On the morning of Saturday, December 9th, the day after I had arrived in Moscow, I happened to be passing the unfinished buildings of the empty University. Minute snow was lashing through the air before a bitter wind, but it thawed as it fell, and people in goloshes went slopping about among the filthy puddles of the street.
Trailing in disorder through the dirt and wind, mixed up with the market people and the little open cabs like sledges that were always dashing up and down with men and women in furs, came a loose string of soldiers, slowly making their way westward. They had just passed the canvas booths where butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers and other loyalists set upon the students with knives the month before; they had reached the point where the soldiers from behind walls fired blindly into the thick of the unarmed procession which accompanied the funeral of the student Baumann. There they halted, because the cross road which passes the great Riding School Barrack and cuts the University in half was blocked with traffic, and then a few passers-by began to look at them curiously.
They were not to be called a column, nor were they organized as an advanced party. They were not organized at all; but a few cavalry came first, their hairy little horses throwing up a steam into the wind; then a few straggling infantry—not more than half a battalion—covered with filth, their uniforms torn and patched, some in low, flat caps like our own men, some in high, furry caps, matted with mud and snow. And under the caps were faces yellow, thin, and as though bemused with wonder. Behind the infantry followed a rambling line of various kinds of cart, and inside the carts were stretched muffled and pallid forms, their heads or arms or feet bound up with dirty and blood-stained bandages.
These were the soldiers returning from the war, the van and first instalment of that great and ruined army coming home. At last they had completed the 5000 or 6000 miles of their journey from the starving East, across the frozen lake, and through the long Siberian plains, and were alive in the heart of their own country again. And this was how they were received. Certainly, the Moscow municipality had intended to arrange some sort of festivities at the station. They had intended to give little presents to the men—something in the shape of chocolates and cigarettes that comfort the hearts of heroes. They had prepared little decorations for the officers, with the inscription, “To the defenders of the country.” But whether these festivities were ever held and these little presents given, no one could tell me. The papers had announced that the army from the Far East would begin to arrive on the Sunday. The paternal Government took care that they should arrive on the Saturday.
Probably the town officials retained for themselves their little offerings to patriotism, and will wear the war decorations with pride at family parties. So little interest was taken in the whole thing that the evening papers continued to announce that the army would begin to arrive on the morrow. The market people and cabdrivers stopped for a moment to look at them before hurrying on through the snow, and no further notice of any kind was taken of the defenders of the country.
So they drifted westward, down the dirty streets, and disappeared. On reaching the barracks, the Reservists among them were discharged, and the crowds of beggars who, with threats and curses, violently demanded the milk of human kindness at every corner, were increased by many tattered figures. They limped about in traces of departed uniforms, and as they passed, people said, “A soldier from the war.” One night I saw two or three of them seated on a curb-stone beside a fire which had been lighted in a street. One was swaying gently backwards and forwards and continually repeating, “At home and alive! at home and alive!” The others took no notice, but stared like imbeciles into the flames.
Some were drafted back by rail to their villages, and the terror of comfortable people was that they would there spread the tale of mismanagement, corruption, and misery till all the peasants would rise in fury and sweep upon the cities in ravenous and overwhelming hordes. Sometimes a dim rumour reached us from the Far East of a distracted army, mutinous and starving; maddened with hardship and the longing for home, but unable to crowd into the worn-out trains that crept along those thousands of miles of single line, choked with stores and blocked by continual accidents and strikes. If they should all come home—all the 500,000 or 600,000 of them at once? The comfortable citizens—and even in Moscow there were such people—shuddered in their furs and thanked Heaven for the difficulties of that narrow road.
On the other hand, a big manufacturer told me he was delighted to see the army returning. “For now,” he said, “the Reservists on garrison duty here will be dismissed, and we can always trust the Line to obey their officers and shoot in defence of law and order.” At the time I hoped he was over-sanguine. In Russia there is no caste of soldiers as with us. All come from the people, and in a year or two will return to the people. The Line are exactly the same kind of men as the Reservists, only younger. Of course, it might happen that, being younger, they would more likely obey, for to most people obedience is the easiest thing to do, and a young man in uniform is almost sure to fall into it. But for the moment that was to me just the one question of the future; would the Line obey their officers and shoot in defence of law and order?
