CHAPTER XX MRS. PANKHURST IN RUSSIA
Emmeline Pankhurst, the English militant suffrage leader, known to thousands in this country, went to Russia in late June of this year to organize the women of the country and help them to support the provisional government and to oppose the Bolsheviki or extremists. She succeeded in organizing a group of strong and influential women leaders, and she might have accomplished great good had not Kerensky frowned on the movement. Mrs. Pankhurst’s project, in my opinion, was one of Kerensky’s many lost opportunities.
This will answer a natural curiosity on the part of the reader as to why Mrs. Pankhurst came to be in revolutionary Russia. She went of her own initiative and under the auspices of her suffrage organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union, but her plan had the warm approval of the English premier, Mr. Lloyd George, who personally issued her passport and that of her secretary, Jessie Kenney. Mr. Lloyd George also gave directions that Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Kenney should be allowed to travel on the only passenger boat that plies regularly between Great Britain and Norway. This boat is strongly convoyed and it is used by very few people not in the service of the English government. No one in England has a higher esteem for Mrs. Pankhurst than Lloyd George, and since the beginning of the war the two erstwhile enemies have become friends and allies. Mrs. Pankhurst’s suffragettes fired a house that Mr. Lloyd George was building in the country, and Mrs. Pankhurst was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for the deed. She had served several weeks of the sentence, in hunger strike intervals which extended over a year or more, when the war broke out and all internal feuds were declared off in England. The Pankhursts at once called a truce of militancy and ever since have done yeoman service in recruiting for the army, collecting money for war sufferers, especially in Serbia, and in many other lines of patriotic work.
The whole world admired the statesmanship of this policy, but only a few people know how really statesmanlike it was. Among those who do know is the English premier, for without it he might not have become premier. In abandoning militancy Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel were actuated by two motives: they wanted England and the allies to win the war, and they saw in the war an opportunity to further the cause of woman suffrage. They were under no delusion that a grateful country would bestow the vote on its women as a reward for their unselfish war services. Women have rendered the noblest kind of service in all the wars that have ever been fought, but no country ever showed its gratitude by making them citizens for it. Witness our civil war. Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel knew that suffrage would come in England when the political situation suffered certain changes, and it would come in no other way.
They were in France in July, 1914, Mrs. Pankhurst out of prison under the famous “Cat and Mouse” act, and resting up for another bout with the Holloway jailers. Christabel lived in Paris and edited there the British suffragette weekly newspaper. They watched with deep emotion the mobilization of the French army and saw the French women drop all their other activities and mobilize for hospital and relief work. They agreed that they must go back to England and organize their women for the same work, and they said: “At last! A chance to get rid of Asquith and Sir Edward Grey!”
These two men, especially Mr. Asquith, were the arch enemies of the women’s cause. Mr. Asquith had consistently blocked the woman suffrage bills in Parliament, even when a large majority of the House of Commons wanted to vote favorably on them. Mr. Lloyd George, on the other hand, was, theoretically at least, a suffragist. He wanted the women to have votes, but he wanted something else a great deal more. He wanted, with an earnestness amounting to a cosmic urge, to be prime minister of England. His whole soul being set on that ambition, he was not going to take people’s minds off of his candidacy by getting into the woman suffrage controversy. So he put the whole subject one side for future reference.
Mrs. Pankhurst, great and wise stateswoman that she is, perfectly understood this. She knew that, if Mr. Lloyd George became premier, he would probably put a suffrage bill through Parliament, and she and Christabel knew that the new war cabinet, which they trusted would come, would probably have Lloyd George at its head. So they bent all their energies to ousting Mr. Asquith and boosting Mr. Lloyd George. They criticized caustically, with pen and voice, the cabinet’s war policies, they turned a whole volume of scorn on England’s Serbian blunders and the Dardanelles failure. They went all over England talking about Mr. Asquith and his ministers, and their work told. So when Mrs. Pankhurst decided to go to Russia and do what she could to rally the women of that distracted country, Mr. Lloyd George knew that she would do it if any one could. He gave her a passport and a safe conduct, and she went. A little later Ramsay Macdonald, leader of England’s “little group of wilful men” opposing the war, thought he would go to Russia and undo any good Mrs. Pankhurst might do.
Mr. Lloyd George at first refused to give Mr. Macdonald a passport, but his refusal so angered the Bolshevik element in the Petrograd Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates that Kerensky was actually forced to ask the English premier to allow Mr. Macdonald to visit Russia. The English premier therefore consented to issue the passport, but the Seamen’s Union, which was not in the least afraid of the Petrograd soldiers and workmen, or of any international misunderstandings, refused point blank to allow Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to travel on any boat crossing to Norway. The union served notice that the moment Mr. Macdonald stepped foot on any boat leaving England the sailors on that boat would step off. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald accordingly never stepped on a boat.
Mrs. Pankhurst was very well received in Russia. The newspapers published columns about her, statesmen and ambassadors called on her, almost as on a visiting royalty, and the finest women in Petrograd came to her and welcomed her proffered aid. Which is certainly discouraging to those suffragists who always try to be good and well mannered and never picket the White House or disturb a congressman’s afternoon nap. A series of meetings were arranged for Mrs. Pankhurst, but they were neither well arranged nor well managed. Some of them got into the hands of women who had movements of their own to push, and who were willing to use Mrs. Pankhurst’s drawing capacity to fill a room, but were not willing to turn the meeting over to her when she got there.
I was present at such a meeting, which had for chairman a lady of title who had a scheme of some kind, and the speakers were mostly women who had other schemes, and they all talked and talked about their schemes, until I feared that Mrs. Pankhurst would never be given a chance to talk at all. One woman spoke for over an hour about the food situation. Her remedy was to send a commission to America and beg that a shipload of food be sent via Archangel to Petrograd. It was pointed out to her at some length by Mr. MacAllister Smith, an American business man living in Petrograd, that there was plenty of food nearer home than America, and that it didn’t need to be begged for.
Through it all Mrs. Pankhurst sat quietly, but I who knew her well saw a suspicious little color creep into her cheeks and a light of battle flash into her gray eyes. I don’t know what might have happened, but what did happen was dramatic. A tall, fine-looking woman in the back of the room sprang to her feet and burst into a passionate speech of protest. While the women in that room were wasting time in inconsequential talk the Germans were steadily advancing, the Russian troops were retreating and ruin and desolation were at their very doors. She begged them for the sake of bleeding Russia to drop all controversy and let Mrs. Pankhurst, if she could, tell them what to do.
