THE DAWN IN RUSSIA

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Neighbours of ours

In the Valley of Tophet

The Thirty Days’ War between Greece and Turkey

Ladysmith: The Diary of a Siege

The Plea of Pan

Between the Acts

A Modern Slavery

Art Reproduction Co.

“PACIFICATION.”

The Kremlin of Moscow, Christmas, 1905.

From Sulphur (Jupel).

THE
DAWN IN RUSSIA

OR

SCENES IN THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION

BY

HENRY W. NEVINSON

ILLUSTRATED

LONDON AND NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS
45 ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1906

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The design on the cover is from a cartoon in the Russian revolutionary paper Pulemet (The Machine Gun).

The illustrations are from Russian cartoons and from photographs, most of which were taken by the author.

THE DAWN IN RUSSIA

OR

SCENES IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

INTRODUCTION

I have not attempted in this book to do more than describe some of the scenes which I witnessed in Russia during the winter of 1905–1906, while I was acting there as special correspondent for the Daily Chronicle. For the most part, the descriptions are given in the same words which I wrote down at the time, either for my own memory or for the newspaper. But the whole has been re-arranged and rewritten, while certain scenes have been added for which a daily paper has no room. I have also inserted between the scenes a bare outline of the principal events that were happening elsewhere, so that the significance of what I saw may be more easily understood, and the dates become something better than mere numbers.

But to realize the meaning of the earlier chapters, a further introduction is necessary, and it is difficult to know where to begin. For there is never any real break in a nation’s history from day to day, and the movement of 1905 was not the first sign of change, but only the brightest. The story of the undaunted struggle for freedom in Russia during the last fifty years has been admirably told by Stepniak, Kropotkin, Zilliacus, Miliukoff, and many other writers. In books that are easily obtained, any one may learn the course of that great movement—the changes in its aims and methods, the distinctions in its parties, and the martyrdoms of its recorded heroes. So for this present purpose of chronicling a few peculiar or unnoticed events and situations which would hardly have a place in history at all, perhaps it will be enough if I begin the skeleton annals with the outbreak of the war between Russia and Japan in February, 1904.

A DEMONSTRATION BY THE KAZAN CHURCH, ST. PETERSBURG.

From The Marseillaise.

It is true that for some time earlier the revolutionary movement had obviously been gathering strength. Within two years there had occurred outbreaks among the peasants, student risings in Moscow, and a demonstration in front of the great classic building called the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Some soldiers at Toula had actually refused to kill the work-people. The Zemstvos, or District Councils of landowners and upper-middle classes, had ventured to recommend economic reforms, and a student from Kieff had assassinated Sipiaguine, the Minister of the Interior. To counteract these evils, heightened by a period of industrial depression, Plehve had been promoted from the Governorship of Finland to the Ministry of the Interior; a manifesto had been issued (March 12, 1903), removing the responsibility of the village communes for individual taxation, and promoting religious toleration; and the Jews of Kishineff had been massacred, with the connivance of the Government, and probably at its direct instigation (April 20, 1903). The Armenian Church in the Caucasus was deprived of £3,000,000 of its funds, the public debt of Russia rose to £700,000,000, about half of the interest on which had to be paid to foreign countries, and Witte was appointed President of the Committee of Ministers, while his assistant Pleske succeeded him in what was then regarded as the far more important position of the Ministry of Finance.

It was obvious that the Government—which we may call Tsardom or Oligarchy as we please—had in any case entered upon the way to destruction, and that the revolution was already at work. Indeed, the Social Democrats had met in secret in 1903, and published a “minimum programme” demanding a Republic under universal adult suffrage. But still the disastrous war with Japan hastened these tendencies, and its outbreak may conveniently be taken to mark a period, for the dates of wars are definite and the results quick.

The course of that ruinous campaign, unequalled, I suppose, in history for the uninterrupted succession of its disasters, need not concern us now. It wasted many millions of money, borrowed by a country which is naturally and inevitably poor. It revealed an incompetence in the ruling classes worse than our own in South Africa, together with a corruption and a heartlessness of greed compared to which even the scandals of South Africa seemed rather less devilish. It kept from their work in fields and factories about a million grown men, who had to be fed and clothed, however badly, by the rest of the population, and it killed or maimed some two or three hundred thousand of them. Otherwise the war can hardly be said to have concerned the Russian people any more than ourselves, so general was their indifference both to its cause and to its failure. “It is not our war, it is the Government’s affair,” was the common saying. Tolstoy is a prophet, and the mark of a prophet is that he speaks with the voice of God and not with the voice of the people; but in his protest against the war (published in the Times of June 27, 1904) he uttered a denunciation of the Government with which nearly the whole of Russia’s population would have agreed. Of the head of that Government himself, he wrote:—

“The Russian Tsar, the same man who exhorted all the nations in the cause of peace, publicly announces that, notwithstanding all his efforts to maintain the peace so dear to his heart (efforts which express themselves in the seizing of other people’s lands and in the strengthening of armies for the defence of those stolen lands), he, owing to the attack of the Japanese, commands that the same should be done to the Japanese as they had begun doing to the Russians—namely, that they should be slaughtered; and in announcing this call to murder he mentions God, asking the Divine blessing on the most dreadful crime in the world. This unfortunate and entangled young man, recognized as the leader of 130,000,000 of people, continually deceived and compelled to contradict himself, confidently thanks and blesses the troops which he calls his own for murder in defence of lands which he calls his own with still less right.”

While the myth of Russia’s military and naval power—a myth which for fifty years had misguided England’s foreign policy, checked any generous impulse on the part of our statesmen, and driven them to breach of national faith, callousness towards outrageous cruelty, and every moral humiliation that a proud and ancient people can suffer—while this overwhelming myth was being dissipated month by month in the Far East, the characteristic methods by which the Russian Tsar and Oligarchs sought to maintain their hold upon the wealth and privileges of State were being revealed in the so-called Königsberg case. It was discovered that even in a foreign capital like Berlin, the Russian Government employed a little army of spies, under a recognized and highly-paid official, to search the homes of Russian Liberals, to watch their goings, and open their letters. It was also shown that, even under a comparatively civilized government like the German, the authorities were ready to bring their own subjects to trial for alleged verbal attacks upon the Tsar; while a Russian Consul, probably in obedience to orders from home, would tell any lie and garble any document to support the charge.

On June 17th the air was cleared by the assassination of General Bobrikoff, the Russian tyrant of Finland, and on July 8th that deed was followed by the assassination of Plehve. In all the history of political murder, I suppose, there has never been a case in which the victim received less pity, or the crime less condemnation. The pitiless hand of reaction was for the moment stayed. The birth of an heir to the uneasy crown inspired the Tsar with such amiability that, as father of his people, he abolished the punishment of flogging among his grown-up subjects. Prince Sviatopolk Mirski, who was justly regarded as something of a Liberal as princes go, succeeded Plehve at the Interior, released some political prisoners, advocated decentralization with the development of the Zemstvos, and promised better education, liberty of conscience, and freedom of speech.

Again the Zemstvoists, taking their courage as moderate Liberals in both hands, met secretly in St. Petersburg, and drew up a kind of Petition of Rights to be presented to the Tsar. There were one hundred and six members present at the secret conferences, thirty-six of them belonging to the caste of the nobility, and their Petition began with the complaint that the bureaucracy had alienated the people from the Throne, and that by its distrust of self-government it had shown itself entirely out of touch with the people. In place of the bureaucratic system, the Petition demanded an elected Legislature of two Houses, together with freedom of conscience, the press, meeting, and association, equal civil and political rights for all classes and races, and similar methods of justice for the peasants as for other men.

The Zemstvo petition was issued on November 22, 1904. A month later (December 26th) it was repeated in still more direct and urgent terms by the Moscow Zemstvo, which had always taken the lead in reform, being inspired by its President, Prince Sergius Troubetzkoy, Professor of Philosophy in the University since 1888. But, in the meantime, student riots had again occurred in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the censorship had been renewed, and on the same day as the Moscow petition there appeared an Imperial manifesto proclaiming “the unshakable foundations of the Russian State system, consecrated by the fundamental laws of the Empire,” and announcing the Tsar’s determination to act always in accordance with the revered will of his crowned predecessor, while he thought unceasingly upon the welfare of the realm entrusted to him by God. The manifesto went on to admit that when the need of this or that change had been proved to be mature, the Tsar was willing to take it into consideration, and upon this principle he undertook to maintain the laws, to give local institutions as wide a scope as possible, to unify judicial procedure throughout the Empire, to establish State insurance of workmen, and to revise the laws upon political crime, religious offences, and the press. But the tone of the whole manifesto was felt to be reactionary, and there was no guarantee that its promises would be observed. When our own Charles I. made concessions, the people shouted, “We have the word of a King!” But they soon found that assurance was a shifty thing to trust to, and since then the words of kings have counted for no more than the words of men.

But the opening of the next year (1905) was marked by the appearance of a new element in revolution. Certainly, there had been strikes and riots in the great cities before; there had been peasant risings and other forms of economic agitation in various parts. But as a whole the revolutionary movement as such had been inspired, directed, and even carried out by the educated classes—the students, the journalists, the doctors, barristers, and other professional men. It had been almost limited to that great division of society which in Russia is called “The Intelligence.” The word is fairly well represented by our phrase “educated classes”—a phrase which embodies our greatest national shame. It includes all who are not workmen or peasants, and so is much wider in significance than the French term “The Intellectuals,” with which it is often confused. In England, for instance, it would include the House of Lords, the clergy, army officers, country gentlemen, and the leaders of society whom no Frenchman would dream of classing among the intellectual.

It was “the Intelligence” who hitherto had fought for the revolution. It was they who had suffered scourgings and exile and imprisonment and madness and violation and the gallows in the name of freedom. It was they who had endured the horror that most people feel in killing a man. And, above all, it was they who had devoted their lives, their careers, and reputations to going about among the peasants and working-people to show them that the misery and terror under which they lived were neither necessary nor universal. At length the firstfruits of their toilsome propaganda, continued through forty years, were seen, and the revolutionary workman appeared.

He was ushered in by Father George Gapon, at that time a rather simple-hearted priest, with a rather childlike faith in God and the Tsar, and a certain genius for organization. His personal hold upon the working classes was probably due to their astonishment that a priest should take any interest in their affairs, outside their fees. We have seen the same thing happen in England, when Manning and Westcott won the reverence due to saints because they displayed some feeling for the flock which they were paid large sums to protect. Father Gapon, with his thin line of genius for organization, had gathered the workmen’s groups or trade unions of St. Petersburg into a fairly compact body, called “The Russian Workmen’s Union,” of which he was President as well as founder. In the third week in January the men at the Putiloff iron works struck because two of their number had been dismissed for belonging to their union. At once the Neva iron and ship-building works, the Petroffsky cotton works, the Alexander engine works, the Thornton cloth works, and other great factories on the banks of the river or upon the industrial islands joined in the strike, and in two days some 100,000 work-people were “out.”

With his rather childlike faith in God and the Tsar, Father Gapon organized a dutiful appeal of the Russian workmen to the tender-hearted autocrat whose benevolence was only thwarted by evil counsellors and his ignorance of the truth. The petition ran as follows:—

“We workmen come to you for truth and protection. We have reached the extreme limits of endurance. We have been exploited, and shall continue to be exploited under your bureaucracy.

“The bureaucracy has brought the country to the verge of ruin and by a shameful war is bringing it to its downfall. We have no voice in the heavy burdens imposed on us. We do not even know for whom or why this money is wrung from the impoverished people, and we do not know how it is expended. This is contrary to the Divine laws, and renders life impossible. It is better that we should all perish, we workmen and all Russia. Then good luck to the capitalists and exploiters of the poor, the corrupt officials and robbers of the Russian people!

“Throw down the wall that separates you from your people. Russia is too great and her needs are too various for officials to rule. National representation is essential, for the people alone know their own needs.

“Direct that elections for a constituent assembly be held by general secret ballot. That is our chief petition. Everything is contained in that.

“If you do not reply to our prayer, we will die in this square before your palace. We have nowhere else to go. Only two paths are open to us—to liberty and happiness or to the grave. Should our lives serve as the offering of suffering Russia, we shall not regret the sacrifice, but endure it willingly.”

On the morning of Sunday, January 22, 1905, about 15,000 working men and women formed into a procession to carry this petition to the Tsar in his Winter Palace upon the great square of government buildings. They were all in their Sunday clothes; many peasants had come up from the country in their best embroideries; they took their children with them. In front marched Father Gapon and two other priests wearing vestments. With them went the ikons, or holy pictures of shining brass and silver, and a portrait of the Tsar. As the procession moved along, they sang, “God save our people. God give our Orthodox Tsar the victory.”

So the Russian workmen made their last appeal to the autocrat whom they called their father. They would lay their griefs before him, they would see him face to face, they would hear his comforting words.

But the father of his people had disappeared into space.

As the procession entered the square, the soldiers fired volley after volley upon them from three sides. The estimate of the killed and wounded was about 1500. That Sunday—January 9th in Russian style—is known as Bloody Sunday or Vladimir’s Day, after the Grand Duke Vladimir, who was supposed to have given the orders.

Next morning Father Gapon wrote to his Union: “There is no Tsar now. Innocent blood has flowed between him and the people.”

“HOMUNCULUS” AND THE S. D. (SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC) RATS.

From Burelom (The Storm).

Innocent blood has flowed before and tyrants still have reigned. They have been feared, they have won their way, and men have served them. Mankind will endure much in the name of government, but to be governed by a coward is almost beyond the endurance of man.

On January 24th a new office of Governor-General of St. Petersburg was created, and Trepoff received the first appointment.

Disturbances continued in Warsaw, Lodz, and Sosnowice, the industrial centres of Poland, and on January 31st 200 work-people were killed and 600 wounded in the streets of Warsaw.

On February 17th the Grand Duke Sergius, Governor-General of Moscow, uncle to the Tsar, conspicuous for his cruelty, and, even among the Russian aristocracy, renowned for the peculiarity of his vices, was assassinated as he drove into the Kremlin.

This event and other outbreaks that were continually occurring in the great centres of industry, inspired a remarkable manifesto and rescript that appeared on March 3rd and were characteristic of the hesitating fugitive in Tsarkoe Selo. The manifesto took the form of a pathetic address to the people whom he had misgoverned with such disaster:—

“Disturbances have broken out in our country” (it said) “to the joy of our enemies and our own deep sorrow. Blinded by pride, the evil-minded leaders of the revolutionary movement make insolent attacks upon the Holy Orthodox Church and the lawfully established pillars of the Russian State....

“We humbly bear the trial sent us by Providence, and derive strength and consolation from our firm trust in the grace which God has always shown to the Russian power, and from the immemorial devotion which we know our loyal people entertain for the Throne....

“Let all those rally round the Throne who, true to Russia’s past, honestly and conscientiously have a care for all the affairs of the State such as we have ourselves.”

In the rescript that followed on the same day a form of Legislative Assembly was promised in these words—

“I am resolved henceforth, with the help of God, to convene the worthiest men, possessing the confidence of the people and elected by them, to participate in the elaboration and consideration of legislative measures.”

