UFA held little to interest me, so that after only a brief pause I continued my journey east to Cheliabinsk, the western terminal of the Trans-Siberian Railway. It had not originally been my intention to traverse Siberia. European Russia I did want to cover thoroughly, but when I found myself here on the edge of Asia, within a night’s ride of the “land of lost leaders,” I felt justified in making an excursion far enough over the border to bring me to the nearest places of exile, where I could meet and talk with men and women whom Russia had expelled. Instead of pursuing the line of the Trans-Siberian road, however, I decided to follow the old route used by exiles in the days when no railroad penetrated even to the borders of Siberia. To reach this port it was necessary for me to go north from Cheliabinsk, along the ridge of the Ural Mountains, and down into Yekaterinburg, a famous mining-center, and the starting-point of a short railroad line running to Tyumen, the most northerly point reached by railroad in Siberia.

From Cheliabinsk to Yekaterinburg was one long day’s journey. Autumn was already descending upon the land and the trees were tossing their dried and brown leaves over the steep slopes of the hills into the valleys below, where a lingering green still carpeted the earth.

From Yekaterinburg to Tyumen is a night’s journey. When the first light of dawn creeps into the car window and one realizes that day will presently reveal the melancholy wastes of the dreariest country on earth, a little of the meaning of that sinister name—Siberia—possesses one, and the desolate miles of waste and marsh country seem to hold a weird fascination.

The same train that brought me to Tyumen carried a party of exiles in the prison-car ahead—a car ironclad, with small square windows to receive the light—windows crossed by iron bars. At the station I watched the gendarmes forming their charges into line, preparatory to the first stage of their long walk. Most of these prisoners were strikingly ill-clad for a Siberian expedition. Several had no hats, while only one or two had overcoats. A representative of the revolutionary Red Cross Society—himself an exile—was on hand to make note of these things. Of him I inquired the reason why these prisoners were so inadequately clothed. He laughed at my ingenuousness, and told me that recently a party of fifty had come in, most of whom were clad in their underclothes, with an old army coat over for decency’s sake. Sometimes men are arrested in the dead of night, torn from their beds without time to dress, but often it happens that a man will sit for months in a local prison, and then, suddenly one night, he will be hurried from his cell to join the party about to start for Siberia. There is no time to dress nor to collect his possessions. The worst feature of this treatment is that the government usually makes no ultimate effort to make good this loss. Therefore the exiles have been obliged to organize a relief committee among themselves, with underground[19] connections with the outside world, to make provisions for the neglected and ill-clad new-comers whom the government so mercilessly deserts upon their arrival in this region of long winter and incredible cold.

The exile whom we found taking notes of the needs of arriving prisoners was immeasurably delighted when we spoke to him. His home was one of the university cities of south Russia, where he had been the editor of a local newspaper. Because of something he had written the wrath of the governor of the province was brought down upon him, and he had been exiled to Siberia for five years. At the beginning he was sent to a settlement several hundred miles to the north, but through influential friends in St. Petersburg he had been given permission to return to Tyumen, which is a distinctly more habitable place than a remote settlement of half-civilized Ostiaks. He invited us to visit him in his lodgings, and promised to introduce us to several other political exiles who were living in so-called “free” exile in Tyumen, and to supply us with letters of introduction to various people that would be helpful to us in Tobolsk.

When, later in the day, we climbed to his attic-room I was struck by the atmosphere of refinement that was somehow conveyed in the simple furnishings of the

room, and the few books neatly arranged on a crudely fashioned table.

“Free” exile is allowed to only certain privileged exiles, and mostly to those against whom there are only trivial charges or undefined “suspicions.” When we arrived our friend was composing a letter presently to be forwarded to St. Petersburg, detailing the pressing needs of the revolutionary Red Cross committee. In reply to questions I asked he told us how the revolutionary Red Cross Society has its committee in every village, settlement, and hamlet where exiles are sent. In Russia and abroad its agents are always actively collecting money for food for the starving and clothing for the needy. He cited many instances of heroic sacrifices of men and women of smallest resources sharing their little with their comrades in distress in Siberia. Exiles who have well-to-do families and friends receive contributions, but these are almost invariably shared with those who have no such resources. Were it not for this work of the revolutionary Red Cross Society, the suffering in Siberia would be infinitely greater than it is, and the number of deaths from starvation would be appalling.

