I have been staying for the last three days in the country quite close to Moscow. I thought I should get away for a time from politics, from talk of new Cabinets, new eras, liberal autocracy, strong-handed reform, and other such pleasing illusions. I was mistaken. Politics filter through everywhere now; in a third-class railway carriage, at the station buffets, in the public parks, in the villages.

As regards the various opinions I heard expressed the prevailing one is this: that the new Prime Minister’s programme of strong-handed Liberal reform is a repetition of the programme of the last five Ministers of the Interior.

M. Stolypin says these last five Premiers were all mistaken in their policy; in the meantime (people say) it is difficult to see in what respects his programme is to differ from theirs. And we have no evidence as yet that M. Stolypin is an infinitely more capable man than Count Witte. Some people, referring to the official denial of the article that appeared in the semi-official newspaper Rossia, with regard to foreign intervention, say: “If M. Stolypin cannot control the first page of his official newspaper, how can he expect to control Russia?” Others commenting on his intention to initiate social reform and put a stop to the political movement, say that this effort is the very root and kernel of the whole trouble in Russia; that the mistake of would-be reformers has always consisted in their not understanding that social reforms are impossible unless they are preceded by political reforms. (M. Leroy-Beaulieu, in his splendid book on Russia, writes in a most illuminating fashion on this very point.)

As regards what is actually happening in Moscow, the town is empty and quiet; public meetings are forbidden, small political gatherings in private houses are held only under surveillance of the police; gatherings of the “Black Gang” are said to be allowed; the Press is certainly subjected to a rigid censorship; the Morning Post arrived blacked out yesterday for the first time for two years; the manifesto of the ex-members is being spread, likewise the manifesto of the Social Democrats. I have not seen anybody who thinks that an era of peace and resigned content has begun.

Near the house where I am living there is a village; as this village is so close to the town of Moscow I thought that its inhabitants would be suburban, and therefore not representative of peasant life. This is not so. The nearness to Moscow seems to make no difference at all. I was walking through the village on Saturday morning when a peasant who was sitting on his doorstep called me and asked me if I would like to eat an apple. I accepted his invitation. He said he presumed I was living with X., as other Englishmen had lived there before. Then he asked abruptly, “Is Marie Alexandrovna in your place?” I said my hostess’s name was Marie Karlovna. “Of course,” he said, “I don’t mean here, but in your place, in your country.” I didn’t understand. Then he said it again very loud, and asked if I was deaf. I said I wasn’t deaf and that I understood what he said, but I did not know to whom he was alluding. “Talking to you,” he said, “is like talking to a Tartar. You look at one and don’t understand what one says.” Then it suddenly flashed on me that he was alluding to the Queen of England. “You mean Queen Alexandra,” I said, “the sister of the Empress Marie Feodorovna.” “That’s what I mean,” he said. It afterwards appeared that he considered that England had been semi-Russianised owing to this relationship; he thought of course that both the Queen and the Empress were Russians.

Two more peasants joined us, and one of them brought a small bottle (the size of a sample) of vodka and a plate of cherries. “We will go and drink this in the orchard,” they said. So we went to the orchard. “You have come here to learn,” said the first peasant, a bearded man, whose name was Feodor. “Many Englishmen have been here to learn. I taught one all the words that we use.” I said I was a correspondent; that I had just arrived from St. Petersburg, where I had attended the sittings of the Duma. “What about the Duma?” asked the other peasant. “They’ve sent it away. Will there be another one?” I said a manifesto spoke of a new one. “Yes,” said Feodor, “there is a manifesto abolishing punishments.” I said I hadn’t observed that clause. “Will they give us back our land?” asked Feodor. “All the land here belongs to us really.” Then followed a long explanation as to why the land belonged to them. It is the property, as a matter of fact, of the Crown. I said I did not know. “If they don’t give it back to us we shall take it,” he said simply. Then one of the other peasants added, “Those manifestoes are not written by the Emperor but by the ‘authorities.’” (The same thing was said to me by a cabman at St. Petersburg, his reason being that the Emperor would say “I,” whereas the manifesto said “We.”) Then they asked me why they had not won the war; and whether it was true that the war had been badly managed. “We know nothing,” he said. “What newspaper tells the truth? Where can we find the real truth? Is it to be found in the Russkoe Slovo?” (a big Moscow newspaper). They asked me about the Baltic Fleet and why Admiral Nebogatoff had hoisted a signal which meant “Beat us.”

