Although I had looked on Europe as but a halting-place, eight years had passed. Sometimes I thought half of these years were thrown to the wind, and they the best years of my life, but at other times I knew I had gained as well as lost. I had learned to know myself and I had won back my health. – had broadened my knowledge, learned something of the German people and a great deal about India and Indians.
My alliance with Virendranath terminated early in 1928.
To me he was not just an individual, but a political principle. For me he embodied the tragedy of a whole race. Had he been born English or American, I thought, his ability would have placed him among the great leaders of his age. Despite all this, I could not take up life with him again.
I was not to see Viren again until 1933′. Much time and what seemed centuries of events had flowed past. Hitler was threatening and Viren had left Germany for the Soviet Union, where he was connected with the Academy of Sciencesin Leningrad. Upon my arrival in Moscow he came to see me. He was at last growing old, his body thin and frail, and his hair rapidly turning white. The desire to return to India obsessed him, but the British would trust him only if he were dust on a funeral pyre. What happened to him after that I do not know?
In an effort to free myself from him totally, I had spent a number of months of 1927 in Denmark and Czechoslovakia, where I wrote my first book, Daughter of Earth. This book was a desperate attempt to reorient my life. I returned to Berlin in 1928 to teach at the university, but as soon as vacation time came I left for France, where I completed plans to go first to China and then to India.
For two years previous to this, I had been studying Chinese history. The Chinese “Great Revolution” of 1922-27 had broken on the rocks of class warfare when the Kuomintang had split the national front and begun war on the Communists. Many middle-class Chinese revolutionaries had fled to Europe and the Soviet Union. I had made friends with a few of them and had edited a book by one. Virendranath had tried to unite all subjected Asiatic people behind the Chinese Revolution, and I had become involved. To the turmoil of German life was now added a new element, the Chinese Revolution; and at this time I attended Berlin meetings in which Chinese and Germans of different factions actually fought one another physically.
The League against Imperialism had been organized by the Communists, with Virendranath as one of its founders. The Indian delegation to its first Congress included [awaharlal Nehru, and after the Congress in Brussels, Nehru came to Berlin, where I met him. He was a quiet, unspectacular man, totally unlike most Indian leaders. He was so modest and reserved that it was difficult to think of him as a political leader at all; yet he wielded tremendous influence over Indian youth. The Chinese Revolution had made a deep impression on him. Unlike China, India was unarmed. This major difference was a subject of constant conflict between the followers of Gandhi and the advocates of armed revolutionary struggle. Virendranath was an unrelenting advocate of armed struggle.
Returning to Germany from France in 1928, I halted in Frankfurt am Main, where I met the editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung and signed a contract to act as their special correspondent in China. I was to hold this position until shortly before Hitler came to power, after which that old liberal daily was taken over by the Nazis.
In leaving Germany I was venturing into the unknown, entering a responsible profession in which I had but little experience. Sometimes the thought of this new task frightened me. With conflicting emotions of relief and desolation I waved farewell to friends as my train pulled out of Berlin en route to China through the Soviet Union.
As I saw it in late 1928, Moscow was very different from the city I had visited for six months in 1921 as a member of the Indian delegation. In 1928 I stayed less than two months. On both occasions, however, I visited schools, hospitals, factories, the opera, theaters, and the homes of the bezptizomi, or homeless waifs. In 1928 I also visited some of the collective farms in the neighborhood of Moscow.
On my first visit in 1921, the “azure city” period of the Russian Revolution was coming to a close and the cold gray dawn of undramatic hard labor was beginning. At that time grim Red soldiers, clad in captured British clothing and carrying captured British and French guns, were pouring into Moscow from the southern front, where they had driven out the White armies financed by England and France.
The Volga famine was beginning, and I saw thousands of refugees sleeping in railway stations and empty churches. Typhus was decimating the Volga region. Herbert Hoover’s relief organization was being organized and the Russians were suspicious. American intervention in the Soviet Union and Hoover’s black record in Hungary led Russians to believe that, as in Hungary, Hoover would try to do with food what interventionist armies had failed to do by armed force.
In 1921 everyone was ragged, but filled with hope and enthusiasm. Men with holes in the seats of their pants would say: “Anyway, we’re free.” Once some friends of mine left Moscow for Germany, but the engine steamed away toward the east and it was hours before anyone realized that the passenger cars were still standing in the railway station. Almost no telephone worked, no lock locked, and no train ran on time.
In all, I visited the Soviet Union during three different periods. Through all these years I maintained an interest in the fate of the bezprizomi. In 1921 the Government had issued a manifesto concerning the rescue of these homeless children, and committees were formed to round them up, examine and sort them, and place them in homes. The fate of these children affected me deeply because of my own childhood.
The Soviet Government regarded all children as its wards.
Years have now passed and I remember but faintly the individual dramas that were played out before the bezprizomi committees. A plainly-clad motherly woman of middle age, with ample hips and bosom, would often hold out her hands to a ragged, filthy little boy. The child would shrink back in fear. Carefully, deviously, the woman would talk and laugh with him, caress him, and slowly win him to her.
I went to a number of churches, cathedrals, and monasteries which had been fitted out as dormitories and schoolrooms for the children. Some buildings were being equipped with machinery and tools in order that the boys might be drawn into constructive and disciplined work. Any form of manhandling was forbidden, and the boys had their own self-government and tried any offending comrade.
In 1933-4, when I visited the Soviet Union for the third time, I was too ill to do much more than inquire about the fate of the bezptizomi. I learned that there were no longer any homeless children; and those who had once been waifs were men and women. Some were skilled workers or technicians, some university students, some officers or soldiers in the Red Army. Once, in a sanatorium in the Caucasus, I met a young agrarian economist, a graduate of Moscow University, who had been one of the 1921 waifs. In one of the Red Army rest homes I met two former bezprizomi who had become commanders. In the truest sense of the phrase, these men could say: The Soviet Union is my motherland.
Many of the foreign travelers were filled with a vitriolic hatred of the Soviet Union and would stare through the windows, calling attention to the poorly dressed people on the railway platforms. Though these foreigners had merely changed trains in Moscow, they felt that they had become authorities on Russian atrocities and tyranny. Certainly there had been many sad and tragic events during and after the Russian Revolution. But I never heard well-placed foreigners object to atrocities perpetrated by the White Guard armies against the Russian people, nor did they see anything wrong with the invasion of the Soviet Union by foreign armies during the Revolution.
For years there has remained deeply etched in my memory the scene that confronted me as I entered the Soviet Union in 1928. My train had passed through Poland and at railway stations I had watched fashionably dressed Polish ladies, painted and elegant, bid farewell to Polish officers in smart uniforms gaudy with gold braid. On a late wintry October day our train drew up at the Soviet-Polish frontier and I approached the customs station of the first socialist country. This building was rough-hewn out of great logs, and in the waning light it seemed to tower far into the sky and lose itself in the gloom. Before the entrance stood a tall Red Army soldier, his gray greatcoat reaching to the earth, his tall peaked cap with its red star shadowing his face. One end of his rifle rested on the earth and the fixed bayonet reached above his shoulder.
He stood as immovable as the powerful, rough-hewn building behind him. Beyond the scene stretched the gray, impenetrable darkness. Somewhere in that darkness I knew that people were struggling with the rudest forces of nature to build a new world of their own choosing, struggling alone and unaided. But always before the frontier station stood a guard, silent and watchful, facing the Western world. In such a position, I thought, had once stood the men who had founded my own country.