Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

When we reached Moscow we saw a different Russia. Here were plenty of poor people, too, but there were also rich and well-fed ones, wearing handsome furs and satins and English woolens. They rode in carriages or hired droshkies and they talked in French as easily as in Russian, and many of them lived in France or Italy, but especially in France, for most of every year. Moscow was a handsome city, far more interesting to me than Saint Petersburg, but what impressed me, and perhaps depressed me, were the vast cathedrals, those palaces wherein the priests were the ruling princes. The lights, the gold and the silver, the immense and cavernous groined ceilings and in the naves the gilded images and jewelled icons, the smouldering incense and the thousands of candles, were in terrifying contrast to the ceaseless stream of poor people who came in to pray, their sad faces brooding and yearning. And what really broke the heart was the worship of the relics, the bits of dead saints, the fingerbone, the wisp of hair, the fragment of dried skin, which the ignorant pressed to their lips. It made me weep because it was so hopeless, the prayers lost and all the suffering still there. No wonder that a day was to come when the people turned in frightful anger even against the priests. “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”

And I wandered with my parents and a guide through the dark small rooms of the ancient parts of the Kremlin and I can still feel upon me the speechless weight of human history as the guide described the tortures of prisoners and the tribunal chambers under the Czars who had been despots, although the present family, he told us, was far more gentle than most of the Imperial Families had been, both the Czar and Czarina much absorbed with their children and especially with their son, the Crown Prince, who suffered from haemophilia. Yet it was this gentle family who a decade or so later was murdered by the angry people, who forgot their gentleness and remembered only that their rulers had done too little to make the lives of the people more bearable.

Even then, young as I was, I felt a fearful premonition of a world to come, when many innocent would suffer because of the anger of an outraged people. I remember hoping again and as usual, with a sort of awful fear, that my own would escape the punishment we did not deserve and that when the peoples of Asia rose up against the white men who had ruled them, Americans could be recognized as different. It was possible that the day would come, and now it has come, and, alas, even American boys lie dead in the earth of Korea.

Years later, after the revolution had broken in Russia and Communism had taken it over, I was curious to know how the people fared. Time was then in the middle of the Second World War and Russia was a friend and an ally and not yet a potential enemy to the United States, and we still had the will to understand each other. I did not want to go to Russia again, however. I cannot speak the language, and unless I can speak the language of a country I find myself constricted and consequently impatient. Moreover, I had already a deep distrust and fear of Communism, for by then I had seen its effects in China. Yet I knew that the average people of any country judge their government by what it does for them and not by its theory, and remembering the misery I had seen in Russia thirty years before, it seemed to me at that time quite possible that the new Russian government might have improved the lot of the common man. At least it could not be worsened. I sought and found, therefore, a Russian woman in New York, one young enough to have grown up under the new regime and yet old enough to have been born under the old, and we became friends. Our long discussions were so interesting to me that I put them verbatim, though arranged and edited, into a short book, entitled Talk About Russia. There Masha, the daughter of Russian peasants, told me the story of her life as a child and a young girl in a new Russia entirely strange to me. I could never have endured its restrictions, and yet I could see, nevertheless, that Masha had lived a better — that is, an easier — life than had her parents, and if I felt that the tyrannies of the new regime were intolerable, I had to agree that at least there were compensations in food and opportunities for education. Thus Masha’s parents were illiterate but she and her brothers and sisters all went to college at the expense of the State. It was easy to understand her enthusiasm for her own country as we wrote our book together.

Even so, we differed often. For example, when we came to the matter of the right of free speech, so dear to an American, Masha could not understand why I felt it was an essential for happiness as well as for democracy.

“You Americans are always wanting so much to talk!” she exclaimed. “Why do you need always to talk?”

And we differed, too, on the absolutes of right and wrong as well as on the right to one’s own beliefs. For example, two books on Russia had just been that year published, both by American writers. One was favorable, the other unfavorable to the Soviet system. This Masha could not understand.

“One of the two is right and therefore the other is wrong,” she declared with indignation. “The one that is right should be kept, the other should be abolished.”

“But Masha,” I reasoned, “every American has the right to decide for himself which book is true.”

“And if some decide one is true and some decide the other is true?” she inquired.

“They have the right to differ,” I said.

“You call it the right, I call it the confusion,” she retorted.

To such discussion there can be no end. We were in this way as far apart as our two countries, and yet we became dear friends, and have so remained, accepting our difference.

Not long ago, however, I asked Masha how she felt now about Russia. She has lived a long time in the United States as a citizen and the wife of a well-known American, and years have passed since our book was published. And she is very changed, in many ways, from the girl who had come, so young and so Russian, to live in New York. She had longed for her own country and had been homesick until her husband let her go to visit her Russian family, “not knowing,” he told me, “when I put her on the train, whether I would ever see her again.”

And on the train, Masha told me, she was set back, and not to say shocked, because some Russian officers who were her compartment mates treated her as an American instead of a fellow countrywoman.

“Did you visit your parents, Masha?” I asked.

Her mother and father had been central figures in our book together. They had reminded me of other peasant couples I had known in China, and though I had never seen them, I had grown fond of them. Mother had been the typical humble Russian peasant wife until the revolution came and then she had caught at the one straw which she could use, which was that women and men were to be equal. The next time Father raised his hand to emphasize a command by a blow she had stood her ground. “I have the same equality you have and I am not afraid,” she had told Father. “Father was better to Mother after the revolution,” Masha had said, “so he stopped beating her. When he was mad he still threatened her, but he was afraid to touch her.”

“I did visit my parents,” Masha now replied. “And they were well and happy and glad to see me. They are old and retired but they live comfortably.”

She laughed, her grey eyes crinkling. “Do you know what Father said to me the first thing? He had seen our book. Someone had read it aloud to him, and so he said, reproachfully, ‘Masha, your book was so nice, but only one thing was not nice. Why did you tell all those Americans how I beat Mother? I didn’t beat her so very hard!’”