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A YEAR IN RUSSIA

BY

MAURICE BARING

AUTHOR OF “WITH THE RUSSIANS IN MANCHURIA,” ETC.

METHUEN & CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

First Published in 1907

DEDICATED

TO

LADY CONSTANCE LYTTON

“Vieni a veder Montecchi e Cappelletti,

Monaldi e Filippeschi, uom senza cura;

Color già tristi e costor con sospetti.

Vien, crudel, vieni e vedi la pressura

De’ tuoi gentili, e cura lor magagne:

E vedrai Santafior come si cura.

Vieni a veder la tua Roma, che piagne,

Vedova, sola, e dì e notte chiama:

Cesare mio, perchè non m’ accompagne?”

Dante (Purg. VI.)

“Une nation ne se sépare jamais de son passé sans de cruels déchirements.”

“Why, Sir, absolute princes seldom do any harm. But they who are governed by them are governed by chance. There is no security for good government.”

Dr. Johnson

PREFACE

The basis of most of these chapters is composed of letters contributed during the current year to the Morning Post, by whose kind permission they are here republished. They reflect the fleeting ideas, the passing moods of the moment; but as the various moments of which they reflect some kind of image form part of what must constitute an eventful chapter of Russian history, I have thought that it would be worth while to republish them, so as to furnish some kind of record of what people were thinking and saying while the interesting things—which history will relate—were happening, and so as to give a few sidelights showing the attitude of “the man in the street,” during the hours of crisis. Such sidelights tend to show how little even the greatest crises in the lives of States affect the daily life of the average man. The people who cry out that the state of things is intolerable and not to be borne are, for the most part, well-to-do people who work up their indignation towards the end of a good dinner. The people who to the far-off looker-on seem to be undergoing intolerable oppression are themselves lookers-on, and they scarcely look, hardly realise and seldom say anything.

I have endeavoured in these chapters to present impartially the widely divergent points of view of various people; at the same time I have made no attempt to disguise the whereabouts of my sympathies, being mindful of the sage, who, as Renan translates him, says: “Ne sois pas trop juste, et n’affecte pas trop de sagesse de peur d’être un niais.”

These sidelights being the reflections of fugitive phases, I have made no attempt to introduce an element of consistency into them, nor have I in the light of subsequent events tried to modify the effect of the hopes which proved to be illusory or of the fears which were groundless—hopes and fears which I myself shared with those by whom I heard them expressed.

To those who take a serious interest in the Russian evolution I would suggest two valuable books, “The Crisis in Russia,” by Professor Milioukov (London: Fisher Unwin, 1905), and “La Crise Russe,” by Maxime Kovalevsky (Paris: Giard & E. Brière, 16, Rue Souflot, 1906).

“Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia,” by the same author (Nutt, 1891), will be useful to the student of the past history of Russia. Nor can one too often recommend “L’Empire des Tsars,” by M. Leroy-Beaulieu. Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace’s work on Russia needs no recommendation. All these books, which deal with the past of Russia, will help the student to understand what is happening at present; for without some knowledge of the past history of Russia, what is now taking place cannot but be incomprehensible.

St. Petersburg

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

This book is nothing else but a collection of notes, a bundle of impressions gathered during a year’s stay in Russia. It lays no claim to be either exhaustive or even of any practical use to the serious student of the Russian Evolution. It is written for the ignorant, and with the object of helping them to decide whether they wish to take an interest in what is now happening in Russia, or not. I cannot take them into the house and show them all over it from floor to ceiling with the knowledge and authority of a master-builder; all I can do is to open a small window and ask them to look through it and observe certain things, pointing out how far these things are typical of the whole; and my hope is that the glimpses I have given them will enable them to decide whether they wish to go and knock at the front door and investigate for themselves.

This book consists solely of a record of things I have seen and heard myself in Russia during an interesting year of the history of that country. My experience of English opinion on Russian things has convinced me that in order to make such a record as intelligible as possible, a great deal of introduction and explanation would be necessary. The reason of this is that the ignorance in England about Russia is extraordinary; and most of the current literature—I mean the books published on Russian affairs—instead of dispelling that ignorance, succeed rather in increasing it. Russia and Russian affairs are so little known in England that the country has proved a happy hunting ground for sensational writers of fiction and still more sensational purveyors of facts. Leaving the writers of fiction out of the question, the chief bar which seems to separate writers about Russia from a just estimate and a valuable appreciation of that country is the language. It is possible to convey information about Russia if you are ignorant of the Russian language; and such information may prove to be not only useful, but of surprising interest to people who are totally ignorant of the country. But unless you are acquainted with the Russian language it is impossible to acquire an intimate knowledge of the Russian people, and it is difficult to understand many things which happen in Russia.

I had, therefore, the intention, before proceeding to a record of any things I had seen myself, to collect and convey the impressions I had received of the Russian character and of Russian life in various classes, correcting and illustrating my impressions by those of others who have worked in the same field, and by evidence drawn from Russian literature. I meant to try and illustrate books by examples taken from life, and throw light on events and people by examples taken from literature; but I found when I began to do this that the writing of such an introduction was equivalent to the writing of two large books, one on the Russian people and one on Russian literature, a task which I still hope to accomplish some day, but for which I do not at present feel sufficiently equipped. Moreover, even were I sufficiently equipped, the writing of two such books cannot be accomplished in a hurry in a country which is in a state of political effervescence. I have therefore sadly resigned myself to work backwards, and give to the public my record of raw facts first and the explanation at a later date.

Nevertheless in giving this collection of scraps to the public I still have an aim and a purpose. As I have said, Englishmen are amazingly ignorant of Russia; not only because they deliberately prefer the works of sensation-mongers to those of really well-informed writers like Sir D. M. Wallace or M. Leroy-Beaulieu, but also because, when they honestly seek for truth in the newspapers which are by way of being serious, they are almost invariably misled. On the other hand Englishmen who live in Russia, even if only for a short period—such as officers from the Indian Army who come out on leave to learn the language—find no difficulty in forming a just appreciation of the country and its people. It has always struck me that if any such person were to write a record of what he saw and thought, that record would have a real value because it would constitute an aspect of the truth and not an aspect of the lie. This is therefore my aim, and it is the only merit I claim for this work. It contains aspects of things, seen by some one whose object was to try and understand the ordinary and not to invent the extraordinary. And therefore, although my work has no sort of claim to be taken seriously, either as history, or as a manual of useful information, it will have the negative merit of being free from any attempt at sensationalism, and, I hope, the positive merit of containing some aspects of the truth, some unvarnished record of la chose vue.

If what I have written leads others to take an interest in Russia and to go and see for themselves, and to treat exhaustively in a masterly fashion the things at which I have hinted incompletely and haltingly, I shall feel amply rewarded.

Somebody might object that even if we are totally ignorant of Russia in England there is no great harm done, that Russia is a far-off country with an impossibly difficult language; why should we bother about it? To this I would reply that the British people have shown themselves to be gravely concerned about the increasing competition with which the Englishman has to contend in all branches of life, and at the alarming improvement in the methods of his neighbours, which is met by no similar improvement at home. British trade, British influence, are rapidly, it is said, being outstripped. Remedies, such as protection, are suggested. As to whether such a remedy would prove efficacious or not I have no idea; but one practical reason of our stagnation in certain matters cannot fail to strike the most indolent observer. Our neighbours are well and practically educated. We are not. Is not this fact the cause of a great many things? If we want to remedy an evil we must look for the cause. I firmly believe that the unpractical education which is given to so many of us is largely responsible for the comparative stagnation of Englishmen in matters of trade and enterprise, compared with the sedulous efforts of the citizens of other countries. I am not advocating the introduction of a purely continental system of education, nor would I like to see our system of athletics disappear; but it is obvious that there is not and never will be any danger of either of these two things happening. But I never mean to lose an opportunity of advocating a radical reform in the old-fashioned strictly classical education given and received at our public schools and rendered necessary by the obstinacy of our universities, owing to which Greek and Latin are taught (but no longer learned except by a slender minority), to the exclusion of all other useful knowledge.

The mass of boys who now learn nothing because Greek and Latin mean nothing to them, would gladly assimilate something which would be useful to them in after life: for instance, some smattering of their own history, some mastery of the English tongue, or the knowledge of a modern language.

There is no country where the disadvantage at which an Englishman finds himself compared to his continental rivals is made so plain as in Russia. In Russia there is, and there will be even more in the future, an immense field for foreign enterprise. The Germans have taken, are taking, and will take the utmost advantage of this fact. The English are content to send advertisements here, written in the English language, and never dream of trying to learn Russian themselves.

A working knowledge of the Russian language is acquired here by the average British officer, working for an examination, in the course of six months. Therefore this difficulty, though serious, is not insurmountable. This, then, is the practical reason which I advance for the furthering of knowledge about Russia. I say that such knowledge is useful and advantageous to Englishmen. I have another reason for wishing such knowledge to be propagated, which is personal and moral, but not sentimental. It is this. I confess that I entertain perhaps a foolish desire for goodwill among nations. Of course I know very well that rivalries and conflicts must exist. Sometimes such rivalries and conflicts are the result of a fundamental antagonism and of the struggle for existence. But sometimes they are merely the outcome of misunderstanding and prejudice.

One of the wickedest things which shelters itself under the holy name of patriotism is the spirit which stirs up such prejudice and incites one country against another groundlessly by playing on ignorance and popular passion. With regard to Russia this has been done with considerable success. So far from considering such action to be patriotic, I consider it to be criminal; and although it may not be of the slightest interest to any one to hear this opinion expressed, to express it is a pleasure which I cannot deny myself. Whatever faults this book may contain, I mean to make up for the disappointments which it has caused me by indulging to the full in the luxury of saying exactly what I think in its pages. I cannot, unfortunately, hope to be among those masters who, speaking with inspired authority and unerring skill, compel the crowd to listen to their message, and at the sound of whose clarion-like utterance the “forts of folly” fall to the ground like the walls of Jericho. Mine is a humbler task, a more inglorious ambition. I hope to be like an obscure mouse who nibbles in the darkness at the net which holds the lion captive. The mouse in his lifelong effort succeeds perhaps only in gnawing away a little; and I shall be content if I succeed in nibbling through the most tenuous thread of this great net of error, misunderstanding, and falsehood. There are other mice who will come after me, and who knows? perhaps one day the lion will be set free.

Finally, if it be asked from what point of view I approach my study of Russia, I would answer that I have no political views whatever in the matter; I have tried to make it my business to discover, understand, and explain the points of view of the people with whom I have met; with some of these views I sympathise, with others I do not. I have already said that I have not disguised my sympathies, but I have attempted to understand even what repelled me; my attitude is that of a sympathetic friend, for whether the Frenchman who said “L’intelligence est presque toujours la sympathie” was right or wrong, I am convinced that the converse is true, and that the spirit of carping is nearly related to stupidity.

A YEAR IN RUSSIA

CHAPTER I
ST. PETERSBURG TO GODZIADAN

August 8, 1905.

I left St. Petersburg this evening for Manchuria. The one absorbing discussion in St. Petersburg is the question of the peace negotiations. Will there be peace or not?

In the train on the way to Irkutsk,

August 11th.

I started for Irkutsk on the 9th from Moscow. The train is crowded with people—officers going to the war, men of business going to Siberia, women and children. It is exceedingly hot. The last time I travelled in this Trans-Siberian express the winter had just given way to the leafless and bare aspect of early spring. Now we travel through great stretches of green plains, past huge fir-woods which are burnt and browned by the heat. The topic of the peace negotiations continues to prevail above all other topics. I am constantly asked my opinion. We have just received the latest telegrams from Portsmouth. A man of business asked me if I thought there would be peace. I said “Yes.” “There won’t be,” he replied. The railway line is fringed all the way with pink flowers, which, not being a botanist, I take to be ragged robin. At night the full moon shines spectral and large over the dark trees and marshes, and every now and then over stretches of shining water. The officers discuss the war from morning till night. They abuse their generals mercilessly. They say that it is impossible for Russians to look foreigners in the face. In my compartment there is an army doctor. He assisted at the battle of Mukden and is now returning for the second time to the war. He tells me that he wrote a diary of his experiences during the battle and that he is unable to re-read it now, so poignantly painful is the record. He trusts there will not be peace. He is sanguine as to the future. He loathes the liberal tendencies in Russia and detests Maxim Gorki. Yet he is no Jingo.

A gentleman from Moscow, and his wife, on the contrary, inveigh bitterly against the Government and the war. (I saw these same people again at Moscow after the December rising. Their house was situated in a street where the firing had been heavy and abundant. They had had enough of revolution and blamed the revolutionaries as severely then as they now blamed the Government.) We constantly pass trains full of troops going to the war. The men all ask the same question: “When is peace going to be?” They ask for newspapers and cigarettes. I gave some of them some bottles of whisky, which they drank off then and there out of the bottle. An amusing incident happened last evening. We had stopped at a siding. Everybody had got out of the train. I was walking up and down the platform with one of the passengers. We saw a soldier throwing big stones at the window of the washing compartment.