Then I went away, and as I was going Feodor asked me if I would like to go and see the haymaking the next day. If so I had better be at his house at three o’clock in the afternoon. The next day, Sunday, I kept my appointment, but found nobody at home in the house of Feodor except a small child. “Is Feodor at home?” I asked. Then a man appeared from a neighbouring cottage and said: “Feodor is in the inn—drunk.” “Is he going to the haymaking?” I asked. “Of course he’s going.” “Is he very drunk?” I asked. “No, not very; I will tell him you are here.” And the man went to fetch him. Then a third person arrived, a young peasant in his Sunday clothes, and asked me where I was going. I said I was going to make hay. “Do you know how to?” he asked. I said I didn’t. “I see,” he said, “you are just going to amuse yourself. I advise you not to go. They will be drunk, and there might be unpleasantness.”

Then Feodor arrived, apparently perfectly sober except that he was rather red in the face. He harnessed his horse to a cart. “Would I mind not wearing my hat but one of his?” he asked. I said I didn’t mind, and he lent me a dark blue yachting cap, which is what the peasants wear all over Russia. My shirt was all right. I had got on a loose Russian shirt without a collar. He explained that it would look odd to be seen with some one wearing such a hat as I had. It was a felt hat. The little boy who was running about the house was Feodor’s son. He was barefooted, and one of his feet was bound up. I asked what was the matter with it. The bandage was at once taken off and I was shown the remains of a large blister and gathering. “It’s been cured now,” Feodor said. “It was a huge blister. It was cured by witchcraft. I took him to the Wise Woman and she put something on it and said a few words and the pain stopped, and it got quite well. Doctors are no good; they only cut one about. I was kicked by a horse and the pain was terrible. I drank a lot of vodka and it did no good; then I went to the Wise Woman and she put ointment on the place and she spoke away the pain. We think it’s best to be cured like this—village fashion.” I knew this practice existed, but it was curious to find it so near Moscow. It was like finding witchcraft at Surbiton.

Then we started for the hay meadows, which were about ten miles distant. On the road we met other peasants in carts bound for the same destination. They all gravely took off their hats to each other. After an hour and a half’s drive we arrived at the Moscow River, on the bank of which there is a tea-shop. Tea-shops exist all over Russia. The feature of them is that you cannot buy spirits there. We stopped and had tea. Everybody was brought a small teapot for tea and a huge teapot of boiling water, and very small cups, and everybody drank about four or five cups out of the saucer. They eat the sugar separately, and do not put it into the cup.

Then we crossed the river on a floating bridge, and driving past a large white Byzantine monastery arrived at the green hay meadows on the farther river bank towards sunset. Then the haymaking began. The first step which was taken was for vodka bottles to be produced and for everybody to drink vodka out of a cup. Then there was a great deal of shouting and an immense amount of abuse. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Feodor said. “We curse each other and make it up afterwards.” Then they drew lots for the particular strip they should mow; each man carrying his scythe high over his shoulder. (“Don’t come too near,” said Feodor; “when men have taken drink they are careless with scythes.”)

When the lots were drawn they began mowing. It was a beautiful sight to see the mowing in the sunset by the river; the meadows were of an intense soft green; the sky all fleecy and golden to the west, and black with a great thundercloud over the woods to the east, lit up with intermittent summer lightnings. The mowers were all in different coloured shirts—scarlet, blue, white, and green. They mowed till the twilight fell and the thundercloud got near to us. Then Feodor came and made our cart into a tent by tying up the shafts, putting a piece of matting across them, and covering it with hay, and under this he made beds of hay. We had supper. Feodor said his prayers, and prepared to go to sleep, but changed his mind, got up, and joined some friends in a neighbouring cart.

Three children and a deaf and dumb peasant remained with me. The peasants who were in the neighbouring tent were drunk; they began by quarrelling, then they sang for about four hours without stopping; then they talked. Feodor came back about half an hour before it was light, and slept for that brief space. I did not sleep at all. I wasn’t tired, and the singing was delightful to hear: so excessively characteristic of Russia and so utterly unlike the music of any other country, except that of Mongolia. What strikes me most about it is in the first place the accuracy with which the parts are taken, and in the second place the curious rhythm, and the close, ending generally on the dominant. The children chattered for some time about mushroom gathering, and the deaf and dumb man told me a lot by signs, and then they went to sleep.

As soon as it was light the mowers all got up and began mowing. I do not know which was the more beautiful effect, that of the dusk or of the dawn. The dawn was gray with pearly clouds and suffused with the faintest pink tinge, and in the east the sun rose like a great red ball with no clouds near it. At ten o’clock we drove to an inn and had tea; then we drove back, and the hay, although it was quite wet, for it had rained in the night, was carried there and then. “The women dry it at home,” Feodor explained; “it’s too far for us to come here twice.” The carts were laden with hay, and I drove one of them home, lying on the top of the hay, in my sleep. I had always envied the drivers of carts whom one meets lying on a high load of hay, fast asleep, and now I know from experience that there is no such delicious slumber, with the kind sun warming one through and through after a cold night, and the slow jolting of the wagon rocking one, and the smell of the hay acting like a soporific. Every now and then one wakes up to see the world through a golden haze, and then one falls back and drowns with pleasure in a deep slumber of an inexpressibly delicious quality.

