Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

Carlyle says that of all man’s earthly possessions, unquestionably the dearest to him are his symbols. They have the strongest hold on us without a doubt. At the time of the French revolution the sign and symbol of the old régime was the Bastille, that state prison in Paris which was the living grave of the king’s enemies, or of almost anybody who made himself unpopular with one of the king’s favorites. When the French people rose up in their might and swept the old régime out, the first thing they did, obeying a common impulse, was to tear down and destroy utterly the Bastille. In Russia the sign and symbol of the autocracy was the exile system, and particularly Siberia. The first thing the Russian people did when they rose up and dethroned the Romanoffs was to send telegrams to every political prison and to every convict village in Siberia that the prisoners and exiles were free. They sent orders to all the jailers and guards that the exiles were to be furnished with clothing and money and transportation to the railroads, and the railroads were directed to bring them back to Petrograd.

There is something to warm the coldest blood in the thought of what it must have meant to those poor desolate creatures, living in the hopeless isolation of Siberia, to have the door of the cell open one February day and hear the words,“You are free!” Sometimes the announcement was prefaced by words of unheard of friendliness and courtesy from wardens and jailers who had before been cruel and brutal task-masters. “Please forgive me if I have been over-zealous in my duties,” these men would say, and the prisoner would think that he had gone mad and was dreaming. Then the announcement would come, unbelievable in its wonder; the revolution had actually happened. The Czar was gone. The prisoner was free. They heard that news in the depths of mines, where men worked shackled and hopeless. They heard it in lonely villages near the Arctic Circle. They heard it in far lands, where homesick men and women toiled in sweatshops among aliens. They were free, and Mother Russia was calling them home again. I should think they would almost have died of joy at the tidings. No generous mind can wonder that Russia called back her children, all of them, without stopping to sort out the good and the bad, the well and the sick, the desirable and the undesirable. Or without stopping to calculate how she was going to take care of them when they got there.

But very early in the day it became evident that Russia was going to face a serious problem in her returned exiles. In the very first days of the revolution they opened all the prison doors in Petrograd as well as in other Russian cities, and let all the prisoners out. Among them were a number of politicals, and many of them immediately became public charges. They had no money, no friends, no home. The revolution had robbed them, in some cases, of all three. In some cases of long imprisonment the homes and friends had been taken from them by death. There had been a committee working secretly in behalf of political prisoners, and now this committee, with a group in the Red Cross, got together and formed a society which they call the Political Red Cross, the committee in charge of returned exiles. For they saw plainly that what had happened in the case of the Petrograd prisoners would be repeated on a large scale when the Siberian exiles and those from foreign lands returned. Another committee was formed in Moscow. They sprang up in various cities, co-operating with the Zemstvoes or county councils.

At the head of the work is Vera Figner, one of the most famous of the old revolutionists, almost the last survivor of the nihilism of the eighteen seventies. The Russians are said to lack organizing ability, but the work done by this committee under Vera Figner’s direction looks to me that once Russia gets a government that can govern and an army that will fight the people of Russia will organize a civilization that will teach Europe new things. The committee started with nothing, not even machinery to work with. There is no such thing in Russia as a charity organization society. Charity and benevolence there are, mostly of the old-fashioned type, “Under the patronage of her imperial highness, the Princess Olga,” or “the empress dowager.” There was no well-organized society of any kind to appeal to to help take care of some seventy-five thousand exiles hurrying home, an unknown number of them sick, another unknown number poor and homeless, and all of them strangers in a new Russia.

Vera Figner I saw in the Petrograd headquarters of the society. She is a matronly woman, looking less than sixty, although she must be older. She has a handsome face, with the deep, smoldering eyes of the revolutionist, but her smile is quiet and kind. Near her at the long committee table sat Mme. Kerenskaia, the estranged wife of the minister president Kerensky. She is an attractive young woman with dark eyes and abundant dark hair, who gives all of her time to the work of the exiles committee. Mme. Gorki is another woman of prominence who works with the committees, and Prince Kropotkin and his daughter, Mme. Lebedev, whose husband was in the government when I left, are also constant workers. The work was done through eight committees, one of which collected money, a great deal of money, too. Hundreds of thousands of roubles have poured in from all over Russia as well as from England, America, France. Another committee collects clothes, and they are much scarcer than money in Russia. A committee on home-finding also collects sanitarium and hospital beds wherever they are to be found. A reception committee meets the exiles and takes them to their various lodgings. A medical and a legal aid committee take care of their own sides of the work. All over Petrograd and Moscow they have established temporary lodgings and temporary hospitals for the cure of the returned sick and helpless. It was in such a refuge that I saw and heard the man with the concertina.

I had come to find Marie Spirodonova, one of the most appealing as well as the most tragic figures of the revolution of 1905-06. She was the Charlotte Corday of that revolution, for like Charlotte she, unaided by any revolutionary society, freed her country of one of the worst monsters of his time. She shot and killed the half-mad and wholly horrible governor of Tambosk. And like Charlotte she paid for that deed with her life. She lived indeed to return to Russia, but her span after that was short. Marie Spirodonova was in the last stages of tuberculosis when they brought her back to Russia. Ten years’ solitary confinement had done that for her. The first sentence of death, afterward commuted to twenty years’ exile, would have been shorter and more merciful. When I saw her, she was in bed, so wasted that she looked like a child. The flush of fever on her cheeks gave her a false look of health, and she looked almost as beautiful as on the day when she stood in the prisoner’s dock and told the judges how and why she killed the monster of a governor. Her voice was all but gone now, and it was in a hoarse whisper that she greeted me, and asked news of her one or two friends in America. I could stay only a few minutes, she was so weak. It is hardly possible that she still lives, although no news of her death has reached me.

Until the last breath she must have kept her iron will and indomitable spirit. Ten years in a solitary cell could not break that spirit, as the story of her release shows. When the first telegram came to the distant prison, where she and nine other women were confined, the names of only eight of them were specifically mentioned.

“But what about us?” wailed the two forgotten ones.

The warden of the prison perhaps did not entirely believe in the success of the revolution, and wanted to be on the safe side. “You stay,” he said.

“Then none of us will go,” said Marie Spirodonova, and they all stayed until the next day when another telegram arrived setting them all free. In the same spirit Spirodonova refused to leave her companions after they reached Petrograd. She was so famous, so sought after, that she could have chosen among a dozen hospitable homes, in the country, in the Crimea or the bracing mountains of the Caucasus. But she said she would not have anything her old prison mates did not have, so Marie Spirodonova, daughter of a general, and the concertina player, child of a peasant, die as they lived, revolutionists, spurning all the comforts of life, all the protection and security of home, all the plaudits of the world. They lived and died for Russia as surely as though they died on the battlefield.