CHAPTER VI
MOSCOW—THE DECEMBER RISING
MOSCOW, _December 12th_.
When one is in England it is very difficult to form an idea of what is taking place in Russia, and this is not owing to the absence but to the superabundance of news concerning Russian events. One cannot see the wood for the trees. In Russia there is also a superabundance of news and of rumours; but merely by walking about in the streets one is brought face to face with certain facts, enabling one to check the news to some extent. I have been in Russia a week, at St. Petersburg, and I arrived here yesterday. In St. Petersburg the impression that a stranger receives on arriving is that everything is going on exactly the same as usual. The streets are crowded, the shops are all open, and there is nothing to show that the country is in a state of revolution.
The postal strike was over in St. Petersburg when I arrived, and it is now over here, although, owing to the dislocation and the arrears, the postal service is at this moment almost imperceptible.
With regard to political matters, the main impression one receives is that the revolutionary party is admirably organised, and although there are dissensions among it—as, for instance, between the Social Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats—they are willing if not ready to coalesce at any given moment against the Government, whereas the body of people who do not side with the revolutionaries are split up into various groups, differing on some of the most important points of policy. Perhaps the most important of these groups is the Constitutional Democratic Party, which is in favour of universal suffrage and a National Assembly.
Especially remarkable are the various shapes taken by the criticism directed against Count Witte by the various parties. Roughly speaking, this criticism may be divided into three heads:
1. The revolutionaries (including the Constitutional Democrats) say that Count Witte is a Bureaucrat; that nothing good can come of him, and that he and his _régime_ must go.
2. The Moderates—I call them Moderates for want of a better word—say that Count Witte has not proved himself to be equal to his task; that since the publication of the Manifesto he has not formulated a single law save an ineffectual one with regard to the Press.
3. The reactionary Nationalists say that Count Witte is a traitor, that he has been bought by the Jews and is playing for a Republic. There is a sentence of Napoleon’s which perhaps may occur to Count Witte under the present circumstances: “Un homme d’état est-il fait pour être sensible? N’est-ce pas un personnage complètement excentrique, toujours seul d’un côté, avec le monde de l’autre?” Count Witte is at this moment completely “excentric.” If he succeeds—and by succeeding I mean remaining in power until the Duma meets—his triumph will be great. To give some idea of the atmosphere which we vaguely call public opinion, I will quote some of the _obiter dicta_ I have heard since I have been here. That Count Witte is a cunning old fox, worse than Plehve. That Count Witte is not what he was; that he is merely incapable of executing what he undertook. That Count Witte is the most far-seeing man in Russia; that he centralised Russia in order to lead to a revolution, and thus make radical changes easier; that he placed the railways in the hands of the State and created the spirit monopoly in order to have no private interests to deal with when the crash should come. That Count Witte is a Radical of the type of Robespierre, and will only declare himself to be on the side of popular representation when the upper classes are entirely destroyed.
That the Government is too weak, and that it all comes from having been too weak from the first and from not having hanged the Kronstadt mutineers. That the Government was too reactionary from the first, and that it destroyed the confidence of the people by establishing martial law in Poland directly after the Manifesto. That the _régime_ of Plehve was better than the present state of anarchy. That the present _régime_ is more reactionary than the system of Plehve. That with a Government as revolutionary as the existing one nothing good can be expected; that the Constitution should be withdrawn, the Emperor should be deposed and another appointed, and that Count Witte should be hanged. That the Government has not been explicit enough; that a programme including two Legislative Chambers—an Upper and Lower Chamber—should be published and sworn to by the Emperor, and that the utmost severity should be employed, after that, in case of necessity. That no Government at all is necessary in Russia; only a _Bund_, a Council of Empire, which should meet once a year and manage the railways; that the Army should be disbanded and the country entirely decentralised. That a Dictator should be appointed at once, and 10,000 “intellectuals” arrested.