There were rumours about the disaffection of a good many battalions. The Rostoff regiment got up a little mutiny on its own account one day, and planted guns at the corners of their barracks, but they were soon won back by promises of bodily comfort. For the rest, the troops patrolled the streets in mounted and unmounted parties day and night, but no one knew whether they represented a Government or not. Their chief duties were concentrated round the great block of Post Office buildings. For all day long large groups of postal clerks and officials on strike were gathered upon the pavements there, like working bees around a ruined hive, and in the neighbouring boulevard gardens, where girls and children skated, they assembled in eager controversy.
On the Monday morning (December 11th), I saw there a feeble little attempt to rush a mail-cart starting for the provinces, or for the St. Petersburg station, under mounted escort. In a moment two Cossack patrols wheeled round and dashed at full gallop into the crowd, striking blindly at the nearest heads with the terrible nagaikas or loaded whips which I described before. Where the patrols had passed, men, women, and little girls, lay felled to the ground or stood screaming with pain while blood ran down their faces. Pushing, stumbling, and scrambling for life, the crowd fled in panic before the stroke of the hoofs and the whirling whips. Then I knew that until they could face violence with some sort of organized front, the revolutionists had better stay at home. Against twenty men in uniform, five hundred had no chance. As a gigantic Caucasian cried in scorn the night before to a meeting of peaceful and scientific Social Democrats, “The party that commands force is the Government.” Who would command force was at that time the most important question in Russia, and no one was certain how it should be answered from day to day.
In the ordinary affairs of life we enjoyed liberty tempered by assassination. The advance from tyranny supported by execution was immeasurable, and it had all been accomplished in about six weeks. In that old city, the natural centre of Russian life both by position and trade, were gathered some 1,100,000 souls who had never known liberty before, either in politics, economics, or thought. It was very natural that they should not know exactly what to make of the change at first. The surprising thing was to see how rapidly their instinct for organization and self-government developed, especially in the working classes. Whether one ought to trace this faculty to the old habit of the village community among the peasants, I am not sure. But I think it certain that the feeling for association and common action—the feeling of “mutual aid” as Kropotkin calls it—is very widely extended among Russians.
Every one was then waiting for the next step in history, and the wildest rumours flew. At every corner and in every restaurant stood prophets foretelling the fates, and winning the momentary applause of delight or terror. But, except for such rewards, the time of prophets was not more valuable than usual, and for ordinary people, whose perceptions are blind to futurity, the real points of interest were still the postal strike and the rapid formation of unions. The loss to friendship and business owing to the cessation of letters was so severe, that the leaders of finance and commerce in Moscow drew up a petition to Witte and Durnavo, urging them to grant the economic demands, especially the right of union, even if no political demands were considered. The Government replied with a manifesto dismissing one thousand of the postal strikers offhand, and making all strikes among Government servants a criminal offence.
The hardship was great. Many of the strikers had served fifteen years or more, and were entitled to pensions, which they now lost. Many lived in Government quarters, from which they were now evicted. The Progressives certainly did all that they could to assist them. At all lectures and meetings, such as were held in various parts of the city every night, the bag was sent round for aid to the strikers. At one lecture I counted seven bags—chiefly students’ caps—going round for various righteous causes. In one of the most moderate of all Liberal papers—the Russian News—a strike fund was organized for the women and children, and it reached about £5000 before the Government clutched it and put it in its own pocket. In all Progressive papers you read advertisements that Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So would undertake to feed so many strikers for so many days, or to house the children. I knew three Socialist families of quite poor people who took in one or two children of strikers every day to share their dinner. The noticeable thing was that the children were fed, no matter what party of Socialism their parents belonged to. All the workers knew that the strike so far had been the people’s only weapon. The Government had two—hunger and the rifle.
