The failure at Moscow fell like a blight upon all Russia, and hope withered. The revolutionists, certainly, protested that much was gained. They admitted that they had allowed their hand to be forced by the Government. The attempt, they knew, was ill-timed and ill-devised. But they had not intended to win this time; the rising was only a dress rehearsal for the great revolution hereafter. They were teaching the proletariat the methods of street fighting, and after all it was something to have held a large part of the ancient capital for ten days against the Government troops. Such a thing had never been accomplished before. They were proud of it, and when the hour of defeat came they pointed to the high service which even reaction performed for the cause by combining all parties again in opposition to the common oppressor.

Of these various pleas, the last alone could stand. The ferocity of the Government’s vengeance, the unscrupulous, disregard of all its pledges under the reactionary terror, certainly obliterated the differences between the parties of progress, and smoothed away the growing enmities of rivals in their country’s salvation. Persecution is a powerful bond, and when all are gagged, silence passes for agreement. There need be no question that for the time the ruthlessness of the repression only inflamed the revolutionary spirit, and combined all sections against the pitiless and incapable clique which was bringing ruin upon the people. How far such a lesson might be permanent, how long such unity of purpose amid differences would be maintained when the pressure of adversity was removed, could only be known when the next opportunity for revolution came. For the moment unity was gained.

Otherwise the failure was only disastrous. It had proved too expensive for a dress-rehearsal, and to fight for defeat is seldom worth the pain. It deprived the movement of its prestige. The revolution was no longer an unknown and incalculable power, springing from secret roots, no one knew where. The Government had gained all the advantages of a general who has carried out a successful reconnaissance and discovered the enemy’s limitations. They knew now on whom they could rely, and many of the wealthy and educated classes who had rather enjoyed posing as Liberals when they thought it was the fashion, now began to appreciate the virtues of the ancient regime with fresh intelligence.

One thing, above all, the failure had proved: the devil was still on the side of the big battalions. The real hope of the revolutionists had been that the troops would come over to the side of freedom,—that the soldiers would “fraternize.” They had some grounds for the hope. Mutinies had been frequent and serious, the war scandals were partially known throughout the army, the soldiers themselves sprang from the people and would return to the people. It might be that they would hesitate to shoot men and women so like their own relations at home.

Large quantities of revolutionary literature had been distributed among the garrisons, and many of the reservists had already professed Socialism. But when it came to action none of these things counted against the cowardice of obedience and the fear of death. It is true that comparatively few of the garrison infantry were employed, though, as I have noticed, even the disaffected Rostoff regiment clamoured to be led to the front. But the gunners, who were supposed to be very uncertain, were the chief instruments of suppression, and both the dismounted Sumsky Dragoons and the Semeneffsky Guards, when they arrived, displayed a bloodthirsty lust for massacre which could not have been surpassed by the most loyal mercenaries.

Put a man in uniform, feed him, give him arms, and he may generally be depended upon to shoot as directed. Obedience is only a temptation to sloth, and it becomes almost irresistible when the temptation is supported by fear of death. The soldier who “fraternized” had everything to lose, and the revolutionists could offer him nothing—nothing but a revolver, a dubious payment for three days without food or clothing, and a prospect of almost certain death if they failed. To win over an army, the revolutionists must first command a public purse. They must point to some Parliament, Assembly, Committee—some authoritative body which can supply food, clothes, and pay. This was the advantage of our own Parliament in its struggle against despotism; it could draw upon legitimate taxes, the King could only melt down plate. And under modern conditions, unless the revolutionists can win over the army, a revolution by violence appears almost impossible. That was why the immediate occasion of our own revolution was the dispute between the King and Parliament about the command of the militia at Hull. Add to these instincts of obedience and self-preservation the promise of better food held out to the army in the Tsar’s Christening-Day Manifesto; add the weariness and irritation of street fighting, the terror of sudden death lurking at every window, the memory of women’s jibes and taunts during the past few weeks, and you get a temper which will stick at no methods and be troubled by no remorse. Among poverty-stricken and uneducated men, with no employment or home or resources of their own, I doubt if enthusiasm for freedom should ever be counted upon against the restraining powers of habit, uniform, and rations.

