In my regiment we had no cultural-enlightenment committee. Being unnecessary for purposes of control they were not so universal as the “cells,” but depended to some extent for their establishment upon the enterprise of the commissar. Living, however, mostly in Petrograd, I came in touch through friends with other regiments than my own, and attended entertainments got up by cultural-enlightenment committees until I knew the propagandist speeches, which were always the same, almost by heart. Let me describe one such meeting. It was in the regiment of which Morozov was commissar. At this particular meeting I was to have functioned as amateur accompanist and should have done so if one of the singers, from a Petrograd theatre, had not unexpectedly brought a professional with her.6
The organizer of this entertainment, though he played but little part in the performance, deserves a word of mention. As a sailor, of about twenty years of age, he differed greatly from his fellows. He was not ill-favoured in looks, unintelligent but upright, and occupied the post of chairman of the Poor Committee of a house where I was an habitual visitor. I will refer to him as Comrade Rykov. Like Morozov, Rykov had had only an elementary education and knew nothing of history, geography, or literature. History for him dated from Karl Marx, whom he was taught to regard rather as the Israelites did Moses; while his conception of geography was confined to a division of the world’s surface into Red and un-Red. Soviet Russia was Red, capitalistic countries (of which he believed there were very few) were White; and “White” was an adjective no less odious than “bourgeois.” But Rykov’s instincts were none the less good and it was with a genuine desire to better the lot of the proletariat that he had drifted into “the party.” Under the Tsarist regime he had suffered maltreatment. He had seen his comrades bullied and oppressed. The first months of the revolution had been too tempestuous, especially for the sailors, and the forces at issue too complex, for a man of Rykov’s stamp to comprehend the causes underlying the failure of the Provisional Government. To him the Soviet Government personified the Revolution itself. A few catchphrases, such as “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “tyranny of the bourgeoisie,” “robber-capitalism,” “Soviet emancipation” completely dominated his mind and it seemed to him indisputably just that the definition of these terms should be left absolutely to the great ones who had conceived them. Thus Rykov, like most Communists, was utterly blind to inconsistencies. The discussion of policy, especially of foreign policy, of which the rest of the world hears so much, was not attempted by him. Rykov accepted his directions unhesitatingly from “those who knew.” He never asked himself why the party was so small, and popular discontent he attributed, as he was told to do, to the pernicious agitation of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were but Monarchists in disguise. Rykov was the type of man the Bolsheviks were striving their utmost to entice into the Communist Party. He had three supreme recommendations: he was a untiring worker, his genuinely good motives would serve to popularize the party, and he never thought. It is independent thinkers the Bolsheviks cannot tolerate. Rykov, like a good Communist, accepted the dogma propounded from above and that was the alpha and omega of his creed. But when it came to doing something to improve the lot of his fellows, and, incidentally, to lead them into the true Communist path, Rykov was all there. In other realms he would have made an ideal Y.M.C.A. or Salvation Army worker, and it was not surprising that he was in great demand whenever it was a question of amusing or entertaining the soldiers.
The hall was decorated with red flags. Portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and of course of Karl Marx, wreathed in red bunting and laurels, decorated the walls. Over the stage hung a crude inscription painted on cardboard: “Long live the Soviet Power,” while similar inscriptions, “Proletarians of all countries, unite,” and “Long live the World Revolution,” were hung around. The audience, consisting of the regiment and numerous guests, sat on wooden forms and disregarded the injunction not to smoke.
The entertainment began with the singing of the “Internationale,” the hymn of the World Revolution. The music of this song is as un-Russian, unmelodious, banal, and uninspiring as any music could possibly be. To listen to its never-ending repetition on every possible and impossible occasion is not the least of the inflictions which the Russian people are compelled to suffer under the present dispensation. When one compares it with the noble strains of the former national anthem, or with the revolutionary requiem which the Bolsheviks have happily not supplanted by any atrocity such as the “Internationale” but have inherited from their predecessors, or with national songs such as “Ey, Ukhnem,” or for that matter with any Russian folk-music, then the “Internationale” calls up a picture of some abominable weed protruding from the midst of a garden of beautiful and fragrant flowers.
The “Internationale” was sung with energy by those in the audience who knew the words, and the accompanist made up with bombastic pianistic flourishes for the silence of those who did not.
Nothing could have afforded a more remarkable contrast than the item that followed. It was an unaccompanied quartette by four soldiers who sang a number of Russian folk-songs and one or two composed by the leader of the four. If you have not listened to the Russian peasants of a summer evening singing to accompany their dances on the village green, you cannot know exactly what it meant to these peasant soldiers, cooped in their city barracks, to hear their songs re-sung. The singers had rehearsed carefully, the execution was excellent, the enthusiasm they aroused was unbounded, and they were recalled again and again. They would probably have gone on endlessly had not the Jewish agitator, who was acting
