One day while walking down the Kurfi.irstendamm, I saw a cabaret billboard advertising the Black jazz band of Leland and Drayton and their Charleston dancers. It was a well-known band back in the States. I had little money, but I couldn't resist the temptation to stop in and hear them. I sat down at a table and ordered a beer. To my dismay, the waiter said they didn't sell beer, just wine. So I took the wine card and chose the cheapest bottle I could find.
A number of band members and dancers came over to my table and asked where I was going. When I told them I was a student going to Moscow, they said they had just returned from a six-month tour in Russia. They were the first Blackjazz group that
151
had gone to the Soviet Union. I asked if they had met Otto and the ol her Black students there. Y es, they had met them all and they had had good times together. So we all sat down to exchange news.
As we talked, I began to worry about the bill, and said I was low on money. "Oh, don't worry about that," someone said and ordered more wine. But when it came time to pay for the drinks, I
�ot stuck with the whole tab and had to walk several miles across town to get home.
After a month in Berlin, my visa came through. I was on my way to Stettin, a city on the Baltic Sea which bordered Poland and where I boarded a small Soviet ship. After three days of some of I he roughest seas I have ever ex perienced, we land ed in Leningrad.
It was April 1926, and we were already in the season of the "white nights," when daylight lasted until late into the evening.
As we entered the Gulf of Finland the foliowing morning, we passed the naval fortress of Kronstadt about twenty miles out from I ,eningrad (the site of the anti-Soviet mutiny of 1920). The ship rinally docked in Leningrad. Upon landing, I presented my visa and passport to the authorities. Addressing me in English, a man in civilian dress said, "Oh, you're going to the Comintern school in Moscow?"
"Y es," I rep lied.
He immediately took me in charge and got my baggage through customs. I assumed he was a member of the security police. We left the customs building and got into an old beat-up Packard. As we drove away from the docks, he informed me that the Moscow train would not leave until eight that evening. He put me up at a hotel where I could rest and go out to see the city.
Leningrad ( old St. Petersburg) was built by Czar Peter the Great in the sixteenth century and now renamed for the architect of the new socialist society. As I walked down the now famous Nevsky Prospekt, I thought of John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, trying to recapture some of the dramatic scenes in that classic.2 I passed the Peter and Paul Fortress and then the Winter Palace-once the home of the czars and now a museum of the people. The storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 had been the crucial event in the taking of St. Petersburg by the Bolsheviks.
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
The people I saw passing me on the street were plainly dressed.
Many of the men wore the traditional robochka and high boots; others were in European dress. Most people were dressed neatly, though shabbily, and all appeared to be well-fed. They were bright and cheerful. It seemed they went about with a purpose-a sharp contrast to the atmosphere of hopelessness that had pervaded Berlin. People in Leningrad looked at me-and I looked at them.
By this time, 1 had become used to being stared at and took it as friendly curiosity. Af ter all, a Black man was seldom seen in those parts.
After several hours, I returned to my hotel. My friend from the security police showed up promptly at seven with my train ticket and took me to the station to put me on the train to Moscow. Filled with excitement and anticipation, I got little sleep on the train and awoke early to seethe Russian landscape flowing by my windowpiae forests, groves of birch trees and swamps. I was in the midst of the great Russian steppes.
When we arrived in Moscow at Yaroslavsky Station, some of my traveling companions hailed a droshky and told the driver to take me to the Comintern.
Moscow at last! We drove from the station into the vast sprawling city-once the capital of old Russia and now of the new.
It was a bright, sunny morning and the sun glistened off the golden church dornes in the "city of a thousand churches." It seemed a maze of narrow, cobblestone streets, intersected by broad boulevards. While Leningrad had been a distinctly European city, Moscow seemed a mixture of the Asiatic and the European-a bizarre and Strange combination to me, but a cheerful one.
Moscow was more Russian than the cosmopolitan Leningrad.
Crowds swarmed in the streets in many different styles of dress.
We arrived at the Comintern, which was housed in an old eighteenth century structure on Ulitsa Kornintern near the Kremlin, across the square from Staraya Konyushnya (the old stables of the czar). I paid the driver and entered the building. The guard at the door checked my credentials and directed me upstairs to a small office on the third floor. After producing my bonafides, I was told to take a seat, to wait for my comrades who would soon be
A STUDENT IN MOSCOW
153
coming for me.
About half an hour later, Otto and another Black man entered the room. I was overjoyed at the sight of him and his friend, who turned out to be a fellow student, Harold Williams. We embraced Russian style, and I began to feel more at home in this strange land.
Otto asked about the family. An ex pression of sadness crossed his face, however, when I asked him about the rest of the Black students. He then informed me of Jane Golden's serious illness.
She was at that moment in a uremic coma from a kidney ailment and was not expected to live. Her husband was at her side at the hospital. (Though both were from Chicago, I had not met them before.)
The situation had saddened the whole Black student body, and for that matter, the whole school. In the course of her brief sojourn, Jane had become very popular. Otto described her in glowing terms-a real morale booster, whose spirit had helped all of them through the period of initial adjustment.
I was impressed. Here was a Black woman, not a member of the Communist Party, who had so easily become accustomed to the new Soviet socialist society. It seemed to me that there must be thousands of Black women like her in the U.S.
After we had greeted each other, we caught a droshky over to the school in order that I might register officially. In the.course of the ride, the driver lashed his horse and cursed at him. I asked Otto what he was saying, and he gave a running translation: "Get up there, you son-of-a-bitch. I feed you oats while I myself eat black bread ! Y our sire was no good, you bastard, your momma was no good too!" This verbal and physical abuse, Otto told me, was typical of most Russian droshky drivers.
We finally arrived at the school administration which was housed in another old seventeenth century structure, built before the Revolution. It had been a finishing school for daughters of the aristocracy. Before that, it had been a boys' school where, rumor has it, the great Pushkin had studied.
Otto introduced me to the university rector with what sounded to my untrained ear like fluent Russian. We then went to the office
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
of the chancellor, where I was duly registered. I was now a student at the Universitet Trydyashchiysya Vostoka Imeni Stalina (the University of the Toilers of the East Named for Stalin)-Russian acronym K UTV A. Otto and I then walked to the dormitory a f ew blocks away where I met the other two Black students, Bankole and Farmer.
We all immediately took a streetcar to the hospital which was located on the other side of the Moscow River. There we were met by Golden and some other students who informed us that Jane Golden had just passed away that morning. Golden seemed to be in a state of shock and the doctors had given him some sedatives.
We went into the hospital morgue to view her body. Bankole broke down in uncontrollable tears. I learned afterwards that Jane had been a close friend-a kind of mother to him during the period of his adjustment to this new land.
y./e took Golden home to the dormitory. The school collective and its leaders immediately took over the funeral arrangements.
The body lay in state in the school auditorium for twenty-four hours, during which time the students thronged past.
The funeral was held the foliowing day and the whole school turned out. The cortege seemed a mile long as it flowed past Tverskaya towards the cemetery. The students would not allow the casket to be placed upon the cart, but organizing themselves in relays every fifty yards, insisted on carrying it the distance of several miles on their shoulders.
A good portion of the American colony in Moscow was assembled at the cemetery. The chairman of the school collective, a young Georgian, delivered a stirring eulogy at the graveside. One of the students who was standing next to me made a running translation sotto voce which went something like this: The first among her race to come to the land of socialism .. .in search of freedom for her oppressed peoples, former slaves ...
to find out how the Soviets had done it. We were happy to receive her and her comrades ... condolences to her bereaved husband, our Comrade Golden, and to the rest of the Negro students ... the whole university has suffered a great loss. Rest in peace, Jane Golden. Y ou were with us only a short time, but all of us have benefitted from your presence and comradeship.
155
Turning to Golden, he said:
We Soviet people and comrades of oppressed colonial and dependent countries must carry on" W e pledge our undying support to the cause of your people's freedom. Long live the freedom fight of our Negro brothers in America! Long live the Soviet Union and its Communist Party, beacon light of the struggle for freedom of all oppressed peoples.
Golden had borne himself well at the graveside, but we didn't want him to return to his room in the students' dormitory, which would only remind him of his grievous loss. So we went to the apartment of MacCloud, an old Wobbly friend of ours from Philadelphia, who had attended the funeral and who lived in the Zarechnaya District, across the river. He was a close friend of Big Bill Haywood and had followed the great working class leader to the Soviet Union. There we tried to drown our sorrows in good old Russian vodka, which was in plentiful supply.
Jane Golden's funeral and the school collective's response to her death made a profound impression on me. Through these events, crammed into the first three days of my stay in the Soviet Union, I came to know something about my fellow students and the new socialist society into which I had entered.
THE BOLSHEVIKS FIGHT FOR EQUALITY OF NATIONS
K UTV A was a unique university. At the time I entered, its student body represented more than seventy nationalities and ethnic groups. It was founded by the Bolsheviks for the special purpose of training cadre from the many national and ethnic groups within the Soviet Union-the former colonial dependencies of the czarist empire-and also to train cadres from colonies and subject nations outside the Soviet Union.
The school was divided into two sections-inner and outer. At the inner section there were Turkmenians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Bashkirs, Yakuts, Chuvashes, Kazaks, Kalmucks, Buryat-Mongols and Inner and Outer Mongolians from Soviet Asia. From the Caucasus there were Azerbaidzhanis, Armenians, Georgians,
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Abkhazians and many other national and ethnic groups I had never heard of before. There were Tartars from the Crimea and the Volga region.
The national and ethnic diversity found within the Soviet Union is hard to imagine. The Revolution had opened up many areas, for example through the Trans-Caucasus Road, and as late as 1928, the existence of new groups was still being "discovered." These nationalities were all former colonial dependencies of the czars and were referred to as the "Soviet East," "peoples of the East,"
and "border land countries." The inner section comprised the main and largest part of the student body in the university.
W e Blacks were of course part of the outer section at the school.
It included Indians, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, Persians, Egyptians, Arabs and Palestinian Jews from the Middle East, Arabs from North Africa, Algerians, Moroccans, Chinese and several J apanese (hardly a colonial people, but as revolutionaries, identified with the East).
The Chinese, several hundred strong, comprised the }argest group of the outer section. This was o bviously because China, bordering on the USSR, was in the first stage of its own antiimperialist revolution, a revolution receiving direct material and political support from the Soviet Union. While K UTV A trained the communist cadres from China, there was also the Sun Yat-sen University, just outside of Moscow, which trained cadres for the Kuomintang.
Among its students was the daughter of the famous Christian general, Chang Tso-lin. Several Chinese, including Chiang Kaishek's son, studied in Soviet military schools du ring this period. A number of the Chinese students from K UTV A were massacred by Chiang's troops at the Manchurian border when they returned to China shortly after Chiang's bloody betrayal of the revolution in 1927. Otto told me that a former girlfriend of his was among this group.
As I remember, there were no Latin Americans at K UTV A during the time I was there, and the sole black African was Bankole. The student body was continually expanding, however, and later included many students from these and other areas.
A STUDENT IN MOSCOW
157
We students studied the classic works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. But unlike the past schooling we had known, this whole body of theory was related to practice. Theory was not regarded as dogma, but as a guide to action.
In May I 925, Stalin had delivered an historie speech at the school, outlining K UTV A's purpose and its main task. His lecture was the subject of continuous discussion and study.3 It was our introduction to the Marxist theory on the national question and its development by Lenin and Stalin.
How did the Bolsheviks transform a territory embracing onesixth of the earth's surface-known as the "prison-house of nations" under the Czar-into a family of nations, a free union of peoples? What was the policy pursued by the Soviets which enabled them to forge together more than a hundred different stages of social development into such extraordinary unity of eff ort for the building of a multinational socialist state-the kind of unity that enabled them to win the civil war within and to defeat the intervention of seventeen nations, including the U nited States, from without.
The starting point for us was to understand that the formation of peoples into nations is an objective law of social development around which the Bolsheviks, particularly Lenin and Stalin, had developed a whole body of theory. Accotding to this theory, a nation is an historically constituted stable community of people, based on four main characteristics: a common territory, a common economic lif e, a common language and a common psychological makeup (national character) manifested in common features in a national culture. Since the development of imperialism, the liberation of the oppressed nations has become a question whose final resolution would only come through proletarian revolution. 4
The guiding principle of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the national question was to bring about the unity ofthe laboring masses of the various nationalities for the purpose of waging a joint struggle-first to overthrow czarism and imperialism, and then to build the new society under a working class dictatorship. The accomplishment of the latter required the
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
establishment of equality before the law for all nationalities-with no special privileges for any one people-and the right of the colonies and subject nations to separate.
This principle was incorporated into the law of the land in the Declaration of Rights of the People of Russia, passed a few days after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. Of course, the declaration of itself did not eliminate national inequality, which as Stalin had observed, "rested on economic inequality, historically formed." To eliminate this historically based economic and cultural inequality imposed by the czarist regimes upon the former oppressed nations, it was required that the more developed nations assist these formerly oppressed nations and peoples to catch up with the Great Russians in economic and cultural development.
In pursuance of this aim, the new government was organized on a bicameral basis. One body was chosen on the basis of population alone; the other, the Council of N ationalities, consisted of representatives from each of the national territorial units-the autonomous Soviet republics, autonomous regions and national areas. Any policy in regard to the aff airs of these formerly oppressed nations could be carried through only with the approval of the Council of N ationalities. The Communist Party, through its members, was involved in both bodies and worked to see that its policy of full equality and the right of self-determination was implemented.
As this theory was put into practice, we learned that national cultures could be expressed with a proletarian (socialist) content and that there was no antagonistic contradiction, under socialism, between national cultures and proletarian internationalism. U nder the Soviets, the languages and other national characteristics of the many nationalities were developed and strengthened with the aim of drawing the formerly oppressed nationalities into full participation in the new society. Thus, the Bolsheviks upheld the principle of "proletarian in content, national in form." Through this policy, they hoped to draw all nationalities together, acquainting each with the achievements of the others, leading to a truly universal culture, a joint produet of all humanity.
