Chapter IV: Part 4

“We stand always ready to reduce our army,” said Trotsky, “even to liquidating it fully, whenever our closest and our farthest neighbors accept a program of disarmament. In January we offered disarmament. Europe refused even the suggestion. Later we asked our close neighbors, with the same result. If America would only take the initiative in this respect,” he shrugged and smiled, “well, we would support her with our whole heart.”

ENVER PASHA

AND THE

MOHAMMEDANS

ENVER PASHA

AND THE

MOHAMMEDANS

No man I ever met lives so completely in the immediate moment as Enver Pasha; the past he puts behind him, the future he leaves to Allah. His only hero is Napoleon. In Moscow he was the _avant coureur_ of the new understanding between Russia and the Mohammedan world, which means Turkey, Afghanistan, Persia, Bokhara and enough of India to shake the British Empire.

Any man who has brains and gives all his being to the task in hand is bound to possess personality and power and, very likely, charm. Enver Pasha certainly has charm, in spite of his very obvious opportunism, and the cruelty and lack of conscience which a fatalistic belief inspires. Interested in himself above all things, he is a curious contrast to those men who are trying to blot out individualism and make the state all-important.

As far as there was any social life in Moscow, Enver was, for the nonce, the social lion. Some future historian will probably call him the Don Juan of the revolution, though it is only fair to say that he resisted this alluring doom with an uncomplimentary coldness; he was too absorbed in politics to be interested in social conquest. The real reason for the shower of attention bestowed on him by the ladies of Moscow was the natural reaction of those ladies to a life almost unendurably monotonous and difficult.

There was something very pitiful about the way actresses smiled at Enver across the footlights and unearthed old pictures of him in his elaborate War Minister regalia, when he still wore the “Kaiser” moustache, the gold braid and numerous medals. One evening we went to the dressing room of a prima donna where we were invited for tea during an intermission. Enver sat stiffly in his chair, refusing to talk, but his uncle, Halil Pasha, the former Commander of the Mesopotamian and Caucasian fronts, caused much merriment by fighting a sham duel with wooden swords. His opponent was a singer dressed as a medieval knight.

Besides the actresses several of the old aristocracy were gracious to Enver and even the pretty wife of a Commissar attached to the Foreign Office wrote him what would have been considered an intriguing note, in another time and place. She offered to teach him Russian if he would teach her French and he replied curtly that he was not a “professor.”

But Enver was not always over-serious and unbending. In a certain small circle of friends he was quite otherwise. And circumstances, which so largely decide our destinies, gave me an opportunity to know him as well as one alien to his religion could know him. He was allotted by the Foreign Office quarters in the little palace where I was living. For half a year I saw him every day, sat next to him at table and occasionally we went to the theatres and the Turkish Embassy. During that time Enver told me a great deal about his life and his ambitions.

He had known my husband in Constantinople, and was away from Moscow at the time of my husband’s death. As soon as he returned he called on me, bringing Halil and the Turkish Ambassador, Ali Fued Pasha, with him. All three were extremely kind and sympathetic. From that moment until I left Moscow the Turks did everything possible to make life less tragic for me, and I gained an insight into the Turkish character which I had never imagined. The Turks have a peculiar capacity for friendship. And friendship, once given, has no bournes; a friend is a friend through everything--sorrow, dishonor, poverty, as well as wealth and success. An enemy, on the other hand, is beyond all consideration; he is spared nothing, forgiven nothing.

Enver has the personal vanity of the enthusiast and he imagines that everything he does he does well. The only way to cope with his conceit is to be brutally frank. I discovered early in our acquaintance that frankness by no means offends him. One of Enver’s nicest qualities is that he likes to discover his faults as well as his virtues; he is eager to improve himself.

He has a passion for making pencil sketches of people he meets and always goes about with a pencil and a pad of paper in his pocket. In the house where we lived he made sketches of all the guests and all the servants. He made, in all, six very uninteresting portraits of me. One morning when the tea was more tasteless than ever and the bread especially sour and muddy so that I felt I could not manage to eat a single bite, I could not help feeling unpleasantly resentful to see Enver busy with his sketches and full of enthusiasm. And while I sat staring at the terrible meal, he proceeded to make a life-size portrait of me which was incredibly bad. I remember that I wondered where on earth he ever got such a large piece of paper in Russia. When he had finished the sketch he signed his name with a flourish and presented it to me. I took it but said nothing. Enver has the curiosity of a child, and, after a long silence, he asked me if it was possible that I did not really like it. I said that I thought he had no talent for drawing. He became suddenly quite angry and said in a low voice, “But do you realize I have signed my name to it?”

“Your name doesn’t mean anything on a picture,” I explained. “If it was an order for an execution or an advance it would be another matter. You can’t make a good drawing just by signing your name to it”

He frowned and then grew cordial as suddenly as he had grown angry. He rose and bowed to me in a most courtly way. “You can’t imagine,” he said, “how pleasing arrogance is to me.” His three dominating characteristics being bravery, hauteur and recklessness, he imagined that these motives also guided the actions of his friends.

