But for the time their misery was extreme. They had crowded for refuge into courts which ran far back from the ordinary streets—something like the old “rents” in Holborn. There I found them living in stinking and steaming rooms or cellars, and often I had to grow accustomed to the darkness before I could discern exactly how many families were accommodated in the corners. The assistant of one of the University professors was my guide, for a certain amount of relief work was being carried on by such Liberals as happened to be still out of gaol. I was told the town had already spent £15,000 in relief, and the Zemstvo had voted as much again to keep the distressed alive till the end of April. I dimly heard, also, of a fund contributed by Jews in England, but I did not discover their methods. As to the town fund, I could not be certain how much of it reached the Jews, but some did, for with an agent I visited one of the ten “sanitary districts” into which the town had been divided, and saw how he dealt with the cases.

Money had been given at first, but, as usual, imposture came, and the professors had found themselves no match for a race whose whole weekday existence is devoted to gathering where they have not strown. Later on, the town bound itself only to feed the destitute by a system of free tickets, or at a very small charge. It was the ordinary soup-kitchen method—not scientific, not inhumanly discriminating; but Russia has the happiness of being young in philanthropy, as in politics, and has not yet developed the caution of our charity societies, which in their strained quality are so little like mercy. As was to be expected, crowds of the unemployed came wandering in from other towns, even as far away as Kharkoff and Kieff; and under the passport system most of them were routed out and sent back again. What was worse, some 15,000 men and women had lately been turned upon the streets because the rich people of Odessa, who live in the pleasant quarter by the cliffs overlooking the sea, began to run for their lives that day in June when the mutinous warship Potemkin made them all jump by throwing two shells into the town near the cathedral; and they had been running ever since. Behind them they left all that host of valets, cooks, nurses, housemaids, grooms, coachmen, gardeners, boot-boys, barbers, and washerwomen who depend on the rich for existence, just as the rich depend on them. The shopkeepers who sell the things that only rich people can buy suffered equally, and many of their assistants were dismissed. It is bad for all when, according to the old parable, the members refuse to feed the belly, and it is worse when the belly runs away from the members. But if any one supposes on that account that the expenditure of the rich confers an inestimable benefit upon the working classes, he is involved in a very comfortable old fallacy.

Beside all this, there was great distress among the dockers, in spite of the considerable share of Jewish wealth which they had obtained in their outburst of religious and patriotic zeal. Most of it went in an immense drinking debauch to celebrate the victory over the enemies of Christ, and work had ceased because the great fire during the mutiny in June destroyed a great part of the docks, and entirely burnt away the wooden viaduct upon which the dock railway runs along the whole face of the port. One day when I was there, trial trains began to run for the first time, amid such popular excitement that I hoped another mutiny had broken out. But no warships were any longer stationed in the port, except one little destroyer. The dockers were only excited at the prospect of regular work. They live by themselves at the foot of the cliffs, below the fashionable boulevard, and they are said to be in every way a race apart. Certainly they adopt a distinctive costume, more astonishing in its incongruity than a West Coast chiefs, and suggesting a burlesque air of intentional raggedness, like an amateur who wants to look Bohemian. The dockers, however, have no need for deliberation in picturesque poverty, for the average wages of unskilled labour through the city is 1s. 8d. for a day of ten hours, or 2d. an hour. And it is not as though 2d. in Russia went as far as the “honest tanner” for which our own dockers struggled so hard in the early nineties. Ordinary living is very expensive in Odessa, more expensive even than in most Russian cities, and in an earlier chapter I noticed how strangely high the cost of living is in St. Petersburg and Moscow, chiefly owing to the heavy rent charges, in spite of the vast extent of unfilled and unoccupied land in the Empire. Except for the hire of street sledges and little open cabs, two shillings in Russia do not go much further than one in London, nor twopence to an Odessa docker much further than a penny in Poplar. No one can dress very sumptuously when he has to feed himself and family on a penny an hour, and we cannot wonder that the unskilled join the party of law and order, in the hope that an occasional massacre will bring a change of clothes.

In politics, Odessa included all the Russian parties, from the rival pioneers of Social Revolution and Social Democracy (most of whom were in gaol) down to the “Russian Order,” or party of violence, which is the Government’s ready instrument for the destruction of Jews, Poles, Liberals, and other heretics. The Russian Order alone was still allowed to hold meetings, every other party organization being forbidden by the police. But, nevertheless, it was in Odessa that I first became intimate with the Constitutional Democratic party, which has since grown to such importance as a possible instrument for reform. They were especially strong in the University, which justly prides itself on its political fearlessness. Their newspapers and all meetings had been suppressed; but most of the Professors and other leaders were still at large, though daily awaiting arrest, with enviable unconcern.

