Living My Life - Emma Goldman [250]
I could not bear Moscow any longer. It had grown into a veritable monster that I had to escape lest it destroy me. Petrograd held out the hope of relief in useful labour. And there was also my gnawing longing for news from my old home. Five months had passed without a word from anyone. The address we had left with our friends in America was Petrograd. My yearning was mingled with some unaccountable apprehension, both combining into the idée fixe that I must hasten back to the northern city.
Mail was actually awaiting us there, received four weeks previously. Why had it not been forwarded, we asked Liza Zorin. “What was the use?” she replied; “I did not think anything from America so important and interesting as what you must have seen and heard in Moscow.” The letters were from Fitzi and Stella. Not “so important”—only news of the death of my beloved Helena. What could personal sorrow mean to people who had become cogs in the wheel that was crushing so many at every turn? I myself seemed to have turned into one of the cogs. I could find no tears for the loss of my darling sister, no tears or regrets. Only paralysing numbness and a larger void.
My deportation, Stella wrote, had proved the last blow to Helena’s shattered condition. She had grown steadily worse from the moment she had heard about it. Death was more kind to her than life: it came quickly through a stroke. [... ]
On our return to Petrograd we found our fellow-passengers of the Buford considerably diminished in numbers. Some of them had succeeded in getting sent to their native places. Others, who in America had been bitter opponents of our defence of the Bolsheviki, became reconciled to the Soviet régime. In Rome now, they argued, they would howl with the Romans. The eleven Communists among the deportees were entirely in clover. They found the flesh-pots prepared for them, and the tables laden. They had but to grab the best place and morsels.
The remaining group was in a deplorable condition. Their attempts to secure useful work, for which years of labour in the United States had qualified them, brought no results. They were being sent from one institution to another, from commissar to commissar, without anyone able to decide whether their efforts were needed and where.
Here was Russia, famished for what these men could and longed to give, yet their productive capacities were compelled to lie fallow, and everything was being done to turn their devotion to hatred. Was this to be the lot of other workers to be deported from the United States and of those who would flock to Soviet Russia to aid the Revolution, we wondered. We could not sit by without at least essaying some effort to prevent the repetition of such criminal stupidity. Sasha proposed a clearing-house for the American deportees, those already in Russia and the others that were being expected. [... ] His project included the classification of the refugees by trade and occupation and assignment to useful and needed work. “Think of the gain to the Revolution if American training and experience were sensibly directed into productive channels,” Sasha commented. His plan also provided an immediate opening for our own usefulness and that of other deportees in the city. [... ]
Now they achieved in a fortnight what Ravich and Kaplan admitted would have ordinarily taken months to accomplish. Three old germ-eaten buildings were renovated and equipped for the use of the expected deportees; the distribution of