Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  It was probably at The Gallery that I last saw Herbert. One day shortly after I went underground, Herbert, Ulrich and I were in The Gallery together. It was hot, but Ulrich was pacing the floor, a nervous habit. He had taken off his jacket. I thought that his expensively tailored, but many-pleated gray trousers, his sweat-soaked silk shirt, slight stoop, and gait made him look a good deal like a gangster.

  Herbert was sitting on a wide couch behind a low coffee table.

  He would not have dreamed of taking off his jacket. He sat, stiff and soldierly. Suddenly, he said: “Bob, stand up in front of me.” I stood up. “Empty your pockets.” This was “pocket inspection,” to which Herbert subjected all underground workers at irregular intervals to see if they were violating the rule about not carrying notes or non-essential papers in their pockets. Since my suit was new, and I had not had time to turn my pockets into a filing case, I passed the inspection handily.

  Pocket inspection is my last clear recollection of Herbert, whom I was to see only three or four times before he faded from my horizon. I never asked, of course, what had become of him. But I know that eventually he returned to Russia. For Don talked with him in Moscow, in 1936, at the time when Don was engaged in a life and death battle of wits with the Fourth Section in the person of Colonel Uritzky (the nephew of Moses Uritzky, the organizer of the Red Terror).

  IX

  Like Herbert, Don too soon disappeared. I did not see him again for two or three years, when I would learn that, during his absence, he had set up an underground organization in California.

  When Don disappeared, Ulrich was, for a time, my only contact in the underground. He was a Russian who was also known as Walter. His real name, as I was to discover much later on (and as Scotland Yard and the F.B.I. have confirmed), was Alexander Ulanov.10 Before the Russian Revolution, Ulrich had been in a dozen jails in Russia and outside of it. He had been a fellow prisoner of Stalin’s in a sub-arctic Siberian prison camp, from which Ulrich made a sensational escape that briefly made him a hero of the revolutionary world. During the revolution and the civil war, he had been a partisan commander in southern Russia, where his exploits were legendary.

  He was a monkeyish little man, short, tough and agile. There was something monkeylike in his loose posture, in the droop of his arms and the roll of his walk (for some years, he had been, among other things, a sailor). There was something also monkeylike about his features, which were small, lined and alert. Sometimes, they seemed young for his age, which was about fifty (old for an underground worker). Sometimes, they seemed almost ageless. But it was his brown eyes that were most monkeylike, alternately mischievous and wistful. They had looked out on all life in four continents, from top to bottom, from stinking prison cells to diplomatic dinners, from violence in battle to conspiracy in peace. They had observed it all tranquilly, beyond the terms of any political theory or doctrine, with an instinctive charity that took the form of irony and pity, and the wisdom of a man who knows that amusement at the folly of life begins first of all with amusement at the folly of himself.

  Ulrich was a humble man (which sometimes made lesser people take him for less than he was), well aware of his own limitations, and not at all troubled by them. But his experience of life was great, his reading of men acute, though often he acted directly against what his intelligence told him about them. For his humanity was greater than anything else. And he had the rare faculty of seeing most things from a viewpoint outside of himself.

  I was once walking with him in Central Park when an eclipse of the sun began. He suggested that we sit on a bench and watch it. We sat perfectly silent while the light thickened into a brownish murk. In that strange obscurity, the man of violence suddenly said in a voice of tender concern: “The little birds and the animals, what can they possibly make of it?” Yet one of his favorite expressions was: “I’ll have you shot.” I never doubted that, in an ultimate sense, he meant what he said, that he would indeed shoot me if he felt that he must for the safety of the organization, or because he had been ordered to. He would merely recognize, as he had before in his experience, that there is a necessity under which all men live, and against which his natural impulse to mercy was powerless. I never doubted, either, that, if he could possibly do so, he would find a way to let me, or anybody else, escape, for he hated necessity’s brutal grip.