Enver never seemed to be able to loaf in the easy manner of most Orientals. His mental and physical vitality is more like that of an enthusiastic and healthy American. Every morning he rose early to go for a long walk, he read a great deal, took at least three lessons in some foreign language every week and was constantly writing articles for Turkish papers which he printed on a hand press in his own room, and he held almost daily conferences either with the Russians or the Mohammedans. He does not drink or smoke and is devoutly religious.

He likes any discussion which reveals another person’s deepest emotions. If he cannot rouse one any other way he does so by some antagonistic remark which often he does not mean at all. For example, he is extremely liberal in his opinions about women and does not think they should be excluded from political life. Nevertheless, he said to a young actress at tea one afternoon in my apartment, when they were talking about woman suffrage, that she would be better off in a harem. Being an ardent feminist, she rose and fairly shouted at him: “Enver Pasha, you may be a great man in the East, but just listen to me! I am one of the first actresses of my profession. In my world it is every bit as great and important for me to remain an actress as it is for you in your world to remain a warrior or a diplomat.”

Enver took his scolding in very good humor. Afterwards he told me that he had never liked this actress before. “Independence is a great thing in women. Our women lack it and many of them are just puppets on this account.”

He was always extremely interested in American ideas and American opinions. He said he could never understand why Americans were so sentimental about Armenians. “Do they imagine that Armenians never kill Turks? That is indeed irony.”

At the table he used to ask Mr. Vanderlip questions about his proposed Kamchatka concessions. Vanderlip, like many Californians, is rather violently anti-Japanese. His idea of having a naval base at Kamchatka amused Enver. He said Vanderlip was killing two birds with one stone, that he wished to manœuver the American Government into a war with Japan, prove himself a patriot, and at the same time protect his own interests and grow rich. “So that,” said Enver, “if it really came about--the next war would be for Vanderlip and should be known as ‘Vanderlip’s War.’”

When I asked, “Would you be sorry to see America and Japan at war?” he replied, “Not if England was involved. Anything which tends to draw England’s attention away from us or which weakens the great powers, naturally gives Turkey a better chance for reconstruction. You understand that I’m not saying I want to see another war; I am simply saying that if those nations interested in destroying Turkey are occupied elsewhere it relieves us of war burdens and gives us a chance to carry out our own destinies.”

He tried to get Mr. Vanderlip’s reaction on women by the same tactics he employed with the actress. One day he said, “I have three wives and I’m looking for another.” This was not true, but Mr. Vanderlip proved entirely gullible. “Good heavens,” he said, regarding Enver in shocked surprise, “we Anglo-Saxons consider one wife enough tyranny....”

“Naturally,” Enver conceded, suavely, “with one there must be tyranny but with three or four or a hundred.... Ah, you must agree that is quite a different matter.”

His sudden appearance in Moscow during the blackest days of the blockade as well as the blackest days for the Central Powers proves him an incomparable soldier-of-fortune. With two suits of clothes, a pair of boots, a good revolver and a young German mechanician whom he could trust, he started by aeroplane from Berlin to Moscow. The story of how they had to land because of engine trouble near Riga, of how he was captured and spent two months in the Riga jail just at the moment when the whole Allied world was calling loudest for his blood, will remain a story which will have scanty advertisement from those British Secret Service men who like so well to turn journalists and write their own brave autobiographies.

Enver sat in the Riga jail as plain “Mr. Altman” who could not speak anything but German. He was scrutinized by every Secret Service man in the vicinity and pronounced unanimously a Jewish German Communist of no importance. By appearing humble, inoffensive and pleasant, he soon worked his way into the confidence of the warden, was released and escaped to Moscow. He arrived just in time to rush off for the dramatic Baku conference.

The Communists understood perfectly well that Enver Pasha was not at the Oriental Conference as a sudden and sincere convert to Internationalism, and he knew that they knew. Both Zinoviev and Enver were actors taking the leading rôles in a significant historical pageant. The results are really all that matter, since the motives will soon be forgotten.

When Enver turned to Moscow he had no other place to turn to and when Zinoviev took him to Baku, Zinoviev knew no other means of effectively threatening the English in order to change their attitude on the blockade. Zinoviev could not complain about Enver’s shallow attitude towards Socialism since there was hardly anything Socialistic about Zinoviev’s appeal for a “holy war.” Enver summed up his feelings about the new alliance thus: “For the future of Turkey and the future of the East a friendship with Russia is worth more to the Turks than any number of military victories. And we have to build that friendship while we have the opportunity.”

His way of living without any regrets and as if there were no to-morrows is rather startling at times. I remember when Talaat Pasha, his lifelong friend, was murdered by an Armenian in Berlin, he read the message with no show of emotion and his only comment was: “His time had come!” But against an excessive temptation on the part of fate to record Enver’s death prematurely, in his own words, he “sleeps with one eye open,” carries a dagger and a loaded automatic. Once when we talked about the possibility of his being assassinated he said, “I have been near death so many times that these days I live now seem to be a sort of present to me.”

Enver is no open sesame to those who do not know him well. He really has the traditional Oriental inscrutability. The first two or three times I talked with him, we stumbled along rather lamely in French. Someone suggested to me that he probably spoke several languages which, for some unknown reason, he would not admit. So one day I said abruptly, “Oh, let’s speak English.” He looked at me with one of his sudden, rare smiles and answered in my own language, “Very well, if you prefer it.”

