Fellow Travelers (22 page)

The ostensible issue between the party and the Comintern was autonomy, but the specific one was labor unions. For a decade or more, the U.S. party had worked mainly through the unions, influencing, controlling, and even taking them over. In New York the party already controlled the needle trades and their 300,000 workers—furriers, clothing workers, hat and cloak makers—its influence was spreading. Then suddenly Moscow reversed course. It ordered the party to abandon these unions and set up independent communist unions on their own. Ben Gitlow, the party's general secretary, was especially incensed. The order would undo everything the party had accomplished in nearly three decades. In his view, the Russians knew nothing about American conditions, and they didn't even want to know.

The American party leaders should have known they were headed for disaster. They had trouble getting their visas from the Soviet embassy in Berlin, though the government had been alerted months in advance they were coming, and later, when they arrived at Scolpce, the railroad interchange at the Polish border, they ran into trouble with the guards. They were pulled off the train and sequestered overnight in the station before being permitted to go on.

Once they arrived in Moscow, they were put up at the Bristol, a scruffy hotel across the street from the Lux, where communist party delegates were usually housed. The Bristol was a squalid fleabag of a place, third-rate even by Moscow standards, where the guests lived too many to a room amid the smell of stale urine, boiling cabbage, and simmering beets.

We had dinner with Eddie that first evening at Red House, all of us gathered around the big table in the great paneled dining room, Pop at the head of the table, Mama Eva at his right next to me, and Eddie and Manny at his left. Tania had some party function to attend and couldn't be there, but I wasn't sorry for that. Yelena wasn't even invited.

It was the first time I can remember that the five of us had ever eaten formally together. The chandeliers glittered above our heads while candles flickered on the table, and the tall ceilings and broad spaces turned our voices to echoes. Uniformed waiters placed the plates before us and removed them when we were finished. It was a dizzying notion, the five of us, dining in baronial splendor, here of all places in Moscow, in the workers' paradise.

Eddie had changed since I had last seen him, so much so that I am not sure I would have recognized him if I had run into him on the street. It was not just that his straight black, hair had become streaked with gray; there was a weariness in his look, and his hand seemed to tremble slightly when he reached for his water glass.

I had last seen him in New York six or seven years before, but he no longer lived at home, and I never did get to know him. Sitting there with the rest of the family, I felt for the first time I liked him. I liked the way he handled himself and the slow deliberate way he considered whatever we talked about.

He may have been simply a labor organizer, an agitator, but he was a warrior all the same, fighting a battle that, if it was not ours, ought to have been. Whatever the reason, we all deferred to him that night, even Pop, treating him like someone returned from the wars, someone who had looked into the abyss, as we used to say in those days, and seen things too terrible to be easily shared by those who had not been there themselves.

Mama Eva was beside herself at having Eddie with her again. She wanted to be sure he had all he wanted to eat, badgered the waiters to bring him delicacies she had somehow overlooked. She found excuses to go around the table and put her hands on his shoulders, she bent over and kissed him, she fingered the scar on his right cheek and turned away as if she—hardbitten Mama Eva—were fighting back tears. I had never seen her like this before, certainly not with me or even with Manny, and I found myself wondering about her first husband, Vladimir Promyslov. Who was this man who had fathered her child, where had she met him, what had he been like? A tailor? A nobody? A nothing she had abandoned and then divorced to marry my father.

I don't know what we talked about over dinner. I don't think we talked about very much, how cold it had been this winter in Moscow, how sultry this spring, how difficult it was getting food, how drab life was getting. Eddie didn't say much about himself.

After dinner we all went upstairs and settled into the parlor. Eddie didn't drink anything, but the rest of us did, downing vodka with the reckless abandon of Russians. Eddie may not have had anything to drink—“I only drink when I work,” he said, “and then usually beer or whisky”—but he smoked, endlessly, nervously, incessantly, lighting one cigarette from the butt end of the other. Camels, not the Nords that most foreigners smoked in Moscow and that I favored myself.

“I wouldn't have come here,” Eddie said, “except that the party was willing to pay my way, so what the hell, why not? It's a waste of money, but that's never bothered those guys. They seem to think there's a chance they can persuade the Comintern to change its mind.”

“They're fools then,” Pop said.

“They don't think they have any choice,” Eddie answered. “Gitlow's group keeps getting the membership's vote but the Comintern always sides with Bill Foster all the same.”

“That's what the dictatorship of the proletariat is all about,” Manny said. “What does the proletariat know? Nothing. So you've got these party functionaries instead telling the working classes what they want to dictate.”

“They all know that, Manny,” Eddie replied. “That's why they brought us along. There are eight or ten of us, not necessarily party members, and we're here to demonstrate that the party has the solid support of the working people.”

“The proposition is wrong,” Manny said. “Nobody cares about the working classes in Russia. It's a classless society, and if you don't have any classes you don't have any class conflict. So what's the problem? The workers can't complain about their hours or working conditions or pay, because everybody works for the government, and there are no greedy employers to exploit them. That's why the unions are never a problem. The only power that works is class power. The only power that can ever be organized is through the economic classes. Look around you, throughout the world, throughout history, these are the only groups that have ever taken power anywhere.”

“I know Gitlow and Lovestone from way back,” Pop said, “from when they were kids. They're professional revolutionaries, without the party they would be nothing. And you know what will happen to them if they don't knuckle under? They'll be called every name in the book—fascist reactionaries, counterrevolutionaries, traitors—and somebody will eventually produce the evidence to prove it.”