This is in sharp contrast to imperialism's policy of forcibly
A STUDENT IN MOSCOW
159
arresting and distorting the free development of nations in order to maintain their economic and cultural backwardness as an essential condition for the extraction of superprofits. Thus, the oppressed nations can achieve liberation only through the path of revolutionary struggle to overthrow imperialism and in alliance with the working class of the oppressor nations. Stalin, proceeding from the experience and practice of the Soviet Union, emphasized the need for the formation and consolidation of a united revolutionary front between the working class of the West and the rising revolutionary movements of the colonies-a united front based on a struggle against a common enemy. The precondition for forming such unity is that the proletariat of the oppressor nations gives:
direct and determined support to the liberation movement of the oppressed peoples against the imperialism of its "own country," for "no nation can be free if it oppresses other nations." (Engels) .... This support implies the advocacy, defense and implementation ofthe slogan ofthe right ofnations to secession, to independent existence as states.s Without this cooperation of peoples based on mutual confidence and fraternal interrelations, it will be impossible to establish the material basis for the victory of socialism.
The test of all this theory was being proven in practice in the Soviet Union. The experience of the Bolsheviks demonstrably proved to us that socialism offered the most favorable conditions for the full development of oppressed nations and peoples.
At the time of the Revolution, there were many nationalities within the horders of the Soviet Union in which the characteristics of nationhood had not yet fully matured, and in faet had been suppressed by the czars. It was the Soviet system itself which became a powerful factor in the consolidation of these nationalities into nations, as socialist industry and collective farming created the economic basis for this consolidation.
I observed this firsthand in the Crimea and the Caucasus during my visits there in the summers of 1927 and 1928. The languages
160
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
and culture which had been stifled under the czarist regime were now being developed. The language of the Crimean people was a Turko-Tartar language, but befare the Revolution, almost all education, such as there was, was in the Russian language. Now there were schools established which used the native language.
Otto and other students made similar observations when they traveled to different areas of the Soviet Union.
In the meantime, I was having my own problems with the Russian language. On first hearing it, the language had sounded most strange to me. I could hardly understand a word and wondered if I would ever be able to master it. As the youngest Black American, I applied myself seriously to its study. The first hurdle was the Cyrillic alphabet-its uniquely different characters intimidated me. But the crash course at K UTV A, lasting about an hour and a half per day, soon broke down this initial barrier.
a In addition, I studied on my own for a couple of hours each day.
I would set out to memorize twenty new words a day. Then at night, I would write them out on a sheet of paper and pin them above the mirror in my room. I would then go over them again in the morning while shaving, and during the day I would make sure to use them in conversation with the Russians.
English grammar had always seemed irrelevant to me, but I soon came to appreciate the logic of Russian grammar. In faet, I learned most of my English grammar through the study of Russian. lts rules were consistent and understandable. The language soon ceased to be mysterious and revealed itself as being beautifully and simply constructed. In six months I was able to read Pravda with the help of a dictionary.
KUTVA: STRUCTURE AND STUDIES
The school structure was fairly complicated, but, as I saw it, thoroughly democratic. There was the collective, the general body which included everybody in the school-from the rector, faculty, students, clerical and maintenance workers to the scrubwoman.
The leading body of the collective was the bureau-composed of
A STUDENT IN MOSCOW
161
representatives elected by the various groups in the university.
There was also a Communist Party organization which played the leadership role at all levels.
Originally established by the Council of Nationalities, K UTV A was now a Party school, administered by the Educational Department (AGITPROP) of the Central Committee of the CPSU. There was a direct representative of the Party, called a
"Party strengtbener," in the school administration. Together with the rector and a representative of the students, he was part of the
"troika" which constituted the top leadership of the school.
Students had the rights of citizens, voting and participating in local elections. The school discussed and dealt with all the issues which Soviet workers and peasants discussed at their work places.
As with all students who pursued courses in higher education in the Soviet Union, we at KUTVA received full room and board, clothes and a small stipend for spending money. There was, of course, no tuition. We used to attend workers' cultural clubs and do volunteer work, like working Saturdays to help build the Moscow subways. Education for us was not an ivory tower, but a true integration into the Soviet society, where we received firsthand knowledge from our experiences.
The curriculum (which was a three-year course) was based on Marxism-Leninism; that is, the teachings of Marx and Engels as developed by Lenin. It included dialectical and historical materialism, the Marxist world concept; the Marxist theory of class struggle as the motive force of human events; the economic doctrines of Marx: value and surplus value, as a key to understanding history by revealing the economic law of motion of modem capitalist societies; Lenin's analysis of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism; theory and tactics of the prol!!tarian revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat and its Soviet state form; the problems of socialist construction; Lenin's theory on the peasant question-the alliance of workers and peasants as the base for Soviet power; the national and colonial questions; and the role of the party as vanguard of the proletariat. W e also studied the specific history of the CPSU.
Our favorite teacher was Endre Sik, who taught courses on
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Leninism and the history of the Soviet Party. Sik was a striking young man. His distinguishing feature was a large shock of white hair, unusual for a man so young-he was probably in his thirties.
He was soft-spoken and modest. We all loved Sik; he was an outgoing person who radiated warmth.
Sik was a Hungarian, a political refugee living in Russia. He had been a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. Captured by the Russians, he was converted to Bolshevism while in a Russian prison camp. On his release, he had gone back to Hungary and participated in the short-lived (133
days) Hungarian Soviet government of 1919 of Bela Kun. With the defeat of the Bela Kun government, Sik-along with hundreds of other revolutionaries-fled to the Soviet Union. Hungarian exiles made up one of Moscow's }argest foreign colonies. In Moscow, Sik pursued an academic career. He was a graduate of the Institute of R.ed Professors and like many H ungarian intellectuals, he was multilingual.
For all his good nature, Sik seemed tired and harassed. He was teaching in many schools, in addition to activity in the H ungarian community. Seven years after the defeat of the Htingarian Soviet, the exiled revolutionaries were bitterly divided and factionalized, laying blame on each other for the failure of the revolution.
Sik became deeply interested in the question of Blacks in the United States and undertook a serious study of the question. He read all the books available and also asked the Black students at K UTV A to join with him. U nfortunately for our personal relationship, Sik and I were to find ourselves on opposite sides of the fence in the discussion of Black Americans which took place at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in June 1928.
Our teacher of Marxist economics was a young man by the name of Rubenstein, a Russian economist in the Gosplan (Governmental Planning Commission). The star pupil in that class turned out to be our modest friend Golden. Golden, who had known nothing about Marxism befare coming to the Soviet Union, was able to grasp the intricacies of Marx's Capita/ and Va/ue, Price and Profit seemingly without effort.
163
A class that stands out in my memory was one on how to make a revolution, to seize power once the situation was ripe. This course consisted of a series of lectures by a young Red Army officer. He had been a heroic figure in the M oscow u prising of 1917 and the subsequent seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in that city. A tall, handsome young man of bourgeois background, he had been a lieutenant in the army of the Kerensky government. Like many other soldiers, he had been won over by the Bolsheviks on the basis of their demands, which reflected the needs of the people: peace, bread and land. To him, the Moscow uprising against Kerensky, led by the Bolsheviks, was a model for the coming seizure of power in the big cities of the capitalist world.
He had a large map of Moscow on the wall and would use it to illustrate how it had been done. The call for the uprising, he said, had come to the Moscow Communist Party by telephone from Leningrad, where the revolutionary workers, sailors and army under the leadership of Lenin had overthrown the Kerensky government and seized power in that city.
In Moscow, the Party organization, already prepared, issued a call to the people for an uprising. His regiment, stationed on the outskirts of the city, together with red guards (workers' militia), responded and began to march towards the center of the city. The White Guardists were concentrated in the Arbot and in the Kremlin. Here he pointed out, in Russian and other European cities, the working class districts were centered around factories on the outskirts of the city and Moscow was circled by workers suburbs. Together with defected units of other regiments and with red guards, they marched towards Moscow's central area, whence fighting spread throughout the city-even into the trans-Moscow district. The reds finally wiped out the White Guardist strongholds, and the Kremlin, which had changed hands two times before in the fighting, finally surrendered.
Moscow was ours!
CLASSMATES AT KUTV A
Because of the language problem, we students from outside the
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Soviet Union were subdivided into three main language groups: English, French and Chinese. English and French were the dominant languages of the many colonial areas represented at the university. Spanish was later added when Latin American students began to arrive. In addition to ourselves, the English-speaking group included East Indians, Koreans, J apanese and lndonesians.
I had many close friends in this latter group.
One of the most interesting and brilliant was an Indian student by the name of Sakorov. (They all took Russian names because of the severe repression which they faced back home.) A former machinist in a Detroit auto plant, Sakorov had been sent to the school by the American Party.
Originally from Bombay, Sakorov had gone to sea on a British ship at the age of twelve and had been subjected to very op pressive conditions his whole career at sea. He eventually jumped ship in B..,altimore and wound up working in an auto plant in Detroit. Of all the group of students, he was the closest to us Blacks. He knew first band the plight of Blacks in the United States, and as a dark skinned lndian, he had experienced much of the same type of racial abuse while there. After he left the school, he returned to India, where he became one of the founders of the Indian Communist Party.
Later, more Indian students were to come, including one sixteen year old-a tall, lanky boy who took the name of Volkov. He had been bom in California; his parents were Sikhs who had migrated to the U.S. and worked as agricultural workers in the Imperial Valley of California. They were part of a foreign contingent of the Ghadr Party, a revolutionary nationalist party of Sikhs which had been organized in 1916. The Party would pick out young men to be future leaders; Volkov was chosen and sent to Japan for education and stayed there a year. Then he was sent to study in the Soviet Union, perhaps by the Japanese Party. He spoke Japanese and English.
Among the Indian students was a group of about half a dozen Sikhs, former professional soldiers, survivors of the Hong Kong massacre of 1926. On the pretext of quelling an '"imminent mutiny," the British colonel of the regiment stationed in Hong
A STUDENT IN MOSCOW
165
Kong had called the unarmed Sikh soldiers into the regimental square and turned machine guns on them. (All regiments in the lndian Army included a British machine gun company as a safeguard against mutiny.) Several hundred were killed or wounded. As I understood it, the massacre was engineered to quell the protests over conditions which were being raised by members of the Ghadr Party and its supporters.
The group who arrived in Moscow were among the few who escaped over the walls; they had fled to Shanghai where they were taken in charge by M.N. Roy, an lndian and then Comintern representative to China. Roy sent them to Moscow. These students, some of them older grey-bearded men, had spent their whole lives in the British lndian Army. They represente9 a special problem for the school, because most of them had had very little education of any kind. They were not brought into our class, but were put into a special group under the tutelage of Volkov, Sakorov and other of the regular Indian students.
It was my good fortune to meet many of these Indian students again in 1942, when I was in Bombay as a merchant seaman. Most of them were leading figures in the Indian revolutionary movement. Sakorov had been a defendant in one of the Merut trials, having been charged with "conspiracy against the king." Since his return to India, he had spent eleven years in prison. Nada, another former schoolmate, was president of the Indian Friends of the Soviet Union and very active among the students and youth.
There were several Koreans and J apanese at the school, and two lndonesians. I remember Dirja particularly well. A Dutcheducated Indonesian intellectual, he was an old revolutionary who had spent many years in prison. There was another Indonesian, a young man (whose name I cannot recall), who later emerged as a communist leader and was killed in the Indonesian revolt of 1946.
Kemal Pasha (a party name conferred on him by Sakorov) was a grey-eyed Moroccan from the Riffian tribe of Abdul Krim. I met Kemal Pasha again in Paris during the Spanish Civil War. There were also two whites in the group-J une Kro Il, then the wife of an American communist leader, Carl Reeves; and Max Ralff, a young English lad of Russian-Jewish parentage.
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
BLACKS IN MOSCOW
We students were a fairly congenial lot and in particular I got to know the other Black students quite well. Golden was a handsome, jet-Black man; a former Tuskegee student and a dining car waiter. He was not a member of theCommunist Party, but was a good friend of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, head of the Party's Afro-American work.
Golden told me that his coming to the Soviet Union had been accidental. He had run into Fort-Whiteman, a fellow student at Tuskegee, on the streets of Chicago. Fort-Whiteman had just retumed from Russia and was dressed in a Russian blouse and boots.
As Golden related it:_ "I asked Fort-Whiteman what the hell he w�s wearing. Had he come off the stage and forgotten to change clothes? He informed me that these were Russian clothes and that he had just returned from that country."
Golden at first thought it was a put-on, but became interested as Fort-Whiteman talked about his experiences. "Then out of the bluc, he asks me if I want to go to Russia as a student. At first, I thought he was kidding, but man, I would have done anything to get off those dining cars! I was finally convinced that he was serious. 'But I'm married,' I told him. 'What about my wife?' 'Why, bring her along too!' he replied. He took me to his office at the American Negro Labor Congress, an impressive set-up with a secretary, and I was convinced. Fort-Whiteman gave me moneyto get passports, and the next thingl knew, a couple of weeks later we were on the boat with Otto and the others on the way to Russia.
And here I am now."
He had a keen sense of humor and kidded the rest of us a lot, particularly Otto. His Southern accent carried o.ver into Russian, and we teased him about being the only person who spoke Russian with a Mississippi accent.
Then there was Bankole, an African who spent most of his time with the Black Americans. He was an Ashanti, from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and his family was part of the African elite.
167
The son of a wealthy barrister, his family had sent him to London University to study journalism. From there, he .had gone to Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh.
He had been on the road to becoming a perennial student and had planned to continue at McGill University in Montreal, but was recruited to the Young Communist League in Pittsburgh. In the States, he was confronted with a racism more blatant than any he had met before. I gathered that this had struck him sharply and had been largely responsible for his move to the left.
My brother Otto had become sort of a character in the school.
He was popular among the students, who immediately translated his pseudonym "John Jones" into the Russian "Ivan Ivanovich."
Otto had absolutely no tolerance for red tape, and he had become a mortal enemy of the apparatchiki (petty bureaucrats) in the school. He had built a reputation for making their lives miserable, and when they saw him coming, they would huddle in a corner:
"Here comes Ivan lvanovich. Ostorozhno (watch out)! Bolshoi skandal budyet (this guy will make a big scandal)!"
