In St. Petersburg the successors of the original Strike Committee had declared the general strike at an end, on January 1st. The thing had not been a success. Either because the leaders were in prison, or that the work-people were harassed by the frequent repetition of strikes when funds were low, only about 20,000 remained away from work, and most of these were locked-out by the employers. Outwardly, the city continued quiet, in spite of the deep indignation excited by the arrest of all the popular leaders and editors, and afterwards by the murder of a musical student named Davidoff, who was shot by Okounoff, an officer of the Guards, for keeping one foot on a chair while the National Anthem was being played in a restaurant on the Russian New Year’s Eve (January 13th).

Then came the first anniversary of Vladimir’s Day or Bloody Sunday (January 22nd). The city was filled with troops. All the previous night cavalry patrols went up and down the streets, and on going into the large courtyards, round which most of the dwelling-houses are arranged, I found many of them full of soldiers, sitting round fires with piled arms. Guns were concealed at convenient points, and all preparations laid for repeating the massacre of the previous year. But the Strike Committee had issued an appeal calling upon the workmen to observe the day only by quitting the factories, staying at home, and drawing down the blinds;[3] and though, in answer to this, the masters placarded a notice threatening with dismissal any one who remained away from work, the Strike Committee still had power enough to ordain a passive resistance.

All the morning of the day—it was a Monday—I was down the Schlüsselburg Road, where a disturbance was most likely to occur; but, on the surface, everything was still. The steam-trams carried soldiers with fixed bayonets as a guard, but otherwise the troops were kept rather carefully out of sight. Wherever the police saw blinds down, or other signs of mourning, even in the main streets of the city, they entered with their revolvers, and sometimes a little knot of spectators gathered, but there was no appearance of organized resistance or demonstration at all. The sun shone, but it was intensely cold. Upon the Neva, a few people were crossing with loaded sledges, a few on foot were following the fir branches that marked the paths. Women were washing clothes by letting them down through square holes they had cut in the ice, and then beating them with wooden slats. Men were sinking bag-nets through the ice for fish. Otherwise there was hardly a sign of life. Nearly all the mills were closed, and those that pretended to continue work were held by a strong military guard, with sentries before the gates. No throngs of excited work-people now moved along the footways or stood at street corners. In one or two of the churches, a memorial service was being held for the dead, but for the most part the priests refused to open their churches for the purpose, and the work-people observed a nobler celebration by remaining at home in their darkened rooms.

While visiting a great naval ironworks, closed, like most Government things, for want of cash, I heard from one of the chief engineers an enlightening instance of the Russian Government’s methods in conducting foreign warfare. For the Japanese War, the works had turned out many large guns, fitted with telescopic sights. When the engineers offered to teach the officers the use of these sights, their offer was scornfully refused, and the Government allowed the guns to be dispatched to the war without a man who understood them. So complete was the ignorance, that the cleaners covered the sights, glasses and all, with vaseline, and, from first to last, no advantage was taken of the invention. Yet these are the people who talked of the Japanese as “yellow monkeys,” sure to scuttle into the sea at the first sound of a Russian gun. And, what is worse, these are the people who have dictated England’s foreign policy for over half a century. Even the Social Democrats, who make no pretence to military knowledge or ambition, could hardly defend their country’s interests worse.

During the late afternoon, and far into the night, I was driving through the workmen’s quarters upon the Petersburg Island and other districts north of the main river. All the streets were hushed and empty. Where, as a rule, the pavements are crowded with men and women going home or shopping for next day, a stillness like death reigned now. Even when the hands from some working factory came out between the lines of pickets watching the gates, they hurried fast home, and in a few minutes all was silent again. Perhaps the Tsar and his minister congratulated each other that order was restored, and the corpse of freedom lay quiet at last. They did not consider that the very silence was an evidence of the revolution’s continued power—a proof that the committee which had defied them could still count on the working-people’s loyalty to its desire.

In the first and, I believe, the only number of one of the many satiric papers which had lately been suppressed in St. Petersburg, a cartoon represented the Government as a hideous vampire gloating over the body of a young girl in Russian costume. “I think she’s quiet at last,” says the monster with satisfaction, but still a little dubiously. That picture exactly expressed the situation at the time of my return to St. Petersburg. Was the sucked and tortured body of freedom really quiet at last? The vampire was anxious and dubious. But it certainly looked as though she were dead; at all events, she lay very still.

