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Title: Inside the Russian Revolution
Author: Rheta Louise Childe Dorr
Release Date: September 24, 2021 [eBook #66371]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ***
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INSIDE THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION
[Illustration: Logo]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: Catherine Breshkovskaia, the “Little Grandmother of the
Russian Revolution.”]
INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
BY
RHETA CHILDE DORR
_ILLUSTRATED_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1917
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1917,
By THE EVENING MAIL
COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and Electrotyped. Published November, 1917
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I TOPSY-TURVY LAND 1
II “ALL THE POWER TO THE SOVIET” 10
III THE JULY REVOLUTION 19
IV AN HOUR OF HOPE 30
V THE COMMITTEE MANIA 41
VI THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN 50
VII TO THE FRONT WITH BOTCHKAREVA 58
VIII CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD 65
IX AMAZONS IN TRAINING 75
X THE HOMING EXILES--TWO KINDS 84
XI HOW RASPUTIN DIED 97
XII ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS 107
XIII MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT 119
XIV THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS 129
XV THE HOUSE OF MARY AND MARTHA 141
XVI THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE 152
XVII GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR 162
XVIII WHEN THE WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS 172
XIX WHY COTTON CLOTH IS SCARCE 181
XX MRS. PANKHURST IN RUSSIA 189
XXI KERENSKY, THE MYSTERY MAN 199
XXII THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS 208
XXIII WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD? 217
XXIV RUSSIA’S GREATEST NEEDS 226
XXV WHAT NEXT? 235
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Catherine Breshkovskaia, the “Little Grandmother
of the Russian Revolution.” _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Typical crowd on the Nevski Prospect during the
Bolshevik or Maximalist risings 22
Kerensky watching the funeral of victims of the July
Bolshevik risings 42
Mareea Botchkareva, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and
Women of “The Battalion of Death.” 52
Prince Felix Yussupoff, at whose palace on the
Moika Canal Rasputin was killed, and his wife,
the Grand Duchess Irene Alexandrovna, niece of
the late Czar 92
Gregory Rasputin and some of his female devotees 108
Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky 142
The Grand Duchess Elizabeta Feodorovna, sister of
the late Czarina, and widow of the Grand Duke
Serge, who was assassinated during the Revolution
of 1905, now Abbess of the House of Mary and
Martha at Moscow 150
INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
TOPSY-TURVY LAND
Early in May, 1917, I went to Russia, eager to see again, in the hour
of her deliverance, a country in whose struggle for freedom I had, for
a dozen years, been deeply interested. I went to Russia a socialist
by conviction, an ardent sympathizer with revolution, having known
personally some of the brave men and women who suffered imprisonment
and exile after the failure of the uprising in 1905-6. I returned from
Russia with the very clear conviction that the world will have to wait
awhile before it can establish any coöperative millenniums, or before
it can safely hand over the work of government to the man in the street.
All my life I have been an admiring student of the French revolution,
and I have fervently wished that I might have lived in the Paris of
that time, to witness, even as a humble spectator, the downfall of
autocracy and the birth of a people’s liberty. Well--I lived for three
months in the capital of revolutionary Russia. I saw a revolution
which presents close parallels with the French revolution both in men
and events. I saw the downfall of autocracy and the birth of liberty
much greater than the French ever aspired to. I saw the fondest dream
of the socialists suddenly come true, and the dream turned out to be a
nightmare such as I pray that this or any country may forever be spared.
I saw a people delivered from one class tyranny deliberately hasten
to establish another, quite as brutal and as unmindful of the common
good as the old one. I saw these people, led out of groaning bondage,
use their first liberty to oust the wise and courageous statesmen who
had delivered them. I saw a working class which had been oppressed
under czardom itself turn oppressor; an army that had been starved and
betrayed use its freedom to starve and betray its own people. I saw
elected delegates to the people’s councils turn into sneak thieves and
looters. I saw law and order and decency and all regard for human life
or human rights set aside, and I saw responsible statesmen in power
allow all this to go on, allow their country to rush toward an abyss of
ruin and shame because they were afraid to lose popularity with the mob.
The government was so afraid of losing the support of the mob that
it permitted the country to be overrun by German agents posing
as socialists. These agents spent fortunes in the separate peace
propaganda alone. They demoralized the army, corrupted the workers in
field and factories, and put machine guns in the hands of fanatical
dreamers, sending them out into the streets to murder their own
friends and neighbors. Every one knew who these men were, but the mob
liked their “line of talk” and the government was afraid to touch them.
After one of the last occasions when, at their behest, the Bolsheviki
went out and shot up Petrograd, Lenine, the arch leader, and some of
his principal gangsters deemed it the part of discretion to retire
from Russia temporarily, and they got to Sweden without the slightest
difficulty, no attempt having been made to stop them. Some of the minor
employees of the Kaiser were arrested, among them a woman in whose name
the bank account appeared to be. But she too, and probably all the
others, were later released.
A government like this could not bring peace and order into a
distracted nation. It could not establish a democracy. It could not
govern. The sooner the allied countries realize this the better it will
be for Russia and for the world that wants peace. It is not because I
am unfriendly to Russia that I write thus. It is because I am friendly,
because I have faith in the future of the Russian people, because I
believe that their experiment in popular government, if it succeeds,
will be as inspiring to the rest of the world as our own was in the
eighteenth century. I think the most unkind thing any friend of Russia
can do is to minimize or conceal the facts about the terrible upheaval
going on there at the present time. Russia looks to the American people
for help in her troubled hour, and if the American people are to help
they will have to understand the situation. No discouragement to the
allies, no assistance to the common enemy need result from a plain
statement of the facts. The enemy knows all the facts already.
Everything I saw in Russia, in the cities and near the front, convinced
me that what is going on there vitally concerns us. Every man,
woman and child in the United States must get to work to give the
help so sorely needed by the allies. Whatever has failed in Russia,
whatever has broken down must never be missed. We must supply these
deficiencies. Our business now is to understand, and to hurry, hurry,
hurry with our task of getting trained and seasoned men into France.
After what I saw in the neighborhood of Vilna, Dvinsk and Jacobstadt,
I know what haste on this side means to the world. There are several
reasons why the whole truth has not before been written about the
Russian revolution. It could not be written or cabled from Russia.
It could not be carried out in the form of notes or photographs. It
could not even be discovered by the average person who goes to Russia,
because the average visitor lives at the expensive Hotel d’Europe,
never goes out except in a droshky, and meets only Russians of social
position to whom he has letters of introduction, and who naturally
try to give him the impression that the troubled state of affairs is
merely temporary. The visitor usually knows no Russian and cannot read
the newspapers. There are two good French newspapers published in
Petrograd, but the average American traveler is as ignorant of French
as of Russian. Even if he could read all the daily papers, however, he
would not get very much information. The press censorship is as rigid
and as tyrannical to-day as in the heyday of the autocracy, only a
different kind of news is suppressed. One of the modest demands put
forth by the Tavarishi (comrades) when I was in Petrograd was for a
requisition of all the white print paper in the market, the paper to be
distributed equally among all newspapers, large and small. The object,
candidly stated, was to diminish the size and the circulation of the
“bourgeois” papers.
A great deal of news, as we regard news, never gets into the papers at
all, or is compressed into very small space. For example there have
been a number of terrible railroad accidents on the Russian roads. Most
of these one never heard of unless some one he knew happened to be
killed or injured. Sometimes a bare announcement of a great fatality
was permitted. Thus an express train between Moscow and Petrograd was
wrecked, forty persons being killed and more than seventy injured. This
wreck got a whole paragraph in the newspapers, with no list of the
dead and injured and no explanation of the cause. The fact is that the
railroads are in a condition of complete demoralization and the only
wonder is that more wrecks do not occur.
An acquaintance of mine in Moscow, the wife of a colonel in the British
army, was anxious to go to Petrograd to meet her husband who was
expected there on his way from the front. My friend’s father, who is
the managing head of a large Moscow business concern, tried to prevail
on her to wait for her husband to reach her there, but she was anxious
to see him at the earliest moment and insisted on her tickets being
purchased. The day after she was to have gone her father called on me
and told me of his intense relief at receiving, an hour before train
time, a telegram from the colonel saying that he would be in Moscow the
next morning.
“And what do you think happened to that train my daughter was to have
taken?” he asked. It was the regular night express to Petrograd,
corresponding somewhat to the Congressional Limited between New York
and Washington. A few miles out of Moscow a difference arose between
the engineer and the stoker, and in order to settle it they stopped the
train and had a fight. One of the men hit the other on the head with a
monkey wrench, injuring him pretty badly. Authority of some kind stepped
in and arrested the assailant. The engineer’s cab was blood-stained,
and some authority unhitched the engine and sent it back to Moscow as
evidence. The train all this time, with its hundreds of passengers,
stood on the tracks waiting for a new engine and crew, and if it was
not run into and wrecked it was because it was lucky.
About the middle of August an American correspondent traveled on that
same express train from Petrograd to Moscow. The night was warm, and
as the Russian occupants of his carriage had the usual constitutional
objection to raised windows, he insisted on leaving the door of the
compartment open. In the middle of the night a band of soldiers boarded
the train and went into every one of the unlocked compartments, five in
all, neatly and silently looting them of all bags and suitcases. The
American correspondent lost everything he possessed--extra clothes,
money, passport, papers. There was a Russian staff officer in that
compartment and he lost even the clothes he traveled in, and was
obliged to descend in his pajamas. The conductor of the train admitted
that he saw the robbery committed, that he raised no hand to prevent
it, nor even pressed the signal which would have stopped the train.
“They would have killed me,” he pleaded in extenuation. “Besides, it
happens almost every night on a small or large scale.”
There is only one way of getting at the facts of the Russian situation,
and that is by living as the Russians do, associating with Russians,
hearing their stories day by day of the tragedy of what has been called
the bloodless revolution. This I did, as nearly as it was possible,
from the end of May until the 30th of August, in Petrograd, Moscow and
behind one of the fighting fronts. In Petrograd I lived in the Hotel
Militaire, formerly the Astoria, the headquarters of Russian officers
and of the numerous English, French and Roumanian officers on missions
in Russia. This was the hotel where the bitterest fighting took place
during the revolutionary days of February, 1917. The outside of the
building is literally riddled with bullets, every window had to be
replaced, and the work of renovating the interior was still going on
when I left. Under the window in my bedroom was a pool of dried blood
as big as a saucer, and the carpet was stained with drops leading from
the window to the stationary washbowl in the alcove dressing room. Over
the bed were two bullet holes.
Since the revolution the Hotel Militaire has been a garrison, soldiers
sleeping in several rooms on the ground floor and two sentinels
standing day and night at the door and at the gateway leading into
the service court. I do not know why, when I asked for a room, the
manager gave it to me. Two other women writers had rooms there, but
one was in a party which included American officers, and the other
was introduced by an English officer attached to the British embassy.
However, I took the room and was grateful, because whatever happened in
Petrograd was quickly known in the hotel. Also, it faced the square on
which was located the Marie Palace, where the provisional government
held many of its meetings, and where several important congresses were
held. Whenever the Bolsheviki broke loose this square always saw some
fighting. It was an excellent place for a correspondent to live.
I spent much of my time in the streets, listening, with the aid of
an interpreter, a young university girl, to the speeches which were
continually being made up and down the Nevski Prospect, the Litainy and
other principal streets. I talked, through my interpreter, with people
who sat beside me on park benches, in trams, railroad trains and other
public places. I met all the Russians I could, people of every walk of
life, of every political faith. I spent days in factories. I talked
with workers and with employers. I even met and talked with adherents
of the old régime. I talked for nearly an hour with the last Romanoff
left in freedom, the Grand Duchess Serge, sister of the former empress,
widow of the emperor’s uncle. I went, late at night, to a palace on the
Grand Morskaia where in strictest retirement lives the woman who has
been charged with being the closest friend and ally of Rasputin, the
one who, at his orders, is alleged to have administered poison to the
young Czarevitch. I traveled in a troop train two days and nights with
a regiment of fighting women--the Botchkareva “Battalion of Death”--and
I lived with them in their barrack behind the fighting lines for nine
days. I stayed with them until they went into action, I saw them
afterward in the hospitals and heard their own stories of the battle
into which they led thousands of reluctant men. I talked with many
soldiers and officers.
Russia is sick. She is gorged on something she has never known
before--freedom: she is sick almost to die with excesses, and the
leadership which would bring the panacea is violently thrown aside
because suspicion of any authority has bred the worst kind of license.
Russia is insane; she is not even morally responsible for what she is
doing. Will she recover? Yes. But, God! what pain must she bear before
she gets real freedom!
CHAPTER II
“ALL THE POWER TO THE SOVIET”
About the first thing I saw on the morning of my arrival in Petrograd
last spring was a group of young men, about twenty in number, I should
think, marching through the street in front of my hotel, carrying a
scarlet banner with an inscription in large white letters.
“What does that banner say?” I asked the hotel commissionaire who stood
beside me.
“It says ‘All the Power to the Soviet,’” was the answer.
“What is the soviet?” I asked, and he replied briefly:
“It is the only government we have in Russia now.”
And he was right. The soviets, or councils of soldiers’ and workmen’s
delegates, which have spread like wildfire throughout the country, are
the nearest thing to a government that Russia has known since the very
early days of the revolution.
The most striking parallel between the French and the Russian
revolutions lies in the facility with which both were snatched away
from the sane and intelligent men who began them and placed in the
hands of fanatics, who turned them into mad orgies of blood and terror.
The first French revolutionists rebelled against the theory of the
divine right of kings to govern or misgovern the people. They wanted
a constitution and a government by consent of the governed. But the
mob came in and took possession of the situation, and the result
was the guillotine and the reign of terror. Miliukoff, Rodzianko,
Lvoff, and their associates in the Russian Duma, rebelled against a
stupid, cruel autocrat who was doing his best to lose the war and to
bring the country to ruin and dishonor. They wanted a constitution
for Russia, and, for the time being at least, a figurehead king who
would leave government in the hands of responsible ministers. But the
Petrograd council of soldiers’ and workmen’s delegates came in and
took possession of the situation, and the result is a country torn
with anarchy, brought to the verge of bankruptcy, and ready, unless
something happens between now and next spring, to fall into the hands
of the Germans.
These councils of workmen are not new. In the upheaval of 1905-06 a man
named Khrustaliov, a labor leader, became the head of an organization
called the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s Deputies. It was made up of
elected delegates from all the principal factories in and near the
capital, and during the general strike which forced Nicholas to convene
the first Duma, the council assumed general control of the whole
labor situation, managing matters with rare good sense and firmness.
Witte, who became premier in those days, negotiated with Khrustaliov
as with an equal. For a time he and his council were a real power
in the empire. A dozen cities formed similar organizations. There
were councils of workmen’s deputies, peasants’ deputies, even, in
some places, of soldiers’ deputies. The reaction which came in July,
1906, swept them all into oblivion, and I never found anybody who
knew what became of Khrustaliov. But the tradition of the council of
workmen’s deputies was unforgotten. Perhaps the council even existed
still in secret; I do not know. It was quickly revived in March, 1917,
and before the political revolution was fairly accomplished it had
added soldiers to its title and had curtly informed the provisional
government and the Duma that no laws could be made or enforced
without first having received the approval of the working people’s
representatives. No policy in peace or war could be announced or put
into practice; no orders could be given the army; no treaties concluded
with the allies; in short, nothing could be done without first
consulting the 1,500 men and women--five women--who made up the Council
of Workmen´s and Soldiers’ Delegates.
If the country had been in a condition of peace instead of war this
would not have been at all a bad thing. The working people of Russia,
under the electoral system devised by the old régime, had very little
representation in the Duma, and they had a perfect right to demand a
voice in the organization of the new government. But unfortunately
the country was at war; and more unfortunately still, the Council
of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates was made up in large part of
extreme radicals to whom the war was a matter of entire indifference.
The revolution to them meant an opportunity to put into practice new
economic theories, the socialistic state. They conceived the vast dream
of establishing a new order of society, not only for Russia but for
the whole world. They were going to dictate terms of peace, and call
on the working people of every country to join them in enforcing that
peace. After that they were going to do away with all capitalists,
bankers, investors, property owners. Armies and navies were to be
scrapped. I don’t know what they purposed doing with the constitution
of the United States, but “capitalistic” America was to be made over
with the rest of the world.
Many members of this council are well-meaning theorists, dreamers,
exactly like thousands in this country who read no books or newspapers
except those written by their own kind, who “express themselves” by
wearing red ties and long hair, and who exist in a cloudy world of
their own. These people are honest and they are capable of being
reasoned with. In Russia they are known as Minsheviki, meaning small
claims. A noisy and troublesome and growing minority in the council
are called Bolsheviki (big claims), because they demand everything
and will not even consider compromise. They want a separate peace,
entirely favorable to Germany. I talked to a number of these men, but
I could never get one of them to explain the reason of this friendship
for Germany. Vaguely they seemed to feel that socialism was a German
doctrine and, therefore, as soon as Russia put it into practice, the
Germans would follow suit. Not all the council members are working
people. Some have never done a hand’s turn of manual work in their
lives. Many of the soldier members have never seen service and never
will. The Jewish membership is very large, and in Russia the Jews have
never been allowed any practice of citizenship.
Lastly the council is liberally sprinkled with German spies and agents.
Every once in a while one of these men is unmasked and put out. But
it is more than likely that his place is quickly filled. It is a most
difficult thing to convince the council that any “Tavarish,” which
is the Russian word for comrade, can be guilty of double dealing.
The council defended Lenine up to the last moment. Even after he
fled the country the Socialist newspapers, _Isvestia_, _Pravda_, and
Maxim Gorki’s _Nova Jisn_, declared him to be the victim of an odious
calumny. It was this Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates that
first claimed a consultive position in the government, and within a few
months was parading the streets with banners demanding “All the Power
to the Soviet.”
I cannot say that I unreservedly blame them. They were people who had
never known any kind of freedom, they had been poor and oppressed and
afraid of their lives. All of a sudden they were freed. And when they
went in numbers to the Duma and claimed a right to a voice in their own
future, men like Kerensky and others, who are honest dreamers, others
plain demagogues and office seekers, came out and lauded them to the
skies, told them that the world was theirs, that they alone had brought
about the revolution and therefore had a right to take possession of
the country. The effect of this on soldiers and on the working people
was immediate and disastrous.
If Kerensky was not the author of the famous Order No. 1, which
was the cause of most of the riot and bloodshed in the army, he at
least signed it and defended it. This order provided for regimental
government by committees, the election of officers by the soldiers,
the doing away with all saluting of superiors by enlisted men and the
abolition of the title “your nobility,” which was the form of address
used to officers. In place of this form the soldiers were henceforth to
address their officers as Gospodeen (meaning mister), captain, colonel,
general, as the case might be. Order No. 1 was a plain license to
disband the Russian army. Abolishing the custom of saluting may seem
a small thing. A member of the Root mission expressed himself thus to
me soon after his arrival in Petrograd: “This talk of anarchy is all
nonsense,” he said. “A lot of peacock officers are sore because the men
don’t salute them any more. Why should the men salute?”
Perhaps I don’t know why they should, but I know that when they don’t
they speedily lose all their soldierly bearing and slouch like tired
subway diggers. They throw courtesy, kindness, consideration to the
winds. The soldiers of other countries look on them with disgust and
horror. At Tornea, the port of entry into Finland, I got my first
glimpse of this “free” Russian soldier. He was handing some papers
to a trim British Tommy, who was straight as an arrow, clean cut and
soldierly. The Russian slouched up to him, stuck out the papers in a
dirty paw and blew a mouthful of cigarette smoke in his face. What
the Tommy said to him was in English, and I am afraid was lost on
the Russian, who walked off looking quite pleased with himself. In
Petrograd I saw two of these “free” soldiers address, without even
touching their caps, a French officer who spoke their language. The
conversation was repeated to me thus: “Is it true that in your country,
which calls itself a democracy, the soldiers have to stand in the
presence of officers? Is it true that they----” The interrogation
proceeded no further, for the Frenchman replied quickly: “In the
first place French soldiers do not walk up to an officer and begin
a conversation uninvited, so I find it impossible to answer your
questions.”
If he had been a Russian officer he would probably have been murdered
on the spot. The death penalty having been abolished, and the police
force having been reduced to an absurdity, murder has been made a safe
and pleasant diversion. Murder of officers is so common that it is
seldom even reported in the newspapers. When the truth is finally and
officially published, if it ever is, it will be found that the brutal
and horrible butchery of officers exceeds anything the outside world
has ever imagined. I met a woman whose daughter went insane after her
husband was killed in the fortress of Kronstadt, the port of Petrograd.
He with a number of officers was imprisoned there, and some of the
women went to the commander and begged permission to see and speak to
their men. He grinned at them, and said: “They are just finishing their
dinner. In a few minutes you may see them.” Shortly afterwards they
were summoned to a room where the men sat around a table. They were
tied in their chairs, and were all dead, with evidences of having been
tortured.
In the beginning of the revolution the soldiers of Kronstadt killed
the old officer commandant. They began by gouging out his eyes. When he
was quite finished they brought in the second officer in command and
his young son, a lieutenant in the navy. “Will you join us, embrace
the glorious revolution, or shall we kill you?” they demanded. “My
duty is to command this garrison,” replied the officer. “If you are
going to kill me do it at once.” They shot him, and threw his corpse
on a pile of others in a ditch. The son they spared, and a few nights
later the young man rescued his father’s body and brought it home to be
buried. This story was related under oath by him, but in the face of it
and hundreds more like it the death penalty was abolished; nor would
Kerensky consent to restore it, except for desertion at the front.
At the Moscow congress, held in August, Kerensky said, apologizing for
even this small concession: “As minister of justice I did away with the
death penalty. As president of the provisional government I have asked
for its reinstatement in case of desertion under fire.” There was a
burst of applause, and Kerensky exclaimed: “Do not applaud. Don’t you
realize that we lose part of our souls when we consent to the death
penalty? But if it is necessary to lose our souls to save Russia we
must make the sacrifice.”
Petrograd and Moscow are literally running over with idle soldiers,
many of whom have never done any fighting, and who loudly declare that
they never intend to do any. They are supported by the government, wear
the army uniform, claim all the privileges of the soldier and live
in complete and blissful idleness. The street cars are crowded with
soldiers, who of course pay no fares. It is impossible for a woman to
get a seat in a car. She is lucky if the soldiers permit her to stand
in the aisle or on a platform. “Get off and walk, you boorzhoi,” said
a soldier to my interpreter one day when she was hastening to keep an
appointment with me. She got off and walked. I heard but one person
dispute with a soldier. She was a street car conductor, one of the many
women who have taken men’s places since the war. She turned on a car
full of these idlers riding free and littering the floor with sunflower
seeds, which they eat as Americans eat peanuts, and told them exactly
what she thought of them. It must have been extremely unflattering, for
the other passengers looked joyful and only one soldier ventured any
reply. “Now, comrade,” said he, “you must not be hard on wounded men.”
“Wounded men!” exclaimed the woman. “If you ever get a wound it will
be in the mouth from a broken bottle.” There was a burst of laughter,
in which even the soldiers joined. But after it subsided one of the
men said defiantly: “Just the same, comrades, it was we who sent the
Czar packing.” This opinion is shared by the Council of Workmen’s and
Soldiers’ Delegates. They have completely forgotten that the Duma had
anything to do with the revolution. At their national congress of
Soviets held in July, they solemnly debated whether or not they would
permit the Duma to meet again, and it was a very small majority that
decided in favor. But only on condition that the national body worked
under the direction of the councils.
CHAPTER III
THE JULY REVOLUTION
Every one who has read the old “Arabian Nights” will remember the
story of the fisherman who caught a black bottle in one of his nets.
When the bottle was uncorked a thin smoke began to curl out of the
neck. The smoke thickened into a dense cloud and became a huge genie
who made a slave of the fisherman. By the exercise of his wits the
fisherman finally succeeded in getting the genie back into the bottle,
which he carefully corked and threw back into the sea. Kerensky tried
desperately to get the genie back into the bottle, and every one hoped
he might succeed. Up to date, however, there is little to indicate that
the giant has even begun materially to shrink. Petrograd is not the
only city where the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates has
assumed control of the destinies of the Russian people. Every town has
its council, and there is no question, civil or military, which they do
not feel capable of settling.
I have before me a Petrograd newspaper clipping dated June 12. It is
a dispatch from the city of Minsk, and states that the local soviet
had debated the whole question of the resumption of the offensive, the
Bolsheviki claiming that the question was general and that it ought
to be left for the men at the front to decide. They themselves were
against an offensive, deeming it contrary to the interests of the
international movement and profitable only to capitalists, foreign as
well as Russian. Workers of all countries ought to struggle against
their governments and to break with all imperialist politics. The
army ought to be made more democratic. This view prevailed, says the
dispatch, by a vote of 123 against 79.
This is typical. In some cities the extreme socialists are in the
majority, in others the milder Minsheviki prevail. In Petrograd it
has been a sort of neck and neck between them, with the Minsheviki
in greater number. But as the seat of government Petrograd has had a
great attraction for the German agents, and they are all Bolsheviki
and very energetic. Early in the revolution they established two
headquarters, one in the palace of Mme. Kchessinskaia, a dancer, high
in favor with some of the grand dukes, and another on the Viborg side,
a manufacturing quarter of the city. Here in a big rifle factory and a
few miles down the Neva in Kronstadt, they kept a stock of firearms,
rifles and machine guns big enough to equip an army division.
The leader of this faction, which was opposed to war against Germany
but quite willing to shoot down unarmed citizens, was the notorious
Lenine, a proved German agent whose power over the working people
was supreme until the uprisings in July, which were put down by
the Cossacks. Lenine was at the height of his glory when the Root
Commission visited Russia, and the provisional government was so
terrorized by him that it hardly dared recognize the envoys from
“capitalistic America.” Only two members of the mission were ever
permitted to appear before the soviet or council. They were Charles
Edward Russell and James Duncan, one a socialist and the other a labor
representative. Both men made good speeches, but not a line of them,
as far as I could discover, ever appeared in a socialist newspaper. In
fact, the visit of the commission was ignored by the radical press, the
only press which reaches 75 per cent of the Russian people.
In order to make perfectly clear the situation as it existed during the
spring and summer, and as it exists to-day, I am going to describe two
events which I witnessed last July. Both of these were attempts of the
extreme socialists to bring about a separate peace with Germany, and
had they succeeded in their plans would have done so. Moreover, they
might easily have resulted in the dismemberment of Russia.
The 18th of June, Russian style, July 1 in our calendar, is a day
that stands out vividly in my memory. For some time the Lenine
element of the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council had planned to get up
a demonstration against the non-socialist members of the provisional
government and against the further progress of the war. The Minshevik
element of the council, backed by the government, spoiled the plan
by voting for a non-political demonstration in which all could take
part, and which should be a memorial for the men and women killed in
the February revolution, and buried in the Field of Mars, a great open
square once used for military reviews. As the plan was finally adopted
it provided that every one who wanted to might march in this parade,
and no one was to carry arms. Great was the wrath of the Lenineites,
but the peaceful demonstration came off, and it must have given the
government its first thrill of encouragement, for events that day
proved that the Bolsheviki or Lenine followers were cowards at heart
and could be handled by any firm and fearless authority.
It was a beautiful Sunday morning, this eighteenth of June, when I
walked up the Nevski Prospect, the Fifth avenue of Petrograd, watching
the endless procession that filled the street. Two-thirds of the
marchers were men, mostly soldiers, but women were present also, and
a good many children. Red flags and red banners were plentiful, the
Bolshevik banners reading “Down with the Ten Capitalistic Ministers,”
“Down with the War,” “Down with the Duma,” “All the Power to the
Soviets,” and presenting a very belligerent appearance.
With me that day was another woman writer, Miss Beatty of the San
Francisco _Bulletin_, and as we walked along we agreed that almost
anything could happen, and that we ought not to allow ourselves to get
into a crowd. For once the journalistic passion for seeing the whole
thing must give place to a decent regard for safety. We had just agreed
that if shooting began we would duck into the nearest court or doorway,
when something did happen--something so sudden that its very character
could not be defined. If it was a shot, as some claimed, we did not
hear it. All we heard was a noise something like a sudden wind. That
great crowd marching along the broad Nevski simply exploded. There is
no other word to express the panic that turned it without any warning
into a fleeing, fighting, struggling, terror-stricken mob. The people
rushed in every direction, knocking down everything in their track.
Miss Beatty went down like a log, but she was up again in a flash, and
we flung ourselves against a high iron railing guarding a shop window.
Directly beside us lay a soldier who had had his head cut open by the
glass sign against which he was thrown. Many others were injured.
[Illustration: Typical crowd on the Nevski Prospect during the
Bolshevik or Maximalist risings.]
Fortunately the panic was shortlived. It lasted hardly five minutes, as
a matter of fact. All around the cry rose that nothing was the matter,
that the Cossacks were not coming. The Cossacks, once the terror of the
Russian people, in this upheaval have become the strongest supporters
of the government. Nothing could better demonstrate the anti-government
intention of the Bolsheviki than their present fear and hatred of the
Cossacks. So the “Tavarishi” took up their battered banners and resumed
their march. No one ever found out what started the panic. Some said
that a shot was fired from a window on one of the banners. Others said
that the shot was merely a tire blowing out. Some were certain that
they heard a cry of “Cossacks,” and some cynics suggested that the
pick-pockets, a numerous and enterprising class just now, started the
panic in the interests of business. This was the only disturbance I
witnessed. The newspapers reported two more in the course of the day. A
young girl watching the procession from the sidewalk suddenly decided
to commit suicide, and the shot she sent through her heart precipitated
another panic. Still a third one occurred when two men got into a
fight and one of them drew a knife.
The instant flight of the crowds and especially of the soldiers must
have given Kerensky hope that the giant could be got back into the
bottle, especially since on that very day, June 18, Russian style, the
army on one of the fronts advanced and fought a victorious engagement.
The town went mad with joy over that victory, showing, I think, that
the heart of the Russian people is still intensely loyal to the allies,
and deadly sick of the fantastic program of the extreme socialists.
Crowds surged up and down the street bearing banners, flags, pictures
of Kerensky. They thronged before the Marie Palace, where members of
the government, officers, soldiers, sailors made long and rapturous
speeches, full of patriotism. They sang, they shouted, all day and
nearly all night. When they were not shouting “Long live Kerensky!”
they were saying “This is the last of the Lenineites.” But it wasn’t.
The Bolsheviki simply retired to their dancer’s palace, their Viborg
retreats and their Kronstadt stronghold, and made another plan.
On Monday night, July 2, or in our calendar July 15, broke out what
is known as the July revolution, the last bloody demonstration of the
Bolsheviki. I had been absent from town for two weeks and returned to
Petrograd early in the morning after the demonstration began. I stepped
out of the Nicholai station and looked around for a droshky. Not one
was in sight. No street cars were running. The town looked deserted.
Silence reigned, a queer, sinister kind of a silence. “What in the
world has happened?” I asked myself. A droshky appeared and I hailed
it. When the izvostchik mentioned his price for driving me to my hotel
I gasped, but I was two miles from home and there were no trams. So I
accepted and we made the journey. Few people were abroad, and when I
reached the hotel I found the entrance blocked with soldiers. The man
behind the desk looked aghast to see me walk in, and he hastened to
tell me that the Bolsheviki were making trouble again and all citizens
had been requested to stay indoors until it was over.
I stayed indoors long enough to bathe and change, and then, as
everything seemed quiet, I went out. Confidence was returning and the
streets looked almost normal again. I walked down the Morskaia, finding
the main telephone exchange so closely guarded that no one was even
allowed to walk on the sidewalk below it. That telephone exchange had
been fiercely attacked during the February revolution, and it was one
of the most hotly disputed strategic positions in the capital. Later
I am going to tell something of the part played in the revolution by
the loyal telephone girls of Petrograd. A big armored car was plainly
to be seen in the courtyard of the building, and many soldiers were
there alert and ready. I stopped in at the big bookshop where English
newspapers (a month old) were to be purchased, and bought one. The
_Journal de Petrograd_, the French morning paper, I found had not been
issued that day. Then I strolled down the Nevski. I had not gone far
when I heard rifle shooting and then the sound, not to be mistaken,
of machine gun fire. People turned in their tracks and bolted for
the side streets. I bolted too, and made a record dash for the Hotel
d’Europe. The firing went on for about an hour, and when I ventured
out again it was to see huge gray motor trucks laden with armed men,
rushing up and down the streets, guns bristling from all sides and
machine guns fore and aft.
What had happened was this. The “Red Guard,” an armed band of workmen
allied with the Bolsheviki, together with all the extremists who could
be rallied by Lenine, and these included some very young boys, had been
given arms and told to “go out in the streets.” This is a phrase that
usually means go out and kill everything in sight. In this case the
men were assured that the Kronstadt regiments would join them, that
cruisers would come up the river and the whole government would be
delivered into the hands of the Bolsheviki. The Kronstadt men did come
in sufficient numbers to surround and hold for two days the Tauride
Palace, where the Duma meets and the provisional government had its
headquarters. The only reason why the bloodshed was not greater was
that the soldiers in the various garrisons around the city refused to
come out and fight. The sane members of the Soviet had begged them
to remain in their casernes, and they obeyed. All day Tuesday and
Wednesday the armed motor cars of the Bolsheviki dashed from barrack
to barrack daring the soldiers to come out, and whenever they found a
group of soldiers to fire on, they fired. Most of these loyal soldiers
are Cossacks, and they are hated by the Bolsheviki.
Tuesday night there was some real fighting, for the Cossacks went to
the Tauride Palace and freed the besieged ministers at the cost of the
lives of a dozen or more men. Then the Cossacks started out to capture
the Bolshevik armored cars. When they first went out it was with
rifles only, which are mere toy pistols against machine guns. After
one little skirmish I counted seventeen dead Cossack horses, and there
were more farther down the street. As soon as the Cossacks were given
proper arms they captured the armored trucks without much trouble. The
Bolsheviki threw away their guns and fled like rabbits for their holes.
Nevertheless a condition of warfare was maintained for the better part
of a week, and the final burst of Bolshevik activity gave Petrograd,
already sick of bloodshed, one more night of terror. That night I shall
not soon forget.
The day had been quiet and we thought the trouble was over. I went to
bed at half-past ten and was in my first sleep when a fusilade broke
out, as it seemed, almost under my window. I sat up in bed, and within
a few minutes, the machine guns had begun their infernal noise, like
rattlesnakes in the prairie grass. I flung on a dressing gown and ran
down the hall to a friend’s room. She dressed quickly and we went down
stairs to the room of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragette,
which gave a better view of the square than our own. There until nearly
morning we sat without any lights, of course, listening to repeated
bursts of firing, and the wicked _put-put-put-put_ of the machine
guns, watching from behind window draperies, the brilliant headlights
of armored motors rushing into action, hearing the quick feet of men
and horses hastening from their barracks. We did not go out. All a
correspondent can do in the midst of a fight is to lie down on the
ground and make himself as flat as possible, unless he can get into a
shop where he hides under a table or a bench. That never seemed worth
while to me, and I have no tales to tell of prowess under fire.
I listened to that night battle from the safety of the hotel, going
the next day to see the damage done by the guns. A contingent of
mutinous soldiers and sailors from Kronstadt, which had been expected
for several days by the Lenineites, had come up late, still spoiling
for a fight; had planted guns on the street in front of the Bourse and
at the head of the Palace Bridge across the Neva, and simply mowed
down as many people as were abroad at the hour. Nobody knows, except
the authorities, how many were killed, but when we awoke the next day
we discovered that, for a time at least, the power of the Bolsheviki
had been broken. The next day the mutinous regiments were disbanded in
disgrace. Petrograd was put under martial law, the streets were guarded
with armored cars, thousands of Cossacks were brought in to police the
place, and orders for the arrest of Lenine and his lieutenants were
issued. But it was openly boasted by the Bolsheviki that the government
was afraid to touch Lenine, and certain it is that he escaped into
Sweden, and possibly from there into Germany.