Buliguine, who had now succeeded Mirski as Minister of the Interior, and was probably the author of the rescript, was appointed to organize the elections. But a counterblast of reaction swept over the distracted Tsar; Trepoff was made Assistant-Minister of the Interior and Chief of the Police, with full power to forbid all congresses, associations, or meetings, and Buliguine resigned, though he remained nominally in office till the end of October.

Outbreaks in the country became continually more serious. In June there was fierce rioting in Lodz, the great manufacturing town of Poland, and in the Baltic port of Libau. In the same month the great battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea fleet mutinied at Odessa, threw two big shells into the town, burnt the docks, and steamed away to the mouth of the Danube for refuge.

Mid-August brought another manifesto, which began with the usual precepts of maudlin falsehood—

“The Empire of Russia is formed and strengthened by the indestructible solidarity of the Tsar with the people and the people with the Tsar. The concord and union of the Tsar and the people are a great moral force, which has created Russia in the course of centuries by protecting her from all misfortunes and all attacks, and has constituted up to the present time a pledge of unity, independence, integrity, material well-being, and intellectual development.

“Autocratic Tsars, our ancestors, constantly had that object in view, and the time has come to follow out their good intentions and to summon elected representatives from the whole of Russia to take a constant and active part in the elaboration of laws, attaching for this purpose to the higher State institutions a special consultative body, entrusted with the preliminary elaboration and discussion of measures, and with the examination of the State Budget.

“It is for this reason that, while preserving the fundamental law regarding autocratic power, we have deemed it well to form a State Duma, and to approve regulations for the elections to this Duma.”

This consultative Duma was to lay its proposals before the Council of State, which might submit them to the Tsar if it approved. The Duma was to meet not later than January, 1906, and was to consist of 412 members, representing 50 governments and the military province of the Don, only 28 of the members representing towns. The members were to be paid £1 a day and fares, and were to sit for five years, unless the Tsar chose to dissolve them. Their meetings were to be secret, except that the President might admit the Press if he chose.

On September 7th a race-feud broke out between the Mohammedan Tartars and the Armenians at Baku, on the Caspian, and spread to Tiflis and all along the southern slopes of the Caucasus. The destruction of the great oil-works at Baku involved a loss of many millions of pounds, and further embarrassed the railways and manufacturing districts, which depended almost entirely on naphtha for their fuel.

On September 25th an assembly of 300 representatives of the Zemstvos of the empire was gathered in a private house at Moscow to consider their attitude towards the promised Duma, which was regarded as a concession to their previous representations during the year. They recognized that the Duma of the August manifesto would not be either a representative or legislative assembly, but, regarding it as a possible rallying-point for the general movement towards freedom, they agreed to obtain as many seats as possible, so as to form a united group of advanced opinion.

They further drew up a programme of their political aims, including the formation of a National Legislative Assembly; a regular budget system; the abolition of passports; equal rights for all citizens, including peasants; equal responsibility of all officials and private citizens before the law; the liberation of the villager from the petty official (natchalnik); inviolability of person and home; and freedom of conscience, speech, press, meeting, and association.

The programme is important, as indicating what to the average Liberal politician in England would appear the most obvious abuses of the Russian system, because nothing is here demanded which has not long ago been obtained for our own country by the efforts of our upper and middle classes in the past.

As soon as the assembly broke up, Prince Sergius Troubetzkoy, the true leader of these Liberal or Zemski delegates, the President of the Moscow Zemstvo, and for a month past the Rector of the University, went to St. Petersburg to urge the Government to allow public meetings, and while speaking on behalf of free speech at the Ministry of Public Education, he suddenly died. He was only forty-three, and it is tempting to speak of him as the first of the Girondists to fall. But all through what I have seen in Russia, I have avoided even a mental reference to the French Revolution as carefully as I could. For history is a great hindrance in judging the present or the future.

The manifesto of October 19th, announcing the final conclusion of the peace with Japan, by which the Russian Government was compelled to abandon all for which it had striven during many years in the Far East, was hardly noticed in the gathering excitement of the days.

On October 21st, the workmen again appeared unexpectedly upon the scene, and delivered their first telling blow by declaring a general railway strike. The strength of the movement was that it disorganized trade, made the capitalist and commercial classes very uncomfortable, and, above all, that it prevented the Government from sending troops rapidly to any particular point of disturbance. The weakness was that, as in all strikes, the strikers were threatened with starvation while their employers suffered only discomfort; that the peasants, being unable to get their produce to market, began to regard the revolution with suspicion; and that the Government succeeded in running a military train between St. Petersburg and Moscow (only a ten hours’ journey) nearly all the time.

The objects of the strikers were in the main political, as could be seen from the demands presented to Witte by a deputation on October 24th—

“The claims of the working classes must be settled by laws constituted by the will of the people and sanctioned by all Russia. The only solution is to announce political guarantees for freedom and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, elected by direct, universal, and secret suffrage. Otherwise the country will be forced into rebellion.”

To this petition Witte’s reply was peculiarly characteristic—

“A Constituent Assembly is for the present impossible. Universal suffrage would, in fact, only give pre-eminence to the richest classes, because they could influence all the voting by their money. Liberty of the press and of public meeting will be granted very shortly. I am myself strongly opposed to all persecution and bloodshed, and I am willing to support the greatest amount of liberty possible.... But there is not in the entire world a single cultivated man who is in favour of universal suffrage.”

Undeterred by any fear of exclusion from the circle of culture, the workmen continued their demands for universal suffrage and a Constituent Assembly, and on October 26th the Central Strike Committee—or Council of Labour Delegates, as it was properly called—sitting in St. Petersburg, declared a general strike throughout Russia. About a million workers came out.

This was the second workmen’s blow, and it shook Tsardom from top to bottom.

Four days after the beginning of the strike, the famous Manifesto of October 30th (17th in Old Style) was issued, promising personal freedom and a constitution. The document began with the harmless necessary cant—

“The troubles and agitations in our capitals and numerous other places fill our heart with great and painful sorrow.... The sorrow of the people is the sorrow of the sovereign.... We therefore direct our Government to carry out our inflexible will in the following manner:—

“I. To grant to our people the immutable foundations of civil liberty, based on real inviolability of person, and freedom of conscience, speech, union, and association.

“II. Without deferring the elections to the State Duma already ordered, to call to participation in the Duma (as far as is possible in view of the shortness of time before the Duma assembles) those classes of the population now completely deprived of electoral rights, leaving the ultimate development of the principle of electoral right in general to the newly established legislature.

“III. To establish it as an immutable rule that no law can ever come into force without the approval of the State Duma, and that it shall be possible for the elected of the people to exercise a real participation in supervising the legality of the acts of authorities appointed by us.”

This manifesto was greeted by an outburst of joy unequalled in the melancholy annals of Russia. Righteousness and peace kissed each other upon the streets; and so did professors, students, and even working people. Red flags paraded the squares, generals saluted them, soldiers joined in the Marseillaise of labour. But the Central Strike Committee was not overcome by the general hallucination. They rightly refused to trust the Tsar without guarantees, and they continued to press their demands for a political amnesty and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. They also demanded the restoration of its old liberties to Finland, and the dismissal of Trepoff. When anti-Jewish riots broke out at Kieff, Warsaw, and especially at Odessa, they steadily and justly maintained that the “Black Hundred” or “Hooligans” of the massacre and pillage were encouraged by the police and the priests, who wished to make out that the Russian people were opposed to political liberties.

The panic of the Government continued. They could not measure the strength of this new force among the work-people, or of this new instrument, the general strike. They were uncertain, also, about the army, which, together with the police and officials, formed their sole protection from ruin. Pobiedonostzeff, the aged Procurator of the Holy Synod, and the embodiment of an obstinate and narrow tyranny in Church and State, resigned. On November 4th, an amnesty was proclaimed for political offenders, though certain qualifications and categories were added.

On the same day a manifesto restored the old liberties of Finland, abolishing the decree of February 15, 1899, by which the autocratic principle, the dictatorship, and the employment of Russian gendarmes had been imposed upon the duchy contrary to its original constitution, and repealing also the military law of July 12, 1901, which compelled recruits to serve outside their own country.

On November 9th Trepoff sent in his resignation, and Durnovo, since infamous for his brutality, took office. The same day a violent but ill-considered mutiny broke out among the sailors and gunners at Kronstadt.

From that moment the Government began to recover courage, and we may mark the gradual revival of reaction. Perhaps it was immediately due to the refusal of the Liberal Zemstvoists to take part in a ministry under Witte, unless the promises of the manifesto were guaranteed, and a Constituent Assembly convened. In any case the change was quite apparent in a manifesto of November 12th, declaring the present situation unsuitable for the introduction of reforms, which would only be possible when the country was pacified.

Next day a ukase proclaimed martial law in Poland, and excluded that country from the manifesto, on the pretence that the Poles were plotting against the integrity of the Russian Empire by establishing a separate nation of their own.

The Central Strike Committee answered this ukase on the morrow (November 14th) by declaring another general strike in sympathy with Poland, and Witte, on his side, retaliated by posting an appeal to the work-people, conceived in his most unctuous and fatherly style. It ran—

“Brothers! Workmen! Go back to your work and cease from disorder. Have pity on your wives and children, and turn a deaf ear to mischievous counsels. The Tsar commands us to devote special attention to the labour question, and to that end has appointed a Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which will establish just relations between masters and men. Only give us time, and I will do all that is possible for you. Pay attention to the advice of a man who loves you and wishes you well.”

This appeal was immediately followed (November 17th) by a manifesto to the peasants, reducing their payments for the use of land by one-half after January, 1906, and abolishing it altogether after January, 1907. These payments were still being made under the land settlement that followed the emancipation of the serfs in the early sixties, and their nominal value to the Government was seven million pounds a year. But the apparent generosity of the remission is diminished by the consideration that the peasants had already paid the economic value of the land many times over, and pressure could still be brought upon them to make up the heavy arrears due to successive famines.

Three days later (November 20th), the Central Strike Committee declared the strike at an end. This second general strike was felt to have been a failure. People and funds were still exhausted by the first. Comparatively few of the great factories came out; the object of the strike was too remote from the workman’s daily life to persuade him to endure the starvation of his family for it. So the strike failed. It produced nothing; it did not frighten or paralyse the Government.

Nevertheless, the Strike Committee remained the most powerful body of men in the Empire, and their order commanding the cessation of the strike called hopefully upon the working classes to continue the revolutionary propaganda in the army, and to organize themselves into military forces “for the final encounter between all Russia and the bloody monarchy now dragging out its last few days.”

Such was the situation when, on November 21st I landed at the revolutionary little port of Reval, and went on to St. Petersburg by the first train which had run since the strike ended.

CHAPTER I
THE STRIKE COMMITTEE

Away in the western quarter of St. Petersburg, at some distance from the fashionable centre, stands a rather decrepit hall of debased classic. In England one would have put it down to George II.’s time, but in St. Petersburg everything looks fifty years older than it is, because fashions used to travel slowly there from France. Among the faded gilding of stucco pilasters and allegorical emblems of the virtues and the arts, are hung the obscure portraits of long-forgotten men—philosophers, governors, and generals—who were of importance enough in their day to be painted for the remembrance of posterity. Glaringly fresh among the others hangs the portrait of the hesitating gentleman whom the accident of birth has left Autocrat of Russia, whether he likes it or not. The hall was dedicated to the discussion of “Free Economics” by some scientific body, but never before had economics been discussed there with such freedom as during those November nights when the Central Strike Committee, or Council of Labour Delegates, chose it for their meetings.

Admission was by ticket only, and I obtained mine from a revolutionary compositor, hairy as John the Baptist, and as expectant of a glory to be revealed. On the first night that I went, the big chamber, with its ante-room half separated by plaster columns, was crowded with working people. So was the entrance hall, where goloshes are left, in Russian fashion, so that the floors may not be dirtied. Some of the men wore the ordinary dingy clothes of English or European factory-hands, making all as like as earwigs. Some had come dressed in the national pink shirt, with embroidered flowers or patterns down the front and round the collar. But most wore the common Russian blouse of dark brown canvas, buttoned up close to the neck, and gathered round the waist by a leather belt.

Many women were there, too, but as a rule they were not working women from the mills. Some may have been artisans or the wives of artisans, but most were evidently journalists, doctors, or students, from the intellectual middle classes, which in Russia produces the woman revolutionist—the woman who has played so fine a part in the long struggle of the past, and was now elated above human happiness by the hope of victory. For Russian women enjoy a working equality and comradeship with men, whether in martyrdom or in triumph, such as no other nation has yet realized.

The workmen were delegates from the various trades of the capital and some of the provinces—railway men, textile hands, iron workers, timber workers, and others. About five hundred of them had been chosen, and each delegate represented about five hundred other workers. But round the long green table in the middle of that decrepit hall, under the eyes of the hesitating little Tsar’s portrait, sat the chosen few whom the delegates had appointed as their executive committee. Between twenty and thirty of them were there—men of a rather intellectual type among workers, a little raised above the average, either by education or natural power. A few wore some kind of collar, a few showed the finest type of Russian head—the strong, square forehead and chin, the thoughtful and melancholy eyes, the straight nose, not very broad, and the dense masses of long hair all standing on end. A few seemed to be bred just a trifle too fine for their work, as dog-fanciers say. There they sat and spoke and listened—the members of that Strike Committee which had won fame in a month—just a handful of unarmed and unlearned men, who had shaken the strongest and most pitiless despotism in the world.

In the middle, along one side of the table, was their president, the compositor Khroustoloff—or Nosar, as his real name was—a man of about thirty-five, pale, grey-eyed, with long fair hair, not a strong-looking man, but worn with excitement and sleeplessness. For there was no time now for human needs, and his edge of collar was crumpled and twisted like an old rag. Yet he controlled an excited and inexperienced meeting with temper and ease, showing sometimes a sudden flicker of laughter for which there is very little room in Russian life. Neither for sleep, nor human needs, nor laughter, was there time, but in front of Khroustoloff and of all those men lay the prison or the grave, and in them there is always time enough.

That night, as long as I was there, the meeting was occupied with the discussion of the eight-hours’ day. One of the executive read out the reports received from all the factories represented by delegates as to the hours of labour at present. In some cases, the masters had conceded an eight-hours’ day after the first strike. In others, they had come down to nine, in others to ten. Most had absolutely refused a reduction. These reports, though monotonous and many, were listened to with the silence that characterizes a Russian meeting. It was broken only now and then by a little laughter or a murmur of anger. I have never heard a Russian speaker interrupted even by applause.

The evening before I had attended a meeting where a dull but deserving speaker, to whom no one wanted to listen, went on for an hour and twenty minutes in a silence like an African forest’s, with only an occasional whisper of breezy dresses as the audience changed their position at the end of some uninteresting clause. Ages of dumb suffering have given these people the interminable patience of mountains, and a public meeting is so new to them that they find a fearful pleasure in speeches which our free-born electors would howl down in three minutes. Any meeting of British trade-unionists would have polished off the Strike Committee’s business in an hour, but when I came away, though it was past two in the morning and the meeting had begun at six in the afternoon, the discussion was still proceeding with healthy vigour, and there were plenty of other subjects of equal importance still to be settled. The Committee, in fact, sat almost in permanence night and day.

