“If the commandant does not object, perhaps you will share my room till another is vacant?” he said pleasantly, speaking good English.
The commandant, having examined my papers, consented, and presently I was installed in my friend’s large and pleasantly warm room.
He looked at me carefully, then asked:
“Are you from San Francisco?”
“Yes, I used to live there. Why do you ask?”
“Is your name Berkman?”
“Yes.”
“Alexander Berkman?” he persisted.
“Yes.”
He embraced me, kissing me thrice in Russian fashion. “Why,” he said, “I know you. I used to live in Frisco myself. Saw you many a time—at meetings and lectures. Don’t you remember me? I’m Sergei. I lived on the Russian Hill. No, of course, you wouldn’t remember me,” he ran on. “Well, I returned to Russia at the outbreak of the February Revolution, by way of Japan. Been to Siberia, in Sakhalin and the East, and now I have brought our report to the Party.”
“Are you a Communist?” I inquired.
“A Bolshevik,” he smiled, “though not a Party member. I used to be a Left Social Revolutionist, but I’m close to the Communists now, and have been working with them since the Revolution.”
Again he embraced me.
V
The Guest House
—Life in the Kharitonensky is interesting. It is an ossobniak (private house), large and roomy, and contains a number of delegates and guests. At meal time we gather in the common dining room, furnished in the bourgeois taste of the typical German merchant. The house has weathered the Revolution without any change. Nothing has been touched in it; even the oil painting of the former owner, life-size, flanked by those of his wife and children, still hangs in its accustomed place. One feels the atmosphere of respectability and correctness.
But at meals a different spirit prevails. The head of the table is occupied by V⸺, a Red Army officer in military uniform of English cut. He is the chief of the Ukrainian delegation come for an important conference to “the center.” A tall, strapping fellow, not over thirty, of military bearing and commanding manner. He has been in many fights against Kaledin and Denikin, and was repeatedly wounded. When still an officer in the Tsar’s army he became a revolutionist. Later his party, the Left Social Revolutionists of the South, joined the Communists of the Ukraine.
Next to him sits K⸺, black-haired and black-bearded, member of the Central Rada when it was broken up by Skoropadsky with the aid of German bayonets. To his right is another delegate from the Ukraine, a student with soft black beard, the only one who understands English. The editor of the Communist paper of Kiev and two young women are also in this party.
One of the foreign visitors is “Herman,” a middle-aged German grown gray and old in the revolutionary struggle. He was sent by the minority of the Spartacus Party to enlist the moral and financial support of the Bolsheviki; but Radek, he complains, refuses to recognize the rebellious minority. Near Herman sits young L⸺, an American I.W.W., who hoboed his way to Russia without pass or money. There are also several correspondents from Sweden, Holland, and Italy, two Japanese, and a Korean Communist who was brought a prisoner from Siberia because of some peculiar misunderstanding.
The steaming samovar is on the table, and a buxom young woman is serving us. She is red-cheeked and country-like, but her demeanor is free and unforced, and she uses tovarish with an ease indicating a full-grown sense of equality. From snatches of her conversation with the diners I gather that she had been working in a shoe factory till she entered the service of the former owner of the house, before the Revolution, and has remained in the ossobniak after it was nationalized. She calls herself a Bolshevik, and speaks familiarly about the proceedings at the meetings of the women Communist circle, at which she often presides.
She seems to personify the great revolutionary upheaval: the master driven from the house, the servant become the equal of the guests, all tovarishi in a common cause.
Surrogat tea or coffee is served in the morning—one cannot tell the difference. Breakfast consists of several small slices of black bread, a bit of butter and occasionally an attenuated layer of cheese. At dinner we receive a thin soup of fish or vegetables; sometimes there is also a piece of meat, cooked or fried. Supper is usually the same as breakfast. I always feel hungry after meals, but fortunately I still have some American crackers. Everyone watches anxiously if there is an unoccupied seat at the table. In their eyes I read the frank hope that the missing one may not come: there will be a little more soup left for the others.
The Ukrainians bring “private packages” to the table—chunks of salo (fat) or pork sausage, wrapped in pieces of paper written on both sides. Yesterday I casually glanced at one of these wrappers. It was a circular letter of the Tsarist police, descriptive of a man charged with the murder of his brother. It was evidently torn out of an office file. Paper is scarce, and even old newspapers are too valuable to be used as wrappers.
The Ukrainians never offer their delicacies to their neighbors at table. Today at dinner I placed my can of condensed milk before the man at my side, but he needed urging before he dared use some in his coffee. I asked him to pass it around. In consternation he protested, “Tovarish, keep it for yourself, you’ll need it.” All the others declined at first, but their eyes burned with desire for the “American product.” The can was emptied quickly amid the general smacking of lips and words of admiration in Slavic superlatives. “Miraculous, worshipful,” they cried.
I spend considerable time with the Ukrainians, learning much about their country, its history, language, and its long revolutionary struggle. Most
