Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

I have told something about the food situation in Russia. The clothing situation and the fuel situation are, if anything, worse. If you want to buy a pair of shoes in Petrograd you must take two days to do it and you must put much money in your purse. There is an American shoe store on the Nevsky Prospect and every day the line of people trying to get in and buy shoes was so great that it blocked traffic and the city authorities finally had to close the street entrance. The line now forms in a court or lane in the rear of the store and the customers are admitted, a few at a time, through the back door. This American shoe store is very popular because the shoes are of excellent quality and the prices are regarded as reasonable. A woman can buy a pair of boots there as low as $25. Men’s shoes are somewhat dearer. But the stock was running low when I was there in the summer, and when it gives out I don’t see how they are going to replenish it. On a corner of the Grand Morskaia there was another shoe store, in front of which a crowd stood all day long and all night. The queue extended around the corner, and I have seen it when it stretched to the Moika canal a very long block away. This is a store where cheaper shoes were sold. It represented an attempt on the part of one of the fleeting ministries to relieve the shoe shortage. Large quantities of shoes and leather were purchased and were then being distributed through authorized channels in the shop on the Morskaia.

In order to buy a pair of those shoes a man or a woman went there and got a place in line. Each stood in line until his or her turn came to be admitted to the shop, a long and weary business. When he gained admission to the shop and the clerk got around to waiting on him he received—a pair of shoes? Not a bit of it. He got a ticket with a number on it. The ticket entitled the customer to come back at some future date, stand in line and claim a pair of shoes which were probably at the time being made—provided he could afford to pay a minimum of ten dollars for them.

When I was in Poland with the women soldiers, the Botchkareva Battalion of Death, the regiment was delayed in its further progress toward the fighting line by a dearth of boots in which to march. About half the women soldiers received boots along with their other equipment before they left Petrograd, but the other half wore, with their khaki uniform, the women’s shoes, often worn and tattered, in which they had enlisted. One day there was great rejoicing in the barrack. The boots had come, and the rest of the afternoon was spent in sorting out from the pile a pair to fit each girl. I was interested in those boots, for they were mute but eloquent witnesses of the poverty of life in Russia. Not a pair was new. They were all second-hand, remade and mended boots, and I strongly suspect that most of them had been taken off the feet of dead soldiers. They had, in many cases, new feet or new soles, but the majority of them were merely mended and patched. Coarse, stiff, malodorous and badly put together as these were, the girls were only too glad to get them. The Adjutant, Skridlova, and one or two of the well-to-do soldiers had their boots made to order, and they paid ninety dollars a pair for them. Seventy-five dollars for a pair of women’s boots is not an unheard-of price.

What is true of boots and shoes is true of almost every other clothing commodity. I ran out of gloves while I was in Russia, but, after hearing what gloves cost in Petrograd, I went without. You could get cotton gloves as low as a dollar and eighty cents a pair. They were ugly and shapeless, but people bought and wore them. If you wanted a pair of kid gloves and you knew where you could find them and had time, you could buy them for three to five dollars. They were the kind that an American department store might put on a table in the center aisle and sell for fifty cents to attract customers in the dull season. A man pays a dollar for a fifteen-cent collar in Petrograd. He pays several dollars for a decent pair of socks. What he pays for a suit of clothes staggers the imagination. There are only two things that are cheap to buy in Russia just now: cats and dogs. You can buy a magnificent wolfhound or other thoroughbred dog, or a pure bred Persian or Angora cat for a song in Petrograd, because people can’t afford to feed pet animals. Mr. Basil Miles, attached to the Root mission, took home with him two Russian wolfhounds that are going to make him the most envied man in the next dog show in his town, and the song he sang to get them was too short to mention.

Russia is a very cold country and almost every one, rich and poor alike, wears furs. The rich wear sable, mink and ermine, and the poor wear rabbit and sheep skin. But furs just now are as difficult to buy as other clothing indispensables. There are several special reasons for this shortage of fur in a fur country. There are not so many people hunting furs since the war, and the pelts are scarcer; and besides, the Russians have never cured and dyed their own furs. They sent them to Germany to be prepared for market, and, of course, the war put a stop to that. Aside from these special reasons, the fur shortage and all the food, clothing and other shortages are caused by two main obstacles. There is plenty of food in the empire, plenty of raw materials for clothing. But the transportation system has almost broken down and they cannot distribute food or raiment. Also the factory system has all but broken down, and they cannot produce the clothing. There are besides minor and contributory obstacles, some of which I shall describe. The main reason why Russia will starve and freeze this winter is because the people of Russia have allowed their railroad system to go to pieces, and because they have, to an almost incredible extent, ceased to do any work.

I cannot speak as an expert about the railroad situation, nor would mere figures and statistics give the reader any adequate picture of the railroad demoralization. To say that on May 15, 1917, the then Minister of Ways and Communications reported to the Duma that more than 25 per cent. of the total number of locomotives in the empire were laid up for repairs wouldn’t begin to express the thing. The average reader does not know that 5 per cent. of “sick” locomotives is considered high by competent railroad managers. I might go further and say that the number of freight cars loaded from May 15 to May 31, 1917, was 87,000 poods less than the number loaded between those dates in 1916, but that would not mean much. Few outside of Russia know what a pood is. As a matter of fact it is thirty-six pounds. But figures cannot adequately describe the situation.

What told the tale of railroad demoralization to me was the constant anxiety I heard voiced on all sides by people trying to buy their winter stock of wood and coal. There is an endless quantity of wood in Russia. Great forests of pine and cedar and birch—beautiful forests. I had often marveled at them from the windows of my railway carriage passing through Finland and the country between Petrograd and Moscow. Plenty of this wood has been cut. I saw thousands and thousands of cords of it piled up along the railroad tracks, and of course there must have been much more elsewhere. Petrograd is built on a marsh and the ground is drained by picturesque if rather badly smelling canals which run through the city and empty into the Neva. Down one of the widest of these—the Moika, which I crossed every day—a constant line of barges, loaded with wood, floated slowly, drawn by horses and sometimes by men walking along a towpath beside the canal. I used to watch those bargeloads of wood and wonder why, with such an almost unparalleled means of distributing wood after it got there, the people of Petrograd should be troubled about the winter fuel supply. Not nearly enough of it was getting there last summer; that was all. The quantity that floated down the Moika and the other canals and got stacked up in woodyards and in the courtyards of apartment houses, hotels, hospitals, factories and even palaces, was not half the normal quantity. There weren’t enough flat cars and locomotives running to get the wood as far as the city limits.

I tried the experiment of keeping house with the wife of the Outlook correspondent after he left Russia on a mission. We had a charming little apartment offered us rent free, with a maid thrown in, if we would live in it and keep it from being looted. Every one who knew a Cossack or other reliable soldier, or an American, did that when they went to the country from Petrograd. We gave up housekeeping after a week and went back to hotels, partly because the maid could not get us enough to eat, and partly because we never had any hot water. The landlord of the apartment house had cut off the wood. He said that he couldn’t get wood enough to warm the house next winter, much less provide warm baths for the tenants in summer.

The railroad situation was visualized for me on a dreadful two days and nights’ journey I took on a Russian railroad last July. Miss Beatty, of the San Francisco Bulletin, was with me, and the train was so small and so crowded that the only berth we could get was an upper one three feet wide. The two of us slept in that berth, Miss Beatty’s head one way and mine the other. Every time the train struck a rough place on the rails the Bulletin came near losing its star reporter, for she had the outside, just above an open window. That railway carriage could have seated, by close crowding, eleven passengers. On the last night of the journey twenty-five people were packed into it. They took turns sitting down.