Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

CHAPTER XXIII WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD?

Will the German army get to Petrograd and Moscow? The answer to this question is, they probably can if they want to, but it is hardly possible that they do. If they have that object, and if they succeed in taking Moscow it will simply add one more to the psychological blunders committed by the German government since the war began. The disorganized Russian army might not pull itself together and fight for Petrograd, but the army and the people would fight to the death for Moscow. It is their holy city, their crown of glory, their dream. Moscow is Russia, and one who has never seen it knows not the Russian people.

Petrograd is a modern European city, built by Peter the Great in the early part of the eighteenth century and by Catherine II, also called “the Great,” in the latter half of the same century. Peter, who would have been a master man in any century and in any country, whether born in a palace or a farmhouse, was all the more a marvel because he was a Russian, born at a time when the Russian people were still medieval and still oriental. Peter didn’t allow the fact that he was heir to an oriental autocracy to interfere with his ambitions or his activities. He left the golden palace in the Kremlin, left Moscow, the capital, and sacred heart of the empire, left Russia altogether, and went off to become a day laborer in the shipyards of England and Holland. Peter learned what he could in a short time and went back to establish western civilization in Russia. He chose the site of his new capital much as the United States Steel Company chose the site of Gary, Ind., for its nearness to a good harbor, its easy access to trade routes and its fine front view of the best commercial centers. Peter called his city “a window toward Europe.”

Petersburg, as it was styled by the half German Peter, was a more stupendous piece of engineering than Gary, Ind., although the steel town is one of the greatest triumphs of engineering this country can boast. It was built on a marsh which nowhere rose above the muddy waters of the Neva more than two or three feet, and in most places was partially or wholly submerged. That marsh never has been completely drained. When, in 1765, St. Isaac’s Cathedral was built to replace a small wooden church of Peter’s time, they first had to drive over twelve hundred huge piles into the soft ground. Of the 40,000 workmen who toiled under Peter’s direction to create the first Petrograd a majority died from exposure and cold, and of fevers bred in the miasmas of the bogs.

Catherine, who became czarina a little more than half a century later, vastly improved the city. She enlarged it, erecting many splendid palaces and public buildings, and bringing in a vast amount of western culture in the way of libraries, art galleries and theatres. The monuments of Peter and Catherine are the most conspicuous objects in the capital. The ghosts of Catherine and Peter may be said to walk in every street in Petrograd. But the Russians, for all their admiration for their greatest monarchs, have little real love for the city they built.

The ghost of Ivan the Terrible walks through the streets of Moscow; nevertheless, the Russians love the place as the Mohammedans love Mecca. It is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and one of the strangest. It has hundreds of churches, so gorged with art treasures and with gold, silver and jewels that it dizzies the mind to contemplate them. It has the ancient wall, foliage-hung, that enclosed the Moscow of the thirteenth century, and it has the Kremlin, or fortress, which antedates the town. Inside the Kremlin is the old palace of the rulers of Russia built, in part, centuries before they became czars. The first Kremlin palaces were built by the dukes of Moscow in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Some of the most beautiful of the treasure churches of the Kremlin were built by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. One of these, just outside the walls, the Cathedral of St. Basil, is a gem of such radiance supreme that the half-mad Ivan determined that it should never be surpassed. When it was finished he called the architect to him and asked him if he thought he could ever design a better church. The architect, in the pride and joy of his achievement, modestly said that he thought he might. “You never will,” said the terrible Ivan, and he had the man’s eyes burned out with red-hot irons.

In the great square in front of the Kremlin still stands the high place of execution where Ivan and the other almost as terrible czars tortured and slew their victims. In a side street still stands the wonderful golden house which was the home and seat of the Romanoff boyars, and where the first (or second) czar of Russia was born. Moscow is the very symbol of czardom; nevertheless the Russians love it as their heart. Germany might send her armies there, but they could no more take it, or hold it, than they could take and hold Washington. Inside the Kremlin walls lie heaped thousands of bronze cannons, bright and beautiful as snakes, all decorated with eagles and N’s and ambitious mottoes. Napoleon Bonaparte left them there when he fled, defeated and routed by the Russians, only to be still more soundly defeated by snow and storm and bitter cold. Those cannon are evidence indeed of the invincibility of Moscow.

Germany ought to know that a march on Moscow, however easy, would result in unifying the Russian army against the foe. Perhaps Germany does not know this, for she seems not to know anything about the hearts and minds of any people. The mechanics of nationality she knows and understands. The psychology of it she never understands. However, I do not believe that Germany’s recent attack and partial conquest of the islands before Riga are a prelude to a march on the capital or on Moscow. What Germany probably wants is the splendid loot to be found in Courland and Esthonia. Riga, which is a city of 400,000 inhabitants, is, next to Petrograd, the most important port on the Baltic Sea. Out from Riga go immense exports of timber, flax and hemp, linseed and many cereals. The country east and south of Riga produces these things in great quantity, and Germany needs them in her business just now, and needs them badly enough to risk a few of her ships and men to get them.