“Do you want entire separation?”
“No. We want to be federated with R.S.F.S.R., but not subject. We are as good Communists as they in Moscow, but our influence here would be much greater were we left free to act. We know the conditions and needs of the people better than those who sit in the Kremlin. Take, for instance, the recent wholesale suspension of the union management. It has antagonized the entire labor element against us. The same is happening in the other Soviet institutions. Only yesterday a chauffeur complained to me about our ‘Moscow methods.’ The man had been ordered to the front, but his wife died recently, leaving a paralytic boy on his hands. He has been trying to get his child into some hospital or home, but his petition, in the Ukrainian language, has been returned to him with the order to ‘write it in Russian.’ And that after two weeks of waiting! Now the man is to join his regiment within two days. Do you wonder that the people hate us? The ‘center’ ignores our suggestions, and we are powerless.”
Criticism of Moscow is general among the Ukrainian Communists. Often, to my surprise and consternation, I detect obvious antisemitism in their resentment of Kremlin domination. The anecdotes and puns circulating in Soviet institutions are tinged with this spirit, though some do not lack wit. Among the people at large hatred of the Jew is intense, though its active expression is held in abeyance. Yet not unfrequent are incidents such as happened this morning in the Podol, the proletarian district of the city, where a man ran amuck in the market, knife in hand, shouting: “Kill the Jews, save Russia!” He stabbed several persons before he was overpowered. It is said that the man was crazed by hunger and illness, but his sentiments are unfortunately too popular to require such an explanation.
Kiev, in the heart of the former ghetto, has lately still more increased its Hebrew population, come to the larger city in the hope of finding comparative safety from the continual wave of pogroms which swept the province since 1917. Whoever the changing political masters—with the sole exception of the Bolsheviki—the Jew was always the first victim, the eternal martyr. It is the concurrence of opinion that Denikin and the Poles were the most brutal and ruthless. Under the latter even Kiev was not free from antisemitic excesses, and in the Podol pogroms took place repeatedly.
In the city library, in a recent publication by a man of great literary and intellectual attainments, I read: “Pogroms are sad, but if that is the only way to get rid of the Bolsheviki, then we must have pogroms.”
XXX
In Various Walks
By the aid of R⸺, the secretary of an important labor union, I have gathered much valuable material for the Expedition. R⸺ is a Menshevik who has in some unexplained manner escaped the recent “cleaning process.” His known popularity among the workers, he believes, has saved him. “The Bolsheviki are keeping an eye on me, but they have left me alone so far,” he said significantly.
Familiar with the city, its museums, libraries, and archives, R⸺ has been a great help in my quest for data and documents. Much that is valuable has been lost, and still more has been destroyed by the workers themselves, in the interests of their safety, at the time of German occupation and White Terror. But a considerable part of the labor archives has been preserved, sufficient to reconstruct the history of the heroic struggle of the unions since their inception and throughout the stormy days of revolution and civil war. All through the Mensheviki played the role of the intellectual leaders, with the Bolsheviki and Anarchists as the revolutionary inspiration of the workers.
The headquarters of the Labor Soviet have somehow become the depository of a strange documentary mixture. Police and gendarme records, the minutes of Duma sessions, and financial statistics have found their way there, only to be forgotten. By a curious chance the first Universal of Petlura, a rare document containing the original declaration of principles and aims by the Ukrainian national democracy, has been discovered by me in a neglected drawer. A Communist official claims it as his “personal possession,” with which, however, he is willing to part for a consideration. In view of the large price demanded, the matter has now become a subject of correspondence with the Museum.
In Menshevik circles feeling against the Bolsheviki is very bitter. It is the general sentiment among them that the Communists, formerly Social Democrats, have betrayed Marx and discredited Socialism. “Asiatic revolutionists,” R⸺ calls them. There is no difference between Trotsky and the hangman Stolypin, he asserts; their methods are identical. Indeed, there was more political life under Nicholas II than there is today. The Bolsheviki, alleged Marxists, think by decrees and terror to alter the immutable law of social evolution; to skip several steps at once, as it were, on the ladder of progress. The February Revolution was essentially bourgeois, but Lenin attempted to turn it by the violence of an insignificant minority into a social revolution. The complete debacle of all hopes is the result. The Communists, R⸺ believes, cannot last much longer. Russia is on the verge of utter economic collapse. The old food reserves are exhausted; production has almost ceased. Militarization of toil has failed. Trotsky’s calculations of the progressive increase of the output on the “labor front” have been exploded like Bolshevik prophecies of world revolution. The factory is not a battlefield. Converting the country into a camp of forced labor is not conducive to creative effort. It has divided the people into slaves and slave drivers, and created a powerful class of Soviet bureaucrats. Most significant of
