets, in spite of its socialist beginnings and of its supposed disapproval on principle of our capitalist business and our bourgeois democracy, actually envied and aimed to emulate our industrial organization, our brisk methods and our material prosperity; it was also that a man like Barmine, tall, straight and well set-up, sanguine in the physical sense, bred out of what seems quite another race than that of the ordinary Moscow pygmy, had behind him, as have so many Americans, a tough and vigorous rural stock. For both of these reasons, perhaps, he approximates—though rather more accomplished than most American executives are—to an ideal at the opposite pole from the old-fashioned type of Russian official, a type of which many examples are still to be seen in the Soviet Union. Barmine is not nervous, not volatile, not theatrical, not evasive; he is not even, for a Russian, very flexible or very sensitive to psychological atmospheres—as was shown by his not grasping sooner the full implications of the purges and the danger of talking about them. He is in some ways much like an American, and he perhaps finds himself more at home here than the modernized Communist official can sometimes be in the Soviet Union among conditions often nearly as primitive as that life of the sixteenth century which, to the Elizabethan travellers of Hakluyt’s Voyages, seemed barbaric in comparison with England.
Yet the product of Marxist schooling and the Soviet commissar have marked characteristics of their own that are unlike anything in America and perhaps quite new in the world. Barmine has been cast in a mold and can hardly now be remelted. The proud self-confidence of the Communist official, taught to believe that the future belongs to him and set off from the common herd almost as much as a member of the old upper classes—an assurance which has come more and more to present a hard mask of arrogance—appears in Barmine as a challenging dignity, a brusquely ironic tone, an air of knowing all the answers; and the tradition of Communism betrays itself in the bad habit which he sometimes reverts to, when his own point of view becomes hard to defend, of trying to talk his opponent down by sheer emphasis or loudness of voice, instead of conducting a sober discussion; and in his resorting to what is technically known as the “bedfellow” line of argument, which relies on producing the illusion of having put you irremediably in the wrong by associating you with some odious person who holds either a similar opinion to yours or an opinion which may be confused with yours. The indoctrination of Leninist Marxism which such Russians as Barmine received went deeper perhaps than the teaching of any of the Protestant churches usually does at the present time and almost as deep as the Catholic dogmas. To us who have first seen the world through the windows of the bourgeois economy, the Marxist view must always come as a heresy and require a certain effort to be valued and understood; but to Barmine it was the social cosmogony, the story of history and the basic morality, which it required an effort to correct. He has told me of the shock that it was to him to discover, in the collective nurseries, where the toys which had been brought by the parents had been pooled and made common property, that instincts of acquisitiveness appeared in these children who had never had contact with the bad appetites of capitalist society; and of the disquieting doubts suggested by his realizing at last in the factories that disunion and sabotage were not invariably and inevitably due to motives of political obstruction, but could also, all too obviously, be prompted by jealousies and personal ambitions. Of late years I have sometimes heard him talk as if he were disillusioned, not merely with the government of Stalin, but with the ideals of socialism themselves; yet it is a little like the pupil of the Jesuits who, emancipated though he may think himself, can never lose either the conviction of sin or the intellectual discipline they have given him. So Barmine, by a conditioned reflex, will respond to certain kinds of stimulus by plugging the old Communist line of insisting on the permanent scandal of the contrast between rich and poor in a capitalistic society—only to pull himself up with the admission that the poverty of Stalin’s Moscow is in just about the same proportion to the standard of the privileged groups as the poverty of Tammany’s New York; or—the other way around—he will start talking of international affairs with the incisive and cynical realism of Lenin during the First World War-only, influenced by our own propaganda, by the pressure of the American newspapers, to fall flat into some ready-made attitude, to my mind quite unrealistic, dictated by the supposed desirability of our following the line of the British.