Nearly every night meetings were held for the new unions which were springing up on every side. The whole of Moscow, which is built in concentric circles round the Kremlin or eminent citadel overhanging the little river, had been divided off into wedges, or “rays,” as they were called, and each ray sent so many delegates to the central committee—corresponding to the Council of Labour Delegates in St. Petersburg—which superintended the whole labour question, and had to decide the moment for strikes. But besides the central organizations, almost every trade was forming its own union of defence.
First came the great Railway Union, which controlled the powerful instrument of the railway strikes, and had its headquarters in Moscow, because the city is the obvious centre of all Russian railways. Perhaps next in size, though hardly in importance, came the peculiar union of Floor Polishers—a class of workers unknown in England, because we are not clean enough to have parquetted floors. But in Moscow they were said to number thirty thousand in the union. There were other large unions besides—the tailors’, the metal-workers’, the waiters’, the jewellers’, and a very strong printers’ union called “The Society of the Printed Word,” said to be the oldest in Russia, and rising almost to the dignity of a knightly order by its title. The Union of Bathmen and Bathwomen, a very large class of labour in Russia, is also old, and in those weeks they came to the very satisfactory decision of declaring a boycott against the editor of Katkoff’s famous old clerical and reactionary paper, the Moscow News (Moskovskaya Viedomosti). No minister of the union would wash the editor of the Moscow News at any price.
One evening I was present at the formation of two new unions in very different classes of labour. First I went to an immense meeting of tea-packers in a summer theatre, attached to the Aumont, a music hall of easy virtue. But the theatre had now been boarded up into a meeting-house as more suitable for the times. Packers of the Chinese tea that comes overland are naturally a large class in Moscow, for the tea is still the Russian national drink, in spite of the deadly blend from Ceylon which is slowly being introduced. The packers are said to number about six thousand, and forty companies sent deputies to the meeting, though some of the companies employed only eight or ten hands. It is an unhealthy trade, the dust leading to consumption; and of all the many meetings I attended it was only here that I found the voices feeble and toneless. Wages run from half a crown a week for boys and girls up £1 a week for the best men. But in the trade there is an ancient peculiarity that the wife of the owner or manager has to supply a free midday dinner for the hands, and, as one of the delegates said, “Apparently she cooks it in hell.”
The other new union was formed at a meeting of shop assistants, conducted with that suavity and grandeur of manner which one always notices at meetings of this class. It comes from watching the grace of the shopwalkers, who alone carry the dignified and charming traditions of the old noblesse into modern life. The meeting was occupied for many hours in discussing whether the union should attend only to the assistants’ interests, or should enter into wider life as a political force. The Social Democrats urged them to be bold, and, as usual, they had their way. They were far the most strongly organized party; they had their speakers ready at every meeting, and they played their “minimum programme” of quietly progressive measures with great effect. Their opponents were unprepared, and on this occasion were almost too polite to argue. I came away soon after midnight, but it was obvious that the Shop Assistants’ Union would be a Social Democratic force before dawn.
Mid-winter is the height of the season for learning, art, and pleasure, but Moscow was neither gay nor learned. Reading and fiddling seemed equally irrelevant. So were painting, poetry, love-making, and all the other pleasant arts. In the big restaurant of the Métropole, it is true, an orchestra still maintained a pretence of joy, and poured out its vapid tunes to the rare guests who sat like shipwrecked sailors scattered on a vasty deep, and struggled to be gay. But, like a middle-aged picnic on the Thames, the thing was too deliberate a happiness, and too conscious of its failure. “We must keep our spirits up, you know,” I heard a youth say to an elderly gentleman as he poured out the champagne. But it was no good. The elderly gentleman had obviously dined well daily for many years, and was overwhelmed at the solemn thought that at any moment dinners might end for ever. Day and night he was living in “the haggard element of fear.”
The University was closed. Her seven thousand students were scattered, some to their homes, some to their lodgings in the city, where for the most part they swelled the army of the Social Democrats, and spent their time discussing maximum and minimum programmes and the socialization of productivity. They were also collecting arms.