While waiting for one or two others to join us he gave me a little sketch of Siberian exile history and life:

“Siberia began to be used by Russia as a place of exile about three hundred years ago, but at that time very cruel and terrible punishments were meted out to civil as well as political offenders. The bodies of men were frequently mutilated, their limbs amputated, and hideous tortures applied that left lasting scars. In order to dispose of these maimed and now worthless creatures they were dumped into this remote region of northeastern Asia, which was at that time a recently acquired possession. A hundred years later, that is, just before the beginning of the eighteenth century, bodily mutilation was officially abolished, and simple banishment was introduced on a large scale. Exile soon came to be the usual punishment for a long list of crimes, covering practically the whole criminal list. Men were exiled on every conceivable pretext, or merely to get rid of them. About this time the mineral resources of the country began to be known, and the government conceived the idea of utilizing the labor of exiles for developing these resources. This policy continues in force to-day. From time to time the exile system has sunk into such a condition of disorganization and barbarity that the escape of death was sought by scores and hundreds. Pestilential prisons, incredibly crowded, were allowed to become fairly putrid with filth, while the men and women confined in them grew foul with disease or lost their senses through suffering.

“Six years ago the Czar, by imperial ukase, ended the banishment of political prisoners to Siberia, but you see how it is, this edict, like most of the imperial decrees that go out from our Emperor and his government, was meaningless. A flood of politicals pours through Tyumen all of the time now, and most people have forgotten that that edict was ever issued.

“Cruelties like those of former times are not employed now. That is to say, prisoners are not mutilated, although they are sometimes beaten and roughly handled, and while the prisons are still foul and bad they are not as they were even a generation ago. What the government does now is to desert its political prisoners to inevitable starvation, and to force many of them into intimate daily contact with loathsome diseases in the settlements of diseased savages in the interior.”

I was soon to learn the full truth of these statements from other lips, but I listened to this man’s story with keenest interest. It appears that there are two classes of political prisoners, the so-called privileged, and unprivileged, exiles. The privileged grade includes the graduates of all technical schools and universities, all noblemen, and the sons and daughters of noblemen. The unprivileged are all others: peasants, merchants, workmen, clerks, and the rest of the rank and file.

The government allows each privileged exile three dollars a month, out of which he must rent a room, or sleeping-place of some description, pay for his food, clothing, and all other necessities. If the wife of a privileged exile accompanies her husband into exile, she also is granted six rubles, or three dollars, and one dollar and a half for each child. But at the present time eighty-five per cent. of the political exiles in western Siberia, are of the unprivileged class, and these the government allows one ruble and a half, or seventy-five cents, a month! It seems almost unthinkable that a government which aspires to greatness would turn adrift living men and expect them to live for years on an allowance of seventy-five cents a month. Sometimes exiles arrive unknown to the Red Cross Society, and then there happens to them what would happen to nearly all unprivileged exiles if the government’s dole were not supplemented—they starve.

At this point a bright-faced, buoyant man of about thirty-five entered the room, and shook hands with us with great warmth. He soon told his story. He came from the town of Yaroslaff, on the Upper Volga. By trade he was a carpenter. Last spring the workmen of Yaroslaff decided to keep May Day (the European Labor Day) by what they called a “peaceful celebration”; they would not only refrain from work, they would remain indoors all day. On the eve of May Day the governor caused to be issued a proclamation warning all the inhabitants of the province that any one who celebrated Labor Day in any way whatsoever would be punished. The Yaroslaff work-men decided to take the chance. They remained in their respective homes all day, merely absenting themselves from work. The next morning every man who had thus “celebrated” was placed under arrest. The man whom I met here in Tyumen had been sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia for this offense.

The man had brought with him his wife and five children—as “voluntary” exiles. During the first three days after their arrival in Tyumen they had no money, and somehow had failed to connect with the Red Cross committee, in consequence of which they literally starved. The man told me that he had not one piece of bread for his children, the youngest of whom cried constantly through hunger.

For many years the government made a slightly better allowance to exiles for food than now. When Mr. George Kennan was in Tyumen, for example, the cost of food for each prisoner in the forwarding prison was 3-1/2 cents a day, and for privileged prisoners 5 cents a day.[20]

The impossibility of living on seventy-five cents a month, the current allowance, is patent on the face of it. Living is very high in Siberia. All foods are costly. For example, the government allowance of bread for soldiers is thirty pounds a month. Now thirty pounds of bread cost ninety cents! Sugar—criminally high all over Russia—is twelve cents a pound in Siberia. Ordinary meat is practically unobtainable at any price in the remoter places. All vegetables, save potatoes, are unknown. The character of the soil, in the northern provinces, is such that no vegetables will grow. Potatoes, being scarce, are thirty cents a pail.

