Living My Life - Emma Goldman [277]
Those sturdy sons of the north apparently had something that was very unsovietsky—respect for human life and recognition of its sanctity. Former nuns, monks, White officers, and members of the bourgeoisie put to useful work instead of against the wall were an extraordinary revelation. The mere suggestion of such a thing elsewhere in Russia would have marked us as very suspicious characters if not out and out counter-revolutionists. Here the new method had rescued hundreds of lives and had gained for the regime additional workers. Not that the Cheka was absent or capital punishment abolished. A dictatorship could hardly exist without these. But in Archangel the Cheka had not attained the unlimited powers it enjoyed in other places. It did not constitute a State within the State whose sole function was terror and vengeance. If these measures were really dictated by revolutionary necessity, the barbarous methods of the Whites in northern Russia would have certainly justified their use. Not only Communists, but even those remotely sympathetic with them had been subjected to torture and death. Entire families had been ruthlessly exterminated by the Whites. Kulakov, chairman of the Ispolkom, for instance, had lost every member of his family. Even his youngest sister, a mere child of twelve, had not escaped the fiendishness of the enemy, and there was hardly a radical or liberal home that had not felt the cruel hand of those that had come to crush the Revolution.
“Naturally we could not meet such fury with gloved hands,” the chairman of the educational department said to us. “We fought back desperately, but when the enemy had been driven to flight, we saw no need of retaliation or terror. We felt that vengeance would serve no other purpose than to antagonize the population against us. We set to work to bring order out of the chaos left by the Whites and to reclaim as many lives as we could among our captives.”
“Did all your comrades agree with such ‘sentimental’ methods?” I asked in astonishment. “Of course not,” he replied; “there were many who insisted on drastic measures, and there are those who still insist that we shall yet have to pay dearly for what they call our reformist attitude to those who had conspired against the Revolution.” However, the chairman continued, the more level-headed comrades had prevailed, and experience proved that even former White officers could be utilized in various walks of life. A number of them were employed as teachers and they were doing faithful and useful work. The same held good of several other departments. Moreover, even such dark and bigoted elements as nuns and monks had responded to humane treatment. It was not at all sentimentality, but good common sense that taught him, he added, that the will to life was not dictated by creeds. Nuns and monks were as subject to that law of nature as any average person. After they had been dispossessed from the cloisters and monasteries and faced death if they continued plotting, or starvation if they refused to work, they proved themselves only too eager to make themselves useful in some way. We could convince ourselves of it, he said, by visiting the schools, nurseries, and arts and crafts studios. [ ... ]
Archangel proved so absorbing that we overstayed our time by two weeks. We still had Murmansk to visit, while our credentials were good only till the end of the year. With regret we left the friends we had made and the splendid people we had met in the city.
Within three days’ distance from our objective we had to turn back. Heavy snow-storms blocked our route, and our progress resembled that of a snail. It would have required weeks