That was the main lesson of Moscow, and the Government was quick to learn it. They knew their power depended entirely upon the command of the army and police, but for the present that was secure. The command of the army and police depended again upon their ability to pay them, and, with an estimated deficit of £50,000,000 for the coming year and a real deficit of about £80,000,000, finance was the weak point in the Government’s defences. But Kokovtsoff was now in Paris negotiating a loan by which at least the French might pay their own interest on their own advances for one year, and for the future everything might be hoped from the power of reaction. On January 9th, Witte replying to a deputation of the gently Conservative “League of October 30th,” announced his conversion to violent and repressive measures with characteristic tearfulness. Whining like an apostate who blubbers over the God he has betrayed, he cried—

While he was thus speaking, I myself was moving very slowly south-west from Moscow towards Kieff, over indistinguishable spaces of snow marked only by rare and desolate villages of wooden huts and sheds. During the twenty-eight hours of the journey, we passed a few miserable towns as well, and on the side platforms of every station I noticed great piles of sacks sopping in the snow and rain; for a premature thaw had set in and there was hardly a shred of tarpaulin to cover them. I found out afterwards that these sacks held the last summer’s harvest—the grain which ought to have been feeding Russia and Europe. But it lay rotting there while peasants starved, because the thousand trucks which should have taken it to market were standing idle in Siberia or dragging men and horses slowly home, and the Government which had made war upon Japan was now entirely occupied in flogging or shooting the men and women who differed from their policy.

Kieff, like Moscow and other towns, was exposed to all the violence of martial law, which, indeed, for various reasons had become almost chronic there. The city has often shown herself the birthplace of revolution, and she is kept in almost continual ferment by the opposition between her piety and her intellect. She boasts herself the ancient centre of Russian religion and, at the same time, of Russian thought—a strange combination, but that the religion is mainly subterranean and the thought dwells in the upper air. As objects of pilgrimage her holy shrines are unrivalled. Peasants from all over Russia visit Kieff by hundreds of thousands a year. They come to pray at the ancient church of St. Sophia—a circle of dark and unexpected chapels clustering round a central dome, where mosaics on golden ground dimly gleam to the few tapers below, but all else is dark, and invisible forms are heard moving in shadow, as a priest intones, or an outburst of deep chanting sounds from unseen altars. But most pilgrims are more attracted by the mummied forms of Russian saints who lie at rest in catacombs far underground, below the churches and monasteries of the sacred Lavra hill, which looks across the Dnieper to the great plain of unenclosed fields and forests beyond. With coffin lids open to preclude deception, the saints are laid in the rock-cut passage or niche where once they spent their dull years of suffering because the torments of ordinary life upon the surface were insufficient for their zeal. Nay, one who, regardless of health, lived buried in earth to his shoulders for thirty years, stands buried so still. The rest lie wrapt in coloured cloth through which their face and form may only obscurely be discerned; but when I examined the cloth I found it genuine. Year after year their holy shrines are watched by silent monks, who sit beside them with lighted tapers, religiously idle, while the long files of peasants pass and give their pence, and kiss the cotton coverings, and gulp the holy water which as a final blessing is presented them to drink from the hollow of a silver cross. Or if any one refuses to drink, the monk pours the water down his back, in the hope that even upon a heretic the efficacy of so great a blessing may not be entirely wasted.

But above ground, Kieff is the mother of science and intellectual progress, as far as such things can exist in Russia at all. Upon the surface of her pretty hills, stand a famous University, a great Polytechnic, and many schools. Ever since the fourteenth century, when there was no such great distinction between divine and human knowledge, Kieff has been conspicuous for her learning, and she still claims equal rank with Moscow and St. Petersburg. Hers was the first printing press of Russia, and it is she who has provided the training for most of Russia’s recent politicians up to Witte himself—politicians as distinct from officials, who are produced according to regulation type by the more passive and unimaginative races of other districts. For Kieff is the real capital of Little Russia, and the Little Russians have no doubt that they are the intellectual people. They call themselves the Midi of Russia, the Provençals, the people of the sunny south. They are Slavs themselves, but they claim the Slavs of Galicia or such Slavs as are found in Prague as their nearest relations, and though their language is only a Slavonic dialect, it is unintelligible to other Russians, and is a bond of union only among the dwellers in the Ukraine or marches or borderland of the south-west.

Even in winter the dress of Little Russian peasants is brilliant and distinctive. They go in cheerful crimson and orange, and their skirts and aprons are worked with barbaric embroidery, as among the Bulgarian Slavs of Macedonia. Their music and dances are like no other in Russia, being comparatively gay. The artistic instincts run in their blood, and the women supply the Empire with singers, actresses, dancers, and others among whom beauty counts for wealth. In ordinary life even a stranger notices at once that the people are better mannered and more cheerful, though that does not imply an unseemly excess of merriment.

