Inside the Russian Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV AN HOUR OF HOPE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V THE COMMITTEE MANIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII TO THE FRONT WITH BOTCHKAREVA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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