As she sat down, or rather dropped exhausted into her seat, Mrs. Pankhurst stood up. She is a small woman, but when she is in certain moods she manages somehow to look tall. She looked tall on this occasion. She spoke in French and her talk lasted not longer than fifteen minutes, but when she finished half the women in the room would have gone into the trenches after her. The others looked frightened. Mrs. Pankhurst told the women that 250 Russian women had gone out of their homes, donned soldiers’ uniforms and were prepared to give their lives for their country and the democracy of the world. Mrs. Pankhurst was naturally an admirer of Botchkareva and her Battalion of Death, and had a few days before this meeting reviewed the regiment. She told these women of leisure that if working women were willing to risk their lives on the battlefield for the freedom of Russia the women who remained at home ought to be willing to risk their lives on the streets. Whenever a Bolshevik street orator preached separate peace or a cessation of fighting, a woman of education and ability ought to stand up and tell that same street crowd the truth. The women ought to storm the soviets all over Russia and force the men to support Kerensky and the Provisional Government in their effort to rally the army and defeat the Germans.
The movement, she told them, must be a Russian women’s movement only. No foreigners should appear in it at all. They must do the work, but she was there to give them the full benefit of her experience as an organizer. She would show them how to do the work, how to train speakers, how to manage politicians, how to arrange demonstrations. One of the first things she advised them to do was to establish a headquarters in a conspicuous place, and to get up a great demonstration of women to march in a body to the Winter Palace or the Tauride Palace, wherever the Provisional Government was holding its meetings at the time. They should offer their services to the government, and let the country see that women were in the field to support the war. That speech and that program swept the women off their feet. Immediate steps were taken to organize, and a few women, without waiting for organization, actually did go out into the streets and talk against the Bolsheviki.
Then came the days of the July revolution when all street speaking ceased, and that interfered with the women’s plan. What discouraged it most of all was Kerensky’s cynical attitude toward it. A woman of rank and of great ability, knowing Kerensky well, went to him and told him what they proposed to do, and asked for his coöperation. To her astonishment he refused point blank and he told her that the women would not be allowed to make a demonstration or to march to the palace. Naturally she asked him why, and he replied evasively that there had been too many demonstrations already.
Ambassador Francis shared the women’s disappointment to the extent of calling on Kerensky and trying to make him see the value of their assistance in an hour of crisis, but Kerensky persisted in his refusal.
I do not understand why he acted in this manner. His own domestic affairs were in a sad state at this time, a rumor stating that Mme. Kerenskaia was divorcing her famous husband. It may be that Kerensky was in a state of mind of general prejudice against all women. Perhaps he has the Napoleonic conception of the position of women in the state. I do not know. But if he is an anti-suffragist he is almost alone in his opinion in Russia. Mrs. Pankhurst did not have to convert the country to suffrage. There is no spoken opposition to it anywhere, as far as I could discover. It is taken for granted that women will vote under the new constitution. They have voted already in municipal elections, and in many cities they have been elected to the town dumas. Fourteen women were elected to the Moscow town duma last summer.
Neither is Russia opposed to militant suffragism. Mrs. Pankhurst was a guest of honor one night at the great congress of Cossacks in Petrograd. When she appeared on the platform she received an ovation, and Prof. Miliukoff’s introduction of the famous Englishwoman was a high eulogy. Mrs. Pankhurst’s autobiography has been translated into Russian and is widely circulated. Her mission failed because Kerensky killed it. That is all. Her visit to Russia was not a complete failure, however, for she succeeded in awakening at least one group of Russian women to a keen sense of their political responsibilities. They have begun to work, and when order is restored in the country, their work will be heard of.
They told her in my hearing that they had never before realized what was before them, and they did not intend that the new constitution should be written by any but the best men in Russia. Much can be expected of Russian women in the future, in my opinion.
Among the working people the women have shown themselves to be at least as ready for citizenship as the men. They appear among the Bolsheviki, of course, and they are seen among the slackers in industry. But one group of women workers played a loyal part throughout the February revolution and in the after troubles. This was the telephone force, especially the girls in the big central office in the Morskaia. These girls, without any direction or orders, joined in an absolute refusal to connect the headquarters of the Bolsheviki in the dancer’s palace on the Neva, or the munitions factory which was their other stronghold. Cut off from using the telephone the mutinous soldiers and workmen were severely handicapped, and the government was materially assisted.
Women of the educated classes will play an important part in the reconstruction of Russia. They will hold office, and may sit in the ministry. Already one woman has been appointed adjunct Minister of Public Welfare. This was the well known and efficient Countess Panine, whose civic work is famous throughout the empire. Countess Panine held office for a short time only, because no ministry held together long. That she will be returned to office when stability is secured, there seems to be no doubt.
CHAPTER XXI KERENSKY, THE MYSTERY MAN
It is unfortunate that nothing has ever been written about Kerensky except eulogies. However deserved they may be, eulogies have the fault of not being informative. Who is Kerensky? What kind of a man is he? Why hasn’t he restored order in Russia? If he cannot restore order, discipline the army and make it fight, why doesn’t he step aside and let somebody else try? These questions have been asked on all sides.
I may not be able to answer all or any conclusively. But I was in Russia three months, and I watched Kerensky progress from Minister of War to Minister-President of the Provisional Government and virtual President of the Russian Republic. I can tell my own observations of the man, and I can present the evidence of events, allowing the reader to draw his conclusions. I saw Kerensky frequently, heard him speak several times, and, like almost every one else, I went through a period of extreme enthusiasm for him. A certain enthusiasm I have retained. I still think he has achieved marvels in keeping a government together and remaining for nearly six months at the head of that government. In fact Kerensky, whatever else is said of him, for a time at least kept before the wild-eyed, liberty-mad masses of the Russian people the certain fact that governments must be, that the state cannot exist without leaders.
There was apparently no other man in Russia who could do this thing. The old theory that great events always produce great men seems to have failed in this case. The most stupendous event in modern history, the Russian revolution, has as yet produced no great, or even, when Kerensky is left out, no near-great men. The first provisional government contained able men like Lvoff and Miliukoff. But they could no more cope with the situation created by the fall of autocracy in Russia than so many children could operate a railroad system.
These men thought that they had helped to bring on a political revolution. They little knew their Russia. There was just one man of ability in that first ministry who knew the truth, and he knew only part of it. Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky, the socialist who was appointed Minister of Justice, knew that what the world was about to witness in Russia was a social revolution. But he, too, was blind to the task before him. At the very outset of his career as Minister of Justice, Kerensky insisted on abolishing the death penalty. “I do not wish that this shall be a bloody revolution,” he declared. In one sentence he showed how little he, too, knew his Russia.