“It was impossible to keep open. The students would insist on turning the quadrangle into a Fort Chabrol,” said Professor Manioukoff, the new Rector of the University, a learned economist and advanced politician, who, being prohibited from studying grievances nearer home, had won fame by specializing on the Irish land question. So the University was closed, the professors were compelled to pursue research without the due endowment of fees, and their wives and babies had to manage upon half the family income.
Many of them took to lecturing, not for pay, but because it was the only thing they could do for the Movement. One night I listened to one who lectured for nearly two hours on the comparative history of amnesties during the last few centuries, with a very close application to the present time. He still called himself a Professor, though he had been exiled from his Chair for so many years that his name had long been forgotten, and, like most of the exiles, he came back to a world which regarded him with a considerate but uneasy pity, as we should all regard the dead if they returned. For nearly thirty years he had lived in Bulgaria, surely not too far away to be remembered, and now he was lecturing again in Moscow, an old man, lame and blind, dressed in a frock-coat and worsted slippers. His nice little granddaughter guided his steps, kept his water-glass full, reminded him every half-hour of the flight of time (which he bore patiently), and put him right about his dates, which made the audience smile. Otherwise, the large lecture hall, packed with the intellectual, listened intently, but showed no sign of approval until the end. The portrait of the Tsar had been carefully removed from behind the chair, and only the gaunt iron staples showed where it had hung.
Another evening, in one of those dubious theatres which had just been converted to decent use, I heard a Professor deliver an immense discourse upon the first principles of Social Democracy before an audience half composed of working people. They also listened patiently, but the moment of real excitement came when the lecturer ceased, and three young soldiers sprang upon the stage and shouted that, on the highest economic principles, they too had struck, and would Cossack it no more. “I have flung away the uniform!” shouted one, who was apparelled in a long dressing-gown. “No more fools of officers over me!” shouted another. “And they fed us like swine!” shouted the third, who was just economically drunk. The applause that rocked the audience was one of the grandest noises I have ever heard. If only all the army would follow the example of those three gallant musketeers! But that night they vanished from the blaze of glory, and I heard of them no more.
Vanished too were the Zemstvoists, the men who, in July, had impeached the Government in an overwhelming series of accusations. Since the death of their hero, Prince Sergius Troubetskoy, their heart had failed them, and in November, when they met again in congress and their chance had come, they wasted the precious days in discussions upon Witte’s character, just like a suburban essay society discussing Hamlet. But time was going fast just then, and before they had settled Witte’s psychology to their satisfaction they were forgotten. They had meant so well by their counsels of moderation and attempts to imitate the British Constitution, but rushing time had left them lonely. Yet Moscow was rather strong in Liberal papers, which the bourgeoisie were glad to accept as protests against the extremes of socialism. The Russian News, for instance, edited by white-haired Sobolevski, with a grey-haired staff, was a strictly moderate paper, as I have said, though its writers had become so inspired by the youthfulness of the time that their articles would have sent them a year before to meditate in prison or exile upon the license of governments.
Then again, the first Sunday I was in Moscow, Professor Miliukoff brought out his new paper called Life (Zhisn) on simple and moderate lines. He began with a long and earnest appeal for the unity of Progressive parties against the common enemy of Absolutism. “Let us all combine,” he cried, “into a bloc, and present a solid front to the ancient tyranny and new reaction. When Absolutism is overthrown, there will be time enough to discuss the divergent lines of our own programmes.” Every one respected Professor Miliukoff, and was cheered by his eternal hopefulness. The advice was obviously sensible. Its only fault was that it was sensible to commonplace—just too obviously sensible for times of high exhilaration, when the position of the moderate man is always painful and usually neglected. Neither workmen nor Social Democrats cared in the least for a Liberal alliance. They knew that, in any case, the Liberals would join them in the fight against Absolutism, and to the truly revolutionary spirit Liberalism is always suspect. A significant cartoon came out that week, called “The Hare at the Hunt.” The lion of the proletariat has sprung upon the Bear of tyranny; but in the foreground the Hare of the bourgeoisie is seen hastening up and delicately nibbling at one of the dead Bear’s ears, as much as to say, “Please, give me a little bit too!” A little bit might be given to the Moderates, but the proletariat were determined to keep the lion’s share.