I do not wish to sustain the popular impression that Siberia lies entirely within the region of Arctic cold and barrenness, for it reaches as far south as the latitude of central and southern Italy, Greece, and Constantinople, but political exiles at the time of my visit to Siberia were being sent rather to the northern and desolate parts of Tobolsk province, to Yakutsk, and the Transbaikal region.

Space forbids that I recount the vivid hours spent in Tyumen, of interesting conversations I enjoyed with cultivated men and women who had been sent off to this distant Asiatic province to end their efforts to do something worth while for their long-suffering fellow countrymen. After three days I started for Tobolsk, the capital of this western province, where I anticipated planning a tour of a few hundred miles to outlying settlements used for penal colonization.

The great Siberian Trakt, or imperial highway, begins at Tyumen and runs across the eternal desolateness of interior Siberia to the Amur River, a distance of more than three thousand miles. Along this ancient road, beaten hard by sore and bleeding feet, moistened by myriad tears, more than one million exiles trudged between the reigns of Nicholas I and Nicholas II. When exiles arrive in Tyumen they are thrown into the waiting-prison until a sufficient number have arrived to make up a party for the interior. They are then corralled like so many cattle, formed into loose marching order, surrounded by Cossacks or regular troops, and marched over the weary way. They tramp thirty versts a day for two days, and rest the third day. Rough Russian carts, called telegas, usually drawn by one horse, accompany each party to carry the luggage and provisions, and sometimes sick or exhausted marchers. At this rate of going, through summer heat and winter cold, many months are consumed in reaching the destinations to which the exiles have been assigned. During the short summer season when the waterways are open, convict barges carry some of the parties as far as possible along the rivers of the Tobol, the Irtysh, and the Obi. In order to get a taste of Siberian water travel I decided to go by boat to Tobolsk, and from there on, and indeed back to Tyumen, by the usual post-roads. The little steamer that carried us from the chief city to the capital of the province was filled with soldiers and Tartar merchants returning from Nijni-Novgorod. Each spring the Tartars travel from their northern homes with winter pelts—ermines, sables, silver foxes—up the Siberian rivers to Tyumen, then by rail over the Ural Mountains to Perm and down the Kama to the Volga, then up to Nijni-Novgorod.

The amount of commerce on the river surprised me greatly. We met many boats heavily freighted, plying between Omsk, Tobolsk, and Tyumen, and there was every appearance of a large volume of trade passing over these waterways. The quays and landing-places were very crude. In fact there were no regular docks at all. At intervals a single post had been driven into the mud, usually within a reasonable distance of some settlement or village, which seemed rarely to be close to the stream, and around this post the steamer’s hawser would be made secure, while a long gang-plank would be

extended to the muddy bank over perhaps ten or even twenty feet of water.

The steamer engines burned wood. Every few hours we would make fast to the bank near to a pile of cordwood which the native Tartars constantly replenish, and practically the entire crew and sometimes some of the passengers would act as stevedores bringing it aboard.

The settlements we passed were mostly of Tartars. The women would offer for sale milk, fish, and raw turnips—the latter sweet and tasty, though hard, and very cheap. Two and three for a cent. Toward nightfall we would pass fishermen in crude boats that were often merely dugouts—logs, hollowed and roughly shaped. On the whole the civilization of these shores was as crude as any frontier country could be, and the dirty, dilapidated hamlets we could see in the distance from the steamer-decks, suggested only decay and stagnation. Even the somber wooden Moslem houses of worship with their gilded, or painted, crescents, looked faded and forgotten, rarely reflecting any of the garishness which characterizes the temples of Mohammed. Relics of a dead civilization are all that remain to these people who once boasted a powerful empire, with glory as well as power.

Tobolsk proved a business-like town of something over 20,000 inhabitants. It commands an excellent location on the river Irtysh, facing the junction of the Tobol. On a high bluff to the west of the town proper is a striking monument to Jermak, the conqueror of Siberia. Behind this monument is a small but tremendously interesting museum. It contains large collections of old instruments of torture: branding tools, used to stamp the foreheads and cheeks of prisoners, instruments for pulling out the center bone of the nose, painful shackles, and other horrible devices for human torture. Besides these things are splendid collections epitomizing the ethnology of western Siberia through costumes and excellent models of the industries of the natives. The ornithology, geology, and mineralogy of the country are also indicated through complete collections.