As soon as the reports were all read, the executive gathered up their papers and adjourned into an upper room to consider their decision. During their absence, the other delegates broke up into groups according to trades, for the discussion of their own affairs. Standing on a chair, a man would shout, “Weavers, this way, please!” “Engineers, here!” or “Railway-men, this way!” and the various workers clustered round in swarms. A fine hum of business arose, and a buzz of conversation with outbursts of laughter too, for all spirits still were high with success and the confidence of victory. At last, as the executive remained over an hour in conference, a yellow-haired young workman with a voice like the Last Trumpet, raised the Russian “Marseillaise,” and in a moment the room was sounding to the hymn of freedom. Russian words—rather vague and rhetorical words—have been set to the old French tune, and even the tune has been altered at the end of the chorus, to make room for the words, “Forward, forward, forward!” which come in suddenly, like the beating of a drum. It was sung in all the streets of all the cities, but I heard it first in the midst of German territory, upon the Kiel canal. For as I was coming over, the only passenger upon the Russian boat, we met an emigrant ship bound for the refuge of freedom, as England still was at that time, and at the sight of our Russian flag the emigrants all burst into the song, the men waving their hats and the women their babes in defiance.

After the “Marseillaise,” the workmen turned to national songs, one of which was almost as magnificent, and was touched with the immense sorrow of Russia. All had one burden—the hatred of tyrants, the love of freedom, the willingness to die for her sake. To us, such phrases have come to bear an unreal and antiquated sound, for it is many centuries since England enjoyed a real tyranny, and the long comfort of freedom has made us slack and indifferent to evil. But in Russia both tyranny and revolt are genuine and alive, and at any moment a man or woman may be called upon to prove how far the love of freedom will really take them on the road to death.

A few days before this workmen’s meeting, I had been at an assembly of the educated classes to protest against capital punishment. One speaker—a professor of famous learning—was worn and twisted by long years of Siberian exile. He was the worst speaker present, but it was he who received the deep thunder of applause. Another had, with Russian melancholy, devoted his life to compiling an immense history of assassination by the State. Before he began to speak, he announced that he was going to read the list of those who had been executed for their love of freedom since the time of Nicholas I. Instantly the whole great audience rose in silence and remained standing in silence while a man might count a hundred. It was as when a regiment drinks in silence to fallen comrades. But few regiments have fought for a cause so noble, and few for a cause in which the survivors still ran so great a risk.

The executive returned from their consultation, and at once the meeting was quiet. President Khroustoloff, in a clear and reasonable statement, announced that, in the opinion of the executive, a fresh general strike on the eight-hours’ question would at present be a mistake. The eight-hours’ day was an ideal to be kept before them; they must allow no master who had once granted it to go back on his word; they must urge the others forward, little by little, and in the meanwhile organize and combine till they could confront both capitalism and autocracy with assurance. Another member of the executive spoke in support of this decision, and then the delegates of the opposite party had their turn. It was the old difference between the responsible opportunist, who takes what he can get, and the man of the ideal, who will take nothing if he cannot have all. The idealists pointed to the evident intention of Witte’s Government to thwart the workmen’s advance. They pointed, with good reason, to the gradual renewal of police persecution during the last few days, and to the encouragement given to masters who declared a lock-out. They urged that it was best to fight before the common enemy regained his full power, and that the general strike, so efficient before, was still the only weapon the workmen had. It was all true. Yet the recent strike had almost failed, and it was just because a general strike was the workmen’s only weapon that it should be sparingly used. A second failure within a fortnight would show the Government that freedom’s only weapon was not so dangerous after all. In the end the executive had its way; they were supported by three hundred votes against twenty; and there could be no question of the wisdom. The weapon of a general strike is too powerful to be brought out, except for some special and all-important crisis. It is like an ancient king, more feared when little seen.

Freedom at that moment was just hanging in the balance. One almost heard the grating of the scales as very slowly the balance began to swing back again. Already things were not quite so hopeful as they had been, and many good revolutionists spoke of the future with foreboding. The first fine rapture of liberty was over, and people who had eagerly proclaimed themselves Liberals three weeks before, now began to feel in their pockets, to hesitate and look round. In subdued whispers commerce sighed for Trepoff back again, and the ancient security of a merchant’s goods. They pretended terror of peasant outbreaks, and the violence of “Black Hundred” mobs, organized by the police just to show the dangers of reform. But it was reform itself that they dreaded, and the name of Socialism was more terrible to them than the tyranny.

Day by day the police were becoming active again. As family men with a stake in the country, they could not be expected to see their occupation taken from them without a struggle. They had the same interest in the ancient régime as the Russian aristocracy in Paris or Cannes; and for their livelihood the misery of the people was equally essential. Whenever they dared, they planted themselves in front of the doors and drove the audience away from a meeting; and the audience had to go, for except to bombs and revolvers there was no appeal. Every day I watched the police hounding groups of tattered and starving peasants or workmen along the streets, because they had ventured to come to St. Petersburg without passports, and had to be imprisoned till a luggage train could take them back to their starving homes. In spite of the manifesto, the censor of the post-office was active again. It is a terrible thing for a civil servant to feel that his work does not justify his pay. So the censor blacked out a cartoon in Punch representing the Tsar as hesitating between good and evil, and then he felt he could look the world in the face.

Already the people recognized that as yet they had no guarantee of freedom. As long as the Oligarchs controlled the police and the army, freedom existed only on sufferance. No one knew what the army would do, and no one knew what the fighting power of the revolution was. Those unknown factors alone terrified the Oligarchs into reform. But all the promises were only bits of paper. It had long been proved that the Tsar’s word went for nothing. At the birth of his son he had abolished flogging, but the taxes had been “flogged out” of the peasants just as before. Manifesto after manifesto had been issued without the least result, beyond winning the applause of an English writer or two. So far the Tsar’s pledges of reform had been no more effectual than his Conference of Peace and he could only become harmless if he had no power to harm.

Yet the outward appearance of freedom surpassed all hope and imagination. Nothing like this had ever been seen in Russia before. Newspapers dared to tell the truth. Meetings were held which a few weeks before would have sent every speaker to the cells. The Poles gathered in a great assembly demanding the overthrow of absolutism and solidarity for the revolution among all the states of the Empire. Women and children taunted the patrols of Guards and Cossacks as they rode the streets. Ladies threw open their nice clean rooms for workmen to meet in. The students’ restaurants hummed with liberty. The air sounded with the “Marseillaise.”

“In Russia now, everybody thinks,” said a revolutionist to me, “and where people think, liberty must come.” Thought and liberty were to bring him death in a few weeks, but for the moment it seemed impossible that any reaction could bring the old order back. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not restore that ancient tyranny. The spring of freedom had come slowly up that way, but at last it was greeted as certain, and so it seemed to me when in the darkness of early morning I left that workmen’s meeting still hot with discussion in the mouldering hall, and tramped home through slush and thawing snow, watching the rough floes of drifting ice as they settled down into their winter places upon the Neva.

CHAPTER II
THE WORKMEN’S HOME

The Schlüsselburg road runs nearly all the way beside the great stream of the Neva, which was still pouring down in flood in those November days, though it sounded incessantly with the whisper of floating ice. The road leads from St. Petersburg along the whole course of the river up to that ill-omened fortress in the Ladoga lake, where so many of the martyrs of freedom have enjoyed the imprisonment or death with which Russia rewards greatness. For six or seven miles the road passes through a series of villages, now united into one long and squalid street, inseparable from the city, though only a few hundred yards behind the mills and workmen’s dwellings lie flat fields, and woods, and dull but open country. This is the largest manufacturing district of the capital. Its factories had already become historic with bloodshed, and it was here that the workmen’s party was organized, and the Council of Labour Delegates first formed.

The mills stand on both sides of the river, but as a rule the work-people live on the south or left bank, where the road runs; for there is no passable road on the other side. In summer they pay a farthing toll to steam ferry-boats. In winter they walk across the ice to work, guided by little rows of Christmas trees stuck on the ice, as is the Russian way. But between whiles, twice a year, there come a few days when they cannot go to work at all. Those days ought to have come by the time I visited the region first, but the frost was late.

Everything was strange that year. For months together no work had been done, and though some of the mills had just re-opened after the second general strike, the road was crowded with shabby men and women, who gathered at the corners, or trampled up and down in the filth, or sat stewing in the dirty tea-rooms, quieting their hunger with drink. Fully 60,000 of them were out of work, for in answer to the strike many masters had declared a lock-out.

Backwards and forwards among them marched little sections of six or seven soldiers, their bayonets fixed, their rifles loaded, their warm brown overcoats paid for by the work-people and the peasants. Groups of four or five Cossacks clattered to and fro with carbine and sword, while on the saddle, ready to the right hand, hung the terrible nagaika or Cossack whip, paid for by the work-people and the peasants. It is heavy and solid, with twisted hide, like a short and thicker sjambok; at the butt is a loop for the wrist, and near the end of the lash a jagged lump of lead is firmly tied into the strands. When a Cossack rises in his stirrups to strike, he can break a skull right open, and any ordinary blow will slit a face from brow to chin, and cripple a woman or child for life.

The Manifesto had not changed the Cossack nature. A week before, at a workmen’s meeting held to discuss the strike, it was proposed to stop the steam trams which run along the road. But the Cossacks had received orders not to allow the trams to be stopped. So down they trotted to the meeting; a pistol shot is said to have been heard somewhere in the darkness, and in a moment the horses were plunging through the midst of a confused and helpless crowd, while swords and nagaikas hewed the people down. The number of killed and wounded was variously given, as is usual in massacres.

On one of my later visits down the road, I became acquainted with a man who had survived a scene even more terrible. As a small patrol of Cossacks was riding by, a little boy of eight, who had come to the mill with his mother, shook his tiny fist at them from a window. By command of their officer, the men rode into the mill yard, dismounted, entered the machinery rooms, bayoneted the child, and began firing at random upon the people at their work. Eight were killed where they stood. The man who told me of the deed escaped through a side door, and hid himself under the boilers till the soldiers rode away elated with victory. Then the workmen dragged out the dead, and the boy’s body was given to his mother.

Tired of being slaughtered like fowls, the workmen themselves were collecting arms, and had organized a kind of volunteer service, or “militia,” as they called it. Armed groups crept through the fields and back lanes from one point of vantage to another. Even in the daytime, firing was common in the streets, and almost every night the workmen met the soldiers in sharp encounter. The factories, whether at work or not, were all guarded by sentries inside and out. The Alexandrovsky ironworks, which belong to Government, and had been shut down the day before I was there, were at once filled with troops, and the hands, some five thousand in number, remained outside to increase the shabby and indignant crowd upon the street.

Art Reproduction Co.

AN AUTUMN IDYLL.

From Sulphur (Jupel).

The ironworkers were the best paid of all the workmen in the district. The works are in an old red-brick factory, built originally for making guns, but long used for the locomotives on the straight line from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Many charming personages in Russian society had justly regarded that factory as the source of human happiness. But in their trepidation to enjoy, they had neglected the fount of enjoyment, and the place had long been sliding down to ruin. Already it was much cheaper to buy new locomotives from Germany, Belgium, or Zurich, in spite of the high tariff, than even to repair the old engines here. At last, I suppose, just the one inevitable day had come when the thing became too ludicrous even for a Government’s methods of industry. The gates were shut, and the five thousand hands turned out to meditate on the source of human happiness.

It was thought at the time that, like the master of finesse who pays his tailor by ordering more clothes, the management would open again soon, because one per cent. of the wages had always been stopped for a pension fund. This fund was estimated at something like £2,000,000, and the Government might well prefer to go on paying out several thousands a year in dead loss rather than be called upon for a solid £2,000,000 when nothing more could be flogged out of the starving peasants, and France was beginning to look twice at a sou before lending it. What happened in the end I did not hear, but I passed down that road some months later, and the works were still shut up.

Other mills, which did not rest upon State credit (that is to say, on drink and the flogging of peasants), and were struggling not to keep shut, but to keep open, were naturally in a different position. There are cotton mills, wool mills, paper mills, and candle mills along the river, many of them run by English capital, and managed by English overseers. In most of the textile mills, the machinery is also English, this being almost the only import in which England still rivals Germany. There is a greater spaciousness about the buildings and yards than in England, due, I suppose, to the cheapness of land; though, in fact, our old economic theories of rent are valueless here, for, in spite of the vast extent of uncultivated land in Russia, the rents in the capital towns are far higher than in London. But, apart from this spaciousness and a certain easy-going slackness in the labour, one might imagine one’s self in a Lancashire or Yorkshire mill. It was in mills like these that the labour questions arose which were really the causes of the strike that shook the Russian despotism. Of course, political questions came in—the war scandals, the demands for home rule, amnesty, universal suffrage, and a constituent assembly. But a revolution, like a war, goes upon its belly, and it is difficult to get working men to move if they are fairly content with their food and lodging. It is still more difficult to get working women to move.

Till ten years ago the hours in these mills were seventy-five a week, or twelve and a half a day, not counting the dinner hours. They then fell to sixty-seven, and the strike of last October brought them down to sixty-two and a half. For the first week of November (just after the manifesto), the hands proclaimed an eight-hours’ day, and walked out of the mills when the time was up. After a week of that, the managers shut the gates, preferring to pay the hands the fortnight’s wages to which they are entitled on dismissal, and then to let the mills stand idle. About a fortnight later, the textile managers agreed to come down to sixty and a half hours a week, and on that arrangement the hands came in again. Thus in ten years the workmen had reduced their hours by nearly fifteen a week, and seven of these had been knocked off in two months, simply by combination in strikes. As I said, the general strike is a powerful weapon, though, unhappily, dangerous to those who use it.

At the time there was a general opinion that a nine-hours’ day would be enforced by an Imperial ukase. Even the employers believed it, and looked forward to making up the loss by increased duties on imports, and higher prices for their goods. The workmen would probably acquiesce, for a strike falls most heavily on themselves, and under the Russian factory laws any one who incites to a strike or joins in it may be imprisoned for four to eight months. Till December, 1904, all trade unions and meetings of workmen were also illegal. During his period of ill-omened power, Plehve had affected to encourage meetings in this very district, but his sole object was to ascertain who were the real leaders among the people, and who were the best speakers. When that was known, in the middle of the night, knocking would be heard at a man’s door. He would open it to a group of soldiers or police, and from that moment he disappeared, spirited away, no one knew where. It was the Government’s method of protecting vested interests.

Wages nearly always go by piecework, and they vary according to skill. In the cotton mills a man may earn anything between 15d. and 4s. 4d. a day, and a woman between 10d. and 2s. 4½d. In the woollen mills a weaver makes about 3s. 5d. a day, and he has two assistants (generally girls) who make from 1s. 10d. to 2s. 4d. each. The ironworkers, as I said, get a rather higher wage, but the maximum, I think, in no case is over 30s. a week, and I doubt if the average, including women and girls, is over 15s.

The mere amount of money in wages is unimportant. A handful of bay-salt or three yards of cheap cotton may be good wages to an African native. All depends on what the payment can buy and what work it represents, and I am inclined to think from what 1 have seen in many lands that in reality the wage of the working class is much the same all the world over. The standard of tolerable existence certainly varies a little, but the wage is always regulated by the lowest standard that will be endured. Wherever I have consulted an overseer or mill-owner as to the standard of living in Russia, he has almost always told me that I must not judge by English ideas, “because the people here are quite satisfied with black bread and cucumbers.” By cucumbers he meant the small pickled gherkins in barrels, such as form one peculiar ingredient in the smell of Petticoat Lane. At the same time all English overseers were agreed that the Russian workman’s standard of work is far lower than the English. A Russian will mind only two looms, they told me, where an Englishman will mind four or even six. It had not occurred to them that there might be some connection between the standard of food and the standard of work, nor, indeed, did that concern them much, for in the end they obtained about the same amount of work for the same amount of wage.