One day, for the sake of comparison with the proletariat of St. Petersburg, I went over a large and very rich factory, which almost holds a monopoly in candles, and the darkness of Northern Russia for six months in the year makes a candle monopoly valuable. At the end of October a serious riot had occurred there, and the front of the mill was still a wreck of bricks and broken glass. The strikers had then demanded a 50 per cent. rise in wages, an eight-hour day, a lodging allowance of 6s. to 10s. a month, pensions of half wages after fifteen years’ work, and pensions of full wages after twenty-five years. When I was there, they had just begun work again on a rise of 16 per cent., an eight-hour day in three shifts, and a lodging allowance of 4s. 6d. a month. That lodging allowance arises from the general old custom of living-in. Hitherto all the single men and single women had lived in barrack dormitories inside the mill, with a room for meals, gas, heating, and washing-troughs provided. These blocks of lodgings—“spalnya,” as they are called—dismal and crowded as life in them must be, were perhaps as comfortable and much cheaper than the accommodation to be had outside. But they lacked the one great charm in life—the charm of liberty. At the time of the strike, the hands demanded the right of receiving friends and relations from outside into the premises. The managers complied, and that evening the whole place was crammed with enthusiastic advocates of family affection. A mass meeting, eloquent of revolution, was held in the mill yard, and the devotees of friendship paraded their red flags in front of the managers’ quarters with trumpet and drum. Next day the managers withdrew their amiable concession, cleared the dormitories of men and women, and turned them neck and crop out into the road to fend for themselves. The lodging allowance was given to prevent further riots and to soothe the conscience. In the matter of money, it is no compensation for what the workmen lose, but liberty is thrown in, and liberty counts so high that I think the workers had the best of it in the end, and probably the old barracks will gradually disappear.
In the last twenty years the rate of pay has gone up fourfold, while the cost of living has only doubled. A good workman in this mill now received from 24s. to 30s. a week, which appeared to be the maximum wage, and since the strike a woman’s wage had risen to 8s. a week, with the same lodging allowance as the men, or about 9s. 2d. a week in all. The standard of food was perhaps a little higher than in St. Petersburg, for, except during fasts, the family expected some sort of meat or stew every day. But this was a particularly rich mill; it prided itself on its high wages, and the Englishmen of its management delighted to display a paternal benevolence to the innocent unfortunates of a lower race. It was certainly remarkable that all the hands had gone back, except those who could not be summoned from their villages owing to the breakdown of the post.
Of course, the prolonged post strike, which had continued for nearly three weeks then, was inconvenient for everybody. Revolutions are generally inconvenient, especially for business people. But it was rather too much when that ancient champion of tyranny, the Novoe Vremya, took this opportunity for working itself up into such a glow of righteous indignation because the strikers were depriving mankind of humanity’s glorious right—the right of communication and speech—the right of corresponding with fellow-men afar off, and calling on others to associate in their joys and griefs. What had the Novoe Vremya cared about that glorious right a few months before? What protest had it ever raised against a censorship that pried into letters, and chuckled over lovers’ secrets, and tracked men down to death through the words of their friends? Or what communication with their fellow-men had been allowed to exiles and prisoners—exiles and prisoners who had been wiped out from human existence for exercising that glorious right of speech? In reading leading articles like that I have sometimes detected limits beyond which even hypocrisy ceases to be decent.
