A year in Russia

by Maurice Baring

Then everything in these books was so gloriously managed; everybody was so efficient, so powerful; the Bismarcks so Machiavellian and so mighty; the Princesses so splendide mendaces. The background was also gorgeous, barbaric, crowded with Tartars and Circassians, blazing with scimitars, pennons, armour, and sequins, like a scene in a Drury Lane pantomime; and every now and then a fugitive household would gallop in the snow through a primæval forest, throwing their children to the wolves, so as to escape being devoured themselves. This, I think, was the impression of Russia which I derived before I went there from reading French and English fiction about Russia, from Jules Verne’s “Michel Strogoff,” and from memories of many melodramas. Then came the impressions received from reading Russian books, which were again totally different from this melodramatic atmosphere.

From Russian novels I derived a clear idea of certain types of men who drank tea out of a samovar and drove forty versts in a vehicle called a Tarantass. I made the acquaintance of all kinds of people, who were as real to me as living acquaintances; of Natascha and Levine, and Pierre and Anna Karenine, and Basaroff, and Dolly, and many others. But I never saw their setting clearly, I never realised their background, and I used to see them move before a French or German background. Then I saw the real thing, and it was utterly and totally different from my imaginations and my expectations. But now when I try to give the slightest sketch of what the country is really like the old difficulty presents itself; the difficulty which arises from talking of a thing of which one has a clear idea to people who have a vague and probably false idea of the reality. The first thing one can safely say is this: eliminate all notions of castles, Rhine country, feudal keeps, and stone houses in general. Think of an endless plain, a sheet of dazzling snow in winter, an ocean of golden corn in summer, a tract of brown earth in autumn, and now in the earliest days of spring an expanse of white melting snow, with great patches of brown earth and sometimes green grass appearing at intervals, and further patches of half-melted snow of a steely-grey colour, sometimes blue as they catch the reflection of the dazzling sky in the sunlight. In the distance on one side the plain stretches to infinity, on the other you may see the delicate shapes of a brown, leafless wood, the outlines soft in the haze. If I had to describe Russia in three words I should say a plain, a windmill, and a church. The church is made of wood, and is built in Byzantine style, with a small cupola and a minaret. It is painted red and white, or white and pale-green. Sometimes the cupola is gilt.

The plain is dotted with villages, and one village is very like another. They consist generally of two rows of houses, forming what does duty for a street, but the word street would be as misleading as possible in this case. It would be more exact to say an exceedingly broad expanse of earth: dusty in summer, and in spring and autumn a swamp of deep soaking black mud. The houses, at irregular intervals, sometimes huddled close together, sometimes with wide gaps between them, succeed each other (the gaps probably caused by the fact that the houses which were there have been burnt). They are made of logs, thatched with straw; sometimes (but rarely) they are made of bricks and roofed with iron. As a rule they look as if they had been built by Robinson Crusoe. The road is strewn with straw and rich in abundance of every kind of mess. Every now and then there is a well of the primitive kind which we see on the banks of the Nile, and which one imagines to be of the same pattern as those from which the people in the Old Testament drew their water. The roads are generally peopled with peasants driving at a leisurely walk in winter in big wooden sledges and in summer in big wooden carts. Often the cart is going on by itself with somebody in the extreme distance every now and then grunting at the horse. A plain, a village, a church, every now and then a wood of birch-trees, every now and then a stream, a weir, and a broken-down lock. A great deal of dirt, a great deal of moisture. An overwhelming feeling of space and leisureliness, a sense that nothing you could say or do could possibly hurry anybody or anything, or make the lazy, creaking wheels of life go faster—that is, I think, the picture which arises first in my mind when I think of the Russian country.

Then as to the people. With regard to these, there is one fact of capital importance which must be borne in mind. The people if you know the language and if you don’t are two separate things. The first time I went to Russia I did not know a word of the language, and, though certain facts were obvious with regard to the people, I found it a vastly different thing when I could talk to them myself. So different that I am persuaded that those who wish to study this country and do not know the language are wasting their time, and might with greater profit study the suburbs of London or the Isle of Man. And here again a fresh difficulty arises. All the amusing things one hears said in this country, all that is characteristic and smells of the Russian land, all that is peculiarly Russian, is like everything which is peculiarly anything, peculiarly English, Irish, Italian, or Turkish, untranslatable, and loses all its savour and point in translation. This is especially true with regard to the Russian language, which is rich in peculiar phrases and locutions, diminutives, and terms which range over a whole scale of delicate shades of endearment and familiarity, such as “little pigeon,” “little father,” &c., and these phrases translated into any other language lose all their meaning. However, the main impression I received when I first came to Russia, and the impression which I received from the Russian soldiers with whom I mingled in Manchuria in the war, the impression which is now the strongest with regard to them is that of humaneness. Those who read in the newspapers of acts of brutality and ferocity, of houses set on fire and pillaged, of huge massacres of Jews, of ruthless executions and arbitrary imprisonments, will rub their eyes perhaps and think that I must be insane. It is true, nevertheless. A country which is in a state of revolution is no more in its normal condition than a man when he is intoxicated. If a man is soaked in alcohol and then murders his wife and children and sets his house on fire, it does not necessarily prove that he is not a humane member of society. He may be as gentle as a dormouse and as timid as a hare by nature. His excitement and demented behaviour are merely artificial. It seems to me now that the whole of Russia at this moment is like an intoxicated man; a man inebriated after starvation, and passing from fits of frenzy to sullen stupor. The truth of this has been illustrated by things which have lately occurred in the country. Peasants who have looted the spirit stores and destroyed every house within reach have repented with tears on the next day.

