Apart from our academic courses, we received our first tutelage in Leninism and the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the heat of the inner-party struggle then raging between -Trotsky and the majority of the Central Committee led by Stalin. We KUTVA students were not simply bystanders, but were active participants in the struggle. Most of the students—and all of our group from the U.S.—were ardent supporters of Stalin and the Central Committee majority.
It had not always been thus. Otto told me that in 1924, a year before he arrived, a majority of the students in the school had been supporters of Trotsky. Trotsky was making a play for the Party youth, in opposition to the older Bolshevik stalwarts. With his usual demagogy, he claimed that the old leadership was betraying the revolution and had embarked on a course of “Thermidorian reaction.”1 In this situation, he said, the students and youth were “the Party’s truest barometer.”2
But by the time the Black American students arrived, the temporary attraction to Trotsky had been reversed. The issues involved in the struggle with Trotsky were discussed in the school. They involved the destiny of socialism in the Soviet Union. Which way were the Soviet people to go? What was to be the direction of their economic development? Was it possible to build a socialist economic system? These questions were not only theoretical ones, but were issues of life and death. The economic life of the country
would not stand still and wait while they were being debated.
The Soviet working class, under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, had vanquished capitalism over one-sixth of the globe; shattered its economic power; expropriated the capitalists and landlords; converted the factories, railroads and banks into public property; and was beginning to build a state-owned socialist industry. The Soviet government had begun to apply Lenin’s cooperative plans in agriculture and begun to fully develop a socialist economic system. This colossal task had to be undertaken by the workers in alliance with the masses of working peasantry.
From the October Revolution through 1921, the economic system was characterized by War Communism. Basic industry was nationalized, and all questions were subordinated to the one of meeting the military needs engendered by the civil war and the intervention of the capitalist countries.
But by 1921, the foreign powers who had attempted to overthrow the Soviets had largely been driven from Russia’s borders. It was then necessary to orient the economy toward a peace-time situation. The NEP (New Economic Policy) formulated at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 was the policy designed to guide the transition from War Communism to the building of socialism. It replaced a system of surplus appropriation with a tax in kind which would be less of a burden on the peasantry. The NEP was a temporary retreat from socialist forms: smaller industries were leased to private capital to run; peasants were allowed to sell their agricultural surplus on free markets; central control over much of the economy was lessened. All of this was necessary to have the economy function on a peace-time basis. It was a measure designed to restore the exchange of commodities between city and country which had been so greatly disrupted by the civil war and intervention.3 It was a temporary retreat from the attack on all remnants of capitalism, a time for the socialist state to stabilize its base area, to gather strength for another advance. A year later at the Eleventh Party Congress, Lenin declared that the retreat was ended and called on the Party to “prepare for an offensive on private capital.” 4
Lenin was incapacitated by a series of strokes in 1923 and could no longer participate in the active leadership of the Party. It was precisely at this time, taking advantage of Lenin’s absence, that Trotsky made his bid for leadership in the Party. Trotsky had consistently opposed the NEP and its main engineer, Lenin— attacking the measures designed to appease the peasantry and maintain the coalition between the peasants and the workers.
From late 1922 on, Trotsky made a direct attack on the whole Leninist theory of revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He denied the possibility (and necessity) of building socialism in one country, and instead characterized that theory as an abandonment of Marxist principles and a betrayal of the revolutionary movement. He postulated his own theory of “permanent revolution,” and contended that a genuine advance of socialism in the USSR would become possible only as a result of a socialist victory in the other industrially developed states.
While throwing around a good deal of left-sounding rhetoric, Trotsky’s theories were thoroughly defeatist and class-collaborationist. For instance, in the postscript to Program for Peace, written in 1922, he contended that “as long as the bourgeoisie remains in power in the other European countries, we shall be compelled, in our struggle against economic isolation, to strive for agreement with the capitalist world; at the same time it may be said with certainty that these agreements may at best help us to mitigate some of our economic ills, to take one or another step forward, but real progress of a socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the major European countries.”5
At the base of this defeatism was Trotsky’s view that the peasantry would be hostile to socialism, since the proletariat would “have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations.” Thus Trotksy contended that the working class would:
...come into hostile collision not only with all the bourgeois groupings which supported the proletariat during the first stages of its revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad masses of the peasantry with whose assistance it came into power. The contradictions in the position of a workers’ government in a backward country with an overwhelmingly peasant population could be solved only ...in the arena of the world proletarian revolution.6
Therefore, it would not be possible to build socialism in a backward, peasant country like Russia. The mass of peasants would exhaust their revolutionary potential even before the revolution had completed its bourgeois democratic tasks—the breakup of the feudal landed estates and the redistribution of the land among the peasantry. This line, which underestimated the role of the peasantry, had been put forward by Trotsky as early as 1915 in his article “The Struggle for Power.” There he claimed that imperialism was causing the revolutionary role of the peasantry to decline and downgraded the importance of the slogan “Confiscate the Landed Estates.”7
As it was pointed out in our classes, Trotsky portrayed the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass. He made no distinction between the masses of peasants who worked their own land (the muzhiks) and the exploiting strata who hired labor (the kulaks). His conclusions openly contradicted the strategy of the Bolsheviks, developed by Lenin, of building the worker-peasant alliance as the basis for the dictatorship of the proletariat.8 Further, they were at complete variance with any realistic economic or social analysis.