“What are you doing that for?” we asked.

“I want to speak to his Honour,” the soldier said; “he is washing his face in the washing-room.” And through the window of the compartment, lit by electric light, we could see the silhouette of an officer washing his face.

“Why don’t you go and knock at the door?” we asked.

“They are” (to speak of a person in the third person plural is respectful in Russian, and is always done by inferiors of their superiors)—“they are ‘having taken drink’ (Oni Vipimshi),” he replied, and then he added, lest we should receive a false impression, “His Honour is very good.”

As we passed train after train of troops I reflected on the rashness of prophecy. How often I had heard it said in London, when the war broke out, that the line would break down immediately. Even when I reached Mukden I heard people say that the line could not possibly last through the summer, and here it is supporting gaily train after train in the second year of the war.

On the way to Chita, August 20th.

We arrived at Irkutsk on the morning of the 17th and took the train for Baikal. At Irkutsk station there was a train of sick soldiers returning from the war. They begged for newspapers. The tedium of their long journey is, they say, intolerable. They say there has been a good deal of typhus in Manchuria.

We crossed the lake in the steamer. Its summer aspect is far less striking than the strange glory which it wears when it is frozen, and the distant mountains seem like “a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.” In summer the waters are blue, the nearer hills grey and the distant mountains blue, but with nothing strange or unreal about them. Yet when the sunset silvered the grey tints and spread a ragged golden banner in the sky, the lake was extremely beautiful in another way. At Baikal station there was the usual struggle for places in the train. How well I remembered the desperate struggle I had gone through to get a seat in a third-class carriage at this same place last year! This time it was in the first-class carriage that the conflict took place. An engineer got into the same carriage as I did. He occupied one of the lower berths and I the other. Presently a lady arrived, bound for Chita, and looking for a place. She came into our carriage and asked to be allowed to have one of the lower berths. The engineer flatly refused and said that he had occupied his seat and had a right to keep it. I told her I would let her have mine with pleasure. She occupied it and went out. I moved my things into the upper berth. “Why on earth did you give up your seat?” the engineer asked. “You had a right to keep it.” When the lady came back she said to me: “Ah! you are evidently not a Russian; no Russian would have given up his place.” The engineer turned out to be quite a good-natured sort of person, but there is something about trains which makes people who are by nature mild and good-natured turn into savages, and instils into them a passionate determination to cleave to their rights. The next morning another man arrived in our carriage, with a large basket and a second-class ticket. This upset the engineer, who complained to the “Controller” of the train, and the poor man was turned out. The engineer snorted and said: “There’s an insolent fellow for you.” The lady was the wife of an engineer who was employed at Chita; and she told me much about life in Chita: how hard times were, owing to the war, how scarce food was getting—

“Und wie so teuer der Kaffee,

Und wie so rar das Geld!”

The “Controller” of the train, an official in plain clothes, whose exact duties I was not able to determine, except that he was able to turn the second-class passenger out of our carriage, spent a day and a night with us. He and the engineer talked without ceasing of the meetings of the Zemstva all over the country; of the discontent of the public servants and of the imminence of a strike. They told me there would be a big railway strike, but I did not pay much attention to this, nor did I in the least realise the importance of what they were discussing. In one of the second-class carriages I made friends with two young officers who were going out to the war as volunteers, and two ladies, one the wife of an officer already out there, and the other a hospital nurse. With them also was the son of the officer’s wife, a student from Odessa, who told me many interesting things. He described to me in great detail the mutiny of the Black Sea Fleet, and he prophesied, if not a revolution, at least a great change in Russia in the immediate future. One of the carriages of the train was barred, and in it sat a political prisoner, a schoolmaster from Irkutsk. Some of my friends went to speak to him, but they came back in melancholy and disappointment, since they said this prisoner was hissing hatred and rage through the bars in an undignified and painful manner.

Soon after we left Baikal a young man joined us who said he was employed in a firm at Chita. He had brought with him some flowers from Irkutsk. These he carried in a large basket full of wet sand. They were a kind of pathetic stock but not “in fragrant blow”; poor, feeble, starved and rather dirty flowers they were. But in Transbaikalia flowers were rare, and he had paid 18 roubles, he said (£1 8s.), for this nosegay, and he was bringing them to Chita as a gift to the girl to whom he was engaged to be married. He looked after these flowers with the utmost care; the basket was put in my berth and, as it was full of water, a constant stream trickled down from it and made a small pond on the floor of the carriage.

August 20th. Later.

We are nearing Chita; the husband of the lady to whom I gave my place has arrived to meet her and take her home. He is an engineer. They are deeply engaged in discussing local politics. The husband talks of a coming strike, and tells me that if I wish to see political meetings I had better stay in Chita. There are meetings every evening; some of them are dispersed by the police. I now realise the importance of flowers in this country; it is “a land of sand and ruin and gold.” The young clerk has produced two perforated bouquetholders (is there such a word?) and has carefully placed the flowers in them, with a sigh of relief. They have not quite faded, although they droop sadly. At Chita the lady and her husband get out. The engineer also. I am now alone in my carriage. Beyond Chita the country is mountainous and fledged with fir-trees.

August 21st.

The hilly country has ceased and we have once more reached the flat plains. This morning the guard brought a man into my carriage and asked me if I minded his sitting there. I said I did not mind. I offered him some tea. The man made no answer, and looked at me with a vacant stare. Then the guard laid him down at full length, and said, “This man is the assistant station-master at Manchuria station. He is drunk, but you need not be alarmed; he will be quite quiet.” He was quiet; at Manchuria station he woke up from his stupor automatically, as though from frequent habit.

August 22nd.

We arrived at Manchuria station last night. The chaos that always reigns there is terrific. I had the utmost difficulty in obtaining permission to continue my journey. The officials said I needed an extra paper, besides those I had with me, from the Chief of the Staff in Kharbin. The initial difficulty was to get one’s ticket, as the crowd was dense and long. What quantities of people seem to be drawn to Manchuria, like filings to a magnet! An officer got me my ticket, and just when I had utterly despaired of being able to travel further, the gendarme brought me my permission to proceed. Then came the struggle for a place in a third-class carriage. This was successfully got through. I obtained an upper berth across the window. The compartment is crammed with people.

August 23rd.

We are travelling through the hills of northern Manchuria. News has arrived of the summoning of a new Duma. Now people say there will not be peace, and the war will become a national war because it will have the consent of the people. Others contest this; there are hot discussions. I have moved into a second-class carriage in which there is a photographer and a captain. I had my fortune told with cards by a lady in the train. She said I should soon meet a lot of friends and experience a change of fortune for the better.

August 28th.

We arrived at Kharbin the day before yesterday. The town seems to have got much bigger than when I left it last year. The climate has not improved, nor have the prices at the hotel diminished. I have already met some old friends of last year at the bank and at the staff. There is a new restaurant opposite the bank, where a band plays the overture to “William Tell” without ceasing. Kharbin is empty. It appears that Linievitch does not allow officers to come here except on pressing errands. I dislike Kharbin more than any place I have ever seen in the world. The one topic is, of course, the peace negotiations. The matter is hotly discussed; some are in favour of peace, others vehemently against it. The news is contradictory. I have asked for leave to go to the front. I shall have to wait some days before I receive it.

August 31st.

I am laid up in bed, and Mr. Ostrovski of the Russo-Chinese bank has just been to see me. He has come from the staff, where they told him that news had been received from St. Petersburg that there would not be peace. Orders had come to dispatch everything available to the front with all possible speed and to get ready for an offensive movement.

September 1st.

Peace has been officially announced. Among the officers I have seen, opinions vary, but the men are delighted. They are tearing the telegrams from each other.

September 7th.

I arrived at Gonchuling yesterday. Gonchuling is now what Mukden used to be before the battle of Mukden was fought. It consists of dozens and dozens of small grey brick houses, with slate roofs, on one side of the line, and on the other side of the line is a small Chinese town. The Military Attachés are here in their car. I am living with the Press Censors. People talk about peace as if it was not yet a fact. An officer, whose wife I met in the train coming out, has been sent to fortify positions. Kouropatkin’s army is said to have received orders to advance. People express doubts as to whether the peace will be ratified, and there is talk of a revolution in Japan.

I have the intention of joining the 2nd Transbaikal Cossack battery, with which I lived last year. I have telegraphed to them to send horses to meet me at Godziadan, the Head Quarters of the Staff.

September 10th.

I have arrived at Godziadan. In the station is the train of the Commander-in-Chief. There is also a correspondents’ car, where I have been put up and hospitably entertained by Boris Nikolaievitch Demchinsky, correspondent of a Russian newspaper. The news has come of the first pour-parlers which are to take place between the Russian and Japanese Commanders-in-Chief.

CHAPTER II
JEN-TZEN-TUNG

September 13th.

I arrived at the quarters of the battery this morning. It is quartered in a village near the large Chinese town of Jen-tzen-tung on the Mongolian frontier. I started from Godziadan at eight o’clock in the morning on the 11th, when I found two Cossacks waiting for me, with a third pony for me to ride, saddled with my own English saddle, which I had left behind me last year. As we started one of the Cossacks said: “You must be careful with that pony, he throws himself.” I wondered what this meant; whether the pony ran away, or bit, or kicked, or stumbled, or bucked, or fell, my experience of Chinese ponies being that they do all these things. I was not long in finding out; it meant that the pony took a sort of dive forward every now and then, tearing the skin off one’s fingers in the effort to hold it up.

After we had ridden for about two hours, one of the Cossacks asked the other if he knew the way. The other answered that he did not. The first one told him he was a fool. “But,” I interrupted, “as you have just come from Jen-tzen-tung, surely you know the way back.”

“Oh!” they answered, “we came by quite a different way along the lines. But, nichevo, it doesn’t matter. We shall get there somehow.” We stopped for luncheon at an encampment of the Red Cross. I was entertained by the doctors and the hospital nurses. They expressed the most bitter and violently revolutionary sentiments. After luncheon we went on, asking the way of the Chinese in each village, our destination for the evening being the large town of Oushitai. At every village we asked, the Chinese answered by telling us how many lis (a li is 1⅓ of a mile) Oushitai was distant, and the accuracy with which they determined the distance was, as far as I could judge, amazing. We arrived at Oushitai at moonrise. We went into a yard where there was tea, and straw to lie on, and provisions, but the Cossacks refused to stay there because there were “soldiers” there. The Cossacks, being Cossacks and not “soldiers,” often consider it beneath their dignity to mix with soldiers. So we had to find another yard, where we drank tea and slept until dawn the next morning, when we started once more. We halted at midday in a small Chinese village for our midday meal. It was a small, rather tumble-down village, with a large clump of trees near it. A Chinaman came out of a house, and seeing the red correspondent’s badge on my arm, asked me if I was a doctor. To save the bother of explanation I said I was a doctor. Then he conveyed the information in pidgin-Russian that his son was ill, and requested me to cure him. I went into the house and he showed me a brown and naked infant with a fat stomach. I made him put out his tongue. It was white. I asked what he had been eating lately. The Chinaman said raw Indian corn. I prescribed cessation of diet and complete repose. The Chinaman appeared to me to be much satisfied, and asked me if I would like to hear a concert. I said very much. Then he bade me sit down on the khan—the natural divan of every Chinese house—and to look (“smotrì, smotrì” he said). Presently another Chinaman came into the room and, taking from the wall a large and twisted clarion (like the wreathed horn old Triton blew), he blew on it one deafening blast and hung it up on the wall again. There was a short pause, I waited in expectation, and the Chinaman turned to me and said: “The concert is now over.”

I then went to have luncheon with the Cossacks under the trees. The luncheon consisted of hard rusks (hard as bricks), made of black bread, swimming in an earthen bowl of boiling water on the top of which tea was sprinkled. When we had finished luncheon, and just as we were about to resume our journey, the Chinaman in whose house I had been entertained rushed up to me and said: “In your country, when you go to a concert, do you not pay for it?” The concert was paid for and then we started once more to ride along the mountainous roads, a flat green country, with few trees, and great pools of water caused by recent rain, through which we had to wade and sometimes to swim. Towards the afternoon the aspect of the country changed; we reached grassy and flowery steppes. It was the beginning of the Mongolian country. We met Mongols sitting sideways on their ponies, and dressed in coats of many colours. I have never felt quite so tired in my life as while that interminable afternoon wore on. The distance from Godziadan to Jen-tzen-tung is eighty miles, and when the sun set, and the Cossacks announced that after arriving at Jen-tzen-tung we should have to ride yet two miles further to find the battery, I inwardly resolved that no force on earth should make me ride another inch that night. We arrived at Jen-tzen-tung at eight o’clock in the evening. There I found my old friend Kizlitzki, of the battery, who, as usual, was living by himself in Chinese quarters of immaculate cleanliness. His servant being the former cook of the battery who used every day to make “Boeuf Stroganoff,” Kizlitzki gave me an excellent dinner and a most comfortable bed. The next morning I rode to the village, two miles distant, where the battery was quartered, and here I found all my old friends: Glinka, the doctor, Hliebnikoff, and others.