All my former friends were in prison now. One after another I called upon those who had welcomed me so joyfully before, when the world was bright with hope; and one house-porter after another told me they had gone away for a few days, and it would be useless to leave any message. We soon learn the meaning of that formula in Russia. It means that the police have come, probably in the middle of the night, have routed up the man or woman, seized all papers, money, and anything else useful, and driven their victim away in the darkness to some “House of Inquiry” on suspicion of holding the same kind of political views as the majority of English people. In the House of Inquiry the suspect is generally kept from four to six months, while his spirit is being broken down and evidence raked together against him. He may then be brought up for trial before a judge and sentenced to two years’, five years’, or ten years’ imprisonment or exile, according to the state of the judge’s political opinions or digestion. He may also be condemned by “administrative order,” without coming before a tribunal at all. I believe no “political” has been tried in open court before a jury since Vera Sassoulitch was acquitted for the attempted assassination of the elder Trepoff in 1878. No Russian jury can ever be trusted to condemn. But the Russian suspect has two advantages still—he may be thrown out of prison as unexpectedly as he was thrown in, and with as little reason given. He may also call upon any one he pleases, not necessarily a barrister, to take up his defence, if he is brought before a tribunal. He may thus obtain the satisfaction of having his case defended on the broad lines of human reason and obvious justice, instead of listening to some professional pleader, stultified by legal training, while he struggles to elude condemnation on a verbal error or by some uninspiring precedent in commercial fraud. It is very seldom, however, that the most convincing defence makes the least difference to the sentence, for that has been decided beforehand.

A day or two after my return to St. Petersburg, I was shown a letter from a friend who had been locked up in a House of Inquiry for speaking at Liberal meetings and for feeding the children of work-people during the second general strike. He had sometimes written, also, for a Progressive newspaper, and it must be remembered that the Tsar’s Manifesto of October 30th had granted freedom of the press as well as freedom of public meeting. Yet the suspicion of these three crimes was sufficient to show that he must be put out of the way like a mad dog. The letter was written on three sides, and each side marked by a broad yellow cross drawn diagonally from corner to corner as a proof that the prison authorities had read it. Yellow seems to be the favourite official colour in Russia, as I noticed before in the case of the “yellow ticket” or passport which binds the prostitutes almost hopelessly to their way of life; and the yellow cross, signifying the gaoler’s approval of the contents, shows that the prisoner did not in any way exaggerate his condition. The letter was written simply for the information of another friend who had hitherto escaped the common martyrdom which rewards all lovers of freedom in Russia. I translate a part of it:—

The treatment is not worse, it is perhaps rather better than the peculiarly brutalizing treatment of prisoners in England. There is something distinctly paternal in the provision of a library especially strong in political economy. But it must be remembered that this friend of mine had never been accused, had never been tried, and was only suspected of a crime which all the Liberals of England, from the Prime Minister downwards, commit every waking hour of their lives amid the applause of our nation; unless, indeed, it be urged against him that he fed the children of strikers—an offence from which our official Liberals are often exempt.

The particular prison in which this man was confined, was, as I said, a House of Inquiry, but the number of arrests had been so enormous since the Moscow rising that the suspects were now being thrust into the ordinary prisons straight away, or into any hole where they could be kept tied up. Just across the breadth of river from the Winter Palace of the Tsars, and the dilettante picture-gallery of the Hermitage, glitters the long-drawn brazen spire which marks the old fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, the citadel and grave of Peter the Great. Encased in monotonous marble slabs, and surrounded by hideous emblems of death and glory, there lie the bodies of all those melancholy tyrants from Peter downwards. Perhaps there are some people still left among the royal family who sincerely reckon those dull tombs among Russia’s treasures; but close beside the church along the Neva, so low that some of the cells are beneath the river level, run the dungeons which form the true Martyrs’ Memorial of the country—the places that will some day be honoured like the graves of the saints, for they are consecrated by the blood and suffering of hundreds of men and women who fought for freedom, though they seemed to fight in vain. This was the prison where again the foremost champions of freedom were now cooped up. Khroustoloff was there, the man of genius who organized the first general strike and was the chairman of the Workmen’s Council when I used to attend their sittings two months before. Not long after my return, the rumour went that he had been shot in the prison yard. Nothing was known for certain, but the thing was only too likely, for a tyranny does not spare its finest enemies, and Khroustoloff will be known to all Russian history as the man who forced the Government to defend itself by that lying Manifesto with which it betrayed the people as with a kiss.