When we re-crossed the river we again stopped for tea. As we were standing outside an old woman passed us, and just as she passed one of the peasants said to me, “Sit down, Barine.” Barine, I suppose everybody knows, means a monsieur, in contradistinction to the lower class. “Very like a Barine,” said the woman, with a sarcastic snort, upon which the peasant told her in the plainest and most uncomplimentary speech I have ever heard exactly what he thought of her personal appearance, her antecedents, and what she was fit for. She passed on with dignity and in silence. Then, after a time, I climbed up on the wagon again, and sank back into my green paradise of dreams, and remember nothing more till we arrived home at five o’clock in the evening.

At a moment like this, when one meets with various conflicting statements made by people in authority, Government officials or Liberal leaders, as to what the Russian people, the real people, are thinking and feeling, it seemed to me that it would be worth while to put aside theoretical speculations for a moment, and to try to obtain some small fragments of first-hand evidence with regard to what the people are saying and thinking. With this object in view I have spent the last four nights in the train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. My field of observation was necessarily small, but it cannot be called unrepresentative or anti-national.

The first thing which struck me was a small incident which occurred at a railway station at Moscow, and has a certain significance. I was engaging a cab, and near me an officer was doing the same thing. The cabmen were expressing reluctance to accept the officer’s terms, and my cabman turned round to me and said: “That man comes every day; he is drunk, and he drives and drives, sometimes to the other end of the town, and never pays a single kopeck.” “Why do you drive him if he never pays you?” I asked. “There is nothing to be done—he is an officer,” answered the cabman. This is a small example of how the lawlessness of the existing system of government in Russia affects the poorer classes.

I travelled from Moscow to St. Petersburg by a slow train in a third-class carriage. In the carriage was a mixed and representative assembly of people—a priest, a merchant from Kursk, a photographer from Tchelabinsk, a young volunteer: that is to say a young man doing his year’s military service previous to becoming an officer, two minor public servants, an ex-soldier who had been through the Turkish campaign, a soldier who had lately returned from Manchuria, three peasants, two Tartars, a small tradesman, a carpenter, and some others. Besides these a whole band of gipsies (with their children) encamped themselves on the platform outside the carriage, and penetrated every now and then into the carriage until they were driven out by threats and curses.

The first thing everybody did was to make themselves thoroughly comfortable: to arrange mattresses and pillows for the night; then they began to make each other’s acquaintance. We had not travelled far before the gipsies began to sing on the platform, and this created some interest. They suggested fortune-telling, but the ex-soldier shouted at them in a gruff voice to begone. One of the officials had his fortune told. The gipsy said she could do it much better for five roubles (ten shillings) than for a few kopecks, which he had given. I had my fortune told, which consisted in a hurried rigmarole to the effect that I was often blamed, but never blamed others; that I could only work if I was my own master, and that I would shortly experience a great change of fortune. The gipsy added that if I could give her five roubles she would tie a piece of bark in my handkerchief which, with the addition of a little bread and salt, would render me immune from danger. The gipsies soon got out. The journey went on uneventfully—

as in La Fontaine’s fable. We had supper and tea, and the ex-soldier related the experiences of his life, saying he had travelled much and seen the world (he was a Cossack by birth), and was not merely a Moujik. This offended one of the peasants, a bearded man, who walked up from his place and grunted in protest, and then walked back again.

They began to talk politics. The Cossack was asked his opinion on the attitude of the Cossacks. He said their attitude had changed, and that they objected to police service. The photographer from Tchelabinsk corroborated this statement, saying he had been present at a Cossack meeting in Siberia. Then we had a short concert. The photographer produced a mandoline and played tunes. All the inmates of the carriage gathered round him. One of the peasants said: “Although I am an ignorant man” (it was the peasant who had grunted) “I could see at once that he wasn’t simply playing with his fingers, but with something else” (the tortoiseshell that twangs the mandoline). He asked the photographer how much a mandoline cost. On being told thirty roubles he said he would give thirty roubles to be able to play as well as that. Somebody, by way of appreciation, put a cigarette into the mouth of the photographer as he was playing.