  He was a natural leader of men at the human level. “Bob,” he said to me at once by way of settling what our relationship was to be: “I will never ask you to do anything that I am afraid to do myself.” But as a kind of military man whom history has largely outmoded, he sometimes felt a twinge of childlike envy for those whom history had replaced him with. “Herbert,” he once said to me, “is a real soldier. He marches up to a regiment on the parade ground and shouts: ‘Salute!’ I can’t do that. If I know we have to take a dangerous position, I just say (with a forward jerk of his arm): ‘Come on, boys, we have to go up and take it.’”

  This curious man, the only Russian who was ever to become my close friend, was not a Communist. He had been a member of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party which, during the Russian Revolution, had gone over to the Bolsheviks. His wife (whom I was soon to meet in the underground as Elena and Maria) was a party member. She was the party’s eye on Ulrich—a loving eye, for they had been happily married for years. The party trusted Ulrich, insofar as it ever trusts anyone, because of his revolutionary past. Moreover, his son was kept as a hostage at school in Russia (the boy was killed fighting against the Germans during the Nazi invasion). For the complexities of Communist theory and the loopings of policy, Ulrich had an amused tolerance. He observed with the same detached amusement the foibles of Communists, especially of Communist intellectuals. (Ulrich himself was a proletarian, a former steel worker—but a proletarian who had read Byron as a boy, as he once told me, drawing a volume of the English Romantic from Paula Levine’s crowded bookshelves.)

  He once humorously pointed up the difference between the intellectual and the man of action in one of the stories of which he had scores. It was before the Russian Revolution. Ulrich had been arrested for political activities and was being marched in a mixed convoy of political prisoners and criminals to exile in Siberia. Now and again, the whole convoy had to halt while the snows melted and the roads opened to the east. To while away the time, a group of prisoners decided that each one should write out and read the story of his life. ‘“There was one young student,” said Ulrich. “He was just a boy. He had simply been arrested for reading some Marxist book. That was all. In his whole life, nothing had ever happened to him. But he wrote a long story, and, do you know, it was very interesting.

  “Then there was a criminal. He was a grown man. When his turn came, he said that he had no story. ‘Why?’ we asked. ‘Didn’t you agree to tell the story of your life?’ There is nothing to tell,’ he said. 'I killed a man. They sent me to Siberia. In prison, they beat me. With another convict, I escaped. We got lost in the taiga. We were starving. I killed my comrade and ate some of his flesh. If I had not killed him, he would have killed me. I went on. I met a bear. He attacked me. I had no knife, so I choked him with my hands. I ate some of the meat. So at last I escaped. What is there to tell?’”

  During the civil war, Ulrich had commanded an armored train that ran north out of Nikolaiev. “Bob,” he used to say to me, “if there is ever a revolution in America, get yourself an armored train. It is the only comfortable way to go through a revolution.” But Ulrich did not have great faith in an American revolution. “When the revolution comes here,” he once said, “it will only mean that the pants pressers are on strike and everybody has to go around without pants.”

  Once, during the civil war, two members of Ulrich’s partisan band were captured by the White Guards. They were to be executed on a square in Sebastopol. Troops were posted everywhere, but Ulrich had decided to save his men. Under a guard of soldiers, they were marched out on the square to be shot. Alone, armed only with two revol
vers, Ulrich opened fire on the troops. In a scene of truly Russian confusion, Ulrich and his two friends (for whom he had brought a revolver apiece), shot their way out and escaped.

  Ulrich’s wife told me that story. Ulrich told me another. In one pitched battle, his partisan forces were wiped out. Ulrich escaped by riding a horse until it foundered. Then he went on on foot. At last, he dropped, exhausted by combat and flight, on the banks of a little river and fell asleep. He awoke just at sunset and found two peasant children watching him. One of them was crying. He asked her why. “Because,” she said, “Ilyosha Ulanov has been killed.” (He made up another name when he told me the story.)

  “Do you know, Bob,” he said to me, “it is the strangest feeling to hear from a child that you are dead.”