“They all make me sick,” Eddie said. “The party doesn't really like labor unions; they think they're the enemy. Unions are designed to make industrial capitalism work, and the party doesn't want it to work. They're not interested in high pay for the workers. They don't care whether the men get anything when they strike, they want to foment the discontent, outrage, and hatred, to lay the basis for revolution. They like to see men beaten and dispirited, their heads bashed and their bones broken, to radicalize them and bring them to the point of revolution. In one labor negotiation I know of, the workers got everything they asked for, but the party made them turn the deal down because they wanted the unrest and resentment a strike would bring.”

“Even so,” Pop answered, “without violence, without revolution, the workers aren't going to get what is justly theirs.”

“I don't believe that,” Eddie replied, “but if it's true, the party has no right to be that cynical about working people. I don't belong to the party, and I won't let them use me at this meeting. I suppose I keep hoping that things will change if the party gets the autonomy that it wants.”

Mama Eva touched the scar on his forearm, “They've hurt you a lot.”

“It's part of the job. I got that trying to organize some workers in West Virginia. It bothers me to see good people being screwed. You still think I should have joined the party?” Eddie asked.

“I don't give people advice anymore,” he answered. “I have always been a party member and probably always will be. They thought I should join it here when I first came to Moscow, but I didn't want to do that. I could have lost my American citizenship. I was a socialist in my head. I believed in justice and the brotherhood of man, and I had the dream of building a sort of heaven here on earth. But I don't know anymore whether becoming a member of the party is the way to do it.”

“I always felt more American, not belonging to the party” Eddie told them. “It meant that when they bashed my head in they could do it knowing I was just a wild-eyed American and not some wild-eyed agent of a foreign power. Besides, when your father is one of the party's founders, communism is already in your blood.”

Stepfather, I found myself thinking unexpectedly. Stepfather.

“You know what they're up to, don't you?” Eddie went on. “They're prepared to break away if they have to—Lovestone, Gitlow, Wolfe, the whole delegation. If the Comintern turns them down, they've worked out a scheme to transfer all the assets of the party in the U.S. to themselves.”

“The Comintern will refuse,” Pop said.

“Well, once they know that for sure, they'll send word back to New York to make the transfer.”

“Why not?” Pop said. “The party's split up before. And they may not have the blessing of the Comintern, but they'll have the money, and that means they'll have the power. Maybe that will be just as good.”

“You're talking like a capitalist, Pop,” I heard myself saying. Somehow I wanted them to know I was there. “Besides, how much money does the American party have?”

“Millions in real estate,” Pop answered. “I ought to know, I gave it to them, and dozens of newspapers and magazines, and control of a raft of unions.”

“Communists are no different from anyone else,” Manny said. “You do whatever you have to, and if that means running things as if you were capitalists, and exploiting people, well, you don't hesitate, not when you do it in defense of the just cause.”

“Even if you throw decent working-class people to the wolves?” Eddie asked.

“I have never been easy with that,” Pop said. “I'm not like Gitlow and Lovestone and the rest. They never did a day's worth of work in their lives. They don't know what the lives of working people are like, the exhaustion, the tedium, the loss of hope. What work did Gitlow ever do? He worked in a department store and organized the retail clerks.”

I was exhilarated by our being together. I had never heard any of them talk like this before. It was almost as if we were a real family, that we were a group of people who had something in common and who were welcoming back a cherished member who had been away.

“Things are changing,” Pop went on. “There used to be room for disagreement. Lenin would always listen to dissenters, but nobody listens anymore. Even us, we're going to be squeezed out. We don't belong here anymore.” Pop wasn't worried about himself, he was one of the party's founding fathers, and they still recognized that, but he wasn't sure the rest of the family could stay on; certainly the Faust enterprises weren't going to survive.

“It was the money that mattered,” Manny insisted. “Money meant power, here, back home, everywhere. If you didn't have that, you didn't have anything, and I'm going to make sure that Faust enterprises gets all that we are entitled to.”

“The money doesn't matter in itself,” Pop said. “It's the commitment that surrounds the money that matters. It's what you do with your life. It's how you want to change the world. Lose that, and you become just like the capitalists. Worse. Because you fool yourself.”

We were all getting a little drunk and talking too much except for Eddie. The drunker we got, the soberer he became.

The last thing I remember was Pop telling Eddie he would have to watch himself: “You are not in the United States any more. You are in the Soviet Union and there are things you never permit yourself to say publicly. Never, no matter how cynical you become. You don't say such things, and you don't even see them. There is no exploitation of the worker here, there is no starvation, no poverty, and you must never let anyone know that you think otherwise. If you do, you will destroy all your usefulness.”

I think I went to sleep or blacked out, because the next thing I knew I was awake on my bed, fully clothed, with Tania beside me.

I suppose it was because I was the youngest that I was so taken with Eddie. He was my big brother and had led such an adventurous and dangerous life. It was hero worship, I suppose, boyish infatuation, though at twenty-seven I was getting too old for that. Whatever the reason I couldn't see enough of him. During the weeks Eddie spent in Moscow that spring, I spent as much time with him as I could. I kept thinking of things we could do together—places to go, things to see. I showed him the sights of Moscow—the rivers, the palaces, the churches—taking him to the coffee shops and tearooms, even a public bath, getting him to talk about his life.

But I always thought he was talking around it, that he didn't want to come at it head on. He made it sound as if being a labor organizer was one of the most ordinary jobs you could imagine, prosaic, a matter of patience, persistence, and sympathy. He would go to work in some small Midwestern industrial town, the way salesmen went on the road or accountants took the train to the office. He would begin to make friends with the workers. If he could he would get a job at the plant or the mine, and hang out in the saloons where the men came when out of work. He'd try to get them talking about their lives, and listen to their complaints. He'd get to know the men, their women and families. He'd get himself invited home to supper, and gradually, as they came to trust him, he would begin talking to them about how exploited they were by the owners, how underpaid and overworked, how they needed to get together, to organize to improve their lot. The world was changing, and working people didn't have to put up with such conditions anymore.