Even more significant than the printed daily papers were the satiric and illustrated sheets, which appeared as suddenly and in greater numbers. Perhaps the best managed and most constant was the Observer (Zritel), but the Signal (same word in Russian) was almost as good, and below them came the Arrows (Streli) and the Libel (Strekoza). The Vampyre (same word in Russian) came later, and so did the Sulphur (Jupel), which was the most artistic of them all, but so bloody and savage that it survived only three numbers. The character of nearly all the cartoons was, indeed, bloody and savage rather than humorous. The satire was hardly ever kindly, as it has become in England now that politics are so seldom a matter of life and death. Sometimes, it is true, in those early weeks, Witte was treated with a raillery that might be called gentle. He would be represented as a cook trying in vain to make the dinner come right; or as a chemist watching an empty bottle labelled “Constitution;” or as a brood hen sitting on an egg with the same label; or as an old nurse cherishing a sickly little figure; or as an acrobat balancing on a slack-rope, while Trepoff held one end, and the red flags of the revolution surged below; or as a cunning old tailor threading his needle to stitch up the two-headed eagle, which lay dead or stuffed on his board, while an inverted imperial diadem held the flat-iron, and the candle stood in a vodka bottle representing Witte’s spirit monopoly. But as a rule the design was far more savage, and the savagery grew as the reaction became stronger, till after the Days of Moscow all the cartoons might have been printed in blood, and most appeared in that colour. Then we were shown the skeleton of death stalking through the devastated streets, or the skeleton of hunger crawling upon the stage from the flies, or the Kremlin floating in blood like an island, or Dubasoff as butcher in a human meat-shop, or foul monsters brooding over the corpses beneath the gallows of freedom. Right through its past history, all Russian art that counts has been either horrible or melancholy—a thing of skeletons and vampires and desolation. The subjects chosen by painters are cruel scenes from war or history, and dreary views of the steppe. The subjects chosen by writers are almost invariably sad. It is part of the unbroken melancholy which pervades all Russian life, and is no less visible on the faces of the people than in the sound of their music. And all this sorrow and savagery and blood lie at the door of a Government which has kept the people poor and depressed, exposed to the constant peril of the scourge, the prison, and secret death.
WITTE AND THE CONSTITUTION.
Witte: “I’ve bought a pipe, and now I can’t play it.”
From Sprut.
On the reactionary side, I think, the only satiric paper was the Harlequin (Chout) and though it was fairly clever, there is an eternal law which forbids the service of satire or letters or any other form of art to the enemies of freedom.
The crowd of Liberal and revolutionary papers was but the visible sign of a grace that took many forms. In reality, perhaps, there were even more parties than papers, and certainly there were many parties that had no paper to represent them. The Anarchists, as I have shown already, could hardly be called a party, at all events in the towns, and no paper was occupied with the abolition of the State as a fetish, when all were insisting upon the strengthening of the State as against the government of the few. But even such a large party as the Social Revolutionists had no organ of their own. Next to the Social Democrats, they were the most powerful of the advanced parties. Probably they were even more numerous, but their organization was not so complete, and as they devoted themselves mainly to the peasants, their voice was not so loud in cities. They were the Terrorists of the time; they were what Europe confusedly calls the Anarchists, and it was they who kept the agents of the Government in peril of their lives. Yet they had no paper of their own.
Neither had a large and growing party of the Left Centre, which we may call the Radical as distinguished from the Socialists. They issued a programme which nearly all the advanced parties would have accepted when the time for business came. Like all the rest, they demanded first a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage, and beyond that their ideal of the Russian State consisted in a single chamber, a ministry chosen from the majority, home rule for Poland, Finland, the Caucasus, and the Baltic Provinces, the right of referendum, separation of Church and State, expropriation of Crown and Church lands and of private estates beyond a fixed maximum, free education, and a general militia for defence. Moderate as these demands were, nearly all the revolutionists, except the more starchy among the Social Democrats, would have been content to fight for them and welcome them with joy; but the Radicals had no special organ for their views.
As in all movements of intense and vital interest, the danger to reform came from division. All were united in their final purpose, but as to methods and strategy the divisions of parties were many and violent. It was the same thing as in a restaurant of Polish students to which I was often invited. There was a long, low room, furnished only with benches and tables. At one end was a piano; at the other a counter where the student could buy excellent meals at all hours of the day and night for very small payment. Though the university had long been closed owing to the disturbances, the place was always crowded with young men and girls, living in perfect comradeship and much at their ease. One night, a young girl, with clear grey eyes, a demure little face, and pale hair tightly braided, was giving me a very satisfactory lecture in German upon the minute distinctions between all the Polish parties. I heard afterwards that in her zeal for knowledge, she had gained the necessary passport to St. Petersburg by going through the form of marriage with a student whom she had never seen since the ceremony. It is not an unusual device, and I have known girl-students who have even taken “the yellow ticket” as prostitutes in order to reach a university town.
In the midst of her disquisition, she suddenly burst into an attack upon two or three girls at another table who were suspected of betraying true comradeship by ordinary flirtation. “I suppose they think themselves rather pretty,” she said, “but neither logically nor psychologically do I understand their behaviour.” At that moment a few notes sounded on the piano, and to distract her wrath I suggested she should ask for some Polish music.