They were energetically preparing the first grade of elections for the Duma, and they expected to secure a majority upon the body, who in turn would select the single representative appointed for the great city in the Duma. Like other Progressive parties, they demanded a Constituent Assembly under the four-headed suffrage (universal, direct, secret, and equal). Their programme included Home Rule for the various nationalities of the Empire, labour legislation, and a sweeping agrarian reform on the basis of compensation for private land, but not for the Crown lands held by the Imperial family. In fact, their immediate objects, as the Professors admitted, were hardly to be distinguished from the “minimum programme” of the Social Democrats. But when we began to talk about “immediate objects” and “minimum programmes,” I remembered that seven weeks had gone by since such conversations seemed natural—seven weeks of bloodshed and suppression and bitter change. They themselves took the mournful difference very calmly. The fight was still in front of them, every hope had been crushed, every effort for freedom would have to begin again from the very start. But nothing discouraged them; the mere struggle was worth the pains; and to this patient people even the bitterest and most cruel experience never ceases to work hope.

But, after all, the Jewish question is the centre of political interest in Odessa, and, in spite of all suppression, the Jewish “Bund” is likely to remain the most powerful progressive organization as long as the Jews continue subject to their hereditary wrongs. Under laws which were called temporary, but have continued unrepealed for fifty years, no Jew may buy land or rent it. He may not live out in the country, and only in certain quarters of the towns. He may not be a schoolmaster or professor. He may not teach in private Christian families. He may not be educated at a high school (gymnasium) or at a University, except at a very low percentage of the whole number of students. Usually it is not higher than three to five per cent., though in Odessa the Professors, being exceptionally Liberal, had on their own authority extended the number to ten per cent., and were on the point of declaring the University open on level terms to Jew and Christian alike, when the University was suddenly shut on level terms to all. A Jew may not sit on the Zemstvo or Town Council; he may not be an officer in the army or navy; he may hold no State appointment; and he must not move from place to place without special permission and a special form of passport, like the prostitutes. Jews are not by nature a revolutionary people. The rigid Conservatism of their customs and ritual, as well as their intense pre-occupation in material gain, deters them from violence and change. Their peculiar dangers lie in exactly the opposite direction—in disregard of the large issues before mankind, and in a narrow devotion to antiquated ideals. But we cannot wonder that in Odessa, as in Russia generally, they are revolutionists almost to a man, and that to the ordinary Russian official or soldier a Jew of the “Bund” is identical with the “Anarchist”—a creature to be shot as quickly as convenient. When I was in Odessa I first heard how the new Aliens Act was being put into operation in England, and as I read of Jewish refugees cast back from the ancient protection of our country to the misery and bloodshed from which they believed they had escaped, I thought of these things.

CHAPTER XIII
LIBERTY IN PRISON

In St. Petersburg the successors of the original Strike Committee had declared the general strike at an end, on January 1st. The thing had not been a success. Either because the leaders were in prison, or that the work-people were harassed by the frequent repetition of strikes when funds were low, only about 20,000 remained away from work, and most of these were locked-out by the employers. Outwardly, the city continued quiet, in spite of the deep indignation excited by the arrest of all the popular leaders and editors, and afterwards by the murder of a musical student named Davidoff, who was shot by Okounoff, an officer of the Guards, for keeping one foot on a chair while the National Anthem was being played in a restaurant on the Russian New Year’s Eve (January 13th).

Then came the first anniversary of Vladimir’s Day or Bloody Sunday (January 22nd). The city was filled with troops. All the previous night cavalry patrols went up and down the streets, and on going into the large courtyards, round which most of the dwelling-houses are arranged, I found many of them full of soldiers, sitting round fires with piled arms. Guns were concealed at convenient points, and all preparations laid for repeating the massacre of the previous year. But the Strike Committee had issued an appeal calling upon the workmen to observe the day only by quitting the factories, staying at home, and drawing down the blinds;[3] and though, in answer to this, the masters placarded a notice threatening with dismissal any one who remained away from work, the Strike Committee still had power enough to ordain a passive resistance.

All the morning of the day—it was a Monday—I was down the Schlüsselburg Road, where a disturbance was most likely to occur; but, on the surface, everything was still. The steam-trams carried soldiers with fixed bayonets as a guard, but otherwise the troops were kept rather carefully out of sight. Wherever the police saw blinds down, or other signs of mourning, even in the main streets of the city, they entered with their revolvers, and sometimes a little knot of spectators gathered, but there was no appearance of organized resistance or demonstration at all. The sun shone, but it was intensely cold. Upon the Neva, a few people were crossing with loaded sledges, a few on foot were following the fir branches that marked the paths. Women were washing clothes by letting them down through square holes they had cut in the ice, and then beating them with wooden slats. Men were sinking bag-nets through the ice for fish. Otherwise there was hardly a sign of life. Nearly all the mills were closed, and those that pretended to continue work were held by a strong military guard, with sentries before the gates. No throngs of excited work-people now moved along the footways or stood at street corners. In one or two of the churches, a memorial service was being held for the dead, but for the most part the priests refused to open their churches for the purpose, and the work-people observed a nobler celebration by remaining at home in their darkened rooms.