At midnight the windows of our house had been rattled by the firing of guns somewhere near; but on Christmas morning (this is not the Russian Christmas) one was able to get about. I drove down one of the principal streets, the Kouznetski Most, into another large street, the Neglinii Proiesd (as if it were down Bond Street into Piccadilly), when suddenly in a flash all the cabs began to drive fast up the street. My cab went on. He was inquisitive. We saw nothing. He shouted to another cab, asking him what was the matter. No answer. We went a little further down, when along the Neglinii Proiesd we saw a patrol and guns advancing. “Go back,” shouted one of the soldiers, waving his rifle—and away we went. Later, I believe there was firing there. Further along we met more patrols and ambulances. The shops are not only shut but boarded up.
Next day I walked to the Nikolaiev Station in the afternoon. It is from here that the trains go to St. Petersburg; the trains are running now, but how the passengers start I don’t know, for it was impossible to get near the station. Cabs were galloping away from it, and the square in front of it had been cleared by Cossacks. I think it was attacked this afternoon. I walked into the Riansh Station, which was next door. It was a scene of desolation: empty trains, stacked-up luggage, third-class passengers encamped in the waiting-room. There was a perpetual noise of firing. Practically the town is under martial law. Nobody is allowed to be out of doors after nine o’clock under penalty of three months’ imprisonment or 3,000 roubles fine. Householders have been made responsible for people firing out of their windows. The idea of collective responsibility is a shock to some Russians. During the last twenty years the system has led, through the perpetual shifting of responsibility, to the annihilation of responsibility; and this in its turn has produced a revolution of irresponsibility. Some people talk as if the revolution were an evil element which had sprung from hell without any cause, a sudden visitation like the plague, as if it were not the absolutely logical and inevitable result of the particular form of bad government which has obtained in Russia during the last twenty years. These people pass a sponge over this fact. They say to people of liberal ideas: “You have brought this about,” then, asked if they are in favour of the Constitution, assent; which should prove them to be opportunists. They do not like being called opportunists.
This morning, December 27th, there is considerable movement and traffic in the streets; the small shops are open, and the tobacconists. News has come from St. Petersburg of the Electorate Law. The question is now whether it will satisfy the people. Firing is still going on; they say a factory is being attacked. The troops who were supposed to be disaffected have proved absolutely loyal. The one way to make them loyal was to throw bombs at them. The policemen are now armed with rifles and bayonets. I asked an educated man this afternoon if he thought the Electorate Law would satisfy people. He said he thought not. He said that the people demanded a far wider suffrage law. “Are you in favour yourself of universal suffrage?” I asked. “No,” he answered; “but when I see that the whole people demand it, I submit to the majority. The Government has as yet given nothing; everything has been torn from it, and more will have to be torn from it.” One learns here at any rate not to generalise and not to prophesy. A cabman said this afternoon: “There is an illness abroad, we are sick, it will pass—but God remains.” I agree with him.
I do not believe that it is a case of bricks falling out of a wall until the wall falls down, but of a young tree shedding bark. The illness, however, is a severe one, and it is idle to blame the patient for the violence of his symptoms and the doctor for the inadequacy of his remedies. The people to blame are those who made the patient ill by feeding him on poison. And some of these have already met with their just reward.
CHAPTER VII
MOSCOW AFTER THE RISING
Moscow, January 1, 1906.
If it is difficult—and it seems to be difficult to the verge of impossibility—for the historian of the present day to write impartially about political movements which happened in the days of Queen Elizabeth and of Mary Queen of Scots, how infinitely more difficult must it be to arrive at an impartial view of events when one is oneself in the centre of them and living among the actors who are contributing to what is afterwards called history! The historian solves the question by frankly affiliating himself to one side (like Froude or Macaulay or Taine), and he is probably right in doing this; I notice, also, that our most eminent correspondents do the same. Therefore I confess at once that I am in no way free from prejudices, and I make no pretence of invincible impartiality; only I have seen and heard enough of both sides to learn one thing—that the two parties who are now engaged in strife in Russia are both right or both wrong. I will try to the best of my ability to stifle my own feelings, and, like a piece of blotting-paper which absorbs red or black ink indiscriminately, try to reproduce as best I can fragments of what I absorb.