The house is a regular Chinese house, or series of one-storeyed houses forming a quadrangle, in which horses, donkeys, and hens disport themselves. We occupy one side of the house. Opposite us the owner lives. In the evening one hears music from the other side. I went to see what it was; a Chinaman lying on his back plays on a one-stringed lute, “und singt ein Lied dabei, das hat eine wundersame gewaltige Melodei.” Something like this:—

The first question everybody asked me was whether peace had been declared or not. There has been some fighting here at the outposts since peace was declared.

September 15th.

This village is exceedingly picturesque. It lies in a clump of willow-trees and hard by there is a large wood which stretches down to a broad and brown river. Next to our quarters there is a small house where an old Chinaman is preparing three young students for their examination in Pekin. One of these Chinamen came this morning and complained that their house had been ruined by the Cossacks. We went to inspect the disaster. It turned out that one of the Cossacks had put his finger through one of the paper windows of the house, making thereby a small hole in it. The old teacher is quite charming. He recited poetry to us. When the Chinese recite poetry they half sing it. I had lately read a translation of a Chinese poem by Li-Tai-Po, which in the translation runs thus:—

“You ask me what my soul does away in the sky;

I inwardly smile but I cannot make answer;

Like the peach blossom carried off by the stream,

I soar away to a world unknown to you.”

By means of a small piece of wood, a flower, and some water I made the Chinaman understand what poem I was alluding to, and he recited it for us. The Chinese asked me to tell them their fortunes by their hands. I said to one of them, at random, that I saw great riches in his hand, thinking it would please him. The Chinaman said nothing, but later, when this Chinaman, who was a visitor, had gone, the others said to me: “You spoke true words. That man is a ‘Koupeza’ (pidgin-Russian for merchant) and he is enormously rich.” These Chinamen take an acute interest in the result of the peace negotiations, and wish to be informed as to all sorts of details of which we are ignorant. The impression among the officers here is that it is a very good thing that peace has been concluded. “We ought to thank Heaven that our men have not been beaten again,” one of them said, and he added: “It is silly to say that the higher authorities are the only guilty ones; we are all equally guilty.”

September 16th.

We spend the time riding, reading, bathing, sleeping, and playing patiences.

Jen-tzen-tung is a large and most picturesque town. A constant stream of Mongols flows in and out of it. They wear the most picturesque clothes, silks and velvets of deep orange and luminous sea-green, glowing like jewels. We ride into the town to buy provisions, fish mostly. The wines sold at the shops are all sham and horribly nasty. At the corner of one of the streets there is a professional wizard, dressed in black silk embroidered with silver moons, and wearing the conical cap that wizards always do wear. You ask a question, pay a small sum and shake coins out of a cup three times, and according as the coins make an odd or even figure, the wizard writes down a sign on a piece of paper, and then he tells you the answer to your question. The Chinese consult him before striking a bargain or setting out on a journey. I asked him whether I should get back all right? He answered that I could go home either by the East or the West, and that the West would be better, though I should meet with obstacles.

He refused to prophesy for more than a hundred days ahead.

In the evening, after dinner, we discussed politics and the Duma (that is to say the Duma as originally planned by the decree of August 6th). The doctor said that unless there were to be a constitution in Russia, he would emigrate abroad, as he did not choose that his children should be brought up in a country which was politically inferior to Turkey. He is hopeful about the Duma; he says Witte will be a national hero; and that a constitution is a foregone conclusion. Somebody said the peasants were hopeless. He hotly contested this, and said there was far more political sense among the peasants than among the rest of the population. He has had great experience of the peasants.

September 19th.

I had a long talk with Kizlitzki this afternoon. He is like a round peg in a square hole in this army. Strict discipline and impeccable order seem to him the first essentials of military life. The others don’t understand this, although they are conscientious; but they like doing things in their own way, which is a happy-go-lucky way, and they think Kizlitzki is rather mad. Kizlitzki told me that at the battle of Ta-shichiae, where he was in command of the battery, when he had made all the necessary arrangements, placed his guns, &c., he received orders to go and speak to a general; before he went, he warned his subordinates to leave everything as it was. When he came back he found that the battery, owing to the fancy of one of the subordinates, had been moved two miles from where he had placed it. So he had to fetch it back and arrange everything over again. The result was that it did not open fire until two in the afternoon, a fact which I had noticed at the time, although I was not with the battery then. He said he had never made such an effort of self-control as not to lose his temper when he saw what had been done. In the French or German, and I trust also in our army, Kizlitzki’s methods would be taken as a matter of course. Here they are considered to be an unnecessary pose. On the other hand he is not in the least a formalist, a lover of red-tape, or a pedant; he merely considers elementary discipline to be necessary.

I had tea with a Chinese Mandarin. I do not know which was the more exquisite, his tea or his manners. In the evening we discussed writers of books. Hliebnikoff said he knew who was the greatest writer in the world, and when some one else asked who, he answered Dostoievski of course. The doctor vehemently disagreed with this. Hliebnikoff went out of the room in disgust. It is astonishing what a quantity of English novels these people have read in translations: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Rider Haggard, Stevenson, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome. The doctor admires Jerome enormously. I think there is a human element in him which especially appeals to Russians.

September 21st.

A fine, hot, and glorious September day. The evening was one of those things that linger in one’s mind like music. The sky was a very faint mauve, something between mauve and pink, like a hydrangea, or as Dante says:—

“Men che di rose e più che di viole

Colore aprendo,”

and, hanging over the delicate willow-trees, silvery in the half-light and faintly rustling, a large and misty moon—a moon made of ghostly fire. The days pass in pleasant monotony; visitors come from other divisions; but we go to bed about nine in the evening and get up very early. It is a delicious life. We often visit the Chinese professor in his peripatetic school. One of the students asked me whether in my country “you write and a big captain comes to look-see, and if all was not well, beats you.” I said that practically this was the procedure of our competitive examinations.

September 27th.

Autumn has come and it is too cold now for the men to be encamped here out of doors, so we have moved into quarters in the town.

October 1st.

I left for Gunchuling, en route for Kharbin, with Hliebnikoff and another, and bade goodbye to the friends who had so hospitably entertained me. (Two of them I was never to see again, for they died shortly after I left, one of typhoid and one of dysentery.) We arrived at Oushitai at five in the evening. The country is said to be infested by Hung-Hutzes, and some men were wounded by them yesterday in the environs of this place. At Jen-tzen-tung I met a merchant, whom I had known at Liaoyang, who had been caught by the Hung-Hutzes, but—

“As no one present seemed to know

His use or name, they let him go.”

Jen-tzen-tung was on the extreme right flank of the Russian army. The army therefore extended eighty miles from the extreme right flank to the centre, and again another eighty miles from the centre to the extreme left flank. Oushitai was connected with Gunchuling by a kind of tram-railway drawn by horses.

October 6th.

In this tram we travelled to Gunchuling, and thence I proceeded to Kharbin by train.

CHAPTER III
THE STRIKE AND THE MANIFESTO OF OCTOBER (30TH) 17TH

Moscow, November 3rd.

My return journey from Kharbin to Moscow was entirely uneventful until we arrived at Samara. At Irkutsk I had got a place in the Trans-Siberian express, which was crowded with all sorts and conditions of men: officers, merchants, three Germans, three Americans who had returned from working a mine in Siberia, a Polish student, and some ladies.

The first inkling that I received of the fact that a revolution was going on in Russia came to me in the following manner. We had crossed the Urals and had only been travelling thirteen days. We had arrived at Samara, when the attendant, who looked after the first-class carriage, came into my compartment and heaved a deep sigh. I asked him what was the matter. “We shan’t get further than Toula,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “Because of the unpleasantnesses” (niepriyat nosti). I asked, “What unpleasantnesses?” “There is a mutiny,” he said, “on the line.” We passed the big station of Sisran and arrived at the small town of Kouznetsk. There we were informed that the train could not go any further because of the strike. Nobody realised the extent of the strike, and we expected to go on in a few hours. By the evening the passengers began to show some signs of restlessness. Most of them telegraphed to various authorities. A petition was telegraphed to the Minister of Ways and Communications, saying that an express train full of passengers, overtired by a long and fatiguing journey, was waiting at Kouznetsk, and asking him to be so good as to arrange for them to proceed further. There was no answer to this telegram. The next day a sense of resignation seemed to come over the company. Although every evening, towards dinner-time, one heard innumerable complaints such as “only in Russia could such a bezobrazie (literally an ugliness, i.e., a disgraceful thing) happen,” and one passenger suggested that Prince Kilkoff’s portrait, which was hung in the dining-car, should be turned face to the wall. The Polish student, who had accompanied the Americans and made music for them, playing by ear any tune they whistled to him, and consequently a great many tunes from the Gaiety repertoire, played the piano with exaggerated facility and endless fioriture and runs. I asked an American mechanic who was with the mining managers whether he liked the music. He said he would like it if the “damned hell” were knocked out of it, which was exactly my feeling. But on the second day after our arrival my American friends left by road for Samara, to proceed thence by water to St. Petersburg. The passengers spent the time in exploring the town, which was somnolent and melancholy in the extreme. Half of it was a typical Russian village built on a hill, a mass of brown huts; the other half, on the plain, was like a village in any country. The idle guards and railway officials sat on the steps of the station-room whistling. Two more trains arrived: a sanitary train and an ordinary slow passenger train.

The passengers from these trains wandered about the platform, mixing with the idlers from the town population. A crowd of peasants and travellers, engineers, and Red Cross attendants, soldiers, and merchants sauntered up and down in loose shirts and big boots, munching sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks till the platform was thick with refuse. A doctor who was in our train, and who was half a German, with an official training and an orthodox official mind, talked to the railway servants like a father. It was very wrong to strike, he said. They should have put down their grievances on paper and had them forwarded by the proper channels. The officials said that that would be waste of ink and caligraphy. “I wonder they don’t kill him,” said my travelling companion, and I agreed with him. Each passenger was given a rouble a day to buy food. The third-class passengers were given checks, in return for which they could receive meals. However, they deprecated the idea, and said that they wanted the amount in beer. They received it. Then they looted the refreshment room, broke the windows, and took away the food. This put an end to the check system. The feeling among the first-class passengers deepened. Something ought to be done, was the general verdict; but nobody quite knew what. They felt that the train ought to be placed in a position of safety. The situation on the evening of the second day began to resemble that described in Maupassant’s masterpiece, “Boule de Suif.” Nothing, however, could be done except to explore the town of Kouznetsk. It was warm autumn weather. The roads were soft and muddy, and there was a smell of rotting leaves in the air. It was damp and grey, with gleams of pitiful weak sunshine. In the middle of the town was a large market-place where a brisk trade in geese was carried on. One man whom I watched failed to sell his geese during the day, and while driving them home at night talked to them as if they had been dogs, saying, “Cheer up, we shall soon be home.” A party of convicts who belonged to the passenger train were working hard by the station, and implored the passing tribute of a sigh and a cigarette. Both were freely given. Convicts in Russia are always alluded to as “unfortunates.” I met them near the station and they at once said, “Give the unfortunates something.” In the evening, in one of the third-class carriages, a party of Little Russians, assistants in the Red Cross, sang songs in parts—melancholy, beautiful songs, with a strange trotting rhythm and no end and no beginning; and opposite their carriage on the platform a small crowd of moujiks gathered together and listened, saying that the men sang with cunning (lovko paiout).

