the commissariat of education also included the department of museums. the petrograd museum of the revolution had two chairmen; lunacharsky being one of them, it was necessary to secure his signature to our credentials which had already been signed by zinoviev, the second chairman of the museum. i was commissioned to see lunacharsky.
i felt rather guilty before him. i left moscow in march promising to return within a week to join him in his work. now, four months later, i came to ask his co?peration in an entirely different field. i went to the kremlin determined to tell lunacharsky how i felt about the situation in russia. but i was relieved of the necessity by the presence of a number of people in his office; there was no time to take the matter up. i could merely inform lunacharsky of the purpose of the expedition and request his aid in the work. it met with his approval. he signed[pg 142] our credentials and also supplied me with letters of introduction and recommendation to facilitate our efforts in behalf of the museum.
while our commission was making the necessary preparations for the trip to the ukraine, i found time to visit various institutions in moscow and to meet some interesting people. among them were certain well-known left social revolutionists whom i had met on my previous visit. i had told them then that i was eager to visit maria spiridonova, of whose condition i had heard many conflicting stories. but at that time no meeting could be arranged: it might have exposed spiridonova to danger, for she was living illegally, as a peasant woman. history indeed repeats itself. under the tsar spiridonova, also disguised as a country girl, had shadowed lukhanovsky, the governor of tamboy, of peasant-flogging fame. having shot him, she was arrested, tortured, and later sentenced to death. the western world became aroused, and it was due to its protests that the sentence of spiridonova was changed to siberian exile for life. she spent eleven years there; the february revolution brought her freedom and back to russia. maria spiridonova immediately threw herself into revolutionary activity. now, in[pg 143] the socialist republic, maria was again living in disguise after having escaped from the prison in the kremlin.
arrangements were finally made to enable me to visit spiridonova, and i was cautioned to make sure that i was not followed by tcheka men. we agreed with maria's friends upon a meeting place and from there we zigzagged a number of streets till we at last reached the top floor of a house in the back of a yard. i was led into a small room containing a bed, small desk, bookcase, and several chairs. before the desk, piled high with letters and papers, sat a frail little woman, maria spiridonova. this, then, was one of russia's great martyrs, this woman who had so unflinchingly suffered the tortures inflicted upon her by the tsar's henchmen. i had been told by zorin and jack reed that spiridonova had suffered a breakdown, and was kept in a sanatorium. her malady, they said, was acute neurasthenia and hysteria. when i came face to face with maria, i immediately realized that both men had deceived me. i was no longer surprised at zorin: much of what he had told me i gradually discovered to be utterly false. as to reed, unfamiliar with the language and completely under the sway of the new faith,[pg 144] he took too much for granted. thus, on his return from moscow he came to inform me that the story of the shooting of prisoners en masse on the eve of the abolition of capital punishment was really true; but, he assured me, it was all the fault of a certain official of the tcheka who had already paid with his life for it. i had opportunity to investigate the matter. i found that jack had again been misled. it was not that a certain man was responsible for the wholesale killing on that occasion. the act was conditioned in the whole system and character of the tcheka.
i spent two days with maria spiridonova, listening to her recital of events since october, 1917. she spoke at length about the enthusiasm and zeal of the masses and the hopes held out by the bolsheviki; of their ascendancy to power and gradual turn to the right. she explained the brest-litovsk peace which she considered as the first link in the chain that has since fettered the revolution. she dwelt on the razverstka, the system of forcible requisition, which was devastating russia and discrediting everything the revolution had been fought for; she referred to the terrorism practised by the bolsheviki against every revolutionary [pg 145]criticism, to the new communist bureaucracy and inefficiency, and the hopelessness of the whole situation. it was a crushing indictment against the bolsheviki, their theories and methods.
if spiridonova had really suffered a breakdown, as i had been assured, and was hysterical and mentally unbalanced, she must have had extraordinary control of herself. she was calm, self-contained, and clear on every point. she had the fullest command of her material and information. on several occasions during her narrative, when she detected doubt in my face, she remarked: "i fear you don't quite believe me. well, here is what some of the peasants write me," and she would reach over to a pile of letters on her desk and read to me passages heart-rending with misery and bitter against the bolsheviki. in stilted handwriting, sometimes almost illegible, the peasants of the ukraine and siberia wrote of the horrors of the razverstka and what it had done to them and their land. "they have taken away everything, even the last seeds for the next sowing." "the commissars have robbed us of everything." thus ran the letters. frequently peasants wanted to know whether spiridonova had gone over to the bolsheviki. "if you also forsake us, matushka,[pg 146] we have no one to turn to," one peasant wrote.
the enormity of her accusations challenged credence. after all, the bolsheviki were revolutionists. how could they be guilty of the terrible things charged against them? perhaps they were not responsible for the situation as it had developed; they had the whole world against them. there was the brest peace, for instance. when the news of it first reached america i happened to be in prison. i reflected long and carefully whether soviet russia was justified in negotiating with german imperialism. but i could see no way out of the situation. i was in favour of the brest peace. since i came to russia i heard conflicting versions of it. nearly everyone, excepting the communists, considered the brest agreement as much a betrayal of the revolution as the r?le of the german socialists in the war—a betrayal of the spirit of internationalism. the communists, on the other hand, were unanimous in defending the peace and denouncing as counter-revolutionist everybody who questioned the wisdom and the revolutionary justification of that agreement. "we could do nothing else," argued the communists. "germany had a mighty army, while we had[pg 147] none. had we refused to sign the brest treaty we should have sealed the fate of the revolution. we realized that brest meant a compromise, but we knew that the workers of russia and the rest of the world would understand that we had been forced to it. our compromise was similar to that of workers when they are forced to accept the conditions of their masters after an unsuccessful strike."