I should not like to believe that the government actually connived at
his escape, since there was always the menace of his return, and the
absolute certainty that he would remain an outsider directing force
in the Bolshevik campaign. It is more probable that in the confusion
of those days of fighting he was smuggled down the Neva in a small
yacht or motor boat to the fortress of Kronstadt, and from there was
conveyed across the mine strewn Baltic into Sweden. Rumor had it that
he had been seen well on his way to Germany, but it is more likely
that his employers kept him nearer the scene of his activities. He was
guilty of more successful intrigue, more murder and violent death than
most of the Kaiser’s faithful, and deserves an extra size iron cross,
if there is such a thing. In spite of all that he has done he has
thousands of adherents still in Russia, people who believe that he is
“sincere but misguided,” to use an overworked phrase. The rest of the
fighting mob were driven from their palace, which they had previously
looted and robbed of about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of costly
furniture, china, silver and art objects. They were hunted out of their
rifle factory, and finally surrendered to the government after they
had captured, but failed to hold the fortress of Peter and Paul. They
surrendered but were they arrested and punished? Not a bit of it. They
were allowed to go scot free, only being required to give up their
arms. The government existed only at the will of the mob, and the mob
would not tolerate the arrest of “Tavarishi.”
CHAPTER IV
AN HOUR OF HOPE
There was an hour when the sunrise of hope seemed to be dawning for the
Russian people, when the madness of the extreme socialists seemed to be
curbed, the army situation in hand, and a real government established.
This happened in late July, and was symbolized in the great public
funeral given eight Cossack soldiers slain by the Bolsheviki in the
July days of riot and bloodshed in Petrograd. I do not know how many
Cossacks were killed. Only eight were publicly buried. It is entirely
possible that the government did not wish the Bolsheviki to know the
full result of their murder feast, and for that reason gave private
burial to some of the dead. The public funeral served as a tribute
to the loyal soldiers, a warning to the extremists that the country
stood back of the war, and a notice to all concerned that the days of
revolution were over and that henceforth the government meant to govern
without the help or interference of the Tavarishi, or comrades in the
socialist ranks. The moment was propitious for the government. The
Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates was in a chastened frame
of mind, caused first by the running amuck of the Bolshevik element,
the unmasking and flight of Lenine, and next by a lost battle on the
Galician front, and the disgraceful desertion of troops under fire.
The best elements in the council supported the new coalition ministry,
although it did not have a Socialist majority, and it claimed the right
to work independently of the council. The Cossack funeral was really a
government demonstration, and those of us who saw it believed for the
moment that it marked the beginning of a new era in Russia’s troubled
progress toward democracy and freedom. The services were held in St.
Isaac’s Cathedral, the largest church in Petrograd, and one of the
most magnificent in a country of magnificent churches. The bodies, in
coffins covered with silver cloth, were brought to the cathedral on a
Friday afternoon at 5 o’clock, accompanied by many members of their
regiments and representatives of others. The flower-heaped coffins
surrounded by flaming candles filled the space below the holy gate
leading to the high altar; around them knelt the soldiers and the
weeping women relatives of the dead, while a solemn service for the
repose of their souls was chanted.
In the Russian church no organ or other instrumental music is
permitted, but the singing is of an order of excellence quite unknown
in other countries. Part of a priest’s education is in music, and the
male choirs are most carefully trained and conducted. They have the
highest tenor and the lowest bass voices in the world in those Russian
church choirs, and there is no effect of the grandest pipe organ which
they cannot produce. They sing nothing but the best music, and their
masses are written for them by the greatest of Russian composers.
Many times I have thrilled to their singing, but at this memorial
service to brave men slain in defense of their country I was fairly
overwhelmed by it. I do not know what they sang, but it was a solemn,
yet triumphant symphony of grief, religious ecstasy, faith and longing.
It soared to a great climax, and it ended in a prolonged phrase sung
so softly that it seemed to come as from a great distance, from Heaven
itself. The whole vast congregation was on its knees, in tears.
The service in the cathedral next morning was long and elaborate,
and it was early afternoon before the procession started for the
Alexander Nevski monastery where a common grave had been prepared for
the murdered men. Back of the open white hearses walked the bereaved
women and children, bareheaded, in simple peasant black. Thousands
of Cossacks, also bareheaded, many weeping bitterly, followed. The
dead men’s horses were led by soldiers. The Metropolitan of Petrograd
and every other dignitary of the church was in the procession. I saw
Miliukoff, Rodzianko and other celebrities. Women of rank walked side
by side with working women. Many nurses were there in their flowing
white coifs. There were uncounted hundreds of wreaths and floral
offerings. The bands played impressive funeral marches. But there was
not a single red flag in the procession.
There was, of course, Kerensky, and his appearance was one of the
dramatic events of the day. I watched the procession from a hotel
window, and I saw just as the hearses were passing a large black motor
car winding its way slowly through the crowd that thronged the street.
Just as the last hearse passed the door of the car opened and Kerensky
sprang out and took his place in the procession, walking alone hatless
and with bowed head after the coffins. He was dressed in the plain
service uniform of a field officer, and his brown jacket was destitute
of any decorations. The crowd when it saw him went mad with enthusiasm;
forgot for a moment the solemnity of the occasion and rushed forward to
acclaim him. “Kerensky! Kerensky!”
It was his first appearance as premier, and practically dictator of
Russia, and he would not have been human if he had not felt a thrill
of triumph at this reception. But with a splendid gesture he waved the
crowd to silence, and bade them stand quietly back. At first it seemed
impossible to restrain them, but the people in the front ranks joined
hands and formed a living chain that kept the crowds back, and in a few
moments order was restored. There was something fine and symbolic about
that action, those joined hands that stopped what might have created
a panic and turned the government’s demonstration into a fiasco. That
spontaneous bit of social thinking and acting restored order better
than a police force could have done, and it left in me the conviction
that whenever the Russian people join hands in behalf of their country
they are going to work out a splendid civilization. If they had only
done it after that day! But the new coalition ministry, with President
Kerensky, the popular idol, substituted for Lvoff, who had grown
wearied and dispirited by the struggle, soon found itself facing the
same old sea of troubles that had swamped the former ministries.
The democracy, created largely by Kerensky, in a country which is not
yet ready for self-government, had split up into many anarchistic
groups. It had become a Frankenstein too huge and too crazy with
power to be handled by any man less than a Napoleon Bonaparte, and
Kerensky is not a Bonaparte. Perhaps he had the brain of a Bonaparte,
as he certainly had the charm and magnetism. It may be that he lacked
the iron will or the deathless courage. It may only be that his
frail physical health stood in the way of resolution. Whatever the
explanation, the fact remains that Kerensky never once was able to
take that huge, disorganized, uneducated, restless, yearning Russian
mob by the scruff of the neck and compel it to listen to reason.
Apparently, also, he was unable or unwilling to let any one else do
it, as the mysterious Korniloff incident seems to prove. The story
of the disintegration of the Russian army has been described in many
dispatches. Later I am going to tell what I saw of the Russian army,
and what I know of the demoralization at the front. The state of things
was bad, but it was by no means hopeless, as it is fast becoming. That
Russian army, I confidently believe, could, as late as August, 1917,
have been reorganized, renovated and made into an effective fighting
force. It is very evident that it still has possibilities, because the
Germans still keep an enormous number of troops on the eastern front.
They know that the Russians can fight, and they fear that they will
fight, as soon as they are given a real leader. Military leaders they
do not lack, as the Germans also know. Most of the old commanders, the
worthless, corrupt hangers-on of the old régime, are gone now. Some
are dead, some in prison, some relegated to obscurity. The men who are
left are real soldiers, good fighters, true allies of America, France
and England. Especially is this true of the once feared and hated
Cossack leaders.
The Cossack regiments to the last man had supported the provisional
government, and were wholeheartedly in favor of fighting the war to a
finish. There are about five million of these Cossacks, and practically
every able-bodied man is a soldier. And what a soldier! Except our own
cowboys, there never were such horsemen. No troops in the world excel
them in bravery and fighting power. They are a proud race and would
never serve under officers save those of their own kind. I asked a
young Cossack at the front where his officers got their training. He
had spent some ten years in Chicago and spoke English like one of our
own men. “We train them in the field,” he said with a smile. “Every one
of us is a potential officer, and when our highest commander drops in
battle, there is always a man to take his place.”
The Cossack has no head for politics. He agrees on the government he is
going to support and he serves that government with an undivided mind.
When he served the Czar he did the Czar’s bidding. When he decided to
serve the new democracy he could be depended on to do it. He has done
no fraternizing with wily Germans in the trenches. He has listened
to no German propaganda in Petrograd. He wants to fight the war to
a successful end, and then he wants to go back to his home on the
peaceful Don river, or in the wild Urals and cultivate his fields and
vineyards.
Of all Cossack leaders the most picturesque and the most celebrated
as a military genius was Gen. Korniloff. His life and adventures
would fill volumes. He fought his way up from a penniless boyhood
to a successful manhood. He knows Russia from one end to the other,
and speaks almost every dialect known to the empire, and several
foreign languages in addition, especially those of the Orient. He is a
small, wiry man with a beard, and the only time I ever saw him he was
surrounded by a bodyguard of tall Turkestan Cossacks wearing long gray
tunics, huge caps of Persian lamb and a perfectly beautiful collection
of silver-mounted swords, daggers and pistols. In a pictorial sense
Gen. Korniloff was quite obscured by them.
Following a series of disasters and wholesale desertions at the front,
the late provisional government announced that the chief command of the
army had been given to Gen. Korniloff. The command was accepted with
certain conditions attached to the acceptance. Gen. Korniloff would
not be a commander in any limited or modified sense of the word. He
demanded absolute power and control over all troops, both at the front
and in the rear. He wanted to abolish the committees of soldiers who
administered all regimental affairs, and who even decided what commands
the men might or might not obey. Gen. Korniloff could never tolerate
these bodies. Whenever he visited an army division he asked: “Have your
regiments any committees?” And if the answer was yes, he immediately
gave the order: “Dissolve them.” One of the principal demands made by
Gen. Korniloff on the provisional government was the right to inflict
the death penalty on deserters, both in the field and in the rear. I
have written of the thousands of idle soldiers in Petrograd, and of
the expressed refusal of many of them to go to the front when ordered.
There was no secret about this, nor any concealment of the fact that
of many thousands of soldiers sent to the front at various times since
the early spring, about two-thirds deserted on the way. They captured
trains--hospital trains in some instances--turned the passengers out,
left the wounded lying along the tracks, and forced the trainmen to
take them back to Petrograd, or wherever they wanted to go.
Kerensky had tried every means in his power to stop this shameful
business. He had fixed three separate dates on which all soldiers
must rejoin their regiments and must obey orders to advance. He
had published manifestoes notifying these coward and slackers that
unless they did report for duty they would be declared traitors to
the revolution, their families would be deprived of all army benefits
and they would not be allowed to share in the distribution of land
when the new agrarian policy went into effect. These manifestoes were
absolutely ignored. The desertions continued. Army disintegration
increased. Anarchy pure and simple reigned on all fronts and in the
rear. Soldiers who were willing to fight were afraid to, because there
was every probability of their own comrades shooting them in the back
if they obeyed their officers. The state of mind of the officers can be
imagined perhaps--it cannot be described. Many committed suicide in
the madness of their shame and despair.
Gen. Korniloff wanted to deal with this horrible situation in the only
possible way, by shooting all deserters. This may sound drastic. No
doubt it will to every copperhead and pro-German in this country. But
remember, for every man who deserts on that Russian front some American
boy will have to suffer. We shall have to fight for the Russians, we
shall have to pay the awful price of their defection. Gen. Korniloff,
a true patriot, knew this, and he wanted to save his country from
that dishonor. Kerensky apparently could not endure the thought of
those firing squads. Or else he did not dare to risk the wrath of the
soviet. There is no doubt that he would have courted great personal
danger, it may be certain death, but what of it? There is no doubt
that Gen. Korniloff, if he saved the situation, would loom larger as
a popular hero than Kerensky, but what of it? The whole country, all
of it that retained its sanity and its patriotism, looked for Gen.
Korniloff to establish a military dictatorship in the army. There was
never any question of his assuming the civil power. There was never any
indication that he wanted it.
But there was this question--what political party in Russia was going
to dominate the constituent assembly, that consummation which has been
postponed many times, but which cannot be indefinitely postponed? The
Social Revolutionary party, of which Kerensky was a member, seems
to have had a clear majority, but there was little organization,
and the Socialists were split up into numerous groups. In one city
election recently there were eighteen tickets in the field, most of
them separate Socialist parties. The Cossacks, solidly lined up behind
Korniloff, announced that in the coming constituent assembly election
they would form a bloc with the Constitutional Democrats and the
moderate party known as the Cadets, of which Prof. Paul Miliukoff is
the leader. That bloc might dominate the constituent assembly. If it
did the Bolshevik element in the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’
Delegates throughout the country would be overpowered and discredited.
The “social revolution” which the councils still insisted must come out
of the political revolution might be modified.
Outside of the secret conclaves of the provisional government, outside
of the inner circles of political life in Russia, there is no one who
knows the exact truth of the so-called Korniloff rebellion. It is known
that a congress was held in Moscow in late August, in which Kerensky
made one of his great speeches, absolutely capturing his audience
and once more hypnotizing a large public into the belief that he
could restore order in Russia. Korniloff appeared, and aroused great
enthusiasm, as he always does. Everybody seemed to think that the two
leaders would get together and agree on a program. But they did not get
together, and the government announced the “rebellion” and disgrace
of Korniloff. Two more things were announced: that the Bolsheviki had
gained a majority in the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’
Delegates, and that Lenine was on his way back to Russia to address a
“democratic congress,” which had for its objects the abolishment of
the Duma and the calling of a parliament chosen from its membership.
Russia’s hour of hope had come and gone. When will it come again?
CHAPTER V
THE COMMITTEE MANIA
In writing a plain statement of the condition of anarchy into which
Russia has fallen, I am very far from wishing to create a prejudice
against the Russian people. I don’t want anybody to distrust or scorn
the Russians. I want the American people to understand their situation
in order that, through sympathy, patience and common sense, they can
find some way of helping them out of the blind morass that surrounds
them. All the educated Russians I have met like Americans and trust
them. They will not soon forget that the United States was the first
great power to recognize the new government and to hail the revolution.
The American ambassador, David R. Francis, is easily the most popular
diplomat in Petrograd. Every one knows him, and he rarely appeared
in a meeting or convention without being applauded. Over and over
again, during my three months’ visit to Russia, I was told that it
was to America they looked for help and guidance, and after the war
they want to enter into the closest commercial relations with us. One
business man said to me just before I left: “Tell your people that we
will never trade with Germany again unless the Americans force us to
do so. If they will supply us with chemicals, with manufactures and
machinery, we will gladly buy them. If they will send us experts for
our manufacturing plants we will be delighted to have them instead of
the Germans we used to employ, who never taught our people any of their
knowledge because they did not want us to develop.”
The Russians want us to help them establish public schools; to
show them how to build and operate great railroad systems; to farm
scientifically; to do any number of things we have learned to do well.
We mustn’t despise the Russians, we must help them. And we can’t do
that unless we understand them. Take, for example, the army situation.
It is very bad. The mass of the soldiers are in rebellion against all
authority. But consider the past history, the very recent past history
of those soldiers. Aside from brutal personal treatment at the hands
of some of the officers, they were cheated and starved and neglected
by the bureaucracy in Petrograd, and then again by their commanders
at the front. The Russian soldier’s wants are simple enough. He eats
the same food seven days in the week and rarely complains. This food
consists of soup made of salt meat and cabbage; kasha, a porridge
made of buckwheat; black bread and tea. “Ivan” wears coarse clothes
and big, clumsy boots, and he has none of the small comforts we think
essential to the fighting man in the field. But slight as the Russian
soldier’s equipment is he did not invariably get it in the old days.
It was stolen from him by a band of official crooks with which the
war department and the army were honeycombed. Every department of the
army, from the commissariat to the Red Cross, was full of corruption
and graft. The traffic in army supplies and ammunition, even in
hospital supplies, that went on constantly beggars description. Gen.
Sukhomlinoff, the former minister of war, who has been tried and
sentenced to life imprisonment for the part he played in this business,
was only one of the big thieves. Under him were myriads more, and among
them all the soldiers were often stripped of their overcoats in the
dead of winter, and of half of their rations the year round. When a
Russian soldier was badly wounded he might as well have been shot as
succored. I have seen these men, pitiful wretches, having lost one or
more arms or legs, blind perhaps, or frightfully disfigured, begging in
the streets of Petrograd. Clad in tattered uniform, pale and miserable,
these poor soldiers stand on the steps of the churches or on street
corners and beg a few kopecks from the passersby. There is no such
thing as a pension for them, no soldiers’ homes. They suffered for a
country that knew no such thing as gratitude. Russia sent her men into
battle without sufficient arms or ammunition with which to fight. It
fed them to the German guns without mercy, that a band of looters in
the government might buy sables and bet on horse races. It let them
shiver and freeze in shoddy uniforms that army contractors might grow
rich. And, after they were wounded, it let them beg their bread.
[Illustration: Kerensky watching the funeral of victims of the July
Bolshevik risings.]
Small wonder, then, after the revolution, that there was a great
popular demand for swift justice for the soldiers. The provisional
government announced that henceforth each regiment should have an
elected committee, an executive body which should have entire charge
of regimental affairs. Food, clothing, supplies of all kinds, were to
pass through the hands of these committees, and they were to hear and
pass on all complaints. The committees were the vocal organs of the
army. For the first time in Russian history the soldier was allowed
to speak. The plan might have worked excellently had the provisional
government not made the mistake of too much zeal in democratizing the
army. It gorged the soldiers with freedom, gave them such heady doses
of self-government that they got drunk on the idea and ran amuck like
so many crazed Malays. Kerensky decreed that the soldiers need not
salute their officers. “Well then, we won’t,” they said. “And just to
show how free we are we won’t wash our faces, or wear clean clothes, or
touch our caps to women, or stand up straight----” and from that it was
an easy journey to “We won’t take any orders from anybody.”
The government told the soldiers to elect their own officers, and they
did, after butchering a thousand or so of their old ones. They elected
them wisely in some instances, but in a great many more they did not.
They chose men, not for their capacity to lead in a military way, but
for their political views. In a Bolshevik regiment the best Bolsheviki
were elected. If there was a Minshevik majority the new officers were
pretty sure to be Minsheviki. And after they were elected nobody
respected them, nor did they dare give orders. But of all the madness
that took possession of the “free” soldiers, the committee madness went
farthest. The Russians love to talk. To make speeches, to heckle and
be heckled is the joy of their lives. The committee gave them a new
chance to talk, and they got the habit of calling a committee meeting
on every conceivable occasion. Petrograd heard with horror last summer
that the men in the trenches, when ordered to advance, actually called
meetings to discuss the orders and to vote whether or not they were to
be followed. They did this at times when the Germans were at the very
gates of an important strategic point.
Even in the hospitals it got so that the doctors and the nurses were
without authority. If a man was ordered to take a pill he wanted to
call a committee meeting to discuss the thing. It is an actual fact
that men refused to take treatment or undergo operations until they
had consulted the Tavarishi about it. From that to refusing to obey
any orders is a short step, and Red Cross nurses have told me some
fantastic stories about life in Russian lazarets. Some wounded men
refused to take their clothes off and insisted on wearing them, boots
and all, to bed. Others refused to go to bed at night, preferring to
snooze during the day and wander around in pajamas and dressing gowns
at night. Some insisted on being discharged before they should be,
while others, on being discharged, declined to go.
They were not like that in all hospitals, of course. Ivan is a great
child, and very often he is a stupid and an unruly child. But often
he is good, especially when he is sick and suffering and in need of
women’s care and kindness. I don’t want to describe the bad hospital
conditions without admitting that they have the other kind, too, in
Russia. I remember seeing at the corner of a street below a big
lazaret in Petrograd a dozen discharged wounded men and a group of
nurses and orderlies. They were waiting for the tram which was to carry
the men to the railroad station. Some still wore bandages, some were
on crutches, some walked with the aid of sticks. Two were blind. But
all were wildly happy at the prospect of going home to the old village.
The nurses and orderlies shared in the excitement. Some of them were
going to the station, and had their arms full of bundles, clothes, food
and souvenirs of battle. One nurse carried a competent looking cork
leg, the future prop of a pale young fellow on crutches. The car swung
around the corner, full of passengers, idle soldiers mostly, but even
they, at the command of the energetic sister, vacated their seats for
the invalids. They climbed aboard, and those who were most helpless
were lifted. The cork leg was handed in through an open window and
delivered to one of the more able-bodied men. There had been plenty
of time for farewells before, but parting was difficult, and for five
minutes after boarding the car the men continued to shake hands with
the nurses, to shout last messages, and to kiss their hands to those on
the sidewalk. The nurses patted their charges’ arms and shoulders, and
called anxious admonitions. “Take care of that leg, Ivan Feodorovitch.
You know how to bandage it. Don’t try to walk too much, and keep out of
the sun.” You didn’t have to know a word of Russian to understand what
those nurses were saying.
The street car conductor wrung her hands and begged to be allowed to go
on. The time schedule had to be observed. “Please, sister, please,”
she entreated, and at last she was permitted to ring the bell and send
her car forward. As it turned the corner the men were still waving and
laughing and wiping the tears from their cheeks. I don’t believe those
men had called any committee meetings before obeying their nurses, or
ever reminded the doctors that it was a free country now and they could
take medicine or not as they pleased.
You certainly got tired of that overworked phrase “It’s a free country
now.” You hear it on all sides in Russia. “It’s a free country,” says
a man with a third-class ticket taking possession of a first-class
compartment. “It’s a free country,” declares a soldier, tossing a
handful of sunflower seed shells on a woman’s white shoes in a street
car. “It’s a free country,” say a group of men, stripping off their
clothes before a crowd of women and children and taking a bath in the
Neva. This occurs frequently on the Admiralty quay, a great pleasure
resort in Petrograd.
“They called them Sans Culottes during the French Revolution,” said a
clever woman writer in one of the newspapers. “Our men will go down to
fame as Sans Caleçons. The difference, perhaps, between a political and
a social revolution.” The first French phrase means without trousers.
The second carries the denuding process to its concluding stage.
In this kind of a free country nobody is free. Try to imagine how
it would be in Washington, in the office of the secretary of the
treasury, let us say, if a committee of the American Federation of
Labor should walk in and say: “We have come to control you. Produce
your books and all your confidential papers.” This is what happens to
cabinet ministers in Russia, and will continue until they succeed in
forming a government responsible only to the electorate, and not a
slave to the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates. Of course,
the simile is grossly unfair to the American Federation of Labor. Our
organized labor men are the most intelligent working people in the
community, and most of them have had a long experience in citizenship.
Above all, their loyalty, as a body, has been amply demonstrated. The
Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates has among its members
loyal, honest, intelligent men and women. But it has also a number of
extreme radicals, people who would dishonor the country by concluding a
separate peace with Germany, and who care nothing for the interests of
any group except their own. Nobody in Russia has very much experience
in citizenship, and the working people have less than others. Yet
the soviet, to give the council its local name, deems itself quite
capable of passing on all affairs of state, not only in Russia but in
the allied countries as well. The soviets have had the presumption to
announce that they are going to name the peace terms, although Russia
has virtually ceased to fight. “No annexations or contributions,” is
the formula, very evidently made in Germany. I am sure that not one in
a thousand knows what this means.
“Have you ever thought,” I asked a member of the Petrograd council,
“what your program would mean to the working people of Belgium? Don’t
you think that the farmers and artisans of northern France are
entitled to compensation for their ruined homes and blasted lives?”
“Yes, but not from Germany,” was the astounding reply. “All countries
should contribute.”
“If I were a cashier in a bank and stole a million dollars of the
depositors’ money, do you think I ought to be made to pay it back, or
should all the employés be taxed?” To this question I got no answer.
There isn’t any answer.
In all this confusion of mind, this whirlwind of ideas and theories,
are there no Russians who can think clearly? Are there no brave and
courageous people left in Russia? None who realize the ruin and
desolation which is being prepared for them? There are. Russia has its
submerged minority of thinkers. It has at least two fighting elements
which are ready to die to restore peace, order and bright honor to
their distracted land. These two elements are the Cossacks and the
women.
CHAPTER VI
THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN
The women soldiers of Russia, the most amazing development of the
revolution, if not of the world war itself, I am disposed to believe,
will, with the Cossacks, prove to be the element needed to lead, if it
can be led, the disorganized and demoralized Russian army back to its
duty on the firing line. It was with the object, the hope, of leading
them back that the women took up arms. Whatever else you may have heard
about them this is the truth. I know those women soldiers very well. I
know them in three regiments, one in Moscow and two in Petrograd, and I
went with one regiment as near to the fighting line as I was permitted.
I traveled from Petrograd to a military position “somewhere in Poland”
with the famous Botchkareva Battalion of Death. I left Petrograd in
the troop train with the women. I marched with them when they left the
train. I lived with them for nine days in their barrack, around which
thousands of men soldiers were encamped. I shared Botchkareva’s soup
and kasha, and drank hot tea out of her other tin cup. I slept beside
her on the plank bed. I saw her and her women off to the firing line,
and after the battle into which they led reluctant men, I sat beside
their hospital beds and heard their own stories of the fight. I want
to say right here that a country that can produce such women cannot
possibly be crushed forever. It may take time for it to recover its
present debauch of anarchism, but recover it surely will. And when it
does it will know how to honor the women who went out to fight when the
men ran home.
The Battalion of Death is not the name of one regiment, nor is it used
exclusively to designate the women’s battalions. It is a sort of order
which has spread through many regiments since the demoralization began,
and signifies that its members are loyal and mean to fight to the death
for Russia. Sometimes an entire regiment assumes the red and black
ribbon arrowhead which, sewed on the right sleeve of the blouse, marks
the order. Regiments have been made up of volunteers who are ready to
wear the insignia. Such a regiment is the Battalion of Death commanded
by Mareea Botchkareva (the spelling is phonetic), the extraordinary
peasant woman who has risen to be a commissioned officer in the Russian
army.
Botchkareva comes from a village near the Siberian border and is, I
should judge, about thirty years old. She was one of a large family of
children, and the family was very poor. They had a harder time than
ever after the father returned from the Japanese war minus one foot,
but that did not prevent their number from increasing, and merely
made the lot of Mareea, the oldest girl, a little more miserable. She
married young, fortunately a man with whom she was very happy. He
was the village butcher and she helped him in the shop, as they had
no children. When the war broke out in July, 1914, Mareea’s husband
marched away with the rest of the quota from their village, and she
never saw him again. He was killed in one of the first battles of the
war, and the only time I ever saw Botchkareva break down was when she
told me how she waited long months for the letter he had promised
to write her, and how at last a wounded comrade hobbled back to the
village and told her that the letter would never come. He was dead--out
there somewhere--and they had not even notified her.
“The soldiers have it hard,” she said, when her brief storm of tears
was over, “but not so hard as the women at home. The soldier has a gun
to fight death with. The women have nothing.”
For months Mareea Botchkareva watched the sufferings of the women and
children of her village grow worse and worse. Winter killed some of
them, winter and an unwonted scarcity of food. Typhus came along and
killed more. The village forgot that it had ever danced and sung and
was happy. Every family was in mourning for its dead. Mareea decided
that she could not endure it to sit in her empty hut and wait for
death. She would go out and meet it in the easier fashion permitted to
men. That was the way, she explained to me, she joined the regiment of
Siberian troops encamped near the village. The men did not want her,
but she sought and got permission, and when the regiment went to the
front she went along too.
[Illustration: Mareea Botchkareva, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and Women of
“The Battalion of Death.”]
She fought in campaigns on several fronts, earned medals and finally
the coveted cross of St. George for valor under fire. She was three
times wounded, the last time in the autumn of 1916, so badly that she
lay in hospital for four months. She got back to her regiment, where
she was now popular, and I imagine something of a leader, just before
the revolution of February, 1917.
Botchkareva was an ardent revolutionist, and her regiment was one
of the first to go over to the people’s side. Her consternation and
despair were great when, shortly after the emancipation from czardom,
great masses of the people, and especially the soldiers at the front,
began to demonstrate by riots and desertions how little they were ready
for freedom. The men of her regiment deserted in numbers, and she went
to members of the Duma who were going up and down the front trying to
stay the tide, and said to them: “Give me leave to raise a regiment of
women. We will go wherever men refuse to go. We will fight when they
run. The women will lead the men back to the trenches.” This is the
history of Botchkareva’s Battalion of Death, or rather of how it came
to be organized. The Russian war ministry gave her leave to recruit the
women, gave her a barrack in a former school building, and promised her
equipment and a place at the front. Many women in Petrograd, women of
wealth and social position, took fire with the idea, raised money for
the regiment, helped in the recruiting, some of them joining.
In an odd copy of an American newspaper that reached me in Russia I
read a paragraph stating that the schoolgirls of Petrograd were forming
a regiment under a man named Butchkareff, a lieutenant in the army.
I don’t know who sent out that piece of news, but it lacked most of
the facts. The women soldiers are not schoolgirls, and Botchkareva’s
battalion has no men officers. Three drill sergeants, St. George cross
men all of them, did assist in the training of the battalion while
it remained in Petrograd. Other men drilled it behind the lines,
but Botchkareva, and another remarkable woman, Marie Skridlova, her
adjutant, commanded and led it in battle.
Marie Skridlova is the daughter of Admiral Skridloff, one of the most
distinguished men of the Russian navy. She is about twenty, very
attractive if not actually beautiful, and is an accomplished musician.
Her life up to the outbreak of the war was that of an ordinary
girl of the Russian aristocracy. She was educated abroad, taught
several languages, and expected to have a career no more exciting or
adventurous than that of any other woman of her class. When the war
broke out she went into the Red Cross, took the nurses’ training and
served in hospitals both at the front and in Petrograd. Then came
the revolution. She was working in a marine hospital in the capital.
She saw many of the horrors of those February days. She saw her own
father set upon by soldiers in the streets, and rescued from death only
because some of his own marines who loved him insisted that this one
officer was not to be killed.
Into the ward of the hospital where she was stationed there was borne
an old general, desperately wounded by a street mob. He had to be
operated on at once to save his life, and as he was carried from the
operating room to a private ward the men in the beds sat up and yelled,
“Kill him! Kill him!” It is unlikely that they knew who he was, but
it was death to all officers in those days of madness and frenzy. Half
unconscious from loss of blood, still under the spell of the ether, the
old man clung to his nurse as a child to his mother. “You won’t let
them kill me, will you?” he murmured. And Mlle. Skridlova assured him
that she would take care of him, that he was safe.
The door opened and a white faced doctor rushed into the room.
“Sister,” he gasped, “go for that medicine--go quickly.” Not
comprehending she asked, “What medicine?” But he only pushed her
towards the door. “Go, go!” he repeated.
She left the room, and then she saw and understood. Down the corridor
a mob was streaming, a wild, unkempt, blood-thirsty mob, the sweepings
of the streets and barracks. Quickly she threw herself across the door
of the old general’s room. “Get back,” she commanded. “The man in that
room is old and wounded and helpless. He is in my care, and if you harm
him it must be over my body.”
Incredible as it seems this girl of twenty was able for forty minutes
to hold the mob at bay. When guns were pointed at her she told the men
to fire through the red cross that covered her heart. They did not
shoot, but some of the most brutal struck her down, and then held her
helpless while others rushed into the room and hacked and beat the
old man to death. When the nurse fought her way to his side he was
breathing his last. She had time to whisper a prayer, and to make the
sign of the cross above his glazing eyes. Then she went home, took off
her Red Cross uniform, and said to her father: “Women have something
more to do for Russia than binding men’s wounds.”
When Botchkareva’s Battalion of Death was formed Marie Skridlova
determined to join it. Admiral Skridloff, veteran of two wars, iron
old patriot, went with her to the women’s barracks and with his own
hand enrolled her in the Russian army service. In the regiment of which
this girl was adjutant I found six Red Cross nurses who were through
with nursing and had gone out to die for their unhappy country. There
was a woman doctor who had seen service in base hospitals. There were
clerks and office women, factory girls, servants, farm women. Ten women
had fought in men’s regiments. Every woman had her own story. I did
not hear them all, but I heard many, each one a simple chronicle of
suffering or bereavement, or shame over Russia’s plight.
There was one girl of nineteen, a Cossack, a pretty, dark-eyed young
thing, left absolutely adrift after the death in battle of her father
and two brothers, and the still more tragic death of her mother when
the Germans shelled the hospital where she was nursing. To her a place
in Botchkareva’s regiment and a gun with which to defend herself
spelled safety.
“What was there left for me?” sighed a big Esthonian woman, showing me
a photograph she wore constantly on her heart. It was a photograph of a
lovely child of five years. “He died of want,” said the woman briefly.
“His father is a prisoner somewhere in Austria.”
There was a Japanese girl in the regiment, and when I asked her her
reason for joining she smiled, and in the evenly polite tone that
marks her race, replied: “There were so many reasons that I prefer
not to tell any of them.” One twilight I came on this girl sitting
outside with the little Polish Jewess with whom she bunked. The two sat
perfectly motionless on a fallen tree, watching a group of soldiers
gathered around a fire. In their silent gaze I read a malevolence, a
reminiscence so full of concentrated loathing that I turned away with
a shudder. I never asked another woman her reason for joining the
regiment. I was afraid it might be more personal than patriotic.
I do not believe, however, that this was the case with the majority.
Mostly the women were in arms because they feared and dreaded the
further demoralization of the troops, and they believed fervently
that they could rally their men to fight. “Our men,” they said, “are
suffering from a sickness of the soul. It is our duty to lead them back
to health.” Every woman in the regiment had seen war face to face, had
suffered bitterly through war, and finally had seen their men fail in
the fight. They had beheld their men desert in time of war, the most
dishonorable thing men can do, and they said, “Well then, there is
nothing left except for us to go in their places.”
Did the world ever witness a more sublime heroism than that? Women, in
the long years which history has recorded, have done everything for men
that they were called upon to do. It remained for Russian men, in the
twentieth century, to call upon women to fight and die for them. And
the women did it.
CHAPTER VII
TO THE FRONT WITH BOTCHKAREVA
Women of all ranks rushed to enlist in the Botchkareva battalion.
There were many peasant women, factory workers, servants and also a
number of women of education and social prominence. Six Red Cross
nurses were among the number, one doctor, a lawyer, several clerks and
stenographers and a few like Marie Skridlova who had never done any
except war work. If the working women predominated I believe it was
because they were the stronger physically. Botchkareva would accept
only the sturdiest, and her soldiers, even when they were slight of
figure, were all fine physical specimens. The women were outfitted and
equipped exactly like the men soldiers. They wore the same kind of
khaki trousers, loose-belted blouse and high peaked cap. They wore the
same high boots, carried the same arms and the same camp equipment,
including gas masks, trench spades and other paraphernalia. In spite of
their tightly shaved heads they presented a very attractive appearance,
like nice, clean, upstanding boys. They were very strictly drilled and
disciplined and there was no omission of saluting officers in that
regiment.
The battalion left Petrograd for an unknown destination on July 6
in our calendar. In the afternoon the women marched to the Kazan
Cathedral, where a touching ceremony of farewell and blessing took
place. A cold, fine rain was falling, but the great half circle before
the cathedral, as well as the long curved colonnades, were filled with
people. Thousands of women were there carrying flowers, and nurses
moved through the crowds collecting money for the regiment.
I passed a very uneasy day that July 6. I was afraid of what might
happen to some of the women through the malignancy of the Bolsheviki,
and I was mortally afraid that I was not going to be allowed to get
on their troop train. I had made the usual application to the War
Ministry to be allowed to visit the front, but I did not follow up the
application with a personal visit, and therefore when I dropped in for
a morning call I was dismayed to find the barrack in a turmoil, and to
hear the exultant announcement, “We’re going this evening at eight.”
It was an unseasonal day of rain, and I spent reckless sums in droshky
hire, rushing hither and yon in a fruitless effort to wring emergency
permits from elusive officials who never in their lives had been called
upon to do anything in a hurry, or even to keep conventional office
hours. Needless to say I found nobody at all on duty where he should
have been that day. Even at the American Embassy, where, empty-handed
and discouraged, I wound up late in the afternoon, I found the entire
staff absent in attendance on a visiting commission from home. The one
helpful person who happened to be at the Embassy was Arno Dosch-Fleurot
of the New York _World_. “If I were you,” he said, “I wouldn’t worry
about a permit. I’d just get on the train--if I could _get_ on--and
I’d stay until they put me off, or until I got where I wanted to go.
Of course they may arrest you for a spy. In any other country they’d
be pretty sure to. But in Russia you never can tell. Shepherd, of the
United Press, once went all over the front with nothing to show but
some worthless mining stock. Why not try it?”
