Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

INSIDE THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION

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Catherine Breshkovskaia, the “Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution.”

INSIDE THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION

BY

RHETA CHILDE DORR

ILLUSTRATED

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1917
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1917,
By THE EVENING MAIL
Copyright, 1917,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
————
Set up and Electrotyped. Published November, 1917

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

CHAPTER I TOPSY-TURVY LAND

Early in May, 1917, I went to Russia, eager to see again, in the hour of her deliverance, a country in whose struggle for freedom I had, for a dozen years, been deeply interested. I went to Russia a socialist by conviction, an ardent sympathizer with revolution, having known personally some of the brave men and women who suffered imprisonment and exile after the failure of the uprising in 1905-6. I returned from Russia with the very clear conviction that the world will have to wait awhile before it can establish any coöperative millenniums, or before it can safely hand over the work of government to the man in the street.

All my life I have been an admiring student of the French revolution, and I have fervently wished that I might have lived in the Paris of that time, to witness, even as a humble spectator, the downfall of autocracy and the birth of a people’s liberty. Well—I lived for three months in the capital of revolutionary Russia. I saw a revolution which presents close parallels with the French revolution both in men and events. I saw the downfall of autocracy and the birth of liberty much greater than the French ever aspired to. I saw the fondest dream of the socialists suddenly come true, and the dream turned out to be a nightmare such as I pray that this or any country may forever be spared.

I saw a people delivered from one class tyranny deliberately hasten to establish another, quite as brutal and as unmindful of the common good as the old one. I saw these people, led out of groaning bondage, use their first liberty to oust the wise and courageous statesmen who had delivered them. I saw a working class which had been oppressed under czardom itself turn oppressor; an army that had been starved and betrayed use its freedom to starve and betray its own people. I saw elected delegates to the people’s councils turn into sneak thieves and looters. I saw law and order and decency and all regard for human life or human rights set aside, and I saw responsible statesmen in power allow all this to go on, allow their country to rush toward an abyss of ruin and shame because they were afraid to lose popularity with the mob.

The government was so afraid of losing the support of the mob that it permitted the country to be overrun by German agents posing as socialists. These agents spent fortunes in the separate peace propaganda alone. They demoralized the army, corrupted the workers in field and factories, and put machine guns in the hands of fanatical dreamers, sending them out into the streets to murder their own friends and neighbors. Every one knew who these men were, but the mob liked their “line of talk” and the government was afraid to touch them. After one of the last occasions when, at their behest, the Bolsheviki went out and shot up Petrograd, Lenine, the arch leader, and some of his principal gangsters deemed it the part of discretion to retire from Russia temporarily, and they got to Sweden without the slightest difficulty, no attempt having been made to stop them. Some of the minor employees of the Kaiser were arrested, among them a woman in whose name the bank account appeared to be. But she too, and probably all the others, were later released.

A government like this could not bring peace and order into a distracted nation. It could not establish a democracy. It could not govern. The sooner the allied countries realize this the better it will be for Russia and for the world that wants peace. It is not because I am unfriendly to Russia that I write thus. It is because I am friendly, because I have faith in the future of the Russian people, because I believe that their experiment in popular government, if it succeeds, will be as inspiring to the rest of the world as our own was in the eighteenth century. I think the most unkind thing any friend of Russia can do is to minimize or conceal the facts about the terrible upheaval going on there at the present time. Russia looks to the American people for help in her troubled hour, and if the American people are to help they will have to understand the situation. No discouragement to the allies, no assistance to the common enemy need result from a plain statement of the facts. The enemy knows all the facts already.

Everything I saw in Russia, in the cities and near the front, convinced me that what is going on there vitally concerns us. Every man, woman and child in the United States must get to work to give the help so sorely needed by the allies. Whatever has failed in Russia, whatever has broken down must never be missed. We must supply these deficiencies. Our business now is to understand, and to hurry, hurry, hurry with our task of getting trained and seasoned men into France. After what I saw in the neighborhood of Vilna, Dvinsk and Jacobstadt, I know what haste on this side means to the world. There are several reasons why the whole truth has not before been written about the Russian revolution. It could not be written or cabled from Russia. It could not be carried out in the form of notes or photographs. It could not even be discovered by the average person who goes to Russia, because the average visitor lives at the expensive Hotel d’Europe, never goes out except in a droshky, and meets only Russians of social position to whom he has letters of introduction, and who naturally try to give him the impression that the troubled state of affairs is merely temporary. The visitor usually knows no Russian and cannot read the newspapers. There are two good French newspapers published in Petrograd, but the average American traveler is as ignorant of French as of Russian. Even if he could read all the daily papers, however, he would not get very much information. The press censorship is as rigid and as tyrannical to-day as in the heyday of the autocracy, only a different kind of news is suppressed. One of the modest demands put forth by the Tavarishi (comrades) when I was in Petrograd was for a requisition of all the white print paper in the market, the paper to be distributed equally among all newspapers, large and small. The object, candidly stated, was to diminish the size and the circulation of the “bourgeois” papers.

A great deal of news, as we regard news, never gets into the papers at all, or is compressed into very small space. For example there have been a number of terrible railroad accidents on the Russian roads. Most of these one never heard of unless some one he knew happened to be killed or injured. Sometimes a bare announcement of a great fatality was permitted. Thus an express train between Moscow and Petrograd was wrecked, forty persons being killed and more than seventy injured. This wreck got a whole paragraph in the newspapers, with no list of the dead and injured and no explanation of the cause. The fact is that the railroads are in a condition of complete demoralization and the only wonder is that more wrecks do not occur.

An acquaintance of mine in Moscow, the wife of a colonel in the British army, was anxious to go to Petrograd to meet her husband who was expected there on his way from the front. My friend’s father, who is the managing head of a large Moscow business concern, tried to prevail on her to wait for her husband to reach her there, but she was anxious to see him at the earliest moment and insisted on her tickets being purchased. The day after she was to have gone her father called on me and told me of his intense relief at receiving, an hour before train time, a telegram from the colonel saying that he would be in Moscow the next morning.

“And what do you think happened to that train my daughter was to have taken?” he asked. It was the regular night express to Petrograd, corresponding somewhat to the Congressional Limited between New York and Washington. A few miles out of Moscow a difference arose between the engineer and the stoker, and in order to settle it they stopped the train and had a fight. One of the men hit the other on the head with a monkey wrench, injuring him pretty badly. Authority of some kind stepped in and arrested the assailant. The engineer’s cab was blood-stained, and some authority unhitched the engine and sent it back to Moscow as evidence. The train all this time, with its hundreds of passengers, stood on the tracks waiting for a new engine and crew, and if it was not run into and wrecked it was because it was lucky.

About the middle of August an American correspondent traveled on that same express train from Petrograd to Moscow. The night was warm, and as the Russian occupants of his carriage had the usual constitutional objection to raised windows, he insisted on leaving the door of the compartment open. In the middle of the night a band of soldiers boarded the train and went into every one of the unlocked compartments, five in all, neatly and silently looting them of all bags and suitcases. The American correspondent lost everything he possessed—extra clothes, money, passport, papers. There was a Russian staff officer in that compartment and he lost even the clothes he traveled in, and was obliged to descend in his pajamas. The conductor of the train admitted that he saw the robbery committed, that he raised no hand to prevent it, nor even pressed the signal which would have stopped the train. “They would have killed me,” he pleaded in extenuation. “Besides, it happens almost every night on a small or large scale.”

There is only one way of getting at the facts of the Russian situation, and that is by living as the Russians do, associating with Russians, hearing their stories day by day of the tragedy of what has been called the bloodless revolution. This I did, as nearly as it was possible, from the end of May until the 30th of August, in Petrograd, Moscow and behind one of the fighting fronts. In Petrograd I lived in the Hotel Militaire, formerly the Astoria, the headquarters of Russian officers and of the numerous English, French and Roumanian officers on missions in Russia. This was the hotel where the bitterest fighting took place during the revolutionary days of February, 1917. The outside of the building is literally riddled with bullets, every window had to be replaced, and the work of renovating the interior was still going on when I left. Under the window in my bedroom was a pool of dried blood as big as a saucer, and the carpet was stained with drops leading from the window to the stationary washbowl in the alcove dressing room. Over the bed were two bullet holes.

Since the revolution the Hotel Militaire has been a garrison, soldiers sleeping in several rooms on the ground floor and two sentinels standing day and night at the door and at the gateway leading into the service court. I do not know why, when I asked for a room, the manager gave it to me. Two other women writers had rooms there, but one was in a party which included American officers, and the other was introduced by an English officer attached to the British embassy. However, I took the room and was grateful, because whatever happened in Petrograd was quickly known in the hotel. Also, it faced the square on which was located the Marie Palace, where the provisional government held many of its meetings, and where several important congresses were held. Whenever the Bolsheviki broke loose this square always saw some fighting. It was an excellent place for a correspondent to live.

I spent much of my time in the streets, listening, with the aid of an interpreter, a young university girl, to the speeches which were continually being made up and down the Nevski Prospect, the Litainy and other principal streets. I talked, through my interpreter, with people who sat beside me on park benches, in trams, railroad trains and other public places. I met all the Russians I could, people of every walk of life, of every political faith. I spent days in factories. I talked with workers and with employers. I even met and talked with adherents of the old régime. I talked for nearly an hour with the last Romanoff left in freedom, the Grand Duchess Serge, sister of the former empress, widow of the emperor’s uncle. I went, late at night, to a palace on the Grand Morskaia where in strictest retirement lives the woman who has been charged with being the closest friend and ally of Rasputin, the one who, at his orders, is alleged to have administered poison to the young Czarevitch. I traveled in a troop train two days and nights with a regiment of fighting women—the Botchkareva “Battalion of Death”—and I lived with them in their barrack behind the fighting lines for nine days. I stayed with them until they went into action, I saw them afterward in the hospitals and heard their own stories of the battle into which they led thousands of reluctant men. I talked with many soldiers and officers.

Russia is sick. She is gorged on something she has never known before—freedom: she is sick almost to die with excesses, and the leadership which would bring the panacea is violently thrown aside because suspicion of any authority has bred the worst kind of license. Russia is insane; she is not even morally responsible for what she is doing. Will she recover? Yes. But, God! what pain must she bear before she gets real freedom!

CHAPTER II “ALL THE POWER TO THE SOVIET”

About the first thing I saw on the morning of my arrival in Petrograd last spring was a group of young men, about twenty in number, I should think, marching through the street in front of my hotel, carrying a scarlet banner with an inscription in large white letters.

“What does that banner say?” I asked the hotel commissionaire who stood beside me.

“It says ‘All the Power to the Soviet,’” was the answer.

“What is the soviet?” I asked, and he replied briefly:

“It is the only government we have in Russia now.”

And he was right. The soviets, or councils of soldiers’ and workmen’s delegates, which have spread like wildfire throughout the country, are the nearest thing to a government that Russia has known since the very early days of the revolution.

The most striking parallel between the French and the Russian revolutions lies in the facility with which both were snatched away from the sane and intelligent men who began them and placed in the hands of fanatics, who turned them into mad orgies of blood and terror. The first French revolutionists rebelled against the theory of the divine right of kings to govern or misgovern the people. They wanted a constitution and a government by consent of the governed. But the mob came in and took possession of the situation, and the result was the guillotine and the reign of terror. Miliukoff, Rodzianko, Lvoff, and their associates in the Russian Duma, rebelled against a stupid, cruel autocrat who was doing his best to lose the war and to bring the country to ruin and dishonor. They wanted a constitution for Russia, and, for the time being at least, a figurehead king who would leave government in the hands of responsible ministers. But the Petrograd council of soldiers’ and workmen’s delegates came in and took possession of the situation, and the result is a country torn with anarchy, brought to the verge of bankruptcy, and ready, unless something happens between now and next spring, to fall into the hands of the Germans.

These councils of workmen are not new. In the upheaval of 1905-06 a man named Khrustaliov, a labor leader, became the head of an organization called the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s Deputies. It was made up of elected delegates from all the principal factories in and near the capital, and during the general strike which forced Nicholas to convene the first Duma, the council assumed general control of the whole labor situation, managing matters with rare good sense and firmness. Witte, who became premier in those days, negotiated with Khrustaliov as with an equal. For a time he and his council were a real power in the empire. A dozen cities formed similar organizations. There were councils of workmen’s deputies, peasants’ deputies, even, in some places, of soldiers’ deputies. The reaction which came in July, 1906, swept them all into oblivion, and I never found anybody who knew what became of Khrustaliov. But the tradition of the council of workmen’s deputies was unforgotten. Perhaps the council even existed still in secret; I do not know. It was quickly revived in March, 1917, and before the political revolution was fairly accomplished it had added soldiers to its title and had curtly informed the provisional government and the Duma that no laws could be made or enforced without first having received the approval of the working people’s representatives. No policy in peace or war could be announced or put into practice; no orders could be given the army; no treaties concluded with the allies; in short, nothing could be done without first consulting the 1,500 men and women—five women—who made up the Council of Workmen´s and Soldiers’ Delegates.

If the country had been in a condition of peace instead of war this would not have been at all a bad thing. The working people of Russia, under the electoral system devised by the old régime, had very little representation in the Duma, and they had a perfect right to demand a voice in the organization of the new government. But unfortunately the country was at war; and more unfortunately still, the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates was made up in large part of extreme radicals to whom the war was a matter of entire indifference. The revolution to them meant an opportunity to put into practice new economic theories, the socialistic state. They conceived the vast dream of establishing a new order of society, not only for Russia but for the whole world. They were going to dictate terms of peace, and call on the working people of every country to join them in enforcing that peace. After that they were going to do away with all capitalists, bankers, investors, property owners. Armies and navies were to be scrapped. I don’t know what they purposed doing with the constitution of the United States, but “capitalistic” America was to be made over with the rest of the world.

Many members of this council are well-meaning theorists, dreamers, exactly like thousands in this country who read no books or newspapers except those written by their own kind, who “express themselves” by wearing red ties and long hair, and who exist in a cloudy world of their own. These people are honest and they are capable of being reasoned with. In Russia they are known as Minsheviki, meaning small claims. A noisy and troublesome and growing minority in the council are called Bolsheviki (big claims), because they demand everything and will not even consider compromise. They want a separate peace, entirely favorable to Germany. I talked to a number of these men, but I could never get one of them to explain the reason of this friendship for Germany. Vaguely they seemed to feel that socialism was a German doctrine and, therefore, as soon as Russia put it into practice, the Germans would follow suit. Not all the council members are working people. Some have never done a hand’s turn of manual work in their lives. Many of the soldier members have never seen service and never will. The Jewish membership is very large, and in Russia the Jews have never been allowed any practice of citizenship.

Lastly the council is liberally sprinkled with German spies and agents. Every once in a while one of these men is unmasked and put out. But it is more than likely that his place is quickly filled. It is a most difficult thing to convince the council that any “Tavarish,” which is the Russian word for comrade, can be guilty of double dealing. The council defended Lenine up to the last moment. Even after he fled the country the Socialist newspapers, Isvestia, Pravda, and Maxim Gorki’s Nova Jisn, declared him to be the victim of an odious calumny. It was this Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates that first claimed a consultive position in the government, and within a few months was parading the streets with banners demanding “All the Power to the Soviet.”

I cannot say that I unreservedly blame them. They were people who had never known any kind of freedom, they had been poor and oppressed and afraid of their lives. All of a sudden they were freed. And when they went in numbers to the Duma and claimed a right to a voice in their own future, men like Kerensky and others, who are honest dreamers, others plain demagogues and office seekers, came out and lauded them to the skies, told them that the world was theirs, that they alone had brought about the revolution and therefore had a right to take possession of the country. The effect of this on soldiers and on the working people was immediate and disastrous.

If Kerensky was not the author of the famous Order No. 1, which was the cause of most of the riot and bloodshed in the army, he at least signed it and defended it. This order provided for regimental government by committees, the election of officers by the soldiers, the doing away with all saluting of superiors by enlisted men and the abolition of the title “your nobility,” which was the form of address used to officers. In place of this form the soldiers were henceforth to address their officers as Gospodeen (meaning mister), captain, colonel, general, as the case might be. Order No. 1 was a plain license to disband the Russian army. Abolishing the custom of saluting may seem a small thing. A member of the Root mission expressed himself thus to me soon after his arrival in Petrograd: “This talk of anarchy is all nonsense,” he said. “A lot of peacock officers are sore because the men don’t salute them any more. Why should the men salute?”