When I asked him how he learned English he told me he had learned it from an English spy. “He came to me as a valet and professed deep love for Turkey. For several months we studied diligently. One day I thought I would test his love for Turkey so I ordered him to the front. He was killed. Later, we found his papers.”

“Were you surprised?” I asked him.

“Why, not at all,” said Enver. “He really showed a great deal of pluck. The only thing I had against him was that he taught me a lot of expressions not used at court.”

“Like what?”

“Like ‘don’t mention it,’” said Enver, laughing. “And the terrible thing about learning such an expression,” he said, “is that it is so sharp and so definite and often fits an occasion so aptly that it flashes in one’s mind and can’t be forgotten. American slang is extremely picturesque and expressive, but it is not dignified enough to be used by diplomats.”

Everyone is familiar with Enver’s “direct action” method of playing politics. One of the ways he was wont to remove troublesome rivals in the days of the Young Turk Revolution was to go out and shoot them with his own hand. This “impulsiveness” got him into grave trouble with the Soviets in spite of all his sensible utterances to the contrary. When he was “shifted” to Bokhara so that he would not be in the way of either Kemal or the Russians, he got bored and started a war of his own. One night he fled into the hills of Afghanistan and soon began to gather recruits around him. A few nights after that one of the principal officials of the Bokharan Republic also fled to join Enver. This performance was repeated until over half the Bokharan cabinet had fled. Then fighting began and we got vague rumors of battles, but only through the Soviet press.

In August, 1922, we heard that Enver had been killed, that his body had been found on the field of battle. There was even romance surrounding him and his supposed death. Stories were circulated that when the body was picked up and examined, the letters of an American girl were found next his heart. I went to see Jacob Peters, who has charge now of all the Eastern Territory and who was then in Moscow. He laughed heartily and said he would show me the “information.” It consisted of three very hazy telegrams which had been three weeks on the way. The men who sent the telegrams and discovered the body had never seen Enver. There was no mention of letters. And Peter’s opinion of the whole affair was that there was nothing at all authentic in the story or else it was “a trick of Enver’s to sham being dead.” Peters’ theory proved true. Within a few days fighting began again and Enver began to win.

He had conceived the notion of uniting all Turkestan and Bokhara and Keiva to the Angora government. It places the Soviets in a strange position. They may have to give in to him, though he will not actually be an “enemy,” because neither the Turks nor the Russians can afford to break their treaty. Therefore, his private war in the south embarrasses the Soviets much more than it does Kemal, who needs only to disavow any connection with it, as do all the Turkish officials. If Enver wins he will add a nice slice to Turkish territory; if he loses, Turkey will be in the same position as before.

Enver, while he will always maintain a great prestige in the Mussulman world, will never oust Kemal. Mustapha Kemal Pasha is the great popular hero of a victorious Turkey, which but for him might never have even survived. There were times in the past when Enver was more important than Kemal, but that can never happen again in Kemal’s life. Both men rose from the ranks and both are the sons of peasants. And Kemal at this moment is more important than the Sultan. Greater than that no man can be under the banners of Mohammed.

One can hardly over-estimate the importance of the new Mohammedan unity, that new patriotic energy which has taken the place of the former lethargy and which already reaches out far beyond the borderland of the Faithful. The Mussulman world is reviving after a long sleep. And not only Mohammedans are uniting but the entire East and Middle East. Aside from Japan, a significant harmony is rapidly taking place, a harmony which evolves itself into a tremendous power. This power may decide the world’s destiny before another generation.

Enver and Kemal Pasha, being aware of the purport of beginning that great concord by interwoven treaties with Russia, read the stars well. There must come a day also when that great sleeping giant, China, will be part of this alliance. And the seeds of that friendship have also been planted. The Chinese official delegations which came to Moscow were not only well received by the Russians, but they hob-nobbed with the Mohammedans like brothers.

TIKON AND THE RUSSIAN CHURCH

There are two points of importance in regard to the Greek Orthodox Church and the Russian revolution. First, that the church has maintained itself and second, that it has issued no frantic appeals for outside help. While certain priests have allied themselves with counter-revolutionists, officially the church has never taken sides. Even at the present moment when a bitter conflict is on, the quarrel remains a family quarrel.

Tikon, the Patriarch, by remaining unruffled through the barricade and blockade days, proved himself a strong leader in a time when only strong leaders could survive. If he had been frightened or hostile in the Denikin or Kolchak days he might have shared the fate of the Romanoffs; if he had taken part in counter-revolutions, the church itself might have been badly shattered. But until recently, Tikon has been as placid as his ikons and as interested in the great change going on about him as a scientist. And therein lay his strength. “Don’t let any one pity me,” he said last winter when I talked to him, “I am having the most interesting time of my life.”

Much nonsense has been written about anti-church propaganda in Soviet Russia. Dozens of writers have discussed a certain rather obscure sign in Moscow which reads: “Religion is the opiate of the people.” This sign, about three feet across, is painted high up on the north side of the Historical Museum building near the entrance to the Red Square. No one in Russia seems to be much interested in it and certainly it attracts less attention than any one of our million billboard advertisements. I tried for a year to find out who had put it up and what group it represented, but could never discover. It was a cab driver who said the wisest thing concerning it. “If somebody took it down,” he said dryly, when I asked him what he thought of it, “no one would notice.”