I said I would, and before eight that evening I was at the Warsaw
Station, unwillingly participating in what might be called the
regiment’s first hostile engagement. For at least two thirds of the
mob that filled the station were members of the Lenine faction of
Bolsheviki, sent there to break up the orderly march of the women,
and even if possible to prevent them from entraining at all. From the
first these spy-led emissaries of the German Kaiser had sworn enmity to
Botchkareva’s battalion. Well knowing the moral effect of women taking
the places of deserting soldiers in the trenches, the Lenineites had
exhausted every effort to breed dissension in the ranks, and at the
last moment they had stormed the station in the hope of creating an
intolerable situation. In the absence of anything like a police force
they did succeed in making things painful and even a little dangerous
for the soldiers and for the tearful mothers and sisters who had
gathered to bid them good-by. But the women kept perfect discipline
through it all, and slowly fought their way through the mob to the
train platform.
As for me, a mixture of indignation, healthy muscle and rare good luck
carried me through and landed me in a somewhat battered condition next
to Adjutant Skridlova. “You got your permit,” she exclaimed on seeing
me. “I am so pleased. Stay close to me and I’ll see you safely on.”
Mendaciously perhaps, I answered nothing at all, but stayed, and
every time a perspiring train official grabbed me by the arm and told
me to stand back Skridlova rescued me and informed the man that I
had permission to go. At the very last I had a bad moment, for one
especially inquisitive official asked to see the permission. This time
it was the Nachalnik, Botchkareva herself, who came to the rescue.
Characteristically she wasted no words, but merely pushed the man
aside, thrust me into her own compartment and ordered me to lock the
door. Within a few minutes she joined me, the train began to move and
we were off. That was the end of my troubles, for no one afterwards
questioned my right to be there. At the Adjutant’s suggestion I parted
with my New York hat and early in the journey substituted the white
linen coif of a Red Cross nurse. Thus attired I was accepted by all
concerned as a part of the camp equipment.
The troop train consisted of one second class and five fourth class
carriages, the first one, except for one compartment reserved for
officers, being practically filled with camp and hospital supplies.
In the other carriages, primitive affairs furnished with three tiers
of wooden bunks, the rank and file of the regiment traveled. I had a
place in the second class compartment with the Nachalnik, the Adjutant
and the standard bearer, a big, silent peasant girl called Orlova. Our
luxury consisted of cushioned shelves without bedding or blankets,
which served as seats by day and beds by night. We had, of course, a
little more privacy than the others, but that was all. As for food,
we all fared alike, and we fared well, friends of the regiment having
loaded the train with bread, butter, fruit, canned things, cakes,
chocolate and other delicacies. Tea-making materials we had also, and
plenty of sugar. So filled was our compartment with food, flowers,
banners, guns, tea kettles and miscellaneous stuff that we moved about
with difficulty and were forever apologizing for walking on each
other’s feet.
For two nights and the better part of two days we traveled southward
through fields of wheat, barley and potatoes, where women in bright red
and blue smocks toiled among the ripening harvests. News of the train
had gone down the line, and the first stage of our journey, through
the white night, was one continued ovation. At every station crowds
had gathered to cheer the women and to demand a sight of Botchkareva.
It was largely a masculine crowd, soldiers mostly, goodnatured and
laughing, but many women were there too, nurses, working girls,
peasants. Occasionally one saw ladies in dinner gowns escorted by
officer friends.
The farther we traveled from Petrograd, the point of contact in Russia
with western civilization, the more apparent it grew that things were
terribly wrong with the empire. More and more the changed character
of the station crowds reminded us of the widespread disruption of the
army. The men who met the train wore soldiers’ uniforms but they had
lost all of their upright, soldierly bearing. They slouched like
convicts, they were dirty and unkempt, and their eyes were full of
vacuous insolence. Absence of discipline and all restraint had robbed
them of whatever manhood they had once possessed. The news of the
women’s battalion had drawn these men like a swarm of bees. They thrust
their unshaven faces into the car windows, bawling the parrot phrases
taught them by their German spy leaders. “Who fights for the damned
capitalists? Who fights for English bloodsuckers? We don’t fight.”
And the women, scorn flashing from their eyes, flung back: “That is the
reason why we do. Go home, you cowards, and let women fight for Russia.”
Their last, flimsy thread of “peace” propaganda exhausted the men
usually fell back on personal insults, but to these the women,
following strict orders, made no reply. When the language became too
coarse the women simply closed the windows. No actual violence was
ever offered them. When they left the train for hot water or for tea,
for more food or to buy newspapers, they walked so fearlessly into the
crowds that the men withdrew, sneering and growling, but standing aside.
There was something indescribably strange about going on a journey
to a destination absolutely unknown, except to the one in command of
the expedition. Above all it was strange to feel that you were seeing
women voluntarily giving up the last shred of protection and security
supposed to be due them. They were going to meet death, death in battle
against a foreign foe, the first women in the world to volunteer for
such an end. Yet every one was happy, and the only fear expressed was
lest the battalion should not be sent at once to the trenches.
As for me, when we arrived at our destination, some two miles from the
barracks prepared for us, I had a moment of longing for the comparative
safety of the trenches. For what looked to me like the whole Russian
army had come out to meet the women’s battalion, and was solidly massed
on both sides of the railroad track as far as I could see.
I looked at the Nachalnik calmly buckling on her sword and revolver.
She had a confident little smile on her lips. “You may have to fight
those men out there before you fight the Germans,” I said.
“We are ready to begin fighting any time,” she replied.
She was the first one out of the train, and the others rapidly followed
her.
CHAPTER VIII
IN CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD
The women’s regiment did not have to fight its brothers in arms,
however. The woman commander took care of that. She just walked into
that mob of waiting soldiers and barked out a command in a voice I
had never before heard her use. It reminded me somewhat of that extra
awful motor car siren that infuriates the pedestrian, but lifts him
out of the road in one quick jump. Botchkareva’s command was spoken in
Russian, and a liberal translation of it might read: “You get to hell
out of here and let my regiment pass.”
It may not have been ladylike, but it had the proper effect on the
Russian army, which promptly backed up on both sides of the road,
leaving a clear lane between for the women. The women shouldered their
heavy kits and under a broiling sun marched the two miles which lay
between the railroad and the camp. The Russian army followed the whole
way, apparently deciding that the better part of valor was to laugh at
the women, not to fight them.
Botchkareva must also have decided that the first thing to be done was
to give those men to understand that whether the regiment was funny or
not it would have to be treated with respect. As soon as we reached
our barracks and disposed of the heavy loads, she made a little speech
in which she said that here we were, and while we would be obliged
to mingle with the men, relations would be kept formal. The men must
be shown that the women were entitled to the same camp privileges as
themselves, and were no more to be molested or annoyed than any other
soldiers. We had had a long, hot journey, she ended, and the first
thing we were going to do was to go down to the river and have a nice
swim. So with towels around their necks the 250 women made gayly for
the river. I trotted along on the commander’s arm. At least a thousand
men went along, too, but just before we reached the swimming pool under
a railroad bridge, Botchkareva turned around and delivered another of
those crisp little commands. The men stopped in their tracks as if she
had thrown some kind of freezing gas at them, and we went on.
It was a lovely swimming pool, clear and cold and fringed with
sheltering willows. The women peeled off their clothes like boys and
plunged in. As we dressed afterward I looked at them, heads shaved,
ugly clothes, coarse boots, no concealments, not a single aid to
beauty, but, in spite of it all, singularly attractive. Some of course
were homely, primitive types. Purple and fine linen would not have
improved them much. But some who would not have been especially pretty
as girls were almost handsome as boys. A few were strikingly beautiful
in spite of their shaved heads. You observed that they had good skulls,
nice ears, fine eyes, strong characters, whereas in ordinary clothes
they might have appeared as pleasingly commonplace as the girl on the
magazine cover.
Cool and refreshed, the battalion marched back to the barracks, which
consisted of two long, hastily constructed wooden buildings, exactly
like hundreds of others on all sides about as far as the eye could
reach. Some of the buildings were half underground, for warmth in
winter, and must have been rather stuffy. Our buildings were well
ventilated with many dormer windows in the sharply slanting roof, and
they were new and clean and free from the insects which in secret I
had been dreading. Inside was nothing at all except two long wooden
platforms running the length of the building, about ninety feet. They
were very roughly planed and full of bumps and knot holes, but they
were the only beds provided by a step-motherly government. Here the
women dumped their heavy loads, their guns, ammunition belts, gas
masks, dog tents, trench spades, food pails and other paraphernalia.
Here they unrolled their big overcoats for blankets, and here for the
next week, all of us, officers, soldiers and war correspondent, ate,
slept and lived. Two hundred and fifty women in the midst of an army
of men. Behind us a government too engrossed in fighting for its own
existence to concern itself about the safety of any group of women.
Before us the muttering guns of the German foe. Between us and all
that women have ever been taught to fear, a flimsy wooden door. But
sleeplessly guarding that door a woman with a gun.
In that first midnight in camp I woke on my plank bed to hear the
shuffling of men’s feet on the threshold, a loud knock at the door,
and from our sentry a sharp challenge: “Who goes there?”
“We want to come in,” said a man’s voice ingratiatingly.
“No one can come in at this hour,” answered the sentry. “Who are you
and what do you want?”
The man’s answer was brutally to the point. “Aren’t there girls here?”
he demanded.
“There are no girls here,” was the instant reply. “Only soldiers are
here.”
An angry fist crashed against the thin wood, to be answered by the
swift click of a rifle barrel on the other side. “Unless you leave at
once we shall fire on you,” said the sentry in a voice of portentous
calm.
Down the long plank platform I heard a succession of low chuckles, and
a sleepy comment or two which the retreating men outside would not
have found complimentary. That midnight encounter served the excellent
purpose of finally establishing the status of the regiment in camp.
From that time on we lived unmolested. We stood in line with the men
at the cookhouse for our daily rations of black bread, soup and kasha,
a sort of porridge made of buckwheat. We performed our simple morning
toilets in the open; we washed our clothes in improvised washtubs
behind the barracks; we strolled about between drills. The men followed
us around from morning until night. They watched us open eyed, hung in
curious groups before the doors. A few were openly friendly, and beyond
some disparaging remarks regarding our personal appearance none were
hostile.
The day after we arrived, Monday, it rained. It poured. The camp became
a swamp. The women stayed in their barrack, drilling as best they could
in the narrow aisles. Sitting on the edge of their plank beds, the
only place there was to sit, they listened with deep attention while
under-officers read aloud the army code and regulations. In the morning
a group of nurses from a hospital train in the neighborhood came to
call, and in the afternoon half a dozen officers came from the stavka,
two miles away. The commander, a charming man, seemed astonished and
deeply impressed with the regiment standing at attention to greet him.
“It is beautiful,” he said repeatedly, and he was good enough to say to
me, “How wonderful for an American woman to be with them. Thank you for
coming.”
Tuesday it cleared and the battalion had its first open field drills.
The rest of the Russian army stood around and pretended to be vastly
amused. Whenever a woman made a mistake in the manual, and better
still, when she fell down while charging, or splashed into a mud puddle
on a run, the men laughed loudly. Some of that laughter, I feel pretty
certain, hid hurt pride, for every decent soldier I talked to expressed
his sorrow and humiliation that the women had felt the necessity of
enlisting. Quite a number of men in that camp had been in America and
of course spoke English. They said, “Say, sister, what do you suppose
they think about this back in Illinois?” One man said, “Sister,” (I
still wore the nurse’s coif, having no other headgear) “back home
in the States they used to say women oughtn’t to vote because they
couldn’t fight. I’ll bet these women can fight.”
The officers in and around that army position were evidently of the
same opinion. They came to the drill field every day to inspect and
criticize the work, and they sent their best drill sergeants to
instruct the women, who worked hard and learned quickly. One day the
commander of the Tenth army, whose Russian name is too much for my
memory at this distance, came over with his whole staff, a brilliant
sight. The commander was plainly delighted, and shook hands with a
great many of the women. He even went out of his way to shake hands
with the American. Kerensky was in the neighborhood one day, but he
did not visit us. The Nachalnik saw him at staff headquarters and he
sent kind messages, promising the women that they should be sent to the
front as soon as they were ready.
The impatience of those women to go forward, to get into action, was
constant. They fretted and quarreled during the frequent rainy spells
which kept them housebound, and were really happy only when something
happened to promise an early start. One day it was the arrival of 250
pairs of new boots, great clumsy things which it would have crippled me
to wear, and in fact all the women who could afford it had boots made
to order. Another day it was the appearance of a camp cooking outfit
especially for the battalion. Four good horses were attached to the
outfit, and the country girls hailed them with delight as something to
pet and fuss over.
The women spent much time cleaning and learning their guns. They seemed
to love their firearms, one girl always alluding to her rifle as “my
sweetheart.”
“How can you love a gun?” I asked her.
“I love anything that brings death to the Germans,” she answered
grimly. This girl, a highly educated, wellbred young woman, was in
Germany when the war broke out. She was arrested and charged with
espionage, a charge which, for all I know, may have been true. It
was not proved, of course, or she would have been shot. On the mere
suspicion, however, she was kept in prison for a year and must have
suffered pretty severely. She looked forward to the coming fight with
keen zest. I asked her one day what she would do if she was taken
prisoner again. She pulled from under her blouse a slender gold chain
on the end of which was a capsule in a chamois bag. “I shall never be
taken prisoner,” she said. “None of us will.”
From Thursday on the weather improved and the regiment worked hard in
the field. I had felt the strain of confinement in barracks, and when
I was not watching the drill I was taking long walks down a highway
over which went a constant procession of troops and camp supply
wagons, moving on and on, nearer the horizon, from which came frequent
low mutterings like distant thunder, but which were heavy gunfire.
Sometimes I walked as far as a little settlement which the Nachalnik
told me was not unlike the village she found so unbearable after her
husband left it. The village consisted of two rows of log or roughly
timbered cottages along a winding, muddy road. Green moss grew on the
thatched roofs, and the whole place had a forlorn, neglected look, but
surrounding each cottage was a carefully tended garden with beets,
cabbages, onions, potatoes, and sunflowers grown for the seeds, which
are the Russian substitute for chewing gum. Often the cottages had
poppies growing in the rows of vegetables, the bright blooms giving
brilliance to the somber and lonely landscape.
Half a dozen miles on the other side of the railroad was another and
a larger village, equally dismal, but furnished with a church, a
wayside shrine, small shops and other improvements. My special friend
the Adjutant and I drove over there one day after supplies. We bought
chocolate, nuts, sardines and biscuits to relieve the deadly monotony
of our daily black bread, soup and kasha. The regiment bought some
supplies at little market stalls near the station. Here one bought
butter, sausages reeking with garlic, tinned fish and doubtful eggs.
At an officers’ store in the vicinity Botchkareva spent some of the
money donated in Petrograd for tea and sugar when they were needed,
and for a kind of white bread or biscuits. They were hard and shaped
like old-fashioned doughnuts, with a hole in the middle through which a
string was run. A yard or two of this bread went well with good butter
and hot, fragrant tea. As far as food was concerned I was better off
in the camp than I was a little later in Petrograd. There was even
a fairly good hot meal to be had at the station when we chose to go
there, which we did several times. But no amount of good food would
have kept our regiment happy in camp very long. The women fretted
and chafed and demanded to know why they were kept in that hole. The
Nachalnik coaxed and scolded them along, and Skridlova, who was easily
the most popular person in camp, reminded them that it took six months
to train ordinary soldiers and that they were being especially favored
by having the time shortened.
Those women went into battle after less than two months’ training, as
it turned out, for the evening of the ninth day the Nachalnik came back
from headquarters with orders to march the next morning at five. What
an uproar followed! Cheers, laughter, singing. You would have thought
they were going anywhere except to a battlefield where death waited for
some and cruel suffering for many. I wanted to go with them, and would
have insisted on going had I known that they were so soon to fight.
But orders were merely to advance for further drill under gunfire. I
would have been frightfully in the way in the new position, which had
no barracks, but only dog tents, just enough to go around. Nothing on
earth except the knowledge that I would be depriving some one of those
brave women from the comfort of a dry and sheltered bed persuaded me to
leave them.
Five days later in Petrograd I read in the dispatches that they had
been sent almost directly into action, leading men who had previously
refused to advance, and turning a defeat into a victory; a small one
to be sure, but Russia was thankful for even small victories those
days. A short note from Skridlova prepared me for the story of losses
which I knew was coming. She wrote in French, which she knows better
than English, “You have heard already perhaps that we have been in
action. I do not know yet how many were killed or have died of wounds,
but two of those you knew well were killed. Catherine and Olga, who
you remember had won three medals of St. George. Eighteen girls are
wounded badly, Nina among them.” Nina was the girl who called her gun
“sweetheart,” and who had been a prisoner in Germany. Skridlova was
badly contused in the head, shoulders and knees, but she remained
in command of the remnant of the battalion because the Nachalnik,
Botchkareva, had suffered so severely from shell shock that she had to
be sent to a hospital in Petrograd. She was nearly deaf when I saw her,
and her heart was badly affected.
“It was a good fight,” she whispered, smiling from her pillow. “Not a
woman faltered, not one. The Russian men hid in a little wood while the
officers swore at them and begged them to advance. Then they sent us
forward, and we called to the men that we would lead them if they would
only follow. Some of them said they would follow, and we went forward
on a run, still shouting to the men. About two-thirds of them went
with us, and we easily put the Germans to flight. We killed a lot of
Germans and took almost a hundred prisoners, including two officers.”
In another hospital I found more than twenty of the battalion, some
slightly and others seriously wounded. The worst cases were kept in
base hospitals, near the battle front, and I never saw Nina again.
CHAPTER IX
AMAZONS IN TRAINING
If the first battle of the first women soldiers in the world had been
fought on American soil imagine what the newspapers would have made of
the story. Especially if the women had gone into battle with the object
of rallying a demoralized American army, and had succeeded in their
object. And this is all the space Botchkareva’s victorious battalion
was accorded in _Novoe Vremya_, one of the best newspapers in Russia.
After describing briefly the engagement on the Smorgon-Krevo front, in
which prisoners, guns and ammunition were taken, the account proceeded:
“The women’s battalion made a counter attack, replacing deserters who
ran away. This battalion captured almost a hundred prisoners including
two officers. Botchkareva and Skridlova are wounded, the latter
receiving contusions and shock from the explosion of a big shell. The
battalion suffered some losses, but has won historic fame for the name
of women. The best soldiers looked with consideration and esteem on
their new fighting comrades, but the deserters were not touched by
their example, and in this respect the aim was not reached. We must
take care of these dear forces, and not give too much consideration to
new formations of the kind.”
If the press of Russia had been wise, the fact that some of the
slackers in the army were not touched by the women’s bravery would
have been made less conspicuous than the more important fact that many
soldiers were touched by it, and that the Russian army was thereby
enabled to win a victory. Instead of discouraging new formations, the
press should have called for more and more regiments of women to lead
the men. They should have kept it up until people got so excited over
the tragedy of women being torn to pieces by German shot and shrapnel
that they would have risen in wrath, taken hold of their army and their
government, and created conditions which would relieve women from the
dreadful necessity of fighting.
It could have been done, the people were ready for it. They felt the
tragedy. At a memorial service for the dead women, held in Kazan
Cathedral the Sunday after the battle, the presiding priest said:
“This is a terrible and yet a glorious hour for Russia. Sad it is,
and terrible beyond expression that men have allowed women to die in
their places for our unhappy country. But glorious it will ever be that
Russian women have been ready and willing to do it.”
After the service, a Bolshevik soldier, standing in front of the
cathedral, tried to turn the sympathies of the crowd by making
insulting remarks about the dead women. He did not have time to say
much before a group of working women, with howls of rage, rushed him,
and I believe would have killed him if his friends had not got him away.
Of the women left alive but wounded, thirty were brought to a hospital
not far from the Nikolai station, Petrograd, and there I saw them. When
I went into the first hospital ward a wounded girl sat up in bed and,
smiling like the sun, held out to me a German officer’s helmet, her
prize of battle. She had killed him--that was her duty--and had taken
his helmet as a man would have done. But when she told me that Orlova,
big, dull, kind, unselfish Orlova, loved by everybody, was among the
killed, she broke down and wept as any woman would have done.
From this girl and the others I learned that Botchkareva had spoken the
exact truth when she said that no woman had faltered or shown fear. “We
all expected to die, I think,” one girl said. “I know that I did. I
said over the prayers for the dying while I was dressing that morning.
We all prayed and kissed our holy pictures, and thought sadly about
the ones at home. But we were not afraid. We were stationed between
two little woods. They were full of men, some who openly refused to
go forward, some who hesitated and didn’t quite know what they ought
to do. We shouted at them, the commander shouted at them, called them
cowards, traitors, everything we could think of. Then the commander
called out: ‘Come on, brothers, we’ll go first if you’ll only follow.’
“‘All right then,’ some of them called back, and we ran forward as fast
as we could, following Botchkareva. She was wonderful, and Skridlova
was wonderful too. We would have followed them anywhere.”
“Did you really capture a hundred Germans?” I asked.
“I don’t believe we did it all by ourselves,” was the modest reply.
“After we got into the fighting the men and the women were side by
side. We fought together and we won the battle together.”
Every one of those wounded women soldiers wanted to go back to the
front line. If fighting and dying were the price of Russia’s freedom,
they wanted to fight and fight again. If they could rally unwilling
men to fight, they wanted nothing in the world except more chances to
do it. Wounds were nothing, death was nothing in the scale of Russia’s
honor or dishonor. Then too, and this is a strange commentary on
women’s “protected” position in life, the women soldiers said that
fighting was not the most difficult or the most disagreeable work they
had ever done. They said it was less arduous if a little more dangerous
than working in a harvest field or a factory.
This point of view I have heard expressed by other Russian women
soldiers, those who have fought in men’s regiments. There are many
such women; I have met and talked with some of them. One girl I saw in
a hospital, a bullet in her side and a broken hand in a plaster cast,
assured me that fighting was the most congenial work she had ever
done. This girl had gone to Petrograd from Riga to join Botchkareva’s
battalion, but for some reason she had not been accepted. She met a
young marine who told her of a new Battalion of Death which was being
formed out of the remnants of several old regiments and of a number
of marines. “Why not join us?” he asked. “We already have four girl
comrades.” So she joined.
We were alone except for the interpreter, and I took occasion to ask
this girl minutely how it fared with women who joined men’s regiments.
Were the women treated with respect, let alone? How did they manage
about their physical needs? Where did they bathe and change their
clothes? Did not the officers object to their presence in the barracks?
At first, my young soldier admitted, the men did not treat the women
with respect, did not let them alone. She was obliged to give the
men some severe lessons. But after a while they learned. They were
considerate in certain respects, and arranged for the girls to have
some privacy. Of course one lost foolish mock modesty when in camp.
The officers did not object to their enlisting, but were inclined to
treat them with a lofty indifference. The men too seemed to assume that
the girls could not endure the real hardships of war when they came.
“The first thing we had to do in camp was to make a quick march of
twelve versts. ‘Of course the girls can’t walk that far,’ the men said,
‘they can ride on the cook wagons.’ But we said, ‘Not much we don’t
ride on the cook wagons. We didn’t come here to watch you do things.
We came to be soldiers like yourselves.’ So they said, ‘Oh, very well!
_Harasho!_ March if you like.’ And we did. And when we got back to
camp, it was so funny; sailors are not much used to walking, you know,
and those men were completely tired out, exhausted. They lay around in
their bunks and groaned and called on everybody to look at their feet
and their blisters, while we weren’t tired at all. Why, any of us
had walked as far and worked as hard in one day in the kitchen or the
harvest field. So we laughed at the men and said, ‘You’re just a lot of
old women. Look at us. We could do it all over again and not complain.’
After that I can tell you they didn’t patronize us quite such a lot.”
When the regiment got into camp near the trenches and the men were
given the regulation uniform of the army, the officers decreed that the
girls’ soldiering should come to an end. The real business of fighting
was about to begin and women were not wanted. They could be sanitaries,
said the commander. So they went back to women’s clothes and women’s
historic job of waiting on men. This girl, however, objected, and
finally confided to one of her men friends that the sanitary’s work
was too distasteful for her to endure longer. “Why should I be obliged
to patch up wounds?” she asked. “It is much easier to make them.” The
soldier found some regimentals for her and she went out and fought in
a skirmish line. When the commander heard of it he was terribly angry
and to frighten her he put her on sentry duty in an exposed post. “He
thought he’d cure me of my taste for fighting,” she chuckled, “but I
wasn’t frightened a bit, and so he said, ‘Well, be a soldier if you are
so bent on it. We need soldiers.’ And so, I fought.”
She described her first and only battle where she helped storm several
lines of trenches and was one of thirty-seven survivors out of a
thousand in her regiment who took part in the engagement. Her wounds,
she said, did not hurt much at the time, but she was bleeding pretty
badly and thought she ought to get to the hospital.
“Just then I saw our captain, and he was badly wounded, almost
unconscious in fact, and I had to get him to the rear on my back. It
was all that I could do, for about that time I felt that I was growing
weak and would soon have to sit down. I managed to get him as far as
the first line of Red Cross men, and then I went under. I had been hit
in the side by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel and I was pretty sick
for a while. By and by I felt better and somehow got back to the rear.
The first thing I saw was one of our men who was weeping with his head
in his hands. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, and when he looked up and saw
me he gave a yell. ‘They said you had been killed,’ he shouted. And
he began to dance a hornpipe. Poor chap, he had been wounded too and
before he had danced more than a few steps he began to bleed and fell
over in a faint.”
The ambulances were pretty full, so this plucky young creature thought
she could walk the three or four versts to the hospital. She had to
give up before long and a captain of another regiment, himself wounded,
took her into his cart or whatever conveyance he had, and carried her
to the hospital. “Our captain was there,” she finished, “quite out of
his head with pain. He kept saying, ‘Don’t let that girl go back to the
field. Don’t let her fight again. She is too young.’ He did not know
then that I had carried him off on my back, and me wounded too.”
A great many women who had seen service in men’s regiments were leaving
them and joining one or another of the women’s regiments which were
forming all over Russia about that time. The largest of these regiments
was being trained for action in Moscow. There were about two thousand
women in this battalion, which was formed and recruited by a women’s
committee, “The Society of Russian Women to Help the Country.” Among
the women was Madame Morosova, before the war prominent socially, but
since the war almost entirely occupied with relief work. She was a very
gay and laughter-loving person, but she had fed and clothed and helped
on their way thousands of refugees. She had turned her house into a
maternity hospital at times, and she had given large sums of money for
the relief of women and children. Finally the women soldiers appealed
to her as the most important work to be assisted and her whole energies
last summer were devoted to the battalion. Princess Kropotkin, a
relative of the celebrated Prince Pierre Kropotkin, was another member
of the society. She had a Red Cross hospital until the army desertions
began, and then she closed the hospital and turned to recruiting women.
Mme. Popova, vice-president of the society, is one more untiring
worker. In August she obtained Kerensky’s consent to go to Tomsk, her
old home, and organize a battalion there.
The Moscow regiment was being drilled by a colonel and half a dozen
younger officers, all of whom seemed immensely proud of their command.
Twenty picked women of the regiment were going daily to the officers’
school and when ready were to be given commissions in the regular army.
In Petrograd a regiment of 1,500 women was almost ready for the
trenches when I saw them last in August. They too were to be officered
by women, two score being a daily attendance at a military school. On
August 20 I saw these 1,500 women march out of their barrack in the old
Engineers’ Palace, to go into camp preparatory to going to the front.
This palace was once the home of the mad Emperor Paul, son of Catherine
the Great. He was assassinated there and his restless ghost is supposed
to haunt the gusty corridors. I asked Captain Luskoff, commander of
the regiment, if he had found out what the Emperor Paul thought of the
women soldiers, and he laughed and promised to report later on that
point.
It was not intended to raise many regiments of women, I was told. The
intention was to enlist and train to the highest point of efficiency
between ten and twenty thousand women, and to distribute the
regiments over the various front lines to inspire and stimulate the
disorganized army. They would lead the men in battle when necessary,
as Botchkareva’s brave band led them, and they would appear as a sign
and symbol that the women of the country were not willing that the
revolution, which generations of Russian men and women have died for,
and have endured in the snows of Siberia sufferings worse than death,
should end in chaos and national disintegration.
CHAPTER X
THE HOMING EXILES--TWO KINDS
In a great, bare room, furnished with rows of narrow cots like a
hospital, but with none of the crisp whiteness of the hospital, nor any
of its promise of relief and restoration, a young man, propped with
pillows, played on a concertina. He was white, emaciated, near the end
of his young life. His eyes were like banked fires. He sat up in bed
and in the intervals of coughing made the most wonderful music on that
concertina, much more wonderful than I had ever dreamed the humble
instrument could produce. The man was a true musician, and he had had
many years of practice on his concertina, for it had been the one
friend and solace of a solitary confinement which lasted nearly a dozen
years. All around him in that bare room men lay in bed and listened
to him. Some, however, were asleep. Even music could not break their
weary rest. All were sick. Some were as near death as was the musician.
Siberia had done its work with them. They had come home to die.
On a soap box, or its equivalent on a corner of the Nevski Prospect
near the Alexander Theater, another young man stood and poured out a
passionate speech to the crowd of soldiers, workmen and workwomen and
idle boys who had paused to listen. The man was about thirty years
old, and his clothes, it was plain to see, had never been purchased in
Russia. They were American clothes of fair quality, and of that stylish
cut possible to buy for twenty-five dollars in almost any department
store. He wore a derby hat, tipped back on his head, a soft collar and
a flowing tie. He talked rapidly and with many gestures, and the crowd
listened with rapt interest to his speech. I, too, stopped to listen.
“What is he saying?” I asked my interpreter.
“I don’t like to tell you,” she replied.
I insisted, and this is an almost literal translation of what that man
said, on that Petrograd street corner, on an August day, 1917:
“You people over here in Russia don’t want to make a mistake of setting
up the kind of a republic, of the kind of phony democracy like what
they’ve got in the United States. I lived in the United States for ten
years, and you take it from me, it’s the worst government in the world.
They have a president who is worse than the Czar. The police are worse
than Cossacks. The capitalist class is on top there just like they were
in the old days in Russia. The working class is fighting them, and they
are going to win. We are going to put the capitalists out just like you
put them out here, and don’t you let any American capitalists come over
here and help fasten on you a government like that one they still have
in America. It’s the capitalists that plunged America into war. The
working class never wanted it.”
These are two types of exiles which Russia has called back to her bosom
since the revolution, both of which constitute another grave problem
with which the distracted people are struggling. The sick ones, of
whom there are thousands, came back and more of them are coming from
Siberia at a time when food suitable for the sick is impossible to
obtain. There was almost no milk. Eggs were hard to get and were not
very fresh. Food of all kinds was getting scarcer every day. There was
a fuel shortage that threatened to make all Russia spend a shivering
winter, and what was to become of the sick was and still is a grave
question. There is a great shortage of many medicines. If fighting is
resumed the hospitals will be overcrowded. Doctors and nurses will be
scarce. Yet the exiles continue to come back, the long stream from the
remote villages continues to hold out its longing hands to the people
back home, who cannot deny them. And nearly all the exiles come back
sick and homeless and penniless. Russia must take care of those freed
Siberian exiles, and I don’t quite see how she is going to do it,
unless the miracle happens and they find a way of restoring peace and
order in the land. In that case they can do anything. They can even
deal with the kind of exile I heard talking on the Nevski.
Carlyle says that of all man’s earthly possessions, unquestionably
the dearest to him are his symbols. They have the strongest hold on
us without a doubt. At the time of the French revolution the sign
and symbol of the old régime was the Bastille, that state prison in
Paris which was the living grave of the king’s enemies, or of almost
anybody who made himself unpopular with one of the king’s favorites.
When the French people rose up in their might and swept the old régime
out, the first thing they did, obeying a common impulse, was to tear
down and destroy utterly the Bastille. In Russia the sign and symbol
of the autocracy was the exile system, and particularly Siberia. The
first thing the Russian people did when they rose up and dethroned
the Romanoffs was to send telegrams to every political prison and to
every convict village in Siberia that the prisoners and exiles were
free. They sent orders to all the jailers and guards that the exiles
were to be furnished with clothing and money and transportation to
the railroads, and the railroads were directed to bring them back to
Petrograd.
There is something to warm the coldest blood in the thought of what
it must have meant to those poor desolate creatures, living in the
hopeless isolation of Siberia, to have the door of the cell open
one February day and hear the words,“You are free!” Sometimes the
announcement was prefaced by words of unheard of friendliness and
courtesy from wardens and jailers who had before been cruel and brutal
task-masters. “Please forgive me if I have been over-zealous in my
duties,” these men would say, and the prisoner would think that he
had gone mad and was dreaming. Then the announcement would come,
unbelievable in its wonder; the revolution had actually happened.
The Czar was gone. The prisoner was free. They heard that news in
the depths of mines, where men worked shackled and hopeless. They
heard it in lonely villages near the Arctic Circle. They heard it in
far lands, where homesick men and women toiled in sweatshops among
aliens. They were free, and Mother Russia was calling them home again.
I should think they would almost have died of joy at the tidings. No
generous mind can wonder that Russia called back her children, all of
them, without stopping to sort out the good and the bad, the well and
the sick, the desirable and the undesirable. Or without stopping to
calculate how she was going to take care of them when they got there.
But very early in the day it became evident that Russia was going to
face a serious problem in her returned exiles. In the very first days
of the revolution they opened all the prison doors in Petrograd as
well as in other Russian cities, and let all the prisoners out. Among
them were a number of politicals, and many of them immediately became
public charges. They had no money, no friends, no home. The revolution
had robbed them, in some cases, of all three. In some cases of long
imprisonment the homes and friends had been taken from them by death.
There had been a committee working secretly in behalf of political
prisoners, and now this committee, with a group in the Red Cross,
got together and formed a society which they call the Political Red
Cross, the committee in charge of returned exiles. For they saw plainly
that what had happened in the case of the Petrograd prisoners would
be repeated on a large scale when the Siberian exiles and those from
foreign lands returned. Another committee was formed in Moscow. They
sprang up in various cities, co-operating with the Zemstvoes or county
councils.
At the head of the work is Vera Figner, one of the most famous of the
old revolutionists, almost the last survivor of the nihilism of the
eighteen seventies. The Russians are said to lack organizing ability,
but the work done by this committee under Vera Figner’s direction
looks to me that once Russia gets a government that can govern and an
army that will fight the people of Russia will organize a civilization
that will teach Europe new things. The committee started with nothing,
not even machinery to work with. There is no such thing in Russia as
a charity organization society. Charity and benevolence there are,
mostly of the old-fashioned type, “Under the patronage of her imperial
highness, the Princess Olga,” or “the empress dowager.” There was no
well-organized society of any kind to appeal to to help take care of
some seventy-five thousand exiles hurrying home, an unknown number of
them sick, another unknown number poor and homeless, and all of them
strangers in a new Russia.
Vera Figner I saw in the Petrograd headquarters of the society. She
is a matronly woman, looking less than sixty, although she must be
older. She has a handsome face, with the deep, smoldering eyes of the
revolutionist, but her smile is quiet and kind. Near her at the long
committee table sat Mme. Kerenskaia, the estranged wife of the minister
president Kerensky. She is an attractive young woman with dark eyes and
abundant dark hair, who gives all of her time to the work of the exiles
committee. Mme. Gorki is another woman of prominence who works with
the committees, and Prince Kropotkin and his daughter, Mme. Lebedev,
whose husband was in the government when I left, are also constant
workers. The work was done through eight committees, one of which
collected money, a great deal of money, too. Hundreds of thousands of
roubles have poured in from all over Russia as well as from England,
America, France. Another committee collects clothes, and they are much
scarcer than money in Russia. A committee on home-finding also collects
sanitarium and hospital beds wherever they are to be found. A reception
committee meets the exiles and takes them to their various lodgings. A
medical and a legal aid committee take care of their own sides of the
work. All over Petrograd and Moscow they have established temporary
lodgings and temporary hospitals for the cure of the returned sick and
helpless. It was in such a refuge that I saw and heard the man with the
concertina.
