Moscow, Oct. 26th, 1921—The humblest peasant may come to ask the help or advice of Kalinin, the President of the Soviet Republic with none to bar his way.
Around him come pressing two or three score of men dressed in rough untanned sheepskin or dun-colored cloth, that hall-mark of the Russian villagers. Some are carrying a sack of food or a bed-roll, token of the long journey they made to lay their case before Kalinin.
He greets his visitors simply and talks to one after another in the same peasant dialect as theirs.
It is hard to realize that here before one’s eyes is the secret of the no small Bolshevist hold on the Russian people. More than any of his colleagues, more even than Lenin, Kalinin knows what the peasants think, what they love or hate and what they want.
However impossible it is for him to appease their grievance or satisfy their requests, he contrives somehow to send them away comforted and almost contented. For the man streams magnetism in every word and gesture.
“See, now, little mother,” he says persuasively to an old woman who has traveled a thousand miles to ask Kalinin that her village be let off the food tax because the harvest is only half what was estimated, “your crop is only 500 poods instead of 1,000. Then you will pay only 25 poods instead of 55 on each hundred—that is your tax.
“More than that we cannot do, for we must feed our hungry brothers on the Volga, who have no crop at all—you would not have them starve.”
The old woman shakes her head strongly and backs away with the evident feeling that somehow she has got the tax reduced 50 per cent, which, will be good news for her fellow-villagers.
Next comes a young soldier who claims that as a veteran of the Polish war he should not pay a tax at all.
“But you are a man of Tula,” says Kalinin, “and Tula folks, farm as well as they fight. Why, I hear Tula has the best crop in Russia. Surely you won't grudge help to hungry brothers not so clever or lucky as you?”
The soldier looks sheepish but sticks stubbornly to his point.
“This is the first year I have been able to sow or reap my own harvest for seven years, Comrade Kalinin. Others reaped while I was fighting to defend them. Now let them pay the tax for me.”
The President takes him up like a flash.
“What!” he cries, “Others worked to feed you while you were winning glory?”—he bends forward and touches the red star medal on the youngster’s army overcoat—“well, now you, too, must give something to help those who need it.”
This time he has struck home. The soldier flushes with pride, and, as he shakes the President’s hand with a firm grip, he mutters:
“That’s only fair, comrade. I will tell the rést of the soldiers of our village what you say, and all will help.”
And so it goes. An old man from Tambov and a widow from a village near Moscow get part of their tax remitted because the former is supporting a war-broken son, and the latter, five fatherless little children. And the peasants go back to Russia’s myriad villages with a message of good tidings from Kalinin, the new Little Father of the people.
Water Duranty, correspondent,
in the New York Times, Oct. 29th, 1921