That the revolutionaries merely want to destroy any form of government as an act of revenge; that they are as the Irish, “agin the Government”; that this act of revenge is not surprising, considering they are smarting under the monstrous wrong which has been done them for years, _i.e._, misgovernment carried to the extreme. That nothing can possibly restore peace to Russia except universal suffrage, and that Russia being by nature more democratic than other European countries need not feel herself bound to follow their example, but must proceed straight to universal suffrage. That the Emperor should go to Moscow. That if the Emperor goes to Moscow it would excite the peasants to kill the middle and upper classes. That this would be a bad thing. That this would be a good thing. That if the Emperor goes to Moscow he will be killed. That it is nonsense to think the Emperor would be killed at Moscow; that his position cannot be worse than it is, but might be improved by such a step. That the Kremlin would be a safer residence than the Tsarskoe Selo. That the Emperor must take an oath to the Constitution, and give guarantees that it will not be withdrawn. That the Emperor should put himself at the head of the peasants and the Army and snap his fingers at the Socialists and the landlords and give the peasants the land.
All these opinions I have heard from Russians since I have been here. In St. Petersburg considerable anxiety was felt as to what would happen in Moscow on the occasion of the Emperor’s birthday (to-day), since the reactionary party—the “Alliance of Russian People”—had requested and been allowed to organise a demonstration opposite the Kremlin. These fears, however, proved groundless. I was present at the demonstration. The holy banners were carried in procession from the Kremlin to the public place outside the Kremlin walls, where a service was held. The procession then returned into the Kremlin at twelve o’clock. There was a small crowd looking on, and one man (a butcher) made a speech, saying that the Emperor had been terrorised into giving a Constitution, but that he would be requested to take it back again. The crowd cheered, and one policeman repeated five times that the speaker was a fine fellow. The crowd then marched in procession to the Governor-General’s house, and Admiral Dubassoff spoke to the crowd. This crowd was a ridiculously small one; it dispersed at noon. The population of Moscow was conspicuous by its absence.
A great deal is talked at present about the doings of the hooligans in St. Petersburg and Moscow. In St. Petersburg the number of beggars in the street is remarkable; here the doings of the hooligans are said to take place mostly at night. One hears on all sides that the state of things is impossible and that the streets are unsafe, yet they are crowded with people all day long. There appears also to be some danger from the reckless way in which the population toy with “Browning” pistols in self-defence, but except for this and the hooligans there is no kind of danger for foreigners here.
The state of the Army here has caused the Government a good deal of alarm. The mutiny in the Rostov Regiment came to an abrupt end yesterday, and to-day news has arrived of a manifesto granting the soldiers extra pay, extra meat, and soap. The discontent among the soldiers and sailors has been up to now in every case economical and not political, therefore it is thought that if the economical demands are satisfied the discontent will disappear. It will be well for the Government if it does, for in the long run the ultimate issue of the conflict must depend on the Army, and the symptoms which have declared themselves up to now are not reassuring. It is quite possible, however, that the soap and the blankets which are to be given to the men may allay their political restlessness. The Cavalry is said to have been all along thoroughly reliable.
MOSCOW, _December 28th_.
Wednesday, the 20th of December, punctually at midday the strike began in Moscow. The lift ceased working in the hotel, the electric light was turned off and I laid in a large store of books and cigarettes against coming events. The strike was said to be an answer to the summary proceedings of the Government and its action in arresting leaders of the revolutionary committee, &c., and its watchword was to be: “A Constituent Assembly based upon universal suffrage.” Beyond the electric light going out nothing happened on this day. On Thursday, the 21st, most of the shops began to shut. The man who cleaned the boots in the hotel made the following remark: “I now understand that the people enjoy great power.” I heard a shot fired somewhere from the hotel at nine o’clock in the evening. I asked the hall porter whether the theatres were open. He said they were shut, and added: “And who would dream of going to the theatre in these times of stress?”
The next day I drove with a friend into the country to a village called Chernaia, about 25 versts from Moscow on the Novgorod road, which before the days of railways was famous for its highway robberies and assaults on the rich merchants by the hooligans of that day. We drove in a big wooden sledge drawn by two horses, the coachman standing up all the while. We went to visit two old maids, who were peasants and lived in the village. One of them had got stranded in Moscow, and owing to the railway strike was unable to go back again and so we took her with us, otherwise she would have walked home. We started at 10.30 and arrived at 1.30. The road was absolutely still—a thick carpet of snow, upon which fresh flakes drifting in the fitful gusts of wind fell gently. Looking at the drifting flakes which seemed to be tossed about in the air, the first old maid said that a man’s life was like a snowflake in the wind, and that she had never thought she would go home with us on her sister’s name-day.
