by James Cook
Except for Eddie’s involvement, I couldn’t have cared less about the principles at stake. If you were going to commit your mind to somebody else’s dictation, I couldn’t see that it much mattered whether that dictation came from Moscow or the party headquarters on East 13th Street. Either way, you had given up all that mattered about yourself, just as a medieval serf did in pledging fealty to his lord, or as some hooded monk, or bare-skinned savage did in bowing to his omnipotent god.
But at least the lord was your own, Eddie explained to me, one you had chosen to serve, not one imposed on you from outside. So you all had to stick together, even if you weren’t in perfect agreement on everything. I suppose I saw his point, except that if you’re building a heaven on earth, I’d have thought that you’d start by ensuring the freedom of every person to think for himself.
Sure, you want everybody to have the minimal necessities of life—enough to eat, a decent place to live and raise children, education, health care, and all that. But beyond that, what? There’s the consolation of god’s grace, of course, the streets paved with gold, and harps to play for your amusement. But it sounds pretty boring. The Muslims at least offer a paradise of unending sensual delight—nubile loveliness in diaphanous bloomers—slim limbs and lissome loins, rosebud breasts and languorous eyes—the promise of unending orgasm. Whether that’s heaven for women I wouldn’t have any idea, but for most men I would guess even perpetual foreplay and orgasm could lose its appeal after a while. And once people set about engineering heaven on earth, utopia has a way of turning into nightmare—regimentation, beautifully organized prison systems in which men and women are made happy by decree, like it or not. If life is anything, it has to be more than that.
Until the morning after that last Comintern session, I doubt if any of the American delegates realized they were captives of the Soviet government. They had done what they had come to Moscow to do, but having done that, they couldn’t just get on the next train for Berlin and go home. You came to Russia, you surrendered your passport to the government, and once you’d done that, you couldn’t leave until the government gave it back.
You might think that retrieving a passport would be as simple as picking it up from the desk of your hotel, but the Soviet bureaucracy was notoriously, if not deliberately, inefficient, and it could sometimes take months and even years to locate a passport, process it, and issue an exit visa. So Eddie and his colleagues began what became a daily ritual. Walk down to the passport office, wait for an hour or two in the corridor before making the trip to the desk and asking in English or fumbling Russian for the missing passport, and then, after waiting for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, be told that the agency had still not been able to locate it, come back tomorrow.
I tried to find out what was going on from Tania, but all she would tell me was that as far as she was concerned these people no longer existed. What did they have to complain about? she wanted to know. The government gave them a weekly stipend, more than most Russians earned in a year, that enabled them to live lavishly in the fleshpots if they chose, in the bars and coffee shops, the theatres and cabarets. They could even investigate some of Moscow’s unprecedented cultural achievements—its museums, opera, ballet, its universities and institutes—but she knew that Americans were such barbarians they would be incapable of appreciating them.
But most of the delegates hadn’t come to Russia as tourists. They were in Moscow to make a political and philosophical point. Having done that they had nothing to do with themselves except wait—and make the daily visit to the passport control office.
In another country they could have gotten a new passport at the American embassy, but there was no American embassy in Moscow or anywhere else in Russia. The U.S. had broken off diplomatic relations during the revolution and never restored them, and so if an American citizen ran into problems he had no place to turn. Sometimes he could get help from the embassies of countries friendly to the U.S.—the British, the Dutch, the Danes—but often they could do nothing and he would have to begin investigating ways of slipping over the border and throwing himself on the mercy of the Poles, Germans, Swedes, or Finns.
I learned later that the government’s passport control operations had become part of a counterfeiting operation run by the secret police. Passports would he copied, supplied with different photographs, and used by communist agents elsewhere in the world on matters of high importance. Sometimes you got back the original passport you had surrendered and sometimes a skillful counterfeit.
And so, while the American delegates waited for their passports, they didn’t know what to do with themselves. Eddie had begun hanging out in the all-night bar at the Lux. Everybody drank too much, sang too many songs, all those Wobbly songs that had stirred the hearts of an earlier generation, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “Hallelujah, I’m a bum,” and so on. Eddie was no longer the man who had come to dinner that first night at Red House, the man who drank nothing stronger than water. I suppose he had become the labor organizer again, assuming the open-hearted character that was his when he came to some backwater town and lifted a few with the boys.
I was always amazed at the ease with which people involved with the party changed their names and identities to reflect the needs of the moment, as if they had no identity other than what the party invested them with. Some say it’s a hangover from the days when the party was underground, a secret society as cabalistic as any religious or fraternal organization. I don’t doubt that’s true, but I think it also comes from some basic need peculiar to people caught up in the party to release themselves to some transcendent force, the way nuns or brothers change their names when they join the orders of the church. The practice applied to everybody, pervaded the entire organization. Look at Lenin, little Vladimir Ulyanov, or Trotsky, the firebrand Jacob Bronstein, or the Georgian seminary student who transformed himself from Joseph Dzhugasvili into Koba and finally into Steel, dictator of the proletariat and all others who would worship him: the president of the Soviet Republic, Joseph Stalin.