  I did not care whether or not Ulrich was a Communist (it was some time before I discovered the fact that he was not). In him I felt the continuity of the revolutionary generations. In him, the wretched of the earth were no longer wretched. They had climbed to their feet in the dignity of effort and purpose to proclaim that they were the future. My work in the underground was a part of that revolutionary purpose. That feeling did not at all blind me to the fact that Ulrich himself was a rather careless underground worker.

  X

  One day Bedacht told me that “somebody” had been waiting in New York for some time to see my superior, and he was getting a little restless. Ulrich would know what it was all about. Ulrich did know at once, leading me to wonder then (as I was to wonder later) if there were not other means of communication between the underground and the open party in a Communist stratosphere closed to me.

  Ulrich explained to me that he himself did not wish to meet the man who was waiting to see him. The man was a possible recruit for underground work in “one of the most dangerous countries in Europe.” Bearing that in mind, I must meet him, said Ulrich, and decide whether I thought that the man was a good underground prospect.

  In a day or so, Bedacht introduced me to a young American of Finnish extraction. His name was Arvid Jacobson. He had been a schoolteacher in Michigan, but had given up his job and come to New York at the party’s orders. “Mrs. Morton” had recommended Jacobson, Bedacht said, as if he expected the name to electrify me. At that time, I had never heard of Mrs. Morton.

  Jacobson seemed to me a highly nervous young man, somewhat truculent and petulant—not unnaturally, perhaps, since he had been kept waiting and his money was running low. But temperament is as hazardous in the underground as in the crew of a submarine. Moreover, Jacobson had one or two fingers missing from one hand—too easy an identifying mark.11 Therefore, I advised against his use in the underground, especially in Europe. Despite that, Ulrich decided to meet Jacobson after all. I brought them together one day in Bryant Park, directly behind the New York Public Library. There I left them together.

  I did not hear of Arvid Jacobson again until 1935 when he was arrested in Finland in a roundup of a Soviet espionage network, one of whose members was Colonel Pentakainen, the photographer of the Finnish General Staff. Jacobson was imprisoned, but subsequently returned to the United States. Colonel Pentakainen escaped by dashing across the Russian frontier in a car which contained his last consignment of highly secret Finnish military documents. It was the break-up of this ring in Finland that led, shortly afterward, to the break-up of the Soviet ring in France to which belonged Paula Levine, the tenant of The Gallery.

  I presently asked Bedacht who Mrs. Morton was. He told me that she was the wife of Otto Kuusinen and that she had been working for some time in Detroit. Otto Kuusinen was for years a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International and chairman of its Anglo-American bureau. When Russia invaded Finland, in 1939, Kuusinen was head of the puppet government of Finland which issued proclamations from behind the Russian lines.

  One day Ulrich told me that he wished to visit Bedacht at his home. I arranged the meeting with Bedacht and then first learned from him where he lived. On an agreed night, Ulrich and I drove to Bedacht’s red-brick house which was far out in Brooklyn. Inside and out, it looked like the home of a prosperous storekeeper. The “kids to the number of acht” were present, but were soon sent upstairs or outdoors. Ulrich, Bedacht and I sat around the dining-room table. I had the impression that Ulrich and Bedacht had never met before. They presently fell into a rambling argument about modern warfare. The mousy member of the Central Committee was all for tanks and mechanization. Ulrich, the former commander of an armored train, thought that cavalry was by no means outmoded and that the horse still played an important part in the Red Army.

  When Ulrich had had enough of this, he asked me to leave the room. I went into the front living room. What the real business of the two men was I do not know. But as Ulrich parted from Bedacht in the hall, he slipped into his hand a large roll of bills, which Bedacht glanced at pleasurably. It was poor underground technique to pass this money in front of me. But that was Ulrich’s way.

