ALVMNVS BOOK FYND RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS BY ROBERT CROZIER LONG CORRESPONDENT IN RUSSIA, IQI7, OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS OF AMERICA NEW YORK E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 68 1 FIFTH AVENUE Copyright 1919 By E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY All Rights Reserved /r>n Printed in the United States of America PREFACE THE aim of this book is not to give a history or interpretation of the Revolution in Russia; but to record in narrative form the more striking events seen by a newspaper correspondent long familiar with the country, people and language. Many books purport- ing to give a rationale or interpretation of these events have already appeared; and these are good or bad according as the writers were equipped with a qualify- ing knowledge of Russian conditions. As far as I know, I was the only foreigner who witnessed some of the occurrences, and visited some of the places here described; and the amount of material collected directly and therefore not to be omitted was so great that for the causes, the inner course and the future prospects of the Revolution there has been little space. Further, the time has not yet come for treating the Revolution in historical perspective and analyzing its finer elements. Russia is to-day in a state of flux, probably indeed still early in the prolonged process that will in future be called her Revolution; and no final judgment upon the events so far accomplished can be passed until the lines of ultimate progress are more clearly revealed. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE LAST ROMANOFF ...... i II. THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY . . . . 15 III. WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES . . . . 32 IV. THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS .... 49 V. PRINCE LVOFF AND His REFORMS . . . 68 | VI. WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION .... 87 VII. THE REBIRTH OF NIHILISM .... 103 VIII. BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 119 IX. THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND .... 141 X. KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE . . . 159 \ XI. KORNILOFF AT MOSCOW 178 * XII. THE REVIVAL OF ORTHODOXY . . . .193 XIII. KORNILOFF'S REBELLION 207 t XIV. TSARISM AND THE TSAR 228 XV. THE BASTILLE OF PETROGRAD . . . .250 XVI. THE TRIUMPH OF BOLSHEVISM . . . .265 XVII. RUSSIA AND AMERICA 277 vii RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS CHAPTER I THE LAST ROMANOFF THREE times in the course of many visits to Russia I saw Nicholas II, the last, least considerable and unluckiest of the Romanoffs. The first time, he was at the height of his power; the second time, he had just unwillingly surrendered a part of that power; and the third time, he was returning to his palace between armed guards, a captive of the Revolution. The first time was for an instant in February, 1899. This month was ominous for the Tsar's future. In the summer before he had sent out his circular sug- gesting a Peace Conference at The Hague, and had convinced the less skeptical among foreigners of his progressive designs; but he had followed this, as he had preceded it, with reactionary measures at home; and in the month mentioned had provoked a revolt in the universities, and made his first serious assault upon the Constitutional rights of the Grand Duchy of Finland. A mere look at the Petrograd streets as he passed was enough to convince anyone, even if new 2 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS to Russian affairs, that his subjects did not share the foreign illusion. Preceded by a detachment of the palace cavalry known as "The Convoy of His Im- perial Majesty" big, black-bearded men, mostly Caucasus Moslems he drove in a sledge into the Nevsky Prospect on his way to the Winter Palace. The streets were lined with soldiers. The civilian public paid no attention to this Imperial progress. Hardly a man turned his head. But there were other civilians in abundance who were sharply interested; and after a month's experience of Russia it was as easy to distinguish them from the unofficial public as it was to distinguish the Convoy itself. These were the detectives, spies and agents provocateurs of the Okhrana, or, as it was officially called, the Security Department of the Police. Nicholas II improved much in appearance in later life. He was then ex- tremely thin, unrepresentative in his bearing and servile in his expression ; and his pale face was covered with unsightly spots. The total impression gained was: a frightened monarch and his guards. Of any organic bond between him and his Empire and his subjects; of any of the traditional associations of Romanoff greatness; even of the more picturesque and awe-inspiring associations of Autocracy there was no visible trace. The second occasion was seven years later, in May, 1906, when the First Duma was opened in the Winter Palace. This was after the debacle of the Man- churian War. The concession of a Duma, nominally THE LAST ROMANOFF 3 with a final word in legislation but without influence upon the executive, had been forced out of the Tsar by the General Strike of October, 1905, but this con- cession was made only after a vain attempt to satisfy the people with a consultative Duma, framed by the Minister of the Interior, Buluigin. The new Duma was the work of Count Sergius Witte. Russians knew that this surrender was hateful to the Court; and if any doubted, they were convinced by the events of the next years, for the subsidence of the revolu- tionary enthusiasm made it possible for the Tsar and his Prime Minister Stolypin to cancel the Duma's rights one by one until only a shadow remained. At the Winter Palace, Nicholas II played his en- forced role with dignity. The environment was dif- ficult, and symbolical of an opposition of moods that continued with steady aggravation until the catas- trophe of March, 1917. The old Russia and the new faced one another. To the Tsar's right, stretching all way down the hall, were the adherents of the old regime, courtiers, ministers and ex-ministers, bureau- crat members of the till then nominated, but now to be half elected, Council of the Empire, all in Court uniforms; and with them ladies of the Court in the vari-colored costumes of the old Moscow Tsardom with high beaded headdress. To the Tsar's left, fa- cing these pillars of a system of government already undermined, were the members of the Duma, gathered for the first time. The physical contrast was almost as striking as the moral. A few members from the 4 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS conservative parties came in evening dress; a few more in morning dress; but two out of three were plain, disheveled citizens from the land in peasant armiaks, or in red blouses, with trousers tucked into high, newly oiled boots, the smell of which rilled the hall. These two factions faced one another across the aisle, the courtiers making no attempt to conceal their discomfort at the presence of men some of whom had been serfs of their fathers or even of themselves ; and the new disheveled Russia of the Duma demonstratively showing its animosity, contempt and vindictiveness. When all were assembled, the Tsar entered the hall ; read the document convoking the new legislature ; and then with the Dowager Empress on his right arm, and the young Empress on his left, walked down the aisle between the old Russia and the new, and disappeared. He read in a slow and agreeable voice, that had no suggestion of Petrograd, and recalled rather a Mos- cow droschky driver's. He looked well, and ex- tremely young; was self-possessed; and did not show the chagrin he felt. But the five hundred Duma mem- bers were in no mood for reconciliation. They listened glumly and dourly, many demonstratively turning away their heads, and when the reading ended they remained grimly silent. The representatives of old Russia, with whom cheering is not etiquette, also kept silence and waited, and there was an uncom- fortable pause. At last the courtiers broke into a loud cheer; and some Duma members reactionaries or THE LAST ROMANOFF 5 conservatives joined them. But the Duma as a whole kept to the silence of protest. No ruler was ever less an object of demonstrations even of demonstrations of hatred than Nicholas II. That, too, was the impression gained when he came to Tsarskoe Selo, a prisoner on the 2Oth March, 1917. Two days earlier, the Provisional Government of Prince George Lvoff, which at first believed that the Tsar, abandoned by his nearest adherents, might be left in ignominious liberty, gave way to pressure from the Petrograd Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, which from the first claimed a condominium in political affairs; and issued a decree with the curt wording, "Deprive of his liberty the former Emperor." When this decree was issued, four members of the Duma, MM. Bublikoff, Gribunin, Vershinin and Kalinin left for Moghileff, the army headquarters, or "Stavka," to arrest the deposed Tsar, transfer him into the custody of the Revolution's troops at Tsarskoe Selo, and so bring the first stage of the Revolution, the overthrowal and making in- nocuous of the Romanoff dynasty, to an end. On this morning just arrived from Stockholm I witnessed for the first time the unexampled reversal of ranks and conditions which in a week's time the Revolution had brought about in the most despotic and class-crystallized country of Europe. In front of me, in a first-class compartment of the Tsarskoe Selo train, sat a very slovenly private soldier side by side with a guards officer of the Pavlovsk regiment a 6 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS regiment known as "the snub-noses" because the mad Tsar Paul after whom it was named had a defective nose. The officer had the refined, studious and some- what effeminate features that one sees in Russia's upper class. The soldier lolled against him in com- radely way, and sometimes rubbing the window- pane with a dirty thumb, sometimes staring at a news- paper which he probably could not read made ribald remarks, which the officer answered politely and with signs of fear. When the officer answered in French a question put by me, the soldier threw down his news- paper, and said to him impertinently, "Speak your own language. This is no place for German spies." And he listened humbly while the soldier talked about "the dog Tsar," "the former Tsaritsa, Madame Ras- putin," and the prospects of the "new order," an ex- pression then used everywhere to comprehend the political and social changes made by the Revolution. A week before, Tsarskoe Selo was a microcosm of autocratic Russia; now it was a microcosm of the Revolution. It is a small and very neat wooden town, with a great many outlying palaces and summer villas, and level roads of a kind seen nowhere else in neglected Russia. Nicholas II had made it his chief place of abode since January, 1905, when shots fired at him across the Neva frightened him away from the Winter Palace in Petrograd. He lived not in the old Grand Alexandrovsk Palace, which lies near the center of the town with no surrounding park; but in the more easily protected New Alexandrovsk Palace, THE LAST ROMANOFF .7 a large yellow Corinthian building, with white pillars and capitals, in the middle of a vast railed park. In the old days this palace was inaccessible. Every- where about were palace guards, palace policemen, soldiers of the Asiatic convoy, town police, and mem- bers of the Okhrana, the organization whose plots and counter-plots, equally efficient in trapping Socialist schoolgirls and murdering Grand Dukes, dominated Russia's underground political life. All these had disappeared. At the main railroad station were crowds of untidy revolutionary soldiers, all with red badges ; the commandant of the station was a corporal ; the station building was already defiled by what came to be known as "revolutionary dirt"; and the portraits of Nicholas II and his father Alexander III lay in tatters in a rubbish heap. The town was entirely under the control of a Revolutionary Committee which sat in the Rathaus under chairmanship of a colonel named Kobuilinsky, who with his officer assistants shared power with an equal number of soldier delegates. The soldiers were already giving trouble. In a room below, they held an excited meet- ing; and sent imperative demands to the Committees sitting upstairs. Some wanted to take immediate vengeance upon particular friends of the Tsar who had been thrown into jail; and two soldiers actually rushed out, and declared they would execute vengeance themselves. Next to the Rathaus is the large building of the Nicholas Lyceum; and here many Autocratists were 8 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS imprisoned. In one room on the first floor I found seventy persons, mostly in civilian dress, with a few in military or police uniforms. These captives were charged with being spies or agents provocateurs of the Tsardom. They were in an indescribably dirty, neglected and forlorn condition, and had no beds, change of linen or food. Some lay exhausted in corners, and others stood or crouched because there was no room to lie down. There were officers in uniform without shoulder-straps, badges, or swords, who had been arrested because they bore German names, and were accused without any evidence of forwarding the Tsaritsa's treasonable letters to Berlin. On the floor above was a room equally crowded; and beside it in a separate room was one of the Revolu- tion's best known victims. This was the Tsar's secretary Prince Putiatin, popularly considered one of the most influential and vicious courtiers. When a deputation of Zemstvo leaders under M. Schipoff visited the Tsar in 1905 in order to warn him of the ruin he was bringing on his country, they found Putiatin in the reception room, and were made furious by the conduct of the Tsar, who turned to his favorite and in a stage whisper asked him what reply he should give. Now Putiatin stood in a showy uniform tunic, with civilian trousers and bedroom slippers, very pale and terrified, trying to wash his hands without soap. Despite his plight, he retained his dignity; paid no attention to the jeers of the soldiers; and said to me in French, "If you will excuse me I prefer not to THE LAST ROMANOFF 9 talk. I prefer to be left alone." In another room I found four prisoners asleep, and a fifth dead, with a gash in his forehead and blood clots in his hair. He looked like a university student. "He was killed," the soldiers explained, "because he gave insolent answers." In general, Tsarskoe Selo had seen little bloodshed. But on the way out I met more soldiers carrying a corpse; and to the reply who was the victim, got the indifferent answer, "We do not know." The arrival of the Tsar caused not the least interest to Tsarskoe Selo. Hardly a soul was in the streets. The corporal commandant of the railroad declared that the prison-train would arrive at the private station of the New Alexandrovsk Palace. The road there was also deserted. The local civilian population consisted almost exclusively of courtiers, servants and tradesmen who had lived on the Tsar's bounty, and who might be considered a hereditary Court caste. But these did not show even curiosity. A few soldiers of the "Convoy of His Imperial Majesty," who had remained tepidly faithful, though not faithful enough to fight, peered through the white park railing. The only preparations for reception were at the private railroad station. Here there were five companies of the Petrogradsky Guards Regiment, which like all other military units had immediately gone over to the Revolution, in command of the chief of the Town Committee, Kobuilinsky. This officer remained in authority at Tsarskoe Selo until Nicholas was trans- ferred to Siberia, and then accompanied him there. 10 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS At the station was a much more notable soldier, a little, dark man of Japanese type, with a sparse Tartar beard, tight yellow skin, and oblique dancing eyes. This was General Laurus Korniloff, the new Com- mandant of the Petrograd Military District, a position given him as testimony of general trust in his democratic devotion to the new regime. It was Korniloff who in the following months so firmly struggled for the restoration of discipline to the Army, who planned and fought the only victory won after the Revolution, who as Commander-in-Chief rebelled against Kerensky, and who has since been one of the mainstays of patriotic opposition to the Government of the Soviets. At half past twelve, the Tsar's train of ten coaches steamed into Alexandrovsk station. It was the famous Imperial train; and it was the last time it conveyed Nicholas II. The locomotive stopped near the middle of the platform, and half of the train remained far out of the station. Nicholas occupied a car in the middle, immediately ahead of the car carrying the Duma commissaries, his jailers. First out of his coach stepped a very tall officer in Cossack uniform, who saluted; and immediately afterwards out stepped the deposed Tsar; and replied to the salute of the officers on the platform by putting his hand to the big black busby on his head. He wore the uniform of the Kuban Cossacks, a feature of which is a long lambskin cloak, and one order, the Cross of St. George. He walked quickly and nimbly; but was en- THE LAST ROMANOFF 11 tirely impassive; spoke a few words to Kobuilinsky; and made immediately for his motor-car. After him went his adjutant Prince Dolgoroukoff, the only officer of high rank allowed to accompany him. Next appeared the four Duma members, who reported to Kobuilinsky "Our mission is now ended," meaning that the Tsar was henceforth in charge of the military of Tsarskoe Selo. With dragoons on either side and an infantry guard marching slowly behind, the Tsar's motor-car entered the palace drive, and disappeared behind a group of birches near the west wing. After this disappearance, no unofficial person caught a glimpse of Nicholas II until four months later when he was led through the streets of Tobolsk in western Siberia. Kobuilinsky later gave me details of the Tsar's progress towards captivity. He had received the four Duma members politely, expressing no surprise or anger at his impending arrest; and made only one request that his friend Admiral Niloff, then at MoghilefT, the army headquarters, should be allowed to accompany him. This request was refused. An hour earlier, Korniloff had gone to the New Alexandrovsk Palace to inform the Empress of the arrest of the whole Imperial Family ; and she, too had received the news calmly, and asked only that her intimate servants should not be sent away, and that in particular she should be allowed to keep the giant sailor Derevenko, "uncle," or male nurse, of the Tsarevitch since birth, who during the long illness 12 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS of the little heir had carried him about in his arms. Derevenko was one of the best-known Court figures of pre-revolutionary Russia. On arrival at the Palace, the Tsar was met by Count Benckendorff, Marshal of the Court, who was also a prisoner; but no member of his family had come downstairs to greet him. Four of the children were down with measles, one, the Grand Duchess Tatiana, dangerously ill; and some days before a panic had reigned among the several hundred inmates of the Palace owing to rumor that revolutionary soldiers were marching from Petrograd with the avowed design of exterminating the whole Romanoff brood. In fact, no such attempt was made. I paid several visits to Tsarskoe Selo after this. Kobuilinsky remained in command of the revolu- tionary troops; but the Tsar's immediate jailer was a certain Staff-Captain Kotzebue, a well-mannered and smart officer who spoke French and English. Kotzebue was in complete control of the Palace, and was already at work reorganizing the administration and stopping waste, an instance of which, he said, was the fact that sixty yardmen had no other work than carrying firewood to the rooms. The Tsar was guarded by three different units. The first guard was inside the Palace, a member being stationed in the Tsar's study by day, and at night outside his bed- room. In this guard were delegates from the revolu- tionary regiments at Petrograd, whom agitators had already taught to distrust the "bourgeois" Govern- THE LAST ROMANOFF 13 ment of Prince Lvoff. These resented any indulgence shown to the prisoner, and believed in the danger of his escape. A second guard was stationed in the garden between the two palace wings, in which Nicholas exercised; and the third consisted of a line of sentries posted outside the park gates. Only in the garden mentioned was the Tsar allowed to exercise. He never entered the park. When tired of trudging through the deep snow, he usually sent for a shovel, and, sometimes helped by his fellow- prisoner Benckendorff, cleared paths through the snow. During these exercise hours he was forbidden to speak any language except Russian. Kotzebue was always present; and the Tsar had further to see him three times a day. He was not allowed to use the telegraph or telephone; and received no communica- tions from outside that had not passed through the censor's hands. His letters were tested for invisible ink. On the first day was improvised a rough and ready system of examining food sent into the palace, and all things sent out; and later this examination became very strict. The Tsar was treated as an imprisoned army officer, and was addressed as polkovnik, or colonel; and always wore a colonel's uniform without decorations or sword. His jailer Kotzebue spoke of him politely as "the ex-Emperor," but to the soldiers he was "Nikolai Romanoff," and sometimes even "little Nikolai." The courtly manners of Kotzebue were a source of much comment and of resentment by the 14 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS soldiers. He proved, in fact, too courtly. About three weeks after he was appointed jailer, newspapers re- ported that he had been detected carrying communica- tions from the Empress to her friends outside, and had been put under arrest. The Revolution was be- ginning to show its uglier side; and the Palace Com- mandant, already somewhat disillusioned, had fallen under the charm of the Empress, and for no corrupt motive had gone over to her cause. This incident created a panic ; and the regimen at the Palace became severer. When the soldiers heard that the ex-Tsar was allowed wine with his dinner, they entered the Palace cellars and smashed several thousands of bot- tles. Later appeared an official report that a non- commissioned officer had been dismissed after being caught kissing the hand of the Grand Duchess Tatiana; and this trivial incident led to fresh severities. Kobuilinsky assured me that the Tsar met these trials with dignity. He ascribed this, however, not to magnanimity but to an abnormal insensibility to events. The Tsar felt nothing ; he was neither kind nor cruel; merry nor morose; he had no more sensibility than some of the lowest forms of life. "A human oyster" was the summing up of this officer, who saw him nearly every day for months. The monarch, who had continued playing tennis when told of the destruction of his fleet at Tshushima, later heard of his army's disasters in Poland, of his loss of the Throne, of the last indignities and petty persecu- tions, in the same imperturbable way. CHAPTER II "THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY" OF all attempts to express in a phrase the manifold and complex causes which led to the fall of the Romanoff dynasty, the most truthful and striking is that of the late M. Shingarieff, a Cadet Duma mem- ber and economic expert who perished at the hands of soldiers immediately after the Bolshevik Revolu- tion. "Dying from auto-intoxication," said Shin- garieff to the Duma. "From the poison produced by Autocracy itself." Nicholas II, his predecessors, his bureaucrats and his courtiers had themselves produced the solvents of disintegration. It was not so much the oppressiveness of their measures for state and personal security as the inherent rottenness and self- destructive character of these measures which caused the universal collapse. The deadliest of these poisons was the political police system. A great deal has been written of the past history of this system, from the bloodthirsty opritchina of the old Moscow Tsars, via the "Third Division" of the later Romanoffs, down to Okhrana of latest years. The Okhrana, officially the "Security Department," permeated all public and private life. is 16 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS The main features of its operations were kept fairly secret before the Revolution of 1905, but thereafter they became public through repeated exposures in the Duma, based largely upon the confessions of security agents and the revelations of Vladimir Burtseff. The Okhrana, these revelations showed, was not an in- strument of Government, not a means, but an end in itself. Not content with espionage and treason, obvious and inevitable expedients against revolu- tionary plotting and a by no means scrupulous Terror, not content even with the ordinary devices of the agent provocateur, it resorted to the wholesale organization of the very political crimes which it was expected to combat. No Terrorist assassination of importance, no revolutionary manifestation took place without the prior knowledge, help or even organization ab initio of the political police. The grandest type of okhrannik was Yevno Azeff who, as Burtseff said, "had one murder for every year of his life." Azeff, always a regularly-paid Security Department official, plotted everywhere, at home and abroad; he flourished in France, was defended in the Duma by the former Premier Stolypin, fooled a genuine revolutionary committee which inquired into his deeds when suspicion fell upon him, escaped many attempts at revolutionary vengeance, and is to-day in safety in Berlin. The murders of the Grand Duke Sergius and of the reactionary Minister of the In- terior Plehve were both deeds of Azeff. Although Azeff was an exception by the vastness of his opera- "THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY" 17 tions, he was in other respects only a typical agent of the police system which after the complete aliena- tion of the people was the only bulwark left to the Autocracy. The whole Okhrana was an organization of criminals. When Terrorism was rampant, a genuine zeal was sometimes shown in putting it down ; when Terrorism declined or was suppressed, it was systematically revived; and thereby the Okhrana justified its continued existence. Thus Autocracy was attacked by itself. The Okhrana was further active in the anti-Jewish, anti-Liberal, and mystical-re- actionary propaganda ; and it was practically an affilia- tion of the looser-organized Rasputinism, the infamies of which dealt a last blow to the Autocracy, and imme- diately precipitated the Tsar's fall. Complete revelations as to the activities of the Security Department were furnished only after the Revolution. The Okhrana building was burnt down in the first revolutionary days; and the Chief of Police, Bieletsky, was thrown into the Peter and Paul Fortress where I found him six months later. My first sight of the building was a pile of blackened, shattered walls, outside of which was a crowd of men and women, all with red badges, some of whom sang emotionally the Marseillaise, while others were busy picking charred papers out of a pile. From the viewpoint of history this pile of papers was one of the most precious relics of the vanished regime. It was the archives of the Okhrana's head office, with details of the organization of the whole state spy and 18 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS murder system, and lists of many thousands of per- sons, policemen, gendarmes, and ostensibly private individuals, men and women, employed in the vast work of provocation, treason and blood. Just such a scene had been witnessed at Yildiz Kiosk in Con- stantinople nine years before when the triumphant Young Turks seized the spy d journals of Abdul Hamid. The Russian and Turkish systems differed only in the amount of money spent and of blood taken in exchange. In the first revolutionary days many agents of the Security Department were thrown into jail, and some were killed. By a mistaken policy those who were spared were sent to the front to redeem their crimes by fighting; and these, true to their traditions, played a conscious role in demoralizing the Army. In July I was assured by the Premier, Prince Lvoff, that this was the main cause of the Galician rout. Before that the public learned more of the Okhrana record. The charred archives of Petrograd and the records of Okhrana departments in other cities, re- vealed that thousands of respected citizens who took no visible interest in politics or who even professed to be enthusiasts for reform or revolution were in government pay. In the middle-sized town of Kharkoff alone were three hundred private spies. Every political association had spies among its mem- bers. There were spies in factories and workshops, in literary and scientifical associations, and even in the self-governing institutions of town and country. "THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY" 19 The Autocracy dreaded the Press, so naturally news- papers were infested with spies, who reported to head- quarters tendencies in the editorial staffs, the author- ship of anti-governmental articles; and who, in the true Okhrana spirit, used their influence to give moderately conducted Liberal papers a revolutionary color in order to provide excuses for repression. For many months after the Revolution, a Special Commission issued periodical reports containing lists of names and facts about Okhrana organization. The lists showed that every secret police agent had at least two names, sometimes three. He had his real name, the name under which he passed among the public, and his nickname. His real name might be Ivanoff or Semenoff ; but he was officially known as "Dumpy," "Drunkard," "Frenchy," "Lively," and something else meant to describe physical or moral character- istics. Among the spies were men of all classes peasants, working men, small traders, merchants, professors, writers, lawyers and doctors. In July a terrific scandal was caused by the revelation that a rich citizen and prominent philanthropist of South Russia, was a police agent; and that he had reported monthly the political activities of prominent men. In spite of the fact that the total sum spent upon the spy department was great, the spies were not well paid. The Okhr ana's accounts show that the wage of nine-tenths of the spies was under $20 a month. For this pittance thousands of men and women prac- tised the worst forms of treason, including the 20 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS organization of murder, with the aim of sending their fellow-citizens to the gallows. The Okhrana treated its agents with distrust. It entered in its lists com- plete descriptions of the mental and moral characteris- tics of every spy in its employment. There was a biography, followed by a short characteristic of the spy's work and conduct, which in many cases stated that he ought not to be trusted, and needed watching. This was the natural result of the system of intrigue and deceit which the Okhrana practised. The police were deceived by their chosen deceivers. Men whom they absolutely relied upon, who were ostensibly giv- ing reports of the conduct of political agitators, were in reality the Government's worst enemies, and were supplying reports merely in order to deceive it, while at the same time carrying on genuine revolutionary or even Terrorist activity. Such a fraudulent spy was Poliakoff of Warsaw. Poliakoff was a member of numerous Russian and Polish Socialistic and revolu- tionary organizations; and he seemed to prove his genuineness by betraying his comrades. But corre- spondence was discovered showing that he had done his acts of treason merely in order to lull the police into security; by sacrificing a few of his comrades he had helped the Terrorist activity of others; and he had been a partner to over twenty plots for assassinations. As a result of such revelations, the Okhrana watched sharply its employees, but in spite of this it was continually being tricked. Women spies were liberally employed. Particularly "THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY" 21 was this so abroad, from where many supposed revolutionary women students sent monthly reports to the police, and kept them informed of the move- ments of Terrorists. The Commission found a report about a certain Olga Desiatsky, against whose name appeared the entry "age eighteen, is a woman of remarkable beauty and talent, which has enabled her to render very great services. May be implicitly re- lied upon." The girl Desiatsky pursued her trade with extraordinary success until she made a false step, and then she perished. She was captured at Dvinsk by Terrorists; given the choice of taking poison or being killed; and on her refusal to take the poison was executed in a barbarous way. The Terrorists gagged her, bound her hands, and hanged her by driv- ing through her chin a sharp hook used for impaling carcasses of pigs and suspending her alive from the rafter of a cabin. From a psychological point of view, a more remark- able Okhrama story was that of an attractive woman of twenty-seven, who out of genuine affection for the Autocracy pursued the work of spy in Switzer- land, Germany and Austria. This woman refused to accept money she rendered enormous services to the police, but demanded no return except that her five-year-old son should be cared for if she fell a victim to Terrorist vengeance. Her letters to the police were an extraordinary mixture of bloodthirsty cruelty she betrayed without a qualm dozens of men and women and maternal affection. They refer to 22 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS her son as "my adored little Alexis" and enlarge with passion upon his beauty and his progress in study and play. This woman, whom the Okhrana report described as the best of all spies ever employed abroad, disappeared mysteriously, and her "adorable little son" was deposited at the head office of the Okhrana with a card announcing who he was. The Minister of the Interior ordered that the boy be provided for; but the greatest of women spies was never heard of again. The Okhrana had local departments at Moscow, at Kharkoff, at Odessa and in Siberia and Central Asia; also at Warsaw. All these departments were cor- ruptly administered, they quarreled fiercely, and com- peted with one another in order to gain special credit, which meant special money, from the Ministry of the Interior. They even went so far as to foil one an- other's plots and counter-plots. The chief of the Kharkoff Okhrana, a retired gendarme officer, when transferred to a subordinate position in Petrograd as result of his embezzlements, did everything to spoil the plans of his former colleagues. When the Kharkoff reports came into his hands, he abstracted and destroyed some, with the result that several political plots were never revealed to the head authori- ties. He later sent an agent to Kharkoff to get up a fake plot under conditions which prevented the local spy office from discovering it. The plot was a sham ; but owing to the intrusion of genuine Terrorists, it ended in an actual assassination. For their failure the "THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY" 23 local secret agents were reprimanded and reduced in rank; and the dishonest colleague got his revenge. In its range Nicholas IFs spy organization was truly oriental. Nobody was exempt. Just as the Turkish Sultans spied upon their brothers and cousins, regarding them as their worst enemies, so the Romanoff Tsars spied upon their kinsmen, Grand Dukes, courtiers and ministers. Small spies spied on great spies. The notorious Ratchkovsky, once head of the secret police in Paris and an industrious organizer of Terrorist plots abroad, complained that the Ministry of the Interior had set special agents to watch his movements. When the Tsar in a fit of panic appointed a reforming Minister of the Interior (the late Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky) the adherents of a former reactionary minister formed a little council of spies to watch the new minister, and collect material for the accusation that he was in touch with reformers. The Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Paul, declared that he himself was spied on after the murder of the notorious Rasputin. The Grand Duke's son Dmitri was associated in this murder with the Tsar's relative by marriage Prince Yousoupoff, though he denied that he himself fired the shot. When the Grand Duke Paul, in a dramatic meeting at Tsarskoe Selo, warned the Tsar of the impending revolution, Nicholas listened silently and made no objections; but from that day on until the Revolution the Grand Duke's villa was watched by Okhrana agents. The Grand Duke Michael, the historian, who was many years 24 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS ago exiled to the Caucasus for supposed Liberal lean- ings, was surrounded by spies, who reported on his most innocent movements. As many as five hundred words were devoted to describing how after break- fast he went for a walk; how he spoke to a moun- taineer on the road; and how he carried on with Petrograd "a correspondence which is supposed to be with his tailor, but which certainly ought to be watched." The Grand Duke's letters were regularly opened; his servants were bribed; and periodical re- ports upon his opinions, almost entirely fabrications, were presented to Nicholas II himself. Before the Revolution, foreigners were told out of a servile sense of propriety towards royalty that the Tsar was merely a passive agent in the hands of his police, and that he had no idea of what was going on. Discoveries made after the Revolution prove this to have been untrue. The Tsar did not go so far as Abdul Hamid, who examined his djournals every day, and was his own Okhrana; but he was well aware of the crimes of the Security Department. This was proved by the discovery at Tsarskoe Selo of reports giving childish information about the move- ments of suspected Liberals. One document un- earthed was an appeal to the Tsar from the Ministry of the Interior to sanction the pension claimed by a superannuated spy, who had rendered enormous services (as was proved by the fact that he had brought several persons to the gallows). On this re- port Nicholas had written in his own handwriting, "THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY" 25 "I entirely approve." The fact is, the Tsar was as well informed about the general principles of the Security Department's campaign of assassination as he was of the parallel assassination campaign of the Black Hundreds, for which he repeatedly showed approval by words and deeds. The Duma debates were no secret. Both assassination campaigns were logical outcomes of the doctrine of Tsarkoe Selo that nothing mattered save the comfort and security of the reigning House. The measures taken for the Tsar's immediate com- fort and security were not the work of the Okhrana, except when the Imperial Family was traveling, but of an independent organization, the palace police. Of these I saw something during a second visit paid to Tsarskoe Selo three days after the Tsar's return in captivity. The Tsaritsa, according to Petrograd re- port, had been caught smuggling out letters by an underground gallery; and a new, more severe Palace Commandant had been appointed. To investigate these stories, and partly with the object of visiting Rasputin's grave, I returned to Tsarskoe Selo in com- pany of a member of the British Legation at Stock- holm. Tsarskoe Selo had settled down, and was deader even than on the day of the Tsar's arrival ; and as the headquarters of the Revolutionary Committee was vacant we decided to visit first the grave. The palace park was vacant. Across the deep snow, be- hind the weedy birches and willows, rose the vast yellow and white Corinthian building which was now 26 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS a prison; but though this was Nicholas' exercise hour nothing of him or his watchers appeared in the garden; and outside, as on the day of arrival, were only uncouth sentries with fixed bayonets, in shaggy sheepskin coats. Rasputin's grave lies far from Tsarskoe Selo town, just outside the park, and not far from the Tsar's private railroad station. My companion and I trudged through the deep snow, being stopped once by soldiers at the "kitchen entrance," the only one of several entrances open, which was now headquarters of the palace revolutionary guard. Further on we were again stopped, this time at the unpicturesque red buildings known as "the Tsar's model farm." On the ground that our passports did not bear the stamp of the Provisional Government a stamp which in fact did not exist the sentries put us politely under arrest ; and told us that we must see the Commandant, who I believed was the Colonel Kobuilinsky who was in charge of the town. Instead, we were brought back to the "kitchen entrance" and from there into or rather underneath the palace. The early imprisonment of the Tsar, like his later treatment and death, and indeed like his personality, was entirely without dignity or romance. Nothing of tragedy was to be seen, but only a good dose of truly Russian indifference, negligence and levity. This was the note struck by Tsarskoe Selo palace. After passing through the main gateway of the "kitchen entrance" we entered a small, untidy court- "THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY" 27 yard with walls very badly painted, innumerable pigeons and high heaps of firewood. After the sentry was told who we were, we passed into a second court- yard, also crowded with pigeons and littered with fire- wood; and from there we went into a dark hall in which were a dozen lounging soldiers of a Tirailleur regiment under a very untidy non-commissioned officer, who was scribbling in the light of a red ikon lamp. On both sides of the hall rise short flights of steps joined by a gallery at the top. Here we had fresh proof of the indifference with which the Romanoff's connections regarded their fall. Leaning over the rail, and joking with the slovenly revolu- tionary soldiers underneath were half a dozen foot- men in the handsome blue uniforms with black-eagled gold braid lapels worn by the lackeys of the Court. The subject of wit was "the little man" the deposed Tsar. Behind the laughing servants, between the tops of two side staircases, we saw a dim tunnel apparently the beginning of a gallery running parallel to the palace front in the direction of the left wing where the Tsar was imprisoned. The non-commissioned officer under the red lamp telephoned to somewhere reporting the arrival of "two French gentlemen" who had been asking indiscreet questions about the Tsar; and a moment later we were inside the gallery on the way to the officer of the day. Much sensationalism has been written of the physical precautions taken to guard Romanoff Tsars. I believe that my companion and I are the only out- 28 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS siders who ever had even an incomplete glimpse of these precautions. The Tsarskoe Selo gallery, prob- ably originally built for the sake of dryness, is part of the system. It is about eight feet high, is painted a dull gray color, and is lighted at the beginning from skylights, and farther on where it runs under the palace proper (the "kitchen entrance" is a detached complex of buildings) by electricity. About every dozen yards it is intersected by transverse galleries of the same kind. Before we turned down one of these galleries to the room of the officer of the day we passed four or five transverse galleries. Along the walls of all run wires and pipes, some of which are probably for electricity and water; but there are too many for such uses. Below the wires is a con- tinuous box of brown wood, with little glass windows showing brass knobs every dozen feet. There are a few doors, some bound with iron, all closed, and all with the exception of two, which are not iron- bound, without any inscription. One of these two is marked "The Servants of the Most August Children," and the other "Guard of the Day." On most of the doors are boxes which look as if they contained telephone apparatus. As there could be no use for so many telephones, I asked one of our soldiers whether these boxes were part of the security mechanism, and got the answer "Exactly so !" but the soldier's tone implied that he knew nothing. Later I learned that the continuous box, some of the wires and all the telephone-like apparatus were indeed links "THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY" 29 in the system of protection. Exactly how they were used I never found out ; but an officer assured me that the greater part of the apparatus had been set up merely in order to impress the Tsars with the laudable diligence of their protectors. Later the Palace Com- mandant told me the same story. "Shortly before the Revolution," he said, "Nicholas, frightened for his safety, himself entered the vaults and examined everything personally. As he did not understand technical matters he was profoundly impressed by scores of wires which had no functions; and he went away in the conviction that the continuous wooden box and the mysterious door-boxes contributed potently to his safety." This was an analogue of the Okhrana spy system, which was also inverted camouflage an excuse to put money into the hands of officials, and a means for impressing the Imperial Family with the zeal and efficiency of the Okhr ana's agents. Later, when the revolutionary soldiers broke discipline and entered the palace in order to destroy wines which they believed were being preserved for the Tsar's use, it was their favorite sport to try and make the mysterious signals work. A description of a visit paid on the same day to Rasputin's grave fits logically into a chapter on the poisons of the Autocracy. The grave lies about a hundred yards to the right of the road which runs round the palace park; and before reaching it one has to cross a plain intersected by a deep ravine, which was then covered in deep snow. The site, at least 30 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS in winter, is desolate and forbidding. Soldiers whom we met on the way assured us that the Tsaritsa a day before had secretly left the palace, carrying a wreath of flowers; and that she had then first dis- covered what everyone else knew that the revolu- tionaries had disinterred the body, and scattered the ashes to the winds of heaven. The Palace Com- mandant assured me that the Tsaritsa never left the palace after the Tsar's arrival as prisoner; and as she had been ill with measles this account is probably correct. But it is true that before the Revolution the Tsaritsa prayed daily at the grave, and that the initiative in building a chapel around it was hers. The chapel was never finished. In its present state when seen from a distance it could not easily be dis- tinguished from a half-built villa. The rough log walls are about breast-high, showing the lower half of window-openings. These windows open into half a dozen tiny chapels or cells for worshipers and devotees; and inside is a walled space, the size of an average dwelling room, in a corner of which Rasputin was buried. No civilians were in sight the only civilian met on the way, an old woman, answered my question about the location of the grave with "How could you wish to see such an abomination?" but the chapel was full of soldiers who shouted, sang, and made ribald remarks about the Romanoffs. On the log walls are indecent sketches and unrepeatable jokes. There is a rude drawing of the Tsaritsa being scrubbed in her bath by the mystic; and over the "THE POISON OF AUTOCRACY" 31 vacant grave is the legend "Here lies Grishka (nasty Gregory) Rasputin, shame of the House of Romanoff, and shame of the Orthodox Church." At the bottom of the grave squatted a very ugly little Siberian soldier who when he saw spectators began to execute the dance known as the trepak; and other soldiers standing around began to dance also and spit into the grave. The desecration of the grave was typical of the attitude of revolutionary Russia towards the Imperial Family and the mystic Siberian adventurer who played such a truly oriental role in the Empire's down- fall. The educated classes of Petrograd showed no more moderation than the ignorant soldiers in their execration of both. Newspapers were daily publish- ing articles and feuilletons, mostly impudent inven- tions, describing Court scandals; and picture theaters were producing "The Nightly Orgies of Rasputin," heroines of which were the unfortunate Empress and her confidante, Madame Vuirubova. The long-sup- pressed liberty of speech had come with a vengeance and taken the inevitable forms. The poison of the Autocracy, in fact, communicated itself to the people; and its effects are to-day appearing in a new form in the license, the espionage on "counter-revolu- tionaries" and the reign of terror parodies rather than parallels of the Romanoff system of the Bol- shevik Soviets. CHAPTER III WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES THE decay of the Revolution into disorder and anarchy began very much sooner after the deposition of the Tsar than foreigners usually believe. It began almost immediately; and it was only the brave front kept up at Petrograd and the emphatic announcements that Russia's Army would continue to fight that had the effect of blinding observers in Ally countries. Observers on the spot who were experienced in Rus- sian affairs feared a collapse from the first. The elements of disintegration were too many and too strong. They came from the most opposite sides. Potent as evil forces, as I stated in the preceding chapter, were the unemployed spies, informers and agents provocateurs of the vanished regime. But even more potent was the opposite class of personally honest and politically sincere men and women of the extreme left whose slogan was: Better no Revolution at all than a non-Socialist Revolution. Unconsciously the two classes collaborated: the bloodstained, mer- cenary wretches of the dispersed Okhrana, who thirsted to see the lavish old order restored, and mean- 32 WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES 33 time lived on German pay; and the Bolsheviks, who preferred the old order to any revolutionary political or economical system that fell short of their extreme demands. Nearly all the chiefs of the extremist movement were returned exiles. Trotsky from New York; Lenine from Switzerland via Germany; Tokoi, the Finnish Socialist dictator from Colorado, were types among leaders. But in the rank and file of Bolshevism were also many reimported Russians from America, France, Switzerland and Scandinavia. And the rest of the rank and file, in the days before the Army went over wholesale to Bolshevism, was largely com- posed of political exiles back from Siberia. The liberation of the Siberian exiles is therefore an essen- tial part of the tragedy of the Revolution; and as the only foreigner who went East specially to witness the release I find it necessary to give the facts in full. I started on this expedition late in March, traveling by the Siberian Express with the intention of going first to Ekaterinburg, the Ural mining center, where the ex-Tsar w r as later imprisoned and murdered, and next to Tiumen, the first important town in West Siberia in which would congregate exiles from the province of Tobolsk. In the train were a Duma mem- ber, M. Rozanoff, and two members of the Council of the Empire, all traveling as Commissaries of the new Provisional Government with the duty of inter- preting the Revolution to remote and backward populations in the eastern provinces in preparation for 34 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS the Constituent Assembly. Like most Russians, the Commissaries predicted that with the Tsardom abolished the country would make speedy progress towards reconstruction, and emerge triumphantly from the war. I doubted this faith. The Autocracy, I knew, had thoroughly demoralized the people ; in the customary phrase, Russians were "not fit for free- dom/' which does not mean that the miserable despotism of the Tsars was fit for them, but only that misgovernment had left certain undesirable traces on the people, and that this would retard reconstruc- tion. Not understanding this, and quite rightly rea- soning that the Tsardom was the source of all past misfortunes, Russians regarded their later misfor- tunes as surprising and lamentable. Lamentable they were, but not surprising. The immediate success of the Revolution the speedy consolidation of the new liberties side by side with order would have been surprising, so surprising indeed as to cast doubt on the legend of the all-corrupting badness of the Tsardom. The Siberian Express showed the first symptoms of revolutionary disorder. Disbanded soldiers, who already in Petrograd had begun to occupy without payment the street-cars and the best theater seats, traveled without regard to class in the overcrowded trains. Lying side by side with, and even on top of one another, they slept in the corridors and lavatories. The railroad stations were crowded with soldiers clamoring for food and transport. At WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES 35 Petrograd food conditions had been threatening; but as we moved east they became considerably better white bread, which never appeared in the capital, was sold at the stations of Vologda and Viatka; and although the prices were high, that was less the result of scarcity than of the continuous fall in the value of the paper rouble. At this stage of the Revolution the soldiers were still behaving politely; but they already looked upon themselves as revolutionary authorities; and their stereotyped reply to protests against their crowding into the already-crowded cars was: "I am going to shed my blood, but you are a slacker." This answer I even received from a deserter who was flying from the front to his home in Siberia. In Ekaterinburg I found a hundred thousand soldiers, a number almost equal to the civilian popula- tion. A quarter of these were deserters. The town was also crowded with Austrian soldier prisoners, who by their smartness contrasted sharply with the slovenly Russians. These prisoners were having a good time; their relations with the inhabitants were good; and thanks to their superior technical training and greater general adaptability they rendered con- siderable services, and were much more welcome than the disorderly native soldiers. In general, disorder was much in evidence in Ekaterinburg; and it showed itself in the treatment of the political exiles. Already some thousands had passed through the town; many thousands more were on the way; and telegrams had been received from Petrograd begging East-Russians 36 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS and Siberians to give the exiles a reception expressive of the gratitude and veneration of the liberated nation. And indeed in Ekaterinburg there was an imposing Committee of Reception, the heads of which were a lawyer and the wife of a railroad official; and there was gratitude and enthusiasm. But with the excep- tion of cheering and speech-making, the city's recep- tion of the martyrs of freedom was meager in the extreme. The exile trains were overcrowded with cold, hungry and miserable men and women, and even girls; and the sufferers had been from ten days to a fortnight in the trains after sledging for days and nights through the Arctic snows. But Ekaterinburg considered it had done its duty when it decorated the station and posted acclamatory notices; and a party of exiles who were turned out of their car in biting weather could not even find an official who would say whither they were to be sent and where they could spend the night. In Ekaterinburg I met my first exiles. This was a trainload of about a hundred and fifty persons, all crowded into two very uncomfortable third-class cars. They had been nine days on the road from Irkutsk in East Siberia. The overcrowding was so great that many lay on the floor, and on the bare board beds meant for one person there were always two. There was no ventilation, and the stench was insupportable. The exiles were mostly exhausted or ill ; and they com- plained that although the newspapers were full of articles glorifying them as heroes and martyrs noth- WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES 31 ing had been clone for their comfort. The only assistance given was free transport; and though some towns en route arranged banquets none had thought of providing food for the journey. The exiles belonged predominantly to the class of petty tradesfolk and artisans. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, all classes had participated in opposition to the Autocracy; but the backbone of active Revolu- tionism was the superior workingman and the small tradesman the micstchanin who filled the gap between the peasant and the educated "Intelli- gentsiya." About half the exiles were Jewish. About one in ten was a girl. Some from remote parts wore sheepskin or wolfskin garments; but most were in mixed peasant and city clothing. All were neglected and dirty; and none had baggage other than bundles of ragged clothing. The dim cars with their thick atmosphere resembled Asiatic pest-houses; and the resemblance was a real one, for the exiles had come from a country of typhus, scurvy and small-pox. This I learned to my cost, for after returning to Petrograd I fell ill with small-pox, and spent a month in a military clinic in the Vyborg suburb. The news of the Revolution was received by the Siberian bureaucracy with terror. Popular vengeance was feared. Most of the officials, however, were not honestly devoted to the Autocracy ; as a rule they had no political tenets of any kind; but mechanically fulfilled their duties for salary; and had no reason and indeed no means for resisting the local spread 38 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS of the Petrograd revolt. That the lower bureaucracy was not devoted to the Tsardom might be judged from the fact that before the Revolution, the mass of Petrograd officials voted for the Constitutional Democratic Party. When news of the Revolution reached Siberia, the police did not resist; some police- men even anticipated the mob in releasing prisoners. But in most towns the officials and jailers were violently dispossessed before they could proclaim their attitude; and the exiles and prisoners were at once set free. Less speed was shown in supplying them with money and necessaries. A month after the Revolution only a fraction of the exiles had started for home; and ten thousand, I learned, were waiting for money, clothes and railroad accommodation at three stations east of Lake Baikal. Very little harm was done to the officials and police. The chief hatred was felt for the Okhrana and for the gendarmery which conducted all political processes. At Tobolsk, the oldest of exile centers, where Nicholas II was imprisoned after his removal from Tsarskoe Selo, a few bureaucrats were killed; and at Krasnoyarsk, the Empire's reddest town, famous for its "republic" in I 95 excited demonstrations were followed by murder and by the flogging to death of a particularly detested policeman. Such violence was exceptional. Feeling as a rule vented itself in rhetorical excesses, leaving old foes in peace, and most men were willing to accept the officials' sincere or insincere espousal of the Revolution's cause. WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES 39 In Ekaterinburg's very dirty and very gorgeous American Hotel, a typical Russian provincial hotel started upon most modern principles and allowed at once to lapse into utter Asiatic barbarism, I found two exiles. One was a medical student who had spent four years in Eastern Siberia. He had been falsely accused of conspiring against the Prefect of Moscow. After acquittal by a court he was rearrested, and sent by administrative order to the Narim exile settlement in North Siberia. He escaped, and had traveled over a thousand miles before he was caught. In a second flight attempt, he shot a village guard, and for this he was condemned to lifelong katorga, the severest form of penitentiary punishment. When news of the Revolution reached his town, a hundred and fifty politicals commandeered all sledges, and started across the three feet deep snow. Among them were a dozen women and children. Many perished before the train of sledges reached the railroad. The student arrived in such exhaustion that he had to be carried to bed. He reported that the first railroad town reached was, like Ekaterinburg, wild with en- thusiasm ; there were flags, banquets and speeches ; but when the exiles asked for warm clothing they were told that the help organization was not yet complete; and they shivered for days in unheated rooms. The other exile's story was more dramatic. Some weeks before the Revolution he fled from a partic- ularly cold and remote settlement on the Lena. He was well equipped; and had a forged passport of a 40 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS kind that formerly was manufactured in large num- bers by a Jewish corporation of Odessa. In spite of his specious passport he feared to enter a railroad town; and he spent many nights in the Siberian cold with no better shelter than a snow-hut. At last, ex- haustion and hunger convinced him that he must face the risk. He chose his town, entered the outskirts, climbed a fence, and secreted himself in a toolshed, and fell asleep. He was awakened by a terrific uproar and the sound of firing. The cause he could not guess. In the morning he rang the bell of a house. Terrified by his wild and haggard appearance, the servant ran away ; and the exile walked into a dining- room where he found a young girl at breakfast. He threw himself on his knees, and exclaimed, "I am an escaped exile. Help me to get away!" The girl rose, and said with a laugh, "There are no more exiles. You are free." The exile exclaimed, "What do you mean? You are making fun of me!" "I am not making fun," answered the girl. "There are no more exiles. Petrograd is in the hands of the Revolution. In our town, there are fifty other exiles; and they are all free." The exile was brought to the City Hall, whence had come the uproar of the preceding night; and with better luck than most of his fellow exiles, he was given warm clothing, money and food for the whole journey to Europe. The city of Tiumen was thronged with released exiles, some from Tobolsk, some from East Siberia, the latter having been detrained against their will, but WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES 41 not told where they were to go. Here I met the most interesting exile yet released. In a crowd of typical agitators, men and women, undersized, unwashed and largely Jewish, stood a yery tall, well-dressed man with a fresh complexion, clear blue eyes, and an Im- perial beard that made him resemble an old-time Frenchman. Confident that from such an obvious member of the "Intelligentsiya" I should get informa- tion about the exiles' movements, I asked him who he was. He took off his hat, made a comic bow, and answered, "I am Michael Anuikhin, Terrorist assassin, executioner of General Kurloff, and katorzhnik (convict slave)." I remembered this murder well. Kurloff, a kinsman of a particularly despotic Governor of Minsk of the same name, was military commandant of the construction shops of the Warsaw Railroad. During a strike, he kidnaped four hundred employees, and planned to send them without trial to Siberia. In revenge for this, the good- looking, debonair gentleman before me slaughtered him in a particularly brutal way, which he now, stand- ing in a group of admiring exiles, described with great composure. The main point of the story was Anuikhin's adroitness in taking advantage for murder of the brutal KurlofFs passion for wayside flowers. Following the practise of the Autocracy, which, except during the period of Premier Stolypin's Field Courts-Martial, seldom executed political criminals. Anuikhin was sentenced to katorga for life. For a year he was dragged from one European prison to RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS another, after which he was sent to the Alexandrovsk convict jail in East Siberia. This prison contained twelve thousand ordinary criminals and five hundred politicals; and there Anuikhin spent the next ten years. As result of his great strength and of the fears of officials in European Russia he early got a bad name. When ordered by a frightened governor to put up his hands, he obeyed so quickly that he was accused of an attempt to strike out; and he was listed as dangerous. He was flogged repeatedly; and in Siberia for five years he was manacled. Always he had chains upon wrists and ankles; when at work he was chained to a wheelbarrow; and at night he was chained to the wall of his cell. This was the rule with convicts during the first "punitive" period, which preceded the "probation" period and several other periods, each with mitigations of treatment, end- ing in release "on settlement." The curse of the Alexandrovsk prison during Anuikhin' s stay was the Deputy Governor. When the Governor was present, things went well; there was even a prison theater which was shown with pride to foreigners, who went home and reported on the beauty and humanity of Siberia's prison administration. But when the Governor a frivolous old man who could not do without holidays departed, his deputy with no other aim than his own amusement ordered wholesale flogging of prisoners, and as a rule Anuikhin was the first victim. Not long before the Revolution there was a revolt, in which a dozen convicts were killed WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES 43 and wounded, and two of the guards were strangled. When news of the Revolution arrived, the Deputy Governor, bolder than most local officials, determined to celebrate the event by giving certain convicts a special flogging, stating cynically that it would fit them for liberty; and he was only prevented doing this by the arrival of the Revolution's liberating troops. Some of the other exiles had had remarkable ad- ventures; and some told of events which they did not claim to have witnessed, and which sounded more romantic than true. The most picturesque tale came from a Social-Revolutionary "expropriator" (robber for political aims) Popoff, just escaped from Tobolsk jail. When the revolutionary troops began the work of release, he and a dozen other men await- ing transportation to a more remote prison were in chains. The prison armorer, fearing popular vengeance, fled, and no one was found who could remove the chains quickly. Meantime citizens had stormed the Governor's palace the gloomy barracks in which later lived Nicholas II and had arranged a banquet at which the guests of honor were to be the released political prisoners. Who would remove the chains? Blacksmiths were sought for in vain; amateurs with files volunteered; but the labor was great ; and the banquet was delayed. The entertainers had already long been seated when preceded by musicians and covered with red flags into the hall marched the prisoners still in chains. And the banquet 44 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS proceeded with the clang of the captives' manacles mingling with the din of knives and forks, the ring of glasses and the impassioned eloquence of the revolutionary guests. At Tiumen I met a young and attractive girl who had been in exile since the age of sixteen. As a senior student at the gymnasium of Kursk in European Russia, she had led a school organization directed against the authorities; and also, as was the rule, against parental authority. Her room was searched, and the usual "revolutionary" documents were found. With a carload of thieves and mur- deresses she was sent to Siberia, and cut off from all communication with her kin folk. She lived four years in the exile settlement of Narim. There she fell in love with a consumptive student; and on his dying tried to kill herself. A police officer sent to examine into her case took her as governess for his children; but he made love to her in such an odious way that she again attempted suicide, this time with rat poison. The policeman beat her ferociously; and she resolved to kill him. She took his gun during his absence and posted herself at a window, awaiting his return. But the policeman was brought back already dead as result of a town quarrel. His widow gave the girl money, and sent her to Tchita, then the easiest place for procuring a false passport ; and while she was there the Revolution broke out. She wit- nessed sanguinary scenes. The most tyrannical policemen and gendarmes fled from the revolutionary WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES 45 mob; but a posse pursued them. Women went out to see the impending massacre; and they took with them the exile girl. They reached the scene as the mob was setting fire to a wooden house in which the fugitives had taken refuge. The policemen shot furiously from their trap; the pursuers replied; and thirty men were killed and wounded before the house went up in flames, burning the survivors to death. This young woman had the makings of a Bolshevik of extreme type. She assured me that the Provisional Government of Prince Lvoff (of whose activities she knew nothing whatever) was worse than the Autoc- racy because it was "sham-Liberal" and bourgeois; it must therefore be overthrown by the proletariat. "No bomb ever loaded against despots," she said, "was in such a hurry to explode as some bombs are now." In this spirit, a spirit which boded ill for the Revolution, she differed from most of the other exiles only by her greater bitterness. The exiles were mostly Social-Democrats; and many of them were Bolsheviks. Their past intense hatred of Tsarism had been transferred to the liberal and humane regime which followed. Most of the exiles expressed themselves as already profoundly discon- tented with the Revolution's course. The Revolution had indeed had only three weeks to show its quality; but the exiles were not willing to give it longer time because, they proclaimed, it was taking a course vicious in principle and therefore irremediable. They considered that the workingmen and soldiers who had 46 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS overthrown the Autocracy should have seized power from the first and realized on the spot the full program of Marxian Socialism. As that had not happened they were bound for Petrograd "to make things hot," as they threatened "for the bourgeoisie" In fact, soon after their arrival, workmen and soldiers began to parade the Nevsky Prospect with banners inscribed "Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers." The peasant exiles and the murderer Anuikhin were free from this menacing spirit. I knew before the Revolution that the peasants, though healthily anti- Tsarian in sentiment, were less spoiled than the towns- folk, by the demagogues who are the curse of Democracy; and in this exile train were a few fine peasant types, young men sent to Siberia for no worse offense than enlightening their fellow villagers. These men returned home in a spirit of conciliation. The murderer Anuikhin was of the same mind. He told me that he would support any Government that ruled in legal way on democratic lines, and would oppose extremist demands, which were certain, he predicted, to cause trouble. After comparing his words with the statements of other exiles, I came to the conclusion that a certain leaning towards murder does not neces- sarily disqualify a man from talking sense. The assassin and katorznik was a cautious, sensible man, who foresaw that the Revolution was bound to pass through severe trials, and who had resolved not to aggravate the inevitable trouble by demanding too much, and not to hamper the Liberal and progressive WITH THE SIBERIAN EXILES 47 men then in power who were doing their best for their Fatherland. Before I left Tinmen, the railroad station was im- pressively flagged in honor of the Martyrs of the Revolution; and magniloquent speeches were made. But of about two thousand exiles in the town five hundred had to spend the night in the open; and nearly all went hungry. Elsewhere in Siberia condi- tions were much the same. Later the exiles* trials were mitigated. They were not only made heroes of, but they were clothed and fed, and generally treated so well that the ordinary, unpolitical citizen who had not been a martyr of Autocracy began to regard them with envy. The inevitable happened. When the ordinary unpolitical citizen read that IvanofT, exiled to Siberia for murdering General Pavloff, had had a gift of a thousand roubles, or had married a beautiful heiress, he regretted that he too had not killed someone. So all over the country appeared fraudulent exiles, who told credulous en- thusiasts that they had committed political crimes which were committed by other men or were not com- mitted at all. For three weeks Moscow welcomed, clothed, fed and overwhelmed with gifts a handsome young exile who had murdered the commander of troops at Kazan, and paid therefor with four years in chains; and it was not until a rival appeared who claimed it was he that had murdered the commander that citizens discovered that the commander had not been murdered at all. There were other such cases; 48 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS and much of the money collected for genuine sufferers never found its way into the sufferers' pockets. In this, as in other matters, the bad organization, the credulity and the emotionalism that were destined to destroy the Revolution were in evidence from the first. CHAPTER IV THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS THE Bolshevik agitation, fanned openly by returned exiles, and secretly by adherents of the old regime, made the orderly development of the Revolution im- possible from the first. True, the nominal obstacle in the way of the Provisional Government was the Petrograd Soviet or Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, which had created an imperium in imperio, a government existing beside the Provisional Government, and claiming to control its actions; and in this Council the Bolsheviks were a minority. But minority Bolshevism was aggressive; and the moderate Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary major- ity had not the courage to back the Government in crushing it even when it resorted to disorder and crime. As a result, from the first" days of the Revolu- tion Bolshevism was a potent influence in general policy. It exercised this influence in two directions: towards the immediate realization of Marxian Social- ism without any regard for the country's political and social interests: and towards the displacement of the Provisional Government by an untried system known as Soviet Government. 49 50 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS The Soviet idea is older than the present Revolu- tion. It dates from the Revolution of 1905, when Petrograd workmen under the leadership of a certain Khrustalieff-Nossar organized a Council of Work- men's Deputies which attempted to impose its will upon Petrograd. This Council was suppressed, and its members were arrested by the Witte-Durnovo Cabinet. But the Soviet idea did not die; and when it revived in March, 1917, it took a much more effec- tive form. The new Soviets were Councils not only of Workmen's but also of Soldiers' Deputies. In the Petrograd Soviet was represented the whole local garrison ; and this gave the Soviet physical power with which to back its claim to control the Provisional Government. The first Soviets, however, were not intended to be direct organs of government. They were to keep an eye upon and to influence the Provi- sional Government. Direct government by local Soviets, linked together only by periodical inter-Soviet congresses at the capital, is a later invention. It was resorted to by the Bolsheviks ostensibly because it is democratic; but in reality because it ensured Bolshevik power. The local Soviets represent pre- dominantly the soldiers and town workmen, who are mostly Bolshevik; and they do not fairly represent the peasants who are largely Social-Revolutionary and anti-Bolshevik. The anti-Soviet Socialists Social- Revolutionaries and Menshevik Social-Democrats would always dominate a directly elected Russian THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS 51 Parliament; but a federation of Soviets, the present system, must give a large majority to the Bolsheviks. The cradle of this novel system of government is the city of Kronstadt. From the first day in June, on which Kronstadt in the name of the Soviet system defied the Provisional Government of Prince Lvoff, down to the November day when Kronstadt detach- ments helped to overthrow Kerensky, the fortress city has led in Russian affairs. To a great extent this has been a pre-eminence in evil ; and to those familiar with Kronstadt's exceptional political and racial char- acter and its recent history this pre-eminence causes no surprise. Though Kronstadt is probably the most famous fortress in the world, few Americans have clear knowledge of what it is. The one generally known fact is that it is the impregnable sea defense of Petrograd. To Russians Kronstadt is equally well know r n as a populous city. On Kotlin Island, where lie the naval and commercial ports, the administration center and the industrial town, fortifications occupy only a small area. Most of the forts are built on two chains of islets, partly natural and partly artificial, which run from Kotlin Island to Oranienbaum, a suburb of Petrograd on the south side of the Gulf of Finland, and to near Sestroretsk, a bathing resort, on the north side. One fort Ino is built on the mainland of Finland. Kronstadt city on Kotlin Island has a population of sixty thousand persons, Russians, Finns and 52 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Esthonians, probably the most turbulent and an- archical population in the world. The agitators of Kronstadt were always known for their combination of visionary doctrinairism and rhetorical violence ; and they were partly aided and partly hampered in their revolutionary plans by a large number of professional criminals, whose real objects were murder and plunder. In this witch's cauldron was the additional element of terror that the naval and military garrisons were unreliable. During the Revolution of 1905, they revolted and murdered their officers. After that, discontented and mutinous units were persistently crowded on to the island, which at last came to be regarded as a penal settlement, or as Russians said, "a suburban Siberia." The officers treated their men with great severity. During the Revolution of March, the soldiers and sailors again revolted. Under cir- cumstances of great brutality they murdered the Commander, Admiral Viren, a hero of the Japanese War, and several other of the commanders. Other unpopular officers were thrown into jail. For a few days, anarchy prevailed; and after that there was little physical violence, but much incendiary rhetoric against the "bourgeois Government" of Prince Lvoff. On the Anchor Place, which faces the Byzantine Naval Cathedral, were daily held meetings attended by tens of thousands of workmen who threatened immediate war upon Petrograd if it did not at once realize Bolshevik Socialist notions. The soldiers and sailors threatened to send the obsolete warships the THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS 53 main fleet was at Helsingfors to bombard the city, and massacre the educated and propertied classes. For a time these threats remained unaccomplished as result of moderate Socialist influence in the local Council of Workmen's, Soldiers' and Sailors' Deputies; but at the end of May the storm broke loose. Kronstadt then practically declared itself independent of the rest of Russia. Up till then the Provisional Government was repre- sented in Kronstadt, as everywhere else, by a Com- missary. As a rule these Commissaries had no power, power being in the hands of the Councils; and the Kronstadt Commissary, though he occupied a hand- some room in the Naval Officers' Club now revolu- tionary headquarters had no functions. However, the Commissary was a symbol of the unity of Kronstadt with Russia and of the supremacy of the Provisional Government. On the ist of June Petrograd received the news that the Kronstadt Council of Deputies had dismissed the Commissary; and had declared by a large majority that in future the fortress and town would have no relations with Russia except through the Petrograd Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies. Kronstadt thus repudiated the government of Prince Lvoff. At the same time it was reported that the agitators of the Anchor Place had again threatened to send the Fleet to Petrograd to set the Bolshevik Lenine in LvofFs place this although the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd 54 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Council were still a minority, and had no claim what- ever to represent Russia. The secession of Kronstadt was the great sensation of the Revolution so far. It was foreseen that it would lead to the establishment of other republics in Great-Russian territory, and that by proving the im- potence of Petrograd it would accelerate the separatist movements in Finland and the Ukraine. But the main dread was as to the effect upon the war. The Gulf of Finland was now free from ice; and Petro- grad asked what would happen if the German Fleet took advantage of Kronstadt's disorganization, and steamed into the Neva. The Minister of Justice, Pereverseff, who had himself had bad experience of Kronstadt, having nearly been lynched as result of his attempt to liberate unjustly-held prisoners, re- assured me. He said that the Government, anticipa- ting Kronstadt's action, had taken certain measures which made the fortress unnecessary to Petrograd's defense. The Kronstadt Soviet was now seeking collabora- tion with other Soviets in order to realize its notion of general Soviet Government. But the moderate majority in the Petrograd Soviet condemned Kron- stadt's action. Kronstadt thereupon sent delegates to negotiate ; and with these returning delegates I started for Kronstadt by steamer. Chief of the delegation on board was Liubovitch, a common sailor of extraor- dinary intelligence and energy, who was formerly president of the local Council of Deputies. Liubovitch THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS 55 was in defiant mood, and he assured me that Kron- stadt would resist the Provisional Government to the last. The present chief authority on the island, he added, was Anatole Lamanoff, newly elected president of the Council of Deputies, "a young man of burning zeal, a man of ideas whom you should certainly meet." Lamanoff was the "boy dictator." The "boy dictator," now twenty-five years old, had been a student of chemistry at the Petrograd Technological High School. Early in the War he was sent on government work to Kronstadt; and there, under the guise of patriotic lectures to the working men, he had preached a crusade against the Autocracy, full of bitter innuendo and ill-concealed sarcasm. "A daring, ambitious man who aimed at being Napoleon and Rousseau in one," Lamanoff, said his admirer, combined plans of universal human betterment with great efficiency and somewhat dictatorial methods. To ensure his power he had appointed his brother, Peter Lamanoff, a boy of twenty-two, "much given to poetry," said Luibovitch, commander of all naval forces on Kronstadt Island. On arriving at Kronstadt, I made for the Naval Officers' Club, passing the villa of the former Com- mander, where Admiral Viren and his comrades were murdered in the first days of the Revolution. Violence and ideology always go together in Russia; and I was not surprised to see over the door the inscription "Headquarters for Revolutionary Ameli- oration and Ideal Progress." Kronstadt showed no 56 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS signs of damage; and the Officers' Club was intact. It is a middle-sized, two-storied building, hung inside with portraits and pictures of warships ; and decorated with porcelain and statuary given to warships during their visits to foreign waters. There is an immense vase of Limoges porcelain presented by a French port at the height of the Franco-Russian Entente, which preceded the Dual Alliance. On the top floor is a handsome theater with a small stage; and behind this is the room where sat the Executive Committee of the Council of Deputies. This Committee was then meeting, but the boy dictator was absent; and the temporary presidency was held by a gigantic sailor named YevstignayefT, who, I was told, had great in- fluence in the Fleet. At this stage of the Revolution, though the demand for peace was loud, and resentment was shown at the supposed contempt for Russia's ideals by the Allies, there was no general sentiment in favor of an ignominious peace. On hearing that a visitor from an Ally country was outside, the Executive Committee admitted me to its meeting, and even invited me to deliver an address. The thirty members of the Com- mittee were seated at both sides of a long table. All were in army or navy uniform. They kept admirable order; and greeted "our friend from the Allies" with great friendliness; and the chairman, the sailor Yevstignayeff, made a speech proclaiming for com- plete solidarity with the Allies. Up to that time the Bolsheviks had not captured Kronstadt ; the Executive THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS 57] Committee and the Council were relatively reasonable. But it was the extremist minority, always threatening violence, which really dominated affairs. On the Executive Committee sat only one officer; and he was a representative of Oranienbaum on the mainland. The Committee found it necessary to explain this, assuring me insincerely that there was no enmity between officers and men, but that the officers were "on grounds of principle" excluded from all power. The town prefect was, indeed, an officer; but he was a feeble old man who based no pretensions on his military rank, and was pityingly allowed to sign unimportant papers and do other mechanical work on condition that he wore no uniform. The officers surviving and at liberty were completely under the men's control. The new Commander of the Fortress, a colonel named Gerasimoff, though nomi- nally appointed by the Provisional Government, was appointed only after he had been elected by a vote of the Kronstadt Council of Deputies; and the Council tolerated him because he was extremely radical, or, as some said, a Socialist. Twice a week Gerasimoff had to appear before the Council of Deputies, read reports of what he had done, and secure the Council's approval. The officers were still supposed to com- mand their men in purely military and naval affairs; but their orders on such subjects were first submitted by the men to the Executive Committee, and were obeyed only if they had the Committee's sanction. The Soviet Government at Kronstadt boasted that 58 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS it was extremely democratic. No politician was allowed to be too prominent, because prominence is undemocratic. This doctrine seemed to be violated by the ambitious "boy dictator," Lamanoff; but Lamanoff was an exception. No other "prominent" persons held power; and to my question who led in parliamentary debates I got the answer "The mem- bers are all equal ; it is against Democracy for anyone to lead." In accord with this policy, the Kronstadt republic had no ministers. It was governed, subject to the Executive Committee, by departmental com- missions, all members of which had equal power and prestige. There was an Army and Navy Commission, which controlled the commanders of troops and ships ; there was a very active Food Commission, which worked so well that isolated Kronstadt was better fed than Petrograd; there was a Publications Commission which did propaganda work ; and there was a Revision Commission, controlling all expenditure, which as- sured me that it had summarily stopped the embezzle- ment of state monies. The Council of Deputies, or Parliament, consisted of three hundred and eighteen members soldiers, sailors and workmen, with three representatives of each of the local Socialist organiza- tions, and three factory women, who were very active and eloquent. All the members were Socialists, some being Social-Revolutionaries, some Menshevik Social- Democrats, some Menshevik Internationalists and some Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks numbered about a third of the whole; the strongest and most effective THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS 59 were the Social-Revolutionaries, a party of the peasants, from among whom came most of the garrison. "Parliament" sat in the theater of the Naval Club, from which had been removed all Romanoff portraits except that of Peter the Great, whom apparently even a Bolshevik might respect. The debate, during my stay, promised to be tame; it concerned, in fact, sewers, and the right of certain applewomen to sell at a particular spot; but on the latter subject a fiery speech was made by the ex- President of the Council, the soldier Liubovitch; and a woman member, an extreme Bolshevik, took up the same question, and proved with skilful analogies from the apple-trade that the two old warships which Kron- stadt used for training should be sent to bombard Petrograd and overthrow "The Cabinet of the Capitalist Ministers." The boy-dictator later received me in his room. He was a smooth-faced, soft-eyed and mild-voiced youth in student's uniform, with an extremely boyish expression that contrasted sharply with his full black beard. Lamanoff, I saw at once, took himself very seriously; but in energy and directness he seemed in- ferior to his predecessor, the soldier Liubovitch. He began by telling me that he had not sought power, which had been thrust upon him. "Why thrust?" I asked. "Because the Revolution thought that I had the general ideas which it had hitherto lacked ; and now I am going to put these ideas into force." There- (60 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS upon he gave me the reasons for Kronstadt's defiance of the Government of Petrograd. "For us," he began, "the Provisional Government no longer exists. A reunion of our island with the rest of the country is out of the question. Kronstadt's secession is not the result of any quarrel with the bourgeois Government of Prince Lvoff. It is an expression of our extreme democratic conceptions. The policy which we are carrying out, and which we hope to extend to the rest of Russia, is based on our conviction that all large territorial units of Govern- ment make for despotism. Decentralization, it fol- lows, ought to go extremely far, even if it stops short of entire independence. It cannot stop at federation or confederation. That is far too close an association for individual or local territorial freedom. Therefore we resolutely oppose and rebel against the popular plan, which is to cut Russia up into a dozen large self-governing units with a central Parliament at Petrograd. This would mean a renewal of the Tsarist despotism. The units must be very much smaller, and the central connection must be very much looser. Territory with a population of a hundred thousand is large enough to be a state unit. That was probably the population of some of the flourishing Greek states of antiquity. Kronstadt has sixty thou- sand population; and if every town or district in Russia with about that population formed its own government it would be about as big as genuine democracy could stand. However, that is not enough. THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS 6l We reject also the dominant policy of centralization in the shape of an All-Russian Parliament. The local government in every one of the thousand states into which Russia must be divided should be the existing Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, such as we have here. Russia needs no closer organization for these than a Congress at Petrograd representing all the local Councils of Deputies. It needs no more organization. That will be the future Russia." "Is that meant to be an universal doctrine applying to all the world as well as to Russia?" "It is. It is an universally applicable principle." At this Lamanoff's eyes flashed in a way that left no doubt of his sincerity ; but he proceeded to describe his own administration in a way that did not indicate excessive liberty. Opening his desk he took out a proclamation, and said "Look at that !" The proclama- tion was headed "To All Drunkards !" and it declared that any person found intoxicated within the limits of Kronstadt would be sent without trial to the front. Lamanoff boasted to me of the good order in his dominions, order which contrasted with the anarchy prevailing in such parts of the Empire as recognized the Provisional Government. This boast was justified. The city was clean; there was no disorder in the streets; and storekeepers and others whom I ques- tioned after my talk with the boy dictator agreed that they felt secure. The Anchor Place's incendiary talk was directed not so much against local property 62 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS owners as against the "Capitalist Government" of Petrograd. Kronstadt's worst offense was the condition of the prisons. Weeks before the revolt against Petrograd, newspapers had been full of tales of prison horrors alleged to be very much worse than anything known under the Autocracy. The victims were several hundred army and navy officers, soldiers, sailors and civilians who had been spared massacre in the first days of the Revolution, and had been thrown into jail. In local Bolshevik opinion these men were guilty of serious offenses; and in theory they were awaiting trial. But Kronstadt had no machinery for trying them; and the Commission of Enquiry sent down by Petrograd had only awakened suspicion in the Anchor Place extremists, who believed that everyone officially connected with the old regime should be punished. Persons who demanded a speedy trial, and meantime decent treatment, for the prisoners were denounced in violent language as "counter-revolutionaries," and were exposed to mob violence; and in some cases notably that of Pereverseff, the Minister of Justice barely escaped with their lives. In this matter the Council of Deputies claimed the authority which rightly belonged to the Ministry of Justice. The Council, on which sat many serious and responsible men, wanted to end the scandal; and it appointed its own Commission of Enquiry. The Anchor Place rose in wrath, besieged the Commission of Enquiry in the Naval Club, and threatened lynch- THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS 63 ing. So menacing was the mob at the time of the secession that no one dared to intercede publicly for the prisoners. In Petrograd terrible tales of ill-treat- ment, torture, and insult continued to circulate. In order to investigate these stories I resolved to get into the prisons myself. A day before this, my second visit, Kronstadt made a temporary surrender to the Provisional Government, which it withdrew a few days later. The "republic's" last act was to give me a permit to inspect the prisons. The legislator with whom I dealt a certain Gromoff warned me that I should see very terrible things. Gromoff was a remarkable Revolution type. He be- longed to the Mining School, and was aged eighteen; and beside him even the boy dictator looked like a graybeard. He wore a naval uniform and sailor's cap coquettishly perched far back on his head. He was one of the most influential speakers in the Council, and an active member of the executive Committee. In manner he was entirely cool, self-possessed and hard; and he talked to the admirals and generals in the jails politely but in quite as authoritative a tone as an admiral or general would have spoken to him before the Revolution. We visited first the Naval Preliminary Prison in the remote quarter known as the Petrograd Suburb. This was the chief of several jails for "enemies of the Revolution." The Preliminary Prison was a Chamber of Horrors, which could hardly have been surpassed under the Autocracy. It consisted of five 64 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS so-called "chambers," four of them halls into which were crowded many captives, while the fifth was a long row of solitary cells, formed from the case- mates of an obsolete fort. The first chamber was a smallish, vaulted, whitewashed and well lighted but damp room, containing fourteen beds and one small table but no other furniture. There were no washing utensils. The beds were a foot apart, and there was no room for the prisoners to move in. The prisoners, all officers, were in uniform; but their sword-belts, shoulder-straps and badges of rank had been torn off. They were pale, unshaven, dirty and neglected. The worst terror was the sleeping accommodation. Before the Revolution prisoners had been supplied with iron beds and mattresses, but no bedclothes; but during the Revolution the mattresses had disappeared ; and most of the prisoners had lain for three months on the iron slats. Three or four beds were covered with thin layers of very dirty straw. Some of the officers slept on their cloaks; and a few had evil- smelling rugs. In this room was Admiral Sapsai, one of the higher commanders. He looked ill; and complained that the food the ordinary soldier's payok was uneatable by men in his weak state of health; that he had been sworn at by the guards; and was sore from sleeping on the iron slats. But the chief complaint was that he, and the other two hundred persons in this prison, had been kept for three months without any charge being preferred. He declared that all the other cham- THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS 65 bers were in as bad a condition as his; and this I found was true. The fifth chamber, consisting of solitary confinement cells, was much worse. Opening into a corridor so narrow that two persons could hardly pass, were a dozen cells, each six feet square by eight high, all unventilated, windowless, and lighted only by a barred slit in the door. The dirt and stench were unbearable. When I arrived, the doors were open, and the prisoners were crowded in the corridor. Here was Admiral Kurosh, a little, yellow, nervous man who had been twice wounded in the Japanese War. His cell contained no furniture except the usual iron bed, on the slats of which he had long slept. Later, he had received from outside a rug and a pillow, but he had still no mattress. He complained bitterly both of his treatment and of his wrongful detention. He had heard that he had been vaguely charged with oppressive handling of the Kronstadt sailors; but he replied that he had taken over his command only four days before the Revolu- tion; and that the Council's own Enquiry Commission had admitted that there was nothing against him. The prisoners in the adjacent cells, among them two colonels, were in the same miserable state, the only exception being a captain of the first rank named Almquist. Almquist, who was a Swedish Finn in Russian service, had been released by the Enquiry Commission. When he was embarking for Petrograd, a raging mob rushed to the quay, and threatened a general massacre unless he was brought back to jail. 66 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS After two months of solitary confinement he was stout, healthy and rosy, and made a sharp contrast with his pale, disspirited neighbors. "I am a Finn, you forget/* he said when I expressed surprise. "I am well because I am an athlete." On returning to Petrograd, I was asked by Prince LvofF s secretary to draw up a report on the condition of the prisons, as the Government had itself been unsuccessful in getting first-hand information. This commission I fulfilled; but for weeks nothing was done for the captives; and the extremists continued to threaten murder and massacre if the bourgeois Provisional Government intervened. The conflict over this matter, and over the other extravagances of Kronstadt, continued to cause trouble to the Provisional Governments until the final catastrophe in November. The Government would have done better had it faced the risk boldly and resorted to measures of coercion. As Kronstadt is purely a naval and official city which produces no necessaries and lives on wages drawn from the capital, it could have been coerced by a stoppage of the sailors' and work- shops employees' pay. But even after the secession the garrison and workmen drew government money. The dictator Lamanoff remained in power until September, when he was succeeded by his prede- cessor the soldier Liubovitch. His gospel of little states ruled by Councils of Deputies was adopted in a few centers of population, and for months after the secession we heard of "republics" springing up THE CRADLE OF THE SOVIETS 67 in purely Russian territory. The Kronstadt soldiers and sailors meantime repeatedly threatened to come to Petrograd and overthrow the bourgeois Cabinet. A day after the first threat loud explosions were heard from the Gutuyeff Port near the mouth of the Neva; and the capital believed that Kronstadt had really come. In fact, a Kronstadt ice-breaker flying Bolshevik flags had arrived at the port shortly before the explosion; but the cause of the explosion was never revealed. Kronstadt so often threatened to march on Petrograd and so often failed that at last citizens ceased to pay attention; but the threat was fulfilled in November when Bolshevik units from the fortress helped in overthrowing the Government of Kerensky. Therewith the "boy-dictator" Lamanoff saw his dream realized; for the new Bolshevik Gov- ernment made the Soviets the chief organs of local government; and Russia's only parliament since then has been a central council of delegates from the Soviets in the provinces. The Lamanoff doctrine, however, has not been realized in so far as it concerns local independence. True, many of the Soviets are insisting on their practical independence of the Lenine- Trotzky Government; but this Government where it has power is firmly opposing such local independence as an obstacle to the realization of Socialism on homogeneous lines all over the country. CHAPTER V PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS IT is a common belief of foreigners unfamiliar with Russia's record immediately after the overthrow of the Tsardom that the Revolution's degeneration into anarchy was unrelieved by any hopeful events. This belief is natural, because the post-revolutionary anarchy obscured everything else, but it is mistaken. True, serious disorders broke out in Petrograd in April; and after that, disorder spread rapidly until it culminated in the organized disorder of the Bol- shevist regime. This aggravation of conditions was never even temporarily checked. But it was relieved by many creditable achievements and attempts. These were the reforms and initiated reforms of the first Provisional Government. In a few weeks this Government completely reconstructed the Empire's institutions in ultra-modern way. From being con- stitutionally behind Turkey, which had at least the fiction of Parliamentary Government, Russia was suddenly set on a level with, and in some important respects, such as Feminism, materially ahead of, the United States. 