Diary of Events
On November 20th, a Peasant’s Congress met at Moscow. There were 300 delegates including several women. Their main demands were for a Constituent Assembly and Nationalization of the land. Sixty followers of Tolstoy were present, and most of the delegates spoke for revolution by peaceful means. Yet on November 27th they were all arrested.
On November 26th, a serious mutiny broke out in the army and fleet at Sevastopol, under the leadership of Lieutenant Schmidt, who had already been expelled from the navy as a Socialist. For a few days the Government suffered panic, but the mutiny was put down without much difficulty.
On November 28th, the post and telegraph hands struck at Moscow for the right of union. The strike extended through the service and paralysed business and Government action. The average wage of the assistants was £5 a month.
CHAPTER III
FATHER GAPON AGAIN
The morning of December 4th was damp and misty, but from an early hour crowds of working people were standing in the slushy snow outside the queer old arrangement of two or three huge sheds which is known as “Salt Town.” It is across the Fontanka canal from the School of Engineers, not very far from the two churches that commemorate the murder of two Tsars. I suppose it has been used at some time or other as a depôt for a Government salt monopoly, and so received its name. In ordinary peaceful years, it now serves as a suitable place for military lectures and engineering experiments such as trained the Russian officers for their overwhelming defeats. But in the stir of revolution, popular meetings of every kind assembled there, because its gaunt white walls and iron roofs would hold such large crowds of work-people under cover, and it supplied accommodation for the coats and goloshes of the intellectual.
I had already attended an immense all-night meeting there to denounce the Government for encouraging the priests and hooligans in their slaughter of the Jews. That very morning of December 4th the school teachers were assembled in one of the halls to discuss whether they too should strike and claim the right of union. But the main interest of the day was centred in the other large hall, where the followers of Father Gapon—the men who had appealed in procession to the Tsar himself on the 22nd of January before—were now gathering together for the first time since that childlike appeal had been answered by massacre.
The meeting was called for ten o’clock in the morning, either to elude the police or to save the expense of light. A Russian meeting is, I think, very seldom less than an hour late, because the Russians are by nature a courteous people, and it is obviously impolite to begin before every one who wishes to come has had a chance of being in time. But long before eleven there was not standing room for another soul, and fifteen hundred men and women were waiting with that inexhaustible Russian patience. Their pallid faces, many of them grim with hunger, looked spectral under the dim twilight of a Russian morning, as I watched them turned upwards in silence to the platform.
Two whispered rumours were going round. One that the Social Democrats intended to break up the meeting; the other, that Father Gapon was not coming after all, and both rumours were almost unique among the rumours I have heard in wars and revolutions, for both were true.
At last the meeting was called upon to declare whom it would have for chairman, and one great shout went up for “Barashoff.” I do not know who Barashoff was, or how he had gained the confidence of the work-people, but his election was at once taken to prove that the Social Democrats present were comparatively few. He came forward—a middle-aged, reddish-bearded man, with no apparent gift of voice or influence—and I do not know what has become of him since, or what prison received him. But there he stood beside me on the platform and announced to the meeting that first they would sing the Hymn of the Fallen, in honour to the victims of that Bloody Sunday when last they had met together.