Perhaps I don’t know why they should, but I know that when they don’t they speedily lose all their soldierly bearing and slouch like tired subway diggers. They throw courtesy, kindness, consideration to the winds. The soldiers of other countries look on them with disgust and horror. At Tornea, the port of entry into Finland, I got my first glimpse of this “free” Russian soldier. He was handing some papers to a trim British Tommy, who was straight as an arrow, clean cut and soldierly. The Russian slouched up to him, stuck out the papers in a dirty paw and blew a mouthful of cigarette smoke in his face. What the Tommy said to him was in English, and I am afraid was lost on the Russian, who walked off looking quite pleased with himself. In Petrograd I saw two of these “free” soldiers address, without even touching their caps, a French officer who spoke their language. The conversation was repeated to me thus: “Is it true that in your country, which calls itself a democracy, the soldiers have to stand in the presence of officers? Is it true that they——” The interrogation proceeded no further, for the Frenchman replied quickly: “In the first place French soldiers do not walk up to an officer and begin a conversation uninvited, so I find it impossible to answer your questions.”

If he had been a Russian officer he would probably have been murdered on the spot. The death penalty having been abolished, and the police force having been reduced to an absurdity, murder has been made a safe and pleasant diversion. Murder of officers is so common that it is seldom even reported in the newspapers. When the truth is finally and officially published, if it ever is, it will be found that the brutal and horrible butchery of officers exceeds anything the outside world has ever imagined. I met a woman whose daughter went insane after her husband was killed in the fortress of Kronstadt, the port of Petrograd. He with a number of officers was imprisoned there, and some of the women went to the commander and begged permission to see and speak to their men. He grinned at them, and said: “They are just finishing their dinner. In a few minutes you may see them.” Shortly afterwards they were summoned to a room where the men sat around a table. They were tied in their chairs, and were all dead, with evidences of having been tortured.

In the beginning of the revolution the soldiers of Kronstadt killed the old officer commandant. They began by gouging out his eyes. When he was quite finished they brought in the second officer in command and his young son, a lieutenant in the navy. “Will you join us, embrace the glorious revolution, or shall we kill you?” they demanded. “My duty is to command this garrison,” replied the officer. “If you are going to kill me do it at once.” They shot him, and threw his corpse on a pile of others in a ditch. The son they spared, and a few nights later the young man rescued his father’s body and brought it home to be buried. This story was related under oath by him, but in the face of it and hundreds more like it the death penalty was abolished; nor would Kerensky consent to restore it, except for desertion at the front.

At the Moscow congress, held in August, Kerensky said, apologizing for even this small concession: “As minister of justice I did away with the death penalty. As president of the provisional government I have asked for its reinstatement in case of desertion under fire.” There was a burst of applause, and Kerensky exclaimed: “Do not applaud. Don’t you realize that we lose part of our souls when we consent to the death penalty? But if it is necessary to lose our souls to save Russia we must make the sacrifice.”

Petrograd and Moscow are literally running over with idle soldiers, many of whom have never done any fighting, and who loudly declare that they never intend to do any. They are supported by the government, wear the army uniform, claim all the privileges of the soldier and live in complete and blissful idleness. The street cars are crowded with soldiers, who of course pay no fares. It is impossible for a woman to get a seat in a car. She is lucky if the soldiers permit her to stand in the aisle or on a platform. “Get off and walk, you boorzhoi,” said a soldier to my interpreter one day when she was hastening to keep an appointment with me. She got off and walked. I heard but one person dispute with a soldier. She was a street car conductor, one of the many women who have taken men’s places since the war. She turned on a car full of these idlers riding free and littering the floor with sunflower seeds, which they eat as Americans eat peanuts, and told them exactly what she thought of them. It must have been extremely unflattering, for the other passengers looked joyful and only one soldier ventured any reply. “Now, comrade,” said he, “you must not be hard on wounded men.”

“Wounded men!” exclaimed the woman. “If you ever get a wound it will be in the mouth from a broken bottle.” There was a burst of laughter, in which even the soldiers joined. But after it subsided one of the men said defiantly: “Just the same, comrades, it was we who sent the Czar packing.” This opinion is shared by the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates. They have completely forgotten that the Duma had anything to do with the revolution. At their national congress of Soviets held in July, they solemnly debated whether or not they would permit the Duma to meet again, and it was a very small majority that decided in favor. But only on condition that the national body worked under the direction of the councils.

CHAPTER III THE JULY REVOLUTION

Every one who has read the old “Arabian Nights” will remember the story of the fisherman who caught a black bottle in one of his nets. When the bottle was uncorked a thin smoke began to curl out of the neck. The smoke thickened into a dense cloud and became a huge genie who made a slave of the fisherman. By the exercise of his wits the fisherman finally succeeded in getting the genie back into the bottle, which he carefully corked and threw back into the sea. Kerensky tried desperately to get the genie back into the bottle, and every one hoped he might succeed. Up to date, however, there is little to indicate that the giant has even begun materially to shrink. Petrograd is not the only city where the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates has assumed control of the destinies of the Russian people. Every town has its council, and there is no question, civil or military, which they do not feel capable of settling.

I have before me a Petrograd newspaper clipping dated June 12. It is a dispatch from the city of Minsk, and states that the local soviet had debated the whole question of the resumption of the offensive, the Bolsheviki claiming that the question was general and that it ought to be left for the men at the front to decide. They themselves were against an offensive, deeming it contrary to the interests of the international movement and profitable only to capitalists, foreign as well as Russian. Workers of all countries ought to struggle against their governments and to break with all imperialist politics. The army ought to be made more democratic. This view prevailed, says the dispatch, by a vote of 123 against 79.

This is typical. In some cities the extreme socialists are in the majority, in others the milder Minsheviki prevail. In Petrograd it has been a sort of neck and neck between them, with the Minsheviki in greater number. But as the seat of government Petrograd has had a great attraction for the German agents, and they are all Bolsheviki and very energetic. Early in the revolution they established two headquarters, one in the palace of Mme. Kchessinskaia, a dancer, high in favor with some of the grand dukes, and another on the Viborg side, a manufacturing quarter of the city. Here in a big rifle factory and a few miles down the Neva in Kronstadt, they kept a stock of firearms, rifles and machine guns big enough to equip an army division.

The leader of this faction, which was opposed to war against Germany but quite willing to shoot down unarmed citizens, was the notorious Lenine, a proved German agent whose power over the working people was supreme until the uprisings in July, which were put down by the Cossacks. Lenine was at the height of his glory when the Root Commission visited Russia, and the provisional government was so terrorized by him that it hardly dared recognize the envoys from “capitalistic America.” Only two members of the mission were ever permitted to appear before the soviet or council. They were Charles Edward Russell and James Duncan, one a socialist and the other a labor representative. Both men made good speeches, but not a line of them, as far as I could discover, ever appeared in a socialist newspaper. In fact, the visit of the commission was ignored by the radical press, the only press which reaches 75 per cent of the Russian people.

In order to make perfectly clear the situation as it existed during the spring and summer, and as it exists to-day, I am going to describe two events which I witnessed last July. Both of these were attempts of the extreme socialists to bring about a separate peace with Germany, and had they succeeded in their plans would have done so. Moreover, they might easily have resulted in the dismemberment of Russia.

The 18th of June, Russian style, July 1 in our calendar, is a day that stands out vividly in my memory. For some time the Lenine element of the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council had planned to get up a demonstration against the non-socialist members of the provisional government and against the further progress of the war. The Minshevik element of the council, backed by the government, spoiled the plan by voting for a non-political demonstration in which all could take part, and which should be a memorial for the men and women killed in the February revolution, and buried in the Field of Mars, a great open square once used for military reviews. As the plan was finally adopted it provided that every one who wanted to might march in this parade, and no one was to carry arms. Great was the wrath of the Lenineites, but the peaceful demonstration came off, and it must have given the government its first thrill of encouragement, for events that day proved that the Bolsheviki or Lenine followers were cowards at heart and could be handled by any firm and fearless authority.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, this eighteenth of June, when I walked up the Nevski Prospect, the Fifth avenue of Petrograd, watching the endless procession that filled the street. Two-thirds of the marchers were men, mostly soldiers, but women were present also, and a good many children. Red flags and red banners were plentiful, the Bolshevik banners reading “Down with the Ten Capitalistic Ministers,” “Down with the War,” “Down with the Duma,” “All the Power to the Soviets,” and presenting a very belligerent appearance.

With me that day was another woman writer, Miss Beatty of the San Francisco Bulletin, and as we walked along we agreed that almost anything could happen, and that we ought not to allow ourselves to get into a crowd. For once the journalistic passion for seeing the whole thing must give place to a decent regard for safety. We had just agreed that if shooting began we would duck into the nearest court or doorway, when something did happen—something so sudden that its very character could not be defined. If it was a shot, as some claimed, we did not hear it. All we heard was a noise something like a sudden wind. That great crowd marching along the broad Nevski simply exploded. There is no other word to express the panic that turned it without any warning into a fleeing, fighting, struggling, terror-stricken mob. The people rushed in every direction, knocking down everything in their track. Miss Beatty went down like a log, but she was up again in a flash, and we flung ourselves against a high iron railing guarding a shop window. Directly beside us lay a soldier who had had his head cut open by the glass sign against which he was thrown. Many others were injured.

Typical crowd on the Nevski Prospect during the Bolshevik or Maximalist risings.

Fortunately the panic was shortlived. It lasted hardly five minutes, as a matter of fact. All around the cry rose that nothing was the matter, that the Cossacks were not coming. The Cossacks, once the terror of the Russian people, in this upheaval have become the strongest supporters of the government. Nothing could better demonstrate the anti-government intention of the Bolsheviki than their present fear and hatred of the Cossacks. So the “Tavarishi” took up their battered banners and resumed their march. No one ever found out what started the panic. Some said that a shot was fired from a window on one of the banners. Others said that the shot was merely a tire blowing out. Some were certain that they heard a cry of “Cossacks,” and some cynics suggested that the pick-pockets, a numerous and enterprising class just now, started the panic in the interests of business. This was the only disturbance I witnessed. The newspapers reported two more in the course of the day. A young girl watching the procession from the sidewalk suddenly decided to commit suicide, and the shot she sent through her heart precipitated another panic. Still a third one occurred when two men got into a fight and one of them drew a knife.

The instant flight of the crowds and especially of the soldiers must have given Kerensky hope that the giant could be got back into the bottle, especially since on that very day, June 18, Russian style, the army on one of the fronts advanced and fought a victorious engagement. The town went mad with joy over that victory, showing, I think, that the heart of the Russian people is still intensely loyal to the allies, and deadly sick of the fantastic program of the extreme socialists. Crowds surged up and down the street bearing banners, flags, pictures of Kerensky. They thronged before the Marie Palace, where members of the government, officers, soldiers, sailors made long and rapturous speeches, full of patriotism. They sang, they shouted, all day and nearly all night. When they were not shouting “Long live Kerensky!” they were saying “This is the last of the Lenineites.” But it wasn’t. The Bolsheviki simply retired to their dancer’s palace, their Viborg retreats and their Kronstadt stronghold, and made another plan.

On Monday night, July 2, or in our calendar July 15, broke out what is known as the July revolution, the last bloody demonstration of the Bolsheviki. I had been absent from town for two weeks and returned to Petrograd early in the morning after the demonstration began. I stepped out of the Nicholai station and looked around for a droshky. Not one was in sight. No street cars were running. The town looked deserted. Silence reigned, a queer, sinister kind of a silence. “What in the world has happened?” I asked myself. A droshky appeared and I hailed it. When the izvostchik mentioned his price for driving me to my hotel I gasped, but I was two miles from home and there were no trams. So I accepted and we made the journey. Few people were abroad, and when I reached the hotel I found the entrance blocked with soldiers. The man behind the desk looked aghast to see me walk in, and he hastened to tell me that the Bolsheviki were making trouble again and all citizens had been requested to stay indoors until it was over.

I stayed indoors long enough to bathe and change, and then, as everything seemed quiet, I went out. Confidence was returning and the streets looked almost normal again. I walked down the Morskaia, finding the main telephone exchange so closely guarded that no one was even allowed to walk on the sidewalk below it. That telephone exchange had been fiercely attacked during the February revolution, and it was one of the most hotly disputed strategic positions in the capital. Later I am going to tell something of the part played in the revolution by the loyal telephone girls of Petrograd. A big armored car was plainly to be seen in the courtyard of the building, and many soldiers were there alert and ready. I stopped in at the big bookshop where English newspapers (a month old) were to be purchased, and bought one. The Journal de Petrograd, the French morning paper, I found had not been issued that day. Then I strolled down the Nevski. I had not gone far when I heard rifle shooting and then the sound, not to be mistaken, of machine gun fire. People turned in their tracks and bolted for the side streets. I bolted too, and made a record dash for the Hotel d’Europe. The firing went on for about an hour, and when I ventured out again it was to see huge gray motor trucks laden with armed men, rushing up and down the streets, guns bristling from all sides and machine guns fore and aft.

What had happened was this. The “Red Guard,” an armed band of workmen allied with the Bolsheviki, together with all the extremists who could be rallied by Lenine, and these included some very young boys, had been given arms and told to “go out in the streets.” This is a phrase that usually means go out and kill everything in sight. In this case the men were assured that the Kronstadt regiments would join them, that cruisers would come up the river and the whole government would be delivered into the hands of the Bolsheviki. The Kronstadt men did come in sufficient numbers to surround and hold for two days the Tauride Palace, where the Duma meets and the provisional government had its headquarters. The only reason why the bloodshed was not greater was that the soldiers in the various garrisons around the city refused to come out and fight. The sane members of the Soviet had begged them to remain in their casernes, and they obeyed. All day Tuesday and Wednesday the armed motor cars of the Bolsheviki dashed from barrack to barrack daring the soldiers to come out, and whenever they found a group of soldiers to fire on, they fired. Most of these loyal soldiers are Cossacks, and they are hated by the Bolsheviki.

Tuesday night there was some real fighting, for the Cossacks went to the Tauride Palace and freed the besieged ministers at the cost of the lives of a dozen or more men. Then the Cossacks started out to capture the Bolshevik armored cars. When they first went out it was with rifles only, which are mere toy pistols against machine guns. After one little skirmish I counted seventeen dead Cossack horses, and there were more farther down the street. As soon as the Cossacks were given proper arms they captured the armored trucks without much trouble. The Bolsheviki threw away their guns and fled like rabbits for their holes. Nevertheless a condition of warfare was maintained for the better part of a week, and the final burst of Bolshevik activity gave Petrograd, already sick of bloodshed, one more night of terror. That night I shall not soon forget.

The day had been quiet and we thought the trouble was over. I went to bed at half-past ten and was in my first sleep when a fusilade broke out, as it seemed, almost under my window. I sat up in bed, and within a few minutes, the machine guns had begun their infernal noise, like rattlesnakes in the prairie grass. I flung on a dressing gown and ran down the hall to a friend’s room. She dressed quickly and we went down stairs to the room of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragette, which gave a better view of the square than our own. There until nearly morning we sat without any lights, of course, listening to repeated bursts of firing, and the wicked put-put-put-put of the machine guns, watching from behind window draperies, the brilliant headlights of armored motors rushing into action, hearing the quick feet of men and horses hastening from their barracks. We did not go out. All a correspondent can do in the midst of a fight is to lie down on the ground and make himself as flat as possible, unless he can get into a shop where he hides under a table or a bench. That never seemed worth while to me, and I have no tales to tell of prowess under fire.

I listened to that night battle from the safety of the hotel, going the next day to see the damage done by the guns. A contingent of mutinous soldiers and sailors from Kronstadt, which had been expected for several days by the Lenineites, had come up late, still spoiling for a fight; had planted guns on the street in front of the Bourse and at the head of the Palace Bridge across the Neva, and simply mowed down as many people as were abroad at the hour. Nobody knows, except the authorities, how many were killed, but when we awoke the next day we discovered that, for a time at least, the power of the Bolsheviki had been broken. The next day the mutinous regiments were disbanded in disgrace. Petrograd was put under martial law, the streets were guarded with armored cars, thousands of Cossacks were brought in to police the place, and orders for the arrest of Lenine and his lieutenants were issued. But it was openly boasted by the Bolsheviki that the government was afraid to touch Lenine, and certain it is that he escaped into Sweden, and possibly from there into Germany.

