A year in Russia

by Maurice Baring

Wednesday, the 20th of December, punctually at midday the strike began in Moscow. The lift ceased working in the hotel, the electric light was turned off and I laid in a large store of books and cigarettes against coming events. The strike was said to be an answer to the summary proceedings of the Government and its action in arresting leaders of the revolutionary committee, &c., and its watchword was to be: “A Constituent Assembly based upon universal suffrage.” Beyond the electric light going out nothing happened on this day. On Thursday, the 21st, most of the shops began to shut. The man who cleaned the boots in the hotel made the following remark: “I now understand that the people enjoy great power.” I heard a shot fired somewhere from the hotel at nine o’clock in the evening. I asked the hall porter whether the theatres were open. He said they were shut, and added: “And who would dream of going to the theatre in these times of stress?”

The next day I drove with a friend into the country to a village called Chernaia, about 25 versts from Moscow on the Novgorod road, which before the days of railways was famous for its highway robberies and assaults on the rich merchants by the hooligans of that day. We drove in a big wooden sledge drawn by two horses, the coachman standing up all the while. We went to visit two old maids, who were peasants and lived in the village. One of them had got stranded in Moscow, and owing to the railway strike was unable to go back again and so we took her with us, otherwise she would have walked home. We started at 10.30 and arrived at 1.30. The road was absolutely still—a thick carpet of snow, upon which fresh flakes drifting in the fitful gusts of wind fell gently. Looking at the drifting flakes which seemed to be tossed about in the air, the first old maid said that a man’s life was like a snowflake in the wind, and that she had never thought she would go home with us on her sister’s name-day.

When we arrived at the village we found a meal ready for us, which, although the fast of Advent was being strictly observed and the food made with fasting-butter, was far from jejune. It consisted of pies with rice and cabbage inside, and cold fish and tea and jam, and some vodka for me—the guest. The cottage consisted of one room and two very small ante-rooms—the walls, floors, and ceilings of plain deal. Five or six rich ikons hung in the corner of the room, and a coloured oleograph of Father John of Kronstadt on one of the walls. A large stove heated the room. Soon some guests arrived to congratulate old maid No. 2 on her name-day, and after a time the pope entered, blessed the room, and sat down to tea. We talked of the strike and how quiet the country was and of the hooligans in the town. “No,” said the pope with gravity, “we have our own hooligans.” A little later the village schoolmaster arrived, who looked about twenty years old, and was a little tiny man with a fresh face and gold-rimmed spectacles, with his wife, who, like the æsthetic lady in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Patience,” was “massive.” I asked the pope if I could live unmolested in this village. He said, “Yes, but if you want to work you won’t be quiet in this house, because your two hostesses chatter and drink tea all day and all night.” At three o’clock we thought we had better be starting home; it was getting dark, the snow was falling heavily. The old maids said we couldn’t possibly go. We should (1) lose our way, (2) be robbed by tramps, (3) be massacred by strikers on the railway line, (4) not be allowed to enter the town, (5) be attacked by hooligans when we reached the dark streets. We sent for Vassili, the coachman, to consult with him. “Can you find your way home?” we asked. “Yes, I can,” he said. “Shall we lose our way?” “We might lose our way—it happens,” he said slowly, “it happens times and again; but we might not—it often doesn’t happen.” “Might we be attacked on the way?” “We might—it happens—they attack; but we might not—sometimes they don’t attack.” “Are the horses tired?” “Yes, the horses are tired.” “Then we had better not go.” “The horses can go all right,” he said. Then we thought we would stay; but Vassili said that his master would curse him if he stayed unless we “added” something.