On the morning of the fourth day after we had arrived the impatience of the passengers increased to fever pitch. A colonel who was with us, and who knew how to use the telegraph, communicated with Piensa, the next big station. For although the telegraph clerks were on strike they remained in the office conversing with their friends on the wire all over Russia. The strikers were most affable. They said they had not the slightest objection to the express proceeding on its journey, that they would neither boycott nor beat anybody who took us, and that if we could find a friend to drive the engine, well and good. We did. We found a friend, an amateur engine-driver, and an amateur engine, and on the 28th of October we started for Piensa. We broke down on the way. The engine-driver was supported by public contributions. The moment the engine stopped work all the passengers volunteered advice as to how it should be mended, one man producing a piece of string for the purpose. However, another stray engine was found, and we arrived at last at Piensa. There I saw mentioned in the telegrams the words “rights of speech and assembly,” and I knew that the strike was a revolution. At Piensa the rage of the military—who had had their return journey from the Far East delayed—against the strikers was indescribable. They were lurching about the station in a state of inebriate frenzy, using language about strikes and strikers which is not fit to repeat. One of them asked me if I was a striker. We stopped at Piensa for the night. We started again the next morning for Moscow, but the train came to a dead stop at two o’clock the next morning at Riansk, and when I woke up the first-class attendant came, with many deep sighs, and said that we should go no further until the unpleasantnesses were at an end. But an hour later news came that we could go to Riazan in another train, which we did. Riazan station, when we arrived, was guarded by soldiers. A train was ready to start for Moscow, but the scuffle for places in it was terrific. I found a place in a third-class carriage. Opposite me was an old man with a grey beard. He attracted my attention by the extraordinary courtesy with which he prevented a woman, with many bundles, from being turned out of the train by another moujik. I asked him where he came from. “Eighty versts from the other side of Irkutsk,” he said. “I was sent there, and I am returning home now after thirteen years at the Government’s expense. I was a convict.” “What were you sent there for?” I asked. “Murder!” he answered very gently. The other passengers asked him to tell his story. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Tell!” shouted the other passengers. His story briefly was this: He had got drunk, set fire to a barn, and when the owner interfered he had killed him. He had served two years’ hard labour and eleven years’ banishment. He was a gentle, humble creature, with a very mild expression, like an apostle in disguise. He had no money, and lived on what other passengers gave him. I gave him a cigarette. He smoked a quarter of it and said he would keep the rest for the journey, as he had still got five hundred versts to travel. We arrived at Moscow at eleven o’clock in the evening and found the town in darkness, save for the glimmer of oil lamps. The next morning we woke up to find that Russia had been given a Magna Charta; that the railway and other officials had obtained the same concessions from the Government as the Barons had won from King John seven hundred years ago.

Moscow, October 30th (Old Style, October 17th).

The first thing which brought home to me that Russia had been granted the promise of a Constitution was this. I went to the big Russian baths. Somebody came in and asked for some soap, upon which the barber’s assistant, aged about ten, said with the air of a Hampden, “Give the ‘citizen’ some soap” (Daite grajdaninon mwilo). Coming out of the baths I found the streets decorated with flags, and everybody in a state of frantic and effervescing enthusiasm. I went to one of the big restaurants. There old men were embracing each other and drinking the first glass of vodka to free Russia. After luncheon I went out into the Theatre square. There is a fountain in it, which forms an excellent public platform. An orator mounted it and addressed the crowd. He began to read the Emperor’s Manifesto. Then he said: “We are all too much used to the rascality of the Autocracy to believe this; away with the Autocracy!” The crowd, infuriated—they were evidently expecting an enthusiastic eulogy—cried: “Away with you!” But instead of attacking the speaker who had aroused their indignation they ran away from him! It was a curious sight. The spectators on the pavement were seized with panic and ran too. The orator, seeing his speech had missed fire, changed its tone and said: “You have misunderstood me.” But what he had said was perfectly clear. This speaker was an ordinary Hyde Park orator, and not to be confused with the University professors who afterwards spoke from the same platform. Later in the afternoon a procession of students arrived opposite my hotel with red flags, and collected outside the Governor-General’s house. He appeared on the balcony and made a speech, in which he said that now there were no police he hoped that they would be able to keep order themselves. He asked them also to replace the red flag which was hanging on the lamp-post opposite the palace by the national flag. One little student climbed like a monkey up the lamp-post and hung a national flag there, but did not remove the red flag. Then the Governor asked them to sing the National Anthem, which they did; and as they went away they sang the Marseillaise.

“On peut très bien jouer ces deux airs à la fois

Et cela fait un air qui fait sauter les rois.”

At one moment a Cossack arrived, but an official came out of the house and told him he was not needed, upon which he went away amidst the jeers, cheers, hoots, and whistling of the crowd. The day passed off quietly on the whole, the only untoward incidents being the death of a woman and the wounding of a student and a workman while trying to rescue a student from the prisoners’ van. A veterinary surgeon called Bauman was also shot on this day.

To-day for the first time I heard the phrase “Black Gang” used. I was standing on the doorstep of the Hôtel de France, when a woman rushed frantically up and said the “Black Gang” were coming. A student, belonging to a very good family, who was standing there, also explained that the “Black Gang” consisted of roughs who supported the autocratic cause. His hand, which was bandaged, had been severely hurt while he was in the act of taking off his hat that day, by a Cossack who had beat it with a whip, thinking he was about to make a disturbance. He came up to my room and from the hotel window we had a good view of the crowd which proceeded to—

“attaquer la Marseillaise en la

Sur les cuivres, pendant que la flûte soupire

En mi bèmol: Veillons au salut de l’Empire.”

Moscow, November 7th.

I went to see Maxim Gorki’s new play at the Artistic Theatre of Moscow, “The Children of the Sun.” It was the second night that it had been performed. M. Stanislavoshi, one of the chief actors of the troupe and the stage manager, gave me his place. The theatre was crammed. There is a scene in the play, where a doctor, living in a Russian village, and devoting his life to the welfare of the peasants, is suspected of having caused an outbreak of cholera. The infuriated peasants pursue the doctor and bash some one on the head. On the first night this scene had reduced a part of the audience to hysterics. It was too “actual.” People said we see enough of our friends killed in the streets without going to the play for such a sight. On the second night it was said that the offensive scene had been suppressed. I did not quite understand what had been eliminated. As I saw the scene it was played as follows. A roar is heard as of an angry crowd. Then the doctor runs into a house and hides. The master of the house protests; a peasant flies at his throat and half strangles him until he is beaten on the head by another peasant who belongs to the house. The play is full of interesting moments, and was played with the finished perfection which makes this theatre famous and unique. But M. Gorki has not M. Tchekoff’s talent of representing on the stage the uneventful passage of time, the succession of the seemingly insignificant incidents of people’s everyday lives, chosen with such skill, depicted with such an instinct for mood and atmosphere that the result is enthrallingly interesting. M. Gorki’s plays have the faults and qualities of his stories. They are unequal, but contain moments of poignant interest and vividness. I do not think, however, that his gifts are pre-eminently suited for the stage.

CHAPTER IV
MOSCOW AFTER THE MANIFESTO

Wednesday, October 1st.

At dinner at the Métropole Restaurant a strange scene occurred. At the end of dinner the band played the Marseillaise, and after it the National Anthem. Everybody stood up except one mild-looking man with spectacles, who went on calmly eating his dinner, upon which a man who was sitting at the other end of the room, and was rather drunk, rushed up to him and began to pull him about and drag him to his feet. He made a display of passive resistance, which proved effectual, and when he had finished his dinner he went away.

Thursday, November 2nd.

The outward aspect of the town during these days is strange. Moscow seems like a city which has been undergoing a siege. Many of the shops have got great wooden shutters. Some of the doors have a large red cross on them. The distress, I am told, during the strike was terrible. There was no light, no gas, no water, all the shops were shut; provisions and wood were scarce. This afternoon I went to see Bauman’s funeral procession, which I witnessed from many parts of the town. It was one of the most impressive sights I have ever seen. A hundred thousand men took part in it. The whole of the “Intelligenzia” (the professional and middle class) was in the streets or at the windows. The windows and balconies were crowded with people. The order was perfect. There was not a hitch nor a scuffle. The men walking in the procession consisted of students, doctors, workmen, people in various kinds of uniform. There were ambulances, with doctors dressed in white in them, in case there should be casualties. The men bore great red banners and the coffin was covered with a scarlet pall. As they marched they sang in a low chant the “Marseillaise,” “Viechni Pamiat,” and the “Funeral March”[^[1]] of the fighters for freedom. This last tune is the most impressive. From a musician’s point of view it is a shockingly bad tune; but then, as Du Maurier said, one should never listen to musicians on the subject of music any more than one should listen to wine merchants on the subject of wine. But it is the tune which to my mind is exactly fitting for the Russian revolution, with its dogged melancholy and invincible passion, as fitting as the “Marseillaise” (which, by the way, the Russian sings in parts and slowly) is totally unfitting. The “Funeral March” has nothing defiant in it; but it is one of those tunes which, when sung by a multitude, make one’s flesh creep; it is commonplace if you will; and it expresses—as it were by accident—the commonplaceness of all that is determined and unflinching, mingled with an accent of weary pathos. As it grew dark torches were brought out, lighting up the red banners and the scarlet coffin of the unknown veterinary surgeon, who in a second, by a strange freak of chance, had become a hero, or rather a symbol, an emblem and a banner, and who was being carried to his last resting place with a simplicity which eclipsed the pomp of all royal funerals, and to the sound of a low song of tired but indefatigable sadness stronger and more formidable than the pæans which celebrate the triumphs and the pageants of kings.

[1]. By a strange irony of fate, this tune, which the revolutionaries have made their own, was originally an official tune, composed probably by some obscure military bandmaster, and played at the funerals of officers and high officials.

The impression left on my mind by this funeral is deep. As I saw these hundred thousand men march past so quietly, so simply, in their bourgeois clothes, singing in careless, almost conversational fashion, I seemed nevertheless to hear the “tramping of innumerable armies,” and to feel the breath of the

“Courage never to submit or yield,

And what is else not to be overcome.”

It is impossible for the Government or for any one else to accuse these people of displaying a provoking attitude, of badgering or insulting the soldiers or the authorities, or of not being able to keep order among themselves.

November 3rd.

Last night, after Bauman’s funeral, which passed off without an incident, at eleven o’clock a number of students and doctors were shot in front of the university, as they were on their way home, by Cossacks, who were stationed in the Riding School, opposite the university. The Cossacks fired without orders. They were incensed, as many of the troops were, by the display of red flags, and they disliked processions.

November 6th.

The last three days have been days of curious disorder and anarchy. I will try and note briefly what has been taking place.

The day after Bauman’s funeral (November 3rd) was the anniversary of the Emperor’s accession, and all the “hooligans” of the city, who are now called the “Black Gang,” used the opportunity to make counter demonstrations under the ægis of the National flag. The students did nothing, they were in no way aggressive; but the hooligans when they came across a student beat him and in many cases killed him. The police did nothing; they seemed to have disappeared. These hooligans paraded the town in small groups, sometimes uniting, blocking the traffic, demanding money from well-dressed people, killing students, and making themselves generally objectionable. When the police were appealed to they shrugged their shoulders and said: “Liberty.” The hooligans demanded the release of the man who had killed Bauman. “They have set free so many of their men,” they said, referring to the revolutionaries, “we want our man set free.” Practically the town was in a state of anarchy; anybody could kill any one else with impunity. In one of the biggest streets a hooligan came up to a man and asked him for money; he gave him ten kopecks. “Is that all?” said the hooligan, “Take that,” and he killed him with a Finnish knife. I was myself stopped by a band on the Twerskaia and asked politely to contribute to their fund, the fund of the “Black Gang,” which I did with considerable alacrity. However, students, or those whom they considered to be students in disguise, were the people they mostly attacked. The citizens of the town in general soon began to think that this state of things was intolerable, and vigorous representations were made to the town Duma that some steps should be taken to put an end to it. The hooligans broke the windows of the Hôtel Métropole and those of several shops. There was a general impression among them that liberty meant doing as much damage as they pleased. This state of things lasted three days, and now it has been stopped—utterly and completely stopped. A notice is published forbidding all demonstrations in the streets with flags. The police have reappeared, and everything has resumed its normal course. These bands of hooligans were small and exceedingly easy to deal with. The disorders were completely unnecessary. But they have done some good in one way; they have brought home to everybody the necessity for order and the maintenance of order, and the conviction that if the police are removed the result will be anarchy. However, considering the state of lawlessness that existed, it is remarkable how little damage was done.

The night before last, as I was walking back to the hotel after dinner, I met two omnibuses full of wounded students being driven to the hospital. One student was torn to pieces by a hooligan crowd yesterday afternoon; and a friend of mine from the windows of the Hôtel National saw another trampled to death.

The general tenour of opinion among the Liberals is that the Government must prove their good intentions by deeds and not by words, and that soothing Manifestoes are of no use now. There are three points on which they insist. First, they demand that the partial amnesty should be made complete; that there should be an amnesty for all political offenders without exception. Secondly, they say that they have no guarantee for the new reforms, because the Ministers are taken from the Bureaucracy. They demand new Ministers taken from the Zemstva. Thirdly, they demand the resignation of General Trepoff. With regard to the first point it would be a wise step on the part of the Government to satisfy the Liberals. The concessions will probably be made gradually, and I suppose their maxim is not to give too much at once or the demands will increase. It is a pity, if the Government have decided to give in on this point, that they did not do so at once. Every concession seems, as it is, to have been extorted by force. That is the general impression of the Liberals: “We have been given nothing; everything we have obtained we have extorted by force.” With regard to the resignation of General Trepoff, if I were a Russian and guarantees were given that the police were no longer going to interfere with individuals, and that the secret police force was to be abolished—and I believe this is being done—I should make a demonstration for the retention of General Trepoff. If there are to be police at all to keep order, somebody must manage them. The Russian police are a hopelessly incompetent body, and General Trepoff is a thoroughly competent man. He may have used too heavy a hand sometimes, and I can understand the people being indignant that he should rule Russia like a dictator. On the other hand he knows how to keep order; he knows how to manage the police, and if the liberty of individuals is respected—and, so far, since the publication of the Manifesto it has been—I cannot see why any one should desire his retirement. However, the discussion of this point is futile. General Trepoff has become a symbol, like General Galliffet in France after the Commune. To the ordinary Russian Liberal he represents the Bureaucracy and all the evils of the old régime, and nothing can change that impression. His position is probably untenable, and he will be forced to resign, though, as far as liberty is concerned, at present the people do exactly what they like in the way of political meetings, the newspapers write what they please, and the prisons at Moscow and St. Petersburg have been partially emptied of their political prisoners. The Russians have, in fact, got the two boons which Matthew Arnold said were so dearly cherished by the English middle class—liberty to make fools of themselves, and publicity to show the world how they are doing it. The extreme revolutionary party wish to do away with the Emperor altogether and to have a Republic. If this is done some people say there will be a civil war in every town and village in the Russian Empire. As it is, half the people do not understand what a Constitution means. A soldier, for instance, asked whether it meant that the Emperor had resigned; and some of the educated class understand it still less.