I should not like to believe that the government actually connived at his escape, since there was always the menace of his return, and the absolute certainty that he would remain an outsider directing force in the Bolshevik campaign. It is more probable that in the confusion of those days of fighting he was smuggled down the Neva in a small yacht or motor boat to the fortress of Kronstadt, and from there was conveyed across the mine strewn Baltic into Sweden. Rumor had it that he had been seen well on his way to Germany, but it is more likely that his employers kept him nearer the scene of his activities. He was guilty of more successful intrigue, more murder and violent death than most of the Kaiser’s faithful, and deserves an extra size iron cross, if there is such a thing. In spite of all that he has done he has thousands of adherents still in Russia, people who believe that he is “sincere but misguided,” to use an overworked phrase. The rest of the fighting mob were driven from their palace, which they had previously looted and robbed of about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of costly furniture, china, silver and art objects. They were hunted out of their rifle factory, and finally surrendered to the government after they had captured, but failed to hold the fortress of Peter and Paul. They surrendered but were they arrested and punished? Not a bit of it. They were allowed to go scot free, only being required to give up their arms. The government existed only at the will of the mob, and the mob would not tolerate the arrest of “Tavarishi.”

CHAPTER IV AN HOUR OF HOPE

There was an hour when the sunrise of hope seemed to be dawning for the Russian people, when the madness of the extreme socialists seemed to be curbed, the army situation in hand, and a real government established. This happened in late July, and was symbolized in the great public funeral given eight Cossack soldiers slain by the Bolsheviki in the July days of riot and bloodshed in Petrograd. I do not know how many Cossacks were killed. Only eight were publicly buried. It is entirely possible that the government did not wish the Bolsheviki to know the full result of their murder feast, and for that reason gave private burial to some of the dead. The public funeral served as a tribute to the loyal soldiers, a warning to the extremists that the country stood back of the war, and a notice to all concerned that the days of revolution were over and that henceforth the government meant to govern without the help or interference of the Tavarishi, or comrades in the socialist ranks. The moment was propitious for the government. The Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates was in a chastened frame of mind, caused first by the running amuck of the Bolshevik element, the unmasking and flight of Lenine, and next by a lost battle on the Galician front, and the disgraceful desertion of troops under fire.

The best elements in the council supported the new coalition ministry, although it did not have a Socialist majority, and it claimed the right to work independently of the council. The Cossack funeral was really a government demonstration, and those of us who saw it believed for the moment that it marked the beginning of a new era in Russia’s troubled progress toward democracy and freedom. The services were held in St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the largest church in Petrograd, and one of the most magnificent in a country of magnificent churches. The bodies, in coffins covered with silver cloth, were brought to the cathedral on a Friday afternoon at 5 o’clock, accompanied by many members of their regiments and representatives of others. The flower-heaped coffins surrounded by flaming candles filled the space below the holy gate leading to the high altar; around them knelt the soldiers and the weeping women relatives of the dead, while a solemn service for the repose of their souls was chanted.

In the Russian church no organ or other instrumental music is permitted, but the singing is of an order of excellence quite unknown in other countries. Part of a priest’s education is in music, and the male choirs are most carefully trained and conducted. They have the highest tenor and the lowest bass voices in the world in those Russian church choirs, and there is no effect of the grandest pipe organ which they cannot produce. They sing nothing but the best music, and their masses are written for them by the greatest of Russian composers. Many times I have thrilled to their singing, but at this memorial service to brave men slain in defense of their country I was fairly overwhelmed by it. I do not know what they sang, but it was a solemn, yet triumphant symphony of grief, religious ecstasy, faith and longing. It soared to a great climax, and it ended in a prolonged phrase sung so softly that it seemed to come as from a great distance, from Heaven itself. The whole vast congregation was on its knees, in tears.

The service in the cathedral next morning was long and elaborate, and it was early afternoon before the procession started for the Alexander Nevski monastery where a common grave had been prepared for the murdered men. Back of the open white hearses walked the bereaved women and children, bareheaded, in simple peasant black. Thousands of Cossacks, also bareheaded, many weeping bitterly, followed. The dead men’s horses were led by soldiers. The Metropolitan of Petrograd and every other dignitary of the church was in the procession. I saw Miliukoff, Rodzianko and other celebrities. Women of rank walked side by side with working women. Many nurses were there in their flowing white coifs. There were uncounted hundreds of wreaths and floral offerings. The bands played impressive funeral marches. But there was not a single red flag in the procession.

There was, of course, Kerensky, and his appearance was one of the dramatic events of the day. I watched the procession from a hotel window, and I saw just as the hearses were passing a large black motor car winding its way slowly through the crowd that thronged the street. Just as the last hearse passed the door of the car opened and Kerensky sprang out and took his place in the procession, walking alone hatless and with bowed head after the coffins. He was dressed in the plain service uniform of a field officer, and his brown jacket was destitute of any decorations. The crowd when it saw him went mad with enthusiasm; forgot for a moment the solemnity of the occasion and rushed forward to acclaim him. “Kerensky! Kerensky!”

It was his first appearance as premier, and practically dictator of Russia, and he would not have been human if he had not felt a thrill of triumph at this reception. But with a splendid gesture he waved the crowd to silence, and bade them stand quietly back. At first it seemed impossible to restrain them, but the people in the front ranks joined hands and formed a living chain that kept the crowds back, and in a few moments order was restored. There was something fine and symbolic about that action, those joined hands that stopped what might have created a panic and turned the government’s demonstration into a fiasco. That spontaneous bit of social thinking and acting restored order better than a police force could have done, and it left in me the conviction that whenever the Russian people join hands in behalf of their country they are going to work out a splendid civilization. If they had only done it after that day! But the new coalition ministry, with President Kerensky, the popular idol, substituted for Lvoff, who had grown wearied and dispirited by the struggle, soon found itself facing the same old sea of troubles that had swamped the former ministries.

The democracy, created largely by Kerensky, in a country which is not yet ready for self-government, had split up into many anarchistic groups. It had become a Frankenstein too huge and too crazy with power to be handled by any man less than a Napoleon Bonaparte, and Kerensky is not a Bonaparte. Perhaps he had the brain of a Bonaparte, as he certainly had the charm and magnetism. It may be that he lacked the iron will or the deathless courage. It may only be that his frail physical health stood in the way of resolution. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that Kerensky never once was able to take that huge, disorganized, uneducated, restless, yearning Russian mob by the scruff of the neck and compel it to listen to reason. Apparently, also, he was unable or unwilling to let any one else do it, as the mysterious Korniloff incident seems to prove. The story of the disintegration of the Russian army has been described in many dispatches. Later I am going to tell what I saw of the Russian army, and what I know of the demoralization at the front. The state of things was bad, but it was by no means hopeless, as it is fast becoming. That Russian army, I confidently believe, could, as late as August, 1917, have been reorganized, renovated and made into an effective fighting force. It is very evident that it still has possibilities, because the Germans still keep an enormous number of troops on the eastern front. They know that the Russians can fight, and they fear that they will fight, as soon as they are given a real leader. Military leaders they do not lack, as the Germans also know. Most of the old commanders, the worthless, corrupt hangers-on of the old régime, are gone now. Some are dead, some in prison, some relegated to obscurity. The men who are left are real soldiers, good fighters, true allies of America, France and England. Especially is this true of the once feared and hated Cossack leaders.

The Cossack regiments to the last man had supported the provisional government, and were wholeheartedly in favor of fighting the war to a finish. There are about five million of these Cossacks, and practically every able-bodied man is a soldier. And what a soldier! Except our own cowboys, there never were such horsemen. No troops in the world excel them in bravery and fighting power. They are a proud race and would never serve under officers save those of their own kind. I asked a young Cossack at the front where his officers got their training. He had spent some ten years in Chicago and spoke English like one of our own men. “We train them in the field,” he said with a smile. “Every one of us is a potential officer, and when our highest commander drops in battle, there is always a man to take his place.”

The Cossack has no head for politics. He agrees on the government he is going to support and he serves that government with an undivided mind. When he served the Czar he did the Czar’s bidding. When he decided to serve the new democracy he could be depended on to do it. He has done no fraternizing with wily Germans in the trenches. He has listened to no German propaganda in Petrograd. He wants to fight the war to a successful end, and then he wants to go back to his home on the peaceful Don river, or in the wild Urals and cultivate his fields and vineyards.

Of all Cossack leaders the most picturesque and the most celebrated as a military genius was Gen. Korniloff. His life and adventures would fill volumes. He fought his way up from a penniless boyhood to a successful manhood. He knows Russia from one end to the other, and speaks almost every dialect known to the empire, and several foreign languages in addition, especially those of the Orient. He is a small, wiry man with a beard, and the only time I ever saw him he was surrounded by a bodyguard of tall Turkestan Cossacks wearing long gray tunics, huge caps of Persian lamb and a perfectly beautiful collection of silver-mounted swords, daggers and pistols. In a pictorial sense Gen. Korniloff was quite obscured by them.

Following a series of disasters and wholesale desertions at the front, the late provisional government announced that the chief command of the army had been given to Gen. Korniloff. The command was accepted with certain conditions attached to the acceptance. Gen. Korniloff would not be a commander in any limited or modified sense of the word. He demanded absolute power and control over all troops, both at the front and in the rear. He wanted to abolish the committees of soldiers who administered all regimental affairs, and who even decided what commands the men might or might not obey. Gen. Korniloff could never tolerate these bodies. Whenever he visited an army division he asked: “Have your regiments any committees?” And if the answer was yes, he immediately gave the order: “Dissolve them.” One of the principal demands made by Gen. Korniloff on the provisional government was the right to inflict the death penalty on deserters, both in the field and in the rear. I have written of the thousands of idle soldiers in Petrograd, and of the expressed refusal of many of them to go to the front when ordered. There was no secret about this, nor any concealment of the fact that of many thousands of soldiers sent to the front at various times since the early spring, about two-thirds deserted on the way. They captured trains—hospital trains in some instances—turned the passengers out, left the wounded lying along the tracks, and forced the trainmen to take them back to Petrograd, or wherever they wanted to go.

Kerensky had tried every means in his power to stop this shameful business. He had fixed three separate dates on which all soldiers must rejoin their regiments and must obey orders to advance. He had published manifestoes notifying these coward and slackers that unless they did report for duty they would be declared traitors to the revolution, their families would be deprived of all army benefits and they would not be allowed to share in the distribution of land when the new agrarian policy went into effect. These manifestoes were absolutely ignored. The desertions continued. Army disintegration increased. Anarchy pure and simple reigned on all fronts and in the rear. Soldiers who were willing to fight were afraid to, because there was every probability of their own comrades shooting them in the back if they obeyed their officers. The state of mind of the officers can be imagined perhaps—it cannot be described. Many committed suicide in the madness of their shame and despair.

Gen. Korniloff wanted to deal with this horrible situation in the only possible way, by shooting all deserters. This may sound drastic. No doubt it will to every copperhead and pro-German in this country. But remember, for every man who deserts on that Russian front some American boy will have to suffer. We shall have to fight for the Russians, we shall have to pay the awful price of their defection. Gen. Korniloff, a true patriot, knew this, and he wanted to save his country from that dishonor. Kerensky apparently could not endure the thought of those firing squads. Or else he did not dare to risk the wrath of the soviet. There is no doubt that he would have courted great personal danger, it may be certain death, but what of it? There is no doubt that Gen. Korniloff, if he saved the situation, would loom larger as a popular hero than Kerensky, but what of it? The whole country, all of it that retained its sanity and its patriotism, looked for Gen. Korniloff to establish a military dictatorship in the army. There was never any question of his assuming the civil power. There was never any indication that he wanted it.

But there was this question—what political party in Russia was going to dominate the constituent assembly, that consummation which has been postponed many times, but which cannot be indefinitely postponed? The Social Revolutionary party, of which Kerensky was a member, seems to have had a clear majority, but there was little organization, and the Socialists were split up into numerous groups. In one city election recently there were eighteen tickets in the field, most of them separate Socialist parties. The Cossacks, solidly lined up behind Korniloff, announced that in the coming constituent assembly election they would form a bloc with the Constitutional Democrats and the moderate party known as the Cadets, of which Prof. Paul Miliukoff is the leader. That bloc might dominate the constituent assembly. If it did the Bolshevik element in the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates throughout the country would be overpowered and discredited. The “social revolution” which the councils still insisted must come out of the political revolution might be modified.

Outside of the secret conclaves of the provisional government, outside of the inner circles of political life in Russia, there is no one who knows the exact truth of the so-called Korniloff rebellion. It is known that a congress was held in Moscow in late August, in which Kerensky made one of his great speeches, absolutely capturing his audience and once more hypnotizing a large public into the belief that he could restore order in Russia. Korniloff appeared, and aroused great enthusiasm, as he always does. Everybody seemed to think that the two leaders would get together and agree on a program. But they did not get together, and the government announced the “rebellion” and disgrace of Korniloff. Two more things were announced: that the Bolsheviki had gained a majority in the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, and that Lenine was on his way back to Russia to address a “democratic congress,” which had for its objects the abolishment of the Duma and the calling of a parliament chosen from its membership. Russia’s hour of hope had come and gone. When will it come again?

CHAPTER V THE COMMITTEE MANIA

In writing a plain statement of the condition of anarchy into which Russia has fallen, I am very far from wishing to create a prejudice against the Russian people. I don’t want anybody to distrust or scorn the Russians. I want the American people to understand their situation in order that, through sympathy, patience and common sense, they can find some way of helping them out of the blind morass that surrounds them. All the educated Russians I have met like Americans and trust them. They will not soon forget that the United States was the first great power to recognize the new government and to hail the revolution. The American ambassador, David R. Francis, is easily the most popular diplomat in Petrograd. Every one knows him, and he rarely appeared in a meeting or convention without being applauded. Over and over again, during my three months’ visit to Russia, I was told that it was to America they looked for help and guidance, and after the war they want to enter into the closest commercial relations with us. One business man said to me just before I left: “Tell your people that we will never trade with Germany again unless the Americans force us to do so. If they will supply us with chemicals, with manufactures and machinery, we will gladly buy them. If they will send us experts for our manufacturing plants we will be delighted to have them instead of the Germans we used to employ, who never taught our people any of their knowledge because they did not want us to develop.”

The Russians want us to help them establish public schools; to show them how to build and operate great railroad systems; to farm scientifically; to do any number of things we have learned to do well. We mustn’t despise the Russians, we must help them. And we can’t do that unless we understand them. Take, for example, the army situation. It is very bad. The mass of the soldiers are in rebellion against all authority. But consider the past history, the very recent past history of those soldiers. Aside from brutal personal treatment at the hands of some of the officers, they were cheated and starved and neglected by the bureaucracy in Petrograd, and then again by their commanders at the front. The Russian soldier’s wants are simple enough. He eats the same food seven days in the week and rarely complains. This food consists of soup made of salt meat and cabbage; kasha, a porridge made of buckwheat; black bread and tea. “Ivan” wears coarse clothes and big, clumsy boots, and he has none of the small comforts we think essential to the fighting man in the field. But slight as the Russian soldier’s equipment is he did not invariably get it in the old days. It was stolen from him by a band of official crooks with which the war department and the army were honeycombed. Every department of the army, from the commissariat to the Red Cross, was full of corruption and graft. The traffic in army supplies and ammunition, even in hospital supplies, that went on constantly beggars description. Gen. Sukhomlinoff, the former minister of war, who has been tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for the part he played in this business, was only one of the big thieves. Under him were myriads more, and among them all the soldiers were often stripped of their overcoats in the dead of winter, and of half of their rations the year round. When a Russian soldier was badly wounded he might as well have been shot as succored. I have seen these men, pitiful wretches, having lost one or more arms or legs, blind perhaps, or frightfully disfigured, begging in the streets of Petrograd. Clad in tattered uniform, pale and miserable, these poor soldiers stand on the steps of the churches or on street corners and beg a few kopecks from the passersby. There is no such thing as a pension for them, no soldiers’ homes. They suffered for a country that knew no such thing as gratitude. Russia sent her men into battle without sufficient arms or ammunition with which to fight. It fed them to the German guns without mercy, that a band of looters in the government might buy sables and bet on horse races. It let them shiver and freeze in shoddy uniforms that army contractors might grow rich. And, after they were wounded, it let them beg their bread.

Kerensky watching the funeral of victims of the July Bolshevik risings.

Small wonder, then, after the revolution, that there was a great popular demand for swift justice for the soldiers. The provisional government announced that henceforth each regiment should have an elected committee, an executive body which should have entire charge of regimental affairs. Food, clothing, supplies of all kinds, were to pass through the hands of these committees, and they were to hear and pass on all complaints. The committees were the vocal organs of the army. For the first time in Russian history the soldier was allowed to speak. The plan might have worked excellently had the provisional government not made the mistake of too much zeal in democratizing the army. It gorged the soldiers with freedom, gave them such heady doses of self-government that they got drunk on the idea and ran amuck like so many crazed Malays. Kerensky decreed that the soldiers need not salute their officers. “Well then, we won’t,” they said. “And just to show how free we are we won’t wash our faces, or wear clean clothes, or touch our caps to women, or stand up straight——” and from that it was an easy journey to “We won’t take any orders from anybody.”