When I became more acquainted with the work-people’s life and had been into several of their homes, I found that, as long as they were in work, most of them had soup every day, because bad meat was cheap. Beyond the soup, black bread was the duty, pickled cucumber the pleasure; and the drink was almost unlimited tea—very weak and without milk, but syruppy with sugar—varied by an occasional debauch on the State’s vodka, which pays the greater part of the tyranny’s expenses.

On the Schlüsselburg road the work-people live in wooden huts built up wandering courts or lanes off the main street. I have not seen a family occupying more than one room. If they rent two or three, they sub-let. A room costs from 15s. to 22s. a month, and the larger rooms are usually divided between two or more families. In some cases each of the four corners is occupied by a different family, separated by shawls or strings, and dwelling as though in tents, as used to be the fashion in the East End. Till quite lately a very large proportion of the work-people lived in special barracks built for them inside the mills, but during that year of strikes most of the overseers had cleared their work-people out because they were dangerously near to themselves and the machinery, and I did not see the “living-in” system really at work till I got to Moscow, where it was still general, though probably soon to disappear.

In the work-people’s rooms there was hardly ever any furniture beyond the bed, the table, some stools, and a chest for clothes. I never saw washing things of any kind. Even in winter the family clothes are washed in the river, the women cutting square holes in the ice and dipping the clothes into the water below. As to the people, in accordance with the one salutary rubric of the Orthodox Church, all men (I am not quite sure about women) must wash before they go to service. In preparation for this sacred duty, they pay a few pence at the public baths, sluice themselves down with hot water, and then lie steaming on shelves, brushing their skin with branches of birch. The effect is very satisfactory, and the Russians as a whole are a cleanly people, both in themselves and their houses, compared to ourselves.

The work-people have the further advantage of twenty-three ecclesiastical holidays in the year, not counting Sundays, and the masters are obliged to provide a hospital or to pay for medical assistance, even for women with child. In an English mill across the river, a clubroom for lectures, concerts, and amusements had just been erected, but the revolution had arrested culture of that kind. It had also arrested football, which was just becoming popular. Cricket had been tried, but was found too mysterious and pedantic, too much like the British Constitution with all its growths and precedents. The only native amusements that I could find were cards, knucklebones, and the fortnightly debauch in vodka when the wages are paid. But at the time of my first visit, there was some chance that the vodka would be dropped, for on the previous Sunday night the Strike Committee had decided that the work-people should for the present give up spirits, tobacco, and other Government monopolies, not for abstinence but to deprive the Government of revenue. The truly Nationalist party has urged the same course in Ireland.

There is one peculiarity which complicates the Russian labour question. Some of the work-people have now lost all connection with the land, but a great majority are still bound by the closest links of duty and affection to their village, and to the little strips of earth which have been allotted to their family. Probably most of the hands in any mill have come there in hopes of paying the taxes on the land, and keeping the family alive in the starving village at home. Between the village and the factory they are continually passing to and fro. Sometimes as many as half the hands in a mill will set off to their villages during the year, and come back again. I have seen the books of one factory, employing nearly 2000 hands, from which over 1000 had gone and returned. If a working son on the land is called to the army, a mill hand walks away to take his place. If labour is short at harvest, they go. If the village community is re-dividing the land, they go. The father of the house at home can always send for them, and they go. It comes of that touching passion for the land which is the great motive of the Russian people. Mercilessly robbed as they have been, nothing has yet induced them to believe that land can belong to Tsar, or Prince, or idle proprietor. Land, they say, cannot belong to people who do not work it; of course it cannot. The land belongs to the peasants. If only the good Tsar know what the people suffer because their land is kept from them, he would give it them back. As Stepniak said long ago, that simple faith is one of the tragedies of Russian life.[1]

Diary of Events

On November 20th, a Peasant’s Congress met at Moscow. There were 300 delegates including several women. Their main demands were for a Constituent Assembly and Nationalization of the land. Sixty followers of Tolstoy were present, and most of the delegates spoke for revolution by peaceful means. Yet on November 27th they were all arrested.

On November 26th, a serious mutiny broke out in the army and fleet at Sevastopol, under the leadership of Lieutenant Schmidt, who had already been expelled from the navy as a Socialist. For a few days the Government suffered panic, but the mutiny was put down without much difficulty.

On November 28th, the post and telegraph hands struck at Moscow for the right of union. The strike extended through the service and paralysed business and Government action. The average wage of the assistants was £5 a month.

CHAPTER III
FATHER GAPON AGAIN

The morning of December 4th was damp and misty, but from an early hour crowds of working people were standing in the slushy snow outside the queer old arrangement of two or three huge sheds which is known as “Salt Town.” It is across the Fontanka canal from the School of Engineers, not very far from the two churches that commemorate the murder of two Tsars. I suppose it has been used at some time or other as a depôt for a Government salt monopoly, and so received its name. In ordinary peaceful years, it now serves as a suitable place for military lectures and engineering experiments such as trained the Russian officers for their overwhelming defeats. But in the stir of revolution, popular meetings of every kind assembled there, because its gaunt white walls and iron roofs would hold such large crowds of work-people under cover, and it supplied accommodation for the coats and goloshes of the intellectual.

I had already attended an immense all-night meeting there to denounce the Government for encouraging the priests and hooligans in their slaughter of the Jews. That very morning of December 4th the school teachers were assembled in one of the halls to discuss whether they too should strike and claim the right of union. But the main interest of the day was centred in the other large hall, where the followers of Father Gapon—the men who had appealed in procession to the Tsar himself on the 22nd of January before—were now gathering together for the first time since that childlike appeal had been answered by massacre.

The meeting was called for ten o’clock in the morning, either to elude the police or to save the expense of light. A Russian meeting is, I think, very seldom less than an hour late, because the Russians are by nature a courteous people, and it is obviously impolite to begin before every one who wishes to come has had a chance of being in time. But long before eleven there was not standing room for another soul, and fifteen hundred men and women were waiting with that inexhaustible Russian patience. Their pallid faces, many of them grim with hunger, looked spectral under the dim twilight of a Russian morning, as I watched them turned upwards in silence to the platform.

Two whispered rumours were going round. One that the Social Democrats intended to break up the meeting; the other, that Father Gapon was not coming after all, and both rumours were almost unique among the rumours I have heard in wars and revolutions, for both were true.

At last the meeting was called upon to declare whom it would have for chairman, and one great shout went up for “Barashoff.” I do not know who Barashoff was, or how he had gained the confidence of the work-people, but his election was at once taken to prove that the Social Democrats present were comparatively few. He came forward—a middle-aged, reddish-bearded man, with no apparent gift of voice or influence—and I do not know what has become of him since, or what prison received him. But there he stood beside me on the platform and announced to the meeting that first they would sing the Hymn of the Fallen, in honour to the victims of that Bloody Sunday when last they had met together.

The whole audience rose, and stood in absolute silence till some one gave out the first note. The hymn consists of only one line, three times repeated, and its only words are, “To their eternal memory.” Yet all the church services I have heard were frivolous compared to it. For it celebrated the martyrdom of men and women whom the worshippers had known, and whose danger they had shared. I do not know what it is that gives so profound a solemnity to Russian popular music, or how it comes that a Russian crowd produces such a deep volume of musical sound. Perhaps there is an unconscious influence from the old Church music, always so solemn and grave, so free from sentiment and tune. More likely the nature of both arises from the monotonous unhappiness of Russian life, the melancholy of long oppression, and the nearness of death from day to day; at all events, it must have a different origin from the comfortable and profane spirit that produces “A little bit off the top” or “The old bull and bush.”

When the hymn had been sung, we were definitely told that Father Gapon would not be present, but had sent a letter, which was read. It called upon the work-people to take courage again, and to set about rebuilding the unions and clubs which had been destroyed by the massacre. While the letter was being read, great excitement arose among the audience because police spies had been discovered among the teachers’ conference in the neighbouring hall. Spies, disguised as schoolmasters, disguised as women! Teachers are not a militant race; should not the hard-handed work-people flow over into the conference and protect the innocent instructors of the coming State? It is spies that drive men crazed with hatred, and even the reptile governments that use them shoot them. That very morning the post and telegraph clerks had proclaimed that they would never end their strike until the enormous system of spying into letters, newspapers, and telegrams had been abolished. Of all the methods by which a cowardly government can harass the people who feed it, none is more despicable than the entanglement of espionage with which it surrounds itself. But as to abolition, what would then become of all those swarms of censors, blackers-out, interpreters, letter-openers, secret police, cabdrivers, porters, and provocative agents who seek their meat from Government? Will not all these men struggle for existence like others, being human creatures, though no one would suppose so? Or who will pay the rent of all those houses, like that house beside the Moika Canal where muffled figures hang carelessly about the doors, and sledges stop for no apparent reason, and the men and women who come out have acquired the look of vultures?

But for the moment the Government which feeds the vultures was afraid for its own skin. The police and spies slunk out of the conference without compulsion, and in the workmen’s meeting the five-minutes’ speeches began. They went with that extraordinary dash and fire which appear to be the common heritage of nearly all Russian speakers. How they have managed to inherit such a power is one of the mysteries of this mysterious revolution. In a land where public speaking has usually been punished by exile or death, we find a whole race of orators. Carlyle used to speak of a “great dumb Russia” with admiration, and foretell a strange time when Russia found her voice. That autumn she had found her voice, and certainly the time was strange. One workman after another got up and said his brief say, without pause or hesitation, inspired by that passion of conviction which only unendurable wrong can give. A woman also spoke, with similar brevity and power.

The demands made in those little speeches of condensed flame and rushing words were for rights which English workmen have long ago won for themselves. The object of the meeting was to re-establish the eleven unions of workmen which Father Gapon had instituted before the massacre of last January. Such unions were hardly to be distinguished from the trade unions of our country, and there was nothing in the least Utopian or savage about the Gapon programme. His followers refused even to call themselves a party. They had no newspaper as their organ. The Word (Slovo), which had once most befriended them, had lately gone over completely to the reaction. One of the most applauded speakers at that morning’s meeting denounced the leaders who urged the workmen to organize themselves into armed bands, whereas knowledge, he said, must come before arms, and not battalions but unions must be organized. Only one other purpose remained before the meeting—to demand complete amnesty for Father Gapon and all political offenders, especially for those who had taken on themselves the hateful task of political assassination in the time of darkness before freedom appeared.

From time to time a Social Democrat raised his arm and burst into a violent and threatening speech against the meeting. Once there was a deliberate attempt to empty the hall by a free fight, and the timid began edging out at the doors, chiefly under the belief that the yelling democrat who was denouncing the Gaponists was secretly an agent of the police. It may have been so, but I think he was only a Social Democrat insisting upon the creed by which alone the Marxists would drive the world to salvation. This Catholic kind of Social Democrat is often distinguished by a certain intolerance and pedantry which give a power and consistency such as religious Catholicism has, but form a barrier against wider sympathies and human freedom. “No salvation but by us” is their motto, and when an erring meeting cries them down, they feel defrauded of their right to redeem mankind.

On the other hand, a speaker who brought greetings from the Belgian Anarchists was politely listened to, though in the towns Russia has no Anarchist party now. Tolstoy bears an honoured name such as Rousseau bore in France, and his portrait is welcome in shop-windows; but among revolutionists his Anarchism is too gentle, and his Christianism too dull. Outside his own circle of disciples among the peasants, the flame of his spirit may kindle many, but his actual followers are few. When every one is remodelling the State with impassioned zeal, it seems hardly opportune to raise the question whether it is not better to have no State at all.

The speeches were over by about one, and then the meeting split up into groups to reorganize the unions. By an arrangement among one or two friends, we left the Salt Town separately, and gradually reassembled in a room above a little restaurant, some distance away. There we found Father Gapon himself hiding from the police, with a bottle of beer before him, and a few supporters at his side, rather obviously his inferiors. At the time he was not afraid of political arrest. Probably Durnovo himself would hardly have dared to strike at him then. But the danger was that he might be handed over to the Church as a renegade priest and imprisoned till death in some monastery for the good of his soul.

Outwardly there was little of the priest left about him then, unless it was his evident want of the commonplace kinds of knowledge that most people have. It was said that his stay in England that summer had changed him so much that his own friends could not recognize him, and he had been present at the meeting unobserved. But there was not really much difference, except that he had cut his hair and beard like ordinary men, and put on modern clothes instead of the survival of classical raiment which most European priests prefer. The transparent eyes of lightish brown, generally looking down or cast a little sideways—these were the same. So were the nose and thin face, the thin and delicately arched eyebrows, the thin hands and slight figure, the blood just showing under the pale brown skin—a rare thing in a Russian; and, indeed, both by name and race I believe he comes of a Dnieper Cossack or, some say, a Greek stock. If the Russian police cannot see these things, Scotland Yard could beat them. The outward look seemed to reveal at once a delicate and sensitive nature rather than strength of resolution or fire of purpose—one of those natures in which we easily detect the child still lying hid beneath the maturity of manhood. Something of a child’s craft, perhaps, lay there too, and of a woman’s methods, unwilling to be hated or despised even by the enemy. Equally childlike was that evident love of pleasure which made him rejoice in Paris and London as in glorious bazaars where the toys were all real things, and the dolls were living women, all made to squeak and shut their eyes.

Yet this was the man who struck the first blow at the heart of tyranny and made the old monster sprawl. At first, perhaps, his heart was simpler in its ignorance, and pleasure, being unknown, did not move him. But when theorists condemned him for opportunism, as they did daily, I remembered that he, at all events, knew the work-people in their daily life and not as an abstract proletariat, and that he, at all events, had accomplished something. It is much to be regretted, but it sometimes happens that the opportunist is the only man who does accomplish something.

The conversation naturally ran upon the meeting, and upon a danger to the movement that would very likely arise from the unbending attitude of the Social Democrats, who with impracticable pride hated a Social Revolutionary more than a Grand Duke, just as true Catholics enjoyed burning a Protestant more than a pagan. To Father Gapon the great danger before the country appeared to be the immense conflict between the Social Democrats, representing the town work-people, and the host of peasants, numbering over four-fifths of Russia’s population. But as he spoke, warning voices were heard, a danger appeared before us all, and suddenly the picturesque little figure had vanished, and the rest of us were drinking beer over a sleepy game of cards, till with a yawn we rose, and one by one made our way down the busy street.

That afternoon Father Gapon escaped into Finland, and France swallowed him for a time.

CHAPTER IV
THE FREEDOM OF THE WORD

In those happy weeks when freedom still was young and living, two things ruled the country—speech and the strike, the word and the blow. The strike was everywhere felt. No letter or telegram went or came. Each town in Russia was isolated, and the whole Empire stood severed from the world. Banks sent their money to Europe by special messengers, like kings. Telegrams were carried a twenty-four hours’ journey to the frontier. Almost every night I was down at the Warsaw station watching the passengers, to see if any could be trusted to take a letter home. When I travelled further into Russia, I organized an elaborate private post by stages, engaging hotel-porters, students, lady-doctors, tram-conductors, and barmaids in my service. On one occasion the scheme worked with real success, and brought me a halfpenny paper which cost me three pounds. Later I found it best to give my own letters to Lancashire women, going home for safety—wives of the managers or engineers in cotton-mills—and they posted them under their skirts.

