CATHEDRAL OF ST. SAVIOR, MOSCOW.
The cathedral of Saint Savior has been nearly a century in building. Founded in commemoration of the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, it has been slowly raised by means of the multitudinous contributions of the Russian people. It is a square cross in outline, as lofty as the capitol at Washington, and surmounted by five oriental domes, the central one bigger than the other four, all topped with Greek crosses, and all covered with plates of solid gold, the burnished glittering splendor of which dazzle the eyes long miles away. Within, the interior is tiled with rare marbles of divers colors, while the walls are decorated with priceless paintings by the most illustrious Russian artists of the century, done by them at the command of the Czar, with pillars of malachite and lapis lazuli, green and blue, standing between the splendid pictures. There are altars of solid silver covered with rare embroideries of gold and emblazoned with precious stones. Close by each altar rests an Eikon.
A soldier in gold lace uniform opened our carriage door. He led us up the long flight of white steps—white in the golden sunlight—and pushed his way and ours through the bowing, crossing, sweating, stinking (the Russian really never takes a bath) thousands, who, like ourselves, sought to enter the precincts of the most magnificent cathedral of “Holy Russia.” We jostled against rich merchants and their wives clad in splendid furs and silks and adorned with many jewels; against military officers in long gray coats, high boots and caps of astrakhan wool or fur; and peasants, in sheepskin coats, belted at the waist, their legs wrapped in cotton cloth tied with leathern thongs, their feet bound up in straw. These farmers from the country are too poor to afford the luxury of socks and shoes. Through all these the soldier with our pourboire in his hand, forced his way—not always gently—and led us up a winding flight of one hundred steps to the series of galleries which run round the immense interior. Here he again forced back the press of people until we might lean over the great brass rail and gaze down below! And what a spectacle! There, were ten thousand, twenty thousand,—I dare not say how many, men and women; all standing; all bowing; all devoutly responding to the intoning of the priests! Three hundred men and boys clad in red and purple and golden vestments were chanting the melancholy music of the Russian Church! No organ is there allowed, no musical instrument, no instrument save that which God has made, the human throat! Then, from the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary, comes out the Archbishop of all the Russias, the Metropolitan of “Holy Moscow,” clad in vestments of gold and of silver, intoning the mystery of the mass! Other priests stand close behind him, swinging censers of incense, and also chanting in melancholy mournful harmony with the mighty melody of the choir. Never have my senses apprehended such opulent, refulgent splendor, such a pageant of gold and of purple, of jewels and of fine linen, such clouds of incense, such glorious, mighty music from the human throat! Such fervor, such frenzy, such exaltation as I now beheld in the swaying, worshiping multitude! I was beholding the fervant, fanatical, hysterical religious feeling of the Russian people, a people mediaeval in their blind superstition, mediaeval in their per-fervid ardor for their church!
What I am writing of can only be impressions, and yet perhaps the impressions which I receive in my brief sojourn within the Russian Empire may more vividly portray that subtle, almost indefinable, atmosphere which broods over Russia and marks it from all the world, than I might be able to do if I remained so long within her confines that I should lose the power.
I have now sojourned in Russia barely seven days, yet I feel as though I had spent a lifetime in another world than that of America. I hear no sound which is familiar. I cannot even count in Russian. I see no street signs which my eyes have before beheld; even the alphabet, though Greek, is yet enigmatically Russianized. Nor do I find that English or Danish, French or German is of much avail. In the largest news emporium or bookstore, in St. Petersburg, upon the Nevsky Prospekt, the other day, where twenty or thirty clerks were serving the public, there was no one of them who spoke or even understood either French, or German, much less English. In the chief bookstore in Moscow, where a large trade is carried on, nothing is spoken but Russian. After much search I did find one small bookshop where a clerk spoke passable French, and another where the Jewish proprietor understood German. And while it is true that the high Russian officer who escorted us from St. Petersburg spoke fluently in German and in French, and while it may also be true that among the bureaucracy, and perhaps nobility, French is still generally understood, yet it is equally true that the present tendency in Russia is to Russify language as well as things, and that foreign tongues are less spoken and less known to-day than they were thirty or forty years ago. The Russian is absorbed in himself, he knows little of the outside world and he cares less. The news of Europe and of America and of all the earth only comes to him in expurgated driblets through the sieve of the Censor. The saying that “there are three continents,” the “continent of Europe,” the “continent of Russia” and the “continent of Asia,” is no mere jest. One feels it here to be a verity. One feels that Russia, despite her pretensions to the contrary, is mediaeval, that she is mentally and morally aloof from all the progress of the present century, from all the thought of modern peoples, and utterly remote from all touch with the progressive nations of to-day.
