RED PETROGRAD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 September 1938, Page 6

RED PETROGRAD

ACTIONS IN EMERGENCY MANY SURPRISES. CORNS IN A CRISIS. What do people do in an emergency? There is really no knowing what most of them will do when suddenly faced with a real difficulty. Some reveal unexpected qualities, others the total absence thereof, but even with one’s most intimate friends there are bound to be some extraordinary surprises (writes George Soloveytchik, in “Truth,” London). One such surprise has left an unforgettable impression on my memory, and the last wave of arrests and executions in Russia made me think of it once again. Petrograd was a fantastic place in the early days of Bolshevism. Zinoviev and the other commissars ruled supreme. Terrorism was at its worst. Every day hundreds of people were arrested,- deported or shot without any trial and for no special reason. Sometimes they were also released after days and weeks of imprisonment, and nobody quite knew either why they had been locked up or, later, why they had been let out. Indiscriminate mass arrests were made in the streets or in tram cars or in the theatres and cinemas, and it was just a matter of good luck dodging them. It was almost impossible to find out what happened to those who disappeared, for you never knew whether they had been destroyed or whether they had escaped and were hiding in some distant corner. Communications with the outside world worked but feebly; the telephone functioned only intermittently, the trams did not always go where they should, there were no private cars or cabs, and only occasional droshkies. Yet, somehow, one kept in touch with one’s friends, and if they fell victims to the Cheka one did all that was possible to help or, at least, to comfort their families. Those who, as yet, had something to eat, or any sources of moral strength left to draw upon, just shared these unique possessions with the less fortunate ones. So much for the setting of -my story. One day we learnt that a very good friends of ours had just been arrested. My mother, than whom there is nobody more kind or loyal, immediately decided to go round and see whether anything could be done for the man's wife and young daughter. They lived right at the other end of the town, miles away from us, and we had to walk across the greater part of snowy and slippery Petrograd to get to their house. But once my mother had decided on an expedition of this sort there was no stopping her. So off we went. When we finally landed successfully at the other end we found the girl alone, in tears—almost in hysterics. “Where is your pother?” we inquired. “Well, father is arrested and mother has gone to the pedicure,” came the somewhat staggering reply. “They’ll shoot him .. “Pedicure?” said my mother. “Pedicure? What is all this nonsense?” “I ... I don’t know,” sobbed the girl, “but mother said she was going to the pedicure, and that she’d be back in a couple of hours.” And she bdgan to cry again. There was nothing to do but to wait. About an hour later we heard the front door bang and the lady of the house rushed into the room, looking the nearest approach to one of the ‘Macbeth’ witches that I have ever seen. Without so much as bothering to say “How do you do?” or to thank us for the visit, undertaken at obvious personal risk, she shouted at the top of her voice, “Yes, yes, I had to do it. You can’t understand, but I had to go to the pedicure. They’ve arrested Vania (her husband), and this means that I will have to do a devil of a lot of running about to try and get him out again, and in the meantime to provide him with food and all that. Well, I don’t mind telling you that I have been suffering from such atrocious corns lately that I can barely stand on my feet. How do you expect me to do all this running when my poor feet are in such a state? I simply had to go to the pedicure first to have them put right, see?” This is what our old friend, Mrs K., did in a state of emergency many years ago in Red Petrograd when hei husband was arrested. She first of all went to the pedicure to have her corns attended to and thus make herself ready to engage in the battle for her

husband’s life. A somewhat* unexpected course of action, you will agree. But I think that in her own way she was not lacking in greatness. And, after all, the husband was released some time later. Whether this was thanks to, or despite, the pedicure, I do not know.