At St. Petersburg, the well-to-do classes, who were losing most by the postal strike, made a heroic effort to assist the Government and themselves. Having first seen that strong patrols of horse and foot were stationed at all corners of the General Post Office, and at every door, they organized a volunteer service of sorters among their own number, and one saw elegant young men and white-haired gentlemen who had passed an honoured existence in avoiding work, now struggling to make out how it was done. Enthusiastic girls, in the prettiest of furs and the smallest possible goloshes, hastened by eleven o’clock to their stools in the stuffy office, and sat there till four, with the self-sacrificing zeal of young ladies at a church bazaar. One must do something for one’s country when the lower classes are giving so much trouble. So with a smile and a flash of rings, they plunged into the honest toil of sorting the stacks of letters which had been arriving by half a million a day; and some of the letters reached the right address.

Other strikes were of almost equal interest. In Moscow the cooks struck, and paraded the streets with songs never heard in the drawing-room. The waiters struck, and heavy proprietors lumbered about with their own plates and dishes. The nursemaids struck for Sundays out. The housemaids struck for rooms with windows, instead of cupboards under the stairs, or sections from the water-closets. Schoolboys struck for more democratic masters and pleasanter lessons. Teachers struck for higher pay and, I hope, for pleasanter pupils. All had one’s sympathy, as all rebels necessarily have. There was a solidarity about the grievances of all, and each movement proved how far the revolutionary spirit had spread. The only danger was that the people were making a good thing too common. The strike was the guillotine of the Russian revolution in those days, and even the guillotine had once been worked too hard.

But at the back of the strikes and all the revolutionary movement lay the motive force of speech. In Russia, even more than in other countries, was seen the power of the creative word. A strain of unwonted idealism has long been audible in all Russian literature, and has led to the hope that when Russia’s hour came she would advance on finer and higher lines than the more material and self-satisfied peoples of Europe. The hour seemed now to have come, and the hope to be justified. The people were drunken with ideas. After these centuries of suppression, all Russia was revelling in a spiritual debauch of words. Meetings were held almost every night. Entrance could only be gained by ticket; but crowds fought at the doors to hear discussions on the first principles of government, taxation, or law, just as eagerly as English people fight for a place at a football match or an indecent farce. To Russians the power of the word was all so new and delightful. I myself remember the first and only time I listened to a debate in the House of Commons. It was the day when Mr. Wyndham was treading “with fairy footstep” through the mazes of Irish statistics. I knew those mazes at least as well as he did, but I have never heard anything so interesting as that debate. And for Russians to listen to a man speaking was like an escape from gaol.

I had noticed it in the Strike Committee and in Gapon’s meetings. Without practice or tradition in public speaking, Russia was suddenly found to be a nation of orators. At all the meetings it was the same: speaker after speaker rose, and not one of them faltered for a moment. There was no muddle, or shyness, or hesitation—none of that weary up-and-down cadence, like riding over ridge and furrow, none of that harking back and beating round the bush for words to which our sporting legislators of the shires have long accustomed us at home. In some cases, no doubt, the speeches were dull; but often, even without understanding a thousandth part of what was said, one could tell how true an orator the speaker was from the breathlessness of his hearers, from the feeling of diffused unity in the crowd, and from the deep gasp of applause which greeted the end.

The high level of thought in the speeches might be sneered at as an idealist level by dull people who do not believe in ideas. But strength was given to the speakers by the continual danger of the moment and the reality of the horror waiting at the door. As though apologizing for his impertinence in taking any part in such a mighty thing as politics, a workman said humbly to me once: “I know nothing but the street, the factory, and the prison. But I would die for the movement.” When his turn came to speak, of course he spoke well. With such a training, he could hardly fail to speak well; and as to law-making, his life was a far more genuine preparation for it than English universities.

There was a similar outburst in newspapers as in speeches. Hitherto most Russian journalists who were not mere hirelings, writing in support of the bureaucracy, had been obliged to work underground, or to write abroad and trust to the ruses of war for a circulation in their own country. During the six weeks after the Manifesto the change was astonishing. For a time there was not a country, except England, where the freedom of the press was so complete. A new paper appeared almost every other day. Now and then a number or two would be confiscated, and sometimes the paper would cease to appear for a while. The first and most notorious case of this suspension was when a little satiric paper, called The Machine Gun (Pulemet), printed a copy of the Tsar’s manifesto with the impression of a bloody hand stamped upon it, and the superscription, “Signed and Sealed.” This was seized as an insult to the dynasty. The editor was imprisoned, the price of the cartoon went up from five farthings to almost as many pounds, and, when the paper appeared again, its fame was established.

But at the time a cartoon of that kind was mainly prophetic, and most of the papers said what they pleased, and said it with seriousness and self-restraint. Among the very best was the workmen’s little paper called The Russian Gazette, sold at one farthing. It had been started soon after Father Gapon’s petition, and since the Manifesto only one number had been confiscated. Written in the common workman’s language which all could understand, it had a very large circulation, but its price kept the funds low, and its news from outside was small. In politics it called itself Social Democratic, but being concerned at first hand with the real workmen and their interests, it touched solid ground, and its tone was the same as one heard at the meetings of the labour delegates.

Next in revolutionary influence came the New Life (Novaya Zhisn), generally known as Maxim Gorky’s paper. He certainly supplied the money and its general policy. Sometimes he wrote a long letter or address in it, and his present wife, the actress of his plays, was nominally editor. But, even when Gorky was in St. Petersburg, which was very seldom, the paper was really conducted by the poet Minsky and a few other Social Democrats of high education and theoretic knowledge. The sternest and most official organ of that sect, it followed Marx with doctrinaire exactness, and its teaching was impeded by the stiffness and pedantry that characterize the Social Democrats even in England. No one could question the skill and enthusiasm of its attacks upon the oligarchy and capitalists, but it often devoted more space to sour depreciation of other good Socialists who doubted if Marx had said the last word in human history. It was like a really clever staff officer who, on the morning of the battle, goes from brigade to brigade telling the soldiers what fools all the other officers have made of themselves, and what an immense disaster will ensue if his own plan of attack is not adopted. So it often happened that the truest friends of the movement were in despair at the vanity and exclusiveness of the New Life, and irretrievable opportunities passed by while its staff of editors were arranging the future of humanity in neat little circles and squares, as though they were the Creator and men were as obedient as the stars. If you work on German first principles, you are likely to arrive at queer conclusions, because mankind was not made in Germany. But still there was no denying the paper’s honesty and zeal, nor its great influence within its own wide circle of well-disposed and intelligent people.

The Son of the Country (Syn Otetchestva) was an old paper; it had been running off and on for nearly a century; but, since the manifesto, it had become extreme in its Liberalism, and could be grouped as a new paper among the Social Democratic organs. All Russians admitted that it was particularly well written, and being far less pedantic than the New Life, it was read by every advanced party and promised to become one of the strongest papers of the revolution.

While I was still in St. Petersburg, at the end of November, some of the famous exiles, who had begun to return to Russia under the promised amnesty, started a paper called the Beginning (Natchalo). It was distinctly Social Democratic, and perhaps the leading spirit on it was Vera Sassoulitch, who had failed in an attempt to assassinate Trepoff’s father during the most gloomy period of tyranny, twenty years before. She had returned from Geneva, old and grey and wrinkled, but almost any night she was to be seen sitting out the revolutionary meetings, talking, writing, or stitching with unflagging energy, and on her face and in her pale grey eyes a fixed and beaming smile, as though at the fulfilment of hopes for which she and so many others had been willing to give their lives.

Not definitely connected with social democracy, but extreme in its opposition to the Government, there was another new paper called Our Life (Nacha Zhisn), which was started in September and at once was recognized for its excellent news and management. It has since increased its reputation, and become one of the leading papers in Russia.

But at that time perhaps the very best of all the papers, both for news and leading articles, was Russia (Russ). It had been founded three years before, but began to redate its numbers from the Manifesto of October 30th. During the war, it won a reputation by an overwhelming exposure of army scandals, and under the movement it was almost universally read for its progressive policy and fearlessness of speech. At the time, it was edited by one of the sons of Suvorin, the famous editor of the Novoe Vremya. Such divergence of political views must have strained the conversation at the family dinner-table, and perhaps it was really a relief at home when the son was shut up in prison, and the paper appeared under the new title of Molva.

The two Jewish papers—the News (Novosti) and the Stock Exchange Gazette (Birshevza Viedomosti)—were both old, one being nearly the oldest paper in Russia, and the other having run twenty-five years, but both had become very Progressive or even revolutionary. For in Russia, Jews are inevitably revolutionists, however much against their own nature, and the Stock Exchange paper was one of the most advanced political organs in the Empire, and had the best news.

At that time, two other Progressive papers had just been started—Dawn (Rassiojet) and Russia Renewed (Obnovlionnaya Rossiu), and at Moscow, Professor Miliukoff was on the point of bringing out his new paper called Life (Zhisn) of which I may speak later on. But there seemed no end to the number of excellent journalists that Russia could supply, just as there seemed no end to the number of excellent speakers. When I think of that sudden outburst of talent, I remember the saying of an Englishman who had lived thirty years in Russia and professed a good-humoured contempt for the whole people from the Court to the dustmen; “But unquestionably,” he always added, “they are the most intelligent race in the world.” In reality, however, it was intensity of conviction and present sense of wrong which converted those inexperienced men into such effective writers and speakers. Where conviction is sincere, habit and training are best away, just as really sincere and original dramas should be performed only by actors unhabituated to the stage.

To oppose these battalions of progress, there were only three or four journals on the reactionary side, and it is significant that none of these were new and nearly all were subsidized. First came the New Time (Novoe Vremya), almost the only Russian paper which is well known by name outside Russia. It is the Times of Russia, steadily on the side of the Government, the reaction, and the moneyed classes. Scornful of enthusiasm, deaf to every idea, incredulous of every hope, always ready to impute the vilest motives to reform, it stands like an impenetrable barrier on the road of human progress. Proclaiming itself the champion of stability, and taking law and order for its motto, and the price of funds for its test, it succeeds in pleasing the financier and the official, and its cynical disregard of humanity is matched by its unquestioned influence for evil. A certain dignity of tone, combined with the excellence of its foreign news, has given it a reputation for sobriety and truth, but against the rights of freedom it is virulent in its animosity, and against a leader of the people it will welcome any libel without reserve. To discover where justice lies, one has but to take the opposite view to its own, and to agree with it is a danger-signal that one’s sense of right has gone astray. Yet in moments of deep indignation against some governmental shame, it will affect the popular tone and act the reformer’s part with whines and deprecations. The scandals of the Japanese war were too flagrant even for its compliant worship of birth and rank, and after the Manifesto had granted freedom of speech it began to demand that freedom with righteous solicitude.

On the same side, though inferior in skill and reputation, stood the Citizen (Grashdanin), heavily subsidized by the Government, and possessing, it was said, a particular influence over the Tsar’s perplexed little mind; and the Petersburg News, also subsidized, but indignant none the less about the war scandals and the Grand Dukes.

Last of this group came the Word (Slovo), once famous for its violent attacks upon errors in high places, and for its fearless defence of freedom, especially on behalf of the Old Believers. But after the Manifesto appeared, the tone of the paper changed, and instead of joining like others in the joy of victory, it grew more and more sullen and distrustful of progress. Whether money was the motive of the change, as rumour said, I did not discover, but the paper’s influence had to be counted among the reactionary forces, and it was a strong paper.

Even more significant than the printed daily papers were the satiric and illustrated sheets, which appeared as suddenly and in greater numbers. Perhaps the best managed and most constant was the Observer (Zritel), but the Signal (same word in Russian) was almost as good, and below them came the Arrows (Streli) and the Libel (Strekoza). The Vampyre (same word in Russian) came later, and so did the Sulphur (Jupel), which was the most artistic of them all, but so bloody and savage that it survived only three numbers. The character of nearly all the cartoons was, indeed, bloody and savage rather than humorous. The satire was hardly ever kindly, as it has become in England now that politics are so seldom a matter of life and death. Sometimes, it is true, in those early weeks, Witte was treated with a raillery that might be called gentle. He would be represented as a cook trying in vain to make the dinner come right; or as a chemist watching an empty bottle labelled “Constitution;” or as a brood hen sitting on an egg with the same label; or as an old nurse cherishing a sickly little figure; or as an acrobat balancing on a slack-rope, while Trepoff held one end, and the red flags of the revolution surged below; or as a cunning old tailor threading his needle to stitch up the two-headed eagle, which lay dead or stuffed on his board, while an inverted imperial diadem held the flat-iron, and the candle stood in a vodka bottle representing Witte’s spirit monopoly. But as a rule the design was far more savage, and the savagery grew as the reaction became stronger, till after the Days of Moscow all the cartoons might have been printed in blood, and most appeared in that colour. Then we were shown the skeleton of death stalking through the devastated streets, or the skeleton of hunger crawling upon the stage from the flies, or the Kremlin floating in blood like an island, or Dubasoff as butcher in a human meat-shop, or foul monsters brooding over the corpses beneath the gallows of freedom. Right through its past history, all Russian art that counts has been either horrible or melancholy—a thing of skeletons and vampires and desolation. The subjects chosen by painters are cruel scenes from war or history, and dreary views of the steppe. The subjects chosen by writers are almost invariably sad. It is part of the unbroken melancholy which pervades all Russian life, and is no less visible on the faces of the people than in the sound of their music. And all this sorrow and savagery and blood lie at the door of a Government which has kept the people poor and depressed, exposed to the constant peril of the scourge, the prison, and secret death.

WITTE AND THE CONSTITUTION.

Witte: “I’ve bought a pipe, and now I can’t play it.”

From Sprut.

On the reactionary side, I think, the only satiric paper was the Harlequin (Chout) and though it was fairly clever, there is an eternal law which forbids the service of satire or letters or any other form of art to the enemies of freedom.

The crowd of Liberal and revolutionary papers was but the visible sign of a grace that took many forms. In reality, perhaps, there were even more parties than papers, and certainly there were many parties that had no paper to represent them. The Anarchists, as I have shown already, could hardly be called a party, at all events in the towns, and no paper was occupied with the abolition of the State as a fetish, when all were insisting upon the strengthening of the State as against the government of the few. But even such a large party as the Social Revolutionists had no organ of their own. Next to the Social Democrats, they were the most powerful of the advanced parties. Probably they were even more numerous, but their organization was not so complete, and as they devoted themselves mainly to the peasants, their voice was not so loud in cities. They were the Terrorists of the time; they were what Europe confusedly calls the Anarchists, and it was they who kept the agents of the Government in peril of their lives. Yet they had no paper of their own.

Neither had a large and growing party of the Left Centre, which we may call the Radical as distinguished from the Socialists. They issued a programme which nearly all the advanced parties would have accepted when the time for business came. Like all the rest, they demanded first a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage, and beyond that their ideal of the Russian State consisted in a single chamber, a ministry chosen from the majority, home rule for Poland, Finland, the Caucasus, and the Baltic Provinces, the right of referendum, separation of Church and State, expropriation of Crown and Church lands and of private estates beyond a fixed maximum, free education, and a general militia for defence. Moderate as these demands were, nearly all the revolutionists, except the more starchy among the Social Democrats, would have been content to fight for them and welcome them with joy; but the Radicals had no special organ for their views.