The anti-clerical posters gotten out at the beginning of the revolution, however, had a much more far-reaching influence. They were usually to the effect that the priests were hoarding the church lands and at the same time expecting the peasants to support them. Any idea which sanctions giving the land to the peasants is popular in Russia. It was not long before the peasants had seized the church lands and divided them through their land committees. But this did not make them atheists.

I remember meeting an old peasant leader from Siberia who had led a successful revolt against Kolchak. He was received as a hero when he arrived at Moscow for an All Russian Congress of Soviets. He told me a story about a priest in his community who was a counter-revolutionist. He said, “It usually is this way with me and with many of the peasants, we love God and we are religious but we hate the priests.” I asked him if it was not possible to find good priests, and he began to tell me about one priest who had been very noble and self-sacrificing. But this was the only one he could think of. “The others disgrace God,” he said.

And that is just what one must understand in order to comprehend the Russian church and its present position. The Soviets did not destroy the church or ruin it in any way--no outside pressure could do that. It was Rasputin and other “disgracers” who at last outraged even the credulous and easy-going peasants.

A revolution had to take place in the church as well as outside of it to save it at all. The church, at the time of the revolution, was as corrupt as the Tsardom. Nothing is better evidence of this than the way it was deserted by hundreds of priests as soon as the life in the monasteries ceased to be easy. Long before the upheaval the priesthood had grown dissolute. All that the revolution did was to give the church a pruning which saved its soul. By shearing it of its old luxuries it cut off the parasitic priests and by severing it from the state it took the church out of politics. It was forced to stand or fall by its own merits.

And when the wealth of the church was reduced to a certain point it became necessary for a priest to be such a good priest and so well loved and appreciated by his flock that his flock was willing to support him, in spite of the hard life and the terrible conditions. Thus a new and better clergy came into being.

The final test of the priesthood, however, came with the famine. All that was left of the church wealth, outside of the churches themselves, were the jewels in the ikons and the silver and gold ornaments which glitter in the shrines throughout Russia. The government decided to requisition these treasures. The priests who had been shriven in the revolutionary fire were glad and willing to part with these things, but there were many who resisted. The outcome was a split in the church ranks, as well as riots, intrigue, and bad feeling. There probably was a good deal of mismanagement on the part of a few arbitrary Soviet officials like Zinoviev, who do not seem to comprehend the sensitiveness of religious people and how easily outraged they are by outside intrusion. There is little doubt that this heightened a delicate and unfortunate situation. If a Church Committee had been allowed to select and turn over the jewels and precious metal, Tikon and other churchmen would probably never have been brought to trial.

However, the trials themselves are intensely interesting and mark an epoch in the life of the revolution. They actually mark the real beginning of public opinion in Russia and that, in any case, is a healthy development. It is like letting fresh air into a long-closed room. Discussions of the government and the church have for five years been going on in whispers behind closed doors. It now comes down to this: if the government is wrong and is unjustly stripping the church of wealth, the government will suffer by lack of support or even open hostility on the part of the peasants, who have so much power now that they can no longer be ignored on any question; and if the priests are wrong and prove themselves selfish in this time of need, the priests will be deposed. But the church itself will go on because the peasants are religious; they will continue to “love God” in the traditional manner.

About a week ago I met a Russian priest in New York and I asked him at once how he felt about the requisitioning of the jewels. He raised his hands devoutly. “What man could pray to God and hoard jewels at such a time?” he exclaimed. Then he showed me a very old and precious carved wooden cross. “There was a ruby in this cross,” he said. “It was the only valuable thing I possessed. I can’t tell you how happy I was when it was sold and the money used for relief. This is not a stone you see in it now; it is a piece of red glass, but it is somehow more precious to me than the ruby.” Here is the expression of a really devout man and the only sort of priest that people will follow in such a crisis.

It is perfectly true that the leaders of the Communist movement are not religious. All students, in fact the entire “intelligentsia” or educated classes of Russia, were never religious. Before the revolution all groups of revolutionaries and literary folk prided themselves on their lack of religion. So anti-religion is not confined strictly to the leaders of the Communist movement. Any other party except the Monarchist Party would be equally devoid of interest in religion.

The Monarchists necessarily support the church because the Tsar was really head of the church. This has been true since the time of Peter the Great, who while not actually abolishing the office of Patriarch, never allowed another Patriarch to be elected. One of the curious and interesting sidelights of the revolution was that a few weeks after the church was separated from the state, a Patriarch was elected for the first time in two hundred years, so that while in one way the church lost its power, in another way it really came into its own.

Freedom of religion, as we know it in the United States, was a surprise and a shock to the members of the Russian church, for up until 1917 no other sects but the Greek Orthodox were permitted by law in Russia. Naturally, when other religious orders began to send in missionaries the old church protested, and when the Soviets answered that freedom of religion was now an established fact they did not understand it as “freedom” and called it discrimination. And it seemed like discrimination, because, while the Orthodox Church was losing its former possessions, other religions were gaining concessions.

