Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

Russia needs not only political leaders, she needs, even more urgently, leaders in the economic field. She needs at the present time a business man of the caliber of Mark Hanna, a man who, with a better ethical standard, possesses Mark Hanna’s great genius for organization, his marvelous executive ability. Such a man rarely dazzles the public with oratorical powers. He wastes little energy in speech. But he knows exactly what to do. He says to one man “come” and to another man “go,” and you may depend on it they are precisely the right men at the right jobs. He says to all about him, “Do this,” and they do it “to the king’s taste.” Russia needs many such men.

Nobody need be a slave under leaders, responsible and removable, like that. We were, in the United States, until we got our eyes a little open. We sink back once in a while still. Witness some of our municipal governments. But freedom under strong leadership is entirely possible. In fact, it is the only real freedom there is in the world.

The Russians may have a difficult time achieving it, for they are not quite the hard-fibered, ambitious, struggling race the English, French and Americans are. They are fatalistic and dreamy. That is the reason they endured their autocrats so long. But in the end they will achieve it.

Russia needs education, and here again America must show her the way. A public school system on the best lines we have been able to develop will make over the Russian people in one generation. Ninety per cent. of the present population is said to be illiterate. The old government tried within the past ten years to extend the common schools, but with little effect on illiteracy. The mass of the children were given two years of schooling, with the object of teaching them at least to read and write. Most of them barely learned and practically all forgot, because they were not encouraged to use their tiny bit of knowledge. Russia has no conception of the public library as we have developed it. There are libraries, magnificent ones, in the cities. But they are reference libraries for the learned, not reading and lending libraries for the masses. I am sure there is not such a thing in Russia as a children’s library, much less a librarian especially trained and paid to teach children how to use and to love books. Russia needs schools to teach children knowledge and she needs libraries very near, if not directly attached, to the schools. I talked to many people in Russia about the wonderful Gary schools, in which children work, study and play their way to fine, strong, thinking manhood and womanhood, and in every case the response was the same. “We must have schools like that all over Russia. Will you help us, when the time comes, to organize them?”

They cannot hope, of course, to go at once into all the intensive work of the Gary public school system, but they can adopt its general principles and its duplicate use of the school plant. In this way they will be able to educate more children in each school house and thus hasten the day when all the children will be in school. William Wirt’s next great work may be organizing school systems in new Russia. Having no old system to replace, he will not meet with the stupid and criminal obstruction and opposition with which his labors in New York were met.

Russia needs wholesome popular amusements to entertain and instruct her adult population. If I were to write a detailed list of Russia’s most pressing needs I should place near the head of the list plumbers and moving pictures. The empire is back in the dark ages as far as building sanitation is concerned. That is no small thing, because it affects both the health and the morals of a people. It affects their manners also, as any one who ever had to enter the lavatory of a Russian railroad carriage or station can testify.

They have some moving picture theaters in Russia, but they are poor in performance and frightfully high-priced. You pay as much to go to the movies in Russia as you pay to hear a high class symphony concert. I never saw a 10 and 15 cent motion picture house, nor could I learn that they existed anywhere in the empire. Mrs. Pankhurst and I went to the movies one night, paying something like a dollar and a half for our seats. The play was a long, dreary drama, ending in suicide and general misery. The acting was poor and the actors fat and elderly. For current events pictures they presented the Cossack funeral, reeled off at such a dizzy pace that it looked less like a funeral than an automobile race.

Moving pictures, carefully selected, offered for a small admission fee, would be a boon to Russia. They would teach the grown people a thousand and one things they have never had a chance to learn, and they would perhaps get the Russian mind out of its habit of ingrowing, self-torturing analysis that leads to nowhere. They would also give the Tavarishi something to do besides soap box spouting, and their listeners something more to think about than half-baked social theories. Because of the great illiteracy of the masses, Russia would have to introduce into her picture theaters an institution which Spain has already established. In Spain few people can read the titles and captions that run through the picture dramas, so each theater has a public reader, a man with a strong voice and clear enunciation, who reads aloud to the audience, and also makes any explanations that are necessary.

I know exactly where moving pictures for the masses could be shown in Petrograd without waiting for private enterprise to open theaters. On the west bank of the Neva, not far from the sinister fortress of Peter and Paul, stands the best and most democratic monument to Russian enterprise in the capital. This is known as the Narodny Dom, or People’s House, a combination club house, restaurant, theater and general meeting place of the working classes, founded by Prince Alexander of Oldenburg and liberally supported by the late Czar.

They have some fine concerts there, in times of peace, and an excellent drama for the more intelligent of the workers. Admission prices are fairly low and the performances good. For the less intellectual there are certain Coney Island features, and these are so well patronized that the concessionaries were well on the road to vast wealth. Long lines of people waited every evening for a turn on the chutes or the roller coaster. Their absolute hunger for a little amusement, a chance to laugh and be gay is pathetic to witness.