“You, sir,” the premier would reply, “are occupied with your own department, your own ministry, you cannot know all the cards.” (A favorite phrase with Witte.)
“If I do not know all the cards, then show them to me. I am not merely head of my ministry, I am also a member of your cabinet.”
This Witte never would do. And in the attitude of mutual suspicion, each member at sixes and sevens with the premier and with the other members of the cabinet, all working individually and often at cross-purposes; in this blind but truly Russian way the Witte ministry staggered on—to its fall. Similarly is Russia as a whole reeling toward the abyss. A ministry falls a thousand times more easily than a dynasty, but a dynasty following the same mad tactics that wrecks ministry after ministry must sooner or later collapse also. Follies that pass understanding are laid to the door of the house of Romanoff, and after the revolution had once broken over Russia, every serious person knew that the time element was all that remained as a subject for speculation. This is a big factor, however. The moment marked by this X stands elusively in the distance and between the present and it are weary miles that a nation must tramp, miles marked by many a mirage which like the vision of the oasis in the desert cruelly deceives the faint and exhausted traveler.
One week in St. Petersburg was enough for me to realize all this. The beginning of the end might be to-morrow. Or, with equal likelihood, it might be years away. The temper of the people was such that nothing would be a surprise.
St. Petersburg seemed to reflect the atmosphere of Moscow, which still cowered and quivered from the severe and bloody repression that followed the magnificent fight her mere handful of armed citizens maintained on the barricades for nine days against disciplined troops. Suggestive messages, distorted and censored by government officials, kept coming in from different parts of the empire, the most disquieting, perhaps, from the Baltic provinces, for there General Orloff, “the butcher,” was pressing on with his expedition of “pacification.” Telegrams from Riga and other Baltic towns which leaked through the censor were one mournful chronicle of the “pacification”:
At the Staro-Gulben 20 peasants are shot dead, at Tirsen, 6, and at Sipolena, 2. At Novo-Pebalge an estate is burned down. At Staro-Pebalge a beautiful school building has been destroyed by shells. At the Volosts of Saukin and Noutt, 13 people were shot dead by the dragoons, and 20 peasants were whipped by the “Rozgie.” Troops set fire to the Library of one landlord and all the books were burned, he himself arrested, and his daughter punished by “Rozgie.”
In Wender district, when the people were burying a number of the “Volost” who had been shot by the dragoons, the cemetery was surrounded by the troops, and about 100 peasants taken and punished by “Rozgie.”
In the government of Kurland, 20 estates are burned down,—the inhabitants of which are mostly arrested. In Assorski Volosta, a teacher, M. Stapran, a student and an organist, and an officer—a deserter—were arrested. The first three were shot and the latter sent to Jacobstadt.
In Wenden the shooting of members of the new “Volostny Pravleny” is still going on, though the chief of the Wenden army, General Schiff, absolutely declared to the members of the “Volostny Pravleny” that none of them will be shot any more, without trial.