Altogether the Liberals seem to me to be in too great a hurry; nevertheless things are apparently calming down. The question is—Will Count Witte between now and then succeed in thoroughly gaining the confidence of the Liberals and of the representatives of the Zemtsva? If he succeeds all will be well. The extreme Conservative Party, represented by the Moskovski Viedomosti, is really of no practical account. Its point of view was admirably represented by the hall porter of one of the old and conservative families at Moscow, who on the day of the publication of the Manifesto said: “The Emperor has deserted us.”

CHAPTER V
ST. PETERSBURG BEFORE THE SECOND STRIKE

St. Petersburg, November 9th.

I arrived here this morning from Moscow. The chief piece of news which is being discussed is the dismissal of Trepoff. Of Trepoff one always hears contradictory accounts: some people saying he is an inveterate reactionary, a Jew-baiter, &c.; others that he is a man of great common sense, liberal in policy as far as this is compatible with common sense, and never afraid of speaking his mind. I heard from people who ought to know that he was strongly in favour of the granting of the Manifesto of October 17th. What aroused the general hatred against him was his “order for the day” telling the soldiers not to spare cartridges, should there be disorders. I met him once here before the war broke out. I thought he seemed a sensible, strong-willed person. When he was Chief of the Police at Moscow he had the reputation of being sensible, of keeping order well, of being rather heavy-handed, and of committing foolish gaffes from time to time. I am certain he is neither the monster he is made out by the Liberal press here and abroad, nor yet the Cromwellian genius other people would have us believe him to be. I expect that his strength lies in the fact that he does not mind saying what he thinks. In St. Petersburg this quality is so rare that people who possess it appear to be geniuses.

November 12th.

I went this afternoon to hear a performance of Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” I don’t think the young lions in the gallery realised that this opera was the complete expression of the “Liberation movement” in Germany!

The number of hooligans who now infest the streets is great. A story is circulating of a hooligan who stopped a man and demanded his watch. He gave it. The hooligan then asked for his coat. He gave it also, the hooligan giving him his own coat in exchange. When the man who had been robbed got home he found his own watch and 170 roubles in the pocket of the hooligan’s coat.

November 14th.

The official declaration of the postponement of the Polish constitutional liberties is causing a good deal of talk and excitement.

One point with regard to Poland which people sometimes overlook is that there are Poles in Germany; Poles in the North of Germany besides those in German Poland; and moreover a great many Poles. German Poland also is an important factor in itself. The situation therefore is analogous to what would happen if Ireland were a country shared between France and England, and if England had been at war with Germany or any Power, just as Russia has been at war with Japan, and if while that war lasted France had promised to cause no trouble on our Irish frontier. Whether the German Emperor made any definite promise not to interfere on the Polish frontier during the Japanese War it is impossible to say; what at all events is certain is that an independent Poland would not be viewed favourably in Germany, because it would tend to produce an independent German Poland and a discontented and rebellious Polish population in North Germany. One has only to read Bismarck’s Memoirs to see that one of the keynotes of his policy was a friendship with Russia based on common interests and action with regard to Poland. It is unlikely that the German Emperor has departed from this traditional policy. However that may be, at this moment the situation in Poland, the prolonged strike which has continued steadily long after the strikes have ceased in other parts of Russia, calls for some immediate action. Two courses were open to the Government: either to grant autonomy at once or to enforce order by martial law. There is a rumour current here that the German Emperor, who would, as has already been explained, be strongly opposed to anything like Polish autonomy, had come to an agreement with the Russian Emperor on this point. The Russian newspapers to-day say that German troops are being moved to the frontier. In any case we are face to face with the fact that martial law has been proclaimed in Poland; and any sentimental sympathy with the Poles which one might feel is counteracted by the fact that had they only waited until the Duma or the Constituent Assembly met in Russia they would probably have got autonomy without any trouble. Whether the enforcement of martial law in Poland is a wise measure or not is another question; but it is one of two necessary courses.

The fact is that the Poles, like the Liberals here, are in a great hurry. They wish everything to be done at once, and changes which have taken some centuries to elaborate in other and calmer countries to be brought about here in a few days. The Liberals are now crying loudly that nothing will satisfy them but a Constituent Assembly based on universal suffrage. They are unwilling to wait a few months until order can be restored, and until the Duma can meet and vote on the adoption or the non-adoption of such an assembly. They wish it to come straight into existence, like Pallas from the brain of Zeus. All that is written in the Liberal papers here must not be taken as an absolutely impartial and dispassionate record of facts. A well-informed, sensible, and Liberal Russian told me yesterday that some of these papers—and among them not the most Radical, some of which, he said, were managed by sincere and able men—were merely for opposition for the sake of opposition, and that whatever Count Witte said or did they would say it was wrong; some of them act the part of deliberate inciters and wish merely to add fuel to the general excitement. I am not of course alluding to Liberal newspapers which have an old-established and solid reputation such as the Russkie Viedomosti of Moscow. There is a newspaper here which was especially violent in insisting on the fact that not only General Trepoff but also all the military should be removed from the town; these violent articles did not prevent them from sending privately to General Trepoff to ask for a squadron of Cossacks to protect their office, begging at the same time that this request might be kept secret.

The “Intellectuals” of Russia have many qualities, but everything they say must not be taken as being irrefutable; they are human, like the rest of us. They are less practical than some of us, even if we do not agree with a well-known French manager of a café here, who said: “Les Intelligents!” (with a snort of disgust). “Ce sont les intelligents les plus bêtes que j’aie jamais vus.” What one is hearing constantly said by sensible people is that before any political theory or system is carried into effect order must be restored; that the reforms which have been granted cannot be carried out in detail in a day; that there is one man capable of carrying these reforms out, and that he is Count Witte; that to oppose Count Witte for the sake of opposition is merely criminal, because if Count Witte throws up the sponge the game will be lost and the result will be universal anarchy, the only remedy for which will be universal and drastic repression. The trouble is that Count Witte is a man of business, and no one else in Russia is. It seems to me that the Liberals by their action are in danger of creating a party of reaction. For the so-called “reactionary party” did not up to the present moment exist. That is to say, there was practically nobody of any importance who wished to revert to the state of things before the granting of the Constitution. On the other hand, there are a great many people who think that the maintenance of order is all important.

The opponents of the Government, however, say that it is making for disorder, and point to the massacres of the Jews in the provinces. The Kronstadt mutiny is said not to have been political; nevertheless if the sailors had not got drunk, nothing could have prevented their blowing Peterhof to bits. A universal strike is threatened immediately.

November 17th.

Last night, while I was at the Opéra Bouffe, where the “Country Girl” was being given, the electric light went out. The performance continued all the same; the actors holding bedroom candles in their hands, while the auditorium remained in the dimmest of twilights. This is owing to the strike.

November 21st.

I started for London.

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.

CHAPTER VII
MOSCOW AFTER THE RISING

Moscow, January 1, 1906.

If it is difficult—and it seems to be difficult to the verge of impossibility—for the historian of the present day to write impartially about political movements which happened in the days of Queen Elizabeth and of Mary Queen of Scots, how infinitely more difficult must it be to arrive at an impartial view of events when one is oneself in the centre of them and living among the actors who are contributing to what is afterwards called history! The historian solves the question by frankly affiliating himself to one side (like Froude or Macaulay or Taine), and he is probably right in doing this; I notice, also, that our most eminent correspondents do the same. Therefore I confess at once that I am in no way free from prejudices, and I make no pretence of invincible impartiality; only I have seen and heard enough of both sides to learn one thing—that the two parties who are now engaged in strife in Russia are both right or both wrong. I will try to the best of my ability to stifle my own feelings, and, like a piece of blotting-paper which absorbs red or black ink indiscriminately, try to reproduce as best I can fragments of what I absorb.

The strike is over, although I believe some revolutionaries are still holding out in a factory near the Zoological Gardens. The shops are open, the electric light is shining on the hard, snowy, ice-cold streets, and life is going on, in the Russian expression, in its old rut. I suppose the first question which will present itself to people abroad anxious for information is: What did it all amount to? The second question: What is the result of it? The third is possibly: What do the people in Moscow, the inhabitant, the man in the street, think of it? Practically, it did not amount to very much; a general strike was proclaimed which was to take place all over Russia with the object of obtaining universal suffrage. The strike was not universal. It was closely followed by an armed rising of the revolutionary party in Moscow with the object of arresting the Governor-General and establishing a temporary Government. It resulted in complete and utter failure; and this seems to point to one of two things: either that the revolutionary party is less well organised than we supposed it to be, or that it wrongly gauged popular feeling and no longer found such strong support in public opinion as it did before. If it be judged by its recent action it cannot be said to have given proof of any good organisation, since it was obviously a mistake to foment a movement among the military—using economic needs and demands as a weapon—a week before the strike began. The economic demands were made by the soldiers, and satisfied immediately, and their mutiny ceased. It is nonsense to pretend that the soldiers have any revolutionary tendencies, and the revolutionaries made a great mistake in trying to undermine their belief in the Emperor. The same thing holds good as regards the peasants; and only yesterday a person with ultra-Radical convictions said to me: “The peasant, if he is hungry, can easily be made to loot and burn; but if he is replete he will send anybody who talks politics to him to the devil, and if any one attacks the Emperor before him he will tear him to pieces; possibly in twenty or thirty years things will be different and he will be an enlightened man; at present he is not, and there is no use in not facing the fact. The revolutionaries have made a cardinal error in attacking the peasants’ and the soldiers’ only ideal—call it ideal, idol, or what you like.” Therefore I say that in this case the behaviour of the revolutionaries showed neither insight nor statesmanship nor good organisation. It is possible, of course, that the strike may have been brought about, as I wrote before, by the workmen forcing the leaders’ hands, being unwilling to starve for a month but ready to rise in arms and fight for several days.