I had come to find Marie Spirodonova, one of the most appealing as
well as the most tragic figures of the revolution of 1905-06. She
was the Charlotte Corday of that revolution, for like Charlotte she,
unaided by any revolutionary society, freed her country of one of
the worst monsters of his time. She shot and killed the half-mad and
wholly horrible governor of Tambosk. And like Charlotte she paid for
that deed with her life. She lived indeed to return to Russia, but her
span after that was short. Marie Spirodonova was in the last stages of
tuberculosis when they brought her back to Russia. Ten years’ solitary
confinement had done that for her. The first sentence of death,
afterward commuted to twenty years’ exile, would have been shorter
and more merciful. When I saw her, she was in bed, so wasted that she
looked like a child. The flush of fever on her cheeks gave her a false
look of health, and she looked almost as beautiful as on the day when
she stood in the prisoner’s dock and told the judges how and why she
killed the monster of a governor. Her voice was all but gone now, and
it was in a hoarse whisper that she greeted me, and asked news of her
one or two friends in America. I could stay only a few minutes, she was
so weak. It is hardly possible that she still lives, although no news
of her death has reached me.
Until the last breath she must have kept her iron will and indomitable
spirit. Ten years in a solitary cell could not break that spirit, as
the story of her release shows. When the first telegram came to the
distant prison, where she and nine other women were confined, the names
of only eight of them were specifically mentioned.
“But what about us?” wailed the two forgotten ones.
The warden of the prison perhaps did not entirely believe in the
success of the revolution, and wanted to be on the safe side. “You
stay,” he said.
“Then none of us will go,” said Marie Spirodonova, and they all stayed
until the next day when another telegram arrived setting them all free.
In the same spirit Spirodonova refused to leave her companions after
they reached Petrograd. She was so famous, so sought after, that she
could have chosen among a dozen hospitable homes, in the country, in
the Crimea or the bracing mountains of the Caucasus. But she said she
would not have anything her old prison mates did not have, so Marie
Spirodonova, daughter of a general, and the concertina player, child
of a peasant, die as they lived, revolutionists, spurning all the
comforts of life, all the protection and security of home, all the
plaudits of the world. They lived and died for Russia as surely as
though they died on the battlefield.
Of the same type is the most celebrated exile of all, Catherine
Breshkovskaia, the Babushka, or little grandmother of the revolution.
They brought Babushka back to Petrograd in the first rush. They gave
her a reception at the station such as no crowned head in Europe ever
had, and they took her to the Winter Palace and told her that when the
Czar moved out he left it to her. Babushka lived in the Winter Palace
when she was in Petrograd, which was seldom. Most of the time she was
touring rural Russia and trying to make her peasants understand what
the revolution meant, and that they would make the country a worse
place than it ever was before unless they stopped fighting to grab all
the land in sight without any regard to right and justice. “I know
them,” she said in a brief talk I had with her in the palace. “If I can
only live long enough to reach them in numbers, I can deal with them.
They have listened to a pack of nonsense, but I shall tell them better.”
Breshkovskaia is past seventy years old. She is growing very deaf,
and her weight makes traveling difficult. Yet her mind is clear and
vigorous, and when she makes a speech she manages somehow to call
back the voice and the strength of a woman of forty. Spirodonova,
Breshkovskaia, Kropotkin, Tschaikovsky and almost every one of the old
revolutionists are eager adherents of the moderate program of the early
provisional government, before the Bolsheviki crowded in with their
cry of “All the power to the Soviets!” They want the war fought to a
finish, and they want order restored in Russia. It is quite otherwise
with another type of exile, and I am sorry to say some of this other
kind were made in the United States of America.
[Illustration: Prince Felix Yussupoff, at whose palace on the Moika
Canal Rasputin was killed, and his wife, the Grand Duchess Irene
Alexandrovna, niece of the late Czar.]
In the boat in which I crossed the Atlantic last May there were three
Russian men who had spent some years in America and were on their
way back to Petrograd. These men were not exiles, but they had found
Russia intolerable to live in and had gone to America, which had been
so kind to them in a material way that they were able to go back to
Russia in the first cabin of an ocean liner. All three were pronounced
pacifists and one was a readymade Bolshevik. He was for the whole
program, separate peace, no annexations or contributions, no sharing
the government with the bourgeois, no compromise on anything. A real
Bolshevik. And made on the east side of New York. This man used to talk
to me on deck and in the saloon about how the Soldiers’ and Workmen’s
Delegates were going to dictate terms of peace to the allies, and how
the social revolution was going to spread all over the world, and
especially all over America, and then he would hasten to assure me that
he wasn’t nearly as radical as some of the Tavarishi I would meet in
Russia, and he wasn’t. When we reached the Finnish frontier and stopped
at Tornea for examination I had the pleasure of seeing all three of
these men taken into custody by some remnant of authority existing
in the army, and taken down to Petrograd under guard as men who had
evaded military duty. My friend declared that nothing would ever induce
him to put on a uniform or to fight. Not he. And the others rather
less confidently echoed his defiance. Finally one of them said: “on
the whole, I think I will enlist. They need educated men at the front
to talk peace to them.” Thus at least one emissary of the Kaiser was
contributed to poor, bleeding Russia by the United States.
Just one more case, because it is typical of many. This man was a
real exile, and for eleven years he had lived in Chicago. Born in a
small city of western Russia, he joined, when still a youth, what was
known as the Bund, a socialist propagandist circle of Jewish young men
and women. The youth’s parents, quiet, orthodox people, knew nothing
of his activities, nor of the revolutionary literature of which he
was custodian and which he had concealed in the sand bags piled up
around the cottage to keep out the winter cold. On May 31, 1905, the
Tavarishi, or comrades, in his town organized a small demonstration
against the celebration of the Czar’s birthday. The next day the
police began searching houses and making arrests among the youth of
the town, and they found the books hidden in the sandbags. The boy
fled, and found refuge in the next town. Money was raised, a passport
forged and the youth finally got to England via Germany. He didn’t like
England and in 1906 he crossed to the United States. He didn’t like the
United States either, and his whole career in Chicago was a history of
agitation and rebellion. He was one of the founders of a socialist
Sunday school in Mayor Thompson’s town, where children of tender years
are given a thorough education in Bolshevik first principles.
When the Russian revolution broke and Russian consuls all over the
world advertised for exiles to be taken back to Russia’s heart, this
man presented himself as one of the returners. He showed me the
certificate issued by the Russian consulate in Chicago. It says that it
was issued in accordance with the orders of the provisional government
and records that the said ---- ---- was paid the sum of $157.25 and
was given transportation from Chicago to Petrograd, via the Pacific
Ocean and the Trans-Siberian railroad. At Vladivostock he received more
money, and on his arrival in Petrograd he was given a small weekly
allowance in addition to his free lodgings. He had a good time on the
journey, he said. There was a band at most of the stations where the
train stopped, crowds, flowers and much cheering. It was agreeable to
get back to Petrograd also and be met by a committee. But the habit
of hating governments was so settled in his system that within a
week he was talking against the one that had paid his way back, and
he was talking hard against the one which had taken him in and given
him a free education and a job and a chance to establish a socialist
Sunday school with perfect impunity. He was in with all the Bolshevik
activities except one. He had no stomach for fighting. The spirit was
willing but the flesh was weak. It got to a point where it was hard to
be a Bolshevik in good standing and never do any gun work, so this
exile determined to go back to Chicago. When I knew him he was haunting
the committees and various ministries trying to persuade them to give
him the money with which to return.
“You don’t think they can draft me into the American army, do you?” he
asked me anxiously. “I am a Russian subject. I don’t see how they could
do it legally.”
I don’t know how many men of this kind went back to Russia from the
United States, but there were enough of them to be conspicuous, and the
Russian radicals believe them to be far more reliable witnesses than
the Root Commission, which made a remarkably good impression on the
educated people but none at all on the Tavarishi. “Don’t you believe
that the United States is in this war for democracy,” shouted one
Nevsky Prospect orator. “The United States is just as imperialistic as
England. You oughtta read what Lincoln Steffens and John Reed wrote
about the United States and Mexico.” These men will do Russia all the
harm they can, and then they will come back to America and do us all
the harm they can. If I had my way they would go from Ellis Island,
with all the rest of their kind still remaining here, to some kind of a
devil’s island in the South Seas and be kept there until they died.
CHAPTER XI
HOW RASPUTIN DIED
Looking at these exiles, these wrecks of humanity done to death in the
name of the state, and reflecting that their number was so great that
months had to elapse before they could all be located and brought back
to life, it is not to be wondered at that most Russians believed the
autocracy a thing too strong to be shaken. But the February revolution
revealed that the autocracy was a tree rotten at the roots. At a touch
it collapsed.
The Russian autocracy went down like a house of cards, and within an
incredibly short time the whole horde of ignorant and reactionary
ministers, grafting generals, corrupt officials, court parasites,
vagrant monks, mystics and fortune tellers went down with it and
were buried in its ruins. The Czar--a reed shaken in the wind. The
Czarina, the Empress Dowager, the poor little Czarevitch, Rasputin,
Anna Virubova, his sponsor at the court--leaves in the current. They
all went. In the dead of night a group of determined men, led by a
nephew-in-law of the Czar, murdered a monk, and almost the next day
the whole Protopopoff-Sturmer gang was in the fortress of Peter and
Paul and the Romanoff family was on its way to Siberia. Rasputin, it
is true, was killed in December, and the revolution did not actually
occur until February; but two months in the history of a nation is an
inconsiderable lapse of time. The story of the killing of Rasputin has
been published in this country, and, in its main facts, accurately. In
some of its important details the published stories are in error, and
I am glad to be able to tell the facts as they were related by Prince
Felix Yussupoff himself, the man who fired the shot that freed Russia.
Prince Yussupoff did not tell these facts directly to me. He told them
to Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragist, with whom he is
on terms of warm friendship, and gave her permission to repeat them
to me, which she did within an hour of hearing them. Prince Yussupoff
was willing that I should know the story, but our acquaintance was
brief, and I am sure that I heard a more detailed account through
Mrs. Pankhurst than I should have had had he talked directly to me, a
comparative stranger.
Prince Yussupoff did not kill Rasputin, as has been charged, because
the monk had cast lascivious eyes on his beautiful young wife, the
Grand Duchess Irene Alexandrovna. At least he said nothing about her in
connection with the affair, and it is certain that she took no active
part in it. She did not lure the monk to the Yussupoff palace on the
fatal night. She could not have done so because she was in the Crimea
at the time. Prince Yussupoff killed Rasputin because of the man’s evil
influence on the Czar, his wife’s uncle, and his worse influence on the
Czarina. The thing had got beyond scandal. It had become unbearable,
and when evidence was presented to him that Rasputin was trying to
influence the royal pair to force Russia into a separate peace with
Germany, Prince Yussupoff decided that the time for Rasputin’s death
had come. Rasputin had to die. He was invited to Yussupoff’s house and
he accepted. Then he died.
I have often walked past that great, beautiful, yellow palace on the
Moika canal, the Petrograd town house of the Yussupoff family, and
tried to reconstruct the ghastly drama enacted there on that December
night. Snow burying the black ice of the canal, shrouding the street
and silent houses, dimming the street lights, and in a basement room,
a private retreat of the lord of the palace, a young man sweating from
every shivering pore, and watching the sinister monk eat and drink
deadly poison which affected him no more than water. They had fed one
of the poisoned cakes to a dog, just before they sent them downstairs
to be fed to Rasputin, and the dog died in a few seconds. Rasputin
ate one and lived. Explain it who can, but cease to wonder that the
Russians firmly believe that Rasputin was something more than human.
Excusing himself on some pretext Prince Yussupoff went upstairs, where
the others waited--young Grand Duke Dmitri and two or three other men,
and told them the incredible news. When he went back he had a revolver
in his pocket. He and the monk resumed their conversation, which was on
general topics. It was the first time Rasputin had visited Yussupoff or
had any particular conversation with him. The prince was not a favorite
at court, the empress especially disapproving of certain alleged
episodes in his youthful past. For this reason young Prince Felix and
the monk were on formal terms, and it took a great deal of diplomacy
to persuade Rasputin to make that midnight visit at all. They resumed
their interrupted conversation, and in the course of it the prince
invited Rasputin to cross the room and look at an ikon, or sacred
picture, which hung on the opposite wall. These ikons are frequently
rare objects of art, gold or silver, and incrusted with gems. The ikon,
which was to be the last on which Rasputin’s gaze was to rest, was an
antique of almost priceless value. He looked, and the next moment a
revolver shot tore through his side and he crumpled up on the floor
without a groan. Prince Yussupoff had shot him.
The prince had never killed a man before, and it was natural that, in
his revulsion of nerves after the deed, he should have rushed from
the room. He fled upstairs and gasped out that it was over, the thing
they had sworn to do was done, Rasputin was dead. The next thing was
to get the body out of the house, and this task was rendered the more
difficult because a policeman who had passed the house at the moment
when the shot was fired, rang a doorbell and insisted on knowing what
had occurred. He was pacified somehow, and one of the men went out
to get a motor car. Prince Yussupoff went downstairs to guard the
body until the car came. Rasputin lay motionless on the floor beneath
the jeweled ikon, but as his slayer reached the spot where he lay,
the monk’s body shot up, the monk’s long arms darted forward and his
powerful hands reached and clawed for Yussupoff’s throat. Half mad
with amazement and horror, the young man tore himself loose, leaving
one of the epaulets from his uniform in the clawing hands. Rushing with
all his might to the room upstairs, he shrieked: “He lives yet! He is
the devil himself! We cannot kill him!”
“We must kill him!” they shrieked in return, and the whole band rushed
for the stairs. When they opened the door Rasputin was crawling on
hands and knees up the stairs. His face was diabolic. What followed
does not make pleasant reading. They tried to kill him, crawling toward
them, using every weapon they could grasp--revolvers, swords, daggers,
clubs, heavy chairs, even their boots. They shot and beat him until
he was senseless, but even then he did not die. They tied his hands
and feet and regardless of possible risk of detection they loaded the
senseless body into a motor car, drove to the Neva, a considerable
distance, and threw the still breathing thing through a hole in the
ice. There Rasputin died.
That is the way Prince Yussupoff tells it. The world knows how the Czar
had the body embalmed and buried, and how he and all the royal family
walked in the funeral procession. It was the intention of the Empress
to build a costly tomb over his grave, perhaps a church. They usually
built a church to commemorate assassinations of royalty, and the poor,
half-demented Empress of Russia regarded Rasputin as greater than
royalty. Perhaps if the revolution of February had not succeeded the
church would have been built, loaded with gold and art treasures, as
those Russian churches are, and might in time have become a shrine in
which the superstitious would pray for miracles. But the revolution did
succeed, and one of the first things they did was to unearth the corpse
of Rasputin and give it another burial. I heard several accounts of
that burial, all of them horrible. One account has it that the body was
burned. It doesn’t make any real difference. Rasputin had to be killed,
and he was. The burial was nothing unless you find something symbolic
in the uneasy character of the man even after he was dead. It does
indicate, strangely, the sinister nature of the whole Rasputin episode.
No arrests followed the killing of Rasputin, although the men who did
it were known almost from the first. Rasputin’s family, with whom he
lived in Petrograd, knew where he went on his death night, and when
he did not return they telephoned Tsarskoe Selo to ask if he was
there. The royal family lived in the Alexander palace at Tsarskoe, and
Rasputin often visited them there. But he did not live at court, as
many people seem to think. The Czarina, frightened half to death, sent
for the Petrograd chief of police and the dragnet immediately thrown
out drew in the policeman who had heard a revolver shot from the yellow
palace on the Moika canal. The chief of police went in person to the
Yussupoff palace and found it a shambles. Prince Felix had been so
nearly prostrated by the events of the night--he is really little more
than a boy--that he had not even had the place cleaned. The prince at
first refused to tell anything of the affair and he steadfastly refused
to divulge the names of the men who had helped him do the deed. But
little by little the police unearthed the whole story, and the frantic
Czarina learned that at least two of the assassins were of the blood
royal. She demanded their punishment, and the Czar joined with her in
the demand.
They would have sent all the men to the farthest Siberian mine if they
had had their way. But there was a meeting of the Romanoff clan in
the Tsarskoe palace, probably more than one meeting. The grand dukes
were all there, and the Empress Dowager. They told the royal pair
that nobody must suffer for the deed. Horrible as it was, it had to
happen some time, because assassination was the certain end of men like
Rasputin. They told the Emperor and Empress plainly that they were
fortunate that only one assassination had taken place. Nobody at that
time knew that the revolution was close at hand. None of the Romanoff
family believed that the revolution would ever come. But they knew--all
of them except the Czar and his wife--that the house of Romanoff was
due to have a thorough cleaning, and they were thankful at heart that
Prince Felix and young Grand Duke Dmitri had had the nerve to begin the
work. The young grand duke was sent to the Caucasus and Prince Felix
was banished to his estates. I don’t know where the lesser lights were
sent, but certainly they were not arrested. The grand duke is still in
the Caucasus, the provisional government wisely considering him well
off out there on the Persian border.
Prince Yussupoff is not only free but he is something of a popular
hero still. He is very democratic, is openly sympathetic with the
revolution, although he detests the Bolsheviki, who have turned
revolution into riot. The constitutional democrats and other
conservative revolutionists admire the young man, and there is even
a group, I don’t know how large, which would like to see him the
constitutional monarch of Russia. He is not a Romanoff, but his wife
is. She is young, rarely beautiful and a great favorite in society.
As for Prince Felix, he belongs if not to royalty, to a family which
has intermarried more than once with royalty. On his father’s side
he is Count Sumarokoff-Elston, the latter name indicating British
descent, the original Elston coming over from Scotland during the reign
of the Empress Catherine. He gained her favor and secured the title
and estates of Sumarokoff. The father of Prince Felix assumed, by
Imperial decree, the title of Prince Yussupoff on his marriage with the
beautiful Princess Yusupova, the last of her line, who thus perpetuated
the family name. The Yussupoffs are one of the oldest and wealthiest
families in Russia. Their origin runs back into the half-fabulous days
of Tartar domination, the name Yussupoff being Tartar, and not Russian
at all. It means Joseph’s son. The title, however, dates back only
about a century. Prince Felix is the head of the family, his elder
brother having been killed in a duel some years ago on French soil.
He is barely thirty years old, and looks much younger. Nobody would
be likely to pick out this man in a crowd for an assassin. He is tall
and slender, and almost too handsome. With his fine features, dark,
melancholy eyes and ivory skin he might almost be called effeminate in
appearance. One sees such men only in very old families where the vigor
has begun to run low. There is plenty of vigor left in Prince Felix,
however. He has an Oxford education, and speaks English perfectly. He
speaks many other languages besides, as the highly educated Russians
are all supposed to do, but which they frequently do not. French is
commonly spoken, of course.
I had a long talk with Prince Felix Yussupoff in Moscow, and we
talked, most of the time, about the American public school system. He
wanted to know what the Gary system was, and fortunately I was able
to tell him. As I described the schools, where children spent their
days, working, studying, playing, being wholly educated and trained
to think as well as to work, the prince’s eyes glowed and his face
shone with interest and amazement. “It’s the finest thing I ever heard
of,” he exclaimed. “It is exactly what we ought to have in Russia.”
And then he went on to say thoughtfully: “Mrs. Dorr, my wife and I
want to do something for Russia, something really worth while. I
don’t want to be forever remembered for--for just one thing. I want
to do something constructive. Of course, as things are now, there is
nothing constructive to be done. Besides, my wife is a Romanoff, and,
naturally----” He paused with a graceful little gesture of the hand.
Naturally a Romanoff couldn’t be conspicuous in any way just then. “But
when the time comes, if it ever does, when Russia is normal again, why
shouldn’t the contribution I make be to the education of children?”
“The salvation of your country lies in the education of its children,
all of them, not just the children of the rich,” I replied.
“I believe it,” was the earnest response. “And I want to help establish
the best public school system in the world in Russia. How can I do it?”
I told him, to the best of my ability. And he promised me that he would
carry out my suggestions. Prince Felix Yussupoff means to spend the
next year or two studying the American public school, and especially
the Gary system. He doesn’t want to be remembered for just one thing.
CHAPTER XII
ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS
“Let any American mother imagine that her only son, who came into the
world a weakling, and whose life had always hung on a thread, had been
miraculously restored to health. Suppose also that the person who did
this wonderful thing was not a doctor, but a monk of that mother’s
church. Wouldn’t it be natural for that mother to regard the man with
almost superstitious gratitude for the rest of her life? Wouldn’t it
also be natural that she would want to keep the monk near her, at least
until the child grew up, in order to have the benefit of his advice and
help in case of a return of the illness?”
I had heard the story of the Rasputin murder as told by one of the
principals in the gory tragedy, Prince Felix Yussupoff, and now I was
to hear it again, this time from one of the reputed “dark forces,” of
which Rasputin had been the head and front, Anna Virubova, the intimate
friend and confidante of the Empress of Russia, and believed by many
to be the chief accomplice of Rasputin. I had heard all sorts of
horrible stories about this woman. It was said that she was Rasputin’s
procuress. It was said that she conspired with him to make the Empress
believe that the Czarevitch would die if the monk were sent away from
court, or if he voluntarily withdrew. On the several occasions when
he did go, Madame Virubova was said to have fed the child with minute
doses of poison, so that he sickened, and when that happened of course
the frantic mother demanded the return of Rasputin.
As the monk’s appetite for power grew and he demanded the removal
of this or that metropolitan or bishop, the removal or appointment
of ministers, the suppression of newspapers that denounced him, the
Czarina, urged on by her friend Madame Virubova, would insist that
Rasputin should have his way. Otherwise he might leave, and the
Czarevitch would surely die. Madame Virubova was also said to have
conspired with a court physician to poison the Czar, or rather to put
constant doses of some toxic in his food in order to cloud his mind,
and thus make him an easier dupe for the pro-German conspirators. They
told the most amazing stories about this woman, making her out a sort
of a combination of Lucrezia Borgia and Jezebel.
[Illustration: Gregory Rasputin and some of his female devotees.]
Whether the provisional government believed these stories or not,
the Duma members who forced the revolution evidently believed Anna
Virubova to be one of the most dangerous of the inner court circle,
or camarilla, which was planning a German peace. For when the Czar
was forced to abdicate, and all the accused men of the camarilla
were arrested and thrown into the fortress of Peter and Paul, Madame
Virubova was also arrested and sent to the fortress. She was taken out
of a sick bed--there had been an epidemic of measles in the royal
family--thrown into an underground cell and kept there for three
months. At the end of that time she was in such a state of collapse
that the prison physician recommended her removal to a hospital. To
this the provisional government consented, but when the order for her
release was presented to the governor of the fortress, and he ordered
her cell door unlocked, the soldiers on duty refused to obey the order.
It was days before they were persuaded to let her go. Madame Virubova
was sent to a hospital for a month, and then they set her free. That
is, they permitted her to go to the home of her brother-in-law, who
is a stepson of the Grand Duke Paul, and to live there under strict
surveillance. They had searched her house in Tsarskoe Selo, and her
rooms in the palace. They had put her through every kind of cross
examination, not once but many times, and they were forced to admit
that they could not discover a single incriminating circumstance, or
any evidence of poisoning or conspiracy. They had to release her, but
she was not allowed to leave the country, or even her brother’s house,
without permission, which, of course, would not be granted. She was
watched all the time, and might be rearrested and given the third
degree at any time if the least bit of evidence seemed to warrant it.
Anna Virubova is considered a very dangerous woman. She is one of
two things, very dangerous or very much maligned. She gave me the
impression, after two long, intimate talks, of a woman absolutely
innocent of any wrongdoing. If she is a criminal she ought to be put
in prison for life, for her powers of deceit are simply marvelous. I
liked Anna Virubova, and I don’t think I could possibly like a woman
capable of poisoning little boys or handing innocent young girls over
into the claws of a lascivious monk.
How I met this woman, how she came to talk confidentially with me,
where I saw her and when, are not to be written just now. They could
not be published without injuring a number of people, perhaps including
Madame Virubova herself. I saw and talked with her soon after her
release from the prison hospital. She was still a little drawn and
haggard from the hardships and the terror of her experiences in Peter
and Paul, and she was in the depth of despondency over the plight
of her friend the Czarina. She is a very pretty woman, this alleged
Borgia-Jezebel. She has an abundance of brown hair and her eyes are
large and deeply blue. Her features are regular, and her mouth curves
like a child’s. Two or three years ago the train on which she was
traveling between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo was wrecked, some say
purposely. Madame Virubova was desperately injured, both legs being
broken and her spine wrenched. She was lamed for life and walks with a
crutch, but in spite of that all her movements are singularly graceful.
One of the stories about her is that she was a peasant girl brought to
court by Rasputin and forced on the Empress as a convenient tool of
the conspirators. This is quite untrue. Madame Virubova is a patrician
by birth, and before she was born, and long before Rasputin appeared
in Tsarskoe Selo, her family was attached to the court. The father and
the grandfather of Madame Virubova were court officials, confidential
secretaries to the emperors of their times. Both her parents are living
and I have met them both. They are highly educated and unmistakably
well bred. They are not rich people, but they live in a very beautiful
apartment in an exclusive quarter of Petrograd.
For more than a dozen years Mme. Virubova lived on terms of closest
friendship with the Czarina. She did not live at court, at least she
did not until after the murder of Rasputin, when she went to the palace
to be near the frightened and despairing Empress. She had a house of
her own in Tsarskoe Selo, and it was at her house that the Empress met
the monk who was to have such a sinister influence on her after life.
The Empress, who was never popular at court, and never happy there,
liked to have a place where she could go and throw off her imperial
character, be a woman among her intimate friends, care free. Such a
refuge was Mme. Virubova’s home to the melancholy Alexandra, wife of
the Emperor of all the Russias. Mme. Virubova’s husband was an officer
in the navy, and gossip had it that he disapproved of his wife’s
friendship with the Empress, and disapproved still more of the people
who were invited to meet her in his home. Rasputin was not the only one
of the mystics and charlatans she met and talked with, it appears. The
Empress was deeply religious, and she was interested in all kinds of
strange and mystical doctrines. The husband of Mme. Virubova was not,
and he feared, as well he might, that almost any kind of a political
plot might be hatched by that “little group of serious thinkers” who
met in his drawing room and in the scented boudoir of his wife. They
quarreled. It got to the point where they did nothing but quarrel, and
one day Mme. Virubova was given a choice between her husband and her
friend. She chose the friend, and thenceforth she occupied the house in
Tsarskoe Selo alone. The husband went to sea, and after a year or two
he died.
Something of this Madame Virubova told me, and the rest a friend of
the husband told me. In her story the husband appears as a jealous,
unreasonable, bad tempered man, almost a lunatic. In her friend’s story
he appears a martyr. “I have not had a very amusing life,” said Anna
Virubova, in speaking of her marriage. She smiled, a little bitterly.
“Perhaps that is one reason why I, like the Empress, was attracted to
religion, why we both liked and trusted Rasputin. We did trust him,
and to the end everything he did justified our confidence. As for the
Empress’s feeling for him I give you my solemn word of honor it was
solely that of a grateful mother, and a devout member of the Orthodox
church.” And then she spoke the words with which I have opened this
chapter. “Let any American mother imagine that she had an only son who
had come into the world a weakling, one whose life had always hung on a
thread, and that that child had suddenly and miraculously been restored
to health. Let her suppose that the person who did this wonderful thing
was not a doctor but a monk of her own church. Wouldn’t it be natural
for that mother to regard the man with almost superstitious gratitude
for the rest of her life? Wouldn’t it also be natural that she should
want to keep the monk near her, at least until the child grew up, in
order to have the benefit of his advice and help in case of return
of the illness? Well, that is the whole truth about the Empress and
Rasputin.”
“But did Rasputin really heal the Czarevitch, and restore him to
health?” I asked.
“Judge for yourself,” she replied. “Perhaps you know how ardently the
birth of a son was desired by both the Emperor and the Empress. They
had four girls, but a woman may not inherit the Russian throne. A
boy was wanted, and when at last he came, a poor little sickly baby,
the Empress was nearly in despair. The child had a rare disease, one
which the doctors have never been able to cure. The blood vessels
were affected, so that the patient bled at the slightest touch. Even
a small wound would endanger his life. He might bleed to death of a
cut finger. In addition to this the boy developed tuberculosis of the
hip. It seemed impossible that he could ever live to grow up. He was
a dear child, always, beautiful, clever, and lovable. Even had less
hung on his life than succession to the throne it would have been
hard to give him up. Each one of his successive illnesses racked the
Empress with such terror and anguish that her mind almost gave away.
For a long time she was so melancholy that she had to live in seclusion
under the care of nurses. It was not so much assassins that she feared.
It was that the child should die of the maladies that afflicted him.
And, in addition to all this daily and hourly anxiety and pain she
suffered, the poor Empress was torn this way and that by the grand
dukes and all the members of the court circle. Each one had a remedy
or a treatment they wanted applied to the child. There were always new
doctors, new treatments, new operations in the air. The Empress was
criticized bitterly because she wouldn’t try them all. The Empress
Dowager--well----” Virubova looked at me and we both smiled. The
mother-in-law joke is as sadly amusing in a palace as in a Harlem flat.
“Then came Rasputin,” continued Madame Virubova. “And he said to the
Empress: ‘Don’t worry about the child. He is going to live, and he
is going to get well. He doesn’t need medicine, he needs as much of
a healthy, outdoor life as his condition can stand. He needs to play
with a dog and a pony. He needs a sled. Don’t let the doctors give
him any except the mildest medicines. Don’t on any account allow them
to operate. The boy will soon show improvement, and then he will get
well.’”
“Did Rasputin say that he was going to heal him?” I asked.
“Rasputin simply said that the boy was going to get well, and he told
us almost the day and the hour when the boy would begin to get well.
‘When the child is twelve years old,’ Rasputin told us, ‘he will begin
to improve. He will improve steadily after that, and by the time he is
a man he will be in ordinary health like other men.’ And very shortly
after he turned twelve years old he did begin to improve. He improved
rapidly, just as Rasputin said he would, and within a few months he
could walk. Before that, when he went out it was in the arms of a
soldier, who loved him better than his own life, and would have gladly
given his life if that could have brought health to his prince. The
man’s joy when the child really began to walk, began to play with his
dog and his pony, was equaled only by that of the empress. For the
first time in her life in Russia she was happy. Do you blame her, do
you blame me for being grateful to Rasputin? Whether he cured him or
God cured him, I know no more than you do. But Rasputin told us what
was going to happen, and when it was going to happen. Make of it what
you will.”
Rasputin told the Empress of Russia that her son would begin to improve
when he was twelve years old. Almost any doctor might have told her
that it was not unlikely that he would begin to improve as soon as
adolescence began. Many childish weaknesses, and even some very grave
constitutional weaknesses, have been known to disappear gradually from
that period. Empresses and ladies in waiting are not usually medical
experts, but they might have learned that much from ordinary reading,
if the doctors failed to enlighten them. But neither Alexandra nor
Virubova knew it, and when Rasputin threw that gigantic bluff at them
they grabbed it. As a guesser Rasputin was a wonder, for the almost
impossible happened and the sick little Czarevitch lived up to his
prediction. That’s what I make of it.
When the Czarevitch grows to manhood, if he ever does, and reads the
history of his father’s and mother’s last years as rulers of Russia,
what a subject for reflection this whole Rasputin episode will afford
him! He was the pawn shoved back and forth across the chessboard where
the destinies of nearly two hundred million Russians, to say nothing of
the Romanoff family, were being decided. He was the bait with which the
biggest game in modern European politics was played. He and a wily monk
and two women with a taste for mystical religion.
“This was the beginning of the close friendship between Rasputin and
the royal family,” Madame Virubova continued. “But it was by no means
the only tie between them. Whatever anybody says about Rasputin,
whatever there may have been that was irregular in his private life,
whatever he may have done in the way of political plotting, this
much I shall always believe about him, he was clairvoyant, he had
second sight, and he used it, at least sometimes, for good and holy
purposes. His prediction about the health of the Czarevitch was only
one instance. Often and often he told us that such and such thing would
happen, and it always did. The Emperor and Empress consulted him at
several crises in their lives, and he always told them what they ought
to do. In each and every case the advice was wise. It was miraculously
wise. No one except a person gifted with second sight could possibly
have known how to give it.”
“Was Rasputin as bad as they say he was?” I asked.
“He couldn’t have been,” she answered. “But he may have been more or
less licentious. Unfortunately you find men, even in holy orders, who
are weak in certain ways. I can only answer positively for myself
and the Empress. The charge that either of us ever had any personal
relation with Rasputin was a foul slander. Nothing of the kind ever
existed, or ever could have existed. Oh,” she cried, a sudden flame
dyeing her white cheeks, “how easy, very easy, it is to say that
kind of thing about a woman. Nobody ever asks for proofs. Accusation
and judgment are joined instantly together. Why, Rasputin was just a
wandering monk when we met him. He was dirty, uneducated, uncouth. He
did learn to wear a clean shirt and to preserve a sort of cultivated
manner when he came to court. That was not very often, by the way. I am
sure that the Empress did not see him more than six or eight times a
year, and the Emperor saw him more rarely than that.”
“Was he a German agent? Was he a part of the political intrigue that
threatened a separate peace for Russia?”
Anna Virubova was silent for a long minute. She seemed to be pondering.
Then she spoke, and her eyes were the candid eyes of a child. “Truly, I
do not know. Certainly I did not believe it in Rasputin’s lifetime, but
now--I do not know. This much I do know, that it was difficult, very
difficult, at the Russian court, to avoid being drawn into political
intrigues. You know, of course, what a court is like.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t know anything about a court. Tell me what it is
like.”
“There is only one word in English to describe it,” replied Mme.
Virubova. “That word is ‘rotten.’ A court is made up of numberless
little cliques, each one with its endless gossip, its whisperings,
its secrets and its plots, big and small. There is nothing too big
or too small for these cliques to concern themselves with. They plot
international political changes, and they plot private murders. They
plot to ruin the mind and the morals of an Emperor, and they plot to
break up a friendship between two women. They plot to raise this one
to power and they plot to bring about the fall of another. They plot
in peace and they plot in war. The person who lives at court and is
not drawn into some of these plots is an exception to the rule. That
is all that I can say. However, Rasputin, as I told you before, never
lived at court. He did not even live in Petrograd. Most of his time was
spent in Siberia, and he ought to have been in Siberia on the day he
was murdered. But he had a home in Petrograd, where his wife and two
daughters lived while the girls were being educated. Rasputin was very
fond of those girls, and he was visiting them when that Yussupoff boy
killed him.” Mme. Virubova usually spoke of Prince Felix Yussupoff as
“that Yussupoff boy.”
CHAPTER XIII
MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT
In an even, passionless voice Anna Virubova went on to tell me the
story of the murder in the Yussupoff palace, as it had appeared to the
slain man’s devotees in Tsarskoe Selo.
“We knew that certain people were plotting to kill Rasputin. His life
was attempted, you may know, at least three times. But it never entered
our minds that Prince Yussupoff was in the plot. He was not a favorite
with the Empress, who thought him a very dissolute young man. Still,
he was in Tsarskoe once in a while, because his wife, who is a lovely
girl, often came, and sometimes he came with her. On one of his last
visits he saw the Empress. I was in the room and I heard him say, quite
casually, that he had invited Rasputin to come to his house. ‘My wife
wants to meet him,’ he said.
“We thought no more about it, but on the morning after the dreadful
thing happened one of Rasputin’s daughters called me on the telephone
and asked me if I knew where her father was, and if not would I
telephone the palace and find out if he was there. Some intuition
seemed to tell me that something terribly wrong had occurred.
“Trying not to let my voice tremble, I asked the girl when her father
had left the house and with whom. ‘He left about midnight,’ she
answered. ‘I don’t know whose motor car it was that came for him,
but he told us he was going to call on Prince Yussupoff.’ I did not
telephone the palace to ask about Rasputin. I went there as quickly
as I could and told the Empress my news. ‘He went to see Felix?’ she
exclaimed. ‘Why should he have gone there now, when Irene is in the
Crimea?’ We looked at each other and the same kind of awful fear looked
out of her eyes that had gathered in my heart. ‘Send for the chief of
police at once,’ said the Empress. ‘Tell him to come as fast as he
possibly can.’ It is almost too terrible for me to tell you. The police
found the Yussupoff house in the most ghastly state of blood and--ugh!”
she exclaimed, “it made me sick to hear them describe it, and it
makes me sick just to remember it.” After a moment she continued,
real feeling in her voice. “The thing was not difficult to trace. The
Yussupoff boy denied everything at first, made up a silly story about a
dog that had to be killed.”
When Mme. Virubova said this I admit I shuddered. It was evident that
she did not grasp the subtlety of that “silly story about a dog that
had to be killed.”