Harold Williams of Chicago was a West Indian and former seaman in the British merchant marine. He had adopted the name of Dessalines, one of the three leaders of the Haitian revolution of the 1790s. Williams had little formal education and some difficulty in grasping theory, but was instinctively a class-conscious guy.
Finally, there was Mahoney, whose name in the USSR was Jim Farmer. Farmer was a steelworker from East Liverpool, Ohio, a Communist Party member and had played a leading role in local struggles in the steel mills.
There were only eight of us Blacks in a city of 4,500,000 people.
In addition to the six students, there were also two Black American women who had long residence (since before the Revolution) in Moscow.
I only knew one of the women, Emma Harris. We first met on the occasion of the death of Jane Golden. Emma was a warm, outgoing and earthy middle-aged woman, originally from Georgia.
It was evident that she had once been quite handsome-of the type that in the old days we called a "teasin' brown." Emma had first come to Moscow as a member of a Black song and dance group, a
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
lowly hoofer in the world of cheap vaudeville. Having been deserted by its manager, the group was left stranded in Moscow.
While the others had evidently made their way back to the States, Emma had decided to stay. She had liked the country.
Here, being Black wasn't a liability, but on the contrary, a definite asset. With her drive and ambition to be "somebody," Emma parlayed this asset into a profitable position. She married a Russian who installed her, it seems, as a madam of a house of prostitution. It was no ordinary house, she once explained to me.
"Our clients were the wealthy and nobility." To the former hoofer, this was status.
Such was Emma's situation in November 1917, when the Russian Bolsheviks and Red Guards moved in from the proletarian suburbs of Moscow to capture the bourgeois inner city and the Kremlin. During some mopping-up operations, Emma's house
'Was raided by the Cheka (the security police). A bunch of White Guardists had holed up there and the whole group was arrested, including Emma. They were taken to the Lubyanka Prison and some of the more notorious White Guardists were summarily executed.
Emma remained in a cell for a few days. Finally she was called up before a Cheka official. He told her that they were looking into her case. Many of the people who had been arrested at her place were counter-revolutionaries and conspirators against the new Soviet state, and some had been shot. Emma disclaimed knowledge of any conspiracy and stated that she was engaged in
"legitimate" business and had nothing to do with the politics of her clients.
'"Y ou know the only reason we didn't shoot you was because you are a Negro woman," the official said. To her surprise, he added,
"Y ou are free to go now. I advise you to try to find some useful work. Keep out of trouble."
When we met Emma, she had become a textile worker. She lived with a young Russian woman-also a textile worker, whom I suspected was a reformed prostitute-in a two-room apartment in an old working class district near Krasnaya Vorota (Red Gate).
Soon after the first Black students arrived, she sought them out
A STUDENT IN MOSCOW
169
11 nd greeted them like lang lost kinfolk.
At least once a month, we students would pool part of the small slipends we received and give Emma money to shop for and prcpare same old home cooking for us. On these occasions, she would regale us with stories from her past life. At times one could dctcct a fleeting expression of sadness, of nostalgia, for her old days of affluence. One could see that she had never become fully ndjusted to the new life under the Soviets. While not openly hostile, it was clear that she was not an ardent partisan of the new regime. Knowing our sentiments, she avoided political discussion und kept her views to herself. Our feelings toward her were warmest when we first arrived, but as we developed more ties with I he R ussians, we went by to see her less often. But we did continue lo visit her periodically; she was a sort of mother figure for us, and wc all felt sorry for her. She was getting old and aften expressed a dcsire to return to the States. She was finally able to return home after World War II.
Needless to say, Blacks attracted the curiosity of the Muscovites. Children followed us in the streets. If we paused to greet a friend, we found ourselves instantly surrounded by curious crowds-unabashedly staring at us. Once, while strolling down Tverskaya, Otto and I stopped to greet a white American friend and immediately found ourselves surrounded by curious Russians.
It was a friendly curiosity which we took in stride. A young Russian woman stepped forward and began to upbraid and lecture the crowd.
"Why are you staring at these people? They're human beings the same as us. Do you want them to think that we're savages? Eta ne kulturnya! (That is uncultured!)" The last was an epithet and in those days a high insult.
"Eta ne po-Sovietski! (lt's not the Soviet way!)" she scolded them.
At that point, someone in the crowd calmly responded: "Well, citizeness, it's a free country, isn't it?"
We were not off ended, but amused. We understood all this for what it was.
There was one occasion when Otto, Farmer, Banko le and I were
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
walking down Tverskaya. Bankole, of course, stood out-attracting more attention than the rest of us with his English cut Savile Row suit, monocle and cane-a black edition of a British aristocrat. We found ourselves being followed by a group of Russian children, who shouted: "Jass Band .... Jass Band!"
Otto, Farmer and I were amused at the incident and took it in stride. Bankole, however, shaking with rage at the implication, jerked around to confront them. His monocle fell off as he shouted: "Net Jass Band! Net Jass Band!" As he spoke, he hit his cane on the ground for emphasis.
Evidently, to these kids, a jazz band was not just a group of musicians, but a race or tribe of people to which we must belong.
They obviously thought we were with Leland and Drayton, the musicians I had met in Berlin. They had been a big hit with the Muscovites.. We pulled Bankole away, "C'mon man, cut it out.
They don't mean anything."
In the Soviet Union, remnants of national and racial prejudices from the old society were attacked by education and law. It was a crime to give or receive direct or indirect privileges, or to exercise discrimination because of race or nationality. Any manifestation of racial or national superiority was punishable by law and was regarded as a serious political offense, a social crime.
During my entire stay in the Soviet Union, I encountered only one incident of racial hostility. It was on a Moscow streetcar.
Several of us Black students had boarded the car on our way to spend an evening with our friend MacCloud. It was af ter rush hour and the car was only about half filled with Russian passengers. As usual, we were the objects of friendly curiosity. At one stop, a drunken Russian staggered aboard. Seeing us, he muttered (but loud enough for the whole car to hear) something about "Black devils in our country."
A group of outraged Russian passengers thereupon seized him and ordered the motorman to stop the car. It was a citizen's arrest, the first I had ever witnessed. "How dare you, you scum, insult people who are the guests of our country!"
What then occurred was an impromptu, on-the-spot meeting, where they debated what to do with the man. I was to see many of
171
this kind of "meeting" during my stay in Russia.
It was decided to take the culprit to the police station which, the conductor informed them, was a few blocks ahead. Upon arrival there, they hustled the drunk out of the car and insisted that we Blacks, as the injured parties, come along to make the charges.
At first we demurred, saying that the man was obviously drunk and not responsible for his remarks. "No, citizens," said a young man (who had done most of the talking), "drunk or not, we don't allow this sort of thing in our country. You must come with us to the militia (police) station and prefer charges against this man."
The car stopped in front of the station. The poor drunk was hustled off and all the passengers came along. The defendant had sobered up somewhat by this time and began apologizing before we had even entered the building. We got to the commandant of the station.
The drunk swore that he didn't mean what he'd said. "I was drunk and angry about something else. I swear to you citizens that I have no race prejudice against those Black gospoda (gentlemen)."
W e actually felt sorry for the poor fellow and we accepted his apology. We didn't want to press the matter.
"No," said the commandant, "we'll keep him overnight. Perhaps this will be a les son to him."
BIG BILL HAYWOOD
In addition to the students at K UTV A and the two Black women, there was a sizeable American colony in Moscow during my stay there. There were political representatives of the Communist Party USA to the Comintern, the Profintern, the Crestintern and to the departments, bureaus and secretaries of these organizations-holding jobs as translators, stenographers and researchers. 6
Soviet cultural and publishing organizations also employed U.S. citizens, and in addition to the political groups, there were a number of technical and skilled workers who came as specialists to
172
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
work for the new Soviet state. I gat to know a number of the Americans during my stay, both official reps and others in the colony.
Big Bill Haywood was perhaps the most famous of these. He was organizer and founder of the IWW, and a great friend of all Blacks in Moscow. At the time I met him he was in his late fifties and quite ill, suffering from diabetes. Physically, he was only the shell of the man he had once been. He called himself a political refugee from American capitalism. As a sick man, he had fled the U .S. to avoid a ten-year frame-up prison sentence which he knew he would never have survived. Bill was blind in ane eye, over which he wore a black patch. I had imagined the loss of his eye had happened in a fight with company or police thugs and was rather disappointed to learn that it was the result of a childhood accident.
In the Soviet Union he had participated in the organization of tbe Kuzbas Colony. This project was to reopen and operate industry in the K uznetsk Basin in the U rals, closed during the Civil War period. The colony was located about a thousand miles from Moscow in an area of enormous coal deposits, vital to socialist industrialization. The district, with its mines and deserted chemical plants, had been established by the Soviet government as an autonomous colony. Big Bill had brought a number of American skilled workers, many of whom were old Wobblies, to reopen the plants and mines.
Big Bill became a member of the CPUSA at its faunding convention in 1921, and while in the Soviet Union he was a member of the CPSU. Bill and his devoted wife, a Russian office worker, lived in the Lux Hotel-a Comintern hostelry.
His room had become a center for the gathering of American radicals, especially old W obblies passing through or working in the Soviet Union. Here they would gather on a Saturday night and reminisce about old times and discuss current problems. Often a bunch of us Black students were present. Sametimes these sessions would carry on all night until Sunday morning. There were only a f ew chairs in the room, and Bill would sit in a huge armchair surrounded by people sitting on the floor. For us Blacks, listening to Big Bill was like a course on the American la bor mavement. He
A STUDENT IN MOSCOW
173
was a bitter enemy of racism, which he saw as the mainstay of capitalist domination over the U .S. working class, a continuous brake on labor unity. This attitude was reflected in the preamble of the IWW constitution, he told us. It read: "No working man or woman shall be excluded from membership in unions because of creed or color." This was borne out in practice.
The IWW was the first labor organization in modem times to invade the South and break down racial barriers in that benighted region. He recounted his experiences in the organizing drives among Southern lumber workers in Louisiana and Texas. This resulted in the organization of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in 1910, an independent union in the lumber camps of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas. At its height this union had 25,000 members, half of them Black.
Big Bill described how the IWW broke down discrimination at the first convention of this union. He had come from the national IWW office to speak to the convention. They were all white, he said, and he inquired why no colored men were present. He was told that the Louisiana state law prohibited meetings of Black and white-the Negro brathers were meeting in another hall nearby.
Bill recalled that he then told them: "Damn the law! !t's the law of the lumber bosses. lts objective is to defeat you and to keep you divided and you're not going to get anywhere by obeying the dictates of the bosses. Y ou've got to meet toget her." And the latter is exactly what they did, he told us.
I remember that a few days after one of these gatherings we telephoned to tell him that we were coming over, only to learn from his wife that he had had a stroke and was in the Kremlin hospital. She said that he was getting along OK, but couldn't see visitors. After several weeks he returned home. Still weak, he received many of his friends, and many of the delegates to the Fourth Congress of the Profintern which was in Moscow at the time. Big Bill had been a leading participant in this organization since its inception.
Theo suddenly, he was back in the hospital, where he died May 18, 1928. The whole American colony turned out for the funeral.
There were "delegations from the Russian Communist Party, of
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
which he was a member, and from the various international organizations in which he had played a role. The Fourth Congress of the RILU adjourned its sessions, and representatives of trade unions from all over the world attended the funeral.
I'm sure for all us Black students, our meeting and friendship with this great man were among the most memorable experiences of our stay in Moscow. A stalwart son of the American working class, Bill's life and battles represented its best traditions. Te, Blacks, he was a man who would not only stand up with you, but if need be, go down with you. This was the iron test in the fight against the common enemy, U.S. capitalism. Big Bill obviously understood from his own experience the truth of the Marxian maxim that in the U.S., "la bor in the white skin can never be free as long as in the Black it is branded."
iNA
I first met my second wife, Ekaterina-Ina-in December 1926.
We were both at a party at the home of Rose Bennett, a British woman who had married M. Petrovsky(Bennett), the chairman of the Anglo-American Commission of the Comintern and formerly Cl representative to Great Britain.
Ina was one of a gro up of ballet students whom Rose had invited to meet same of us K UTV A students. She was a small young woman of nineteen or twenty, shy and retiring, and sat off removed from the party. After that party, we met several times, and she told me about herself.
She was bom in Vladikavkaz (in northern Caucasus), the daughter of the mayor of the town. It was one of those towns that was taken and re-taken during the Civil War, one time by the whites, then by the reds. On one occasion when the town fell to the reds, her father was accused of collaborating with the whites. The reds came and arrested him and she never saw him again. Ina was about eleven at the time; she later learned that her father had been executed.
Her unde was a famous artist in Moscow and after her father's
175
cxecution they went there to live. Ina told me of her trip to Moscow at the height of famine and a typhus epidemic; they rode in freight cars several days through the Ukraine, and saw people dying along the road. Her uncle took charge of them and got them an apartment on Malaya Bronaya. He investigated the case of her father and discovered that a mistake had been made, and her father was posthumously exonerated. As a sort of compensation, she and her mother were regarded as "social activists," and Ina entered school to study ballet. She later transferred from the ballet school to study English in preparation for work as a translator. We lived together in the spring of 1927 and got married the foliowing fall, after my return from the Crimea.
In January 1927, I was stunned by the news of the death of my Mother. One morning, when I was at Ina's house, Otto burst in.
Overcome by emotion, he could hardly talk, but managed to bl urt out, "Mom's dead!" He had a letter from our sister Eppa, with a clipping of Mother's obituary from the Chicago De/ender.
Under the headline "Funeral of Mrs. Harriet Hall," was her picture and an article which described her, a domestic worker, as a
"noted club woman." She had been a member of the Black Eastern Star and several other lodges and burial societies. The article mentioned that she was survived by her husband, daughter and two sons, the latter in Moscow.