Trotsky’s entire position reflected a lack of faith in the strength and resources of the Soviet people, the vast majority of whom were peasants. Since it denied the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, the success of the revolution could not come from internal forces, but had to depend on the success of proletarian revolutions in the advanced nations of Western Europe. In the absence of such revolutions, the revolutionary process within the Soviet Union itself would have to be held in abeyance, and the proletariat, which had seized power with the help of the peasantry, would have to hold state power in conflict4with all other classes.
Behind Trotsky’s revolutionary rhetoric was a simplistic social-democratic view which regarded the class struggle for socialism as solely labor against capital. This concept of class struggle did not regard the struggle of peasant against landlord, or peasant against the Czar, as a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. This was reflected as early as 1905, inTrotsky’s slogan, “No Czar, but a Workers’ Government,” which, as Stalin had said, was “the slogan of revolution without the peasantry.”9
Given the state of the revolutionary forces at the time, the position was dangerously defeatist. For instance, 1923 marked a period of recession for the revolutionary wave in Europe; it was a year of defeat for communist mqvements in Germany, Italy, Poland and Bulgaria. What then, Stalin asked, is left for our revolution? Shall it “vegetate in its own contradictions and rot away while waiting for the world revolution”?10 To that question, Trotsky had no answer. Stalin’s reply was to build socialism in the Soviet Union. The Soviet working class, allied with the peasantry, had vanquished its own bourgeoisie politically and was fully capable of doing the job economically and building up a socialist '’society.
Stalin’s position did not mean the isolation of the Soviet Union. The danger of capitalist restoration still existed and would exist until the advent of classless society. The Soviet people understood that they could not destroy this external danger by their own efforts, that it could only be finally destroyed as a result of a victorious revolution in at least several of the countries of the West. The triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union could not be final as long as the external danger existed. Therefore, the success of the revolutionary forces in the capitalist West was a vital concern of the Soviet people.
Trotsky’s scheme of permanent revolution downgraded not only the peasantry as a revolutionary force, but also the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples within the old Czarist Empire. Thus, in “The Struggle for Power,” he wrote that “imperialism does not contrapose the bourgeois nation to the old regime, but the proletariat to the bourgeois nation.”11
While Trotsky de-emphasized the national colonial question in the epoch of imperialism, Lenin, on the other hand, stressed its new importance. “Imperialism,” said Lenin, means the progressively mounting oppression of the nations of the world by a handful of Great Powers; it means a period of wars between the latter to extend and consolidate the oppression of nations.”12
It was not until sometime later that I was able to fully grasp the implications of Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution on the international scene. The most dramatic example was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39. The Trotskyist organization had infiltrated the anarchist movement in Catalonia and i ncited revolt against the Loyalist government under the slogans of “Socialist Republic” and “Workers’ Government.” The Loyalist government, headed by Juan Negrin, a liberal Republican, was a coalition of all democratic parties. It included socialists, communists, liberal Republicans and anarchists—all in alliance against fascist counter-revolution led by Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini. The attempted coup against the Loyalist Government was typical of the Trotskyist attempts to short-circuit the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolutionary process. The result was a “civil war within a civil war” and, had their strategy succeeded, it would have split the democratic coalition—effectively giving aid to the fascists.
In the United States I was to witness how Trotsky’s purist concept of class struggle led logically to a denial of the struggle for Black liberation as a special feature of the class struggle, revolutionary in its own right. As a result, American Trotskyists found themselves isolated from that movement during the great upsurge of the thirties. But all this was to come later.13
At the time I was at KUTVA, Trotskyism had not yet emerged as an important tendency on the international scene. I did not foresee its future role as a disruptive force on the fringes of the international revolutionary movement. At that point, I wasn’t clear myself on a number of these theoretical questions. It was somewhat later when my understanding of the national and colonial question—particularly the Afro-American question— deepened, that the implications of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution became fully obvious to me.