Tikon, whose official title is Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias, and who is called, with a sharp flavor of French revolutionary days, by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, “Citizen Basil Ivanovitch Baliavin,” was born in Pskoff in 1860. He was educated in Petrograd Theological Academy and became a monk upon the completion of his studies. He later held several important posts as a professor in theological institutions. He was consecrated Bishop of the Aleutian Isles and North America in 1897 and then came to America. In 1905 he was made Archbishop and moved the cathedral residence from San Francisco to New York. He returned to Russia in February, 1907, having been appointed Archbishop of Jaroslav. In 1913 he became Archbishop of Vilna. Early in 1917 he was elected Metropolitan of Moscow and in November of that same year, just when the Bolsheviks came into power, he became Patriarch.

Just what influenced Tikon and made him so much more democratic than most of his colleagues, I do not know. My own opinion, after a conversation with him, is that he is somewhat of a student of history and a philosopher, as well as a priest. It is the opinion of many people, inside and outside of Russia, that it was his long residence in America which made him so liberal. Of one thing I feel sure. He would have resisted the Soviet Government if he had believed that it was better for the future of the church. I do not think he refrained because of any personal fears, but because he actually saw a real revival of religion in the fire through which the church was passing.

No one could have expected the church to embrace the revolution. The nobility and the clergy had walked too many centuries hand in hand. The nobility perished in the course of events and the church survived, as it did in France. And the church will continue to survive--merely the poorer by a few jewels or a few thousand acres of land. But it will never wield the same power that it once did or that it could wield if there was a return to Tsardom. It cannot be as strong, for example, as the Church of Rome is in Italy.

The real menace to the power of the Russian church lies in its own medieval outlook on life. It has scarcely anything to do with anti-church propagandists or with opposition by force or by requisition. The youth of Russia is interested in reconstruction and the government for the first time. The young people have learned to read and to think. They are no longer content with the old forms; they are repelled by dissolute or un-Christlike priests. If the church wishes to be strong and to have an influence in the life of the nation it cannot gain that influence by haggling over a pile of rubies and diamonds and emeralds while thousands of children are dying of hunger. The old peasants might follow Tikon when he says that the famine is the business of God, but the young people will not. It is almost inconceivable that a man can follow the lowly Christ in such a proud way. Certainly, the young Russians, who have so passionately defended the revolution, will never be satisfied with such a conception.

It seems very sad, from the religious point of view, that Tikon, who steered his church through the long period of fighting and destruction, should lose his equilibrium in the period of adjustment. He was able to smile through all the worst days of terror and suspicion. He could joke about the Cheka guard outside his door, he could calm his agitated congregations, but he could not sacrifice form. When I interviewed him he wore a gorgeous robe and jewels.

Tikon is sincere. Even in his clinging to the splendor of gold and jewels, he is sincere. It is his particular mystical way of loving God, which is difficult to understand in our age of materialism. Tikon, in a lesser degree, has many of those qualities of Lenin which make him a leader of men. If he had been as great a man as Lenin he would have thoroughly purified the church and led a great religious revival in Russia.

TCHICHERIN, COMMISSAR FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS, AND HIS SUBORDINATES.

GREGORY VASSILIEVITCH TCHICHERIN MAXIM LITVINOV, ASSISTANT COMMISSAR LEONID KRASSIN DAVID ROTHSTEIN GREGORY WEINSTEIN MICHAEL KARAKHAN MR. FLORINSKY MR. AXIONOV

GREGORY VASSILIEVITCH TCHICHERIN

My first interview with Tchicherin was at midnight and my last interview was at five in the morning. This happens to cover a fairly complete rotation of the official hours of the Soviet Foreign Office.

One evening at a box party in the Bolshoi Theatre, Enver Pasha remarked: “I have to kill time somehow for three hours after the play. Halil Pasha and I have an appointment with Mr. Tchicherin at two o’clock.” In spite of his smiling Oriental inscrutability and a palpable diplomatic duty to conform to everything Russian, one could feel an amused disapproval of such official unconventionality.

This eccentric habit of turning night into day, with every floor of the Foreign Office blazing like a lighthouse in a city which by municipal decree is put to bed before midnight in order to save fuel, naturally creates an almost fantastic air of whimsicality. Mr. Tchicherin makes no excuse for this “vice,” as one of his secretaries very cleverly phrased it; he simply finds night more harmonious for his tasks than day and with that lack of consideration which dreamers always consciously or unconsciously assume, he forces his whole staff to follow his example. The result is that his clerks make a mad scramble to get transferred into another government department.

Everything about Tchicherin is as consistently contrary to an ordered life as his inversion of working hours. Born an aristocrat, trained under the Tsar for the diplomatic service, delicate, cultured, aloof, with a fine gesture of Quixotic generosity, he has thrown his life and his fortunes in with the cause of the proletariat with all the abandon of religious fervor.