Eddie and I saw each other a couple of times after the Comintern meeting was over, once at the office after the staff had gone home, another time in a coffee bar in the Arbat, and a third in the library at Red House. Eddie was seeing the city and the country with what to me were fresh eyes. Unlike him, I had discovered Moscow and Russia by living there and gradually becoming a part of it—whereas Eddie had this new world suddenly dumped upon him, and it came like an electric shock. I don’t know how he could have spent most of his adult life amid so much violence and pain without losing his sense that it was possible to create something better but he had, and now he awoke to reality.
What I saw when I looked around me was the spreading drabness of life in the city, its fading intellectual excitement and artistic vitality. The government was closing down the cabarets, one after another. It had begun dictating what music could be played and listened to, what books could be published, what the public could see in the museums, what newspapers and magazines they could read.
Eddie wasn’t concerned about any of this. What upset him were things that I had long since become so accustomed to that I never noticed them anymore—not just the peasants from god knows where in their birch-bark shoes, rope belts, sheepskin coats, and exotic eyes, speaking languages that sounded like nothing you had ever heard in your life. He saw things that back in New York, Pittsburgh, or Hell’s Kitchen would have provoked him to outrage but in Moscow elicited only a painful and spreading melancholy—young girls walking the Tsverskaya, the homeless children in the railroad stations warming their hands over flaming barrels, the beggars shaking their cups on the street, dealers in cocaine, heroin, and hashish, the women lined up before dawn in front of the co-op stores on the Tverskaya, people scavenging the garbage dumps, the slums in back of the Khitrov market, with a half-dozen people crowded into rooms too small for two. By now, these were things that I no longer ever questioned, and that, like most other people in Moscow, I simply dismi
ssed as the just desserts meted out to those who had sought to undermine the country—the aristocrats, the saboteurs, the counterrevolutionaries. Among whom, but for the grace of happenstance, you nonetheless knew you might find yourself.
I tried to explain this attitude to Eddie. These people were reactionaries, kulaks, counterrevolutionaries, and they had brought all their misery on themselves. “You talk about justice, well, they deserved what they got. That’s what the average Russian would tell you. It’s what my wife, Tania, would say.”
“If that’s what they tell you,” Eddie said, “they’ve never been hungry or cold or homeless. They don’t know what justice is all about.”
Eddie had even taken the trolley ride to the new auto plant the Ford people were building for the Russians on the outskirts of Moscow, and talked with the Americans who were overseeing the shakedown of the plant and even with some of the workers. Things were worse than anything he’d ever come across back home. The workers were afraid of making any change in accepted procedures. If anything went wrong—if a piece of machinery broke down or they failed to meet production goals—they risked being charged with sabotage, exiled, and losing their wives and children.
He was fed up; he couldn’t stand the workers’ paradise and its hypocrisy any longer, he couldn’t stand the betrayal of the socialist cause he saw everywhere around him. He had no trouble with the government asking people to sacrifice their dreams and their lives to achieve a greater good for all mankind, but the sacrifices being made here were being made for the greater glory of the politicians and the bureaucracies.
But what outraged Eddie as much as anything was his discovery that the unspoken issue between the Comintern and the American party was the Jews. That was what was behind the Comintern’s order that the U.S. party set up independent communist unions in the U.S. parallel to the party-controlled unions already in existence. These unions were preponderantly Jewish, and Stalin wanted to make the party more acceptable in the United States as he had in Russia, by eliminating its predominantly Jewish coloration.
People who know about anti-Semitism only from what goes on in the U.S. don’t know what it’s really all about. The tsars had driven the Jews out of Russia into the border areas adjoining Poland and Roumania, the areas beyond the pale of settlement, as they called it. Although the revolution had undone that and Jews were permitted to move about as freely as any other Soviet citizens, anti-Semitism was as virulent as ever. When I first came to the country, there were people who used to refer to the revolutionary regime as the Jewish government—after all wasn’t Zinoviev’s real name Apfelbaum, Kamenev’s Rosenfield, and Trotsky’s Bronstein? But none of these men thought of themselves as Jewish, and people, by and large, didn’t either. Such attitudes began to change, however, when Stalin, the former seminary student, launched his assault on Jews in the mid-Twenties and now, at the end of the decade, on Gitlow, Lovestone, and Wolfe, the American Jews.
Eddie made me think about things that I had chosen to ignore. Somehow, I had come out of my family without any overwhelming concern for the inequities of the human condition or the capitalist system. I wasn’t even sure that capitalism wasn’t simply an invention of socialism, invent one and you inevitably invented the other. The way Christianity invented Paganism, the Jews, Gentiles, and the Greeks, Barbarians.
I think now I was more Russian than most of the Russian ideologues I knew—passive, resigned, fatalistic. I thought most of what happened to you in life was beyond your control, and there wasn’t very much you could do to change it. Things happened for good or ill for no very good reason, and somehow you learned to play the hand that was dealt you to the best of your ability. Now that I am nearing eighty, I like to think that I’ve done that—which I suppose is what these recollections are all about: the sweet cheat long, long gone.
