Certain French newspapers recently reported, when I was already in Constantinople, that the order for my expulsion from France is still in force to-day, after thirteen years. If that be true, it is added evidence that not all values were destroyed in the most terrible of world catastrophes. During those years, whole generations have been wiped out by shells, entire cities have been razed; imperial and royal crowns have been strewn about the waste lands of Europe; the boundaries of states have changed; the frontiers of France, forbidden to me, have moved. And yet, in the midst of this tremendous cataclysm, the order signed by Malvy in the early autumn of 1916 has happily been preserved. What of the fact that Malvy himself has since managed to be exiled and to come back? In history, the work of a man’s hands has often proved more formidable than its creator.
True, a strict jurist might object that he fails to see why there need be continuity in the life of the order. Thus, in 1918, the French military mission in Moscow placed its acting officers at my disposal. This could hardly have been done for an “undesirable” alien deprived of admission to France. Again, on October 10, 1922, M. Herriot paid me a visit in Moscow, not at all to remind me of the order for my expulsion from France. On the contrary, it was I who recalled it to him, when M. Herriot courteously inquired when I planned to visit Paris. But my reminder was in the nature of a jest. We both laughed, for different reasons, it is true, but we laughed together all the same. True, too, that in 1925 the ambassador of France, M. Herbette, on behalf of the diplomats present at the opening of the Shatura power station, replied to my speech with a most amiable greeting, in which even the most captious ear could not have detected the slightest echo of M. Malvy’s order. But what of that? There is significance in the fact that one of the two police inspectors who were conducting me from Paris to Irun in the autumn of 1916 explained to me: “Governments come and go, but the police remain.”
For the better understanding of the circumstances of my expulsion from France, it is necessary for me to dwell for a moment on the conditions under which the tiny Russian paper existed during my editorship. Its chief enemy was, of course, the Russian embassy. There the articles of the Nashe Slovo were diligently translated into French and forwarded with appropriate comments to the Quai d’Orsay and the Ministry of War. Thereupon, telephone calls of alarm would go to our military censor, M. Chasles, who had spent several years in Russia as a French teacher before the war. Chasles was not distinguished for any quality of resolution. He always solved his hesitations by crossing out rather than leaving in. (What a pity that he did not apply this rule to the unusually poor biography of Lenin that he wrote several years later!) As a timorous censor, Chasles extended his protection not only to the Czar, Czarina, Sazonov, the Dardanelles dreams of Miliukoff, but to Rasputin as well. It would require no great effort to prove that the whole war against the Nashe Slovo a veritable war of attrition was waged not against the paper’s internationalism, but against its revolutionary spirit in opposition to Czarism.
We ran into the first acid bit of censorship at the time of the Russian successes in Galicia. At the least military success, the Czar’s embassy would become arrogant to an extreme. This time the censor went so far as to cross out the entire obituary notice of Count Witte and even the title of the article, consisting only of five letters: WITTE. At that very time the official organ of the St. Petersburg Navy Department was publishing uncommonly insolent articles aimed at the French republic, sneering at the parliament and its “sorry little czars,” the deputies. With a copy of the St. Petersburg journal in my hand, I went to the censor’s office to ask for an explanation.
“I have nothing to do with this,” M. Chasles said to me. “All the instructions concerning your publication come from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Would you like to speak to one of our diplomats?”
Half an hour later a gray-haired diplomat arrived at the War Ministry. The conversation between us, which I wrote down soon after it was over, was something like this:
“Could you explain to me why an article in our paper dealing with a Russian bureaucrat who was in retirement and also in disfavor, and, moreover, already deceased, has been crossed out? And what relation this measure has to military operations?”
“Well, you know such articles are displeasing to them,” the diplomat said, as he inclined his head vaguely presumably in the direction of the Russian embassy.
“But it is precisely to displease them that we write them.”
The diplomat smiled condescendingly at this answer, as if it were a charming joke. “We are at war. We depend on our allies.”
“Do you mean to say that the internal affairs of France are controlled by the Czar’s diplomacy? Didn’t your ancestors make a mistake then in chopping off Louis Capet’s head?”
“Oh, you exaggerate. And besides, please don’t forget; we are at war.”
Our further conversation was fruitless. The diplomat explained to me with a suave smile that since statesmen are mortal, the living ones do not like to hear the dead spoken of disparagingly. After the meeting, everything went on as before. The censor continued to blue-pencil. Instead of a newspaper, often all that appeared was a sheet of white paper. We were never guilty of disregarding M. Chasles’ will; he, in turn, was even less inclined to disregard the will of his masters.
Nevertheless, in September, 1916, the prefecture handed me the order for my expulsion from French territory. What was the reason for it? But they told me nothing. Gradually, however, it became apparent that the cause was a malicious frame-up organized by the Russian secret police in France.
When deputy Jean Longuet came to Briand to protest, or, to be more precise, to grieve (Longuet’s protests always sounded like the gentlest of tunes) about my expulsion, the French prime minister answered him: “Do you know that the Nashe Slovo was found on the persons of the Russian soldiers wh............