“While Prince Felix was still insisting that no crime had been
committed the police found the hole in the ice, and around it, on the
snow, many bloodstains. And then they found the poor corpse. They
had killed him, first by shooting and then by every horrible means
in their power. He was shot in the head and in the body, crushed and
mangled almost beyond recognition. There was one frightful, ragged
wound across his stomach which could only have been made with a spur,
the doctors told us. When he had been beaten until he was helpless
those men tied him up with meters of rope and threw him in the river to
drown. He must have regained consciousness at the end, because he had
dragged one arm partially free and by his hand we knew that he tried to
make the sign of the cross. Yussupoff persisted in his denials until
Grand Duke Michael and his son drove to the palace and told the Czar
that they were all more or less in it, and that it had been a good
thing to do. A good thing to murder and mutilate a defenseless man!
Well, you asked me what a court was like.
“There was a terrific time at the palace. The Emperor was horrified,
and the Empress, I think, was nearer the insanity they accused her of
than she had ever been before. They demanded the name of every man and
woman connected with the plot, and promised that every one of them
should be brought to sternest justice. But what power had they, after
all? The grand dukes and the whole family stood as one against the
Emperor and Empress. They declared that no one should be punished for
that atrocious crime. I cannot tell you all they said and did, because
that would be revealing confidences. But they held a strong enough club
over the poor Emperor when they threatened to desert him in a troubled
and uncertain time. He was absolutely forced to agree that only the
principal plotters should be banished to their estates, and the others
should be left unpunished. Afterward, when we could talk about it at
all,” Mme. Virubova resumed, “I reminded the Empress that the day
before Rasputin was murdered that Yussupoff boy had telephoned to me
asking me to arrange for him to see the Empress. She had declined to
see him, and we both believe that if she had received him he would have
killed her and then, very likely, me also. We are convinced that there
was a great assassination plot all laid. But there is no proof.”
This, then, is how the Rasputin murder appears in the reverse. Prince
Felix Yussupoff did not look like a wholesale assassin to me, but,
then, neither did Anna Virubova look like a poison plotter. Evidently
you have to be accustomed to the atmosphere of courts to judge these
things. I don’t judge anybody in this grewsome drama. I leave that to
history.
I asked Mme. Virubova why the court cliques plotted against the
Empress. “It was inevitable,” she replied. “The Empress came there,
a stranger, a poor, beautiful, painfully shy young girl. She did not
know how to flatter or win favor. She was studious, and she was devoted
to her husband and children. They needed her devotion--oh, far more
than the ordinary family needs that of the mother. You have heard, I
suppose, some of the atrocious slanders that have been circulated about
the Empress. One of these had it that she encouraged the Emperor in his
weakness for alcohol because she wanted to keep him in a muddled state
of mind and herself be the real ruler of Russia. The exact opposite is
true. The poor Emperor did drink too much sometimes, but it was not her
fault. There were others at that court who were vitally interested in
keeping their Emperor in a muddled state of mind, and they constantly
played on his weakness. His wife fought for him desperately, did
everything in her power to save him from these men.
“Another slander said that the Empress tried to Germanize the court,
and that she made her children talk German to her. The children almost
never spoke a word of German to her or to any one else. Of course they
were taught German, with other languages, but English and Russian
were the only two languages spoken in the family circle. The Empress
was anxious for all her children to be good linguists, but not all of
them were gifted that way. Tatiana, the second daughter, for example,
declared that she never would be able to carry on a conversation in
French, the easiest of all foreign tongues. But English they all spoke
from their cradles.
“As for the Empress’s intrigues for a separate peace with Germany,”
and here Mme. Virubova’s voice trembled with indignation, “that was
the greatest nonsense and the wickedest slander of them all. From the
time the war broke out until the revolution last February the Empress
was tireless in her work for the Russian soldiers and their families.
She fairly lived in the hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo. Immediately after
breakfast every morning she began her rounds, dressed in the plain
cotton frock of the Red Cross nurse. There was no duty too humble, no
task too arduous for her to undertake. She stood beside the surgeons
in the operating room, seeing the most dreadful amputations. She sat
beside the suffering and the dying in their beds. ‘Stand near me,
czaritza,’ a poor wretch would cry to her in his anguish and pain,
and she would take his rough hand and soothe him, pray for him, that
he might bear it for Russia. They loved her then, those men, though
they turned against her afterward. We used to motor home for luncheon
and then go to more hospitals. It would be 5 o’clock before we reached
home, and then the Empress always sent for her children. What time did
she have, will you tell me, for German intrigues?
“The home life of the royal family was happy and harmonious above any
I have ever seen,” interpolated Mme. Virubova. “The Czar worshiped his
wife and the children worshiped both of them. Would you believe that
some of those court parasites tried to break up that happy home? Once
when the Emperor was at Livadia, in the Crimea, some one sent each day
a great basket of flowers to be placed on his writing table. Attached
to the basket was my card. They thought they could make the Empress
believe that I was carrying on an intrigue with the Emperor. As a
matter of fact, the Empress asked me directly if I sent the flowers.
I had not heard a word of it before, and if she had merely sent me
away I should never have known the reason. Against me they plotted
ceaselessly. Why? Because the Empress loved and trusted me, and I would
have died for her, and they all knew it. They resented our friendship.
They hated to see us sitting together hours at a time over our books.
We read a great deal. It may interest you to know that we read many
American books.”
“What American books did the Empress read?” I asked.
“We read Mrs. Eddy’s book, of course, and the complete works of the
great American author, Miller.”
“Miller?” I interrupted. “What Miller?”
“I don’t remember his first name,” said Mme. Virubova. “But you must
know who I mean. He wrote many religious and philosophical works. The
Empress was very fond of them.”
I was obliged to confess that I had never heard of Miller, and Mme.
Virubova looked her surprise.
“Another reason why the Empress, and of course myself, were unpopular
was because the children were with us so much of the time. The Empress
simply would not allow them to associate with the sons and daughters
of the nobility. She wanted to keep them sweet and clean minded and
good, and she knew that very few of the children of high society in
Russia were fit companions for them. The daughters of our nobility are
mostly frivolous, selfish, empty-headed girls, and as for the sons,
they are too often debauched in early boyhood. You can imagine that the
Empress’s poor opinion of them and her refusal to allow her children
to know them aroused great resentment. People always think their own
children perfect, you know.”
The former Empress of Russia is one of the enigmas of histories. Mme.
Virubova, who knew her better than almost any other living woman, makes
her out a religious devotee and something of a puritan. She does not
reveal her as an intellectual woman, in spite of her love of books. A
really intelligent woman in her position would not have spent so much
of her time in the wards of hospitals in the one small town of Tsarskoe
Selo. She would have used her brains, her vast wealth and her almost
unlimited power to organize the work of the hospitals all over the war
area. I have seen some of those hospitals, and while some of them are
modern and well equipped, many are of the crudest description. I never
saw such a thing as a fly screen in any Russian hospital. Flies seem
to be regarded as harmless domestic pets even in contagious disease
hospitals in Russia.
The Empress may or may not have been a German plotter. I heard it said
on high authority that the minutest search of all the palace records,
after the revolution, failed to unearth any evidence to that effect.
Practically everybody in Russia, however, believes that she was a
traitor to her country in the war. Those who are charitably disposed
toward her say that she was melancholy, mad, irresponsible, and a weak
tool in the hands of Russia’s enemies. But when the days of revolution
burst on the palace at Tsarskoe Selo, and the night of perpetual
extinction began to descend on the royal house of Romanoff, it was
this woman, the Empress of Russia, who alone showed strength of mind
and character. She alone of the whole court kept her head and her cool
nerve, and kept them to the last.
Much has been made of Alexandra’s influence over the weak and yielding
Emperor. It is said that the Empress, when arguments failed to move
him, resorted to hysterical fits which invariably brought results. But
this may be the merest gossip. Alexandra’s influence over her husband
was probably as strong as the average wife’s, but is it not a little
curious that, while few countries allow women to inherit a throne and
not all countries allow women to vote, when anything happens to a
dynasty they always discover that the queen was the only member of the
family who had any brains or any strength of character? The troubles of
the whole house of Bourbon have been ascribed to Marie Antoinette, and
the fall of the third empire and the house of Bonaparte was caused by
the malign influence of Josephine.
Rasputin is another actor in the drama who will have to be judged by
the historians. I firmly believe that Rasputin as a dark force was
very much overrated. I have no doubt that he was a wicked, deceitful,
plotting creature, a monster of sensuality, an impostor and an
all-around bad lot. That seems to be settled. But I cannot find much
evidence that he was anything more than a tool of the German plotters,
whoever they were. He exercised great influence, but it seems to me
that almost everything he did was out of personal spite. He demanded
the suppression of a newspaper that attacked him, the removal of a
minister who insulted him. His principal activities were against men in
the orthodox church. Here he was about as venomous as a rattlesnake. An
obscure monk, it filled him with pride and joy to humble a bishop, to
unfrock a priest, to influence appointments.
Rasputin had a small, mean mind, and his egotism was colossal. Of
course the women fools at court who flattered and deferred to him,
perhaps worse, fostered this egotism until it reached the limit of
inflation. But Rasputin, I believe, will live in history more as a
scandal than as a menace to Russia. He was a menace also, because a
bad, weak man is often even more of a menace than a bad, strong one.
The weakling is almost sure sooner or later to fall into the hands of
plotters and criminals, and under their directing power he becomes as
dangerous as a rabid animal.
CHAPTER XIV
THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS
I asked Mme. Virubova to tell me what happened at the palace during the
revolution and how the royal family received the news of its overthrow.
“I can tell you only what I personally know,” she replied, “and I was
very ill in bed when it happened. All the children had measles and,
helping the empress nurse them, I was stricken too. The Empress was
an angel. She went from one room to another caring for us, waiting on
us, while all the time anxiety must have been tearing cruelly at her
heartstrings. Once or twice she said something to me about trouble in
Petrograd, food riots.
“The scarcity of food had preyed on the Empress’s mind for many months,
and one of the last conversations she ever had with Rasputin was on
that subject. The winter of 1916 set in early, and the snows were so
deep that transportation of all kinds of things, food included, was
greatly impeded. I remember that the Empress said to Rasputin that
nature itself seemed to be conspiring against poor Russia that year.
“The rioting in Petrograd increased, and even in my bed I could hear
echoes of it around the palace. Shots I heard and horrid yells. I
tried to get out of bed, but the Empress soothed me. ‘It is bad, of
course,’ she said, ‘but it will quiet soon. The poor people are mad
with hunger. They will be given food and then all this will be over.’
Soon the palace guards, the regiments on duty in Tsarskoe Selo, began
to show signs of demoralization. They were afraid for their own lives,
and you cannot wonder that they were. The Empress used to go out in
the cold and snow in the dead of night and talk to the men, reassure
them, comfort them. ‘Nothing will happen,’ she told them. But for her I
believe the last man would have thrown away his gun and fled. Her will
and her resolution alone kept them at their posts.”
“Do you think that the Empress really believed that it was a riot and
not a revolution?” I asked. It was history this woman was telling me,
history that will live in libraries a thousand years after we two, and
all of us, are dust. I wanted to know the exact truth.
“I am sure she did,” said Mme. Virubova. “If she had dreamed that it
was a revolution she would have sent earlier for the Emperor, who, you
know, was at the front with his army. She was alone and she faced the
trouble alone, but if she had known the full extent of the trouble
she would have wanted the Emperor where he would be safer than out
there among that murderous gang. She did not know that Russia was in
revolution, nor would she believe it at first when she was told that
the army had gone over to the revolutionists. The officers of the guard
told her, but she simply shook her head. Finally, Grand Duke Paul came
tearing out to Tsarskoe in his highest power motor car. He convinced
her that it was true. Even then her steel nerves endured. ‘Send for
the Emperor,’ she said calmly and sternly. ‘I am going back to my sick
children.’ And she went.”
The iron nerve displayed by the Empress of Russia when she learned that
supreme disaster had befallen the house of Romanoff was in contrast
to the emotion which overcame the deposed Emperor on his return to
Tsarskoe Selo. At the time of his abdication, near the army front,
he had behaved with dignity and self-command. He scornfully refused
the whispered suggestion of one general that he escape in one of the
high-power motor cars which always accompanied the imperial train. If
the people wanted him to abdicate, he was ready to do so, and ready
also to place himself at their disposal. Nicholas also showed himself
to be a good Russian and no tool of the pro-German party, if reports
are correct. When the news came that the army had gone over to the
revolution some one near the Emperor, it is said, told him that there
was one desperate way to avert the catastrophe. He could open up the
Dvinsk front, let the enemy in, and thus by the sacrifice of his
country save his dynasty. Nicholas refused even to consider such a
crime. He committed many sins of cruelty in his time, and many more
sins of stupidity. But in the end he showed himself no traitor. His
return to Tsarskoe Selo was intended by Kerensky and the other members
of the provisional government to be in accordance with his former rank,
and orders were given to treat him with all respect and consideration.
These orders, if Mme. Virubova is to be believed, were disregarded by
the soldiers on guard at the Alexander palace, the home of the royal
family.
In my last talk with Mme. Virubova she spoke with deep feeling of
the rowdy reception given the returning Nicholas. “They blew tobacco
smoke in his face, the brutes!” she said. “A soldier grabbed him by
the arm and pulled one way, while others clutched him on the other
side and pulled him in an opposite direction. They jeered at him and
laughed at his anger and pain. When he was finally alone with his
family and intimate friends he could not contain his grief but wept
unrestrainedly. We all wept, for that matter: we who loved him.”
It is to the credit of Kerensky and the ministers that they never would
consent to any suggestion that Nicholas be thrown into a dungeon or
otherwise harshly treated. As long as the family remained at Tsarskoe
Selo, which was until the 1st of August, Russian style, and August
13 in the western calendar, it lived in its accustomed manner. The
servants, most of them, remained at their posts, and while no member
of the family was allowed to leave the palace grounds on any pretext,
nor the palace itself except when accompanied by armed guards, they
had the freedom of their home and the society of a few friends. They
were not allowed to telephone, and all letters reaching them had first
to be read by the officer in command of the guards. Mme. Virubova told
me that in spite of Kerensky’s good intentions, the deposed royalties
were subjected to a number of petty annoyances which must have caused
them all the resentment and humiliation their tormentors intended.
The electric lights were sometimes turned off early in the evening,
leaving the palace in darkness. There were days when the water was
turned off and the family was deprived of bathing facilities. The
soldiers on guard were not infrequently rude and churlish and openly
exultant in the presence of their prisoners.
Kerensky cannot be held responsible for these things, but he was
responsible for depriving the former Empress of the society of her
most intimate friend, Mme. Virubova. I have already told how she was
arrested while still suffering from the effects of measles and thrown
into a cell in Peter and Paul. The cell was damp and insanitary, and
the sick woman suffered extreme misery all the time she was there.
Surrounded constantly by soldiers, who watched her night and day, she
was never alone even long enough to dress or to bathe. She is lame, as
I have stated, and once she fell on the slippery floor of her cell and
was unable for a long time to rise. The soldiers on guard refused to
help her, but simply stood and laughed at her efforts to reach her bed.
“Twice during the months of my confinement they let my mother visit
me,” she told me. “But I was allowed to talk to her only in presence of
the guard and across a wide table in the governor’s room.”
A friend of Mme. Virubova told me a still worse story concerning her
imprisonment. Several times her father was visited by soldiers from
Peter and Paul and made to pay large sums of money in order to insure
his daughter from the most horrible indignities at the hands of the men
who guarded her. He paid this blackmail. He had to. There was no power
in Russia to appeal to, and Kerensky himself could not have prevented
the murder or outrage of that lame and helpless woman in the fortress
of Peter and Paul. She escaped the last insult men are capable of
offering to women, and the government, after vainly trying to fasten
the crime of treason on her, set Anna Virubova free under military
surveillance. But they would not grant the Empress’s plea to send her
friend back to Tsarskoe Selo.
The first shock of dumbfounded amazement over, the royal family, which
had never believed that it could be overthrown, regained its composure
and accepted its destiny with quiet resignation. The Emperor became his
adored son’s tutor, and the Empress her daughters’ constant companion.
When spring came the whole family went out and made a garden. The
hundreds of soldiers in Tsarskoe and thousands of people from Petrograd
made pilgrimages to the palace grounds and watched through the high
iron fence the former Czar spading up the ground and the former heir
and his sisters planting and hoeing potatoes. The former Empress, in
a wheeled chair or low pony carriage, for she was in feeble health,
usually looked on smilingly.
Of course, the Tavarishi, or at least the extremists in the Council
of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates, resented the respectful and
considerate treatment accorded the captive royalties. They kept up a
constant clamor for the removal of the Emperor and Empress to some
dungeon in Kronstadt or Peter and Paul. Every once in a while the
newspapers published a resolution to that effect passed by a committee
of the council in Petrograd or Tsarskoe, or in a city more remote. A
dispatch from Helsingfors said that the crews of three warships lying
near there had passed fiery resolutions demanding that the Czar be
turned over to the tender mercies of the ruffians at Kronstadt. The
crew of the cruiser _Gangoute_ went on record as saying: “This is the
third time that we have expressed our will in this matter, and we have
not been trifling. This is our last resolution. Next we shall employ
force.”
The government, however, disregarded all these resolutions and muttered
threats. It may very well be, though, that the final decision to send
Nicholas and his wife into Siberian exile came as a result of pressure
on the part of the soviets. Kerensky may have feared a bloody tragedy
at Tsarskoe Selo, and perhaps he had reason to fear it. At all events,
the provisional government decided, some time in July, to transfer the
family to one of the remotest spots in the empire, Tobolsk, in Eastern
Siberia. The government kept this decision an absolute secret, as far
as the deposed Emperor as well as the general public were concerned.
A few days before the transfer was made one of the soviets, I think
at Tsarskoe, held a stormy meeting at which great indignation was
expressed over the ease and comfort in which the once royal family
lived. “We eat black bread, they eat white,” complained one impassioned
orator. “We drink cold water and Nicholas drinks wine. My wife walks
while his rides in a carriage. Where’s the justice in that?”
Doesn’t it sound like a deliberate plagiarism of one of the speeches
made against allowing the sixteenth Louis to remain in the Tuileries? A
lot of things have changed since the French revolution, but some human
nature is just as small and mean as ever.
It was not until the Romanoff family was well on its way to Siberia
that the transfer was mentioned in the newspapers. Many people knew of
it, of course, and the news was passed from excited lip to lip in the
capital a few hours after the special train left Tsarskoe Selo. In the
newspapers of August 3 (16, old style) the carefully censored story
of the departure was published. The full story, as far as I know it,
reveals that for three weeks beforehand the garrison at Tsarskoe knew,
or suspected, that something was about to happen to the captives. Two
days before the event Kerensky went in person to the garrison and asked
the soldiers to choose from their ranks a squadron of the most reliable
and trustworthy men. They were needed, he explained, for a mission of
great importance. Three hundred and eighty-four men were chosen, eight
from forty-eight regimental groups. On the 31st of July (August 12)
at midnight Kerensky appeared at the barrack, called the picked men
together and told them that their mission was to escort the man who had
been their emperor and autocrat into exile in far Siberia.
The royal family knew its fate before that time, but just when they
were told has not been revealed. Kerensky told them, and I feel
sure that he did it gently and courteously. But he refused them all
information as to where they were going. On July 30 (August 11) the
confessor of the family held a service for those about to go on a long
journey. Then they went to work to pack trunks and to choose among
clothes, trinkets, furs, personal belongings, books, ikons, rugs and
other essential things that would lighten exile and keep them in memory
of other days. It is said that neither Nicholas nor Alexandra slept on
the night before their departure, but wandered from room to room, hand
in hand, mutely and sorrowfully bidding their beloved home good-by.
Many others in Tsarskoe Selo refrained from sleep on that night. The
garrison was wildly excited, and the streets of the picturesque little
town were full of people. At 3 o’clock in the morning motor vans
were driven into the palace grounds, and those near enough the gates
could see that the vans were being loaded with trunks and boxes. At 6
o’clock a long train slowly backed into the station of Tsarskoe Selo,
the station was surrounded by soldiers, and troops with loaded rifles
marched out and lined both sides of the road from the palace to the
station, each soldier carrying in his belt sixty rounds of cartridges.
Those who saw the departure differ in minor details, of course, because
no two people ever see the same event exactly alike. Especially an
important event on which we would like to have all the details. But all
the observers agree that Nicholas walked out of the palace and entered
the waiting motor car with the calm manner of a man about to take a
pleasure drive. Alexandra did the same. She walked without assistance,
having apparently recovered her shattered health. The former
Czarevitch, in a sailor suit and cap, danced ahead of his parents, in
pleased anticipation of a journey, and the young grand duchesses also
appeared in high spirits. They are extremely handsome girls, all of
them, and people rather sympathetically observed that during their
illness in February they had all had their luxuriant hair cut short.
Some of the observers say that the former Czar drove to the station
alone, others say Kerensky followed him into the car and still others
say that the family went together. Some say that Nicholas wore the
uniform of a Russian army officer, others particularly noticed his gray
suit. To some he looked dejected and tearful, and to others careless
and cold. Some saw tears in his eyes when he entered the train, others
marveled at the calmness with which he shook hands with members of the
provisional government who were on the platform. To this day we do not
know whether Louis XVI. laid his head on the block quietly or fought
the headsman all over the place, although several thousand Frenchmen
witnessed the execution.
It is said that the Emperor left Tsarskoe under the impression that he
was being taken to Livadia, the beautiful Crimean estate toward which
he yearned at the time of his abdication. He must have been profoundly
shocked when he learned that instead he was speeding toward one of
the bleakest and dreariest spots in Siberia. Before the train left
the Emperor is said to have asked Kerensky, who accompanied him to
the last, if the family would ever be allowed to return to Tsarskoe
Selo. If he did, Kerensky’s reply must have been evasive, for Nicholas
told one of his suite, or is said to have done so, that he expected to
return after the war.
The Empress, when told that the family was on its way to Tobolsk,
is reputed to have smiled coldly and said: “I am glad we shall see
Tobolsk. It is a place that has dear associations.” Tobolsk, or its
near neighborhood, it will be remembered, was the early home of
Rasputin. Women of the French aristocracy mounted the guillotine with
exactly such speeches on their lips, a last defiance of the mob.
“Why are there so many soldiers on this train?” asked one of the young
grand duchesses. She was used to being escorted by soldiers, but the
great number on this occasion excited her surprise. The children
all knew that they were going into exile, and had been given their
choice of remaining with relatives or going with their parents. Mme.
Virubova’s claim that the family bond is strong was borne out by their
unanimous decision to go wherever their father and mother went.
Mme. Narychkine, one of the empress’s faithful ladies in waiting, went
with her, since the provisional government would not let her have Mme.
Virubova or even allow the two friends to bid each other farewell.
Prince Dolgorouki was permitted to go with the Emperor. The children
retained a governess and the boy a tutor. Twelve servants accompanied
the family.
According to the depths of his nature and understanding, one feels a
certain pity for the former autocrat of all the Russias, or rejoices
wildly at his present plight. He had to be exiled, and perhaps Siberia
was the best place to send him. But Siberia has a large variety of
climates and places to choose among, and it seems to many people that
the provisional government might have been a little more humane in
their choice of a residence for Nicholas and his family. Whatever his
shortcomings, however just his punishment, his five children never
harmed anybody, and they deserve no punishment. According to accounts,
every hour they spend at Tobolsk will be a punishment, and their time
there will be short, because all of them will probably die owing to the
frightful surroundings.
Tobolsk is a town of about 25,000 inhabitants, situated on the Irtish
river, a little sluggish stream that drains, or partially drains one
of the great marshes of eastern Siberia. The town is built on a marsh,
and the mosquitoes which breed there are said to be of a size and a
ferocity unequaled elsewhere. Malaria haunts the miasmas of the marshy
forests that stretch for miles around the town and line the river
banks. The nearest railroad is 300 versts distant. In winter, which
endures eight months of the year, the place is shut off from the world.
It is as remote from human association as the moon. The provisional
government apologizes for Tobolsk as a choice on the ground of the
necessity for remoteness.
CHAPTER XV
THE HOUSE OF MARY AND MARTHA
On the afternoon of the day when Nicholas II., deposed emperor and
autocrat of all the Russias, with his wife and children left Tsarskoe
Selo and began the long journey toward their place of exile in Siberia,
I sat in a peaceful convent room in Moscow and talked with almost the
last remaining member of the royal family left in complete freedom in
the empire. This was Elisabeta Feodorovna, sister of the former empress
and widow of the Grand Duke Serge, uncle of the emperor. The Grand Duke
Serge was assassinated, blown to pieces by a bomb, almost before the
eyes of his wife, by a revolutionist on February 4 old style, 1905. He
was killed when going to join the Grand Duchess in one of the churches
of the Kremlin in Moscow. She rushed out and saw his mutilated remains
lying in the snow. The Grand Duchess Serge had long been known as a
noble and saintly woman, and her conduct following the horrible death
of her husband perfectly illustrates her character. She besought the
Czar to commute the death sentence passed upon the assassin, and when
he refused she went to the prison where the wretched man waited his
death, gained admission to his cell, and almost to the end prayed with
him and comforted him. No children had ever been born to her, and
after the event which cut the last tie that bound her to the life of
royal pomp and glitter she retired from society and gave herself up to
religion. As soon as possible she became a nun. Her private fortune,
to the last rouble, investments, palaces, furniture, art treasures,
jewels, motor cars, sables and other fine raiment were turned into cash
and the money used to build a convent and to found an order of which
she became the lady abbess. The Grand Duchess Serge literally obeyed
the edict of Christ to the rich young man: “Sell all thou hast and give
it to the poor.”
The Convent of Mary and Martha, of the Order of Mercy in Moscow, is a
living token of her great sacrifice. Here for the past eight years she
has lived and worked among her nuns, at least one of whom was a court
lady, and many of whom are women from the intellectual classes. Some
of the nuns were from humble households, for the order is perfectly
democratic. Every one who enters the House of Mary and Martha does
so with the understanding that her life is to be spent in service,
spiritual service such as Mary of the Gospels gave, and material
service such as the practical Martha rendered her Lord. The somewhat
dreamy and passive Russians will tell you that Elisabeta Feodorovna’s
convent is one of the most efficient institutions in the empire, and
they usually add: “They say she makes her nuns work terribly hard.”
When the days of revolution came, in February, 1917, a great mob went
to the House of Mary and Martha, battered the gates open and swarmed
up the convent steps demanding admission. The door opened and a tall,
grave woman in a pale silver-gray habit and white veil stepped out into
the porch and asked the mob what it wanted.
[Illustration: Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky.]
“We want that German woman, that sister of the German spy in Tsarskoe
Selo,” yelled the mob. “We want the Grand Duchess Serge.”
Tall and white, like a lily, the woman stood there. “I am the Grand
Duchess Serge,” she replied in a clear voice that floated above the
clamor. “What do you want with me?”
“We have come to arrest you,” they shouted.
“Very well,” was the calm reply. “If you want to arrest me I shall have
to go with you, of course. But I have a rule that before I leave the
convent for any purpose I always go into the church and pray. Come with
me into the church, and after I have prayed I will go with you.”
She turned and walked across the garden to the church, the mob
following. As many as could crowd into the small building followed her
there. Before the altar door she knelt, and her nuns came and knelt
around her weeping. The Grand Duchess did not weep. She prayed for a
moment, crossed herself, then stood up and stretched her hands to the
silent, staring mob.
“I am ready to go now,” she said.
But not a hand was lifted to take Elisabeta Feodorovna. What Kerensky
could not have done, what no police force in Russia could have done
with those men that day, her perfect courage and humility did. It
cowed and conquered hostility, it dispersed the mob. That great crowd
of liberty-drunk, blood-mad men went quietly home, leaving a guard
to protect the convent. It is probably the only spot in Russia to-day
where absolute inviolability may be said to exist for any members of
the hated “bourju,” as the Bolsheviki call the intellectual classes.
On the August day when I rang the bell of the convent’s massive
brown gate I did not really know that I was to see and speak with
the grand duchess. Mr. William L. Cazalet, of Moscow, the friend who
took me there, doubted very much whether I could be received thus
informally, without a previous appointment. The gravity of the times,
and especially the situation of the Romanoff family, placed the Grand
Duchess Serge in a position of extreme delicacy, and Mr. Cazalet said
frankly that he expected to find her living in strict retirement. The
best he could promise, he said, was that I should see the convent,
where one of his young cousins was a nun.
The convent, which is situated in the heart of Moscow, is a group of
white stone and stucco houses built around an old garden and surrounded
by a high white wall, over which vines and foliage ramble and fall. A
key turned, the brown gate swung open to our ring and we stepped into
a garden running over with the richest bloom. I remember the pink and
white sweet-peas against the wall, the white madonna lilies that nodded
below and the carpet of gay verbenas that ran along the pathway to the
convent door. There were many old apple trees and a forest of lilacs,
purple and white.
In her small room, combination of office and living room, we were
received by the executive head of the convent, Mme. Gardeeve, for
many years the intimate friend of Elisabeta Feodorovna. Like the grand
duchess she had had a life full of tears and tribulation, in spite
of her rank and wealth, and when the grand duchess took the veil she
followed her example and became a nun. The business of the convent is
transacted under her direction, and most ably, I was told. Efficiency
and ability are written in every feature of Mme. Gardeeve’s fine
face, in her crisp, clear voice and quick though graceful movements.
Her enunciation was a joy to hear, an especial joy to me, for I have
difficulty in understanding the rather indistinct French spoken by
the average Russian. Mme. Gardeeve’s French was of that perfect kind
you hear spoken in Tours more often than in Paris or elsewhere. I
understood every word. Woman of the world to her finger tips, Mme.
Gardeeve wore the picturesque habit of the order with the same grace
that she would have worn the latest creation of the ateliers. She
smiled and chatted with Mr. Cazalet, who is very well known in the
convent, and was most kind and cordial to me. After a few minutes’
conversation my friend said to her that I had told him some extremely
interesting things about public schools in America, and he wanted me to
repeat them to her.
So I told her something about the extraordinary experiments that have
been worked out in Gary, Indiana, and the work that was being done
in New York and elsewhere to give children, rich and poor alike, the
complete education they merit. As I talked she exclaimed from time to
time: “But it is excellent! I find it admirable! The Grand Duchess
should hear of this!”
I said hopefully that I would like very much to meet the Grand Duchess
and she replied she thought it might be arranged. Not to-day, however,
as the Grand Duchess’s time was completely filled. How long did I
expect to remain in Moscow? A week? It could certainly be arranged, she
thought. Meanwhile what would I like to see of the convent? Everything?
She laughed and touched a little bell on the desk beside her. A little
nun appeared and Mme. Gardeeve handed me over to her with orders that I
was to see everything.
I saw a small but perfectly equipped hospital, with an operating room
complete in all its details. The hospital had been devoted to poor
women and children before the war. Now most of the wards are filled
with wounded soldiers. I saw a room filled with blinded soldiers who
were being taught to read Braille type by sweet-faced nuns. Blindness
is bitter hard for any man, but for illiterates it must be blank
despair. I saw a house full of refugee nuns from the invaded districts
of Poland. I saw an orphanage full of slain soldiers’ children. I
lingered long in the lovely garden where nuns were at work, some with
their habits tucked up, among the potato rows, some pruning trees and
hedges, some sweeping the gravel paths with besoms made of twigs, some
teaching the orphan girls to embroider at big frames, to knit and to
sew. They made a fascinating picture, and I could hardly leave them
even to see the church, which is one of the most beautiful small gems
of architecture to be found in Europe. I never really saw that church
at all, as it turned out, for just as we entered and I was getting a
first impression of its blue and white and gold beauty, a messenger
hastily opened the door and said that the Grand Duchess wanted to see
me.
We went back to the convent and I was taken to a tiny parlor, which
is the private retreat of the Lady Abbess. It is not much bigger than
a hall bedroom, and it gave the same general impression of blue and
white and gold that one sees throughout the place. There were many
books bound in the lapis blue which seems to be the Grand Duchess’s
favorite color; a few pictures, mostly of the Madonna and Child; some
small tables, one with Stephen Graham’s book, “The House of Mary
and Martha,” held open upon it by a piece of embroidery carelessly
dropped. There were easy chairs of English willow with blue cushions,
and a businesslike little desk crammed with papers. Everywhere, in the
window, on tables and the desk, were bowls and vases of flowers. Every
room in the place, in fact, was filled with flowers.
The door opened and the Grand Duchess came in with a radiant smile of
welcome and a white hand outstretched. “I am so glad to find that I had
time to meet you to-day, Mrs. Dorr,” she said, in a rarely sweet voice.
“Your highness speaks English?” I exclaimed in surprise, and she
replied, waving me to a comfortable armchair: “Why not? My mother was
English.”
I had forgotten for the moment that the Grand Duchess and her younger
sister, the former Empress of Russia, were daughters of the Princess
Alice of England and granddaughters of Queen Victoria. Russia seemed
to have forgotten it also and to have remembered only that the father
of these women was the Grand Duke of Hesse and the Rhine. The Grand
Duchess added when we were seated that when she was a child at home
they always spoke English to their mother, if German to their father.
“I welcome an opportunity to speak English, because if one is wholly
Russian, as I am, and especially if one is orthodox, he hears little
except Russian or French.” Then she said, with another radiant smile:
“Tell me what you think of my convent.”
I told her that I felt as though I had stepped back into the glowing
and romantic thirteenth century.
“That is just what I wanted my convent to be,” she replied, “one of
those busy, useful medieval types. Such convents were wonderfully
efficient aids to civilization in the middle ages, and I don’t think
they should have been allowed to disappear. Russia needs them,
certainly, the kind of convent that fills the place between the
austere, enclosed orders and the life of the outside world. We read the
newspapers here, we keep track of events and we receive and consult
with people in active life. We are Marys, but we are Marthas as well.”
The Grand Duchess’s interest in the outside world is patent. She asked
me eagerly to tell her how things were going in Petrograd, and her
face saddened when I told her of the riotous and bloody events I had
witnessed during the days of the July revolution, scarcely past.
“Times are very bad with us just now,” she said, “but they will improve
soon, I am sure. The Russian people are good and kind at heart, but
they are mostly children--big, ignorant, impulsive children. If they
can find good leaders, and if they will only realize that they must
obey their leaders, they will emerge from this dreadful chaos and build
up a strong, new Russia. Have you seen Kerensky, and what do you think
of him?”
I replied rather cautiously. Like every one else, I still hoped that
Kerensky would succeed in getting his released giant back into its
bottle, and I did not want to unsettle any one’s confidence in him even
to the extent of an expressed doubt. Kerensky, I told her, was greatly
admired and liked, and I hoped he might prove the strong leader Russia
needed in her trouble.
“I hope so,” replied the last of the Romanoffs, “I pray for him every
day.”
The bells of the little church chimed the hour softly, and the Grand
Duchess paused to cross herself devoutly. “I want to hear about those
wonderful public schools of yours,” she said, “but first tell me what
America is doing in war preparation.”
As I talked she listened, nodding and smiling as if immensely pleased.
The great airplane fleet in course of construction seemed to amaze
and delight her, and when I told her of the conservation of the food
supply and the restriction of the manufacture of alcohol she fairly
glowed. “America is simply stupendous,” she exclaimed. “How I regret
that I never went there. Of course I never shall now. To me the United
States stands for order and efficiency of the best kind. The kind of
order only a free people can create. The kind I pray may be built some
day here in Russia.” And then she made her one allusion to the deposed
Czar. I did not know that at that minute the Czar was on his way to
Siberia, but it is very probable that she knew it. She said: “I am glad
you are going to protect your soldiers from the danger of the drink
evil. Nobody can possibly know how much good the abolition of vodka
did our soldiers and all our people. I think history should give the
Emperor credit for his share in that act, don’t you?” I agreed that the
Emperor should receive full credit for what he did, and I spoke with
all sincerity.
Elisabeta Feodorovna kept me for nearly three-quarters of an hour
talking to her about the Gary schools, which she is eager to see in
Russia; about American women and their part in the war, and about
welfare work for children, especially for tubercular and anemic
children. “It is wonderful,” she said with a sigh. “I can scarcely help
envying you sinfully. Think of a great, young, hurrying nation that can
still find time to study all these frightful problems of poverty and
disease, and to grapple with them. I hope you will go on doing that,
and still find more and more ways of bringing beauty into the lives
of the workers. How can you expect workmen who toil all day in hot,
hideous factories or on remote farms, with nothing in their lives but
work and worry, to have beauty in their souls?”