So we settled to stay, and the schoolmaster took us to see the village school, which was clean, roomy, and altogether an excellent home of learning. Then he took us to a neighbouring factory which had not struck, and in which he presided over a night class for working men and women. From here we telephoned to Moscow and learned that everything was quiet in the city. I talked to one of the men in the factory about the strike. “It’s all very well for the young men,” one said, “they are hot-headed and like striking; but we—we have to starve for a month. That’s what it means.” Then we went to the school neighbouring the factory where the night class was held. There were two rooms, one for men presided over by the schoolmaster and one for women presided over by his wife. They had a lesson of two hours in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The men came to be taught in separate batches; one batch coming one week, one another. This day there were five men and two boys and six women. The men were reading a story about a bear—rather a tedious tale. “Yes, we are reading,” one of them said to me, “and we understand some of it.” That was, at any rate, consoling. They read to themselves first, then aloud in turn, standing up, and then they were asked to tell what they had read in their own words. They read haltingly, with difficulty grasping familiar words. They related fluently, except one man, who said he could remember nothing whatsoever about the doings of the bear. One little boy was doing with lightning rapidity those kind of sums which, by giving you too many data and not enough—a superabundance of detail, leaving out the all that appears so imperatively necessary—seem to some minds peculiarly insoluble. The sum in question stated that a factory consisted of 770 hands—men, women, and children, and that the men received half as much again as the women, &c. That particular proportion of wages seems to exist in the arithmetic books of all countries to the despair of the non-mathematical, and the little boy insisted on my following every step of his process of reckoning; but not even he with the wisdom and sympathy of babes succeeded in teaching me how to do that kind of sum. He afterwards wrote in a copybook pages of declensions of Russian nouns and adjectives. Here I found I could help him and I saved him some trouble by dictating them to him; though every now and then we had some slight doubt and discussion about the genitive plural. In the woman’s class, one girl explained to us, with tears in her eyes, how difficult it was for her to attend this class. Her fellow-workers laughed at her for it, and at home they told her that a woman’s place was to be at work and not to meddle with books. Those who attend this school show that they are really anxious to learn, as the effort and self-sacrifice needed are great.

We stayed till the end of the lesson and then we went home, where an excellent supper of eggs, &c., was awaiting us. We found the two old maids and their first cousin, who told us she was about to go to law for a legacy of 100,000 roubles which had been left her, but which was disputed by a more distant relation on the mother’s side. We talked of law suits and politics and miracles, and real and false faith-healers, till bedtime came. A bed was made for me alongside of the stove. Made is the right word, for it was literally built up before my eyes. A sleeping place was also made for the coachman on the floor of the small ante-room; then the rest of the company disappeared to sleep. I say disappeared, because I literally do not know where in this small interior there was room for them to sleep. They consisted of the two old maids, their niece and her little girl, aged three, and another little girl, aged seven. My travelling companion slept in the room, but the rest disappeared, I suppose on the top of the stove, only it seemed to reach the ceiling; somewhere they were, for the little girl, excited by the events of the day, sang snatches of song till a late hour in the night. The next morning, after I got up, the room was transformed from a bedroom into a dining-room and aired, breakfast was served, and at ten we started back again in the snow to Moscow.

On the 23rd we arrived in the town at one o’clock. The streets of the suburbs seemed to be unusually still. My companion said to me: “How quiet the streets are, but it seems to me an uncanny, evil quietness.” My companion lived in the Lobkovski Pereoolok, and I had the day before sent my things from the hotel to an apartment in the adjoining street, the Mwilnikov. When we arrived at the entrance of these streets we found them blocked by a crowd and guarded by police and dragoons. We got through the other end of the streets, and we were told that the night before Fielder’s School, which is a large building at the corner of these two streets, had been the scene of a revolutionary meeting; that the revolutionaries had been surrounded in this house, had refused to surrender, had thrown a bomb at an officer and killed him, had been fired at by artillery, and had finally surrendered after killing one officer and five men, with 17 casualties—15 wounded and two killed. All this had happened in my very street during my absence. An hour later we again heard a noise of guns, and the armed rising (of which some of the leaders, who were to have seized the Governor-General of the town and set up a provisional Government, had been arrested the night before in my street) had nevertheless broken out in all parts of the town. A little later I saw a crowd of people on foot and in sledges flying in panic down the street shouting “Kazaki!” I heard and saw nothing else of any interest during the day. There were crowds of people in the streets till nightfall.