68 PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS 69 Had the reformed laws and administrative system been enforced, Russia would to-day be the world's most advanced country. The reasons why that was not attained make an instructive sermon as to the insignificance of laws and institutions compared with national temper and tradition. Speaking to me of this in July, Prince Lvoff remarked that the English Constitution is far less progressive than the Constitu- tion of the most backward South American republic. "But what is given to the people by a Constitution," he said, "plays a small role compared with what the people give to the Constitution." This remark ex- plains well why the new and highly enlightened paper reforms framed for revolutionary Russia have been of less than no avail. The tradition of anarchy and license inherited from the Tsardom destroyed everything A nation whose only experience of discipline was police despotism inevitably had perverted notions of the very nature of discipline. Old Russia rejected voluntary dis- cipline of every kind, scholastic, family, religious. Before the Revolution the popular conception of a good citizen was a rebel against restraints. Because the Autocracy tyrannized the schools for political aims, the schoolboy who boxed his teacher's ears was a hero , and because the Church was in servile subjection to the State, also for political ends, any moral discipline that was based on religion was looked on as super- stitious weakness. After the Revolution the country got free government on paper, but it could not so 70 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS easily get the temper and tradition of free citizenship. Convinced by experience of the Autocracy that all state compulsion was corrupt and rotten, it would tolerate no compulsion at all. Hence from the first days of the Revolution there was an orgy of what fthe English critic Arnold criticized as "doing as one likes." The country had despotic anarchy instead of despotic order; instead of one Tsar there were thou- sands of tsarlets; and instead of law-breaking bureaucrats there were law-breaking citizens. The new principle was doing as one likes, but preventing others from doing as they liked. In great affairs this system reached its climax when the carefully prepared and highly democratic Constituent Assembly, which the extreme Socialists had clamored for for eight months, was dispersed with force by the same ex- tremists because its majority was unfavorable to them. Yet steadily, vainly against this wave of national demoralization for a time stood the bulwark of legis- lative reforms rushed through by the First Provisional Government. This was the Provisional Government of Prince Lvoff, appointed in the first days of the Revolution by the Temporary Duma Committee which seized power on the actual days of Revolt. The first Provisional Government was not a coalition ministry; but was composed entirely of bourgeois, mostly from the Constitutional-Democratic and allied parties, with the single exception of Kerensky, a Socialist of the Social-Revolutionary camp. Kerensky was then a Vice-President of the all-powerful Pe- PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS 71 trograd Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies ; and his inclusion in the Cabinet promised to provide a useful link between his colleague ministers and his colleagues in the Soviet. In the middle of May, when the disorders which originally arose as protest against the Imperialistic war-policy proclaimed by the Foreign Minister Miliukoff became threatening, Prince Lvoff took into the Cabinet three more prominent Socialist leaders, Tseretelli, Skobeleff and Tchernoff, all either moderate Mensheviks or Social-Revolutionaries. This was the first of several coalition cabinets. The Bol- sheviks, whose slogan was "All power into the hands of the Councils of Deputies," stood out. The head of this Cabinet until late in July remained Prince George Lvoff, who had led in the Constitutionalist cause for many years before the Revolution, and who as chief of the Zemstvo movement, Russia's first ex- periment in local self-government, had practical quali- fications for governmental work. No man was further from the tangle of rhetoric and generalities which the Constitutional-Democrats, the moderate Socialists and, of course, the Bolsheviks regarded as the whole art of government. Had the Revolution settled down quietly under Lvoff's practical and extremely democratic rule, Russia would be spared the humiliation and anguish of to-day. For Lvoff was not only a great and tried Democrat; he was also a great patriot. Though him- self an aristocrat and a man of wealth, he was ready to go to great lengths to meet the Socialistic spirit 72 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS of the workmen, soldiers and peasants; in fact, in forming his first coalition cabinet he did go far ; but he would not consent to betray Russia in her conflict with Germany ; and, being a far better internationalist than the noisy Bolsheviks, he believed that the world- problems now awaiting settlement would be settled satisfactorily only if Russia fought with the Allies for a satisfactory peace. Even in this he showed a spirit of compromise. When compelled by the genuine pressure of public opinion, he accepted the Socialist policy: "no annexations and no indemnities." But he understood this to mean that Russia's foes also should not annex or exact indemnities. Outside Russia the period of government of Prince Lvoff has almost passed from memory; but that is only because the events most vital and exciting for Russia's allies took place after Lvoff's successor, Kerensky, took office. But from the viewpoint of revo- lutionary achievements, the Lvoff period was incom- parably more important than the Kerensky. Kerensky achieved nothing. It was under Lvoff, and not under Kerensky that the country realized its immemorial aspiration after liberty, after equality of all races and classes, and after an ordered and modern system of government. If these were only paper reforms, that was not Lvoff's fault; he fell before most of them could be put into effect; and his successor Kerensky led them slide until the ultimate authorities, Lenine and Trotsky, wiped them entirely off the slate. I first met Prince Lvoff early in April immediately PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS 73 after the United States entered the War. I saw a middle-sized, slight man with a pale face, black hair, beard and eyes, and an extremely worried expression, the result of persistent overwork. He spoke French, but no English; and our conversations were in his own language. The first serious disorders of the Revolution had not yet occurred; and he was in good spirits over Russia's future and in particular over America's intervention. He asked me to cable to New York expressing his certain conviction that the Allies, now assisted by America, would win the War ; and he added that America's participation was a pledge that all the disputed world-problems would be solved in a spirit of justice. "The war," he said, "is itself a world-problem; and it could not have been settled satisfactorily upon a purely European basis. America will help us to achieve this." Russia, he prophesied, would continue in the War till the end. The soldiers at the front, freed from the despotism of the Tsar, would do their duty consciously, and better than before. Optimism of this kind inspired Lvoff from beginning to end. When I saw him for the last time in July, a few days before his enforced resignation, he declared that conditions were moving towards the re-establishment of order, that the Army would recover and would co-operate in winning the War. The great legislative and administrative reforms of the Lvoff Cabinet were carried out without difficulty, without opposition, even without criticism. Never 74 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS before in history were such unanimous changes carried through with such apparent ease. The reason is to be sought in Russia's history in the preceding decades. Practically every Russian knew what his country wanted ; the necessary reforms, all of them based upon precedents from the more advanced countries of West Europe, had been considered and debated thoroughly; and before the first Duma met in May, 1906, the Bills which the progressive majority hoped to, but did not, pass were already drawn up. The chief liberationist aspiration was comprehended in the phrase "the Five Freedoms" Plat svobod freedom of the Person, of Speech, of Association, of Religion and of the Press. The Five Freedoms were regarded as Russia's Bill of Rights. Bills enacting such free- doms and many more Bills on detail questions of government had been introduced into the four succes- sive Dumas; but all were defeated or mutilated as result of the triumph of the Reaction which began in 1907. In this destructive work, the Upper Chamber the half -elected, half -nominated Council of the Empire played a prominent role. On the eve of the Revolution all reforms seemed buried beyond resus- citation. With the Revolution nothing was needed except to re-inter them, and proclaim them as laws, sometimes with progressive amendments in directions impossible before. One such direction was Feminism in which revolutionary Russia led the world. Prince Lvoff effected this by purely autocratic procedure. The Duma and the Council of the Empire PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS 75 had ceased to meet. The Socialist parties from the first sharply attacked the Duma, and demanded its abolition. This was not formally attained until after the Bolshevik coup d'etat; but after the March Revolution the Duma never met in its official capacity. The Socialist demand was defensible because the Third and Fourth Dumas were elected on a franchise proclaimed without consulting the Legislature by Nicholas II in June, 1907, in violation of the new Fundamental Law of 1906 wherein the Tsars re- linquished their prerogative of legislating alone on franchise matters. In default of Duma, Prince Lvoff had no legislative machinery. The new reform laws, as far as they were not already prepared, were drawn up by experts, submitted for examination to a Juridical Commission which, under presidency of the Duma member Kokoshkin, sat in the Mariinsky Palace, and then promulgated. This procedure ex- plains the great speed with which the Revolution's reforms were carried through. The reversal of old Russian legislation was com- plete. All the old laws and administrative practises restricting the liberty of the citizen were revoked. The judicial authorities there were now no police but only ununi formed militiamen/ mostly students lost their right to arrest at will. Instead of lying in jail untried for months or years, arrested citizens of revolutionary Russia must be brought before an examining magistrate within twenty-four hours; and if that were not done they were to be immediately 76 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS released. "Administrative justice" was abolished. Administrative justice was the complex system, based on hundreds of so-called "compulsory ordinances," under which the Autocracy's local governors fined, imprisoned and exiled without trial. The newspaper and book Press was relieved of all censorship and the same freedom was given to theaters and public meetings. No person was henceforth to be punished for Press or Speech offenses unless the offenses violated the ordinary criminal law, and unless a con- viction proving violation was obtained from a jury. The new legislation provided guarantees against a revival of the system of espionage practised by the Okhraiw. Violation of the secrecy of written cor- respondence and of the telegraph and telephone was henceforth a punishable offense. A victim of a breach of this new law could not only have the offender pun- ished but could also get damages against him. Under the old government officials were so privileged that it was practically impossible to get redress against them. Before prosecuting an official it was necessary to get his superior's consent. In practise no official who was known to have reactionary views or who was well protected could be punished for any offense. The Lvoff Cabinet reformed the Courts of Administration in such a way that officials were placed in exactly the same position as private citizens in regard to their duties and rights. The Bill regulating this went even farther than is customary in progressive countries, for it declared that officials might be prosecuted and PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS 77j punished for no worse offense than too dilatory procedure, if from such procedure a citizen suffered harm. Thus, probably for the first time in history, was the universal official disease, red-tape, turned into a crime. The equalizing of races and religions was complete. The walls of Petrograd were suddenly covered with posters in Yiddish, Polish, Little-Russian, Lettish, Tartar and Esthonian, languages which were formerly never seen outside the districts where they were native, and even there sometimes used only in private. The system of religious persecution practised by nearly all the Romanoffs and aggravated by Alexander III and Nicholas II disappeared in a night. By one of the first reform measures, was abolished the "Pale of Settlement" law, under which seven million Jews were confined to towns in a small expanse of territory in Poland and Western Russia. The Autocracy's Anti-Semites had predicted that if this Pale of Settle- ment was abolished, the released Jews would flood the whole Empire and seize all business. This did not happen. A few Jews changed their place of abode ; but the dreaded domination over the less active Christian Russians never materialized, though Jews did play a considerable role in directing the higher affairs of the Revolution, which is natural enough in view of the fact that they had been the pioneers of opposition to the Autocracy. All religions were given equal rights. Under the Autocracy, missionaries of the dominant Greek 78 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Orthodox church were encouraged to convert mem- bers of other religious communities to the State religion; but it was a crime to convert Orthodox: be- lievers to any other religion. All religions in this respect were now equal. In the extreme Left there was a wide demand also for disestablishment of the Orthodox Church, but this question was left for settle- ment to the great Church Congress, which was to meet in Moscow in August. The dominant opinion among clerics was that the Church should be com- pletely independent of the State; but that the State should continue to guarantee the salaries of bishops and priests. In fact, this was realized, and it existed until the revolt of the Bolsheviks who confiscated all church and monastery property, and severed the Church entirely from the State. But this reform or reaction, whichever it was like all other measures, remained in part a paper measure and the monks and priests still keep possession of much of the Church property. The Revolution radically reformed the system of justice. The most important reform was the making of judges irremovable, a system recognized in prin- ciple by the Autocracy but ignored in fact. The local courts were made elective, trial by jury became the universal rule instead of the exception, and women acquired the right of sitting upon juries and of acting as magistrates. Under the influence of the Council of Deputies, the Government went farther in reform- ing military jurisdiction than was wise this was PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS 79 part of the universal disruption of authority in the Arny. Offenses of non-military character by sol- diers were no longer to be tried by courts-martial. The superior rights of officers in purely military trials were abolished, by providing that soldiers accused of military offenses should be tried by juries consisting of an equal number ot officers and men. and the jury, which the men were bound to dominate, not only determined the accused's guilt 01 innocence, but decided, together with the judge, the measure of punishment. This reform went farther than was intended; for when the first soldier-offenders were arrested, their comrades either demanded their imme- diate release, or formed juries which in violation of the new law consisted exclusively of soldiers; and when the offense was committed against an officer, the culprit was invariably acquitted. The Lvoff Government radically reformed local administration and local self-government. Instead of the former governors of provinces, local tsarlets who interfered unchecked with the municipalities and Zemstvo councils, were appointed Commissaries. These commissaries had very little power on paper, and no power at all in fact, as against the new un- official Councils of Deputies. Municipal self-govern- ment was reformed by abolishing entirely the property franchise, and giving all adults, men, or women, an equal vote. This produced a tremendous change in Petrograd, where the municipality had been entirely controlled by a handful of rich houseowners. The 80 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS / city administration was decentralized by creating subordinate municipal councils. The same policy was pursued in regard to the Zemstvos, or provincial councils. These councils were created by the Tsar Alexander II during his brief fit of Liberalism in the sixties; but many provinces were left without them; and those provinces which had them benefited relatively little, owing to the despotic interference of the Ministry of the Interior and his local instruments, the governors. Now the Zemstvos were opened to persons of both sexes and to all classes, and a new form of subordinate Zemstvo was created. This last reform was important. Before the revolution, the smallest unit of local self-government in which all classes were represented was the "District Zemstvo." This governed much too large a district. The com- munal and cantonal administrations, which directed the affairs of smaller territorial units, were purely peasant bodies, which had no authority over the privileged classes; and this perpetuated the division of Russia into sharply defined classes. By creating a new type of cantonal Zemstvo in which all classes co-operated equally, the Lvoff Government met a popular demand. The "Little Zemstvo Unit" was one of the important reforms of the Revolution. All the new or reformed local-governing bodies were given very wide powers and were guaranteed against outside bureaucratic interference. One such guarantee was the transfer of the town militias, which had replaced the police and gendarmery, into municipal PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS 81 control. Henceforth no Government could use the police for its own political ends. The Lvoff Government did much to encourage Education. A new university was founded at Perm near the Siberian frontier; plans were prepared for the foundation of other universities and high schools; the secondary school educational system was enlarged ; and the Government entered on plans for universal Elementary Education. Again, these reforms met with no opposition ; but partly owing to lack of money, partly owing to growing anarchy, the plans came to naught. The same was the fate of the greatest legislative enterprise of the Lvoff Government, an enterprise which occupied a Commission for several months, and unlike the other reforms provoked some controversy. This was the law providing for the Constituent As- sembly. After the Revolution Russia had no Con- stitution. Her new Government was administering and legislating autocratically; and, though un- doubtedly supported by the masses, it had no formal mandate to which it could point when challenged. Prince Lvoff felt this defect very much. He told me that he was waiting impatiently for the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, which as the unchallenged voice of all the Empire, could confer constitutional authority upon the government. Such a legal govern- ment would be in a stronger position than his own, for where necessary it could apply methods of coer- cion, and justify its acts with the will of the people. 82 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Enormous industry was shown in preparing for the Assembly, and planning its program of work. The main item of this program was to draw up a Con- stitution, but this meant first solving the nationalities problem on a basis of Home Rule, Federation, or Independence. The peasants, backed by the city Socialists, demanded that the Assembly should also act as a legislative assembly on the question of the ownership of land. This point was carried. The Constituent Assembly law was finally promulgated, on the same basis of equality which had been adopted in matters of local self-government. Women were to vote and be elected equally with men among the eight hundred members. But this also remained a paper project. Extremists of different kinds robbed the Assembly of its rights in advance; and then killed the Assembly itself. The first blow was the declara- tion of a Republic. It was understood from the first that only a Constitutent Assembly elected directly by the whole people could declare the future form of government. In fact there were practically no monarchists in the country. The Socialists of different groups, making certainly seven-eighths of the people, had all declared for a republic ; and the middle- class Constitutional Democrats after first declaring for a democratic monarchy themselves went over to Republicanism. But after the rebellion of General Korniloff in September, the Left parties got into a panic on the score of the alleged counter-revolutionary aspirations of the bourgeoisie; they assumed that PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS 83 the counter-revolutionists were monarchists; and they insisted that Kerensky should forestall a monarchist attempt by declaring a republic without waiting for the Constituent Assembly. Kerensky, as always when threatened, gave way, and though himself entirely without any mandate from the people, and without any position whatever in constitutional law, he took on himself to proclaim a republic. So for the first time was laid down the vicious principle that Russia's future was to be directed not by the people but by any non-elected partisan who could control a certain number of disorderly soldiers. For a second time this principle was put into practise when Prince Lvoff's great achievement, the Constituent Assembly, met in December. This was after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. The Constituent Assembly showed a considerable majority, composed mainly of Social-Revolutionaries and moderate Socialists, against the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks commanded less than a third of the votes. The Bolshevik gov- ernment of Peoples' Commissaries thereupon dis- persed the Assembly. Since that time Autocracy has been replaced not by Democracy, but by an oligarchy based solely upon military force. The government of the country by Soviets automatically superseded many of the Lvoff reforms; and the others were simply let fall into desuetude. Prince Lvoff resigned office on the i8th of July as result of violent demonstrations by soldiers in the Nevsky Prospect which caused a number of deaths. 84 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS This outbreak was only the last and worst of several of similar kind organized by Lenine and Trotsky since April. Foi not suppressing these outbreaks and punishing the ringleaders, Lvoff was accused of weak- ness, as Kerensky after him was accused. The accusa- tion was untrue. The position of Lvoff differed markedly from that of Kerensky. Lvoff, as he recognized, came into power without any mandate from the people at a time when it was hoped the Revolution would develop peacefully without any need for coercion. When growing disorder proved that coercion could not be dispensed with, Lvoff left office ; and Kerensky succeeded him with an avowed program of war upon the Bolsheviks in so far as they practised violence. But beyond making a few arrests, the weak Kerensky never carried out this program. He would not accept the logic of the situation that he was at the top of a Revolution based on force and must rule by revolutionary means; and he would not give way to resolute men like Savinkoff and Korniloff who would have made the attempt. Lvoff's position was made impossible by the ambiguous policy of the omnipotent Petrograd Council of Deputies. The Bolshevik minority in this Council consistently demanded that into the Council's hands should go all power. The Menshevik majority, led by the moderate Socialists, Cheidze, President of the Council, and Tseretelli, obstinately refused to take power, but at the same time they meddled and placed obstacles in Lvoff's path; and while condemning Bolshevik dis- PRINCE LVOFF AND HIS REFORMS 85 order never showed willingness to take firm military measures against the Bolshevik intriguers. This sys- tem made all stable government impossible. The other disturbing influence against the Lvoff Government was the international situation. The first serious revolt of the Bolshevik soldiers in Petrograd's garrison was directed against the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Prof. P. Miliukoff, long leader of the Constitutional-Democratic party. If the ruin of Russia the result of many complex factors could be ascribed to any one individual, probably Miliukoff would be chosen as that individual by an impartial judge. Miliukoff's political career has dis- played practically all the characteristic defects of the Russian "Intelligentsiya" without most of their merits A man of considerable talents as writer and historian, he totally lacked political qualities. He also lacked foresight, and even ordinary tact. He was largely responsible for the wrecking of the Revolution of 1905-6. It was the Vyborg Demonstration, his chief achievement in those days, which gave the reactionary Prime Minister Peter Stolypin the weapon he wanted most for the crushing of Reform. After the premature dissolution of the first revolutionary Duma, Miliukoff induced forty deputies to issue from Vyborg in Finland a solemn protest against payment of taxes or the rendering of army conscripts until the Duma was reconvoked. The demonstration was a ridiculous fiasco; the signatories meekly paid their own taxes; and forty of them not including 86 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Miliukoff got into jail. When the new Revolution came Miliukoff misunderstood its international im- port. The Russian Army though exhausted might possibly have continued to fight for national defense; but it was determined and all knew it not to fight for aggrandizement at the expense of non-Russian nations. When Miliukoff proclaimed publicly that the soldiers, in the hands of whom now lay the only real power, must fight for the possession of Con- stantinople he provoked a storm which surprised no one but himself. The sound policy of revolutionary Russia, the only policy which would have satisfied Russia's allies without incensing her war-exhausted soldiery was to proclaim for the Council of Deputies' plan of no annexations and no indemnities, and to declare that Russia would fight beside the Allies to prevent the Central Powers violating that principle. The policy of no annexations or indemnities was in the end accepted by the Provisional Government; but the injury had been done; the Miliukoff indiscretions had given color to the Bolshevik argument that the bourgeoisie in defense of its predatory interests was sending the proletariat to be massacred. Thereby the fall of Prince Lvoff and the later fall of Kerensky were predetermined; and Lvoff's great reform work, the fundamental reconstruction of Russia as a modern state, was brought to naught. CHAPTER VI WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION A WEEK after Nicholas II's deposition, was held the most impressive and significant ceremony of the Revolution. The scene was the magnificently decorated and upholstered Imperial suite at the Nicholas railroad station in Petrograd. Before the Revolution, this Imperial suite was sacred; the rooms were jealously locked, being opened only when the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, or some foreign imperial or royal guest entered or left the capital. A suggestion that the rooms should be opened in honor of a revolu- tionary convict would have made any member of the old Court faint. Yet this was the ceremony. In the chief room, decorated with red tulips, emblematic of Revolution, the surviving heroines of the Terrorist movement had assembled to welcome the return from Siberia of the venerable Catherine Breschko- Breschkovsky, who of her seventy-four years of life had spent nearly fifty in prison, in Siberian exile, or under supervision of the political police. Of these champions of liberation, the chief were women. The most notable among them were the Terrorist Vera Zasulitch, who forty years before, then a slight girl, 87 88 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS shot General Trepoff, the despotic chief of the Petrograd police; and Vera Figner who, betrayed by a false accomplice, spent twenty-two years in Schliisselburg Fortress as punishment for her work as member of "The People's Will" league, and who now with her sharp features and strong expression under an enormous fur cap, looked like the traditional Nihilist princess of sensational romance. The Revolution was made by women, more than by men. Turgenieff in his novel Virgin Soil con- trasted his devoted and competent heroine Marianna with his instable, idealistic hero; and in real life women like Breschkovsky, Figner, Zasulitch and Sophie Perovsky led among the sufferers for Russian freedom, and surpassed in steady devotion and self- sacrifice the often emotional and vacillating men. Now, with the Revolution accomplished, women were to reap their reward. It is characteristic of Russia that the complete emancipation of women carried through by the Revolution provoked no opposition. Before the Revolution liberty of thought was as complete as liberty to express thought publicly was limited. The outer despotism had its natural reaction in internal radicalism; and as result the equality of women in all matters was more generally accepted in Russian society than anywhere else in the world. Yet in the villages, and in relation to the State, the posi- tion of women remained low. The muzhik beat his wife because, as his proverb said, "women and horses WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION 89 have no souls" ; and educated women could not travel without their husbands' permission because they were refused separate passports. Starting so far behind, Russia suddenly found herself ahead of Norway and Denmark where complete female suffrage has existed for some years. The country was well prepared for this change. It assumed that when liberation came it would be universal; and people were in no mood to discuss limitations, whether of race, religion or sex, upon the exercise of citizenship. The complete emancipation and enfranchisement of women were therefore carried through almost without comment by the relatively Conservative government of Prince Lvoff. In the universal remolding of institutions, this was compara- tively easy. As men had no rights, or only very limited rights, institutions had to be re-created from the bottom ; and the admission of women, so far from being a revolution in itself, was only a part of the general great change. The question of women's right to vote for a central legislature did not arise, because the existing central legislature the Duma, and the Council of the Empire had ceased to function and practically ceased to exist ; and the Constituent As- sembly which was to provide for a new central legis- lature, had not met. But in voting for the members of this Constituent Assembly the most august body of Russia which was to frame a Constitution and to settle the complicated National and Land questions women were given equal rights with men; and had 90 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS the assembly been allowed to sit and frame a con- stitution instead of being dissolved by force by the triumphant Bolsheviks, it was part of the program to give women an equal right with men to vote for and to sit in the new permanent legislature. Within a few weeks of the Revolution, women were voting and sitting in the municipalities and the provincial councils. There was no office in the state which a woman might not hold. All the professions were opened. In this matter, before the Revolution Russia was well- advanced. There were many women doctors and dentists, some women lawyers, who how- ever had only qualified rights, and a new school of women architects, engineers, and technologists. How much farther the Revolution pushed Feminism may be seen from the fact that in the reformed lower courts, which were to be reconstructed on electoral principles, even illiterate women who could not sign their names had a right to sit as assessors beside the chief magistrate. Women accepted this emancipation in the right spirit. They had no part in the indiscipline which wrecked the Revolution; they voted, it was generally admitted, intelligently and for disinterested motives; and when elected to any of the public self-governing bodies they showed moderation and good sense. Could that be said also of men? Russia in this respect had the same experience as Finland, where women have had the vote since 1906, and where on the whole they have exercised their right moderately and wisely. WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION 91 The Revolution yielded to Europe its first Woman Minister. This was the brilliant Countess Sophie Panin. The Countess Panin was a very wealthy lady of aristocratic family, who inhabited a palace on the Sergievsky Street. She was a prominent member of the Constitutional Democratic party; and years ago built in Petrograd at her own cost the first privately founded People's Palace, with a theater and restaurant for working men. When the Cabinet of Prince Lvoff was reconstructed on coalition principles, the Countess was offered the position of Assistant Minister of Public Welfare, and this position she took, appearing for inauguration in a rough leather blouse. She told me her plans. Her department was an entirely new one ; and in organizing it, she intended to employ chiefly women. Like most Revolution plans, this was doomed to failure. The Countess was obliged to resign; and after the Bolshevik Revolution of the autumn she was put on trial because she refused to recognize Lenine and Trotsky by handing over to them public money of which she was in charge. The trial was a public scandal. In spite of the universal veneration in which she was held and testimony to her sound Revolutionary principles given by working- men witnesses, the Countess was convicted and sen- tenced. The Bolsheviks, who in many things re- sembled the satraps of Nicholas II, resembled them in this, that they chose for their first victims women who were friends of Russia and friends of liberty. The "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution," 92 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Madame Breschko-Breschkovsky, has had a better fate so far; but as she belongs to the Social-Revolutionary party, and is a friend of the Allies and of war till vic- tory, she is not yet out of danger. After her triumphal return to Petrograd, she was forced to occupy a hand- some suite of rooms in an upper story of the Winter Palace, almost directly over the offices of the Provi- sional Government. Popular legend declared that "Grandmother" was Russia's real ruler, she having enormous influence with the Prime Minister Keren- sky, who summoned her to every meeting of ministers and listened to her advice. This story was untrue; for Russia it would have been better had it been true, for "Grandmother" was a far more masculine and vital character than the nerveless Prime Minister. Kerensky professed for her great veneration and con- stantly payed her ceremonial visits, but he used her popularity with the masses in order to advertise him- self. While he was posing as a great patriot to the innocent Ally diplomats and the uncomprehending Root commission, "Grandmother" was doing the real work. Working with the Social-Revolutionary party, the party of peasants, which never turned its back upon the War, and would never have ratified Ger- many's peace had it been allowed to vote, she carried on a vigorous enlightening propaganda in favor of order, legality and a patriotic attitude towards the war. In three months, she arranged the distribution of over six million pamphlets among the soldiers at the front. When I last saw her towards the close WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION 93 of September, she told me that she was directing 140 daily newspapers, some for army reading, some for the peasants, all in favor of fighting for Russia's integrity and for the security of the Revolution in union with America and the European Allies. It is surprising that while Kerensky was being advertised in America for his wholly ineffective war work, the tremendous and real labors of Breschkovsky were ignored ; and that while money was being sent from America for such absurd propaganda at which Rus- sians laughed as the presentation of moving pictures, "Grandmother" was complaining of the hampering of her work through lack of a few hundred roubles. Showing me a batch of pamphlets, some written by herself, some by other prominent patriots, all well written and convincing, she expressed her faith that Russia would come through. It was touching to see this old woman who, with her handsome, deeply- lined face, flashing eyes, and the red kerchief on her hair, resembled one of the Rembrandt heads in the Hermitage refusing even in this worst stage to despair of her country. Her one cause of complaint was her gilded captivity. "Do you know how I felt when the cheering crowd brought me to these palace rooms, and left me alone ?" she asked. "I felt as I felt when I was first arrested for revolutionary work, and locked up in my 'stone sack' in the Peter and Paul Fortress." This interview took place shortly after the Korniloff revolt. Breschkovsky denounced the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS educated classes for the way in which after encourag- ing the Commander-in-Chief they basely left him in the lurch. "Still worse disorders," she said, "are coming. But you can tell America not to despair of us. The disorders are normal. They are the fruit of the political and social igonrance of our people. I believe in Russia. I see growing anarchy; but I see also that people are progressing. Six months ago when I was in Siberia, the peasants had no notion at all of their political duties, and no patriotic attitude towards their country; but to-day they are preparing in an enlightened spirit for the Constituent Assembly, which I hope will settle our troubles. The peasants understand their unfitness for direct administration and legislation; and they are choosing the best- educated candidates. And of the Army I refuse to despair." "How then do you account for the growing dis- organization? The murders?" "The cause is the first great mistake of the Provi- sional Government. If anything could wreck our Revolution it is this mistake. In order to get rid of the spies and gendarmes maintained by the Tsar, who would probably become foes of the Revolution and tools of counter-revolutionists, the Government sent them to the front. From letters which I have received, and from reports from soldiers, I know that it is the spies and the gendarmes of the Autocracy who are the great agents of dissolution and pro- German propaganda. They hope to destroy the WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION 95 Revolution by bringing upon us foreign defeat; and their hope is that foreign defeat will restore the Monarchy, after which the golden age of espionage will return. That, not lack of patriotism, among the soldiers, is the cause of the tragedy which you now witness at the front." The "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution" declared that she had only one passion left impatience to see the triumph, via order and patriotism, of the revolutionary principles for which she had fought since girlhood. She told me that she would go to the country and perhaps to the front to work among the people, paying particular attention to the returned soldiers and to women's questions. By women's questions she understood hygiene and domestic economy. For political Feminism she had not much sympathy, and would only admit reluctantly that women had a right to vote if they wished; and for the Women's Battalion, the most striking instance of active Feminism so far, she had nothing good to say. But she admitted that the Battalion was no accidental phenomenon; it could have sprung up nowhere except in Russia; and it was one more proof that in the equalization of the sexes Russia led the world. The organizer of this battalion, Mile. Boutchkarieff, I saw twice. She was not a mademoiselle in the or- dinary sense of the word ; and she had no claim to the rank colonel, given to her when she visited America; but as reward for stout fighting before the Revolution, 96 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS she had received the honorary rank of sergeant. She was an undersized, thick-set, extremely plain woman, with a yellow skin, sparse hair, and a very red nose due to some cause other than drink. If seen among men soldiers, no one would have taken her for any- thing but an ugly boy of twenty-five. She could read and write; but she had little other education; and in conversation, though undoubtedly a sturdy patriot, she betrayed no particularly exalted sentiments about the Fatherland. She gave me the impression of an ordinary conscript soldier, hardened by life in camp and trench, without much sensibility, and with an unusually cold-blooded and professional attitude toward the soldiering trade. She neither advertised herself nor her scheme to form a regiment of women; and the regiment was already formed, and in fact partly as result of defections, before the public knew about it. Five hundred girls and women, many belonging to famous families, were at first enrolled and drilled. I visited their barracks early in June. The Petrograd War Office had already recognized the enterprise; undertaken to supply uniforms, arms, food and pay; organized for it the usual system of regimental accountancy; and ordered the provincial conscription authorities that girl volunteers should travel at State cost, like men soldiers. The barracks were a school building in the Torgovaya Street in the west of Petrograd. At the courtyard gate, I saw my first woman soldier a little, blue-eyed girl dressed in a WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION 97 soldier's ordinary khaki blouse much too big, short breeches, a gray-green forage cap, and ordinary women's black stockings and somewhat ornamental shoes with neatly tied ribbon bows. Half of the women soldiers were dressed in this grotesque way, because the War Office had refused to make special uniforms and boots until it was sure that the women would fight; and the women, though they could w r ear the much too big men's blouses and breeches, could not possibly walk in regulation boots. Therefore they wore their own shoes and stockings; and in this get up, incredible as it seems, many entered the trenches. The sentry was Marya Skrydloff, daughter of Admiral Skrydloff, a very well-known naval officer, who commanded the Baltic Fleet, and was Minister of Marine. The first Woman's Battalion was almost entirely composed of girls belonging to the educated class. Most were students in the women's higher educational courses. The second Women's Battalion of Petrograd, which was a much more imposing affair, but never went to the front, was mostly com- posed of working-class women, servants and peasants. This was the result of BoutchkariefFs experiment with the spoiled middle-class. She complained to me that of five hundred women who had volunteered to serve, only two hundred were left after three weeks' train- ing. They had failed under the rigid discipline. Boutchkarieff took me over the barracks. It con- sisted of four large dormitories. The beds, without bedclothes or even mattresses, were strewn with men- 98 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS soldiers' heavy overcoats, on which the girls were forced to sleep. "What is the meaning of that," I asked. "That is my system of training," said Boutch- kariefL "I decided from the first to try the hardest possible discipline. Instead of medically examining the girls and rejecting the weak, we decided to put all volunteers to a hard test ; so that those who would not stand field life could leave. That is why I have lost half of my volunteers. The rest will stand the trenches. Our discipline is hard. I decided that girls could not be drilled upon the anarchical principles which are now applied in our disorganized army at the front; and I enforce the rigid discipline of the pre-revolutionary army. With us there is no 'soldiers' self-government.' But I have no legal right to punish my girls, otherwise I should shoot them for dis- obedience." In the dining-room were the remnants of a woman soldier's breakfast, which consisted of very bad black bread, and very liquid tea without sugar. The girls rose at 5 o'clock and drilled without a rest from 7 to ii and afterwards from i to 6. Men soldiers, boasted Boutchkarieff, were never subjected to such a Spartan regime. Yet the Battalion was to some extent a sham. The girls were sincere and so was the commander; but drilling was being carried on with sticks. In theory the Battalion was armed with the cavalry carbine, which is five pounds lighter than the infantrymen's rifle; in fact, only the sentry had WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION 99 a firearm; to the others rifles were first dealt out the day the Battalion left for the front. Although the drill-sergeants were experienced men, detailed from the Voluinsky regiment, which distinguished itself by being the first Petrograd unit to go over to the Revolu- tion, the girls knew very little of military affairs ; and few outsiders believed that they would go to the front. But on the ist of July they went, after being blessed at a solemn ceremony in the Kazan Cathedral; and a fortnight later, they engaged at Kreda near Smorgon in their first and only battle. At four on a cold morning, the two companies of women were ordered into a front trench, half a mile from the nearest German works. While on their way to this trench, two girls were killed by shellfire. The rest without a shudder continued their march. In the trench they began to lose steadily from shrapnel. As they had come "to give an example to the men soldiers," they refused to go into dug-outs. Soon began the brief German attack. The enemy, who had no idea that he was opposed by women, had his skirmishers in advance on both flanks. The women shot vigorously, and believed that they were account- ing for many foes. What was happening in the neighboring trenches occupied by men soldiers they could not say; but at a moment when the Germans were cutting their way through the projecting en- tanglement, a girl from the flank on the women's position ran along the trenches screaming, "All the men have run away." The Germans rushed on. Some 100 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS of them, having captured a fortified hillock, began firing down into the women's trenches and the women began to fall quickly ; and at the same time the enemy in overwhelming numbers broke through the entangle- ment and rushed the trench. A few of the girls stood their ground, the others knowing that the position was lost fled, or, as they said, retreated. The majority escaped. Two were taken prisoners, about twenty were left dead upon the ground, and about fifteen were wounded, among them Boutchkarieff and, I believe, the daughter of Admiral Skrydloff. The others, having shown great courage under fire and shamed the men by their steadfastness, got to the rear, where they had the further pain of being mocked by the disorderly men, who shouted: "So you also ran away. We thought you would." The "Battalion of Death" had a painful ending. It was sent to Moscow, where Boutchkarieff after her recovery again took command. A quarrel ensued: some girls set upon their commander and beat her; and as result, an order was issued by the Minister of War for the disbandment of the battalion. But the idea survived. Two months later I inspected in Petrograd the second Women's Regiment, and in- terviewed the organizer, Miss Fromenko. From the first battalion, the second learned a lesson. The second battalion was well organized, well recruited, well equipped and well drilled. The drill period was three months ; all the volunteers mostly sturdy work- WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION 101 ing girls had rifles, bayonets, and good uniforms and boots; and they were instructed by a commissioned officer. They had a sanitary service, a machine-gun detachment, and a mounted unit of twenty-six Cos- sack women who had been in the saddle all their lives. No girl was accepted without medical examination. After six weeks' drilling in town, the women, then 1000 strong, went to a camp at Levashova outside Petrograd, and there learned soldiers' outdoor work. The environs of Petrograd teemed with bandits who in search of food constantly raided the women's camp at night. Pitched battles ensued, and some of the girls were wounded. The organizer of this battalion, Miss Fromenko, was a pretty, delicate looking girl of twenty, who was herself unfit for soldiering, but considered that women would make as good soldiers as men. In fact, these women, like the first Battalion of Death, made better soldiers than the men. In November when the Provi- sional Government was in extremis as result of the Bolshevik insurrection the girl soldiers, "faithful among the faithless" stood fast, and defended the government headquarters, the Winter Palace, losing many of their number, against overwhelming numbers of Bolsheviks. The statement put into the mouth of Boutchkarieff during her visit to America that the women proved of no use because they thought only of powder-puffs and other vanities was untrue. Ow- ing to physical weakness, the women were unfit for 102 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS soldiering; but the spirit was willing; and no unit of women soldiers ran away, murdered or plundered as did the men on all fronts after the Bolshevik propa- ganda began. Therein the attitude of Russia's women in the death-throes of the Revolution was in accord with their heroic part in its birth. CHAPTER VII THE REBIRTH OF NIHILISM THE sudden outbreak of disorder which occurred within a few weeks of the Revolution, and which brought to naught the well-conceived, ardently awaited reforms described in the two preceding chapters, proved a great puzzle to foreigners who took into account only the traditionally peaceable and pas- sive character of the Russian people. The explanation already given the deep-rooted national prejudice against discipline as an equivalent of bureaucratic tyranny is sufficient to explain the outbreak. But it is not sufficient to explain the particular forms which the outbreak took. The out- break took the form of general, undiluted Nihilism. From the middle of April, 1917, up to the time of the Bolshevik revolt, the Revolution was a continuous exemplification of the Nihilist method and the Nihilist temper; and since then Nihilism has been the conscious guiding principle of the Soviet administration. The late General Loris MelikofT, Alexander the Second's Constitutionalist minister, defined Nihilism as "the destruction of all moral and material values." 103 104 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Nihilism as a Russian party title has been extinct for thirty years. The Nihilist Party began to dissolve after the assassination of Alexander II. The Ter- rorist deeds perpetrated under Nicholas II were the work not of Nihilists, but as a rule of a body known as the "Fighting Organization of the Social-Revolu- tionary Party." But though Nihilism as a name was long ago relegated to history, Nihilism as a fact sur- vived. It survived because it still had strong attrac- tions for the national temperament. Dead in active politics, it kept cropping up under other names and in non-political forms. It can be traced in all modern Russian literature, very plainly in the works of the best of all purely modern Russian writers, the late Anton Tchekhoff, where it appears as passivism or negative indirferentism ; and less plainly but in more aggressive forms in Gorky, in the pseudo-Nietzschen Artzybacheff, and in many living writers of less note. Nihilism arose in the reign of Alexander II. Its dis- coverer and namer was the novelist Ivan Turgenieff. TurgeniefT was himself no Nihilist, but a European Liberal, a Zapadnik, or Westerner, firmly opposed to Slavophilism and other Russian pretensions to a separate potentially superior civilization. The word Nihilism as applied to Russia first occurs in Tur- geniefFs novel, Fathers and Sons, the hero of which, Bazaroff, prototype of all Nihilists, proclaimed that the existing false civilization must be destroyed before the seeds of a real civilization could be sown. For the present, destruction was enough. In a later novel, THE REBIRTH OF NIHILISM 105 Virgin Soil, Turgenieff first showed Nihilism at work. Turgenieff was sharply attacked by progressives for his critical attitude towards the new creed; he was even accused of writing his novels at the behest of the despotic government. When the era of the great assassinations began, the Russian public, and still more so foreigners, identified Nihilism almost exclu- sively with the Terror ; and the fundamental character of the creed a recklessly denying attitude towards all things that fail to satisfy the most exacting ideal- ists was forgotten. But the real Nihilism was only buried alive. When the Revolution disinterred it by failing to satisfy immediately the extremest political and economical demands, the new Nihilists seized upon the program of the old Nihilist BazarofT; and set to work to deface and wreck the surrogates for perfection which were all that the Revolution could offer them. In this, as in the other social actions of Russians, one seeks in vain for clear motives of self- interest. Destruction, not depredation, was the rule. Instead of the orderly transfer of wealth into the hands of the victors there was a general wiping out of wealth, from which no one benefited, instead of leveling up there was leveling down; and instead of intensive production with the aim of turning the new Socialistic order to account for the supposed bene- ficiaries the working-class there was universal waste, idleness and aimless spoliation. In the first days of the Revolution, the police and gendarmery totally disappeared, and even the criminal 106 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS detective service was wiped out and not replaced. In the towns was organized a so-called militia, manned by untrained civilians, who were ununi formed except for the arm-badge "G. M.," for "Town Militia," and were armed with rifles which they seldom knew how to use. In the country there was no police at all. The population, exhausted by the War, was hungry, un- clothed, sullen and hopeless. With all the restraints that civilization puts on men's passions removed, there was every reason why the mob should murder, burn and rob. Yet until the separate peace brought about the general disbandment of the Army the amount of crime was not great. Competent native judges ex- pected much more. In July, 1917, at a time when the revolutionary chaos was a byword in the foreign Press, Prince Lvoff remarked to me that Petrograd without a police force was nearly as safe as London with a police force; and added that if in London, as in Russia, crime went wholly unpunished the mob would probably sack the Bank of England and the palaces of the West End. Crimes of violence were at first few. Violence is foreign to the Russian character. But Russians are not exempt from the law that panic provokes to crime ; and at a later stage panic on the score of "counter- revolution" led to wholesale massacres. At the first hint that individuals or classes were aiming at a restoration of strong government, the masses, who preferred the worst revolutionary anarchy to the com- parative order of Tsarism, set out to kill. The revolt THE REBIRTH OF NIHILISM 107 of General Korniloff led to wholesale massacres of officers at Kronstadt, Helsingfors and Vyborg; a little later to the savage butchery of the Commander-in- Chief Dukhonin; and finally, after the Bolshevik triumph, to the murders of the ex-ministers Shin- garieff and Kokoshkin as they lay ill in hospital. But the ordinary motives of crime cruelty and greed were almost wholly absent. When the Revolu- tion broke out, people who imagined that they knew Russia predicted fearful massacres on the land. There was to be a jacquerie similar to that which ravaged the chateaux of France in the fourteenth century. This prediction was based on the land- hunger of the peasants. The Empire's chief economic disease was peasant landlessness. In European Russia sixty millions of people are crowded on plots of land which though big enough to support families if in- tensively cultivated, are wholly inadequate when tilled by the primitive methods of the moujik. In the decades before the Revolution there were constant riots against proprietors, and these riots were sup- pressed mercilessly. When with the triumph of the Revolution the police disappeared, the peasants could have destroyed with impunity every manor-house and seized all land. But as a rule they remained peace- fully at home, waiting for the Constituent Assembly to decide upon what terms proprietorial land should be transferred into their hands. The exceptions were chiefly the result, not of direct peasant action but of the measures of self-constituted local "republics," 108 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS which seized all land, and attempted, always without success, to cultivate it upon communist principles. Panic on the score of ''counter-revolution" led to the destruction of many estates. When the peasants learned, usually without foundation, that a local Marshal of the Nobility, Count or Prince, was "op- posing the Revolution" they marched to the suspect's estate, and burned his house. In the government of Tamboff, southeast of Moscow, mobs of terrified peasants made pilgrimages from estate to estate and destroyed everything. But the Nihilist, not the brigand spirit governed their methods. They chose usually the best-managed properties equipped with modern machinery, sometimes even model farms from which they themselves had learned all they knew of agriculture; and often without robbing anything, they gave everything to the flames. In the cities, too, the Revolution seemed to aim blindly at destruction. Just as the political revolutionaries, with the exception of the moderate adherents of the Provisional Government, were content with the aboli- tion of the Tsardom and did nothing to enroot new institutions, so the social revolutionaries rejoiced in demolishing everything they could not appreciate, without any concern for what should come after. The most barbarous vandalism was shown towards works of art. In the early days of the Revolution a fanatic demanded the complete razing of the Winter Palace, declaring that "the debris might be left a heap of shapeless stones and rotting wood as a finer monu- THE REBIRTH OF NIHILISM 109 ment to the fall of the Romanoffs than the hand- somest monument to Liberty reared anywhere else on earth." The mob defaced the handsome iron and brass railing around the Palace Park on which the last Tsar spent $750,000. The gold eagles and Im- perial crowns and monograms disappeared; and the honest iconoclasts characteristically refused to sell them as relics; and cast them into the Neva. Every- where showed defaced signboards, brass plates with demonstrative erasure of the word "Imperial," and demolished insignia. A society was formed for "removal of all external objects connected with the Tsardom." The destroyers even proposed to melt down the fine statue of Peter the Great, erected by Catherine II in the Senate Square. In different parts of the country about twenty monuments were demolished, among them the statue erected at Kieff to Nicholas II's reactionary Prime Minister, Peter Stolypin, which I believe was the only statue ever erected in Russia to a mere politician. The interiors of public buildings occupied by com- mittees of soldiers and workingmen were defaced, dirtied and made uninhabitable. As a type of what happened in the palaces, in the Duma building, and later in the famous Smolny Institute, the headquarters of the Bolsheviks, I describe the following from personal observation. The scene is the Winter Palace, on the eve of a threatened revolt by the Bolsheviks and Red Guard of the anarchical Vyborg Quarter, north