There was some excuse for ignorance on the part of most of the other ministers. Prince Lvoff, for example, was a large estate owner, a man who lived in the country a great deal of the time, one who had been active in the affairs of his zemstvo or county council, a friend and adviser of peasants, but always the great gentleman, the aristocrat. Miliukoff was a university professor, a man of books, an amateur of music. And so on through the list.
But Kerensky was no aristocrat. He was an obscure lawyer, one who specialized in cases of men and women accused of political offenses. He defended with fiery zeal young students whose revolutionary activities drew them within the tiger claws of the autocracy. He was the friend of the poor. He was one of the executive council of the Social Revolutionary party, largely made up of peasants. Why did he not know and understand his countrymen? Why could he not have known that the abolishment of the death penalty at that hour of supreme crisis would drench the revolution in blood?
Kerensky was in the beginning an extreme idealist, a preacher, a prophet. He changed a great deal between February and November, 1917. But events, I think, on the whole, prove him an extreme idealist, a dreamer instead of a doer. Such men and women are never really great as leaders. They can stir up an enormous enthusiasm, send the crowd to the highest pitch of inspiration, even make it do monumental things for a time. But the dreamer’s usefulness stops there.
Somewhere in Russia, in one of the universities perhaps, in some farmhouse or on some lonely steppe, there lives a big, hard-fisted strong-brained ruthless boy who can and will some day do the kind of ruling and guiding Kerensky talks about and would have enforced if he could. Perhaps that boy got his inspiration from hearing Kerensky talk. But the boy is a real leader. He will stretch out his hand to the mob and the mob will obey his indomitable will.
Did the mob ever obey Kerensky’s will? Take the army situation, for example. The day I arrived in Petrograd, May 28, I had a talk with the then American consul, Mr. North Winship. He told me what he had seen of the revolution, and spoke gravely and apprehensively of the future. The sedition in many regiments at the front was, to his mind, the most sinister single menace that had yet developed. “Kerensky, the new war minister, has just been sent down to the front,” he told me. “He will save the situation if any living human being can. His influence over the Russians is enormous. He can sway them like the tides with his eloquence.”
Kerensky, who all the world knows is a sickly man, spared himself no whit during those critical days. He tore all over the front in motor cars. He made scores of speeches, thrilling speeches. Every one reading in the newspapers of his wonderful speeches breathed more freely and whispered, “We are saved.” But were they?
One incident. It may have been cabled to the American newspapers. On one front where Kerensky was speaking a soldier, doubtless deputed by the less brave in the regiment, stepped forward and said: “It is all very well to urge us to fight for liberty, but if a man is killed fighting what good is liberty to him?” Instantly Kerensky’s wrath poured out in a torrent of eloquence. He denounced the man for a traitor and a disgrace. The man who would think about his miserable skin when the freedom of his mother country was threatened was unfit to live with brave men. Turning to the colonel of the regiment, he demanded that the soldier be degraded and immediately turned out of the army, sent home a branded coward.
The colonel replied that there were others in the regiment who might, with justice, receive the same treatment. But no, said Kerensky, one man disgraced was enough. He would be a symbol of dishonor. The Russian army needed nothing more. The unfortunate man is said to have fallen in a swoon. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was so. But he was probably glad enough after he recovered that he was sent home. Nor was the symbol of dishonor enough for the Russian army. It continued to desert.
Often after one of Kerensky’s speeches he would call on the troops to declare whether or not they would fight. Always they roared out that they would, to the death. Sometimes they did, it is true, but sometimes also they didn’t. At present no one can tell whether any soldiers, except the Cossacks and the women, are going to go forward when commanded.
When the army demoralization, fraternization and desertions began to assume recent frightful proportions Kerensky issued a manifesto telling the soldiers what he was prepared to do to deserters. They would not be shot—no, the death penalty was for all time abolished in Russia. But deserters would be treated as traitors. Their families would receive no soldiers’ benefits, and they would not be allowed to participate in the redistribution of land. The Minister-President, for by this time Kerensky was at the head of the Provisional Government, would give the deserters time to get back to their regiments. He named a date about three weeks in advance. But on that day, at the extreme limit, all soldiers must be back in their regiments. This manifesto was issued not once, but three times, as I have stated. Three separate dates were given, three ultimata pronounced. But none of them was even noticed by the demoralized soldiers. On one date, June 18, it is true, Kerensky’s order to advance was obeyed. At all events, the troops advanced on that day and fought a victorious fight. It may have been in response to Kerensky’s order, or it may have been a coincidence.
Kerensky’s idealism began to suffer. He began to see his people as an unruly, unreasoning, sanguinary mob. But he loved the mob and could not bring himself to do it violence even for its own good. In July he agreed that Korniloff should be made commander-in-chief of the army, with power to shoot deserters in the face of battle. Korniloff’s demand for full command of the army, both at the front and in the reserve, with power to shoot all slackers, Kerensky would not agree to. However, in that same month of July, 1917, Kerensky had progressed so far that he told the world that he was prepared to save Russia and Russian unity by blood and iron, if argument and reason, honor and conscience, were not sufficient. Apparently they were not sufficient, but where was the blood and iron? Beating Russia into submission would be a big job for anybody just then, and it would be interesting to know just how Kerensky thought he could do it. He was the only man of first rate ability in his ministry, the only strong force. He would have had to have some backing, and where could he get it?
The Soviets? They have over and over, after fierce fighting, voted to give Kerensky support. Once they voted to give him supreme power. But they were never in earnest about it, and Kerensky knew it very well. They proved that they were insincere, it seems to me, by their action in October in refusing to support any ministry not made up exclusively of Socialists, and then making such a body subject to criticism and control.
“The Germans are at our very gates,” Kerensky told those men. “While you sit talking here, and are refusing to listen to words of reason from your commander-in-chief, your revolution is in danger of destruction. Are there no words of mine to make you see it?”
Words, words, words! Hurled passionately from a burning heart into a whirling void. That seems to me to typify Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky talking to the Russian revolutionary mob.
The French revolution offers no parallel to this. Each one of the successive leaders of that mob accomplished something good or bad. Mirabeau led the mass as far as a constituent assembly. Marat and Danton got rid of the king. Robespierre imposed his will on Paris until the end of the reign of terror. Robespierre, “the sea-green incorruptible,” is the nearest parallel to Kerensky that the French revolution offers. He led the mob in the direction it wanted to go. Kerensky followed it in a direction it wanted to go, begging it with all his eloquence to turn around and follow him. The mob applauded him, adulated him, wove laurels for his brow, but it would not follow him.
He could not turn the mob. Perhaps nobody could have done so. Perhaps what had happened in Russia was inevitable, the only possible reaction from three centuries of Romanoff rule. To have it otherwise Kerensky has all but laid down his life. He suffers from some kind of kidney disease, and shortly before the February revolution he underwent an operation which nearly finished him. His right hand is incapacitated and is usually worn in a sling or tucked inside his coat. He is thin, hollow of chest and walks with a slight stoop.