In Scandinavia, the world is abreast of the times, its peoples are advanced and alert, but the instant you cross the dead-line and enter Russia, you feel that the world has taken a back-set of five hundred years, that Russian life is so far behind all modern movement that it never can catch up.
Even the bigness of St. Petersburg carries with it an impracticability that is itself mediaeval. St. Petersburg did not grow up because there was need of a city on that spot. It was created as the deliberate act of a despot. Peter the Great feared to live longer in Moscow. He had murdered and tortured too many of its worthy citizens. He had, for one job, hung eight thousand patriots in the Red Square; he had thrown ten thousand more into dungeons, there to rot. Daring no longer to live in Moscow, he founded the new capital, “Petersburg,” on the banks of the Neva, which should become a seaport, be protected from his own subjects by the ships he himself would build, and house his government as safe from domestic as from foreign foes. He laid out the city with streets so wide that it has never been possible to pave them well. He provided public buildings so huge that it has never been possible to secure a foundation upon the Neva’s miry delta solid enough safely to hold them up. He drove the nobility into this quagmire city, and drew the bureaucracy up to its unstable ground. To-day, St. Petersburg is a city of a million and a half of inhabitants, but if the Russian Czars should choose to reconstitute Moscow their permanent capital, St. Petersburg would again become a wilderness, a waste of marshy islands, desolate and bare. It is the hot-house plant of autocracy. There is no natural reason for it to exist.
Everywhere in Russia one feels the certain so childish straining after effect which is mediaeval and barbaric. In the palace of the Kremlin lies the disabled and gigantic cannon which Catherine II commanded to be cast, and which has never fired a shot for the reason that it was so big they could never find a gunner to serve and handle it. Close beside it lies the enormous bell, the “Czar Kolokol”—King of Bells—cast by command of a Czar, so huge that it could never be lifted up into a belfry and which, falling to the ground from a temporary scaffold, cracked itself by sheer weight. It lies there a fit commentary on overleaping ambition. The cars and locomotives of the railways are uncouth from their very size. Russia is like a big, loose-jointed, over-grown boy, a boy so constituted that he may never become a veritable man.
The government arsenals and machine shops in Moscow are run by German and English bosses. The Russian makes big plans, but he does not possess the power himself to carry them to successful issue. The great empire is so spread out that pieces of it are even now ready to break off. An intelligent Swede with whom I voyaged from Stockholm, then living in St. Petersburg, declared the day not far distant when not only Finland, but the German provinces of Esthonia and Livonia and Courland along the Baltic, as well as Poland, must inevitably crack off. And he declared that from mere internal cumbersomeness the Russian Empire must soon dissolve. It may be so. And one is here impressed with the fact that Russia now chiefly holds together by reason of the military might of her autocracy, whose strength and permanence under serious defeat may vanish in a night.
Another thing I have become cognizant of is the fact that everywhere the men who do not wear a uniform hate the men who do. The cleavage parting the upper and the lower levels of Russian life is immense. Apparently there is no sympathy between them. The mujik upon the street scowls at the uniformed official who drives by in his dashing equipage. He looks with surly countenance upon the grandee who nearly runs him down. He hates the men who so mercilessly wield authority and power, and who order the Cossack to ride him down and knout and saber him into terrified submission.