We students felt that Trotsky’s position denigrated the achievement of the Soviet Revolution. We didn’t like his continual harping about Russia’s backwardness and its inability to build socialism, or his theory of permanent revolution. The Soviet Union was an inspiration for all of us, a view confirmed by our experience in the country. Everything we could see defied Trotsky’s logic.
His writings were readily available throughout the school, and the issues of the struggle were constantly on the agenda in our collective. These were discussed in our classes, as they were in factories, schools and peasant organizations throughout the country.
About once a month the collective would meet and a report would be given by Party representatives—sometimes local, sometimes from the rayon (region of the city) and Moscow district, and sometimes from the Central Committee itself. They would report on the latest developments in the inner-party struggles—Trotsky’s and Lenin’s views on the question of the peasantry; the NEP, how i( had proved its usefulness and how it was now being phased out; Trotsky’s position on War Communism and Party rules; the dictatorship of the proletariat, and whether it could be a dictatorship in alliance with the peasantry or one over the peasantry. An open discussion would be held after the report. By that time the Trotskyists at KUTVA had dwindled to a small group of bitter-enders..
The struggle raged over a period of five years (1922-27) during which time the Trotsky bloc had access to the press and Trotsky’s works were widely circulated for everyone to read. Trotsky was not defeated by bureaucratic decisions or Stalin’s control of the Party apparatus—as his partisans and Trotskyite historians claim. He had his day in court and finally lost because his whole position flew in the face of Soviet and world realities. He was doomed to defeat because his views were incorrect and failed to conform to objective conditions, as well as the needs and interests of the Soviet people.
It was my great misfortune to be out of the dormitory when the Black students were invited to attend a session of the Seventh Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, then meeting in the Kremlin in the late fall of 1926.1 was out in the street at the time and couldn’t be found, so they went without me. I missed a historic occasion, my only chance to have seen Trotsky in action. I was bitterly disappointed. When I arrived back at the dormitory, Sakorov, my Indian friend, told me where they had gone. Returning in the early hours of the morning, they found me waiting for them. They described the session and the stellar performance of Trotsky.
Stalin made the report for the Russian delegation. Trotsky then asked for two hours to defend his position; he was given one. He spoke in Russian, and then personally translated and delivered his speech in German and then in French. In all, he held the floor for about three hours.
Otto said it was the greatest display of oratory he had ever heard. But despite this, Trotsky and his allies (Zinoviev and Kamenev) suffered a resounding defeat, obtaining only two votes out of the whole body. The delegates from outside the Soviet Union didn’t accept Trotsky’s view that socialism in one country was a betrayal of the revolution. On the contrary, the success of the Soviet Union in building socialism was an inspiration to the international revolution.
Otto told me that this point was made again and again in the course of the discussion. Ercoli (Togliatti), the young leader of the Italian Party, summed it up well a few days later when he defended the achievements of the Russian Party and revolution as “the strongest impetus for the revolutionary forces of the world.”14
The American Party united across factional lines in support of Stalin. The Trotsky opposition, already defeated within the Soviet Union, was now shattered internationally. From there on out, it was downhill for Trotsky. I witnessed Trotsky’s opposition bloc degenerate from an unprincipled faction within the Party to a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the Party and the Soviet state. We learned of secret, illegal meetings held in the Silver Woods outside Moscow, the establishment of factional printing presses—all in violation of Party discipline. Their activities reached a high point during the November 7, 1927 anniversary of the Revolution.
At that Tenth Anniversary, Trotsky’s followers attempted to stage a counter-demonstration in opposition to the traditional celebration. I remember vividly the scene of our school contingent marching on its way to Red Square. As we passed the Hotel Moscow, Trotskyist leaflets were showered down on us, and orators appeared at the windows of the hotel shouting slogans of “Down with Stalin.”
They were answered with catcalls and booing from the crowds in the streets below. We seized the leaflets and tore them up. This attempt to rally the people against the Party was a total failure and struck no responsive chord among the masses. It was equivalent to rebellion and this demonstration was the last overt act of the Trotskyist opposition.
During the next month Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were expelled—along with seventy-five of their chief supporters. They, along with the lesser fry, were sent in exile to Siberia in Central Asia. Trotsky was sent to Alma Alta in Turkestan from where, in 1929, he was allowed to go abroad, first to Turkey and eventually to Mexico.
Later, many of Trotsky’s followers criticized themselves and were accepted back into the Party. But among them was a hard core of bitter-enders, who “criticized” themselves publicly only in order to continue the struggle against Stalin’s leadership from within the Party. Their bitterness fed on itself and they emerged later in the thirties as part of a conspiracy which wound up on the side of Nazi Germany.