His aloofness is so evident that one can hardly find any concordance about the astounding decision of such an obvious æsthete to become an active part of revolution--which is sweat and blood and violence. Perhaps that explains why he wraps his vision round him like a cloak and shuts out the sun in order not to be disturbed and disillusioned by reality. We were all brought up on stories about kings who were gay-fellows-well-met and could outdance and outdrink their soldiers; on nobles who turned out to be Robin Hoods. But, alas, who can imagine Tchicherin rollicking at a workers’ picnic or smoking a friendly pipe with a Red soldier?

No simple person will ever feel intimate or at home with his super-class indifference to material surroundings. A scrubwoman is just as uncomfortable in his presence as was the intrepid Mrs. Sheridan, who was able to rub such gay elbows with the other commissars. Mr. Tchicherin’s way of arching an eyebrow at life upsets the best brand of poise.

Living alone in a barren room on the top floor of the Foreign Office, he is as far removed socially and physically from the lower as the upper crust. Perhaps only an aristocrat is able to attain this dizzy height of indifference to human contact with one’s fellows. And I can’t help feeling that there is something rather splendid about such complete isolation.

Outside of politics, the telephone and the cable, all up-to-dateness offends him. He abhors new clothes, does not like to ride in automobiles, refuses to have modern office paraphernalia about him, does every little task for himself, like sharpening his own pencils and running all over the building on office-boy errands. This attitude produces the same effect as if he distrusted all his subordinates. His secretaries stand helpless and ill at ease while he searches for a lost telegram or answers the telephone.

Last winter they told an amusing story of how Karakhan, who is Commissar of Eastern Affairs, lured Tchicherin into donning a new suit. Tchicherin’s one suit was literally in rags when the Turkish treaty and the Afghan treaty and the Persian treaty and all the other Oriental treaties were about to be signed. These affairs had to be arranged with more or less bourgeois pomp, since the Orientals are rather keen on ceremony. So Mr. Karakhan, taking a long chance, went ahead and ordered a new suit for Mr. Tchicherin from a Soviet tailor, then one morning while Tchicherin slept, he changed the suits. In a few minutes he came rushing back again and exclaimed with emotion, “There’s a new note from Lord Curzon!” Tchicherin was up in one bound and struggling into the new trousers. Whatever he thought privately of Mr. Karakhan’s presumption, they continued in an apparently pleasant relationship.

In appearance Mr. Tchicherin is tall, with the bent shoulders of the man who stoops to go through doors. His eyes, not through any evasiveness, but because of an extreme shyness, continually seek other places than the face of his interviewer. Yet when one meets his quick, occasional glance, one is startled by the intelligence and gentleness of his expression.

Diplomacy is an inseparable part of Mr. Tchicherin’s existence. He eats, drinks and sleeps with the affairs of state, looks at life as a chess game and is continually checkmating, even in ordinary conversation. Lenin approves of him and feels for him a warm personal affection in spite of the fact that the Premier so dislikes eccentricities. He knows that Tchicherin can be trusted, that he has an invaluable knowledge of international affairs and more important than all that, that he will never make any real decision without consulting Lenin.

Mr. Bullitt told me that during his negotiations he found Tchicherin so brilliant that it was difficult to get anywhere. The Foreign Minister was always quite justified from the Soviet angle but the Soviets were being forced to make hard concessions. Invariably when they came to a deadlock, he telephoned Lenin and Lenin gave in.

During our first talk, when we discussed the campaign of lies about Russia which has so long flooded English, French and American papers, I said that I thought it was partly due to the fact that no reporters were permitted at that time to go in and investigate actual conditions. It was characteristic of Tchicherin to interrupt very suddenly and ask, “Will you tell me why American reporters come over here and claim they are impartial observers, even profess friendliness towards us, and then go home and write such astounding lies?”

I thought it wasn’t fair to generalize. The most unfair stories have always been manufactured at Riga and Reval or at Paris by interested political groups or by disappointed reporters who never got inside. As for the reporters who actually witnessed the revolution, certainly the majority remained fair and sympathetic, in spite of the fact that it grew particularly difficult, especially in America, even to maintain one’s equilibrium about Russia after Brest-Litovsk. To my mind came back unhappy recollections of Overman and Lusk investigations, raids, deportations and general war-hysteria. Perhaps some such thought came also to Tchicherin because he said, “Yes, yes, I suppose in the main, you are right, but how do you account for a man like----?”

Tchicherin is full of old-fashioned honor. The idea that foreign papers sanctioned false reports in order to justify intervention or the blockade seemed so outrageous to him that he could never realize that this sort of propaganda has become as much a part of modern warfare as liquid fire or submarines.

Very late one night I saw Tchicherin running up the stairs to his office in a high state of excitement because a New York evening newspaper carried on its front page a fake interview with Lenin in which he discussed everything from the Irish situation to the Russian Ballet. Tchicherin saw no humor in this. His comment was, “How can a reputable American paper allow such a thing? After all, Comrade Lenin is the Premier of a great country.”

