At the end of January I left St. Petersburg for Riga and the Baltic Provinces. As in other parts of Russia, the hopes of change had faded there, and the whole land lay prostrate under a bloodthirsty suppression, the more savage because it was encouraged by a double race hatred—the ancient feud of German, Russian, and Lett. As I came at sunrise through the fir forests and frozen heaths of Livonia, twenty-five men were being shot in cold blood among the sandhills beside the railway. They were tied together in a row by their feet and arms, and they fell together; but the firing was so bad that many were hardly hit at all, and had to be finished off at close quarters before they were heaped together into a trench already prepared for them. When I reached the town, the first thing I met was a party of twenty soldiers with fixed bayonets driving along four boys of eighteen or nineteen, who marched with their hands in the pockets of their long coats and their caps drawn low down over their pale and weary faces. They were being taken to the castle, where, I was told, a hundred more lay ready for killing, and would probably be slaughtered on the sandhills next morning. It was a fitting entrance for me into these once peaceful and civilized provinces, where now the bloody assize was raging.

The daily papers in Riga are, for the most part, German, but, for once, they were on the side of the Government and the Russian troops, because the leaders of the attempted revolution and the victims in its suppression were Letts. So they would not be likely to exaggerate the injustice and brutality of the assize. Yet each of them, above its tender German love-story or bit of art criticism, displayed columns of tabulated slaughter, and the whole local news of the three Baltic Provinces consisted of shootings, hangings, and floggings. The accounts were generally arranged by villages. For instance, from one number of the leading Riga paper I take the following reports, almost at random, out of the columns that appeared above an excellent appreciation of Ruskin’s “Præterita”—

I need not say that two hundred strokes of a wooden rod delivered by soldiers on the naked body of either a woman or a man would mean almost certain death in its most terrible form.

Village after village had that salutary impression exercised upon it, and one week after another the papers told the same monotonous story of cold-hearted bloodshed.

The German landowners, some of whom had suffered considerable losses during the peasants’ rising, hounded on the military to vengeance. No measures were harsh enough for them, no executions too bloody. They taunted the Governor-General Sollogub with half-hearted mildness, and clamoured for the appointment of the drunken butcher, General Orloff, in his place. They appeared to long for the extermination of the race which for centuries had been their servants. A daughter of a great landowner, whom I met, said to me, “One of the peasants themselves told me to-day that at least a third of them deserve to be shot, and he hopes they will be. I was so glad to hear him say so.”

Certainly, for those who had run for refuge into the town, as most of the German landowners had, life was unavoidably dull. Beyond the restaurants, two music-halls, and a number of brothels, there was nothing to distract a gentleman’s mind. The landowner pined for the country life and healthy sport to which he was accustomed. His imagination was haunted by the smoking ruin to which his ancestral home had been reduced. When he had once enjoyed the newspaper columns of executions and floggings which were served with his breakfast, new every morning like the love of God, there was really nothing left to beguile the tedium of existence till evening came. Even then the entertainment was rather dreary—a German café chantant, with sweet champagne and half a dozen girls whom the proprietor paid to be pleasant. “I suppose I shall have to go and see that dancer again,” said one of the nobility to me, as he yawned and stretched himself. “It will be something to do. Her legs aren’t really good, I know, but in these times we must all take what pleasure we can.”

On going out, we met a strong body of soldiers driving three prisoners rapidly along the street. Flanking files had been thrown out upon the pavements, and a large rearguard followed. One of the prisoners was a ragged man without a hat, and his arms were pinioned to his sides. The other two were women, with white handkerchiefs over their heads, showing they were Letts. They passed very quickly, the soldiers, with fixed bayonets, urging them continually onward from behind. A feeling of intense excitement prevailed. The soldiers were terrified of a rescue. An eager though cautious crowd followed at some distance, like the children who follow bullocks to the slaughter-houses in Aldgate. So they hastened along the road out of the town towards the sandhills, and in half an hour the man and two women were dead and left warm in their graves.

