“Will you help?” my sailor friend asked, “or have you entirely deserted us?”
“Perhaps you’ll soon be in the Party,” another remarked bitterly, “you’re a Bolshevik now, a Sovietsky Anarchist.”
In the hope that a reapproachment may still be established between the Communists and the Left elements, I consented.
Returning home that evening, I reflected on the failure of my previous efforts to bring about a better understanding between the warring revolutionary factions. I recalled my visits to Lenin and Krestinsky, my talks with Zinoviev, Chicherin, and other leading Bolsheviki. Lenin had promised to have the Central Committee consider the matter, but his reply—in the form of a resolution of the Party—merely repeated that “ideini Anarchists22 are not persecuted,” but emphasized that “agitation against the Soviet Government cannot be tolerated.” The question of legalizing Anarchist educational work, which I discussed with Krestinsky several weeks ago, has not been acted upon and has evidently been ignored. Persecution of the Left elements continues, and the prisons are filled with revolutionists. Many of them have been outlawed and compelled to “go underground.” Maria Spiridonova23 has for a long time been imprisoned in the Kremlin, and her friends are being hunted as in the days of the Tsar.
A sense of discouragement comes over me as I witness the bitter animosity of the Communists toward the other revolutionary elements. They are even more ruthless in suppressing the Left opposition than that of the Right. Lenin, Chicherin, and Zinoviev assured me that Spiridonova and her circle are dangerous enemies of the Revolution. The Government pretended to consider Maria insane and had placed her in a sanitarium, from which she recently escaped. But I had an opportunity to visit the young woman, who is again hiding as in the Romanov times. I found her perfectly well-balanced, a most sincere idealist passionately devoted to the peasantry and the best interests of the Revolution. The other members of her circle—Kamkov, Trutovsky, Izmailovitch—are persons of high intelligence and integrity. The Bolsheviki, they believe, have betrayed the Revolution; but they do not advocate armed resistance to the Soviet Government, demanding only freedom of expression. They consider the Brest peace as the most fatal Communist step, the beginning of their reactionary policies and of the persecution of the Left elements. In protest against it and against the presence of the representative of German imperialism in Soviet Russia, they caused the death of Count Mirbach in 1918.
The Communists have grown Jesuitical in their attitude to other viewpoints. Yet most of them I find sincere and hardworking men, devoted to their cause and serving it to the point of self-abnegation. Very illuminating was my experience with Bakaiev, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, with whom I interceded in behalf of three Anarchists arrested recently. A simple and unassuming man, I found him in a small unpretentious room in the Astoria, at dinner with his brother. They sat before a meager meal of thin soup and rice dessert; there was no meat and only a few slices of black bread. I could not help noticing that both men remained hungry.
Introduced by a personal note from Zinoviev, I appealed to Bakaiev for the prisoners, informing him that I knew them personally and considered their arrest unjustifiable.
“They are true revolutionists,” I urged. “Why do you keep them in prison?”
“In the room of Tch⸺,” Bakaiev replied, “we found certain apparatus.”
“Tch⸺ is a chemist,” I explained.
“We know it,” he retorted; “but anti-Soviet handbills had been found in the factories, and my men thought they might have some connection with Tch⸺’s laboratory. But he stubbornly refused to answer questions.”
“Well, that’s an old practice of arrested revolutionists,” I reminded him.
Bakaiev grew indignant. “That is why I’m holding him,” he declared. “Such tactics were justified against the bourgeois regime, but it is an insult to treat us so. Tch⸺ acts as if we were gendarmes.”
“Do you think it matters by whom one is kept in jail?”
“Well, don’t let us discuss it, Berkman,” he said. “You don’t know for whom you are interceding.”
“And the other two men?”
“They were found with Tch⸺,” he replied. “We are not persecuting Anarchists, believe me; but these men are not safe at liberty.”
I appealed to Ravitch, the Commissar of Internal Affairs for the Petrograd District, a young woman with the impress of tragic revolutionary experience on her comely face. She regretted that she could do nothing, the Cheka having exclusive authority in such matters, and referred me to Zinoviev. The latter had not been informed of the arrests, but he assured me I need not be anxious about my friends.
“You know, Berkman, we do not arrest ideini Anarchists,” he said; “but those people are not your kind. Anyhow, rest easy; Bakaiev knows what he is about.”
He slapped me cheerfully on the shoulder and invited me to join him in the Imperial loge at the ballet that evening.
Later I learned that Bakaiev was suspended and exiled to the Caucasus for his too zealous use of summary execution.
—This morning, on the fifth day of the Burtiki hunger strike, I called at the offices of the Central Committee of the Party, on Mokhovaia Street. As on my previous visit the anterooms were crowded with callers; numerous clerks, mostly young girls in abbreviated skirts and high-heeled lacquered shoes, flitted about with arms full of documents; others sat at desks writing and sorting large piles of reports and dokladi. I felt in the whirl of a huge machine, its wheels unceasingly revolving above the beehive on the street and grinding out slips of paper, endless paper for the guidance of the millions of Russia.
Preobrazhensky, formerly Commissar of Finance and now in Krestinsky’s place, received me somewhat coldly. He had read the protest