Now, as to what actually happened. With regard to the loss of life most people seem to be agreed in thinking that neither the revolutionaries nor the soldiers suffered very great losses, but that nine-tenths of the people killed were the onlookers among the public. Sometimes, of course, it was their own fault; sometimes it was not. When firing was going on it was as a rule difficult to get anywhere near it because the police warned you “off the course.” But then one must take into account that the streets in which the firing happened were inhabited, and that sometimes the unfortunate inhabitants were shot through no fault of their own. I think it is quite evident that there was a great deal of entirely unnecessary and absolutely futile bombarding of private houses. No doubt the revolutionaries fired from such houses; but they fired and went away, and then the house was battered and the revolutionaries were not caught. It must not be thought that Moscow is a heap of cinders as in 1812. For the most part the actual traces of bombardment are slight. The damage done to Fielder’s School, for instance, which is in my street, amounts to this: that the windows are broken and there is one hole in the wall. On the other hand, several houses have been entirely destroyed, and the printing offices of the Russkoe Slovo and some factories burnt—it is difficult to ascertain by which side, but possibly by both. This afternoon I went to a hospital to see some wounded soldiers, and in one of the wards the windows had been shattered by a bullet which had lodged in the cornice. Nothing will prevent me from believing that it must be possible to ascertain whether you are firing at a hospital, which is in one of the big streets of the town, or not. The complaints of the inhabitants are universal. Some blame the soldiers and some blame the revolutionaries, and one hears bitter stories from both parties about the conduct of their adversaries. Those on the Government side say: “What can you do against guerilla bands who dart round corners, shoot policemen, and run away?” The others say: “What can you think of people who shoot down the Red Cross doctors and bombard private houses?” Again, the supporters of the Government say the revolutionaries use and exploit the Red Cross and, under the guise of Red Cross men, do murder. The others say again “The Government hires a Militia drawn from the Black Hundred to shoot indiscriminately from the tops of church steeples.” Again you hear a story like this (I do not vouch for its truth): A student was surrounded by a mob, and on the point of being lynched, when he was rescued by a policeman, and on the way to the police station he shot the policeman. Or you hear that a number of peaceable citizens were walking up a street when the soldiery suddenly appeared and fired up the street indiscriminately. It must be borne in mind that the people of Moscow had been fully warned to stay at home as much as possible, that after six o’clock it was dangerous to go out, and that groups of three or more people would be fired on at sight, since the revolutionaries, who wear no uniform and are indistinguishable from the ordinary passer-by, took shelter among such groups. A man in a fur coat may, for all you know, have his pockets full of bombs. I know three cases of people being accidentally killed: a little boy ran out of his house, not into the street, but into the yard of his house to make a slide. As he did so he was shot by a stray bullet. The proprietor of the Ermitage Restaurant was also shot on his doorstep by a stray bullet. Thirdly, Metrofan, a kind of porter who was a friend of mine, and about whom I wrote in my last letter, has disappeared, and is not to be found in any of the hospitals. He was the man—an ex-soldier—who said that it was impossible to walk about safely (I laughed at him as he said it), and if he has been killed—which I trust is not true—he seems to have had the clearest presentiment of his fate. He was sent with a letter to a place where firing was going on. It is just this sort of people who suffered most: door-keepers and commissionaires who had to go about their ordinary business and take the risk of being in dangerous places. One extraordinarily typical incident was told me by an eye-witness. A man was walking up the Neglinii Proiesd, a big street, in which the Ermitage Restaurant is situated; he was deaf and could not hear the noise of the firing; after a time he was wounded in the leg. He saw the blood trickling on the snow, and he made the sign of the cross and lay down and folded his arms together, resigning himself to fate. After a time a poodle came along the street and began sniffing at his head; this was more than he could bear, and he jumped up again and, not noticing anything particular going on, pursued his way quietly home. I think the police behaved exceedingly well and the soldiers as well as could be expected. They were not, of course, responsible for indiscriminate bombardments, which were entirely due to the military in authority, and not, as is loosely stated, to the Governor-General, Admiral Dubassov. In some cases the authorities showed almost inspired ineptness. For instance, there is a large weaving factory in Moscow, the workmen of which had not struck. The police, with Cossacks, made a raid on it at night to search for arms. They found none; they ransacked the barracks of the men, and the men among whose chattels they found leaflets or any papers they beat. On the next day two-thirds of these men went on strike. This happened yesterday. Another case of the sort of thing which happens is worth mentioning. There is a house in which a Jew, a Liberal family, and a rich pork butcher dwell. The Liberal family have a boy of twelve, who had been talking about the revolution with pardonable boyish excess of zeal. The pork butcher said that the whole place was going to be blown up. On the following day soldiers arrived and began to shoot at the house. The owner, on inquiring the reason, received the reply: “You have got a Jew in the house, and we shall go on firing till you give us a nachai (a pourboire).” They did this every day. What the trouble really amounted to was this: an organised street fight, which lasted a week (nothing at all approaching either 1832 or 1848 or 1871 in Paris), and which caused a vast deal of damage to the inhabitants, and inflicted on them a considerable loss of life, besides pecuniary losses resulting from the stoppage of trade, &c. In the Paris Commune it should be remembered that a great many people were shot in cold blood after it was over, as a punishment, quite apart from the losses which occurred during the fighting.

I am perfectly convinced, perhaps wrongly, that the Government is in reality responsible for the troubles, owing to its dilatoriness in making laws. I know the answer to this. It is said: “How can you carry out reforms when the people won’t let you do so—when the moment they are undertaken a series of strikes and disturbances begin, and public servants behave in a manner which would not for a moment be tolerated in the most progressive of Western nations?” On the other hand it is obvious that all the strikes and disturbances which occurred during last year arose from the fact of the delay in the granting of reforms. And now when the people see this delay still existing, and, rightly or wrongly, argue that nothing has been given them till they extorted it, it is perhaps natural that their frame of mind should be one of excited exasperation. The Government expects them to behave reasonably, act reasonably, and think reasonably. They are in a frame of mind when reasonable action or thought is difficult of attainment, and the cause of their demented attitude is the action of the Government in the past. I do not defend them, but I understand them. My heart is with them; my head is against them. Their situation seems to me to resemble that of a man who for years has been kept on the verge of starvation, and is suddenly given champagne (liberty of the Press), and is promised a fixed and daily system of meals, consisting of wholesome food (Parliament). Then the same people who starved him begin to be dilatory in starting his new régime. Is it not easy to understand that the conduct of such a man would not be likely to be reasonable? I hope that one of the results of the events in Moscow will be to make the Government realise the pressing necessity of taking some steps to win the confidence of all that is “Moderate” in Russia. I hope also that it will impress on all the “Moderates” the necessity of combination and co-operation; because the revolutionaries declare that they will strike again in March if they do not get what they wish, and that the events of Moscow will be repeated in St. Petersburg. If they decide on this, no amount of arrests and repression will prevent them, and if the private houses of St. Petersburg are to be subjected to indiscriminate bombardment the outlook is indeed serious. Other results are these. The soldiers have been proved to be loyal, but a Government cannot subsist on bayonets alone. Again, there will be a large number of workmen out of work; these men when they go back to their villages will be met with some such remarks as these: “No money. You struck? What for? Get out.”

These two last mentioned facts should make strikes in the future more difficult. Some people say that nothing will pacify the revolutionaries; possibly, but the important question is, how far will the revolutionaries be supported by public opinion? That depends entirely on the action of the Government. It is certainly untrue to say that public opinion in Moscow was against the revolutionaries, if it is an exaggeration to say that it supported them. This leads us to another question: What do the people here think of it all? In answer I can only repeat what I said in my last letter: there exists violent and bitter partisanship on both sides; there exists also a large class of onlookers which is half-indifferent, half-resigned, and half-sceptical—in the main indifferent. But if one is to go by facts one can point to the small crowd—a selected and, in some parts, I believe, a paid crowd of men—who attended the manifestation for the Emperor’s birthday, the vast crowd which attended Bauman’s funeral, and the great numbers of working men and others who have been fighting against the Government these last few days. When I was talking to the wounded soldiers to-day in the hospital they told me that they had heard from men returning from the Far East that the reports of a large mutiny in the Army there were untrue, that there had been discontent about not coming home and a small rising, but nothing like what was reported. One man said to me: “We may ask for more soup and meat, but is it likely we are going to mutiny for that? They will give us more if we ask for it; soldiers can’t strike, it is as if the whole population were to strike.” I refrained from pointing out that this is what exactly had occurred in October. I answered by my simile of the starving man who is suddenly given champagne.

To-day I tried the Sortes Virgilianæ with regard to the present situation and the chief actors of the drama of Russia. The result was as follows:

1. (For Count Witte)

“dextra discedens impulit altam

Haud ignara modi puppim.”—Æ. x. 245.

2. (The general situation)

“Extemplo turbati animi, concussaque vulgi

Pectora, et arrectæ stimulis haud mollibus iræ.

Arma manu trepidi poscunt; fremit arma juventus,

Flent mæsti mussantque patres. Hic undique clamor

Dissensu vario magnus se tollit in auras.”

Æ. xi. 451.

January 2nd.

I went this afternoon, for the second time to-day, to the Soldiers’ Hospital. One of them asked me whether Paris was in Turkey. He said the Turks were nice. Another asked me whether there wasn’t a place where it was all water. I described Venice as best I could. On my way to the hospital I went to the Hôtel Dresden. Metrofan has been killed. His sister and his wife arrived in tears and in a terrible state. He was shot by a shell.

January 3rd.

In the hospital a soldier told me two fairy tales; one was about a wizard, and the other was in octosyllabic verse. It took twenty-five minutes to tell. When he alluded to the “cloak of darkness” he called it a “waterproof” cloak.

January 4th.

A cabman who drove me home last night drove me again to-day. He said it was lucky I had taken him yesterday, because he had not had another fare; and that he had told his comrades all about it, and had said he would have been lost had not the Lord sent him a Barine, and such a Barine too! (I had heavily overpaid him.) I said, “I suppose you said, ‘God sent you a fool.’” “Oh! Barine, don’t offend God,” he answered. The cabmen are a constant source of amusement to me here. The other day, when I was driving, the cabman stopped and made another one stop to admire his horse. After we drove on again, we kept on meeting again, and every time we met we slowed down, and the conversation about the horse and how much it had cost was continued.

January 5th.

I taught a soldier at the hospital the Latin alphabet. He said he would write me a letter soon in Latin letters; only he did not understand the use of the letters W and X; but he added, I will somehow or other find letters which will serve as equivalents to these in the Russian alphabet.

From having had much conversation with people who defend the revolutionaries with what seems to me nonsensical exaggeration, I feel a wave of reaction coming over me. I can never resist this subtle spirit of contradiction when I am with people who belong to a party, and hear them express party feeling in unmeasured and exaggerated terms. If I am with violent Conservatives a subtle spirit of Liberalism rises within me, and vice versâ. Besides this, I hate political parties.

CHAPTER VIII
THE “INTELLIGENZIA”

January 6th.

I arrived at St. Petersburg this morning. I have been trying to formulate my reactionary feelings. I will put them on paper; although I know I shall only have to spend a very short time with real reactionaries to be driven straight back into the opposite camp. But lately at Moscow I have had a heavy dose of anti-governmental unfairness. Too heavy for the present, although perhaps I shall one day in the future think that it was not unfair at all.

I asked a man the other day, who is employed in the “Zemstva,” what party he belonged to. “I belong to the party of common sense,” he answered; “unfortunately it does not exist.” This exactly sums up, I think, the impression that any impartial observer must necessarily derive from the present situation in Russia. Common sense has gone. Hysteria and undisciplined rant have taken its place.

First, the revolutionaries. There are two kinds of revolutionaries: the active, who throw bombs at policemen and soldiers, who are ready to dare anything and sacrifice themselves; and the passive revolutionaries who sit at home and sympathise and talk a great deal. What is their point of view?

1. They consider that all classes who are not definitely enrolled under their flag are violent reactionaries and are fit to be classed with the “Black Hundred.” The Duma that is to be, they say, will be a “Black Hundred” Duma; the present Government is purely and simply a reactionary Government composed of bureaucrats, and no good can come to Russia until the ulcer is pierced to the core, and all bureaucrats, together with the Emperor and all his family, and all his Court, are removed. The objection that the present Government is merely temporary until the Duma assembles, they meet with the counterargument that the Government, with the franchise law as it is, is capable of influencing the elections to any extent, and that the result will be a reactionary Duma.

2. The second question is—What do they want? They say they want a Constituent Assembly and universal suffrage, and no doubt they do want this. But whether they would be satisfied with this if they were given it is another question. Personally, my experience has so far led me to believe that they would in no wise be satisfied with this; I would lay odds to this effect. I may, no doubt, be mistaken. I believe what they really want is for Russia to become a federation of autonomous States represented by a Republic. Some of the more moderate are either opposed to this or refrain from stating any opinion in favour of it, owing to the fact that they know that the Army and ninety million peasants are ready to kill any one within reach if the “Gasudar” is to be tampered with.

They fear that if the question of a Republic is brought forward there will be a general massacre of the educated bourgeoisie, the so-called “Intelligenzia.” Nothing is more probable. Some people say that nothing will really change the attitude of these people: no more than any amount of measures which one of Lord Salisbury’s Cabinets might have adopted would have changed the opinion of the supporters of Mr. Gladstone or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, or vice versâ. That it is utterly futile to expect common sense or common fairness from them. That they have their party feeling, to which they are ready to sacrifice everything, and that it is infinitely stronger and more bitter, and necessarily stronger and more bitter, than anything of which we have had experience in England during the last century.

Some people object that they understand the militant revolutionaries being in this frame of mind, but they do not understand the more intelligent passive and detached supporters of the advanced party sharing such childish views. The more intelligent and detached supporters are even more violent in their talk than the militant fighters. At present the kind of argument one hears used is like the following, which I have heard with my own ears. I have heard intelligent cultivated people say: “How wicked and cowardly of the Government to fire upon the revolutionaries, since they have guns and the revolutionaries haven’t got any.” The English mind, which, be it Liberal or Conservative, tends to common sense, revolts against such reasoning. It is rare to find in Russia an Englishman who sympathises with the revolutionaries. English common sense revolts at the hysterical impatience which demands the immediate fulfilment of measures more radical and socialist than exist in any European state, and the common British sense of fairness is violated at hearing of the wanton murder of policemen, who earn a poor living and are in no way responsible for the misdeeds of the Government, exalted as a patriotic execution worthy of Harmodius and Aristogiton.

On the other hand I think we fail—I am alluding to Englishmen who visit Russia, and not to those who live here permanently—to realise that the Russians have been up to now destitute of certain guarantees which Englishmen regard as a matter of course, and that they do not consider they have obtained these guarantees yet; and here it is difficult to contradict them.