On Sunday, Christmas Eve, I drove to the hotel in the centre of Moscow to see a friend. The aspect of the town was extraordinary. The streets were full of people—flâneurs who were either walking about or gathered together in small and large groups at the street corners. Distant, and sometimes quite near, sounds of firing were audible, and nobody seemed to care a scrap; they were everywhere talking, discussing, and laughing. Imagine the difference between this and the scenes described in Paris during the street fighting in ’32, ’48, and ’71.

People went about their business just as usual. If there was a barricade they drove round it. The cabmen never dreamt of not going anywhere, although one said to me that it was very frightening. Moreover, an insuperable curiosity seemed to lead them to go and look where things were happening. Several were killed in this way. On the other hand, at the slightest approach of troops they ran in panic like hares, although the troops do not do the passers-by any mischief. Two or three times I have been walking in the streets when dragoons galloped past, and come to no harm. We heard shots all the time, and met the same groups of people and passed two barricades. The barricades are mostly not like those of the Faubourg St. Antoine, but small impediments made of branches and an overturned sledge; they are put there to annoy and wear out the troops and not to stand siege. The method of warfare that the revolutionaries have adopted is a guerilla warfare of the streets. They fire or throw bombs and rapidly disperse; they have made some attempts to seize the Nikolaiev Railway Station, but have in all cases been repulsed. The attitude of the man in the street is curious: sometimes he is indignant with the strikers, sometimes indignant with the Government. If you ask a person of revolutionary sympathies he will tell you that sympathy is entirely with the revolution; if you ask a person of moderate principles he will tell you that the “people” are indignant with the strikers; but the attitude of the average man in the street seems to me one of sceptical indifference in spite of all, in spite of trade ceasing, houses being fired at, and the hospitals being full to overflowing of dead and wounded. The fact is that disorders have lost their first power of creating an impression; they have become everyday occurrences.

Here are various remarks I heard. One man, a commissionaire, asked whether I thought it was right to fire on the revolutionaries. I hesitated, gathering my thoughts to explain that I thought that they thoroughly deserved it since they began it, but that the Government nevertheless had brought it about by their dilatoriness. (This is exactly what I think.) Misunderstanding my hesitation, he said: “Surely you, a foreigner, need not mind saying what you think, and you know it is wrong.” (This was curious, because these people, commissionaires, porters, &c., are often reactionary.) A cabman said to me: “Who do you think will get the best of it?” I said, “I don’t know, what do you think?” “Nothing will come of it,” he said. “There will still be rich people like you and poor people like me, and whether the Government is in the hands of the chinovniks or the students is all one and the same.” Another man, a porter, an ex-soldier, said it was awful. You couldn’t go anywhere or drive anywhere without risking being killed. Soldiers came back from the war and were killed in the streets. A bullet came, and then the man was done for. Another man, a kind of railway employee, said that the Russians had no stamina, that the Poles would never give in, but the Russians would directly. Another man, fond of paradox, said to me that he hoped all the fanatics would be shot, and that then the Government would be upset. A policeman was guarding the street which led to the hotel. I asked if I could pass. “How could I not let a Barine with whom I am acquainted pass?” he said. Then a baker’s boy came up with a tray of rolls on his head, also asking to pass—to go to the hotel. After some discussion the policeman let him go, but suddenly said, “Or are you a rascal?” Then I asked him what he thought of it all. He said: “We fire as little as possible. They are fools.” The fact is that among the wealthier and educated classes the feeling is either one of intense sympathy or violent indignation with the revolutionaries; among the lower classes it is a feeling of sceptical resignation or indifference. “Things are bad—nothing will come of it for us.”

Christmas Day.