Throughout this whole struggle, we Black students at the school had been ardent supporters of the position of Stalin and the Central Committee. Most certainly we were Stalinists—whose policies we saw as the continuation of Lenin’s. Those today who use the term “Stalinist” as an epithet evade the real question: that is, were Stalin and the Central Committee correct? I believe history has proven that they were correct.
In March 1927, the American community in Moscow was shocked by the news of the death of Ruthenberg, general secretary
of the CPUSA. His death came suddenly, from a ruptured appendix. His last request had been that he be buried in the Kremlin walls in Moscow—a request acceded to by the Russian Communist Party. His ashes were carried to Moscow by J. Louis Lngdahl, a member of the Central Committee of the U.S. Party.
The Moscow funeral was impressive. The procession entered Red Square led by a detachment of Red Cavalry. The square was crowded with thousands of Soviet workers, including the entire work force of the Ruthenberg Factory, which had been named in his honor.
We half dozen Black students, together with other members of the American colony, marched into the square immediately behind the urn. We followed it until we stood directly in front of the Lenin Mausoleum. On top of the mausoleum was the speakers’ platform. There stood Bukharin, who had recently succeeded Zinoviev as head of the Communist International: Bela Kun, leader of the abortive Hungarian Soviet of 1919; Sen Katayama, (he veteran Japanese Communist; and others.
Bukharin delivered the main eulogy, followed by several speakers. Suddenly I noticed Bukharin whispering to Robert Minor, who was standing beside him. Bukharin pointed down towards our group of Blacks who were gathered below the mausoleum.
As Minor came down the steps toward us, I was a bit apprehensive, anticipating his mission. Sure enough, addressing my brother Otto, he said, “Comrade Bukharin wants one of the Negro comrades to say a few words.”
Otto pointed at me and said, “Let Harry speak.”
I felt trapped, not wanting to start an argument on such a solemn occasion. I reluctantly agreed to speak and followed Minor back up the steps of the mausoleum. Bela Kun, a polished orator, was speaking; I was to follow. I tried to gather my thoughts, but I was not much of a speaker and certainly not prepared.
Generalities did not come easy to me, and besides, I hadn’t really known Ruthenberg. I had only met him formally on the occasion of my departure for Moscow when he had shaken my hand and wished me luck. But what could I say about him, specifically in relation to the Blacks?
I stood there amidst this array of internationally famous revolutionary leaders, and as I looked down on the thousands of faces in Red Square, panic suddenly seized me. Here was my turn to speak, but I found myself unable to utter a coherent sentence.
I remember saying something about “our great lost leader.” This being my first experience in front of a mike, the words seemed to come back and hit me in the face. Finally, after a minute or two of floundering around I said, “That’s all!” and turned away from the mike in disgust and humiliation. The words “that’s all” resounded through the square loud and clear, to my further discomfiture.
And then came the moment for the translation. The translator was a young Georgian named Tival, one of Stalin’s secretaries. He was one of those people who speak half a dozen languages fluently. Tival got right into the job of translation, assuming an orator’s stance. He had a strong roaring voice, surprising for one of such diminutive stature.
Swinging his arms, apparently emphasizing points that I was supposed to have made, I must admit that he made a pretty good speech for me. Speaking two or three times longer than my two minutes of rambling, he preceded each point by emphasizing, “Tovarishch Haywood skazal” (Comrade Haywood said).
The next morning, I went to the school cafeteria for breakfast. And there sat our little group of Black students. Golden had them laughing at something. He saw me and waved the day’s copy of Pravda. The headline was “Pokhorony Tovarishcha Ruthenber-ga” (Funeral of Comrade Ruthenberg).
Golden began reading with a straight face, but using that peculiar language of his—Russian with a Mississippi accent. The article quoted from the main speeches and went on to say, Tovarishch Harry Haywood, Americanski Negr, tozhe bystupal (Negro American comrade Harry Haywood also stepped forward with a speech).”
And Golden read one paragraph after another of the speech Tival gave for me, each paragraph starting with “Tovarishch Haywood skazal...Tovarishch Haywood skazal...Tovarishch
Haywood skazal. ”
Finally Golden looked up from that paper at me, and he said, “Man, you know you ain’t skazaled a goddamned thing!”
Back home in the U.S., the death of Ruthenberg had signalled another flareup in the factional struggle within the Party. Following the intervention of the Cl at the Fourth Party Convention, there was a period of uneasy peace between the factions. But now a struggle for succession to Ruthenberg’s position as general secretary was raging hot and heavy.