When we arrived at the village we found a meal ready for us, which, although the fast of Advent was being strictly observed and the food made with fasting-butter, was far from jejune. It consisted of pies with rice and cabbage inside, and cold fish and tea and jam, and some vodka for me—the guest. The cottage consisted of one room and two very small ante-rooms—the walls, floors, and ceilings of plain deal. Five or six rich ikons hung in the corner of the room, and a coloured oleograph of Father John of Kronstadt on one of the walls. A large stove heated the room. Soon some guests arrived to congratulate old maid No. 2 on her name-day, and after a time the pope entered, blessed the room, and sat down to tea. We talked of the strike and how quiet the country was and of the hooligans in the town. “No,” said the pope with gravity, “we have our own hooligans.” A little later the village schoolmaster arrived, who looked about twenty years old, and was a little tiny man with a fresh face and gold-rimmed spectacles, with his wife, who, like the æsthetic lady in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Patience,” was “massive.” I asked the pope if I could live unmolested in this village. He said, “Yes, but if you want to work you won’t be quiet in this house, because your two hostesses chatter and drink tea all day and all night.” At three o’clock we thought we had better be starting home; it was getting dark, the snow was falling heavily. The old maids said we couldn’t possibly go. We should (1) lose our way, (2) be robbed by tramps, (3) be massacred by strikers on the railway line, (4) not be allowed to enter the town, (5) be attacked by hooligans when we reached the dark streets. We sent for Vassili, the coachman, to consult with him. “Can you find your way home?” we asked. “Yes, I can,” he said. “Shall we lose our way?” “We might lose our way—it happens,” he said slowly, “it happens times and again; but we might not—it often doesn’t happen.” “Might we be attacked on the way?” “We might—it happens—they attack; but we might not—sometimes they don’t attack.” “Are the horses tired?” “Yes, the horses are tired.” “Then we had better not go.” “The horses can go all right,” he said. Then we thought we would stay; but Vassili said that his master would curse him if he stayed unless we “added” something.
So we settled to stay, and the schoolmaster took us to see the village school, which was clean, roomy, and altogether an excellent home of learning. Then he took us to a neighbouring factory which had not struck, and in which he presided over a night class for working men and women. From here we telephoned to Moscow and learned that everything was quiet in the city. I talked to one of the men in the factory about the strike. “It’s all very well for the young men,” one said, “they are hot-headed and like striking; but we—we have to starve for a month. That’s what it means.” Then we went to the school neighbouring the factory where the night class was held. There were two rooms, one for men presided over by the schoolmaster and one for women presided over by his wife. They had a lesson of two hours in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The men came to be taught in separate batches; one batch coming one week, one another. This day there were five men and two boys and six women. The men were reading a story about a bear—rather a tedious tale. “Yes, we are reading,” one of them said to me, “and we understand some of it.” That was, at any rate, consoling. They read to themselves first, then aloud in turn, standing up, and then they were asked to tell what they had read in their own words. They read haltingly, with difficulty grasping familiar words. They related fluently, except one man, who said he could remember nothing whatsoever about the doings of the bear. One little boy was doing with lightning rapidity those kind of sums which, by giving you too many data and not enough—a superabundance of detail, leaving out the all that appears so imperatively necessary—seem to some minds peculiarly insoluble. The sum in question stated that a factory consisted of 770 hands—men, women, and children, and that the men received half as much again as the women, &c. That particular proportion of wages seems to exist in the arithmetic books of all countries to the despair of the non-mathematical, and the little boy insisted on my following every step of his process of reckoning; but not even he with the wisdom and sympathy of babes succeeded in teaching me how to do that kind of sum. He afterwards wrote in a copybook pages of declensions of Russian nouns and adjectives. Here I found I could help him and I saved him some trouble by dictating them to him; though every now and then we had some slight doubt and discussion about the genitive plural. In the woman’s class, one girl explained to us, with tears in her eyes, how difficult it was for her to attend this class. Her fellow-workers laughed at her for it, and at home they told her that a woman’s place was to be at work and not to meddle with books. Those who attend this school show that they are really anxious to learn, as the effort and self-sacrifice needed are great.