of the Neva. In a gorgeous hall, upholstered 110 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS in white velvet, glowing with jasper, malachite, marquetry and buhl, with cream satin hangings and silver chandeliers, was quartered a company of Chasseurs. Their duty was to defend the Palace, then headquarters of the Government, against attack. The soldiers were in excellent humor; they had a concertina; they had food and kvass; and they had greasy newspapers which they tore into strips for cigarettes. All were dirty. Some slept on straw spread upon the parquetted floor; others lounged on the white velvet sofas. One soldier danced, ceasing occasionally to rest; whereupon he made jokes about the Imperial Family; and after every remark he spat demonstratively, sometimes on the floor, sometimes against the walls. His comrades applauded, and cried "Again!" From the lounging soldiers' uniforms and boots, the walls were covered with filth; the white sofas were strewn with fragments of bacon, stained with the national soup schtchi and burned by care- lessly dropped cigarettes. One warrior had thrown his blouse over a chandelier, and in pulling it back had broken off a branch which lay among glass fragments on the floor. In a corner was a vast heap of food-cans, rags, cigarette-ends and ashes. These some unreasonably tidy person had brushed into a heap; but the lounging soldiers dragged the dirt out on their boots, and churned it into a paste on the wet floor. With the soldiers were Junkers young men of education who looked on in disgust, but feared to protest. Py similar treatment the Duma building was THE REBIRTH OF NIHILISM 111! turned into a stable. This handsome edifice was built by Catherine II for her favorite, Potemkin, "the magnificent prince of Tauride," conqueror of the Turks and inventor of "Potemkin villages" rows of camouflage peasant cabins of cardboard run up in order to give the sovereign a false notion of rural prosperity. The palace was restored in 1906 for the use of the first Duma; and it was used as parliament house until the Revolution. Then it was seized by the Petrograd Council of Deputies, by the Peasant organizations and by associations representing dif- ferent national movements. The pillars were defaced with proclamations, which were later torn off, bring- ing with them the plaster; the cornices were kicked to dust; the walls were scrawled on; windows were broken; and historic furniture was ruined. A month after the Revolution the palace of "the magnificent prince" was an obscene temple of barbarism. Zeal to obliterate all traces of the Tsardom led to other excesses, mostly of more innocent kind, but none the less informed by the same Nihilist spirit that denies history and tradition just as it denies institu- tions. Streets called after Romanoff tsars or grand dukes were renamed after revolutionary, and even Terrorist, heroes, or decorated with abstractions, Chinese in their magniloquence, indicative of freedom. On signboards appeared the names of Kalayeff and Gershuni, assassins of autocratist dignitaries; in Odessa was a "Street of the Eternal Memory of the Martyrs of the Revolution"; the brand-new port RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Romanoff on the Arctic Ocean was renamed Mur- mansk; and as it was inconvenient to rename great cities like Ekaterinburg (called after Catherine) and Nikolaieff, it was proposed to say "New Ekaterin- burg" and "Emancipated Nikolaieff." In Moscow the "House of the Boyard Romanoff," wherein the Tsar's ancestors lived before their elevation to the Throne was renamed "House of a Russian Noble." Leonid Andreyeff and other well-known men of let- ters condemned this iconoclasm and against the destruction of monuments the Socialist Council of Deputies was at last obliged to protest. In all this were much wanton destructiveness and much freakish extravagance; but there was little con- scious crime. Thefts were rare. In the Winter Palace and in other Petrograd and provincial build- ings, the soldiers came into control of valuable property in gold, silver, precious stones and paintings and tapestries. These were worth tens of millions of dollars. Everyone predicted that they would dis- appear, but the prediction proved wrong. From the Winter Palace were stolen a few of the inlaid gold and silver plates upon which peasant communes had presented bread-and-salt to visiting Tsars; and there was a bold raid upon the Senate, accompanied by the robbery of valuable statues presented by Catherine II. But the Russian negative attitude towards property was again exemplified. The mob and soldiers profaned and mutilated because they had no concep- tion of artistic values; but this very motive prevented THE REBIRTH OF NIHILISM 113 them from stealing; and Petrograd and Moscow, though entirely unpoliced, escaped the general looting which under similar conditions would certainly have been experienced by any city of civilized Western Europe. The real orgy of crime began only about mid-July after the rout in Galicia which followed KornilofFs successful march to Kalisch and Halusz. The offenders this time were the soldiers ; and though they robbed and pillaged, destruction rather than profit governed their misdeeds. The western provinces, especially those immediately behind the front, were ravaged till nothing was left. Fragments of a regiment of hungry, panic-stricken, Bolshevik-incited soldiers would arrive at a railroad center, march into town, dispossessing the feeble and inactive local authorities; and burn, murder and violate without limit. If officers remonstrated they were put to death pierced with bayonets, clubbed, tortured, or told to run away and then shot down. In a town of Saratoff province, soldiers burned down two-thirds of the buildings; levied a contribution of a million rubles which they characteristically tore up; destroyed the art gallery of a rich resident ; and ended by murdering forty citizens. The rest of the town might have perished had not the rioters heard that a "counter- revolutionary" plot was being hatched on an estate ten miles off. Seized by new panic they marched on the estate, clubbed the proprietor, a prominent pro- gressive, to death, and killed his two daughters. Kazan RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS and Nijni-Novgorod in European Russia, and Tomsk and Yeneseisk in Siberia, witnessed similar military license, the chief victims being men of property guilt- less of real political offenses but suspected as monarchists. "Dictators" sprang up like mushrooms, and founded independent statelets. Most of these statelets began with a semblance of order and with ostensible devotion to the humane, liberationist prin- ciples of the boy-dictator of Kronstadt; but later they were scenes of anarchy and massacre. The most notorious was the "Republic of Pereyaslavl," which for months repudiated the Provisional Government. The dictator, who claimed power of life or death over the population, was the Socialist Khrustalieff- Nossar mentioned by me already as the chief of the first Council of Workmen's Deputies, founded during the Revolution of 1905. Naturally, mysticism, a strong Russian character- istic, appears in this tale of anarchy. During the transient war enthusiasm of 1914, mysticism produced a multitude of peasant prophets who strongly cham- pioned the war, not on grounds of any political or material benefits which Russia might gain to these the true Russian was as a rule indifferent but on the ground of less tangible and often highly improb- able gains. Victory would "accelerate the coming of the Messiah"; it would "regenerate the Russian soul" or it would "redeem the Holy Church from the in- novations of the Patriarch Nikon." The Revolu- tionary mysticism had the same character. At THE REBIRTH OF NIHILISM 115 Kronstadt, at the club of the Anarchists the most fanatical and sanguinary element of the mob which gathered on the Anchor Place I met a Moscow visionary and fanatic named Lieshkoff, who with wild gestures, flashing eyes and words which left no doubt whatever of his sincerity, proclaimed that the propertied bourgeoisie was the Beast in Revelation; and vowed that "Christian love and regard for the happiness of humanity must induce every thinking man to exterminate the whole of this detestable class." This revolutionary prophet was murdered during a riot on the mainland opposite Kronstadt. Soldiers, with the blood of their officers on their hands, whom I later met in Finland, assured me of similar things. They were undoubtedly sincere; and probably in their pre-war lives as peasants had been law-abiding and kind-hearted. But the Revolution had produced a spiritual ferment accompanied by a perversion of all moral and religious ideas, which Europe has seen nothing like since the religious crazes of the Middle Ages. With minds so disturbed, the freakish and comic element was bound to appear. In what country but Russia could the following occur? In the first month of Revolution, the highway robbers, burglars and pickpockets of the large port of Rostoff-on-the-Don held a Thieves* Congress in the Assembly Hall of the town. Five hundred professional law-breakers at- tended. At the chairman's table, between two criminals one of whom had been fifteen years in 116 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Siberia for murder, sat the Commissary of the Petro- grad Provisional Government and the Commander of the newly formed local militia. This Thieves' Congress was held with all the order and decency of a congress of political economists. The spokesman of the criminals made a solemn declaration that crime, and in particular robbery, had been inevitable products of the corrupt Autocracy; and now that Russia had obtained her freedom, there was no good reason why crimes should be committed any more. The robber audience assented. The Government Commissary and the Commander of the Militia made touching speeches; a murderer who sat near them warmly embraced both; and amid general emotion and exalta- tion, the Congress resolved in favor of moral reform. "We solemnly declare that we shall henceforth work honestly for Mother Russia and the Revolution." The organization of a fund for the support of super- annuated thieves who could not earn a living by honest work for Mother Russia was announced, and a permanent committee was appointed. As the Con- gress was about to disperse, a burglar in the audience slapped his hand to his hip pocket, and announced tragically that one of his neighbors had taken ad- vantage of the enthusiasm to steal his purse, which contained five hundred rubles. The Congress was much pained. A new resolution was carried, express- ing reprobation for this act of treachery; and a sub- scription was got up for the benefit of the robbed robber, which yielded the lost rubles and something THE REBIRTH OF NIHILISM 117 more. This Congress was much laughed at by foreigners; but of the honesty of its initiators and participators there was no doubt. However, even in Russia human nature is human nature; and three months later there was such an orgy of robbery in RostofT-on-the-Don that officials had to be specially sent from Petrograd to clear the offenders out. It is impossible to draw occurrences like the last described under the general formula of Nihilism. But in relations between employers and employees the Revolution expressed itself in the definitely Nihilistic principle of dragging down rather than elevating. The popular form of protest against Capitalism was general idleness, so that no one profited. There were continuous strikes, and unreasonable refusals to work; and there was, especially in Petrograd, a great deal of purely impudent imposition, going so far as demanding pay while refusing to work. Upon slavish minds revolutionary freedom reacted as might have been expected; and the traditional helplessness and timidity of members of the Intelligentsiya made them easy victims. My own hotel was for months terrorized by a robber servant against whom no one dared to take measures. The "robber," an ignorant peasant wearing a red shirt whose work was to shine shoes, had behaved admirably before the Revolution. Imme- diately after the Revolution he announced to the proprietors that he would remain in their service and draw his wages but must decline to work. After that he daily demanded money from guests, and usually 118 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS got it. To reinforce his demands he used threats. Before I had been a week in the hotel, I found on my desk a dirty slip of paper inscribed in red ink, "Please pay the shoe-shiner ten rubles for cream." This I found came from the hotel robber. On my asking him whether he had really spent ten rubles on cream for me only, he assured me that he had means to make me pay. This threat failed. He com- mitted a whole series of outrages against other guests; while the proprietor looked on helplessly, convinced that if he took measures of defense there were no police to appeal to the robber's friends in the newly- constituted Union of Hotel Servants would wreck the hotel. Nobody retaliated. The robber would prob- ably be victimizing the hotel to-day had not a French visitor who had been blackmailed for twenty rubles, reached resolutely for his stick. Thereupon the man who had terrorized a great hotel for three months fled into the street screaming "I have been murdered," and was never afterwards seen. CHAPTER VIII BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION BEFORE midsummer 1917 the Revolution was attacked by three diseases any one of which if un- checked would have proved fatal. These diseases were the distintegration of the Army, the lawlessness of the urban workingmen and to less extent of the peasantry, and the complete collapse of the Empire's monetary, food, communication, manufacturing and commercial mechanism. The distintegration of the Army was the governing and vital factor, because it made impossible the enforcement of well-conceived paper schemes for reconstruction in the other domains. Every politically competent Russian understood this; and hence in the Press and at interparty conferences held at Petrograd and Moscow to find a way out, the dominant topic during the four months preceding the Bolshevik revolt was "the creation of a strong govern- mental power." This really meant a dependable mili- tary force. That this view was correct is proved by the subse- quent zeal of parties and individuals to clear them- selves from responsibility for having disorganized the Army. In fact, all parties and leaders were 119 120 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS responsible. The Constitutional-Democrats and the bourgeoisie generally were responsible through their weakness; and the Socialists of all groups were directly and consciously responsible. The first Minister of War, M. Gutchkoff, did not resign until indiscipline, the result of others' measures which he tolerated, had gone very far; and his successor Kerensky had so frivolously undermined the Army before he became Minister of War that the protests and menaces which he afterwards lavished had less than no effect. In this matter, between himself, his colleagues in the Social-Revolutionary and moderate Menshevik Socialist parties, and the Bolsheviks there was at first no difference at all. All some indeed without knowing what they were doing set to work to wreck the national defense system; and did not see until it was too late that at the same time they were wrecking the Revolution, the success of which depended upon the firm maintenance of order by force during the transition period which had to precede the organization of a permanent government. The first measure against Army discipline was taken by the Petrograd Council of Deputies. It was called "Army Order No. i," and its very title implied that the army authority was not the Commander-in- Chief or the Minister of War Gutchkoff, but a self- constituted unofficial body representing only the work- men and soldiers in Petrograd. For this order the Bolsheviks were not specially responsible. The majority in the Council of Deputies was then Social- BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 121 Revolutionary and Menshevik; the president was the Menshevik Cheidze, and one of the Vice-Presidents was Kerensky. At this time Kerensky was also Minister of Justice in the Lvoff Cabinet. This Army Order was fatal. A few days after it was issued, I visited the headquarters of the Council of Deputies, and found a whole Commission engaged in examining and countersigning or annulling commands issued by the head of the Petrograd District, Korniloff and his subordinate officers. The room was full of slovenly, aggressive soldiers who wanted the Commission's opinion upon the legality of orders of lieutenants to men to clean their dormitories, and so on. At about the same time Kerensky, as Minister of Justice, abolished capital punishment, the only means of preserving discipline during War; and the speedy result was open mutiny. On May 27th, Kerensky, now Minister of War, and still vice-president of the Council of Deputies, issued a Declaration of Soldiers' Rights, which proclaimed that officers and soldiers were free citizens; that they might join any political party; say or write what they chose; salute or not as they chose; discard their uniforms when not on duty; and leave barracks without permission. By the same Declaration the administration of regiments and of ships was placed in the hands of elected com- mittees, four-fifths of the members of whom were to belong to the rank and file. This measure was taken partly under compulsion of the Council of Deputies and partly from idealistic motives the ideal was a RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS free, revolutionary army, self-disciplined, strong in the consciousness of its national and international mission. No such ideal could possibly have been realized by soldiers in the state of culture of Russia's, whose only notions, instilled by agitators, were that all officers were despots and all bourgeois blood- suckers. Kerensky, a demonstrative demagogue with no sense for real political measures, did not under- stand this; and if he had understood it, he lacked sufficient character to oppose, or break with the Council. Late in July coerced by Savinkoff , and sup- ported by the still moderate Socialist majority of the Council, which was thoroughly frightened by the results of its emancipating measures, Kerensky restored the death penalty for serious offenses at the front; but offenders were to be tried by mixed courts of officers and soldiers. Although the army was then resorting to murder, violation and robbery wholesale, it was never clearly reported that any soldier was executed by such a court; the only executions were those of officers, and these by the simple process of soldier lynch-law. Long before the nominal restoration of the death penalty the garrison of Petrograd got entirely out of hand. Authority over it, as far as there was any, was exercised not by the Ministry of War but by the Council of Deputies. But the Council of Deputies itself was not supreme. The garrison like the Council was divided into Bolshevik and moderate Socialists; and the Bolshevik soldiers rioted and demonstrated BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION in violation of the resolutions of the moderate majority in the Council. The garrison could not be relied upon, not only for Government policy but even for the policy of the Council. Under the incitements of Lenine, Trotsky, and a number of other agitators many of whom had come home from America, the Bolshevik element in the garrison steadily increased; it was supported by workingmen Red Guards who openly drilled with machine-guns in the Vyborg quarter; and the slogan "Down with the Capitalist Ministers" was heard more and more loudly until the Korniloff rebellion gave the Bolsheviks the final im- pulse and enabled them to effect the November coup d'etat. The Lvoff and Kerensky Cabinets were repeatedly begged to take measures against the Bolshevik agitators. The agitators threatened that if any attempt were made to arrest them the soldiers and Red Guards would turn out in their defense and over- throw the Government. The Bolshevik headquarters were then the palace of the dancer Kshesinskaya and the villa of the late Minister of the Interior Durnovo, which also sheltered anarchist and Maximalist organizations. In the first days of the Revolution the extremists seized both houses, and partly fortified them. Kshesinskaya was the best dancer of the Imperial Ballet under the old regime. Her relations with the Tsar before his marriage were well known; she was supposed to be the only woman who touched the bachelor Nicholas' heart; and after his marriage RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS she passed from Grand Duke to Grand Duke, belong- ing finally to the Grand Duke Andrew, a son of the Tsar's uncle Vladimir. So not by dancing, for no dancer of the Imperial ballet received much more than $5000 a year she amassed millions. Her jewels and dresses, and her palace which lies not far from the Neva, near the Peter and Paul fortress, were known to all Petrograd. Kshesinskaya was absent when the palace was seized; and she never saw it for four months. Meantime it was the headquarters of Nicholas Lenine. The Bolsheviks brought in soldiers, the staff of their incendiary newspaper Pravda, several committees, and a propaganda organization. For several weeks Lenine slept on the premises, and from a balcony he made agitation speeches to vast crowds of disbanded soldiery and working men, sum- moning them to march upon the Mariya Palace, then headquarters of the Provisional Government, and expel Prince Lvoff and the "ten Capitalist Ministers." To some extent the Kshesinskaya Palace was merely a successful bluff. The Bolsheviks proclaimed that it was thoroughly fortified ; that there were scores of machine-guns at the windows; and enough rifles in the cellars to kill half the population of Petrograd. So when Kshesinskaya demanded her house back, and appealed to the Minister of Justice and to the courts, the garrison answered defiantly. The Government was unable to execute the Court's decree to eject it. As in the case of the Durnovo Palace, and the palace of the Duke of Leuchtenberg, also seized by ex- BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 125 tremists, the Government had to reply upon the Petrograd Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' deputies, in whose hands was the real power; but though the Council had a majority of moderate Socialists who condemned the seizure of private property, it knew that most of the Petrograd soldiers were devoted to Lenine, and it hesitated to give the authorities armed support. So the citadel persisted in its defiance ; and from its balcony Lenine continued to demand the overthrowal of the Capitalist Cabinet, the expropriation of private property, and merciless class war upon the bourgeoisie. Yet at any moment, as I now learned from personal inspection, a handful of resolute policemen could have expelled the extremists. Early in June I gained ad- mittance. The Ministry of Justice had assured me that this was impossible; and on the day of my visit a general who lived close by told me he had seen four motor cars laden with rifles and machine-guns being driven to the palace by soldiers. The mere reputation of the palace had caused a local panic, pedestrians taking care to keep to the other side of the road for fear of bomb explosions. In reality, the Bolsheviks had not even posted a sentry ; and any person without card or introduction could have entered. The palace is one of the finest private residences in Petrograd. But keeping to their usual practise, the Bolsheviks had done their best to ruin it. In a handsome white vestibule, with marble statues, were dirty, spitting soldiers who lounged over desks collating reports 126 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS which, they said, had come from their provincial organizations; the fine winter-garden had become headquarters of the propaganda league, and was packed from ceiling to floor with pamphlets; Kshesinskaya's bedroom, of the oriental luxury of which Petrograd talked, was littered with copies of the incendiary newspaper Pravda; and worst shame of all her marble and tile Roman bath, the size of a small room, was half full of cigarette ends, dirty papers and rags. On the top floor was the Bolshevik Executive Com- mittee. The chiefs of this Committee claimed to be Americans. One, a young Jew, told me that he had edited a Russo-Jewish newspaper in the East Side of New York; and he affirmed that Bolshevism was practically an American doctrine; and that until lately it had flourished better in New York than any- where in Russia. Looking at me with naive glee, he added: "We have brought this, and many other good things from the United States." Lenine, he added, "would certainly carry on the War as effectively as the present bourgeois government, because once he is in power, the soldiers, inspired by genuine militant Socialism, will insist on overthrowing the Kaiser." The other most impressive person in the Bolshevik citadel was a middle-aged, very clever and cultivated lady, who spoke perfect English, and announced that she also had come from the United States. She told me that Lenine was absent; but that in some days he would return and resume his incendiary speech- BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 127 making; and this he did. The palace remained in Bolshevik possession, in spite of the fact that it could have been seized at any moment. To my remark to this effect to the Minister of Justice, I got the reply that it any attempt were made to expel the Bolsheviks, the whole garrison of Petrograd would turn out, and overthrow and perhaps massacre the Government. This incident shows how the Revolution was com- pletely in the power of any handful of men who proclaimed that they had arms, even if the arms were a bluff. Similar conditions existed at the other Bolshevik stronghold, the Durnovo Palace, which I later visited. This palace lies on the banks of the Neva in the extreme northeast of the city. It formerly belonged to Peter Durnovo, probably the worst of all the reactionary ministers of Nicholas II. It was he who initiated the repressive policy which crushed the suc- cessful revolution of 1905; but, apart from politics, Durnovo was a corrupt man, up to his neck in dis- honest financial deals and espionage intrigues. The extremists who seized his palace and declared it to be a fortress of liberty against the Capitalist Govern- ment were partly genuine Bolsheviks, and partly anarchists, backed by the working-class population of the Vyborg suburb where lie many large factories and work-shops. Even before the Revolution this suburb was notorious for disorder, and after the Revolution it turned into a nest of Anarchism. There, in defiance of the Government, drilled the Red Guard, 128 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS which terrorized the factory-owners, committed murders and robberies, and daily threatened to march into the center of the city and overthrow the Govern- ment unless it obeyed the Bolshevik's orders. Again and again the authorities threatened to send troops against the Palace; but on the morning on which the threats were to be executed menacing crowds of soldiers and Red Guards began to collect, and the Government took fright. At the time of my visit, the Palace was at the height of its glory as a center of extremism. The cobbled road leading to it, which runs along the banks of the river, was reported to be mined; there were said to be twenty guns behind the garden railing, and enough explosives in the building to blow up half of Petrograd. The garrison was believed to consist of the greatest desperadoes in Russia. But though there was some truth in this, the Durnovo affair, like the Kshesinskaya affair, was partly an extremist bluff. About ten yards from the gate, our motor-car was stopped by sentries and we were told that we could not proceed. The garrison, the sentries assured us, had trained their machine-guns on the road ; they were particularly frightened of motor-cars, which might contain Government troops sent to besiege them, and there was "desperate discipline within the Palace itself, so that if we let you pass, we should certainly be executed. ' Anyone new to Russia would have been impressed by this, but as I and my companion were not new, we persisted; and at last a civilian, armed BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 129 with a rifle, came from the Palace, and gave orders that we might pass. In this way we got as far as the gate. There we examined the famous garrison which had defied the whole armed strength of the revolutionary Russian state. The desperadoes were collected in a shady garden. They numbered about forty men, none of whom was over twenty-five years old. The majority were youths of twenty. There was nothing bellicose about them, except that each had a rifle and a leather cartridge case. There were four machine- guns; but their muzzles were not turned to the road, and as we later learned, they could not be used for lack of belts. In the garden was a motor-car, whose owner, a Russian newspaper correspondent, had like ourselves penetrated into the Palace; but the Bol- sheviks had expropriated his car, and after giving him a not very serious beating, had sent him home. Us they treated more politely. Before letting us into the Palace, the garrison in- structed us on the principles of extremism and revolution. The conversation was in English. Nearly every one of the forty young men seemed to have come from New York, or some other part of the United States. They spoke the English of men who had been a long time in the United States ; but owing to lack of education their English was useless for explaining the pretentious Bolshevik social and political principles. The most eloquent of the "Americans" a boy of twenty-one, who took his 130 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS rifle and leveled it every time he heard a sound from the road assured me that only at the Durnovo Palace was to be found the pure revolutionary sentiment which was destined to conquer Russia and the whole world. When my companion asked "Who is the commander here?" the youth replied indignantly: "I am." Assured that we were not connected with the Provisional Government, he admitted us into the fortress. This was a medium-sized, very comfortable country house, adorned with family portraits, which the "garrison" had politely left intact: and full of handsome old-fashioned furniture, which had nearly all been mutilated. In the drawing-room, looked on by portraits of Durnovo's ancestors, were about twenty machine-guns, all, like those in the garden, apparently out of use, for they were crowded in one end of the room. Here also were piles of Anarchist pamphlets and leaflets with such titles as "Down with the ten Capitalist Ministers!" "Peace and Bread!" "No more Fighting beside the Imperialist Allies!" These were the same inscriptions as appeared upon the banners with which every Sunday the Bolshevik work- men and soldiers paraded Petrograd. As we left, the garrison handed us a batch of these pamphlets beg- ging us to distribute them to the Cabinet ; and assured us that within six weeks the leaders of the villa would themselves either be Cabinet Ministers or corpses. When at last the Government mustered up courage, and sent a handful of Cossacks, the leaders and all their followers surrendered without firing a shot. BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 131 This confirmed my conclusion based on observations at Kronstadt and elsewhere that in the first half of the Revolution a resolute Government could have re- established order at any time had it only been willing to face a very small risk. The Bolshevik agitation drew much of its strength from the incitements of persons outside the specific Bolshevik class, who ought to have known better, and in fact did afterwards bitterly repent. The chief of these was the novelist Maxim Gorky. In these months I saw Gorky twice. I had first made his acquaintance in 1905 after his release from the Peter and Paul Fortress where he had been incarcerated after pro- testing to Count Witte against the impending massacre of workmen on Bloody Sunday. When I next met Gorky in April, 1917, he had greatly changed in appearance, in politics, in art. He was now editor- in-chief of the Bolshevik organ Novaya Zhisn. He attended daily the office on the Nevsky Prospect ; and there very untidily dressed, with a sickly yellow face and nervous manner he wasted his time on hack newspaper work. His literary work had much fallen off in quality; and his newspaper articles were badly written and empty of any real political content. They consisted chiefly of laments on the growing disorder, attacks on the bourgeoisie and indirect incitements to the Bolsheviks, which brought on him severe con- demnation from responsible men. Soon after the Tsardom's overthrowal, he had suggested the founda- tion of a Great Museum of the Revolution; and now 132 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS a wit wrote, "Maxim Gorky once planned a Museum of the Revolution. He now plans to put the Revolu- tion into a museum." Bourtseff, the exposer of the Okhrana, denounced Gorky as "an unconscious Ger- man agent"; and set him beside Lenine, with the difference that no one suspected Gorky of being in direct communication with Germany. In May Gorky went so far as to accuse the Foreign Minister Miliukoff of being in the pay of Anglo-French capitalists; and his attacks upon the Allies, and upon President Wilson, were so extreme that the Kerensky Government passed a law punishing such conduct with imprisonment in a fortress; and suppressed the Novaya Zhisn, which, however, reappeared under a new name, with a policy more extreme than ever. Nevertheless, when I saw Gorky in the early summer he complained that he was being unfairly attacked as a defeatist a porazhcnets. The Germans watched his antics with delight; and the Bulgarian Minister at Berlin, Rizoff, smuggled through to him a letter full of savage attacks on England, ending with the suggestion that Gorky should come to a neutral coun- try for the discussion of a separate peace. Although Gorky's conduct had practically invited these over- tures, he resented them as a gross insult, and printed the letter with a frantic denunciation. This got him into a new undignified feud. He told me that he intended to abandon politics and return to literature; but this stage lasted a very short time; and he again supported the Bolsheviks. After the Bolshevik BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 133 revolution, he turned on them, and attacked them as savagely as he formerly attacked all moderates. His incitements, by giving a veneer of respectability to the Bolshevik agitation, were a minor cause of the subsequent tragedy. Bolshevism undoubtedly owed much of its success to the material sufferings of the people of Petrograd and elsewhere. In the food question the Revolution showed even less organizing power than the Autocracy had shown. In Petrograd white bread, and after- wards eatable black bread, wholly disappeared. The population was doled out irregularly quantities of a mixed bread called "sitni"; but later this became scarce, and was replaced by ill-baked sticky rye-bread which turned sour if let stand. Meat was almost un- obtainable. For persons with long purses there were fish and game; but the prices of vegetables, fruit, sugar, tea and coffee rose to unheard-of heights. Restaurant prices had trebled between the outbreak of war and the Revolution; and in the three months after the Revolution they nearly trebled again. Plundering soldiers sold flour taken from hospitals. The popular luxury was sunflower seeds. Eating sun- flower seeds is an old peasant custom; and now the Petrograd streets were littered white as if with snow from the husks. The first "hunger-murders" began in July; and grew in numbers; and in the provinces whole families were killed for the sake of a loaf of bread. The Revolution further disorganized the currency. 134 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Immediately after the outbreak of war the Bank of State ceased redeeming credit-notes in gold. Silver disappeared. Instead of copper coins were circulated dirty postage stamps; and as the lowest stamp value was ten kopecks, for smaller sum the Government printed "credit-notes," some as low in value as one kopeck, or half a cent. The Provisional Government had hardly any revenue. The vodka monopoly, the chief source, was stopped in 1914; and there were practically no receipts from imports. In the first three months after the Revolution the land-revenue as com- pared with 1916 dropped 32 per cent; the city estate tax 41 per cent; the land redemption duties 65 per cent; and other direct taxes as much or more. At the Moscow Congress in August, the Minister of Finances predicted a $7,500,000,000 deficit for 1917. Meantime the resource was to print unbacked paper. The average monthly output of paper money imme- diately before the Revolution was 432,000,000 rubles; in the first months of Revolution it rose to 832,000,000 a month; and it rose steadily until six months after the Bolsheviks came into power it is reported to have reached 3,000,000,000 rubles a month. When the mechanical work of printing so much money became impossible, the Provisional Gov- ernment issued a new series of simply-designed notes without numbers. The Finances moved swiftly in a vicious circle. The flood of paper money sent up prices, and the high prices forced up wages and salaries. The wage BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 135 of an unskilled laborer of Petrograd which before the War was about 25 cents daily had risen in the first months of the Revolution to $3, and by November it reached $5. Skilled laborers drew $10. In one Volga district barges drew $45 a day. Employees of the Putiloff arms factory in Petrograd demanded increases of wages totaling $45,000,000 for one year; and in the Donetz region a group of undertakings which had paid $9,000,000 in dividends in 1916 was faced with demands for increases of wages amounting to $120,000,000. Workmen demanded that the rise of wages should be retrospective because under the Autocracy they had been forcibly prevented bettering their position by means of strikes. On this pretext one small Petrograd factory asked for a lump pay- ment of $6,500,000. In May a deputation of metallurgical employers complained to Prince Lvoff that the workmen's demands would force them to close down. The Government was faced by similar demands. The increased allowances to soldiers' families demanded by the all-powerful Council of Deputies would have cost the Treasury $5,500,000,000 a year. The Food Distribution Committees were cost- ing $250,000,000 yearly, and the Land Committees $70,000,000 yearly. The estimated National Debt at the end of 1917 was $25,000,000,000. During the whole period of the Revolution, the railroad system was hopelessly disorganized. This was due to wearing out of the permanent way and rolling stock, and to refusal by employees to obey 136 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS orders. The Government published figures showing that every week a larger and larger percentage of locomotives and freight cars were "sick," which meant unrepairable, as the state workshops had neither the labor nor the material for repairing the cars. A com- plete breakdown of the railroads was threatened. The same state of affairs existed in the street-car system of the big cities. The Petrograd street-cars were ruined. Every day more and more cars were taken from the rails, and sent to the repair workshops where they remained unrepaired, and the remaining few cars had to bear the tremendous burden of the whole traffic. The overcrowding and the struggle for places on the cars can hardly be imagined. Passengers were dragged from the cars with broken bones. They hung on to the couplings in front and behind. The droschky system, once convenient and cheap, broke down. The drivers, in order to keep life together, were obliged to increase their takings tenfold; the excellent little ponies which could be bought before the war at $15 apiece rose in price in three years to $200; and the shoeing of the horse cost the same price as a horse itself had cost before the War. The whole course of the Revolution was an in- effectual attempt to stay this economical dissolution. The attempt was ineffectual simply because the War was swallowing up greater and greater sums, and because of the sharp conflict between Socialistic and bourgeois ideas of public economy. This conflict helped to wreck the Revolution. The Council of BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 137 Deputies made ever more and more extreme Social- istic demands upon the first non-Socialistic govern- ment, and later upon the mixed coalition Cabinets which included Socialists among their members. When in mid-May Prince Lvoff, finding himself un- able in face of the growing anarchy to govern the country alone, came to an agreement with the Petro- grad Council of Deputies for the formation of the first coalition cabinet, he made great economic con- cessions to the Left parties; but this was not enough. The Government in despair issued late in May a statement that it was considering wholesale confisca- tion of private property, giving as excuse the failure of the nation to support war loans, and the need for stopping at any cost the further issue of paper money. The non-Socialist ministers protested so vigorously that the proclamation was withdrawn. Nevertheless, confiscation went on. Even the bourgeois ministers conceded that expropriation could not be avoided, and that taxes of a practically confiscatory nature must be enforced. At the end of June the Government took in hand a very promising, and somewhat pretentious scheme for complete economic reorganization to include the food question as well as the Finances. It decided to establish state monopolies in order to increase the national revenue, and to create a special state organiza- tion to prevent overlapping of the existing economical departments. To direct this was to be a supreme Economical Council with representatives of the work- 138 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS ing and business classes and members of the Stock Exchange. Like most of the Revolution's reforms, this plan was alive only on paper. Later the Government re-entered upon the course of state monopolies, successfully pursued by the Autocracy, which was a cause of the relatively flourishing state of the Finances before the War. This was the policy of the great reformer Witte. There was proclaimed a coal monopoly, which was at first to embrace only the Donetz Basin in Southeastern Russia. Monop- olies of tea, salt and matches were later proclaimed; and owing to the disastrous effect upon farming of the lack of agricultural machinery, a government trust was created in these. But the monopolies never came into being, for the good reason that there was no local machinery of government. The Revolution had lost all power to compel. There was no police and there was no organized army. Individuals ignored the Government's reasonable measures, com- plaining that demands were made upon them for economical sacrifices in exchange for which they were not given reasonable security. They asked why they should be compelled to give up part of their farm machinery for public purposes when the Government could not guarantee them against the seizure of the other part of it by the peasants. The weakness of Petrograd made it impossible to enforce the food and financial reforms ; the failure of the food and financial reforms in turn increased the disorder; and this again increased the Government's weakness. BOLSHEVISM IN ACTION 139 Nevertheless, both the Governments of Prince Lvoff and of Kerensky struggled on on paper. Their taxation schemes seemed democratic enough for even advanced Socialists. The old complaint of Russian democrats was that there was practically no direct taxation. Shortly before the Revolution came the first "democratic" financial reform, a direct income tax, but before the first instalment was collected the Revolution broke out. The Provisional Government, forced by the Socialists and itself eager for democratic reforms, reformed the Income Tax legislation radically. The tax was made progressive, and raised to 30 per cent on incomes of over $200,000; the war tax on surplus industrial profits was increased to 60 per cent; and a third law established a supplementary progressive income tax rising to 30 per cent. Under these laws large incomes from certain sources might have to sacrifice 90 per cent to the State. These taxes were never paid. The Bolshevik Revolution of November automatically repealed them by abolishing private property, other than small values, in Capital and Land; and a decree published in December annulling the National Debt relieved the Soviet Government of one embarrassment. But the Soviet Government is to-day without any real mone- tary system for current expenditure; and its main resource is still the printing press. This new money is not willingly accepted; and numerous local Soviets as well as the outlying provinces which do not recog- nize the Soviets, and even private corporations of 140 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS merchants, are printing their own credit-notes. Where these notes do not pass current, trade is done by barter; and thus the Bolshevik ideal of abolishing capitalistic operations has been attained, but only at the cost of disintegrating the country's industrial and commercial life. CHAPTER IX THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND IN pre-revolutionary days, the adherents of Autocracy proclaimed with good reason that nothing but a strong and centralized administration at Petro- grad could hold together an Empire with such racial diversity as Russia. The late Count Sergius Witte, though himself relatively progressive, held this so firmly that he methodically worked for the centraliza- tion of all forces and resources in Petrograd; and even opposed the creation of Zemstvos in outlying provinces. This reasoning was sound, because most of the frontier races of the old Empire considered themselves more civilized than the Great-Russians, and would certainly have used any weakening of the central power, or devolution of authority, in order to increase their measure of independence. No bond of language, religion, culture or common tradition bound to Great-Russia the Poles, Lithuanians, Finns, Letts, Ests, and people of the Caucasus. With the Ukrainians there was the bond of religion; and had the Autocracy not fostered a separate sentiment of nationality by persecuting the Ukrainian language, Great-Russia and Little-Russia would probably have 141 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS coalesced without pressure. As things were, anti- Russian feeling was almost as sharp in the Ukraine, at least among the peasants and workmen, as in Finland or Poland. It was inevitable therefore that the Revolution, unless it possessed a disciplined army and maintained its power and prestige, should have to face general secession. The Revolution in Finland is a remarkable illustra- tion of this. It was not accomplished by a single blow, but by a series of political acts each of which brought the Grand Duchy nearer to independence, and each of which registered a fresh stage in the disintegration of power at Petrograd. It is probably an example of what would have happened in the other western provinces of Russia had not the German occupation and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk done the work of detachment in a different way. The oppression of Finland was one of the worst sores of the Autocracy. In his misrule here Nicholas II went to extremes from which his most despotic predecessors shrank. Even Nicholas I, though he never convoked the Finnish Diet, left intact the Con- stitution which his predecessor Alexander I had taken over from Swedish times and had sworn to respect. Nicholas II unconstitutionally legislated both in Finnish home affairs and in Finno-Swedish relations without the consent of the Helsingfors Diet; he un- lawfully disbanded the Finnish Army, and compelled Finland to pay a heavy annual contribution; and he threw into jail or sent into exile the country's best THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND 143 citizens. This policy was strongly condemned by Liberal Russians, and the removal of Finnish grievances was inevitably one of the first steps of the Revolution. The removal was done in a thorough way. On the 2Oth of March, the Provisional Government issued a Manifesto annulling all the Tsar's illegal acts, and restoring Finland's Constitution. The Manifesto promised further an enlargement of the Constitutional rights already enjoyed. The Finnish Executive was at once cleansed. The Tsar's chief instruments, the corrupt and despotic General Seyn and the Russian- ized Helsingfors Cabinet, were dismissed, and were succeeded by a Cabinet of Finnish citizens supported by the majority of the Diet. In the Diet of 200 members, in which women sit and vote equally with men, the Social-Democratic Party had a small majority; and in accord with this, the first Cabinet (Senate) after the Revolution was composed of six Socialists and six bourgeois members, with a Social- ist, Oskari Tokoi, Prime Minister. As Governor- General of Finland, that is, local representative of Russia, was appointed Michael Stakhovitch, a stout champion of Constitutionalism and legality, a man of great ability and charming personality, whose concern for Finland's liberties was shown during the era of Russian repression. Immediately after the restoration of the Constitu- tion, the Prime Minister, Tokoi, with other represen- tative Finns went to Petrograd to negotiate with the 144 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Provisional Government on the details of the promised enlargement of constitutional rights. These negotia- tions were early threatened by a dispute as to the exact constitutional relations existing after the Revolution between Russia and Finland. The Provisional Gov- ernment held that the rights of the Tsar as Grand Duke of Finland had automatically descended to the sovereign Russian people with all other of Nicholas' rights. At first Finland did not formally challenge this claim ; but unofficial voices were raised to declare that the rights of the Tsar in Finland had simply ceased, and that therefore in strict law, the country was already independent. This claim was based upon old Swedish law under which in the absence of a sovereign, all rights were held by the Swedish Legis- lature. Without making this claim, the Finnish Diet provisionally allowed Russia to exercise the Tsar's former right of signing or vetoing Finnish legislative bills; but it declared that this must not be taken as a precedent settling the question in dispute. The negotiations at Petrograd went on amid friction, caused by the fact that Tokoi demanded an even greater measure of independence than the Provisional Government was willing to grant. When the negotiations were concluded, Tokoi returned to Helsingfors, and presented to the Diet the draft Bill agreed upon with Russia, declaring that he had got for Finland as much as he could. Prob- ably Finland would have accepted this Bill, which made the Cabinet responsible to the Diet on the most THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND 145 democratic principles if Russian revolutionary affairs had prospered. Though less than Finland wanted, the Bill was more than she could demand if the assump- tion that Russia had succeeded to the former Tsar's rights was correct. But Russia's growing anarchy and weakness encouraged Finland to demand more. A vigorous independence movement sprang up ; it was supported not only by the local Socialists who from the first desired to treat Russia with little ceremony, but also by the bourgeois parties. Both groups agreed in agitating for complete independence. The dif- ference was that the Socialists wanted to enact in- dependence without Russia's consent, whereas the other parties desired that Finland should obtain in- dependence with the consent of the Russian Constit- uent Assembly. Apart from these differences as to method, all parties agreed. The independence agitation was soon formally voiced in a declaration by the Swedish People's Party that Finland, by virtue of her high culture, had attained a position which entitled her to rank among the independent peoples of the world ; and to achieve this aim, an "Independence League" was formed. Meantime the two groups began a feud on domestic questions which was an exact parallel to the struggle between Russia's educated classes and her extreme Socialists. The next stage in Russo-Finnish relations was the handling of the Bill enlarging Finland's rights, as brought by the "returned American" from Petrograd. 