The strike is over, although I believe some revolutionaries are still holding out in a factory near the Zoological Gardens. The shops are open, the electric light is shining on the hard, snowy, ice-cold streets, and life is going on, in the Russian expression, in its old rut. I suppose the first question which will present itself to people abroad anxious for information is: What did it all amount to? The second question: What is the result of it? The third is possibly: What do the people in Moscow, the inhabitant, the man in the street, think of it? Practically, it did not amount to very much; a general strike was proclaimed which was to take place all over Russia with the object of obtaining universal suffrage. The strike was not universal. It was closely followed by an armed rising of the revolutionary party in Moscow with the object of arresting the Governor-General and establishing a temporary Government. It resulted in complete and utter failure; and this seems to point to one of two things: either that the revolutionary party is less well organised than we supposed it to be, or that it wrongly gauged popular feeling and no longer found such strong support in public opinion as it did before. If it be judged by its recent action it cannot be said to have given proof of any good organisation, since it was obviously a mistake to foment a movement among the military—using economic needs and demands as a weapon—a week before the strike began. The economic demands were made by the soldiers, and satisfied immediately, and their mutiny ceased. It is nonsense to pretend that the soldiers have any revolutionary tendencies, and the revolutionaries made a great mistake in trying to undermine their belief in the Emperor. The same thing holds good as regards the peasants; and only yesterday a person with ultra-Radical convictions said to me: “The peasant, if he is hungry, can easily be made to loot and burn; but if he is replete he will send anybody who talks politics to him to the devil, and if any one attacks the Emperor before him he will tear him to pieces; possibly in twenty or thirty years things will be different and he will be an enlightened man; at present he is not, and there is no use in not facing the fact. The revolutionaries have made a cardinal error in attacking the peasants’ and the soldiers’ only ideal—call it ideal, idol, or what you like.” Therefore I say that in this case the behaviour of the revolutionaries showed neither insight nor statesmanship nor good organisation. It is possible, of course, that the strike may have been brought about, as I wrote before, by the workmen forcing the leaders’ hands, being unwilling to starve for a month but ready to rise in arms and fight for several days.
Now, as to what actually happened. With regard to the loss of life most people seem to be agreed in thinking that neither the revolutionaries nor the soldiers suffered very great losses, but that nine-tenths of the people killed were the onlookers among the public. Sometimes, of course, it was their own fault; sometimes it was not. When firing was going on it was as a rule difficult to get anywhere near it because the police warned you “off the course.” But then one must take into account that the streets in which the firing happened were inhabited, and that sometimes the unfortunate inhabitants were shot through no fault of their own. I think it is quite evident that there was a great deal of entirely unnecessary and absolutely futile bombarding of private houses. No doubt the revolutionaries fired from such houses; but they fired and went away, and then the house was battered and the revolutionaries were not caught. It must not be thought that Moscow is a heap of cinders as in 1812. For the most part the actual traces of bombardment are slight. The damage done to Fielder’s School, for instance, which is in my street, amounts to this: that the windows are broken and there is one hole in the wall. On the other hand, several houses have been entirely destroyed, and the printing offices of the Russkoe Slovo and some factories burnt—it is difficult to ascertain by which side, but possibly by both. This afternoon I went to a hospital to see some wounded soldiers, and in one of the wards the windows had been shattered by a bullet which had lodged in the cornice. Nothing will prevent me from believing that it must be possible to ascertain whether you are firing at a hospital, which is in one of the big streets of the town, or not. The complaints of the inhabitants are universal. Some blame the soldiers and some blame the revolutionaries, and one hears bitter stories from both parties about the conduct of their adversaries. Those on the Government side say: “What can you do against guerilla bands who dart round corners, shoot policemen, and run away?” The others say: “What can you think of people who shoot down the Red Cross doctors and bombard private houses?” Again, the supporters of the Government say the revolutionaries use and exploit the Red Cross and, under the guise of Red Cross men, do murder. The others say again “The Government hires a Militia drawn from the Black Hundred to shoot indiscriminately from the tops of church steeples.” Again you hear a story like this (I do not vouch for its truth): A student was surrounded by a mob, and on the point of being lynched, when he was rescued by a policeman, and on the way to the police station he shot the policeman. Or you hear that a number of peaceable citizens were walking up a street when the soldiery suddenly appeared and fired up the street indiscriminately. It must be borne in mind that the people of Moscow had been fully warned to stay at home as much as possible, that after six o’clock it was dangerous to go out, and that groups of three or more people would be fired on at sight, since the revolutionaries, who wear no uniform and are indistinguishable from the ordinary passer-by, took shelter among such groups. A man in a fur coat may, for all you know, have his pockets full of bombs. I