We stayed till the end of the lesson and then we went home, where an excellent supper of eggs, &c., was awaiting us. We found the two old maids and their first cousin, who told us she was about to go to law for a legacy of 100,000 roubles which had been left her, but which was disputed by a more distant relation on the mother’s side. We talked of law suits and politics and miracles, and real and false faith-healers, till bedtime came. A bed was made for me alongside of the stove. Made is the right word, for it was literally built up before my eyes. A sleeping place was also made for the coachman on the floor of the small ante-room; then the rest of the company disappeared to sleep. I say disappeared, because I literally do not know where in this small interior there was room for them to sleep. They consisted of the two old maids, their niece and her little girl, aged three, and another little girl, aged seven. My travelling companion slept in the room, but the rest disappeared, I suppose on the top of the stove, only it seemed to reach the ceiling; somewhere they were, for the little girl, excited by the events of the day, sang snatches of song till a late hour in the night. The next morning, after I got up, the room was transformed from a bedroom into a dining-room and aired, breakfast was served, and at ten we started back again in the snow to Moscow.
On the 23rd we arrived in the town at one o’clock. The streets of the suburbs seemed to be unusually still. My companion said to me: “How quiet the streets are, but it seems to me an uncanny, evil quietness.” My companion lived in the Lobkovski Pereoolok, and I had the day before sent my things from the hotel to an apartment in the adjoining street, the Mwilnikov. When we arrived at the entrance of these streets we found them blocked by a crowd and guarded by police and dragoons. We got through the other end of the streets, and we were told that the night before Fielder’s School, which is a large building at the corner of these two streets, had been the scene of a revolutionary meeting; that the revolutionaries had been surrounded in this house, had refused to surrender, had thrown a bomb at an officer and killed him, had been fired at by artillery, and had finally surrendered after killing one officer and five men, with 17 casualties—15 wounded and two killed. All this had happened in my very street during my absence. An hour later we again heard a noise of guns, and the armed rising (of which some of the leaders, who were to have seized the Governor-General of the town and set up a provisional Government, had been arrested the night before in my street) had nevertheless broken out in all parts of the town. A little later I saw a crowd of people on foot and in sledges flying in panic down the street shouting “Kazaki!” I heard and saw nothing else of any interest during the day. There were crowds of people in the streets till nightfall.
On Sunday, Christmas Eve, I drove to the hotel in the centre of Moscow to see a friend. The aspect of the town was extraordinary. The streets were full of people—_flâneurs_ who were either walking about or gathered together in small and large groups at the street corners. Distant, and sometimes quite near, sounds of firing were audible, and nobody seemed to care a scrap; they were everywhere talking, discussing, and laughing. Imagine the difference between this and the scenes described in Paris during the street fighting in ’32, ’48, and ’71.
People went about their business just as usual. If there was a barricade they drove round it. The cabmen never dreamt of not going anywhere, although one said to me that it was very frightening. Moreover, an insuperable curiosity seemed to lead them to go and look where things were happening. Several were killed in this way. On the other hand, at the slightest approach of troops they ran in panic like hares, although the troops do not do the passers-by any mischief. Two or three times I have been walking in the streets when dragoons galloped past, and come to no harm. We heard shots all the time, and met the same groups of people and passed two barricades. The barricades are mostly not like those of the Faubourg St. Antoine, but small impediments made of branches and an overturned sledge; they are put there to annoy and wear out the troops and not to stand siege. The method of warfare that the revolutionaries have adopted is a guerilla warfare of the streets. They fire or throw bombs and rapidly disperse; they have made some attempts to seize the Nikolaiev Railway Station, but have in all cases been repulsed. The attitude of the man in the street is curious: sometimes he is indignant with the strikers, sometimes indignant with the Government. If you ask a person of revolutionary sympathies he will tell you that sympathy is entirely with the revolution; if you ask a person of moderate principles he will tell you that the “people” are indignant with the strikers; but the attitude of the average man in the street seems to me one of sceptical indifference in spite of all, in spite of trade ceasing, houses being fired at, and the hospitals being full to overflowing of dead and wounded. The fact is that disorders have lost their first power of creating an impression; they have become everyday occurrences.
