It is easy enough to talk restraint, when one has not been wronged. To look upon the things I looked upon in the Caucasus with one’s own eyes brings the awfulness of the régime home with overwhelming force, and if one is not actually driven to take up arms in defense of helpless, outraged, human beings, one is at least forced to charity and forbearance in passing judgment upon the methods of these wronged people in their efforts to defend themselves, and to correct by every means they know the cruel and inhuman régime under which they live and suffer.
CHAPTER VI
COURTING ARREST
A journey in the interior—Warned back—The start—A typical Volga province—Causes of the famine—Arrival at Tsaritzin—Two medical students—“Open! Open to the Police!”—The search—Condition of the peasants—Pesky—A group of remarkable personalities—Village customs—A dramatic meeting—A night ride—A sudden interruption in our plan.
CCASIONAL massacres of Jews, of Armenians, of Tartars, of intellectuals in interior towns—these the world knows about. Massacres are instituted to accomplish certain definite results, such as the terrorizing of a section of the population into passivity, or to coerce popular opinion in a given direction. But these occur only at intervals, and in widely different sections of the empire. Police misrule, on the other hand, is constant, and exists everywhere. The tourist in Russia is met by the police at the frontier—his books are liable to confiscation, his private papers to minute examination; once settled in St. Petersburg or Moscow his letters are very likely opened and frequently parts of them extracted. I remember that at one time all of my letters were regularly opened by the police before they were delivered to me, and more than once a page or two, or perhaps a whole sheet, would be missing when my letter was finally delivered. The power of the police is as omniscient as it is omnipresent. It is the one authority in czardom that can descend upon the Czar himself. About the time of the convocation of the Duma a Moscow publisher brought out a complete set of the Emperor’s speeches. The volume was small, and it was not edited nor annotated in any way, yet the police confiscated the whole edition and forbade its circulation! The weakness and true character of Nicholas II was so plainly revealed in the collection that this step was held to be justifiable.
To meet this police power casually, or to read about it, is one matter. To live under its absolute domination is quite another. The so-called agrarian revolts are often insurrections against the intolerable will of the police.
After leaving the Caucasus I traveled to the town of Saratoff, the capital of the province of the same name, there to begin a journey of a few hundred miles through the peasant country. Spring was fast approaching, at which time the ravages of hunger with greater or less rigor sweep over the peasant villages of central Russia year after year. Incidentally I saw rather more than I anticipated, particularly of the rural police.
“You will not be permitted to travel through the district,” I was told in Saratoff city. “Every correspondent who attempts it is arrested or turned back for one reason or another.”
I had come more than one thousand miles to make this journey and consequently I was not of a mind to be unofficially turned aside. I procured an interpreter, and arranged for horses and a peculiarly Russian wagon with a body of wicker like a great basket, called a tarrantass.
A troika, with loud, jingling bells, carried us out of Saratoff city and straight away to the north, away from all railroads and towns of size. The fast greening steppe rolled to hillocks on the east and the hillocks mounted to hills, higher and higher, farther and farther to the east, till the heights of the Urals seemed to loom vaguely in the purple distance.