Three Months in Soviet Russia (1921)

Introduction

Arthur Holitscher’s book Three Months in Soviet Russia (1921) offers a rare glimpse into the formative years of the Soviet Union seen through the eyes of a journalist traveler who created a new form of travelogue called political-literary journalism.  Holitscher’s style has become an accepted part of reporting today.  His reports from Europe and later trips to the United States contain descriptions of everyday events that bring us inside the goings on of daily life.  His own personal experiences and conflicts had fitted him to the job of recording the physical, economic, philosophical and spiritual turmoil inside Soviet Russia.  The disillusionment with World War One and Holitscher’s own searching combines to give the reader a feeling for the titanic struggles that defined the first part of the 20th century.

This is important for several reasons.  First, it offers the path to understanding current Russian society and exceptionalism.  We see a society in the throes of deprivation, war and chaos.  The formulation of the Russian polity was first and foremost based on an idea that a better world could be made from the ash and trash results of World War One.  Russian scholar E. H. Carr wrote that Lenin and the Bolsheviks essentially succeeded to an empty throne vacated by an incompetent Tsar who was crushed under the burden of a disastrous war.  He also goes on to say that it was Lenin’s constructive genius that really put the Soviet Union into its orbit.  His use of terror, education and propaganda gave Russia a new mission.

Second, we realize that not everything changed in Russia.  It can be argued that today’s Russia resembles pre-revolutionary times.  Lesley Chamberlain recently wrote that Russia was a conservative imperialism, neither individualized according to the particular leader at the helm, nor particularly mysterious. We know full well that the power that rules in Russia is tradition. This has been demonstrated in three great upheavals over the past two-and-a-quarter centuries. The first was the French Revolution, still inspiring fear in St Petersburg fifty years after the event; the second was the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917; and the third was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In each case a revolutionary situation, or threat, eventually led to a nationalist reaction perhaps without the ideology.

Third, the meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution and indeed the Cold War have yet to be examined.  Some have argued that the United States never really examined the Cold War or learned all of its lessons.  Many believed that the revolution in Russia was inevitable, that its coming would herald in a glorious epoch of human happiness.  In 1917 Victor Serge wrote that the present experience of revolutionary Russia reveals an energetic and innovative minority which is compelled to make up for the deficiencies in the education of the backward masses by the use of compulsion.  In this situation it is probable that no other minority, no minority guided by different principles, could have done anything different, and certainly nobody could have done any better.¹  This point is still an open question. 

The outlines of Russia today are very much confirmed in Holitscher’s careful observations made a century ago.  Understanding the Soviet experience will help us understand contemporary Russia.

In a 2018 interview at Yale, Vladimir Pozner, a journalist who speaks fluent Russian and English and has given Americans a unique glimpse into American-Russian relations said, The main problem, from my point of view in Russia, is that the leadership, all the leadership is the people who are at the head of politics and all the rest of it, they're all Soviet.  They were born in the Soviet Union. They went to Soviet schools. They were members of the Young Pioneers.  They were members of the Young Communist League. They were members of the Communist Party, most of them.  They were created, formed by a system that no longer exists. They're trying to run a system that they really don't know anything about.  And they're not very good at it. But whatever they do, is based on the mentality that they have. And that mentality is a Soviet mentality.

Arthur Holitscher’s work could be considered the first volume in a trilogy which would include Boris Brutzkus’ Why Communism Failed: Lessons of Marxism In Light of the Russian Revolution (1927) and  André Gide’s "Retour de l' U.R.S.S.(1936)" which offer the reader a unique perspective building on Holitscher’s observations which include purposefully chosen vignettes that reveal the social, political, economic, cultural and literary trends inside Russia immediately after the Russian Revolution. 

Holitscher’s sketches are important in understanding the post war milieu and the birthplace of Soviet Communism.  One can almost feel Trotsky’s breath and vibrancy as he addresses the new Red Army inside the Kremlin walls.  Lenin’s ideas come alive inside the intense propaganda machine that he helped create and relentlessly utilize in country-wide military styled campaigns that combined literacy with Bolshevik ideas about Communism and the overarching role of the party.  Nothing escapes Holitscher’s lens: artists, common workers, drunken dentists, coachmen, persons of high rank, intellectuals, peasants, the lost, apostate, martyrs, puppets, paupers, pirates, poets, pawns and kings, in short all those who were up and down, and over and out!