I was overcome with grief and guilt at not being home. Deeply shocked, I had always assumed that I would return to see Mother again. Bom a slave, her world had been confined to the midwest and upper South. She had once told me, "Son, I sure would like to see the ocean," and I had glibly promised, "Oh, I'll take you there someday, Momma." I felt that I had been her favorite; I was the responsible one, and yet I hadn't been able to do what I had promised. Worse yet, I wasn't even there when she died. It took me some time to get over the shock.
Trotsky's Day in Court
Apart from our academic courses, we received our first tutelage in Leninism and the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the heat of the inner-party struggle then raging between
-•Trotsky and the majority of the Central Committee led by Stalin.
We KUTVA students were not simply bystanders, but were active participants in the struggle. Most of the students-and all of our group from the U.S.-were ardent supporters of Stalin and the Central Committee majority.
It had not always been thus. Otto told me that in 1924, a year before he arrived, a majority of the students in the school had been supporters of Trotsky. Trotsky was making a play for the Party youth, in opposition to the older Bolshevik stalwarts. With his usual demagogy, he claimed that the old leadership was betraying the revolution and had embarked on a course of "Thermidorian reaction." 1 In this situation, he said, the students and youth were
"the Party's truest barometer."2
But by the time the Black American students arrived, the temporary attraction to Trotsky had been reversed. The issues involved in the struggle with Trotsky were discussed in the school.
They involved the destiny of socialism in the Soviet Union. Which way were the Soviet people to go? What was to be the direction of their economic development? Was it possible to build a socialist economic system? These questions were not only theoretical ones, but were issues of life and death. The economic lif e of the country
177
would not stand still and wait while they were being debated.
The Soviet working class, under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, had vanquished capitalism over one-sixth of the globe; shattered its economic power; expropriated the capitalists and landlords; converted the factories, railroads and banks into public property; and was beginning to build a state-owned socialist industry. The Soviet government had begun to apply Lenin's cooperative plans in agriculture and begun to fully develop a socialist economic system. This colossal task had to be undertaken by the workers in alliance with the masses of working peasantry.
From the October Revolution through 1921, the economic system was characterized by War Communism. Basic industry was nationalized, and all questions were subordinated to the one of meeting the military needs engendered by the civil war and the intervention of the capitalist countries.
But by 1921, the foreign powers who had attempted to overthrow the Soviets had largely been driven from R ussia's horders. It was then necessary to orient the economy toward a peace-time situation. The NEP (New Economic Policy) formulated at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 was the policy designed to guide the transition from War Communism to the building of socialism. It replaced a system of surplus appropriation with a tax in kind which would be less of a burden on the peasantry. The NEP was a temporary retreat from socialist forms: smaller industries were leased to private capital to run; peasants were allowed to sell their agricultural surplus on free markets; central control over much of the economy was lessened. All of this was necessary to have the economy function on a peace-time basis. It was a measure designed to restore the exchange of commodities between city and country which had been so greatly disrupted by the civil war and intervention. 3 It was a temporary retreat from the attack on all remnants of capitalism, a time for the socialist state to stabilize its base area, to gather strength for another advance. A year later at the Eleventh Party Congress, Lenin declared that the retreat was ended and called on the Party to "prepare for an offensive on private capital." 4
Lenin was incapacitated by a series of strokes in 1923 and could
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
no longer participate in the active leadership of the Party. It was precisely at this time, taking advantage of Lenin's absence, that Trotsky made his bid for leadership in the Party. Trotsky had consistently opposed the NEP and its main engineer, Leninattacking the measures designed to appease the peasantry and maintain the coalition between the peasants and the workers.
From late 1922 on, Trotsky made a direct attack on the whole Leninist theory of revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He denied the possibility (and necessity) of building socialism in one country, and instead characterized that theory as an abandonment of Marxist principles and a betrayal of the revolutionary mavement. He postulated his own theory of "permanent revolution," and contended that a genuine advance of socialism in the USSR would become possible only as a result of a socialist victory in the other industrially developed states.
While throwing around a good deal of left-sounding rhetoric, Trotsky's theories were thoroughly defeatist and class-collaborationist. For instance, in the postscript to Program for Peace, written in 1922, he contended that "as long as the bourgeoisie remains in power in the other European countries, we shall be compelled, in our struggle against economic isolation, to strive for agreement with the capitalist world; at the same time it may be said with certainty that these agreements may at best help us to mitigate some of our economic ills, to take one or another step forward, but real progress of a socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the major European countries."5
At the base of this defeatism was Trotsky's view that the peasantry would be hostile to socialism, since the proletariat would "have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations." Thus Trotksy contended that the working class would:
... come into hosti/e collision not only with all the bourgeois groupings which supported the proletariat during the first stages of its revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad
masses of the peasantry with whose assistance it came into power. Tue contradictions in the position of a workers'
TROTSKY'S DAY IN COURT
179
government in a backward country with an overwhelmingly peasant population could be solved only .. .in the arena of the world proletarian revolution.6
Therefore, it would not be possible to build socialism in a backward, peasant country like Russia. The mass of peasants would exhaust their revolutionary potential even before the revolution had completed its bourgeois democratic tasks-the breakup of the feudal landed estates and the redistribution of the land among the peasantry. This line, which underestimated the role of the peasantry, had been put forward by Trotsky as early as l 915 in his article "The Struggle for Power." There he claimed that imperialism was causing the revolutionary role of the peasantry to decline and downgraded the importance of the slogan "Confiscate the Landed Estates."7
As it was pointed out in our classes, Trotsky portrayed the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass. He made no distinction between the masses of peasants who worked their own land (the muzhiks) and the exploiting strata who hired labor (the kulaks).
His conclusions openly contradicted the strategy of the Bolsheviks, developed by Lenin, of building the worker-peasant alliance as the basis for the dictatorship of the proletariat.8 Further, they were at complete variance with any realistic economic or social analysis.
Trotsky's entire position reflected a lack of faith in the strength and resources ofthe Soviet people, the vast majority of whom were peasants. Since it denied the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, the success of the revolution could not come from internat forces, but had to depend on the success of proletarian revolutions in the advanced nations of Western Europe. In the absence of such revolutions, the revolutionary process within the Soviet Union itself would have to be held in abeyance, and the proletariat, which had seized power with the help of the peasantry, would have to hold state power in conflict, with all other classes.
Behind Trotsky's revolutionary rhetoric was a simplistic socialdemocratic view which regarded the class struggle for socialism as solely labor against capital. This concept of class struggle did not
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
regard the struggle of peasant against landlord, or peasant against the Czar, as a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. This was reflected as early as 1905, in Trotsky's slogan, "No Czar, but a W orkers' Government," which, as Stalin had said, was "the slogan of revolution without the peasantry." 9
Given the state of the revolutionary forces at the time, the position was dangerously defeatist. For instance, 1923 marked a period of recession for the revolutionary wave in Europe; it was a year of defeat for communist mqvements in Germany, ltaly, Poland and Bulgaria. What then, Stalin asked, is left for our revolution? Shall it "vegetate in its own contradictions and rot away while waiting for the world revolution"? 10 To that question, Trotsky had no answer. Stalin's reply was to build socialism in the Soviet Union. The Soviet working class, allied with the peasantry, had vanquished its own bourgeoisie politically and was fully capable of doing the job economically and building up a socialist
'society.
Stalin's position did not mean the isolation of theSoviet Union.
The danger of capitalist restoration still existed and would exist until the advent of classless society. The Soviet people understood that they could not destroy this external <langer by their own eff orts, that it could only be finally destroyed as a result of a victorious revolution in at least several of the countries of the West. The triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union could not be final as long as the external <langer existed. Therefore, the success of the revolutionary forces in the capitalist West was a vital concern of the Soviet people.
Trotsky's scheme of permanent revolution downgraded not only the peasantry as a revolutionary force, but also the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples within the old Czarist Empire. Thus, in "The Struggle for Power," he wrote that
"imperialism does not contrapose the bourgeois nation to the old regime, but the proletariat to the bourgeois nation."11
While Trotsky de-emphasized the national colonial question in the epoch of imperialism, Lenin, on the other band, stressed its new importance. "Imperialism," said Lenin, means the progressively mounting oppression of the nations of the world by a
TROTSKY'S DAY IN COURT
181
handful of Great Powers; it means a period of wars between the lutter to extend and consolidate the oppression of nations."12
It was not until sometime la ter that I was able to fully grasp the implications of Trotsky's concept of permanent revolution on the international scene. The most dramatic example was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39. The Trotskyist organi-1.ation had infiltrated the anarchist movement in Catalonia and i ncited revolt against the Loyalist government under the slogans of
"Socialist Republic" and "Workers' Government." The Loyalist
�overnment, headed by Juan Negrin, a liberal Republican, was a coalition of all democratic parties. It included socialists, communists, liberal Repu blicans and anarchists-all in alliance against fascist counter-revolution led by Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini. The attempted coup against the Loyalist Government was typical of the Trotskyist attempts to short-circuit the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolutionary process. The result was a "civil war within a civil war" and, had their strategy succeeded, it would have split the democratic coalition-effecl ively giving aid to the fascists.
In the United States I was to witness how Trotsky's purist concept of class struggle led logically to a denial of the struggle for Black liberation as a special feature of the class struggle, revolutionary in its own right. As a result, American Trotskyists found themselves isolated from that movement during the great upsurge of the thirties. But all this was to come later.13
At the time I was at K UTV A, Trotskyism had not yet emerged as an important tendency on the international scene. I did not foresee its future role as a disruptive force on the fringes of the international revolutionary movement. At that point, I wasn't clear myself on a number of these theoretical questions. It was somewhat later when my understanding of the national and colonial question-particularly the Afro-American questiondeepened, that the implications of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution became fully obvious to me.
We students felt that Trotsky's position denigrated the achievement of the Soviet Revolution. We didn't like his continual harping about Russia's backwardness and its inability to build
182
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
socialism, or his theory of permanent revolution. The Soviet Union was an inspiration for all of us, a view confirmed by our experience in the country. Everything we could see defied Trotsky's logic.
His writings were readily available throughout the school, and the issues of the struggle were constantly on the agenda in our collective. These were discussed in our classes, as they were in factories, schools and peasant organizations throughout the country.
A bout once a month the collective would meet and a report would be given by Party representatives-sometimes local, sometimes from the rayon (region of the city) and Moscow district, and sometimes from the Central Committee itself. They would report on the latest developments in the ioner-party struggles-Trotsky's and Lenin's views on the question of the peasantry; the NEP, how it had proved its usefulness and how it was now being phased out; Trotsky's position on War Communism and Party rules; the dictatorship of the proletariat, and whether it could be a dictatorship in alliance with the peasantry or one over the peasantry. An open discussion would be held after the report. By that time the Trotskyists at KUTVA had dwindled to a small group of bitter-enders ..
The struggle raged over a period of five years (1922-27) during which time the Trotsky bloc had access to the press and Trotsky's works were widely circulated for everyone to read. Trotsky was not defeated by bureaucratic decisions or Stalin's control of the Party apparatus-as his partisans and Trotskyite historians claim.
He had his day in court and finally lost because his whole position flew in the face of Soviet and world realities. He was doomed to def eat because his views were incorrect and failed to conform to objective conditions, as well as the needs and interests of the Soviet people.
It was my great misfortune to be out of the dormitory when the Black students were invited to attend a session of the Seventh Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, then meeting in the Kremlin in the late fall of 1926. I was out in the street at the time and couldn't be found, so they went
TROTSKY'S DA YIN COURT
183
without me. I missed a historie occasion, my only chance to have seen Trotsky in action. I was bitterly disappointed. When I arrived back at the dormitory, Sakorov, my Indian friend, told me where they had gone. Returning in the early hours of the morning, they found me waiting for them. They described the session and the stellar performance of Trotsky.
Stalin made the report for the Russian delegation. Trotsky then ask ed for two hours to def end his position; he was given one. He spoke in Russian, and then personally translated and delivered his speech in German and then in French. In all, he held the floor for about three hours.
Otto said it was the greatest display of oratory he had ever heard. But despite this, Trotsky and his allies (Zinoviev and Kamenev) suffered a resounding defeat, obtaining only two votes out of the whole body. The delegates from outside the Soviet Union didn't accept Trotsky's view that socialism in one country was a betrayal of the revolution. On the contrary, the success of the Soviet Union in building socialism was an inspiration to the international revolution.
Otto told me that this point was made again and again in the course of the discussion. Ercoli (Togliatti), the young leader of the Italian Party, summed it up well a few days later when he defended the achievements of the Russian Party and revolution as "the strongest impetus for the revolutionary forces of the world." 14
The American Party united across factional lines in support of Stalin. The Trotsky opposition, already defeated within the Soviet Union, was now shattered internationally. From there on out, it was downhill for Trotsky. I witnessed Trotsky's opposition bloc degenerate from an unprincipled faction within the Party to a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the Party and the Soviet state. We learned of secret, illegal meetings held in the Silver Woods outside Moscow, the establishment of factional printing presses-all in violation of Party discipline. Their activities reached a high point during the November 7, 1927 anniversary of the Revolution.
At that Tenth Anniversary, Trotsky's followers attempted to stage a counter-demonstration in opposition to the traditional
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
celebration. I remember vividly the scene of our school contingent marching on its way to Red Square. As we passed the Hotel Moscow, Trotskyist leaflets were showered down on us, and orators appeared at the windows of the hotel shouting slogans of
"Down with Stalin."
They were answered with catcalls and booing from the crowds in the streets below. We seized the leaflets and tore them up. This attempt to rally the people against the Party was a total failure and struck no responsive chord among the masses. It was equivalent to rebellion and this demonstration was the last overt aet of the Trotskyist opposition.
During the next month Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were expelled-along with seventy-five of their chief supporters. They, along with the )esser fry, were sent in exile to Siberia in Central Asia. Trotsky was sent to Alma Alta in Turkestan from where, in 1,.929, he was allowed to go abroad, first to Turkey and eventually to Mexico.
