The dawn in Russia

Under the waning moon, before the dawn of a December day, I drove out of the town of Toula in my tiny sledge—so close to the snow that the great black horse with his high yoke looked monstrous in the twilight. It is a typical Russian town, about a hundred miles south of Moscow, and as nearly as possible in the centre of the country. Two great roads cross each other there, and pass on to the points of the compass. Oldish churches, surrounded by a fortified wall, make a kind of Kremlin. Ancient houses conceal cavernous shops in the thickness of their own walls. Across a wooden bridge stands the Government small-arms factory, with workmen’s villages beyond. Strange figures in filthy rags moved up and down, beggars and shaggy peasants, high-school boys, and fur-capped girls. It has long been rather a revolutionary little town, and during the strike, ten days before, nineteen workmen had been shot upon the street.

In spite of solemn warnings, I had come out from the cities to see something of the country, having with difficulty induced a ruined German-Russian to venture with me as interpreter, for the sake of bread. As usual, the danger was nothing compared to the fear. What danger there was in the villages came from the police agents and officials, who hounded on the peasants with the cry that every stranger was a revolutionist conspiring against the Tsar to rob them of God and the land. For in those progressive days the police were dreading lest they should lose their livelihood of flogging and brutality at fifteen shillings a week.

My road went uphill to a high and bare plain, over which the snow was driven by the wind in showers so blinding that the horse kept turning round and appealing to us as reasonable beings to return. Horizon, road, and every mark were lost in whirling grey. But, after we had struggled on for two or three hours, the snow ceased to fall, and the wintry sun appeared low in the sky, making the distant ridges of the wide country shine with pale crimson or gleam like a far-off sea. Most of the land was bare and open ground, the snow blotting out the “stripes” where the peasants grew their crops in summer. But as we went further, lengths of forest came into view, looking brown at a distance, though generally made up of young silver birch, their silky white stems flecked with black. Birch woods supply the fuel of the country; next to food, the first necessity of the peasant’s life. There was some oak, but very little fir or pine. The birch in this region is the favourite, either because it grows best or burns best; and it is almost the only fuel in Moscow.

The peasants’ wooden sleighs passing to and fro bore loads of sawn birch, dragged by miserable little ponies, so caked with mire that their coats looked like a crocodile’s armour. At their side floundered the peasants in sheepskin jackets, with the wool side turned inwards. The jacket was gathered with a belt round the waist, and the skirt stuck out all round, reaching to the knees. Then came the high top-boots of felt or bast, rarely of leather. Men and women were not to be distinguished, except that, instead of a cap, the women usually wore a handkerchief or shawl knotted over head and ears. There was no special grace about the costume; but even the rich ladies of Russian cities find it hard to appear graceful when padded round with fur and wool six or seven inches deep. At the best, they can only appear rich.

Beside the road at one place stood a mouldering wooden inn (tractir), where passers-by could get thawed and have a glass of tea at three farthings. The owner of the estate, being something of a philanthropist or a teetotaller for others, had forbidden beer and spirits, so that the innkeeper was pale with anxiety how to pay his £4 rent, to say nothing of the taxes. Should he borrow, and go to ruin that way, or allow himself to be flogged to prove his poverty? I suggested that times were changing, and flogging might cease, but he only smiled with the politeness of superior knowledge. “No flogging, no taxes,” was to him the law of government.

In one corner hung three great icons, or holy pictures of the saints, glittering with tin and brass—very different in size and expense from the miniature icon which hangs in every bedroom of the wealthy Russian hotels, as a kind of apology to God, like our grace at a City dinner. Otherwise, there was no ornament in the house, except one of those ill-omened iron mugs, for which the crowd crushed each other to death on the coronation day of the present unhappy Tsar, nine years before, when the plain of Khodinsky Polé, on the north-west outskirts of Moscow, stood thick with suffocated peasants.