The peasants have an infinite capacity for pity and remorse, and therefore the more violent their outbreaks of fury the more bitter is their remorse. A peasant has been known to worry himself almost to death, as if he had committed a terrible crime, because he had smoked a cigarette before receiving the Blessed Sacrament. If they can feel acute remorse for such things, much more acute will it be if they set houses on fire or commit similar outrages. If you talk to a peasant for two minutes you will notice that he has a fervent belief in a great, good, and inscrutable Providence. He never accuses man of the calamities to which flesh is heir. When the railway strike was at its height, and we were held up at a small side station, the train attendant repeated all day long that God had sent us a severe trial, which He had. Yesterday I had a talk with a man who had returned from the war; he had been a soldier and a surgeon’s assistant, and had received the Cross of St. George for rescuing a wounded officer under fire. I asked him if he had been wounded. He said, “No, my clothes were not even touched; men all around me were wounded. This was the ordinance of God. God had pity on the orphan’s tears. It was all prearranged thus that I was to come home. So it was to be.” I also had tea with a stonemason yesterday who said to me, “I and my whole family have prayed for you in your absence because these are times of trouble, and we did not know what bitter cup you might not have to drink.” Then he gave me three new-laid eggs with which to eat his very good health.

March 29th.

To-day I went out riding through the leafless woods and I saw one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen, a sight peculiarly characteristic of Russian landscape. We passed a small river that up to now has been frozen, but the thaw has come and with it the floods of spring. The whole valley as seen from the higher slopes of the woods was a sheet of shining water. Beyond it in the distance was a line of dark-brown woods. The water was grey, with gleaming layers in it reflecting the white clouds and the blue sky; and on it the bare trees seemed to float and rise like delicate ghosts, casting clearly defined brown reflections. The whole place had a look of magic and enchantment about it, as if out of the elements of the winter, out of the snow and the ice and the leafless boughs, the spring had devised and evoked a silvery pageant to celebrate its resurrection.

Moscow, April 6th.

I have spent twelve instructive days in the country; instructive, because I was able to obtain some first-hand glimpses into the state of the country, into the actual frame of mind of the peasants; and the peasants are the obscure and hidden factor which will ultimately decide the fate of Russian political life. It is difficult to get at the peasants; it is exceedingly difficult to get them to speak their mind. You can do so by travelling with them in a third-class carriage, because then they seem to regard one as a fleeting shadow of no significance which will soon vanish into space. However, I saw peasants; I heard them discuss the land question and the manner in which they proposed to buy their landlords’ property. I also had some interesting talks with a man who had lived among the peasants for years. From him and from others I gathered that their attitude at present was chiefly one of expectation. They are waiting to see how things turn out. They were continually asking my chief informant whether anything would come of the “levelling” (Ravnienie); this is, it appears, what they call the revolutionary movement. It is extremely significant that they look upon this as a process of equalisation. The land question in Russia is hopelessly complicated; it is about ten times as complicated as the land question in Ireland, and of the same nature. I had glimpses of this complexity. The village where I was staying was divided into four “societies”; each of these societies was willing to purchase so much land, but when the matter was definitely settled with regard to one society two representatives of two-thirds of that society appeared and stated that they were “Old Souls” (i.e., they had since the abolition of serfage a separate arrangement), and wished to purchase the lands separately in order to avoid its partition; upon which the representatives of the whole society said that this was impossible, and that they were the majority. The “Old Souls” retorted finally that a general meeting should be held, and then it would be seen that the majority was in favour of them. They were in a minority; and in spite of the speciousness of their arguments it was difficult to see how the majority, whose interests were contrary to those of the “Old Souls,” could be persuaded to support them. This is only one instance out of many.

Another element of complication is that the peasants who can earn their living by working on the landlords’ land are naturally greatly averse from anything like a complete sale of it, and are alarmed by the possibility of such an idea. Also there is a class of peasants who work in factories, and therefore are only interested in the land inasmuch as profit can be derived from it while it belongs to the landlord. Again, there are others who are without land, who need land, and who are too poor to buy it. If all the land were given to them as a present to-morrow the result in the long run would be deplorable, because the quality of the land—once you eliminate the landlord and his more advanced methods—would gradually deteriorate and poverty would merely be spread over a larger area. One fact is obvious: that many of the peasants have not got enough land, and to them land is now being sold by a great number of landlords. To settle the matter further, a radical scheme of agrarian reform is necessary; many such schemes are being elaborated at this moment, but those which have seen the light up to the present have so far proved a source of universal disagreement. The fact which lies at the root of the matter is of course that if the land question is to be solved the peasant must be educated to adopt fresher methods of agriculture than those which were employed in the Garden of Eden; methods which were doubtless excellent until the fall of man rendered the cultivation of the soil a matter of painful duty, instead of pleasant recreation.