“If anyone is to receive preference, I think it should be the workers,” I replied. “But they get almost the worst pyock.”
“What can we do, tovarish! If it were not for the cursed Allies and the blockade, we’d have food enough for all,” he said sadly. “But it won’t last long now. Did you read in the Izvestia that a revolution is to break out soon in Germany and Italy? The proletariat of Europe will then come to our aid.”
“I doubt it, but let’s hope so. In the meantime we can’t be sitting and waiting for revolutions to happen somewhere. We must exert our own efforts to put the country on its feet.”
The Commissar’s turn in line came, and he was called into an inner office. We had been waiting several hours in the corridors of the various bureaus. It seemed that almost every door had to be entered before a sufficient number of resolutsyi (endorsements) were secured, and the final “order” for supplies obtained. There was a continuous movement of applicants and clerks from office to office, everyone scolding and pushing toward the head of the line. The waiting men watched closely that no one got ahead of his proper place. Frequently someone would march straight to the office door and try to enter, ignoring the queue.
“Into the line, into the line!” the cry would be raised at once. “The sly one! Here we’ve been standing for hours, and he’s just come and wants to enter already.”
“I’m vne otcheredi” (not to wait in line), the man would answer disdainfully.
“Show your authorization!”
One after another came these men and women vne otcheredi, with slips of paper securing immediate admission, while “the tail” was steadily growing longer. “I’m standing three hours already,” an old man complained; “in my bureau people are waiting for me on important business.”
“Learn patience, little father,” a workman replied good-humoredly. “Look at me, I’ve been in line all day yesterday since early morning, and all the time these vne otcheredi kept coming, and it was 2 p.m. when I got through the door. But the chief there, he looks at the clock and says to me, says he, ‘No more today; no orders issued after 2 p.m. Come tomorrow.’ ‘Have mercy, dear one,’ I plead. ‘I live seven versts away and I got up at five this morning to come here. Do me the favor, golubtshik, just a stroke of your pen and it’s done.’ ‘Go, go now,’ the cruel one says, ‘I haven’t time. Come tomorrow,’ and he pushed me out of the room.”
“True, true,” a woman back of him corroborated, “I was right behind you, and he wouldn’t let me in either, the hard-hearted one.”
The Commissar came out of the office. “Ready?” I asked.
“No, not yet,” he smiled wearily. “But you’d better go home, or you’ll lose your dinner.”
In the Kharitonensky Sergei was waiting for me.
“Berkman,” he said, as I entered, “will you let me share your room with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been ordered to vacate. My time’s up, they say. But I have nowhere to go. I’ll look in the morning for another place, but meantime—?”
“You’ll stay with me.”
“But if the House Commissar should object?”
“Are you to be driven into the street in this frost? Remain on my responsibility.”
IX
The Club on the Tverskaya
In the “Universalist” Club on Tverskaya Street I was surprised to meet a number of the Buford deportees. They had grown tired waiting to be assigned to work in Petrograd, they said, and had decided to come to Moscow. They are quartered in the Third Soviet House, where they receive less than a pound of bread and a plate of soup as their daily ration. Their American money is spent: the Petrograd authorities had paid them 18 roubles for the dollar, but in Moscow they learned that the rate is 500. “Robbed by the great revolutionary Government,” Alyosha, the ship zapevalo, commented bitterly.
“We are selling our last American things,” Vladimir remarked. “It’s lucky some markets are open yet.”
“Trading is forbidden,” I warned him.
“Forbidden!” he laughed scornfully. “Only to the peasant women and the kids peddling cigarettes. But look at the stores—if they pay enough graft they can keep open all they want. You’ve never seen such corruption; America ain’t in it. Most of the Chekists are from the old police and gendarmery, and they graft to the limit. The militiamen are thieves and highwaymen that escaped being shot by joining the new police force. I had a few dollars when I came to Moscow; a Chekist changed them for me.”
People of every revolutionary tendency gather in the Club: moderate Left Social Revolutionists and the more extreme adherents of Spiridonova; Maximalists, Individualists, and Anarchists of various factions. There are old katorzhane among them who had passed years in prison and in Siberia under the old regime. Liberated by the February Revolution, they have since participated in all the great struggles. One of the most prominent is Barmash, who had been sentenced to death by the Tsar, somehow escaped execution, and later played a prominent role in the events of February and October, 1917. Askarev, for many years active in the Anarchist movement abroad, is now a member of the Moscow Soviet. B⸺ was a labor deputy in Petrograd during Kerensky’s time. Many others I have met at the “Universalist” headquarters, men and women grown gray and old in the revolutionary struggle.
There is great divergency of opinion in the Club about the character and role of the Bolsheviki. Some defend the Communist regime as an inevitable stage of the “transitional period.” Proletarian dictatorship is necessary to secure the complete
