One evening I went to see Nazarenko in his house. He was not at home, but a friend of his was there. He told me to wait. He was a peasant; thirty-nine years old, rather bald, with a nice intelligent face. At first he took no notice of me, and read aloud to himself out of a book. Then he suddenly turned to me and asked me who I was. I said I was an English correspondent. He got up, shut the door, and begged me to stay. “Do the English know the condition of the Russian peasantry?” he asked. “They think we are wolves and bears. Do I look like a wolf? Please say I am not a wolf.” Then he ordered some tea, and got a bottle of beer. He asked me to tell him how labourers lived in England, what their houses were made of, what wages a labourer received, what was the price of meat, whether they ate meat? Then he suddenly, to my intense astonishment, put the following question to me: “In England do they think that Jesus Christ was a God or only a great man?” I asked him what he thought. He said he thought He was a great man. He said that the Russian people were religious and superstitious; they were deceived by the priests, who threatened them with damnation. He asked me if I could lend him an English Bible. He wanted to see if it was the same as a Russian Bible. I said it was exactly the same. He was immensely astonished. “Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that there are all those stories about Jonah and the whale, and Joshua and the moon?” I said “Yes.” “I thought,” he said, “those had been put in for us.” I tried to explain to him that Englishmen were taught almost exactly the same thing, and that the Anglican and the Orthodox Church used the same Bible. We then talked of ghosts. He asked me if I believed in ghosts. I said I did. He asked why. I gave various reasons. He said he could believe in a kind of telepathy, a kind of moral wireless telegraphy; but ghosts were the invention of old women. He suddenly asked me whether the earth was four thousand years old. “Of course it’s older,” he said. “But that’s what we are taught. We are taught nothing about geography and geology. It is, of course, a fact that there is no such thing as God,” he said; “because, if there is a God, He must be a just God; and as there is so much injustice in the world, it is plain that a just God does not exist. But you,” he went on, “an Englishman who has never been deceived by officials, do you believe that God exists?” (He thought that all ideas of religion and God as taught to the Russian people were part of a great official lie.) “I do,” I said. “Why?” he asked. I asked him if he had read the Book of Job. He said he had. I said that when Job has everything taken away from him, although he has done no wrong, suddenly, in the last depth of his misery, he recognises the existence of God in the immensity of nature, and feels that his own soul is a part of a plan too vast for him to conceive or to comprehend. In feeling that he is part of the scheme, he acknowledges the existence of God, and that is enough; he is able to consent, and to console himself, although in dust and ashes. That was, I said, what I thought one could feel. He admitted the point of view, but he did not share it. After we had had tea we went for a walk in some gardens not far off, where there were various theatrical performances going on. The audience amused me, it applauded so rapturously and insisted on an encore, whatever was played, and however it was played, with such thunderous insistence. “Priests,” said my friend, “base everything on the devil. There is no devil. There was no fall of man. There are no ghosts, no spirits, but there are millions and millions of other inhabited worlds.”
I left him late, when the performance was over. This man, who was a member of the Duma for the government of Tula, was called Petrukin. I looked up his name in the list of members, and found he had been educated in the local church school of the village of Kologrivo; that he had spent the whole of his life in this village, and had been engaged in agriculture; that among the peasants he enjoyed great popularity as being a clever and hard-working man. He belonged to no party. He was not in the least like the men of peasant origin who had assimilated European culture. He was naturally sensible and alert of mind.
