Helen Crawfurd and Russia
First trip in 1920
Helen Crawfurd was a Scottish Suffragette whose name is not as well-known as it ought to be. Born in 1877 in Glasgow, Helen lived through one of the most turbulent times in world history and was right in the thick of much of it, from the struggle for women’s right to vote through two world wars which she vehemently disagreed with and the question of Home Rule for Ireland which provoked strong feelings and violent action on both sides. One of the main reasons that I feel a connection with Helen is because I was also born in Glasgow, though a few years later! One of the main reasons Helen’s name has been passed by in the social history of the suffragette movement is likely to be her unswerving adherence to and campaigning on a socialist and then communist ticket. Her unpublished memoirs are held by the Marxist Library in London, and even a cursory read shows that she was passionate about these beliefs.
By 1920 Helen had been fighting the women’s rights cause, and the Home Rule for Ireland cause for a number of years. The first world war had been won by the Allies, which in this case included the Russian army. Russia herself had been through the revolutions of 1917, and Lenin had taken charge, purporting to build a fully communist state in which no one went without, where everyone had a role to play in the work to make this happen. Helen, who had hated the affect of the first world war on the country and on those sent out to fight, was incensed by the way that the press treated Russia. Having gladly accepted their help to win the war, the British turned on Russia in the post-war period. Likely this was fear driven – the Bolshevik Revolution happened in 1917, resulting in the death of the Imperial family and many others who were part of that regime. The revolution had delighted Helen, who felt that we needed a similar overthrow of power in every capitalist country around the world. She does not record how she felt about the violent deaths which accompanied the action, but we do have a fairly detailed account of her travelling to Russia in 1920, in order to see for herself what was happening. She had a healthy mistrust of press reports and, while she was keen to speak about Russia in her speaking engagements, she also did not want to speak of something she had no first hand experience of.
Helen’s sense of adventure was strong, the trip to Russia in 1920 involved covering may miles by sea. Her planned route didn’t quite come to fruition either, she was supposed to travel first by ferry from Newcastle to Bergen, then by train through Norway and Sweden and a short trip across to St Peterburg, then known as Petrograd.
However, on reaching Oslo, then called Christiana, she was told there was a railway strike on her route and would have to make other plans. It appears that Helen had help from a missionary to get a train ticket from Oslo, north to Trondheim where she caught a boat, crossing from Trondheim to Vardo, sailing up the northern coast of Norway. The journey was rough, being in the Norwegian Sea and everyone on board was seasick. Except Helen who explains,
“I love the sea, and am a good sailor, so kept on foot all the time, being ordered by the captain downstairs, as he feared I would be washed overboard.”
On reaching Vardo Helen got in touch with comrades to make arrangements for the next part of her journey, and after staying the night in a hotel was visited by police. They ask her to accompany them, which she does, thinking there was some passport formality to sort out. In fact, they confiscate her passport, tell her she can go no further and that they will make arrangements to get her back home. Helen once again shows her sheer grit and determination to complete the journey she has set her mind on, maybe it’s sheer bloody-mindedness, maybe it’s bravery. Perhaps those two things are not too far from each other. In any case, she knows that the boats leaving Vardo with passengers will be watched so when she discovers that a small cargo boat will be leaving the port to go over to the Murmansk coast (a port she calls Alexandrovic, which I cannot find on today’s maps), she makes contact with the boat and arranges to get out to this boat on a small fishing vessel. Helen doesn’t give us names of all those who helped her, but it is pretty clear that she had some help and also would not take no for an answer! She describes the three hours on this fishing vessel, being rowed through the darkness of the Norwegian sea at nighttime as the most exciting part of the entire trip. Watching over her shoulder the whole time to see if the police had got wind of the plan. They hadn’t, and Helen’s journey continued uninterrupted. Mind you, instead of the journey being under 1000 miles, it was close to 5000, the final leg being on a troop train.
Fuelled by wood, the train had to stop occasionally as parts of it had caught fire from the sparks which were flying in every direction! By the time she’d reached Petrograd, the Communist Second International gathering had finished. However, there are familiar faces in both Petrograd and Moscow who greet her and pave the way for a truly extraordinary meeting.
In Petrograd, at the hotel she is staying in, Helen meets John Reed, well-known (then and now) American journalist who wrote the book ‘Ten Days that Shook The World’, a book widely understood to be the most authentic account of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it had been printed in 1919. He had been there to witness much of what happened himself. Reed, referred to by Helen as Comrade Reed, helped her to get new papers for travelling while in Russia, and took her to dinner with a number of people, including Maxim Gorky, a man already known for his own Marxist-Leninist writings though his connection with Soviet Russia (which was yet to come at this point) became complicated and controversial. Helen was delighted to meet him, shaking his hand and wondering out loud what a wonder it was to meet someone who, according to the British press, had been murdered by the Bolsheviks.
After an evening at the theatre in Petrograd, Helen visits some of the key sites of the revolution before getting on her way to Moscow. This time she is able to send messages ahead and so when the train she is on pulls into Moscow station, familiar faces are there to greet her, Willie Gallacher and Sylvia Pankhurst among them. It does not take Helen long to get settled in Moscow, she recounts the differences between the two cities she has visited so far, as well as commenting on how respectable her hotel in Moscow is.
She spends three months in Moscow on this visit, including a remarkable meeting with Lenin himself, which I will write more about in the next update.
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