“Your cousin?”
“Oh, she is doing well. With some Communist. I’m all alone in the world now.”
“Poor Lena,” escapes me.
“Oh, I don’t want your pity,” she cries disconsolately. “Wish I’d died with mother.”
Further on the Tverskaya I find “Golos Truda,” the Anarchist publishing house, closed, a Cheka seal on the lock. A man is peering through the window at the havoc wrought within by the raiders. His Red Army cap does not conceal the fresh scars on his head. With surprise I recognize Stepan, my Petrograd soldier friend. He had been wounded in the Kronstadt campaign, he informs me; the Petrograd hospitals were crowded, and he was sent to Moscow. Now he has been discharged, but he is so weak he is barely able to walk.
“We crossed the Neva at night,” he relates; “all in white shrouds like so many ghosts—you couldn’t tell us from the snow on the frozen river. Some of the boys didn’t want to advance,” he looks at me significantly. “The Communist detachment back of us trained machine guns on them—there was no hesitating. The artillery belched from our side; some shots fell short, striking the ice just in front of us. In a flash whole companies disappeared, guns and all, sunk into the deep. It was a frightful night.” He pauses a moment; then, bending close to me, he whispers: “In Kronstadt I learned the truth. It’s we who were the counterrevolutionists.”
The Universalist Club on the Tverskaya is deserted, its active members imprisoned since the Kronstadt events. Anarchists from various parts have been brought to the city, and are now in the Butirki and Taganka jails. In connection with the growing labor discontent severe reprisals are taking place against the revolutionary element and the Communist Labor Opposition which demands industrial democracy.
The situation handicaps the work of the Peter Kropotkin Memorial Committee, in the interests of which I have come to the capital. The Moscow Soviet passed a resolution to aid “Golos Truda” in the publication of the complete works of the great Anarchist thinker, but the Government closed the establishment. The Soviet also donated the house where Kropotkin was born as a home for the Museum, but every attempt to get the place vacated by the Communist organization now occuping it has failed. The official attitude negates all our efforts.
—Unexpected visitors today. I sat in my room (in the apartment of a private family in Leontievsky Alley) when an official entered, accompanied by the house porter and two soldiers. He introduced himself as an agent of the newly organized department “for the improvement of the workers’ mode of life,” and I could not suppress a smile when he solemnly informed me that the campaign for the benefit of the proletarians is directed by the Cheka. Better quarters are to be put at the disposal of the toilers, he announced; my room is among those to be “requisitioned” for that purpose. I should have to leave within twenty-four hours.
In entire sympathy with his object, I called the official’s attention to the utter impossibility of securing even bed space at such short notice. Permission and “assignments” must first be procured from the Housing Bureau, a procedure which at best takes a week’s time; often it requires months. Without deigning a reply the Chekist stepped into the hallway; opening the first door at hand, he said curtly: “You can stay here in the meantime.”
A burst of soapy vapor swept against us. Through the clouds of steam I discerned a bedstead, a little table, and a woman bending over the washtub.
“Tovarish, here lives—,” the house porter remarked timidly.
“It’s big enough for two,” the official retorted.
“But it’s occupied by a woman,” I protested.
“You’ll manage somehow,” he laughed coarsely.
Days spent at the offices of the Housing Bureau bring no results. But a week passes, then another, and no tenants appear to claim my room. The department for the “improvement of the workers’ mode of life” is apparently more interested in “requisitioning” occupied lodgings than in putting them at the disposal of the proletarians. Only influence in high places or a generous “gift” secures the favor.54
Unexpectedly a friendly Communist comes to the rescue. It is arranged that my room be assigned to the Kropotkin Memorial Commission for an office: being the secretary I am permitted to retain it as my living quarters.
—Dark rumors circulate in the city. Three hundred politicals are said to have disappeared from the Butirki prison. Removed by force at night, it is reported; some executed. The Cheka refuses information.
Several days pass in tortuous uncertainty—many of my friends are among the missing. People living in the neighborhood of the prison tell of frightful cries heard that night and sounds of desperate struggle. The authorities profess complete ignorance.
Gradually the facts begin to leak out. It has become known that the fifteen hundred non-politicals in the Butirki had declared a hunger strike in protest against the unhygienic conditions. The cells were overcrowded and unspeakably filthy, the doors locked even by day, the toilet buckets seldom removed, poisoning the air with fetid smells. The sanitary commission had warned the administration of the imminent danger of an epidemic, but its recommendations were ignored. Then the strike broke out. On the fourth day some of the prisoners became hysterical. Unearthly yells and the rattling of iron doors shook the prison for hours, the uproar rousing the neighborhood in alarm. The politicals did not participate in the demonstration. Segregated in a separate wing, they had by collective action compelled concessions. Their situation was much more tolerable than that of the “common” prisoners. But their sense of human kinship determined them to intercede. Their expostulations finally induced the Cheka to declare the demands of the hunger strikers just and to promise immediate relief. Thereupon the “commoners” terminated their protest, and the incident was apparently closed.
But a few days later, on the night of April 25, a detachment of soldiers and Chekists suddenly appeared