There is one good hotel in Tobolsk, but when we arrived it was entirely filled with officers and we were obliged to put up at a small and dilapidated inn kept by a Pole. The man’s father had been sent to Siberia with the Polish revolutionists of the early ’50’s. This man was born in Siberia and had never been out of the country. He had married there and had children born to him, so that he had virtually become a Siberian.

One of the letters of introduction given to me in Tyumen was to a young woman whom I had been particularly told to seek out first. For reasons I did not question I was to find her through a mutual friend of hers and the writer of my letter of introduction. The morning after our arrival in Tobolsk my interpreter and I called at the house of the friend, who accepted the password we had been instructed in as evidence of our trustworthiness. She bade us enter and wait in an inner room while she sent out for the girl whom we wanted to see.

More than half an hour passed before the girl arrived. When she came in I was greatly surprised by her appearance. She did not look more than twenty, and she was gowned as any woman might be of a morning in any fashionable resort in the season. Her manner and bearing suggested Mayfair drawing-rooms. My first thought was that she must be the daughter of an aristocratic family, who had been exiled, but I remembered that the remark had been passed that she was not a prisoner. She was graciously glad to see us and told us we were most fortunate in having come to Tobolsk just at that time, because there were many political exiles in town from all over the province, even from Berezov, a thousand versts to the north. It appeared that every autumn, just before the rivers closed in for the winter, delegates of one or two “free” exiles from each settlement were appointed to go to Tobolsk to purchase the winter’s supply of matches, candles, pins, and other little things; for once the winter sets in it is often many months before a courier can get through, even with mail. The girl told us to come to a certain house in a neighboring street that evening and she would have there to meet us a number of the delegates from different parts of the province.

The house she designated was one belonging to a physician who had been exiled from an eastern Russian city for twelve years, by order of the local governor. He had never been able to learn what charge there was against him, and as he was a Constitutional Democrat, and opposed to revolutionary activity, he found his exile particularly exasperating. However, he had brought his wife and children with him and he was striving to make the best of his situation. He welcomed us with the utmost cordiality, when, at the appointed hour, we repaired to his house. It was seldom that exiles have such direct communication with the outside world as we afforded.

One of the greatest hardships of exile life to educated men and women is the life of enforced idleness that they must lead. Hard labor, indeed, for politicals, is usually interpreted enforced idleness. For an educated and disciplined mind emptiness and absolute lack of occupation is the most cruel strain. The result is that politicals often beg local authorities to permit them to go to work in the mines, merely that they may have occupation. This physician told me that previous to my coming some poor people had come to him to give them relief from pain they were suffering from a certain curable cause. The doctor gave them some simple remedy and sent them away. A day or two after he received a reprimand from a police authority—he was there as an exile, not as a professional man, and he was not expected to use his professional knowledge! The man protested that he had done very little, yet it had relieved the poor peasants, and inasmuch as the government made no provision for healing the sick he could not understand why he should not do what he could.

“But the government does provide physicians,” was the officer’s reply.

The physician then asked me to wait until others of the exiles came in, when the Berezov man reported that the single Berezov doctor, for example, has a territory almost as large as the whole of France! Others told me that in the central and southern sections of Tobolsk province physicians have districts which are defined as “a radius of five hundred versts of a given point.” In winter the only means of communication is by sledge. Fancy a New York physician who had one patient in Atlantic City, another in Lenox, and a third in Utica, and no other way of getting from point to point than by horse; or a Boston practitioner with a call to make in Pawtucket, and a patient to be operated upon in Bangor!

A delegate from a village called Felinsky gave me a photograph of the funeral of a political exile who died through the sheerest, most wanton, neglect. He had a bad tooth which developed an abscess. There was no one about who knew how to lance it, or that it should be lanced, and blood poisoning set in, causing his death.

One by one the exiles began to gather. To me it was a remarkable group. There was a civil engineer who had formerly been the district manager of one of the Baltic provinces railroads—now exiled to the far north. Then there was a mining engineer from Great Russia, the physician from Perm in the Urals, a Jewish student from Odessa, a peasant from Saratoff—who still bore the fresh bruises and mutilations of the police who tortured him—a Harkoff editor, a St. Petersburg school-teacher, and an “intellectual peasant” from Moscow province. This man, a follower of Robert Owen, could not get over his surprise at being greeted by a correspondent in Siberia. “When we fought on the barricades in Moscow,” he said, “correspondents came to see us. When we had our Peasants’ Union congress in Moscow, correspondents were there. And now in Siberia a correspondent visits us!” He shook his head in deep wonderment. Later, he showed me a Russian-English book which he had procured somehow, somewhere, and from which he hoped to learn English during the years of his exile. Around a steaming samovar we sat until far into the night—that little group and I—they relating to me the stories of their lives, the conditions of their exiles, and I telling them of what the world is doing, the world of which they once were a part, but which now seems remote as another planet, this world which they have lost. Some of them spoke English, nearly all of them knew French or German. They were strong men, all. Men of great hopes, of nobler thought and life than banishment and suffering can destroy.

