Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The Bolsheviks still aimed to provide everyone with an abundance of material and cultural well-being. Schooling and health care were already free of charge. Wherever possible, housing was made available to the poor. Trade unions could take up the grievances of individual labourers. Party militants set about promoting working-class youngsters to posts of authority. The dream was to make the ‘proletarian state’ ever more proletarian.

The American journalist Anna Louise Strong, arriving in Russia at the outset of the New Economic Policy, bore witness to the preserved ideals. She reported that even entrepreneurs could be found imbued with enthusiasm for Bolshevism. In her account of a trip to the famine-afflicted Volga region she wrote in note form:

The little East-side Jew whom I met in Samara, the heart of the famine, and who went with me as interpreter to organize village kitchens. Speaking English with a vile accent and physically most unattractive. Then I learned that he was manager of two little factories which had just reopened, making doors and windows for the repairing of Samara. He was a machinist; he was so proud of the two or three machines he had put together, down in a country where even plain nails were not to be had. 2

Despite being a communist party member, he was proud of having obtained official permission to put his workers on to piecework. This way they earned the equivalent of fifteen dollars per month. He himself received only rations and lodgings; beyond that point, he worked for free. His wife had to work too, and his offspring had to be fed in a state children’s home. But he did not complain. He was ‘eager and energetic and happy to be building Russia’. 3

Strong may well have been, and indeed almost certainly was, one of those many foreigners who fell for a self-serving story. But the situation in Russia was anyway complicated. Its people were emerging from a period of military and political turmoil and trying to come to terms with the often convoluted ways of understanding and practising communism that were being set before them.

Ivy Litvinov directed a questioning gaze at the ambivalent lifestyles of most veteran Bolsheviks. Her scepticism began when she joined Maxim from London in Copenhagen in 1920: ‘You see, we lived in grand hotels and he wore fur coats and smoked enormous cigars and things like that. I’d never seen him so plutocratic, and we had cars all the time.’ 4But she also recalled an earlier incident which was in his favour. When he took the train for Moscow from Petrograd the railway officials gave him an empty carriage to himself. Discovering that other passengers had been ejected to accommodate him, he insisted on their reinstatement. 5Litvinov was far from being the only Soviet leader to undergo a ragged process of embourgeoisement . Krasin was a case in point. Attending a private dinner given in his honour by leading bankers at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon, he let himself go and said: ‘Communism as we have tried it has proved a failure and it must be modified.’ Some of the waiters were radical socialists and, overhearing these startling comments, halted work in the kitchen for a while. 6But the International News Service judged that ‘Krasin was just kidding the bankers along for the benefit of [Soviet] business.’ Even so, there was an increasing and unmistakable tendency for communist leaders to enjoy the pleasures of the old upper classes. Litvinov and Krasin were sincere communists; but although they were not sybaritic, they were starting to accept privilege as their right.

The American reporter Frank Mason saw Karl Radek as resistant to the sartorial drift of the Soviet elite and noted that he dressed ‘like a movie picture Bolshevic [ sic ]’. Mason commented: ‘You could pick him out without hesitation even were he seated in a room filled with stage anarchists.’ Radek had a fuzzy brown fringe of a beard, his hair was untroubled by a comb, and curls framed a face that was ‘delicate, almost womanly’. He wore a soiled fur-lined jacket and long, black-leather breeches. 7

Ivy Litvinov resented the communist milieu she found in Moscow. She disliked being introduced to everybody as Maxim’s marital adjunct and deposited with the wives of Soviet leaders who only wanted to talk about children or clothing. 8In the early 1920s the Litvinovs were living in the Kharitonenko House. 9Ivy’s great new friend was Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent Bolshevik whom she loved for her kindness and vivacity. 10This was not all that helpful for her husband’s career since Kollontai had emerged as a harsh critic of the Politburo and an advocate of the Workers’ Opposition. But the two women also came together for other reasons. Ivy was a devotee of D. H. Lawrence and, believing in free love, discovered a fellow spirit in Alexandra who scandalized most Russian communists with her uninhibited sexual liaisons. Ivy and Alexandra got on splendidly. They confided in each other about their disillusionment with communist leaders; and Ivy, despite admiring Lenin in many ways, came to believe he was ‘a wrong-headed saint’. 11

Her distaste for the Kharitonenko House surprised Maxim, who had written enticingly to her in London: ‘If you ever come here, your eyes will bulge.’ 12Ivy thought the antique furniture hideous, although she herself shopped in expensive stores and hired governesses for her children; 13but she was shocked by the disparity between the conditions of the Moscow poor and the comfortable life of the elite: ‘I saw a woman in Red Square, sort of, just fall down. People just went like that round her, nobody stopped. Oh, of course… I thought everyone was a peasant because all the women wore shawls, you see, I was quite sure everybody was peasants, which was sort of not so untrue.’ 14Although Ivy was no communist, she had expected more of communists:

I thought I was going to the land of Socialism. You see I thought these thoughts so often, I remember exactly. And one thing I thought: how lovely — you see things have always had me in their power. I can’t cope with them. And it’s so lovely to throw them away every now and then. Get rid of them. And I somehow thought for some unknown reason: now I’m going to a land where ‘things’ — I suppose I meant property — won’t mean so much… I very soon discovered that there never had been a place where they mattered so much.

The collapse of manufacturing output made people cling to whatever they possessed and few families could afford what they saw in shop windows. 15

The Bolsheviks had spent the year 1917 denouncing the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks for their denial of the immediate achievability of Russian socialism. Now Bolsheviks presided over the return of markets, and it was their New Economic Policy which had led to the emergence of both fur-coated urban spivs in the cities and well-off peasants — often known as ‘kulaks’ — in the villages. Although open political opposition was no longer possible, the anti-Bolshevik militants spread their message in other ways. Satirical song was one of these. A Socialist-Revolutionary ditty went as follows:

Denied the freedom to stand against the Bolsheviks in elections, Sovnarkom’s enemies faced constant adversity if they continued the political struggle. Eventually, in 1922, the patience of the Soviet authorities would be exhausted when the surviving Socialist-Revolutionaries were put on show-trial in 1922; and Lenin wanted to do the same to the Mensheviks. 17

Yet the communist elite never lost their basic unease about the New Economic Policy. They feared that the reintroduction of capitalism, albeit with severe restrictions, might be the start of counterrevolution by stealth. Ivy Litvinov recalled how badly her husband Maxim had reacted to Lenin’s policy: ‘[He] was terribly depressed. Afterwards I supposed he knew it had to be, but how depressed he was; he felt everything had been sold, you know… he was so terribly, terribly depressed.’ 18Bolshevik wives thought and wrote as Bolsheviks and it did not usually occur to them to depict personal moods in their accounts: the bigger revolutionary cause was everything. But Ivy Litvinov was not typical. She was British, possessed little interest in politics and had the eyes and ears of a novelist; and the depression her husband experienced was almost certainly widely shared.