Coming of “the Reds”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21304, 25 March 1939, Page 12

Coming of “the Reds”

MEMORIES OF RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT

M. Alexandre Barmine was a schoolboy in Kiev, in the Ukraine, when the Russian Revolution broke out. The town was in a turmoil, with rumours flying about all over the place. When word came that the Red Army was drawing nearer, the workers at the Arsenal planned a rising. They were a week too early, and fifteen hundred of them paid for the mistake with their lives. Six days later, says M. Barmine in “Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat” a squadron of grey-cloaked cavalry came suddenly in sight, advanced as far as the public square, and beat a hurried retreat. Then an armoured car with two turrets appeared. It halted in the square, and two sunburnt men, wearing red brassards on their sleeves, got out. The Reds! The Reds! The crowd swarmed round them. A few thin, pale women started to shout: “Do you know what happened at the Arsenal? —shot, the whole lot of ’em!" Executed in Revenge Then followed another reign of .terror —reprisals for the Arsenal shootings. These were the scenes that young Barmine witnessed. A couple dressed in working-class clothes had their papers examined by Red soldiers. Their papers were in order, but as they moved away they were called back by the soldier in charge. Very roughly he tore open the man’s overcoat, and, as he expected, discovered a pair of epaulettes. “Take him away!” he said, and two soldiers led him off, while the woman, not yet understanding the tragedy that had fallen upon them, cried out: “What’s the matter, dear?” Four hundred officers were shot at the Arsenal as a reprisal for the massacre of the workmen. Blood calls for blood. This was merely a beginning. In another five weeks the tables had turned again, and the Bolsheviks had to flee before the Ukrainian-German forces. By December, 1919, not a single German soldier was left. They were followed by the National Republicans, the White Russians, and finally the Reds again. Promoted Instead of Shot M. Barmine joined the Bolshevik Party, and was a seasoned officer at the age of eighteen. He received his baptism of fire when he was attached to a special Communist battalion of a regiment. His first engagement was nearly his last, for the battle was not too successful: “Shoot the Communists as an example to the others,” said Skrypnik. My commanding officer pointed out that, so far as we were concerned, the Communists had already given an admirable example, having succeeded in checking a rout. “All right, then,” Skrypnik decided, “promote them Commissars.” And so it came about that I was appointed Political Commissar of the battalion. The Bolshevik officers of those days were a rare collection of personalities. There was, for instance, Michael Bloukhov, who owed his success as a soldier to the fact that he had been born with a snub nose. This led to his being enrolled in the Pavlovtsi regiment of the Imperial Guard, formed in memory of the Emperor Paul I. It consisted entirely of men with snub noses, because the face of the murdered Tsar whose name they bore had been so graced. The Pavlovtsi regiment happening to be in Petrograd during the 1917 crises; Bloukhov, snub nose and all, heard Lenin speaking from a balcony, and became a convert. The Examiners were Baffled The examiners at the military school which M. Barmine attended consisted of officers of the old regime—and they could not adapt their examinations to the new type of pupil. A tough Ukrainian cavalry leader named Dimitri Schmidt was asked such questions as “Name the wars of Catherine II”: “I don’t know them,” he replied. The three generals glanced at one another; Martynov pressed his point. “Tell us when the Empress Catherine reigned and the date of her death.” “I was not born at the time, and the point has no interest for me.” He tapped nervously with this stick on the floor. Martynov gave went to an outburst. “This in intolerable, gentlemen! I refuse to put any further questions to the candidate.” But poor Schmidt was admitted on condition that he promised to pass the examination later—which meant never! Later Schmidt quarrelled politically with Stalin, then Secretary-General of the Central Committee. He met him outside the Kremlin one day and, half joking and half serious, began “to blackguard him as only old fellow campaigners know how,” and threatend to cut his ears off. Stalin listened to the diatribe, saying nothing, but his face was dead white and his lips drawn into a tight line. At the time he chose to treat his interlocuter as beneath his notice, but there can be little doubt that ten years later he remembered the violent threat of which he had been the victim. Dimitri Schmidt has disappeared, accused of terrorism. When Trotsky was Exiled M. Barmine’s pages are full of these mysterious "disappearances”—former friends and old members of the Party

who have fallen from favour. Trot-.ky was too big a man to “disappear,” but when it was known he was to be exiled to Central Asia, we are told, thousands of demonstrators tried to prevent the departure of the tram that was to take him thither. He was seized by force a few days later and sent to Alma-Ata. At the last moment he refused to go. The police had to break down the door of his apartment and carry him out like a sick man. Once he was safely gone, the O.G.P.U. began to get busy, and the weary round of arrests, imprisonments, and deportations started. Second-Rate Man M. Barmine has little that is good to say about Stalin, whom he calls “a thoroughly second-rate man.” He blames him even for the deterioration of Russian films. Choumiatsky, the director of the industry, he says, had to spend most of his time running round to the villas occupied by Stalin and his friends, giving exhibitions in private theatres of foreign films which the public would never see, which even the “specialists” would never see, imported for gold in order to amuse the high aristocracy of the Soviets. Before any Russian film could be shown generally, it had first to be projected privately for Stalin and then for various other people. A New Use for Cars One of M. Barmine’s jobs was to exports cars to the wilds of Mongolia and Sinkiang. The Mongol Government, he says, rationed them out to favoured officials:— These officials, all ardent hunters, have found a new way of using these triumphs of modern engineering technique. Driven at full speed across the flat, hard surface of the immense steppes, standing on the seats, they hunt the wild game and shoot the terrified hares and birds that they put up in their course. The cars destined for Sinkiang, we are old, were sometimes towed by camels for many miles to the residences of some “semi-feudal Khan” in the mountains. Impressions of London M. Barmine filled diplomatic posts in various countries—Persia, Belgium, Greece. He even paid a visit to England. His first sight of the white cliffs of Dover, he tells us, gave him “a genuinely emotional thrill”:— “I lost myself in the maelstrom of the largest capital of the old world, and saw that all sorts and conditions floated on its waters, very good as well as very bad, and that what was most noticeable about these people was a strong sense of discipline in which respect for the rights of the individual played a predominant part." Gradually M. Barmine lost faith in his Party’s policy and came to condemn Stalin for Russia’s troubles. His pages are sprinkled with disappearances, executions, confessions, and instances of wholesale muddle and distrust. "Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat” is the story of a disillusioned man —but it is an extremely interesting story. [“Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat,” by Alexandre Barmine. London: Lovat Dickson.]