know three cases of people being accidentally killed: a little boy ran out of his house, not into the street, but into the yard of his house to make a slide. As he did so he was shot by a stray bullet. The proprietor of the Ermitage Restaurant was also shot on his doorstep by a stray bullet. Thirdly, Metrofan, a kind of porter who was a friend of mine, and about whom I wrote in my last letter, has disappeared, and is not to be found in any of the hospitals. He was the man—an ex-soldier—who said that it was impossible to walk about safely (I laughed at him as he said it), and if he has been killed—which I trust is not true—he seems to have had the clearest presentiment of his fate. He was sent with a letter to a place where firing was going on. It is just this sort of people who suffered most: door-keepers and commissionaires who had to go about their ordinary business and take the risk of being in dangerous places. One extraordinarily typical incident was told me by an eye-witness. A man was walking up the Neglinii Proiesd, a big street, in which the Ermitage Restaurant is situated; he was deaf and could not hear the noise of the firing; after a time he was wounded in the leg. He saw the blood trickling on the snow, and he made the sign of the cross and lay down and folded his arms together, resigning himself to fate. After a time a poodle came along the street and began sniffing at his head; this was more than he could bear, and he jumped up again and, not noticing anything particular going on, pursued his way quietly home. I think the police behaved exceedingly well and the soldiers as well as could be expected. They were not, of course, responsible for indiscriminate bombardments, which were entirely due to the military in authority, and not, as is loosely stated, to the Governor-General, Admiral Dubassov. In some cases the authorities showed almost inspired ineptness. For instance, there is a large weaving factory in Moscow, the workmen of which had not struck. The police, with Cossacks, made a raid on it at night to search for arms. They found none; they ransacked the barracks of the men, and the men among whose chattels they found leaflets or any papers they beat. On the next day two-thirds of these men went on strike. This happened yesterday. Another case of the sort of thing which happens is worth mentioning. There is a house in which a Jew, a Liberal family, and a rich pork butcher dwell. The Liberal family have a boy of twelve, who had been talking about the revolution with pardonable boyish excess of zeal. The pork butcher said that the whole place was going to be blown up. On the following day soldiers arrived and began to shoot at the house. The owner, on inquiring the reason, received the reply: “You have got a Jew in the house, and we shall go on firing till you give us a nachai (a pourboire).” They did this every day. What the trouble really amounted to was this: an organised street fight, which lasted a week (nothing at all approaching either 1832 or 1848 or 1871 in Paris), and which caused a vast deal of damage to the inhabitants, and inflicted on them a considerable loss of life, besides pecuniary losses resulting from the stoppage of trade, &c. In the Paris Commune it should be remembered that a great many people were shot in cold blood after it was over, as a punishment, quite apart from the losses which occurred during the fighting.
I am perfectly convinced, perhaps wrongly, that the Government is in reality responsible for the troubles, owing to its dilatoriness in making laws. I know the answer to this. It is said: “How can you carry out reforms when the people won’t let you do so—when the moment they are undertaken a series of strikes and disturbances begin, and public servants behave in a manner which would not for a moment be tolerated in the most progressive of Western nations?” On the other hand it is obvious that all the strikes and disturbances which occurred during last year arose from the fact of the delay in the granting of reforms. And now when the people see this delay still existing, and, rightly or wrongly, argue that nothing has been given them till they extorted it, it is perhaps natural that their frame of mind should be one of excited exasperation. The Government expects them to behave reasonably, act reasonably, and think reasonably. They are in a frame of mind when reasonable action or thought is difficult of attainment, and the cause of their demented attitude is the action of the Government in the past. I do not defend them, but I understand them. My heart is with them; my head is against them. Their situation seems to me to resemble that of a man who for years has been kept on the verge of starvation, and is suddenly given champagne (liberty of the Press), and is promised a fixed and daily system of meals, consisting of wholesome food (Parliament). Then the same people who starved him begin to be dilatory in starting his new régime. Is it not easy to understand that the conduct of such a man would not be likely to be reasonable? I hope that one of the results of the events in Moscow will be to make the Government realise the pressing necessity of taking some steps to win the confidence of all that is “Moderate” in Russia. I hope also that it will impress on all the “Moderates” the necessity of combination and co-operation; because the revolutionaries declare that they will strike again in March if they do not get what they wish, and that the events of Moscow will be repeated in St. Petersburg. If they decide on this, no amount of arrests and repression will prevent them, and if the private houses of St. Petersburg are to be subjected to indiscriminate bombardment the outlook is indeed serious. Other results are these. The soldiers have been proved to be loyal, but a Government cannot subsist on bayonets alone. Again, there will be a large number of workmen out of work; these men when they go back to their villages will be met with some such remarks as these: “No money. You struck? What for? Get out.”