The Schlüsselburg road runs nearly all the way beside the great stream of the Neva, which was still pouring down in flood in those November days, though it sounded incessantly with the whisper of floating ice. The road leads from St. Petersburg along the whole course of the river up to that ill-omened fortress in the Ladoga lake, where so many of the martyrs of freedom have enjoyed the imprisonment or death with which Russia rewards greatness. For six or seven miles the road passes through a series of villages, now united into one long and squalid street, inseparable from the city, though only a few hundred yards behind the mills and workmen’s dwellings lie flat fields, and woods, and dull but open country. This is the largest manufacturing district of the capital. Its factories had already become historic with bloodshed, and it was here that the workmen’s party was organized, and the Council of Labour Delegates first formed.

The mills stand on both sides of the river, but as a rule the work-people live on the south or left bank, where the road runs; for there is no passable road on the other side. In summer they pay a farthing toll to steam ferry-boats. In winter they walk across the ice to work, guided by little rows of Christmas trees stuck on the ice, as is the Russian way. But between whiles, twice a year, there come a few days when they cannot go to work at all. Those days ought to have come by the time I visited the region first, but the frost was late.

Everything was strange that year. For months together no work had been done, and though some of the mills had just re-opened after the second general strike, the road was crowded with shabby men and women, who gathered at the corners, or trampled up and down in the filth, or sat stewing in the dirty tea-rooms, quieting their hunger with drink. Fully 60,000 of them were out of work, for in answer to the strike many masters had declared a lock-out.

Backwards and forwards among them marched little sections of six or seven soldiers, their bayonets fixed, their rifles loaded, their warm brown overcoats paid for by the work-people and the peasants. Groups of four or five Cossacks clattered to and fro with carbine and sword, while on the saddle, ready to the right hand, hung the terrible nagaika or Cossack whip, paid for by the work-people and the peasants. It is heavy and solid, with twisted hide, like a short and thicker sjambok; at the butt is a loop for the wrist, and near the end of the lash a jagged lump of lead is firmly tied into the strands. When a Cossack rises in his stirrups to strike, he can break a skull right open, and any ordinary blow will slit a face from brow to chin, and cripple a woman or child for life.

The Manifesto had not changed the Cossack nature. A week before, at a workmen’s meeting held to discuss the strike, it was proposed to stop the steam trams which run along the road. But the Cossacks had received orders not to allow the trams to be stopped. So down they trotted to the meeting; a pistol shot is said to have been heard somewhere in the darkness, and in a moment the horses were plunging through the midst of a confused and helpless crowd, while swords and nagaikas hewed the people down. The number of killed and wounded was variously given, as is usual in massacres.

On one of my later visits down the road, I became acquainted with a man who had survived a scene even more terrible. As a small patrol of Cossacks was riding by, a little boy of eight, who had come to the mill with his mother, shook his tiny fist at them from a window. By command of their officer, the men rode into the mill yard, dismounted, entered the machinery rooms, bayoneted the child, and began firing at random upon the people at their work. Eight were killed where they stood. The man who told me of the deed escaped through a side door, and hid himself under the boilers till the soldiers rode away elated with victory. Then the workmen dragged out the dead, and the boy’s body was given to his mother.

Tired of being slaughtered like fowls, the workmen themselves were collecting arms, and had organized a kind of volunteer service, or “militia,” as they called it. Armed groups crept through the fields and back lanes from one point of vantage to another. Even in the daytime, firing was common in the streets, and almost every night the workmen met the soldiers in sharp encounter. The factories, whether at work or not, were all guarded by sentries inside and out. The Alexandrovsky ironworks, which belong to Government, and had been shut down the day before I was there, were at once filled with troops, and the hands, some five thousand in number, remained outside to increase the shabby and indignant crowd upon the street.

The ironworkers were the best paid of all the workmen in the district. The works are in an old red-brick factory, built originally for making guns, but long used for the locomotives on the straight line from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Many charming personages in Russian society had justly regarded that factory as the source of human happiness. But in their trepidation to enjoy, they had neglected the fount of enjoyment, and the place had long been sliding down to ruin. Already it was much cheaper to buy new locomotives from Germany, Belgium, or Zurich, in spite of the high tariff, than even to repair the old engines here. At last, I suppose, just the one inevitable day had come when the thing became too ludicrous even for a Government’s methods of industry. The gates were shut, and the five thousand hands turned out to meditate on the source of human happiness.