146 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS This Bill was submitted to a Commission of the Diet. Before it issued from this Commission, the weakness of the Petrograd government and the general revolu- tionary disintegration had gone much farther; there had been serious riots in Petrograd; the Ukraine, which had no such historical and constitutional claims as Finland, had practically demanded independence; Kronstadt had seceded; and secessionist aspirations were being proclaimed by small districts and even by single towns all over the Empire. As from the first Finland wanted complete independence, it was in- evitable that she should take advantage of Russia's weakened condition, and she did so. The Commission returned the Bill to the Diet with important amendments which deprived Russia of several of the powers reserved to her in the negotia- tions at Petrograd. The amended Bill was to be voted on by the Diet, and if passed sent to Petrograd for sanction. Up to this time even the official Socialists had not adopted the contention of many individual Finns that Finland could legislate on mutual relations without Russia's consent. So far this doctrine had been put forward only unofficially. The amendments nevertheless excited great distrust and resentment at Petrograd; and the Constitutional Democrats, who are very Imperialistic and Nationalistic, urged the Provisional Government not to give its consent. The Provisional Government never had a chance to refuse. Before the amended Bill could be submitted for the vote of the Diet, Russia's plight grew still THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND 147 worse, and the position of the Provisional Govern- ment became still weaker. The Kronstadt, Ukraine and other local troubles grew more menacing; Prince Lvoff was on the eve of falling; and the Russian soldiers and sailors at Helsingfors began to show Bol- shevik leanings, indicating that if a breach occurred between Finland and Russia, they might support the local Socialists against the hated Petrograd bourgeoi- sie. The fleet had even threatened to join Kronstadt in bombarding Petrograd, with the aim of overthrow- ing Prince Lvoff. Naturally under such conditions, Finland's appetite for independence grew; but the bourgeois parties in the Diet continued to recommend caution, persisting that it would be better to come to an agreement with the Constituent Assembly than take the dangerous step of promulgating independence by Finland's will alone, provoking Russian resent- ment, and inviting repression if Russia recovered from her troubles. The Socialist majority in the Diet decided to take the risk. The Bill was returned again to the Com- mission; and the Commission returned it to the Diet once more radically altered, this time in a way which practically expelled Russia altogether. The re- amended Bill declared that the former rights of the Tsar as Grand Duke in Finland had ceased, that is, had not descended to the Russian people; and it deprived Russia of all authority except in the domains of military defense and foreign relations. The main new point was that the Bill should not be submitted to 148 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Russia for sanction or veto. Russia, it was practically proclaimed, had lost that right. This Bill constituted a coup d'etat. It did not men- tion the Russian Governor-General and left him not even his decorative functions. The intent was that he should be sent out of the country. The concession to Russia on the question of defense and foreign rela- tions had no meaning, for the vital point of the Bill was the fact that it was not to be submitted to Russia, this meaning that Finland without Russia's consent could regulate mutual relations. If so, Finland could at any time also deprive Russia of the last vague rights conceded to her in defense and diplomatic matters. If the Bill, said objectors, passed through the Diet, this last link between the two countries would certainly soon be broken. The objectors were right; for only four months later Finland proclaimed her full independence in international law. When I left for Helsingfors the Independence Bill was meeting fierce opposition from two quarters. First, from Russians. The Bolshevik minority in the Petrograd Council of Deputies supported it, mainly out of a feeling of solidarity with Finnish Socialists; but the moderate Socialist Press, and much more so the governmental and Constitutional-Democratic Press, sharply attacked and even threatened Finland. They accused her of practising the very illegality of which she had complained when it was practised by the Autocracy; and declared that if she claimed to regulate her relations with Russia by her own will THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND 149 alone, Russia might play at the same game; and when she recovered from her weakness, might resort to the one-sided method of settling relations which were practised by Nicholas II. With the exception of Kerensky, who during a visit to Helsingfors read a lecture to the Finns and threatened them with serious consequences if they seceded, the Government gave no indication of its policy. In fact, it seemed helpless; it had no reliable troops; and the garrison of Finland would probably refuse to obey Petrograd's orders to take repressive measures. The Petrograd Press bitterly denounced Finland for ingratitude, emphasizing the fact that Russian Liberalism had supported her in her days of trial; and that one of the Revolution's first acts was to restore all that she had lost and to grant her even more. The Finnish non-Socialists the Young-Finns, Old-Finns and Swedish People's Party, together con- stituting nearly half the Diet also opposed the Bill. They stood for independence, but still held that it should be attained in agreement with Russia. They proclaimed further that the Socialists wished for immediate independence merely because that would allow them to attack and destroy the propertied classes. The determining factor in the dispute was the attitude of the Socialist Prime Minister Tokoi. Although Tokoi had advised the Diet to pass the Bill in the mild form first agreed upon with Russia, he began to waver. Without actually championing the last amendments, he referred in a speech to Russia 150 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS as "a possible ally" ; and by this aggravated the resent- ment at Petrograd, which began to fear that the Socialists in the Diet would vote solidly for the re- amended Bill. And in fact this took place. While the semi-Socialistic Cabinet was still supposed to be solid in opposing the amendments, and while Tokoi remained discreetly silent, the Bill passed through the Diet on the first reading. Of the following develop- ments until the final passage of the Bill I was a wit- ness myself. Arriving in Helsingfors from Petrograd in mid- summer was like arriving in Paradise from Hades. Clean, well-dressed, bathed in sunshine, decorated with handsome statues and glowing with flowers, Helsingfors resembled one of the minor German capitals in time of peace. Underneath, conditions were not so good. The food trouble, though mitigated by Scandinavian order, was even more serious than in Russia, where, in some parts, there was a rude plenty. Already in Finnish parishes peasants were mixing pine-bark and lichens with their rye-bread; and the daily portion of bread in Helsingfors was only 150 grams. Prices were even higher than in Russia. A room in the best hotel which in peace-time could be had for four marks now cost twenty; and for this twenty marks persons from Russia had to pay twenty-five rubles, for which in peace-time they would have got over sixty marks. This break in the exchange was due to cessation of imports. Before the Revolution Finland had been exporting large THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND 151 quantities of products, mainly munitions, to Russia, and getting nothing in exchange. Uninstructed Rus- sians ascribed the fall in exchange to Finnish enmity. Finland, in fact, was flooded with Russian paper money for which she could get nothing; her dealings with Russia had caused her heavy loss; and, partly as result of that, the Finns who in the first Revolution days had shared in the general fraternization were again thoroughly anti-Russian. Helsingfors was quiet. The Socialist Prime Minister had left town, because, said opponents, he wished to delay committing himself as to the proposed coup d'etat. The temporary head of the Cabinet was a professor Senator Setala, the greatest living authority on the Finnish language. Setala belongs to the non-Socialist Young-Finnish Party; and he denounced the amended Bill and declared that if it passed the Diet, all of the Cabinet would probably resign. I found the Governor-General, M. Michael Stakhovitch, also much aroused by the Socialist plan. Stakhovitch is one of the most interesting and picturesque figures in Russian Liberalism. A stout, almost Falstaffian figure, a rosy face, an enormous beard, blazing eyes and emphatic speech are combined with whole-hearted devotion to liberty, with universal education and sound judgment. Stakhovitch assured me that he was entirely friendly to Finland; but he sharply condemned the policy of the Socialist majority, and claimed that Finland must not determine her fate without a prelttr.ivr'vy p~reement with Russia. The 152 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Socialists, he complained, had made things worse by threatening to force through the Bill without the two- thirds majority legally required for any Constitutional change. The ruin of Finland would be the result. Under the new law, the Socialists would legislate against bourgeois property interests; the bourgeoisie would refuse to obey, on the ground that the In- dependence Law was unconstitutionally passed; and as the Socialists had no army or police with which to enforce their will, the result would be general dis- order; and Russia would have to intervene. Stak- hovitch assured me that as the Bill left no functions to the Governor-General, he would resign if it passed. The day before the Bill was finally presented to the Diet, I made the acquaintance of the Premier, the "returned American," upon whose personal deci- sion its fate now depended in great measure. Tokoi is certainly more a "returned American" than a Finn. Neither in appearance, dress or manners is he like a Finn. He is a little, stoutish, very dapper man, with beady brown eyes, small regular features, and a rosy shining face, who in no way resembles the typical Socialist, but looks rather like a small but pros- perous tradesman of an American country town. Like the Anarchists of the Durnovo Palace, he speaks fluent English, but it is the English of an uneducated man ; and when he ceased telling me of his adventures in the United States, and tried to explain his own country's constitutional troubles, he was entirely at sea. He told me he had spent ten years in Colorado, THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND 153 California and British Columbia, at first mining gold and later engaging in small trading operations; and that after his return to Finland he had engaged in Trade. He owed his political authority, he admitted, to what he considered "American" politics, by which Finns understood slickness parading as diplomacy, talent in organization, and the keeping of the mouth tightly shut when necessary. He was now waiting to see how the cat would jump. He refused to say whether he would support the Separation Bill or resign; he must first study the attitude of the rank and file of his party. This attitude, I learned, did not depend upon himself; but upon a man of very different type, the editor of the evening newspaper Tydwies, M. Makelin, leader of the Socialist Party in the Diet. Makelin I found to be a very untidy, grim-faced and rude gentleman who spoke only Fin- nish, and very gruffly refused to take an interpreter. As he understood Swedish, I put my question to him in that language, and he wrote down his answers in Finnish, which I could not understand when spoken but was able to read. The Socialists, he vowed, would pass the Bill, if necessary by unconstitutional means; and if the Cabinet, including its Socialists, resigned in protest the stouter-hearted Socialists in the Diet would not fear to take power. As Russia was help- less, she would do nothing. When I asked him whether he would himself become head of the Gov- ernment and take the responsibility of fighting all Russia and his own bourgeois countrymen, he took 154 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS up a very stubby pencil and scrawled, "I am quite competent to do that/' The Bill went through. When it came before the Diet on the following evening, the "returned Ameri- can" rose, and in flat opposition to his non-Socialistic colleagues in the Cabinet, declared emphatically for it. It was part, he said of the Revolution; and he could not oppose the Revolution. The Socialists thereupon announced that they proposed to observe Constitutional forms, and would not declare the Bill passed unless it was supported by the necessary majority. If it were passed, it must not be submitted to Russia for sanction. Finland alone must determine her fate. The Bill passed by a little more than the legally necessary majority. So Finland's independence on paper was declared by Finland herself. It was not realized in fact until four months later. In this affair high drama and low comedy were strangely in contact. The former Finnish Parliament House is now used only for committee meetings ; and the Diet meets in a large private assembly hall in the Government Street. This hall has amusement rooms in the story underneath. Before attending the fateful session I entered these amusement rooms, and there found about a hundred Russian sailors flirting, dancing, and kissing Finnish servant girls. A band played. The sailors showed no sign that they knew that a great event in Russia's history was taking place directly over their heads, and the lively Finnish girls seemed unconscious that their country's destiny was THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND 155 at stake. The entrance door bore the legend "No Soldiers Admitted." That inscription meant some- thing. The dancing sailors were well-dressed, clean and plentifully supplied with money; not only were they highly paid, but they earned enormous sums by doing repairs to the ships in the lack of mechanics, and also made money by selling fittings and instru- ments from the ships. Everything portable was car- ried off. Some sailors, apart from these thefts, earned three hundred rubles a month, in addition to free lodging and board. At the same time about the town slouched Russia's dirty, neglected and miserable peasant soldiers, who received for all their needs $1.50 a month and found nothing to steal. The highly civilized Finns, though they looked down on all Rus- sians, tolerated the good-looking, jovial and rich sailors ; but the inscription over the door, "No Soldiers Admitted" meant that they drew the line somewhere. The headquarters of the Baltic Fleet's Socialist organization, which was largely Bolshevik, and later became entirely so, was the ex-Tsar's private yacht the Polar Star, which lay at the quay. A committee on board directed all the affairs of the Fleet, only occasionally condescending to consult officers on technical questions. The sailors alone determined where the Fleet should be stationed. Shortly before my arrival, the Provisional Government had ordered it to go back to Reval, which is the chief naval base in the Baltic. The sailors refused. They declared that Reval was a skutchny gorod, a tedious town; 153 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS there were no gins to dance with and only inferior moving picture shows. I asked the head of the com- mittee on the Polar Star what the Fleet would do if the Diet's coup d'etat of the night before caused a collision between Russia and Finland. Whether Rus- sia could carry her will or not depended entirely upon her garrison. He replied that the Fleet would prob- ably support the Finnish Socialists, as the sailors were mostly Bolsheviks, who regarded the supporters of the Bill nearly all Socialists as friends and natural allies against the bourgeoisie. "They regard," he said, "questions of every kind as mere issues between Socialists and non-Socialists." During this fateful week for Finland, occurred in Russia the great Bolshevik riot and demonstration which led to the fall of Prince LvofT. I did not witness that remarkable spectacle. The Kerensky Government which followed made a bold attempt to fight Finland's pretensions. At first, owing to the skilful action of the Governor-General, Stakhovitch, it succeeded. Stakhovitch made a patriotic appeal to the garrison, and temporarily won its support. Made confident by this, the Petrograd Government declared the Diet dissolved, and when the Socialists, objecting that Russia had no right to dissolve, attempted to hold a Diet Session, the Government was able to prevent them by force. The Socialists persisted that the Diet was still in existence, but they illogically participated in the new General Election, and were THE REVOLUTION IN FINLAND 157 defeated, with the result that the new Diet had a small non-Socialist majority. Before the new Diet met, there were more com- plications. After Korniloff's rebellion against Keren- sky, the Helsingfors garrison, like the garrisons in Russia, turned overwhelmingly Bolshevik; and as a result of the revelation of Kerensky's complicity in the rebellion against himself, they withdrew their sup- port. The Finns were then able to do as they liked; and this time the Socialists held a session of the dis- solved Diet, and legislated without the participation of the non-Socialists. The Socialists, just as in Russia, determined, legal majority or no legal major- ity, to seize power, and there were disorders, accom- panied by the murders of many Finnish citizens who had committed no offense except that of being bourgeois. The murderers were the Socialistic "Red Guards." Against the Red Guards was formed a White Guard. This was a repetition of the history of 1905, when Red Guard and White Guard clashed in the streets of Helsingfors. After the successful Bolshevik revolution of the late autumn, Finland, here all parties agreeing, declared complete independence of Russia, and her act was acknowledged by the government of Lenine and Trotsky, in pursuance of their unqualified policy of national self-determination. The head of the first in- dependent Finnish Government, supported by the non- Socialistic Diet majority, was M. Svinhufvud, formerly Attorney General and judge, a sound patriot, 158 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS who was exiled to Siberia without trial early in the War as punishment for resisting the Tsar's oppressive and illegal acts. But Finland's troubles were only beginning. The Bolshevik Government, though it had recognized the independence, understood "self- determination" in its own way; and considered it its duty to support the Socialists against the bourgeoisie. The Bolshevik garrison, backed by fresh Bolshevik troops and Red Guards from Petrograd, co-operated with the Finnish Socialists against the White Guards ; and expelled the lawful Government. As commander of the White Guards, charged with the restoration of the Government, was appointed General Baron Man- nerheim, a Finnish aristocrat and a capable soldier who long served in the Russian cavalry and won several notable successes over the Austro-Germans in Galicia. Being without arms and munitions, the Whites appealed for Swedish help, which was refused, and afterwards for German help, which was granted; and in a short campaign the combined White and German forces easily defeated the Reds. Legal gov- ernment is thus restored; but Finland has now to solve the German problem; she cannot get rid of the German forces before her own army is organized, without risking a new Red revolt, probably again aided from Petrograd; and she cannot keep the Ger- mans if she is to maintain full independence and justify her claims to recognition as an independent state in international law. CHAPTER X KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE DURING the July Revolution in Finland occurred the fall of Prince Lvoff and the elevation of Alex- ander Kerensky to presidency in the Cabinet. These two events are only loosely connected. The imme- diate cause of LvofFs resignation was a violent demonstration in Petrograd by the Bolsheviks of the garrison in favor of the transfer of all power into the hands of the Soviets. The riot lasted for nearly a week, and several score persons were killed or wounded. It took place against the will of the Petro- grad Soviet itself, which still contained a moderate majority of Menshevik Social-Democrats and Social- Revolutionaries; but, as all through the Revolution, the extremists took advantage of the reluctance of the moderates to resort to preventive coercion. The Provisional Government escaped expulsion or capture only through the loyalty of the best disciplined part of the garrison, mainly Cossacks. The signal for the outbreak of this revolt was the resignation of several Ministers who refused to sanction the wide conces- sions made by the majority in the Cabinet to the Ukrainian Rada, which by that time was in a position 159 160 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS to make its own demands. When Prince Lvoff resigned, he declared publicly that he considered Kerensky best fitted to head the Government. That he really believed this is doubtful. Kerensky had so far shown no real political abilities. But he was cer- tainly the most prominent politician in the country; he had survived so far all Cabinet changes; he was still a useful link between the Soviet, of which he continued to be a member, and the non-Socialist parties; and he had a great reputation abroad. His succession to the leadership of the Cabinet was made inevitable by conditions in the Cabinet and in the country; and LvofT in recommending him merely recognized that fact. The universal anarchy that followed was also inevitable. It needed no active blunders by the executive. But the passivity, con- fusion and wholesale headlessness shown in the next two months were specific Kerensky qualities; and to understand them and the Conservative reaction which they induced, a reader must have clear notions what Kerensky was. The writer first met Kerensky in April when as Minister of Justice he was facing the first outbreaks of disorder. The interview took place at the Ministry of Justice in the Catherine Street. Into an untidy room, in a furtive way, came a very thin man of middle height, clean-shaven, with a sallow, unhealthy face, dark eyes and eyebrows, and close cropped black hair standing erect over the forehead. In manner he was nervous and demonstrative and obviously not KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE 161 sure of himself. He spoke a little French, but on this occasion used Russian. This was not yet the historic Kerensky. The historic Kerensky arrived when the Minister of Justice, after GutchkofFs resig- nation, became Minister of War; and put on the uniform which he never took off until he fled from the Bolsheviks. The uniform, supposed to be a Rus- sian private's, was made of rough Russian khaki; but in cut it was not Russian. With no medals or badges of rank, with ill-made breeches and puttees badly put on over rough shoes, the physically frail Kerensky contrasted picturesquely with his get up. This dominated the various poses in which he later in- dulged. Injudicious admirers, misled by the windy heroics that were all he had of politics, liked to paint him in that most attractive role the man with body too weak to contain his heroic spirit ; who, hardly able to walk, spitting blood, sleepless at night, was joy- fully killing himself for his country's sake. In his rough uniform, with his slight form and ghastly face, Kerensky reminded me of Sarah Bernhardt as I saw her in L'aiglon. He supported this farce, making clear to persons who inquired about his health that his mind was superior to his weak body ; but like most poseurs he was not a conscious hypocrite; and was quite as honest as were his admirers in admiration of himself. Kerensky's reputation in Ally country was not the result of any ability shown in his work. To the Allies Russia naturally presented a simple problem: there 162 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS were good Russians who wanted to fight and bad Russians who did not. The conclusion of the War in the resolute if ruinous way of Lenine and Trotsky was as entirely outside Kerensky's range as was the efficient carrying on of the War. His way was to let things drift, and where he could not do that, to choose the line of least resistance; and he professed to stand for the War because Russia's nominal war- making, though difficult, was easier than making peace. To the Allies, with the view above given of good Russians and bad Russians, Kerensky was naturally a hero and a great man. This judgment was mistaken. Although Kerensky made some fervent speeches to soldiers at the front, yet such little fighting as Russia did after the Revolu- tion was not due to him, but to Korniloff and other high officers. Kerensky was the chief disorganizer of the Army. Being entirely lacking in political judg- ment, he shared fully the first immature enthusiasms of the Revolution; and he joined the other Socialists in the Soviet in undermining the Army. He worked at this hand in hand with the moderate Socialist Soviet majority, which pursued a policy no way less fatal than the policy of the Bolshevik minority; and only when he saw that his measures and his rhetoric against discipline had torn the Army to pieces, did he turn round with the other moderate Socialist leaders, and vainly try to undo the harm. He did this mainly with speeches and proclamations; but he shrank from withdrawing the Soviet's ruinous "Army Order No. KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE 163 One," and his own hardly less ruinous Declaration of Soldiers' Rights. Kerensky had no knowledge or ideas about adminis- tration or about the art of government generally. As has been made clear in an earlier chapter, the great revolutionary reforms were all carried through or planned during the premiership of Prince Lvoff. In the three and a half months in which Kerensky was supreme he showed no instinct for sound political action. That was inevitable from his feeble and shallow character. Not only had he no concrete measures in that most of the Revolution's leaders were weak but his mind could not even grasp the imposing political generalizations which replace con- crete measures with most educated Russians. The qualities which enabled him to rise were personality and energy; but as these are not specifically political qualities, they no more equipped him to rule than they would have equipped him to paint a picture. They merely led him to histrionic prominence on the revolu- tionary stage ; and kept him there for a time. Kerensky's personality was marked. Part of it was sham and pose, but it was not all that. He dominated assemblies in a remarkable way. The audiences at these political assemblies consisted of true Russians, men without resisting power or energy, whose self- confidence had been crushed by centuries of despotism and subjection. They were men made to be dominated. When Kerensky appeared upon the platform, made frantic speeches, gesticulated and screamed in his 164 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS harsh voice, hinting at terrible things which would happen if he were thwarted, he seemed to cow his audiences. Consciously or unconsciously, he knew that; and his oratory developed into streams of hysterical talk and wild threats, which he was not at all the man to carry out. He talked in a way from which the Autocracy's despots would have shrunk. Although his Government had behind it no popular mandate, and had not even much physical force, and might legally have been resisted by any rival revolu- tionary group that claimed to represent the people, he seemed to assume that he had a divine right. He practically told assemblies that he would not tolerate resistance to his will. His favorite menace was to use "blood and iron." This second-hand Bismarckian phrase delighted him; he used it thrice in a single speech, reiterating "I, as representative of the Revolu- tion, will use blood and iron." The rest of his oratory was on the same level; the speeches were strings of disconnected, politically empty sentences, packed with meaningless adjectives, and delivered with hysteria. No educated person could read them without disgust. Nevertheless they imposed upon audiences partly com- posed of educated men. He held his audience's ear. When interruped or challenged, he usually came off best, even against men of solid reputation and real political ability. At these he screamed and even shouted rudely imperative commands; and as a rule he won. This indicated that he had a strong per- sonality; but it was mainly a sham personality of KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE 165 stage kind, for he never faced real opposition; and towards the Council of Deputies, the Bolsheviks, the mutinous troops, and the rebellious Commander-in- Chief Korniloff, he showed no real power of resistance. Kerensky's other quality his energy was very marked, though it was in the main confined to speech- making. His campaigns of oratory at the front resembled whirlwinds; and when Prime Minister he worked at the Winter Palace eighteen hours a day. But he accomplished nothing. Not a single reform, administrative improvement or decisive executive act is linked with his name. Kerensky's personal vanity took unheard-of dimen- sions. Even before he became Prime Minister, his head was completely turned. His speeches were full of himself, his opinions and his feelings. Every other sentence began with the words "I as your leader," "I as Chief of the Army," and so on; and at last he began to employ with reference to himself phrases borrowed from the tinsel rhetoric of the Autocracy, creating derision and disgust. This vanity seriously interfered with the nation's business long before the public were aware of it. The first public accusation that he was suffering from swelled head came from the former Commander-in-Chief ; the victor of Galicia in 1917, General Brusiloff. Brusiloff, the best and most successful general Russia produced during the War, was suddenly dismissed from the command- in-chief without any explanation being given to him. 166 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS He reported the facts to a Moscow newspaper. Kerensky, then Prime Minister and Minister of War, had announced his impending arrival at Moghileff, the headquarters. His train arrived before the expected hour; and Brusiloff, being engaged at a Council of War, did not meet him. Kerensky at once sent for him; received him coldly, showing clearly that his vanity was wounded; and next day dismissed him without explanation. At about this time, he moved into the Winter Palace, and occupied with his wife the bedroom of a former Tsar. Towards the end, his vainglory was a matter of public ridicule. The eccen- tric Alexis Suvorin published mock bulletins about "His Majesty Alexander Feodorovitch (Kerensky)," recording how "His Majesty deigned to receive the British Ambassador"; and how "His Majesty con- tinued to be solicitous for the welfare of the subjects entrusted to him by God." Kerensky's weaknesses were very pronounced; but his critics went too far. They accused him of being a conscious humbug and adventurer. The Novoye Vremya, referring to a historic Russian impostor whom he closely resembled in face, declared that it was inevitable "that Russia in time of trouble should have a False Demetrius. Now he has come." But Kerensky was not clever enough to be a conscious fraud. He honestly considered himself a very great man, chosen by Providence to save his country. For this role, having a head entirely empty, he was un- fitted. But he was too comic a figure to deserve KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE 167 enmity. His adherents repeatedly spread stories of attempts to assassinate him ; but I believe that nobody ever took him seriously enough for that. For him that was a misfortune. Had he died at the climax of his early patriotic speech-making campaigns, his- tory would never have found him out; he would be regarded to-day as one of Shelley's "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" ; and the world would be saying "The Revolution might have been saved, the War might have been won, if only Alexander Kerensky had lived." The attitude of the different parties towards Keren- sky was clearly defined within a few weeks of his taking power. The Bolsheviks violently opposed him. He came into power with a clear anti-Bolshevik, re- pressive program, imposed by the July revolt in Petrograd, which had convinced all reasonable men that the policy of sweet reason pursued by Prince LvofI must come to an end. There were only two courses; either to surrender to Bolshevism or to repress it. Surrender was absurd, for the Bolsheviks had no claim to represent the majority even in Petro- grad. Repression was clearly justified against a minority party that had resorted to violence. The new Kerensky Cabinet proclaimed for such a policy; but did not execute it thoroughly. Orders were issued for the arrest of Lenine and Trotsky, who had both disappeared; their incendiary newspaper Pravda was suppressed; and such leaders as were caught were sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where they 168 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS remained until the Korniloff revolt set them free. These measures incensed the Bolsheviks against Kerensky, but did not weaken them. The Menshevik Socialists and Social-Revolutionaries were relatively well-disposed towards him, because they, as he, stood for a coalition Cabinet representing both Socialists and the non-Socialist bourgeoisie. But the non- Socialists, though some of them entered his Cabinet, looked on him with deep distrust and very little respect; and a general revolt of the bourgeoisie, sup- ported by chiefs of the Army, seemed to be brewing almost from the first. The cause was the growing pessimism as to the prospects of reorganization under any regime in which the Soviets and the disorderly soldiery had influence. With such a system Kerensky's past had been bound up; and to it he was committed for the future beyond recall. Several factors of dis- integration brought about this pessimism. First, the increasing disorder in the Army and the country; second the financial and economic dissolution with a threat of universal hunger; third, the threatened break-up of the Empire by the secession of integral provinces; fourth, the treasonable conduct of ruling persons towards the War; fifth, the threatened deprivation of the educated classes of all political rights. In the late summer the disorder among soldiers and civilians grew to serious dimensions. There w r ere mass robberies, massacres and incendiary fires in European Russia and Siberia; there was wholesale bloodshed KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE 169 and rebellion in Tashkent, the most important city of Central Asia; and in the eastern provinces there were pitched battles between loyal and mutinous troops. In the west things were worse. Hundreds of thou- sands of fleeing soldiers murdered, outraged and robbed. That was the aftermath of Korniloff's brilliant offensive in Galicia. Soldiers massacred one another; massacred officers; massacred civilians, men, women and children. The towns through which they fled, pursued by Austrians and Germans, were given up to mediaeval pillage. The scenes during the flight from Kalusz in Galicia, the limit of Korniloff's advance, would be incredible were they not testified to by officers, civilians and soldiers themselves, and confirmed in an official report which shows that soldiers in their orgy of blood and lust did not spare little children, who perished in scores, carved elab- orately to bits in the public squares. All decent elements were shamed by these revelations, of which the Germans took full advantage for propaganda, flooding neutral countries with "The Russians' own confessions of their misdeeds." The moderate classes were bitterly incensed by the country's foreign humiliations. The Foreign Min- ister Terestchenko's attempt to combine a policy of fighting besides the Allies with a policy of "no annexa- tions and no indemnities" failed utterly. To some extent, this was due to the fault of the Allies in fail- ings to re-state their War aims; the Bolsheviks con- tinued to proclaim that England and France were 170 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS imperialistic; and Terestchenko was in an ambiguous position. Still trying to keep in with the Allies, he was obliged to make concessions to the anti-Imperialist Left. How far he was forced to go may be seen from the Provisional Government's manifesto of July 6th, condemning the measures taken by the Allies against King Constantine, and announcing that Russia so sharply disapproved that she had refused the par- ticipation of her troops in the expedition to Southern Greece. While the Provisional Government thus did not get from the Allies the sympathy and support which in its difficult position it might have expected, it was baffled by an independent Bolshevik foreign policy entirely in Germany's interest, which made patriotic Russians blush. Bourtseff, the revealer-general of plots, and other trustworthy initiated persons, produced proof that the anti-War party was doing Germany's work and sometimes taking German pay. General Brusiloff, then Chief of Staff, published a letter declaring that Lenine was an agent of the German General Staff, and was in connection with German agents then in Russia. A search made at the office of Lenine's newspaper Pravda revealed letters from Germans at Haparanda on the Swedish frontier. Many German agents were arrested. A raid made upon a supposed Petrograd hospital brought out the fact that the manageress, doctors and some of the patients were German agents; and one of the sick men proved to be a German officer. The hospital was in direct con- KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE 171 nection with the Bolsheviks. The patriotic newspapers published lists to show that the Bolshevik leaders, all of whom used Russian surnames, were really named Rosenbaum, Goldmann, Apfelbaum, Bron- stein (that is Trotsky) Katz and Nachamkes. A proclamation by Kerensky revealed the fact that Ger- man agents were responsible for the disorders on the warships at Kronstadt, Helsingfors and Reval, Rus- sia's chief naval port on the Gulf of Finland. Naturally, no German intrigues could have caused the collapse of Russia's diplomacy, army and navy had not the necessary conditions of collapse already existed, and in this respect it is a mistake to ascribe Russia's surrender to German intrigue; the Germans, however, had thoroughly studied the Russian political soil; and they now cultivated it with great success. Although the majority of the propertied and educated classes had lost all enthusiasm for the War, and doubted whether it could be won, they took a normal patriotic view of their country, were proud of its great area and population, and were not ready to have it dismembered in the name of "self-determina- tion." The revelation that this dismemberment was being effected by German agents helped by a clique of internationalist so-called "Russians," hardly one of whom was a Russian by race, caused a fierce revul- sion; and a strong desire was shown to throw out the misruling classes in Petrograd. This revulsion was accelerated by revelations about the Minister of Agriculture, Tchernoff. Before the Revolution 172 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Tchernoff, it appeared, had been a contributor to newspapers printed in Russian by the German General Staff with the aim of seducing Russian soldiers from their allegiance. The ambiguous attitude of the Kerensky Government toward this charge made things worse. After itself making the revelations about Tchernoff, the Government, threatened by the min- ister's Social-Revolutionary supporters, tried to hush matters up; and at last it whitewashed Tchernoff in a communique which few believed. The educated classes were enraged by the demand of the extreme Left for the abolition of the Duma and the Council of the Empire. For reasons already given in Chapter V, the Left revolutionaries never recognized the Duma after the Revolution; and officially the Duma was never convoked. The Petro- grad Council of Deputies by occupying the Duma buildings laid emphasis on its claim to be the only Parliament Russia possessed. But private meetings of the Duma were held, in which participated most of the country's ablest men, and the champions of Constitutionalism in pre-revolutionary times. Speakers made violent attacks upon the Petrograd Soviet, "a mob," one speaker said, "of murderers, lunatics and traitors." The extremists retorted by demanding that the Duma should not even meet privately, and added that the best way to prevent this was formally to abolish the Duma and also the Council of the Empire as institutions. Led by its speaker, the veteran Rodzianko, the Duma passed a KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE 173 resolution declaring that it would defy any such de- cree. It was the one permanent center of moderate and pro-war opinion; and the assault upon it, aggra- vated by a demand for the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from all political power, tended to solidify this class, and intensify its desire for a change. The passive revolt which began about July was backed by three elements. First was the moderate Liberal element, consisting mainly of the Constitu- tional Democratic Party, which may to a large extent be identified with the Duma. The Constitutional- Democratic Party, or "Party of National Freedom," was before the Revolution the greatest party of Rus- sia. It represented the "Intelligentsiya" the profes- sional classes, the university professors, part of the business men, and the great mass of those officials who being obscure and having no chance of preferment were not reactionary by program. The party con- tains undoubtedly the ablest heads in Russia; to it are mainly due the reforming laws prepared before the Revolution and passed after it by Prince LvofT; its political program is, roughly, English or Ameri- can; and it was inclined for a Constitutional Mon- archy until the extreme Left made it plain that they would not tolerate a monarchy in any shape. The party then proclaimed for a republic. In foreign policy it was frankly Imperialistic before the Revolu- tion; and after the Revolution, Imperialistic in secret. Against the Kerensky anarchy the Constitutional- RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Democratic Party was now in full revolt, though some of its members still remained in the cabinet. Joined with the Constitutional-Democrats in revolt were the adherents of the "Moscow Industrial Group." Moscow, by far the most important indus- trial and financial center of the Empire, has an ex- tremely powerful class of merchant princes, a great many of them peasants by origin, mostly characterized by moderate Liberalism in politics, great practical sense, and intense devotion to their own business in- terests. The Industrial Group, whose most prominent leader was the Revolution's first Minister of Trade, M. Konovaloff, was embittered by the failure of Petrograd. Konovaloff and his friends made many pronouncements, declaring that the Empire was on the verge of ruin, and demanding immediate measures for the betterment of the finances and the restoration of order in the factories. The weak Kerensky Gov- ernment did nothing. From July on, the Industrial Group was prepared, at least in theory, to support any move to replace the Kerensky Government by a Gov- ernment pledged to moderate reform and recon- struction. The third element which it seemed could be counted upon for a revolt was Cossackdom. Early in July the Don Cossacks, the largest of all Cossack groups, had elected as their Ataman General Kaledine, who was destined to become famous as one of the sup- porters of Korniloff in the rebellion of September, and was afterwards the chief military opponent of KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE 175 the Bolsheviks. In the summer the Cossacks were looked upon as a solid element to be counted on against the extremist Left. Weeks before, they had held meetings at Petrograd and elsewhere and pro- claimed their desire to help the Government in restor- ing order, and their determination to fight the War to a triumphant finish. As the Cossacks preserved discipline and as they were the sole coherent military force in the Empire, it caused surprise that when the tussle came they achieved so little against the undisciplined, unofficered and incapable Bolsheviks. That this must be so was plain from an examination of the Cossack question made by me at the time. The Cossacks, it is true, are on the whole a moderate and conservative element. They might have been counted on as anti-Bolshevik to a certain extent, but not altogether. Like all the working classes and peasants in the Empire, they are extremely progressive. Like the peasants, they are Socialists. Their quarrel with the Left extremists was not on the question of Socialism or non-Socialism, but on the intimate question of land, the vital question everywhere. The Cossacks on the average are far more prosperous than the poverty-stricken moujiks of Russia proper. They have more horses and much more land. Therefore, they distrusted the Bolsheviks, who wanted to cut up and distribute among the land- less peasants not only all large proprietorial estates, but also all peasant farms larger than the average. In many fiery speeches Lenine declared that the main 176 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS enemy of the poor peasant was not the great landed proprietor, but the prosperous peasant, who was the worst land-grabber. The Cossacks feared that the Bolsheviks would not only deprive them of their sur- plus acreage of land, but would give land-holding rights to the many non-Cossack peasants settled in Cossack territory and this would lead to general im- poverishment of the whole "Cossack Army." There- fore the more prosperous Cossacks took up a more or less bourgeois attitude. Had this been so with all Cossacks, we should have had about four million thoroughly disciplined men to fight the extremists. In that case, the Bolsheviks could never have kept mastery. But in fact the Cos- sacks are not solid. The landless Cossacks and the very poor Cossacks are just as "proletarian" in their ideas as are the landless peasants and the urban work- ing men. These poor Cossacks were strongly repre- sented in the Petrograd Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies. Thus while a Council claiming to represent all the Cossacks was meeting at Petrograd and declaring to the world that it would help to crush Lenine and the Red Guard, another Cossack body was declaring that the Council was a fraud because it did not represent all the Cossacks but only the rich minority, while the rank and file of Cossacks, it was alleged, were solid with the Socialist working men. In September, General Kaledine told me that this was the case. He regretted it. "There is no other body in the Empire," he said, "which can be relied upon KERENSKY AND THE BOURGEOISIE 177 to carry out its leader's orders. We only have dis- cipline. We are the one real military force. But I cannot pretend that all Cossacks agree on one policy. If they did, they would be irresistible." Kaledine's judgment proved to be right; for a great many Cos- sacks deserted Kerensky when he was attacked by the Bolsheviks; and Kaledine himself has had no solid Cossack support. The Korniloff rebellion in Septem- ber had detached many Cossacks from the bourgeois or moderate parties. The dread of "counter-revolu- tion," as among the line soldiers, was the cause. Yet before the middle of August there was a great, and relatively solid mass of Russians against the feeble Kerensky Government and against the principle of a coalition, or partly bourgeois and partly Socialist, Cabinet, a Cabinet system which, though first tried by Prince Lvoff, had particular attractions for Kerensky owing to his dread of being thrown into sharp opposition to any class. Although these dis- contented Russians were not reactionaries in the old sense of the word, they were conservative enough as a whole to gain the label of reactionaries from the suspicious Left; and their agitation was denounced in the Socialist Press as a counter-revolutionary plot, the secret aim of which was to restore Capitalism and Monarchy. In this way were accumulated materials for the staging of the next two Revolution acts, the State Congress of Moscow and the rebellion of Korniloff. CHAPTER XI KORNILOFF AT MOSCOW THE Moscow State Congress met in the last days of August. It had been summoned because, in default of an elected Parliament, it was hoped that a tem- porary assembly of notables would find means for extricating the country from a position that had now become threatening. The Congress was to "save Russia." The prospects of success in this were never very great. Already in July, in the gorgeous green and gold Malachite Hall of the Winter Palace, had been held the same kind of Congress, with fewer participants; and at this the nation's perilous state was debated with fervid eloquence and glittering generalities; but no decision was made except a vague decision to support the Kerensky coalition system. The vital problem the creation of "a strong governmental power" remained unsolved. And now in the Moscow Grand Theater, one of the biggest in Europe, the Malachite Hall gathering was to be repeated by two thousand invited persons. For rea- sons plain from the preceding chapter, it was foreseen that this Congress would be nothing but a feud, more or less veiled, between the Kerensky Cabinet, backed 178 KORNILOFF AT MOSCOW 179 by the Soviet, and the discontented bourgeoisie. That being so, no vital change could be expected; because the Cabinet itself had selected the participators and sent out the invitations; and there was a marked numerical predominance of the parties of the Left. The Congress nevertheless was representative. No Russian of distinction was ignored. There were famous Duma politicians; leaders of the Industrial Group, of the Zemstvos, of the Cities, of the Church, of Science, of Art; many delegates from the metro- politan and provincial Councils of Deputies; and delegates from the Army and from the Army Com- mittees which were then all-powerful at the front. The sum of talent and influence was great. The Congress, however, was much too large for the dis- cussion of concrete problems; and as the members had not been elected, they had no mandate to settle these problems by vote. No resolutions were, in fact, put; and the Congress, as far as it expressed any opinion, did so by acclamation. From this, as was intended, the Kerensky Cabinet profited, the greater volume of acclamation being always on its side. On the Saturday morning on which the Congress opened, Moscow was crowded not only with hundreds of participants and lookers-on, but also with many thousand ecclesiastics, laymen, and peasants who had come for the great Congress of the Orthodox Church which was to be held at the same time. Rumors of impending violence by the Bolsheviks, who had been excluded, had gone round the City; and against 180 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS the "bourgeois assembly," Moscow's workmen pro- claimed a one day general strike. The authorities were frightened. The Grand Theater, a detached, white building with Ionic columns, was isolated by troops, and guarded inside by Junkers, young men of the educated classes studying for the rank of officer, upon whom the Government, threatened by the Bol- shevik soldiery, believed it could rely. In the garden in front of the theater, in the vestibules, on the stair- cases and even in the auditorium itself Junkers, in a way new to negligent Russia, examined tickets thoroughly. My own ticket was examined at least ten times before I got inside the theater. The cellars were occupied by armed men, and it was impossible to pass from one anteroom to another without giving fresh proof of identity. The auditorium was sharply divided between the opposing groups, so that even persons new to Russia could tell that a clash was coming between Socialists and bourgeoisie. On the right sat Duma members, leaders of the Industrial Group, army officers and the "Intelligentsiya" generally, all extremely embittered with Kerensky and with the Councils of 'Deputies, which they regarded as the ruiners of Russia. On the left sat the Socialists, delegates of the Councils of Deputies, soldiers and representatives of the Army Committees who had come from the front as counterweight to the Korniloffite officers. The factions glared at one another across the theater; and it seemed that for the first time since the Revolution Russia had KORNILOFF AT MOSCOW 181 a clear-cut issue and two coherent parties. And this was, temporarily, so. The Congress developed into a series of giant demonstrations and counter- demonstrations between the Kerensky group, with the Socialists and the soldiers on the one hand, and the non-Socialist political parties and the officers on the other. Each group kept silence when an enemy spoke and cheered wildly during a friend's speech. In such conditions, serious debate was impossible; the very few concrete proposals brought up received no atten- tion. Lamentations on the country's ruin, and restatements of old platforms and policies occupied most of four days; and when the Congress broke up, things were in the same condition as before it met, with one exception. The eagerness of the educated classes and of the army leaders to overthrow the Kerensky system, and their aversion to any Cabinet dependent upon the Petrograd Soviet, had for the first time been made plain. The Congress opened with a very long, very frothy, and entirely meaningless speech by Kerensky, full of references to his position and powers. This was followed by statements from other ministers, each describing the anarchy in his own department, but all without new definite suggestions for reform. The absence of reform propositions showed that ministers understood where the real evil lay. The Government had no power; and the demand for creation of "a strong government power" was a matter on which both sides of the Congress agreed. Of reforms on 182 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS paper Russia had had enough ; and a policy in regard to the War, even if an unsatisfactory policy, she had also; but her Government continued to be unable to enforce its decrees; and anarchy at home and defeat abroad were the results. The Congress dispersed without doing anything to create this "strong power." Such power could not have been created unless the Socialist leaders consented to the restoration of dis- cipline in the Army by sanguinary measures. To enter upon this course in defiance of his Socialist colleagues Kerensky had not the necessary nerve. And the bourgeois minority of the Congress believed that if the work was to be done at all it must be done by military men, of whom by far the most prominent and respected was the Commander-in-Chief Korniloff. The swift rise of Korniloff is a romance which has hardly been paralleled in Russia since the eighteenth century when a fisherman's son from Lake Ladoga, Michael Lomonosoff, rose by native genius to be leader of the Empire's new literature and science. Forty-six years ago, in an obscure village of West Siberia, to a retired lieutenant of Karalinsk Cossacks, was born the son, christened Laurus, who for a second time made the name Korniloff famous. The first Korniloff was a naval officer who, entrusted during the Crimean War with the defense of Sevastopol, sank his hopelessly inferior fleet in the mouth of the bay, and defended the fortress for a year. The retired Cossack lieutenant of Siberia was so poor that he had to earn a living as village clerk; and Laurus got KORNILOFF AT MOSCOW 183 very little schooling. Industry and zeal were his tutors. By his own efforts, he secured admission to the Michailovsky Artillery School in Petrograd, where he amazed his teachers by his talent for languages and mathematics. He had already displayed revolutionary leanings; and this soon came to the knowledge of his teachers. This under the Tsardom meant imme- diate expulsion ; but Korniloff had earned such respect that the school authorities pretended not to notice what was going on ; and the artillery student, a revolu- tionary at heart, a few years later entered a Petrograd guards regiment. Being penniless, Korniloff