As in all movements of intense and vital interest, the danger to reform came from division. All were united in their final purpose, but as to methods and strategy the divisions of parties were many and violent. It was the same thing as in a restaurant of Polish students to which I was often invited. There was a long, low room, furnished only with benches and tables. At one end was a piano; at the other a counter where the student could buy excellent meals at all hours of the day and night for very small payment. Though the university had long been closed owing to the disturbances, the place was always crowded with young men and girls, living in perfect comradeship and much at their ease. One night, a young girl, with clear grey eyes, a demure little face, and pale hair tightly braided, was giving me a very satisfactory lecture in German upon the minute distinctions between all the Polish parties. I heard afterwards that in her zeal for knowledge, she had gained the necessary passport to St. Petersburg by going through the form of marriage with a student whom she had never seen since the ceremony. It is not an unusual device, and I have known girl-students who have even taken “the yellow ticket” as prostitutes in order to reach a university town.

In the midst of her disquisition, she suddenly burst into an attack upon two or three girls at another table who were suspected of betraying true comradeship by ordinary flirtation. “I suppose they think themselves rather pretty,” she said, “but neither logically nor psychologically do I understand their behaviour.” At that moment a few notes sounded on the piano, and to distract her wrath I suggested she should ask for some Polish music.

“Oh, I couldn’t speak to that end of the room,” she replied; “the other party has captured it, and the piano besides.”

“But you hold the kitchen end,” I remarked consolingly.

“I am sorry to say our possession is not exclusive,” she answered, with a look that was bloodthirsty in its conviction of righteousness. Then she took a shining revolver from her pocket, examined its action, said good-bye to her friends, and stalked through the enemy’s camp without a sign either of fear or pardon.

She was herself a Social Democrat of the most attractive though sternest type, and as such, she believed in international fraternity. But “the other party” were Polish Revolutionists, or Democratic Poles, or something just wrong, and they followed the old-fashioned faith of nationality; and so the room was split by an invisible but impassable barrier. To me it all seemed rather a pity, when I thought of the long years of conflict which must pass before they reached the separating point in their ideals, and how few would live to see a single item in their programme fulfilled. Yet I know that at the first note of the revolution, Social Democrats, Polish Revolutionists, Democratic Poles, flirtatious girls, and all would be ready to die together for Poland’s freedom. And so probably they will have to die.

It was the same throughout the length and breadth of Russia in those happy weeks. Divisions are the evidences of life, and Russia was seething with life like the world in the days of creation. But one thought exhilarated all young and happy minds—the thought of liberty. And if to a middle-aged man and a stranger in the country it was a joy then to be alive, to the young and to the Russian it must indeed have been very heaven.

Diary of Events

December 6.—General Sakharoff, who had succeeded Kuropatkin as Minister of War, and had lately been appointed Governor-General of the Saratoff district on the Volga, was shot in his office at Saratoff by a woman, a Social Revolutionist, who said, when she was arrested, “Now he can cause the peasants no more suffering.”

December 7.—The Strike Committee (Central Labour Committee in St. Petersburg) called on the work-people to withdraw their money from the savings-banks. They rightly believed that bankruptcy was the best way of overthrowing the Government.

December 9.—Khroustoloff, the President of the Strike Committee, and three other leading delegates were arrested at the Printers’ Union and imprisoned.

At this time severe fighting was renewed in the Caucasus between the Tartars and Armenians.

There was also a violent outbreak of revolution in Riga, and the Letts of the three Baltic Provinces of Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland, rose against the Government, and burnt some of the country houses belonging to German landowners who had inherited estates from the Teutonic Orders of Knight and other Prussian conquerors in the Middle Ages.

December 16.—The Council of Workmen’s Delegates (Strike Committee), combined with the Committee of the Peasants’ Congress, the Committee of the Social Democratic Workmen’s Party, and the Committee of the Social Revolutionists, issued another manifesto on Government finance. The following extracts show its tendency:—

“The Government is on the verge of bankruptcy. With the capital obtained by foreign loans, it has built railways and fleets and fortresses, and supplied itself with arms. The foreign sources of capital are now dried up. The Government orders have ceased, and the merchants and factory-owners, accustomed to enrich themselves at the expense of the State, are closing their offices. No one is sure of the morrow.

“The Government has wasted all the State revenues on the army and the fleet. There are no schools, and the roads are neglected. Troops throughout the country are disaffected, impoverished, and hungry. The Government has robbed the State savings-banks. The capital of small investors has been played with on the Bourse. The gold reserve of the State Bank is insignificant compared with the demands of the State loans and commercial transactions.

“The Government covers the interest on old loans by contracting new loans. Year by year it publishes false estimates of the revenue and expenditure, so as to show a surplus instead of the real deficit.

“Only after the fall of the autocracy can a Constituent Assembly put an end to this financial ruin. The national representatives must then liquidate the debts as soon as possible.

“There is but one way out of this abyss—the overthrow of the Government, and the removal of its last weapon. We must take from it the last source of its existence—its financial revenue.

“The Government is issuing orders against the people as though Russia were a conquered country. We have decided not to allow the payment of debts contracted by the Tsar’s Government, since it has openly waged war against the whole nation.

“We call on you to withdraw your deposits from the savings banks, and to refuse to pay taxes, or to take banknotes, or to subscribe to loans.”

This manifesto showed how clearly the leaders of the working classes realized that the control of finance is the basis of political power.

The Government recognized it too, and took immediate measures.

On the 14th the Tsar had proclaimed “his inflexible will to realize with all possible speed the reforms he had granted.”

On the 16th came a Government message denouncing “the groups who are threatening the Government, society, and all the population who do not share their views,” and threatening imprisonment against all strikers and inciters to strike.

That evening the hall of the Free Economic Society, which I described in the first chapter, was surrounded by troops and police. Three hundred men and women were arrested, and two hundred and sixty-four of them were imprisoned, including twenty of the Executive.

At the same time the editors of all the papers which had published the Committee’s manifesto were arrested, and their papers suppressed. Of the leading dailies, only the reptile Novoe Vremya continued to appear.

December 18.—An entirely new council and executive were appointed for the Strike Committee, and at once they determined on another general strike. “The Government has declared civil war,” ran the decree, “and, as it wants war, it shall have it.”

In the mean time, on December 8th, I had gone to Moscow, and it was to Moscow that the centre of revolution now shifted. But before I take up the narrative of the rising in that city, I will describe a few days’ visit I made from there into the open country and the villages where peasants live. The change in the order of date is unimportant, and the story of Moscow can then follow continuously.

PEASANT SLEDGES.

A PRIVATE SLEDGE.

CHAPTER V
THE OPEN LAND

Under the waning moon, before the dawn of a December day, I drove out of the town of Toula in my tiny sledge—so close to the snow that the great black horse with his high yoke looked monstrous in the twilight. It is a typical Russian town, about a hundred miles south of Moscow, and as nearly as possible in the centre of the country. Two great roads cross each other there, and pass on to the points of the compass. Oldish churches, surrounded by a fortified wall, make a kind of Kremlin. Ancient houses conceal cavernous shops in the thickness of their own walls. Across a wooden bridge stands the Government small-arms factory, with workmen’s villages beyond. Strange figures in filthy rags moved up and down, beggars and shaggy peasants, high-school boys, and fur-capped girls. It has long been rather a revolutionary little town, and during the strike, ten days before, nineteen workmen had been shot upon the street.

In spite of solemn warnings, I had come out from the cities to see something of the country, having with difficulty induced a ruined German-Russian to venture with me as interpreter, for the sake of bread. As usual, the danger was nothing compared to the fear. What danger there was in the villages came from the police agents and officials, who hounded on the peasants with the cry that every stranger was a revolutionist conspiring against the Tsar to rob them of God and the land. For in those progressive days the police were dreading lest they should lose their livelihood of flogging and brutality at fifteen shillings a week.

My road went uphill to a high and bare plain, over which the snow was driven by the wind in showers so blinding that the horse kept turning round and appealing to us as reasonable beings to return. Horizon, road, and every mark were lost in whirling grey. But, after we had struggled on for two or three hours, the snow ceased to fall, and the wintry sun appeared low in the sky, making the distant ridges of the wide country shine with pale crimson or gleam like a far-off sea. Most of the land was bare and open ground, the snow blotting out the “stripes” where the peasants grew their crops in summer. But as we went further, lengths of forest came into view, looking brown at a distance, though generally made up of young silver birch, their silky white stems flecked with black. Birch woods supply the fuel of the country; next to food, the first necessity of the peasant’s life. There was some oak, but very little fir or pine. The birch in this region is the favourite, either because it grows best or burns best; and it is almost the only fuel in Moscow.

The peasants’ wooden sleighs passing to and fro bore loads of sawn birch, dragged by miserable little ponies, so caked with mire that their coats looked like a crocodile’s armour. At their side floundered the peasants in sheepskin jackets, with the wool side turned inwards. The jacket was gathered with a belt round the waist, and the skirt stuck out all round, reaching to the knees. Then came the high top-boots of felt or bast, rarely of leather. Men and women were not to be distinguished, except that, instead of a cap, the women usually wore a handkerchief or shawl knotted over head and ears. There was no special grace about the costume; but even the rich ladies of Russian cities find it hard to appear graceful when padded round with fur and wool six or seven inches deep. At the best, they can only appear rich.

Beside the road at one place stood a mouldering wooden inn (tractir), where passers-by could get thawed and have a glass of tea at three farthings. The owner of the estate, being something of a philanthropist or a teetotaller for others, had forbidden beer and spirits, so that the innkeeper was pale with anxiety how to pay his £4 rent, to say nothing of the taxes. Should he borrow, and go to ruin that way, or allow himself to be flogged to prove his poverty? I suggested that times were changing, and flogging might cease, but he only smiled with the politeness of superior knowledge. “No flogging, no taxes,” was to him the law of government.

In one corner hung three great icons, or holy pictures of the saints, glittering with tin and brass—very different in size and expense from the miniature icon which hangs in every bedroom of the wealthy Russian hotels, as a kind of apology to God, like our grace at a City dinner. Otherwise, there was no ornament in the house, except one of those ill-omened iron mugs, for which the crowd crushed each other to death on the coronation day of the present unhappy Tsar, nine years before, when the plain of Khodinsky Polé, on the north-west outskirts of Moscow, stood thick with suffocated peasants.

I next passed a great smelting works, newly finished, its fine furnaces and machinery never used, but already deserted and allowed to go to ruin. I could not discover whose money had been devoted to this characteristic fraud, or into whose pockets it had passed. Then came a few small gardens and summer residences built on the Crown land; for most of the land in that district is part of the Tsar’s vast estates, amounting to a fortieth part of the whole of European Russia, not counting the landed property of the Imperial family. But all the houses were deserted and empty, and one was burnt, and smouldered still.

Driving further on, I came to a large country house, where one of the ancient families of the Russian nobility was still living in the midst of its own land. I happened to be bringing them letters from friends, as the post was not working, and I found a house-party there, beguiling the winter day with much the same occupations as a house-party in England—doing embroidery, playing battledore with racquets and a soft ball, pushing a marble up a kind of bagatelle-board, examining their guns, and taking the dogs for walks in the woods. At a wandering luncheon of various courses, they maintained a quiet converse, marked by the gracious silliness, the “cheerful stoicism,” which is the justification of the aristocrat’s existence.

It was all a fine piece of self-reserve, for inwardly their mood was serious and apprehensive. They had just heard that the country-house of a friend and neighbour had been burnt to the ground by his peasants, though the family had escaped with their lives. One of the ladies had a son in the army, and they had just heard of a terrible riot and mutiny in his garrison town. Another lady’s son had married a rich heiress, and they had just heard that the three country residences of her parents had been utterly destroyed by the peasants, and now she was rich no more. From every side came tales of loss and danger, and no one could say what the end would be.

For themselves, they were just waiting helplessly to see what would happen. Polite, charming, highly educated, well dressed, healthy, fond of sport and country life, full of good will and high intentions, they were so like our own country squires and aristocracy at their best—so like the people who used to be held up to us as the school of manners and the producers of the fine old English stock—that only the dreariest of Social Democrats could have refused them sympathy. They were themselves fairly conscious of the absurdities in their own position, but the only protest or complaint that they made was to say they were getting a little tired of perpetual parallels between themselves and the aristocrats of the French Revolution, whose heads were cut off so rapidly.

In the afternoon my sledge took me further into the unlimited and desolate country, till at last we came to a village fairly typical of that district—not a rich part of Russia nor yet so starving poor as the famine provinces which lay close by it. The village was built in one long street, with about forty separated cottages on each side. A few of the cottages had bits of brick in the walls or round the windows, but wood was almost the only building material, and the roofs, though sometimes of flat iron plates, painted green, were generally thatched. In this particular village there was no school and no church, but from the high ground above it I could see a church about two miles off, and that, no doubt, was near enough. There were two shops and an inn, all just like the other cottages. Each house had a separate wattle shed near it, for fodder, stores, and perhaps to shelter the beasts in summer. In winter they have to be brought into the dwelling-house for warmth.

By the invitation of a peasant I went into his cottage. The man was rather above the ordinary type, being tall and straight. But he had the thoughtful and quiet look of the average peasant, as well as the long, dark hair and shaggy appearance. His wife was quite the usual woman—short, ungainly, and possessing no visible beauty except, perhaps, patience. On the faces of both was the green look of hunger, almost invariable in the peasants I have seen. The outside door of the house opened into the cattle-room, where a sickly cow was dragging out the winter. There was room for a horse, but the people had been obliged to sell their horse that autumn to pay the taxes and their debts to the Koulak or village usurer. From the Koulak, too, I suppose, they would borrow the money to hire another horse in the summer, as they said they intended. For no peasant can get through his work without a horse.

A wooden partition separated the cattle from the dwelling-room, the house being designed exactly like an Irish cabin, except that the white brick construction of the stove projected on both sides of the partition, thus warming the cow and the family both. As every one knows, the peasant’s stove is a large and wonderful edifice, full of mysterious holes and caverns for cooking and baking, and even for the dry roasting process which serves the family as a bath. Close beside it were two broad, wooden shelves on which the inmates slept—the parents above, the five children underneath. There was no bedding of any kind, except one worn coverlet or shawl on each shelf.

The children had made their shelf into a day-nursery as well as a bed, for they were all rolling about on it and biting each other, imagining a game of wolf, I think, though wolves are not common there. All were bare-legged, and quite naked but for loose red shirts reaching to their knees. Of course, they went out sometimes, but there were not enough clothes to send them all out together at once in winter. The furniture of the home was a wooden box, which was the seat of honour, a short bench, a table, and a small wooden loom, on the universal model of primitive manufacture. Both man and woman could weave, and they were making yards of a coarse stuff dyed with red madder, exactly the same as the women make for their petticoats on Achill Island.