A man of thirty-seven, Kerensky is about five feet eight in height. He has thick brown hair, which bristles in pompadour all over his finely shaped head. His myopic eyes are blue, or grey, according to his mood. You see those eyes in Russia, deep, beautiful blue at times, steel grey at others. Kerensky’s eyes look straight at you and give you confidence in his candor. Sometimes when he is suffering physically the eyes seem to sink in his head and lose all their brightness. When he is tired or discouraged they burn like somber fires. His face is pale, and even sometimes an ashen grey, and the face is deeply lined and scarred with troubled thought. The nose is big and strong, the mouth deeply curved, and the strong chin is cleft, with a deep line, rather than a dimple.
Kerensky’s speeches, to my mind, read better than they sound. He is intensely nervous on the platform, jerking, moving from side to side, striding up and down, thrusting out his chin—a kind of delivery I especially dislike. His gestures are all jerky and nervous. His voice is rather shrill. But in spite of all this he is a really eloquent speaker, and he rouses his audiences to a point of enthusiasm I have seen only one man equal. Of course I mean Theodore Roosevelt.
Kerensky was formerly a model family man, I heard, but something went wrong, and last summer Mme. Kerenskaia and her two small sons, nine and seven, lived alone in the modest home. Kerensky lived in a suite in the Winter Palace and drove in the Czar’s motor cars and was waited on by a whole retinue of faithful retainers. No disparagement to him is intended in the statement. The Winter Palace was his headquarters, and as for the motor cars he had a right to drive in them, and every right in the world to be waited on and cared for.
The parents of this fated child of revolution were well educated and fairly well circumstanced. The elder Kerensky was a school inspector and was able to give his son a university education. Rumor persistently states that Kerensky’s mother was a Jewess, but I do not know whether this is true or not.
CHAPTER XXII THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS
One of the main contentions of the extremists of the Russian revolution concerns the self-governing rights of the states, large and small, which make up the empire. I met no one in Russia who did not agree that each one of the states had a right to local autonomy, but I met many who feared greatly lest the empire should be dismembered and should fall apart into a number of small, weak states. Especially disastrous would this be, both to Russia and to the Allies, if it happened during the war. That Germany is doing everything in her power to bring about this end is proof enough that it would be disastrous to the Allies. Germany’s army and navy and German diplomacy are working overtime to separate the Russian states. The enemy forces are working now to isolate the Baltic states and Finland, and German agents are busy all over the empire spreading the propaganda of secession.
“The right of small peoples to govern themselves” is one of the easiest gospels in the world to preach. As a principle it is not even debatable. In practice, however, it very often is far from expedient or practicable. But the recently liberated Russians, each separate language and racial group smarting from remembered wrongs inflicted by the old government, took fire with the idea of self-government, and in every corner of Russia are found provinces, governments, even cities, repudiating the central government and setting up republics of their own. Provisional governments were created last summer in provinces of Siberia, in the rich province of Ukrania, in the town of Kronstadt, in the Siberian towns of Tomsk and Tsaritsine, and in a number of other localities. Finland very early started an agitation for a separate government, and only the closing of the Diet and the prevention by armed force of the convening of a new Diet stood in the way of a socialist manifesto of separation. The Socialists are the majority party in the Diet, and they counted on the support of enough people in the three “bourgeois” parties—the Swedish, old Finnish and young Finnish parties—to carry their measure through.
Every one of these attempts at secession was marked by riots, murders and excesses of every kind. A report from Kirsanoff, a city that wanted last June to be a republic all by itself, told of a garrison of soldiers who broke loose, fell on the inhabitants of the town, robbed and murdered them, outraged women, burned houses, looted shops and generally behaved like maddened animals. There seemed to be no reason why the soldiers, who had previously behaved like decent men, should have been seized with sudden criminal mania. Liberty simply acted on their systems like a deadly drug.
It was the same thing in Kronstadt, only in Kronstadt they developed a drug habit, so to speak. This fortified town of some 60,000 inhabitants is situated at the mouth of the Neva on the Gulf of Finland. The fortress of Kronstadt, which dominates the town, in normal times constitutes one of the chief defenses of Petrograd, a few miles up the river. The Gulf of Kronstadt, on which the fortress stands, is the chief station of the Baltic fleet. With a strong garrison, a fleet of battleships and a well-organized Bolsheviki, Kronstadt was able for many weeks to defy the Provisional Government, to maintain what it called a government of its own, and to commit more horrible crimes and more stupid excesses than almost any other place in Russia. Murder on a wholesale scale marked the progress of the revolution in the fortress and on the battleships. More than a score of young officers in training were killed in the fortress in one day last spring. They were not even arrested and tried on any charges. They were just butchered. A number of other officers were killed, including the commandant and vice-commandant of the fortress, and other officers were thrown into cells and kept there for months without even the farce of a trial.
Kronstadt set up a republic in late May and by mid-June the orgy was in full swing. The civil population looted and robbed, and the soldiers and marines aided and abetted them heartily. Once a band of looters sacking a warehouse were arrested by the militia police after a lively shooting match and put in jail. Cases where the militia actually arrested thieves were so rare in Russia last summer that this one received considerable newspaper publicity. The papers were obliged to record that, a few hours after the men were arrested, a crowd of armed soldiers and sailors demanded the liberation of the prisoners. Of course their demands were honored.
The provisional government was able to keep Finland in partial check by threatening to withhold cereals and other provisions from her in case of secession. But Kronstadt, being a fortress, had plenty of provisions, as plenty goes in Russia these days. Kronstadt had more food and fuel than Petrograd. That is why her orgy was able to last so long. It lasted until the days of the July revolution, when thousands of loyal troops were recalled from the front to restore order, many of the ringleaders of the mutinous troops were expelled from the army and several regiments were disbanded in disgrace. The orgy still goes on to a certain extent in the fortress, and no one knows yet how far disaffection among the naval forces went.
The Kronstadt Soviet, or Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, covered itself with glory during the existence of the republic. The Soviet, or one of its committees, undertook the solving of the housing problem as follows: The committee went all over the town and inspected houses and apartments. They inquired in each case at the different places the amount of the rent, and then they proceeded to cut down the rent, one-third to one-half. They didn’t say anything about the reduction to the landlord, but they passed the word around to the Tavarishi. A perfect exodus of renters out of their apartments into bigger and better ones ensued. Everybody moved, and when rent day came around and the landlords or their agents called on the new tenants they were calmly told: “Not on your life is my rent thirty rubles a month. It is fifteen rubles, and if you don’t take that you will get nothing.”