Russia poet Alexander Blok’s The Twelve as well as On Pushkin House, his last work read on the anniversary of Pushkin’s death, have been included in new translations to allow the reader to hear and feel what it was really like inside the minds of artists as they struggled to make sense of the pain and anguish, they could not shield themselves from.  Holitscher describes the explosion of artistry at the beginning of the Bolshevik rule.  With its rapid increase in creative space, a veritable floodgate of written and expressionist art blooms.  All the while grass grew on the streets of St. Petersburg…

Hungarian born Arthur Holitscher himself grew up in the contradicting atmosphere of a bourgeois Jewish family, which tended to assimilate the Germanness of Austria-Hungary, and view the Magyar environment as hostile to Jewish traditions.  Holitscher received a decidedly German upbringing in the Protestant grammar school in Budapest. His creative space, always threatened by his environment, found refuge in German literature, art and philosophy.  Confined by the narrowness of mercantile thought his father had forced on him, the future travel writer struggled with the same things that Blok said actually killed Pushkin: the lack of creative air. 

After 6 lost years as a banker in Budapest, Fiume and Vienna, Holitscher began to write around 1890 and made contact with the Social Democrats in Vienna, went to Paris in 1894, where he came under the influence of Kropotkin in anarchist circles and where he attempted to realize his literary plans. Here he met Albert Langen and then spent one summer in Munich as the editor of Simplicissimus in order to commute restlessly between Paris and Munich, to travel through half of Europe and attend the universities of Brussels and Heidelberg where for the next 4 years he studied philosophy and art history. From  1900-05 he lived in the bohemian district of Munich, made friends with Wedekind and Wassermann, made acquaintance with Thomas Mann and, with Max Dauthendey and other artists, dreamt of an aesthetic colony. In 1907 he moved to Berlin and became an editor at the Bruno Cassirer publishing house. In 1911 he travelled to Canada and the USA. With the travel report America Today and Tomorrow (1912) he created a new type of cultural-political reportage and achieved his first public recognition.

Holitscher was deported from London to Germany after the outbreak of World War and lived for a while in East Prussia, worked for the "Berliner Tageblatt and Aktion and took part in 1917 as a correspondent for the Vienna New Free Press at the World Congress of the Second International in Stockholm. Through the war and the Russian October Revolution he became a radical pacifist and a socialist. During the November Revolution he was the representative of the Workers and Soldiers Council and a member of the Council of Intellectual Workers in Berlin. In 1919 he founded the Proletarian Theater" together with Piscator, R. Leonhard, L. Rubiner and others.

Although he never became a Communist, Holitscher became a passionate agitator for the young Soviet republic, on which his socialist hopes were based and which he toured in 1920 (on behalf of United Telegraph) and 1922 as a participant in the Third World Congress of the Communist International. He called for help for the people on the Volga threatened by famine with various reports and lectures in Germany and Switzerland. In the Society of Friends of the New Russia he was one of the most active promoters of the new proletarian culture of Soviet Russia. Through trips to Palestine (1921), France, England, India, China and Japan (since 1924), southwest Europe (1927) and especially through a second trip to America (1929), he published popular reports, created with an open eye for social realities.  Open-minded pacifistically influenced by Freudian ideas and highly emotionally invested, he always remained a socialist, but during the last years of the Weimar Republic he stood between party communists and the bourgeoisie, which he strongly opposed. After the National Socialists came to power, he was immediately ostracized. He had to emigrate to Switzerland, and many of his writings were banned and burned by the Nazis.

Isolated by emigration, Holitscher tried to use the anti-fascist émigré press to work as a journalist, but could no longer create any literary work. His last years in Ascona and Geneva were marked by poverty and loneliness.

Holitscher's first narrative attempts (including "Von der Lust und dem Tode, 1902) are in the Impressionist style with a psychologically differentiated development of the characters. They suffered criticism of being informal and confused. His Prague ghetto drama The Golem" (1908) only achieved a greater impact in the expressionist film adaptation with Paul Wegener. His novels and short stories show the strong influences of the French symbolists and mostly process his own experiences and views.

His eventful and material-rich autobiographies are relentless self-revelations based on Rousseau's model with a psychoanalytic impact and political commitment. Holtischer’s most important contribution to German literature of the 20th century goes far beyond the mere report of what has been experienced.  They are socially critical representations of historical and political contexts. Written with high spirits, they belong, alongside those of E. E. Kisch, to the best of this new genre of political-literary journalism, which Holtischer helped to create.