Later, many of Trotsky's followers criticized themselves and were accepted back into the Party. But among them was a hard core of bitter-enders, who "criticized" themselves publicly only in order to continue the struggle against Stalin's leadership from within the Party. Their bitterness fed on itself and they emerged later in the thirties as part of a conspiracy which wound up on the side of Nazi Germany.
Throughout this whole struggle, we Black students at the school had been ardent supporters of the position of Stalin and the Central Committee. Most certainly we were Stalinists-whose policies we saw as the continuation of Lenin's. Those today who use the term "Stalinist" as an epithet evade the real question: that is, were Stalin and the Central Committee correct? I believe history has proven that they were correct.
RUTHENBERG'S DEATH
In March 1927, the American community in Moscow was shocked by the news of the death ofRuthenberg, general secretary
185
of the CPUSA. His death came suddenly, from a ruptured appendix. His last request had been that he be buried in the K remlin walls in Moscow-a request acceded to by the Russian
<.'ommunist Party. His ashes were carried to Moscow by J. Louis Engdahl, a member of the Central Committee of the U.S. Party.
The Moscow funeral was impressive. The procession entered Red Square led by a detachment of Red Cavalry. The square was crowded with thousands of Soviet workers, including the entire work force of the Ruthenberg Factory, which had been named in his honor.
We half dozen Black students, together with other members of lhe American colony, marched into the square immediately hehind the urn. W e followed it until we stood directly in front of the Len in Mausoleum. On top of the mausoleum was the speakers'
platform. There stood Bukharin, who had recently succeeded Zinoviev as head of the Communist International: Bela Kun, lcader of the abortive Hungarian Soviet of 1919; Sen Katayama, the veteran Japanese Communist; and others.
Bukharin delivered the main eulogy, followed by several speakers. Suddenly I noticed Bukharin whispering to Robert Minor, who was standing beside him. Bukharin pointed down lowards our group of Blacks who were gathered below the mausoleum.
As Minor came down the steps toward us, I was a bit apprehensive, anticipating his mission. Sure enough, addressing rny brother Otto, he said, "Comrade Bukharin wants one of the Negro comrades to say a few words."
Otto pointed at me and said, "Let Harry speak."
I felt trapped, not wanting to start an argument on such a solemn occasion. I reluctantly agreed to speak and followed Minor back up the steps of the mausoleum. Bela Kun, a polished orator, was speaking; I was to follow. I tried to gather my thoughts, but I was not much of a speaker and certainly not prepared.
Generalities did not come easy to me, and besides, I hadn't really known Ruthenberg. I had only met him formally on the occasion of my departure for Moscow when he had shaken my band and
186
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
wished me luck. But what could I say about him, specifically in relation to the Blacks?
I stood there amidst this array of internationally famous revolutionary leaders, and as I looked down on the thousands of faces in Red Square, panic suddenly seized me. Here was my turn to speak, but I found myself unable to utter a coherent sentence.
I remember saying something about "our great lost leader." This being my first experience in front of a mike, the words seemed to come back and hit me in the face. Finally, after a minute or two of floundering around I said, "That's all!" and turned away from the mike in disgust and humiliation. The words "that's all" resounded through the square laud and clear, to my further discomfiture.
And then came the moment for the translation. The translator was a young Georgian named Tival, ane of Stalin's secretaries. He was one of those people who speak half a dozen languages fluently.
Tival gat right into the job of translation, assuming an orator's mance. He had a strong roaring voice, surprising for ane of such diminutive stature.
Swinging his arms, apparently emphasizing points that I was supposed to have made, I must admit that he made a pretty good speech for me. Speaking two or three times longer than my two minutes of rambling, he 'preceded each point by emphasizing,
"Tovarishch Haywood skazal" (Comrade Haywood said).
The next morning, I went to the school cafeteria for breakfast.
And there sat our little group of Black students. Golden had them laughing at something. He saw me and waved the day's copy of Pravda. The headline was "Pokhorony Tovarishcha Ruthenberga" (Funeral of Comrade Ruthenberg).
Golden began reading with a straight face, but using that peculiar language of his-Russian with a Mississippi accent. The article quoted from the main speeches and went on to say, Tovarishch Harry Haywood, Americanski Negr, tozhe bystupa/
(Negro American comrade Harry Haywood also stepped forward with a speech)."
And Golden read one paragraph after another of the speech Tival gave for me, each paragraph starting with "Tovarishch Haywood skazal ... Tovarishch Haywood skazal ... Tovarishch
TROTSKY'S DAY IN COURT
187
llaywood skazal."
Finally Golden looked up from that paper at me, and he said,
"Man, you know you ain't skazaled a goddamned thing!"
Back home in the U.S., the death of Ruthenberg had signalled
,mother flareup in the factional struggle within the Party. Foliowing the intervention of the Cl at the Fourth Party Convention, there was a period of uneasy peace between the factions. But now a struggle for succession to Ruthenberg's position as general secretary was raging hot and heavy.
Lovestone, who had been organizational secretary, was supported by the Ruthenberg stalwarts-Max Bedacht, Ben Gitlow and John Pepper. Since Ruthenberg's death, Lovestone (as heir apparent) had pre-empted the interim job of acting secretary. In opposition, William W. Weinstone was the candidate supported by the Foster-Cannon bloc which included Alexander Bittelman and Jack Johnstone.
Weinstone had formerly been a member of the Ruthenberg faction, but foliowing Ruthenberg's death, he sought the position of general secretary himself. His move offered an opportunity for the Foster-Cannon group to oppose Lovestone, whom they bitterly detested, with a candidate they believed had more of a chance of winning than did one of their old stalwarts.
We Blacks in Moscow were isolated from much of this struggle.
We were sort of observers from the sidelines, and with the exception of Otto (who had entered the Party immediately after its founding convention), we didn't have any of the old factional loyalties or political axes to grind. We generally favored the Ruthenberg leadership, although we could hardly be called ardent supporters.
Ruthenberg's leadership had been endorsed by the Cl, which gave his followers credence in our view. But Lovestone was something else again. On this, even Otto agreed. Lovestone had a reputation for being a factionalist par excellence, involved in the dirty infighting that took place. He was regarded as a hatchet man for the Ruthenberg group.
None of us in Moscow could discern any principled political differences between the two groups on the question uppermost in
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
our minds-the question of Black liberation. Though we had not yet fully succeeded in relating our newly acquired Marxist-Leninist perspective to the question of Blacks in the U .S., we were sureand our studies had confirmed-that Blacks were a potentially powerful revolutionary force in the struggle against U.S. capital.
Clearly the common enemy could not be defeated without a revolutionary alliance of Blacks and the class-conscious elements of the working class. It was crucial to us that Party policy be directed towards consummating that alliance. We felt, however, that both factions underestimated the revolutionary potential of Blacks and we were determined not to allow ourselves to become a political football between the two.
There had been no progress in this area since the folding of the American Negro Labor Congress in 1925. The collapse of the ANLC for us confirmed the Party's isolation from the Black masses. According to James Ford, a young Black Party leader, there were only about fifty Blacks in the Party at this time.15
Something was definitely wrong. At the time, we were inclined to attribute the Party's shortcomings simply to an underestimation of the importance of Afro-American work. We were not, at that point, able to discern any theoretical tendencies within the Party which served to rationalize this underestimation. We felt it was due simply to hangovers of racial prejudices of white Party members and leaders.
In Moscow, we had been in constant communication with Black comrades in the U.S. We had, in faet, set ourselves up as a sort of unofficial lobby to keep the situation with respect to Blacks continuously before the attention of the Russians and other Comintern leaders. They, for the most part, were sympathetic to our grievances.
In May 1927, Jay Lovestone (while still acting secretary of the Party) showed up in Moscow at the CI's Eighth Plenum. During his stay, he invited us Black students to his room at the Lux Hotel to give us an informal report on the Party's work among Blacks.
He had heard, of course, of our discontent and wanted to mollify us. He also knew that the question was coming up for serious discussion at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International,
TROTSKY'S DA Y IN COURT
189
which was to take place the following year. There was no doubt he was out to mend his political f ences.
I had my first close look at the man when we gathered in his room. He tried to give us the impression of being very frank and self-critical. He said the Party leadership, involved in factional struggles, had neglected Black struggles, had neglected Afro
American work, an "important phase" of the Party's activities. But this factional phase had now at long last come to a closc and thc Party (under his leadership) had now begun seriously to tackle the job of overcoming this tremendous lag in the work.
He told us that Otto Huiswood had been placed on the Central Committee and assigned as organizer for the Buffalo (western New York) district. We thought it was about time! Richard B. Moore had been placed as New England organizer for the International Labor Defense. "I cite this," Lovestone said, "only as an earnest example of the determination of the Central Committee to remedy our default on this most important question."
Assuming a modest air, he turned to me and said, "Last but not least, we have decided that you, Harry, as one of our bright young Negroes, are to be transferred to the Lenin School. We've had our eye on you, Harry, for some time."
I was delighted at this news. The Lenin School had been established only the year before (1926) as a select training school for the development of leading cadres of the parties in the Communist International. But though I was delighted, I was also suspicious of the man; his cold eyes belied the warmth and modesty he tried to express. It seemed like a bid to buy me out.
Otto, however, seemed to have been impressed.
Though Lovestone was a teetotaler, he had a big bottle of vodka in his room for us students. He had brought us presents-which was true of most visitors from the States. It was understood that a visitor would not return to the U.S. with extra things that the students in Moscow could use. Most people, and Lovestone was no exception, came prepared with things to give away. During the course of the evening, Otto had seized a few pair of socks, and Lovestone had given him a tin of pipe tobacco (and cigarettes for us all). As we were leaving, Otto looked over Lovestone's shoes.
190
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
"Say, Jay," he said, "you and me wear the same size shoes, don't we? Y ou got another pair with you?"
"Sure, Otto, sure," said Lovestone, and produced an extra pair.
On our way home, walking down Tverskaya Boulevard towards the dormitory, we exchanged our impressions of the evening.
Golden started off: "Oh, he's full of crap. There's no sincerity in the man."
Otto responded, "I think you're wrong, Golden, I think you're wrong."
Golden said, "I saw his eyes. That's something you didn't see, Otto. Y ou had too much vodka. Y ou know I've always told you to go light on it-you know you can't handle the stuff. Y ou remember what Vesey's lieutenant said when the slaves rebelled in Virginia:
'Beware of those wearing the old clothes of the master, for they will betray you!' "
I never saw Otto so furious! He turned on Golden with his fists clenched, but thought better of it. Golden was too hig. I laughed, .
and he turned towards me, but I was his brother. At that moment a drunk Russian staggered into view and suddenly bumped into him.
Otto let his fist go and knocked the poor man down. There was a great commotion and a crowd of Russians gathered around. Some Chinese students from our school were across the street, and thinking we were being attacked by "hooligans," rushed to our def ense. W e helped the man to his feet and, in the confusion, attempted to explain to the crowd what had happened. Otto said he had thought the drunk was attacking him, and it was thus that we managed to pass the thing off and return to our dorm.
Lovestone was a consummate factionalist, utterly uninhibited by scruples or principles. He finally won out in the struggle to succeed Ruthenberg, but the mantle ofRuthenbergfit him poorly; the cloven hoof was always visible. His victory was aided by the ineptitude of the Foster-Cannon-Weinstone bloc, which made several tactical blonders ( of which Lovestone took full advantage).
Lovestone's friendship with Bukharin was perhaps a factor in his victory; Nikolai Bukharin had succeeded Zinoviev as the president of the Comintern. He was an erstwhile ally of Stalin in the
TROTSKY'S DAY IN COURT
191
struggle against the Trotskyist "Left" and was later to emerge as a lcader of the right deviation within the Soviet Party and the ( 'ommunist International. As head of the Comintern, he already had begun to line up forces for his next battle which was to break out foliowing the Sixth Congress of the Cl in 1928. His man in the ll.S. was none other than Jay Lovestone.
As I have indicated, we KUTVA students in Mosccow were rcmoved from much of the bitterness of the post-Ruthenberg struggle, and at the time, were not fully aware of its intensity. I was to be filled in with a blow-by-blow account of what went on at home by some of my classmates at the Lenin School, which I cntered the foliowing autumn.
V ACA TION IN THE CRIMEA
The month of August, vacation time, drew near. Our group of Hlack students split up and all of us (with the exception ofBankole) lcft Moscow. Bankole was reluctant to leave his Russian girl friend and remained in the city. Golden's girl friend, a pretty Kazakhstanian girl, took him home to meet her people in Kazakhstan, an autonomous republic in southwest Asia, inhabited by a Turko
M ongolian people.
As for myself, I askedfor and received permission to spend my vacation in the Crimea. At the Chancellor's office, I was given money, a railroad ticket and a document entitling me to stay one month at a rest home in Yalta. I was on my own and for the first time since my arrival fourteen months before, I was separated from my f ellow Black students. But I had no misgivings. By this time, I had acquired a considerable knowledge of the country and had overcome the main hurdles in the language and could speak and read Russian with some fluency. In faet, I looked forward to my journey with pleasurable expectations. I was not to be disappointed.
The Autonomous Republic of Crimea is a square-shaped peninsula jutting out into the Black Sea. At that time, it was one of the two Tartar autonomous republics; the other was Tartaria, on
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
the Volga. I immediately fell in love with the oountry-its lush subtropical climate and its people. The Tartars were a darkskinned Mongolic people, descendants of the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan. When I arrived in Sevastopol, the !argest city and seaport, I was struck by the dazzling brilliance of the sun against the pastel-colored buildings, the deep blue of the sea and the verdant Crimean mountains rising behind the city. Tall and stately cypress trees lined the streets. It was a busy seaport; all types of shipping could be found in the harbor from small fishing boats to Black Sea passenger liners and ocean-going freighters of the Soviet trading fleet.
As a history buff, I stopped over for a couple of days to take in the historie sites of the city and its environs. There was the Panarama, a life-like display graphically depicting the battle of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, 1854-66. (The war was fought mainly on the Crimean peninsula between Russian forces on the one band; British, French and Turkish allies on the other.)
