As in other Soviet cities, the population is supplied with a bread and products card. But except Communists, very few receive enough bread to exist. On the “bourgeois” categories none has been issued for months; in fact, since the Bolsheviki took Odessa in January. Occasionally a little salt, sugar, and matches are rationed out.
“Fortunately the markets are still permitted to exist,” Semyon explained. “The government cannot press out enough bread of the farmers to feed the cities. The pyock is mostly a vision. That reminds me of a certain commissar in our department, a rare type of Communist, for he has a sense of humor. Once I asked him why the Bolsheviki nationalized everything except the izvostchiki.42 His reply was characteristic. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we found that if you don’t feed human beings, they continue to live somehow. But if you don’t feed horses, the stupid beasts die. That’s why we don’t nationalize the cabmen.’ ”
Life is indeed stronger than decrees; it sprouts through every crevice of the socialist armor. When private trade was forbidden and only the cooperatives were permitted to continue, all business places suddenly became inspired by feelings of altruism, and every store was decorated with the sign of the Epo (cooperative). Later, when the cooperatives were also closed and only kustarnoye (small scale) production remained legal, all the little stores began manufacturing cigarette lighters and rubber soles from stolen automobile tires. Subsequently new decrees were issued permitting trade only in articles of food. Thenin every store window there appeared bread and tea surrogates, while other wares were sold in the rear rooms. Finally all food stores were closed; now the illicit trade is transferred to the storekeeper’s home, and business is done on the back stairs.
“The Bolsheviki want to abolish private trade and destroy speculation,” Semyon remarked; “they want everyone to live exclusively by his labor. Yet in no place in the world is there so much speculation as in Russia; the whole country is swept by its fever. ‘Nationalization of trade means that the whole nation is in trade,’ our wits say. The truth is, we have all become speculators,” he continued sadly. “Every family now depends more on the sale of its table and bed linen than on the salaries paid by the Soviet Government. The shopkeepers, having lost their shops, still remain traders; and they are now joined by those who formerly were workers, physical as well as intellectual. Necessity is stronger than laws, my dear friend. The real factory proletarians have become declassified: they have ceased to exist, as a class, because most of the factories and mills are not working. The workers flee into the country or become meshotchniki.43 The Communist dictatorship has destroyed, but it cannot build up.”
At the house of Dr. L⸺ almost nightly gather little groups of the local intelligentsia. A man of broad culture and tolerance, L⸺’s home is neutral ground for the most diverse political tendencies. His private sanatorium, beautifully situated on an enbankment washed by the Black Sea, was formerly famed as one of the best in Odessa. It has been nationalized, but the physician and his staff are exempt from professional mobilization and remain in charge. Dr. L⸺ is still permitted to receive a certain number of private patients, which privilege enables him to support himself and family in comparative comfort. In return he is obliged to treat without remuneration the sick assigned to the sanatorium by the authorities.
L⸺ and his wife, herself a graduate physician, are hospitable in the best Russian spirit. Though their present mode of living is far below that of former days, every comer finds a warm welcome which includes an invitation to the dining room—a custom now almost entirely fallen into disuse in Russia. With charming smile and graceful gesture Mme. L⸺ passes around tea, little lumps of yellow candy, homemade from beet sugar, and sandwiches, her manner quite innocent of any suggestion of the saving quality of her service to her famished guests.
The sanatorium was requisitioned for the “benefit of the proletariat,” the doctor informs me with a humorous twinkle in his eyes, but it is occupied exclusively by high Communist officials and several members of the Cheka. Among the latter is also a Commissar, who has repeatedly taken treatment in the institution. He suffers from acute neurosis and is an habitual user of cocaine. In spite of the near presence of the dreadful autocrat of life and death, great freedom of speech prevails in L⸺’s home. It is the tacit understanding among his guests that the place is a free forum, a “sanctuary for the crime of thought.” Yet I notice that when a Communist happens to be present, expression is less spontaneous, more controlled. I recall the arrest of the frequenters of a similar oasis in Moscow, betrayed by a member of the family, a Bolshevik. Might not such a misfortune also happen here? Yet Dr. G⸺, the Menshevik colleague of the host, is most outspoken against the Bolsheviki whom he holds up to ridicule, as counterfeit Marxists. The Zionists and literati present, among them Byalik, the greatest living Jewish poet, are more temperate in their criticism of the dictatorship. Their attitude is prompted by their love of the Jewry and its aspirations as a nation. They tell of the many vain efforts their most venerated representatives have made in the interests of justice to their coreligionists, only to be met with scorn and insult. R⸺, the noted Hebrew author, relates the incident of his visit to the chief of the Cheka, to seek protection for two friends unjustly accused of speculation and in danger of being shot. In the reception room, while awaiting audience with the predsedatel, he was abused by