The government told the soldiers to elect their own officers, and they did, after butchering a thousand or so of their old ones. They elected them wisely in some instances, but in a great many more they did not. They chose men, not for their capacity to lead in a military way, but for their political views. In a Bolshevik regiment the best Bolsheviki were elected. If there was a Minshevik majority the new officers were pretty sure to be Minsheviki. And after they were elected nobody respected them, nor did they dare give orders. But of all the madness that took possession of the “free” soldiers, the committee madness went farthest. The Russians love to talk. To make speeches, to heckle and be heckled is the joy of their lives. The committee gave them a new chance to talk, and they got the habit of calling a committee meeting on every conceivable occasion. Petrograd heard with horror last summer that the men in the trenches, when ordered to advance, actually called meetings to discuss the orders and to vote whether or not they were to be followed. They did this at times when the Germans were at the very gates of an important strategic point.

Even in the hospitals it got so that the doctors and the nurses were without authority. If a man was ordered to take a pill he wanted to call a committee meeting to discuss the thing. It is an actual fact that men refused to take treatment or undergo operations until they had consulted the Tavarishi about it. From that to refusing to obey any orders is a short step, and Red Cross nurses have told me some fantastic stories about life in Russian lazarets. Some wounded men refused to take their clothes off and insisted on wearing them, boots and all, to bed. Others refused to go to bed at night, preferring to snooze during the day and wander around in pajamas and dressing gowns at night. Some insisted on being discharged before they should be, while others, on being discharged, declined to go.

They were not like that in all hospitals, of course. Ivan is a great child, and very often he is a stupid and an unruly child. But often he is good, especially when he is sick and suffering and in need of women’s care and kindness. I don’t want to describe the bad hospital conditions without admitting that they have the other kind, too, in Russia. I remember seeing at the corner of a street below a big lazaret in Petrograd a dozen discharged wounded men and a group of nurses and orderlies. They were waiting for the tram which was to carry the men to the railroad station. Some still wore bandages, some were on crutches, some walked with the aid of sticks. Two were blind. But all were wildly happy at the prospect of going home to the old village. The nurses and orderlies shared in the excitement. Some of them were going to the station, and had their arms full of bundles, clothes, food and souvenirs of battle. One nurse carried a competent looking cork leg, the future prop of a pale young fellow on crutches. The car swung around the corner, full of passengers, idle soldiers mostly, but even they, at the command of the energetic sister, vacated their seats for the invalids. They climbed aboard, and those who were most helpless were lifted. The cork leg was handed in through an open window and delivered to one of the more able-bodied men. There had been plenty of time for farewells before, but parting was difficult, and for five minutes after boarding the car the men continued to shake hands with the nurses, to shout last messages, and to kiss their hands to those on the sidewalk. The nurses patted their charges’ arms and shoulders, and called anxious admonitions. “Take care of that leg, Ivan Feodorovitch. You know how to bandage it. Don’t try to walk too much, and keep out of the sun.” You didn’t have to know a word of Russian to understand what those nurses were saying.

The street car conductor wrung her hands and begged to be allowed to go on. The time schedule had to be observed. “Please, sister, please,” she entreated, and at last she was permitted to ring the bell and send her car forward. As it turned the corner the men were still waving and laughing and wiping the tears from their cheeks. I don’t believe those men had called any committee meetings before obeying their nurses, or ever reminded the doctors that it was a free country now and they could take medicine or not as they pleased.

You certainly got tired of that overworked phrase “It’s a free country now.” You hear it on all sides in Russia. “It’s a free country,” says a man with a third-class ticket taking possession of a first-class compartment. “It’s a free country,” declares a soldier, tossing a handful of sunflower seed shells on a woman’s white shoes in a street car. “It’s a free country,” say a group of men, stripping off their clothes before a crowd of women and children and taking a bath in the Neva. This occurs frequently on the Admiralty quay, a great pleasure resort in Petrograd.

“They called them Sans Culottes during the French Revolution,” said a clever woman writer in one of the newspapers. “Our men will go down to fame as Sans Caleçons. The difference, perhaps, between a political and a social revolution.” The first French phrase means without trousers. The second carries the denuding process to its concluding stage.

In this kind of a free country nobody is free. Try to imagine how it would be in Washington, in the office of the secretary of the treasury, let us say, if a committee of the American Federation of Labor should walk in and say: “We have come to control you. Produce your books and all your confidential papers.” This is what happens to cabinet ministers in Russia, and will continue until they succeed in forming a government responsible only to the electorate, and not a slave to the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates. Of course, the simile is grossly unfair to the American Federation of Labor. Our organized labor men are the most intelligent working people in the community, and most of them have had a long experience in citizenship. Above all, their loyalty, as a body, has been amply demonstrated. The Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates has among its members loyal, honest, intelligent men and women. But it has also a number of extreme radicals, people who would dishonor the country by concluding a separate peace with Germany, and who care nothing for the interests of any group except their own. Nobody in Russia has very much experience in citizenship, and the working people have less than others. Yet the soviet, to give the council its local name, deems itself quite capable of passing on all affairs of state, not only in Russia but in the allied countries as well. The soviets have had the presumption to announce that they are going to name the peace terms, although Russia has virtually ceased to fight. “No annexations or contributions,” is the formula, very evidently made in Germany. I am sure that not one in a thousand knows what this means.

“Have you ever thought,” I asked a member of the Petrograd council, “what your program would mean to the working people of Belgium? Don’t you think that the farmers and artisans of northern France are entitled to compensation for their ruined homes and blasted lives?”

“Yes, but not from Germany,” was the astounding reply. “All countries should contribute.”

“If I were a cashier in a bank and stole a million dollars of the depositors’ money, do you think I ought to be made to pay it back, or should all the employés be taxed?” To this question I got no answer. There isn’t any answer.

In all this confusion of mind, this whirlwind of ideas and theories, are there no Russians who can think clearly? Are there no brave and courageous people left in Russia? None who realize the ruin and desolation which is being prepared for them? There are. Russia has its submerged minority of thinkers. It has at least two fighting elements which are ready to die to restore peace, order and bright honor to their distracted land. These two elements are the Cossacks and the women.

CHAPTER VI THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN

The women soldiers of Russia, the most amazing development of the revolution, if not of the world war itself, I am disposed to believe, will, with the Cossacks, prove to be the element needed to lead, if it can be led, the disorganized and demoralized Russian army back to its duty on the firing line. It was with the object, the hope, of leading them back that the women took up arms. Whatever else you may have heard about them this is the truth. I know those women soldiers very well. I know them in three regiments, one in Moscow and two in Petrograd, and I went with one regiment as near to the fighting line as I was permitted. I traveled from Petrograd to a military position “somewhere in Poland” with the famous Botchkareva Battalion of Death. I left Petrograd in the troop train with the women. I marched with them when they left the train. I lived with them for nine days in their barrack, around which thousands of men soldiers were encamped. I shared Botchkareva’s soup and kasha, and drank hot tea out of her other tin cup. I slept beside her on the plank bed. I saw her and her women off to the firing line, and after the battle into which they led reluctant men, I sat beside their hospital beds and heard their own stories of the fight. I want to say right here that a country that can produce such women cannot possibly be crushed forever. It may take time for it to recover its present debauch of anarchism, but recover it surely will. And when it does it will know how to honor the women who went out to fight when the men ran home.

The Battalion of Death is not the name of one regiment, nor is it used exclusively to designate the women’s battalions. It is a sort of order which has spread through many regiments since the demoralization began, and signifies that its members are loyal and mean to fight to the death for Russia. Sometimes an entire regiment assumes the red and black ribbon arrowhead which, sewed on the right sleeve of the blouse, marks the order. Regiments have been made up of volunteers who are ready to wear the insignia. Such a regiment is the Battalion of Death commanded by Mareea Botchkareva (the spelling is phonetic), the extraordinary peasant woman who has risen to be a commissioned officer in the Russian army.

Botchkareva comes from a village near the Siberian border and is, I should judge, about thirty years old. She was one of a large family of children, and the family was very poor. They had a harder time than ever after the father returned from the Japanese war minus one foot, but that did not prevent their number from increasing, and merely made the lot of Mareea, the oldest girl, a little more miserable. She married young, fortunately a man with whom she was very happy. He was the village butcher and she helped him in the shop, as they had no children. When the war broke out in July, 1914, Mareea’s husband marched away with the rest of the quota from their village, and she never saw him again. He was killed in one of the first battles of the war, and the only time I ever saw Botchkareva break down was when she told me how she waited long months for the letter he had promised to write her, and how at last a wounded comrade hobbled back to the village and told her that the letter would never come. He was dead—out there somewhere—and they had not even notified her.

“The soldiers have it hard,” she said, when her brief storm of tears was over, “but not so hard as the women at home. The soldier has a gun to fight death with. The women have nothing.”

For months Mareea Botchkareva watched the sufferings of the women and children of her village grow worse and worse. Winter killed some of them, winter and an unwonted scarcity of food. Typhus came along and killed more. The village forgot that it had ever danced and sung and was happy. Every family was in mourning for its dead. Mareea decided that she could not endure it to sit in her empty hut and wait for death. She would go out and meet it in the easier fashion permitted to men. That was the way, she explained to me, she joined the regiment of Siberian troops encamped near the village. The men did not want her, but she sought and got permission, and when the regiment went to the front she went along too.

Mareea Botchkareva, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and Women of “The Battalion of Death.”

She fought in campaigns on several fronts, earned medals and finally the coveted cross of St. George for valor under fire. She was three times wounded, the last time in the autumn of 1916, so badly that she lay in hospital for four months. She got back to her regiment, where she was now popular, and I imagine something of a leader, just before the revolution of February, 1917.

Botchkareva was an ardent revolutionist, and her regiment was one of the first to go over to the people’s side. Her consternation and despair were great when, shortly after the emancipation from czardom, great masses of the people, and especially the soldiers at the front, began to demonstrate by riots and desertions how little they were ready for freedom. The men of her regiment deserted in numbers, and she went to members of the Duma who were going up and down the front trying to stay the tide, and said to them: “Give me leave to raise a regiment of women. We will go wherever men refuse to go. We will fight when they run. The women will lead the men back to the trenches.” This is the history of Botchkareva’s Battalion of Death, or rather of how it came to be organized. The Russian war ministry gave her leave to recruit the women, gave her a barrack in a former school building, and promised her equipment and a place at the front. Many women in Petrograd, women of wealth and social position, took fire with the idea, raised money for the regiment, helped in the recruiting, some of them joining.

In an odd copy of an American newspaper that reached me in Russia I read a paragraph stating that the schoolgirls of Petrograd were forming a regiment under a man named Butchkareff, a lieutenant in the army. I don’t know who sent out that piece of news, but it lacked most of the facts. The women soldiers are not schoolgirls, and Botchkareva’s battalion has no men officers. Three drill sergeants, St. George cross men all of them, did assist in the training of the battalion while it remained in Petrograd. Other men drilled it behind the lines, but Botchkareva, and another remarkable woman, Marie Skridlova, her adjutant, commanded and led it in battle.

Marie Skridlova is the daughter of Admiral Skridloff, one of the most distinguished men of the Russian navy. She is about twenty, very attractive if not actually beautiful, and is an accomplished musician. Her life up to the outbreak of the war was that of an ordinary girl of the Russian aristocracy. She was educated abroad, taught several languages, and expected to have a career no more exciting or adventurous than that of any other woman of her class. When the war broke out she went into the Red Cross, took the nurses’ training and served in hospitals both at the front and in Petrograd. Then came the revolution. She was working in a marine hospital in the capital. She saw many of the horrors of those February days. She saw her own father set upon by soldiers in the streets, and rescued from death only because some of his own marines who loved him insisted that this one officer was not to be killed.

Into the ward of the hospital where she was stationed there was borne an old general, desperately wounded by a street mob. He had to be operated on at once to save his life, and as he was carried from the operating room to a private ward the men in the beds sat up and yelled, “Kill him! Kill him!” It is unlikely that they knew who he was, but it was death to all officers in those days of madness and frenzy. Half unconscious from loss of blood, still under the spell of the ether, the old man clung to his nurse as a child to his mother. “You won’t let them kill me, will you?” he murmured. And Mlle. Skridlova assured him that she would take care of him, that he was safe.

The door opened and a white faced doctor rushed into the room. “Sister,” he gasped, “go for that medicine—go quickly.” Not comprehending she asked, “What medicine?” But he only pushed her towards the door. “Go, go!” he repeated.

She left the room, and then she saw and understood. Down the corridor a mob was streaming, a wild, unkempt, blood-thirsty mob, the sweepings of the streets and barracks. Quickly she threw herself across the door of the old general’s room. “Get back,” she commanded. “The man in that room is old and wounded and helpless. He is in my care, and if you harm him it must be over my body.”

Incredible as it seems this girl of twenty was able for forty minutes to hold the mob at bay. When guns were pointed at her she told the men to fire through the red cross that covered her heart. They did not shoot, but some of the most brutal struck her down, and then held her helpless while others rushed into the room and hacked and beat the old man to death. When the nurse fought her way to his side he was breathing his last. She had time to whisper a prayer, and to make the sign of the cross above his glazing eyes. Then she went home, took off her Red Cross uniform, and said to her father: “Women have something more to do for Russia than binding men’s wounds.”

When Botchkareva’s Battalion of Death was formed Marie Skridlova determined to join it. Admiral Skridloff, veteran of two wars, iron old patriot, went with her to the women’s barracks and with his own hand enrolled her in the Russian army service. In the regiment of which this girl was adjutant I found six Red Cross nurses who were through with nursing and had gone out to die for their unhappy country. There was a woman doctor who had seen service in base hospitals. There were clerks and office women, factory girls, servants, farm women. Ten women had fought in men’s regiments. Every woman had her own story. I did not hear them all, but I heard many, each one a simple chronicle of suffering or bereavement, or shame over Russia’s plight.

There was one girl of nineteen, a Cossack, a pretty, dark-eyed young thing, left absolutely adrift after the death in battle of her father and two brothers, and the still more tragic death of her mother when the Germans shelled the hospital where she was nursing. To her a place in Botchkareva’s regiment and a gun with which to defend herself spelled safety.

“What was there left for me?” sighed a big Esthonian woman, showing me a photograph she wore constantly on her heart. It was a photograph of a lovely child of five years. “He died of want,” said the woman briefly. “His father is a prisoner somewhere in Austria.”

There was a Japanese girl in the regiment, and when I asked her her reason for joining she smiled, and in the evenly polite tone that marks her race, replied: “There were so many reasons that I prefer not to tell any of them.” One twilight I came on this girl sitting outside with the little Polish Jewess with whom she bunked. The two sat perfectly motionless on a fallen tree, watching a group of soldiers gathered around a fire. In their silent gaze I read a malevolence, a reminiscence so full of concentrated loathing that I turned away with a shudder. I never asked another woman her reason for joining the regiment. I was afraid it might be more personal than patriotic.

I do not believe, however, that this was the case with the majority. Mostly the women were in arms because they feared and dreaded the further demoralization of the troops, and they believed fervently that they could rally their men to fight. “Our men,” they said, “are suffering from a sickness of the soul. It is our duty to lead them back to health.” Every woman in the regiment had seen war face to face, had suffered bitterly through war, and finally had seen their men fail in the fight. They had beheld their men desert in time of war, the most dishonorable thing men can do, and they said, “Well then, there is nothing left except for us to go in their places.”

Did the world ever witness a more sublime heroism than that? Women, in the long years which history has recorded, have done everything for men that they were called upon to do. It remained for Russian men, in the twentieth century, to call upon women to fight and die for them. And the women did it.

CHAPTER VII TO THE FRONT WITH BOTCHKAREVA

Women of all ranks rushed to enlist in the Botchkareva battalion. There were many peasant women, factory workers, servants and also a number of women of education and social prominence. Six Red Cross nurses were among the number, one doctor, a lawyer, several clerks and stenographers and a few like Marie Skridlova who had never done any except war work. If the working women predominated I believe it was because they were the stronger physically. Botchkareva would accept only the sturdiest, and her soldiers, even when they were slight of figure, were all fine physical specimens. The women were outfitted and equipped exactly like the men soldiers. They wore the same kind of khaki trousers, loose-belted blouse and high peaked cap. They wore the same high boots, carried the same arms and the same camp equipment, including gas masks, trench spades and other paraphernalia. In spite of their tightly shaved heads they presented a very attractive appearance, like nice, clean, upstanding boys. They were very strictly drilled and disciplined and there was no omission of saluting officers in that regiment.