The landlords appealed to the Soviet, but all the satisfaction they got there was a threat of confiscation. “You’ve robbed the working class long enough,” said the Soviet. “We ought not to pay you any rent, and perhaps after a while we won’t.”
From one point of view not the least outrage the Soviet perpetrated on the helpless population of Kronstadt was an attempt to talk it to death. There is a fine cathedral in Kronstadt and in front of it, as is customary in Russia, a large open square. In this square the Soviet erected a speaker’s stand and every day the population, or as much of it as could get into the square, assembled and listened for hours to fervid oratory. The people had to come because the Soviet ordered them to, and very likely they enjoyed themselves at first. Even in Russia, however, a continual political meeting, carried on three months at a time, every day at 5 p. m., must be a trial.
Tomsk was another city where the right of small peoples to govern themselves was demonstrated last summer. In the newspapers of June 8, old style, appeared a telegram from Tomsk to Minister-President Kerensky, the Minister of Justice and the all-Russian Council of Deputies, Workmen and Soldiers, then in session in Petrograd. The telegram was sent by the commanding general of loyal regiments and it read in part thus: “Criminal and mutinous soldiers in company with other criminal elements of the population have organized themselves into bands and have set themselves systematically to pillage and assassination. Under the flag of anarchy they have looted the banks, the shops, business houses of all kinds. They were prepared to murder all heads of public organizations, and declared that they would next move on to other towns and cities and continue their robberies there.”
The telegram went into more particulars of these outrages, and closed by saying that martial law had been established in Tomsk on the 3d of June, 2,300 persons had been arrested and the city, thanks to the presence there of a few brave and loyal troops, was now in order.
Thus the tale could be continued. Finland, usually a peaceful, orderly, law-abiding and intelligent country, by far the most enlightened in Russia, lost its head completely over the right of small peoples’ idea. Helsingfors has seen days of violence in the old years of rule by fire and sword. But Finland has never answered with fire and sword, but by the most intelligent kind of passive resistance. With the revolution passive resistance became violence. Most of this, it is true, came from soldiers and sailors of Sveaborg, the island fortress of Helsingfors. Murder of officers went on there and in the town also. Marines pursued their hapless officers through the streets, cutting them down with swords and knives, shooting them and killing them by torture before the eyes of women and children. The townspeople did no such shocking deeds as that, but there were bloody strikes and many riots, and finally the attempt to open an illegal diet and to force a separation from the empire. Kerensky handled that situation very well, sending the best men in the government to Helsingfors, where some kind of a truce, temporary no doubt, but a truce, was patched up.
Kerensky’s fiercest battle last summer was with Ukrania, where a real government was established. It was real enough at all events to force a kind of recognition from the central Provisional Government. Ukrania is an enormous territory in the south of Russia. It extends into southwestern Siberia and southward to the Black Sea. Odessa is its principal port, and within its borders are many important cities. Kiev is one of the largest of these. About 35,000,000 people inhabit the Ukraine, as it is called in Russia. The people are not Russian, strictly speaking. They are Slavs, but they have a language of their own, a literature, a culture. They have been Russian subjects for nearly 300 years.
The Ukraine is a self-contained country and could be made a very rich one. It is rich already in agricultural resources, the “black earth” of certain regions producing the most splendid crops of wheat and other grains. The fruits of the Ukraine are the best in Russia, and the vineyards furnish grapes for excellent wines. Russia would be poor indeed without this country.
Last June the Ukranian Rada, or local diet, voted to establish a republic, restore the old language and customs, and cut themselves off absolutely from the Russian empire. They actually created a provisional government on the spot. Some of the more moderate members of the Rada favored remaining in the empire as a federated state having complete autonomy, and this was finally accepted, I believe, by the majority. But immediately the Bolsheviki of the south began to clamor for separation, and the Ukranians in the army began to show dangerous signs of unrest. A congress of Ukranian armies was held in Kiev in the middle of June, in which it was decided that the armies of the south and southwest ought to be completely and exclusively made up of Ukranians. If this had been done the Rada would have been in a perfect state to dictate terms of any kind to the Russian Provisional Government.
As it was there was considerable dictating done. The military Rada, meeting in June in Odessa, served notice on the Provisional Government that unless the Ukranian soldiers were prevented from forming their own regiments no more soldiers of their force would be sent to the front. The Ukranian regiments were formed, some of them in Petrograd, and the strains of the national hymn, “Ukrania is not dead,” were heard on the streets, played by military bands or sung by soldiers, almost as often as the classic “Marseillaise.”
Kerensky made a frantic dash to Odessa, to Kiev and other cities of the Ukraine. He took with him Tereshtshenko, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and one or two other ministers, and they met the new provisional government in parley. The result was that Kerensky made a complete surrender, recognized the provisional government—at least informally—and agreed that the Ukraine should be a separate state. There was a perfect tempest of protest when the ministers returned to Petrograd. The rest of the ministry declared that Kerensky had overstepped his authority in committing the entire government to a policy which ought to have been left to the constituent assembly to decide. They said that his act, entered into without the knowledge or consent of the full government, was illegal. Perhaps it was; but it stood, and all the most aggrieved ministers could do about it was to resign.
The greatest task ahead of Russia is federation, and she probably will in the end learn how to give autonomy to her states and establish a central government which will bind all the states together in happy union. But she has years of strife and monumental effort ahead of her before the task is done. The wisest men in Russia—even Prof. Miliukoff, who lived for years in the United States—appear to be in a complete fog on the subject of federation. Half the wise men want an empire like Great Britain or Germany, with practically all the power in one central governing body. The other half see nothing ahead but dismemberment of the empire. Nobody apparently can see Russia as another United States.
I believe that part of our responsibility, after the war—perhaps before that time comes—will be to teach Russia how to establish a peaceful federation on republican lines. Russia perhaps does not need to be taught democracy. When she emerges from this present anarchy she may be trusted to establish a safely democratic civilization.
CHAPTER XXIII WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD?
Will the German army get to Petrograd and Moscow? The answer to this question is, they probably can if they want to, but it is hardly possible that they do. If they have that object, and if they succeed in taking Moscow it will simply add one more to the psychological blunders committed by the German government since the war began. The disorganized Russian army might not pull itself together and fight for Petrograd, but the army and the people would fight to the death for Moscow. It is their holy city, their crown of glory, their dream. Moscow is Russia, and one who has never seen it knows not the Russian people.