Lovestone, who had been organizational secretary, was supported by the Ruthenberg stalwarts—Max Bedacht, Ben Gitlow and John Pepper. Since Ruthenberg’s death, Lovestone (as heir apparent) had pre-empted the interim job of acting secretary. In opposition, William W. Weinstone was the candidate supported by the Foster-Cannon bloc which included Alexander Bittelman and Jack Johnstone.
Weinstone had formerly been a member of the Ruthenberg faction, but following Ruthenberg’s death, he sought the position of general secretary himself. His move offered an opportunity for the Foster-Cannon group to oppose Lovestone, whom they bitterly detested, with a candidate they believed had more of a chance of winning than did one of their old stalwarts.
We Blacks in Moscow were isolated from much of this struggle. We were sort of observers from the sidelines, and with the exception of Otto (who had entered the Party immediately after its founding convention), we didn’t have any of the old factional loyalties or political axes to grind. We generally favored the Ruthenberg leadership, although we could hardly be called ardent supporters.
Ruthenberg’s leadership had been endorsed by the Cl, which gave his followers credence in our view. But Lovestone was something else again. On this, even Otto agreed. Lovestone had a reputation for being a factionalist par excellence, involved in the dirty infighting that took place. He was regarded as a hatchet man for the Ruthenberg group.
None of us in Moscow could discern any principled political differences between the two groups on the question uppermost in our minds—the question of Black liberation. Though we had not yet fully succeeded in relating our newly acquired Marxist-Leninist perspective to the question of Blacks in the U.S., we were sure— and our studies had confirmed—that Blacks were a potentially powerful revolutionary force in the struggle against U.S. capital. Clearly the common enemy could not be defeated without a revolutionary alliance of Blacks and the class-conscious elements of the working class. It was crucial to us that Party policy be directed towards consummating that alliance. We felt, however, that both factions underestimated the revolutionary potential of Blacks and we were determined not to allow ourselves to become a political football between the two.
There had been no progress in this area since the folding of the American Negro Labor Congress in 1925. The collapse of the ANLC for us confirmed the Party’s isolation from the Black masses. According to James Ford, a young Black Party leader, there were only about fifty Blacks in the Party at this time.15
Something was definitely wrong. At the time, we were inclined to attribute the Party’s shortcomings simply to an underestimation of the importance of Afro-American work. We were not, at that point, able to discern any theoretical tendencies within the Party which served to rationalize this underestimation. We felt it was due simply to hangovers of racial prejudices of white Party members and leaders.
In Moscow, we had been in constant communication with Black comrades in the U.S. We had, in fact, set ourselves up as a sort of unofficial lobby to keep the situation with respect to Blacks continuously before the attention of the Russians and other Comintern leaders. They, for the most part, were sympathetic to our grievances.
In May 1927, Jay Lovestone (while still acting secretary of the Party) showed up in Moscow at the Cl’s Eighth Plenum. During his stay, he invited us Black students to his room at the Lux Hotel to give us an informal report on the Party’s work among Blacks. He had heard, of course, of our discontent and wanted to mollify us. He also knew that the question was coming up for serious discussion at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, which was to take place the following year. There was no doubt he was out to mend his political fences.
I had my first close look at the man when we gathered in his room. He tried to give us the impression of being very frank and self-critical. He said the Party leadership, involved in factional struggles, had neglected Black struggles, had neglected Afro-American work, an “important phase” of the Party’s activities. But this factional phase had now at long last come to a close and the Party (under his leadership) had now begun seriously to tackle the job of overcoming this tremendous lag in the work.
He told us that Otto Huiswood had been placed on the Central Committee and assigned as organizer for the Buffalo (western New York) district. We thought it was about time! Richard B. Moore had been placed as New England organizer for the International Labor Defense. “I cite this,” Lovestone said, “only as an earnest example of the determination of the Central Committee to remedy our default on this most important question.”
Assuming a modest air, he turned to me and said, “Last but not least, we have decided that you, Harry, as one of our bright young Negroes, are to be transferred to the Lenin School. We’ve had our eye on you, Harry, for some time.”
I was delighted at this news. The Lenin School had been established only the year before (1926) as a select training school for the development of leading cadres of the parties in the Communist International. But though I was delighted, I was also suspicious of the man; his cold eyes belied the warmth and modesty he tried to express. It seemed like a bid to buy me out. Otto, however, seemed to have been impressed.
Though Lovestone was a teetotaler, he had a big bottle of vodka in his room for us students. He had brought us presents—which was true of most visitors from the States. It was understood that a visitor would not return to the U.S. with extra things that the students in Moscow could use. Most people, and Lovestone was no exception, came prepared with things to give away. During the course of the evening, Otto had seized a few pair of socks, and Lovestone had given him a tin of pipe tobacco (and cigarettes for us all). As we were leaving, Otto looked over Lovestone’s shoes.