The first matter I inquired about particularly was the prevalence of disease in the villages to which exiles are assigned. I was already satisfied in regard to the inevitableness of starvation. A report from a certain village five hundred versts from Tobolsk had recently reached Russia, asserting that the number of houses in the village which were infected with a certain loathsome disease was so great that the exiles could not escape close daily contact with it. This was an Ostiak village, and the disease had evidently been rooted there many years, for the report stated that the noses and lips of many of the inhabitants were entirely eaten away. I had already seen some dreadful cases, so I was not unprepared to learn that this report, which was signed by fifty political exiles, was not exaggerated. One of the group round our friendly samovar was an exile from the village of Felinsky. He told me that a careful investigation had just been made, and of the fifty houses composing Felinsky village, forty-eight were infected with this disease. And yet twelve politicals were assigned to this village. A government physician stated that in his district—Ovat Point—there were eighty-two villages, and over sixty per cent. of all the houses in all of the villages were similarly infected.

There is another very common disease found in these northern villages. It is a stomach ailment which poisons the blood. It results from eating bad fish. The query naturally presents itself: why do people eat fish that have gone bad? The explanation is plausible: the northern summers are short and the winters excessively long. The winters are also exceedingly severe, and during weeks at a time the people may not stir out of doors. It is necessary, therefore, for them to lay by what stores they can during the summer against the winter, when they may not shoot or trap. So the fish caught during the warm season are preserved according to a simple and crude method. They are partially sun-dried, then roughly salted. The sun-baking decays them slightly and the salt preserves them in practically that condition. Ordinarily, dried fish are preserved with a specially prepared salt, often containing a dash of sulphur, which prevents this slight decay. But these crudely prepared and partly decayed fish are said to be not untasty once one is accustomed to the diet, only the ultimate effects are disastrous. However, it is the best the people can do, and so they depend largely on these fish during the winter.

Scurvy is very common throughout the region, of course. The scurvy, in advanced forms, is one of the most nauseating of human diseases to look upon, but throughout Siberia, as throughout the famine region, there is no escaping it.

The political exiles in the town of Berezov had prepared a telegram to the Duma setting forth their plight. This telegram was to have been carried from Berezov to the nearest telegraph line—one thousand versts away—by the very messenger who brought the news of the dissolution. A copy of the telegram was preserved, however, and given to me. The text proved incontrovertibly that exile to a Siberian village at the government allowance is equivalent to banishment to starvation. To live upon the government grant would mean subsisting each day on one twelfth of a pound of meat (local meat, deer, or bear, etc.), one half pound of bread, one half of one piece of sugar, and eight potatoes. There would then be left eleven cents a month for lodging, and six cents a month for all exigencies, and such luxuries as candles, matches, and clothing. As a matter of fact it is difficult to find a room in any kind of a house for less than one dollar a month, unless one sleeps with native Ostiaks, and the great crime of Siberia is that political exiles are obliged to do this, even when the Ostiaks are foul with disease.

When I had asked as many questions as I cared to, the conversation shifted to world interests, and we might have been a group in any London or New York club. How the sane men who make up a government can persuade themselves that it is the policy of wisdom to banish educated, intelligent men like those whom I met in Tobolsk is past finding out. It would seem that in Russia’s time of great need that these were the very ones who were most needed in active effort of reconstruction.

It was far into the night when we separated, and then it was with mutual reluctance that we said good-night. To me, the evening had been one of intensest interest and most genuine inspiration. And they, too, had appreciated the breath from west of the Urals.

My companion and I walked home with our friend, the girl who had brought together this little gathering for us. She talked vivaciously of the “work” in Siberia, and I wondered more than ever about her. When she stopped at her own front door, it proved to be before one of the few big houses in the town. This again increased my curiosity concerning her.

“Oh, she is probably a school-teacher,” suggested my interpreter.

“But school-teachers in Siberia are not apt to wear Paris-made gowns and live in one of the grandest houses in town,” I answered.