But in times of revolution we must expect and tolerate much wild absurdity among people who are afraid of losing their money, and among the startled cowards who have suddenly realized what revolution is. In a letter to his own paper, the New Life, about this time, Maxim Gorky said that people had been writing to him from all over Russia to ask why it was that the patient workman and the dear, gentle peasant, whom the advanced thinkers used to worship as a saint, had suddenly shown themselves so very disagreeable and dangerous. There was a crudity and innocence about the question which takes us back more than half a century in Western social history, and Gorky’s own answer sounds to us almost as much a truism as a chapter of Charles Kingsley seems now. He merely repeated the weary old truth that in ordinary times the rich and governing classes have never taken the smallest notice of the worker and the peasant. When have they ever turned from their games of ambition or pleasure to consider the poor? In what way have they shared their life, except in the distribution of doles, which are given for their own comfort? If a bad time had now come for them, and if a worse was coming, that was only the natural turning of a wheel which had been slow to turn.
In our country we have long been familiar with such statements. We have long known that the rich man’s charity is but a ransom for himself, so that he may follow enjoyment with undisturbed content. We have long known that the sympathies of comfortable people are limited by their own comfort. We have also learnt how vain it is to preach such truths, if preaching is to end in words. But what to us has become true to satiety may still be a bewildering paradox to less experienced and less sophisticated nations, and the extraordinary influence of writers like Gorky in Russia seems to arise from the simple-hearted earnestness with which thoughtful Russians have received their doctrine. What to us appears so painfully true that we had almost forgotten it, may dawn upon them as a fine paradox of revelation.
The teaching in Gorky’s new play, The Children of the Sun would be rather less familiar to us, for it strikes at the intellectual classes, who generally regard themselves as above criticism, whereas the rich have become case-hardened to sermons and abuse. It was then being performed in his own theatre—the best theatre in the world, airy, admirably planned for hearing, entirely free from the curse of decoration, and provided with a large hall where the audience could discuss revolution during the welcome pauses which extend Russian entertainments through the night. The drama is Ibsenite—a humorous tragedy, with plenty of ironic laughter, though it fades away into a paltry German suicide. But the political point is that the central figure—an excellent man of science, simple, sweet tempered, and devoted with all his heart to the creation of life by chemical means—declares that intellectual people like himself are in reality toiling for the poor, no matter how indifferent they may appear to the poverty of others. They are the children of the sun—the almost divine beings who shed light in the darkness of the world. The simple-hearted chemist is himself a true saint of intellect. When, with the consent of his wife, a rich and lovely lady flings herself round his neck and offers him all her love and a complete laboratory, he accepts the laboratory with rapture, but asks if the love is not superfluous. Nevertheless all his innocence, his devotion, and his real kindliness of heart do not help him in the least when the peasants, infuriated for liberty, come storming down the village and almost choke the life out of that Child of the Sun in his own back garden.
That was likely to be the fate of many excellent people, who were pursuing culture without extravagance. Many who deserved no worse than the rest of us poor intellectual and decently clothed men were caught up in the whirling skirts of revolution and carried shrieking they knew not where. From every side came rumours of burnings and slaughters. The country was spoken of as a wilderness of destruction, into which none dared penetrate. For many days in vain I sought for a guide and interpreter to accompany me among the peasants. To enter a village was sudden death, and not for three pounds a day would a townsman go with me, till at last I found one whose poverty consented.
In Moscow itself we were still revelling in liberty. We lived under an anarchy almost fit for the angels, who by their divine nature are a law unto themselves. But, unhappily, as I said, our liberty was tempered by assassination. For some weeks the average of street murders was one a day. Barefooted, long-haired beggars, the very heroes of Gorky’s tales, the ragged supermen of misery, sprang out from dark corners, and I always thanked them heartily for their mistake in regarding my money as more valuable than my life. People walked warily, and kept one eye behind them, turning sharply round if they heard even the padding sound of goloshes in the snow. Often at night, as I went up and down the rampart of the Kremlin, and watched those ancient white temples with their brazen domes glittering under the moon, I noticed that the few passers-by skirted round me in a kind of arc, and if they came upon me suddenly they ran. My intentions were far from murderous, but all were living in that haggard element of fear. They had not yet realized that the only decent way to live is to take life in one hand and possessions in the other, and both hands open.