“Say, Jay,” he said, “you and me wear the same size shoes, don’t we? You got another pair with you?”
“Sure, Otto, sure,” said Lovestone, and produced an extra pair.
On our way home, walking down Tverskaya Boulevard towards the dormitory, we exchanged our impressions of the evening. Golden started off: “Oh, he’s full of crap. There’s no sincerity in the man.”
Otto responded, “I think you’re wrong, Golden, I think you’re wrong.”
Golden said, “I saw his eyes. That’s something you didn’t see, Otto. You had too much vodka. You know I’ve always told you to go light on it—you know you can’t handle the stuff. Y ou remember what Vesey’s lieutenant said when the slaves rebelled in Virginia: ‘Beware of those wearing the old clothes of the master, for they will betray you!’ ”
I never saw Otto so furious! He turned on Golden with his fists clenched, but thought better of it. Golden was too big. I laughed, and he turned towards me, but I was his brother. At that moment a drunk Russian staggered into view and suddenly bumped into him.
Otto let his fist go and knocked the poor man down. There was a great commotion and a crowd of Russians gathered around. Some Chinese students from our school were across the street, and thinking we were being attacked by “hooligans,” rushed to our defense. We helped the man to his feet and, in the confusion, attempted to explain to the crowd what had happened. Otto said he had thought the drunk was attacking him, and it was thus that we managed to pass the thing off and return to our dorm.
Lovestone was a consummate factionalist, utterly uninhibited by scruples or principles. He finally won out in the struggle to succeed Ruthenberg, but the mantle of Ruthenberg fit him poorly; the cloven hoof was always visible. His victory was aided by the ineptitude of the Foster-Cannon-Weinstone bloc, which made several tactical blunders (of which Lovestone took full advantage). Lovestone’s friendship with Bukharin was perhaps a factor in his victory; Nikolai Bukharin had succeeded Zinoviev as the president of the Comintern. He was an erstwhile ally of Stalin in the struggle against the Trotskyist “Left” and was later to emerge as a leader of the right deviation within the Soviet Party and the Communist International. As head of the Comintern, he already had begun to line up forces for his next battle which was to break out following the Sixth Congress of the Cl in 1928. His man in the IJ.S. was none other than Jay Lovestone.
As I have indicated, we KUTVA students in Mosccow were removed from much of the bitterness of the post-Ruthenberg struggle, and at the time, were not fully aware of its intensity. I was to be filled in with a blow-by-blow account of what went on at home by some of my classmates at the Lenin School, which I entered the following autumn.
The month of August, vacation time, drew near. Our group of Black students split up and all of us (with the exception of Bankole) left Moscow. Bankole was reluctant to leave his Russian girl friend and remained in the city. Golden’s girl friend, a pretty Kazakh-stanian girl, took him home to meet her people in Kazakhstan, an autonomous republic in southwest Asia, inhabited by a Turko-Mongolian people.
As for myself, I asked for and received permission to spend my vacation in the Crimea. At the Chancellor’s office, I was given money, a railroad ticket and a document entitling me to stay one month at a rest home in Yalta. I was on my own and for the first time since my arrival fourteen months before, I was separated from my fellow Black students. But I had no misgivings. By this time, I had acquired a considerable knowledge of the country and had overcome the main hurdles in the language and could speak and read Russian with some fluency. In fact, I looked forward to my journey with pleasurable expectations. I was not to be disappointed.
The Autonomous Republic of Crimea is a square-shaped peninsula jutting out into the Black Sea. At that time, it was one of the two Tartar autonomous republics; the other was Tartaria, on the Volga. I immediately fell in love with the country—its lush subtropical climate and its people. The Tartars were a dark-skinned Mongolic people, descendants of the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan. When I arrived in Sevastopol, the largest city and seaport, I was struck by the dazzling brilliance of the sun against the pastel-colored buildings, the deep blue of the sea and the verdant Crimean mountains rising behind the city. Tall and stately cypress trees lined the streets. It was a busy seaport; all types of shipping could be found in the harbor from small fishing boats to Black Sea passenger liners and ocean-going freighters of the Soviet trading fleet.
As a history buff, I stopped over for a couple of days to take in the historic sites of the city and its environs. There was the Pan-arama, a life-like display graphically depicting the battle of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, 1854-66. (The war was fought mainly on the Crimean peninsula between Russian forces on the one hand; British, French and Turkish allies on the other.) In this battle, the allies sought to knock out the strong Russian naval base in Sevastopol through an invasion by land and bombardment by sea. The Russians lost the war, but Sevastopol remained Russian.