The Letts boast themselves to be the Irish of Russia. They are the ancient peasant race, whose land has fallen into the hands of alien conquerors, now supported by a foreign military power. For eight centuries the country of the Letts and the smaller tribes of Lithuanians and Esthonians has been the prey of Germans, Swedes, and Russians in turn. But the Germans, the descendants of the Sword-Brothers and the Teutonic Order, who first introduced the laws of conquest and Christianity among them,[5] have remained the chief owners of the great estates, and the culture of the towns is mainly German also. All three tribes come of an imaginative and artistic stock. Many of the leading writers and artists of Russia are Letts, and in their own strange language—probably the most ancient in Europe, and most nearly akin to old Sanskrit—they possess an immense collection of primitive folk-songs and legends. They are not so advanced—not so artistic in form and feeling as the Lithuanian songs, which are familiar in German translations, such as the beautiful and characteristic song set to music by Chopin. But the Lettish songs follow the ancient Asiatic form, seldom more than four or six lines long—simple outbursts of joy and sorrow over the great events of all human life, birth and spring and love and harvest and winter and death. They are full of prehistoric myth and lore. Herder translated a few when he was a parson in Riga about a hundred and forty years ago, but I cannot find that even the Germans have taken the trouble to translate them with any completeness. For the tongue has been despised and neglected, just as Irish was in former years.

The race is like the language. Ages have passed over the people since first they settled down among the sandy heaths and quiet watercourses of the Baltic shore. Their hair and eyes have changed from dark to fair. Their religion has changed from primitive nature-worship to Catholicism, and then to Lutheranism. Evangelical they still remain, though Russia has tried hard for twenty-five years to make them Orthodox. But at heart they continue as they originally were, speaking the same tongue, doing the same work, and building the same houses. On almost any farm you may see the conical outdoor kitchens, modelled on the very huts that they built as they walked from Asia before man learnt his letters. Even their modern farmhouses are constructed on a very ancient type. They are made entirely of wood without any iron, even without nails, the corner joints being dovetailed together with perfect skill. The roofs too, though sometimes thatched with reeds, are nearly always formed of wooden slabs like slates. Round the central house of two large rooms, with high lofts for winter storage, several wings or extra chambers are thrown out, for the labourers (Knechte), or for poorer people who cannot afford a house of their own, but pay a rent in money or work. In this way I have seen five other families gathered round one peasant court or farm (Gesinde, as it is called, the old German word, like the use of Knechte, marking the date of the Prussian occupation).

This peculiarity probably springs from the ancient Lettish habit of living in isolation, like the Boers, and not huddled together in villages, like the Germans or Russians. The peasants’ homes are generally at least a mile or two apart. The country is divided into large parishes, but a village can hardly be said to exist, and probably this isolation has made the people an easier prey to their successive conquerors. There are no Lettish towns at all, for such places as Riga and Dorpat and Mitau were entirely German, but for some hardly perceptible traces of the Swede, till the curse of Russia fell upon them, little over a century ago. Indeed, to enter one of these old towns even now, and to live among the spires and tiled roofs after the bulbous domes and green iron of Russia, is like going back from Gorky’s sombre desperation to the smile and sunlight of “Meister’s Apprenticeship.”

Scattered through the three Provinces there are about a million and a half of Letts living in this way. Most of them now own their patches of land, or are buying slowly, by annual payments. They till the ground in summer, and in winter they weave with their own looms, spin with their own spinning wheels, feed the cattle in the barns, and slide the wood over the snow from the forests. It is not a bad kind of life. Compared to ordinary Russian peasants, the people are rich beyond dreams, and things went pleasantly in the Provinces till the hideous system called Russification began just a quarter of a century ago, upon the accession of Alexander III.—“The Camel,” as they still call him. It was completed, as far as laws can go, in 1889, by the introduction of Russian jurisdiction and language. Since then, the object of the Russian Government has been to thwart German industry, to stifle German culture, and to inflame the Letts against the Germans in hopes that the two races may exterminate each other. So far the design appears likely to succeed. Corrupt Russian officials govern, ignorant Russian professors have taken the place of men like Harnack at the Dorport University, untrained Russian teachers pretend to educate children by means of a language that no child understands, the ancient rights of the provinces have been taken away one by one, and by continual incitement the Letts were at last goaded into burning the country houses of the German landowners.