was obliged to go in search of adventure to Turkestan. There he set him- self to explore and study and to acquire local dialects, and he did this so well that in a short time he was taken for a Turcoman. Physically this disguise was not difficult. Like many Cossacks, he had a dash of Tartar or Mongol blood which is shown in a slight frame, a tight yellowish skin, a sparse black beard, very high cheek bones and distinctly oblique brown eyes. The local Mohammedans worshiped him; and from those days on he was seldom seen without his bodyguard of Tekke Turcomans, fierce horsemen in terrific black busbies, long striped garments resem- bling dressing gowns, and yellow boots, who except for their enormous stature were very like Korniloff himself. Korniloff was next attached to the Siberian army, which before the Japanese war was a military unit 184 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS independent of the main army of Russia. In the war of 1904-5 he did brilliant work. When the tremendous Japanese attacks hurled Kuropatkin's army out of Mukden, it was Korniloff who fought the rear-guard action, and he did this so well that he saved one of Kuropatkin's three armies from annihilation. His success was largely due to the fact that he exposed himself, setting an example to his soldiers. He narrowly escaped falling into the enemy's hands. For that he was rewarded with the Cross of St. George, and with a golden sword per- sonally presented by the Tsar. After the Japanese War, Korniloff was sent as military agent to Pekin. There he mastered Chinese so thoroughly that he wrote reports in that language; acquired a knowledge of Manchu dialects; and studied the philosophy of Confucius and Mencius so thoroughly that he was competent to lecture the Chinese. He amazed the Petrograd Foreign Office by the penetration of his secret reports. An official who read these reports assured me that when pub- lished they will cast a brighter light upon the Chinese social system and Chinese psychology than the wri- tings of men who have spent their lives in China. On the outbreak of the world- war, Korniloff com- manded the famous 48th division, formerly called after the great General Suvoroff, and now called "Korniloff's." In the disaster of Galicia in the spring of 1915, he repeated the feat which he had performed against Japan ten years before. He had fought with KORNILOFF AT MOSCOW 185 success in the bloody Dukla Pass; but was stopped in his raid into the plains of Hungary by lack of shells; and when Mackensen made his tremendous sweep, breaking thiough the Russian front on the Dunajec and threatening the rears of all the Russian armies operating in the Carpathians, it was KornilofFs divi- sion which had to bear the brunt of the attack, and to hold back the enemy long enough for other divi- sions to extricate themselves. Almost without am- munition, and in a position which he could not entrench properly owing to the stones in the ground, he was attacked by Mackensen's heavy guns; and had to retreat. He stayed with the imperiled rearguard, land was wounded in the arm; but despite this he led the charges of his men as he had done at Mukden. After seven days of desperate fighting, part of his division was cut off and captured; but by fighting to the last and sacrificing this unit, he saved the remainder. Wounded and exhausted, he fell into Austrian hands. With him was taken his golden sword, but the enemy commander, struck with his courage and magnaminity, returned it with compli- ments. He spent a year in an Austrian prison-camp in Bohemia. After that year he performed the most remarkable achievement of his adventurous life. With the assistance of a Czech soldier, Mrnak by name, who sympathized with the Russian cause, he escaped. In company of the Czech, he walked five hundred miles, with no assistance except a map and a compass. The pair had food for only five days ; after that they RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS lived upon berries. A few days' march from safety, they were surprised by Austrians, and the Czech, standing valiantly before the fugitive general, was wounded, and taken prisoner. He was court-martialed as a traitor and executed. In this incident KornilofT again displayed his generous and chivalrous character. A poor man himself, he arranged through a neutral country for the payment of a life-pension to the soldier's family; and he entered Mrnak's name upon the roll of a Russian regiment; and ordered that at every roll-call when the names were called out, the sergeant should call back, "Shot by Hungarian court- martial in Pressburg for saving the life of General KornilofT." Korniloff's revolutionary leanings were well-known to Liberals; and when the Revolution broke out, he was summoned to Petrograd as the soldier who could best be trusted to defend the Revolution at its heart. He was appointed Commander of the Petrograd Military District. There from the first he met in- superable difficulties. The local Council of Work- men's and Soldiers' Deputies, which aspired to hold the real power behind the backs of the Provisional Government, made constant trouble against the dis- cipline of the soldiers, resulting in street demon- strations and violence. In May when anarchy was increasing and conditions at Petrograd seemed men- acing, I met Korniloff at the house of a Petrograd writer. He was much excited. He reminded me of the hopes which all Russians had felt after the KORNILOFF AT MOSCOW 187 triumph of the Revolution ; and he said bitterly, 'The Army is only an image of the rest of Russia. We never had discipline; for a time the Army had a little; but now it has no more than the rest of the people. May God help us!" On a conservative guest's re- marking, "Well, general, you will have to shoot." Korniloff rose and said with emphasis: "If I have to shoot, I prefer to shoot Russia's enemies rather than her own sons." A few days later he resigned, took an army command on the Southwestern Front, won the only victory of the Revolution; and when Brusiloff was dismissed by Kerensky early in August became Commander-in-Chief. From the day of his appointment, Korniloff was in constant friction with Kerensky owing to the fail- ure of the Cabinet to sanction measures necessary for the restoration of Army discipline. The friction had gone so far that Kerensky, if rumor was true, begged Korniloff not to attend the Moscow Congress. But on the second day of the Congress Korniloff arrived; and turned what was already a struggle between Socialists and bourgeoisie into a personal duel be- tween Kerensky and Korniloff. The foes of Keren- sky, regarding Korniloff as their hero, did everything possible to make this opposition plain. The Com- mander-in-Chief was to be the man of blood and iron who would cast down the rhetorician Premier, the politician who talked of blood and iron. On the morning of Korniloff's arrival the opposition cir- culated illustrated pamphlets describing his remark- 188 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS able rise, his heroism and his victories, and acclaiming him as the country's destined savior. At the railroad station was all of Russia that was moderate and patriotic the flower of the Cossacks, the Junkers, representatives of the volunteer "striking battalions," and boys and girls who had fought in the War. There were also representatives of the Industrial Group ; the Mayor of Moscow, Rudneff, and the veteran Duma member Roditcheff, a champion of Constitutionalism under the Autocracy, and a fierce advocate of the continuation of the War. The Cossacks, Junkers, and boy and girl volunteers carried bouquets of flowers; and as Korniloff, followed by his bodyguard of gigantic Tekke Turcomans, marched down the line, the flowers were thrown at his feet. As the Mayor addressed him, calling him Russia's hero, savior and "our heart's desire," some of the Cossacks shed tears. Later, Korniloff stood in front of Roditcheff, and heard the floweriest speech ever made. He listened modestly while he was told that he only could save Russia from foreign and domestic foes ; and then em- braced the orator, and left. No word was said of revolt against the Petrograd Government, but there were few who did not know that that was in the air; and Korniloff was expected to lay a foundation for this by a sharp speech of indictment against the Kerensky and Soviet regime. This he did next day, though the indictment was indirect. He declared that if the anarchy in the Army was not stopped, Riga would fall, and then the road to Petrograd would KORNILOFF AT MOSCOW 189 be open. He gave an appalling picture of the disorder and disorganization at the front; told of the murders of officers ; and described the soldiers as "wild beasts," men who "had lost all the likeness of warriors." He further condemned the disorder at the rear, as result of which shell production had declined sixty per cent, and aeroplane production eighty per cent. He was not, he declared, against the Army Committees; but these must henceforth confine their interference to the economic and internal life of regiments, and must not meddle with military operations. Army officers must be appointed, not elected; their prestige must be restored; and their pay improved; and they must have power to compel soldiers to preserve order and cleanliness. These demands were less drastic than was expected; for it was known that Korniloff had privately demanded the militarization of the railroads and the restoration of the death penalty for serious offenses at the rear. But the Left was convinced already that Korniloff aimed at a counter-revolution. Representatives of the Army Committees denounced him to me as a bloodthirsty ogre; and declared that the popularity which he had once enjoyed among soldiers was shattered as result of "his infamous attempt to make soldiers fight when they do not want to fight." When he entered the theater, nearly all the audience rose; but about forty private soldiers, repre- sentatives of Army Committees, kept their seats demonstratively ; and when reproved with the cry "Get up, scoundrels!" hissed loudly. 190 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Moderate men were incensed that Kerensky, wh< as Minister of War wore a soldier's uniform, took no action against this. In fact, the anti-Korniloff party and the pro-Kerensky party were one. For Kerensky the Congress was a success. The remark- able histrionic personality which I have already described enabled him to dominate the audience, even when he was entirely in the wrong. He showed ex- treme rudeness to opposition speakers, openly favored the disorder of the Left and shouted imperative com- mands at persons of the other camp who, he imagined, were breaking the rules. A remarkable collision took place with the Speaker of the Duma, Rodzianko. By his public and private record, and even by his exterior he is a very tall, stout and imposing man Rod- zianko, commanded the respect of all. Yet Kerensky flouted and insulted him. He cut him short in the middle of a sentence, and on Rodzianko's turning to him very politely and saying, "I hope the President of the Council of Ministers will allow me " Kerensky interrupted him still more rudely, and said "Your time is up." With great dignity Rodzianko came down the steps of the tribune and went into his box. The audience protested; and Kerensky, see- ing that he had blundered, turned to Rodzianko's box: "I suppose I must be unfair to other speakers; but if you like you may continue your speech. An excep- tion may be made for the Speaker of the Duma of the Empire." Rodzianko rose in his box and said very resolutely: "The Speaker of the Duma of the KORNILOFF AT MOSCOW 191 Empire is the last man who would think of letting the law be violated in his favor." Kerensky got by far the worst of this encounter, but he continued to dominate the audience; and always had the greatest share of the applause, thus, according to the strange method of the State Congress, getting a sort of vote of confidence. At the time of the Congress Kerensky 's vanity had risen to incredible heights. Early in his speech he provoked mirth by making confessions about the state of his soul, saying "I have been accused of putting too much faith in humanity; henceforth let no man indict Alexander Kerensky for believing too easily in the goodness of his fellow-men." This naive con- fession was delivered with great gravity; and it provoked loud laughter and the remark "Impudent fellow !" Kerensky appeared in half royal state. As Korniloff had to arrive late from the front, Kerensky sooner than show himself before the whole audience was in place, thereby violating royal etiquette, demon- stratively kept the Congress waiting until Korniloff had taken his seat, and then walked in and joined his fellow ministers. There he sat on an armchair drawn back from and differing from theirs; and be- hind the armchair were stationed two very handsome young officers in the pose required by monarchs from their aides-de-camp. The public called these officer* "Kerensky 's lackeys." Kerensky's speeches were so full of pretense that his supposed supporter Tseretelli had to explain solemnly from the tribune that the 192 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS audience was mistaken if it assumed that the Premier claimed to govern Russia by divine right "Kerensky," said Tseretelli, "thoroughly understands that he is only a mandatory of the people." This defense, by emphasizing poses and pretensions which perhaps not all had observed, made things worse; and cynics said that Tseretelli, who is a much cleverer man than Keren- sky, was mocking at his chief. Apparently, the scandal became too great, for on the last day of the Congress the "lackeys" were withdrawn. While crystallizing the antagonism between the bourgeois and Socialist groups, and making clear that Korniloff and Kerensky were leaders who were bound to come to blows, the Congress gave no hint of the intrigues concealed underneath this apparently clear- cut situation. The antagonism was not irreconcilable. Korniloff and Kerensky, disliking and despising one another as they did, at this stage believed that neither could safely hold power without the collaboration of the other; and negotiations were already under way for a common policy with the aim of uniting the Army, the bourgeoisie and the moderate Socialists against the general enemy, the Bolsheviks. These underground negotiations were revealed after they broke down, and Korniloff as result of the break- down had openly rebelled against Kerensky in the middle of September. CHAPTER XII THE REVIVAL OF ORTHODOXY SIMULTANEOUSLY with the Moscow Congress, which condensed many scattered patriotic forces in opposition to the Soviets, the Ecumencial Congress of the Orthodox Church took place. The meeting of both congresses in the same week was a significant accident. Twice before when Russia was dismembered by foreign foes and disunited at home, the Greek Orthodox Church was the citadel of independence. At the time of the Tartar invasion, the country was cut up into petty, individually help- less statelets, which would probably never have coalesced into permanent union after the collapse of the invaders had not religion supplied a common bond. In the seventeenth century when a Polish army marched to Moscow, the successful defense of the Trinity Monastery set an example of patriotic valor to the disspirited people. History repeats itself. To- day, Tikhon, the new Patriarch, leads in summoning the nation to renewed resistance to the foreign enemy. The foundations of this mixed religious and national- istic revival were laid when the secular State Congress 193 194 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS sitting almost next door expressed nothing but pessimism. The revival progressed steadily in measure with the country's political and social degeneration; and it is to-day receiving powerful impulses from the aggressive secularism, verging on anti-religious persecution, of the government of People's Commis- saries. Immersed though she is in a struggle for bread and shoes, Russia is yet a fertile field for such a revival. Spiritually and intellectually, the country is not dead. It is as full of thinkers, idealists, theorists of national and human salvation as at any time under the Autocracy. This was expressed in- directly after the Bolshevik coup by Maxim Gorky when he declared that at least one product of the Revolution remained the open-air meetings, forbid- den under the old regime, of debaters, proselytizers, and enthusiasts, "who talk on abstract themes and propound first principles as if they rightly compre- hended that greater issues are involved than the city's breadlessness for the last three days, that more im- portant events are impending than the next raid on 'counter-revolutionaries.' ' This mental ferment con- tinues to be expressed in pre-revolutionary forms. There are still student "circles" which meet secretly for fear of repression; there are schoolteachers who, with their schools closed for lack of fuel, work at the political education of their pupils' parents; and there are peasant evangelism and Messianism without end, with aims as sublime as "invoking universal felicity by prayer" and as comic as going without THE REVIVAL OF ORTHODOXY 195 clothes as do the neo-monarchists of West Siberia. No class is without its faith or consolation. When a Soviet decree cut off the incomes of the well-to-do, a number of noble ladies of Moscow declared publicly their joy at being driven from their homes, because in the old days they had lacked the courage to "go down to the people" and to "simplify" themselves; and now that they were driven "down to the people" they first found real peace. Under the Autocracy such movements were anti- Nationalistic and either anti-religious or sectarian, because Nationalism and State Orthodoxy spelt reac- tion. This opposition has disappeared. The Church is in great measure dominated by highly progressive men; and that rationalism does not always go with progress, or at least with liberty, the repressions of the Soviets are sufficient proof. Whether Russians are naturally more religious than other Europeans may be doubted. A dispute on the subject raged between two of the most famous native writers, but it is certain th t as soon as the Church and National- ism were cleansed from Autocratism, anti-Semitism and other abuses, a reaction towards both set in. The Bishop of Ufa, Andrew, foretold why: "The people might be indifferent. But even if they were convinced that the Church was a dead and formalist thing, they would reason from the anti-Church zeal of some per- sons that it was a live and dangerous thing." After the Bolshevik revolt this proved true. Peasants who had never entered their churches while these stood 196 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS unharmed, rioted and retaliated as soon as they were burnt down by Bolshevik soldiers. And that this sen- timent was at heart national as well as religious was proved by the denunciation of the iconoclasts as "non- Russian." By tradition Orthodoxy was so closely bound up with Russian patriotism that an attack upon one was inevitably taken as an attack upon the other. Before the Revolution the Russian Church was dis- credited in the public eye not by its association with Nationalism but by its association with State oppres- sion. Since Peter the Great, who brought the Church finally under the power of the State, Orthodoxy had been merely a political instrument of the bureaucracy. Its value as an instrument of reactionary policy depended in great measure upon its fortification against internal reform. The Holy Synod persecuted priests who aimed at a spiritual revival quite as severely as it persecuted those with liberal tenets in politics. Father Gregory Petroff, the only progres- sive cleric in the first Duma, was unfrocked. The State-controlled monasteries were centers of fanati- cism, tempered by debauchery which the State did nothing to eradicate. The country was full of monks and priests like Iliodore and the late Father John of Kronstadt, sometimes rogues, sometimes innocent obscurantists, who upheld reaction, incited to persecu- tion of Jews and progressives, and kept the peasants in wholesome subjection. Thus, though the Church as a whole was passively rather than aggressively retrograde, it earned intense dislike from Liberals and THE REVIVAL OF ORTHODOXY 197 Socialists; and even in the villages it enjoyed little respect.' All this changed with the Revolution. The priests and monasteries shared, or professed to share, the general liberationist enthusiasm. With the approval of the Synod, the Church's governing body, the clergy ceased to pray for the Imperial Family, and prayed instead for the Provisional Government. Revolu- tionary demonstrations went to extremes. At the All- night Easter service of 1917, the ikons and chandeliers of the Petrograd churches were decorated with Socialist red bows. The monasteries were "liberal- ized." In May, we heard of their issuing revolu- tionary proclamations, and eradicating all traces of their past reactionary activities. Superiors ordered reactionary and pogrom literature to be burned in bonfires in the courtyards. The Monastery of the Trinity, mentioned above, collected over three tons of autocratist literature, some of it openly calling for Jewish massacres, and burned it, while the monks in ecstasy danced around the flames. The Superior of the Monastery of the Passion, also at Moscow, issued a decree declaring that "this accursed literature im- posed on us by the infamous Nicholas II must not be used even for wrapping up parcels." Greatest was the cleaning out at the Kieff Pestchera Monastery, the most famous in Russia, under which in catacombs lie the bones of hundreds of saints. This monastery was a notorious center of Reaction. From it was inspired and directed the prosecution of the Jew Beilis 198 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS for ritual murder of a boy. After the Revolution a fortnight was spent in cleansing the monastery of its past politics. The women's convents had also to be cleaned out. Local Councils of Deputies threatened the nuns that if they did not destroy all reactionary pamphlets and expel such reactionary nuns as did not recant, their nunneries would be invaded by the soldiers, "who would do what they liked." The ter- rified women obeyed. So, at least outwardly, the convents as well as the monasteries were revolution- ized. But the Socialists made sharp attacks against the idleness and parasitism of the monks and nuns, and forced the Ministry of War to issue a decree declaring that all monks should do military service, not as soldiers but in the army medical departments. This, like other revolutionary reforms, was never carried out. A great spontaneous reform movement began at the same time. On the contentious issue of the War, most of the higher clerics took up a patriotic attitude, and issued appeals to the soldiers at the front to fight to the last. On internal Church questions dif- ferences arose. The more advanced priests demanded the equalizing of the Black and White Clergy. The White Clergy is secular, the Black monastic. The difference between their positions is great. The White pope remains as a rule an ill-paid parish priest all his life. The only chance of escape is if his wife dies, this allowing him to enter a monastery, become a member of the Black Clergy, and attain high rank. THE REVIVAL OF ORTHODOXY 109 The bishops, priests and spiritual members of the Synod were entirely recruited from the Black Clergy. The reformers held that the White Clergy, while still marrying and having families, should be promoted equally with the Black to the highest Church dignities. The other burning question was the Patriarchate. The Patriarchate was abolished by Peter the Great for political reasons, he making himself real head of the Church. Instead of being ruled by a Patriarch who was himself a priest, the Church has since been governed by the Procurator of the Holy Synod, a layman who is practically Minister for the Church. The restoration of the old system has always been a dream of reformers, who considered that a Patriarch independent of the State would rule the Church fearlessly and independently. After the Revolution a more advanced school sprang up, which demanded the independence of the Church without the restoration of the Patriarchate. These reformers proclaimed that while liberating the Church from the State, the Patriarch would centralize power in his own hands; therefore the real progressive policy was to have no Patriarch at all, but to allow the Church the greatest possible local freedom. The Church was to decide these questions itself, and to submit its decisions to the Constituent Assem- bly, which would finally regulate Church and State relations. In the meantime reform went on rapidly upon democratic lines. These reforms were carried out by the very Synod which had formerly opposed 200 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS all reforms. The Revolution's new Procurator of the Holy Synod was Vladimir Lvoff. a member of the Duma who had for twelve years persistently de- manded Church reform. Lvoff, though a Progres- sive, is by temperament a very autocratic and resolute man; and in a few weeks he pushed through great reforms. The chief was the choice of all church dignitaries by election, in which laymen and clerics, men and women, participated. New Metropolitans were elected for Petrograd and Moscow; in Moscow was held a Congress of Clergy and Laymen to settle questions of common interest; and preparations were made for holding a great Ecumenical Congress of the Greek Orthdox Church. Remarkable church reformers began to come to the front. Most noted was Andrew, Bishop of Ufa. Andrew's life reads like a romance of regeneration out of the works of Tolstoy. He was born Prince Uchtomsky, a member of a historic and wealthy family, and a brother of the Prince Hesper Uchtom- sky, who accompanied Nicholas II, when Tsarevitch, around the world, wrote a book describing the journey, founded the Russo-Chinese bank, and for years edited the Petrograd Viedmosti. As guards officer, Andrew led a life of worldly dissipation; but while still a young man he repented, surrendered his rank, title and wealth and entered a monastery as a plain monk. By piety, learning and zeal he rose to be bishop. An extreme ascetic, he wore a horse-hair shirt, slept on the floor, for years ate only rye bread THE REVIVAL OF ORTHODOXY 201 and in mid-winter lived in a dugout cell in a remote forest. He preached with fervid zeal to the Moham- medan Tartars, and to the heathen Tcheremeses and Tchuvashes in East Russia. His greatest fame was gained by his bold stand against Rasputin. When Rasputin was adopted by the State church, Andrew protested and denounced him as an impostor and rascal. The Court planned to seize Andrew and in- tern him in a monastery-prison for life. The Revolu- tion saved him. He now appeared as a champion of Church reforms and of moral regeneration among the clergy and monks; and he denounced all the dis- integrating influences which were preventing Russia from carrying on the War. Late in July were issued proclamations by the Synod and the dignitaries of the Church, including Andrew, announcing a great Ecumenical Congress. The Congress convocation was heralded in a striking proclamation, composed almost entirely of quotations from Holy Writ. Citizens were adjured to pray for its success as the one element of hope in their day of foreign defeat and domestic ruin. On the Council were to sit representatives of the priesthood and of the laity, elected by parishioners. Women were given the vote equally with men. This was a drastic reform, for the old Church had almost regarded women as unclean. In addition were to sit the bishops and archbishops, the Superiors of the chief monas- teries, representatives of the Army and Navy, mem- bers of the Duma and the Council of the Empire, 202 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS and representatives of the eastern autonomous Churches. These proclamations had a great effect upon the religious part of the people who, beginning to despair of the salvation of the country by political means, saw a last hope in the intervention of Providence. On the 28th of August, the Festival of the Assump- tion, I witnessed the opening of the Congress. The bells of the city's sixteen hundred churches had rung continuously since dawn. The occasion was solemn. Ever since the Revolution of 1905, all ardent believers in the church had desired a revival of the mediaeval practise of holding periodical congresses. They con- sidered this the only means of rescuing the Church from its former servility to the State, of cleansing its dogmas and ritual, and inspiring its formalism with living faith and zeal for social and patriotic service. In this fervent spirit all Moscow and thou- sands of tired pilgrims from elsewhere congregated in the center of the city, chiefly in and around the historic Kremlin. All the preceding night had streamed into town shaggy, bearded peasants, bear- ing packs on their backs and carrying rude images in their hands. These peasants, mixing with the city population, moved in dense masses towards the his- toric Red Square under the Kremlin's walls, where a vast "Procession of the Cross" was to take place, and an "All National Service for the Salvation of Holy Russia" was to be held. At the Kremlin, led by the three newly-elected arch- THE REVIVAL OF ORTHODOXY 203 bishops, who by the Synod's decree had a day before been given the title of Metropolitan, assembled sixty archbishops and bishops from all quarters of the country, representatives of the Russo-Greek Churches, and noted lay and ecclesiastical reformers. In the Cathedral of the Assumption, where still stands the eagled throne on which for hundreds of years the Tsars received the crown, was held the dedicatory service. At this, in cloth of gold vestments and with miters gleaming with precious stones, officiated the leaders of the Church. The Cathedral was thronged with Bishops carrying gemmed crozicrs, arch-priests in purple berettas, coarsely-gowned, often ecstatic, monks, and, mingled with them, laymen of note, the most prominent being the Prime Minister Kerensky, and the former Prime Minister Prince Lvoff. In an impressive sermon, the Exarch of Georgia told the congregation plainly that Russia was already ruined, and that only the Holy Church with the aid of Heaven could rebuild upon the ruins. The demeanor of Moscow showed that despite the secular character of the Revolution, and the open atheism of the Left, the Church had still a strong hold. The long processions of holy men as they entered the Red Square were followed by pious crowds. At the head of one procession came Bishop Andrew. Behind were choirmen in brocaded robes, acolytes carrying episcopal staves hooded with cloth of gold, and visionaries and mystics from the Northern forests clad in rags and shod in birchbark, who as they reached 204 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS historic spots bowed and kissed the stones. Beside the procession ran aged, barefooted and ragged women, who demanded to be allowed to share the burden of the heavy metal ikons. This inaugural ceremony lasted the whole day. After the service in the Cathedral, the three Metro- politans and sixty Bishops proceeded to the Tchudovo monastery where are deposited the relics of Alexis, one of the most revered saints of the Orthodox Church, and one after another kissed the sacred objects. Many onlookers went into hysteria; many beat their brows upon the earth and shed tears; and late at night an aged woman who to see the great event had tramped five hundred miles from a Vol- gaside village went into a state of revivalist ecstasy and proclaimed that an angel had come to her from Heaven, and told her that the great Bishop Andrew with a flaming sword in his hand would drive the Bolshevik defilers from the City of Peter the Great; lead an army of peasants, armed only with the divine spirit, against the German invader; and throw him in ruin back to his native land. Next morning the five hundred members of the Congress held one more ceremony in the Temple of the Savior, built to com- memorate the War of Liberation against Napoleon, and a day later they began their discussions. The Congress revived the Patriarchate, and intro- duced some other useful reforms ; but as with all Revo- tionary initiatives many of its plans were not carried out. The Government of Lenine and Trotsky com- THE REVIVAL OF ORTHODOXY pletely disestablished and despoiled the Church; and the Bolshevik soldiery, incited by agitators, began a war against popular "superstition," often destroying or profaning temples, smashing venerated ikons, and posting sentries outside holy buildings to prevent access by worshipers. These measures are to-day having the effect predicted by Bishop Andrew. New sects have arisen which denounce the Bolsheviks as the legionaries of Antichrist; the churches are defended with violence; and the new institutions of civil marriage and birth registration are denounced as German abominations, and ignored. The incom- petence in secular affairs shown in succession by the skeptical "Intelligentsiya" and the atheistic Socialists has enhanced the Church's reputation in political affairs; and the protests of prominent clerics against the Empire's international humiliation have gained sympathies from a great many citizens who in the past were neutral or hostile towards religion. The Orthodox Church is an integral part of the real Russia. It has its roots in history and tradition; and now that all other historic institutions have perished without any new stable institutions taking their places, Orthodoxy occupies an exceptional and favorable position. It is the one link between present and past. Cleansed as it is already of corruption and formalism, politically emancipated and happily per- secuted, it may again lead the people. The new patriotic Nationalism which is arising to re-unite all of the old Russia that speaks the same Great-Russian 206 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS language and professes the same religion, and which is destined also to save these populations from foreign exploitation, will probably find its strongest support in the Orthodox Church; and in this the Revolution, which has violated so many historic precedents, will keep true to type. CHAPTER XIII KORNILOFF'S REBELLION THE failure of the Moscow State Congress, the reaction against the Government's weakness and against the internationalist velleities and suspected treason of the Soviets, had their inevitable results in the rebellion of Korniloff. This was the most sensa- tional event of the Revolution so far; and though it passed without bloodshed and left no visible mark upon the governmental system of Kerensky, its his- torical importance is quite as great as its picturesque- ness, for it more than anything predetermined the triumph of Bolshevism. On Saturday, the 8th of September, began one more of the ever-recurring ministerial crises. On the following afternoon I went to the Winter Palace with the intent to ask Kerensky about the new appoint- ments. I then first learned of the revolt. A little, mild-faced, black-bearded man in uniform, in whom I recognized the Cossack Duma member Karauloff, was running about in a feminine state of hysteria. He had come out of Kerensky's room. "Korniloff has rebelled!" he exclaimed. "He demands that Kerensky shall hand over to him the executive gov- 207 208 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS ernment* and he threatens that if he gets a refusal he will march his army against Petrograd and accom- plish a coup d'etat." Kerensky, added Karauloff, had refused; and now as result three echelons of KornilofF s troops were being rushed by train against the defenseless capital. In KaraulofFs mind the only remaining hope for Russia was that when the rebel troops learned the real nature of their mission they would refuse to fight. This note dominated the Korniloff history from be- ginning to end. While the outside world was waiting for the first sanguinary clash, the great revolt was being decided bloodlessly by appeals from Kerensky's emissaries to the Korniloffites. An hour after my arrival, the mild Cossack Karauloff was sent out as the first emissary to implore the Korniloffite troops not to provoke a civil war ; and for the next five days, relations between the opposing forces were entirely of this diplomatic kind. Politician after politician went from the Government to the Korniloffites to convince them that the Commander-in-Chief's aim was to ac- complish a reactionary counter-revolution, with the aim of restoring the Tsardom. Envoy after envoy came from the Korniloffites to Petrograd. In the end, Korniloff's men, believing that they were being used as tools to crush the Revolution, refused to fight. They arrested most of their commanders; and, with the exception of a handful, abandoned Korniloff, who six days later, with the Staff generals who were in the plot, surrendered his sword. KORNILOFF'S REBELLION 209 Korniloff had sent his ultimatum to Kerensky on the day before. His ultimatum-bearer was the former Procurator of the Holy Synod, Vladimir Lvoff, the organizer of the Church Congress. After resigning from the Cabinet, Lvoff identified himself with the Constitutional-Democrats, the Moscow Industrial Group, and those of the Cossacks and officers who were opposed to Kerensky. Lvoff came to Kerensky, declaring that he had something important to com- municate; and announced bluntly that he had come as KornilofFs plenipotentiary to demand the surrender of all power into the Commander's hands. He added that this demand did not emanate from Korniloff alone. It was supported by "a group of political workers," he added, meaning the groups that had shown their disapproval of Kerensky at the Moscow Congress. Kerensky, he suggested, should come to KornilofFs headquarters; and he offered him a guarantee against arrest. Kerensky declared himself amazed, and said that he refused to believe his ears. He got into telegraphic communication with Korniloff, and asked if the ultimatum was true. He received the reply that it was true. Thereupon, he issued a proclamation deposing Korniloff from the command, denouncing him as a traitor, and summoning the Army and the country to oppose him. The defense of Petrograd was announced. But in a military sense Kerensky was wholly unprepared. When I saw him that night, pale and agitated, he admitted that if Korniloff's forces obeyed the order to march on Petro- 210 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS grad, no real resistance could be offered. But he did not believe that Korniloff's forces would obey. Kerensky's first step was to summon for counsel the former Commander-in-Chief Alexeyeff, whom he asked to use his influence with the Army. Alexeyeff arrived the following night. Meantime, the ministers entirely lost their heads. The Foreign Minister, Terestchenko, who was most in evidence, assured me repeatedly that Korniloff could do nothing; but I learned from another quarter that he did not believe his own words, and had himself prepared for flight to Moscow. Kerensky's chief assistant, Nekrasoff, was in a panic. The effective head of the Govern- ment during the next few days was the Assistant Minister of War, Savinkoff. Savinkoff is one of the most striking personalities, and perhaps the ablest man produced by the Revolu- tion. His personal record is remarkable. Now a man of middle age, he early engaged in Terrorist plots. He was implicated in the assassination of several officials; and he fled abroad, living for years in France, whence he directed several deadly bomb plots against the Autocracy. A typical Terrorist of fiction, he plotted cold-bloodedly from a distance, yet shrank from no personal danger and was absolutely ruthless in his treatment of weak comrades. He has remark- able literary talent. Before the Revolution, he pub- lished under the pseudonym "Ropshin" a novel W 'hat Never Happened, in which he laid bare the whole mechanism and psychology of Terrorism. The book KORNILOFF'S REBELLION 211 had great success. After the Revolution, he returned to Russia, where he became the first Supreme Com- missary of the Army; and he applied his strong will, revolutionary devotion and diplomatic skill to stop the disintegration of the national defenses. When this attempt failed, he started an agitation to compel the Provisional Government to restore capital punish- ment for soldier criminals, and here he succeeded. He was associated with Korniloff in urging the Goveinment to take further disciplinary measures. He became Assistant Minister of War. When the Korniloff rebellion broke out, he, though a civilian, was appointed Commander of the Petrograd Military District, and he had under him such small forces as the Government could bring together to oppose KornilofFs march. I now first made SavinkofFs acquaintance. He is an extremely handsome, dark-haired man with a pale face and resolute chin. He denounced Korniloff as a traitor to the Revolution. This surprised me, as I knew that the two had been allies. During the next days, I met him many times, and soon saw that he alone of the higher Government officials kept his nerve. It was he who really directed the emissaries who broke down the revolt; and it was he who at the same time compelled the terrified Bolshevik soldiers of Petrograd to go to the "front," and pre- pare for something like a fight Savinkoff was thoroughly distrusted by these soldiers, who knew him to stand for merciless discipline, and for the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS continuation of the War ; and he knew that they were a much worse peril to the country than Korniloff's rebel troops. On the following Wednesday, when it was quite clear that the Commander-in-Chief's rebellion had failed, he said to me with a vicious look: "Now that we have finished with Korniloff, we must finish with the Bolsheviks." His plan was to sur- round the disorderly garrison with a few devoted troops and give them the alternative of disbandment or wholesale destruction. A "massacre of the Janis- saries," such as the Turkish Sultan Mohammed carried through in Constantinople a hundred years before, was his aim. He believed that bloodshed was the only thing that would save his country. Hardly was the Korniloff rebellion born before it began to die. Apart from the unwillingness of soldiers on either side to fight, it was killed by the sentiment which runs like a red thread through the whole Revolution, the dread of Counter-Revolution. It was further killed by the treason of the civilians around Korniloff. Many expected that the Constitu- tional-Democrats, the Moscow Industrial Group, and all those moderate men who opposed the despotism of the Petrograd Council of Deputies, would openly proclaim for Korniloff. Some of them were believed to be already at Moghileff, the headquarters. They not only sympathized with the rebellion but more or less knew of it in advance. But the "Intelligentsiya" acted as it always acts in time of crisis. It showed the white feather. Of all the highly placed and in- KORNILOFF'S REBELLION 213 fluential civilians who wanted Korniloff to succeed, who had incited him to revolt, not one had the courage to take his side openly. Terrified by dread of massacre by the Bolshevik soldiers, most of them kept silent; but the Mayor of Moscow, who had attended the triumphal reception at Moscow station, and had acclaimed Korniloff as the nation's savior, had the baseness to issue a proclamation denouncing him as a traitor. As result Korniloff, who would have been enormously strengthened had he been backed by a declaration from the Duma majority, from ex- Ministers or from any other well-known civilians, was left in the position of a mere military adventurer playing for his own hand. I heard later that Korniloff, to whose chivalrous mind treachery was inconceivable, bitterly condemned his unfaithful sup- porters. Their cowardice was one nail in the coffin of the revolt. The other nail was the conduct of the soldiers, sailors and working men, all terrified by the cry "Counter-Revolution!" The Bolshevik agitators, the authors of the blood-bath in Petrograd in mid- July, who lay awaiting trial in the Peter and Paul Fortress, declared for the Kerensky Government and some of them got their release in order to form a force "to save the Revolution." The Army at the front refused to support Korniloff. From garrisons in the rear towns, from the warships at Helsingfors, Reval and Kronstadt, came expressions of determination to support the Government. All day and all night into RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS the Ministry of War poured telegrams from units of soldiers, sailors and working men, denouncing Korniloff as the foe of the Revolution, and begging the Government to stand firm. And while KornilofFs advanced guard was still moving on Petrograd, and in three days had reached to within thirty miles, the revolt broke down. The Army Committees at the front to a man opposed the revolt; and they began to arrest their generals. General Denikin, perhaps the best strategist in the Army, and General Erdeli were the first arrested. At Moghileff, Korniloff, his Chief of Staff Lukomsky, alleged to be the real initiator of the rebellion, and the other high staff officers were not arrested, but they were surrounded by foes. They escaped arrest because faithful to them were some of the so-called "striking battalions," with KornilofFs own body-guard of ferocious Tekke Turcomans, who threatened, numbering as they did only twenty, to massacre the whole town if any man dared to lay a hand upon their chief. Korniloff had used these desperate fellows at the start of the revolt. When the Staff printers, Bolsheviks to a man, refused to set up the proclamation in which the revolt was justi- fied, he sent to the typesetting room ten Tekke Tur- comans, all men over six feet high, with enormous Mongolian skulls, oblique eyes, yellow skins, and particularly ferocious expressions, and these, with their long curved sabers drawn, stood over the com- positors while the proclamation was meekly set up. But the compositors were cleverer than the Turco- KORNILOFF'S REBELLION mans. They printed KornilofTs proclamations; but they printed secretly at the same time Kerensky's proclamation denouncing the revolt, and the two proclamations were loaded on railroad cars, and dis- tributed at the same time. The Cabinet had so little faith in its ability to stop Korniloff that its chief military measures were taken in order to save the Ministers' own lives. In the cellars underneath the Winter Palace were kept two hundred sailors of a Baltic fleet corps; there were armored motor cars in the yard; and men of the Preobrazhensky and Litovsky regiments ate, slept and danced in the handsomest palace rooms; dirtied the parquetted and mosaic floors ; scrawled upon the walls ; ripped and burned the silk-upholstered furniture; broke the windows ; and threw their boots at the glass chandeliers. Petrograd kept quiet. But terror was caused by the composition of Korniloff's advance guard. This advance guard was the so-called "Savage Division," consisting of four thousand Mohammedan horsemen, belonging to the wildest and most barbarous Caucasus tribes. Kerensky in his proclamation emphasized his indictment of Korniloff by pointing out that he had chosen savage Asiatics in order to crush the Revolu- tion and the new liberties. In Petrograd the "Savage Division" was famous for its exploits in the War; and exaggerated tales of its ferocity and license flew through the capital; and some citizens believed that 16 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS if the Division broke through, they would be mas- sacred in their beds. When the revolt broke out, the Division was at Pskoff, by rail five hours away. It moved quickly northward; and before the rebellion collapsed was distant only three hours' ride on horseback. At the time when KornilofFs Christian soldiers were known to have abandoned his cause, the Savage Division remained a factor of doubt and terror. The Savages, everyone knew, had no reason for interfering in a Russian domestic quarrel; but they were devoted to their officers; and officers everywhere supported Korniloff. It was believed therefore that the rank and file of the Savages remained loyal to him. In fact, that was not so; or at least the loyalty did not go as far as readiness to fight. That I discovered during a visit to the rebellion front, paid only after considerable difficulty. The Government, which even now did not feel secure, did not want correspondents to see what was going on; and the Commander at Petrograd, Savinkoff, kept me waiting twenty-four hours for a permit. On the I2th of September, I motored to Tsarskoe Selo, which, I was told, the Division had already entered. This was a mistake. The Savages were still outside Pavlovsk, a few miles further from Petrograd ; and the Govern- ment's defenses ran through the neighboring village of Popovo. The Chief of Staff at Tsarskoe Selo gave me a further permit to pass from the Govern- ment front to the rebel front. Tsarskoe Selc looked KORNILOFF'S REBELLION 217 entirely quiet; and the Staff already knew that the Division was not inclined for slaughter; but residents were panic-stricken. I picked up in my car a youthful officer, on his way to the front, who talked frankly of the anarchy at Petrograd; and said that though he had to obey orders to oppose Korniloff, he would rejoice to see the "Savage Division" breaking the Government lines, raiding and "hanging the whole Kerensky crew on a rope across the Palace Square." Popovo is a small village with a wooden church. The inhabitants were peacefully at work. The regimental staff occupied a villa only a hundred yards behind the Government's defense line. This indicated an unusual sort of war. In a closed room negotiations were going on; and from it came dull voices speaking Russian with a foreign accent. They were the voices of the "Savages' " emissaries. The regimental Staff consisted of five unpresentable, ill-educated, ap- parently Socialist officers, who long could not under- stand why a newspaper correspondent should want to see the enemy; and the chief, taking offense at my failure to recognize his rank, refused to allow me to cross the lines. He declared that he had authority to ignore permits from the Tsarskoe Selo command or from Petrograd if local conditions made my pas- sage inadvisable. The negotiations in the villa were extraordinary. The "Savage Division" had pledged itself not to pursue the campaign against the Provisional Govern- ment, and not on any account to attack. With its 218 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS artillery and machine-gun detachment, the Division was quartered peacefully in villages to the South of Popovo; and it had shown its unwillingness to fight by making no entrenchments, and having no outposts, sentries or reconnoitering detachments. When the negotiations in the room were completed, two Caucasus officers came out ; mounted their horses, and, accompanied by a Russian, rode off. A moment later into the village came another "Savage." He an- nounced that he had been sent to give the Govern- ment's troops one more assurance of his comrade's peaceful intentions. He had been chosen because he was a Christianized Alhasetz, one of very few Chris- tians among the "Savages." The Staff brought him into a room, and told him he would be kept as a hostage, because three Government officers were still in the "Savages' " camp, and it was feared that they might be detained. The Christianized Alhasetz made a remarkable pic- ture. He was a little, very ugly, black-mustached and black-eyed man, with four small and apparently old scars upon his neck, and enormous hands. He was dressed in a long frieze caftan, a shaggy black sheep- skin cloak with a silver buckle at the neck, a lambskin busby and rough but highly decorated boots of a kind I had never seen before. He was armed with a broad, bone-handled, silver-inlaid dagger, and wore a neck- lace of black and white horsehair rings. Speaking good Russian, he told me that his name was Karaidse, which meant "Black Prince." He was the son of KORNILOFFS REBELLION 219 one of the greatest of Alhasetz magnates. As he announced that, he put his hand upon his dagger, and said in a piping voice which contrasted strangely with his ferocious get-up, "Of course we are very peace- able." Seeing me eyeing his four scars, he grinned, put a finger to the largest, and said, "You think that this proves the contrary. You do not know us quiet mountaineers. It is nearly twenty years since I had a fight of any kind. My father gave all his seven male children daggers as playthings when they reached the age of two; and I did all my fighting before I was six." He assured me that the "Savage Division" would not under any circumstances fight; the tribes- men did not know why they had been marched against Petrograd; and "when to their amazement they learned that they were expected to fight, they imme- diately proclaimed that they had come upon a mission of peace." As the door closed on the "Black Prince," he again put his hand on his dagger, and said: "Don't forget to report that we are very peaceful men, and that we do not intend to fight." Next came a Government emissary, who had been in the Division's camp. He assured me that even if the horsemen changed their minds about not fighting, they could not fight, as their artillery and machine- gun units were mostly Russian and were entirely on the side of the Government. Without them the cavalrymen would be helpless. The emissary had carried to the Division a proclamation signed by Filonenko, the Supreme Army Commissary, advising 220 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS the "Savages" to abandon their Korniloffite officers and march in to Tsarskoe Selo. This they refused to do. The only thing that might induce the Division to show its savagery was a threat to its officers, who were chieftains in the same stage of civilization and with the same notions of honor as Walter Scott's Highlanders. The Kaberdinian tribesmen who had accompanied the Division's negotiators to Popovo refused to leave them alone in the council chamber with the Government's officers. They insisted upon being present; and all the time kept their hands on the hilts of the yataghans which they carried instead of swords. When the Russians in excitement raised their voices, the Kaberdinians, not understanding the language, concluded that a massacre of envoys was about to begin ; and out, to the horror of the Russians, who were even more peaceful than the "Savages," flew the terrible yataghans. From the church tower I looked across the half a mile of flat country, dotted with cottages, which separated Popovo from Savage Division territory. I saw no sign of war. There were a few bonfires; something like rudely constructed shelters; and in- numerable horsemen who seemed to be scampering about without any aim. A single rifle report was heard. After