One Sunday I went by train to a place called Terrioki, in Finland, where a meeting was to be held by the Labour Party of the Duma. The train was crowded with people who looked more like holiday-makers than political supporters of the Extreme Left—so crowded that one had to stand up on the platform outside the carriage throughout the journey. After a journey of an hour and a quarter we arrived at Terrioki. The crowd leapt from the train and immediately unfurled red flags and sang the “Marseillaise.” The crowd occupied the second line, and a policeman observed that, as another train was coming in and would occupy that line, it would be advisable if they were to move on. “What?—police even here in free Finland?” somebody cried. “The police are elected here by the people,” was the pacifying reply; and the crowd moved on, formed into a procession six abreast, and started marching to the gardens where the meeting was to be held, singing the “Marseillaise” and other songs all the way. The dust was so thick that, after marching with the procession for some time, I took a cab and told the driver to take me to the meeting. We drove off at a brisk speed past innumerable wooden houses, villas, shops (where Finnish knives and English tobacco were sold), into a wood. After we had driven for twenty minutes I asked the driver if we still had far to go. He turned round and, smiling, said in pidgin-Russian (he was a Finn): “Me not know where you want to go.” Then we turned back, and, after a long search and much questioning of passers-by, found the garden, into which one was admitted by ticket. (Here, again, anyone could get in.) In a large grassy and green garden, shady with many trees, a kind of wooden semicircular proscenium had been erected, and in one part of it was a low platform not more spacious than a table. On the proscenium the red flags were hung. In front of the table there were a few benches, but the greater part of the public stood. The inhabitants of the villas were here in large numbers; there were not many workmen, but a number of students and various other members of the Intelligentsia—young men with undisciplined hair and young ladies in large art nouveau hats and Reformkleider. M. Zhilkin, the leader of the Labour Party in the Duma, took the chair.
The meeting was opened by a man who laid stress on the necessity of a Constituent Assembly. Speeches succeeded one another. Students climbed up into the pine trees and on the roof of the proscenium. Others lay on the grass behind the crowd. “Land and Liberty” was the burden of the speeches. There was nothing new or striking said. The hackneyed commonplaces were rolled out one after another. Indignation, threats, menaces, blood and thunder. And all the time the sun shone hotter and “all Nature looked smiling and gay.” The audience applauded, but no fierceness of invective, no torrent of rhetoric, managed to make the meeting a serious one. Nature is stronger than speeches, and sunshine more potent than rant. It is true the audience were enjoying themselves; but they were enjoying the outing, and the speeches were an agreeable incidental accompaniment. They enjoyed the attacks on the powers that be, as the Bank-holiday maker enjoys Aunt Sally at the seaside. Some Finns spoke in Russian and Finnish, and then Aladin made a speech. As he rose he met with an ovation. Aladin was of peasant extraction. He had been to the University in Russia, emigrated to London, had been a dock labourer, a printer’s devil, a journalist, an electrical engineer, a teacher of Russian; he spoke French and German perfectly, and English so well that he spoke Russian with a London accent. Aladin had a great contempt for the methods of the Russian revolutionaries. He said that only people without any stuff in them would demand a Constituent Assembly. “You don’t demand a Constituent Assembly; you constitute it,” he said. “The Russian people would never be free until they showed by their acts that they meant to be free.” Aladin spoke without any gesticulation. He was a dark, shortish man, with a small moustache and grey, serious eyes, short hair, and had a great command of mordant language. His oratory on this occasion was particularly nervous and pithy. But he did not succeed in turning that audience of holiday-makers into a revolutionary meeting. The inhabitants of the villas clapped. The young ladies in large hats chortled with delight. It was a glorious picnic—an ecstatic game of Aunt Sally. And when the interval came, the public rushed to the restaurants. There was one on the seashore, with a military band playing. There was a beach and a pier, and boats and bathers. Here was the true inwardness of the meeting. Many people remained on the beach for the rest of the afternoon.
As soon as the Duma was dissolved I went to Moscow and stayed a few days at Marie Karlovna’s datcha at Tsaritsina, near Moscow.
