Living My Life - Emma Goldman [274]
Through all the bitter disappointments in Russia and our struggle to find ourselves and our work I had been sustained by one thought—our material independence. We did not have to beg or cringe like so many others who were driven by hunger. We had been able to keep our self-respect and to refuse any truck with the dictatorship because we had been made secure by our American friends. Now all was gone! “What now, Sasha?” I cried. “What is going to become of us?” Impatiently he replied: “You seem more concerned about the damned money than about our lives. Don’t you realize that if I had stirred, or anyone else in the car, the burglars would have shot us dead?” He had never known me to cling to material things, he added; it was funny I should have thought of the money first of all. “Not so funny when one is compelled to forswear all one holds high in order to exist,” I replied. I simply could not face the possibility of eating out of the hand of the Bolshevik State. For myself I should have preferred to be finished by our night callers. [ ... ]
In Bryansk we were greeted with the joyful news of the complete rout of Wrangel. Strange to say, Nestor Makhno was being proclaimed a hero who had materially helped to bring about the great victory. But yesterday denounced as a counter-revolutionary, a bandit, the aid of Wrangel, with a large price on his head—what had brought the sudden change of front on the part of the Bolsheviki, we wondered. And how long would the love-feast last? For Trotsky had in turn eulogized the leader of the rebel peasant army and in turn condemned him to death.
Sad news clouded our joy. In a Soviet paper we read of the death of John Reed. Both Sasha and I had been very fond of Jack and we felt his demise as a personal loss. I had last seen him the previous year when he returned from Finland, a very sick man indeed. I had learned that he was put up at the Hotel International in Petrograd, alone and without anyone to take care of him. I had found him in a deplorable condition, his arms and legs swollen, his body covered with ulcers, and his gums badly affected as a result of scurvy acquired in prison. The poor boy suffered even more spiritually, because he had been betrayed to the Finnish authorities by a Russian Communist, a sailor whom Zinoviev had sent with him as a companion. The valuable documents and the large sum of money Jack was taking to his comrades in America all fell into the hands of his captors. It was Jack’s second failure of the kind and he took it much to heart. Two weeks’ nursing helped put him on his feet again, but he remained fearfully distressed over the methods of Zinoviev and others in jeopardizing the lives of their comrades. “Needlessly and recklessly,” he kept saying. He himself had twice been sent on a wild goose chase without any trouble having been taken to find out whether there was any possibility of the venture’s succeeding. But at least he could take care of himself and he went into it with open eyes. Moreover, as an American he did not run the same grave risks as the Russian comrades. Communists, mere youngsters, were being sacrificed by the score for the glory of the Third International, he had complained. “Perhaps revolutionary necessity,” I had suggested; “at least your comrades always say so.” He had believed it also, he had admitted, but his experience and that of others had made him doubt it. His faith in the dictatorship was still fervent, but he was beginning to doubt some of the methods used, particularly by men who themselves always remained