The dawn in Russia

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

A TRAMP.

In language, in life, and in temperament the distinction is almost as much marked as between two kindred but separate races, but among the Little Russians there is no proposal of separation. They would gladly become a home-ruled State in a Russian Confederacy, provided their defence were insured and they suffered no commercial loss. But their great fear is not of Russia but of Poland, lest any marked improvement in their position should bring more Poles among them to swallow them up. Already the Poles are gathering the commerce and land into their hands, and Poles are regarded much like the Jews, as insinuating people, unscrupulous, and horribly clever. Little Russia is apprehensive of Poland very much in the same way as Poland is apprehensive of Germany. Worse than all, the Poles are Catholic and care nothing for Theodosius and Nestor and the eighty mummied saints of Kieff. The Little Russian knows of only two religions beside his own—the “Old Believers,” who in spite of all the death and torture they have suffered for two centuries and have so richly deserved for holding up a heretical number of fingers in the blessing, still remain in the family of the Church, as the poor relations of Orthodoxy; but, apart from them, he only knows “the Polish,” by which he means the Catholic—schismatics hardly removed from heathendom, who worship images instead of pictures, and keep their Easter wrong, and do not compel their priests to marry, but are predestined to eternal fire.

As it is, the Polish element is very strong in Little Russia, and so is the German, the Bohemian, and the Galician. For Kieff has been the great centre of international intercourse during the last fifty years, ever since an English engineer, with English workmen, and English materials, threw a suspension bridge over the wide stream of the Dnieper there, and placed it on the great high-road of South Russia. The bridge was lately reconstructed, and it is a sign of change that a Russian engineer was now employed, with Russian workmen, and Russian materials, and still it stands. But the result of all this admixture in Kieff has been that the Little Russian movement is disappearing before the general longing for great constitutional changes throughout the Empire. For themselves, the Little Russians would be well content if they were allowed the free use of their language, which is now forbidden both in print and on the stage, while a Little Russian newspaper which ventured to peep out after the October Manifesto was at once stamped upon. But for the larger aspects of progress, Kieff has never failed to supply revolutionists alike eloquent and daring.

When I arrived in the city the surface looked quiet enough, though martial law still prevailed. Some ten weeks had passed since the Loyalists or the Black Hundred, directed by the police, protected by the soldiers, and bearing crosses and portraits of the Tsar in procession, had sacked and plundered down the main street; while in front of the Town Hall a military band played the national anthem to enliven their patriotism. On that occasion the Liberals were saved by the riches of the Jews, for the patriots preferred free and easy plunder to risky assassination. So the Cossacks who were ordered out to suppress the tumult, ranged up their horses in front of the Jewish shops, and took heavy toll of the plunder as the thieves came out through the line with their loads. The police and hotel-keepers took toll in the same way; indeed, the proprietor of the best hotel in the town accumulated so valuable a reward from the neighbouring jewellers’ shops that even patriots regarded his patriotism as overstepping the requirements of citizenship and good taste.

That day the blessings of this world were very widely distributed in Kieff, but it happened that almost the only non-Jewish house attacked was the British Consulate. Outside this house, which stands within forty yards of the main street, and bears over its door the usual painted placard of the British arms, a garrison officer formed up his company in a half-circle, and ordered them to pour volleys into the windows. Apparently he acted out of mere national spite, or perhaps because England, in spite of all the errors of the last ten years, is still regarded by the Russian revolutionists as “the Holyland of Freedom.” Happily, the British Consul himself had just left the place, being engaged in a gallant attempt to save the lives of a Jewish family by sheltering them in his own private residence. A formal apology was afterwards made by the Governor-General of the town, and the incident was officially declared “closed.” But English people who are inclined to trust the forces of law and order rather than the Russian Liberals, for the protection of our consulates and our interests, should consider its significance. It was more shameless than the attack upon our Consul at Warsaw on January 31st of the same year, though it did not attract so much attention.

Throughout the winter, the sufferers who had been ruined by the Loyalist demonstration kept putting in claims for redress, which the Russian Government politely answered by assuring them that they were at perfect liberty to prosecute those who had done the damage in the usual law-courts. The day I arrived in Kieff, a very large number of Jews—said to be three hundred—were suddenly arrested at a religious service, no reason being given. Two days later they were suddenly released, no one knew why. These are but instances of the kind of justice which the revolutionists think they could improve upon without upsetting the foundations of society.

Also on the same day on which I arrived, a band of thirty-five revolutionists who had escaped from Moscow and had crept down the railway as far as this, with a view perhaps to escaping by way of Odessa or Poland, were arrested at the station. They disappeared, and it was universally assumed that they were shot at once, if only because the prisons were so horribly full that no one else could possibly be stowed into them. After the first railway strike in October, a deadly form of typhus, or gaol fever, broke out in the prisons. The relatives of the imprisoned railway men offered to nurse their own friends, and be responsible for them, if only they might be released from the plague-stricken gaols. But the request was refused, and the men left to rot. Next came the serious military rising of December, the chief demand of the soldiers being for more decent treatment from their officers. The mutiny was rapidly suppressed, and the published figures of the men who disappeared in consequence were given at ninety, but I discovered that among the officers themselves the acknowledged numbers were three hundred and eighty.

But beside its distinction for religion, intellect, and revolution, Kieff is also famous as the capital and market for the land of “Black Earth” that great deposit of fertile soil which supplies wheat for England and most of Europe, and is the chief source of such little wealth as Russia possesses. In 1904, Russia’s total exports were valued at £96,000,000. To this amount the foodstuffs contributed £61,400,000, and the value of exported grain alone was £49,530,000, of which England took £6,370,000. Next to grain in value came naphtha, which amounted only to £5,823,200, and, only a little below that, eggs. Rather more than half the total of Russia’s exports, therefore, consists of grain, and this Black Earth is the granary of the country.

From Kieff I made a long journey by sledge to many villages about thirty or forty miles away.