Living My Life - Emma Goldman [290]
I shared his grief, as indeed did all our people and nearly everyone else who still had revolutionary fibre left. Our place in Moscow became the oasis for our comrades, as well as for others outside of our ranks. They came at all hours of the day and even late at night, hungry, spiritless, in black despair. The meals intended for ourselves and perhaps for one or two invited guests had to perform the miracle of Christ’s loaves for the many who would drift in by the time we sat down to eat. To assure them that there was enough to go round I had to invent all kinds of reasons for my poor appetite: headaches, stomach trouble, and the vice of cooks who always have their pick of the best before the meal is served. I minded the faintness that would sometimes overcome me much less than the lack of privacy. But these people had no other place to go, nowhere where they might feel at home or free to communicate their troubled spirit. It was the only service we could render and we did so out of the fullness of our hearts. [...]
The Nep spread.41 The hour of the new bourgeoisie had arrived. No further need to worry about Sovietsky soup or rations with such an assortment of delicacies on hand. No further anxiety to hide the loot taken from the predecessors of the new privileged class. I could hardly trust my eyes when at the Stanislavsky First Studio I met a number of women dressed in velvet and silks, wearing costly shawls, and bedecked with jewelry. Why not? The Sovietsky ladies knew how to appreciate fine clothes, even if they were somewhat crumpled from their hiding-places and not exactly in keeping with the latest Parisian fashions!
The grey and drab continued, however, among the masses, wearing out their already depleted strength in the long wait for an order for a hole to live in, a bit of calico or medicine for their sick family or even a coffin for their dead. This was no hallucination of my exhausted brain. It was one of the many ghastly realities. One such case was related to me by Angelica Balabanoff. She had been sent back to a little room in the National and completely divested of her Soviet functions. Ill, disillusioned, and broken, she suffered more than most of her comrades from the latest somersault of her idol Ilich. To see constantly the hungry crowds around the bakeries and pastry-shops was torture to one who, like Angelica, felt guilty to accept the gift of even a few biscuits from her Swedish friends. It was a purgatory which only we, who knew her well, could appreciate. [...]
The Nep flourished, and the inspired, flocking to the holy grail, were assured that the proletariat was in full control and that money was no more needed in Soviet Russia because the workers had free access to the best the land produced. A large contingent of the devout believers from America had confidingly turned over to the reception committee on the border all their possessions. In Moscow they were packed like sardines in common quarters, given a small ration of bread and soup, and left to their fate. Within a month two children of the group died of undernourishment and infection. The men became despondent, the women ill, one of them going insane from anxiety about her children and the shock of the conditions she had found in Russia. [...]
Over and above this crazy pattern of Soviet life, the famine suddenly loomed across the land; want and death spread through the Volga region and threatened the rest of the country. The Soviet Government had known for two months that millions were likely to perish unless immediate steps for relief were taken. Agricultural specialists and economists had warned the authorities of the impending calamity. They had frankly declared that the main cause of the situation was inefficiency, mismanagement, and bureaucratic corruption. Instead of setting the Soviet machinery to work to relieve the calamity, to acquaint the public with the situation and rouse it to the danger, the report of the specialists had been suppressed.
The few non-Communists who knew of it were powerless