The battalion left Petrograd for an unknown destination on July 6 in our calendar. In the afternoon the women marched to the Kazan Cathedral, where a touching ceremony of farewell and blessing took place. A cold, fine rain was falling, but the great half circle before the cathedral, as well as the long curved colonnades, were filled with people. Thousands of women were there carrying flowers, and nurses moved through the crowds collecting money for the regiment.

I passed a very uneasy day that July 6. I was afraid of what might happen to some of the women through the malignancy of the Bolsheviki, and I was mortally afraid that I was not going to be allowed to get on their troop train. I had made the usual application to the War Ministry to be allowed to visit the front, but I did not follow up the application with a personal visit, and therefore when I dropped in for a morning call I was dismayed to find the barrack in a turmoil, and to hear the exultant announcement, “We’re going this evening at eight.”

It was an unseasonal day of rain, and I spent reckless sums in droshky hire, rushing hither and yon in a fruitless effort to wring emergency permits from elusive officials who never in their lives had been called upon to do anything in a hurry, or even to keep conventional office hours. Needless to say I found nobody at all on duty where he should have been that day. Even at the American Embassy, where, empty-handed and discouraged, I wound up late in the afternoon, I found the entire staff absent in attendance on a visiting commission from home. The one helpful person who happened to be at the Embassy was Arno Dosch-Fleurot of the New York World. “If I were you,” he said, “I wouldn’t worry about a permit. I’d just get on the train—if I could get on—and I’d stay until they put me off, or until I got where I wanted to go. Of course they may arrest you for a spy. In any other country they’d be pretty sure to. But in Russia you never can tell. Shepherd, of the United Press, once went all over the front with nothing to show but some worthless mining stock. Why not try it?”

I said I would, and before eight that evening I was at the Warsaw Station, unwillingly participating in what might be called the regiment’s first hostile engagement. For at least two thirds of the mob that filled the station were members of the Lenine faction of Bolsheviki, sent there to break up the orderly march of the women, and even if possible to prevent them from entraining at all. From the first these spy-led emissaries of the German Kaiser had sworn enmity to Botchkareva’s battalion. Well knowing the moral effect of women taking the places of deserting soldiers in the trenches, the Lenineites had exhausted every effort to breed dissension in the ranks, and at the last moment they had stormed the station in the hope of creating an intolerable situation. In the absence of anything like a police force they did succeed in making things painful and even a little dangerous for the soldiers and for the tearful mothers and sisters who had gathered to bid them good-by. But the women kept perfect discipline through it all, and slowly fought their way through the mob to the train platform.

As for me, a mixture of indignation, healthy muscle and rare good luck carried me through and landed me in a somewhat battered condition next to Adjutant Skridlova. “You got your permit,” she exclaimed on seeing me. “I am so pleased. Stay close to me and I’ll see you safely on.”

Mendaciously perhaps, I answered nothing at all, but stayed, and every time a perspiring train official grabbed me by the arm and told me to stand back Skridlova rescued me and informed the man that I had permission to go. At the very last I had a bad moment, for one especially inquisitive official asked to see the permission. This time it was the Nachalnik, Botchkareva herself, who came to the rescue. Characteristically she wasted no words, but merely pushed the man aside, thrust me into her own compartment and ordered me to lock the door. Within a few minutes she joined me, the train began to move and we were off. That was the end of my troubles, for no one afterwards questioned my right to be there. At the Adjutant’s suggestion I parted with my New York hat and early in the journey substituted the white linen coif of a Red Cross nurse. Thus attired I was accepted by all concerned as a part of the camp equipment.

The troop train consisted of one second class and five fourth class carriages, the first one, except for one compartment reserved for officers, being practically filled with camp and hospital supplies. In the other carriages, primitive affairs furnished with three tiers of wooden bunks, the rank and file of the regiment traveled. I had a place in the second class compartment with the Nachalnik, the Adjutant and the standard bearer, a big, silent peasant girl called Orlova. Our luxury consisted of cushioned shelves without bedding or blankets, which served as seats by day and beds by night. We had, of course, a little more privacy than the others, but that was all. As for food, we all fared alike, and we fared well, friends of the regiment having loaded the train with bread, butter, fruit, canned things, cakes, chocolate and other delicacies. Tea-making materials we had also, and plenty of sugar. So filled was our compartment with food, flowers, banners, guns, tea kettles and miscellaneous stuff that we moved about with difficulty and were forever apologizing for walking on each other’s feet.

For two nights and the better part of two days we traveled southward through fields of wheat, barley and potatoes, where women in bright red and blue smocks toiled among the ripening harvests. News of the train had gone down the line, and the first stage of our journey, through the white night, was one continued ovation. At every station crowds had gathered to cheer the women and to demand a sight of Botchkareva. It was largely a masculine crowd, soldiers mostly, goodnatured and laughing, but many women were there too, nurses, working girls, peasants. Occasionally one saw ladies in dinner gowns escorted by officer friends.

The farther we traveled from Petrograd, the point of contact in Russia with western civilization, the more apparent it grew that things were terribly wrong with the empire. More and more the changed character of the station crowds reminded us of the widespread disruption of the army. The men who met the train wore soldiers’ uniforms but they had lost all of their upright, soldierly bearing. They slouched like convicts, they were dirty and unkempt, and their eyes were full of vacuous insolence. Absence of discipline and all restraint had robbed them of whatever manhood they had once possessed. The news of the women’s battalion had drawn these men like a swarm of bees. They thrust their unshaven faces into the car windows, bawling the parrot phrases taught them by their German spy leaders. “Who fights for the damned capitalists? Who fights for English bloodsuckers? We don’t fight.”

And the women, scorn flashing from their eyes, flung back: “That is the reason why we do. Go home, you cowards, and let women fight for Russia.”

Their last, flimsy thread of “peace” propaganda exhausted the men usually fell back on personal insults, but to these the women, following strict orders, made no reply. When the language became too coarse the women simply closed the windows. No actual violence was ever offered them. When they left the train for hot water or for tea, for more food or to buy newspapers, they walked so fearlessly into the crowds that the men withdrew, sneering and growling, but standing aside.

There was something indescribably strange about going on a journey to a destination absolutely unknown, except to the one in command of the expedition. Above all it was strange to feel that you were seeing women voluntarily giving up the last shred of protection and security supposed to be due them. They were going to meet death, death in battle against a foreign foe, the first women in the world to volunteer for such an end. Yet every one was happy, and the only fear expressed was lest the battalion should not be sent at once to the trenches.

As for me, when we arrived at our destination, some two miles from the barracks prepared for us, I had a moment of longing for the comparative safety of the trenches. For what looked to me like the whole Russian army had come out to meet the women’s battalion, and was solidly massed on both sides of the railroad track as far as I could see.

I looked at the Nachalnik calmly buckling on her sword and revolver. She had a confident little smile on her lips. “You may have to fight those men out there before you fight the Germans,” I said.

“We are ready to begin fighting any time,” she replied.

She was the first one out of the train, and the others rapidly followed her.

CHAPTER VIII IN CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD

The women’s regiment did not have to fight its brothers in arms, however. The woman commander took care of that. She just walked into that mob of waiting soldiers and barked out a command in a voice I had never before heard her use. It reminded me somewhat of that extra awful motor car siren that infuriates the pedestrian, but lifts him out of the road in one quick jump. Botchkareva’s command was spoken in Russian, and a liberal translation of it might read: “You get to hell out of here and let my regiment pass.”

It may not have been ladylike, but it had the proper effect on the Russian army, which promptly backed up on both sides of the road, leaving a clear lane between for the women. The women shouldered their heavy kits and under a broiling sun marched the two miles which lay between the railroad and the camp. The Russian army followed the whole way, apparently deciding that the better part of valor was to laugh at the women, not to fight them.

Botchkareva must also have decided that the first thing to be done was to give those men to understand that whether the regiment was funny or not it would have to be treated with respect. As soon as we reached our barracks and disposed of the heavy loads, she made a little speech in which she said that here we were, and while we would be obliged to mingle with the men, relations would be kept formal. The men must be shown that the women were entitled to the same camp privileges as themselves, and were no more to be molested or annoyed than any other soldiers. We had had a long, hot journey, she ended, and the first thing we were going to do was to go down to the river and have a nice swim. So with towels around their necks the 250 women made gayly for the river. I trotted along on the commander’s arm. At least a thousand men went along, too, but just before we reached the swimming pool under a railroad bridge, Botchkareva turned around and delivered another of those crisp little commands. The men stopped in their tracks as if she had thrown some kind of freezing gas at them, and we went on.

It was a lovely swimming pool, clear and cold and fringed with sheltering willows. The women peeled off their clothes like boys and plunged in. As we dressed afterward I looked at them, heads shaved, ugly clothes, coarse boots, no concealments, not a single aid to beauty, but, in spite of it all, singularly attractive. Some of course were homely, primitive types. Purple and fine linen would not have improved them much. But some who would not have been especially pretty as girls were almost handsome as boys. A few were strikingly beautiful in spite of their shaved heads. You observed that they had good skulls, nice ears, fine eyes, strong characters, whereas in ordinary clothes they might have appeared as pleasingly commonplace as the girl on the magazine cover.

Cool and refreshed, the battalion marched back to the barracks, which consisted of two long, hastily constructed wooden buildings, exactly like hundreds of others on all sides about as far as the eye could reach. Some of the buildings were half underground, for warmth in winter, and must have been rather stuffy. Our buildings were well ventilated with many dormer windows in the sharply slanting roof, and they were new and clean and free from the insects which in secret I had been dreading. Inside was nothing at all except two long wooden platforms running the length of the building, about ninety feet. They were very roughly planed and full of bumps and knot holes, but they were the only beds provided by a step-motherly government. Here the women dumped their heavy loads, their guns, ammunition belts, gas masks, dog tents, trench spades, food pails and other paraphernalia. Here they unrolled their big overcoats for blankets, and here for the next week, all of us, officers, soldiers and war correspondent, ate, slept and lived. Two hundred and fifty women in the midst of an army of men. Behind us a government too engrossed in fighting for its own existence to concern itself about the safety of any group of women. Before us the muttering guns of the German foe. Between us and all that women have ever been taught to fear, a flimsy wooden door. But sleeplessly guarding that door a woman with a gun.

In that first midnight in camp I woke on my plank bed to hear the shuffling of men’s feet on the threshold, a loud knock at the door, and from our sentry a sharp challenge: “Who goes there?”

“We want to come in,” said a man’s voice ingratiatingly.

“No one can come in at this hour,” answered the sentry. “Who are you and what do you want?”

The man’s answer was brutally to the point. “Aren’t there girls here?” he demanded.

“There are no girls here,” was the instant reply. “Only soldiers are here.”

An angry fist crashed against the thin wood, to be answered by the swift click of a rifle barrel on the other side. “Unless you leave at once we shall fire on you,” said the sentry in a voice of portentous calm.

Down the long plank platform I heard a succession of low chuckles, and a sleepy comment or two which the retreating men outside would not have found complimentary. That midnight encounter served the excellent purpose of finally establishing the status of the regiment in camp. From that time on we lived unmolested. We stood in line with the men at the cookhouse for our daily rations of black bread, soup and kasha, a sort of porridge made of buckwheat. We performed our simple morning toilets in the open; we washed our clothes in improvised washtubs behind the barracks; we strolled about between drills. The men followed us around from morning until night. They watched us open eyed, hung in curious groups before the doors. A few were openly friendly, and beyond some disparaging remarks regarding our personal appearance none were hostile.

The day after we arrived, Monday, it rained. It poured. The camp became a swamp. The women stayed in their barrack, drilling as best they could in the narrow aisles. Sitting on the edge of their plank beds, the only place there was to sit, they listened with deep attention while under-officers read aloud the army code and regulations. In the morning a group of nurses from a hospital train in the neighborhood came to call, and in the afternoon half a dozen officers came from the stavka, two miles away. The commander, a charming man, seemed astonished and deeply impressed with the regiment standing at attention to greet him.

“It is beautiful,” he said repeatedly, and he was good enough to say to me, “How wonderful for an American woman to be with them. Thank you for coming.”

Tuesday it cleared and the battalion had its first open field drills. The rest of the Russian army stood around and pretended to be vastly amused. Whenever a woman made a mistake in the manual, and better still, when she fell down while charging, or splashed into a mud puddle on a run, the men laughed loudly. Some of that laughter, I feel pretty certain, hid hurt pride, for every decent soldier I talked to expressed his sorrow and humiliation that the women had felt the necessity of enlisting. Quite a number of men in that camp had been in America and of course spoke English. They said, “Say, sister, what do you suppose they think about this back in Illinois?” One man said, “Sister,” (I still wore the nurse’s coif, having no other headgear) “back home in the States they used to say women oughtn’t to vote because they couldn’t fight. I’ll bet these women can fight.”

The officers in and around that army position were evidently of the same opinion. They came to the drill field every day to inspect and criticize the work, and they sent their best drill sergeants to instruct the women, who worked hard and learned quickly. One day the commander of the Tenth army, whose Russian name is too much for my memory at this distance, came over with his whole staff, a brilliant sight. The commander was plainly delighted, and shook hands with a great many of the women. He even went out of his way to shake hands with the American. Kerensky was in the neighborhood one day, but he did not visit us. The Nachalnik saw him at staff headquarters and he sent kind messages, promising the women that they should be sent to the front as soon as they were ready.

The impatience of those women to go forward, to get into action, was constant. They fretted and quarreled during the frequent rainy spells which kept them housebound, and were really happy only when something happened to promise an early start. One day it was the arrival of 250 pairs of new boots, great clumsy things which it would have crippled me to wear, and in fact all the women who could afford it had boots made to order. Another day it was the appearance of a camp cooking outfit especially for the battalion. Four good horses were attached to the outfit, and the country girls hailed them with delight as something to pet and fuss over.

The women spent much time cleaning and learning their guns. They seemed to love their firearms, one girl always alluding to her rifle as “my sweetheart.”

“How can you love a gun?” I asked her.

“I love anything that brings death to the Germans,” she answered grimly. This girl, a highly educated, wellbred young woman, was in Germany when the war broke out. She was arrested and charged with espionage, a charge which, for all I know, may have been true. It was not proved, of course, or she would have been shot. On the mere suspicion, however, she was kept in prison for a year and must have suffered pretty severely. She looked forward to the coming fight with keen zest. I asked her one day what she would do if she was taken prisoner again. She pulled from under her blouse a slender gold chain on the end of which was a capsule in a chamois bag. “I shall never be taken prisoner,” she said. “None of us will.”

From Thursday on the weather improved and the regiment worked hard in the field. I had felt the strain of confinement in barracks, and when I was not watching the drill I was taking long walks down a highway over which went a constant procession of troops and camp supply wagons, moving on and on, nearer the horizon, from which came frequent low mutterings like distant thunder, but which were heavy gunfire. Sometimes I walked as far as a little settlement which the Nachalnik told me was not unlike the village she found so unbearable after her husband left it. The village consisted of two rows of log or roughly timbered cottages along a winding, muddy road. Green moss grew on the thatched roofs, and the whole place had a forlorn, neglected look, but surrounding each cottage was a carefully tended garden with beets, cabbages, onions, potatoes, and sunflowers grown for the seeds, which are the Russian substitute for chewing gum. Often the cottages had poppies growing in the rows of vegetables, the bright blooms giving brilliance to the somber and lonely landscape.

Half a dozen miles on the other side of the railroad was another and a larger village, equally dismal, but furnished with a church, a wayside shrine, small shops and other improvements. My special friend the Adjutant and I drove over there one day after supplies. We bought chocolate, nuts, sardines and biscuits to relieve the deadly monotony of our daily black bread, soup and kasha. The regiment bought some supplies at little market stalls near the station. Here one bought butter, sausages reeking with garlic, tinned fish and doubtful eggs. At an officers’ store in the vicinity Botchkareva spent some of the money donated in Petrograd for tea and sugar when they were needed, and for a kind of white bread or biscuits. They were hard and shaped like old-fashioned doughnuts, with a hole in the middle through which a string was run. A yard or two of this bread went well with good butter and hot, fragrant tea. As far as food was concerned I was better off in the camp than I was a little later in Petrograd. There was even a fairly good hot meal to be had at the station when we chose to go there, which we did several times. But no amount of good food would have kept our regiment happy in camp very long. The women fretted and chafed and demanded to know why they were kept in that hole. The Nachalnik coaxed and scolded them along, and Skridlova, who was easily the most popular person in camp, reminded them that it took six months to train ordinary soldiers and that they were being especially favored by having the time shortened.