There are about seven hundred estates in Livonia alone, including the various Crown lands, and in the three Provinces taken together it was estimated that two hundred and fifty country houses had been burnt. This was said to represent about fifteen per cent. of the total of existing estates. In many cases, no doubt, the landowners were leading a monotonous and stupid kind of life, and the loss of their possessions will open to them a wider horizon, with new chances of happiness. But as a rule they are a pleasant, healthy kind of people, like the country gentlemen who used to exist in England, and the Lettish peasants felt no violent personal animosity towards the man whom they were accustomed to call Master. One of the largest landowners, for instance, the proprietor of four separate estates, thus described to me how the trouble began in his favourite country house:—

“It was last December. Owing to the disturbances throughout the country, I had sent my wife and children into Riga. One day a deputation of peasants came and rang at the front door. I received them in the hall.

“‘Master (Herr),’ they said; ‘we are heartily sorry, but we have condemned you to death.’

“‘Oh, you have condemned me to death, have you?’ I answered.

“‘Yes, master,’ they said. ‘We are heartily sorry. You are a good master, and we have nothing against you, but we have condemned you to death.’

“‘All right,’ I answered; ‘what’s your reason?’

“‘You see, you have more land than we have,’ they said.

“‘Certainly,’ I answered; ‘but many of you have more land than others.’

“‘Yes, that is true,’ they said; ‘but all the land is ours by right. Your fathers took it away from us seven hundred years ago, and now we are going to nationalize it all.’

“‘Well,’ I answered; ‘I suppose you must do what you like. When are you going to begin?’

“‘Oh, master,’ they said, ‘we are heartily sorry. You are a good master, but we have just condemned you to death, and now we have come to warn you first. Master, we strongly advise you to escape.’

“So the conversation went on. A few days later, they made an attack upon the house in the evening. But I had armed two of my own servants; we fired a gun from a window, and they all went away again. But after that my wife was so frightened that I came into Riga, and now the peasants are sending us firewood and vegetables twice a week by sledge, because they have heard such things are dear in town.”

It is easy to imagine the peculiar confusion that would arise in such kindly and childlike minds when young students and orators, like the almost mythical leader “Maxim,” come out to their isolated farms and preached Karl Marx to them, and the socialisation of wealth, or the glories of a Lettish republic. Social change and the sense of nationality were equal motives in the rising. Excited by wild hopes, inspired by man’s natural longing for equality, by race hatred, and by the oppressions of a stupid and savage Government from abroad, they turned upon the country houses, the church records, the Government offices, and the portraits of the Tsar as the symbols of all that stood between them and happiness.

Certainly the German landowners suffered, and a few were assassinated. It was part of the Russian Government’s scheme that they should suffer, and one of the strangest things in the whole situation of these Baltic Provinces was the unanimity with which, not only every Lett, but every German whether in town or country, rejected the idea of appealing to the German Empire for protection. The suggestion of such a thing made the mildest German mad. It united German and Lett like comrades in arms against a common enemy. The Germans cling to their German language and culture; they will go to any trouble and expense to avoid Russian education; they have the utmost contempt for Russian law and justice; by union with Germany they would gain immensely in government and probably in trade. Yet from Russia they will endure any hardship rather than look to Berlin for help. It is a remarkable instance of the truth that man is governed, not by his interests, but by his tastes. Hearing the protest repeated with vehemence by a beautiful German lady whose home had been burnt down, I asked her the reason, and she said: “We could not endure to be told at every corner not to spit and not to lean out of the window.”