Holitscher’s preferences for parenthetical clarifications, semicolons, the long sentences, generous use of etc., and other stylistical mannerisms were retained to preserve the author’s man on the street style and charm.  For the careful reader, his discernment can be read between the lines creating a virtual second invaluable experience and preserving the original genius of Holitscher.

The words are Holitscher’s, any mistakes are mine.

David Grunwald

Campbell, California 2022

The Truth About Soviet Russia

In the first week of September last year Karl Radek, who was then in Moabit prison, sent me a message asking me whether I would like to join a commission that would travel to Russia with him.² This commission consisted of experts for agriculture, industry, a former state secretary who was an expert in administration, a representative of Berlin's radical workers and the chief of police in a large Swiss city. I wrote down the results of this trip in a book.  I immediately agreed and then met members of this commission repeatedly in the reception room of the Moabit prison, where we were allowed to speak to Radek under the supervision of an inspector. The departure of the commission, which Radek seemed to have guaranteed on the part of the German government, was delayed from week to week. Radek was then brought across the border alone and secretly in January of the current year.

The longer our departure was postponed, the more disappointed I became at the possibility of not seeing Bolshevism in what seemed to me the strongest and most definitive form in operation. The steps to the right discussed in detail in Lenin's pamphlet of The Next Tasks of Soviet Power had been taken; the Taylor system, and the bonus system was included in the program of economic development.³ The attitude of the Bolsheviks to the peasant class, especially to the middle peasants, gave us pause for thought; There was news about the labor army and the compulsory work, news that bothered us, and when we parted I asked Radek whether there was any point at all in traveling to Russia for me and for all of us, since all the compromises and concessions, if not obscured, then falsified the image of Bolshevism in a disastrous way.  Radek reassured me with his bright, sarcastic smile and said, if I'm not mistaken, that it matters little that one compromises, everything that one understands depends on how to reverse things at the right moment. He was convinced that this would happen. As far as I know, I was the only member of this commission who has set foot in Russia since Radek's departure from Berlin, exactly one year to the day after that messenger appeared in my apartment. In that year the image of Bolshevism, i.e., the practical implementation of communist principles in Russia continuously changed and was postponed.  The death penalty was abolished, then reintroduced as a result of an attempted attack by the counter-revolutionaries. Avalanches of lies, deliberate forgeries and fantastic distortions fell on the work of the communists in Russia before the eyes of the world. After all, nobody knew their way around the tangle of contradictions, rumors, denials, allegations and manifestos.⁴ At the Second Congress of the Third International⁵, the delegations that visited and reported on what they had seen, did nothing to dispel the fog. Many a smoking pyre erected for the men of the Soviet government was boiling their own local party soup. I was quite upset, shaky, and unsure when a newspaper company asked me to go to Russia that summer and write a book about my experiences.

What were the nature of the reporters who the world was sending into this besieged, much slandered and much vaunted country? And how could one learn the essentials in Russia? Learning from a member of the party was out of the question here as we were entering and leaving Russia with a fixed route. I knew of a few books, a series of essays on Soviet Russia, and I was personally acquainted with one or more of the reporters, and as a result I was able to confront the man with his opinion as well as with the actual circumstances. All kinds of ambitious fellows, secret businessmen and treacherous traitors cavorted on the hot and colorful scene. There was no such thing as the hunger for truth, the thirst for knowledge in a good sense, the authorized, and the serious and true (the books of some Englishmen and one German, Alfons Paquet, from the early days of the Bolshevik revolution stand out from the chaos). One cannot describe the contempt the leading men of Russia share of those speculative ecstatics who see in them glorious heroes without blemish, and present their work in a salacious manner.  Of course, one has nothing more in Russia than a smile of disdain, for those others who, out of unsteady fear, simulate enthusiasm in Russia and then, back over the border, overflow with slander and drool about their Russian homeland.

It is true that anyone who comes to Russia on behalf of bourgeois newspapers, magazines, or associations is received with undisguised suspicion and without any particular fondness. A certain attitude towards socialism, tried and tested in decisive situations, can be regarded as a basic condition for the granting of entry. But I found out for myself how one or the other obtained this entry permit, which the Russians recognized as soon as they had crossed the border and were taken into custody with a heavy hand. It had happened that way especially for some people I knew well, men and women, including Americans. I was appalled to learn of their arrest soon after stepping on Russian soil. Afterwards, I received unmistakable evidence of the double game they had played and of which they had been convicted.

