Nearly every night meetings were held for the new unions which were springing up on every side. The whole of Moscow, which is built in concentric circles round the Kremlin or eminent citadel overhanging the little river, had been divided off into wedges, or “rays,” as they were called, and each ray sent so many delegates to the central committee—corresponding to the Council of Labour Delegates in St. Petersburg—which superintended the whole labour question, and had to decide the moment for strikes. But besides the central organizations, almost every trade was forming its own union of defence.
First came the great Railway Union, which controlled the powerful instrument of the railway strikes, and had its headquarters in Moscow, because the city is the obvious centre of all Russian railways. Perhaps next in size, though hardly in importance, came the peculiar union of Floor Polishers—a class of workers unknown in England, because we are not clean enough to have parquetted floors. But in Moscow they were said to number thirty thousand in the union. There were other large unions besides—the tailors’, the metal-workers’, the waiters’, the jewellers’, and a very strong printers’ union called “The Society of the Printed Word,” said to be the oldest in Russia, and rising almost to the dignity of a knightly order by its title. The Union of Bathmen and Bathwomen, a very large class of labour in Russia, is also old, and in those weeks they came to the very satisfactory decision of declaring a boycott against the editor of Katkoff’s famous old clerical and reactionary paper, the Moscow News (Moskovskaya Viedomosti). No minister of the union would wash the editor of the Moscow News at any price.
One evening I was present at the formation of two new unions in very different classes of labour. First I went to an immense meeting of tea-packers in a summer theatre, attached to the Aumont, a music hall of easy virtue. But the theatre had now been boarded up into a meeting-house as more suitable for the times. Packers of the Chinese tea that comes overland are naturally a large class in Moscow, for the tea is still the Russian national drink, in spite of the deadly blend from Ceylon which is slowly being introduced. The packers are said to number about six thousand, and forty companies sent deputies to the meeting, though some of the companies employed only eight or ten hands. It is an unhealthy trade, the dust leading to consumption; and of all the many meetings I attended it was only here that I found the voices feeble and toneless. Wages run from half a crown a week for boys and girls up £1 a week for the best men. But in the trade there is an ancient peculiarity that the wife of the owner or manager has to supply a free midday dinner for the hands, and, as one of the delegates said, “Apparently she cooks it in hell.”
The other new union was formed at a meeting of shop assistants, conducted with that suavity and grandeur of manner which one always notices at meetings of this class. It comes from watching the grace of the shopwalkers, who alone carry the dignified and charming traditions of the old noblesse into modern life. The meeting was occupied for many hours in discussing whether the union should attend only to the assistants’ interests, or should enter into wider life as a political force. The Social Democrats urged them to be bold, and, as usual, they had their way. They were far the most strongly organized party; they had their speakers ready at every meeting, and they played their “minimum programme” of quietly progressive measures with great effect. Their opponents were unprepared, and on this occasion were almost too polite to argue. I came away soon after midnight, but it was obvious that the Shop Assistants’ Union would be a Social Democratic force before dawn.
Mid-winter is the height of the season for learning, art, and pleasure, but Moscow was neither gay nor learned. Reading and fiddling seemed equally irrelevant. So were painting, poetry, love-making, and all the other pleasant arts. In the big restaurant of the Métropole, it is true, an orchestra still maintained a pretence of joy, and poured out its vapid tunes to the rare guests who sat like shipwrecked sailors scattered on a vasty deep, and struggled to be gay. But, like a middle-aged picnic on the Thames, the thing was too deliberate a happiness, and too conscious of its failure. “We must keep our spirits up, you know,” I heard a youth say to an elderly gentleman as he poured out the champagne. But it was no good. The elderly gentleman had obviously dined well daily for many years, and was overwhelmed at the solemn thought that at any moment dinners might end for ever. Day and night he was living in “the haggard element of fear.”
The University was closed. Her seven thousand students were scattered, some to their homes, some to their lodgings in the city, where for the most part they swelled the army of the Social Democrats, and spent their time discussing maximum and minimum programmes and the socialization of productivity. They were also collecting arms.
“It was impossible to keep open. The students would insist on turning the quadrangle into a Fort Chabrol,” said Professor Manioukoff, the new Rector of the University, a learned economist and advanced politician, who, being prohibited from studying grievances nearer home, had won fame by specializing on the Irish land question. So the University was closed, the professors were compelled to pursue research without the due endowment of fees, and their wives and babies had to manage upon half the family income.
Many of them took to lecturing, not for pay, but because it was the only thing they could do for the Movement. One night I listened to one who lectured for nearly two hours on the comparative history of amnesties during the last few centuries, with a very close application to the present time. He still called himself a Professor, though he had been exiled from his Chair for so many years that his name had long been forgotten, and, like most of the exiles, he came back to a world which regarded him with a considerate but uneasy pity, as we should all regard the dead if they returned. For nearly thirty years he had lived in Bulgaria, surely not too far away to be remembered, and now he was lecturing again in Moscow, an old man, lame and blind, dressed in a frock-coat and worsted slippers. His nice little granddaughter guided his steps, kept his water-glass full, reminded him every half-hour of the flight of time (which he bore patiently), and put him right about his dates, which made the audience smile. Otherwise, the large lecture hall, packed with the intellectual, listened intently, but showed no sign of approval until the end. The portrait of the Tsar had been carefully removed from behind the chair, and only the gaunt iron staples showed where it had hung.
Another evening, in one of those dubious theatres which had just been converted to decent use, I heard a Professor deliver an immense discourse upon the first principles of Social Democracy before an audience half composed of working people. They also listened patiently, but the moment of real excitement came when the lecturer ceased, and three young soldiers sprang upon the stage and shouted that, on the highest economic principles, they too had struck, and would Cossack it no more. “I have flung away the uniform!” shouted one, who was apparelled in a long dressing-gown. “No more fools of officers over me!” shouted another. “And they fed us like swine!” shouted the third, who was just economically drunk. The applause that rocked the audience was one of the grandest noises I have ever heard. If only all the army would follow the example of those three gallant musketeers! But that night they vanished from the blaze of glory, and I heard of them no more.
Vanished too were the Zemstvoists, the men who, in July, had impeached the Government in an overwhelming series of accusations. Since the death of their hero, Prince Sergius Troubetskoy, their heart had failed them, and in November, when they met again in congress and their chance had come, they wasted the precious days in discussions upon Witte’s character, just like a suburban essay society discussing Hamlet. But time was going fast just then, and before they had settled Witte’s psychology to their satisfaction they were forgotten. They had meant so well by their counsels of moderation and attempts to imitate the British Constitution, but rushing time had left them lonely. Yet Moscow was rather strong in Liberal papers, which the bourgeoisie were glad to accept as protests against the extremes of socialism. The Russian News, for instance, edited by white-haired Sobolevski, with a grey-haired staff, was a strictly moderate paper, as I have said, though its writers had become so inspired by the youthfulness of the time that their articles would have sent them a year before to meditate in prison or exile upon the license of governments.