Near the house where I was living there was a village; as this village was close to the town of Moscow, I thought that its inhabitants would be suburban. This was not so. The nearness to Moscow seemed to make no difference at all. I was walking through the village one morning, when a peasant who was sitting on his doorstep called me and asked me if I would like to eat an apple. I accepted his invitation. He said he presumed I was living with Marie Karlovna, as other Englishmen had lived there before. Then he asked abruptly: “Is Marie Alexandrovna in your place?” I said my hostess’s name was Marie Karlovna. “Of course,” he said, “I don’t mean here, but in your place, in your country.” I didn’t understand. Then he said it again louder, and asked if I was deaf. I said I wasn’t deaf, and that I understood what he said, but I did not know whom he was alluding to. “Talking to you,” he said, “is like talking to a Tartar. You look at one and don’t understand what one says.” Then it suddenly flashed on me that he was alluding to the Duchess of Edinburgh.[13] “You mean the relation of our Queen Alexandra?” I said. “That’s what I mean,” he answered. “Your Queen is the sister of the Empress Marie Feodorovna.” It afterwards appeared that he thought that England had been semi-Russianised owing to this relationship.
Two more peasants joined us, and one of them brought a small bottle (the size of a sample) of vodka and a plate of cherries. “We will go and drink this in the orchard,” they said. So we went to the orchard. “You have come here to learn,” said the first peasant, a bearded man, whose name was Feodor. “Many Englishmen have been here to learn. I taught one all the words that we use.” I said I was a correspondent; that I had just arrived from St. Petersburg, where I had attended the sittings of the Duma. “What about the Duma?” asked the other peasant. “They’ve sent it away. Will there be another one?” I said a manifesto spoke of a new one. “Yes,”said Feodor, “there is a manifesto abolishing punishments.” I said I hadn’t observed that clause. “Will they give us back our land?” asked Feodor. “All the land here belongs to us really.” Then followed a long explanation as to why the land belonged to them. It was Crown property. I said I did not know. “If they don’t give it back to us we shall take it,” he said simply. Then one of the other peasants added: “Those manifestos are not written by the Emperor, but by the ‘authorities.’” (The same thing was said to me by a cabman at St. Petersburg, his reason being that the Emperor would say “I,” whereas the manifesto said “We.”) Then they asked me why they had not won the war, and whether it was true that the war had been badly managed. “We know nothing,” he said. “What newspaper tells the truth? Where can we find the real truth? Is it to be found in the Russkoe Slovo?” (a big Moscow newspaper). They asked me about the Baltic Fleet and why Admiral Nebogatov had made a signal which meant “Beat us.”
I went away, and as I was going Feodor asked me if I would like to go and see the haymaking the next day. If so, I had better be at his house at three o’clock in the afternoon. The next day, Sunday, I kept my appointment, but found nobody at home in the house of Feodor except a small child. “Is Feodor at home?” I asked. A man appeared from a neighbouring cottage and said: “Feodor is in the inn, drunk.” “Is he going to the haymaking?” I asked. “Of course, he’s going.” “Is he very drunk?” I asked. “No, not very; I will tell him you are here.” And the man went to fetch him. Then a third person arrived—a young peasant in his Sunday clothes—and asked me where I was going. I said I was going to make hay. “Do you know how to?” he asked. I said I didn’t. “I see,” he said, “you are just going to amuse yourself. I advise you not to go. They will be drunk, and there might be unpleasantness.”
Presently Feodor arrived, apparently perfectly sober except that he was rather red in the face. He harnessed his horse to a cart. “Would I mind not wearing my hat, but one of his?” he asked. I said I didn’t mind, and he lent me a dark blue yachting cap, which is what the peasants wear all over Russia. My shirt was all right. I had got on a loose Russian shirt without a collar. He explained that it would look odd to be seen with someone wearing such a hat as I had. It was a felt hat. The little boy who was running about the house was Feodor’s son. He was barefooted, and one of his feet was bound up. I asked what was the matter with it. The bandage was at once taken off, and I was shown the remains of a large blister and gathering. “It’s been cured now,” Feodor said. “It was a huge blister. It was cured by witchcraft. I took him to the Wise Woman, and she put something on it and said a few words, and the pain stopped, and it got quite well. Doctors are no good; they only cut one about. I was kicked by a horse and the pain was terrible. I drank a lot of vodka, and it did no good; then I went to the Wise Woman and she put ointment on the place and she spoke away the pain. We think it’s best to be cured like this—village fashion.” I knew this practice existed, but it was curious to find it so near Moscow. It was like finding witchcraft at Surbiton.