Men who give themselves completely to an ideal quite naturally become supersensitive and unreasonable. At least that is the rule, and Tchicherin is no exception. The deliberate misinterpretation abroad, during long hard years, of every effort of the Soviet Government at peace or reconstruction or defense or negotiations, has got under his skin. So while he insisted on the strictest adherence to the truth in all reports sent over the government wire, at the same time he permitted himself a mild dissipation in extravagant adjectives by way of retaliation, in his too long and too complicated “notes.” He allowed even more unrestrained language in _Vestnik_. _Vestnik_ is the official bulletin of the Soviet Government--very much like the bulletin issued by the Bureau of Public Information during the war. The young man who edited this sheet was a talented and educated Russian but his idea of an unemotional government report was very much like that of our own George Creel. I used to tease him about his passion for such words as “scurrilous” in reference to capitalists or White Guards. But it never made any impression. He confessed that he found my cables flat and uninteresting.

Besides my radios to American papers, which were transmitted by way of Berlin, and the government bulletin which was sent out to the whole world and rarely used by anybody, there was also a wire to London for the _Daily Herald_. Every one of these telegrams had to be read and corrected by Tchicherin himself and I shared the unhappy fate of sitting around all night until he found time to do it. So many nights my telegrams went in the waste-basket because they contained too much American “punch” or a little “news value” or “human interest” which Tchicherin considered gossip, that for a while I regarded Tchicherin as just a fussy old man, and I almost forgot the Herculean tasks he performed in his various interlacing Eastern treaties. Or again, if one reads his correspondence with the old and settled governments of Europe, one will be startled to see how he has outclassed his adversaries. No Foreign Minister ever inherited a more difficult post and, everything considered, no Foreign Minister ever stuck to his post with more dignity and honor. It was characteristic of Tchicherin, as it is of most Russians, not to be able to strike a balance; when he did let the bars down, he let them down completely. A few months ago, we were having battles over adjectives; now reporters are given a free hand; even in Washington they do not dare criticize the government so openly. It is amusing to note that the more freedom they have the fewer harsh criticisms they find it necessary to make.

Mr. Tchicherin is a bachelor; women manifestly have no place in his dreams of a millennium. How this came to be is a secret which perhaps will never out. I am not presuming that there never was any romance in Mr. Tchicherin’s life. Just to illustrate how wrong I should be if I did, I recall an incident which occurred in a fashionable Berlin café. Some Americans were discussing Tchicherin. One remarked that she often regretted that there is no room for chivalry in a Socialist State; that equality does not recognize gallantry. Another claimed that while Lenin seems to have a way of treating women no better and no worse than men, Tchicherin simply overlooks the whole feminine sex; if he is conscious of women at all, it is only through a slight annoyance.

Now, when the company had finally arrived at these conclusions, they suddenly became aware of a very aristocratic and beautiful old lady at the next table who was regarding them disdainfully through a gold lorgnette. Presently she exclaimed in Russian, “How absurd you are! Mr. Tchicherin was an old sweetheart of mine.” So saying, she arose and swept grandly away, rustling in her lavender silks, as delicate as a Dresden china doll. So life repeats itself; there is always an Elaine for every Launcelot. And Launcelot inevitably deserts his lady for some vague “Light” beyond the stars.

Tchicherin is a many-sided character. When one sees him on the street of an afternoon blinking and confused, with an old umbrella under his arm, rain or shine, he appears pitiful and frail and incapable.... But if one sees him also, as I once saw him, in an ancient, resurrected dress-suit, at the head of a long conference table in a gold and white hall, under glittering candelabra, speaking in flowery and perfect French to the suave Turkish delegates, one gets quite another idea; he appears fine, selfless, determined.

And it is like him to admire Secretary of State Hughes, and call him a “fine, high-minded man” without realizing that Hughes’ high-mindedness is that of a stern, religious brother who refuses to admit again into the family of nations the erring and prodigal Soviet Republic; that it was Hughes who stood out alone against the Genoa conference until he stampeded other members of the Cabinet and even overpowered the President. Hughes regards Communism as immoral as Tchicherin regards capitalism. Both men possess that unbending, cold objectiveness, that unattractive righteousness of attitude towards those who disagree with them, which we know in America as Puritanism. Both would have made excellent bishops.

One evening last spring I happened to be present when Tchicherin was nearly assassinated. A man flourishing a revolver appeared in the reception room and called out for the Foreign Minister. This roused a Red soldier half asleep in a comfortable chair near the door leading to Tchicherin’s private office. A scuffle ensued and the soldier succeeded in getting the pistol before any harm was done.

Tchicherin refused to discuss the incident and remained obviously tranquil. He was annoyed when the Cheka tried to put extra guards at his door and absolutely balked at the suggestion that the Foreign Office be made a place difficult to enter. He simply asked every one to forget the whole incident.

I always believed that he secretly dislikes the Cheka. I remember the night that Santieri Nuorteva was arrested. It happened at midnight and was rather spectacular. Tchicherin liked Nuorteva. He was visibly upset and for a whole week he would not talk to a soul.

The confusion of the Foreign Minister’s desk is a national scandal. In midwinter I have seen his summer hat still lying there, crushed under a pile of papers. I have seen papers piled high on all the chairs and sofa and gray with the dust of months. He has a fearful habit of misplacing important telegrams and then sending out a search call. Those are terrible moments in the Foreign Office. All other work stops. After everything is turned upside down some subordinate gets the courage to ask, “Comrade Tchicherin, perhaps it is on your own desk.” And there it invariably is, almost on his nose, like grandmother’s proverbial spectacles.