[Illustration: The Grand Duchess Elizabeta Feodorovna, sister of the
late Czarina, and widow of the Grand Duke Serge (who was assassinated
during the Revolution of 1905), now Abbess of the House of Mary and
Martha at Moscow.]
She wanted eagerly to know about the women soldiers, and said that she
greatly admired their heroism. What was their life in camp like, and
were they strong enough to stand the hardships? The Grand Duchess Serge
is a good feminist and she agreed with me that in Russia’s crisis,
as in the situation in all countries created by the war, it had been
completely demonstrated that women would have henceforth to play a rôle
equally important and equally prominent as that of men.
They would have to share equally with men in the successful operation
of the war whether on the battlefield or behind the lines. She had
always had a special devotion to Jeanne d’Arc and believed her to have
been inspired by God. Other women also had been called of God to do
great things.
“I am glad you like my convent,” she repeated as we parted. “Please
come again. You know that it does not belong to me any more, but to the
Provisional Government, but I hope they will let me keep it.”
I hope they will. The House of Mary and Martha, with the beautiful
woman in it, is one of the things new Russia can least afford to lose.
CHAPTER XVI
THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE
The Romanoffs gone, the soviets apparently yielding to Kerensky’s
demand for a coalition government, and finally voting to give him
almost supreme power, what then stood in the way of restoring order in
the army and civil life? Readers of the despatches in the daily press
last September and later must have puzzled over this question. The fact
is that while there were indications that the last convention held in
Petrograd by the Russian Socialists, the so-called Democratic Council,
ended in a partial victory for Kerensky, there remained every evidence
that the Bolshevik element was still very strong. Kerensky succeeded in
forming a coalition ministry, but the Petrograd Council of Soldiers’
and Workmen’s Delegates at the same time succeeded in electing a
Bolshevik central executive committee with the notorious Leo Trotzky
as chairman, displacing N. C. Tcheidse, the Georgian Duma member,
prominent in the Council, but against whose sincerity and honesty I
never heard a word.
Trotzky was elected because the Bolsheviki couldn’t then get Lenine
back. There were not enough bold spirits in the Democratic Council
to force from the government a promise of immunity from arrest for
Lenine, should he appear at a meeting, so he was kept in the background
and Trotsky was made chairman of the Petrograd executive committee in
his stead.
Lenine is the real leader of the Bolsheviki to-day, exactly as he was
during the fateful days of July when he sent mutinous soldiers and idle
workmen out on the streets of the capital with machine guns to murder
the populace. Trotzky, however, is an able and faithful lieutenant.
He is a Jew and his real name is Braunstein. He is one of those Jews,
unhappily too prominent in Russian affairs just now, who are doing
everything in their power to prejudice the people of Russia against the
race, and to check the movement for the full freedom of the Jews of the
empire.
Trotzky, or Braunstein, is known to many in New York city. He gained
some newspaper publicity when he arrived in New York from Spain a
short time before the February revolution. He posed as a martyr to
socialist principles, one who had been persecuted by the governments
of four countries--Russia, Germany, France and Spain. All four had
expelled him, he said, for the crime of editing really successful
socialist newspapers. Trotzky’s story was founded on fact. At least,
four countries did find him as a citizen too undesirable to retain.
Banishment from Russia, under the old régime, is no stigma, so we may
begin Trotzky’s saga in August, 1914, the early days of the world war.
He was editing a Jewish paper in Berlin. He was given a few hours to
leave, he says, and with his family fled across the Swiss frontier to
Zurich. From there he went to Paris, where he was miraculously able,
poor as he had always been and high as the price of white paper was
soaring, to establish a socialist newspaper in the Russian language.
When the Russian contingent of the allied armies reached France in
April, 1916, _Our Words_, which was the name of Trotzky’s spicy little
sheet, was circulated free among the 65,000 soldiers. The motto of the
paper was “Down with the War” far more than it was “Up with Socialism.”
It was filled from page one to page four with the sort of pro-German
stuff that has done its deadly work with the men at the Russian front,
inducing them to refuse to fight and thus opening their country to the
German army.
The French government, which had its hands full with its own pet
sedition raisers, had never before heard of Trotzky, but now it told
him to move on. He did. He went to Spain, where he was arrested as
an extreme trouble-maker, and after a short time expelled from the
country. He came to the United States, where he remained until the
Russian revolution of late February, 1917, when he flew back to
Petrograd. Trotzky always had money to make these long journeys. At
Halifax he was halted, for the English government knew his record. The
English authorities considered interning him for the duration of the
war, but a lot of people interceded for the poor Russian exile, and he
was allowed to go on to Russia. Poor Russia!
Trotzky was elected a member of the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s
and Soldiers’ Delegates, being a pacifist and never having done any
manual work. Last summer when I was in Russia I used to read almost
daily in the accounts of the National Council of Soviets, or councils,
burning speeches of Trotzky’s in which he urged a separate peace with
Germany, or what would amount to exactly the same thing, Russia’s
immediate cessation of fighting. Trotzky ridiculed the idea that
abandonment of the allies would in any way injure Russia in a material
way or soil the national honor. His ideas of economics and finance were
simply and frequently reiterated. Arrest all capitalists and force
them to disclose the secret of how they got rich, and hang all the
bankers--presumably as the first step toward seizing the contents of
the banks. With this man as chairman of the central executive committee
of the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council, and with
the October revolt of the German naval men on five ships for him to
point to as evidence that the social revolution is at hand in Germany,
the life of the last coalition government was not likely to be peaceful.
But the end of the Bolsheviki is in sight in spite of Lenine, Trotzky
and the entire majority in the Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s
Delegates. It has been coming on stealthy feet for many months, and
now the messengers’ hands are on the latch. The messengers’ names are
Hunger and Cold.
When I went down to my first dinner in Petrograd last May, I was amazed
to see the price on the menu card placed at five rubles fifty kopecks,
about $1.80. In a previous visit to Petrograd I had eaten an excellent
dinner in this same hotel and had paid for it one ruble seventy-five
kopecks, or about seventy-five cents, as the ruble was then valued.
The one offered for more than twice this amount consisted of a watery
soup, a small piece of not very fresh fish, a thin slice of veal with
peas and a water ice flavored with cherry juice. One piece of black
bread without butter was served. If I wanted water to drink with the
meal I had to pay two rubles for bottled water, for one drink of plain
water in Petrograd is an attempt at suicide by the typhoid route. If I
wanted coffee I had to pay one ruble sixty-five kopecks more, and after
I added the customary 10 per cent. for the tip my check was ten rubles
and six kopecks. Three dollars and thirty-five cents.
This was bad enough, but before I left Russia the price of that meager
meal had advanced to thirteen rubles and the quality of the dinner had
sensibly declined. Also the tip had advanced, for after a strike of
waiters a system was adopted all over Russia, as far as I traveled,
whereby tips were abolished and 15 per cent. was added to the bill by
the hotel and restaurant proprietors.
You now pay an additional 15 per cent. of your entire hotel bill in
Russia, which is distributed in tips to all the servants except the
lift boys and the gorgeous individual who stands in front of the hotel
door, who assists you to alight from your droshky when you arrive,
and touches his peacock feather trimmed hat to you when you go in
and out. He is called the Swiss, denoting the origin of his earliest
predecessor, I imagine, and why he and the elevator men do not share in
the general distribution I never found out.
Walk down the Nevsky Prospect, or the Grand Morskaia, which begins in
fine shops and ends in palaces, like Fifth avenue. Wander through the
maze of little shops in the huge arcade called the Gostinny Dvor. Go
far out on the Nevsky, cross the beautiful Anitchkoff bridge, with its
four groups of rearing horses, and turn in at the Litainy, where the
cheaper shops are to be found, and try to buy something. It doesn’t
matter what, just try to buy something to eat, drink, wear or use. When
the waiter brought in the coffee that morning he said cheerfully, “Niet
malako,” no milk. Try to buy a few cans of condensed milk against a
similar experience. I walked all over Petrograd trying to buy condensed
milk, for the shortage of fresh milk was grave when I arrived, and grew
steadily worse. I found one can, for which I paid two dollars. Shortly
afterward a friend arrived from Japan and gave me two cans, which she
spared out of her store.
Russian illiteracy is so general that the shop signs are not written
but illustrated. Brilliant signboards on the outside show pictures of
what the shopkeeper has to sell. A dairy shop will have a picture of a
cow, crocks of butter, chickens, ducks, geese, baskets of eggs, cheese
of many varieties and so forth. A greengrocer’s signboard is decorated
like a seed catalogue cover, while a clothing store is advertised
by pictures of clothes and hats which were fashionable perhaps ten
years ago. It once added to the gay appearance of the streets, but
just now it increases their anxious and ominous air. Hundreds of the
shops are empty, the doors are locked and the brilliant signboards
alone remain to indicate that business was ever conducted there. One
of the mournfulest sights in Petrograd to me was an abandoned shop
where they once sold French bread and pastry. I used to turn my head
away from the mocking poster, picturing crisp white bread in yard-long
loaves, delicious breakfast crescents, patés and cakes. The standard
bread served in Russia at the present time is black, soggy, sour and
indigestible. It is sold by weight, hence loaded with water and baked
as little as possible to be bread and not dough. Some one has suggested
that that bread was meant for food and drink together, and it is
certain that it is so wet that it quickly mildews. But bad as it is it
is scarce and expensive. A bread ticket calls for three-quarters of a
pound, the daily allotment per person when I left the last of August.
This costs at the rate of ten kopecks a pound. It used to be three and
a half kopecks a pound, and good bread, too.
Butter, when it can be bought at all, was three rubles a pound, about a
dollar. Excellent butter a year or two ago was less than fifty kopecks
a pound, for Russia was rapidly becoming a dairy country. Veal, and
veal is about the only meat to be had, was nearly a dollar a pound.
Feed for cattle is so scarce and so expensive that cows are not allowed
to grow into beef size, hence the prevalence of veal. Chickens may vary
the menu, if you can afford to pay from three dollars upward. You could
buy only a short-weight half pound of meat a day per person, except for
the Sunday dinner, when a pound was allowed.
Even at the Hotel Militaire, where I lived most of the time, and where
the food supply came from government sources, we had veal or its
derivatives, hash, croquettes, etc., five days in the week. Sometimes
they offered what they called beef, but it wasn’t. It was horsemeat,
coarse and strong. Once a week or so we had chicken, a welcome change.
When August came we began to have game, grouse of various kinds mostly.
Game is very plentiful in Russia and Finland this year, because since
the war men have hunted only one another. But game, which is a treat
when you have it occasionally, is a punishment when you have it more
than once or so a week. You detest it when it appears on the table
three times a week, and if it appears oftener you choose a meatless day
as an alternative.
Coffee was about a dollar and a half a pound, not so bad, and tea was
even more moderate in price. What the Russian people would do if the
tea gave out I cannot imagine. Everybody drinks tea, scalding hot,
several times a day. Even the babies drink tea, and it is a fact that
in the best babies’ hospital I saw in Russia the head nurse proudly
showed me, in a hot water table, a whole row of nursing bottles full
of tea for the sick babies’ evening repast. Tea they still have, but
they are almost out of sugar to go with it. In a hotel or restaurant
they serve you with three very tiny lumps of sugar with each glass of
tea, and that is all you can have. If for any reason you do not use
all your sugar you put it in your pocket. You do this whether you keep
house or not, because you can’t buy much candy, and when meat is scarce
everybody craves sweets.
Sugar is not the only leftover one takes home. One day I went into the
Vienna restaurant on the Gogol for dinner, sitting down at a table
just vacated by a very smart young officer. He left behind him on
the window ledge a little parcel neatly wrapped in white paper with
a pink string. It might have been a jeweler’s parcel. I picked it up
with the impulse to hand it over to the waiter, but first as a matter
of precaution, lest it should be really valuable, I opened a corner of
the paper and examined the contents. A piece of fairly white bread as
big as a small turnip, the remains of luncheon, perhaps, at the house
of a rich friend. I went into a fashionable tea place in Moscow just
before I left, and they served with the tea, in lieu of sugar, a kind
of sticky preserve. I had with my sugarless tea a cake made without
flour or sugar. It tasted like almond paste and the whole thing cost me
a dollar and ten cents.
Most of the shops are closed, but before most of those which remain
open you may see, at any hour of the day or night, a queue of people,
men, women and children, waiting to get in and buy. The people often
wait in line twenty-four hours or more. They wait days to buy some
things. Go home from a visit or get in from a journey at any time
of night, midnight, three a. m., any hour, and you see these long,
patient, waiting lines of people. They curl up on the stones of
the pavement and sleep, members of a family relieve one another at
intervals, but every one desperately hangs on to his place in the line.
Not only do all the small shop keepers and the street peddlers have
to replenish their poor little stocks by standing thus for days, but
housekeepers have to feed and clothe their families that way. People
who can afford servants, of course, send their servants to wait in
line. The daily newspapers often contain the advertisement, “Wanted
a queue maid,” meaning a woman whose sole duty it is to sleep on the
sidewalk and bring home next day’s dinner.
It was summer when I was in Petrograd and Moscow. Sleeping on the
sidewalk left something to be desired even in warm weather. The first
hint of autumn was in the air when I left on August 30. By the first
of October it was cold, and by the end of November it was frigid. When
the storms and the driving snows of winter set in in earnest people
will not be able to sleep on the sidewalks. Where will they get food,
and when starvation stares them in the face what will they do? Russia’s
real crisis, political and economic, will come then, and the Bolsheviki
will not be the people to overcome it.
CHAPTER XVII
GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR
After Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeated legions had fled from Russia to
freeze and starve and die by thousands in a frenzied attempt to get
back to France, the victorious commander of the Russian army said that
his two greatest aides had been General January and General February.
The relentless cold and storm of a Russian winter were foes too strong
for Bonaparte to conquer. They sent him to St. Helena, and the same
strong foes this winter are going to rout and banish the Bolsheviki.
The Russian revolution began with a bread riot and it will culminate
in a bread riot. When the people of Russia get hungry enough, they
are going to stop talking about “no annexations or contributions,”
“all the power to the soviets,” and the rest, and demand a government
that shall govern, and as soon as possible put the country back on a
normal basis. When the thermometer falls to 45 degrees below zero, and
a fifty-miles-an-hour wind is driving sleet and snow in their faces,
people can no longer stand twenty-four hours in line to buy food for
their children. Especially when their clothes are thin and worn and
their boots are dropping off their feet.
I have told something about the food situation in Russia. The clothing
situation and the fuel situation are, if anything, worse. If you want
to buy a pair of shoes in Petrograd you must take two days to do it
and you must put much money in your purse. There is an American shoe
store on the Nevsky Prospect and every day the line of people trying
to get in and buy shoes was so great that it blocked traffic and the
city authorities finally had to close the street entrance. The line now
forms in a court or lane in the rear of the store and the customers are
admitted, a few at a time, through the back door. This American shoe
store is very popular because the shoes are of excellent quality and
the prices are regarded as reasonable. A woman can buy a pair of boots
there as low as $25. Men’s shoes are somewhat dearer. But the stock was
running low when I was there in the summer, and when it gives out I
don’t see how they are going to replenish it. On a corner of the Grand
Morskaia there was another shoe store, in front of which a crowd stood
all day long and all night. The queue extended around the corner, and
I have seen it when it stretched to the Moika canal a very long block
away. This is a store where cheaper shoes were sold. It represented an
attempt on the part of one of the fleeting ministries to relieve the
shoe shortage. Large quantities of shoes and leather were purchased and
were then being distributed through authorized channels in the shop on
the Morskaia.
In order to buy a pair of those shoes a man or a woman went there
and got a place in line. Each stood in line until his or her turn
came to be admitted to the shop, a long and weary business. When he
gained admission to the shop and the clerk got around to waiting on
him he received--a pair of shoes? Not a bit of it. He got a ticket
with a number on it. The ticket entitled the customer to come back at
some future date, stand in line and claim a pair of shoes which were
probably at the time being made--provided he could afford to pay a
minimum of ten dollars for them.
When I was in Poland with the women soldiers, the Botchkareva Battalion
of Death, the regiment was delayed in its further progress toward the
fighting line by a dearth of boots in which to march. About half the
women soldiers received boots along with their other equipment before
they left Petrograd, but the other half wore, with their khaki uniform,
the women’s shoes, often worn and tattered, in which they had enlisted.
One day there was great rejoicing in the barrack. The boots had come,
and the rest of the afternoon was spent in sorting out from the pile
a pair to fit each girl. I was interested in those boots, for they
were mute but eloquent witnesses of the poverty of life in Russia. Not
a pair was new. They were all second-hand, remade and mended boots,
and I strongly suspect that most of them had been taken off the feet
of dead soldiers. They had, in many cases, new feet or new soles, but
the majority of them were merely mended and patched. Coarse, stiff,
malodorous and badly put together as these were, the girls were only
too glad to get them. The Adjutant, Skridlova, and one or two of the
well-to-do soldiers had their boots made to order, and they paid ninety
dollars a pair for them. Seventy-five dollars for a pair of women’s
boots is not an unheard-of price.
What is true of boots and shoes is true of almost every other clothing
commodity. I ran out of gloves while I was in Russia, but, after
hearing what gloves cost in Petrograd, I went without. You could get
cotton gloves as low as a dollar and eighty cents a pair. They were
ugly and shapeless, but people bought and wore them. If you wanted a
pair of kid gloves and you knew where you could find them and had time,
you could buy them for three to five dollars. They were the kind that
an American department store might put on a table in the center aisle
and sell for fifty cents to attract customers in the dull season. A man
pays a dollar for a fifteen-cent collar in Petrograd. He pays several
dollars for a decent pair of socks. What he pays for a suit of clothes
staggers the imagination. There are only two things that are cheap
to buy in Russia just now: cats and dogs. You can buy a magnificent
wolfhound or other thoroughbred dog, or a pure bred Persian or Angora
cat for a song in Petrograd, because people can’t afford to feed pet
animals. Mr. Basil Miles, attached to the Root mission, took home with
him two Russian wolfhounds that are going to make him the most envied
man in the next dog show in his town, and the song he sang to get them
was too short to mention.
Russia is a very cold country and almost every one, rich and poor
alike, wears furs. The rich wear sable, mink and ermine, and the poor
wear rabbit and sheep skin. But furs just now are as difficult to buy
as other clothing indispensables. There are several special reasons for
this shortage of fur in a fur country. There are not so many people
hunting furs since the war, and the pelts are scarcer; and besides,
the Russians have never cured and dyed their own furs. They sent them
to Germany to be prepared for market, and, of course, the war put
a stop to that. Aside from these special reasons, the fur shortage
and all the food, clothing and other shortages are caused by two
main obstacles. There is plenty of food in the empire, plenty of raw
materials for clothing. But the transportation system has almost broken
down and they cannot distribute food or raiment. Also the factory
system has all but broken down, and they cannot produce the clothing.
There are besides minor and contributory obstacles, some of which I
shall describe. The main reason why Russia will starve and freeze this
winter is because the people of Russia have allowed their railroad
system to go to pieces, and because they have, to an almost incredible
extent, ceased to do any work.
I cannot speak as an expert about the railroad situation, nor would
mere figures and statistics give the reader any adequate picture of the
railroad demoralization. To say that on May 15, 1917, the then Minister
of Ways and Communications reported to the Duma that more than 25 per
cent. of the total number of locomotives in the empire were laid up for
repairs wouldn’t begin to express the thing. The average reader does
not know that 5 per cent. of “sick” locomotives is considered high by
competent railroad managers. I might go further and say that the number
of freight cars loaded from May 15 to May 31, 1917, was 87,000 poods
less than the number loaded between those dates in 1916, but that
would not mean much. Few outside of Russia know what a pood is. As a
matter of fact it is thirty-six pounds. But figures cannot adequately
describe the situation.
What told the tale of railroad demoralization to me was the constant
anxiety I heard voiced on all sides by people trying to buy their
winter stock of wood and coal. There is an endless quantity of wood in
Russia. Great forests of pine and cedar and birch--beautiful forests.
I had often marveled at them from the windows of my railway carriage
passing through Finland and the country between Petrograd and Moscow.
Plenty of this wood has been cut. I saw thousands and thousands of
cords of it piled up along the railroad tracks, and of course there
must have been much more elsewhere. Petrograd is built on a marsh and
the ground is drained by picturesque if rather badly smelling canals
which run through the city and empty into the Neva. Down one of the
widest of these--the Moika, which I crossed every day--a constant
line of barges, loaded with wood, floated slowly, drawn by horses and
sometimes by men walking along a towpath beside the canal. I used to
watch those bargeloads of wood and wonder why, with such an almost
unparalleled means of distributing wood after it got there, the people
of Petrograd should be troubled about the winter fuel supply. Not
nearly enough of it was getting there last summer; that was all. The
quantity that floated down the Moika and the other canals and got
stacked up in woodyards and in the courtyards of apartment houses,
hotels, hospitals, factories and even palaces, was not half the normal
quantity. There weren’t enough flat cars and locomotives running to get
the wood as far as the city limits.
I tried the experiment of keeping house with the wife of the _Outlook_
correspondent after he left Russia on a mission. We had a charming
little apartment offered us rent free, with a maid thrown in, if we
would live in it and keep it from being looted. Every one who knew a
Cossack or other reliable soldier, or an American, did that when they
went to the country from Petrograd. We gave up housekeeping after a
week and went back to hotels, partly because the maid could not get
us enough to eat, and partly because we never had any hot water. The
landlord of the apartment house had cut off the wood. He said that
he couldn’t get wood enough to warm the house next winter, much less
provide warm baths for the tenants in summer.
The railroad situation was visualized for me on a dreadful two days and
nights’ journey I took on a Russian railroad last July. Miss Beatty, of
the San Francisco _Bulletin_, was with me, and the train was so small
and so crowded that the only berth we could get was an upper one three
feet wide. The two of us slept in that berth, Miss Beatty’s head one
way and mine the other. Every time the train struck a rough place on
the rails the _Bulletin_ came near losing its star reporter, for she
had the outside, just above an open window. That railway carriage could
have seated, by close crowding, eleven passengers. On the last night
of the journey twenty-five people were packed into it. They took turns
sitting down.
Every railroad train you get on is about as crowded as that, and one
of the most difficult things to buy at present is a railroad ticket.
To buy one you usually have to bribe the ticket agent or the hotel
manager. You go to the office of the International Wagons-Lits and tell
them that you want to go to Moscow or Kazan. You want to go to-morrow
or in three days, some near date. The clerk shakes his head. “I might
be able to get you a ticket and a berth in three days,” he will say.
“Of course, you will have to pay a supplement; say, sixty rubles.”
Pressed for particulars he will explain that some one will have to be
paid to stand in line for the ticket. I paid forty rubles extra to
Bennet’s, which is the Cook’s of Petrograd, for a ticket to Moscow,
and that was considered a bargain. When I wanted to return I asked
the hotel management in Moscow how much they would charge to send to
the station and get me a ticket, and they said one hundred rubles.
The ruble was then about thirty cents, so I would have had to pay, in
addition to the cost of the ticket, which had just been raised about 50
per cent., thirty dollars. I got the ticket in almost the only other
way possible. I acted as a courier carrying confidential papers from a
foreign consulate in Moscow to an embassy in Petrograd, and the consul
used his official influence to get me a ticket for the regular price
only.
On the 21st of July the Minister of Ways and Communications ordered a
reduction of 50 per cent. in the number of travelers passing between
Petrograd and Moscow, in view, he explained, of the shortage of fuel
and rolling stock. Soon it will be next to impossible to buy, for love
or money, a ticket or a sleeping berth between the two points in Russia.
This is nearly true now on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Every Tuesday
evening at 8 o’clock the weekly express on that famous line leaves
the Nikolai station, Petrograd, and every berth is filled every week.
What those passengers paid extra for their tickets forms one of the
principal topics of conversation during the long trip over Siberia.
The passengers beguile the weary journey swapping experiences of how
they came to be there at all. I have known people who waited weeks
for a chance to pay the extortionate supplement. The Trans-Siberian
post train which leaves every night and makes stops along the way is a
sight to behold before it leaves. The people crowd the train platform
and fight for a place near the edge. As the train backs slowly into
the station shed, the travelers run to meet it, climb in the windows,
drag their women and children in, rush the platforms and fight like
tigers to get in the doors. The number of carriages to each train has
been reduced gradually until now the train is too short to hold the
travelers.
But didn’t we send a railroad commission to Russia, and didn’t the
papers say something about some 5,000 locomotives and 23,000 freight
cars sent to Vladivostock? We did send a railroad commission, headed
by John Stevens, of Panama canal fame, one of the greatest organizers
and executives in the United States. This commission has done good
work. It has shown the Russians how they could immediately increase
the efficiency of their railroads 60 per cent. We have sent many
locomotives and freight cars to Russia. Nevertheless the transportation
problem remains unsolved.
CHAPTER XVIII
WHEN THE WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS
John Stevens, head of the railroad commission sent to Russia from the
United States, has shown the Russian government how to increase its
transportation facilities sixty per cent. In a report made public in
mid-August Mr. Stevens said that the chief cause of the railroad crisis
was bad management. Locomotives traveled 2,800 versts a month when they
could be made to travel 5,000 versts. A verst is about three-quarters
of a mile. Twice as much freight as was being hauled could be carried,
said Mr. Stevens. Freight cars were constantly being sent out only
half loaded. Mr. Stevens recommended government dictatorship of all
railroads, both publicly and privately owned. That was rather naïve,
considering that the government was powerless to control, much less to
dictate to, any department of activity in the empire. A little earlier
Mr. Nekrassoff, then Minister of Ways and Communications, issued a
circular in which he outlined his plan for coping with the railroad
crisis. He advised turning the entire railroad system over to the
workmen, the engineers, firemen, conductors and machinists. A shriek of
protest went up from the engineering profession and a howl of laughter
arose from the press of Russia. But the fact of the matter is that the
railroads were and are still, for all practical purposes, in the hands
of the working people, and so is every other industry in Russia.
One of the great dreams of the socialists and philosophical anarchists
is of the day when the worker shall own his tools, as they put it, when
all industry shall be owned by the people who operate the machines, and
all profits shall be shared by them. It really is a great dream, and
will probably be realized in some measure some day. But not now. The
human race is not yet educated to such a Utopia. The strongest proof
that the capitalistic system is not yet ready to pass is the well-known
fact that the secret ambition of almost every human being in every walk
of life is to become a capitalist, large or small. This has just been
proved on an enormous scale in Russia. The workers have seized the
factories, shops, department stores and offices, and in no instance of
which I could learn, and I searched diligently, have they used their
great opportunity wisely or unselfishly for the common good. They have
used it to get all the money possible out of the employers and to
render back the minimum of service.
This is what is the matter with the transportation system in Russia.
It is the reason why the people of Petrograd, Moscow and other cities
will go cold and hungry this winter, one reason why the death rate of
children and old people, already appallingly large, will grow more
appalling within the next few months; one reason, and a very strong
one, why order has not been restored in Russia. High as are the prices
of all food and manufactured articles, the working people, as a class,
have money enough to pay for them, and not until the merchants’ stocks
are completely gone and the weather gets too cold to stand in line
long hours in order to buy will the purblind workers realize their
situation. Not until then will they realize what their selfishness and
cruel folly have done to themselves and the entire working class of the
country.
So struck was I by the scarceness of goods in the shops and the soaring
prices of almost every article that I went to the Minister of Labor and
asked him to tell me something of industrial conditions of the country.
I was not entirely ignorant of those conditions. I knew, for example,
that Russia is not exclusively an agricultural country, that, on the
contrary, her development as a manufacturing country has been going
on by leaps and bounds, especially in the last dozen years. Russia
has a proletariat and a factory system, although not quite as large
proportionately as those of the United States. Her iron industry, her
cotton mills, her machine shops are enormous and in normal times they
are wonderfully productive. After the suppressed revolution of 1905-06
important reforms in the land laws were enacted, and for the first time
the peasants were given their lands in fee simple. That is, they were
given an opportunity in certain circumstances to take title to their
share in communal lands. This gave them an opportunity to sell if they
chose, and a large number of peasant artisans did sell their lands,
moved into the cities and became factory workers. Before this time the
factory workers had more or less alternated between town and rural
life.
The leaders of the Social Democratic party encouraged by every means
in their power the selling of lands by peasant owners, because they
wanted the workers to move to town, organize in labor unions and become
a political power. In their own words, they wanted to create a landless
working class, one which, having no stake in property, would the more
easily revolt against the government and more heartily support the
movement to create a coöperative commonwealth. It was good reasoning
up to a certain point. A man with a piece of land thinks twice before
he puts that land in danger of being absorbed by his neighbors. He
hesitates before he takes a course of action which might turn even a
bad government out at least. The bad government protects his title. But
the leaders of the Social Democrats left an important human element
out of their reasoning. A landless man makes a good revolutionist, it
is true, but he does not necessarily make a good coöperator. Nine and
three-quarters times in ten he is just as strong for number one as the
real estate owner. When he gets a chance to grab power and money he
does it, and he divides up just as little as the others let him.
A story is told in Russia which illustrates this trait of character.
Some one asked a peasant of Little Russia what he would do if he
were made czar. “I’d steal a hundred rubles and run away,” was the
prompt reply. In a word, that is virtually what the working people of
Russia did as soon as the revolution of February, 1917, made them into
individual czars of Russia.
When I called on the Minister of Labor and asked him what was the
matter with industry, his face assumed an expression of mingled
amusement and despair. “If you really want to know,” he said, in
effect, “go and look at some of our factories.”
I was given an official document, elaborately stamped and signed,
authorizing me to enter and inspect any factory in Petrograd, and I
began, bright and early the next morning, with one of the largest
munitions factories in the Viborg district of the city. I showed my
pass to the man at the gate, who read it doubtfully, and said he didn’t
think it was good. “What right has the Minister of Labor to give you
permission to visit this plant?” he inquired. “If anybody had a right
to give you such permission, I should think it would be the Minister
of War, for only war materials are manufactured here. Anyhow, I don’t
think you can get in.”
I asked him mildly if he was sure that he had the power to keep me out,
and I suggested that he put the case up to a higher authority, the
manager, for instance. He turned to a wall telephone in his little gate
house and conversed with some one at the other end of the line. Then he
said: “The committee is in session and will see you.”
A long walk through the enormous yard and past many shops brought me to
the office building of the plant, and there, in a small room, I found
the committee, that is, the group of workmen elected by the entire
working force of the factory to manage the industry and to fix all
conditions of labor. Every industry in Russia is thus managed. I had a
long talk with this committee, but I did not get into the factory. The
man would not permit me to get in. They wouldn’t even allow me to see
any one connected with the office force. Kindly but firmly they gave
me to understand that they were all the power there was in that plant
and they could give me all the information I could possibly need. So I
sat there for an hour or so, and, through my interpreter, learned how
manufacturing is carried on when the workers own their tools.
Because I could carry but few notes out of the country, I am not
certain how many delegates per thousand workers make up a committee of
management in a Russian factory, but I think each unit of one hundred
men elects a representative. Perhaps there are two hundred men to the
unit. My memory for numbers is not always reliable. At all events, the
committee members, who are usually the intelligent and highly paid
workers, do no work except committee work. But they draw their full
pay. The employer has no voice in the conduct of his own business. The
committee tells him how much he pays his employees, what their hours
of work are, when they arrive and when they depart and how much they
produce. And the employer pays the committee for its kind words and
deeds. I asked the particular committee which thus informed me if this
seemed fair to the employer. Mostly the men said they thought it did.
One man asked me who in my opinion ought to pay the committee members.
I told him I thought the workers might pay at least a part of their
salaries, and perhaps also give the employers a casting vote in case of
a tie, or something like that. They seemed to find the idea humorous,
all except one fine, thoughtful young fellow, who said: “There may be
an element of unfairness in some of the present conditions, but time
will adjust them. There is no question but that the workers should own
the industries, and they will. The working class has never had a square
deal and now that they have seized the powers of government, nothing
less than confiscation of industries will satisfy them.”
The working class in Russia has had rather less of a square deal than
any other in the modern world, it is true. The factory system being
comparatively new in Russia, there has not been time for the workers to
organize closely, and under the autocracy there was little or no chance
to obtain enlightened factory legislation. There was hardly a chance
for the Russian workman to attain a very high degree of skill in many
industries. He could not, as a rule, learn the finest processes of his
trade, because until the war broke out most of those processes were
in the hands and under the control of Germany. When I was in Russia
in 1906 one of the most striking things to me was the prevalence of
German shopkeepers, German managers, German foremen. You hardly ever
saw a Russian in command of any industry. I spoke of this to a Russian
friend and told him that I should not like to see in my country all
the business controlled by foreigners, for these Germans were not even
Russian citizens. He shrugged his shoulders and said “Nitchevo,” which
means almost anything and is a general expression of indifference or
resignation to the inevitable. “We have no heads for that sort of
thing, we Russians,” he apologized.
“But what if you should ever go to war with Germany?” I asked. And he,
sobered a little, said: “We should have to learn to be business men and
skilled mechanics, in that case, and we should have a devil of a time
doing it.”
Eight years later, almost to a day, they did go to war with Germany,
and they did have a devil of a time adjusting their industries to
meet the crisis caused by the exodus of thousands of highly skilled
German managers and department heads in hundreds of factories and shops
throughout the empire.
One story told me in Moscow is representative, I believe. A very large
factory taken over by the government for the fine toolmaking facilities
its machines afforded was found to be managed exclusively by German
foremen and managers. Not only had they drawn large salaries for years
in that factory, but they had insisted on hiring for the last processes
and the most highly skilled jobs workmen from Germany. They didn’t
want, or rather the German government didn’t want, the Russian people
to know how to do skilled work. They wanted to keep Russia in exactly
the right condition for permanent commercial exploitation by the
fatherland.
I go into this because I think it is only fair to the Russian working
class to explain that they have not been allowed to develop the
intelligence and skill which the English and American working classes
have done. Because of this ignorance the Russians of the working
class have in their few months’ debauch of liberty and the control of
industry wrecked their country industrially and have brought themselves
and their own people to the verge of starvation. They have done to
their class approximately what the mutinous soldiers at the front did
to the men who wanted to go forward and fight--shot them in the back.
I know this, because I have seen it. The next factory I approached the
committee let me in.
CHAPTER XIX
WHY COTTON CLOTH IS SCARCE
When I got on the train to leave Russia for the United States the first
familiar face I saw was that of Mr. Daniel Cheshire, mill owner and
operator of Petrograd. “I’m going home to England to enlist,” he said,
as we shook hands.
“What have you done with your mills?” I asked.
“I have left them to the Tavarishi,” replied Mr. Cheshire, “I thought I
might as well.”
Daniel Cheshire is not the only large manufacturer who has abandoned
his business after a vain struggle to cope with the situation created
by the Russian revolution, and the taking over by the working people
of the control of industry. Others have given up the struggle, and
many more will probably follow their example. But Mr. Cheshire’s
story I know at first hand. His abandonment of his mills is full
of significance, partly because of the importance of his branch of
manufacturing, and partly because his act may hasten the day when,
through sheer lack of the necessities of life, the Russian people will
cease pursuing their utopian dream and will content themselves with a
government which, although still capitalistic, will rescue them from
starvation and ruin.
Those who think of Russia as a land of snow and ice will be interested
to learn that in Turkestan and Transcaucasia as well as in other
provinces of the south and east, they raise millions of pounds of very
good cotton, the seeds of which originally came from America. Those
who think that every Russian peasant does nothing but farm will be
surprised to hear that over a million Russians work in textile mills,
principally cotton textiles.
When cotton spinning and weaving began in Russia the mill owners, in
most cases, sent to England for their foremen and managers, and the
descendants of some of these Englishmen still live and still manage
cotton mills in Russia. The Cheshire family is a case in point. The
original Cheshire went out from Manchester in the 1840’s to manage a
small cotton spinning factory in Petrograd. He saved money, bought
a partnership and enlarged the business. His sons enlarged it still
more, and to-day his grandchildren own and operate ten large cotton
mills in and around Petrograd. Daniel Cheshire, a keen young man
of thirty-something, is head of the family and chief owner of the
mills. That is, he was up to February, 1917. After that he wasn’t.
The Tavarishi, or “comrades,” whose wages he paid, became the virtual
owners then, and on August 30, 1917, they became, temporarily at least,
the sole owners.