I next passed a great smelting works, newly finished, its fine furnaces and machinery never used, but already deserted and allowed to go to ruin. I could not discover whose money had been devoted to this characteristic fraud, or into whose pockets it had passed. Then came a few small gardens and summer residences built on the Crown land; for most of the land in that district is part of the Tsar’s vast estates, amounting to a fortieth part of the whole of European Russia, not counting the landed property of the Imperial family. But all the houses were deserted and empty, and one was burnt, and smouldered still.

Driving further on, I came to a large country house, where one of the ancient families of the Russian nobility was still living in the midst of its own land. I happened to be bringing them letters from friends, as the post was not working, and I found a house-party there, beguiling the winter day with much the same occupations as a house-party in England—doing embroidery, playing battledore with racquets and a soft ball, pushing a marble up a kind of bagatelle-board, examining their guns, and taking the dogs for walks in the woods. At a wandering luncheon of various courses, they maintained a quiet converse, marked by the gracious silliness, the “cheerful stoicism,” which is the justification of the aristocrat’s existence.

It was all a fine piece of self-reserve, for inwardly their mood was serious and apprehensive. They had just heard that the country-house of a friend and neighbour had been burnt to the ground by his peasants, though the family had escaped with their lives. One of the ladies had a son in the army, and they had just heard of a terrible riot and mutiny in his garrison town. Another lady’s son had married a rich heiress, and they had just heard that the three country residences of her parents had been utterly destroyed by the peasants, and now she was rich no more. From every side came tales of loss and danger, and no one could say what the end would be.

For themselves, they were just waiting helplessly to see what would happen. Polite, charming, highly educated, well dressed, healthy, fond of sport and country life, full of good will and high intentions, they were so like our own country squires and aristocracy at their best—so like the people who used to be held up to us as the school of manners and the producers of the fine old English stock—that only the dreariest of Social Democrats could have refused them sympathy. They were themselves fairly conscious of the absurdities in their own position, but the only protest or complaint that they made was to say they were getting a little tired of perpetual parallels between themselves and the aristocrats of the French Revolution, whose heads were cut off so rapidly.

In the afternoon my sledge took me further into the unlimited and desolate country, till at last we came to a village fairly typical of that district—not a rich part of Russia nor yet so starving poor as the famine provinces which lay close by it. The village was built in one long street, with about forty separated cottages on each side. A few of the cottages had bits of brick in the walls or round the windows, but wood was almost the only building material, and the roofs, though sometimes of flat iron plates, painted green, were generally thatched. In this particular village there was no school and no church, but from the high ground above it I could see a church about two miles off, and that, no doubt, was near enough. There were two shops and an inn, all just like the other cottages. Each house had a separate wattle shed near it, for fodder, stores, and perhaps to shelter the beasts in summer. In winter they have to be brought into the dwelling-house for warmth.

By the invitation of a peasant I went into his cottage. The man was rather above the ordinary type, being tall and straight. But he had the thoughtful and quiet look of the average peasant, as well as the long, dark hair and shaggy appearance. His wife was quite the usual woman—short, ungainly, and possessing no visible beauty except, perhaps, patience. On the faces of both was the green look of hunger, almost invariable in the peasants I have seen. The outside door of the house opened into the cattle-room, where a sickly cow was dragging out the winter. There was room for a horse, but the people had been obliged to sell their horse that autumn to pay the taxes and their debts to the Koulak or village usurer. From the Koulak, too, I suppose, they would borrow the money to hire another horse in the summer, as they said they intended. For no peasant can get through his work without a horse.

A wooden partition separated the cattle from the dwelling-room, the house being designed exactly like an Irish cabin, except that the white brick construction of the stove projected on both sides of the partition, thus warming the cow and the family both. As every one knows, the peasant’s stove is a large and wonderful edifice, full of mysterious holes and caverns for cooking and baking, and even for the dry roasting process which serves the family as a bath. Close beside it were two broad, wooden shelves on which the inmates slept—the parents above, the five children underneath. There was no bedding of any kind, except one worn coverlet or shawl on each shelf.

