Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

With the sobranias of Chita filled to overflowing every night, with wealthy and poor seeking to be diverted with vodka, dancing and eating all night, and sleeping most of the day, where is it possible to begin aiding them in the forming of a government of their own? If they are willing to allow various self-seeking usurpers of government to set up military establishments and gradually become local princelings waiting for the time that their power can be sold out to some imperial personage who wishes to restore a throne, why should we quarrel with these princelings or about them—the Semenoffs, the Kalmikoffs and others who are of the same stripe?

That is what the monarchists mean when they talk about the “proper time,” to restore the monarchy—the time when the local chiefs find it convenient to sell out, and there is a buyer handy who knows how to wear a crown—and swing a saber over the heads of the multitude.

Then there will be people in Russia and in that part of the Empire of old known as Siberia, who will rise and assert that the Allies, or the United States, or somebody, betrayed them. They will say that our “watchful waiting,” and our assurances of friendship and our efforts to aid with Red Cross supplies, and our “we don’t know what to do” policy, was merely our waiting for a “proper time” to hand them over to a new Czar.

That is why I say the sobranias with their dirty plays, filled with audiences roaring gleefully over indecency, should have been filled nightly with Siberians threshing out the problems which confronted them. No. They were concerned chiefly with consuming the supply of vodka, with the women who sifted through the port of Vladivostok or came up from Harbin, and with cursing discreetly behind their hands the gentlemanly Japanese officer who went to see the fun. I wonder if some of these Japanese, accused by the Siberians of secretly desiring to capture Siberia, did not realize with Japanese astuteness that the Siberians were conquering themselves. There is no necessity for the Japanese fighting with the Siberians for Siberia, when the Siberians seem to be bent upon eliminating themselves.

Of course the Siberians are friendly to the United States—remember that the American officer whom I relieved in Chita had been threatened with assassination. This officer was a foreigner, who by faithful service in our old regular army, had acquired a commission in our native forces of the Philippines, known as the Philippine Scouts. I am not sure what his nationality was—a Pole or a Ukranian. I think the chief objection to him was the belief in certain quarters in Chita that he was a Jew.

The United States makes a mistake when it sends a Jewish official to represent it in any foreign country which is anti-Jewish, not because the Jew is incapable in any way, but because the nation he represents is forgotten, and only the fact that he is a Jew, is remembered. We of the United States who have no racial or religious prejudices against the Jew find it hard to realize the hatred that is held for them in a country like Russia.

Since my stay in Siberia I am convinced that the hatred of the Jew is neither racial nor religious at bottom. It is based on a resentment of any person or race which is ambitious, which has foresight, which attends to business, and so gets ahead. The Chinese in Siberia are hated as much as the Jews, though not so badly persecuted. This is because, as I understand it, the Chinese attend to their business while the native is sleeping off the effects of liquor or late hours. The Siberian dislikes anybody who represents “unfair competition”—the doing a full day’s work. I believe the Japanese are hated chiefly for the same reason—being up and doing, looking ahead, preparing for the cold winter during the warm summer. All lazy persons resent the man or woman who works. The Siberian was born lazy.

The general Russian workman in a factory will not work a minute more than he is compelled to. I read an article by a Russian woman in this country who ascribes this laziness of her countrymen to an artistic temperament—they need a certain amount of dreaming, and their spiritual condition is better than that of the American, who is always too busy to enjoy life and understand the inner meanings of life. That may be so, but I believe that the average American working man who arrives at his work punctually and quits with the whistle, gets as much of the “inner meanings of life” as the Russian who reaches the factory an hour late, and then wants to assassinate the owner of the factory because the boss scolds the Russian for being late. Maybe this yearning for assassination is indicative of understanding the inner meaning of life.

To disagree in Siberia means to desire to kill. That is one reason why the sobranias were full of rollickers every night in Chita. To sit in a theater beside a man who is laughing at a play while you yourself laugh at the same things he does, prevents anything in the nature of a disagreement. Two men can get drunk together with a certain degree of safety, but in Siberia if they should meet sober and begin to talk about government, they might fight a duel. Perhaps they would rather remain alive than to attempt to agree on how the nation should be conducted.

While I was in Siberia I read in an American newspaper that an American member of Congress demanded information as to why the United States was not coöperating with the Russian Zemstvos in organizing a nucleus for a representative Russian government. If he had been with me the day I read of his demand, I could have taken him and shown him a zemstvo so drunk that its members did not know their first names. The only way in which anybody might have coöperated with them, would have been to buy them a bottle of vodka. This was their way of killing time while waiting for our government to make up its mind on Siberia.