I drove out to Balaklava, a small village nestling on the sea a few miles southeast of Sevastopol, the scene of the disastrous charge of the British “Light Brigade,” led by Lord Cardigan and immortalized by Tennyson in his poem. Looking at the scene brought back memories of childhood school days when our class recited Tennyson’s poem aloud. I stood on Voronsov Heights overlooking the Valley of Death into which rode the six hundred. I walked over the grounds and viewed the graves of the victims of this blunder of the British officer caste. Fourteen years later, Sevastopol was to be the site of one of the most destructive and bloody battles of World War II.
My automobile ride to Yalta, about sixty kilometers further along the coast, was not only exciting, but in some parts, a frightening experience. It was mostly along a narrow road, cut out of the side of mountains, on which two cars could barely pass. In some places, one could look down to what appeared to me to be a sheer drop of two or three thousand feet into the sea below. The chauffeurs driving powerful Packards, Cadillacs and Espano-Swiss sped alongthe road with its many curves at breakneck speed. The obvious fact that they were expert drivers was not enough to allay my fears nor those of the other passengers.
Nearing Yalta, we passed Lavadaya, a beautiful palace built by an Italian architect during the reign of Alexander the Third. It was situated on a high cliff overlooking the sea. Later, it became the summer home of Czar Nicholas II. Now, under the Soviets, it had been converted into a rest home for local peasant leaders. The palace later housed President Roosevelt and Premier Churchill during the Yalta conference in 1945.
At last I arrived in Yalta, center of the great Crimean resort area which extended along the coast and behind which rose the Crimean Mountains. Yalta was a town of rest homes and sanitaria, mostly owned by Soviet trade unions. I was put up at a rest home which mainly housed employees of the Moscow city administration.
Immediately after registering, I put on my bathing trunks and donned the gorgeous Ashanti robe which Bankole had lent me and stepped out for a dip in the sea. I stepped out into the main street which ran alongside the seashore and headed for the beach. Although many of the Tartars of the area were dark-skinned, Blacks were rarely seen, even in these southern climes.
As I passed along I could hear remarks like, “Kak khorosho zagorelsya (How beautifully sunburnt he is)!” It was a remark I was to hear often. It was good natured, and I sensed in it a trace of envy.
The crowds were mainly vacationers from the north, who after the long, weary and cold sub-arctic winters of central Russia had fled to this semi-tropical paradise to soak up a little sunshine. Here they formed a cult of sun-worshippers bent on acquiring a suntan to display upon their return home.
A crowd of small boys followed me out to the public beach a few blocks away. Perhaps they associated me with some of the South Sea Island characters they had seen in movies and waited expectantly for an exhibition of my aquatic skills. I doffed my gorgeous robe and stepped into the water, walked out a few feet and sat down. I turned to see expressions of amazement, disappointment, and even pity. Their bewilderment was quite natural, for I myself had never met a Russian who didn’t know how to swim. These children regarded swimming to be a natural human attribute; to them, an adult who couldn’t swim was regarded as sort of a cripple.
One day, while walking to the beach in Yalta, I was approached by a uniformed officer of the OGPU (federal police). “Bonjour, camarade, vous êtes Sénégalais?” h& asked in French.
He seemed a bit surprised when I responded in Russian, telling him that I was an American Black and a student at KUTVA in Moscow.
He said that he had noticed me several times on the streets and wondered if I were Senegalese. He had fought beside Senegalese riflemen during the world war. His Cossack regiment, he explained, was a part of a small Russian expeditionary force sent to fight with the French Army on the Western Front.
I told him that I had also fought in the war with an American Black regiment and how I had seen Russian troops in a prison camp on my way to the Soissons front in the late summer of 1918.1 asked him if he had been in that camp.
He shrugged and said that it was quite possible. “They scattered us around in a number of camps; they didn’t want too many of us together in one place,” he said.
“Our Russian force,” he went on, “was small and had no real military significance.” It had been sent by the Czar as a demonstration of solidarity and friendship between Russia and France— sort of a morale bqoster for the French people.
“Be that as it may,” he said, “it didn’t boost our morale any to be there. In France, we fought in some of the toughest battles in the war, on the Champagne front and the Marne salient, and we suffered heavy casualties. Our fellows were homesick and confused, and didn’t know what they were fighting for so far away from Mother Russia.
