Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

He was also in sympathy with the Bolshevists, having as his only argument in their favor, the fact that they were “good people.” Now this man, being a conductor, had a considerable influence over such peasants as he met, for as a railroad man he travelled much, and as an “educated man,” had read much. Many gave heed to what he said. And compared to thousands of Siberians that I encountered, his intellect was amazingly powerful.

Yet at home I found people who felt that the peasants of Siberia know what they are doing, and are actuated by a desire to create a democratic government, and that in a short time they will, and operate it. But Siberia will fall a prey to some autocrat, who will rule it by the sword, independently of Petrograd. Such a vast and such a rich territory, peopled with human beings in the darkness of the Middle Ages, can have no other fate.

Our progress was delayed for various reasons, the chief one being the fact that wrecks occurred ahead of us with startling frequency. As a matter of fact, Bolshevists, or Bolshevist sympathizers, or railroad men in Bolshevist pay, were causing the wrecks. It was all a system of sabotage, and being done to hamper the Allies in every way from opposing the Bolshevists who were fighting.

And as we came into the yards of Manchuria Station, or Mandchuli, at about daylight one morning, switches were thrown in such a way that our train, laden with medical supplies for Russian wounded and sick, and with one car full of women nurses, was derailed, and put on three tracks. The immunity which we might have claimed from being wrecked, was lost because we had combined with a Czech military train.

Our Czech commandant took a squad of soldiers to the station, and demanded the man who had derailed us. But the station-master asserted that the culprit had disappeared. So no vengeance was taken.

It was forty below zero that morning. The shaggy camels that passed us, appeared to wear great white coats, for every hair on their bodies stood out straight, covered with frost. So we had breakfast in the station restaurant, and waited through the day for the railroad men to get us back on the rails.

I found the American officer on Intelligence duty at that station, living in a Russian home, and we went and lunched with the Railroad Engineers of the Stevens contingent. One of them was an excellent cook, and we had a splendid meal, the prize of the household being a large jar of gooseberry jam. The house was fairly good, but despite its massive proportions, cold as Greenland. And in the time I spent in Siberia, I never found a house or a hotel that was comfortably warm, even when I was clad in the heaviest clothing, except the house occupied by Colonel Morrow in Khabarovsk.

We arrived in Chita, Trans-Baikal, thirteen days after leaving Vladivostok. As I looked out that morning, over a drear landscape partly concealed by frozen fog, I had in mind the thousands of exiles who had marched overland to Chita, for the city in the old days had been a distributing point for convict labor destined for the mines to the north.

It was fifty degrees below that morning. I saw a low, white plain, shut in on three sides by hills, studded with huts. The huts were marked by white pillars of steam rising straight into the sky—warm air escaping from the chimneys. The station door was shrouded with ice, and whenever it opened there was a burst of white steam outward, but upon entering there was no steam inside—only a warm, odoriferous air. Great icicles over the door, some of them a foot through, are characteristic of public buildings in that country during the cold weather.

We learned that we had passed through the city station of Chita, and had come three versts beyond to “Pervia Chita,” or First Chita, that being the name of the first station built as the building of the road progressed toward Vladivostok.