but spiridonova was not convinced. "there is not one word of truth in the argument advanced by the bolsheviki," she said. it is true that russia had no disciplined army to meet the german advance, but it had something infinitely more effective: it had a conscious revolutionary people who would have fought back the invaders to the last drop of blood. as a matter of fact, it was the people who had checked all the counter-revolutionary military attempts against russia. who else but the people, the peasants and the workers, made it impossible for the german and austrian army to remain in the ukraine? who defeated denikin and the other counter-revolutionary generals? who triumphed over koltchak and yudenitch? lenin and trotsky claim that it was the red army. but the historic truth was[pg 148] that the voluntary military units of the workers and peasants—the povstantsi—in siberia as well as in the south of russia—had borne the brunt of the fighting on every front, the red army usually only completing the victories of the former. trotsky would have it now that the brest treaty had to be accepted, but he himself had at one time refused to sign the treaty and radek, joffe, and other leading communists had also been opposed to it. it is claimed now that they submitted to the shameful terms because they realized the hopelessness of their expectation that the german workers would prevent the junkers from marching against revolutionary russia. but that was not the true reason. it was the whip of the party discipline which lashed trotsky and others into submission.
"the trouble with the bolsheviki," continued spiridonova, "is that they have no faith in the masses. they proclaimed themselves a proletarian party, but they refused to trust the workers." it was this lack of faith, maria emphasized, which made the communists bow to german imperialism. and as concerns the revolution itself, it was precisely the brest peace which struck it a fatal blow. aside from[pg 149] the betrayal of finland, white russia, latvia, and the ukraine—which were turned over to the mercy of the german junkers by the brest peace—the peasants saw thousands of their brothers slain, and had to submit to being robbed and plundered. the simple peasant mind could not understand the complete reversal of the former bolshevik slogans of "no indemnity and no annexations." but even the simplest peasant could understand that his toil and his blood were to pay the indemnities imposed by the brest conditions. the peasants grew bitter and antagonistic to the soviet régime. disheartened and discouraged they turned from the revolution. as to the effect of the brest peace upon the german workers, how could they continue in their faith in the russian revolution in view of the fact that the bolsheviki negotiated and accepted the peace terms with the german masters over the heads of the german proletariat? the historic fact remains that the brest peace was the beginning of the end of the russian revolution. no doubt other factors contributed to the debacle, but brest was the most fatal of them.
spiridonova asserted that the left socialist revolutionary elements had warned the [pg 150]bolsheviki against that peace and fought it desperately. they refused to accept it even after it had been signed. the presence of mirbach in revolutionary russia they considered an outrage against the revolution, a crying injustice to the heroic russian people who had sacrificed and suffered so much in their struggle against imperialism and capitalism. spiridonova's party decided that mirbach could not be tolerated in russia: mirbach had to go. wholesale arrests and persecutions followed upon the execution of mirbach, the bolsheviki rendering service to the german kaiser. they filled the prisons with the russian revolutionists.
in the course of our conversation i suggested that the method of razverstka was probably forced upon the bolsheviki by the refusal of the peasants to feed the city. in the beginning of the revolutionary period, spiridonova explained, so long as the peasant soviets existed, the peasants gave willingly and generously. but when the bolshevik government began to dissolve these soviets and arrested 500 peasant delegates, the peasantry became antagonistic. moreover, they daily witnessed the inefficiency of the communist régime: they saw their products lying at side stations and rotting away,[pg 151] or in possession of speculators on the market. naturally under such conditions they would not continue to give. the fact that the peasants had never refused to contribute supplies to the red army proved that other methods than those used by the bolsheviki could have been employed. the razverstka served only to widen the breach between the village and the city. the bolsheviki resorted to punitive expeditions which became the terror of the country. they left death and ruin wherever they came. the peasants, at last driven to desperation, began to rebel against the communist régime. in various parts of russia, in the south, on the ural, and in siberia, peasants' insurrections have taken place, and everywhere they were being put down by force of arms and with an iron hand.
spiridonova did not speak of her own sufferings since she had parted ways with the bolsheviki. but i learned from others that she had been arrested twice and imprisoned for a considerable length of time. even when free she was kept under surveillance, as she had been in the time of the tsar. on several occasions she was tortured by being taken out at night and informed that she was to be shot—a favoured tcheka method. i mentioned the subject to[pg 152] spiridonova. she did not deny the facts, though she was loath to speak of herself. she was entirely absorbed in the fate of the revolution and of her beloved peasantry. she gave no thought to herself, but she was eager to have the world and the international proletariat learn the true condition of affairs in bolshevik russia.
of all the opponents of the bolsheviki i had met maria spiridonova impressed me as one of the most sincere, well-poised, and convincing. her heroic past and her refusal to compromise her revolutionary ideas under tsarism as well as under bolshevism were sufficient guarantee of her revolutionary integrity.