“There was much grumbling and always an undercurrent of discontent. All of this was heightened towards the latter part of the war by the bad news of Russian defeats on the Eastern Front. This all came to a head with the news of the fall of the Czar. Shortly after that we were withdrawn from the front by the French, as an unreliable element. Behind the lines, we were surrounded and disarmed by Senegalese troops, and quite a number who resisted were killed or wounded. To say that we were ‘unreliable’ was an understatement; by that time, we were downright mutinous!” The Bolshevik Party had active nuclei in the regiments. “I myself was a member of the Party,” said my new-found friend. “We followed the course of the Revolution through French newspapers and were able to glean the truth behind their distortions. We also had contact with some of the French left-socialists and with Bolshevik exiles before they returned home after the outbreak of the February Revolution. After the Armistice was signed, we were sent to Morocco and eventually Soviet ships came to take us to Odessa and home.
“The French used the Senegalese against us,” he said. “We learned later of a mutiny among the Senegalese troops in which they were shot up and disarmed by the French Blue Devils.” I had just been reading André Barbusse and was surprised to learn how widespread mutiny had been in the French Army.
“Well, c’est la guerre,” he said, “especially so an imperialist war. After all, what interest had the Senegalese in defending French imperialism? What interest did we Russian workers and muzhiks (peasants) have in fighting the Czar’s wars?”
We parted, with both of us wanting to meet again, but he had to leave town that evening and I never saw him again.
Often, we visited the local vineyards and wine cellars and tasted the local wines. It was wine country and Crimean wines were of the first quality, from the sweet ports, tokays and muscatels, to the dry red and white wines. On these outings there was always someone who had a guitar or accordion, and we sat late into the nights singing Russian folk songs and gypsy romans (love songs).
The Crimea was not just a vacationers’ haven, although tourism occupied a large place in its economy. At that time, the economy was mainly agricultural. Vineyards were constantly expanding in the mountain valleys along the southern coast. Tobacco of fine quality was grown, and there was also an important fishing industry.
On the east coast of the peninsula near Kerch, there was an area of rich iron ore deposits and mines. This was to serve as the basis for the construction of the gigantic Kerch metallurgical, chemical and engineering works, contemplated in the first five year plan. It was a plan which sought to quadruple the basic capital of the republic.
With the renaissance of national cultures which accompanied the Soviet policy on the national question, the Turkic language spoken by the Tartars—which I understood was closely related to modern Turkish—was being revived and taught in schools. A Latinized alphabet was introduced, replacing the old Arabic script. Tartar literature and culture flourished through this encouragement.
* I met the Party secretary for the county, a young Tartar who took me to visit a kolkhoz (collective farm), a vineyard in this case; A hundred or more peasant families were in the collective, all winegrowers. As in all collective farms, its members were required to sell a definite amount to the government at fixed prices and were allowed to sell the surplus on the free markets.
Each family had a special plot of land which they cultivated for their own food supply» The chairman of the collective was a huge Ukrainian fellow, who showed us around and explained the winegrowing process. The cultivation of grapes and making of the wine required special knowledge, which the government supplied.
The members of the collective used up-to-date wineries owned by the state and managed by expert vintners. There I was to view the intricate process of wine-making, the pressing of the grapes, the fermenting process and the bottling itself. As I remember, this particular collective specialized in dry wines—both red and white. The Crimeans insisted that their wines were as good as the French. Not being a connoisseur, I wouldn’t know, but all I can say is that they tasted good to me.
When I returned to Moscow in the fall, Otto told me of the discovery he had made on one of his trips to the southern region of the Caucasus. He had originally gone there on the invitation of one ol our fellow students, a young woman from the Abkhazian Republic, a part of Georgia. After meeting some of us, she commented that they too had some Black folk down near her area in a village not very far from Sukhum, the capital of the republic on the Black Sea.
She invited Otto down to visit the region over his summer vacation, and there he met the people. He described them as being of definite black ancestry—notwithstanding a history of intermarriage with the local people. But the starsata (old man) of the tribe was Black beyond a doubt. His story went some generations back, when he and the others joined the Turkish army as Numidian mercenaries from the Sudan. After several forays into this region they deserted the Army and had settled there. The starsata himself had been in the Czar’s Cavalry with the Dikhi (wild) Division of the Caucasus Cossacks.
The people in the village wanted to know what was happening to "our brothers over the mountains.” Otto related to them the troubles we had gone through, described the travels “over the mountains and across the big sea.” As the evening wore on and the local brandy was consumed, toast after toast was drunk to “our little brother from over the hills.” Otto described to them the conditions of Blacks in the U.S.—the lynchings, racism and brutality. Incensed, a few jumped up and pulled out their daggers. “You should make a revolution.”
“Why don’t you revolt?”
“Why do you put up with it?”
We were not the only ones surprised to learn about this group; it was news to the Russians in Moscow too! Several of these tribesmen later visited Moscow as a result of Otto’s visit.