Lately an incident happened which has proved a kind of focussing glass concentrating the opinions of both parties. The revolutionaries walked into the house of the head of the detective police service, dragged him from his family circle and shot him. Somewhat later a police officer named Ermolov walked into the house of a doctor and shot him before his wife’s eyes. The officer gave himself up to the authorities and said his act was due to momentary aberration. Around these incidents both parties wage a war of tongues. The sympathisers with the revolutionaries talk of the martyrdom of the doctor; whereas their opponents say that the fuss they are making is unjustifiable since they did the very same thing.

Personally I think that the weak side of the Government case is this: that the revolutionaries are sure of punishment if caught; whereas the official who does wrong is not punished, and his wrong-doing is surely more heinous because he is the representative of the law. On the other hand I think the wanton murder of policemen has nothing of the heroic in it, and when I hear it spoken of in terms of admiration I am disgusted.

As to the opponents of the revolutionaries, they also attack the Government, and especially Count Witte. They say that the only supporters of Count Witte are foreigners. The Slovo newspaper said, for instance, that foreigners only supported Count Witte because they desired the enfeeblement of Russia. But reactionaries say that the Russian revolution is entirely fostered and supported by a foreign Government. Now it cannot be to the French Government’s interest for Russia’s credit to collapse, nor can it be to the German Government’s interest for Russia to become a federation of autonomous States; therefore it must be the English Government, and, when pressed, they admit this. But if the English Press is trying to ruin Russia by supporting Count Witte, it is obvious that it cannot be at the same time trying to ruin Russia by supporting the revolutionaries. One of these two statements must be untrue; quite apart from the question as to whether the collapse of Russia’s credit would prove a material advantage to England. The fact is that the reactionaries who talk in this strain are politically limited in their ideas; they know practically nothing either of England or of any other country, they merely repeat old catchwords and musty traditions which have been proved to be absurd.

Now apart from these reactionary Jingoes, who are really of no importance whatsoever now, there is a large class of people who six months ago would have been called red revolutionaries, and who now call themselves “Moderates,” and are called by the revolutionaries members of the “Black Gang.”

These people wish for the most speedy fulfilment of the Manifesto of the 17th of October; they blame the Government for its delay in making laws, and they blame Count Witte. But they look upon the Duma as being competent to settle the various aspirations of the various parties. They should be a strong party; the trouble is that up to the present time they have never seen their way either to support the Government or to form a homogeneous party among themselves. It is possible that the recent events at Moscow may have the effect of causing them to coalesce. It is to be hoped that this will happen; for in them lies the safe via media between the two extremes of reaction and anarchy.

It will be noticed that all these various parties are united with regard to one detail, that is in their blame of Count Witte. It is also worth mentioning that in all the innumerable attacks made on Count Witte nobody has so far had the ingenuity or the perspicacity to name his possible successor. Would the revolutionaries really like him to go? I doubt it. They would have, in the first place, nobody to attack; in the second place, they would risk having a more reactionary successor. For that reason I have never up to now believed in any of the countless reports regarding Count Witte’s immediate resignation.

At present the Government is feeling extremely confident owing to the way in which recent events have turned out; the revolutionaries also profess to be in no wise disheartened; they say that the Moscow rising is nothing in comparison with what they will do in March, and that seeing that they have exhausted the efficacy of strikes and armed risings they will adopt the method of terrorism and blow up Government buildings with dynamite (in March). I have heard intelligent sympathisers with the revolutionaries talking of such a policy with enthusiasm, saying that this is the only way to deal with the Government, and that the Duma, such as it will be, is not only of no account but will never come into existence.

These people are members of the Russian “Intelligenzia,” or middle professional class. They have many admirable qualities, and I live among them and like them; but I think that sometimes some of their members talk most wildly and ought to know better. Up to now, of course, they have been carefully prevented by the Government from taking any part in politics whatsoever, and they feel now that vast possibilities have been opened to them; that it is they who made the revolution, and that it is they who are going to rule the country.

Only at present they have not succeeded in producing a great man. They arrogate to themselves the position of sole spokesmen and representatives of the Russian people, and at this also common sense revolts. For apart from the fact of the peasants distrusting them, and the Army hating them, what have they done for Russia? Possibly it was not they who brought about the Constitution. They class the whole gentry and aristocracy with the Bureaucrats under one sweeping ban of blame and abuse; but the gentry laid the foundations of reform and revolution long before they existed as a class at all (vide the Decembrists, 1825). Moreover, the gentry gave to Russia Poushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Tchaikovski, and Dostoievski; in fact, her literature, her art, her music, her poetry; all her great men and men of genius. In the sphere of the arts they have made Russia hideous by importing a debased art nouveau from Munich; and in the sphere of literature they have produced some excellent writers of short stories. In verse (the verse of such writers as “Skitaletzt” is weaker than the prose of Andreev and Co.) the English equivalent would be the political poetry of Mr. Alfred Austin; the political tendencies of the Russian writers, of course, differ widely from that of the English Laureate, whose work, although it has met with public recognition, would, perhaps, have made England less famous as a literary nation were it the sole representative of our poetical literature.

Now that I have disburdened myself on the subject of the unfairness of the “Intelligenzia,” I feel better. According to the oriental fashion I should at once add counter-arguments giving all that there is to be said in their favour. This I will do another day.

Moscow, January 13th.

I came back to Moscow on the 10th. I saw the old year out (it is the Russian New Year’s Eve) with the kind family who live on the floor above mine, and with whom I always have my meals. They played Vindt all night. When the New Year came “A happy New Year” was drunk in champagne.

CHAPTER IX
THE BEGINNING OF THE REACTION

Moscow, January 14th.

To-day is the Russian New Year’s Day. To-day is also Sunday, so it would seem a fitting occasion to preach a long sermon on Russia. I have been amusing myself by finding suitable texts for such a sermon. They are all from the works of Renan, a man who gave a good deal of thought to the various political movements and phases of the world’s history, and expressed himself with that nice lucidity and divine ease which we call a perfect style.

The first is this: “La Révolution française fut la gageure d’un petit nombre d’énergumènes qui réussirent à faire croire qu’ils avaient entraîné la nation.”

No. 2: “Éternelle puérilité des répressions pénales, appliquées aux choses de l’âme.”

No. 3: “Dans ses accès de vertu, l’homme croit pouvoir se passer entièrement de l’égoisme et de l’intérêt propre; l’égoisme prend sa revanche, en prouvant que l’absolu désintéressement engendre des maux plus graves que ceux qu’on avait cru éviter par la suppression de la propriété.”

These are my texts, and, as is usually the case when the text is good, the sermon is superfluous.

New Year’s Day is, we are so often told, a good occasion to look forward and behind. What, then, is the outlook at present? Life is going on at St. Petersburg and Moscow exactly as usual, and here, save in the smouldering ruins of the factory of the Presnaya and various broken windows and damaged cornices, there is nothing to tell one that anything unusual has occurred. The Government is said to be confident. Foreign loans are in the air. The revolutionaries, it is said, have been crushed and dispersed. Electioneering work is beginning; in fact, all is going as well as can be expected. That is one view—an optimistic view which I do not altogether share. In the first place, when people say that the Revolutionary Party or its leaders are a minority I would reply by quoting text No. 1. “Laws, in a country which is following an idea, are always made by the minority,” says Renan, immediately before the sentence I have quoted.

Secondly, the Moscow episode does not seem to me to have affected the revolutionary movement in the slightest degree. The numbers of the killed among the insurgents were trifling; all the important and real leaders of the Revolution had left Moscow before this affair, which was, in fact, conducted by boys and girls; and if a number of boys and girls can, at the head of a mass of workmen, bring the garrison to distraction, take guns from the troops, and force the authorities to bombard the houses of the inhabitants without raising universal indignation, things must be fairly serious.

To say that they have alienated public sympathy is certainly untrue; for although they started the fighting, as soon as the authorities answered with artillery the common ordinary man in the street began in many cases to say that it was the fault of the Government and the authorities. Sympathy in Russia is always certain to be with the people who are shot, be they right or wrong.

“Whatever happens, we have got

The Maxim-gun and they have not.”

That is, they argue, the motto of the authorities, and that is exactly the sentiment which arouses the indignation of the citizen. A cabman asked some one the other day when they were going to punish “him.” Who is “him”? he was asked. “Admiral Dubassov,” was the answer. “Surely the Emperor will punish him for shooting at the houses.” The energetic manner in which the rising was suppressed has, I am told, produced a good effect in Europe; doubtless energetic measures were not only necessary but imperative in the first instance; whether the continuation of them now is a mistake or not only the future can show. One fact, however, is certain, and that is that these measures are being conducted with the same arbitrariness which has characterised the action of the Russian police in the past, and are causing intense exasperation. There is a word in Russian, “Proisvol,” which means acting, like Wordsworth’s river, according to your “own sweet will,” unheedful of, and often in defiance of, the law. It is precisely this manner of acting which has brought about the revolution in Russia. It is against the “Proisvol” that all the educated classes and half the official class rebelled. And it is this very “Proisvol” against which the whole country rose on strike, which the Government promised should henceforth disappear, and which is at the present moment triumphantly installed once more as the ruling system.

Of course it may be objected that anarchy and lawless revolution can only be met by severe repression; but the question is: Must it be met by arbitrary and lawless repression? Hang the insurgents if you like, but why shoot a doctor who has got nothing to do with it before you know anything about him? To stop a newspaper like the Russkie Viedomosti, for instance, is an act of sheer “Proisvol,” the reason given being that it had subscription lists for workmen’s unions, which it denies, saying that the money was for the wounded. Here I point to my second text. All this repression seems to me utterly futile. The future, however, can show whether this is indeed so.

In the meantime election programmes are appearing. That of the Constitutional Democrats has come out, and is moderate in tone, although its clauses are extensive. It insists, among other things, on universal suffrage and an eight-hours’ day for the workmen. Here I would point to text 3. Everybody whom I have seen in Russia in any way connected with the working man is agreed in saying that an eight-hours’ day is an absolute impossibility. That a Russian workman’s eight hours means in reality about six hours. That no factory in Russia could exist on these terms. The Constitutional Democrats seem in this case to have omitted the factor of human egoism and interest.

One of the gravest factors of the general situation is that Eastern Siberia seems to be entirely in the hands of the revolutionaries, who are apparently managing the railway and everything else with perfect order, while the troops, anxious only to get home, are taking any engines they can lay hands on and racing back, one train literally racing another!

Altogether it cannot be said that the outlook is particularly cheerful. There is one bright point so far, and that is that all parties seem anxious to convoke the Duma. The Liberals want it, the Conservatives want it, the Extreme Radicals sanction the elections. The Radicals say it will be packed by the Government; but I do not see how this is possible. They say they will let it meet, and that if it proves “a Black Hundred Duma” they will destroy it. They call everything which is not Radical “Black Hundred.” But, as I have said before, and as I cannot tire of saying, it is useless to blame these extreme parties for talking nonsense. They have been driven to this nonsense by the still greater want of sense on the part of the Government of Russia during the last twenty years, and in wanting to wipe out this system altogether they are, after all, in the right. Unfair they may be, hysterical, and absurd. So were the Jacobins; but the absurdity, extravagance, and violence of the Jacobins were only the logical result of the “Ancien Régime.” So it is here, although it is misleading to compare the present movement in Russia with the French Revolution.

And behind all the rumours and conflicts of various parties looms the agrarian question; the ninety million peasants who till the land in the same manner in which they tilled it four hundred years ago; whose land from generation to generation dwindles by partition, while the population increases. How and when is this question going to be solved? It can only be solved by the education of the peasants themselves; but the question is what can be done to gain time and to make this education possible. My outlook is, perhaps, too pessimistic. I do not know. I only feel that the whole revolutionary movement is beyond all forces of control, and that no measures in the world can put it back now; whether it could by wisdom be led into safe channels is another question. Such a thing has seldom been seen in the history of the world, and it is, after all, only out of the past that we make the future.

To get rid of these gloomy ideas I went to the hospital, where New Year’s Day was celebrated with great gusto; there was a Christmas-tree, dancing and song, and it was delightful to see a little tiny boy and a huge soldier dancing opposite each other. The Russian peasants dance to each other, and separately, of course, like Highlanders when they dance a reel or a schottische. It was gay and yet rather melancholy; there were so many cripples, and it reminded me a little of the Christmas feast described in Dostoievski’s “Letters from a Dead House.”

January 18th.

To-day I heard a characteristic story. A student told it to me. A peasant was looking at a rich man’s house in one of the streets of Moscow. An agitator went up to him and said: “Think of the rich man living in that great house, and think of your miserable position.”

“Yes,” said the peasant cheerfully, “it’s a big house; he’s a proper Barine.”

“But,” said the agitator, much irritated, “it’s most unjust that he should live in such a big house and that you should live in a small house. You should turn him out of it.”

“How could that be?” answered the peasant. “He is used to being rich. All his life he has lived in plenty. What would he do in poverty? We are used to poverty, and we must have pity on those who are not used to it.”

The agitator then gave the peasant up and went away in disgust.

January 20th.