It was thought at the time that, like the master of finesse who pays his tailor by ordering more clothes, the management would open again soon, because one per cent. of the wages had always been stopped for a pension fund. This fund was estimated at something like £2,000,000, and the Government might well prefer to go on paying out several thousands a year in dead loss rather than be called upon for a solid £2,000,000 when nothing more could be flogged out of the starving peasants, and France was beginning to look twice at a sou before lending it. What happened in the end I did not hear, but I passed down that road some months later, and the works were still shut up.

Other mills, which did not rest upon State credit (that is to say, on drink and the flogging of peasants), and were struggling not to keep shut, but to keep open, were naturally in a different position. There are cotton mills, wool mills, paper mills, and candle mills along the river, many of them run by English capital, and managed by English overseers. In most of the textile mills, the machinery is also English, this being almost the only import in which England still rivals Germany. There is a greater spaciousness about the buildings and yards than in England, due, I suppose, to the cheapness of land; though, in fact, our old economic theories of rent are valueless here, for, in spite of the vast extent of uncultivated land in Russia, the rents in the capital towns are far higher than in London. But, apart from this spaciousness and a certain easy-going slackness in the labour, one might imagine one’s self in a Lancashire or Yorkshire mill. It was in mills like these that the labour questions arose which were really the causes of the strike that shook the Russian despotism. Of course, political questions came in—the war scandals, the demands for home rule, amnesty, universal suffrage, and a constituent assembly. But a revolution, like a war, goes upon its belly, and it is difficult to get working men to move if they are fairly content with their food and lodging. It is still more difficult to get working women to move.

Till ten years ago the hours in these mills were seventy-five a week, or twelve and a half a day, not counting the dinner hours. They then fell to sixty-seven, and the strike of last October brought them down to sixty-two and a half. For the first week of November (just after the manifesto), the hands proclaimed an eight-hours’ day, and walked out of the mills when the time was up. After a week of that, the managers shut the gates, preferring to pay the hands the fortnight’s wages to which they are entitled on dismissal, and then to let the mills stand idle. About a fortnight later, the textile managers agreed to come down to sixty and a half hours a week, and on that arrangement the hands came in again. Thus in ten years the workmen had reduced their hours by nearly fifteen a week, and seven of these had been knocked off in two months, simply by combination in strikes. As I said, the general strike is a powerful weapon, though, unhappily, dangerous to those who use it.

At the time there was a general opinion that a nine-hours’ day would be enforced by an Imperial ukase. Even the employers believed it, and looked forward to making up the loss by increased duties on imports, and higher prices for their goods. The workmen would probably acquiesce, for a strike falls most heavily on themselves, and under the Russian factory laws any one who incites to a strike or joins in it may be imprisoned for four to eight months. Till December, 1904, all trade unions and meetings of workmen were also illegal. During his period of ill-omened power, Plehve had affected to encourage meetings in this very district, but his sole object was to ascertain who were the real leaders among the people, and who were the best speakers. When that was known, in the middle of the night, knocking would be heard at a man’s door. He would open it to a group of soldiers or police, and from that moment he disappeared, spirited away, no one knew where. It was the Government’s method of protecting vested interests.

Wages nearly always go by piecework, and they vary according to skill. In the cotton mills a man may earn anything between 15d. and 4s. 4d. a day, and a woman between 10d. and 2s. 4½d. In the woollen mills a weaver makes about 3s. 5d. a day, and he has two assistants (generally girls) who make from 1s. 10d. to 2s. 4d. each. The ironworkers, as I said, get a rather higher wage, but the maximum, I think, in no case is over 30s. a week, and I doubt if the average, including women and girls, is over 15s.