The children had made their shelf into a day-nursery as well as a bed, for they were all rolling about on it and biting each other, imagining a game of wolf, I think, though wolves are not common there. All were bare-legged, and quite naked but for loose red shirts reaching to their knees. Of course, they went out sometimes, but there were not enough clothes to send them all out together at once in winter. The furniture of the home was a wooden box, which was the seat of honour, a short bench, a table, and a small wooden loom, on the universal model of primitive manufacture. Both man and woman could weave, and they were making yards of a coarse stuff dyed with red madder, exactly the same as the women make for their petticoats on Achill Island.

Probably the loom brought in an important part of the family’s income, for the sale of the horse showed that they could not live off the land alone. Yet the man boasted that his bit of land, on which he grew potatoes, oats, and rye, was his absolute property, and when I tried to ask him whether the village community did not redistribute his land with the rest every twelve years, as I had read in books, he became very violent and showed no scientific interest at all in the sociological importance of the Mir. The working of the Mir was the only thing I thought I did understand when I came to Russia, and it was disconcerting to find that the first peasant I spoke to had never heard of such an arrangement. I still do not know what mistake he or I can have made. He may have been only insisting on the peasant’s touching faith that the land is the natural possession of the man who cultivates it, and can never be taken from him, even by the Tsar. Anyhow, he was terribly afraid that I had come to shake that belief in some way, and I thought it best to turn the conversation to the cow.

As to the Tsar’s recent promise to remit next year half the annual payment still due to the Treasury for the original purchase of the land, this peasant, in common, I believe, with all others, thought nothing of it. To them the manifesto was so much “dirty paper.” They knew very well that even if half were remitted, the Crown agents would come down upon them for arrears. They also knew dimly that since the liberation of the serfs more than forty years ago, the peasants have paid the extreme value of the land twice over. So they have ceased to concern themselves about any manifesto which does not surrender to them the mass of land which they regard as rightfully theirs.

While I was in the cottage, an old man came up with a canvas bag over his shoulder, and knocked at the door. Though obviously in the sink of poverty, he was not a professional beggar, but only one of that large class of peasants who are driven by age or misfortune to go round the villages and ask for scraps to keep them alive till better times. Accordingly he came in as if for a friendly call, laid his bag on the table with its mouth open, and joined in the conversation. When we were going out again, the woman slipped some squares of black bread into the bag as though by stealth, and he took it up and walked off without further remark on either side. It was the perfection both of appeal and kindliness.

At parting, I looked again at the peasant and his wife, in their clean poverty, with the marks of their almost passionate labour upon them and their five children growing up round their knees, and certainly it did seem incredible that these were just the people who are marched off to the village police-court, are tied face downwards to a sloping bench, have their clothes turned up, and are flogged with whips or rods by officials and police because they cannot pay the taxes for the Japanese war, or for the interest on the French loans.

Yet, in the last resort, it is upon violence almost as brutalizing and indecent that all Empires are founded, and I was all the more ready to welcome what Tolstoy said to me next day, when he received me—as generously as he receives every one—in his “Bright Home” (Jasnaia Poliana) as the country-house is called. He told me that, among the many other plans of work which he could not live to finish, he was then engaged on a book to be called “The End of an Age.”

“You are young and I am old,” he said, “but as you grow older you will find, as I have found, that day follows day, and there does not seem much change in you, till suddenly you hear people speaking of you as an old man. It is the same with an age in history; day follows day, and there does not seem to be much change, till suddenly it is found that the age has become old. It is finished, it is out of date.

“The present movement in Russia is not a riot, it is not even a revolution, it is the end of an age. And the age that is ending is the age of Empires—the collection of smaller States under one large State. There is no true community of heart or thought between Russia, Finland, Poland, the Caucasus, and all our other States and races. Or what have Hungary, Bohemia, and Styria, or the Tyrol to do with Austria? No more than Canada, Australia, India, or Ireland have to do with England. People are now beginning to see the absurdity of these things, and in the end people are reasonable. That is why the age of Empires is passing away.