What puzzled everyone in the days after the end of the Comintern meeting was that for nearly a week there had been no public report on the outcome. Pravda and Izvestia were silent, and so were all the government officials. The Moscow newspaper people already knew what had happened, but matters involving communist parties around the world were normally announced to the local party organization before there was any announcement to the Russian people, and nobody was going to break the news to the outside world without official permission.
The day after the meeting ended, Ben Gitlow, Bert Wolfe, and Jay Lovestone came to us looking for help. As Bert Wolfe explained it, they had sent a series of coded cables through the government telegraph office to the party’s headquarters in New York, but they’d got no response. They didn’t explain why it was so urgent that they get through, but from Eddie we knew of their plan to transfer the party’s American assets to themselves. However, time was beginning to run out. Gitlow had already been read out of the party, and it was only a matter of time before Wolfe and Lovestone followed.
I regularly sent dispatches to our London office by diplomatic pouch through the Danish embassy, and I told them I could try to smuggle something out with our dispatches. Giltow gave me some letters to be mailed in London, and I sent them on. They never got through. By the time those dispatches reached London, the letters had disappeared.
A day or two later, Lovestone, Gitlow and Wolfe showed up again at our offices on Koznetsky Most. They still hadn’t gotten through to New York. I didn’t see what else we could do, but I called Pop and told him what was happening. He said, “I have news for them. Walter Duranty told Manny this morning that Stalin had called in the foreign press yesterday afternoon and announced the Comintern’s ruling on the American party. He also announced that the leaders of the American party were being ousted.”
So that was the end of it. Stalin had outfoxed them again and used the Western press to do his dirty work for him. Now that the whole world knew that the leaders of the American party had been ousted, they would never be able to transfer the party’s assets to themselves. They knew at last what they had always suspected: that it was no accident that there had never been any response to their cables to New York. They had probably never been sent.
Such matters never really concerned me. What absorbed me in those days was my deteriorating relations with Tania. Her thirtieth birthday was coming up, that spring of 1929, and I decided I wanted to get her something out of the ordinary, something that would let her know she was someone special to me, someone I cared about deeply.
Svetlana Churnuchin suggested we go to one of the torgsins that had sprung up all over Moscow for the disposal of personal possessions. A torgsin was a sort of auction warehouse, with people squabbling over the articles for sale, bidding outrageous prices for stuff that was worth little or nothing, and selling others at a fraction of their true value. The flagging economy was putting a squeeze on people who had preserved their family heirlooms since before the revolution. Now these treasures began coming out of hiding—jewelry, art objects, paintings, antiques, sabers, fans, rare ceramics, miniatures, rugs. Svetlana and I found a pair of pendant emerald earrings that must once have graced the ears of a grand duchess or a tsarina. I found a former worker in the Fabergé shop who made a case for them, and we had an American-style birthday party, with candles on a cake and ice cream. The twins got tricornered party hats, balloons, and snappers to pull.
Toward the end of dinner I gave Tania her present and when she opened the box, I could see the delight reflected in her eyes. “Oh, Viktor,” she said, “oh, Viktor, how did you know?” She reached over put her hand on my face, and kissed me.
Only, the next time I saw those emeralds, a week or so later, Tania was in the arms of a slight, effete-looking young man on the dance floor of the Actor’s Club. His name was Valentin Nikitin. He was a poet, and was soon to be recognized as the brightest new star on the Russian literary horizon.
ii
The day after the ruling of the Comintern meeting became public, the government passport office abruptly began functioning again. The line was as long as ever, but after waiting three hours in the
corridors, Eddie found himself at its head. The comrade behind the counter checked the list he had on his clipboard, handed Eddie an envelope from the pile in a metal basket, and said with a friendly smile, “I am happy to report, Citizen Foss, that we have located your passport as we had promised. Your papers are now in order, and now you may leave for your home country whenever you choose.”
So could all the other working stiffs among the ten- or twelve-man American delegation. They got back their passports and began looking around for ways of getting back home again. The government had promised to provide return transportation, and it was as good as its word, but it left it to each delegate to make his own travel arrangements. Some decided to go home by train through Poland and Germany, to Bremerhaven and a steamer bound for the United States. Others took the train to Odessa on the Black Sea, where they found ships bound for Athens, Rome, and Marseilles and from there to the United States. One even braved the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok and a sea voyage to San Francisco.
And so a few days after Tania’s birthday party, we had a farewell party for Eddie at the Metropole. Except for the children, all the Fausts were there, along with Svetlana and Boris Churnuchin. Tania was overseeing a group of visitors to the Thirteenth Annual International Arts Festival, but somehow managed to break away. Now that the government had returned Eddie’s passport I suppose she could afford to risk being seen with him publicly. Even so, I chose to take that as evidence that, whatever had gone wrong, she was still one of us—my wife, a member of the family. The only outsiders were Gene and Billie Lyons, the newspaperman and his wife. Billie Lyons was a film actress who had made a couple of Russian movies, and we had met them not through the press office but through the theatrical crowd that Tania still cultivated. They were our best friends in Moscow, and Manny and Yelena’s as well.