Fellow Travelers (25 page)

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 dismissed 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.

We had seen a lot of the Lyonses over the past couple of years. They had a little girl, so we had that in common, and of course we were all Americans together in Moscow, and that drove even the most incompatible expatriates together.

Gene had written a feature on Eddie for United Press, the kind of warm and admiring story you'd expect from a kid who grew up in Brooklyn, went to City College, and dreamed of a socialist future. He saw Eddie as a hero of the proletariat, as I did, a fighter for justice and the downtrodden, and I thought the piece was very well done. Gene went out of his way to make clear that Eddie was not a political ideologue, that he was simply a man with a mission—to help other working people. Given the disillusion Gene detailed later in his book on his years in Moscow, I think he was trying to contrast Eddie with the committed communists who were interested only in power.

The night of Eddie's party, everyone tried very hard to be funny, exuberant and playful, but it was not a very joyous occasion. I was depressed at the prospect of Eddie's leaving, Tania had other things on her mind, and the old people, as we thought of them then, Boris and Svetlana, Pop and Mama Eva, sat at opposite ends of the table, beyond conversational reach. This was the first time we had all been together since the government was taking over our aspirin concession, and the first time since the government had announced publicly that Boris Chumuchin would be heading up its new aspirin monopoly.

Everybody wanted to know what Eddie's plans were and he didn't seem to know. “I'm going to rethink the rest of life. I'm getting on a steamer back to the United States in Odessa on Thursday and I'm going to sit on a deck in the sun for a month and watch the seagulls plunge after garbage. I'm nearly forty, I'm getting a little old for the kind of thing I've been doing. Maybe I'll get myself an office job somewhere and write party propaganda.”

We tried to be very Russian about Eddie's farewell, with a series of toasts, each more effusive and idiotic than the last, the bottle passing up and down the table, the men drinking vodka or gin, the women wine, the flush rising in our faces as the evening progressed.

I had a sense of undercurrents everywhere. Yelena had never recovered her usual high spirits after her son was born, and though she was as beautiful as ever, she often seemed distracted, disgruntled, and depressed. That evening she seemed more detached than usual. There was a skittish, birdlike quality about her that made me uneasy.