Here are various remarks I heard. One man, a commissionaire, asked whether I thought it was right to fire on the revolutionaries. I hesitated, gathering my thoughts to explain that I thought that they thoroughly deserved it since they began it, but that the Government nevertheless had brought it about by their dilatoriness. (This is exactly what I think.) Misunderstanding my hesitation, he said: “Surely you, a _foreigner_, need not mind saying what you think, and you know it is wrong.” (This was curious, because these people, commissionaires, porters, &c., are often reactionary.) A cabman said to me: “Who do you think will get the best of it?” I said, “I don’t know, what do you think?” “Nothing will come of it,” he said. “There will still be rich people like you and poor people like me, and whether the Government is in the hands of the _chinovniks_ or the students is all one and the same.” Another man, a porter, an ex-soldier, said it was awful. You couldn’t go anywhere or drive anywhere without risking being killed. Soldiers came back from the war and were killed in the streets. A bullet came, and then the man was done for. Another man, a kind of railway employee, said that the Russians had no stamina, that the Poles would never give in, but the Russians would directly. Another man, fond of paradox, said to me that he hoped all the fanatics would be shot, and that then the Government would be upset. A policeman was guarding the street which led to the hotel. I asked if I could pass. “How could I not let a Barine with whom I am acquainted pass?” he said. Then a baker’s boy came up with a tray of rolls on his head, also asking to pass—to go to the hotel. After some discussion the policeman let him go, but suddenly said, “Or are you a rascal?” Then I asked him what he thought of it all. He said: “We fire as little as possible. They are fools.” The fact is that among the wealthier and educated classes the feeling is either one of intense sympathy or violent indignation with the revolutionaries; among the lower classes it is a feeling of sceptical resignation or indifference. “Things are bad—nothing will come of it for us.”
_Christmas Day._
At midnight the windows of our house had been rattled by the firing of guns somewhere near; but on Christmas morning (this is not the Russian Christmas) one was able to get about. I drove down one of the principal streets, the Kouznetski Most, into another large street, the Neglinii Proiesd (as if it were down Bond Street into Piccadilly), when suddenly in a flash all the cabs began to drive fast up the street. My cab went on. He was inquisitive. We saw nothing. He shouted to another cab, asking him what was the matter. No answer. We went a little further down, when along the Neglinii Proiesd we saw a patrol and guns advancing. “Go back,” shouted one of the soldiers, waving his rifle—and away we went. Later, I believe there was firing there. Further along we met more patrols and ambulances. The shops are not only shut but boarded up.
Next day I walked to the Nikolaiev Station in the afternoon. It is from here that the trains go to St. Petersburg; the trains are running now, but how the passengers start I don’t know, for it was impossible to get near the station. Cabs were galloping away from it, and the square in front of it had been cleared by Cossacks. I think it was attacked this afternoon. I walked into the Riansh Station, which was next door. It was a scene of desolation: empty trains, stacked-up luggage, third-class passengers encamped in the waiting-room. There was a perpetual noise of firing. Practically the town is under martial law. Nobody is allowed to be out of doors after nine o’clock under penalty of three months’ imprisonment or 3,000 roubles fine. Householders have been made responsible for people firing out of their windows. The idea of collective responsibility is a shock to some Russians. During the last twenty years the system has led, through the perpetual shifting of responsibility, to the annihilation of responsibility; and this in its turn has produced a revolution of irresponsibility. Some people talk as if the revolution were an evil element which had sprung from hell without any cause, a sudden visitation like the plague, as if it were not the absolutely logical and inevitable result of the particular form of bad government which has obtained in Russia during the last twenty years. These people pass a sponge over this fact. They say to people of liberal ideas: “You have brought this about,” then, asked if they are in favour of the Constitution, assent; which should prove them to be opportunists. They do not like being called opportunists.
This morning, December 27th, there is considerable movement and traffic in the streets; the small shops are open, and the tobacconists. News has come from St. Petersburg of the Electorate Law. The question is now whether it will satisfy the people. Firing is still going on; they say a factory is being attacked. The troops who were supposed to be disaffected have proved absolutely loyal. The one way to make them loyal was to throw bombs at them. The policemen are now armed with rifles and bayonets. I asked an educated man this afternoon if he thought the Electorate Law would satisfy people. He said he thought not. He said that the people demanded a far wider suffrage law. “Are you in favour yourself of universal suffrage?” I asked. “No,” he answered; “but when I see that the whole people demand it, I submit to the majority. The Government has as yet _given_ nothing; everything has been torn from it, and more will have to be torn from it.” One learns here at any rate not to generalise and not to prophesy. A cabman said this afternoon: “There is an illness abroad, we are sick, it will pass—but God remains.” I agree with him.
I do not believe that it is a case of bricks falling out of a wall until the wall falls down, but of a young tree shedding bark. The illness, however, is a severe one, and it is idle to blame the patient for the violence of his symptoms and the doctor for the inadequacy of his remedies. The people to blame are those who made the patient ill by feeding him on poison. And some of these have already met with their just reward.
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