The mere amount of money in wages is unimportant. A handful of bay-salt or three yards of cheap cotton may be good wages to an African native. All depends on what the payment can buy and what work it represents, and I am inclined to think from what 1 have seen in many lands that in reality the wage of the working class is much the same all the world over. The standard of tolerable existence certainly varies a little, but the wage is always regulated by the lowest standard that will be endured. Wherever I have consulted an overseer or mill-owner as to the standard of living in Russia, he has almost always told me that I must not judge by English ideas, “because the people here are quite satisfied with black bread and cucumbers.” By cucumbers he meant the small pickled gherkins in barrels, such as form one peculiar ingredient in the smell of Petticoat Lane. At the same time all English overseers were agreed that the Russian workman’s standard of work is far lower than the English. A Russian will mind only two looms, they told me, where an Englishman will mind four or even six. It had not occurred to them that there might be some connection between the standard of food and the standard of work, nor, indeed, did that concern them much, for in the end they obtained about the same amount of work for the same amount of wage.

When I became more acquainted with the work-people’s life and had been into several of their homes, I found that, as long as they were in work, most of them had soup every day, because bad meat was cheap. Beyond the soup, black bread was the duty, pickled cucumber the pleasure; and the drink was almost unlimited tea—very weak and without milk, but syruppy with sugar—varied by an occasional debauch on the State’s vodka, which pays the greater part of the tyranny’s expenses.

On the Schlüsselburg road the work-people live in wooden huts built up wandering courts or lanes off the main street. I have not seen a family occupying more than one room. If they rent two or three, they sub-let. A room costs from 15s. to 22s. a month, and the larger rooms are usually divided between two or more families. In some cases each of the four corners is occupied by a different family, separated by shawls or strings, and dwelling as though in tents, as used to be the fashion in the East End. Till quite lately a very large proportion of the work-people lived in special barracks built for them inside the mills, but during that year of strikes most of the overseers had cleared their work-people out because they were dangerously near to themselves and the machinery, and I did not see the “living-in” system really at work till I got to Moscow, where it was still general, though probably soon to disappear.

In the work-people’s rooms there was hardly ever any furniture beyond the bed, the table, some stools, and a chest for clothes. I never saw washing things of any kind. Even in winter the family clothes are washed in the river, the women cutting square holes in the ice and dipping the clothes into the water below. As to the people, in accordance with the one salutary rubric of the Orthodox Church, all men (I am not quite sure about women) must wash before they go to service. In preparation for this sacred duty, they pay a few pence at the public baths, sluice themselves down with hot water, and then lie steaming on shelves, brushing their skin with branches of birch. The effect is very satisfactory, and the Russians as a whole are a cleanly people, both in themselves and their houses, compared to ourselves.

The work-people have the further advantage of twenty-three ecclesiastical holidays in the year, not counting Sundays, and the masters are obliged to provide a hospital or to pay for medical assistance, even for women with child. In an English mill across the river, a clubroom for lectures, concerts, and amusements had just been erected, but the revolution had arrested culture of that kind. It had also arrested football, which was just becoming popular. Cricket had been tried, but was found too mysterious and pedantic, too much like the British Constitution with all its growths and precedents. The only native amusements that I could find were cards, knucklebones, and the fortnightly debauch in vodka when the wages are paid. But at the time of my first visit, there was some chance that the vodka would be dropped, for on the previous Sunday night the Strike Committee had decided that the work-people should for the present give up spirits, tobacco, and other Government monopolies, not for abstinence but to deprive the Government of revenue. The truly Nationalist party has urged the same course in Ireland.

There is one peculiarity which complicates the Russian labour question. Some of the work-people have now lost all connection with the land, but a great majority are still bound by the closest links of duty and affection to their village, and to the little strips of earth which have been allotted to their family. Probably most of the hands in any mill have come there in hopes of paying the taxes on the land, and keeping the family alive in the starving village at home. Between the village and the factory they are continually passing to and fro. Sometimes as many as half the hands in a mill will set off to their villages during the year, and come back again. I have seen the books of one factory, employing nearly 2000 hands, from which over 1000 had gone and returned. If a working son on the land is called to the army, a mill hand walks away to take his place. If labour is short at harvest, they go. If the village community is re-dividing the land, they go. The father of the house at home can always send for them, and they go. It comes of that touching passion for the land which is the great motive of the Russian people. Mercilessly robbed as they have been, nothing has yet induced them to believe that land can belong to Tsar, or Prince, or idle proprietor. Land, they say, cannot belong to people who do not work it; of course it cannot. The land belongs to the peasants. If only the good Tsar know what the people suffer because their land is kept from them, he would give it them back. As Stepniak said long ago, that simple faith is one of the tragedies of Russian life.[1]

Diary of Events