In language, in life, and in temperament the distinction is almost as much marked as between two kindred but separate races, but among the Little Russians there is no proposal of separation. They would gladly become a home-ruled State in a Russian Confederacy, provided their defence were insured and they suffered no commercial loss. But their great fear is not of Russia but of Poland, lest any marked improvement in their position should bring more Poles among them to swallow them up. Already the Poles are gathering the commerce and land into their hands, and Poles are regarded much like the Jews, as insinuating people, unscrupulous, and horribly clever. Little Russia is apprehensive of Poland very much in the same way as Poland is apprehensive of Germany. Worse than all, the Poles are Catholic and care nothing for Theodosius and Nestor and the eighty mummied saints of Kieff. The Little Russian knows of only two religions beside his own—the “Old Believers,” who in spite of all the death and torture they have suffered for two centuries and have so richly deserved for holding up a heretical number of fingers in the blessing, still remain in the family of the Church, as the poor relations of Orthodoxy; but, apart from them, he only knows “the Polish,” by which he means the Catholic—schismatics hardly removed from heathendom, who worship images instead of pictures, and keep their Easter wrong, and do not compel their priests to marry, but are predestined to eternal fire.

As it is, the Polish element is very strong in Little Russia, and so is the German, the Bohemian, and the Galician. For Kieff has been the great centre of international intercourse during the last fifty years, ever since an English engineer, with English workmen, and English materials, threw a suspension bridge over the wide stream of the Dnieper there, and placed it on the great high-road of South Russia. The bridge was lately reconstructed, and it is a sign of change that a Russian engineer was now employed, with Russian workmen, and Russian materials, and still it stands. But the result of all this admixture in Kieff has been that the Little Russian movement is disappearing before the general longing for great constitutional changes throughout the Empire. For themselves, the Little Russians would be well content if they were allowed the free use of their language, which is now forbidden both in print and on the stage, while a Little Russian newspaper which ventured to peep out after the October Manifesto was at once stamped upon. But for the larger aspects of progress, Kieff has never failed to supply revolutionists alike eloquent and daring.

When I arrived in the city the surface looked quiet enough, though martial law still prevailed. Some ten weeks had passed since the Loyalists or the Black Hundred, directed by the police, protected by the soldiers, and bearing crosses and portraits of the Tsar in procession, had sacked and plundered down the main street; while in front of the Town Hall a military band played the national anthem to enliven their patriotism. On that occasion the Liberals were saved by the riches of the Jews, for the patriots preferred free and easy plunder to risky assassination. So the Cossacks who were ordered out to suppress the tumult, ranged up their horses in front of the Jewish shops, and took heavy toll of the plunder as the thieves came out through the line with their loads. The police and hotel-keepers took toll in the same way; indeed, the proprietor of the best hotel in the town accumulated so valuable a reward from the neighbouring jewellers’ shops that even patriots regarded his patriotism as overstepping the requirements of citizenship and good taste.

That day the blessings of this world were very widely distributed in Kieff, but it happened that almost the only non-Jewish house attacked was the British Consulate. Outside this house, which stands within forty yards of the main street, and bears over its door the usual painted placard of the British arms, a garrison officer formed up his company in a half-circle, and ordered them to pour volleys into the windows. Apparently he acted out of mere national spite, or perhaps because England, in spite of all the errors of the last ten years, is still regarded by the Russian revolutionists as “the Holyland of Freedom.” Happily, the British Consul himself had just left the place, being engaged in a gallant attempt to save the lives of a Jewish family by sheltering them in his own private residence. A formal apology was afterwards made by the Governor-General of the town, and the incident was officially declared “closed.” But English people who are inclined to trust the forces of law and order rather than the Russian Liberals, for the protection of our consulates and our interests, should consider its significance. It was more shameless than the attack upon our Consul at Warsaw on January 31st of the same year, though it did not attract so much attention.

Throughout the winter, the sufferers who had been ruined by the Loyalist demonstration kept putting in claims for redress, which the Russian Government politely answered by assuring them that they were at perfect liberty to prosecute those who had done the damage in the usual law-courts. The day I arrived in Kieff, a very large number of Jews—said to be three hundred—were suddenly arrested at a religious service, no reason being given. Two days later they were suddenly released, no one knew why. These are but instances of the kind of justice which the revolutionists think they could improve upon without upsetting the foundations of society.