It was in one of the Cheshire cotton mills that I got the most intimate
view of what becomes of industry when the workers own their tools.
Perhaps it would be fairer to say, when the workers seize their tools.
Some day, perhaps, they will find out how to own them honestly and
then they will use them wisely and for the common good.
It was a happy accident that first led me into a Cheshire cotton
mill. After being refused permission to inspect the big munition
works to which I applied--refused by the workers’ committee, not by
the proprietors--I wandered through the Viborg district of Petrograd
until I found another large factory. This time the permit given me by
the Minister of Labor worked better, and I was shown into the general
office of the plant. It was a big, modern, up-to-date office, furnished
with the usual desks, files, safes and the like, but to remind me
that I was in revolutionary Russia, the walls were decorated with
many red flags, and banners inscribed with white-lettered mottoes and
declarations. The head of the workmen’s committee, who came forward to
meet me, looked a little doubtful about letting me go through the mill,
but just then the door opened and a strapping young Englishman came in.
“See the works?” said he. “Of course you may. I’d like nothing better
than to show my mills just now to newspaper people. I call them my
mills yet, but only for a joke.”
He said something in Russian to the workman, who shrugged his shoulders
and stood aside, and Mr. Cheshire and I went into the nearest mill
room. It was a storeroom, as a matter of fact, the receiving room for
the huge bales of coarse yarn spun in another mill. The bales were
soft and made excellent beds, a fact that was not overlooked, for two
tired Russian mill-workers reposed blissfully on a pile of bales as we
passed through, sleeping the sleep of the just. They were not the only
sleepers I saw in that mill. Several women were taking naps on piles
of cloth near their machines, and a great many of the workers, men and
women, might as well have been asleep, for they were doing no work. One
woman was displaying a new pair of shoes to a group of other women, who
stopped their machines to look. Shoes are so expensive in Russia at
present that a new pair is worth looking at, I admit, but they might
have postponed the exhibition until closing time. These women stood and
discussed the shoes, from every point of view, apparently, nor did they
go back to their machines when we stopped and discussed the women.
“Do you mean to tell me that you cannot order them back to their work?”
I asked.
“Oh, I can order them,” was the reply. “But if they choose not to go
that would make me look rather foolish, wouldn’t it?”
“You could discharge them, couldn’t you?” I countered.
“I certainly could not,” declared Mr. Cheshire. “Nobody can discharge
an employé until the shop committee has sat on the case and decided
that it does not want the man or woman in the mill. All I can do is to
make my complaints to the committee and ask it to act.”
Mr. Cheshire was born in Russia, and has lived there all his life
except for a few years spent in an English school. Yet he speaks the
English of his grandfather, the same unmistakable little Lancashire
burr. He has the Lancastrian’s sense of humor also and he laughed even
when he told me of the demoralization and ruin in which the fantasies
of the revolution had plunged his business. The utter absurdity of it
was as present in his mind as the disaster.
“Look at that man,” he said, pointing to a machine at which a man sat
and wound cotton cloth into huge round cylinders. “He and the others at
his particular job have had their wages raised to sixteen rubles (about
$5.25) a day. Yes, of course. The committee decides on the wage scale.
I am not consulted. Even if I were, I should have nothing except a
complimentary vote, one against hundreds. That chap gets sixteen rubles
a day, and in addition I must hire a girl at four rubles a day to lift
the roll of cloth off the machine.”
We passed into a print room still discussing the committee. I asked Mr.
Cheshire if it was true that these workmen’s committees were highly
paid men who performed no service to their employers and still received
their regular pay.
“It is true,” he replied. Then he went on to tell me the following
story: “The work we do in this room is something a little unusual in
Russia. Few mills have these machines as yet, and our product is almost
the only cotton goods of the kind possible to buy in Russian markets
since the war. Before that a great deal of it was imported from England
and Germany. Naturally it is scarce at present, and not long ago one
of our men complained that he couldn’t buy it at all. ‘Of course you
cannot,’ I told him, ‘because these mills are turning out very little
of it. Go into the print room and see for yourself how many machines
are idle for lack of workers.’ And then I made him this offer, for he
was a member of the committee: ‘Let me have four men of your committee
back to work on these machines, and I will guarantee that you will soon
be able to buy the goods you want.’ Well, he agreed, and he got the
rest of the committee to agree, and I got the men back. But what do you
think those four men demanded? They said that they had been doing hard
mental work on the committee for two months, and they thought before
they went back to the machines they ought to have a month’s vacation
with pay. I did draw the line there. I told them I’d close the works
first. But since then I understand that the committee has begun to
discuss the two months on and one month off as a future policy. They
say that mental work--they call committee meetings mental work--is much
harder than physical labor.”
“I’m glad they are finding it out,” I remarked. “Perhaps after a while
they will discover that even you belong to the proletariat.”
“If they raise the wages again,” said Mr. Cheshire, “I mean to ask them
to give me a job. I’ll have to. Then they’ll have some real mental work
finding out how to pay me or themselves either. This factory and all
the others in our name have been running farther and farther behind
for months. Soon we shall have to close. We should have been closed
before now except that we hoped that a strong government would be
formed and industry as well as the army and navy would be placed under
a dictatorship.”
The committees have created an eight-hour day in this particular
industry. Some industries have a six-hour day, and I was told that
numbers of working people claimed that a two-hour day was the ideal
towards which they aspired. I heard also, on good authority, that
certain groups favored a complete cessation of all factory work during
the three hot months of summer.
Mr. Cheshire’s mills were supposed to run eight hours a day, but he
declared that he would be satisfied, in present circumstances, to get
a good, solid five hours’ work out of his people. If they would stay
on the job and actually produce for five hours every working day he
thought he might avert bankruptcy. “We close at five,” he told me. “But
along about 4 o’clock you watch them begin to go home.”
I watched and they did. Man after man and woman after woman stopped all
work and began to put on their shoes. Many millworkers work barefooted.
They gathered in little knots at a window and looked out, talking
aimlessly. They strolled about the rooms. Some just stopped work and
went out. At half past four in the rooms through which I walked, not
half the machines were running.
“Is it really like this in all the mills and factories of Russia?” I
asked, “or is this mill an exception to the rule? Is it worse than the
average?”
“It is no worse than most,” was the reply. “It is better than some.
Industrial Russia has completely broken down in some places. It is
rapidly breaking down everywhere.”
What I saw afterwards absolutely confirmed this statement. The
industrial world is as much in the hands of the Bolsheviki or
extremists as are the councils of workmen’s and soldiers’ delegates.
While the provisional government of the early weeks of the revolution
discussed ways and means whereby the workers in mills and factories
might gradually acquire an interest in their industries and a voice in
the councils of the managers, the workers settled the whole thing by
turning the employers out and taking over the industries themselves.
They have voted themselves enormous salaries, short hours and little
work. But they have done little or nothing to insure the permanence
of the salaries. Soon there will be, instead of an eight hour day, no
working day at all. All the shops and factories will close.
In Moscow is the largest and finest department store in Russia. It is
an English concern, Muir & Merrilies, managed and largely owned by Mr.
William L. Cazalet. I know him well, and his testimony, when I saw him
in August, bore out this statement. The committee in Muir & Merrilies
voted that they found it inconvenient to have clerks and other employés
go home for lunch at different hours. They therefore ordered the store
closed every day from 12 to 2 o’clock. The store was accordingly closed.
“I don’t mind,” said Mr. Cazalet cheerfully. “My stocks are running
low, the transportation system is on the verge of collapse, and I can’t
get any more goods. As each line of goods is exhausted I shall close
the department. When the time comes I shall close the store and go home
to England for a vacation.”
He will go, as Daniel Cheshire went, others will follow, and the
workers will own their tools. They won’t own anything else.
CHAPTER XX
MRS. PANKHURST IN RUSSIA
Emmeline Pankhurst, the English militant suffrage leader, known to
thousands in this country, went to Russia in late June of this year
to organize the women of the country and help them to support the
provisional government and to oppose the Bolsheviki or extremists.
She succeeded in organizing a group of strong and influential women
leaders, and she might have accomplished great good had not Kerensky
frowned on the movement. Mrs. Pankhurst’s project, in my opinion, was
one of Kerensky’s many lost opportunities.
This will answer a natural curiosity on the part of the reader as to
why Mrs. Pankhurst came to be in revolutionary Russia. She went of her
own initiative and under the auspices of her suffrage organization, the
Women’s Social and Political Union, but her plan had the warm approval
of the English premier, Mr. Lloyd George, who personally issued her
passport and that of her secretary, Jessie Kenney. Mr. Lloyd George
also gave directions that Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Kenney should be
allowed to travel on the only passenger boat that plies regularly
between Great Britain and Norway. This boat is strongly convoyed and
it is used by very few people not in the service of the English
government. No one in England has a higher esteem for Mrs. Pankhurst
than Lloyd George, and since the beginning of the war the two erstwhile
enemies have become friends and allies. Mrs. Pankhurst’s suffragettes
fired a house that Mr. Lloyd George was building in the country, and
Mrs. Pankhurst was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for the
deed. She had served several weeks of the sentence, in hunger strike
intervals which extended over a year or more, when the war broke out
and all internal feuds were declared off in England. The Pankhursts
at once called a truce of militancy and ever since have done yeoman
service in recruiting for the army, collecting money for war sufferers,
especially in Serbia, and in many other lines of patriotic work.
The whole world admired the statesmanship of this policy, but only a
few people know how really statesmanlike it was. Among those who do
know is the English premier, for without it he might not have become
premier. In abandoning militancy Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter
Christabel were actuated by two motives: they wanted England and the
allies to win the war, and they saw in the war an opportunity to
further the cause of woman suffrage. They were under no delusion that
a grateful country would bestow the vote on its women as a reward for
their unselfish war services. Women have rendered the noblest kind of
service in all the wars that have ever been fought, but no country ever
showed its gratitude by making them citizens for it. Witness our civil
war. Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel knew that suffrage would come in
England when the political situation suffered certain changes, and it
would come in no other way.
They were in France in July, 1914, Mrs. Pankhurst out of prison under
the famous “Cat and Mouse” act, and resting up for another bout with
the Holloway jailers. Christabel lived in Paris and edited there the
British suffragette weekly newspaper. They watched with deep emotion
the mobilization of the French army and saw the French women drop all
their other activities and mobilize for hospital and relief work. They
agreed that they must go back to England and organize their women for
the same work, and they said: “At last! A chance to get rid of Asquith
and Sir Edward Grey!”
These two men, especially Mr. Asquith, were the arch enemies of the
women’s cause. Mr. Asquith had consistently blocked the woman suffrage
bills in Parliament, even when a large majority of the House of Commons
wanted to vote favorably on them. Mr. Lloyd George, on the other hand,
was, theoretically at least, a suffragist. He wanted the women to have
votes, but he wanted something else a great deal more. He wanted, with
an earnestness amounting to a cosmic urge, to be prime minister of
England. His whole soul being set on that ambition, he was not going
to take people’s minds off of his candidacy by getting into the woman
suffrage controversy. So he put the whole subject one side for future
reference.
Mrs. Pankhurst, great and wise stateswoman that she is, perfectly
understood this. She knew that, if Mr. Lloyd George became premier, he
would probably put a suffrage bill through Parliament, and she and
Christabel knew that the new war cabinet, which they trusted would
come, would probably have Lloyd George at its head. So they bent all
their energies to ousting Mr. Asquith and boosting Mr. Lloyd George.
They criticized caustically, with pen and voice, the cabinet’s war
policies, they turned a whole volume of scorn on England’s Serbian
blunders and the Dardanelles failure. They went all over England
talking about Mr. Asquith and his ministers, and their work told. So
when Mrs. Pankhurst decided to go to Russia and do what she could to
rally the women of that distracted country, Mr. Lloyd George knew that
she would do it if any one could. He gave her a passport and a safe
conduct, and she went. A little later Ramsay Macdonald, leader of
England’s “little group of wilful men” opposing the war, thought he
would go to Russia and undo any good Mrs. Pankhurst might do.
Mr. Lloyd George at first refused to give Mr. Macdonald a passport, but
his refusal so angered the Bolshevik element in the Petrograd Council
of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates that Kerensky was actually forced
to ask the English premier to allow Mr. Macdonald to visit Russia. The
English premier therefore consented to issue the passport, but the
Seamen’s Union, which was not in the least afraid of the Petrograd
soldiers and workmen, or of any international misunderstandings,
refused point blank to allow Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to travel on any
boat crossing to Norway. The union served notice that the moment Mr.
Macdonald stepped foot on any boat leaving England the sailors on that
boat would step off. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald accordingly never stepped on
a boat.
Mrs. Pankhurst was very well received in Russia. The newspapers
published columns about her, statesmen and ambassadors called on her,
almost as on a visiting royalty, and the finest women in Petrograd came
to her and welcomed her proffered aid. Which is certainly discouraging
to those suffragists who always try to be good and well mannered and
never picket the White House or disturb a congressman’s afternoon nap.
A series of meetings were arranged for Mrs. Pankhurst, but they were
neither well arranged nor well managed. Some of them got into the hands
of women who had movements of their own to push, and who were willing
to use Mrs. Pankhurst’s drawing capacity to fill a room, but were not
willing to turn the meeting over to her when she got there.
I was present at such a meeting, which had for chairman a lady of title
who had a scheme of some kind, and the speakers were mostly women who
had other schemes, and they all talked and talked about their schemes,
until I feared that Mrs. Pankhurst would never be given a chance to
talk at all. One woman spoke for over an hour about the food situation.
Her remedy was to send a commission to America and beg that a shipload
of food be sent via Archangel to Petrograd. It was pointed out to her
at some length by Mr. MacAllister Smith, an American business man
living in Petrograd, that there was plenty of food nearer home than
America, and that it didn’t need to be begged for.
Through it all Mrs. Pankhurst sat quietly, but I who knew her well
saw a suspicious little color creep into her cheeks and a light of
battle flash into her gray eyes. I don’t know what might have happened,
but what did happen was dramatic. A tall, fine-looking woman in the
back of the room sprang to her feet and burst into a passionate
speech of protest. While the women in that room were wasting time in
inconsequential talk the Germans were steadily advancing, the Russian
troops were retreating and ruin and desolation were at their very
doors. She begged them for the sake of bleeding Russia to drop all
controversy and let Mrs. Pankhurst, if she could, tell them what to do.
As she sat down, or rather dropped exhausted into her seat, Mrs.
Pankhurst stood up. She is a small woman, but when she is in certain
moods she manages somehow to look tall. She looked tall on this
occasion. She spoke in French and her talk lasted not longer than
fifteen minutes, but when she finished half the women in the room would
have gone into the trenches after her. The others looked frightened.
Mrs. Pankhurst told the women that 250 Russian women had gone out of
their homes, donned soldiers’ uniforms and were prepared to give their
lives for their country and the democracy of the world. Mrs. Pankhurst
was naturally an admirer of Botchkareva and her Battalion of Death,
and had a few days before this meeting reviewed the regiment. She told
these women of leisure that if working women were willing to risk
their lives on the battlefield for the freedom of Russia the women
who remained at home ought to be willing to risk their lives on the
streets. Whenever a Bolshevik street orator preached separate peace
or a cessation of fighting, a woman of education and ability ought to
stand up and tell that same street crowd the truth. The women ought to
storm the soviets all over Russia and force the men to support Kerensky
and the Provisional Government in their effort to rally the army and
defeat the Germans.
The movement, she told them, must be a Russian women’s movement only.
No foreigners should appear in it at all. They must do the work, but
she was there to give them the full benefit of her experience as
an organizer. She would show them how to do the work, how to train
speakers, how to manage politicians, how to arrange demonstrations.
One of the first things she advised them to do was to establish
a headquarters in a conspicuous place, and to get up a great
demonstration of women to march in a body to the Winter Palace or
the Tauride Palace, wherever the Provisional Government was holding
its meetings at the time. They should offer their services to the
government, and let the country see that women were in the field to
support the war. That speech and that program swept the women off their
feet. Immediate steps were taken to organize, and a few women, without
waiting for organization, actually did go out into the streets and talk
against the Bolsheviki.
Then came the days of the July revolution when all street speaking
ceased, and that interfered with the women’s plan. What discouraged
it most of all was Kerensky’s cynical attitude toward it. A woman of
rank and of great ability, knowing Kerensky well, went to him and told
him what they proposed to do, and asked for his coöperation. To her
astonishment he refused point blank and he told her that the women
would not be allowed to make a demonstration or to march to the palace.
Naturally she asked him why, and he replied evasively that there had
been too many demonstrations already.
Ambassador Francis shared the women’s disappointment to the extent
of calling on Kerensky and trying to make him see the value of their
assistance in an hour of crisis, but Kerensky persisted in his refusal.
I do not understand why he acted in this manner. His own domestic
affairs were in a sad state at this time, a rumor stating that Mme.
Kerenskaia was divorcing her famous husband. It may be that Kerensky
was in a state of mind of general prejudice against all women. Perhaps
he has the Napoleonic conception of the position of women in the state.
I do not know. But if he is an anti-suffragist he is almost alone in
his opinion in Russia. Mrs. Pankhurst did not have to convert the
country to suffrage. There is no spoken opposition to it anywhere,
as far as I could discover. It is taken for granted that women will
vote under the new constitution. They have voted already in municipal
elections, and in many cities they have been elected to the town dumas.
Fourteen women were elected to the Moscow town duma last summer.
Neither is Russia opposed to militant suffragism. Mrs. Pankhurst
was a guest of honor one night at the great congress of Cossacks in
Petrograd. When she appeared on the platform she received an ovation,
and Prof. Miliukoff’s introduction of the famous Englishwoman was a
high eulogy. Mrs. Pankhurst’s autobiography has been translated into
Russian and is widely circulated. Her mission failed because Kerensky
killed it. That is all. Her visit to Russia was not a complete failure,
however, for she succeeded in awakening at least one group of Russian
women to a keen sense of their political responsibilities. They have
begun to work, and when order is restored in the country, their work
will be heard of.
They told her in my hearing that they had never before realized what
was before them, and they did not intend that the new constitution
should be written by any but the best men in Russia. Much can be
expected of Russian women in the future, in my opinion.
Among the working people the women have shown themselves to be at least
as ready for citizenship as the men. They appear among the Bolsheviki,
of course, and they are seen among the slackers in industry. But one
group of women workers played a loyal part throughout the February
revolution and in the after troubles. This was the telephone force,
especially the girls in the big central office in the Morskaia. These
girls, without any direction or orders, joined in an absolute refusal
to connect the headquarters of the Bolsheviki in the dancer’s palace on
the Neva, or the munitions factory which was their other stronghold.
Cut off from using the telephone the mutinous soldiers and workmen were
severely handicapped, and the government was materially assisted.
Women of the educated classes will play an important part in the
reconstruction of Russia. They will hold office, and may sit in the
ministry. Already one woman has been appointed adjunct Minister of
Public Welfare. This was the well known and efficient Countess Panine,
whose civic work is famous throughout the empire. Countess Panine held
office for a short time only, because no ministry held together long.
That she will be returned to office when stability is secured, there
seems to be no doubt.
CHAPTER XXI
KERENSKY, THE MYSTERY MAN
It is unfortunate that nothing has ever been written about Kerensky
except eulogies. However deserved they may be, eulogies have the fault
of not being informative. Who is Kerensky? What kind of a man is he?
Why hasn’t he restored order in Russia? If he cannot restore order,
discipline the army and make it fight, why doesn’t he step aside and
let somebody else try? These questions have been asked on all sides.
I may not be able to answer all or any conclusively. But I was in
Russia three months, and I watched Kerensky progress from Minister of
War to Minister-President of the Provisional Government and virtual
President of the Russian Republic. I can tell my own observations of
the man, and I can present the evidence of events, allowing the reader
to draw his conclusions. I saw Kerensky frequently, heard him speak
several times, and, like almost every one else, I went through a period
of extreme enthusiasm for him. A certain enthusiasm I have retained. I
still think he has achieved marvels in keeping a government together
and remaining for nearly six months at the head of that government.
In fact Kerensky, whatever else is said of him, for a time at least
kept before the wild-eyed, liberty-mad masses of the Russian people
the certain fact that governments must be, that the state cannot exist
without leaders.
There was apparently no other man in Russia who could do this thing.
The old theory that great events always produce great men seems to
have failed in this case. The most stupendous event in modern history,
the Russian revolution, has as yet produced no great, or even, when
Kerensky is left out, no near-great men. The first provisional
government contained able men like Lvoff and Miliukoff. But they could
no more cope with the situation created by the fall of autocracy in
Russia than so many children could operate a railroad system.
These men thought that they had helped to bring on a political
revolution. They little knew their Russia. There was just one man of
ability in that first ministry who knew the truth, and he knew only
part of it. Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky, the socialist who was
appointed Minister of Justice, knew that what the world was about to
witness in Russia was a social revolution. But he, too, was blind to
the task before him. At the very outset of his career as Minister of
Justice, Kerensky insisted on abolishing the death penalty. “I do not
wish that this shall be a bloody revolution,” he declared. In one
sentence he showed how little he, too, knew his Russia.
There was some excuse for ignorance on the part of most of the other
ministers. Prince Lvoff, for example, was a large estate owner, a man
who lived in the country a great deal of the time, one who had been
active in the affairs of his zemstvo or county council, a friend and
adviser of peasants, but always the great gentleman, the aristocrat.
Miliukoff was a university professor, a man of books, an amateur of
music. And so on through the list.
But Kerensky was no aristocrat. He was an obscure lawyer, one who
specialized in cases of men and women accused of political offenses. He
defended with fiery zeal young students whose revolutionary activities
drew them within the tiger claws of the autocracy. He was the friend
of the poor. He was one of the executive council of the Social
Revolutionary party, largely made up of peasants. Why did he not know
and understand his countrymen? Why could he not have known that the
abolishment of the death penalty at that hour of supreme crisis would
drench the revolution in blood?
Kerensky was in the beginning an extreme idealist, a preacher, a
prophet. He changed a great deal between February and November, 1917.
But events, I think, on the whole, prove him an extreme idealist, a
dreamer instead of a doer. Such men and women are never really great as
leaders. They can stir up an enormous enthusiasm, send the crowd to the
highest pitch of inspiration, even make it do monumental things for a
time. But the dreamer’s usefulness stops there.
Somewhere in Russia, in one of the universities perhaps, in some
farmhouse or on some lonely steppe, there lives a big, hard-fisted
strong-brained ruthless boy who can and will some day do the kind of
ruling and guiding Kerensky talks about and would have enforced if he
could. Perhaps that boy got his inspiration from hearing Kerensky talk.
But the boy is a real leader. He will stretch out his hand to the mob
and the mob will obey his indomitable will.
Did the mob ever obey Kerensky’s will? Take the army situation, for
example. The day I arrived in Petrograd, May 28, I had a talk with the
then American consul, Mr. North Winship. He told me what he had seen
of the revolution, and spoke gravely and apprehensively of the future.
The sedition in many regiments at the front was, to his mind, the most
sinister single menace that had yet developed. “Kerensky, the new war
minister, has just been sent down to the front,” he told me. “He will
save the situation if any living human being can. His influence over
the Russians is enormous. He can sway them like the tides with his
eloquence.”
Kerensky, who all the world knows is a sickly man, spared himself no
whit during those critical days. He tore all over the front in motor
cars. He made scores of speeches, thrilling speeches. Every one reading
in the newspapers of his wonderful speeches breathed more freely and
whispered, “We are saved.” But were they?
One incident. It may have been cabled to the American newspapers. On
one front where Kerensky was speaking a soldier, doubtless deputed
by the less brave in the regiment, stepped forward and said: “It is
all very well to urge us to fight for liberty, but if a man is killed
fighting what good is liberty to him?” Instantly Kerensky’s wrath
poured out in a torrent of eloquence. He denounced the man for a
traitor and a disgrace. The man who would think about his miserable
skin when the freedom of his mother country was threatened was unfit
to live with brave men. Turning to the colonel of the regiment, he
demanded that the soldier be degraded and immediately turned out of the
army, sent home a branded coward.
The colonel replied that there were others in the regiment who might,
with justice, receive the same treatment. But no, said Kerensky, one
man disgraced was enough. He would be a symbol of dishonor. The Russian
army needed nothing more. The unfortunate man is said to have fallen in
a swoon. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was so. But he was probably
glad enough after he recovered that he was sent home. Nor was the
symbol of dishonor enough for the Russian army. It continued to desert.
Often after one of Kerensky’s speeches he would call on the troops to
declare whether or not they would fight. Always they roared out that
they would, to the death. Sometimes they did, it is true, but sometimes
also they didn’t. At present no one can tell whether any soldiers,
except the Cossacks and the women, are going to go forward when
commanded.
When the army demoralization, fraternization and desertions began to
assume recent frightful proportions Kerensky issued a manifesto telling
the soldiers what he was prepared to do to deserters. They would not be
shot--no, the death penalty was for all time abolished in Russia. But
deserters would be treated as traitors. Their families would receive
no soldiers’ benefits, and they would not be allowed to participate in
the redistribution of land. The Minister-President, for by this time
Kerensky was at the head of the Provisional Government, would give the
deserters time to get back to their regiments. He named a date about
three weeks in advance. But on that day, at the extreme limit, all
soldiers must be back in their regiments. This manifesto was issued
not once, but three times, as I have stated. Three separate dates were
given, three ultimata pronounced. But none of them was even noticed by
the demoralized soldiers. On one date, June 18, it is true, Kerensky’s
order to advance was obeyed. At all events, the troops advanced on that
day and fought a victorious fight. It may have been in response to
Kerensky’s order, or it may have been a coincidence.
Kerensky’s idealism began to suffer. He began to see his people as an
unruly, unreasoning, sanguinary mob. But he loved the mob and could
not bring himself to do it violence even for its own good. In July he
agreed that Korniloff should be made commander-in-chief of the army,
with power to shoot deserters in the face of battle. Korniloff’s demand
for full command of the army, both at the front and in the reserve,
with power to shoot all slackers, Kerensky would not agree to. However,
in that same month of July, 1917, Kerensky had progressed so far that
he told the world that he was prepared to save Russia and Russian unity
by blood and iron, if argument and reason, honor and conscience, were
not sufficient. Apparently they were not sufficient, but where was
the blood and iron? Beating Russia into submission would be a big job
for anybody just then, and it would be interesting to know just how
Kerensky thought he could do it. He was the only man of first rate
ability in his ministry, the only strong force. He would have had to
have some backing, and where could he get it?
The Soviets? They have over and over, after fierce fighting, voted to
give Kerensky support. Once they voted to give him supreme power. But
they were never in earnest about it, and Kerensky knew it very well.
They proved that they were insincere, it seems to me, by their action
in October in refusing to support any ministry not made up exclusively
of Socialists, and then making such a body subject to criticism and
control.
“The Germans are at our very gates,” Kerensky told those men. “While
you sit talking here, and are refusing to listen to words of reason
from your commander-in-chief, your revolution is in danger of
destruction. Are there no words of mine to make you see it?”
Words, words, words! Hurled passionately from a burning heart into
a whirling void. That seems to me to typify Alexander Feodorovitch
Kerensky talking to the Russian revolutionary mob.
The French revolution offers no parallel to this. Each one of the
successive leaders of that mob accomplished something good or bad.
Mirabeau led the mass as far as a constituent assembly. Marat and
Danton got rid of the king. Robespierre imposed his will on Paris
until the end of the reign of terror. Robespierre, “the sea-green
incorruptible,” is the nearest parallel to Kerensky that the French
revolution offers. He led the mob in the direction it wanted to go.
Kerensky followed it in a direction it wanted to go, begging it with
all his eloquence to turn around and follow him. The mob applauded
him, adulated him, wove laurels for his brow, but it would not follow
him.
He could not turn the mob. Perhaps nobody could have done so. Perhaps
what had happened in Russia was inevitable, the only possible reaction
from three centuries of Romanoff rule. To have it otherwise Kerensky
has all but laid down his life. He suffers from some kind of kidney
disease, and shortly before the February revolution he underwent an
operation which nearly finished him. His right hand is incapacitated
and is usually worn in a sling or tucked inside his coat. He is thin,
hollow of chest and walks with a slight stoop.
A man of thirty-seven, Kerensky is about five feet eight in height. He
has thick brown hair, which bristles in pompadour all over his finely
shaped head. His myopic eyes are blue, or grey, according to his mood.
You see those eyes in Russia, deep, beautiful blue at times, steel grey
at others. Kerensky’s eyes look straight at you and give you confidence
in his candor. Sometimes when he is suffering physically the eyes seem
to sink in his head and lose all their brightness. When he is tired or
discouraged they burn like somber fires. His face is pale, and even
sometimes an ashen grey, and the face is deeply lined and scarred with
troubled thought. The nose is big and strong, the mouth deeply curved,
and the strong chin is cleft, with a deep line, rather than a dimple.
Kerensky’s speeches, to my mind, read better than they sound. He is
intensely nervous on the platform, jerking, moving from side to side,
striding up and down, thrusting out his chin--a kind of delivery I
especially dislike. His gestures are all jerky and nervous. His voice
is rather shrill. But in spite of all this he is a really eloquent
speaker, and he rouses his audiences to a point of enthusiasm I have
seen only one man equal. Of course I mean Theodore Roosevelt.
Kerensky was formerly a model family man, I heard, but something went
wrong, and last summer Mme. Kerenskaia and her two small sons, nine and
seven, lived alone in the modest home. Kerensky lived in a suite in
the Winter Palace and drove in the Czar’s motor cars and was waited on
by a whole retinue of faithful retainers. No disparagement to him is
intended in the statement. The Winter Palace was his headquarters, and
as for the motor cars he had a right to drive in them, and every right
in the world to be waited on and cared for.
The parents of this fated child of revolution were well educated and
fairly well circumstanced. The elder Kerensky was a school inspector
and was able to give his son a university education. Rumor persistently
states that Kerensky’s mother was a Jewess, but I do not know whether
this is true or not.
CHAPTER XXII
THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS
One of the main contentions of the extremists of the Russian revolution
concerns the self-governing rights of the states, large and small,
which make up the empire. I met no one in Russia who did not agree that
each one of the states had a right to local autonomy, but I met many
who feared greatly lest the empire should be dismembered and should
fall apart into a number of small, weak states. Especially disastrous
would this be, both to Russia and to the Allies, if it happened during
the war. That Germany is doing everything in her power to bring about
this end is proof enough that it would be disastrous to the Allies.
Germany’s army and navy and German diplomacy are working overtime
to separate the Russian states. The enemy forces are working now to
isolate the Baltic states and Finland, and German agents are busy all
over the empire spreading the propaganda of secession.
“The right of small peoples to govern themselves” is one of the
easiest gospels in the world to preach. As a principle it is not even
debatable. In practice, however, it very often is far from expedient
or practicable. But the recently liberated Russians, each separate
language and racial group smarting from remembered wrongs inflicted by
the old government, took fire with the idea of self-government, and in
every corner of Russia are found provinces, governments, even cities,
repudiating the central government and setting up republics of their
own. Provisional governments were created last summer in provinces of
Siberia, in the rich province of Ukrania, in the town of Kronstadt, in
the Siberian towns of Tomsk and Tsaritsine, and in a number of other
localities. Finland very early started an agitation for a separate
government, and only the closing of the Diet and the prevention by
armed force of the convening of a new Diet stood in the way of a
socialist manifesto of separation. The Socialists are the majority
party in the Diet, and they counted on the support of enough people
in the three “bourgeois” parties--the Swedish, old Finnish and young
Finnish parties--to carry their measure through.
Every one of these attempts at secession was marked by riots, murders
and excesses of every kind. A report from Kirsanoff, a city that
wanted last June to be a republic all by itself, told of a garrison of
soldiers who broke loose, fell on the inhabitants of the town, robbed
and murdered them, outraged women, burned houses, looted shops and
generally behaved like maddened animals. There seemed to be no reason
why the soldiers, who had previously behaved like decent men, should
have been seized with sudden criminal mania. Liberty simply acted on
their systems like a deadly drug.
It was the same thing in Kronstadt, only in Kronstadt they developed a
drug habit, so to speak. This fortified town of some 60,000 inhabitants
is situated at the mouth of the Neva on the Gulf of Finland. The
fortress of Kronstadt, which dominates the town, in normal times
constitutes one of the chief defenses of Petrograd, a few miles up the
river. The Gulf of Kronstadt, on which the fortress stands, is the
chief station of the Baltic fleet. With a strong garrison, a fleet of
battleships and a well-organized Bolsheviki, Kronstadt was able for
many weeks to defy the Provisional Government, to maintain what it
called a government of its own, and to commit more horrible crimes and
more stupid excesses than almost any other place in Russia. Murder
on a wholesale scale marked the progress of the revolution in the
fortress and on the battleships. More than a score of young officers in
training were killed in the fortress in one day last spring. They were
not even arrested and tried on any charges. They were just butchered.
A number of other officers were killed, including the commandant and
vice-commandant of the fortress, and other officers were thrown into
cells and kept there for months without even the farce of a trial.
Kronstadt set up a republic in late May and by mid-June the orgy was in
full swing. The civil population looted and robbed, and the soldiers
and marines aided and abetted them heartily. Once a band of looters
sacking a warehouse were arrested by the militia police after a lively
shooting match and put in jail. Cases where the militia actually
arrested thieves were so rare in Russia last summer that this one
received considerable newspaper publicity. The papers were obliged to
record that, a few hours after the men were arrested, a crowd of armed
soldiers and sailors demanded the liberation of the prisoners. Of
course their demands were honored.
The provisional government was able to keep Finland in partial check
by threatening to withhold cereals and other provisions from her in
case of secession. But Kronstadt, being a fortress, had plenty of
provisions, as plenty goes in Russia these days. Kronstadt had more
food and fuel than Petrograd. That is why her orgy was able to last so
long. It lasted until the days of the July revolution, when thousands
of loyal troops were recalled from the front to restore order, many
of the ringleaders of the mutinous troops were expelled from the army
and several regiments were disbanded in disgrace. The orgy still goes
on to a certain extent in the fortress, and no one knows yet how far
disaffection among the naval forces went.
The Kronstadt Soviet, or Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates,
covered itself with glory during the existence of the republic. The
Soviet, or one of its committees, undertook the solving of the housing
problem as follows: The committee went all over the town and inspected
houses and apartments. They inquired in each case at the different
places the amount of the rent, and then they proceeded to cut down
the rent, one-third to one-half. They didn’t say anything about the
reduction to the landlord, but they passed the word around to the
Tavarishi. A perfect exodus of renters out of their apartments into
bigger and better ones ensued. Everybody moved, and when rent day came
around and the landlords or their agents called on the new tenants they
were calmly told: “Not on your life is my rent thirty rubles a month.
It is fifteen rubles, and if you don’t take that you will get nothing.”
The landlords appealed to the Soviet, but all the satisfaction they got
there was a threat of confiscation. “You’ve robbed the working class
long enough,” said the Soviet. “We ought not to pay you any rent, and
perhaps after a while we won’t.”
From one point of view not the least outrage the Soviet perpetrated
on the helpless population of Kronstadt was an attempt to talk it to
death. There is a fine cathedral in Kronstadt and in front of it, as
is customary in Russia, a large open square. In this square the Soviet
erected a speaker’s stand and every day the population, or as much of
it as could get into the square, assembled and listened for hours to
fervid oratory. The people had to come because the Soviet ordered them
to, and very likely they enjoyed themselves at first. Even in Russia,
however, a continual political meeting, carried on three months at a
time, every day at 5 p. m., must be a trial.
Tomsk was another city where the right of small peoples to govern
themselves was demonstrated last summer. In the newspapers of June
8, old style, appeared a telegram from Tomsk to Minister-President
Kerensky, the Minister of Justice and the all-Russian Council of
Deputies, Workmen and Soldiers, then in session in Petrograd. The
telegram was sent by the commanding general of loyal regiments and it
read in part thus: “Criminal and mutinous soldiers in company with
other criminal elements of the population have organized themselves
into bands and have set themselves systematically to pillage and
assassination. Under the flag of anarchy they have looted the banks,
the shops, business houses of all kinds. They were prepared to murder
all heads of public organizations, and declared that they would next
move on to other towns and cities and continue their robberies there.”
The telegram went into more particulars of these outrages, and closed
by saying that martial law had been established in Tomsk on the 3d
of June, 2,300 persons had been arrested and the city, thanks to the
presence there of a few brave and loyal troops, was now in order.
