I
Take your atlas, find Siberia, locate Vladivostok in the northwest corner of the Japan Sea and trace your finger inland. Follow the Trans-Siberian railroad. One branch will travel upward along the Amur River, as though in the United States the traveler started from Boston, went northward and down the St. Lawrence, to reach Buffalo. Another branch of the Trans-Siberian drops in a southwesterly direction toward Harbin, Manchuria, then up to Chita, away across the steppes to Lake Baikal and beyond, thousands of miles beyond, almost in a straight line into European Russia. Transposing Vladivostok for Boston, Harbin would be Binghamton, Chita would be Buffalo, Lake Baikal would be Lake Michigan, Irkutsk would be Chicago. Further west Omsk would be Lincoln, Nebraska, Ekaterinburg would be Denver, the Urals would be the Rockies, Petrograd would be San Francisco, Moscow would be Los Angeles. The geographical similarity of the two countries is extraordinary. Only Siberian distances are three times as great and Siberian populations one-thirtieth as large.
If any lasting gain is totaled from the great Russian bedlam, emphasized in it prominently must be the opening of Siberia to the world. As boys and girls, and even as grown men and women, we thought of Siberia as an arctic waste of snow and ice, ravaged by man-hunting wolves, dotted with world-lost exile mines, peopled by a strange semi-barbaric race in fur and lambskin and dwelling in half-real dusk beneath the bondage of the knout.
It is only the winter picture which has come to us; then only such a picture as a Russian traveler in America might carry home by describing conditions around a Hudson Bay trading post in late January.
Siberia is a pleasant, smiling land, a land of sunshine and blue distances, of green fields and wild flowers. It is a land of bowered forests, baked prairies, heat-soaked deserts, babbling brooks, plashing, purling rivers.
And the eye of mortal man since Eden has never gazed upon such sunsets!
It has great cities with paved streets, electric car lines, pretentious stores, massive theaters, imposing mansions. And a high-caste Siberian Tartar knows how to make his residence imposing. Many of the great railroad stations, when lighted and viewed at a distance by night, resemble the marble halls which come to us in dreams. But alas, Siberia has its little earth-lost country villages—its “small towns” too—its Podunk Corners and its Gilberts Mills, its East Gileads and its Hastings Crossings. Russian writers have dwelt unduly upon peasant life in these earth-lost villages—as though an American Tolstoi drew a picture of contemporaneous American life solely from Rupert Hughes’s “Carthage” or Sinclair Lewis’s “Gopher Prairie”, eliminating and ignoring entirely Boston, New York, Palm Beach, New Orleans, San Francisco. There are many intermediate steps in Russian living between six log huts clustered on a prairie where half-wild males and females rear families like animals, and the Imperial Ballet at St. Petersburg or the Grand Mosque at Moscow, as both existed before the cataclysm.
In the heart of Eastern Siberia is Great Baikal, a lake sixty miles long and twenty to thirty miles wide. On the northwest corner of this lake, back on the Irkut River, lies the city of Irkutsk. In size it compares with Springfield, Massachusetts, or Cincinnati, Ohio. The river flows through the metropolis. The railroad station and freight yards are set upon the western bank, the main part of the city upon the eastern. Connecting the two is a dilapidated floating bridge of gray, weather-beaten, flood-racked timbers.
Irkutsk was the farthest western point reached by Japanese or Yankee troops in the recent Intervention. From Irkutsk westward to the Urals, the Germans were checkmated from shipping submarines in sections across the Trans-Siberian for submersion in the Japan Sea and “unrestricted” warfare in the Pacific, by a stout little army of pro-Ally Slavs who should have a place in history with Ulysses on his Odyssey and Leonidas at the Pass.
From Russian internment camps under Kerensky “the Talker”, the Czecho-slovaks—pronounced “Checko-slow-vacks”—started for France, via Siberia, Japan, America, the Atlantic. The Germans, through Lenine, heard and said they should not go. France said they should go and supplied the money. The Czechs were willing, eager, to go. So they fought their way forward, holding the Trans-Siberian as they moved, to journey no farther than Vladivostok.
But there were no Lusitania horrors in the Pacific.