“I’m speaking the truth,” the prisoner retorts unabashed. “We employed obstruction tactics: we smashed everything in our cells and we defied the keepers. They threatened us with violence, and we all declared a hunger strike. On the seventh day they consented to leave our doors open. Now we can breathe the corridor air at least.”
“That is enough,” the guide interrupts.
“If we are deprived of the peredatcha we’ll start a hunger strike again,” the girl declares as she is led away.
In the death house the cell doors are closed and locked. The occupants are invisible, and an oppressive silence is felt in the living tomb. From somewhere a short, hacking cough strikes upon the ear like ominous croaking. Slow, measured steps resound painfully through the narrow corridor. A foreboding of evil hangs in the air. My mind reverts to a similar experience long buried in the recesses of my memory—the “condemned” gallery of the Pittsburg jail rises before me. …
The guard accompanying us lifts the lid of the observation “eye” out into the door, and I look into the death-cell. A tall man stands motionless in the corner. His face, framed in a thick black beard, is ashen gray. His eyes are fastened on the circular opening, the expression of terror in them so overwhelming that I involuntarily step back. “Have mercy, tovarish,” his voice comes as from a grave, “oh, let me live!”
“He appropriated Soviet funds,” the woman guide comments unemotionally.
“It was only a small sum,” the man pleads. “I’ll make it good, I swear it. I am young, let me live!”
The guide shuts the opening.
For days his face haunts me. Never had I seen such a look in a human before. Primitive fear stamped upon it in such relief, it communicated itself lingeringly to me. Terror so absolute, it turned the big, powerful man into a single, all-absorbing emotion—the mortal dread of the sudden call to face his executioner.
As I note down these experiences in my Diary, there come to me the words of Zorin. “The death penalty is abolished, our prisons empty,” he had said to me soon after my arrival in Russia. It seemed natural, self-evident. Have not revolutionists always opposed such barbarous methods? Was not much of Bolshevik popularity due to their condemnation of Kerensky for restoring capital punishment at the front, in 1917? My first impressions in Petrograd seemed to bear out Zorin’s statement. Once, strolling along the river Moika, there came to my view the big prison demolished at the outbreak of the Revolution. Hardly a stone was left in place—cells, floors, ceilings, all were a mass of debris, the iron doors and steel window bars a heap of twisted junk. There lay what had once been a dreaded dungeon, now eloquent of the people’s wrath, blindly destructive, yet wise in its instinctive discrimination. Only part of the outer walls of the building remained; inside everything had been utterly wrecked by the fury of age-long suffering and the leveling hand of dynamite. The sight of the destroyed prison seemed an inspiration, a symbol of the coming day of liberty, prisonless, crimeless. And now, in the Cold Hill death house. …
XXVII
Further South
—Slowly our train creeps through the country, evidence of devastation on every hand reminding us of the long years of war, revolution, and civil strife. The towns and cities on our route look poverty-stricken, the stores are closed, the streets deserted. By degrees Soviet conditions are being established, the process progressing more rapidly in some places than in others.
In Poltava we find neither Soviet nor Ispolkom, the usual form of Bolshevik government. Instead, the city is ruled by the more primitive Revkom, the self-appointed revolutionary committee, active underground during White regimes, and taking charge whenever the Red Army occupies a district.
Krementchug and Znamenka present the familiar picture of the small southern town, with the little marketplace, still suffered by the Bolsheviki, the center of its commercial and social life. In uneven rows the peasant women sprawl on sacks of potatoes, or squat on their haunches, exchanging flour, rice, and beans for tobacco, soap, and salt. Soviet money is scorned, hardly anyone accepting it, though tsarskiye are in demand and occasionally kerenki are favored.
The entire older population of the city seems to be in the market, everyone bargaining, selling, or buying. Soviet militsioneri, gun slung across the shoulder, circulate among the people, and here and there a man in leather coat and cap is conspicuous in the crowd—a Communist or a Chekist. The people seem to shun them, and conversation is subdued in their presence. Political questions are avoided, but lamentation over the “terrible situation” is universal, everyone complaining about the insufficiency of the pyock, the irregularity of its issue, and the general condition of starvation and misery.
More frequently we meet men and women of Jewish type, the look of the hunted in their eyes, and more dreadful become the stories of pogroms that had taken place in the neighborhood. Few young persons are visible—these are in the Soviet institutions, working as the employees of the government. The young women we meet occasionally have a startled, frightened look, and many men bear ugly scars on their faces, as if from a saber or sword cut.
In Znamenka, Henry Alsberg, the American correspondent accompanying our Expedition, discovers the loss of his purse, containing a considerable amount of foreign money. Inquiries of the peasant women in the marketplace elicit only a shrewdly naive smile, with the resentful exclamation, “How’d I know!” Visiting the local police station in the faint hope of advice or aid, we learn that the whole force has just been rushed off to the environs reported to be attacked by a company of Makhnovtsi.
Despairing of recovering our loss, we return to the railroad station. To our astonishment the Museum car is nowhere to be seen. In consternation we