Also on the same day on which I arrived, a band of thirty-five revolutionists who had escaped from Moscow and had crept down the railway as far as this, with a view perhaps to escaping by way of Odessa or Poland, were arrested at the station. They disappeared, and it was universally assumed that they were shot at once, if only because the prisons were so horribly full that no one else could possibly be stowed into them. After the first railway strike in October, a deadly form of typhus, or gaol fever, broke out in the prisons. The relatives of the imprisoned railway men offered to nurse their own friends, and be responsible for them, if only they might be released from the plague-stricken gaols. But the request was refused, and the men left to rot. Next came the serious military rising of December, the chief demand of the soldiers being for more decent treatment from their officers. The mutiny was rapidly suppressed, and the published figures of the men who disappeared in consequence were given at ninety, but I discovered that among the officers themselves the acknowledged numbers were three hundred and eighty.

But beside its distinction for religion, intellect, and revolution, Kieff is also famous as the capital and market for the land of “Black Earth” that great deposit of fertile soil which supplies wheat for England and most of Europe, and is the chief source of such little wealth as Russia possesses. In 1904, Russia’s total exports were valued at £96,000,000. To this amount the foodstuffs contributed £61,400,000, and the value of exported grain alone was £49,530,000, of which England took £6,370,000. Next to grain in value came naphtha, which amounted only to £5,823,200, and, only a little below that, eggs. Rather more than half the total of Russia’s exports, therefore, consists of grain, and this Black Earth is the granary of the country.

From Kieff I made a long journey by sledge to many villages about thirty or forty miles away.

For a time the frost had broken up, though the Russian New Year had only just begun. Consequently the tracks were hardly passable for the rough wooden sledges that peasants use, and at one place where the snow was falling in great sheets, driven by the wind, so that the wide steppe showed no marks on its whiteness, and no division was to be seen between sky and land, our progress was very difficult for many hours. But we reached a village at last, and there, as in all the others I visited, I was surprised to find, not higher prosperity, but worse poverty than in the Great Russian villages I had seen. In one cottage, it is true, three dogs, two cows, a bristly pig, and a cat were all nestling against the stove in the entrance-room or antechamber. The dwelling-room also had one real iron bedstead, a chest of clothes, and a whole row of glittering icons. I hoped it was typical of the village, but I was wrong. It must have belonged to the village moneylender.

The other houses were rather singularly wretched. The very next was inhabited by a family who cultivated their own plot of land close around the cottage. The man had gone, like all the other men of the place, to wait his turn in the string of pleasure-seekers outside the Government vodka-shop and purchase the New Year’s joy; but the wife and three children were at home, all seated on the broad shelf which made the second-best bed. The other bed was a warm space constructed on the top of the great brick stove itself. There was no covering of any kind on either bed, and, of course, no mattress; nor was there any furniture in the room, not even a table, chair, or chest. The family had their meals on the bed, and the only decoration was a row of brown earthenware plates which the woman had stuck against a wall, just as though she had been dwelling in the Kensington of twenty years ago. “They look so red,” she said, “red” being the common Russian word for bright or pretty or even splendid, as I noticed in the case of the Krasnaya Square in Moscow. As in all the villages of this district, the oven was heated only by straw, for coal is unheard of, and wood too expensive to buy. Only a few hours earlier I had driven through far the biggest pine forest I had then seen in Russia—great woods of spruce and Scotch fir. But all those forests belonged to the Tsar, and no peasant dared to touch a twig of them. To be found burning wood might cost a man his cottage and land. So the stove that keeps the family and cottage alive is heated with straw.

There are many reasons for the permanent poverty in this rich land—the taxes, the extortions of the moneylender, the ignorance of agriculture, the oppression of the petty officials. But the ultimate reason is that when serfdom was nominally abolished, and the land nominally distributed, forty years ago, there were far more peasants in proportion on the Black Earth than on the unfertile land of other parts, so that the grants were very small—so small that the greater fertility could not make up for the difference—and the price affixed to each grant was not merely too large, it was so overwhelming that the peasants were never able to wipe out the debt, and their payments in fact became a fixed rent to Government, and a much higher rent than in other districts.

So far, all around Kieff, the peasants had remained quiet. No country houses had been burnt or proprietors killed, though the usual superstition about the danger of venturing out into the country prevailed. The people, as I have said, are a sanguine and happy-tempered race, as Russians go. Regiments of soldiers had also been distributed among their villages as a further inducement for keeping the peace. In the little country town of Vasilikoff, among its low hills and wintry orchards, I found the Kieff dragoons, for instance, engaged in spreading contentment among the peasants by showing themselves human to the girls. As I watched them strolling about the filthy lanes of that remote and wintry place, prodding the rough cattle, criticizing the ponies in the street-market, or carrying away the steaming cauldrons of tea for rations, I remembered with a strange sense of distance that the English King was this regiment’s honorary colonel.