Thus the tale could be continued. Finland, usually a peaceful, orderly,
law-abiding and intelligent country, by far the most enlightened in
Russia, lost its head completely over the right of small peoples’ idea.
Helsingfors has seen days of violence in the old years of rule by fire
and sword. But Finland has never answered with fire and sword, but by
the most intelligent kind of passive resistance. With the revolution
passive resistance became violence. Most of this, it is true, came from
soldiers and sailors of Sveaborg, the island fortress of Helsingfors.
Murder of officers went on there and in the town also. Marines pursued
their hapless officers through the streets, cutting them down with
swords and knives, shooting them and killing them by torture before the
eyes of women and children. The townspeople did no such shocking deeds
as that, but there were bloody strikes and many riots, and finally the
attempt to open an illegal diet and to force a separation from the
empire. Kerensky handled that situation very well, sending the best
men in the government to Helsingfors, where some kind of a truce,
temporary no doubt, but a truce, was patched up.
Kerensky’s fiercest battle last summer was with Ukrania, where a
real government was established. It was real enough at all events to
force a kind of recognition from the central Provisional Government.
Ukrania is an enormous territory in the south of Russia. It extends
into southwestern Siberia and southward to the Black Sea. Odessa is
its principal port, and within its borders are many important cities.
Kiev is one of the largest of these. About 35,000,000 people inhabit
the Ukraine, as it is called in Russia. The people are not Russian,
strictly speaking. They are Slavs, but they have a language of their
own, a literature, a culture. They have been Russian subjects for
nearly 300 years.
The Ukraine is a self-contained country and could be made a very rich
one. It is rich already in agricultural resources, the “black earth”
of certain regions producing the most splendid crops of wheat and
other grains. The fruits of the Ukraine are the best in Russia, and
the vineyards furnish grapes for excellent wines. Russia would be poor
indeed without this country.
Last June the Ukranian Rada, or local diet, voted to establish a
republic, restore the old language and customs, and cut themselves off
absolutely from the Russian empire. They actually created a provisional
government on the spot. Some of the more moderate members of the Rada
favored remaining in the empire as a federated state having complete
autonomy, and this was finally accepted, I believe, by the majority.
But immediately the Bolsheviki of the south began to clamor for
separation, and the Ukranians in the army began to show dangerous signs
of unrest. A congress of Ukranian armies was held in Kiev in the middle
of June, in which it was decided that the armies of the south and
southwest ought to be completely and exclusively made up of Ukranians.
If this had been done the Rada would have been in a perfect state to
dictate terms of any kind to the Russian Provisional Government.
As it was there was considerable dictating done. The military Rada,
meeting in June in Odessa, served notice on the Provisional Government
that unless the Ukranian soldiers were prevented from forming their own
regiments no more soldiers of their force would be sent to the front.
The Ukranian regiments were formed, some of them in Petrograd, and the
strains of the national hymn, “Ukrania is not dead,” were heard on the
streets, played by military bands or sung by soldiers, almost as often
as the classic “Marseillaise.”
Kerensky made a frantic dash to Odessa, to Kiev and other cities of
the Ukraine. He took with him Tereshtshenko, Minister of Foreign
Affairs, and one or two other ministers, and they met the new
provisional government in parley. The result was that Kerensky made a
complete surrender, recognized the provisional government--at least
informally--and agreed that the Ukraine should be a separate state.
There was a perfect tempest of protest when the ministers returned
to Petrograd. The rest of the ministry declared that Kerensky had
overstepped his authority in committing the entire government to a
policy which ought to have been left to the constituent assembly to
decide. They said that his act, entered into without the knowledge or
consent of the full government, was illegal. Perhaps it was; but it
stood, and all the most aggrieved ministers could do about it was to
resign.
The greatest task ahead of Russia is federation, and she probably will
in the end learn how to give autonomy to her states and establish a
central government which will bind all the states together in happy
union. But she has years of strife and monumental effort ahead of
her before the task is done. The wisest men in Russia--even Prof.
Miliukoff, who lived for years in the United States--appear to be in
a complete fog on the subject of federation. Half the wise men want
an empire like Great Britain or Germany, with practically all the
power in one central governing body. The other half see nothing ahead
but dismemberment of the empire. Nobody apparently can see Russia as
another United States.
I believe that part of our responsibility, after the war--perhaps
before that time comes--will be to teach Russia how to establish a
peaceful federation on republican lines. Russia perhaps does not need
to be taught democracy. When she emerges from this present anarchy she
may be trusted to establish a safely democratic civilization.
CHAPTER XXIII
WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD?
Will the German army get to Petrograd and Moscow? The answer to this
question is, they probably can if they want to, but it is hardly
possible that they do. If they have that object, and if they succeed
in taking Moscow it will simply add one more to the psychological
blunders committed by the German government since the war began. The
disorganized Russian army might not pull itself together and fight
for Petrograd, but the army and the people would fight to the death
for Moscow. It is their holy city, their crown of glory, their dream.
Moscow is Russia, and one who has never seen it knows not the Russian
people.
Petrograd is a modern European city, built by Peter the Great in the
early part of the eighteenth century and by Catherine II, also called
“the Great,” in the latter half of the same century. Peter, who would
have been a master man in any century and in any country, whether born
in a palace or a farmhouse, was all the more a marvel because he was
a Russian, born at a time when the Russian people were still medieval
and still oriental. Peter didn’t allow the fact that he was heir to an
oriental autocracy to interfere with his ambitions or his activities.
He left the golden palace in the Kremlin, left Moscow, the capital,
and sacred heart of the empire, left Russia altogether, and went off
to become a day laborer in the shipyards of England and Holland. Peter
learned what he could in a short time and went back to establish
western civilization in Russia. He chose the site of his new capital
much as the United States Steel Company chose the site of Gary, Ind.,
for its nearness to a good harbor, its easy access to trade routes and
its fine front view of the best commercial centers. Peter called his
city “a window toward Europe.”
Petersburg, as it was styled by the half German Peter, was a more
stupendous piece of engineering than Gary, Ind., although the steel
town is one of the greatest triumphs of engineering this country can
boast. It was built on a marsh which nowhere rose above the muddy
waters of the Neva more than two or three feet, and in most places was
partially or wholly submerged. That marsh never has been completely
drained. When, in 1765, St. Isaac’s Cathedral was built to replace
a small wooden church of Peter’s time, they first had to drive over
twelve hundred huge piles into the soft ground. Of the 40,000 workmen
who toiled under Peter’s direction to create the first Petrograd a
majority died from exposure and cold, and of fevers bred in the miasmas
of the bogs.
Catherine, who became czarina a little more than half a century later,
vastly improved the city. She enlarged it, erecting many splendid
palaces and public buildings, and bringing in a vast amount of western
culture in the way of libraries, art galleries and theatres. The
monuments of Peter and Catherine are the most conspicuous objects in
the capital. The ghosts of Catherine and Peter may be said to walk in
every street in Petrograd. But the Russians, for all their admiration
for their greatest monarchs, have little real love for the city they
built.
The ghost of Ivan the Terrible walks through the streets of Moscow;
nevertheless, the Russians love the place as the Mohammedans love
Mecca. It is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and one
of the strangest. It has hundreds of churches, so gorged with art
treasures and with gold, silver and jewels that it dizzies the mind
to contemplate them. It has the ancient wall, foliage-hung, that
enclosed the Moscow of the thirteenth century, and it has the Kremlin,
or fortress, which antedates the town. Inside the Kremlin is the old
palace of the rulers of Russia built, in part, centuries before they
became czars. The first Kremlin palaces were built by the dukes of
Moscow in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Some of the most beautiful of the treasure churches of the Kremlin were
built by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. One of these,
just outside the walls, the Cathedral of St. Basil, is a gem of such
radiance supreme that the half-mad Ivan determined that it should never
be surpassed. When it was finished he called the architect to him and
asked him if he thought he could ever design a better church. The
architect, in the pride and joy of his achievement, modestly said that
he thought he might. “You never will,” said the terrible Ivan, and he
had the man’s eyes burned out with red-hot irons.
In the great square in front of the Kremlin still stands the high place
of execution where Ivan and the other almost as terrible czars tortured
and slew their victims. In a side street still stands the wonderful
golden house which was the home and seat of the Romanoff boyars, and
where the first (or second) czar of Russia was born. Moscow is the very
symbol of czardom; nevertheless the Russians love it as their heart.
Germany might send her armies there, but they could no more take it, or
hold it, than they could take and hold Washington. Inside the Kremlin
walls lie heaped thousands of bronze cannons, bright and beautiful
as snakes, all decorated with eagles and N’s and ambitious mottoes.
Napoleon Bonaparte left them there when he fled, defeated and routed by
the Russians, only to be still more soundly defeated by snow and storm
and bitter cold. Those cannon are evidence indeed of the invincibility
of Moscow.
Germany ought to know that a march on Moscow, however easy, would
result in unifying the Russian army against the foe. Perhaps Germany
does not know this, for she seems not to know anything about the hearts
and minds of any people. The mechanics of nationality she knows and
understands. The psychology of it she never understands. However, I
do not believe that Germany’s recent attack and partial conquest of
the islands before Riga are a prelude to a march on the capital or on
Moscow. What Germany probably wants is the splendid loot to be found in
Courland and Esthonia. Riga, which is a city of 400,000 inhabitants,
is, next to Petrograd, the most important port on the Baltic Sea. Out
from Riga go immense exports of timber, flax and hemp, linseed and many
cereals. The country east and south of Riga produces these things in
great quantity, and Germany needs them in her business just now, and
needs them badly enough to risk a few of her ships and men to get them.
Germany is not after conquest, this trip; she is after food and fuel
and supplies. A little south of Riga lie the Governments of Kovno,
Vilna and Minsk, and a little south and west lies Russian Poland,
already partially in German hands. I traveled through part of that
country last summer and watched through the train windows vast fields
of rye and wheat, and thousands of acres of potatoes. I did not see
many sugar-beet fields, but they lie somewhere in that region--hundreds
of thousands of acres of them, already harvested or waiting to be
harvested. And Germany is hungry for those harvests.
There may be other reasons why Germany is pounding so desperately at
the defenses of Riga. Not very far away, to the north, washed by the
same Baltic Sea, lies the grand duchy of Finland, the one province of
the Russian empire which has shown friendliness to Germany. Finland
is also the one province which has already declared its unalterable
determination not to belong further to the Russian empire. Finland
wishes to set up a separate government and to be an independent state.
At least the mass of the people, expressing themselves through a
Socialist majority in the local Diet, has declared for this policy.
It would be tremendously to the advantage of Germany to have the
big Russian empire split up into separate states, and the German
government has worked assiduously to encourage the Finnish people in
their secession policy. Finland is such a Mecca for German agents, and
so many Finns are in the pay of these agents, that the provisional
government last July practically shut the grand duchy off, marooned
it, so to speak, from the rest of the empire. A traveler cannot go
to Finland from Russia without special permission obtained from the
war ministry. A resident of Petrograd could not go down to one of the
numerous and charming Finnish seaside towns near the capital, even for
a week-end visit, without such a permit. I have spent some time in
Finland and know a great many people in Helsingfors, the capital. I
tried to get a permit to stop in Helsingfors on my way out of Russia,
but the war ministry refused to grant the permit.
When the traveler left Russia for England or the United States, for
any country, for that matter, he had to take a certain train leaving
Petrograd at 7.30 o’clock in the morning, and he left that train just
once before he reached the frontier. That once is at Beli Ostrov,
for the customs inspection. After that the traveler was a prisoner
in his train until he reached Tornea, where he was finally inspected
and convoyed across a narrow stretch of water to Sweden. That was the
attitude of the Russian provisional government toward Finland.
The grand duchy is rightly considered one of the greatest menaces to
the future integrity of the empire. It is rightly considered by Germany
a hope for the future of Germany, and it may very well be that the
German navy expects and hopes to follow up the conquest of the Baltic
port of Riga with a conquest of the Baltic port of Helsingfors. Finland
detests Russia to such an extent that she is apparently blind to the
danger of a friendship with Germany. For fifty years she has hated and
feared Russia, and she apparently cannot get it into her head that the
thing she hated and feared has gone forever. I have observed this state
of mind in Poles as well as Finns. They have hated Russia so long that
they cannot stop all at once. The Finns have hated Russia so hard that
they would not even look at the Russian soldiers quartered on them by
the old government. I spent the winter of 1913 in Helsingfors, and
it was one of the sights of the place to me to watch the Finns cut
the Russians in the street every day. A regiment of Russians marched
through the streets, bands playing, swords clanking, feet tramping,
a gorgeous sight. But the soldiers might as well have been invisible
phantoms for all the notice taken of them by the Finns. They walked
quietly along, attending to their business, conversing or chatting with
their neighbors, never looking at the Russians. In fact, it was a point
of honor with the Finns never to look at a Russian. As for speaking
to one, knowing him, inviting him to his house, a Finn who did such a
thing would have been ostracized. Even the smallest children knew that.
This being the state of mind of the Finns, it is explainable in a
measure why, in order to wring their independence from Russia now,
they are willing to run a very great risk of being absorbed or badly
exploited by the Germany of after the war. They became part of the
Russian empire willingly, having been on very bad terms for a number
of years with their old over-lord, Sweden. This was in 1801. Then the
Czar made a solemn compact with Finland, both for himself and his
heirs, that the country should have almost complete autonomy. It was
to maintain its own army, which would never be called upon to serve on
Russian soil, but should defend the Finnish coast and border in case
Russia was involved in war.
Finland was to have her own coinage, postal systems, schools, courts,
language and her own local diet. The Czar retained the right of vetoing
legislation, the right to collect foreign customs and other imperial
rights. Almost every promise made in that treaty has been broken by
the czars of Russia, especially by Nicholas II, now in Siberia. This
Nicholas tried to break the treaty altogether, abolish it, but the
Finns were too intelligent, too clear-headed and too united to let
him do it. Their resistance to his tyrannous treachery is a thrilling
story in itself. Finland has never broken any part of her treaty with
Russia, but now she wants to abolish the treaty. The contention is that
the treaty was made with the czars of Russia, and, now that there are
now no more czars, the treaty has ceased to hold good. Finland is full
of German agents, and they must have invented this brilliant piece of
reasoning and taught it to the Finnish Socialists. At all events, they
must have fostered it with might and main, and perhaps the German navy
believes that a visit to Helsingfors would convert the whole country to
it.
There is even a better reason why the German navy has been pounding
away in the Gulf of Finland, and why in the spring it will pound again.
Germany seeks to separate still further Russia and her allies. There
are only three ways by which Russia can communicate with Europe and
America. One of these ways is across Siberia and the Pacific Ocean, a
long distance. Another way, through Archangel, is a summer way only.
The third and shortest way is through Finland and Sweden. If Germany
can partially take Finland and seize the railroad which leads to
Sweden, and there is only one main line of railroad, she can cut Russia
off from her allies very effectively. Perhaps her next step would be to
interfere, by means of submarines, with Russia’s other outlet in the
Pacific.
CHAPTER XXIV
RUSSIA’S GREATEST NEEDS
It would be a very terrible thing for democracy and the world’s peace
if the Allies, observing the anarchy into which Russia has fallen,
should relax any of their efforts to help her back to a sound military,
economic and social foundation. The first impulse is to beseech the
United States government to refuse to loan money to such an unstable
government, and even to decline to send Red Cross relief to a people
who will not try to help themselves. But second thought reveals the
unwisdom of deserting Russia in her crisis, however wilfully the crisis
was brought on. We must loan money to Russia even though we lose the
money. We must send her food and supplies even though they be received
without much gratitude. For the sake of democracy, to which revivified
and regenerated Russia has a world to contribute, we must help her now.
The task will not be as difficult as the surface facts indicate. Russia
is rapidly approaching the climax of her woe.
Aside from her military situation, bankruptcy is coming if it is not
already there. Bankruptcy for the national treasury, for few taxes are
being paid. Bankruptcy for food, clothing, fuel for all the people
except a few on the farms, and even they will suffer for many things.
Hunger and cold are at the door. The Russian army may rally, may turn
on the Germans and magnificently retrieve its lost reputation as a
fighting force. But there is no way in which the army of producers, the
farmers and the working people, can rout the enemy they have admitted
within the lines.
The farmer class of Russia this year did not produce full crops, and
they refused to send to market a very large proportion of what they did
produce. They hoarded their grain for their own use and some of it at
least they have turned into vodka. In the towns and cities of Russia
prohibition almost prohibits, but the peasant very quickly learned the
art of illicit distilling, and I heard on authority I could scarcely
question that stills have been established in half the villages of
Russia. The statement is borne out to some extent by the fact that
drunkenness among soldiers is increasing, especially in places remote
from the larger cities. In Petrograd I saw little drunkenness, but the
farther I traveled southward into the farming area the more I saw and
heard of it. At the military position in Poland where the Botchkareva
Battalion of Death was stationed, I talked with a soldier who had lived
in America. In the course of our conversation he mentioned that a group
in his regiment had got drunk and were in trouble.
“Where could they get liquor?” I asked.
“Oh, they get it,” he replied. “It’s new and it’s quite horrible, but
they drink it.”
Serious as the grain shortage was, the transportation situation was
still more serious. Food for which Petrograd and Moscow would pay
almost any money, rotted on the ground, spoiled in the half-loaded
freight cars, and wasted in congested way stations for lack of
transportation facilities and for lack of labor. In the industrial
world things were as bad. The working people, blind to their own peril,
had shortened hours of work, had gone slack on their jobs, and had
voted themselves wages far in excess of their productive activities.
The consequences were rapidly accumulating. Factories were closing
down, partly because they could not get coal and partly because of the
extortions of labor. Soon there will be gaunt famine in the land. The
working people will know what it is to go hungry with their pockets
full of money.
When these troubles culminate--and in a few weeks at the most, the
world will stand aghast at Russia’s state--the orgy of the Bolsheviki,
the riot of the dreamers will end. Human nature is the same in Russia
as it is elsewhere, the same as it is in New York or in Emporia,
Kansas. We all know how, when hard times pinch the country, the
Republican party elects its candidates. The people follow their
theorizing and dreaming leaders in good times, but when the hard times
come they turn to the party of strong business men to set them on their
feet again. The full dinner pail argument is going to appeal strongly
to the Russian masses this coming winter, and if the constituent
assembly is postponed until the autumn of 1918, I am confident that the
people will vote in favor, not of a socialistic millennium that will
not work, but for a sane, practical democracy that will.
What Russia needs above all other things is leaders. What the people
of this country must do for Russia is to help her find and develop
those leaders. They are there somewhere. Russia has shown that she
can produce great men and great women, people whom any nation might
be proud to follow. But under czardom the only people permitted to
lead were so corrupt, so reactionary and tyrannical that the Russians
learned to fear and distrust all leadership. When they overthrew
czardom and banished the tyrants and the corruptionists they thought
they could get along without any leaders. The world knows now how fatal
was their mistake, and very soon the blindest of the blind in Russia
will know it.
Russia needs not only political leaders, she needs, even more urgently,
leaders in the economic field. She needs at the present time a business
man of the caliber of Mark Hanna, a man who, with a better ethical
standard, possesses Mark Hanna’s great genius for organization, his
marvelous executive ability. Such a man rarely dazzles the public with
oratorical powers. He wastes little energy in speech. But he knows
exactly what to do. He says to one man “come” and to another man “go,”
and you may depend on it they are precisely the right men at the right
jobs. He says to all about him, “Do this,” and they do it “to the
king’s taste.” Russia needs many such men.
Nobody need be a slave under leaders, responsible and removable, like
that. We were, in the United States, until we got our eyes a little
open. We sink back once in a while still. Witness some of our municipal
governments. But freedom under strong leadership is entirely possible.
In fact, it is the only real freedom there is in the world.
The Russians may have a difficult time achieving it, for they are not
quite the hard-fibered, ambitious, struggling race the English, French
and Americans are. They are fatalistic and dreamy. That is the reason
they endured their autocrats so long. But in the end they will achieve
it.
Russia needs education, and here again America must show her the way.
A public school system on the best lines we have been able to develop
will make over the Russian people in one generation. Ninety per cent.
of the present population is said to be illiterate. The old government
tried within the past ten years to extend the common schools, but with
little effect on illiteracy. The mass of the children were given two
years of schooling, with the object of teaching them at least to read
and write. Most of them barely learned and practically all forgot,
because they were not encouraged to use their tiny bit of knowledge.
Russia has no conception of the public library as we have developed
it. There are libraries, magnificent ones, in the cities. But they are
reference libraries for the learned, not reading and lending libraries
for the masses. I am sure there is not such a thing in Russia as a
children’s library, much less a librarian especially trained and paid
to teach children how to use and to love books. Russia needs schools
to teach children knowledge and she needs libraries very near, if not
directly attached, to the schools. I talked to many people in Russia
about the wonderful Gary schools, in which children work, study and
play their way to fine, strong, thinking manhood and womanhood, and in
every case the response was the same. “We must have schools like that
all over Russia. Will you help us, when the time comes, to organize
them?”
They cannot hope, of course, to go at once into all the intensive
work of the Gary public school system, but they can adopt its general
principles and its duplicate use of the school plant. In this way they
will be able to educate more children in each school house and thus
hasten the day when all the children will be in school. William Wirt’s
next great work may be organizing school systems in new Russia. Having
no old system to replace, he will not meet with the stupid and criminal
obstruction and opposition with which his labors in New York were met.
Russia needs wholesome popular amusements to entertain and instruct her
adult population. If I were to write a detailed list of Russia’s most
pressing needs I should place near the head of the list plumbers and
moving pictures. The empire is back in the dark ages as far as building
sanitation is concerned. That is no small thing, because it affects
both the health and the morals of a people. It affects their manners
also, as any one who ever had to enter the lavatory of a Russian
railroad carriage or station can testify.
They have some moving picture theaters in Russia, but they are poor in
performance and frightfully high-priced. You pay as much to go to the
movies in Russia as you pay to hear a high class symphony concert. I
never saw a 10 and 15 cent motion picture house, nor could I learn that
they existed anywhere in the empire. Mrs. Pankhurst and I went to the
movies one night, paying something like a dollar and a half for our
seats. The play was a long, dreary drama, ending in suicide and general
misery. The acting was poor and the actors fat and elderly. For current
events pictures they presented the Cossack funeral, reeled off at such
a dizzy pace that it looked less like a funeral than an automobile race.
Moving pictures, carefully selected, offered for a small admission
fee, would be a boon to Russia. They would teach the grown people a
thousand and one things they have never had a chance to learn, and
they would perhaps get the Russian mind out of its habit of ingrowing,
self-torturing analysis that leads to nowhere. They would also give
the Tavarishi something to do besides soap box spouting, and their
listeners something more to think about than half-baked social
theories. Because of the great illiteracy of the masses, Russia would
have to introduce into her picture theaters an institution which Spain
has already established. In Spain few people can read the titles and
captions that run through the picture dramas, so each theater has a
public reader, a man with a strong voice and clear enunciation, who
reads aloud to the audience, and also makes any explanations that are
necessary.
I know exactly where moving pictures for the masses could be shown in
Petrograd without waiting for private enterprise to open theaters.
On the west bank of the Neva, not far from the sinister fortress
of Peter and Paul, stands the best and most democratic monument to
Russian enterprise in the capital. This is known as the Narodny Dom,
or People’s House, a combination club house, restaurant, theater
and general meeting place of the working classes, founded by Prince
Alexander of Oldenburg and liberally supported by the late Czar.
They have some fine concerts there, in times of peace, and an excellent
drama for the more intelligent of the workers. Admission prices are
fairly low and the performances good. For the less intellectual there
are certain Coney Island features, and these are so well patronized
that the concessionaries were well on the road to vast wealth. Long
lines of people waited every evening for a turn on the chutes or the
roller coaster. Their absolute hunger for a little amusement, a chance
to laugh and be gay is pathetic to witness.
Another thing Russia needs is the soda fountain. A cold soft drink in
summer and a hot chocolate in winter, easily accessible and cheap,
would do more to take Ivan’s mind off moonshining vodka than all the
laws in the world. Last summer there were times when I would cheerfully
have given a dollar for a frosty glass of soda, any kind, any flavor.
And there were plenty of others in Petrograd of my mind.
The best place to have luncheon in Petrograd is at the officers’
stores in the street which bears the appalling name of Bolshaia
Konnyushennyaia. Here the food, government supplied, is good and it
is sold for something approaching reasonable prices. The best meal
I had every day was luncheon at the officers’ stores. The place is
crowded from 11 to 4 every week-day, military men and their families
predominating. Once, on a hot July day, there appeared on the counter
where hors d’oeuvres were sold a cold delicious drink. It was a sort
of cherry phosphate, and there were glass pitchers and pitchers of it,
literally gallons. It sold for about twenty cents a small glass, and
within half an hour it was gone, every drop. The crowd swarmed to that
counter waving its money in the air, swallowed the cherry phosphate in
one gulp, so to speak, and clamored loudly for more. I remember that
I pleaded almost with tears for a second glass and could not get it.
There is a fortune waiting for the capitalist who will take cold, soft
drinks to Russia, and he will have besides the fortune the additional
satisfaction of bringing hope to the sodden victims of vodka.
An army that will obey orders; a government that will govern; leaders
in business, in transportation, in agriculture and a people willing to
obey those leaders; education, wholesome life. Russia needs all these,
and in her coming mighty struggle to achieve them the whole world of
democracy, and especially our United States, must lend willing and
sympathetic help and guidance.
CHAPTER XXV
WHAT NEXT?
Man must hope. He must believe that his fight is a winning fight or
he must give up in despair. That is why the Americans place credence
in every despatch from Russia which seems to indicate that the
disorganized fighting forces are being whipped into form again. That
is why any hint that Kerensky had not succeeded in restoring order in
the empire was for some time received with incredulity by the reading
public. But why refuse to face the facts? We must face them some time.
In late September I read in one of the newspapers a headline which
stated that the so-called democratic congress then in session in
Petrograd had voted to sustain Kerensky’s demand for a coalition
ministry. The headlines were wrong. What the dispatch really stated
was that the congress had voted not to form any coalition with the
bourgeois element, or with members of the Constitutional Democratic
party. That is, the congress would not support a ministry that had any
non-socialist members in it. “All the power to the Soviets” was retired
as too conservative a slogan. It was “all the power to the Bolsheviki”
then, for that is precisely what the vote in that so-called Democratic
Congress meant.
Since June, 1917, no fewer than six congresses or conventions have
been held in Russia with the object of finding a way out of the chaos
with which the country is threatened. Every one of them was hailed
beforehand as the one which was going to be a revelation of the
intentions and desires of the people. The most important of these was
the all-Russia congress of Soviets held last July, and before that
the preliminary convention to prepare for the constituent assembly.
The one was to decide once and for all whether or not the moderate or
the extreme element in the Soviets was to rule, and the other was to
quiet both elements by showing that the government intended to prepare
a liberal and a democratic constitution for them to debate, amend and
adopt when the time came. Lastly, there was the great Moscow congress
of last August. I don’t remember what the stated object of that
congress was, but it does not matter much. The real object was to find
out which was the stronger man, Kerensky or Korniloff. Kerensky won
by a narrow margin, a very narrow margin. And then they held another
convention, and Kerensky lost.
What will happen next in that distracted country? Into what new morass
are the people being led? Frankly, I do not know. I do not know anybody
who does. The only analogous situation in modern history is that of the
Poland of the eighteenth century. Poland had a government quite as bad
as that of the Russian Soviets, or Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’
Delegates. Instead of being an all-socialist affair Poland’s parliament
was made up entirely of noblemen. These men were so proud, so “free”
in the New Russia sense of the word that they wouldn’t yield on any
question even to a majority vote. A single dissenting voice in their
parliament was enough to kill any measure. The people of Poland had no
more to say about government than the middle class and the rich have
in the Russia of to-day. And when a European war on a limited scale
broke out, and Frederick the Great started the era of frightfulness
which William the last thought he could bring to a triumphant
conclusion, the three great eastern powers of Europe--Russia, Prussia
and Austria--sliced up Poland and handed each of the three monarchs
a piece. Maria Theresa, who ruled the Austria of that day, wanted it
printed in the records that she wept when she took her piece, but she
took it just the same, and Poland has wept ever since.
This could happen to Russia. She could be dismembered and handed
around. But this is not likely to happen. The Allies would never be
so foolish or so cruel as to permit it to happen. Russia could fall
apart and become an aggregation of small separate states, but each one
of those would still have its Soviets, and consequently a government
without stability or permanence. Finland and the Ukraine are two
Russian states which are trying to bring about this end, and they may
succeed, but a dissected Russia would furnish such good material for
future wars that the Allies can hardly afford to consent to it.
Civil war is a fine possibility in Russia just now, except that there
seems to be no one at hand to organize the two forces. The strongest
probability is more guerilla warfare, more street fighting, more
motor trucks loaded with machine guns rushing up and down Petrograd,
more battle, murder and sudden death, and then the reaction. Just
what form the reaction will take nobody knows. But the mad Bolsheviki
know that it is coming, and though they almost court it they also
fear it. They call this inevitable reaction the counter revolution,
and they excuse all their vagaries, their obstinacy, their pig-headed
resistance to a coalition with non-socialists on the ground that
they are fighting the counter revolution. I have heard Americans in
Russia, college professors, business men, correspondents, even members
of American commissions, say: “Don’t blame these people too much for
their radicalism. They are afraid they will lose all they gained by the
revolution. They fear the return of autocracy.”
I can say with all confidence that whatever may happen in Russia, there
is not even the remotest chance of any counter revolution, in the sense
meant by the extremists, nor is there the slightest risk of a return of
autocracy. The autocracy collapsed like a house of cards, and the real
surprise there was in it for the Duma members who deposed Nicholas was
that the thing was so easy. I can imagine Miliukov, Rodzianko and the
others getting together afterward and saying: “Why on earth didn’t we
do this in August, 1914?”
Nobody wants the Czar back unless it is the Romanoff family, and
doubtless each one of the grand dukes believes that if any one came
back it ought to be himself. The only possibility of a return of
monarchy in Russia would result from desperation on the part of the
men who will finally restore order there. The situation may be so bad,
when the time comes to do that, that they may decide on a limited
constitutional monarchy as the best form of government for people who
are not yet ready for self-government. A figurehead king, something
visible to the people and symbolizing government, but a king with
responsible ministers who really rule, is a possibility for Russia. The
inevitable reaction, especially if it is long postponed, may take that
form. I have heard many Russians say so. Some said it with sorrow, some
with satisfaction, but there are plenty of educated and liberal-minded
people in Russia who would welcome it. If it comes, I predict that the
capital of Russia will be moved back to Moscow. The constitutional
monarch, if they have one, may be that brother of the late Czar who is
known in Russia as Michael Alexandrovitch, who as one of the ablest and
most enlightened of the Romanoff family. He is the man who was chosen
by the first provisional government to succeed the Czar when the latter
was deposed, and the governments which have followed have all treated
him with rather especial consideration. Last June he asked permission
to leave turbulent Petrograd and spend the summer in his villa on one
of the Finnish lakes. This permission was granted, and Michael has
lived in Finland in comparative peace and comfort ever since. The
government has not treated any other Romanoff as well.
Most of the grand dukes and grand duchesses are virtually prisoners on
their estates. The Empress Dowager is confined to her estate in the
Crimea, and the government would not even allow her to leave it to bid
her exiled son good-by. But Michael Alexandrovitch must have convinced
the government that he is trustworthy, and he seems to be regarded as
a man who could be brought out of his shadowy background and set up
for the people to call a king, if the worst comes to the worst and
they have to have a king. This is the most severe form the reaction
could permanently take in Russia, as far as I can judge. Of course a
military dictatorship may precede this, but the dictatorship would be a
temporary thing, a war measure to crush the Bolsheviki and bring order
out of chaos. Nobody in Russia, as far as I know and believe, wants a
counter revolution in the sense suggested by the Bolsheviki. But the
counter revolution, as a bogie to be held over the heads of the timid
dreamers and of those half-hearted ones who shrink from bloodshed, is
so useful that the Bolshevik leaders worked it hard all summer and in
the latest developments they were still at it.
The experience of the French people after their revolution is often
cited by the timorous in Russia. It is true that the Bourbons came
back, but the people of France did not call them back. They were
put back by the allied monarchs of Europe, aghast at the spread of
republicanism in the eastern hemisphere. Following the revolution and
the two score years of Napoleonic wars, these rulers got together,
signed a secret agreement that the peace of Europe depended on France
remaining a monarchy, and in 1814 they put Louis XVIII on the throne.
By virtue of giving the French a liberal constitution he kept the
throne until his death, ten years later. The allied monarchs saw to
it that his brother, Charles X, succeeded him, but the allies could
not prevent the French from turning him out of the country within six
years. Nor could they stay the revolution of 1848 which banished Louis
Philippe, the last Bourbon.
Times have changed since the French revolution. Kings have lost most
of their power and almost all of their popularity. They cannot get
together and, under the direction of a Metternich, agree that the peace
of Europe demands that Russia remain an autocracy. They could not do
this even if the old combination, Russia, Prussia, Austria, England
and France, had not been violently disrupted. No country in Europe is
interested in restoring the Romanoff dynasty, unless it be the country
of the Hohenzollerns, and that country is not going to have much to say
about the world’s business for the next few years.
There may be no counter-revolution in Russia, but there will ultimately
be a return to sanity and order. There will be a constitutional
convention, not too soon, it is to be hoped, and in that convention the
voice of the leaders of the moderate parties will be heard. Trotsky
may be a delegate, but so will Prof. Paul Miliukoff, the leader of the
Constitutional Democrats, or Cadets, as they are colloquially known.
All through the riot and turmoil of the summer Prof. Miliukoff and
his colleagues worked steadily to keep the party alive, to keep it
constantly in the foreground as the liberal-conservative force which
might at least share in shaping the new constitution.
There are plenty of wise, sane statesmen, plenty of good citizens in
Russia. They are not very conspicuous just now, and for good reason.
A fine old French abbé who was asked what he did during the Reign of
Terror, replied simply, “I lived.” Avoiding assassination is a career
in itself just now in Russia. Many of the wealthy classes and the
estate owners spent the summer in Finland. Some went to England or
the United States. The peasants in many parts of the empire, falling
in joyfully with the Kerensky plan of dividing up the land, began
the process by sacking and burning the homes of the estate owners,
destroying their fields, orchards and vineyards, and cutting and
burning their forests. These acts, in conjunction with riots and
excesses in the towns have encouraged the intellectual classes to leave
the country and to take no part in politics.
Despite everything that has happened, despite these excesses, there is
no question that the Russian people in revolt have contributed greatly
to the world’s democracy. They will make still greater contributions,
I believe. They have a long road to travel before they establish their
new civilization. The Russians are not as developed as the English, the
French or the Americans. In some respects they are no further developed
than the English of the reign of Henry the Eighth. They ride in street
cars, but the street cars were made in Germany. They use the telephone,
and go up stairs in a lift, but the telephone and the lift came from
Sweden. They have only recently learned to use modern tools with skill
or to farm scientifically. But they are learning very fast. They are
learning to coöperate in their farming faster than almost any other
people in Europe, which to my mind is the most hopeful sign of all.
For I am just as much of a socialist as when I went to Russia in May,
1917, and just as little of an anarchist. I believe that the next
economic development will be socialism, that is coöperation, common
ownership of the principal means of production, and the administration
of all departments of government for the collective good of all the
people. I believe that the world is for the many, not the few. But
Russia has demonstrated that there is no advantage to be gained by
taking all power out of the hands of one class and placing it in the
hands of another. Too much power rests now in the hands of a small
class. But that class never abused its power more ruthlessly than the
Russian Tavarishi did in the 1917 revolution.
The lesson of Russia to America is patient, intelligent, clear-sighted
preparation for the next economic development. Beginning with the
youngest children, we must contrive for all children a system of
education which will create in the coming generation a thinking working
class, one which will accept responsibility as well as demand power,
and into whose hands we can safely confide authority and destiny.
_Printed in the U. S. A._
The following pages contain advertisements of a few of the
Macmillan books on kindred subjects
Russia in 1916
BY STEPHEN GRAHAM
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“A keen, penetrating, sympathetic study of Russian conditions and
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
Russia and the World
BY STEPHEN GRAHAM
_Illustrated, cloth, 8vo, $2.25_
For more than seven years Stephen Graham has been a close student of
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At the outbreak of the present European war Mr. Graham was in Russia,
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But “Russia and the World” is not by any means wholly a war book. It
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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