Those women went into battle after less than two months’ training, as it turned out, for the evening of the ninth day the Nachalnik came back from headquarters with orders to march the next morning at five. What an uproar followed! Cheers, laughter, singing. You would have thought they were going anywhere except to a battlefield where death waited for some and cruel suffering for many. I wanted to go with them, and would have insisted on going had I known that they were so soon to fight. But orders were merely to advance for further drill under gunfire. I would have been frightfully in the way in the new position, which had no barracks, but only dog tents, just enough to go around. Nothing on earth except the knowledge that I would be depriving some one of those brave women from the comfort of a dry and sheltered bed persuaded me to leave them.

Five days later in Petrograd I read in the dispatches that they had been sent almost directly into action, leading men who had previously refused to advance, and turning a defeat into a victory; a small one to be sure, but Russia was thankful for even small victories those days. A short note from Skridlova prepared me for the story of losses which I knew was coming. She wrote in French, which she knows better than English, “You have heard already perhaps that we have been in action. I do not know yet how many were killed or have died of wounds, but two of those you knew well were killed. Catherine and Olga, who you remember had won three medals of St. George. Eighteen girls are wounded badly, Nina among them.” Nina was the girl who called her gun “sweetheart,” and who had been a prisoner in Germany. Skridlova was badly contused in the head, shoulders and knees, but she remained in command of the remnant of the battalion because the Nachalnik, Botchkareva, had suffered so severely from shell shock that she had to be sent to a hospital in Petrograd. She was nearly deaf when I saw her, and her heart was badly affected.

“It was a good fight,” she whispered, smiling from her pillow. “Not a woman faltered, not one. The Russian men hid in a little wood while the officers swore at them and begged them to advance. Then they sent us forward, and we called to the men that we would lead them if they would only follow. Some of them said they would follow, and we went forward on a run, still shouting to the men. About two-thirds of them went with us, and we easily put the Germans to flight. We killed a lot of Germans and took almost a hundred prisoners, including two officers.” In another hospital I found more than twenty of the battalion, some slightly and others seriously wounded. The worst cases were kept in base hospitals, near the battle front, and I never saw Nina again.

CHAPTER IX AMAZONS IN TRAINING

If the first battle of the first women soldiers in the world had been fought on American soil imagine what the newspapers would have made of the story. Especially if the women had gone into battle with the object of rallying a demoralized American army, and had succeeded in their object. And this is all the space Botchkareva’s victorious battalion was accorded in Novoe Vremya, one of the best newspapers in Russia. After describing briefly the engagement on the Smorgon-Krevo front, in which prisoners, guns and ammunition were taken, the account proceeded: “The women’s battalion made a counter attack, replacing deserters who ran away. This battalion captured almost a hundred prisoners including two officers. Botchkareva and Skridlova are wounded, the latter receiving contusions and shock from the explosion of a big shell. The battalion suffered some losses, but has won historic fame for the name of women. The best soldiers looked with consideration and esteem on their new fighting comrades, but the deserters were not touched by their example, and in this respect the aim was not reached. We must take care of these dear forces, and not give too much consideration to new formations of the kind.”

If the press of Russia had been wise, the fact that some of the slackers in the army were not touched by the women’s bravery would have been made less conspicuous than the more important fact that many soldiers were touched by it, and that the Russian army was thereby enabled to win a victory. Instead of discouraging new formations, the press should have called for more and more regiments of women to lead the men. They should have kept it up until people got so excited over the tragedy of women being torn to pieces by German shot and shrapnel that they would have risen in wrath, taken hold of their army and their government, and created conditions which would relieve women from the dreadful necessity of fighting.

It could have been done, the people were ready for it. They felt the tragedy. At a memorial service for the dead women, held in Kazan Cathedral the Sunday after the battle, the presiding priest said: “This is a terrible and yet a glorious hour for Russia. Sad it is, and terrible beyond expression that men have allowed women to die in their places for our unhappy country. But glorious it will ever be that Russian women have been ready and willing to do it.”

After the service, a Bolshevik soldier, standing in front of the cathedral, tried to turn the sympathies of the crowd by making insulting remarks about the dead women. He did not have time to say much before a group of working women, with howls of rage, rushed him, and I believe would have killed him if his friends had not got him away.

Of the women left alive but wounded, thirty were brought to a hospital not far from the Nikolai station, Petrograd, and there I saw them. When I went into the first hospital ward a wounded girl sat up in bed and, smiling like the sun, held out to me a German officer’s helmet, her prize of battle. She had killed him—that was her duty—and had taken his helmet as a man would have done. But when she told me that Orlova, big, dull, kind, unselfish Orlova, loved by everybody, was among the killed, she broke down and wept as any woman would have done.

From this girl and the others I learned that Botchkareva had spoken the exact truth when she said that no woman had faltered or shown fear. “We all expected to die, I think,” one girl said. “I know that I did. I said over the prayers for the dying while I was dressing that morning. We all prayed and kissed our holy pictures, and thought sadly about the ones at home. But we were not afraid. We were stationed between two little woods. They were full of men, some who openly refused to go forward, some who hesitated and didn’t quite know what they ought to do. We shouted at them, the commander shouted at them, called them cowards, traitors, everything we could think of. Then the commander called out: ‘Come on, brothers, we’ll go first if you’ll only follow.’

“‘All right then,’ some of them called back, and we ran forward as fast as we could, following Botchkareva. She was wonderful, and Skridlova was wonderful too. We would have followed them anywhere.”

“Did you really capture a hundred Germans?” I asked.

“I don’t believe we did it all by ourselves,” was the modest reply. “After we got into the fighting the men and the women were side by side. We fought together and we won the battle together.”

Every one of those wounded women soldiers wanted to go back to the front line. If fighting and dying were the price of Russia’s freedom, they wanted to fight and fight again. If they could rally unwilling men to fight, they wanted nothing in the world except more chances to do it. Wounds were nothing, death was nothing in the scale of Russia’s honor or dishonor. Then too, and this is a strange commentary on women’s “protected” position in life, the women soldiers said that fighting was not the most difficult or the most disagreeable work they had ever done. They said it was less arduous if a little more dangerous than working in a harvest field or a factory.

This point of view I have heard expressed by other Russian women soldiers, those who have fought in men’s regiments. There are many such women; I have met and talked with some of them. One girl I saw in a hospital, a bullet in her side and a broken hand in a plaster cast, assured me that fighting was the most congenial work she had ever done. This girl had gone to Petrograd from Riga to join Botchkareva’s battalion, but for some reason she had not been accepted. She met a young marine who told her of a new Battalion of Death which was being formed out of the remnants of several old regiments and of a number of marines. “Why not join us?” he asked. “We already have four girl comrades.” So she joined.

We were alone except for the interpreter, and I took occasion to ask this girl minutely how it fared with women who joined men’s regiments. Were the women treated with respect, let alone? How did they manage about their physical needs? Where did they bathe and change their clothes? Did not the officers object to their presence in the barracks? At first, my young soldier admitted, the men did not treat the women with respect, did not let them alone. She was obliged to give the men some severe lessons. But after a while they learned. They were considerate in certain respects, and arranged for the girls to have some privacy. Of course one lost foolish mock modesty when in camp.

The officers did not object to their enlisting, but were inclined to treat them with a lofty indifference. The men too seemed to assume that the girls could not endure the real hardships of war when they came. “The first thing we had to do in camp was to make a quick march of twelve versts. ‘Of course the girls can’t walk that far,’ the men said, ‘they can ride on the cook wagons.’ But we said, ‘Not much we don’t ride on the cook wagons. We didn’t come here to watch you do things. We came to be soldiers like yourselves.’ So they said, ‘Oh, very well! Harasho! March if you like.’ And we did. And when we got back to camp, it was so funny; sailors are not much used to walking, you know, and those men were completely tired out, exhausted. They lay around in their bunks and groaned and called on everybody to look at their feet and their blisters, while we weren’t tired at all. Why, any of us had walked as far and worked as hard in one day in the kitchen or the harvest field. So we laughed at the men and said, ‘You’re just a lot of old women. Look at us. We could do it all over again and not complain.’ After that I can tell you they didn’t patronize us quite such a lot.”

When the regiment got into camp near the trenches and the men were given the regulation uniform of the army, the officers decreed that the girls’ soldiering should come to an end. The real business of fighting was about to begin and women were not wanted. They could be sanitaries, said the commander. So they went back to women’s clothes and women’s historic job of waiting on men. This girl, however, objected, and finally confided to one of her men friends that the sanitary’s work was too distasteful for her to endure longer. “Why should I be obliged to patch up wounds?” she asked. “It is much easier to make them.” The soldier found some regimentals for her and she went out and fought in a skirmish line. When the commander heard of it he was terribly angry and to frighten her he put her on sentry duty in an exposed post. “He thought he’d cure me of my taste for fighting,” she chuckled, “but I wasn’t frightened a bit, and so he said, ‘Well, be a soldier if you are so bent on it. We need soldiers.’ And so, I fought.”

She described her first and only battle where she helped storm several lines of trenches and was one of thirty-seven survivors out of a thousand in her regiment who took part in the engagement. Her wounds, she said, did not hurt much at the time, but she was bleeding pretty badly and thought she ought to get to the hospital.

“Just then I saw our captain, and he was badly wounded, almost unconscious in fact, and I had to get him to the rear on my back. It was all that I could do, for about that time I felt that I was growing weak and would soon have to sit down. I managed to get him as far as the first line of Red Cross men, and then I went under. I had been hit in the side by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel and I was pretty sick for a while. By and by I felt better and somehow got back to the rear. The first thing I saw was one of our men who was weeping with his head in his hands. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, and when he looked up and saw me he gave a yell. ‘They said you had been killed,’ he shouted. And he began to dance a hornpipe. Poor chap, he had been wounded too and before he had danced more than a few steps he began to bleed and fell over in a faint.”

The ambulances were pretty full, so this plucky young creature thought she could walk the three or four versts to the hospital. She had to give up before long and a captain of another regiment, himself wounded, took her into his cart or whatever conveyance he had, and carried her to the hospital. “Our captain was there,” she finished, “quite out of his head with pain. He kept saying, ‘Don’t let that girl go back to the field. Don’t let her fight again. She is too young.’ He did not know then that I had carried him off on my back, and me wounded too.”

A great many women who had seen service in men’s regiments were leaving them and joining one or another of the women’s regiments which were forming all over Russia about that time. The largest of these regiments was being trained for action in Moscow. There were about two thousand women in this battalion, which was formed and recruited by a women’s committee, “The Society of Russian Women to Help the Country.” Among the women was Madame Morosova, before the war prominent socially, but since the war almost entirely occupied with relief work. She was a very gay and laughter-loving person, but she had fed and clothed and helped on their way thousands of refugees. She had turned her house into a maternity hospital at times, and she had given large sums of money for the relief of women and children. Finally the women soldiers appealed to her as the most important work to be assisted and her whole energies last summer were devoted to the battalion. Princess Kropotkin, a relative of the celebrated Prince Pierre Kropotkin, was another member of the society. She had a Red Cross hospital until the army desertions began, and then she closed the hospital and turned to recruiting women. Mme. Popova, vice-president of the society, is one more untiring worker. In August she obtained Kerensky’s consent to go to Tomsk, her old home, and organize a battalion there.

The Moscow regiment was being drilled by a colonel and half a dozen younger officers, all of whom seemed immensely proud of their command. Twenty picked women of the regiment were going daily to the officers’ school and when ready were to be given commissions in the regular army.

In Petrograd a regiment of 1,500 women was almost ready for the trenches when I saw them last in August. They too were to be officered by women, two score being a daily attendance at a military school. On August 20 I saw these 1,500 women march out of their barrack in the old Engineers’ Palace, to go into camp preparatory to going to the front. This palace was once the home of the mad Emperor Paul, son of Catherine the Great. He was assassinated there and his restless ghost is supposed to haunt the gusty corridors. I asked Captain Luskoff, commander of the regiment, if he had found out what the Emperor Paul thought of the women soldiers, and he laughed and promised to report later on that point.

It was not intended to raise many regiments of women, I was told. The intention was to enlist and train to the highest point of efficiency between ten and twenty thousand women, and to distribute the regiments over the various front lines to inspire and stimulate the disorganized army. They would lead the men in battle when necessary, as Botchkareva’s brave band led them, and they would appear as a sign and symbol that the women of the country were not willing that the revolution, which generations of Russian men and women have died for, and have endured in the snows of Siberia sufferings worse than death, should end in chaos and national disintegration.

CHAPTER X THE HOMING EXILES—TWO KINDS

In a great, bare room, furnished with rows of narrow cots like a hospital, but with none of the crisp whiteness of the hospital, nor any of its promise of relief and restoration, a young man, propped with pillows, played on a concertina. He was white, emaciated, near the end of his young life. His eyes were like banked fires. He sat up in bed and in the intervals of coughing made the most wonderful music on that concertina, much more wonderful than I had ever dreamed the humble instrument could produce. The man was a true musician, and he had had many years of practice on his concertina, for it had been the one friend and solace of a solitary confinement which lasted nearly a dozen years. All around him in that bare room men lay in bed and listened to him. Some, however, were asleep. Even music could not break their weary rest. All were sick. Some were as near death as was the musician. Siberia had done its work with them. They had come home to die.

On a soap box, or its equivalent on a corner of the Nevski Prospect near the Alexander Theater, another young man stood and poured out a passionate speech to the crowd of soldiers, workmen and workwomen and idle boys who had paused to listen. The man was about thirty years old, and his clothes, it was plain to see, had never been purchased in Russia. They were American clothes of fair quality, and of that stylish cut possible to buy for twenty-five dollars in almost any department store. He wore a derby hat, tipped back on his head, a soft collar and a flowing tie. He talked rapidly and with many gestures, and the crowd listened with rapt interest to his speech. I, too, stopped to listen. “What is he saying?” I asked my interpreter.

“I don’t like to tell you,” she replied.

I insisted, and this is an almost literal translation of what that man said, on that Petrograd street corner, on an August day, 1917:

“You people over here in Russia don’t want to make a mistake of setting up the kind of a republic, of the kind of phony democracy like what they’ve got in the United States. I lived in the United States for ten years, and you take it from me, it’s the worst government in the world. They have a president who is worse than the Czar. The police are worse than Cossacks. The capitalist class is on top there just like they were in the old days in Russia. The working class is fighting them, and they are going to win. We are going to put the capitalists out just like you put them out here, and don’t you let any American capitalists come over here and help fasten on you a government like that one they still have in America. It’s the capitalists that plunged America into war. The working class never wanted it.”

These are two types of exiles which Russia has called back to her bosom since the revolution, both of which constitute another grave problem with which the distracted people are struggling. The sick ones, of whom there are thousands, came back and more of them are coming from Siberia at a time when food suitable for the sick is impossible to obtain. There was almost no milk. Eggs were hard to get and were not very fresh. Food of all kinds was getting scarcer every day. There was a fuel shortage that threatened to make all Russia spend a shivering winter, and what was to become of the sick was and still is a grave question. There is a great shortage of many medicines. If fighting is resumed the hospitals will be overcrowded. Doctors and nurses will be scarce. Yet the exiles continue to come back, the long stream from the remote villages continues to hold out its longing hands to the people back home, who cannot deny them. And nearly all the exiles come back sick and homeless and penniless. Russia must take care of those freed Siberian exiles, and I don’t quite see how she is going to do it, unless the miracle happens and they find a way of restoring peace and order in the land. In that case they can do anything. They can even deal with the kind of exile I heard talking on the Nevski.

Carlyle says that of all man’s earthly possessions, unquestionably the dearest to him are his symbols. They have the strongest hold on us without a doubt. At the time of the French revolution the sign and symbol of the old régime was the Bastille, that state prison in Paris which was the living grave of the king’s enemies, or of almost anybody who made himself unpopular with one of the king’s favorites. When the French people rose up in their might and swept the old régime out, the first thing they did, obeying a common impulse, was to tear down and destroy utterly the Bastille. In Russia the sign and symbol of the autocracy was the exile system, and particularly Siberia. The first thing the Russian people did when they rose up and dethroned the Romanoffs was to send telegrams to every political prison and to every convict village in Siberia that the prisoners and exiles were free. They sent orders to all the jailers and guards that the exiles were to be furnished with clothing and money and transportation to the railroads, and the railroads were directed to bring them back to Petrograd.