So the landowners suffer, and bear those ills they have. But the man whose suffering to me seemed least deserved was not a landowner, but a country parson. He was so old that I may mention his name without harm, and it is known to the scholars of Europe; for he was Pastor Bielenstein, the greatest authority upon the Lettish language and literature, and authorities are very few. I found him in Mitau, the Courland capital, a quiet German town not far from Riga. There he had taken refuge in a few small rooms, when the peasants chased him from the parsonage, which had been his for sixty years and his father’s before him. In mind and appearance he belonged to an age that Germany has long left behind—the simple age of the Humboldts and the Grimms. He must be one of the very few Germans left who remember the death of Goethe, and to listen to him was like conversing with those gentle followers of learning a century ago, who combined a zeal for knowledge with a childlike trust in “the dear God.” All the sixty years in his parish had been devoted to the cure of souls and the collection of every fragment of Lettish literature—folk-songs, riddles, proverbs, and legends. Volume after volume appeared, and there they all stand as a monument of German industry, though, unhappily, intelligible only to Lettish speakers. Having lost his sight over his work, and growing very old, with his aged wife and grandchildren around him, he determined to write one more book and then depart in peace. The title of the book was “The Happy Life,” and hardly had he published it when the peasants came to his church, ordered him to leave out the Tsar from his prayers, attacked his house, shot his sexton, held eight rifles at his daughter’s heart, burnt his library, smashed his china, trampled on his harpsichord, and made a bonfire of his furniture in the garden, kindling it with his manuscripts. Thus he was driven out, blind, aged, and poor, to begin a new volume of a life which he thought was ending happily.

“But we do not regret the title of my book, do we, dear wife? We have not lost our trust in the dear God,” he said, bending his tall, slim figure to kiss the old lady’s hand.

“No,” she answered. “We have lost our best china, but our guest will kindly excuse it.”

While we were thus conversing, the pastor of a neighbouring parish entered, a little excited over a scene in which he had just taken part. There had been an execution in his village that morning, and it was his duty to conduct the funeral of the young revolutionist who was shot. For some reason the officer in command had ordered a party of horse and foot with two guns to attend the ceremony and prevent any disturbance. “The coffin and I were surrounded by soldiers along the whole route,” said the pastor; “and when we came to the grave, the people were kept three hundred yards away. The result was that they could not hear a word of the sermon which I had prepared with special care for the occasion. As it was in Lettish, the soldiers did not understand it, and all my pains were entirely thrown away.”

So each suffered in his fashion.

All through the open country parties of cavalry went trotting from farm to farm. Infantry drove in sledges, holding their rifles ready. General Orloff had then made his headquarters at Segewold, some forty miles north of Riga, and obtaining a sledge there with a Lett driver who spoke German, I was able to travel far through the low hills and wooded valleys where the troops were at their work. The ruins of ancient castles built by the Prussian Orders are rather frequent in that neighbourhood, and the modern country houses which have taken their place are especially fine—great mansions like our own “outposts of barbarism,” some with gables and mullions, some with classic pediments and columns in the “Georgian style.” But all were empty now, and not a sound arose even from the stables and barns. One great house, as famous as any monastery for its liqueurs, had been burnt to a cinder of ruin, and there was hardly a farm around which had not lost a father or son, hanged for burning it. The farms we passed appeared to be equally empty; but when the driver gradually discovered that I had no direct concern for Russian Government or German landowners, he began to spread communications along the road by a system of signals and cries. Faces would then peer out from the entrances of fowl houses, or sudden questions would come from the depths of a holly bush. In the quick conversations that followed I heard the word “Cossacks” constantly repeated, for every mounted soldier is to them a Cossack, and the question they always asked was whether the soldiers were coming. Too often they were coming. We had seen them behind us, or had watched a party moving down a hill, or cautiously making their way through woods. The infantry in sledges were harder to distinguish; but they were less numerous, and they went in obvious terror. Under their houses some of the peasants had dug deep holes to hide in, and some had taken to caverns in the sandstone hillsides, covered among the woods. But it was chilly weather for that kind of life. The soldiers were everywhere. In every parish a certain number of victims had to be offered up to create a salutary impression, and all I can hope is that our lonely little sledge, passing almost unobserved along the lanes, may perhaps have saved one or two by its warnings. That it was allowed to pass unobserved must be put down to kindly fortune, for I had applied for the necessary permission to visit the country districts, but had applied utterly in vain. I have often noticed that the agents of justice display a peculiar shyness about the presence of spectators when they are killing men and women as the law directs.