Just outside the fortress the Tsar is building a palace for his former mistress—a Polish dancing girl, said to have been attractive without beauty—and less than a mile further up the river on the same bank, stands the large modern prison called the Cross (Kresty), whether from its shape or as an emblem of salvation, is uncertain. It is a dreary, red-brick building of the ordinary type, like Wormwood Scrubbs, and the officials hang their windows with caged birds as ornaments in keeping with the architecture. That prison also was crammed with “politicals.” In fact, it was the same story in all the prisons of Russia—the same thing as I had seen in Moscow, Kieff, and Odessa. Somehow room had to be found in the gaols for 20,000 Liberals—that was the lowest estimate I heard at the time, and a few weeks afterwards the moderate estimate rose to 70,000, and a high estimate of 100,000 was commonly accepted. We cannot wonder that a bankrupt Government felt only too delighted when it could kill off its prisoners by batches of thirty-five together as in Moscow, or of forty-five together as happened at Fellin in Esthonia just after Vladimir’s Day, when that number of journalists and men of letters were collected there and shot in bloody comradeship. The dead are so cheap in their subterranean cells.

English people are constantly marvelling, with some superiority in their tone, why it is that the Russian revolution has brought to light no man or commanding genius—“no Cromwell,” that is their usual phrase—to direct its energies to victory. Let them search the dungeons and the graves. Perhaps they may find a Cromwell there.

Till quite lately the very noblest of the “politicals” would naturally have been sent to the Schlüsselburg—the old fortress-prison standing on an island where the Ladoga Lake pours out the great stream of the Neva some forty miles above the city. But three days before the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a ukase was issued converting that ancient dungeon into a mint, and removing the few prisoners who still remained. I believe there were only five of them—old men and, perhaps, women who had tried to do something for freedom once, and in their living graves had already become myths of the dreadful past. About their identification and their removal to other dungeons there was much mystery, and the rumour ran that two of them had strangely disappeared, as well as others whose fading names and records were recalled by memories growing obscure.

To such mysteries another mystery now succeeded; for every one, except the few who clung to the orthodox photographic faith about the inexhaustible ingots of the Russian treasury, was marvelling why the terrible fortress had been converted into a mint, of all things, and whence the bullion was to come for coinage there. I am inclined to think that the Government was misled, like most people, by treacherous parallels from history, and, knowing the Schlüsselburg’s evil name, had feared a second Fall of the Bastille. It was a needless anxiety. The Schlüsselburg is too far away for popular frenzy; but the Peter-Paul fortress is close at hand and its abominations grow.

In any case, the conversion of a blood-stained fortress into an empty coin chest made no difference to the situation. The reaction went trampling along its course, and under it the country lay paralyzed. During the four weeks after the collapse of the Moscow rising (January 7th to February 7th), 78 newspapers were suspended, 58 editors imprisoned, 2,000 post and telegraph assistants dismissed, over 20 workmen’s restaurants closed in St. Petersburg to prevent relief to the unemployed, a state of siege was declared in 62 towns, a minor state of siege in 34 towns, 17 temporary prisons were opened, 1,716 “politicals” were imprisoned in St. Petersburg alone, and 1,400 “politicals” were summarily executed under martial law, not including the large and uncertain numbers that were put to death in Moscow after law and order had been re-established.[4]

Such was the terrified blood-thirstiness of that unhappy little body of men called the Committee of Ministers, who went down to Tsarskoe Selo by a guarded train along a guarded line nearly every day to discuss how best they could stifle down the hopes of liberty, and retain for themselves and their narrow circle of friends or patrons the cash, the medals, the jobbery, the social distinction, the female affection, and all the many other delights of power. They did not number more than eight or ten poor mortals, not removed by many years from the abyss of death, and, from all I hear, only two or three of them had been born more brutal or scoundrelly of nature than ordinary rulers are. One would have liked to listen to their conversation in those trains, as, with unctuous regret for the stern necessity laid upon them, they decided how many more should die. Some, like distracted Witte, whom we have heard blubbering over the wickedness of the dear children he was compelled to butcher; or like Count Dmitri Tolstoy, the Minister of Education, formerly President of the Academy of Artists; or like Shipoff, Minister of Finance to the penniless State, who only a year before had voted for universal suffrage; or like Nemeschaeff, Minister of Communications, who had been a chef to a railway, almost as good as a workman, and also had voted for universal suffrage; or like Birileff, Minister of Marine, who among Russian officers passed for a type of incredible integrity because he had abstained from swindling his country when he had the power; or like Rediger, the incapable but comparatively honest Minister of War—all these had once enjoyed a pleasing reputation for Liberalism, as had Prince Obolensky, the new Procurator of the Holy Synod, and successor to Pobiedonostseff as keeper of Russia’s orthodoxy. At one time probably nearly all of them had received the compliment of being thought a little dangerous by their relations, and now, under the ancient curse of tyrants, they were consumed by the knowledge of the virtue they had left behind. But they could not turn back—they had entered upon a road with iron walls. For guide to the entrance of that road they had deliberately chosen Durnovo, the new Privy Councillor, lately made permanent in his Ministry of Interior. And beside Durnovo stood his uneducated relation Akinoff, new-appointed Minister of Justice.