Then I went to bed in the next compartment; but not to sleep, because a carpenter, who had the bed opposite mine, told me the whole story of his life which was extremely melancholy. The volunteer appeared later; he had been educated in the Cadet-Corps, and I asked him if he would soon be an officer. “I will never be an officer,” he answered; “I don’t want to be one now.” I asked him if a statement I had read in the newspapers was true to the effect that several officers had telegraphed to the Government that unless they were relieved of police duty they would resign. He said it was quite true; that general discontent prevailed among officers; that the life was getting unbearable; that they were looked down upon by the rest of the people, and besides this they were ordered about from one place to another. He liked the officers whom he was with very much, but they were sick of the whole thing. Then towards one in the morning I got a little sleep. As soon as it was daylight everybody was up, making tea and busily discussing politics. The priest and the tradesman were having a discussion about the Duma, and every one else, including the guard, was joining in.

“Do you understand what the Duma was?” said the tradesman; “the Duma was simply the people. Do you know what all that talk of a movement of liberation means? It means simply this: that we want control, responsibility. That if you are to get or to pay five roubles or fifty roubles you will get or pay five roubles or fifty roubles, not more and not less, and that nobody will have the right to interfere; and that if some one interferes he will be responsible. The first thing the Duma asked for was a responsible Ministry, and the reason why it was dissolved is that the Government would not give that.”

The priest said that he approved of a Duma, but unless men changed themselves no change of government was of any use. “Man must change inwardly,” he said.

“I believe in God,” answered the tradesman, “but it is written in the Scripture that God said: ‘Take the earth and cultivate it,’ and that is what we have got to do; to make the best of this earth. When we die we shall go to Heaven, and then”—he spoke in a practical tone of voice which settled the matter—“then we shall have to do with God.” The priest took out his Bible and found a passage in the Gospel. “This revolutionary movement will go on,” he said, “nothing can stop it now; but, mark my words, we shall see oceans of blood shed first, and this prophecy will come true,” and he read the text about one stone not being left on another.

Then they discussed the priesthood and the part played by priests. “The priests play an abominable part,” said the tradesman; “they are worse than murderers. A murderer is a man who goes and kills some one. He is not so bad as the man who stays at home and tells others to kill. That is what the priests do.” He then mentioned a monk who had preached against the Jews in the South of Russia. “I call that man the greatest criminal, because he stirred up the peasants’ blood, and they went to kill the Jews. Lots of peasants cease to go to church and say their prayers at home because of this. When the Cossacks come to beat them, the priests tell them that they are sent by God. Do you believe they are sent by God?” he asked, turning to the bearded peasant.

“No,” answered the peasant; “I think they are sent by the devil.” The priest said that the universal dominion of the Jews was at hand. The tradesman contested this, and said that in Russia the Jews assimilated themselves to the people more than in other countries. “The Jews are cunning,” said the priest; “the Russians are in a ditch, and they go to the Jews and say: ‘Pull us out.’” “If that is true,” said the tradesman, “we ought to put up a gold statue to the Jews for pulling us out of the ditch. Look at the time of the pogroms, the rich Russians ran away, but the richest Jews stayed behind.” “They are clever; they knew their business. If they stayed you may be sure they gained something by it,” said the merchant from Kursk. “But we ought to be clever, too,” said the tradesman, “and try and imitate their self-sacrifice. Look at the Duma. There were twenty Jews in the Duma, but they did not bring forward the question of equal rights for the Jews before anything else as they might have done. It is criminal for the priests to attack the Jews, and if they go on like this the people will leave them.”

“Whereas,” said the merchant from Kursk thoughtfully, “if they supported the people the people would never desert them.” “The priests,” said one of the other nondescript people, “say that Catherine the Second is a goddess; and for that reason her descendants have a hundred thousand acres. General Trepoff will be canonised when he dies, and his bones will work miracles.”

The guard joined in here, and told his grievances at great length. They discussed the assassinations of Hertzenstein and Admiral Chouchnin. “Hertzenstein never did any one any harm,” some one said; “Chouchnin condemned hundreds and hundreds of people to death.”

At one of the stations a fresh influx of people came, among others an old peasant and a young man in a blouse. The old peasant complained of the times. “Formerly we all had enough to eat; now there is not enough,” he said. “People are clever now. When I was a lad, if I did not obey my grandfather immediately he used to box my ears; now my son is surprised because I don’t obey him. People have all become clever, and the result is we have got nothing to eat.” The young man said the Government was to blame for most things. “That’s a difficult question to be clear about. How can we be clear about it? We know nothing,” said the old peasant. “You ought to try and know, or else things will never get better,” said the young man. “I don’t want to listen to a Barine like you,” said the old peasant. “I’m not a Barine, I am a peasant, even as thou art,” said the young man. “Nonsense,” said the old peasant.

The discussion was then cut short by our arrival at St. Petersburg.