Revolution. The German in him couldn’t ever understand why this nation
of peasants found itself so at home in dirt and grime. And then Dreiser the
individualist worried about the loss of creative freedom and the rights of
the “big brain” over the “little brain” in this utopian quest. He compared
the Soviet propaganda programs with what he considered the brainwash-
ing eªorts of the Catholic Church. He joked to himself about the ubiquity
of icons of Lenin as the new Christ of the land. “In Moscow alone,” he
wrote in what would become a long tradition of Lenin bashing by the Rus-
sian intelligentsia, “there are so many busts & statues of him that they seem
to constitute an addition to the population. Thus: Population of Moscow—
without statues of Lenin—2,000,000, with statues of Lenin—3,000,000.”
His faith in Russian communism, however, grew during his visit to the So-
viet Union. While in Moscow he wrote a foreword to the English transla-
tion of The Road to Buenos Ayres (1928), an exposé of “White Slavery,” or
world-wide prostitution rings, by Albert Londres, who blamed not kid-
napping but poverty as the culprit and impetus. If there was any chance to
eradicate the “world’s oldest profession,” Dreiser thought it was to happen
in the new Russia. The realist was becoming something of a romantic when
it came to reform.36
–
With Ruth Kennell he visited schools and factories around Moscow. He
felt that the students and workers were “seized with all the doctrines of
Marxism—as much as any Catholic with the doctrines of Catholicism.”
Their religion was, of course, communism, in a state run by the party in-
stead of, as was falsely advertised, the proletariat. In the book he wrote on
his experiences after his return to the United States, Dreiser Looks at Russia
(1928), he recognized that the idea of a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”
c e l e b r i t y
3 4 1
was a misnomer. Rather it was a dictatorship of “the Communist Party in
the interests of the Proletariat,” with the party consisting of “1,200,000
members who rule the rest of Russia.” He worried, therefore, about intel-
lectual and creative freedom, while at the same time admiring the appar-
ently unselfish nature in this stage of the development of communism in
the Soviet Union. It was still an idealistic period, before the Stalinist cam-
paign of terror got fully underway in the 1930s. Stalin made only 225 rubles
a month, Dreiser happily recorded in his book, 25 rubles less than a mine
worker. He hoped in vain to meet this great man of the people.37
In Moscow he did meet several of the people for whom he had letters of
introduction. Sergei Dinamov lived in a crude tenement with “no sanitary
toilet and no bath in the house.” With the November snow yet to fall, the
newer buildings in the neighborhood he visited with the critic could be
reached only by stepping from plank to scattered plank laid across a sea of
mud and slush. The individual apartments had to accommodate ten to
fifteen people, two to seven to a room, providing “no privacy of any kind.”
It gave one, he recorded, “the mood of a slum— or a Pennsylvania mining
village under the rankest tyranny of capitalism.” Their clubrooms and
“Lenin Corners” were covered with red banners and slogans as well as with
civil defense instructions. “All are led to believe that Europe is ready to
pounce on them.” Later he complained that this national paranoia made
any foreigner cling to his passport, for without it he could not leave the
country or even get his hotel mail.38
When the Soviets again dragged their feet on his promised tour of the
provinces, Dreiser threatened to go home, saying literally that the govern-
ment and the head of VOKS could go to hell. Once he got their attention
again, plans for his trip began to move along. In the interim, he met Eisen-
stein, Russia’s most famous movie director and the creator of Battleship
Potemkin (1925) and other cinematic classics of Soviet propaganda. The fu-
ture author of the first screenplay of An American Tragedy lived slightly bet-
ter oª than Dinamov in a one-room apartment. The twenty-something So-
viet cinema king, whom Dreiser described as having a boyish face and “a
mass of thick, curly hair,” defended his country’s political censorship by
saying that America had the same restrictions, only they were moral instead
of political. Before he left Russia, Dreiser found that the sting of political
censorship wasn’t that diªerent from the moral brand that had threatened
Sister Carrie in America. Soviet censors rejected the play An American
Tragedy because of the plot’s opening “religious section” and the improper
relationship between employer and worker.39 Free love along with divorce
c e l e b r i t y
3 4 2
might be tolerated in the new society free of religious superstition, but never
in the sanctum sanctorum of the Soviet workplace.
On November 21, he visited Tolstoy’s home at Yasnaya Polyana, a hun-
dred miles south of Moscow; it was the seventeenth anniversary of the Rus-
sian novelist’s death. Dreiser met Tolstoy’s youngest daughter, Olga, and
attended memorial services. As Kennell remembered, a “ragged Tolstoyan
peasant” recited poems at the grave.40 Still waiting for his tour to begin,
Dreiser decided to visit Leningrad, formerly (and again today) St. Peters-
burg, the Czar Peter’s famous “window to the West.” Hardly out of the train
station, Dreiser thought that he had never seen a more beautiful city, the
“Venice of the north” with its numerous bridges and canals that crisscross
the city, elegant architecture, and—Dreiser could not have forgotten—the
home of Dostoyevsky and the Peter and Paul fortress, where the great Rus-
sian novelist had stood before a firing squad.
He stayed at the Europa, Leningrad’s grandest hotel on Nevsky Prospect,
the city’s Fifth Avenue. He visited both the czar’s summer palace some fifteen
miles out of town and the winter palace in the center of the city overlook-
ing the Neva River. The latter had already been partly transformed into the
museum that is famous today throughout the art world as the Hermitage.
Then its “art” also included a part of the palace “kept as the last czar left it
suddenly on Monday, July 30, 1917.” Almost incredulous at the thought
that the Russian royalty treated themselves to such opulence and still con-
sidered themselves human, he “could understand quite clearly why it was
necessary to get rid of these people.” He spent one evening at the State Cir-
cus, a one-ring aªair about the size, he said, of the old Madison Square on
the east side of Manhattan. As he toured Leningrad, visiting homes,
schools, and factories as he had in Moscow, he ironically found himself
defending capitalism for at least its aªording Americans superior living
conditions. Regarding social justice, he was willing to make concessions to
the Soviets. Yet for some reason the author of An American Tragedy was less
than cooperative in condemning America in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Shortly before their execution on August 23, 1927, he had told Patrick Kear-
ney that he thought the two immigrants were guilty of the charge of mur-
dering a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard.41
Dreiser spent another week in Moscow before finally beginning his tour
of the Russian provinces. Between December 8 and January 13, he followed
a line southeast to Baku on the Caspian Sea and then northwest to Batum
and across the northern coast of the Black Sea to Odessa. More often than
not it was an uncomfortable journey featuring overcrowded trains and
c e l e b r i t y
3 4 3
“one-sheet” and “no-sheets” hotels. His bronchitis continued to plague him.
To lift his spirits, he took to spicing up his tea with vodka, which Ruth
quietly administered. This may be the point at which he started nipping
in the mornings. Yet Dreiser was remarkable in his ability and resolve to
push on to see as much as possible. When Helen toured the Netherlands
with him in 1926, she had begun “to realize what traveling with a man of
Dreiser’s caliber meant: [a] vigorous and rigorous program every hour of
every day.”42
Dreiser was supposed to meet Helen in Constantinople, but when he
reached the end of his tour in Odessa there was no boat to Constantino-
ple for another week. He decided to go through Poland straight to Paris to
meet her there, but he ran into Russian red tape regarding not only the ac-
quisition of a Polish visa but Soviet restrictions on how much money he
could take out of the country. He also needed special permission to leave
with his journal notes for his book. When he cleared up these di‹culties
after four days of waiting and was ready to leave Russia, he wrote in his di-
ary: “At last I was going to leave, yes, literally crawl across the border. I’d