I arrived in St. Petersburg this morning. Yesterday a Russian friend of mine discussed with me my ideas on the “Intelligenzia” and their revolutionary sympathies which I had embodied in a letter to the Morning Post. My friend said that I had committed a gross injustice to the Russian “Intelligenzia,” and that my letter, by reflecting the opinion of Englishmen who had spent but a short time in Russia, and judged everything from the point of view of a country where political liberty had long since been an established fact, gave a wrong impression. There is some truth in this, no doubt. It is difficult here to keep a cool head and not to be swayed by circumambient influence. The danger does not lie in being influenced by those who immediately surround one, but rather in being influenced inversely by their opinions. I mean one has only to talk to a revolutionary or to a conservative long enough, at the present moment, to be convinced that his adversary is right. I still hold, however, to what I wrote about the unfairness and exaggerations of the sympathisers with the revolution among the “Intelligenzia.” I think they are incapable of looking at the matter impartially, and no wonder. Moreover, the Government past and present is responsible for their frame of mind. Again, I still hold to what I said, that the “Intelligenzia” have not produced a great man; but instead of retracting what I said, I will, as I said I would do, after the oriental fashion, having stated all that there was to be said against them, try and set forth all that is to be said in favour of the “Intelligenzia.”

In the first place, what is the “Intelligenzia”? Properly speaking, it is composed of every one who can read or write. But the term is generally used to designate those members of the middle class who belong to the professional classes—doctors, professors, teachers, journalists, and literary men. In its largest sense it is the whole middle class, from which nine-tenths of the officials are drawn. But when Russians speak of it they generally mean the middle class, excluding officials. Such as it is, it contains, as well as the most hot-headed revolutionaries and violent youths, all that is best and most intelligent and cultivated in Russia, all men of science who have done remarkable work in various branches, all doctors, whose life in the country is a life of difficulty and self-sacrifice which it would be difficult to exaggerate, all the professors and the teachers, the actors, the singers, the musicians, the artists, the writers. These people have for years been the absolute prey of the irresponsibility and blundering stupidity of the higher bureaucrats. They have with difficulty been able to obtain foreign books (Matthew Arnold’s “Essays on Criticism” was one of the books on the index two years ago); in teaching, half the facts of history have been forbidden them; and at the slightest suspicion of not being “well-intentioned” they have been placed under police surveillance and often been subjected to gross indignities. Is it to be wondered at that they are bitter now? The average man and woman of the Russian middle class is incomparably better educated than the average English man or woman of the same class. They are saturated with the foreign classics. They often speak two languages besides Russian; and they are conversant with modern thought in the various European countries as far as it is allowed to reach them. When one sees the average Englishman abroad one is aghast at his ignorance and his want of education in comparison with these people. I have constantly, both here and in Manchuria, found to my shame that I knew nothing of English history in comparison with the Russians I met. The reason is very simple: they are taught at school things which will be useful to them. Every one is given a general foundation of knowledge. I do not believe the average Englishman to be more stupid than the average foreigner, but he is not educated. A man may go through a public school and even a university in England and come out at the end ludicrously ignorant of everything except the classical books he was obliged to “get up,” and at our public schools, with a few brilliant exceptions, the education of the average boy amounts to this: that he does not learn Latin and Greek, and he certainly learns nothing else. I never heard English history mentioned at Eton, and all the English history I know I learnt in the nursery. The average Russian boy knows far more about English history than the average English boy, let alone European history; and a cultivated Russian of the middle class is saturated with John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, John Morley, Buckle, and Carlyle; whereas Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley are treated as Russian classics. Only yesterday I travelled with a man who, although he could not speak English, was intimately conversant with our whole literature, and told me that the whole generation to which he belonged had been taught to find their intellectual food in England and not in France and Germany. “How is it,” he asked me, “that we Russians who live on English thought, and admire and respect you as a nation far more than other nations, have been so long at loggerheads with you politically?” I said that I thought the reason was that, although the cultivated and the average educated Russian knows our literature well, the nation as a whole does not know us, and we do not know Russia at all—for most intelligent Englishmen are ludicrously ignorant of Russia. Besides this, the bureaucratic régime has acted like a barrier between the two countries and fostered and fed on the misunderstanding.

As far as politics are concerned things have moved on. Some weeks ago it was possible to believe that the Government had been wantonly hampered in its well-intentioned efforts, now it is only too plain that by their acts they are doing their best to justify the violence of the revolutionaries. The “Proisvol” (arbitrariness) continues on an extensive scale. People in Moscow are arrested every day and without discrimination. Influential people do not dare to inscribe their names on the lists of the Constitutional Democratic Party for fear of being arrested. The police have unlimited powers, and all the methods of the old régime are flourishing once more. I do not believe, as is sure to be objected, that the action of the revolutionaries has rendered this necessary. I do not believe that the best way to fight revolution is by lawless and arbitrary repression. Lastly, and most important, it is not the immorality or the illegality of the methods that I find reprehensible, but their stupidity and ineffectiveness. If all this repression were the iron working of one great central mind, which ruthlessly imposed its will on the nation, breaking down all obstacles and restoring order, it would be excusable. But it is not. I do not believe the Government is responsible for what happens in Moscow; and in Moscow itself the various authorities shift the responsibility on to each other. It is the old story of the bureaucratic system—no responsibility and no individual efficiency, but a happy-go-lucky, drifting, and blind incompetence, striking where it should not strike, being lenient too late, and never foreseeing what is under its very nose. When one comes to think, it is not surprising, considering that the instruments with which Count Witte has to deal are of the old regulation bureaucratic pattern. How, for instance, can the Minister of the Interior, M. Durnovo, be expected to adopt any other methods than those which are ingrained in him? It is as if the Liberals persuaded Mr. Chamberlain to speak at a public meeting and then expressed surprise at finding that he was in favour of Tariff Reform. When some of the revolutionaries were summarily executed after the recent troubles in Moscow, a sentence of Tacitus came back to me which is peculiarly applicable to the old Russian bureaucratic methods: “Interfectis Varrone consule designate et Petronio Turpiliano consulari ... inauditi atque indefensi tamquam innocentes perierunt” (Varro and Turpilianus were executed without trial and defence, so that they might just as well have been innocent).

The whole system of arresting doctors and professors, prohibiting newspapers and plays, censoring books and songs, is now, whatever may have been its effect in the past, childishly futile. Moreover, even this is blunderingly done. The harmless newspapers are suppressed and more violent ones appear. But the point is the futility of it all; as soon as a serious newspaper is stopped it reappears on the next day under another name. Each repressed satirical newspaper (and these journals are often exceedingly scurrilous) finds a successor. It is not as if the revolutionaries were the result of the newspapers; it is the newspapers which are the reflection of the revolutionaries; and until you can repress every revolutionary the spirit which finds its vent in these organs will exist. To repress the Liberal spirit altogether it will be necessary to suppress nearly all the thinking population of Russia. The only hope is that all this is, after all, only temporary, and that the meeting of the Duma will put an end to this riot of lawlessness and inefficiency. One competent man like Count Witte is not enough to deal with things which are happening all over the country in so large a place as Russia, and he is bound to trust himself to minor authorities—and these in many cases prove themselves unfit for their task. “Why are they chosen?” it may be asked. The answer is: “Who else is there to choose until the whole pack of cards is thoroughly reshuffled or rather destroyed, and a new pack, men chosen by the Duma, is adopted?”

“But,” it is objected, “however much you reshuffle the cards, the pack will be the same.” This is true; but one radical change would make all the difference in the world, and that would be the introduction of the system of responsibility. Whenever there has been in a Russian town a governor who had declared his firm intention of holding his subordinates responsible for their acts, and has put such a declaration into practice, things have always gone well. There was for years a chief of the police at Moscow, who was just such a man. The trouble is now, that however good a subordinate official may be, there is no guarantee that he may not be removed at any minute owing to the passing whim of those who are above.

CHAPTER X
CURRENT IDEAS IN ST. PETERSBURG

St. Petersburg, January 27th.

People are now saying that the revolutionary movement in Russia has suffered a complete defeat. I do not share this point of view; my reason is not based upon prophetic discernment into the future, but on what has happened in the past.

If we are in the presence of a stream and note the beginnings of its turbulent course, and then observe that it has met with the obstacle of a dam and burst through that obstacle, and that this occurrence has been repeated six times, with the result that every time the dam has been burst the stream has gathered in strength, when this dam is made a seventh time we are justified in concluding that as the dam is the same in kind as it was before, and the stream also, the stream will break through it a seventh time, although every time the dam was made the onlookers made the observation that the progress of the stream was definitively impeded. Now this is precisely what has happened with regard to the Russian revolutionary movement up to the present time. And we are now witnessing an act of a drama which began in 1895.

The course of events was like this: When the Emperor Nicholas II. came to the Throne a deputation of the Zemstva were told that their moderate demands for the beginning of reform were senseless dreams. Upon these words the first dam was built, and it took the form of universal repression.

In December, 1904, the ukase, embodying the nullified projects of Prince Mirsky, was immediately followed by a threatening Manifesto, and a second dam was made. This dam, however, was ineffectual, and it was followed by the rising of the workmen of the 9th of January, and when this meeting was dispersed by the troops, and a third dam constructed, people said—and among them people who lived here and ought to have known better—that the Russian revolution was over. February 18th saw the publication of the two contradictory Manifestoes and the Boulygin project, and during this time the dam took the shape of the Trepoff dictatorship, which, as General Trepoff is a competent man, proved to be for the time being more effectual than the obstacles which had hitherto been employed.

However, in spite of this there came the incidents of the mutiny on board the Kniaz Potemkin and at Kronstadt and Libau. This was followed by the concession of the law giving the Duma on August 6th, which was accompanied by a law forbidding public meetings. A fourth dam had been made. But the current only increased in strength. The Agrarian movement began. The Labour movement increased. Meetings took place everywhere till the dam burst, owing to the fact that the whole of Russia went on strike in October, 1905.

Then the Manifesto of the 17th of October was given—a Manifesto granting freedom of meeting and of speech, but no laws. It was followed by the declaration of martial law in Poland. This measure was in its turn succeeded by the St. Petersburg strike, the Sevastopol mutiny, and a violent agrarian agitation in the province of Saratov, which spread all over the “black soil” country in Russia. Repressive measures followed. The Zemstvo leaders then addressed themselves to Count Witte, and asked for a cessation of repressive measures, the control of irresponsible bureaucrats in the provinces, and the right of universal suffrage. This was refused. The postal officials, who had formed a union, were arrested; there ensued postal strikes in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Thereupon a law was promulgated—this was the fifth dam—by which each provincial governor could declare his government to be outside the law. This was followed by the armed rising in Moscow, and after this a sixth dam was made by the adoption of repressive measures of arrest all over Russia.

Now, such questions as whether the revolutionary party was right or wrong; whether they were too much in a hurry, and too impulsive and violent in their methods; whether postal officials and Government servants are justified in striking, &c., are altogether beside the mark. The fact is that they have six times been successful in bursting the barrier which has been placed to oppose them. And now once again people are saying that because the movement has been temporarily checked—because a dam has been made—the movement is over; that the stream will not be able to continue its course. This is where I take leave to differ from those who have from the first predicted the ultimate collapse of the revolutionary movement. I differed then—in January, 1905—and I continue to differ now. I am aware that I am laying myself open to the charge of prophesying. “When you keep a diary,” said a shrewd observer of a past generation, “don’t write down public events which you can find in any record, but put down what you think will happen, and then you will be astonished to see how wrong you have been.”

St. Petersburg, February 1st.

I have been amusing myself by putting down some current ideas—those of some people I have met here and some of my own, in the form of a dialogue. The people represented are not real people. They are scarcely even types, but mere mouthpieces of current ideas. I have not tried to describe a conversation such as one now hears in Russia, but I have attempted to put in the form of dialogue certain ideas I have heard expressed by my friends and certain opinions which have occurred to myself during such intercourse.

“There are three parties I could belong to,” said the small landlord; “the alliance of October 17th, the alliance of Right and Order, and the Constitutional Democratic Party. I would be willing to support any one of these three, in the hope that they would lead directly or indirectly to the disappearance of the present dynasty and to the establishment of a real autocracy.”

The student laughed. “The Constitutional Democrats will not lead you to an autocracy of any kind,” he said.

“I am not so sure,” said the landlord. “Napoleon was the child of the Revolution, and so was Cromwell. I support the Radicals in the same way in which I would have supported the Puritans to get rid of Charles I., and make way for Cromwell.”

“And Charles II.?” asked the professor, who had just returned from a prolonged stay in England.

“Precisely, and Charles II.,” said the landlord. “The Charles the Firsts of history are invincibly ignorant, whereas the Charles the Seconds have learned the lesson and make ideal monarchs. One cannot always be governed by men of genius, and in the intervening period, when the genius is absent, I prefer to be governed by a man of the world, such as Charles II. or Louis XVIII., rather than by demagogues and idealists.”