In the evening I went to see Reinstein in the National.
Reinstein is a little old grandfather, a member of the
American Socialist Labour Party, who was tireless in helping
the Americans last year, and is a prodigy of knowledge
about the revolution. He must be nearly seventy, never
misses a meeting of the Moscow Soviet or the Executive
Committee, gets up at seven in the morning, and goes from
one end of Moscow to the other to lecture to the young men
in training as officers for the Soviet Army, more or less
controls the English soldier war prisoners, about whose
Bolshevism he is extremely pessimistic, and enjoys an
official position as head of the quite futile department which
prints hundred-weight upon hundred-weight of
propaganda in English, none of which by any chance ever
reaches these shores. He was terribly disappointed that I had
brought no American papers with me. He complained of
the lack of transport, a complaint which I think I must have
heard at least three times a day from different people the
whole time I was in Moscow. Politically, he thought, the
position could not be better, though economically it was very
bad. When they had corn, as it were, in sight, they could
not get it to the towns for lack of locomotives. These
economic difficulties were bound to react sooner or later on
the political position.
He talked about the English prisoners. The men are brought
to Moscow, where they are given special passports and are
allowed to go anywhere they like about the town without
convoy of any kind. I asked about the officers, and he said
that they were in prison but given everything possible, a
member of the International Red Cross, who worked with
the Americans when they were here, visiting them regularly
and taking in parcels for them. He told me that on hearing
in Moscow that some sort of fraternization was going on on
the Archangel front, he had hurried off there with two
prisoners, one English and one American. With some
difficulty a meeting was arranged. Two officers and a
sergeant from the Allied side and Reinstein and these two
prisoners from the Russian, met on a bridge midway
between the opposing lines. The conversation seemed
to have been mostly an argument about working-class
conditions in America, together with reasons why the Allies
should go home and leave Russia alone. Finally the Allied
representatives (I fancy Americans) asked Reinstein to come
with them to Archangel and state his case, promising him
safe conduct there and back. By this time two Russians had
joined the group, and one of them offered his back as a
desk, on which a safe-conduct for Reinstein was written.
Reinstein, who showed me the safe-conduct, doubted its
validity, and said that anyhow he could not have used it
without instructions from Moscow. When it grew dusk they
prepared to separate. The officers said to the prisoners,
"What? Aren't you coming back with us?" The two shook
their heads decidedly, and said, "No, thank you."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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