The next day I asked our physician about her, and he replied:

“She is the daughter of one of the governor’s staff. She was educated abroad. Most of her family live abroad. She chooses to accompany her father here because of the opportunities she has for service in the

movement. Her father is in the interior now, so she has unusual liberties.” I really might have guessed that her situation was something of this nature.

During the next few days I saw so many exiles in and about Tobolsk that I gave up the idea of visiting outlying settlements. Since I had neither the credentials, nor the time, for visiting the prisons, I only hoped and desired to talk with a fair number of exiles and hear their story of the conditions of political exile under the “constitution.” This I was able to accomplish right here.

One house of special interest in Tobolsk that all the politicals pointed out was a kind of community-house built by the Decembrists of 1825 who were sent to Tobolsk. During my stay here I met at least two men who had been exiled in 1878—they had both met Mr. Kennan when he was in Siberia in 1885, and asked me to carry their greetings to him, and to tell him that they were still there! One man, Kosturin, has made his lot more bearable by editing a newspaper, or rather, his wife edits and conducts the paper—officially.

The season was now advanced, snow-flurries were daily in the air, and there was a winter crisp in the trees that heralded the near approach of the icy storms that close Siberia through long months.

At four o’clock one morning we left Tobolsk in a post-chaise and drove continuously for thirty hours along the great Trakt to Tyumen—a distance of three hundred versts, stopping only at post-stations to change horses. In Tyumen we lingered long enough to say good-by to the men and women we had met coming in, and then traveled by train to Yekaterinburg.

This trip into Siberia was very short, superficial even, yet it proved worth while. I got a brief glimpse of the country, I visited the two most important towns of western Siberia, and I met many splendid men and women who are doomed to long exile, yet who were of good cheer. To merely have met them face to face, to have grasped their hands, and talked with them through the still hours of night—this, alone, was worth the long journey.

If I had needed any further evidence of the inhuman and utterly blind policy of the Russian government, I found it here in the treatment imposed upon men and women that any nation in the world should be proud of—verily the flower of the land.

At Yekaterinburg six weeks’ mail had accumulated, so that I spent several days here before crossing the Urals to Perm, where I rested again for nearly a week, before continuing my journey westward to Vyatka, which I found in many ways the most interesting province I had seen in Russia. The peasants there are very progressive, and through generations of practice have become marvelously skilful in wood-working. Some of the boxes I saw, with secret compartments, were examples of rare ingenuity and skill. There is a museum there of the peasant handicrafts which is most interesting. And withal the Vyatkans have a business sense which has enabled them to build up a profitable trade in these things with Siberia and Russia at large, through the Nijni-Novgorod fair and sales-shops in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

From Vyatka I traveled by a new railroad to Vologda and St. Petersburg, arriving in the capital early in October, when the nights were lengthening and the icy air was calling out the winter furs.

CHAPTER XVIII

MY FRIENDS, THE TERRORISTS

MY interview with Marie Spiradonova on the eve of her deportation to Siberia led to my meeting a good many terrorists. A Moscow newspaper made so bold as to print a short account of my experience in the Tamboff prison and the entire edition of the journal was confiscated by the police. A week or two later, in St. Petersburg, Professor Paul Miliukoff’s paper, the “Retsch,” the official organ of the Constitutional Democratic Party, published one or two of the photographs of Marie that Luboshitz had taken on the occasion of our visit, and the police descended upon it. Some one, unknown to me, procured one of these newspaper reprints and used it for an edition of Marie Spiradonova postcards. A Moscow book-shop placed these cards on sale and the police permanently closed the shop—after taking all of the cards. These and other incidents which developed out of the Tamboff visit seemed to offer a guarantee to the members of the Extreme Left that I was trustworthy. I may have been needlessly reckless, perhaps, in the way I availed myself of the opportunities presented through this chance means, for nowhere in the world to-day is playing with fire apt to lead to deeper burns.

I need look back over only as many months as I can count on my fingers to realize the appalling price these daring men and women of the skirmish line of the revolution pay for devotion to their ideals of a free Russia. Some died where they stood when they cast their one blow for Russia; some died, blindfolded, bullet-riddled, as the dawn wind blew fresh across the fortress courtyard; others swung ignominiously from a hangman’s scaffold, the sunlight and the wide, blue sky shut away from their last vision by a hood of black; at least two checkmated their captors and laughingly claimed their heritage of death by their own hands; several lie in living death in the far north; several rot in pestiferous prisons; a handful are in voluntary exile abroad—dreaming, planning, watching for the moment when they may most effectively return to the fight.