In this oattle, the allies sought to knock out the strong Russian naval base in Sevastopol through an invasion by land and bombardment by sea. The Russians lost the war, but Sevastopol remained Russian.
I drove out to Balaklava, a small village nestling on the sea a few miles southeast of Sevastopol, the scene of the disastrous charge of the British "Light Brigade," led by Lord Cardigan and immortalized by Tennyson in his poem. Looking at the scene brought back memories of childhood school days when our class recited Tennyson's poem aloud. I stood on Voronsov Heights overlooking the Valley of Death into which rode the six hundred. I walked over the grounds and viewed the graves of the victims of this blunder of the British officer caste. Fourteen years later, Sevastopol was to be the site of one of the most destructive and bloody battles of World War Il.
My automobile ride to Yalta, about sixty kilometers further along the coast, was not only exciting, but in some parts, a frightening experience. It was mostly along a narrow road, cut out of the side of mountains, on which two cars could barely pass. In some places, one could look down to what appeared to me to be a
TROTSKY'S DAY IN COURT
193
shcer drop af two ar three thousand feet into the sea below. The l'11auffeurs driving powerful Packards, Cadillacs and Espano
Swiss sped along the road with its many curves at breakneck speed.
The obvious faet that they were expert drivers was not enough to allay my fears nor those of the other passengers.
N earing Yalta, we passed Lavadaya, a beautiful palace built by an ltalian architect d uring the reign af Alexander the Third. It was situated an a high cliff overlooking the sea. Later, it became the summer home af Czar Nicholas Il. N ow, under the Soviets, it had hcen converted into a rest home for local peasant leaders. The palace later housed President Roosevelt and Premier Churchill during the Yalta conference in 1945.
At last I arrived in Yalta, center of the great Crimean resort area which extended along the coast and behind which rose the C. 'rimean Mountains. Yalta was a town of rest homes and sanitaria, mostly owned by Soviet trade unions. I was put up at a rest home which mainly housed employees of the Moscow city administration.
Immediately after registering, I put on my bathing trunks and donned the gorgeous Ashanti robe which Bankole had lent me and stepped out for a dip in the sea. I stepped out into the main street which ran alongside the seashore and headed for the beach.
Although many af the Tartars of the area were dark-skinned, Blacks were rarely seen, even in these southern climes.
As I passed along I could hear remarks like, "Kak khorosho
=agorelsya (How beautifully sunburnt he is)!" It was a remark I was to hear often. It was good natured, and I sensed in it a trace of cnvy.
The crowds were mainly vacationers from the north, who after t he long, weary and cold sub-arctic winters of central Russia had fled to this semi-tropical paradise to soak up a little sunshine. Here lhey formed a cult of sun-worshippers hent on acquiring a suntan to display upon their return home.
A crowd of smalt boys followed me out to the public beach af ew blocks away. Perhaps they associated me with some of the South Sea Island characters they had seen in movies and waited cxpectantly for an exhibition of my aquatic skilts. I doffed my
194
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
gorgeous robe and stepped into the water, walked out a few feet and sat down. I turned to see expressions of amazement, disappointment, and even pity. Their bewilderment was quite natura), for I myself had never met a Russian who didn't know how to swim. These children regarded swimming to be a natura) human attribute; to them, an adult who couldn't swim was regarded as sort of a cripple.
One day, while walking to the bcach in Yalta, I was approached by a uniformed officer of the OGPU ( federal police). "Bonjour, camarade, vous etes Senegalais?" he,asked in French.
He seemed a bit surprised when I responded in Russian, telling him that I was an American Black and a student at K UTV A in Moscow.
He said that he had noticed me several times on the streets and wondered if I were Senegalese. He had fought beside Senegalese rifJemen during the world war. His Cossack regiment, he explained, was a part of a small Russian expeditionary force sent to fight with the French Army on the Western Front.
I told him that I had also fought in the war with an American Black regiment and how I had seen Russian troops in a prison camp on my way to the Soissons front in the late summer of 1918. I asked him if he had been in that camp.
He shrugged and said that it was quite possible. "They scattered us around in a number of camps; they didn't want too many of us together in one place," he said.
"Our Russian force," he went on, "was small and had no real military significance." It had been sent by the Czar as a demonstration of solidarity and friendship between Russia and Francesort of a morale b9oster for the French people.
"Be that as it may," he said, "it didn't boost our morale any to be there. In France, we fought in some of the toughest battles in the war, on the Champagne front and the Marne salient, and we suff ered heavy casualties. Our fellows were homesick and confused, and didn't know what they were fighting for so far away from Mother Russia.
"There was much grumbling and always an undercurrent of discontent. All of this was heightened towards the latter part of the
195
war by the bad news of Russian defeats on the Eastern Front. This all came to a head with the news of the fall of the Czar. Shortly af ter that we were withdrawn from the front by the French, as an unreliable element. Behind the lines, we were surrounded and disarmed by Senegalese troops, and quite a number who resisted were killed or wounded. To say that we were 'unreliable' was an understatement; by that time, we were downright mutinous!"
The Bolshevik Party had active nuclei in the regiments. "I myself was a member of the Party," said my new-found friend.
"We followed the course of the Revolution through French newspapers and were able to glean the truth behind their distortions. We also had contact with some of the French leftsocialists and with Bolshevik exiles before they returned home af ter the out break of the February Revolution. Af ter the Armistice was signed, we were sent to Morocco and eventually Soviet ships came to take us to Odessa and home.
"The French used the Senegalese against us," he said. "We learned later of a mutiny among the Senegalese troops in which they were shot up and disarmed by the French Blue Devils." I had just been reading Andre Barbusse and was surprised to learn how widespread mutiny had been in the French Army.
"Well, c'est la guerre," he said, "especially so an imperialist war.
After all, what interest had the Senegalese in defending French imperialism? What interest did we Russian workers and rnuzhiks (peasants) have in fighting the Czar's wars?"
W e parted, with both of us wanting to meet again, but he had to leave town that evening and I never saw him again.
Often, we visited the local vineyards and wine cellars and tasted the local wines. It was wine country and Crimean wines were of the first quality, from the sweet ports, tokays and muscatels, to the dry red and white wines. On these outings there was always someone who had a guitar or accordion, and we sat late into the nights singing Russian folk songs and gypsy romans (love songs).
The Crimea was not just a vacationers' haven, although tourism occupied a large place in its economy. At that time, the economy was mainly agricultural. Vineyards were constantly expanding in the mountain valleys along the southern coast. Tobacco of fine
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
quality was grown, and there was also an important fishing industry.
On the east coast of the peninsula near Kerch, there was an area of rich iron ore deposits and mines. This was to serve as the basis for the construction of the gigantic Kerch metallurgical, chemical and engineering works, contemplated in the first five year plan. It was a plan which sought to quadruple the basic capital of the republic.
With the renaissance of national cultures which accompanied the Soviet policy on the national question, the Turkic language spoken by the Tartars-which I understood was closely related to modem Turkish-was being revived and taught in schools. A Latinized alphabet was introduced, replacing the old Arabic script. Tartar literature and culture flourished through this encouragement.
" l met the Party secretary for the county, a young Tartar who took me to visit a kolkhoz ( collective farm), a vineyard in this case; A hundred or more peasant families were in the collective, all winegrowers. As in all collective farms, its members were required to sell a definite amount to the government at fixed prices and were allowed to sell the surplus on the free markets.
Each family had a special plot of land which they cultivated for their own food supply. The chairman of the collective was a buge Ukrainian fellow, who showed us around and explained the winegrowing process. The cultivation of grapes and making of the wine required special knowledge, which the government supplied.
The members of the collective used up-to-date wineries owned by the state and managed by expert vintners. There I was to view the intricate process of wine-making, the pressing of the grapes, the fermenting process and the bottling itself. As I remember, this particular collective specialized in dry wines-both red and white.
The Crimeans insisted that their wines were as good as the French.
Not being a connaisseur, I wouldn't know, but all I can say is that they tasted good to me.
When I returned to Moscow in the fall, Otto told me of the disc�very he had made on one of his trips to the southern region of the Caucasus. He had originally gone there on the invitation of one
197
of our fellow students, a young woman from the Abkhazian Rcpublic, a part of Georgia. After meeting some of us, she commented that they too had some Black folk down near her area in a village not very far from Sukhum, the capital of the republic on the Black Sea.
She invited Otto down to visit the region over his summer vucation, and there he met the people. He described them as being of definite black ancestry-notwithstanding a history of intermarriage with the local people. But the starsata ( old man) of the lribe was Black beyond a doubt. His story went some generations hack, when he and the others joined the Turkish army as Numidian mercenaries from the Sudan. After several forays into I his region they deserted the Army and had settled there. The
.�tarsata himself had been in the Czar's Cavalry with the Dikhi ( wild) Division of the Caucasus Cossacks.
The people in the village wanted to know what was happening to
"our brothers over the mountains." Otto related to them the troubles we had gone through, described the travels "over the mountains and across the big sea." As the evening wore on and the local brandy was consumed, toast after toast was drunk to "our little brother from over the hills." Otto described to them the conditions of Blacks in the U.S.-the lynchings, racism and hrutality. Incensed, a few jumped up and pulled out their daggers.
"You should make a revolution."
"Why don't you revolt?"
"Why do you put up with it?"
We were not the only ones surprised to learn about this group; it was news to the Russians in Moscow too! Several of these tribesmen later visited Moscow as a result of Otto's visit.
The Lenin School
Following my summer in the Crimea, I returned to Moscow in the fall of 1927 to attend the Lenin School. The school was located offthe Arbot on what is now called Ambassadors' Row, a fow blocks down the ioner ring of boulevards from the K UTV A dormitories.
The Lenin School, which was set up by the Comintern, opened in Moscow in May 1926. The plans for the school, formally called the International Lenin Course, had been reported on the previous year by Bela Kun, then head of the Educational (Agitprop) Department of the Comintern. Accordingly, the school was to train sixty to seventy qualified students both in theoretical and practical subjects, which included observations of Soviet trade unions and collective farm work. It offered a full three"year course and a short course of one year.
It was a school of great prestige and influence within the international communist movement. lts students, mainly party functionaries of district and section level and some secondary national leaders who could be spared for the period of study, were generally at a higher level of political development than the students at K UTV A.1
I was the first Black to be assigned to the school. Others followed later; including H. V. Phillips in 1928, Leonard Patterson in the thirties, and Nzula-a Zulu intellectual and national secretary of the South African Communist Party.
THE LENIN SCHOOL
199
The American students who entered the Lenin School in the fall of 1927 were an impressive lat. They included prominent Party leaders from the national and district level. Outstanding in the group was Charles Krumbein, a member of the Central Committee of the Party and formerly in charge of trade union work in Chicago and district organizer for Chicago. A steamfitter by trade and a charter member of the Party, he was one of a group ofyoung trade unionists who made up the Chicago Party leadership in the twenties. They were the hest representatives of the radical tradition of that city's labor mavement.
Modesty and honesty were hallmarks of Charlie's character, and he was a man of exceptional organizational and administrative ability. He was a founder of the Trade Union Education League (TUEL) and played a key role in the Chicago Federation of Labor. We developed a close and lasting friendship, and I learned a lot from him about Party history and the background of the revolutionary mavement in the United States.
Margaret Cowl; Charlie's wife, was a capable Party leader and organizer. She had worked in the TUEL and was recognized particularly for her leadership in the struggle for unity of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal miners in 1927. Later she was to head up the Party's Women's Commission and play an active role in the mavement for a Woman's Charter, a broad united front mavement launched in 1936 which asserted the rights of women to full equality in all spheres of activity. Margaret also energetically mobilized support for the struggles of women wage workers in the needle trades, textile, electrical and other industries.
Joseph Zack had emigrated to the U.S. from Eastern_Europe shortly af ter the First W orld War. Active in the first communist organization in New York, he had been section organizer of Y orktown and served on the Party's Trade Union Commission. Zack was ane of Foster's leading trade union cadres in New York and had also been ane of the first New York Party members assigned to work among Blacks. He was a bitter enemy of Lovestone, but was also critical of Foster. In 1932, he was expelled from the Party for refusing to abide by democratic centralism and by the forties had become an informant for
200
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
the Dies Committee on Un-American Propaganda Activities.
Morris Childs, a Chicagoan, was a leader in trade union and Party work. He became Illinois D.O. in the thirties at the same time that I was chairman of the Cook County Committee and secretary of the Southside region. While at the Lenin School, he served as the representative of the American students to the School Bureau.
Rudy Baker, a Yugoslav comrade who later became D.O. in Pittsburgh and in Detroit, and Lena Davis (Sherer), a good friend of mine who was organizational secretary for New York in the thirties, were also at the school. All of these students were members of the Foster group. As far as I can recall, the sole Lovestone supporter in our class was Gus Sklar of Chicago, a leader in the Russian Federation.
Poor Gus was alone in the midst of Fosterites, and it must have been an unhappy experience for him. When Lovestone was expelled from the Party in 1929, Gus remained in the Soviet Union and never returned to the U.S. He served as an officer in the Red Army and was killed in the defense of Moscow during the Second World War.
The American students at the Lenin School were all experienced leaders of the U.S. Party. One might ask whyso many were spared from U.S. work at a time when the Party's position among the masses was so weak.
Actually, these students were victims of Lovestone's purge of the Party apparatus following his victory at the Fifth Party Convention in 1927. Part of Lovestone's strategy was to weaken his opposition on the home front by "exiling" some of its leaders to the Lenin School.
His plan backfired however. In Moscow, these "exiles," as they jokingly called themselves, were to become an effective lobby against Lovestone both in the Comintern and in the CPSU. The political winds were changing.
From the ashes of the defeated Trotskyist "left "rose an equally dangerous, organized and secret rightist opposition headed by none other than Lovestone's patron in the Comintern, Nikolai Bukharin. On the home front, this rightist opposition had its social
THE LENIN SCHOOL
201
base among the capitalists, the landlords and the kulaks (upper peasantry) and pushed a line that would have lopsidedly developed industry along consumer lines, to the detriment of the vast masses of Soviet people. lnternationally, Bukharin greatly underestimated the war danger and the potentially revolutionary situation then developing on a world scale. At the same time, he greatly overestimated the strength and resiliency of imperialism.
