Living My Life - Emma Goldman [242]
Even the Moscow Anarchist Conference had not gone so far in its indictment. The Soviet State was different from capitalist and bourgeois governments, they had told us when we objected to their absurdly illogical resolution asking for the legalisation of their work and the release of our comrades from prison. “In no country have the anarchists ever begged favours from the government,” we argued, “nor do they believe in loyalty to the State. Why do it here, if the Bolsheviki have broken faith?” The Bolshevik government was revolutionary in spite of its offences; it was proletarian in its nature and purposes, the Russian comrades insisted. Whereupon we had signed the petition and agreed to present it to the proper authorities.
Both Sasha and I held on to the firm belief that the Bolsheviki were our brothers in a common fight. Our very lives and all our revolutionary hopes were staked upon it. Lenin, Trotsky, and their co-workers were the soul of the Revolution, we were sure, and its keenest defenders. We would go to them, to Lunacharsky, 16 Kollontay, Balabanoff.17 Jack Reed had spoken of them with deepest admiration and affection. They were capable of other criteria than a membership card in estimating people and events, Jack had said. They would help me see things in their proper light. I would seek them out. And our old teacher, Peter Kropotkin—we had drifted apart over our stand on the World War, but our love and esteem for his great personality and acute mind had not changed. I was certain that his feeling for us had also remained the same. We had been eager to see our dear comrade immediately upon our arrival in Russia. He was living in the village of Dmitrov, we had been informed, about sixty versts from Moscow, in his own little house, and he was well supplied with all necessaries by the Soviet Government. Travel was impossible then, but our trip would be arranged in the spring, Zorin had assured us. [ ... ]
Alexandra Kollontay and Angelica Balabanoff were within easy reach, as they were living in the National. I sought out the former first. Mme Kollontay looked remarkably young and radiant, considering her fifty years and the severe operation she had recently undergone. A tall and stately woman, every inch the grande dame rather than the fiery revolutionist. Her attire and suite of two rooms bespoke good taste, the roses on her desk rather startling in the Russian greyness. They were the first I had seen since our deportation. [ ... ] She leaned back in her arm-chair and I began speaking of the harrowing things that had come to my knowledge. She listened attentively without interrupting me, but there was not the slightest indication in her cold, handsome face of any perturbation on account of my recital. “We do have some dull grey spots in our vivid revolutionary picture,” she said when I had concluded. “They are unavoidable in a country so backward, with a people so dark and a social experiment of such magnitude, opposed by the entire world as it is. They will disappear when we have liquidated our military fronts and when we shall have raised the mental level of our masses.” I could help in that, she continued. I could work among the women; they were ignorant of the simplest principles of life, physical and otherwise, ignorant of their own functions as mothers and citizens. I had done such fine work of that kind in America, and she could assure me of a much more fertile field in Russia. “Why not join me and stop your brooding over a few dull grey spots?” she