Petrograd is a modern European city, built by Peter the Great in the early part of the eighteenth century and by Catherine II, also called “the Great,” in the latter half of the same century. Peter, who would have been a master man in any century and in any country, whether born in a palace or a farmhouse, was all the more a marvel because he was a Russian, born at a time when the Russian people were still medieval and still oriental. Peter didn’t allow the fact that he was heir to an oriental autocracy to interfere with his ambitions or his activities. He left the golden palace in the Kremlin, left Moscow, the capital, and sacred heart of the empire, left Russia altogether, and went off to become a day laborer in the shipyards of England and Holland. Peter learned what he could in a short time and went back to establish western civilization in Russia. He chose the site of his new capital much as the United States Steel Company chose the site of Gary, Ind., for its nearness to a good harbor, its easy access to trade routes and its fine front view of the best commercial centers. Peter called his city “a window toward Europe.”
Petersburg, as it was styled by the half German Peter, was a more stupendous piece of engineering than Gary, Ind., although the steel town is one of the greatest triumphs of engineering this country can boast. It was built on a marsh which nowhere rose above the muddy waters of the Neva more than two or three feet, and in most places was partially or wholly submerged. That marsh never has been completely drained. When, in 1765, St. Isaac’s Cathedral was built to replace a small wooden church of Peter’s time, they first had to drive over twelve hundred huge piles into the soft ground. Of the 40,000 workmen who toiled under Peter’s direction to create the first Petrograd a majority died from exposure and cold, and of fevers bred in the miasmas of the bogs.
Catherine, who became czarina a little more than half a century later, vastly improved the city. She enlarged it, erecting many splendid palaces and public buildings, and bringing in a vast amount of western culture in the way of libraries, art galleries and theatres. The monuments of Peter and Catherine are the most conspicuous objects in the capital. The ghosts of Catherine and Peter may be said to walk in every street in Petrograd. But the Russians, for all their admiration for their greatest monarchs, have little real love for the city they built.
The ghost of Ivan the Terrible walks through the streets of Moscow; nevertheless, the Russians love the place as the Mohammedans love Mecca. It is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and one of the strangest. It has hundreds of churches, so gorged with art treasures and with gold, silver and jewels that it dizzies the mind to contemplate them. It has the ancient wall, foliage-hung, that enclosed the Moscow of the thirteenth century, and it has the Kremlin, or fortress, which antedates the town. Inside the Kremlin is the old palace of the rulers of Russia built, in part, centuries before they became czars. The first Kremlin palaces were built by the dukes of Moscow in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Some of the most beautiful of the treasure churches of the Kremlin were built by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. One of these, just outside the walls, the Cathedral of St. Basil, is a gem of such radiance supreme that the half-mad Ivan determined that it should never be surpassed. When it was finished he called the architect to him and asked him if he thought he could ever design a better church. The architect, in the pride and joy of his achievement, modestly said that he thought he might. “You never will,” said the terrible Ivan, and he had the man’s eyes burned out with red-hot irons.
In the great square in front of the Kremlin still stands the high place of execution where Ivan and the other almost as terrible czars tortured and slew their victims. In a side street still stands the wonderful golden house which was the home and seat of the Romanoff boyars, and where the first (or second) czar of Russia was born. Moscow is the very symbol of czardom; nevertheless the Russians love it as their heart. Germany might send her armies there, but they could no more take it, or hold it, than they could take and hold Washington. Inside the Kremlin walls lie heaped thousands of bronze cannons, bright and beautiful as snakes, all decorated with eagles and N’s and ambitious mottoes. Napoleon Bonaparte left them there when he fled, defeated and routed by the Russians, only to be still more soundly defeated by snow and storm and bitter cold. Those cannon are evidence indeed of the invincibility of Moscow.
Germany ought to know that a march on Moscow, however easy, would result in unifying the Russian army against the foe. Perhaps Germany does not know this, for she seems not to know anything about the hearts and minds of any people. The mechanics of nationality she knows and understands. The psychology of it she never understands. However, I do not believe that Germany’s recent attack and partial conquest of the islands before Riga are a prelude to a march on the capital or on Moscow. What Germany probably wants is the splendid loot to be found in Courland and Esthonia. Riga, which is a city of 400,000 inhabitants, is, next to Petrograd, the most important port on the Baltic Sea. Out from Riga go immense exports of timber, flax and hemp, linseed and many cereals. The country east and south of Riga produces these things in great quantity, and Germany needs them in her business just now, and needs them badly enough to risk a few of her ships and men to get them.
Germany is not after conquest, this trip; she is after food and fuel and supplies. A little south of Riga lie the Governments of Kovno, Vilna and Minsk, and a little south and west lies Russian Poland, already partially in German hands. I traveled through part of that country last summer and watched through the train windows vast fields of rye and wheat, and thousands of acres of potatoes. I did not see many sugar-beet fields, but they lie somewhere in that region—hundreds of thousands of acres of them, already harvested or waiting to be harvested. And Germany is hungry for those harvests.
There may be other reasons why Germany is pounding so desperately at the defenses of Riga. Not very far away, to the north, washed by the same Baltic Sea, lies the grand duchy of Finland, the one province of the Russian empire which has shown friendliness to Germany. Finland is also the one province which has already declared its unalterable determination not to belong further to the Russian empire. Finland wishes to set up a separate government and to be an independent state. At least the mass of the people, expressing themselves through a Socialist majority in the local Diet, has declared for this policy.
It would be tremendously to the advantage of Germany to have the big Russian empire split up into separate states, and the German government has worked assiduously to encourage the Finnish people in their secession policy. Finland is such a Mecca for German agents, and so many Finns are in the pay of these agents, that the provisional government last July practically shut the grand duchy off, marooned it, so to speak, from the rest of the empire. A traveler cannot go to Finland from Russia without special permission obtained from the war ministry. A resident of Petrograd could not go down to one of the numerous and charming Finnish seaside towns near the capital, even for a week-end visit, without such a permit. I have spent some time in Finland and know a great many people in Helsingfors, the capital. I tried to get a permit to stop in Helsingfors on my way out of Russia, but the war ministry refused to grant the permit.
When the traveler left Russia for England or the United States, for any country, for that matter, he had to take a certain train leaving Petrograd at 7.30 o’clock in the morning, and he left that train just once before he reached the frontier. That once is at Beli Ostrov, for the customs inspection. After that the traveler was a prisoner in his train until he reached Tornea, where he was finally inspected and convoyed across a narrow stretch of water to Sweden. That was the attitude of the Russian provisional government toward Finland.