  XI

  One day Max Bedacht handed me a slip of paper on which was written the name and address of a doctor or dentist. It was a Russian or Jewish name and the address, by a curious chance, was Lynbrook, two or three blocks from the house where I had passed most of my life. Bedacht was excited. The doctor was a Trotskyist, he said, and Ulrich would want to do something about him. “Something” —I supposed that that meant hidden pressures, threats or perhaps death.

  The slip of paper was my first challenge in the underground. Here, in a worse form, was the same malevolent force that in 1929 had driven me out of the open Communist party, reaching back again from the open party into the underground. Should I tear up the note? If I did, by the same action, I tore up the discipline that bound me as a Communist, and especially as an underground Communist. Moreover, my action would be futile. It would do the hunted man no good. It would almost certainly be found out. There would be penalties, probably severe penalties. I had a perfectly healthy fear of them. But that fear by itself would never have been enough to deter me. The real penalty that I feared was destroying my usefulness as a Communist. I gave the slip of paper to Ulrich and reported what Bedacht had told me. He glanced at it and thrust it into his pocket without comment.

  Weeks later, I was sitting with Ulrich one day, when he took the same slip of paper from his pocket and showed it to me. Looking at me steadily, he said: “I don’t think Uncle Joe (Stalin) would be interested in this. He has more important things to worry about.” Then he crumpled the slip of paper and tossed it away. At the same time, he smiled very faintly.

  It was a turning point in my experience as an underground worker, for to me it meant that at last I was working with an organization that understood that the revolution was not served by vengefully pursuing a Trotskyist dentist in a suburban village. It was also a turning point in my relations with Ulrich, for by his act, which was the same breach of discipline that I had lacked the will to make, he had consciously put himself at my mercy. At that moment, the relation between us ceased to be merely that of subaltern and superior, and became friendship. His deliberate look, passing into that fine smile, meant that each risked recognizing what the other was. It meant that we were revolutionists, not head-hunters.

  XII

  The Gallery was situated toward the outer edge of the underground’s system of headquarters and workshops. Maria led me a little farther toward the center of the underground. She first took me to the house on Gay Street.

  Maria was an underground pseudonym for Ulrich’s wife. Ulrich first brought us together at an Automat on Sixth Avenue near 42nd Street. As I watched her weave her way toward us between the tables, I had a first impression of a rather plump Russian woman in her early thirties, dark, with black bobbed hair. She wore a bright silk or rayon street dress without a jacket, and was hatless so that the big expensive brown leather briefcase she carried looked peculiarly incongruous. Maria was not beautiful, but she was striking-looking. There was an indolence about her movements (due perhaps to the f
act that she was naturally lazy and at that time pregnant), and an occasional expression of fixed fierceness about her black eyes (due perhaps to the fact that she was near-sighted and sometimes squinted).

  It was also due to something else. As a girl, Maria, like Ulrich, had taken part in the civil war in Southern Russia. During the French occupation of Odessa, she had remained within the city to carry on underground work. With another young Communist, who was little more than a boy, she was captured just as the French were evacuating Odessa. The pair were held for a short time and then ordered to be shot.

  Maria described the incident to me. “One day they stood us up against the wall of a building,” she said. “The French soldiers were drawn up with their rifles ready. I tried not to look at my comrade, who was crying. I wanted to give him an example. I knew that I should feel like a Bolshevik and be happy to die gloriously for the revolution. But all I could think of was my mother.”

  Maria survived because the underground Communists in Odessa got out a message to the Red Army whose artillery was posted on high ground commanding the city. The Red Army warned the French that if Maria and her companion were shot, it would shell the evacuation boats. While Maria and her comrade waited to be shot, they were suddenly told that they were free. It is unlikely that anyone who has survived such an experience ever again sees the sunlight and the trees in quite the same way as before. I came to think that much of Maria’s sloppiness, and occasional disregard for other people were less personal than a result of that ultimate experience—a kind of shrugging indifference toward the details of a life that can be terminated so tersely. For, like Ulrich, she understood what perhaps only those can understand who have lived close to the heart of the violence of our time—that it is “the strangest feeling to hear from a child that you are dead.”