On the other hand, there was, perhaps, too little reserve about another habit practised by the officers in command—the habit of ordering executions by telephone in the presence of the condemned. In Riga I had heard of instances, and they appeared to me to show a peculiarly cold-hearted brutality, though I do not quite understand why. The driver told me of a similar case which had happened in Segewold. After the rapid court-martial and sentence, the officer rang up on the telephone: “Hullo! Is that the sergeant? All right. Have a firing party here six o’clock to-morrow morning. Three prisoners to be shot. Six men will be enough. No, better bring ten perhaps. Mind they’re not late. Six o’clock to-morrow morning. Three prisoners. All right.” Then he rang off, and the prisoners were led away. It was like ordering the funeral lunch in the hearing of the sick.

As a contrast to these things I may mention an occurrence that was thought humorous, and was known to every one in Riga at the time. It concerned a young Lettish schoolmistress who was sentenced to be flogged. Not understanding either the sentence or the brutal orders and gestures of the soldiers, whose duty it was to carry it out, she thought she was to be violated, and that story was an inexhaustible subject of mirth among the commercial and landowning classes in the Riga restaurants. I have heard it translated into four languages so that no one present might miss the full humour of the situation.

So it went on. In the country the people died by hundreds. They were flogged, they were hanged, they were shot. Their wooden farmhouses were burnt to the ground. Their children were turned out in the winter to starve. Men and women alike were slaughtered by hundreds, and no one had pity on them. I heard no single word of pity or of understanding spoken in any language, and week after week the bloody assize went on.

Thank God, there were reprisals, however few. Soldiers on the march through the town moved in single file for fear of bombs, and even that did not always save them. The assassinations of policemen upon the streets averaged one or perhaps two a day. The police lived in terror, and as they went their rounds in groups of two or three, they were escorted by an equal number of soldiers with fixed bayonets. Continual alarms arose from every quarter of Riga; the reports of revolvers or rifles would suddenly be heard, and this way and that the people ran. Two or three days after I arrived there was a gallant rescue from the very police-station itself. At eight o’clock in the morning two women came to the door with food for five prisoners who were lying under sentence of death for the assassination of a police officer named Porschetsky. As they were going away, eight or ten men entered. Some seized the police on duty, killing one and wounding two others who resisted, and four went to the cells and released all five prisoners, who walked quietly in different directions down the streets and escaped, though without their hats. One of them was recaptured two days later while foolishly tying on a false beard in a barber’s shop. His sister who was with him, fell on the floor, and clinging to the knees of the police implored for mercy. The barber fainted with excitement, and the man was dragged away and shot.

The same afternoon a young boy passing my hotel was bayoneted to death by a soldier for refusing to halt at command. Whether he was another of the five or simply did not hear the order, I did not discover. He was under twenty, dark haired, with the clear and intellectual face that characterises the Lettish students, artists, and other revolutionaries of the towns.

Of the same type was another boy who was shot the following Sunday morning at nine o’clock just outside the castle wall. There were eight in the firing party. “One, two, three—fire!” said the sergeant, and the boy fell like a dummy on the stage, to the edification of the early churchgoers who crowded round to examine the body. And with that typical scene in my mind I was obliged to take leave of the Baltic Provinces, marked in every economic map as one of the few fairly prosperous regions of the Russian Empire.