It was his habit to give a short talk about once a month to the personnel of the Foreign Office. We would meet about eight o’clock in the Foreign Office Club. Tchicherin was persistently late, sometimes one, sometimes two or even three hours. From time to time someone would whisper, “He has lost another telegram!” There would be suppressed laughter running around the room. Then suddenly the Foreign Minister would appear glancing shyly about him, clear his throat and before he began his address would explain in his high plaintive voice how sorry he was to be tardy but he had somehow misplaced a telegram....

People at home have often said to me that they could not comprehend the “fascination” of the Russian revolution for an American; they have pointed out that they would find anything possible to endure except such unpleasant facts as lice and filth and lack of soap. Most of us, quite correctly, imagine ourselves capable of the larger tragedies of life and entirely lacking in the courage to face the million little miseries of an economic breakdown. It is true that any man with delicate sensibilities who has stood the test of the Russian revolution has stood the test of fire. I have always believed that we are too sentimental about the romances of the Middle Ages. My opinion is that not much really that happened then was fine or good or beautiful; certainly over it all hovered no scent of the attar of roses. King Arthur’s knights probably never marched away with any more noble visions before them than did those little awkward peasant boys of the Red Army. The Communists are undoubtedly the knights errant of the twentieth century and their slogan of “internationalism” is but a revival of that old, old banner of “Brotherhood.” It is not altogether curious that such a whirlwind has swept into its heart a few men like Tchicherin.

In 1917, when Trotsky was Foreign Minister, I well remember a strike of his entire diplomatic corps. How it paralyzed that arm of the state! At that particular moment Tchicherin was under arrest in London. Workers with muddy boots tramped in and out of the Foreign Office with a desire to help. They were loyal to Trotsky but they were ill at ease; entirely incomprehensible to them was this intricate business of diplomacy. It is well for those same workers and peasants and soldiers that a quiet, aloof person by the name of George Tchicherin presently arrived to arrange all this business for them.

But what a paradox! Here is Mr. Tchicherin, member of one of the oldest and most aristocratic families in Russia, for four years now guiding with such delicate hands and careful brain the affairs of state, in order that all that once was, which gave his family their wealth and power, might never be again.

MAXIM LITVINOV, ASSISTANT COMMISSAR, LEONID KRASSIN AND SUBORDINATES

Litvinov, more than Tchicherin, has been Lenin’s spokesman to the outside world in the past three years. Litvinov is closer to Lenin; he knows how Lenin will react on most situations, while Tchicherin is usually in doubt. This knowledge gives Litvinov power to make immediate decisions. Litvinov has worked with Lenin since the Communist party was created, while Tchicherin actually only came into the Communist ranks after the revolution--he was formerly connected with another group and his allegiance is naturally a little more conservative.

Litvinov makes a striking contrast to Tchicherin, the aesthete. Litvinov is hale, hearty and loves the fleshy things of life. He fairly bursts with a florid, extravagant energy, like a man who has just emerged from a hot bath, dressed in haste and is late for an appointment. He is big and burly, wearing his clothes loosely with a sort of unkempt but smooth-shaven air. He is a great worker and, when he has the opportunity, a man who enjoys life greatly.

Abroad he likes to eat good food, drink old wines and roll around in a new, expensive automobile with a small red flag on the hood. All this not because he craves ease or ostentation but because of a sort of obvious patriotism for the Soviets which wants to shout to a hostile world, “We too can do things with a flourish.” There is nothing subservient about Litvinov.

He has been accused of undue extravagance by the other embassies in Reval, but in Russia he goes about like any peasant with a piece of black bread in his pocket, works furiously from eleven in the forenoon until two or three in the morning to accommodate Tchicherin and never has a moment for recreation. He never looks tired and seems to begin each task with the same enthusiasm.

The Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs is immensely human, and has an ear for jokes and gossip and knows how to hate. He has a wife and three children living in Copenhagen and maintains a perfectly conventional household. One day last winter I interviewed him while he was eating his lunch, and he said, with a sigh, that he wished he could arrange his work somehow so as to get away for a few days to visit his family. His wife had just had a baby.

“Boy or girl?” I asked.

Litvinov reddened and laughed. “The telegram didn’t say,” he said, “and God knows when I’ll have a chance to run over and find out.”

A moment later he was deep in a discussion of the attitude of the American press towards Russia. I remarked his ability to put out of mind circumstances he could not change; it is the same saving quality which keeps Litvinov from breaking under strain.

When Litvinov is interviewed his thoughts run along smoothly with no break in the thread of them; he is extremely capable and intelligent but one feels at once that he is a politician. Perhaps it would be better to say that he is a practical Communist, just as one would say that Mr. Penrose was a practical Republican and Mr. Underwood is a practical Democrat. Most successful public men are practical politicians and reporters learn early to weigh their words; they have a way of using the press, through subtle suggestions, to their own advantage.

No practical politician is above intrigue. Tchicherin is above it and that is probably why he does not see it when it is all around him.

There was a moment when the clashing of personalities and ambitions nearly ruined the staff of Mr. Tchicherin. The whole matter centered round the English trade negotiations begun by Litvinov and David Rothstein and finished by Krassin.