Probably the loom brought in an important part of the family’s income, for the sale of the horse showed that they could not live off the land alone. Yet the man boasted that his bit of land, on which he grew potatoes, oats, and rye, was his absolute property, and when I tried to ask him whether the village community did not redistribute his land with the rest every twelve years, as I had read in books, he became very violent and showed no scientific interest at all in the sociological importance of the Mir. The working of the Mir was the only thing I thought I did understand when I came to Russia, and it was disconcerting to find that the first peasant I spoke to had never heard of such an arrangement. I still do not know what mistake he or I can have made. He may have been only insisting on the peasant’s touching faith that the land is the natural possession of the man who cultivates it, and can never be taken from him, even by the Tsar. Anyhow, he was terribly afraid that I had come to shake that belief in some way, and I thought it best to turn the conversation to the cow.

As to the Tsar’s recent promise to remit next year half the annual payment still due to the Treasury for the original purchase of the land, this peasant, in common, I believe, with all others, thought nothing of it. To them the manifesto was so much “dirty paper.” They knew very well that even if half were remitted, the Crown agents would come down upon them for arrears. They also knew dimly that since the liberation of the serfs more than forty years ago, the peasants have paid the extreme value of the land twice over. So they have ceased to concern themselves about any manifesto which does not surrender to them the mass of land which they regard as rightfully theirs.

While I was in the cottage, an old man came up with a canvas bag over his shoulder, and knocked at the door. Though obviously in the sink of poverty, he was not a professional beggar, but only one of that large class of peasants who are driven by age or misfortune to go round the villages and ask for scraps to keep them alive till better times. Accordingly he came in as if for a friendly call, laid his bag on the table with its mouth open, and joined in the conversation. When we were going out again, the woman slipped some squares of black bread into the bag as though by stealth, and he took it up and walked off without further remark on either side. It was the perfection both of appeal and kindliness.

TOLSTOY’S HOME.

PEASANTS.

At parting, I looked again at the peasant and his wife, in their clean poverty, with the marks of their almost passionate labour upon them and their five children growing up round their knees, and certainly it did seem incredible that these were just the people who are marched off to the village police-court, are tied face downwards to a sloping bench, have their clothes turned up, and are flogged with whips or rods by officials and police because they cannot pay the taxes for the Japanese war, or for the interest on the French loans.

Yet, in the last resort, it is upon violence almost as brutalizing and indecent that all Empires are founded, and I was all the more ready to welcome what Tolstoy said to me next day, when he received me—as generously as he receives every one—in his “Bright Home” (Jasnaia Poliana) as the country-house is called. He told me that, among the many other plans of work which he could not live to finish, he was then engaged on a book to be called “The End of an Age.”

“You are young and I am old,” he said, “but as you grow older you will find, as I have found, that day follows day, and there does not seem much change in you, till suddenly you hear people speaking of you as an old man. It is the same with an age in history; day follows day, and there does not seem to be much change, till suddenly it is found that the age has become old. It is finished, it is out of date.

“The present movement in Russia is not a riot, it is not even a revolution, it is the end of an age. And the age that is ending is the age of Empires—the collection of smaller States under one large State. There is no true community of heart or thought between Russia, Finland, Poland, the Caucasus, and all our other States and races. Or what have Hungary, Bohemia, and Styria, or the Tyrol to do with Austria? No more than Canada, Australia, India, or Ireland have to do with England. People are now beginning to see the absurdity of these things, and in the end people are reasonable. That is why the age of Empires is passing away.

“They tell me, for instance, that if the Russian Empire ceased to exist, swarms of Japanese would overrun our country and destroy our race. But the Japanese also are reasonable people, and if they came and found how much better off we were without any Empire at all, they would go home and imitate our example.”

The whole argument, which ran on with a half-ironic simplicity of this kind, was magnificent, not so much for its daring as for its quiet confidence in human reason. I remembered how for the last twenty years all the brazen trumpets of vulgarity had been sounding the note of Empire over us as the one great and stirring purpose of existence. And here was this rugged old man calmly telling me, as though it were something of a platitude, that we had just come to the end of an age—the age of Empires. There he sat in the familiar grey shirt without coat or collar, the belt round the waist, and the high leather top-boots (for he had just tramped round his land in the snow), quietly following out the exact logic of his principles, no matter where it might lead him. He was seventy-seven, and in terms of years one was forced, as he said, to call him old. The spirit had retired more deeply into the shrunk and wrinkled form. But under the shaggy brows, the grey-green eyes still looked out with the clearness of profound thought and fearless simplicity which have made him the greatest rebel in the world.

As to the present condition of his own country, he believed, as is well known from his writings, that the return of the land to the peasants is the only possible cure for Russia’s misery. He told me that he would accept Henry George’s method of nationalization, or any other which gave the peasants a true hold on the land they work. He quoted Kropotkin’s investigations into “intensive culture” to prove that, with improved methods, there is plenty of land in Russia to maintain an immensely increased population. As things stood, less than a third of the cultivated land was held by peasants or village communities, and less than a quarter of the cultivable land was used at all. The Tsar should at once restore the land to the peasants. With their long experience of the communal system, they could then manage very well for themselves without any State at all, as they had successfully proved in the Siberian colonies; for communism ran in the Russian blood, and its ideal had never been lost in the country.

When I suggested that a town question had also arisen now, besides the claim of peasants to the land, he admitted that town influence was the greatest danger. “Towns,” he said, “are the places where mankind has begun to rot, and unhappily the rottenness spreads. The mistake of our Liberal politicians in the towns is that they are always preaching the blessings of some English or American constitution. But constitutions of that kind, having once been realized, have already become things of the past. They belong to a different age from ours, and an ideal, whether in statesmanship or art, is never a thing of the past, but always of the future. For Russia as she exists now, we ought to aim at something entirely different from your worn-out methods of government.”

So he conversed through the winter morning, eager to speak, and as eager to hear. He asked much about Central Africa from which I had lately returned, and much about the new national movement in Ireland, nor should I have been surprised if he had continued the conversation in Gaelic, so fresh and vigorous was his interest in the world. Only when I told him rather carelessly, that the intellectual movement there was producing a large number of poets, his face fell, and he turned to other things, merely remarking that poets were very little good. In passing, he said he had been pleased to find that his fellow Puritan, Mr. Bernard Shaw, thought very lightly of Shakespeare, in whom he had never himself discovered any satisfaction, though he had read him once all through in English, and twice in German.

But it was not his interest in the common affairs of the world that gave him his true attraction. Apart from all this, there hung over him that separate and distinguishing grace which our fathers called sanctity and considered a thing to be worshipped. It was the grace of a toilsome and abstemious life, unflinchingly devoted to one high aim, and sacrificing all worldly pleasure and success to an ideal which could never be reached. I believe the modern name for it is fanaticism.

I say one high aim, for I see no reason to agree with the many critics who draw a sharp dividing line in his career and in the process of his mind. All the principles of his later teaching are to be found illustrated in the two great imaginative works of his earlier manhood, and if there is any fault to be found with a life so courageous and inspiring, I should seek it only in a rather inhuman and remorseless consistency of reason—a logic which, having for instance, condemned the pleasures of sense, would doom the human race to rapid extinction because life cannot be maintained and handed on without pleasure. But such returns to the strict Christianity of earlier centuries ought not to astonish people who call themselves Christians, especially as there seems no danger at present that the logic of their teaching will be followed in human action. And, in any case, I should rather leave it to others to reveal such limitations as they may find in so beneficient and gracious a personality.

TOLSTOY IN MIDDLE AGE.

CHAPTER VI
THE STATE OF MOSCOW

On the morning of Saturday, December 9th, the day after I had arrived in Moscow, I happened to be passing the unfinished buildings of the empty University. Minute snow was lashing through the air before a bitter wind, but it thawed as it fell, and people in goloshes went slopping about among the filthy puddles of the street.

Trailing in disorder through the dirt and wind, mixed up with the market people and the little open cabs like sledges that were always dashing up and down with men and women in furs, came a loose string of soldiers, slowly making their way westward. They had just passed the canvas booths where butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers and other loyalists set upon the students with knives the month before; they had reached the point where the soldiers from behind walls fired blindly into the thick of the unarmed procession which accompanied the funeral of the student Baumann. There they halted, because the cross road which passes the great Riding School Barrack and cuts the University in half was blocked with traffic, and then a few passers-by began to look at them curiously.

They were not to be called a column, nor were they organized as an advanced party. They were not organized at all; but a few cavalry came first, their hairy little horses throwing up a steam into the wind; then a few straggling infantry—not more than half a battalion—covered with filth, their uniforms torn and patched, some in low, flat caps like our own men, some in high, furry caps, matted with mud and snow. And under the caps were faces yellow, thin, and as though bemused with wonder. Behind the infantry followed a rambling line of various kinds of cart, and inside the carts were stretched muffled and pallid forms, their heads or arms or feet bound up with dirty and blood-stained bandages.

These were the soldiers returning from the war, the van and first instalment of that great and ruined army coming home. At last they had completed the 5000 or 6000 miles of their journey from the starving East, across the frozen lake, and through the long Siberian plains, and were alive in the heart of their own country again. And this was how they were received. Certainly, the Moscow municipality had intended to arrange some sort of festivities at the station. They had intended to give little presents to the men—something in the shape of chocolates and cigarettes that comfort the hearts of heroes. They had prepared little decorations for the officers, with the inscription, “To the defenders of the country.” But whether these festivities were ever held and these little presents given, no one could tell me. The papers had announced that the army from the Far East would begin to arrive on the Sunday. The paternal Government took care that they should arrive on the Saturday.

Probably the town officials retained for themselves their little offerings to patriotism, and will wear the war decorations with pride at family parties. So little interest was taken in the whole thing that the evening papers continued to announce that the army would begin to arrive on the morrow. The market people and cabdrivers stopped for a moment to look at them before hurrying on through the snow, and no further notice of any kind was taken of the defenders of the country.

So they drifted westward, down the dirty streets, and disappeared. On reaching the barracks, the Reservists among them were discharged, and the crowds of beggars who, with threats and curses, violently demanded the milk of human kindness at every corner, were increased by many tattered figures. They limped about in traces of departed uniforms, and as they passed, people said, “A soldier from the war.” One night I saw two or three of them seated on a curb-stone beside a fire which had been lighted in a street. One was swaying gently backwards and forwards and continually repeating, “At home and alive! at home and alive!” The others took no notice, but stared like imbeciles into the flames.

Some were drafted back by rail to their villages, and the terror of comfortable people was that they would there spread the tale of mismanagement, corruption, and misery till all the peasants would rise in fury and sweep upon the cities in ravenous and overwhelming hordes. Sometimes a dim rumour reached us from the Far East of a distracted army, mutinous and starving; maddened with hardship and the longing for home, but unable to crowd into the worn-out trains that crept along those thousands of miles of single line, choked with stores and blocked by continual accidents and strikes. If they should all come home—all the 500,000 or 600,000 of them at once? The comfortable citizens—and even in Moscow there were such people—shuddered in their furs and thanked Heaven for the difficulties of that narrow road.

On the other hand, a big manufacturer told me he was delighted to see the army returning. “For now,” he said, “the Reservists on garrison duty here will be dismissed, and we can always trust the Line to obey their officers and shoot in defence of law and order.” At the time I hoped he was over-sanguine. In Russia there is no caste of soldiers as with us. All come from the people, and in a year or two will return to the people. The Line are exactly the same kind of men as the Reservists, only younger. Of course, it might happen that, being younger, they would more likely obey, for to most people obedience is the easiest thing to do, and a young man in uniform is almost sure to fall into it. But for the moment that was to me just the one question of the future; would the Line obey their officers and shoot in defence of law and order?

There were rumours about the disaffection of a good many battalions. The Rostoff regiment got up a little mutiny on its own account one day, and planted guns at the corners of their barracks, but they were soon won back by promises of bodily comfort. For the rest, the troops patrolled the streets in mounted and unmounted parties day and night, but no one knew whether they represented a Government or not. Their chief duties were concentrated round the great block of Post Office buildings. For all day long large groups of postal clerks and officials on strike were gathered upon the pavements there, like working bees around a ruined hive, and in the neighbouring boulevard gardens, where girls and children skated, they assembled in eager controversy.

On the Monday morning (December 11th), I saw there a feeble little attempt to rush a mail-cart starting for the provinces, or for the St. Petersburg station, under mounted escort. In a moment two Cossack patrols wheeled round and dashed at full gallop into the crowd, striking blindly at the nearest heads with the terrible nagaikas or loaded whips which I described before. Where the patrols had passed, men, women, and little girls, lay felled to the ground or stood screaming with pain while blood ran down their faces. Pushing, stumbling, and scrambling for life, the crowd fled in panic before the stroke of the hoofs and the whirling whips. Then I knew that until they could face violence with some sort of organized front, the revolutionists had better stay at home. Against twenty men in uniform, five hundred had no chance. As a gigantic Caucasian cried in scorn the night before to a meeting of peaceful and scientific Social Democrats, “The party that commands force is the Government.” Who would command force was at that time the most important question in Russia, and no one was certain how it should be answered from day to day.

In the ordinary affairs of life we enjoyed liberty tempered by assassination. The advance from tyranny supported by execution was immeasurable, and it had all been accomplished in about six weeks. In that old city, the natural centre of Russian life both by position and trade, were gathered some 1,100,000 souls who had never known liberty before, either in politics, economics, or thought. It was very natural that they should not know exactly what to make of the change at first. The surprising thing was to see how rapidly their instinct for organization and self-government developed, especially in the working classes. Whether one ought to trace this faculty to the old habit of the village community among the peasants, I am not sure. But I think it certain that the feeling for association and common action—the feeling of “mutual aid” as Kropotkin calls it—is very widely extended among Russians.

Every one was then waiting for the next step in history, and the wildest rumours flew. At every corner and in every restaurant stood prophets foretelling the fates, and winning the momentary applause of delight or terror. But, except for such rewards, the time of prophets was not more valuable than usual, and for ordinary people, whose perceptions are blind to futurity, the real points of interest were still the postal strike and the rapid formation of unions. The loss to friendship and business owing to the cessation of letters was so severe, that the leaders of finance and commerce in Moscow drew up a petition to Witte and Durnavo, urging them to grant the economic demands, especially the right of union, even if no political demands were considered. The Government replied with a manifesto dismissing one thousand of the postal strikers offhand, and making all strikes among Government servants a criminal offence.

The hardship was great. Many of the strikers had served fifteen years or more, and were entitled to pensions, which they now lost. Many lived in Government quarters, from which they were now evicted. The Progressives certainly did all that they could to assist them. At all lectures and meetings, such as were held in various parts of the city every night, the bag was sent round for aid to the strikers. At one lecture I counted seven bags—chiefly students’ caps—going round for various righteous causes. In one of the most moderate of all Liberal papers—the Russian News—a strike fund was organized for the women and children, and it reached about £5000 before the Government clutched it and put it in its own pocket. In all Progressive papers you read advertisements that Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So would undertake to feed so many strikers for so many days, or to house the children. I knew three Socialist families of quite poor people who took in one or two children of strikers every day to share their dinner. The noticeable thing was that the children were fed, no matter what party of Socialism their parents belonged to. All the workers knew that the strike so far had been the people’s only weapon. The Government had two—hunger and the rifle.

Nearly every night meetings were held for the new unions which were springing up on every side. The whole of Moscow, which is built in concentric circles round the Kremlin or eminent citadel overhanging the little river, had been divided off into wedges, or “rays,” as they were called, and each ray sent so many delegates to the central committee—corresponding to the Council of Labour Delegates in St. Petersburg—which superintended the whole labour question, and had to decide the moment for strikes. But besides the central organizations, almost every trade was forming its own union of defence.