There is something to warm the coldest blood in the thought of what it must have meant to those poor desolate creatures, living in the hopeless isolation of Siberia, to have the door of the cell open one February day and hear the words,“You are free!” Sometimes the announcement was prefaced by words of unheard of friendliness and courtesy from wardens and jailers who had before been cruel and brutal task-masters. “Please forgive me if I have been over-zealous in my duties,” these men would say, and the prisoner would think that he had gone mad and was dreaming. Then the announcement would come, unbelievable in its wonder; the revolution had actually happened. The Czar was gone. The prisoner was free. They heard that news in the depths of mines, where men worked shackled and hopeless. They heard it in lonely villages near the Arctic Circle. They heard it in far lands, where homesick men and women toiled in sweatshops among aliens. They were free, and Mother Russia was calling them home again. I should think they would almost have died of joy at the tidings. No generous mind can wonder that Russia called back her children, all of them, without stopping to sort out the good and the bad, the well and the sick, the desirable and the undesirable. Or without stopping to calculate how she was going to take care of them when they got there.

But very early in the day it became evident that Russia was going to face a serious problem in her returned exiles. In the very first days of the revolution they opened all the prison doors in Petrograd as well as in other Russian cities, and let all the prisoners out. Among them were a number of politicals, and many of them immediately became public charges. They had no money, no friends, no home. The revolution had robbed them, in some cases, of all three. In some cases of long imprisonment the homes and friends had been taken from them by death. There had been a committee working secretly in behalf of political prisoners, and now this committee, with a group in the Red Cross, got together and formed a society which they call the Political Red Cross, the committee in charge of returned exiles. For they saw plainly that what had happened in the case of the Petrograd prisoners would be repeated on a large scale when the Siberian exiles and those from foreign lands returned. Another committee was formed in Moscow. They sprang up in various cities, co-operating with the Zemstvoes or county councils.

At the head of the work is Vera Figner, one of the most famous of the old revolutionists, almost the last survivor of the nihilism of the eighteen seventies. The Russians are said to lack organizing ability, but the work done by this committee under Vera Figner’s direction looks to me that once Russia gets a government that can govern and an army that will fight the people of Russia will organize a civilization that will teach Europe new things. The committee started with nothing, not even machinery to work with. There is no such thing in Russia as a charity organization society. Charity and benevolence there are, mostly of the old-fashioned type, “Under the patronage of her imperial highness, the Princess Olga,” or “the empress dowager.” There was no well-organized society of any kind to appeal to to help take care of some seventy-five thousand exiles hurrying home, an unknown number of them sick, another unknown number poor and homeless, and all of them strangers in a new Russia.

Vera Figner I saw in the Petrograd headquarters of the society. She is a matronly woman, looking less than sixty, although she must be older. She has a handsome face, with the deep, smoldering eyes of the revolutionist, but her smile is quiet and kind. Near her at the long committee table sat Mme. Kerenskaia, the estranged wife of the minister president Kerensky. She is an attractive young woman with dark eyes and abundant dark hair, who gives all of her time to the work of the exiles committee. Mme. Gorki is another woman of prominence who works with the committees, and Prince Kropotkin and his daughter, Mme. Lebedev, whose husband was in the government when I left, are also constant workers. The work was done through eight committees, one of which collected money, a great deal of money, too. Hundreds of thousands of roubles have poured in from all over Russia as well as from England, America, France. Another committee collects clothes, and they are much scarcer than money in Russia. A committee on home-finding also collects sanitarium and hospital beds wherever they are to be found. A reception committee meets the exiles and takes them to their various lodgings. A medical and a legal aid committee take care of their own sides of the work. All over Petrograd and Moscow they have established temporary lodgings and temporary hospitals for the cure of the returned sick and helpless. It was in such a refuge that I saw and heard the man with the concertina.

I had come to find Marie Spirodonova, one of the most appealing as well as the most tragic figures of the revolution of 1905-06. She was the Charlotte Corday of that revolution, for like Charlotte she, unaided by any revolutionary society, freed her country of one of the worst monsters of his time. She shot and killed the half-mad and wholly horrible governor of Tambosk. And like Charlotte she paid for that deed with her life. She lived indeed to return to Russia, but her span after that was short. Marie Spirodonova was in the last stages of tuberculosis when they brought her back to Russia. Ten years’ solitary confinement had done that for her. The first sentence of death, afterward commuted to twenty years’ exile, would have been shorter and more merciful. When I saw her, she was in bed, so wasted that she looked like a child. The flush of fever on her cheeks gave her a false look of health, and she looked almost as beautiful as on the day when she stood in the prisoner’s dock and told the judges how and why she killed the monster of a governor. Her voice was all but gone now, and it was in a hoarse whisper that she greeted me, and asked news of her one or two friends in America. I could stay only a few minutes, she was so weak. It is hardly possible that she still lives, although no news of her death has reached me.

Until the last breath she must have kept her iron will and indomitable spirit. Ten years in a solitary cell could not break that spirit, as the story of her release shows. When the first telegram came to the distant prison, where she and nine other women were confined, the names of only eight of them were specifically mentioned.

“But what about us?” wailed the two forgotten ones.

The warden of the prison perhaps did not entirely believe in the success of the revolution, and wanted to be on the safe side. “You stay,” he said.

“Then none of us will go,” said Marie Spirodonova, and they all stayed until the next day when another telegram arrived setting them all free. In the same spirit Spirodonova refused to leave her companions after they reached Petrograd. She was so famous, so sought after, that she could have chosen among a dozen hospitable homes, in the country, in the Crimea or the bracing mountains of the Caucasus. But she said she would not have anything her old prison mates did not have, so Marie Spirodonova, daughter of a general, and the concertina player, child of a peasant, die as they lived, revolutionists, spurning all the comforts of life, all the protection and security of home, all the plaudits of the world. They lived and died for Russia as surely as though they died on the battlefield.

Of the same type is the most celebrated exile of all, Catherine Breshkovskaia, the Babushka, or little grandmother of the revolution. They brought Babushka back to Petrograd in the first rush. They gave her a reception at the station such as no crowned head in Europe ever had, and they took her to the Winter Palace and told her that when the Czar moved out he left it to her. Babushka lived in the Winter Palace when she was in Petrograd, which was seldom. Most of the time she was touring rural Russia and trying to make her peasants understand what the revolution meant, and that they would make the country a worse place than it ever was before unless they stopped fighting to grab all the land in sight without any regard to right and justice. “I know them,” she said in a brief talk I had with her in the palace. “If I can only live long enough to reach them in numbers, I can deal with them. They have listened to a pack of nonsense, but I shall tell them better.”

Breshkovskaia is past seventy years old. She is growing very deaf, and her weight makes traveling difficult. Yet her mind is clear and vigorous, and when she makes a speech she manages somehow to call back the voice and the strength of a woman of forty. Spirodonova, Breshkovskaia, Kropotkin, Tschaikovsky and almost every one of the old revolutionists are eager adherents of the moderate program of the early provisional government, before the Bolsheviki crowded in with their cry of “All the power to the Soviets!” They want the war fought to a finish, and they want order restored in Russia. It is quite otherwise with another type of exile, and I am sorry to say some of this other kind were made in the United States of America.

Prince Felix Yussupoff, at whose palace on the Moika Canal Rasputin
was killed, and his wife, the Grand Duchess Irene
Alexandrovna, niece of the late Czar.

In the boat in which I crossed the Atlantic last May there were three Russian men who had spent some years in America and were on their way back to Petrograd. These men were not exiles, but they had found Russia intolerable to live in and had gone to America, which had been so kind to them in a material way that they were able to go back to Russia in the first cabin of an ocean liner. All three were pronounced pacifists and one was a readymade Bolshevik. He was for the whole program, separate peace, no annexations or contributions, no sharing the government with the bourgeois, no compromise on anything. A real Bolshevik. And made on the east side of New York. This man used to talk to me on deck and in the saloon about how the Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates were going to dictate terms of peace to the allies, and how the social revolution was going to spread all over the world, and especially all over America, and then he would hasten to assure me that he wasn’t nearly as radical as some of the Tavarishi I would meet in Russia, and he wasn’t. When we reached the Finnish frontier and stopped at Tornea for examination I had the pleasure of seeing all three of these men taken into custody by some remnant of authority existing in the army, and taken down to Petrograd under guard as men who had evaded military duty. My friend declared that nothing would ever induce him to put on a uniform or to fight. Not he. And the others rather less confidently echoed his defiance. Finally one of them said: “on the whole, I think I will enlist. They need educated men at the front to talk peace to them.” Thus at least one emissary of the Kaiser was contributed to poor, bleeding Russia by the United States.

Just one more case, because it is typical of many. This man was a real exile, and for eleven years he had lived in Chicago. Born in a small city of western Russia, he joined, when still a youth, what was known as the Bund, a socialist propagandist circle of Jewish young men and women. The youth’s parents, quiet, orthodox people, knew nothing of his activities, nor of the revolutionary literature of which he was custodian and which he had concealed in the sand bags piled up around the cottage to keep out the winter cold. On May 31, 1905, the Tavarishi, or comrades, in his town organized a small demonstration against the celebration of the Czar’s birthday. The next day the police began searching houses and making arrests among the youth of the town, and they found the books hidden in the sandbags. The boy fled, and found refuge in the next town. Money was raised, a passport forged and the youth finally got to England via Germany. He didn’t like England and in 1906 he crossed to the United States. He didn’t like the United States either, and his whole career in Chicago was a history of agitation and rebellion. He was one of the founders of a socialist Sunday school in Mayor Thompson’s town, where children of tender years are given a thorough education in Bolshevik first principles.

When the Russian revolution broke and Russian consuls all over the world advertised for exiles to be taken back to Russia’s heart, this man presented himself as one of the returners. He showed me the certificate issued by the Russian consulate in Chicago. It says that it was issued in accordance with the orders of the provisional government and records that the said —— —— was paid the sum of $157.25 and was given transportation from Chicago to Petrograd, via the Pacific Ocean and the Trans-Siberian railroad. At Vladivostock he received more money, and on his arrival in Petrograd he was given a small weekly allowance in addition to his free lodgings. He had a good time on the journey, he said. There was a band at most of the stations where the train stopped, crowds, flowers and much cheering. It was agreeable to get back to Petrograd also and be met by a committee. But the habit of hating governments was so settled in his system that within a week he was talking against the one that had paid his way back, and he was talking hard against the one which had taken him in and given him a free education and a job and a chance to establish a socialist Sunday school with perfect impunity. He was in with all the Bolshevik activities except one. He had no stomach for fighting. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. It got to a point where it was hard to be a Bolshevik in good standing and never do any gun work, so this exile determined to go back to Chicago. When I knew him he was haunting the committees and various ministries trying to persuade them to give him the money with which to return.

“You don’t think they can draft me into the American army, do you?” he asked me anxiously. “I am a Russian subject. I don’t see how they could do it legally.”

I don’t know how many men of this kind went back to Russia from the United States, but there were enough of them to be conspicuous, and the Russian radicals believe them to be far more reliable witnesses than the Root Commission, which made a remarkably good impression on the educated people but none at all on the Tavarishi. “Don’t you believe that the United States is in this war for democracy,” shouted one Nevsky Prospect orator. “The United States is just as imperialistic as England. You oughtta read what Lincoln Steffens and John Reed wrote about the United States and Mexico.” These men will do Russia all the harm they can, and then they will come back to America and do us all the harm they can. If I had my way they would go from Ellis Island, with all the rest of their kind still remaining here, to some kind of a devil’s island in the South Seas and be kept there until they died.

CHAPTER XI HOW RASPUTIN DIED

Looking at these exiles, these wrecks of humanity done to death in the name of the state, and reflecting that their number was so great that months had to elapse before they could all be located and brought back to life, it is not to be wondered at that most Russians believed the autocracy a thing too strong to be shaken. But the February revolution revealed that the autocracy was a tree rotten at the roots. At a touch it collapsed.

The Russian autocracy went down like a house of cards, and within an incredibly short time the whole horde of ignorant and reactionary ministers, grafting generals, corrupt officials, court parasites, vagrant monks, mystics and fortune tellers went down with it and were buried in its ruins. The Czar—a reed shaken in the wind. The Czarina, the Empress Dowager, the poor little Czarevitch, Rasputin, Anna Virubova, his sponsor at the court—leaves in the current. They all went. In the dead of night a group of determined men, led by a nephew-in-law of the Czar, murdered a monk, and almost the next day the whole Protopopoff-Sturmer gang was in the fortress of Peter and Paul and the Romanoff family was on its way to Siberia. Rasputin, it is true, was killed in December, and the revolution did not actually occur until February; but two months in the history of a nation is an inconsiderable lapse of time. The story of the killing of Rasputin has been published in this country, and, in its main facts, accurately. In some of its important details the published stories are in error, and I am glad to be able to tell the facts as they were related by Prince Felix Yussupoff himself, the man who fired the shot that freed Russia.

Prince Yussupoff did not tell these facts directly to me. He told them to Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragist, with whom he is on terms of warm friendship, and gave her permission to repeat them to me, which she did within an hour of hearing them. Prince Yussupoff was willing that I should know the story, but our acquaintance was brief, and I am sure that I heard a more detailed account through Mrs. Pankhurst than I should have had had he talked directly to me, a comparative stranger.

Prince Yussupoff did not kill Rasputin, as has been charged, because the monk had cast lascivious eyes on his beautiful young wife, the Grand Duchess Irene Alexandrovna. At least he said nothing about her in connection with the affair, and it is certain that she took no active part in it. She did not lure the monk to the Yussupoff palace on the fatal night. She could not have done so because she was in the Crimea at the time. Prince Yussupoff killed Rasputin because of the man’s evil influence on the Czar, his wife’s uncle, and his worse influence on the Czarina. The thing had got beyond scandal. It had become unbearable, and when evidence was presented to him that Rasputin was trying to influence the royal pair to force Russia into a separate peace with Germany, Prince Yussupoff decided that the time for Rasputin’s death had come. Rasputin had to die. He was invited to Yussupoff’s house and he accepted. Then he died.

I have often walked past that great, beautiful, yellow palace on the Moika canal, the Petrograd town house of the Yussupoff family, and tried to reconstruct the ghastly drama enacted there on that December night. Snow burying the black ice of the canal, shrouding the street and silent houses, dimming the street lights, and in a basement room, a private retreat of the lord of the palace, a young man sweating from every shivering pore, and watching the sinister monk eat and drink deadly poison which affected him no more than water. They had fed one of the poisoned cakes to a dog, just before they sent them downstairs to be fed to Rasputin, and the dog died in a few seconds. Rasputin ate one and lived. Explain it who can, but cease to wonder that the Russians firmly believe that Rasputin was something more than human.

Excusing himself on some pretext Prince Yussupoff went upstairs, where the others waited—young Grand Duke Dmitri and two or three other men, and told them the incredible news. When he went back he had a revolver in his pocket. He and the monk resumed their conversation, which was on general topics. It was the first time Rasputin had visited Yussupoff or had any particular conversation with him. The prince was not a favorite at court, the empress especially disapproving of certain alleged episodes in his youthful past. For this reason young Prince Felix and the monk were on formal terms, and it took a great deal of diplomacy to persuade Rasputin to make that midnight visit at all. They resumed their interrupted conversation, and in the course of it the prince invited Rasputin to cross the room and look at an ikon, or sacred picture, which hung on the opposite wall. These ikons are frequently rare objects of art, gold or silver, and incrusted with gems. The ikon, which was to be the last on which Rasputin’s gaze was to rest, was an antique of almost priceless value. He looked, and the next moment a revolver shot tore through his side and he crumpled up on the floor without a groan. Prince Yussupoff had shot him.

The prince had never killed a man before, and it was natural that, in his revulsion of nerves after the deed, he should have rushed from the room. He fled upstairs and gasped out that it was over, the thing they had sworn to do was done, Rasputin was dead. The next thing was to get the body out of the house, and this task was rendered the more difficult because a policeman who had passed the house at the moment when the shot was fired, rang a doorbell and insisted on knowing what had occurred. He was pacified somehow, and one of the men went out to get a motor car. Prince Yussupoff went downstairs to guard the body until the car came. Rasputin lay motionless on the floor beneath the jeweled ikon, but as his slayer reached the spot where he lay, the monk’s body shot up, the monk’s long arms darted forward and his powerful hands reached and clawed for Yussupoff’s throat. Half mad with amazement and horror, the young man tore himself loose, leaving one of the epaulets from his uniform in the clawing hands. Rushing with all his might to the room upstairs, he shrieked: “He lives yet! He is the devil himself! We cannot kill him!”

“We must kill him!” they shrieked in return, and the whole band rushed for the stairs. When they opened the door Rasputin was crawling on hands and knees up the stairs. His face was diabolic. What followed does not make pleasant reading. They tried to kill him, crawling toward them, using every weapon they could grasp—revolvers, swords, daggers, clubs, heavy chairs, even their boots. They shot and beat him until he was senseless, but even then he did not die. They tied his hands and feet and regardless of possible risk of detection they loaded the senseless body into a motor car, drove to the Neva, a considerable distance, and threw the still breathing thing through a hole in the ice. There Rasputin died.