The grand duchy is rightly considered one of the greatest menaces to the future integrity of the empire. It is rightly considered by Germany a hope for the future of Germany, and it may very well be that the German navy expects and hopes to follow up the conquest of the Baltic port of Riga with a conquest of the Baltic port of Helsingfors. Finland detests Russia to such an extent that she is apparently blind to the danger of a friendship with Germany. For fifty years she has hated and feared Russia, and she apparently cannot get it into her head that the thing she hated and feared has gone forever. I have observed this state of mind in Poles as well as Finns. They have hated Russia so long that they cannot stop all at once. The Finns have hated Russia so hard that they would not even look at the Russian soldiers quartered on them by the old government. I spent the winter of 1913 in Helsingfors, and it was one of the sights of the place to me to watch the Finns cut the Russians in the street every day. A regiment of Russians marched through the streets, bands playing, swords clanking, feet tramping, a gorgeous sight. But the soldiers might as well have been invisible phantoms for all the notice taken of them by the Finns. They walked quietly along, attending to their business, conversing or chatting with their neighbors, never looking at the Russians. In fact, it was a point of honor with the Finns never to look at a Russian. As for speaking to one, knowing him, inviting him to his house, a Finn who did such a thing would have been ostracized. Even the smallest children knew that.
This being the state of mind of the Finns, it is explainable in a measure why, in order to wring their independence from Russia now, they are willing to run a very great risk of being absorbed or badly exploited by the Germany of after the war. They became part of the Russian empire willingly, having been on very bad terms for a number of years with their old over-lord, Sweden. This was in 1801. Then the Czar made a solemn compact with Finland, both for himself and his heirs, that the country should have almost complete autonomy. It was to maintain its own army, which would never be called upon to serve on Russian soil, but should defend the Finnish coast and border in case Russia was involved in war.
Finland was to have her own coinage, postal systems, schools, courts, language and her own local diet. The Czar retained the right of vetoing legislation, the right to collect foreign customs and other imperial rights. Almost every promise made in that treaty has been broken by the czars of Russia, especially by Nicholas II, now in Siberia. This Nicholas tried to break the treaty altogether, abolish it, but the Finns were too intelligent, too clear-headed and too united to let him do it. Their resistance to his tyrannous treachery is a thrilling story in itself. Finland has never broken any part of her treaty with Russia, but now she wants to abolish the treaty. The contention is that the treaty was made with the czars of Russia, and, now that there are now no more czars, the treaty has ceased to hold good. Finland is full of German agents, and they must have invented this brilliant piece of reasoning and taught it to the Finnish Socialists. At all events, they must have fostered it with might and main, and perhaps the German navy believes that a visit to Helsingfors would convert the whole country to it.
There is even a better reason why the German navy has been pounding away in the Gulf of Finland, and why in the spring it will pound again. Germany seeks to separate still further Russia and her allies. There are only three ways by which Russia can communicate with Europe and America. One of these ways is across Siberia and the Pacific Ocean, a long distance. Another way, through Archangel, is a summer way only. The third and shortest way is through Finland and Sweden. If Germany can partially take Finland and seize the railroad which leads to Sweden, and there is only one main line of railroad, she can cut Russia off from her allies very effectively. Perhaps her next step would be to interfere, by means of submarines, with Russia’s other outlet in the Pacific.
CHAPTER XXIV RUSSIA’S GREATEST NEEDS
It would be a very terrible thing for democracy and the world’s peace if the Allies, observing the anarchy into which Russia has fallen, should relax any of their efforts to help her back to a sound military, economic and social foundation. The first impulse is to beseech the United States government to refuse to loan money to such an unstable government, and even to decline to send Red Cross relief to a people who will not try to help themselves. But second thought reveals the unwisdom of deserting Russia in her crisis, however wilfully the crisis was brought on. We must loan money to Russia even though we lose the money. We must send her food and supplies even though they be received without much gratitude. For the sake of democracy, to which revivified and regenerated Russia has a world to contribute, we must help her now. The task will not be as difficult as the surface facts indicate. Russia is rapidly approaching the climax of her woe.
Aside from her military situation, bankruptcy is coming if it is not already there. Bankruptcy for the national treasury, for few taxes are being paid. Bankruptcy for food, clothing, fuel for all the people except a few on the farms, and even they will suffer for many things. Hunger and cold are at the door. The Russian army may rally, may turn on the Germans and magnificently retrieve its lost reputation as a fighting force. But there is no way in which the army of producers, the farmers and the working people, can rout the enemy they have admitted within the lines.
The farmer class of Russia this year did not produce full crops, and they refused to send to market a very large proportion of what they did produce. They hoarded their grain for their own use and some of it at least they have turned into vodka. In the towns and cities of Russia prohibition almost prohibits, but the peasant very quickly learned the art of illicit distilling, and I heard on authority I could scarcely question that stills have been established in half the villages of Russia. The statement is borne out to some extent by the fact that drunkenness among soldiers is increasing, especially in places remote from the larger cities. In Petrograd I saw little drunkenness, but the farther I traveled southward into the farming area the more I saw and heard of it. At the military position in Poland where the Botchkareva Battalion of Death was stationed, I talked with a soldier who had lived in America. In the course of our conversation he mentioned that a group in his regiment had got drunk and were in trouble.
“Where could they get liquor?” I asked.
“Oh, they get it,” he replied. “It’s new and it’s quite horrible, but they drink it.”
Serious as the grain shortage was, the transportation situation was still more serious. Food for which Petrograd and Moscow would pay almost any money, rotted on the ground, spoiled in the half-loaded freight cars, and wasted in congested way stations for lack of transportation facilities and for lack of labor. In the industrial world things were as bad. The working people, blind to their own peril, had shortened hours of work, had gone slack on their jobs, and had voted themselves wages far in excess of their productive activities. The consequences were rapidly accumulating. Factories were closing down, partly because they could not get coal and partly because of the extortions of labor. Soon there will be gaunt famine in the land. The working people will know what it is to go hungry with their pockets full of money.
When these troubles culminate—and in a few weeks at the most, the world will stand aghast at Russia’s state—the orgy of the Bolsheviki, the riot of the dreamers will end. Human nature is the same in Russia as it is elsewhere, the same as it is in New York or in Emporia, Kansas. We all know how, when hard times pinch the country, the Republican party elects its candidates. The people follow their theorizing and dreaming leaders in good times, but when the hard times come they turn to the party of strong business men to set them on their feet again. The full dinner pail argument is going to appeal strongly to the Russian masses this coming winter, and if the constituent assembly is postponed until the autumn of 1918, I am confident that the people will vote in favor, not of a socialistic millennium that will not work, but for a sane, practical democracy that will.
What Russia needs above all other things is leaders. What the people of this country must do for Russia is to help her find and develop those leaders. They are there somewhere. Russia has shown that she can produce great men and great women, people whom any nation might be proud to follow. But under czardom the only people permitted to lead were so corrupt, so reactionary and tyrannical that the Russians learned to fear and distrust all leadership. When they overthrew czardom and banished the tyrants and the corruptionists they thought they could get along without any leaders. The world knows now how fatal was their mistake, and very soon the blindest of the blind in Russia will know it.