this inspection, the Staff took me along the Government lines; and gave me some strange facts about their measures of defense. There were no trenches or earthworks. The defenses consisted of a primitive wire entanglement of two strands of KORNILOFFS REBELLION barbed wire, run from tree to tree and where there were no trees, fixed to rude trestles. These defenses were manned by one soldier about every five yards, and on the whole mile of front inspected by me were about twenty machine-guns. There was no artillery. Had the "Savage Division" been as militant as it looked, it would have captured Petrograd with ease. The officers told me that even now there were on the whole Pavlov sk front only 2500 Government troops, and most of these had arrived the day before. In the first days of the revolt, the Government had on the spot four companies of infantry, all under strength, numbering altogether less than three hundred men. This little force, in constant terror, faced for three days the whole Division, every moment expecting a wild rush which might develop into a massacre. Now the soldiers were happy; and one after another they crossed themselves, saying, "Thank God there will be no bloodshed!" When I persisted in my design to cross to the enemy, the Staff officers still opposed. They declared that it was now doubly impossible because the suspicious soldiers had seen me examining the Gov- ernment's defenses, and if I made for the Savages' camp they would conclude that I was about to give away secrets. I drove my car a little way behind Popovo, and marched a mile and a half down the line, opposite the village of Tsarska Slavianka, the nearest quarters of the Division ; and then showing the soldiers, who had not seen me during the inspection, RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS my permit from the Commandant at Tsarskoe Selo I got through the barbed-wire entanglement and walked towards the enemy. The comedy of civil war was here at its best. On the road leading into the village, I met a party of Ingushes, a tribe notorious as robbers since the days of the Roman Empire, and of late employed by the Autocracy for terrorizing the peasants. They were peacefully helping a Finnish washerwoman to carry linen to her cabin. Other Ingushes were galloping about; a few were asleep by the watch fires, wrapped in their shaggy sheepskin cloaks; and a few were carrying on mild flirtations with peasant girls. Order and harmony reigned. Farther on I met more Kab- erdinians, who unlike the Ingushes spoke good Russian. They are an extremely good-looking race, and they boasted to me that they were the most rea- sonable and best educated men in the whole Division. In a cotton factory some way off were quartered Abreks, whom even the fierce Ingushes denounced as injudiciously bloodthirsty. The Abreks told me that the Division Commander, General Bagration, a kins- man of the former rulers of Georgia and of the Bagration who commanded in the war against Napoleon, was at a village so far to the rear that I could not reach him, and with him was the divisional staff. Like the other tribesmen, the Abreks would not fight. But also they would not surrender; they were devoted to their officers; the officers were devoted to Korniloff; and if the Division surrendered KORNILOFFS REBELLION 223 the officers might be punished. This the tribesmen would not permit. That was the reason why negotia- tions with Popovo hung fire. The Abreks were on friendly terms with everyone around. They had not murdered or plundered, or insulted women. They bore themselves with dignity and looked with supreme contempt upon the feeble, denationalized Bolshevik soldiers and the Govern- ment's emissaries. This I was not surprised at; for there is no race in Russia which does not, from its own standpoint, consider itself more civilized than the Russians. Being Mohammedans, brought up under severe religious and family discipline, with a strict though primitive code of morals, the tribesmen could feel no respect for the demoralized, thievish and facile lower-class Russians then in power, who had no principles of conduct, and had never been sub- jected to physical, mental or moral discipline. An occurrence at Tsarska Slavianka illustrated this. Pleased by the Savages' good conduct, the villagers resolved to reward them; and a subscription was secretly organized. At the hour of presentation, across No Man's Land came an emissary from the Government camp, commissioned to reason with the tribesmen and beg them not to attack. The emissary, a little, unwashed, unrepresentative Socialist, trem- bling all over, marched towards a party of fiery Abrek horsemen, and began a carefully prepared speech, which the Abreks heard in contempt. Before he was through, up came the village delegates and held out RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS a hat filled with paper rubles. The leading Abrek drew himself up; and with looks of fury for the villagers and of scorn for the Government envoy, exclaimed: "You dare to offer us money? Do you think we are Russians? Never! We have religion, honor, discipline, and duty!" And pointing towards M. Kerensky's ambassador, he said imperatively: "Give the money to him !" At the cotton factory I met Tartars, who con- stituted a third of the Division. They spoke fluent Russian, learned, they told me, at Baku; and they entered into a long discourse upon the rebellion. Before the Division was marched against Kerensky, the officers, they said, had harangued the men, promis- ing all sorts of political advantages if they overthrew Kerensky, and at the same time assuring them that they would not have to do much fighting. Appeals were made to their religion; and the atheism of the Petrograd Socialists was cited as proof that the Provisional Government was unfriendly to Islam. As I was leaving, a horseman beckoned me aside and whispered: "You have heard from those men ten reasons why we embarked on our march against the Government. Now let me give you the eleventh reason. Last Thursday our officers reminded us how we had suffered when in Kolomea in Galicia owing to the absence of a mosque. They reminded us that Petrograd, whither we were bound, about five years ago started to build a magnificent mosque to the glory of Allah. This mosque, they declared, was unfinished KORNILOFF'S REBELLION 225 as result of strikes by the Socialists. The officers swore by the Koran and on the hilts of their sabers that Korniloff, who is himself of Tartar blood, would reward the captors of Petrograd by forcing the irreligious Bolshevik workmen, under threat of being shot, to complete the mosque within a month." Three days later the Savage Division surrendered on condition that it should be sent home to the Caucasus to rest, and that if employed further in the War, it should not be required to fight its co-religion- ists the Turks. With the exception of Ministers, the Bolshevik garrison, and the working men, Petrograd was Korniloffite almost to a man. The educated classes believed that Korniloff would succeed and they wished him to succeed. Everywhere I heard the exclamation "If only Korniloff comes!" It was believed that he would not only expel the feeble and cowardly ministers, but would also take strong measures against disorder, and would apply to the Bolshevik soldiers and Red Guards the cure of massacre which Savinkoff had planned. This attitude was not confined to the small minority of Russians who desired the restora- tion of the Monarchy. It was shared by the Govern- ment's own intimate officials. Among the young men in Kerensky's secretarial office, I heard the furtive remark, "If only Korniloff comes!" The organizer of the new women's regiment which was then exercising north of Petrograd told me that all her women soldiers were Korniloffites ; but she added that 226 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS they would not join the revolt, because they had taken an oath of allegiance to the Kerensky Government, and they would not follow the Government's example of breaking promises. On Tuesday, two days after the revolt was publicly announced, it was plain that it had failed. The army had deserted and turned against the revolting Generals ; the civilian population, though it prayed for KornilofFs success, had not the courage to help; and the competition between emissaries and envoys had ended decisively in Kerensky's favor. Not a shot was fired. Although the Government had practically no troops with which to defend Petrograd, the Army at the front was obeying it; and columns of soldiers attached to the Provisional Government began to converge upon Moghileff. The ex-Commander-in- Chief, Alexeyeff, went to Moghileff towards the end of the week; and to him Korniloff, Lukomsky and all the other high officers in the rebellion surrendered their swords. The commander of the advanced guard sent against Petrograd, General Krymoff, took his own life. Kerensky continued during the whole week to be in a hysterical mood. I saw him twice, and got from him only rhetorical denunciations of Korniloff, which seemed too violent to be sincere. In this, I afterwards learned, my impression was correct. He talked of the terrible "justice" that would be dealt out to the rebels. Judging by his talk, and still more so by the talk of his assistant Nekrasoff, all the rebel KORNILOFF'S REBELLION 22T generals were to be shot at once. Nothing of this happened. The Bolshevik army at the front and not the helpless Kerensky was really in control. The situation was comic. When Korniloff surrendered, Alexeyeff feared that the soldier jailers would butcher him as they had butchered other high generals against whom they had less cause of complaint; therefore, while Korniloff was put in custody of the Bolshevik army, he was at the same time put in custody of his own devoted Tekke Turcomans. This arrangement was actually officially announced, the explanation being given "that the Tekke Turcomans would see that no harm came to the former Commander-in- Chief." The Turcomans remained faithful to their trust. When one of the cowardly Bolshevik soldiers, seeing Korniloff exercising in the courtyard of the house where he was imprisoned, spat contemptuously, a Turcoman drew his saber and split the Bolshevik from head to midriff. Hearing cries, the rest of the Turcomans rushed out and challenged a whole bat- talion of soldiers to fight them. The soldiers, though outnumbering the Asiatics by fifty to one, fled ignominiously. CHAPTER XIV TSARISM AND THE TSAR A REVOLUTION in its first stage can afford to treat its dispossessed foes with magnanimity. It is in good temper, and confident that it has come to last. When difficulties, disorders and disillusions arise, when citizens see that the expected Utopias are imprac- ticable; and when counter-revolutionary or restora- tionist agitation results, a panic among revolutionaries is inevitable; and the ignored and despised partisans of the old regime fall under suspicion, and are likely to suffer. Russia's Revolution followed this obvious course. It was not the offenses of Nicholas II, but fear that he would become a tool of counter-revolu- tion that caused his murder; and it is fear of counter- revolution that has impelled the Bolsheviks to-day to proclaim a formal Reign of Terror against the bourgeoisie. In the first days of the Revolution, the Bolsheviks actively opposed the bourgeois government, but they showed no vindictiveness. In measure as the Revo- lution degenerated, sentiment against ex-officials, ex-courtiers and Grand Dukes, as potential dangers, 228 TSARISM AND THE TSAR 229 grew; and when the non-Socialist parties began to oppose the Soviet's Socialist policy, animosity and suspicion against them grew also. Even before KornilofFs rebellion finally convinced the Socialists that the old regime was conspiring against the new, stories of counter-revolutionary plots daily appeared in the newspapers; and arrests were made by the Kerensky Government. The first victim was General Gourko. Gourko is a son of the general who forced his way across the Balkan Passes in the Russo- Turkish War of 1877-78, and a brother of the Assistant Minister of the Interior who played a role during the Stolypin despotism. In the present war the younger Gourko commanded a group of armies. He was a good general and a strict disciplin- arian a little, wiry, irritable man, whom I first saw making a scene in the Winter Palace because he was kept waiting for an audience by Kerensky. Gourko was arrested early in August on the charge of royalist plotting. A letter from him, written in the first days of the Revolution, was found among the ex-Tsar's papers, declaring that he remained faith- ful to the dynasty, but that in the present stage of Revolution he must dissimulate. This implied that when the time was ripe Gourko would help to restore the Tsardom. He was kept some weeks in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. The imprisonment was illegal, for after his letter was written an amnesty had been proclaimed for all political offenses; and he demanded a trial, but instead he was released on 230 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS parole; and early in September was told that he would be sent into foreign exile. The counter-revolution panic was now high. The Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Paul, and his brother, the Grand Duke Michael, were also to be exiled. Another dangerous adherent of the old regime who was to go abroad was Ivan Manasseivitch-ManuilofT, secretary and factotum of the former Prime Minister Boris Stuermer. ManuilofI is a good type of the men who served the Autocracy. He began his official life as a police spy in Paris and Rome; next he was engaged in diplomatic espionage at the cost of Japan ; he was mixed up in the police provocation which led to the massacre of Bloody Sunday in 1905 ; and later he appeared as a contributor to the reactionary Novoye Vremya. As result of betraying everyone, including his own employers, and of knowing every- one and everything, particularly the shady pasts and secret failings of exalted persons, Manuiloff became almost the most powerful man in the Empire. He was on intimate terms with the Tsar. He ruled on candidacies for high official positions in such a way that only men of bad character who paid liberally were promoted; he led ministers by the nose; and acquired great wealth. After the outbreak of war he went abroad, and was received with open arms by the innocent ministers of the Entente, who from the beginning of their countries' unlucky intimacy with Russia had an almost diseased talent for getting into relations only with the bad elements of the Tsar's TSARISM AND THE TSAR Empire. Under the Stuermer Premiership, Manuiloff was all-powerful. He blackmailed business men; threw into jail a Jewish financier who dared to cut him out in the affections of an actress; and was in league with Rasputin in the common pursuit of plunder and power. A less important exile, but one whose record is equally enlightening as to the secret policy of Tsarskoe Selo, was the Asiatic Badmai, or, as he Russianized it, Badmayeff. Badmayeff was a Tibetan. He had been sent on missions to his native country ; and later appeared as a prophet of reaction at Tsarskoe Selo. He gained his influence by curing the bodies of the highly placed men and women whose souls were attended to by Rasputin. His method was to douse his patients with cold water, and then explain to them that they were well. Having made them physically whole, he considered them ripe for political enlighten- ment; and he instructed them in the healthy reac- tionary way that always proved pleasing to the Tsar. In gratitude, Nicholas gave him the rank of "Doctor of Tibetan medicine." He was a thorough rascal, even more comic, I believe, than dangerous, but dangerous enough; and to the suspicious Revolution his presence suggested terrible dangers. The greatest of the exiles was Madame Anna Vuirubova. For days after the Revolution, Vuiru- bova's name appeared in the Petrograd and foreign Press as the most remarkable and pernicious Court figure remaining after Rasputin's death. She was the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS influence behind the throne. All that was precisely known about her was that she was young, extremely beautiful, and the Tsaritsa's bosom friend; and as the Tsaritsa was considered a violent reactionary and a friend of her native land Germany, it followed that Vuirubova was also a reactionary and a friend of Germany. On that small basis of real knowledge, newspapers printed columns of revelations about her; she had been on secret missions to Berlin during the war; she had smuggled the Empress' treasonable mes- sages out of Russia; she had advised Nicholas II to dissolve the Duma and drown the Revolution in blood; she had supported Rasputin's political adven- tures; and she was implicated in his personal crimes. Vuirubova even figured with the Empress in Ras- putin's harem. In theaters and moving picture shows she appeared as a woman without brains, without character and without clothes, a modern Pompadour, or Messalina, whose personal depravity was linked with a skill in depraving others which had no parallel in the corrupt history of courts. One popularly believed story about Vuirubova was that her charm? were the real cause of Rasputin's death. When Rasputin, whose physical qualifications for seduction had no limit, abandoned her temporarily for the Tsar's niece, the young and pretty Princess Yousoupoff, in whose husband's palace and by whose husband's hand he was executed, the angry Vuiru- bova, who was ten years older than her rival, revealed the new romance to Yousoupoff. As this story is TSARISM AND THE TSAR 233 only one of fifty sensational accounts of Rasputin's death, it need not be believed; but as a story it is part of history ; and it typifies the attitude of Russians to the woman whom they called "The Female Ras- putin of the Revolution." Vuirubova was imprisoned for several months in the Fortress of Peter and Paul ; but as her health suffered and no concrete political offenses could be charged against her she was released in the summer, and allowed to live under domestic arrest at the house of her aunt in the Znamenskaya Street in Petrograd. There I made her acquaintance on the 8th of September, the day before she was due to leave for exile. A sentry with fixed bayonet was stationed outside her door, with the duty of watching visitors and listening to what was said; but he did not interfere in our conversation and seemed not even to notice that we spoke in a foreign language. Vuirubova is a strikingly handsome woman of just over thirty, tall and stoutish, but with a good figure somewhat resembling that of the Empress Catherine II in middle life. She has a regular, undistinguished face, a clear, rosy skin, very handsome gray eyes and raven black hair. She uses a crutch and limps, the result of a railroad accident early in the War. On her forehead is a large scar, inflicted, she said, by soldiers in the Fortress. During part of our conversation were present the aunt with whom she lived, and her father, M. Taneyeff, director for many years of the Tsar's Chancellery. Through this con- nection, Vuirubova told me, she first met the Tsaritsa. 234 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS At eighteen she had married Vuiruboff, a naval officer, who went out of his mind from the horrors of the Battle of Tsushima; and after that, she was taken up by "Alix" as she called the Tsaritsa. Of this friendship, I quote from notes made at the time: 'The friendship between me and the Tsaritsa has been misrepresented. Two years ago nobody ever dared to affirm that I had any influence in politics, or took any part in Court scandals. The charges against me did not originate with the revolutionaries. They originated with my foes at Court. The curse of the Court was the malice and hatred of the Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses. With the exception of the Grand Duke Paul, whose wife the Countess Pahlen is my relative, all the Romanoffs began a campaign against me. My sole offense was that I kept them apart from the Tsar and Tsaritsa. Worst of all was the young Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch. The Grand Dukes, and with them many courtiers, pursued me for years with abuse and calumny; and their charges later became known to the people outside Court, so that when the Revolution took place I was charged with being responsible for all Russia's mis- fortunes. In reality, I never meddled in politics. The Commission of Enquiry, which examined me in the Fortress, and which expected revelations of my reactionary and pro-German activities, found nothing against me; and this, and not illness, was the reason why I was released." TSARISM AND THE TSAR 235 On the subject of Rasputin, Vuirubova spoke long, emphatically and very naively. Asked whether he really had the enormous influence in politics which he was credited with, she answered: "No. Surely you understand that he was an ignorant peasant, and therefore could not possibly meddle in politics?" She said this repeatedly; and could not be got to see that the vital feature of the Rasputin epic was that a wholly ignorant peasant had meddled in politics. Of the source of Rasputin's personal influence, which she admitted, she said : "Rasputin played a big role at Court; but it was only in family matters. Even here, however, the public tells lies. The accusations of intimate relations between him and the Tsaritsa are untrue. Years ago he assured the Tsar that daily prayers would cure the young Grand Duke Alexis, the Heir, whose illness was then considered incurable. The story that the illness was the result of a Terrorist attempt is untrue. The cause was defective protection of the blood- vessels, a disease universal also in the Battenberg family. This caused hemorrhage at the slightest exertion. Rasputin's prophecy of a cure pro\ed to be right. He prayed daily, first alone, and later along with the Tsar and Tsaritsa, who were both intensely religious and shared his faith. "Two years ago Alexis suddenly recovered his health; and he is now thoroughly sound. Of course, this recovery confirmed Rasputin's influence ; and after that it was unshakable. But I do not think he had 236 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS two ideas about the government of Russia. He played no role. How could an almost illiterate peasant play a political role?" Vuirubova had no great respect for the Tsar. "Nicholas," she said, "has a good character, and a quicker and better mind than any of the good-for- nothing Grand Dukes. His fault was his incorrigible weakness, which was due to his mother, the Dowager Empress, who instructed his tutors to suppress every manifestation of initiative. But he had very little natural initiative. "He hated to hear bad news, or unfavorable judg- ments upon others; and until the end he had no idea how the nation detested and despised him. I have heard him expressing the view that the whole country was devoted to him; and only a few days before the Revolution he told me that he was satisfied with conditions; and that he would grant Cabinet respon- sibility after the War. He was dumbfounded by the revolt, and still more by the sudden defection of the Grand Dukes and the courtiers. He was not pro- German, nor was the Tsaritsa. The Tsaritsa spoke only English in ordinary intercourse; and her affec- tion for me was largely due to the fact that I spoke English like a native. She had no time for politics, as she was busy managing war hospitals, of which we had seventy-nine at Tsarskoe Selo. As for the alleged pro-Germanism of the Court, there was never any. Some courtiers foresaw that a prolonged War would mean defeat and Revolution; and these TSARISM AND THE TSAR 237 clamored for peace; but they were not pro-Germans. The Tsar steadfastly refused to listen to their pro- posals. Immediately before the Revolution, I heard him saying: T believe and hope that we shall soon soundly beat the enemy.' ' Vuirubova ended by declaring that she had no connection with monarchist plots, and did not believe they could succeed, as all the Grand Dukes were equally worthless. Next day, strongly guarded, she left the Finland railroad station for exile abroad; and with her were the spy ManuilofT and the ''Doctor of Tibetan Medicine" Badmayeff. Their path to exile was brief. Before they reached the junction of the railroads branching to Helsingfors and the Swedish frontier, the soldiery got news of Korniloff's revolt; and in a new fit of panic, they arrested all "counter-revolutionaries." They pulled Vuirubova, Manuiloff, and the "Doctor of Tibetan Medicine" from the train and dragged them to Hel- singfors, from where they were taken to the Sveaborg island fortress where they were kept in prison for weeks. Vuirubova was later sent to Petrograd and there held in jail or under domestic arrest. My judg- ment was that she was a personally fascinating but not intelligent woman; and that if she had any in- fluence in politics it was of a primitive kind, as was that of the wholly uneducated Rasputin, who accord- ing to a biographer did not till the end of his days know the difference between the Senate and the Council of the Empire. But if, as was generally 238 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS believed, Vuirubova worked in harness with Rasputin, she may have been a formidable force; and the Provisional Government's desire to get rid of her as a danger to the Revolution is easily explained. Before these measures were taken against suspected Tsarists, the Government began to feel uneasy about the Tsar. In the first weeks of the Revolution he had been entirely ignored. Later, as the Revolution seemed threatened, demands were made, first that he should be more closely watched; next, that he should be in a safer place than Tsarskoe Selo, which is only a day's march from Petrograd; next, that he should be exiled; and finally, that he should be tried and punished. Late in May, having heard stories of the rigor of his treatment, I visited Tsarskoe Selo, and found that the system of guarding had fallen alto- gether to pieces. The once strongly-watched "kitchen entrance" was in charge of only two soldiers, who played draughts when on duty; the sentries outside the park carried no rifles; and at two of the park gates there were no sentries at all. A few days later, the Commander of the Petrograd Military District who was a lieutenant in rank inspected Tsarskoe Selo; and discovered this general neglect. The ex- treme Left, already suspecting a bourgeois counter- revolution, believed that the Provisional Government was culpably negligent. In the Council of Deputies the Bolsheviks demanded that the Tsar be sent to Siberia and put to labor in the mines. The Kronstadt "republic/' prominent in all extreme plans, declared TSARISM AND THE TSAR 239 that it must get the Tsar into its power; and the mutinous sailors at Helsingfors backed the demand. While Prince Lvoff was in power no attention was paid to these demands. Though a mild man by nature, Lvoff was firm in knowledge of the honesty of his intentions, and could not be forced to act by suspicious panic-mongers. This changed when Kerensky became Prime Minister; for Kerensky had to propitiate the Council of Deputies; and further his conscience was not clean. He had already engaged in mild repression against the Petrograd Bolsheviks, and was intriguing with the Army leaders to crush Bolshevism altogether. He knew that if the ex-Tsar was within reach of Petrograd, any military move against the Bolsheviks would certainly be represented as a monarchist plot. To forestall such charges it was necessary to show severity to the Tsar, and to get him out of the way. That, not any real fear of counter-revolution on the part of the Government, dictated the decision of the Cabinet to send Nicholas II into exile in Siberia. The threat of a German advance gave it a further good excuse. The Government did everything to keep the exile a secret. Its reason for secrecy, the Minister of Finances Nekrasoff told me, was that it feared an attack upon the train by the Bolsheviks, and the assassination of the Imperial Family. Not even the head of the railroad department knew where the train was bound. Instead of the gorgeous Imperial train, in which the Tsar had come to Tsarskoe Selo from 240 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Moghileff five months before, was an ordinary train of three sleeping cars, a dining car and several third class cars, with a second train for baggage and for thirty dependents who were allowed to share the exile. On the cars of the Tsar's train were white circles with red crosses; and the public was later told that this was the train that carried the American Red Cross mission from Vladivostok. Nicholas was not told where he was going, and was allowed only a short time for preparations. At three in the morning, he, the Tsaritsa and their five children drove in two motor cars through the park to the railroad station. The Tsar was depressed. He asked the Commander of the Tsarskoe Selo garrison whether he was not to be sent to the Crimea, where he had a palace and "could live like a civilized man"; and on getting an evasive answer, he began to cough, and tears rose in his eyes. The Tsaritsa was in better spirits. Dressed in a long chinchilla cloak, and showing gloveless hands covered with rings, she got out of her motor-car; kissed her son in view of the soldiers; and laughed. Nicholas was in a colonel's uniform, with a khaki blouse, and an open overcoat. He wore no decora- tions. With him were his adjutant Prince Dolgorou^ koff and his physician Botkin. With the Tsaritsa, apart from the servants, went only two Ladies of the Court; and with the four girl Grand Duchesses there were a French and an English governess, and several maids. As always, the procession was completed by the giant sailor Derevenko, the guardian of the Heir TSARISM AND THE TSAR since birth. At the last moment up came soldiers of Tsarskoe Selo garrison, and declared they were going on the train. They had got news of the exile; and, following the usual practise, were determined not to entrust the Tsar to agents of the Provisional Gov- ernment only As the train pulled out, the soldiers on the track jeered, one of them calling out "Sibirsky Tsar!" meaning "Tsar of Siberia," and at the Em- press, who looked defiantly out of the window, "Mrs. Rasputin." That was the last the Imperial family saw of their prison. The Tsar's destination v/as a mystery for some days. Some believed that he was bound for the Crimea, some for his estate in Kostroma Province, the seat of the Romanoffs before their elevation to the Tsardom. The newspapers printed telegrams from different parts of the country, announcing that mysterious trains, with blinds down and soldiers on the platforms had passed; and one telegram even asserted that the train was moving towards Moghileff, the army headquarters which was not far from the enemy's front. This caused a panic in the Narva suburb of Petrograd. A crowd of Bolshevik work- ing-men proclaimed that the counter-revolutionary Government of Kerensky had treacherously sent the Tsar for safety to Germany, and that the result would be an immediate German invasion with the aim of Restoration. Only when the train was near its destination was it officially announced that this was Tobolsk, the capital of the Siberian province of the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS same name. The statement declared that owing to reasons of state the Government had decided to trans- fer the ex-Emperor and Empress to a new residence, whither they were taken with the requisite measures to insure their safety, and that, "with them, of their own free will, went their children and certain of their entourage." With the exile, the irony of Destiny in dealing with Nicholas II reached its climax. Tobolsk is a dirty and disagreeable little town several hundred miles from a railroad, cut off from the world except during the brief summer months when it is reached by steamer along the Irtysh. There was irony in the fact that the Imperial family was lodged in the so- called "palace" of the former governors, a twenty- roomed, tumble-down and very dirty stucco house, without running water, baths, or the most ordinary conveniences. More irony lay in the fact that Tobolsk is the center to which during centuries the Romanoff Tsars sent their foes and critics. A Russian revolu- tionary poet called Tobolsk "a town of exiles' tears and blood from beaten backs, the real metropolis of all crushing Tsarism." As no modern Tsar ever resorted to exile on such a great scale as Nicholas II, it is hard to conceive a fitter punishment. In Russia every important event quickly becomes a myth, the source of hundreds of legendary ramifica- tions added in good faith by the imaginative and accepted in good faith by the credulous. The transfer of the Tsar followed the rule. One legend was that TSARISM AND THE TSAR 243 he had not been sent into exile at all; but had been smuggled out to Japan by the counter-revolutionary Government. Although telegrams from Tobolsk described his arrival and his strict guarding, the Bol- shevik working-men and soldiers credited the legend; and immediately set themselves to foil the Govern- ment's treasonable aim. Siberia practically rose in revolt. The railroad stations in the Eastern provinces were invaded by armed and riotous soldiers, by Red Guards and by revolutionary peasants, who stopped trains, dragged out of them on suspicion men and even women who in no way resembled the Tsar; and showed particular, almost comic, zeal in everything that related to America and to Red Cross trains. The Bolsheviks imagined that the ruse of the Red Cross train was adopted by the Government in order the more easily to smuggle Nicholas out of the coun- try. The amerikansky poyezd American railroad train became part of the myth. Siberian experts affirmed that the train was brought specially to Russia by Americans as part of a great international plot of rescue. From that day on until his execution with- out trial in July, Nicholas II has been a myth to the Russian people. But most of the stories of monarchist counter-revolutionary conspiracies have been woven around the names of other members of the Romanoff family. These stories gained more credence abroad than in Russia, where they are encouraged merely as good excuses for Bolshevik measures of repression against 244 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS rival parties. No Grand Duke has any prospect of becoming Tsar within visible time. The foreign newspapers' usual candidate, the late Commander-in- Chief Nicholas Nicolaievitch, has no backing at all. He was known before the War for swearing, drink- ing and a certain martinet mannerisms which had nothing to do with military talent. As Commander of the vast Russian armies early in the War he was thoroughly incapable. This was shown in October, 1914, when after Hindenburg's retreat from Warsaw he walked into a German trap, and so destroyed the offensive capacity of his army. After the Revolution he was a prisoner on his estate in the Crimea, his neighbor being the Dowager Tsaritsa Marie. The other Grand Dukes have never played prominent roles in politics or in war ; and to the public they are hardly known. The only monarchist plot so far associated with Grand Ducal names proved to be a common fraud. Five rogues prepared documents containing particulars of a plan to restore the dynasty; and at the head of the list of subscribers of money, they set the names of the Grand Dukes Paul and Michael. Armed with this they approached persons of supposed monarchist leanings, and obtained money. It was this event that led to the arrest of the two Grand Dukes; and further to the arrest of ladies of the well-known official family Hitrovo, one of whom was charged with attempting to smuggle letters into the prison palace at Tobolsk. The Bolsheviks, though well aware that these monarchist "plots" had no foundation, TSARISM AND THE TSAR made use of them for agitation purposes; and the extremists of the Anchor Place at Kronstadt pro- claimed that they justified an immediate and universal massacre of the bourgeoisie. In Siberia in the second half of 1917, a real monarchist agitation which was elemental and had not the character of a plot was under way. Like most Russian popular movements it was a compound of religious mysticism and politics. The hero was a starctz. A starctz, which means literally a venerable old man, is a pious man of holy repute and often of very unholy conduct. Such was the most famous of all startzi, Rasputin. The new starctz, who called himself Mitriukha, was a blacksmith by origin. When shoeing horses became unprofitable owing to the lack of iron, he let his beard grow, that being necessary for holiness, and entered into a league with the ex- secretary of a penitentiary, a police spy and bad character, Gromoff. The pair decided to take ad- vantage of the peasants' growing discontent with the Revolution. The peasants, Gromoff saw, reasoned primitively. "We are hungry, unclothed, oppressed by the Bolsheviks, defeated abroad and without security at home; in short, all the ills which we bore under the Tsardom are repeated to-day in aggravated form. Therefore the present Government is worse than the Tsardom; and we had better restore the Tsardom. This will bring back the relatively bearable conditions of pre-revolutionary times." The blacksmith was apparently sincere; but 246 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Gromoff was a rogue, who had no object except the bettering of his position which would result from the restoration of the spy system. He incited the peasants, assuring them that the Revolutionary Government had forbidden the meeting of the Church Congress at Moscow, and that it was going to take the Church's treasures and the church bells and coin money with them. The excited peasants marched into Tobolsk, acclaimed the Tsar and demanded to see him. The Commandant, being unable to induce them to disperse, stationed at a palace window a soldier who somewhat resembled Nicholas. When the monarchist peasants saw him they prostrated themselves and prayed, and then without having seen the real Tsar tramped away. The monarchist enthusiasm in certain parts of Siberia grew. The Kerensky Government refused to allow the news to be printed in Petrograd. It authorized only the statement that many pilgrims were coming to see the Tsar for religious reasons. The Bolsheviks took alarm, and the Tsar became the first victim. He was forced to sleep in a room with only one door; and outside the door slept two emissaries from the Bolsheviks. But the movement went further. Mitriukha preached and prayed zealously. His reputation as a holy man grew; and with it grew the belief of the more ignorant peasants that the specific evils of the Revolution would cease if Nicholas was restored. Every week great crowds of peasants, sometimes from vast distances, collected in Tobolsk. They TSARISM AND THE TSAR 247 mobbed in the streets the young Grand Duchess Olga, the only member of the Imperial family who went out of the palace; assured her that they had heard that Nicholas was starving; and gave her money which the soldiers took from her. The Government took fright, and decreed the transfer of the Tsar to a monastery about twenty miles from Tobolsk. When the Grand Duchess visited the monastery the peasants again gathered, stormed the building, begged to see "the holy room" which Nicholas was to occupy, and wept and danced themselves into a frenzy. The Gov- ernment again took fright, and postponed the transfer. East of Lake Baikal the agitation produced serious riots. Crowds of peasants eager to see the captive Tsar stormed the train, and beat the town militia. The holy man and the penitentiary secretary made fiery speeches, adjuring the peasants to proclaim an independent state, of which the ruler should be the Autocratic Tsar, with a council of peasants and work- ing-men. There would be no Constitution. "The Autocrat would face his people directly, under the blue sky of heaven, and learn their needs without the officials, the army officers, and the middlemen who in the past crushed Russia by standing between the moujiks and their ruler." Tobolsk became a holy city. At one time thirty thousand peasants were on their way thither with no other motive than seeing the Tsar. The staretz organized a pilgrimage along the railroad in a slow train, stopping at every station and exhorting the people to rally to Nicholas' 248 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS standard. The Bolsheviks opposed him; and at Nizhny Udinsk they tore off his clothes and threw him into prison. At night he escaped. He now declared that Heaven had shown its approval of his mission by saving him, naked as he was, from freezing to death; and he announced that he would organize a procession of entirely naked men who would prove their holiness by facing triumphantly the blasts of the Siberian winter. The procession was to start on the 226. of January, a day on which everywhere pious Russians break the river ice and bathe in cold water. The naked men would tramp through the snow to Tobolsk ; and implore the Tsar again to become father of his people. An attempt was actually made to carry this out. From the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk, with the thermometer far below zero, a dozen peasants entirely without clothing, but with bags of food on their backs, issued from their cabins and declared that they were going into the town to meet five thou- sand more naked "Pilgrims of Monarchism." Before they had got down the village street, only three, all badly frostbitten, were alive. This movement died down in the spring; and it was finally killed by the transfer of the Tsar to Ekaterinburg in the Urals, the scene of his murder in July. The prospects of a strong monarchist, or even Romanoff restorationist movement are to-day greater in Russia than at any time since the Revolution. Probably Nicholas II was the most hated, as he was certainly the unworthiest, of all Tsars. But history TSARISM AND THE TSAR 249 shows that royal martyrdom is the seed of monarchy as surely as persecution is the seed of the Church. Already the Orthodox clergy has resumed its ancient prayers for "the slave of God, Nicholas, who suffered much" ; the politically minded "Intelligentsiya" is ask- ing whether in unsettled countries a severely Con- stitutional monarch, set above parties, is not a useful nucleus of political solidarity; and nationally minded men are remembering that though the Romanoffs ruthlessly sacrificed political freedom to national greatness, the Revolution has ruthlessly sacrificed both. The mass of Russians are still republican; and the overthrowal of Bolshevism by the Social-Revolu- tionary and Menshevik majority would not in itself bring about a monarchical restoration. That would be incompatible with the Socialist state organization upon which these latter parties, no less than the Bolsheviks, are bent. But Russia seems to be moving towards the restoration of bourgeois government methods, probably without the restoration of Capital- ism and private land ownership; and bourgeois gov- ernment may easily culminate in a re-established monarchy. At present no desirable candidate for the Tsardom is in sight; but when the time comes there are forgotten Romanoffs and princes of other Euro- pean houses one of whom may, after the long period needed for the creation of a really strong monarchist party, ascend the Imperial throne. CHAPTER XV THE BASTILLE OF PETROGRAD THE history of Russian revolution before 1917 is indissolubly associated with the Bastille of Petrograd, the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. The Fortress lies on the northern side of the river Neva, where Peter first built; and from the southern side, across a mile of gleaming water or crystalline snow, may be seen the sharp spires of the old and new fortress churches where Romanoff Tsars lie buried, gray bastion walls dropping sheer into the stream, and flanks embosomed in trees. The Fortress is the terror of Russian history; and its name is bound up with legends which are hardly grimmer than the facts. There, in an underground cell was imprisoned Peter's erratic son Alexis; and there, says legend, he was tortured before execution. There in the reign of Catherine II languished the beautiful pretender, the self-styled Princess Tarakanoff, who set her- self up as daughter of the Tsaritsa Elizabeth and as claimant to the Imperial throne. The supposed fate of the princess is subject of a famous picture by Flavitsky, which shows her in manacles, standing in 250 THE BASTILLE OF PETROGRAD 261! her "stone sack" while the flooded Neva rises above her knees. The Fortress held several of the aristocrat Decembrists who challenged Nicholas I ; and paid for their plot upon the scaffold or in Siberia. Nekrasoff's poem "Russian Women" tells how the wives of these victims voluntarily went into exile. There early in the seventies until cold and damp undermined his health was Kropotkin; and there in 1905 was Maxim Gorky, as result of his participation in the vain attempt of a group of prominent Petersburgers to prevent the massacre of the workmen who marched upon the Winter Palace under the leadership of the police-agent Father Gapon. In March, 1917, the Fortress was full of enemies of the Autocracy. These were released at once by the revolutionary soldiery; and into the cells were cast the ministers and courtiers of Nicholas II. Enthusiasts believed that once these were tried and disposed of, political imprisonment would be for ever at an end. But within four months the Fortress gates closed upon the Bolshevik agitators who revolted in Mid-July against the Lvoff Cabinet; two months later was imprisoned there a leader in the Korniloff revolt ; and finally the Fortress was the jail of Kerensky's ministers and of other foes of the Bolsheviks them- selves. The Fortress is an epitome of modern Russian history. The Fortress is not all an inaccessible prison. It is a complex of defensive works, churches, barracks and administrative offices occupying a large area; and RUSSIAN ASPECTS before the Revolution it was a favorite place for Sunday promenades. The present fortress-prison is only a single bastion, the Troubetskoi. Into this after the Revolution it was as hard to penetrate as before. The imprisoned Autocratist officials were under trial; and mystery surrounded the preliminary examinations which were being held. The ignorant soldiers who dominated the Provisional Government through the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers Deputies were jealous and suspicious; they were determined that no privileges should be given to the captives; and they regarded attempts of outsiders to visit the Bastion with distrust. The negotiations which led me into the Bastion lasted nearly a month; and were nearly wrecked at the end. Although I was in company of the Assistant Procuror of Petrograd, the soldier guards on the spot laughed at our permit, declaring defiantly "We are the only Government here"; and not until an educated non-commissioned officer invented the story that I was "a well-known Socialist" were we allowed to pass. Before my inspection, several of the best-known prisoners had been released as ill. One was the former Prime Minister Stuermer, who in general belief was a pro-German traitor, though in fact he was probably nothing worse than a servile bureaucrat. Another was Anna Vuirubova. Still in the Bastion was the most-hated of all, Alexander Protopopoff, first known as a progressive, patriotic Duma member; next, seduced by the Tsaritsa, as an oppressive THE BASTILLE OF PETROGRAD 253 Minister of the Interior; and finally as ally and slave of Rasputin. Protopopoff was Russia's Strafford. To foreigners he first became known through the Stockholm scandal. On his way home from England he discussed peace prospects with an emissary of Baron Lucius, Germany's Minister to Sweden. He excused himself on the ground that the transaction was known in advance to the Russian Minister; and that he had talked only of commercial relations after the War; but all Russians who desired to fight out the War regarded him as a traitor. In the Bastion was General Rennenkampf, also an international figure. Rennenkampf was one of Kuropatkin's generals in the war with Japan, where he distinguished himself by the vigor which was usually shown by German Russians and by the ruth- less execution and shooting without trial of Chinese and Manchurians whom he suspected of espionage. He next appeared as suppressor of revolution. This was during the general strike in October, 1905. The Siberian railroad was then cut for several days and local "republics" sprang up, and defied Petersburg. Rennenkampf made himself infamous by deeds which recalled the "Bloody Assizes" of the English Judge Jeffreys. His "Hangman's progress" was made in a railroad train, in which he proceeded from town to town, hanging mercilessly and without trial. The story went that the gallows stood in his own car. At the beginning of the present War, he was a com- rade of the late General Samsonoff; and the two 254 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS raided East Prussia with half a million troops, until the invasion ended in the disastrous defeat of Tannen- berg. Rennenkampf was accused of not coming to the rescue of his brother general; and inevitably he was charged with being in the pay of Germans. He continued in command for a time, but later was removed and disgraced. Now he lay in the Trou- betskoi Bastion under several charges, among them treason and robbery. With Rennenkampf in the Bastion were Bieletsky, ex-Director of the Department of Police, manager of the spy system and accomplice of agents provocateurs; and Makaroff, like Protopopoff a former Minister of the Interior, who was accused of several crimes. The Commission of Inquiry into the Tsarist spy system discovered that Makaroff connived at the election to the Duma of a burglar, the aim being to gain a reactionary who would make trouble in the legislature. In the Bastion were further the chief of the army motor supply service, accused of corruption; General Voyeikoff, commandant of the Palace, an enthusiast for sport, but at the same time one of Nicholas' evil advisers; and Prince Alexander Dolgoroukoff, a cavalry commander who championed Korniloff in his revolt against Kerensky. The other prisoner of distinction was the former Minister of Justice Schtcheglovitoff, whom the late Count Witte char- acterized to me as the "cleverest, most corrupt man in Europe." As an authority on national and inter- national law, Schtcheglovitoff had no equal; and he THE BASTILLE OF PETROGRAD 255 was a man of naturally humane and generous impulses, but like scores of other men of real attain- ments he had succumbed to the seductions of the Court ; and his acts in corrupting Justice, and throw- ing a veil of sham legality over the abuses of the Autocracy, have hardly a parallel even in Russian history. The Troubetskoi Bastion is of typical obsolete fortress construction, pentagonal in shape, surround- ing a small courtyard. Along four sides runs a double-storied tier of cells with very thick walls and low, arched windows heavily barred. The cells are the "stone sacks," famous in revolutionary literature; and according to popular belief, all are partly below the ground, and only a few feet above normal river level. Hence revolutionists tell of scores of captives drowned during floods like the Princess Tarakanoff. In fact, the princess was not drowned, and was not imprisoned in this bastion, but in another part of the fortress. The lower tier of cells is upon ground level ; and here prisoners of the Tsardom were liable to be flooded out; but at the time of my visit, the Revolu- tion's captives were all in the upper story, well out of reach of floods. Each tier contains eighteen cells; and as there were then only eight prisoners, there was room enough upstairs. Before visiting these cells I had glimpses of Protopopoff and Bieletsky. The governor's cabinet opens into dim, small rooms used for the judicial examination of prisoners, and (again according to legend) scenes under the Autocracy of 256 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS violence and even of methodical torture. The governor threw open one door; pointed to a stout, gray-haired man who was gesticulating before the examining magistrate, and exclaimed "That is Bieletzky!" and then opened another door, showing a severe official at a table taking notes, and before him a regular, aquiline profile silhouetted against the barred window. "That is Protopopoff," said the governor. Thereupon he closed the door, and led me to the cells. If one ignores the psychical torment caused by years of captivity, the Bastion is not as grim a place of captivity as is generally believed. The white- washed cells are large and clean, paved with reddish cement, and lighted from electric lamps set in the wall, attached to which are nightlights shining always upon the beds so that the jailers may watch prisoners through a slit in the door. The cells are not damp; and the sanitary arrangements are modern. The worst defect is the bad natural lighting, a result of the thick walls. All the cells open upon a corridor which follows the pentagonal line of the Bastion; and all have red, iron-bound doors, with pigeon-holes for the handing in of food. In these cells the prisoners, with one exception, had been since the first days of the Revolution. Except that they were gibed at by the guards, they were well treated. At first compelled to wear prison dress, they now had their own clothes; and received, if they to pay, the ordinary rations of an army officer. THE BASTILLE OF PETROGRAD 257 Otherwise they ate the private soldier's ration. The officials told me that Protopopoff was the only one then not receiving officer's food. He was in a mystical frame of mind, which later terminated in officially certified insanity; and he wept daily, and declared that he deserved to suffer as he was guilty in great part of his country's misfortunes. The first captive shown at close quarters was Rennenkampf. I had seen him before the Revolution in the Petrograd Hotel d'Europe, shortly after he was deprived of military rank; when he still wore uniform, and was a well set up, dissipated looking officer of German Junker type. Now, he lay upon his mattress, staring fixedly at the night lamp, with his hair disheveled, and his dirty hands hanging on each side of the bed. He was very negligently dressed; and looked like a typical Terrorist prisoner. He lived in chronic terror. When it was proposed to transfer him to another prison for the sake of his health, he refused the offer and begged on his knees to remain, declaring that if the mob caught him he would be torn to pieces. As we entered he turned his head, and showed fright. The assistant procurer told him who I was; and he began to talk, declaring in a whining voice that his hour had come, for he had no doubt that if the Revolution's courts acquitted him, the soldiers would kill him