That is the way Prince Yussupoff tells it. The world knows how the Czar had the body embalmed and buried, and how he and all the royal family walked in the funeral procession. It was the intention of the Empress to build a costly tomb over his grave, perhaps a church. They usually built a church to commemorate assassinations of royalty, and the poor, half-demented Empress of Russia regarded Rasputin as greater than royalty. Perhaps if the revolution of February had not succeeded the church would have been built, loaded with gold and art treasures, as those Russian churches are, and might in time have become a shrine in which the superstitious would pray for miracles. But the revolution did succeed, and one of the first things they did was to unearth the corpse of Rasputin and give it another burial. I heard several accounts of that burial, all of them horrible. One account has it that the body was burned. It doesn’t make any real difference. Rasputin had to be killed, and he was. The burial was nothing unless you find something symbolic in the uneasy character of the man even after he was dead. It does indicate, strangely, the sinister nature of the whole Rasputin episode.

No arrests followed the killing of Rasputin, although the men who did it were known almost from the first. Rasputin’s family, with whom he lived in Petrograd, knew where he went on his death night, and when he did not return they telephoned Tsarskoe Selo to ask if he was there. The royal family lived in the Alexander palace at Tsarskoe, and Rasputin often visited them there. But he did not live at court, as many people seem to think. The Czarina, frightened half to death, sent for the Petrograd chief of police and the dragnet immediately thrown out drew in the policeman who had heard a revolver shot from the yellow palace on the Moika canal. The chief of police went in person to the Yussupoff palace and found it a shambles. Prince Felix had been so nearly prostrated by the events of the night—he is really little more than a boy—that he had not even had the place cleaned. The prince at first refused to tell anything of the affair and he steadfastly refused to divulge the names of the men who had helped him do the deed. But little by little the police unearthed the whole story, and the frantic Czarina learned that at least two of the assassins were of the blood royal. She demanded their punishment, and the Czar joined with her in the demand.

They would have sent all the men to the farthest Siberian mine if they had had their way. But there was a meeting of the Romanoff clan in the Tsarskoe palace, probably more than one meeting. The grand dukes were all there, and the Empress Dowager. They told the royal pair that nobody must suffer for the deed. Horrible as it was, it had to happen some time, because assassination was the certain end of men like Rasputin. They told the Emperor and Empress plainly that they were fortunate that only one assassination had taken place. Nobody at that time knew that the revolution was close at hand. None of the Romanoff family believed that the revolution would ever come. But they knew—all of them except the Czar and his wife—that the house of Romanoff was due to have a thorough cleaning, and they were thankful at heart that Prince Felix and young Grand Duke Dmitri had had the nerve to begin the work. The young grand duke was sent to the Caucasus and Prince Felix was banished to his estates. I don’t know where the lesser lights were sent, but certainly they were not arrested. The grand duke is still in the Caucasus, the provisional government wisely considering him well off out there on the Persian border.

Prince Yussupoff is not only free but he is something of a popular hero still. He is very democratic, is openly sympathetic with the revolution, although he detests the Bolsheviki, who have turned revolution into riot. The constitutional democrats and other conservative revolutionists admire the young man, and there is even a group, I don’t know how large, which would like to see him the constitutional monarch of Russia. He is not a Romanoff, but his wife is. She is young, rarely beautiful and a great favorite in society. As for Prince Felix, he belongs if not to royalty, to a family which has intermarried more than once with royalty. On his father’s side he is Count Sumarokoff-Elston, the latter name indicating British descent, the original Elston coming over from Scotland during the reign of the Empress Catherine. He gained her favor and secured the title and estates of Sumarokoff. The father of Prince Felix assumed, by Imperial decree, the title of Prince Yussupoff on his marriage with the beautiful Princess Yusupova, the last of her line, who thus perpetuated the family name. The Yussupoffs are one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Russia. Their origin runs back into the half-fabulous days of Tartar domination, the name Yussupoff being Tartar, and not Russian at all. It means Joseph’s son. The title, however, dates back only about a century. Prince Felix is the head of the family, his elder brother having been killed in a duel some years ago on French soil. He is barely thirty years old, and looks much younger. Nobody would be likely to pick out this man in a crowd for an assassin. He is tall and slender, and almost too handsome. With his fine features, dark, melancholy eyes and ivory skin he might almost be called effeminate in appearance. One sees such men only in very old families where the vigor has begun to run low. There is plenty of vigor left in Prince Felix, however. He has an Oxford education, and speaks English perfectly. He speaks many other languages besides, as the highly educated Russians are all supposed to do, but which they frequently do not. French is commonly spoken, of course.

I had a long talk with Prince Felix Yussupoff in Moscow, and we talked, most of the time, about the American public school system. He wanted to know what the Gary system was, and fortunately I was able to tell him. As I described the schools, where children spent their days, working, studying, playing, being wholly educated and trained to think as well as to work, the prince’s eyes glowed and his face shone with interest and amazement. “It’s the finest thing I ever heard of,” he exclaimed. “It is exactly what we ought to have in Russia.” And then he went on to say thoughtfully: “Mrs. Dorr, my wife and I want to do something for Russia, something really worth while. I don’t want to be forever remembered for—for just one thing. I want to do something constructive. Of course, as things are now, there is nothing constructive to be done. Besides, my wife is a Romanoff, and, naturally——” He paused with a graceful little gesture of the hand. Naturally a Romanoff couldn’t be conspicuous in any way just then. “But when the time comes, if it ever does, when Russia is normal again, why shouldn’t the contribution I make be to the education of children?”

“The salvation of your country lies in the education of its children, all of them, not just the children of the rich,” I replied.

“I believe it,” was the earnest response. “And I want to help establish the best public school system in the world in Russia. How can I do it?”

I told him, to the best of my ability. And he promised me that he would carry out my suggestions. Prince Felix Yussupoff means to spend the next year or two studying the American public school, and especially the Gary system. He doesn’t want to be remembered for just one thing.

CHAPTER XII ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS

“Let any American mother imagine that her only son, who came into the world a weakling, and whose life had always hung on a thread, had been miraculously restored to health. Suppose also that the person who did this wonderful thing was not a doctor, but a monk of that mother’s church. Wouldn’t it be natural for that mother to regard the man with almost superstitious gratitude for the rest of her life? Wouldn’t it also be natural that she would want to keep the monk near her, at least until the child grew up, in order to have the benefit of his advice and help in case of a return of the illness?”

I had heard the story of the Rasputin murder as told by one of the principals in the gory tragedy, Prince Felix Yussupoff, and now I was to hear it again, this time from one of the reputed “dark forces,” of which Rasputin had been the head and front, Anna Virubova, the intimate friend and confidante of the Empress of Russia, and believed by many to be the chief accomplice of Rasputin. I had heard all sorts of horrible stories about this woman. It was said that she was Rasputin’s procuress. It was said that she conspired with him to make the Empress believe that the Czarevitch would die if the monk were sent away from court, or if he voluntarily withdrew. On the several occasions when he did go, Madame Virubova was said to have fed the child with minute doses of poison, so that he sickened, and when that happened of course the frantic mother demanded the return of Rasputin.

As the monk’s appetite for power grew and he demanded the removal of this or that metropolitan or bishop, the removal or appointment of ministers, the suppression of newspapers that denounced him, the Czarina, urged on by her friend Madame Virubova, would insist that Rasputin should have his way. Otherwise he might leave, and the Czarevitch would surely die. Madame Virubova was also said to have conspired with a court physician to poison the Czar, or rather to put constant doses of some toxic in his food in order to cloud his mind, and thus make him an easier dupe for the pro-German conspirators. They told the most amazing stories about this woman, making her out a sort of a combination of Lucrezia Borgia and Jezebel.

Gregory Rasputin and some of his female devotees.

Whether the provisional government believed these stories or not, the Duma members who forced the revolution evidently believed Anna Virubova to be one of the most dangerous of the inner court circle, or camarilla, which was planning a German peace. For when the Czar was forced to abdicate, and all the accused men of the camarilla were arrested and thrown into the fortress of Peter and Paul, Madame Virubova was also arrested and sent to the fortress. She was taken out of a sick bed—there had been an epidemic of measles in the royal family—thrown into an underground cell and kept there for three months. At the end of that time she was in such a state of collapse that the prison physician recommended her removal to a hospital. To this the provisional government consented, but when the order for her release was presented to the governor of the fortress, and he ordered her cell door unlocked, the soldiers on duty refused to obey the order. It was days before they were persuaded to let her go. Madame Virubova was sent to a hospital for a month, and then they set her free. That is, they permitted her to go to the home of her brother-in-law, who is a stepson of the Grand Duke Paul, and to live there under strict surveillance. They had searched her house in Tsarskoe Selo, and her rooms in the palace. They had put her through every kind of cross examination, not once but many times, and they were forced to admit that they could not discover a single incriminating circumstance, or any evidence of poisoning or conspiracy. They had to release her, but she was not allowed to leave the country, or even her brother’s house, without permission, which, of course, would not be granted. She was watched all the time, and might be rearrested and given the third degree at any time if the least bit of evidence seemed to warrant it.

Anna Virubova is considered a very dangerous woman. She is one of two things, very dangerous or very much maligned. She gave me the impression, after two long, intimate talks, of a woman absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing. If she is a criminal she ought to be put in prison for life, for her powers of deceit are simply marvelous. I liked Anna Virubova, and I don’t think I could possibly like a woman capable of poisoning little boys or handing innocent young girls over into the claws of a lascivious monk.

How I met this woman, how she came to talk confidentially with me, where I saw her and when, are not to be written just now. They could not be published without injuring a number of people, perhaps including Madame Virubova herself. I saw and talked with her soon after her release from the prison hospital. She was still a little drawn and haggard from the hardships and the terror of her experiences in Peter and Paul, and she was in the depth of despondency over the plight of her friend the Czarina. She is a very pretty woman, this alleged Borgia-Jezebel. She has an abundance of brown hair and her eyes are large and deeply blue. Her features are regular, and her mouth curves like a child’s. Two or three years ago the train on which she was traveling between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo was wrecked, some say purposely. Madame Virubova was desperately injured, both legs being broken and her spine wrenched. She was lamed for life and walks with a crutch, but in spite of that all her movements are singularly graceful. One of the stories about her is that she was a peasant girl brought to court by Rasputin and forced on the Empress as a convenient tool of the conspirators. This is quite untrue. Madame Virubova is a patrician by birth, and before she was born, and long before Rasputin appeared in Tsarskoe Selo, her family was attached to the court. The father and the grandfather of Madame Virubova were court officials, confidential secretaries to the emperors of their times. Both her parents are living and I have met them both. They are highly educated and unmistakably well bred. They are not rich people, but they live in a very beautiful apartment in an exclusive quarter of Petrograd.

For more than a dozen years Mme. Virubova lived on terms of closest friendship with the Czarina. She did not live at court, at least she did not until after the murder of Rasputin, when she went to the palace to be near the frightened and despairing Empress. She had a house of her own in Tsarskoe Selo, and it was at her house that the Empress met the monk who was to have such a sinister influence on her after life. The Empress, who was never popular at court, and never happy there, liked to have a place where she could go and throw off her imperial character, be a woman among her intimate friends, care free. Such a refuge was Mme. Virubova’s home to the melancholy Alexandra, wife of the Emperor of all the Russias. Mme. Virubova’s husband was an officer in the navy, and gossip had it that he disapproved of his wife’s friendship with the Empress, and disapproved still more of the people who were invited to meet her in his home. Rasputin was not the only one of the mystics and charlatans she met and talked with, it appears. The Empress was deeply religious, and she was interested in all kinds of strange and mystical doctrines. The husband of Mme. Virubova was not, and he feared, as well he might, that almost any kind of a political plot might be hatched by that “little group of serious thinkers” who met in his drawing room and in the scented boudoir of his wife. They quarreled. It got to the point where they did nothing but quarrel, and one day Mme. Virubova was given a choice between her husband and her friend. She chose the friend, and thenceforth she occupied the house in Tsarskoe Selo alone. The husband went to sea, and after a year or two he died.

Something of this Madame Virubova told me, and the rest a friend of the husband told me. In her story the husband appears as a jealous, unreasonable, bad tempered man, almost a lunatic. In her friend’s story he appears a martyr. “I have not had a very amusing life,” said Anna Virubova, in speaking of her marriage. She smiled, a little bitterly. “Perhaps that is one reason why I, like the Empress, was attracted to religion, why we both liked and trusted Rasputin. We did trust him, and to the end everything he did justified our confidence. As for the Empress’s feeling for him I give you my solemn word of honor it was solely that of a grateful mother, and a devout member of the Orthodox church.” And then she spoke the words with which I have opened this chapter. “Let any American mother imagine that she had an only son who had come into the world a weakling, one whose life had always hung on a thread, and that that child had suddenly and miraculously been restored to health. Let her suppose that the person who did this wonderful thing was not a doctor but a monk of her own church. Wouldn’t it be natural for that mother to regard the man with almost superstitious gratitude for the rest of her life? Wouldn’t it also be natural that she should want to keep the monk near her, at least until the child grew up, in order to have the benefit of his advice and help in case of return of the illness? Well, that is the whole truth about the Empress and Rasputin.”

“But did Rasputin really heal the Czarevitch, and restore him to health?” I asked.

“Judge for yourself,” she replied. “Perhaps you know how ardently the birth of a son was desired by both the Emperor and the Empress. They had four girls, but a woman may not inherit the Russian throne. A boy was wanted, and when at last he came, a poor little sickly baby, the Empress was nearly in despair. The child had a rare disease, one which the doctors have never been able to cure. The blood vessels were affected, so that the patient bled at the slightest touch. Even a small wound would endanger his life. He might bleed to death of a cut finger. In addition to this the boy developed tuberculosis of the hip. It seemed impossible that he could ever live to grow up. He was a dear child, always, beautiful, clever, and lovable. Even had less hung on his life than succession to the throne it would have been hard to give him up. Each one of his successive illnesses racked the Empress with such terror and anguish that her mind almost gave away. For a long time she was so melancholy that she had to live in seclusion under the care of nurses. It was not so much assassins that she feared. It was that the child should die of the maladies that afflicted him. And, in addition to all this daily and hourly anxiety and pain she suffered, the poor Empress was torn this way and that by the grand dukes and all the members of the court circle. Each one had a remedy or a treatment they wanted applied to the child. There were always new doctors, new treatments, new operations in the air. The Empress was criticized bitterly because she wouldn’t try them all. The Empress Dowager—well——” Virubova looked at me and we both smiled. The mother-in-law joke is as sadly amusing in a palace as in a Harlem flat.

“Then came Rasputin,” continued Madame Virubova. “And he said to the Empress: ‘Don’t worry about the child. He is going to live, and he is going to get well. He doesn’t need medicine, he needs as much of a healthy, outdoor life as his condition can stand. He needs to play with a dog and a pony. He needs a sled. Don’t let the doctors give him any except the mildest medicines. Don’t on any account allow them to operate. The boy will soon show improvement, and then he will get well.’”

“Did Rasputin say that he was going to heal him?” I asked.

“Rasputin simply said that the boy was going to get well, and he told us almost the day and the hour when the boy would begin to get well. ‘When the child is twelve years old,’ Rasputin told us, ‘he will begin to improve. He will improve steadily after that, and by the time he is a man he will be in ordinary health like other men.’ And very shortly after he turned twelve years old he did begin to improve. He improved rapidly, just as Rasputin said he would, and within a few months he could walk. Before that, when he went out it was in the arms of a soldier, who loved him better than his own life, and would have gladly given his life if that could have brought health to his prince. The man’s joy when the child really began to walk, began to play with his dog and his pony, was equaled only by that of the empress. For the first time in her life in Russia she was happy. Do you blame her, do you blame me for being grateful to Rasputin? Whether he cured him or God cured him, I know no more than you do. But Rasputin told us what was going to happen, and when it was going to happen. Make of it what you will.”

Rasputin told the Empress of Russia that her son would begin to improve when he was twelve years old. Almost any doctor might have told her that it was not unlikely that he would begin to improve as soon as adolescence began. Many childish weaknesses, and even some very grave constitutional weaknesses, have been known to disappear gradually from that period. Empresses and ladies in waiting are not usually medical experts, but they might have learned that much from ordinary reading, if the doctors failed to enlighten them. But neither Alexandra nor Virubova knew it, and when Rasputin threw that gigantic bluff at them they grabbed it. As a guesser Rasputin was a wonder, for the almost impossible happened and the sick little Czarevitch lived up to his prediction. That’s what I make of it.