“I am a Bolshevist,” says the traveler. “Therefore I am your friend. If a capitalist asks you to fill his tea-kettle, what would he give you? Five kopecks. I give you five hundred rubles. Comrade, your country is behind this money. Look! There are the fields and factories on the notes. The capitalists have worked you hard and given you little: I work you little and give you much. That is because I am a Bolshevist. If you will be a Bolshevist you will never want again. My brother, freedom has come to Russia! Uphold the revolution!”
The secret of the success of this plan lay in the fact that the miraculous conferring of wealth was general. The waiters in the station restaurant received a thousand rubles each for a bowl of cabbage soup. Clerks in nearby shops were paid exorbitant sums for various trifles. Drosky-drivers had their belts filled with money. Bath-attendants packed their tips away wrapped up in towels. In fact the whole population of the town, even the beggars on the street-corners, found that their pockets were bulging when that train pulled out. And since practically every one had the currency, there was no one to say it was bad. Therefore, it was considered good—unanimously.
Just as simple as that! They hated capital, yet were glad to have it! Having it, they were Bolshevists.
You of the United States may laugh at all this. But you must consider two things: First, the abysmal ignorance of the Siberian peasantry; and, second, that from the days of Aladdin, Asia has reeked with legends of magic wealth. So you have a whole people who, like that first moujik, are ready to credit any story—especially a story backed by real money. And the American, or other foreigner, who comes along and says that that money is worthless, and dares to laugh at it, may find himself facing a firing-squad.
When the Allies began to arrive in Siberia, and the Bolshevist leaders found it convenient not to remain, they naturally took their money-machines with them. But this worked the new régime no noticeable hardship. For the larger business concerns, realizing the beauty of a plan which permitted each firm to establish its own Treasury, began to print their own currency. And there was a mad riot of money manufacturing.
It was most profitable for the business houses—it had its shortcomings for the public. For instance: You drop in at the balconied “Zolotoi Roq” (this restaurant has been dubbed the “Solitary Dog” by the doughboy), and order your five o’clock stakahn chai. The tea is served in a glass. Your cake is about the size of a political campaign button. The bill is four rubles. Being a newcomer to Vladivostok, you hand out, unwisely, an Imperial twenty-ruble note. The waiter brings back sixteen rubles in change. You count it, give him one, and fold the other fifteen away—carefully.
Farther down the Svetlanskaya, which is the Broadway of Vladivostok, you drop into a shop for a new shaving-stick and a picture-postcard. “Four rubles, pshaltza.” You fish out that fifteen rubles from the “Zolotoi Roq” and offer four of them. The clerk looks at the money, then lifts shoulders and eyebrows. What is the matter? The rubles are good only at the “Zolotoi Roq.” You demur. But for you an argument in Russian is a fearsome thing. “Oh, well, nitchyvo.” (You are acquiring already the native frame of mind!) But as you have no other small change,—you will grow wiser later!—out comes another precious twenty-ruble Imperial.
And what do you get this time? Imperial roubles, good elsewhere in town? Niet! You receive sixteen exquisite new rubles which have just come off the presses of that particular shop, and—they are good only at that shop!
Being an officer, you are blessed with many pockets. So now you plot out, as it were, your khaki façade. The upstairs right hand, as Barrie would say, becomes the Imperial pocket; the upstairs left, is sacred to your American money; while the downstairs, right and left, is given over respectively to the “Zolotoi Roq” and the shaving-stick store. In other words, you are a walking bank for at least two establishments in that town. You are virtually holding some of their money in escrow. You may have it, but eventually it will belong to them. And it will be your fate to wear out your field boots carrying that money back to the place of its redemption. Yes, the light has dawned upon you—your lower pockets are mortgaged!
It is probably at this point in your Siberian monetary education that you wish on your soul that you had brought along your own little printing-press! (And you feel sure that you could have produced better looking rubles than even General Horvat’s American-made ones—with their pictures of a lightning express.) But lacking the press, a supply of cigar-store certificates from home would come in handy. For you learn that the doughboys have already successfully put into circulation the pink coupons of a certain popular cigarette.