I probably didn’t write about friends I made in the Russian theater because I already felt that they were under a shadow. I was afraid something I might say would make their lives more difficult under the regime.
The other inhibition, of course, was the fear of writing something that would be seized on by anti-Soviet propaganda in the West. In those days I was trying to be neutral, above the battle like Goethe.
It was puzzlement more than disillusionment I suffered from. I came away full of admiration for the energy and breadth of the Russian mind. I felt that the Russians were nearer to finding a solution to the strange and horrible world industrial society had produced for mankind than we were in America. Even then I didn’t pretend to like the solution. There must be a better way.
I tried to put that feeling into words: You don’t have to make a decision yet, I kept telling myself. As Communist power grew, that position proved untenable.
How hard it is to write truthfully. Reading over the articles I wrote that summer I keep remembering things I forgot to put in. Why did I forget to put in about the enlarged photographs of Lenin as a baby I saw in the ikon corner in the peasants’ houses instead of the Christ Child? Why did I neglect people’s hints about Stalin? There was a very pleasant actress whom I’ve called Alexandra who had worked with the Art Theater I sometimes took evening walks with in Moscow. She came of the old revolutionary intelligentsia. I shall never forget the look of hate that would come into her face when we’d pass a large photograph of Stalin in a store window. She never spoke. She would just nudge me and look. As the years went on I understood what she meant. Of course in 1928 Stalin had not shown himself yet. He was working from behind the scenes. Trotsky was in exile but there were still people around the theater in Moscow whom their friends introduced half laughingly as Trotskyites. The terror that English journalist was trying to tell me about still lurked in the shadows. It was not yet walking the streets.
And yet, I remember that for absolutely no reason I fell into a real funk for fear they wouldn’t let me leave the last few days I was in Moscow attending to the final passport formalities. Just like every other American, I’d done my best to see the good, but the last impression I came away with was fear, fear of the brutal invisible intricate machinery of the police state. No fear was ever better founded.
Warsaw in those days was no paradise of civil liberties, but I still remember how well I slept in the sleazy bed in the faded hotel I put up at in Warsaw after piling out of the Moscow train. Warsaw was Europe. My last month in Moscow I’d been scared every night.
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