before he was released. Of the charges against himself, he refused to talk in detail; but with a sardonic grin, he declared that his chief offenses were, "General 258 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS SamsonofFs defeat and my own German name"; and added savagely, "I am told that the cause of Russia's defeat is that three-quarters of her officers are Ger- mans; the real cause is that three-quarters of them are Russians." He asked some questions about the Revolution, but showed no great interest in the answers ; and begged me not to publish in the Russian newspapers anything he had said. I believe that fear as to his fate had almost deprived him of sanity. The governor assured me that well-educated men have always stood the psychical strain of Fortress imprisonment better than men of Rennenkampfs type. The ex-Minister of Justice Schtcheglovitoff had shown no fear; but had behaved with great dignity; and to keep his mind occupied had begun to study Finnish. In the prison library, in addition to Russian, English, French, German and Italian books, I found a brand-new collection of Finnish works, specially purchased for Finnish citizens who under an unconstitutional law passed during the Stolypin despotism were liable to be kidnaped and brought for trial before Russian courts. The new prisoners were not allowed to read newspapers; and had practically no knowledge of the course of the Revolution; their guards never spoke to them; and they exercised in the courtyard one by one. Rennen- kampf was under the impression that Nicholas II still reigned, as a Constitutional monarch; and the only mitigation of his chronic terror was a vain belief that the old system would be restored. THE BASTILLE OF PETROGRAD 259 The suspicion of the revolutionary soldiers in every- thing that concerned the captives went to extremes. The Provisional Government's guards, a regular military unit, were posted in the periphery of the Bastion where they never saw the inmates; whereas the unofficial guards, representatives of the revolu- tionary regiments, were stationed inside and exercised the real control. The only attempt at escape since the Revolution was made by a Jew-baiter who made a dash against one of these unofficial guards, and was nearly shot dead after he reached the court- yard. This courtyard makes an incongruous impres- sion. It is reached by a forbidding door, enclosed in a metal cage in which prisoners wait; but is itself a verdant paradise, altogether out of harmony with its surroundings. Rising to the Bastion roof are poplars, aspens and maples, and underneath are jasmine and lilac bushes. Between the pavement crevices rise untrodden grasses and wild flowers; and as if to mar this charm, in the middle stands a shape- less and very ugly brown bath-house. The officials told me further stories of the prisoners. The former Prime Minister Stuermer had returned before his release to a state of childhood. Brought exhausted into the fortress, after being dragged between rows of soldiers who threatened to club him to death, he broke down and cried. He was asked to sit in his cell until sheets were brought for his bed; but before the sheets were brought he was fast asleep on the cement floor. On waking, he refused 260 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS to believe that there was any Revolution; and declared that he had been arrested for pro-Germanism by order of the Tsar. He begged to be sent abroad to die in peace, declaring that he had always served his country faithfully; and he offered as condition of release to give information about his colleagues' intrigues. The examining magistrate refused, declar- ing that the Government had already enough facts to hang all ministers if it chose. After that Stuermer lapsed into a dazed condition; and his health got worse until he was transferred to the hospital where he died. The former Minister of the Interior, Makaroff, was defiant. He denounced the Revolution, and prophesied that it would perish at the hands of extreme Democracy. "The Government of the Tsar/' was his judgment, "was wholly vicious; but I sup- ported it as a patriotic man, and did nothing to ag- gravate its badness. I was honestly convinced that all possible Russian governments must be bad." Prison and Terror had been the only means of keep- ing order and of correcting despotism, since Tartar days; and they would continue so to the end. This argument by an authority as to the natural character of Russian history gained emphasis from a visit to the obsolete dungeons, situated under the present commandant's lodging, outside the Bastion. These dungeons are real "stone sacks." The dirty windows are guarded by cumbrous bar-work designed to imitate rows of halberds; and peering from the outside through these bars one sees a damp floor THE BASTILLE OF PETROGRAD 261 which must be well under flood level, and filthy dripping gray walls. We looked into the cell of Peter's son Alexis and that of the "Princess Tarakanoff." No relics remain of either. There is still alive, I learned, an old fortress servant who had had it from father, grandfather and great-grand- father, all also fortress servants, that these cells con- fined the soldier lovers of Catherine II before they were put to death. Back in the governor's cabinet, we examined the roll of past captives, with several famous names. One entry reads "1905, January 12; Pieshkoff, Alexei Maximovitch" the real name of Maxim Gorky; and another reads "Kisska (a girl's pet name) ; aged 18; identity uncertain; believed real surname is Mazantzeff; arrived February 5, 1908; handed over for execution February 7." Such execu- tion of unknown persons was common. Caught in Terrorist acts or "expropriations," they refused to reveal their identity for fear of betraying accomplices. The unknown girl "Kisska, aged 18," was executed merely on suspicion, the suspicion being that she was engaged in a plot to murder the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Vladimir, who commanded Petrograd's garrison during the massacre of January, 1905. My visit to the Bastion concluded in a second meet- ing with Protopopoff. As we were inspecting the roll, the Assistant Procurer put his head into a side room, and announced that the ex-Minister's examina- tion was ending. Into the cabinet, two soldiers with fixed bayonets behind him, walked the man I had most 262 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS wished to see at close quarters. I saw a man of middle height and slight figure, with small, fine features, and a short, sparse grayish beard, with eyes which were unnaturally bright and almost feverish, and with an expression of remarkable refinement and dignity. He looked more like a fine drawn English aristocrat than a Russian. He was neatly dressed but wore no collar. On his face was a smile. He stepped quickly into the middle of the room and suddenly stopped. The assistant attorney looked at him, and looked again at me, and said: "That is M. Protopopoff." I exchanged a few words with him. "We can speak English," he began. The assistant attorney intervened "Please do not speak English," he said. Protopopoff began to smile nervously and I thought sarcastically. He moved his head quickly from side to side, twitched his hands in a nervous and feminine gesture, came very close to me and began to speak in Russian. From what the Procurer had told me I knew that I should not be allowed to touch on politics, so I asked him regarding his health; and this led to a very brief but very remarkable discussion. In reply to my inquiry about his health, he said: "It is too good." That answer surprised me. Still intending to keep away from politics, I asked him about his treatment. "Have you any complaint to make?" He looked at me again with a sarcastic smile and said, "Why ask me a question of the kind that always THE BASTILLE OF PETROGRAD 263 in such conditions answers itself? How could I make any complaint?" "I did not mean to ask whether you complain of being in prison," I explained. "I asked merely if there is anything you have to complain of in the conduct of the prison officials." "I have no complaint of any kind," answered Protopopoff; and again smiling enigmatically, he continued : "Would any of your Americans complain of their treatment if they were conscious that they were desperate criminals?" He continued to smile apparently in sarcasm; and I concluded that he was being harshly treated; and that this was his oblique manner of putting the fact. I said, "You mean that as irony?" "It is not irony," he answered. "I have no right whatever to complain because I am guilty of a very serious crime." The Procurer looked at him sharply. "That," I said, "is a strange remark to make in the presence of an official who has come here in order to pile up evidence against you." Protopopoff again flashed his head suddenly from side to side and said, this time with the same smile, which seemed half sincere and half sardonic: "I supply the evidence myself." He uttered this with tremendous emphasis. "I am guilty of the most awful crime that a man can commit, the crime of failing to understand the spirit of my age." 264 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS That was Protopopoff's confession. Repeating the words "spirit of my age" and again making the delicate feminine gestures with his hands, followed by his two soldier guards with fixed bayonets, he went out of the room. A month later it was announced that he was suffering from progressive paralysis; and I believed he was released. Most of the other prisoners remained in the Bastion until the Bolshevik Revolution, when they were joined by Kerensky's Cabinet. Rennenkampf was let out; and two Keren- sky ministers, ShingariefT and Kokoshkin, were sent from the fortress to a hospital, where they were butchered while in bed by Bolshevik soldiers. The Fortress prison continues to play its traditional role; for it now contains a new class of prisoners Social- revolutionaries, Mensheviks and members of other extremely radical and progressive groups who oppose the regime of the Soviets, and are therefore classed as counter-revolutionaries, and foes of popular gov- ernment. Probably the Fortress will not have run its full course as instrument of, and corrective to, despotism until it houses the Bolsheviks as guests of the still more radical, and rapidly growing Anarchists, or some even more extreme party yet to be formed. CHAPTER XVI THE TRIUMPH OF BOLSHEVISM IN past chapters stress was laid more than once upon the fact that the steady swing of the Revolution from moderate Right to extreme Left was pre- determined by the overmastering dread among the masses of a Counter-Revolution. For this mass psychosis there was never any substantial foundation. The whole of Russian society was, and is, radical in its views of policy and economy. The aim of the designed blood-bath of Bolshevism, which Savinkoff wanted, and probably would have had if Korniloff had succeeded, was not to restore the ancient regime, nor even to establish a Conservative government. It was to attain the strong governmental power the silnaya vlast of which so much had been heard in the Malachite Hall and at the Moscow Congress, and upon the need of which men differing so fundamen- tally as Korniloff and Savinkoff, the Octobrist Rodzianko and the Socialist ex-convict Tseretelli agreed. The Bolshevik leaders were not themselves opposed to the principle of strong governmental power; and their policy since their triumph has been a series of unavailing attempts to create such power. 265 266 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Their opposition was against the holding of such power by any Cabinet in which even one of the hated bourgeoisie was a minister. They believed that strong Government power in bourgeois or coalition hands meant Counter-Revolution, a return to administrative despotism and a reversal of the practically Socialist policy in Finance v and Industry which had been entered upon and in part carried through immediately after the March Revolution. Measured from this angle the abortive Korniloff revolt was a disaster. Its success would probably have brought about the restoration of order, if for no other reason than that success would have meant a superiority of military force on Korniloff's side. As it was not fated to succeed, it would have been better had no attempt been made. In that case a more reasonable system might have succeeded Kerensky's. Under no circumstances could Kerensky have much longer held power. Immediately after the revolt the Counter-Revolu- tion obsession became a mania. In popular opinion all Russians were now divided into two classes: honest men faithful to the Revolution and to the Socialist doctrines with which it was identified, and counter- revolutionaries. Advocacy of a strong governmental power was henceforth equivalent to counter-revolu- tionism. No middle party remained. The Bolshevik extremists, now strongly reinforced from moderate Socialist quarters, began a fierce press and platform campaign against the whole educated and propertied THE TRIUMPH OF BOLSHEVISM 267 class; and in the Petrograd Council of Deputies, in the Council's newspaper Isvestiya, this class was denounced as not only sympathizing with, but also as directly engaged in KornilofFs conspiracy. Its aim was to crush the Revolution in blood, and to restore bourgeois if not monarchial government. The ex- tremists demanded the deprivation of all rights, the outlawry, and even the trial and execution of the whole "Intelligentsiya," in particular of the Constitu- tional-Democrats. Their mildest suggested punish- ment was loss of the right to vote for or be elected to the Constituent Assembly. In the Army a clean sweep was to be made of counter-revolutionaries once and for all. Kerensky's attempt to keep office at all costs became increasingly difficult. He was still trying to hold a middle course between Socialists and bourgeoisie; and his Cabinets, several times remade, were on coalition principles till the last. But after the revolt he attempted to swing somewhat towards the Left, and to base his position more upon the support of the moderate Socialists, while still excluding the Bol- sheviks who were in theory a suppressed, illegal mob of agitators. Their newspapers appeared only sur- reptitiously; and their leader Lenine was still in hiding to evade execution of the order for his arrest issued in July, which had not been withdrawn. Only such Bolshevik leaders were supposed to be at large as had supported the Government during the Korniloff revolt 268 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS In fact, Kerensky, almost completely abandoned by the educated and propertied classes, was more and more in the Left's control; and he fulfilled its chief demands. After assuming the position of Com- mander-in-Chief of the Army and fleet, he cleansed the Headquarter's Staff of all officers suspected of sympathizing with Korniloff . This was done through his new Minister of War, General Verkhovsky, formerly Commander of the Military District of Moscow, who had shown great vigor in crushing a military revolt in East Russia, and was supposed to be a moderate Socialist. Verkhovsky, rendering reports to the Petrograd Council of Deputies as if it was a Government institution, cleansed the Staff in such a thorough way that not one competent officer remained. By this means, Kerensky, of course not intentionally, continued the process of ruining the Army which he began six months before when he agreed to the destruction of the authority of officers. Kerensky's new policy did not succeed. The rea- son of his failure was the further strengthening of the Bolsheviks by the Korniloff revolt. Dread of Counter-Revolution continued to drive the working men and soldiers more and more to the Left; and immediately after the rebellion, in elections for the Council of Deputies at Petrograd and Moscow, the Bolsheviks for the first time obtained majorities, and so captured the executives. Kerensky, Cheidze and the other moderate Socialists in the Petrograd executive resigned; and thereafter the Councils were THE TRIUMPH OF BOLSHEVISM 269 predominantly Bolshevik. The panic on the score of counter-revolution had done its work; and, at least in the two capitals, the moderate Socialist parties were regarded almost as counter-revolutionary as the bourgeoisie. As far as this popular judgment concerns Kerensky, it was thoroughly justified; and the nation soon learned why this was so. The Bolsheviks had always distrusted him more than they distrusted other leaders of the moderate Socialist groups; and they resented, or rather made capital out of, his half-hearted measures of repression after the July riot. Now they learnt that Kerensky was indeed a "counter-revolu- tionary," though, as was inevitable from his character, an indecisive and timid one. It transpired that his anger and amazement at KornilofFs revolt were humbug and fraud. It was he himself who invited Korniloff to send troops to Petrograd. He designed to crush the Bolsheviks. Later, seeing that the Petro- grad garrison was growing more and more Bolshevik, he began to doubt whether this policy would succeed if it came to an armed collision; and he abandoned the plan; and denounced as a traitor Korniloff, who had fulfilled stoutly his part of the agreement. This revelation was made to me first by M. Gobetchiya, who some days before the facts were published, declared that "everyone," meaning the initiated, knew that Kerensky started the whole thing, and then took fright and withdrew. A few days later, the Terrorist Savinkoff, Commander of Petrograd during the 270 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS revolt, and the Chief Army Commissary Filonenko confirmed publicly Gobetchiya's story; and weeks afterwards General Alexeyeff declared that Kerensky knew of the coup from the first. The details are still in dispute. It is admitted that the Prime Minister and the Commander-in-Chief long negotiated for the reconstruction of the Government upon an anti-Bolshevik platform. The plan was to form something like a dictatorship at Petrograd. Savinkoff was sent by Kerensky to Korniloff to arrange for the proclamation of martial law. Korniloff was to send troops, including the "Savage Division/' under any commander who was not sus- pected of counter-revolutionary leanings. Korniloff, it was charged, broke the last condition by appointing as his commander Krymoff (the general who com- mitted suicide) who was considered a monarchist. Elaborate negotiations went on as to the composition of a new Government which was to include both Korniloff and Kerensky. Korniloff's plan was to restore discipline in the army by military-revolu- tionary courts, to militarize the railroads and war workshops, and to restore the disciplinary powers of army officers. The collision between the two chief conspirators was due partly to a misunderstanding created by Korniloff's envoy, Vladimir Lvoff, and partly to carelessness by Kerensky. Lvoff submitted to Kerensky on behalf of Korniloff three plans, the second of which provided for the formation of a directory within the cabinet, with the participation of THE TRIUMPH OF BOLSHEVISM 271 himself and Kerensky, while one provided for the appointment of Korniloff alone as dictator. After Lvoff had divulged his mission to Kerensky, Kerensky asked Korniloff by telegram: "Do you insist?" Korniloff, thinking this question referred to the plan that both should share power, replied: "Yes I insist"; but Kerensky understood this to mean that Korniloff insisted upon a dictatorship by himself alone; and without asking any further questions, he broke off communication, denounced Korniloff and proclaimed a state of Civil War. Although the exact details have never been revealed, the revelations are sufficient to prove that Kerensky played a traitorous and cowardly role, in his relations to Korniloff; and that he was dishonest in his relations to the parties of the Left The Bolsheviks now raged furiously against him. They painted him as the chief counter-revolutionary, a traitor to the Revolution, who had planned to crush the popular movement in blood. Kerensky had not the nerve for carrying through any such plan; and I doubt whether the Bolshevik hatred was genuine. But his bad faith and irresolution cost him many of his supporters. The educated classes, the Constitu- tional Democrats and the Moscow Industrial Group did not forgive him his weakness in turning his back on Korniloff, though he had only acted as they had themselves. After the exposure, his fall at the hands of the Bolshevik garrison of Petrograd and the Red Guard workmen was only a question of days. Though he was still in theory supported by the moderate 272 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Socialists, these showed no particular zeal to defend him, and they would probably have openly repudiated him were they not attached to the doctrine of coalition Government and opposed to the Bolshevik claim for a purely Socialist Cabinet. Kerensky seemed to realize his fate. He gesticulated and said, "I am supposed to be supported by all reasonable men, but there are no reasonable men in Russia." The evacua- tion of Petrograd, he told me, was the only remedy; and this now became his favorite plan. His statement to me was made after the Bolsheviks captured the Petrograd Council of Deputies, but before they cap- tured the Council at Moscow. Even after the latter event, Petrograd was more Bolshevik than Moscow; and Kerensky vainly imagined that by moving to Moscow or to some city farther to the East, he would escape the sword hanging over his head. The excuse for the removal given to the people was the overcrowding of Petrograd. In fact, this over- crowding was very great; instead of the pre-War population of a million and a half, there were now nearly three millions, as result of the flood of refugees from the front and of the increase of army institu- tions and of the garrison. Epidemics and starvation were threatened. But the Bolshevik Council of Deputies was determined to keep the Government in its power, and Kerensky, timid as always, did not dare to take the plunge suddenly. "Evacuation" was carried through piece-meal. Many institutions left the city while the Government itself remained. The THE TRIUMPH OF BOLSHEVISM 273 preparations were made secretly. In mid-September were packed for removal the contents of the Hermitage Gallery, the great collection of pictures which includes so many magnificent Rembrandts. In the Foreign Office the archives were packed in wooden cases; and they lay in the corridors and on the stair- ways for weeks, while the Government was collecting courage to go away. The treasures of the Petrograd churches and monasteries, being in the hands of resolute monks, were removed sooner. They were put upon barges in the Neva; and sent on a journey of several thousand miles by river and canal until they reached towns on the Volga. The complete evacua- tion of Petrograd was not carried out until after the Bolsheviks had come into power and had concluded their separate peace with Germany and Austria. Kerensky had now no real power. But the all- powerful Council of Deputies resolved to rob him even of the shadow of power. After the Moscow Congress and before the Korniloff revolt, the plan had been mooted of creating a new national congress to sit in permanency until the Constituent Assembly met, and this plan took shape in a "Democratic Congress" to be held at Petrograd. The August Moscow Congress was sanctioned and organized by the Government ; but in the new Democratic Congress the nominal Government had no share whatever. It was a creation of the Council of Deputies. The Council organized it, making it representative of the workmen and soldiers, and giving very little repre- 274 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS sentation to other classes. The Bolsheviks even proposed that the bourgeoisie, being "counter-revolu- tionary," should be altogether excluded. As the Councils of Deputies were entirely private bodies, their new creation, the Democratic Congress, was an unofficial institution. But the Council decided that it should nevertheless play the role of a "Preliminary Parliament" ; and they insisted that Kerensky should recognize it, and agree that all future cabinets should be responsible to it on the principle of Parliamentarism. The Congress would nominate its own new cabinet. This proposed humiliation bitterly hurt Kerensky; and his adherents declared that he would never recognize the authority of the Congress; and would even refuse to appear before it. The Left retorted that if so they would simply depose him, and form a new cabinet which would be put into power by the Petrograd garrison, executing the orders of the Congress. Kerensky continued to vacillate. But as usual he had to give way, and a day before the Congress met, it was made known that he would attend it and render it an account, without, however, recognizing its official authority. The Bolsheviks demanded that he should also make a full confession of his role in KornilofFs rebellion. Before the opening of the Congress, a new sensa- tion was promised. The whereabouts of the founder and leader of Bolshevism, Lenine, had been a mystery since the order issued for his arrest in July. It was rumored that he was in Sweden, in Switzerland, and THE TRIUMPH OF BOLSHEVISM 275 even in Germany. His newspapers now declared jubilantly that he had been all the time hiding in Russia, protected by faithful friends; and that he intended to appear, supported by armed adherents, at the Congress. Let the miserable Kerensky govern- ment arrest him if it dared! The Bolshevik soldiers would know how to punish such sacrilege. The Gov- ernment replied that the order for arrest still held good; but it qualified this by forbidding arrest once Lenine succeeded in entering the Congress building. This was the Alexander Theater. Petrograd feared a blood-bath. But Lenine, though he was actually in Russia, did not appear. Twelve hundred persons attended the Congress; and the majority gave the Government a new brief lease of life. Kerensky delivered a long speech which contained no clear account of the Korniloff conspiracy, but only a statement that the Government had known for months of a counter-revolutionary plot, and had done its best to foil it. The Congress was a tem- porary check for Bolshevism. Before it met the Bol- sheviks boasted that the majority would endorse their plan of proscription for the educated classes, and would certainly demand an entirely Socialist Cabinet responsible to the Councils of Deputies. Instead, the Congress, though by a small majority, endorsed the old and favorite Kerensky expedient of government by coalition. But Kerensky's fall was imminent; and he knew it. During a conversation late in September, he struck 276 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS me as being entirely helpless and planless, but he was governed so strongly by personal vanity that he could not voluntarily surrender his position. He spoke excitedly, saying, "I have saved Russia. At least I have saved her from the worse things that would have happened had I not taken power in July." He admitted that the Revolution was in a state of decline. The enthusiasm for Revolution as a means of saving the country and disseminating ultra-democratic doc- trines in the world generally had decayed. "The mass of our people," he said, "now regard the Revolution as a passing stage just as they formerly regarded the Autocracy; and they want to know when the Revolu- tion will be wound up and a stable form of Govern- ment set in its place." This statement implied that the Revolution had now fully run its course towards the Left; and that Kerensky did not expect Bol- shevism to enter on power; and I believe that, in fact, he did not believe in a successful Bolshevik revolt, and expected that his own fall would result from a fresh assault from the Right. Without knowing the quarter from which the next trouble was to come, he nevertheless predicted a fresh convulsion; and the prophecy came true in November when the Petrograd garrison, backed by detachments from Kronstadt, expelled him almost without a struggle, and set Lenine and Trotsky in his place. CHAPTER XVII RUSSIA AND AMERICA A FAIR judgment upon revolutionary Russia will inevitably be a long-time judgment, that takes into account past history, and as regards the future treats time generously. Framed only on the facts of to-day and the expected developments of to-morrow, an analysis is likely to be unreliable. It is likely to be unduly black. But a judgment which is come to on the basis of Russia's past, and which does not expect too much in too short a time, is likely to be correct, and further to be reasonably hopeful. Russia's present condition is very bad. She is attacked by a dozen political and social diseases, any one of which might destroy a really prosperous and advanced country. By the Peace of B rest-Li tovsk she has lost her most civilized provinces, the only provinces to any extent European. She has lost a great part of her natural resources, and a still greater part of her industries. Her best farmers inhabit the new semi-independent states at present under Austro- German control. She cannot within measurable time put her finances in order, because she cannot ac- 277 278 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS cumulate the vast resource of gold necessary for restoring her paper money to a gold basis. She is without manufactured goods; and cannot get them from abroad. The Allies cannot supply her; and her former provider-in-chief, Germany, will for years be engaged repairing the waste at home. Her agricultural production has fallen off enor- mously; her model estates are ruined; and such primitive agricultural organizations as she possessed before the War are disintegrated and leaderless. Her peasants are without farm machinery. Paid for their products in worthless paper, in exchange for which they can buy nothing, they have lost the incentive to produce more food than they can themselves consume ; in most districts they are producing less; and these districts, and all the towns that depend upon them, are facing famines worse than those experienced under the Autocracy. In administration one sees neither processes nor personalities through which recovery could come. The present dominant Bolsheviks are in the main honest extremists ; but they are without political ability ; and, perhaps with the exception of Lenine, are not even able men of theory. They have no army and no police. In this they resemble the Provisional Govern- ments of Prince Lvoff and Kerensky, who were never, even for a day, in a position to point to a battalion of troops, and say with confidence, "These men will do as they are told." Threatened both by anti- Bolshevik Russians in the outlying provinces and by RUSSIA AND AMERICA 279 German encroachment from the West, the Govern- ment of People's Commissaries made an attempt to reorganize and increase its Red Guard army, and make it a real army in discipline and technical efficiency, but this attempt failed ; and all through the spring the German encroachments continued; and the opposition by Mensheviks, Social-Revolutionaries, bourgeoisie and Czecho-Slovaks increased. Long before the Allies intervened in the White Sea and at Vladivostok, the Revolution has steadily marched towards disintegration. Already, at the time of the Korniloff revolt, the confusion of platforms, parties and prominent personalities was so great that judicious persons welcomed the prospect of Civil War, arguing that it would be preferable to have irreconcilable antagonism between two groups the conquering party could enforce its will upon the con- quered, and rule by force until a permanent Constitu- tion, and mechanism for the peaceful settlements of differences, were provided by the Constituent Assembly. No such clarification of principles has been achieved. On the contrary, confusion is worse confounded. Tlie Bolsheviks are no longer the homogeneous party they were; they are threatened by a party of Anarchists which proclaims that certain compromises made by Bolshevism with actuality are retrograde and counter- revolutionary ; and the foreign invasions in the North and in the Far East must, unless they entirely over- throw the Moscow Government and establish a Gov- 280 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS eminent in its place, act merely as irritants. Were she healthy at home, Russia might rapidly recover from these frontier troubles; and had she no frontier troubles she might conceivably recover health at home. As it is, she resembles a man who as remedy for internal ailments has been ordered to lie for a time motionless, but who cannot lie motionless because of tormenting external sores. Yet Russia's fate should not be despaired of. All countries of Europe and America have passed through similar stages of decay and disorganization; and though a few have succumbed, the younger and healthier have recovered. Poland fell from precisely the same combination of foreign war and domestic dissension; but Russia triumphantly survived her smutnoe vrcmya her "time of troubles" before the elevation of the Romanoffs. The Russians are a young people. They have not yet lived through an era combining foreign expansion with great wealth, industrialization, physical degeneration and fall of birth-rate. They are young in the sense that they have never been mature. Such races, it is commonly, and probably with reason, believed, do not perish from the ills which beset Russia to-day. Russia's foreign defeat by no means involves her dissolution as a great Empire. Even if the provinces lopped off by the treaty with Austria and Germany, and lost through the declarations of independence of the Ukraine and Finland, are never recovered, the country's power of self-reconstruction will not be RUSSIA AND AMERICA 281 lost. Not one of these provinces is Russian in the true sense of the word. The Ukraine indeed is Rus- sian in so far as the dialect spoken differs no more from Great-Russian than the dialect of Lancashire in England differs from the dialect of London; and the Ukrainians, like the Great-Russians, belong to the Greek-Orthodox Church. Had it not been for opres- sion by the Romanoffs, the Ukraine would have had no more reason for seceding from Great-Russia than Lancashire has for seceding from England. But the suppression of the dialect and of local self-govern- ment created in the Ukrainians a separatist feeling which under free rule and equality of languages would never have arisen. The other lost populations are not Russian in any sense of the word. Some, like the Ests, the Finns and the Germans of the Baltic Provinces, are not even Slavs by race. Nearly all are Lutherans or Catholics ; and all are considerably more advanced, and have always looked upon the Great- Russians as barbarous conquerors. Russia never successfully administered these provinces and she never could. But the real Russia remains. In Europe and in Siberia is a territorially continuous Great-Russian population, speaking the same tongue, professing the same religion, with identically the same customs, traditions and ideology. This is by far the largest area in the world occupied by a homogeneous people; and even under present economical conditions it has room for a population twice or three times as great. 282 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS This Russia remains. It is free from separatist tendencies, with which the present anti-Bolshevik frontier revolts should not be confused. True, before the Revolution Siberia had a colonial Home Rule movement, but Siberia could not flourish economically in independence. It would probably not weaken Russia to lose also the Caucasus and the Central Asian Khanates, where the mass of the population, non- Russian in race and religion, by no means regards itself as inferior in civilization to the Russians. Through this Russia would become an entirely homogeneous national state without race or religious rivalries; and she would have opportunities for development and power much greater than she possessed under the Autocracy or during the first stage of the Revolution, when national development was checked and hampered by the complexities of national questions. Internationally, therefore, the War has not ruined Russia. It has left the real Russia. The constructive men of the future will find their task much simplified by the elimination of the sorest national problems; and for Russia's own sake it is to be hoped that the Peace reconstruction while guaranteeing the newly detached populations of pre- War Russia against absorption by Germany will not force them back into a union which none of them desire. The settlement of this problem, and therefore the restoration of Russia are bound largely to be the work of the United States, even if the present direct RUSSIA AND AMERICA American intervention does not extend into the interior. It is therefore important to know the real Russian attitude to America; how America is regarded as compared with other Ally Powers; what Russians expected from America in the first hopeful days of Revolution; and how they met the American help initiatives in the summer of 1917. At present even among the best-informed Americans, and even among Americans who visited Russia as members of the different missions great misconception reigns. The initial mistake made last year was in expecting too much from these missions. Nine out of ten Rus- sians took no interest in foreign relations; and could not be influenced by what Americans said or did. Yet Russian feeling, as far as there was any, was favorable. Those men who were at all susceptible to foreign influences looked towards America with trust as the one Power which at no time in the War had been moved by Imperialist designs. While the Bolsheviks, supported by many moderate Russians, were sharply distrustful of the European Allies, only the greatest extremists dared accuse America of pursuing selfish aims. And even their accusations were vague, and aimed less at the foreign policy of Washington than at the alleged Capitalistic designs of certain American interests. When the European Allies were despairing of Russia, the arrival of the Root Mission, the Stevens Railroad Commission and the Red Cross Mission of Surgeon Billings were taken as proof in all except 284 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS Bolshevik circles that America remained true to the imperiled new Democracy. None of these missions had a complete success. The Root Mission had no effect whatever upon Russian democratic opinion; and it had a disastrous effect upon the Allies' calcula- tions by its unintentional misstatement that Russia was determined and able to continue the War. The Stevens Commission produced an admirable scheme of railroad reforms; and it initiated port works at Vladivostok, the war value of which would have been great if the Bolshevik Revolution of November had not brought a separate peace. The Red Cross Mission before it was ready to render very much help to the fighting Russians found that the Russians were not fighting at all. The Root Mission was the worst failure. It failed because it was diverted, from the reasonable program of expressing sympathy with and offering help to Russia in her difficult position into the impracticable path of trying to influence Russia to fight. The collapse of Russia as a belligerent and the unwilling- ness of the Bolshevik-incited soldiery to fight further were plain weeks before Mr. Root arrived; and this being so the Korniloff rally in Galicia in early July was a misfortune, for while it had less than no permanent military effects, it misled the Mission as to the spirit of Russia's army. This spirit and the spirit of the anti-War proletariat could not be changed by foreign propaganda. Russians were no more willing to be advised and lectured by an authoritative RUSSIA AND AMERICA 285 American than America, had she been suffering from similar misfortunes, would have been if prominent Russians had appeared in New York. The Mission did not arouse anything like the interest which might be deduced from reading American newspapers. Towards the personalities of the members, Russians were either antagonistic or apathetic. During the weeks of Mr. Root's stay in Petrograd and Moscow, the whole non-Socialist Press contained only a single leading article about his work. The Mission's meet- ings and speeches were chronicled briefly in obscure corners. The Bolshevik newspapers, led by the Pravda and the organ of Gorky, carried on a fierce anti-Root campaign. At the time of Mr. Root's appointment, the New York Bolsheviks had denounced him as capitalistically minded and therefore unfit to send to democratic and Socialistic Russia; and this propaganda had reached across the Atlantic. And, in fact, Mr. Root was not by temperament the right envoy to send to a people in whom demonstrativeness and rhetoric count for more than reason. The special representatives of democratic America had a bad hearing. The Bolshevik newspapers denounced them as "sham Socialists of the kind which in France, England and Germany make shameful contracts with capitalism." Owing to lack of knowledge of Russia and of its language, and an almost equal lack of familiarity with the other European languages which are well understood by Russians, the members were never in real contact with the Government and peo- 286 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS pie; and from the first were in the dark as to the forces and personalities which were misshaping Russia. The Mission was honest, but it was hopelessly blind. The members seemed unable to understand the most obvious facts of Russian conditions, so much so that from the standpoint of informing America, they would much better have remained at home and employed competent translators to give them the contents of Russian newspapers. In June I was present at a meeting of the Petrograd Council of Deputies, at which a democratic member of the Mis- sion made an address. Everything was done through the medium of translators. Everything was of course done correctly and politely. A member of the Council of Deputies made a sharp criticism of the Allies, and rudely told an American speaker that he did not know what he was talking about, and that America ought to mend her own affairs before advising Russia. This reply typified the attitude of many members of the Council. The interpreter omitted half of this, and toned the other half down, emphasizing the compli- ments which the Bolshevik orators used as sugar in their pills. The representative of American democracy went away under the impression that he and America had been paid pleasant compliments; and that the Council was solid with him. Under such conditions, the whole mission was bound to prove worthless. But this does not obscure the fact that Russia trusted the United States long after she had formally proclaimed distrust of her European Allies. RUSSIA AND AMERICA 287 The Stevens Railroad Commission began with much more promise. It was hailed with enthusiasm by the Ministry of Communications, by the Army and even by some of the extremist Socialists, who knew that nothing but railroad reorganization would combat the hunger and general economical anarchy which were ruining the Revolution. The Railroad Commission, like the diplomatic Mission, was to some extent hampered by the exigencies of official courtesy. Mr. Stevens was obliged to praise the conditions of the totally ruined roads, and even to express admiration for the anarchical officials who struck work in the face of foreign threat and domestic starvation, who stole, wrecked trains, entered into alliance with the deserting soldiers, and from the beginning of the Revolution never showed a spark of patriotism. But the Commission did some practical work; and it showed its real beliefs by including in a program of reforms issued some weeks after its arrival a recom- mendation for the nomination of a supreme railroad inspector who would have very great power. The Commission started upon the improvement of Vladivostok, through which went most war and civilian supplies from the United States. Plans were prepared for two piers for ships drawing 45 feet of water; and the piers were immediately begun, and had it not been for disorder, would have been finished within three months. Russia had already given orders for large quantities of American rails and rolling stock, and during the Commission's stay further 288 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS orders were given. In July the provisional Minister of Trade assured me that the new orders would amount to $375,000,000. The Stevens Commission was hampered by the incapacity and idleness of the Minister of Communica- tion Nekrasoff, one of the evil geniuses of the Revolu- tion. Nekrasoff was an engineer, and a member of the Constitutional-Democratic party, who had some skill in wire-pulling. These were his sole qualifica- tions to become a minister, yet he not only became minister but became the most influential man in Russia during several months of the summer of 1917. He is a big, fat, rosy-cheeked man, with a girl's voice. He did not know his work, and his unreliability was a scandal. When Kerensky became Prime Minister, Nekrasoff was his chief assistant. He acted as barrier between Kerensky and the outside world, flattering Kerensky's inordinate vanity; and himself idling and intriguing while showing gross incapacity when faced with the simplest problem. His unfitness was so notorious that the most obscure reporters in the Win- ter Palace press room treated him with disrespect. Yet when Kerensky went to the front, Nekrasoff acted as his deputy, and was in theory unchallenged ruler of the former empire of the Romanoffs. During the summer of 1917, the idea of economic co-operation with the United States was in great popularity among the educated classes. The Bol- sheviks naturally regarded such co-operation as a new phase of Capitalism, and they denounced it vigorously. RUSSIA AND AMERICA 289 The leader in all co-operation plans was the Assistant Minister of Trade, M. Paltchinsky, one of the remark- able figures of the Revolution. In the Revolution of 1905, Paltchinsky, then a young Siberian engineer, organized the so-called "Krasnoyarsk Republic." When the "Republic" perished, he was obliged to flee abroad; and in his absence he was condemned. He returned home under an amnesty. He founded and managed factories in the Caucasus and in European Russia. Primed with enthusiasm, and thoroughly equipped with foreign technical knowledge, he started a new movement for developing on a great scale the nation's tremendous resources. He gathered round himself other brilliant engineers and mining experts; started at his own expense the monthly journal On the Surface and Under; and began to press upon the pre-revolutionary government the need for economical reforms. The pre-revolutionary government pro- fessed to ignore him, but it borrowed many of his plans, and some of these plans were being carried out when the Revolution occurred. Paltchinsky was then nominated Assistant Minister of Trade, and he took the lead in a Special Commission which was to devise means for developing resources. He denounced the system of piece-meal exploitation of mineral wealth practised so far; and urged with great energy that a single vast plan should be framed for developing the Empire's scattered resources, and for inviting the necessary foreign capital and technical skill. He 290 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS proposed to turn over a great part of the resources to be developed by the United States. Early in July, the Commission rendered a report recommending the adoption of his plan. Americans were to be entrusted with the exploitation of the mineral wealth of Eastern Siberia, of the Altai moun- tains, which are rich in gold, silver and platinum, of the Kirgiz steppe in which there are vast quantities of copper, of the Ural Mountains, which have an abundance of nearly every precious metal and precious stone ; and finally of the northern half of the Island of Saghalien. The Commission was particularly anxious that northern Saghalien should be entrusted to Americans, holding that this was the only way of preventing its falling under the commercial domina- tion of Japan, which gained the southern half of the Island by the Peace of Portsmouth. On this subject I had prolonged interviews with Paltchinsky. He told me that he was already negotia- ting with American capitalists and mining experts; and he expressed radiant hopes of the result. These hopes were not realized. The extreme Socialist Press, knowing that he was a rich man and a director of industries, began to attack his plan as a new device of Capitalism, and demanded his dismissal. The plan, which was one of the most promising economical initiatives of the Revolution, fell to the ground. Paltchinsky came up again during the stirring days of KornilofFs revolt, when though a civilian, he was made SavinofFs assistant in the command of the RUSSIA AND AMERICA 291 Petrograd Military District. Here he showed extraordinary energy and ability; but he was again attacked by the Socialists, and abandoned by the weak and vainglorious Kerensky with whom no man of real ability could long work. He remained to the end a sturdy advocate of union with America with the aim of Russia's industrial and commercial salvation; and when I saw him again in September, just before his resignation, he assured me that he would persist in his plan. "Russia," he said, "will survive her Revolution; and the time will come when we shall revive our constructive plans. Then America must help us. The War will ruin Europe ; and when peace comes America will be the only country with a reserve of capital and skilled men. To America we must then turn." The Paltchinsky plan is only one manifestatin witnessed by me of the general desire for assistance from the United States. Leaders of Zemstvos, co- operative unions and merchants' guilds constantly spoke of the need of Russo- American co-operation, the motive for co-operation with America instead of with European countries being partly distrust of Europe born of ancient jealousies not yet extinct, and partly the conviction that Europe will be hopelessly exhausted at the end of the War. Even persons whose plans for regeneration had no connection with politics or economy were inclined to turn towards America. Among these was Maxim Gorky, who had been unfriendly to everything American since his 292 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS unpleasant New York experience of 1906 when he was expelled from hotels for presenting the actress Andreyeff as his wife. Gorky then lampooned New York as "The City of the Yellow Devil"; and his grandiose scheme of modernizing it by means of friendship was distrustful and even boorish. Yet he, too, turned towards America. Convinced that Russia could not find salvation in politics, he conceived the grandiose scheme of modernising it by means of applied Science, or as he expressed it to me in July "Americanizing the whole country." He jumped to the conclusion that applied Science and advanced technology are the real causes of American political and social stability ; and in order to apply this doctrine to Russia he and his friends founded a Free Associa- tion for the Development and Dissemination of the Positive Sciences. He \vas very eager to advertise this scheme in the United States; expected Americans to supply the necessary funds; and planned to invite to Russia American experts on hygiene, medicine, house-construction, and other practical arts. The scheme came to nothing, the cause of failure being Gorky's instability which led him back into politics with no good result. But many prominent Russians were interested; American practical methods were contrasted in the Press with native political theorising; and the popular belief was encouraged that America is an inexhaustible mine of wealth and energy, and that it is to America Russia must turn when she RUSSIA AND AMERICA seriously seeks foreign assistance out of her present impasse. Of American armed intervention there was then no talk Privately many were already expressing the hope that Germany would occupy Petrograd, crush the Soviets and restore order. But these were mainly men who foresaw the abolition of Property, and knew that a German-controlled Russia would put a stop to extreme Socialist legislation. In fact, Germany had at no time the military power for such a measure, which must have been followed by the occupation of all of European Russia if it were to have any effect. Order in Russia if it is not to be re-established by Russians which means, left to be brought about by exhaustion can only be restored with certainty by general military penetration, followed by re-organiza- tion, with the reconstruction of officialdom, the restoration of the police, and widespread financial, industrial and commercial reforms. The Autocracy in peace time needed a million and a half soldiers to maintain a very precarious order; and to restore order by compulsion to-day would require a force at least as large. That is the obstacle facing America and her Allies. The present weak assistance given to the anti-Bolshevik parties may easily ensure the over- throwal of the already shaken Government of Sovi ts ; but this is not enough. The experience of Lvoff and Kerensky in 1917 shows that a non-Bolshevik Gov- ernment of the capital is not in itself sufficient to maintain local order or to enforce plans of reconstruc- 294 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ASPECTS tion without which Russia cannot flourish. A bourgeois, Menshevik, Social-Revolutionary, or coali- tion Government set up in Petrograd or Moscow after the fall of the Bolsheviks will not have authority throughout the country unless it is buttressed upon the "strong government power" which the first Provi- sional Governments and the Bolsheviks alike planned, but alike failed to create. The popular notion in America that once the Bolshevik despotism is over- thrown, the Russian majority will voluntarily unite, keep order and bear burdens, is not supported by the experience of 1917. The ultimate problem therefore before America and the Allies will not be: what Gov- ernment Russia chooses, but how that Government is to be kept afloat. Means may yet be found for a more active American policy in Russia that will not arouse the suspicion of the Russian people. A sound policy would exploit the confidence in the United States that is generally felt, except by the Bolsheviks, rather than give material for strengthening the Bolshevik anti- American propaganda. Russian trust in America is a great asset that should not be carelessly squandered through any impatience to accelerate the process of recovery which is in any case inevitable; and which is likely to be accompanied by far closer and more satisfactory Russo-American relations than have existed in the past. THE END. OF CALIFORNIA UBRARY 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. 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