Russia needs not only political leaders, she needs, even more urgently, leaders in the economic field. She needs at the present time a business man of the caliber of Mark Hanna, a man who, with a better ethical standard, possesses Mark Hanna’s great genius for organization, his marvelous executive ability. Such a man rarely dazzles the public with oratorical powers. He wastes little energy in speech. But he knows exactly what to do. He says to one man “come” and to another man “go,” and you may depend on it they are precisely the right men at the right jobs. He says to all about him, “Do this,” and they do it “to the king’s taste.” Russia needs many such men.
Nobody need be a slave under leaders, responsible and removable, like that. We were, in the United States, until we got our eyes a little open. We sink back once in a while still. Witness some of our municipal governments. But freedom under strong leadership is entirely possible. In fact, it is the only real freedom there is in the world.
The Russians may have a difficult time achieving it, for they are not quite the hard-fibered, ambitious, struggling race the English, French and Americans are. They are fatalistic and dreamy. That is the reason they endured their autocrats so long. But in the end they will achieve it.
Russia needs education, and here again America must show her the way. A public school system on the best lines we have been able to develop will make over the Russian people in one generation. Ninety per cent. of the present population is said to be illiterate. The old government tried within the past ten years to extend the common schools, but with little effect on illiteracy. The mass of the children were given two years of schooling, with the object of teaching them at least to read and write. Most of them barely learned and practically all forgot, because they were not encouraged to use their tiny bit of knowledge. Russia has no conception of the public library as we have developed it. There are libraries, magnificent ones, in the cities. But they are reference libraries for the learned, not reading and lending libraries for the masses. I am sure there is not such a thing in Russia as a children’s library, much less a librarian especially trained and paid to teach children how to use and to love books. Russia needs schools to teach children knowledge and she needs libraries very near, if not directly attached, to the schools. I talked to many people in Russia about the wonderful Gary schools, in which children work, study and play their way to fine, strong, thinking manhood and womanhood, and in every case the response was the same. “We must have schools like that all over Russia. Will you help us, when the time comes, to organize them?”
They cannot hope, of course, to go at once into all the intensive work of the Gary public school system, but they can adopt its general principles and its duplicate use of the school plant. In this way they will be able to educate more children in each school house and thus hasten the day when all the children will be in school. William Wirt’s next great work may be organizing school systems in new Russia. Having no old system to replace, he will not meet with the stupid and criminal obstruction and opposition with which his labors in New York were met.
Russia needs wholesome popular amusements to entertain and instruct her adult population. If I were to write a detailed list of Russia’s most pressing needs I should place near the head of the list plumbers and moving pictures. The empire is back in the dark ages as far as building sanitation is concerned. That is no small thing, because it affects both the health and the morals of a people. It affects their manners also, as any one who ever had to enter the lavatory of a Russian railroad carriage or station can testify.
They have some moving picture theaters in Russia, but they are poor in performance and frightfully high-priced. You pay as much to go to the movies in Russia as you pay to hear a high class symphony concert. I never saw a 10 and 15 cent motion picture house, nor could I learn that they existed anywhere in the empire. Mrs. Pankhurst and I went to the movies one night, paying something like a dollar and a half for our seats. The play was a long, dreary drama, ending in suicide and general misery. The acting was poor and the actors fat and elderly. For current events pictures they presented the Cossack funeral, reeled off at such a dizzy pace that it looked less like a funeral than an automobile race.
Moving pictures, carefully selected, offered for a small admission fee, would be a boon to Russia. They would teach the grown people a thousand and one things they have never had a chance to learn, and they would perhaps get the Russian mind out of its habit of ingrowing, self-torturing analysis that leads to nowhere. They would also give the Tavarishi something to do besides soap box spouting, and their listeners something more to think about than half-baked social theories. Because of the great illiteracy of the masses, Russia would have to introduce into her picture theaters an institution which Spain has already established. In Spain few people can read the titles and captions that run through the picture dramas, so each theater has a public reader, a man with a strong voice and clear enunciation, who reads aloud to the audience, and also makes any explanations that are necessary.
I know exactly where moving pictures for the masses could be shown in Petrograd without waiting for private enterprise to open theaters. On the west bank of the Neva, not far from the sinister fortress of Peter and Paul, stands the best and most democratic monument to Russian enterprise in the capital. This is known as the Narodny Dom, or People’s House, a combination club house, restaurant, theater and general meeting place of the working classes, founded by Prince Alexander of Oldenburg and liberally supported by the late Czar.
They have some fine concerts there, in times of peace, and an excellent drama for the more intelligent of the workers. Admission prices are fairly low and the performances good. For the less intellectual there are certain Coney Island features, and these are so well patronized that the concessionaries were well on the road to vast wealth. Long lines of people waited every evening for a turn on the chutes or the roller coaster. Their absolute hunger for a little amusement, a chance to laugh and be gay is pathetic to witness.
Another thing Russia needs is the soda fountain. A cold soft drink in summer and a hot chocolate in winter, easily accessible and cheap, would do more to take Ivan’s mind off moonshining vodka than all the laws in the world. Last summer there were times when I would cheerfully have given a dollar for a frosty glass of soda, any kind, any flavor. And there were plenty of others in Petrograd of my mind.
The best place to have luncheon in Petrograd is at the officers’ stores in the street which bears the appalling name of Bolshaia Konnyushennyaia. Here the food, government supplied, is good and it is sold for something approaching reasonable prices. The best meal I had every day was luncheon at the officers’ stores. The place is crowded from 11 to 4 every week-day, military men and their families predominating. Once, on a hot July day, there appeared on the counter where hors d’oeuvres were sold a cold delicious drink. It was a sort of cherry phosphate, and there were glass pitchers and pitchers of it, literally gallons. It sold for about twenty cents a small glass, and within half an hour it was gone, every drop. The crowd swarmed to that counter waving its money in the air, swallowed the cherry phosphate in one gulp, so to speak, and clamored loudly for more. I remember that I pleaded almost with tears for a second glass and could not get it. There is a fortune waiting for the capitalist who will take cold, soft drinks to Russia, and he will have besides the fortune the additional satisfaction of bringing hope to the sodden victims of vodka.
An army that will obey orders; a government that will govern; leaders in business, in transportation, in agriculture and a people willing to obey those leaders; education, wholesome life. Russia needs all these, and in her coming mighty struggle to achieve them the whole world of democracy, and especially our United States, must lend willing and sympathetic help and guidance.