There can only be one opinion, only one judgment, about people who, with carefully concealed plans, find their way into a blocked country, shaken by internal convulsions and a merciless external war, in which a new world is being prepared, in which 150 million people are spiritually liberated have suffered from hundreds of years of dull ignorance, sneaking in to satisfy their little purile interests. But one must condemn such activity if publicists are guilty of it by a tenfold or a hundredfold. The journalism of this time has the task of disseminating clarity, relentlessly and faithfully. It should portray and proclaim the sublime and the horrific that make up this period of time.  Whoever does not know how to speak clearly today, with secret plans and instructions in his pocket, smiles with his mouth and mingles with a tormented people, is committing a crime against the spirit.  For such people the dungeon is only a mild punishment. I have to present all of this up front because I came to Russia myself on behalf of a bourgeois corporation, the United Telegraph, which is affiliated with the great American newspaper organization United Press.  For a long time, I felt I had to atone for this.

Other kinds of obstacles piled up in my way. I want to describe one thing briefly, because it is characteristic of the unforeseen entanglements into which the foreign publicist who wants to go his own way finds himself. Some writers willingly give in to a cheap feuilletonistic play instinct.  They spice up their reports with small, intimate anecdotes, jokes or side-swipes that one man in the Kremlin revealed into the journalist's ear in a moment of good humor about the anther man in the Kremlin. I could sing a song about the calamities that Radek's sharp tongue got me into even before I set foot in Russia and then during the first few weeks in Moscow. Radek had explained to one of my more distant predecessors, an Englishman, about a personage in the Russian Foreign Office; He had classified him animal among the long-eared ones and since I was a foreign journalist reporting to the Foreign Office, I naturally had to bear the consequences as a protégé of Radek. (Not me alone).

Many a person stayed in St. Petersburg or Moscow for a week, then went home and wrote a book about Russia. It must be said that very few of us who had written books about Russia knew the country's language. How many were able to draw their experience directly from dealing with the people. Representatives of the state power are mostly the ones who instruct the stranger about the system, and the connections. Almost without exception, the People's Commissars are former emigrants and have a brilliant command of European languages. They are overburdened with work and you only get to them for short conversations. The circle closest to these leaders is made up of reliable communists, most of whom only speak Russian. It is not uncommon, and this applies particularly to offices that house the so-called specialists, to see taciturn, suspicious and unwilling officials.  There are also those who like to use the presence of the stranger to express their resentment against the system that has allowed them a certain freedom.  Many of these have lived abroad and are happy to digress from the subject they have come to discuss in order to greedily demand news of closed Europe. If you then direct it back to the place from which you started, a valve occasionally opens through which steam, which has been pushed back for a long time, hisses out. But that valve doesn't stay open for long. The frightened soul soon snaps it shut, and one gets meaningless, vague phrases from a face contorted with fear.

Such psychosis does not fail to have an effect on the stranger who stays, if only for a short time, in Russia. In this country shaken by hardship, enthusiasm and despair, each and every one of them experiences the fate of the uncertain future, and the burning dangerous present. Immediately after crossing the border, one feels a certain atmospheric burden of bondage and suspicion sinking down on the soul. I have already mentioned how righteous this mistrust is, and for good reason. The state in which one is forced to live is always difficult, sometimes completely unbearable. And that is not due to the control authority alone, but to the multitudes of elements, some of which are very dubious, which they use to exercise the necessary control. Ochrana people are among them; but I have also met some newly-minted sniffer dogs and blood dogs.⁶

The publicist with a foreign assignment lives in houses under military guard. Felt slippered scoundrels slink through the corridors, and the greasy imprint of unwashed ears collects around the keyhole. One is at the mercy of some door watcher. Once I left a textbook for illiterate adults in a lady's room. When the lady was arrested and her room sealed, I complained to my immediate superior, namely the so-called house commandant, about this book, which I needed for my work. The next day the officials of that control authority, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Usury (called Vecheka after the initials)⁷, opened the room, rummaged through the lady’s belongings, and when I asked for my textbook back, I was told with a sneering expression that the lady kept the Book for Anarchists that I had given her very safe, because it could not be found. This was only a small misunderstanding, but many a person has gotten stuck on such a hook.

Since everything written and printed that one carries with oneself has to be presented to the Vecheka for inspection before leaving the country, and since one then has to cross three borders with this material before returning home, the notebooks you carry with you are somewhat shallow. The writings, whether favorable or unfavorable for one of the three countries, are anxiously kept in mind in order to protect them from misunderstanding, ignorance, informers and border authorities. It is this state of intellectual self-defense that gradually creates that psychological pressure,