The Lenin School students helped to legitimize the anti
Lovestone struggle in the U .S. Party by linking it up with the fight against the right deviation, then only in its incipient stage. The Lenin School was to become a strong point in the fight against this danger.
There were several other American students who had entered the Lenin School the year before. This group included Clarence Hathaway, Tom Bell, Max Salzman and Carl Reeves (the son of Mother Bloor).2 Of this group, Hathaway had the most imposing credentials. A machinist from Minneapolis and one of the leading people in the Trade Union Education League, Hathaway proved to be a valuable asset in the Party's trade union work.
He was a fine organizer and speaker, particularly effective in debates, and combined these talents with a good grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory. Clearly destined for top leadership in the Party, he later served as D.O. of the New York District, became an editor of the Daily Worker and a member of the Political Bureau. Tom Bell, Hathaway's close friend, remained in the Soviet Union, married a Russian woman and died sometime before World War II.
William Kruse of Chicago was the principal Lovestonite in the school. For a brief period he filled in as acting rep from the Party to the Comintern in the absence of a permanent Party rep. Later, he was D.O. in Chicago under Lovestone's leadership and was expelled from the Party with Lovestone in 1929.
The students were organized at the school by language groups, as we had been at KUTVA. In this case, the languages were English, German, French, Spanish, ltalian, Russian and, later, Chinese. The whole school was a collective, comprising students, teachers, administrators and employees. The leading body was the
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Party Bureau, which included delegates from the various groups, including the employees. All students transferred membership from their home party to the CPS U, and were directly subject to its discipline. Party meetings were held about once a month.
Our rector was a handsome, energetic woman named Kursanova. She was a leading communist educator and was married to the old Bolshevik propagandist and CC member, E. Yaroslavsky.
She was about forty at the time and had an impressive background, including civil war experiences as a machine-gunner in a detachment of Siberian partisans. Kursanova had also been a delegate to the Bolshevik Conference in April 1917 which adopted Lenin's famous April Theses. 3
In addition to the Americans, others in the English-speaking section included British, Irish, Australians, a New Zealander, two Chinese, two Japanese and two Canadians-Leslie Morris and Stewart Smith. The British group included Springhall, Tanner, Black (a Welshman), Margaret Pollitt and George Brown. My special friend among the British was Springhall, known to all as
"Springy," with whom I roomed at the Lenin School.
Springy was a British naval veteran of the First World War. He had come from a poor family and his parents had chosen him for a naval career. This latter aet, it seemed, was a common practice among British lower class families with several sons. At the age of twelve, therefore, he had been "given" to His Majesty's Navy to be trained as a sailor. He served through the First World War and after the Armistice was involved in a mutiny or near-mutiny among members of the fleet who protested being sent to Leningrad to intervene against the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time, Springy was about twenty-one years old. As a result of the mutiny, he was cashiered from the Navy. Apparently, the admiralty was deterred from taking any harsher measures against the mutineers because of the widespread sympathy their action had evoked among British workers.
Springy was popular with everybody, particularly among the women on the technical staff. After leaving the Lenin School, he returned to England where he rose rapidly in Party Ieadership. He also fought in Spain as a member of the Fifteenth International
THE LENIN SCHOOL
203
Brigade and was wounded at J arama.
At the beginning of World War Il, he served as organizational secretary of the British Party. During the early stages of the war, Springy was charged by the Churchill government with subversive activity among the armed forces. This was during the period prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when the war was still an imperialist war and we communists opposed it.
There was no defense against the charge of subversion in wartime England, and S pringy was sentenced to seven years in prison. After his release, he went to China, where he did editorial work on English language pu blications until his death from cancer in 1953. Springy died in a Moscow hospital, where he had been sent by his Chinese comrades to make sure that everything possible could be done to save him. His ashes were returned to China and interred with a memorial stone in the Revolutionary Martyrs'
Cemetery outside Peking.
Springy introduced me to the gifted English writer, historian and Marxist scholar, Ralph Fox. A promising young theoretician, Fox was then researching material for one of his books at the Marx-Engels Institute. He died at the age of thirty-seven, fighting the fascists on the Cordova Front during the Spanish Civil War.
By the end of his brief life span, he had already published a tremendous body of work. 4
I got a lot out of my friendship with F ox. Profiting greatly from his wide-ranging knowledge, I often consulted him on theoretical and political questions which arose during my stay at the school.
Springy and I were frequent visitors at the apartment of Fox and his wife Midge. It was there that I first met Karl Radek. A Polish expatriate, he had been an active leader in the Polish Social Democratic Party and a member of the Zimmerwald Left (those internationalists who broke off from the Second International in 1915 and were instrumental in founding the Third International).
In 1915-16, Radek-along with Rosa Luxemburg-publicly disagreed with Lenin on the question of self-determination of subject nations.5 Radek later changed his position and fully united with the Bolshevik point of view in 1917.
Radek was part of the group that returned with Lenin to Russia
204
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
via Germany in the famous "sealed coach."6 He was a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and Politburo. At the time that I met him in 1928, Radek was still under a shadow politically. He had been a leading member of the Trotsky-Zinoviev opposition and was expelled from the CPSU along with the other leaders of the bloc at the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU in December 1927.
Exiled to the Urals, he publicly repudiated his earlier position and was readmitted to the Party a few months later in 1928. He was assigned as editor of lzvestia and låter became the chief foreign affairs commentator in the leading Soviet papers. He was also a member of the Soviet delegation to the Comintern.
Radek, as I remember him, was a little man, appearing to be somewhat of a dandy in his English tweed jacket, plus-fours and cane. But to me, the most striking thing about him was his beard. It stretched from ear to ear, under his chin and cheeks, giving him a simian look.
H'is English, though accented, was fluent. When we first met, he immediately engaged me in a conversation about conditions of Blacks in the United States, which branched off into questions of Black literature, writers and the Harlem Renaissance. To my amazement, it was clear that he knew more about the latter subject than I did. I was embarrassed when he asked my opinion about certain Black writers with whom he was familiar but whom I had never even read. I found out later that Claude McKay had been a sort of a protege of Radek's during the poet's stay in the Soviet Union.
In 1937, along with several others in the Trotskyite "Left Opposition," Radek was convicted of treason, of acting as an
"agency" of German and ltalian fascism and giving assistance to those who might invade the Soviet Union. He was sent to prison where he died in the forties. 7
Springy introduced me to many other young Britons in Moscow: such men as William Rust, who later became editor of the British Worker; Walter Tapsell, editor of the Young Worker; and George Brown. Both Brown and Tapsell were in my brigade in the Spanish Civil War and were killed in battle. Brown was killed at Brunete while I was there.
THE LENIN SCHOOL
205
Our English-speaking section at the Lenin School included five young Irishmen, all members of the Irish Workers League, a communist-oriented group organized by BigJim Larkin in 1923. It seems that the Irish Communist Party, founded in 1921 by Young Roderick Connolly (son of Jarnes Connolly), had collapsed. 8 I was told that its failure was due to a lack of Marxist-Leninist theory and the inability of its members to relate their views on socialism to the specific conditions in Ireland. But there was certainly no lack of revolutionary enthusiasm and motivation among the young people I met at the Lenin School, some of whom had been members of the Irish Communist Party. The group had been sent to the Lenin School as a step towards rebuilding the Irish Party.
All five were proteges of the famous Irish revolutionary, Big Jim Larkin-most definitely a man of action and organization, not of theory. A tall, bulky man with a buge, hawk-like nose and bushy eyebrows, Larkin was one of the most colorful figures of the Irish labor movement. From his base among Dublin dockworkers, his activities as a la bor leader had ranged over three continents-from the British Isles, to Argentina, to the U.S.-and at the time that I met him, spanned more than three decades. He had been a founding member of the U.S. Party and was a member ofboth the Executive Committees of the Communist International and the Red International of La bor Unions (RILU or the Profintern). He was often in Moscow, where I saw him frequently.
The Irish students came from the background of the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the revolutionary movement reflected in the lives of men like Larkin and James Connolly. Among them were Sean Murray and James Larkin, Jr. (Big Jim's son).9 All of them had been active in the post-war independence and labor struggles. I was closest to Murray, the oldest of the group, who was a roommate of mine.
This was my first encounter with Irish revolutionaries and their experiences excited me. As members of oppressed nations, we had a lot in common. I was impressed by their idealism and revolutionary ardor and their implacable hatred of Britain's imperialist rulers, as well as for their own traitors. But what impressed me most about them was their sense of national pride-not of the
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
chauvinistic variety, but that of revolutionaries aware of the international importance of their independence struggle and the role of Irish workers.
Theo too, they were a much older nation. Their fight against Britain had at that time been going on for 750 years. They were fond of quoting the observations of Marx and Engels on the Irish movement, such as Marx's letter to Engels in which he said:
"English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of lreland." 10 Another favorite was: "No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations." 11
But most of all, they liked to point out Lenin's defense of the Easter Uprising in his reply to Karl Radek, who had called the rebellion a putsch and discounted the significance of the struggle of small nations in the epoch of imperialism. Lenin admonished Radek, stating that "a struggle capable of going to the lengths of ins,.urrection and street fighting, of breaking down the iron discipline of the army and martial law," on the doorstep of the imperialist metropolis itself, would be a blow against imperialism more significant than that in a remote colony. 12
I was shortly to find these observations applicable to the liberation movement of U.S. Blacks. As a result of my association with the Irish, I became deeply interested in the Irish question, seeing in it a number of parallels to U.S. Blacks. In retrospect, I am certain that this interest heightened my receptivity to the idea of a Black nation in the United States.
TEACHERS AND CLASSES
The teaching method at the school was a combination of lectures and discussions. About once a week the instructor would give a lecture to the entire English-speaking group, all twenty-five or thirty of us. Readings would be assigned, and when material was not available in English, it would be translated especially for us. I had one advantage in this regard because by this time I could read Russian fluently. Foliowing the lecture, the instructor would delineate a number of sub-topics. Several days later, we would all
THE LENIN SCHOOL
207
get together again and ane person from each group would report on its work. The instructors were often available for consultation during the time the groups were discussing and researching their topics.
There were no grades given, nor were there any examinations.
At the end of the term we would have evaluation sessions, where everyone met and discussed each other's work, including that of the teachers. It was a process of comradely criticism and selfcriticism.
I found the classes exciting and challenging and the students on the whole sharp and on a high political level. I was under pressure to keep up. The English in general seemed to be a notch above most of us in political economy. This, I believe, was due to the existence of a large number of Labour Party schools which were spread throughout Britain.
Our instructor for Marxist political economy was Alexandrov, an economist for the Gasplan, the state planning agency. In our class, he was aften challenged on some aspect of Marxian economics. He would aften have sharp exchanges with ane of the British students, I believe it was Black, over differences in interpretations of Marxian economics.
Black was a perfect foil for Alexandrov, who seemed to enjoy these tilts and invited the whole class to participate. Summing up the discussion, Alexandrov would brand Black's position as
"undialectical, mechanistic, and rooted in vulgar economism and Fabianism." Black was stubbarn, however, and prodded by Alexandrov, kept up his critical attitude for the whole first term. It was only during the evaluations at the end of the term that Black conceded that some of his positions had been in error.
Per haps the most prominent among my teachers was Ladislaus Rudas, a noted Hungarian Marxist philosopher and scholar. Like many Hungarian intellectuals, he spoke several languages fluently.
He had been a leader of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet and had come to Moscow along with Bela Kun and the other Hungarian refugees. He taught historical and dialectical materialism and his class was ane of the most interesting. It presented history, my favorite subject, but with a different content: a Marxist-Leninist
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
interpretation, portraying not just the role of individuals but of classes.
We had lengthy discussions on the French Revolution; the petty bourgeois dictatorship under Robespierre and theJacobins; Saint Just and the extreme left, the Thermidor and Napoleon
"the man on the white horse." The English Revolution and Cromwell, the Levellers, the Long Parliament. The Dutch revolution and Prince Egmont. We had extended discussions on the American revolutions-the War of lndependence, the Civil War and Reconstruction.
These discussions brought out our lack of knowledge of our own U.S. history; there was a complete absence of materials which presented U.S. history from a Marxist standpoint. All I can remember is the so-called Marxist analysis in the works of James Oneal (The Workers in American History) and A.M. Simons's Søcial Forces in American History.
The former I never read, but the work by Simons stands out in my memory for its gratuitous slur on U.S. Blacks. Simons claimed that the Black man did not revolt against slavery during the Civil War: "His inaction in time of crisis, his failure to play any part in the struggle that broke his shackles, told the world that he was not of those who to free themselves would strike a blow." 13
I had read about the slave revolts of Gabriel, Nat Turner, and John Brown's heroic raid on Harper's Ferry with his band of whites, free Blacks and escaped slaves. I knew of the role of Black soldiers in the Civil War who had to overcome the opposition of the Union Army in order to fight. Simons's book skipped over all of this.
I had come across Charles and Mary Beard's The Rise of American Civilization. The Beards were economic determinists who had characterized the Civil War as the Second American Revolution. The idea seemed novel at the time, all of which points up how widespread had been the distortion of the period by U .S.
bourgeois historians.
My sub-group, which included Springy and the lrishman Sean Murray, had chosen the Civil War and the Reconstruction period as our subject, with myself as the reporter. Our group had long
209
discussions, after which we consulted Rudas, who by that time had evidently done some homework of his own on the matter. He called our attention to the writings of Marx and Engels, their correspondence on the Civil War, and Marx's series of articles in the New York Herald Tribune. 14 After the discussions, I submitted a paper to the class, which evoked considerable discussion. On the whole it was well-received by my fellow classmates and commended by Rudas.
Perhaps our most interesting and stimulating course was on Leninism and the his tory of the CPS U, taught by the historian I.