First came the great Railway Union, which controlled the powerful instrument of the railway strikes, and had its headquarters in Moscow, because the city is the obvious centre of all Russian railways. Perhaps next in size, though hardly in importance, came the peculiar union of Floor Polishers—a class of workers unknown in England, because we are not clean enough to have parquetted floors. But in Moscow they were said to number thirty thousand in the union. There were other large unions besides—the tailors’, the metal-workers’, the waiters’, the jewellers’, and a very strong printers’ union called “The Society of the Printed Word,” said to be the oldest in Russia, and rising almost to the dignity of a knightly order by its title. The Union of Bathmen and Bathwomen, a very large class of labour in Russia, is also old, and in those weeks they came to the very satisfactory decision of declaring a boycott against the editor of Katkoff’s famous old clerical and reactionary paper, the Moscow News (Moskovskaya Viedomosti). No minister of the union would wash the editor of the Moscow News at any price.

One evening I was present at the formation of two new unions in very different classes of labour. First I went to an immense meeting of tea-packers in a summer theatre, attached to the Aumont, a music hall of easy virtue. But the theatre had now been boarded up into a meeting-house as more suitable for the times. Packers of the Chinese tea that comes overland are naturally a large class in Moscow, for the tea is still the Russian national drink, in spite of the deadly blend from Ceylon which is slowly being introduced. The packers are said to number about six thousand, and forty companies sent deputies to the meeting, though some of the companies employed only eight or ten hands. It is an unhealthy trade, the dust leading to consumption; and of all the many meetings I attended it was only here that I found the voices feeble and toneless. Wages run from half a crown a week for boys and girls up £1 a week for the best men. But in the trade there is an ancient peculiarity that the wife of the owner or manager has to supply a free midday dinner for the hands, and, as one of the delegates said, “Apparently she cooks it in hell.”

The other new union was formed at a meeting of shop assistants, conducted with that suavity and grandeur of manner which one always notices at meetings of this class. It comes from watching the grace of the shopwalkers, who alone carry the dignified and charming traditions of the old noblesse into modern life. The meeting was occupied for many hours in discussing whether the union should attend only to the assistants’ interests, or should enter into wider life as a political force. The Social Democrats urged them to be bold, and, as usual, they had their way. They were far the most strongly organized party; they had their speakers ready at every meeting, and they played their “minimum programme” of quietly progressive measures with great effect. Their opponents were unprepared, and on this occasion were almost too polite to argue. I came away soon after midnight, but it was obvious that the Shop Assistants’ Union would be a Social Democratic force before dawn.

Mid-winter is the height of the season for learning, art, and pleasure, but Moscow was neither gay nor learned. Reading and fiddling seemed equally irrelevant. So were painting, poetry, love-making, and all the other pleasant arts. In the big restaurant of the Métropole, it is true, an orchestra still maintained a pretence of joy, and poured out its vapid tunes to the rare guests who sat like shipwrecked sailors scattered on a vasty deep, and struggled to be gay. But, like a middle-aged picnic on the Thames, the thing was too deliberate a happiness, and too conscious of its failure. “We must keep our spirits up, you know,” I heard a youth say to an elderly gentleman as he poured out the champagne. But it was no good. The elderly gentleman had obviously dined well daily for many years, and was overwhelmed at the solemn thought that at any moment dinners might end for ever. Day and night he was living in “the haggard element of fear.”

The University was closed. Her seven thousand students were scattered, some to their homes, some to their lodgings in the city, where for the most part they swelled the army of the Social Democrats, and spent their time discussing maximum and minimum programmes and the socialization of productivity. They were also collecting arms.

“It was impossible to keep open. The students would insist on turning the quadrangle into a Fort Chabrol,” said Professor Manioukoff, the new Rector of the University, a learned economist and advanced politician, who, being prohibited from studying grievances nearer home, had won fame by specializing on the Irish land question. So the University was closed, the professors were compelled to pursue research without the due endowment of fees, and their wives and babies had to manage upon half the family income.

Many of them took to lecturing, not for pay, but because it was the only thing they could do for the Movement. One night I listened to one who lectured for nearly two hours on the comparative history of amnesties during the last few centuries, with a very close application to the present time. He still called himself a Professor, though he had been exiled from his Chair for so many years that his name had long been forgotten, and, like most of the exiles, he came back to a world which regarded him with a considerate but uneasy pity, as we should all regard the dead if they returned. For nearly thirty years he had lived in Bulgaria, surely not too far away to be remembered, and now he was lecturing again in Moscow, an old man, lame and blind, dressed in a frock-coat and worsted slippers. His nice little granddaughter guided his steps, kept his water-glass full, reminded him every half-hour of the flight of time (which he bore patiently), and put him right about his dates, which made the audience smile. Otherwise, the large lecture hall, packed with the intellectual, listened intently, but showed no sign of approval until the end. The portrait of the Tsar had been carefully removed from behind the chair, and only the gaunt iron staples showed where it had hung.

Another evening, in one of those dubious theatres which had just been converted to decent use, I heard a Professor deliver an immense discourse upon the first principles of Social Democracy before an audience half composed of working people. They also listened patiently, but the moment of real excitement came when the lecturer ceased, and three young soldiers sprang upon the stage and shouted that, on the highest economic principles, they too had struck, and would Cossack it no more. “I have flung away the uniform!” shouted one, who was apparelled in a long dressing-gown. “No more fools of officers over me!” shouted another. “And they fed us like swine!” shouted the third, who was just economically drunk. The applause that rocked the audience was one of the grandest noises I have ever heard. If only all the army would follow the example of those three gallant musketeers! But that night they vanished from the blaze of glory, and I heard of them no more.

Vanished too were the Zemstvoists, the men who, in July, had impeached the Government in an overwhelming series of accusations. Since the death of their hero, Prince Sergius Troubetskoy, their heart had failed them, and in November, when they met again in congress and their chance had come, they wasted the precious days in discussions upon Witte’s character, just like a suburban essay society discussing Hamlet. But time was going fast just then, and before they had settled Witte’s psychology to their satisfaction they were forgotten. They had meant so well by their counsels of moderation and attempts to imitate the British Constitution, but rushing time had left them lonely. Yet Moscow was rather strong in Liberal papers, which the bourgeoisie were glad to accept as protests against the extremes of socialism. The Russian News, for instance, edited by white-haired Sobolevski, with a grey-haired staff, was a strictly moderate paper, as I have said, though its writers had become so inspired by the youthfulness of the time that their articles would have sent them a year before to meditate in prison or exile upon the license of governments.

Then again, the first Sunday I was in Moscow, Professor Miliukoff brought out his new paper called Life (Zhisn) on simple and moderate lines. He began with a long and earnest appeal for the unity of Progressive parties against the common enemy of Absolutism. “Let us all combine,” he cried, “into a bloc, and present a solid front to the ancient tyranny and new reaction. When Absolutism is overthrown, there will be time enough to discuss the divergent lines of our own programmes.” Every one respected Professor Miliukoff, and was cheered by his eternal hopefulness. The advice was obviously sensible. Its only fault was that it was sensible to commonplace—just too obviously sensible for times of high exhilaration, when the position of the moderate man is always painful and usually neglected. Neither workmen nor Social Democrats cared in the least for a Liberal alliance. They knew that, in any case, the Liberals would join them in the fight against Absolutism, and to the truly revolutionary spirit Liberalism is always suspect. A significant cartoon came out that week, called “The Hare at the Hunt.” The lion of the proletariat has sprung upon the Bear of tyranny; but in the foreground the Hare of the bourgeoisie is seen hastening up and delicately nibbling at one of the dead Bear’s ears, as much as to say, “Please, give me a little bit too!” A little bit might be given to the Moderates, but the proletariat were determined to keep the lion’s share.

One day, for the sake of comparison with the proletariat of St. Petersburg, I went over a large and very rich factory, which almost holds a monopoly in candles, and the darkness of Northern Russia for six months in the year makes a candle monopoly valuable. At the end of October a serious riot had occurred there, and the front of the mill was still a wreck of bricks and broken glass. The strikers had then demanded a 50 per cent. rise in wages, an eight-hour day, a lodging allowance of 6s. to 10s. a month, pensions of half wages after fifteen years’ work, and pensions of full wages after twenty-five years. When I was there, they had just begun work again on a rise of 16 per cent., an eight-hour day in three shifts, and a lodging allowance of 4s. 6d. a month. That lodging allowance arises from the general old custom of living-in. Hitherto all the single men and single women had lived in barrack dormitories inside the mill, with a room for meals, gas, heating, and washing-troughs provided. These blocks of lodgings—“spalnya,” as they are called—dismal and crowded as life in them must be, were perhaps as comfortable and much cheaper than the accommodation to be had outside. But they lacked the one great charm in life—the charm of liberty. At the time of the strike, the hands demanded the right of receiving friends and relations from outside into the premises. The managers complied, and that evening the whole place was crammed with enthusiastic advocates of family affection. A mass meeting, eloquent of revolution, was held in the mill yard, and the devotees of friendship paraded their red flags in front of the managers’ quarters with trumpet and drum. Next day the managers withdrew their amiable concession, cleared the dormitories of men and women, and turned them neck and crop out into the road to fend for themselves. The lodging allowance was given to prevent further riots and to soothe the conscience. In the matter of money, it is no compensation for what the workmen lose, but liberty is thrown in, and liberty counts so high that I think the workers had the best of it in the end, and probably the old barracks will gradually disappear.

In the last twenty years the rate of pay has gone up fourfold, while the cost of living has only doubled. A good workman in this mill now received from 24s. to 30s. a week, which appeared to be the maximum wage, and since the strike a woman’s wage had risen to 8s. a week, with the same lodging allowance as the men, or about 9s. 2d. a week in all. The standard of food was perhaps a little higher than in St. Petersburg, for, except during fasts, the family expected some sort of meat or stew every day. But this was a particularly rich mill; it prided itself on its high wages, and the Englishmen of its management delighted to display a paternal benevolence to the innocent unfortunates of a lower race. It was certainly remarkable that all the hands had gone back, except those who could not be summoned from their villages owing to the breakdown of the post.

Of course, the prolonged post strike, which had continued for nearly three weeks then, was inconvenient for everybody. Revolutions are generally inconvenient, especially for business people. But it was rather too much when that ancient champion of tyranny, the Novoe Vremya, took this opportunity for working itself up into such a glow of righteous indignation because the strikers were depriving mankind of humanity’s glorious right—the right of communication and speech—the right of corresponding with fellow-men afar off, and calling on others to associate in their joys and griefs. What had the Novoe Vremya cared about that glorious right a few months before? What protest had it ever raised against a censorship that pried into letters, and chuckled over lovers’ secrets, and tracked men down to death through the words of their friends? Or what communication with their fellow-men had been allowed to exiles and prisoners—exiles and prisoners who had been wiped out from human existence for exercising that glorious right of speech? In reading leading articles like that I have sometimes detected limits beyond which even hypocrisy ceases to be decent.

But in times of revolution we must expect and tolerate much wild absurdity among people who are afraid of losing their money, and among the startled cowards who have suddenly realized what revolution is. In a letter to his own paper, the New Life, about this time, Maxim Gorky said that people had been writing to him from all over Russia to ask why it was that the patient workman and the dear, gentle peasant, whom the advanced thinkers used to worship as a saint, had suddenly shown themselves so very disagreeable and dangerous. There was a crudity and innocence about the question which takes us back more than half a century in Western social history, and Gorky’s own answer sounds to us almost as much a truism as a chapter of Charles Kingsley seems now. He merely repeated the weary old truth that in ordinary times the rich and governing classes have never taken the smallest notice of the worker and the peasant. When have they ever turned from their games of ambition or pleasure to consider the poor? In what way have they shared their life, except in the distribution of doles, which are given for their own comfort? If a bad time had now come for them, and if a worse was coming, that was only the natural turning of a wheel which had been slow to turn.

In our country we have long been familiar with such statements. We have long known that the rich man’s charity is but a ransom for himself, so that he may follow enjoyment with undisturbed content. We have long known that the sympathies of comfortable people are limited by their own comfort. We have also learnt how vain it is to preach such truths, if preaching is to end in words. But what to us has become true to satiety may still be a bewildering paradox to less experienced and less sophisticated nations, and the extraordinary influence of writers like Gorky in Russia seems to arise from the simple-hearted earnestness with which thoughtful Russians have received their doctrine. What to us appears so painfully true that we had almost forgotten it, may dawn upon them as a fine paradox of revelation.

The teaching in Gorky’s new play, The Children of the Sun would be rather less familiar to us, for it strikes at the intellectual classes, who generally regard themselves as above criticism, whereas the rich have become case-hardened to sermons and abuse. It was then being performed in his own theatre—the best theatre in the world, airy, admirably planned for hearing, entirely free from the curse of decoration, and provided with a large hall where the audience could discuss revolution during the welcome pauses which extend Russian entertainments through the night. The drama is Ibsenite—a humorous tragedy, with plenty of ironic laughter, though it fades away into a paltry German suicide. But the political point is that the central figure—an excellent man of science, simple, sweet tempered, and devoted with all his heart to the creation of life by chemical means—declares that intellectual people like himself are in reality toiling for the poor, no matter how indifferent they may appear to the poverty of others. They are the children of the sun—the almost divine beings who shed light in the darkness of the world. The simple-hearted chemist is himself a true saint of intellect. When, with the consent of his wife, a rich and lovely lady flings herself round his neck and offers him all her love and a complete laboratory, he accepts the laboratory with rapture, but asks if the love is not superfluous. Nevertheless all his innocence, his devotion, and his real kindliness of heart do not help him in the least when the peasants, infuriated for liberty, come storming down the village and almost choke the life out of that Child of the Sun in his own back garden.

That was likely to be the fate of many excellent people, who were pursuing culture without extravagance. Many who deserved no worse than the rest of us poor intellectual and decently clothed men were caught up in the whirling skirts of revolution and carried shrieking they knew not where. From every side came rumours of burnings and slaughters. The country was spoken of as a wilderness of destruction, into which none dared penetrate. For many days in vain I sought for a guide and interpreter to accompany me among the peasants. To enter a village was sudden death, and not for three pounds a day would a townsman go with me, till at last I found one whose poverty consented.

In Moscow itself we were still revelling in liberty. We lived under an anarchy almost fit for the angels, who by their divine nature are a law unto themselves. But, unhappily, as I said, our liberty was tempered by assassination. For some weeks the average of street murders was one a day. Barefooted, long-haired beggars, the very heroes of Gorky’s tales, the ragged supermen of misery, sprang out from dark corners, and I always thanked them heartily for their mistake in regarding my money as more valuable than my life. People walked warily, and kept one eye behind them, turning sharply round if they heard even the padding sound of goloshes in the snow. Often at night, as I went up and down the rampart of the Kremlin, and watched those ancient white temples with their brazen domes glittering under the moon, I noticed that the few passers-by skirted round me in a kind of arc, and if they came upon me suddenly they ran. My intentions were far from murderous, but all were living in that haggard element of fear. They had not yet realized that the only decent way to live is to take life in one hand and possessions in the other, and both hands open.

CHAPTER VII
THE OLD ORDER