Terrorism and assassination are the monumental bugbears—in America. Of all the complexities of the Russian situation, nothing is so little understood, so frequently—I might almost say so universally—misunderstood in America as terrorism. Terrorism in America means “anarchy,” and that suggests Haymarket riots or Czolgosz fanaticism—both of which are entirely outside the pale of terrorism as it is understood in Russia. Terrorism is a philosophy and a policy, rather than the impulsive action of human passions. It is true, of course, in individual cases, that the father or husband of an outraged girl will seek reprisal himself when hopeless of lawful aid, but cases of individual revenge have nothing in common with terrorism properly so-called.

Incidental to the terrorism of political origin is a certain amount of assassination worthy of mention. I mean assassination resulting from specific acts of military or administrative officials. For example, last year a number of women teachers in the Caucasus met to confer upon educational methods, and to lay out a plan for an improved curriculum. The government disapproved of their taking so much upon themselves, and sent Cossacks to break up the meeting. Not content with dispersing it, the colonel of the Cossacks said to his soldiers: “These women are yours.” The Cossacks then outraged all the teachers. Neither the colonel nor any of his men were punished. It is not difficult to understand how the friends and near ones of these young women felt toward the colonel who was responsible. It is not to be wondered at if some one—a father, a brother, a lover, or perhaps one of the dishonored women—took up bomb or revolver in retaliation. What would American fathers, or brothers, or lovers, do under like circumstances?

So long as the Russian government and the military and police authorities encourage massacres, and do not rebuke such enormities as these, absolutism will continue to be tempered by assassination. Under such pressure as this the strongest wall of reason, the finest ideals of manhood, fall away, and the impulse of the moment becomes not merely the supreme, but the only dynamic of life.

Terrorism, however, does not rest on a mere personal basis. These incidents—to which might easily be added a vast number—simply account for the picking off of a man here and there, usually a man of subordinate rank.

The terrorists of the revolution bear precisely the same relation to the movement as a whole as sharp-shooters bear to a regular army. No military officer ever advocated turning a whole army into scouts and sharp-shooters, and no revolutionist I ever talked with desired turning the revolutionary movement into a vast terroristic organization. But as an auxiliary agency the fighting organization has its work, just as distinct and as important as the work of the military organization.

The Russian revolutionary parties, properly so-called, are two—the Social Democratic Party and the Social Revolutionist Party. The former is a Marxian socialist party, dominated by German thought, and influenced even to its working methods by German ideals. More and more the Social Democrats are tending toward the doctrinaire. They aim to keep in step with the international socialist movement, and their immediate efforts are all toned and tempered by their ultimate program, which is the establishment of a socialistic state in Russia, to supersede autocracy, as soon as the rank and file of the people are sufficiently instructed in the nationalistic principles which underlie their philosophy. Active fighting and insurrection with the Social Democrats is now only occasional, and is determined by peculiar local conditions.

The Social Revolutionists, on the other hand, are an out-and-out revolutionary organization in the usually accepted sense. This party believes in barricade fighting when circumstances seem propitious. At all times its propaganda encourages preparation for armed revolts, and instils the belief that it is through insurrection that the balance of power will eventually be wrested from the bureaucracy. While indorsing insurrection, the Social Revolutionists find that there are long periods when active revolt is inexpedient, when the people are for the moment exhausted, their resources drained, their spirits dampened by the cruel reaction such as characterized the period of M. Stolypin’s ministry, from the day of the dissolution of the first Duma. Yet there are always those who chafe under inaction, and who can not cease from the strife so long as life and liberty are spared them. Of such are the Maximalists, an offshoot of the Social Revolutionists, whose exploits thrilled all Russia from time to time during 1906, but whose reckless daring resulted in the almost complete extermination of the party.

Terrorism proper is not a blind, fanatical policy of bloodshed. It is a phase of warfare which can be logically justified even when it can not be sentimentally accepted. Assassination in a country where normal, peaceful conditions prevail can never be justified. But terrorism, as it exists in Russia, rests on the basis that Russia is not only in an abnormal condition, but it is a country seething with internal war. The government maintains its army on a war footing; during the entire year of 1906 at least four fifths of the empire was kept under martial law, military trials and punishments were meted out to ordinary civil offenders, and the men were executed for crimes so petty as stealing less than ten dollars. The Russian government maintains a state of perpetual warfare against its own people, therefore the ethics of a peaceful land do not at all apply to Russia.