Mintz. A former Red Army officer, he was at the time assigned to work on a history of the CPS U. Mintz was a young Ukrainian J ew, a soft-spoken and mild-mannered little man. He had a way of illustrating his subject through his own personal experiences during the Revolution and the Civil War in the Ukraine. His appearance contrasted sharply with his role and bloody experiences in the battle for the Ukraine. His was a thrilling story, involving a meteoric rise from leader of partisans to commander of a Red Army brigade. They had fought against a whole array of anti-Soviet and interventionist forces: the White Guardist Deniken; the Cossack Hepmans, Kornilov and Kaledin; Makhno's anarchists (who were sometimes with and sometimes against the Red Army); General Petlura and sundry gangs of marauders and pogromists; and the remnants of the German garrisons in the Ukraine.
In connection with our studies of the Bolshevik agrarian policy during the Civil War, Mintz told us of his involvement in the settling of the question of land redistribution in a Ukrainian district. This district had been reconquered by his Red Army unit from Denikin in the early winter of 1920. He gave us a general rundown of the agrarian situation at the time, the class forces in the countryside, their shifting alignment during the course of the Revolution, and the evolution of Bolshevik agrarian policy.
Kerensky's provisional government had done nothing to solve the agrarian problem, to relieve the land hunger of the masses of peasantry. Though Kerensky's program had promised confiscation of the big estates, once in power, the government rene ged on
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
even that level of reform.
The Bolsheviks exhorted the peasants to await the decision of the Constituent Assembly. Thus, at the time of the outbreak of the Revolution, the vast majority of the cultivatable land was still concentrated in the estates of the big lan dl ords. The peasantry, constituting four-fifths of the population of the old Czarist Empire, was composed of three diff erent strata. The well-to-do peasant not only owned enough land to support himself in good fashion, but also often hired labor to work his land. This group comprised only about four to five percent of the total. The poor peasant was without sufficient land to support himself and his family and often hired himself out as a laborer to the landlord or to a well-to-do peasant. The landless peasant subsisted entirely from the sale of his labor to the landlord or well-to-do peasant.
Under the slogan "Land, Bread and Peace," the Bolsheviks cQmbined the seizure of power in the cities with the land revolution underway in the countryside. Allied with the Social Revolutionaries (SRs), the traditional party of the peasantry, the land was taken over in two phases. The first phase, nationalization and confiscation, was incorporated in the Land Decree of the All Russian Congress of Soviets, November 8, 1917. This stamped the seal of governmental endorsement on the land seizures and called for their extension.
In September 1917, Lenin declared Bolshevik support for the land program of the SRs, while pointing out that only a proletarian revolution could put even this program into practice. 15
The SR program called for equal distribution of land among the peasants while the Bolsheviks favored collective, and eventually state-owned farms. But since the SR program represented the understanding of the majority of peasants, Lenin's policy was to resolve this difference by "teaching the masses, and in turn learning from the masses, the practical expedient measures for bringing about such a transition."16
The day after seizing power, the Bolsheviks put this policy into practice with their November 8, 1917, Decree on Land which made the SR program into law. 17 Within three weeks, the SRs' left wing-representing the poorer peasants-had split from the rest
211
of the party and entered a coalition government with the Bolsheviks. In the following years, Lenin held to the basic position he stated when presenting the November 8 decree: As a democratic government, we cannot ignore the decision of the masses of the people, even though we may disagree with it. In the fire of experience, applying the decree in practice, and carrying it out locally, the peasants will themselves realize where the truth lies ... We must be guided by experience; we must allow complete freedom to the creative faculties of the masses. 18
It was against this background that Mintz related some of his experiences in the Ukraine. He told us that the Party in the Ukraine had not fully grasped the lessons of the agrarian revolution in Great Russia. He spoke of one occasion when his outfit had attempted to arbitrarily carry out the collectivization of all the big estates in territory occupied by their division of the Red Army; their eff orts met with the stiff resistance of the local peasants, even though the peasants supported Soviet power.
The peasants insisted on the redistribution of all the estates, breaking them up among the individual peasant families, rather than taking over the large estates collectively. This occurred during the fall months of 1919, on the eve of Denikin's final defeat, when Soviet power in the form of an "independent Ukrainian Republic" was about to be established.
It was a time when Lenin, in order to allay anti-Russian distrust and suspicion among the Ukrainian peasantry, had insisted that certain concessions be made. Both Russian and Ukrainian were to be used on an equal footing, and attempts to push back the Ukrainian language to a secondary status were to be denounced.
Lenin demanded that all officials in the new republic be able to speak Ukrainian and called for the 'distribution of large farms among the peasailts. State farms were to be created "in strictly limited numbers and of limited size and in each case in conformity with the instruments of the surrounding peasantry." 19
Despite this, Mintz said, many of us Ukrainian Bolsheviks
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
tended to downplay the nationality element in our own country.
"In my own case, I had long since ceased to consider myself a J ew."
Most of them were what was called at that time "abstract internationalists"; super-internationalists who, in the name of internationalism, renounced the national element in the struggle of the Ukrainian masses.
"But we were not alone in this deviation," Mintz told us.
"Although Lenin's policy was eventually adopted by the Central Executive Committee, it was sharply opposed by leading Ukrainian Bolsheviks such as Rakovsky and Manuilsky. What it finally came down to, in the case of our army division, was that as a result of the opposition of the peasants in the area, we were forced to give up our plan for collectivization; we thus had to settle for having only one of the estates being set as ide as a So viet farm."
The first part of each summer at the Lenin School was spent in p�,iictical work that related to our studies. In the course of my practical work program in the early summer of 1928, I had my first close-up observation of the peasant question in the USSR. I visited a peasant village in an agricultural district to talk with the people and make observations. Though hardly more than 100 versts (about 66 miles) from Moscow, it was truly in "darkest Russia," a provincial place, isolated from the city. Few inhabitants had been as far away as Moscow.
After taking a train to the nearest station, I then had to take a droshky another twenty versts to the county seat. Arriving in the morning, I was let down in the middle of the village square. I looked around to get my bearings, and in no time at all, a crowd had gathered to stare at me.
The crowd grew larger by the minute; it seemed as if the whole village had turned out in the square. I could overhear remarks:
"Who is he?"
"Why is he so Black?"
"What nice teeth!"
"Look, his palms are white!"
"He seems sympatichno," remarked some.
Someone else who perhaps had done a little reading said, "Oh, he's probably from Africa. There the sun is so hot that people who
THE LENIN SCHOOL
213
have lived there for thousands of years become black." The crowd seemed to accept this explanation.
I stuck out my hand to a young man standing nearby.
"Zdravstvuyte," I said. "Could you direct me to the town committee?" He seemed to be surprised that I could speak Russian, but getting himself together, he directed me to a building across the square.
"Who are you? Where did you come from?" the young man asked.
"l'm an American Negro from the United States," I replied.
Someone in the crowd remarked, "I told you he was of the Negro tribe."
Someone else spoke up, "I thought all people in the United States were white."
That gave me the chance to get off on my international propaganda spiel, and Ijumped right in. "Oh no," I replied. "There are twelve million Blacks in the U.S.-about one-tenth of the population." I went on to tel1 thern: about Blacks in the South, and the modern-day remnants of the plantation system: sharecropping, Jim Crow and lynch terror.
Someone remarked, "Oh. Like it was with us under the old regime." Many of the villagers nodded their heads in agreement with this.
Just then I noticed an old woman with a cane, slowly making her way through the crowd toward where I was. The young people gave way before her, in deference to her age. When she reached the center, I watched the changes in expression on her old wrinkled face as she gazed at me. First it registered amazement at such a sight; then comprehension when she had "cased" the whole situation.
Then she spit on the ground and slammed her cane down.
"Idite domoi! Go home!" she told me. "Wash your face! You should be ashamed ofyourself, trying to fool the people around here!" Waving her cane at me, she then turned scornfully away. In all her ninety-odd years, she had nev er before seen a Black man!
214
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE
BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
The first time I met Stalin was at a social gathering, a party in the Kremlin during the World Congress of the Friends of the Soviet Union. The congress coincided with the Tenth Anniversary celebrations in the fall of 1927. The congress sessions were held at the Dom Soyusov (House of the Trade Unions). It was the greatest international gathering I had ever witnessed. There were probably more than one thousand delegates, representing countries from six continents. The most impressive delegation was the buge one (about one hundred people) from China which was headed by Soong Ch'ing-ling, the young and beautiful widow of Sun Yat-sen.
(Today she is vice-chairman of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China.)
t was surprised and delighted to meet my old friend Chi (Dum Ping), a former Chinese student at the University of Chicago with whom I had worked in the organization of the ill-fated Interracial Y outh Forum on the Southside in 1924. He had since gone back to China and was now one of the translators for the Chinese delegation. It was Chi who introduced me to Madame Sun Yatsen. She spoke English with an American accent, which was not surprising since she had been educated in the United States.
Among the other notables we were to meet were the young Cuban revolutionary, Antonio Mella, later murdered in Mexico City by Machado's assassins. He was a tall, wiry youth, who always had a guitar slung over his back. There was Henri Barbusse, a pale, wan man, a victim of tuberculosis. He was a great literary figure in France and wrote a biography of Stalin. There was the American novelist Theodore Dreiser, father of American realism, who was there with his secretary, Ruth Epperson Kennell, a young American woman.
A special friend of us Black students was Josiah Gumede, the elderly president of the African National Congress and a descendant of Zulu chiefs. 20 We took him in charge. Every morning we would call for him �t his room at the National Hotel on Tverskaya
215
(now Gorky Street) and escort him to the congress sessions. We also accom panied him on the rounds of parties held by the various delegations. He must have been about sixty at the time, but was big, strong and healthy and never seemed to tire.
The gala occasion for the whole congress was the Evening of National Culture. It consisted of an elaborate pageant of folk dances from the various Soviet republics and autonornous regions.
The dancers were all in their traditional costumes, a striking array of color and diversity. On this occasion, our Soviet hosts went all out for their foreign guests.
The hall in the Dom Soyusov had been coqverted into a buge banquet room. We were seated before tables loaded with various kinds of liquor, including of course, the hest vodka and zakuskas; appetizers of all kinds-cheeses, herrings, caviar, cold sturgeon and cold rneats. Then carne dinner, from soup to dessert.
The banquet finally ended. Most of us were in somewhat of a stupor from food and drink. Our group, which included our teacher Sik, was leaving the hall arnidst the din of a thousand people talking and laughing. On our way out we stopped and chatted with nurnerous delegates.
Gumede was the chief attraction; he had given a stirring speech at a session of the congress a few days before. As I recall, we were nearing the door when we were stopped and greeted by the old Cossack cavalryman, Marshall Budenny. He was a short, powerful, bow-legged man, with a large ferocious black mustache. He was also in a rnerry mood.
"Tell the chief," he said, grasping Gumede's band, "that we stand ready to corne to his support anytime he needs us!"
"Thank you, thank you," beamed Gumede.
At that moment, someone approached us, I believe it was Tival, Stalin's secretary, and informed us that we were invited to a party in the Krernlin.
We walked the short distance across the square to the Kremlin.
Once within the Kremlin walls, we were guid ed into one of the old palaces and then taken upstairs to a small hall. It was a long room with an arched ceiling reaching alrnost to the floors on the sides. It iooked to me as though it could have been a throne room of one of
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
the old czars.
There were perhaps fifty people in the room. In the center there was a large table loaded with the traditional zakuskas, fruits and drinks. It was sort of a buffet; chairs were not directly at the table but rather were along the walls on each side.
There in the center on one side was Stalin, with a number of people seated beside him. He rose, shook our bands, and after we were introduced, welcomed us, "Be our guests." He was a short, thick-set man, as I remember, dressed in a neat tan suit with a military collar and boots shined to glisten.
He motioned us to the vacant chairs on the other side of the room. On that side were a number of folk dancers and musicians, presumably participants in the earlier festivities. Somebody introduced Gumede as an African Zulu chief from the congress, and the dancers probably thought we were all from the same tribe.
Gumede, however, was the center of attention, surrounded by the dancers, who insisted on being photographed with him.
They gathered around him-a couple sitting on his lap and others behind him with their arms around him. Stalin, observing all this from the other side of the room, seemed amused. La ter on, Stalin got up, bid us all good-night and walked out. As I remember, it was quite a relaxed evening with no political discussion. We left shortly after Stalin departed and were driven home by a chauffeur from the Kremlin car pool.
Another version of this occasion was given, I believe by Sik, who insisted that Otto had danced with Stalin that evening. I don't doubt Sik's word, but I certainly don't remember seeing it. Otto didn't remember the incident either. But I do know that in Russia it was not uncommon for one man to dance with another on festive occasions. As I recall, the hall became more crowded, and I was attracted by a group of folk dancers who offered to help us students with our R ussian.
Afterwards Sik kept reminding Otto, "Don't you remember, Otto, you asked Stalin to dance, and you danced around the hall with him several times. That was a memorable occasion; how could you forget it?"
As for Gumede, he return ed home a firm supporter of the So viet
217
Union. Everywhere he went, he gave glowing reports of his visit there. In January 1928, he told an ANC rally that "I have seen the new world to come, where it has already begun. I have been to the new Jerusalem."21
One day in December, Otto called me and said he had just gotten a call to pick up a young Black woman, Maude White, who was to be a student at K UTV A. She was waiting at the station. He asked me if I'd like to go along and I readily agreed, looking forward with pleasure to meeting this woman-the first Black woman since Jane Golden to study in the Soviet Union.
W e rented a droshky and proceeded to the station. It was a cold winter night, the temperature was somewhere around thirty-five below zero. When we got there, we saw the young Black woman.
She was about nineteen, standing in the unheated station. She was a strikingly pretty, brown-skinned woman with buge dark eyes.
She had on a seal skin coat, silk stockings and pumps, and by the time we got there she was practically hysterical with the cold. "Get me out of here. Get me out of here," she shouted. Otto and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing-we're going to have a rough time with this one.
We couldn't have been more wrong. Maude got right into the swing of things at school. She was a very popular student and stayed in Moscow for three years. We later learned that she had been a school teacher before coming to Moscow. On returning to the States, she became an outstanding Party cadre and a life-long friend of mine.
