Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

Of the same type is the most celebrated exile of all, Catherine Breshkovskaia, the Babushka, or little grandmother of the revolution. They brought Babushka back to Petrograd in the first rush. They gave her a reception at the station such as no crowned head in Europe ever had, and they took her to the Winter Palace and told her that when the Czar moved out he left it to her. Babushka lived in the Winter Palace when she was in Petrograd, which was seldom. Most of the time she was touring rural Russia and trying to make her peasants understand what the revolution meant, and that they would make the country a worse place than it ever was before unless they stopped fighting to grab all the land in sight without any regard to right and justice. “I know them,” she said in a brief talk I had with her in the palace. “If I can only live long enough to reach them in numbers, I can deal with them. They have listened to a pack of nonsense, but I shall tell them better.”

Breshkovskaia is past seventy years old. She is growing very deaf, and her weight makes traveling difficult. Yet her mind is clear and vigorous, and when she makes a speech she manages somehow to call back the voice and the strength of a woman of forty. Spirodonova, Breshkovskaia, Kropotkin, Tschaikovsky and almost every one of the old revolutionists are eager adherents of the moderate program of the early provisional government, before the Bolsheviki crowded in with their cry of “All the power to the Soviets!” They want the war fought to a finish, and they want order restored in Russia. It is quite otherwise with another type of exile, and I am sorry to say some of this other kind were made in the United States of America.

Prince Felix Yussupoff, at whose palace on the Moika Canal Rasputin
was killed, and his wife, the Grand Duchess Irene
Alexandrovna, niece of the late Czar.

In the boat in which I crossed the Atlantic last May there were three Russian men who had spent some years in America and were on their way back to Petrograd. These men were not exiles, but they had found Russia intolerable to live in and had gone to America, which had been so kind to them in a material way that they were able to go back to Russia in the first cabin of an ocean liner. All three were pronounced pacifists and one was a readymade Bolshevik. He was for the whole program, separate peace, no annexations or contributions, no sharing the government with the bourgeois, no compromise on anything. A real Bolshevik. And made on the east side of New York. This man used to talk to me on deck and in the saloon about how the Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates were going to dictate terms of peace to the allies, and how the social revolution was going to spread all over the world, and especially all over America, and then he would hasten to assure me that he wasn’t nearly as radical as some of the Tavarishi I would meet in Russia, and he wasn’t. When we reached the Finnish frontier and stopped at Tornea for examination I had the pleasure of seeing all three of these men taken into custody by some remnant of authority existing in the army, and taken down to Petrograd under guard as men who had evaded military duty. My friend declared that nothing would ever induce him to put on a uniform or to fight. Not he. And the others rather less confidently echoed his defiance. Finally one of them said: “on the whole, I think I will enlist. They need educated men at the front to talk peace to them.” Thus at least one emissary of the Kaiser was contributed to poor, bleeding Russia by the United States.

Just one more case, because it is typical of many. This man was a real exile, and for eleven years he had lived in Chicago. Born in a small city of western Russia, he joined, when still a youth, what was known as the Bund, a socialist propagandist circle of Jewish young men and women. The youth’s parents, quiet, orthodox people, knew nothing of his activities, nor of the revolutionary literature of which he was custodian and which he had concealed in the sand bags piled up around the cottage to keep out the winter cold. On May 31, 1905, the Tavarishi, or comrades, in his town organized a small demonstration against the celebration of the Czar’s birthday. The next day the police began searching houses and making arrests among the youth of the town, and they found the books hidden in the sandbags. The boy fled, and found refuge in the next town. Money was raised, a passport forged and the youth finally got to England via Germany. He didn’t like England and in 1906 he crossed to the United States. He didn’t like the United States either, and his whole career in Chicago was a history of agitation and rebellion. He was one of the founders of a socialist Sunday school in Mayor Thompson’s town, where children of tender years are given a thorough education in Bolshevik first principles.

When the Russian revolution broke and Russian consuls all over the world advertised for exiles to be taken back to Russia’s heart, this man presented himself as one of the returners. He showed me the certificate issued by the Russian consulate in Chicago. It says that it was issued in accordance with the orders of the provisional government and records that the said —— —— was paid the sum of $157.25 and was given transportation from Chicago to Petrograd, via the Pacific Ocean and the Trans-Siberian railroad. At Vladivostock he received more money, and on his arrival in Petrograd he was given a small weekly allowance in addition to his free lodgings. He had a good time on the journey, he said. There was a band at most of the stations where the train stopped, crowds, flowers and much cheering. It was agreeable to get back to Petrograd also and be met by a committee. But the habit of hating governments was so settled in his system that within a week he was talking against the one that had paid his way back, and he was talking hard against the one which had taken him in and given him a free education and a job and a chance to establish a socialist Sunday school with perfect impunity. He was in with all the Bolshevik activities except one. He had no stomach for fighting. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. It got to a point where it was hard to be a Bolshevik in good standing and never do any gun work, so this exile determined to go back to Chicago. When I knew him he was haunting the committees and various ministries trying to persuade them to give him the money with which to return.

“You don’t think they can draft me into the American army, do you?” he asked me anxiously. “I am a Russian subject. I don’t see how they could do it legally.”

I don’t know how many men of this kind went back to Russia from the United States, but there were enough of them to be conspicuous, and the Russian radicals believe them to be far more reliable witnesses than the Root Commission, which made a remarkably good impression on the educated people but none at all on the Tavarishi. “Don’t you believe that the United States is in this war for democracy,” shouted one Nevsky Prospect orator. “The United States is just as imperialistic as England. You oughtta read what Lincoln Steffens and John Reed wrote about the United States and Mexico.” These men will do Russia all the harm they can, and then they will come back to America and do us all the harm they can. If I had my way they would go from Ellis Island, with all the rest of their kind still remaining here, to some kind of a devil’s island in the South Seas and be kept there until they died.