“They tell me, for instance, that if the Russian Empire ceased to exist, swarms of Japanese would overrun our country and destroy our race. But the Japanese also are reasonable people, and if they came and found how much better off we were without any Empire at all, they would go home and imitate our example.”

The whole argument, which ran on with a half-ironic simplicity of this kind, was magnificent, not so much for its daring as for its quiet confidence in human reason. I remembered how for the last twenty years all the brazen trumpets of vulgarity had been sounding the note of Empire over us as the one great and stirring purpose of existence. And here was this rugged old man calmly telling me, as though it were something of a platitude, that we had just come to the end of an age—the age of Empires. There he sat in the familiar grey shirt without coat or collar, the belt round the waist, and the high leather top-boots (for he had just tramped round his land in the snow), quietly following out the exact logic of his principles, no matter where it might lead him. He was seventy-seven, and in terms of years one was forced, as he said, to call him old. The spirit had retired more deeply into the shrunk and wrinkled form. But under the shaggy brows, the grey-green eyes still looked out with the clearness of profound thought and fearless simplicity which have made him the greatest rebel in the world.

As to the present condition of his own country, he believed, as is well known from his writings, that the return of the land to the peasants is the only possible cure for Russia’s misery. He told me that he would accept Henry George’s method of nationalization, or any other which gave the peasants a true hold on the land they work. He quoted Kropotkin’s investigations into “intensive culture” to prove that, with improved methods, there is plenty of land in Russia to maintain an immensely increased population. As things stood, less than a third of the cultivated land was held by peasants or village communities, and less than a quarter of the cultivable land was used at all. The Tsar should at once restore the land to the peasants. With their long experience of the communal system, they could then manage very well for themselves without any State at all, as they had successfully proved in the Siberian colonies; for communism ran in the Russian blood, and its ideal had never been lost in the country.

When I suggested that a town question had also arisen now, besides the claim of peasants to the land, he admitted that town influence was the greatest danger. “Towns,” he said, “are the places where mankind has begun to rot, and unhappily the rottenness spreads. The mistake of our Liberal politicians in the towns is that they are always preaching the blessings of some English or American constitution. But constitutions of that kind, having once been realized, have already become things of the past. They belong to a different age from ours, and an ideal, whether in statesmanship or art, is never a thing of the past, but always of the future. For Russia as she exists now, we ought to aim at something entirely different from your worn-out methods of government.”

So he conversed through the winter morning, eager to speak, and as eager to hear. He asked much about Central Africa from which I had lately returned, and much about the new national movement in Ireland, nor should I have been surprised if he had continued the conversation in Gaelic, so fresh and vigorous was his interest in the world. Only when I told him rather carelessly, that the intellectual movement there was producing a large number of poets, his face fell, and he turned to other things, merely remarking that poets were very little good. In passing, he said he had been pleased to find that his fellow Puritan, Mr. Bernard Shaw, thought very lightly of Shakespeare, in whom he had never himself discovered any satisfaction, though he had read him once all through in English, and twice in German.

But it was not his interest in the common affairs of the world that gave him his true attraction. Apart from all this, there hung over him that separate and distinguishing grace which our fathers called sanctity and considered a thing to be worshipped. It was the grace of a toilsome and abstemious life, unflinchingly devoted to one high aim, and sacrificing all worldly pleasure and success to an ideal which could never be reached. I believe the modern name for it is fanaticism.

I say one high aim, for I see no reason to agree with the many critics who draw a sharp dividing line in his career and in the process of his mind. All the principles of his later teaching are to be found illustrated in the two great imaginative works of his earlier manhood, and if there is any fault to be found with a life so courageous and inspiring, I should seek it only in a rather inhuman and remorseless consistency of reason—a logic which, having for instance, condemned the pleasures of sense, would doom the human race to rapid extinction because life cannot be maintained and handed on without pleasure. But such returns to the strict Christianity of earlier centuries ought not to astonish people who call themselves Christians, especially as there seems no danger at present that the logic of their teaching will be followed in human action. And, in any case, I should rather leave it to others to reveal such limitations as they may find in so beneficient and gracious a personality.