Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

But if people seem to prefer being filthy to being clean, when the desirable condition calls for but little effort, it is obvious that in normal times, they were inherently filthy. And I experienced filth, day after day, in trains, railway restaurants and hotels, which I cannot hint at, much less describe. Sanitation is the beginning of civilization. When conductors on trains, and passengers on trains, will create and permit without protest, a condition of squalor and unsanitary conditions such as I saw, and which the wildest animal avoids, there is something wrong mentally with such a people. And when a suggestion that conditions might be improved is met by a stare of amazement that anyone should find these things revolting, one begins to wonder if government by a knout was not actually needed. But we know that the knout, censorship, repression, and the barriers against outside ideas and education are responsible for these conditions. These people are victims of a government that was criminal.

While observing the peasants, and while discussing them in this book, I have tried to keep an open mind. I have not hesitated to reveal their worst side. I am willing to bring out in full force their exasperating habits of dilatoriness, their slow mental and physical gear which we describe as laziness, that we may realize their problem, and our problem in aiding them.

There is another side to the shield. It is my opinion that the only hope which Russia has for regeneration, no matter how long it may take to do the work, lies in the peasant class. Not the actual stolid peasant, but in men and women from the peasant class. That is the difference and distinction in my whole statement. Breshkovsky, “Grandmother of the Revolution” is of the peasant class, but not peasant-minded.

There are among the millions of peasants in Russia, men and women who are beyond their class in mental attainments. That ability may be latent, but it will rise to the top as surely as water seeks its own level. This quality of genius runs through the whole human race in all lands.

The genius of Russia under the old régime could only express itself in protest against government, which was the biggest job at hand for the genius. And this expression frequently came in the form of literature. When Tolstoy and Gorky extolled the peasant, one a noble and the other a commoner, both were merely praying that the latent genius in a few individuals have a fair chance to come to flower. They were fighting oppression, though they gave us an idea that if the peasants all had a chance, all would reveal the quality of genius. That hope is absurd, in Russia or elsewhere. What we want, in Russia and at home, is that the peasant-minded people have comfort and justice though they persist in remaining peasant-minded, and that when an individual reveals extraordinary ability, he may develop it, and not be broken on the wheel for daring to lift himself out of the rut.

My ideal is not a nation of peasants by any means. But I do insist that a large mass of our own population prefers to be peasant-minded, and fights against being anything else. There is but a small proportion of our population which demands art in literature, pictures, or anything else. There is a mental Bolshevism all about us at home. There is a clearly defined hostility against mental accomplishments, expressed in many newspaper cartoons, in fiction, and in the utterances of demagogues. Our small-town hoodlum who resents the well-dressed stranger as a “dude,” and despises good grammar and evidences of an education, is at heart a Bolshevist—he is hostile to the “upper class” just as is the Siberian peasant. The man in the motor car, who has no consideration for the pedestrian, is at heart a Cossack. Both classes are in a dangerous frame of mind.

Here at home we urge our young folks to get educations. Then we joke about the college professors who get less in wages than laborers. We all like to see labor well-paid, but while teachers get starvation wages, we cannot consistently argue the value of education. The college professor may say he gets more out of life than the laborer—what the laborer says to his children is the thing we must consider. We must be careful that we do not build up a class-war based on an ignorance which has no ideas of relative values, which is the trouble in Siberia. The Bolshevists turned the janitor of a college into president of the college, and made the president do duty as janitor. Without hatred for education, the Siberians could not do such a thing.

When I assert that the salvation of Russia lies in the hands of the peasant class, I mean the peasant who has brains and wants to develop them, not the peasant who wants to kill everybody wearing a white collar. I do not mean that Russia should be led by the professional agitator or the demagogue, or the silk-stockinged revolutionist, but men who spring from the people and have the balance of sanity.

Russia will develop its own Lincoln; but before that time, I believe it will have a national Napoleon. The latter will do it a service by first coördinating and stabilizing the national spirit, and bringing the shattered remnants of the vast land under one government. That is the only kind of ruler the people will understand and obey now. If they had to-day an ideal president directing the country under an ideal form of government, he would probably be sacrificed by the warring factions before he could get his program of regeneration under way.

We must bear in mind the fact that the mass of the Russian people got their official freedom in the days of our Civil War, and their actual freedom as recently as when the Czar’s government was overthrown. They do not know what to do with it yet. They are literal minded, and when we speak to them of equality in rights and of opportunity, they interpret it to mean equality in all things—one man as good as another, one man as wise as another, one man as rich as another. They do not understand political equality. To disagree with them is fatal if they have the power to kill.