He is, I think, less out of place in the United States than he would be in any other country. He can say “we” as an American citizen in a way that would hardly be possible for a Russian in England or France—in a way that is not wholly different from the way in which the Soviet official talks about the Soviets as “we”: in the sense that—as in the case of both countries—the “we” are not an old-fashioned nation but a great geographical unit which is engaged, to use the Communist language, in a project of “social engineering.” “We” are trying certain forms of government, going ahead on certain assumptions, rather than straining to save something that is simply there, like the hierarchy of an English county or a set of French peasant holdings. But he, too, is a man uprooted like any exile of the old regime, like any emigrated “displaced person”; and that position is an extremely uncomfortable, an extremely frustrating one. A former officer of the Red Army, a former worker for Soviet prestige abroad, he was not, in the recent war, any more able to defend his country than if he had been an old tsarist general; he could no more serve the State with his brains than if he had been an excommunicated Menshevik. Nor has he, still a foreigner in the United States, still suspect from his Soviet origin, had the chance there to work at a job that gave anything like full scope to his abilities. He cannot, to be sure—as he could be, if he were a displaced person in Europe—be deported to the Soviet Union; but the injury he has suffered through exile must remain beyond a certain point irreparable. And his commissar irony, his Marxist reactions, persist, like Mme de L.’s imperious yes and her authoritarian instincts, as the insignia of former power, to remind us of the fate of those who, having been trained for positions of leadership, have not been allowed to fill them.
Coming back from Mme de L.’s one day, I saw chalked up on a wall the following ungrammatical legend: “Viva l’anniversario di novembre 7 quando la libertà è stato dato al popolo russo.” Well, I reflected, if the Bolshevik terror had bought the freedom of the Russian people, one could not, after all, complain. But the truth was that, thirty years later, the Russian people were a good deal less free than the man who had scrawled up that slogan and who at least did not run the danger, even under the rule of the Allied Commission, of being executed or imprisoned for life, as he certainly would have been in Russia if he had been caught making public an opinion equally subversive for the Stalin regime. The Russians are today not free either to talk, to print or to vote: they have to do, and they are supposed to think, whatever the government tells them, and they have no means of changing the government. They cannot even have recourse to strikes. There is so little freedom in Russia that even persons of heroic character and irreplaceable talent are no more safe there if they differ from the dictator than they were in the days of the Tsar. First there was Alexander I, who exiled Pushkin for an ode to liberty; then there was Nicholas I, who exiled Lermontov for praising Pushkin, who mounted the throne over the corpses of the Decembrists with their petition for constitutional government, who imprisoned and expelled Herzen, and who sent Dostoevsky to Siberia; then Alexander II, who shut up Kropotkin in the Peter-Paul Fortress and transformed a geologist into an anarchist, and who would have imprisoned Tolstoy if he had not been lucky enough to have an aunt at court; Alexander III, who turned the student of zoology Ulyanov into a conspirator and would-be assassin and hanged him when his plot was discovered, and who prevented his brother Vladimir from graduating at the university; and Nicholas II, who sent to Siberia Lenin and Trotsky and a whole generation of the ablest and most brilliant young Russians. Then there was the first Bolshevik government, which executed or drove into exile, for technically different reasons but in the same autocratic fashion, hosts of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, aristocrats, landlords, officials and representatives of the various departments of the professional bourgeoisie (many of them, in all these categories, just as capable and just as public-spirited as the intransigent Marxists that turned them out) and who bedevilled the men of genius that had believed in the Revolution and tried to help do its work till the life of a Mayakovsky had become even more unhappy than those of Lermontov and Pushkin had been; and finally the satrapship of Stalin, who deported and murdered Trotsky, executed Tukhachevsky and conducted a wholesale massacre and imprisonment of everyone who still held to the Leninist faith and so was likely to question his tyranny. For more than a hundred years the world of the West has been strewn with Russians who have represented the brains and the conscience of Russia—men and women who could rarely be so useful abroad as they would have been at home. And, in spite of my liking for the Russians, my sympathy with the hopes and principles with which the Soviets started out, my admiration for their exploits in the recent war, I remembered with impatience how ridiculous it was for them to think themselves civilized, or for others to think them so, so long as a change of government is allowed to involve in their country the slaughter or extirpation of everyone who happens to oppose it, so long as it is still made a crime to differ from the head of the State.
* I found out later that she had been taking drugs, and I suppose that her serenity and detachment were partly a result of this.