Terrorism does not mean reckless and indiscriminate bloodshed. On the contrary, it means the prevention of bloodshed because victims of the red terror are almost without exception tyrants whose lives, and régime, if permitted to continue, would demand the lives of numberless victims falling under their rule. The assassination of a Plehve, a Sergius, a Pavlov, a Luchenovsky, sends a nation to its knees in praise and thanksgiving—I speak, I believe, without exaggeration—because the taking of each one of those lives saved the lives of many innocents who would have fallen under their merciless régime, precisely as hundreds did fall before these pitiless rulers were overtaken by the terror.

Marie Spiradonova was the first terrorist of the present movement whom I met face to face. I have described her charming girlishness, her burning idealism, her heroic daring. During the succeeding months I met a good many members of the fighting organization and I think with every one I was impressed with their splendid spirit.

Personally, I do not approve of bombs, save under extraordinary circumstances, but I can understand their vogue in Russia. And this I know, that the terrorist—the assassin of the revolution—usually pays greater heed to safeguarding the bystanders than the government ever does.

The slayer of the Grand Duke Sergius allowed five opportunities for striking his victim to go by, because the Grand Duchess Elizabeth was by his side and her death was not desired.

Zinaida Konoplannikova, who shot General Min at Peterhof in August, sacrificed her own life to save the lives of some children. On a certain morning when the general left his home he was approached by Zinaida, who was accompanied by one comrade. She held a velvet work-bag in one hand. In the bag was a bomb, in her pocket was a Browning revolver; Zinaida meant to do her work well. As she was on the point of passing the general and dropping the bomb two children ran toward her and flung themselves at her skirts. She carefully raised the bag above their heads, and turning to her comrade said: “I can not—the children.” That same afternoon Zinaida waited for General Min near the railroad station. Again she carried the velvet work-bag, and in her pocket the Browning. The station was almost deserted. She determined to use the bomb and attempt escape. The bomb would make sure her victim and occasion enough commotion to perhaps enable her to get away unnoticed. But when the general appeared he was accompanied by his wife and daughter. Like a flash she weighed the choice—the bomb would kill the general and the two women, but perhaps cover her escape. The revolver meant the general’s death and her own and no other. There was no hesitancy. Her hand reached for the Browning, and General Min fell. As soldiers rushed upon her she motioned them back, shouting “Careful! Careful! This is a bomb!” The soldiers hesitated. Zinaida gently put down the bomb, and gave herself up. In the dead of night, September 10, 1906, in the grim and sinister courtyard of the famous Schlüsselburg fortress Zinaida was hanged.

Many times have these “terrorists” shown similar care for the lives of the innocent. At least two or three sacrificed their lives during a Maximalist incident which is described at length in the following chapter, by the insistent daring of the “protecting party” in keeping the crowd of passers-by back from the zone of fire.

The capture of Sokolow, known as “The Bear” (a man whom I knew intimately), on the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, was beautifully characteristic. The Bear was five and twenty. He was more than six feet tall, deep-chested, light hair, small light beard, and deep-blue eyes. The Bear was a leader in the Moscow insurrection of December, 1905. A spy who had successfully played the rôle of a revolutionist had arrested a number of the Moscow leaders. Sokolow had quit Moscow immediately after the insurrection and worked only in other places. Sokolow was the soul and spirit of a certain group of the Moscow and St. Petersburg fighting organization. Some of the most daring plots were conceived by him. Now that he is dead there can be no harm in my confessing that it was he who arranged for the blowing up of the ministers in the first Duma, and it was he who forestalled the plan, as I shall describe presently. During the year he had dressed differently than when he lived in Moscow. There he was a workman, wearing a blouse and cap. In St. Petersburg he dressed as a fop, a coxcomb, an exquisite of the court. I knew him well, and was by no means unaffected by his gracious personality, his winning smile, his fine intensity. Ten months had passed since the Moscow affair. So many things had happened during those ten months that Sokolow had ceased to think of any danger from that old affair. One bright afternoon as he was hurrying along the Nevsky a beggar, clad in utter rags, stuck a dirty hand in front of him and whined a pitiful plea—“a copeck, sir, for Christ’s sake!” Sokolow drew out his purse and handed the creature a coin. As he did so, the “beggar,” who was scrutinizing the young man’s features, emitted a shrill whistle and Sokolow was instantly pounced upon by spies. The “beggar” was the old Moscow provocateur. A day or two later, Sokolow met the death of a soldier of the revolution.

During the first week in November there were fourteen executions, including two girls, at Kronstadt alone, and all of these had to be shot because no one could be