Thus was the Committee of Ministers helplessly committed to preserve in wealth and power that handful of useless human beings who may be called the Tsardom or the Government or the ruling classes—the same kind of men who for generations past have brought all that long tale of poverty, ignorance, and bloodshed upon the Russian people. Nothing could save them from the fatality of their own choice. They were forced to go on with it now, driven day by day a few steps further along the inevitable road. So day by day they gave their orders to General Diedulin, the new Chief of Police and Durnovo’s assistant at the Interior, and day by day the noblest and most thoughtful men and women of Russia were shot, imprisoned, or dragged away to the oblivion of Siberia.

I know that in England one of the pleasant myths circulated by the Tsar’s hirelings, or sanctimonious patrons, is that Siberian exile has been abolished. It is as untrue as the similar myth about flogging the peasants for taxes. In St. Petersburg on January 26th, I met a lady whose brother, a conspicuous barrister in a large city of Central Russia, had just been exiled to Siberia for five years because he took the chair at a public meeting. Like so many other confiding people, he was fool enough to trust to a Tsar’s Manifesto, and now as a reward for his simple faith, cut off from his friends, his family, and his career, he is moving by stages from prison to prison towards the dreary spot where the best years of life must be spent, even if he ever returns. It would, indeed, be unthrifty of the Government, when they have crammed the Russian prisons to bursting point, not to take advantage of the Siberian system so providentially organized by their predecessors in office.

On the whole horizon of St. Petersburg life only one sign of hope appeared. In the lecture theatre of the Mokhovaya, leading out of the Nevsky, where the educated revolutionists of the middle classes are accustomed to hold their meetings, a quiet body of men used to assemble every afternoon, with a few quiet men and women to listen. They were the Constitutional Democrats, whose meetings Witte had been compelled, not to permit, but to ignore, because in case of refusal they threatened to remove into Finland, and it was not so easy to spy upon them there. Delegates had arrived from all parts of the Empire—Mohammedan Tartars from Kazan, Armenians from the Caucasus, heathen Mongols from the uttermost parts of the East, speaking no human tongue, nor to be understood by any, had not old Professor Clementz been discovered still alive among his specimens of anthropology. Banished in his prime to the extremity of Mongolia in the hope that he might die of savagery and cold, he had dwelt so many years among the heathen that in face and language he could hardly be distinguished from them, and now they found in him their friend, the one man in the city to whom their monosyllabic squeaks and sounds conveyed a human meaning.

So the delegates met, and listened and debated, discussing the tactics to be employed if ever time should overtake the promised Duma, which continually receded. What was the right course for men who hoped nothing from violence and yet would fight for freedom; men who distrusted haste, believed in law, and yet aimed at revolution? Being concerned with subjects so far-reaching, their debates were naturally more abstract than is usual among hardened old Parliamentarians like ourselves, to whom “the middle of next week” expresses an unimaginable and negligible distance of time. But they boasted themselves practical as Russian parties go, and at all events they were not hampered, as our Liberals usually are, by class tradition and social influence. I mean, for instance, they would never endure anything so ludicrous as a House of Lords in their constitution, and if they should ever come to real power, they would enjoy the very unusual advantage of a clear field. But their immediate object was to form a strong block of opposition to the representatives of the six reactionary parties with which the Government designed to flood the Duma when the elections came—such parties as the Octobrists, or nominal supporters of the Manifesto; the party of “Legal Order,” or Law and Order, as we say; and the party of Industry and Commerce.

Beside the platform at their meetings stood a large death-bed portrait of Sergius Troubetskoy, the Rector of Moscow University, who had suddenly died in the previous September while pleading for freedom of speech, as I mentioned in the Introduction. Across the portrait was written the inscription, “The Champion of Freedom,” and the spirit of the great Zemstvoist leader might well be said to direct the methods and purposes of the assembly. Among the living leaders present were Petrunkevitch, who had succeeded to Troubetskoy’s position upon the Moscow Zemstvo; Struve, long the exiled editor of the Russian paper, Emancipation (Osvobojdenie) in Paris; and Miliukoff, so well known in France through David Soskice’s translation of his book on Russian culture, and in England and America through his own Chicago lectures upon Russia and its Crisis. He almost alone among all the Russians I met in St. Petersburg at that time still retained the power of hope and enthusiasm undiminished, in spite of all the disasters of the past seven weeks.

Coming at such a time, such words were startling in their confidence. But then Professor Miliukoff is one of those few happy people who have carried with them the glories of youth into middle age, and there is no glory of youth more enviable than the wisdom which, as the Preacher said, is the mother of holy hope.