Ghosts
When I was a little child I had a lively and delicious contact with
fairies. We used to laugh and sing and dance together through many
happy hours like the good comrades we were. But I cannot say that I
have ever seen a ghost; that is, I had never seen one until I went to
Russia. During the whole of the time I was in Russia I was haunted.
The Russian novelists have been very faithful to their people.
Turgenieff, Dostoievski, Gorky, Tolstoy, and the rest of them take
one into the real Russia as one reads. It is a country peopled with
human beings who dream dreams and see visions, who have suffered more
cruelly and aspired more loftily than the people of most other European
countries.
The Narishkin Palace in which we were lodged is a fine house devoted to
the mistress of one of the Czars by her lover. It lies on the banks of
the Neva and faces, on the other side, the grim fortress of St. Peter
and St. Paul. I stood on the balcony and looked across the river at
the place of horrors where so many of Russia’s noblest men and women
had gone to their deaths, the poor victims of tyrant princes and their
ministers. The abominable cruelties practised upon the martyrs for
Russian freedom have been as familiar to one’s mind as the alphabet,
and for almost as long. One’s youngest, purest and best emotion has
been given throughout one’s life to those who have endured torture,
disgrace and death for truth and liberty.
I recalled a meeting with Volkhovsy in England, deaf and crippled
by his sufferings in this hideous fortress; of Prince Kropotkin,
one of the oldest of the surviving victims of Czarist tyranny; of
Madame Breshskovski, the “grandmother of the Revolution”; of Marie
Spirodovna, whose special sufferings as a young woman were loathsome
and unspeakable. In sad procession these figures of tortured and
wounded and dead passed silently before my eyes as I leaned over the
stone balcony and gazed into the red light of the sky behind the dark
fortress we were sometime soon to visit.
And into my dreams they pursued me. The room in the Narishkin Palace
which I shared with Madame Balabanov was once on a time a beautiful
_salon_. A scanty curtain which stretched only half-way across the room
made a pretence of dividing it in two and securing privacy for each of
us. Behind the curtain was the door which opened into the dining-room.
Close to my bed was a second door which led to the corridor, at the end
of which was a bedroom. There were neither long curtains nor blinds
to keep out the everlasting light. Some thin and inadequate muslin
was drawn across the lower half of the windows, but was too scanty to
afford any protection against observers in the building opposite.
On entering the room after the intense fatigue and excitement of the
long journey one felt its beauty comforting and refreshing. The fine
linen sheets, the soft silk hangings, the eiderdown bed-covers, the
thick velvety carpet, the quaint, carved and gilded furniture spoke of
gentle living utterly unlooked-for by us, and, to do ourselves justice,
undesired by us in a country full of people slowly dying for lack of
the barest necessaries. It was the most exaggerated kindness on the
part of our hosts, so anxious to make us comfortable and happy, to give
us the very best they possessed.
But there, for me, was the trouble. They gave us all this luxury and
beauty, but was it theirs to give or ours to receive? _They_ had no
doubts on this score whatever. They could see nothing at all in the
argument that the present possessor of property that belongs morally,
if not legally, to the State, having been permitted to grow up in the
belief that what the law sanctioned must necessarily be right, is not
quite fairly treated if he is quite suddenly turned into the streets
without resources, and his property confiscated.
One would not dispute for a moment the principle that nobody should
possess luxuries or even superfluous comforts until the elementary
needs of everybody have been amply satisfied and secured; or that
a royal palace is put to much better use when it shelters many
industrious persons than when it houses a king’s mistress and her
lackeys. But there is a difference as great as between black and
white and right and wrong, between the declared will of the majority
of the citizens acting through their National Assembly or Parliament
which, in the interest of the community dispossesses an individual but
secures the future of his wife and children as well as himself, and
the arbitrary action of the minority in power, who roughly confiscate
without consideration for the dispossessed.
“Where is the owner of this beautiful house?” I asked several times,
but I could get no reply. Nobody knew. I heard the story of a Princess
Narishkin who was doing good work for the children under the Soviet,
but do not know if it was true. One heard so many contradictory
stories. If true, was she happy, I wondered? It might conceivably
be so. The old revolutionary movement in Russia was by no means a
one-class movement. Many of the old régime have willingly consented to
the confiscation of their estates and goods and are content to do hard
work for the new Republic. In such cases no question of right or wrong
arises. These are rare souls.
Before the end of the visit I met an old man who was the millionaire
owner of a great line of steamships before the Revolution. The
Revolution had completely dispossessed him. I found him quite content
and happy about it. He formed part of the secretariat of an important
Committee on Communications and travelled regularly as a Government
employé on his own ships. His one grievance was the way in which the
inventory of his fortune had been taken. He felt that his revolutionary
record might have secured him more considerate treatment in the method
of taking over his enterprises; but even on this point he was entirely
without bitterness.
In Astrakhan we met the owner of a great fish-curing industry, who
had yielded up everything to the Republic without a murmur, and who
declared himself happier making nets along with his former workpeople
than he had ever been in his life.
I slipped quickly into my bed that first night in Petrograd and tried
to sleep and forget the ghost my self-questioning had raised; but sleep
refused to come. It was not because no darkness came and the pale light
streamed in through the unshaded windows. It was not altogether the
lack of privacy, though the fact that one’s room was regarded as a
public highway through which the men and women of the household tramped
indiscriminately whenever they chose was, to say the least of it,
disconcerting. I felt like a guilty thing, lying uninvited by its owner
in that soft, white bed, whilst the poor creature who once occupied it
might be sleeping on straw. I dozed; and inevitably cold, sad eyes in a
thin, hungry-looking face would gaze at me with the look of any woman
whose house had been entered by intruders she was powerless to put
outside.
I tried very hard to control my imagination, but it was very difficult.
Cruelty is one of the vices which madden one. When we rode in the late
Czar’s motor-car, I did not feel the presence of my fellow-delegates,
but the ghosts of the murdered unhappy little man and his family. The
car was a thing of beauty, large and luxurious. Without it one could
have seen very little. But the perfect joy of using it was marred
by two things--the sight of the sore and undressed feet of many of
the weary proletarians of Moscow who had not the means even for a
tram-ride, much less a ride in an automobile or a droshky; and by the
obvious joy and satisfaction with which those who accompanied us on our
investigations regarded the capture of the Czar’s car as an emblem of a
cruel triumph.
“Whenever you are tempted to feel concerned about the execution of
the Czar and his family,” said a friendly Communist, “think about the
millions of innocent human beings who have recently lost their lives
through the policies of that man and his ministers. And call to your
mind the vast hosts of martyrs who have fallen victims to the cruelties
of his predecessors.”
The advice was well-meant but unnecessary. I have already said that it
would be impossible to forget the martyrs of the Revolution and the
tortures of those grand idealists of Russia. The visit in Petrograd to
the graves of some of them is an incident in a wide experience in many
countries, the memory of which will stay with me to the end of my days.
It was so sincere, yet so dramatic.
A large open space in the heart of the city called the Field of Mars,
and devoted in the old times to military reviews and the drilling of
troops, is being converted by the Communists into a fine memorial
of the heroes of the Revolution who have lost their lives in some
prominent fashion in the struggle for freedom. Voluntary labour and
the labour of the Red Army is digging up the hard soil and planting
beautiful trees in symmetrical designs. In the middle of this large
tract a simple stone memorial has been erected. It is not a flaunting
column shouting to the sky, but it takes the form of a low, solid,
granite wall, enclosing in four sections with rounded corners a burial
ground. The spaces between the sections permit people to enter. From
all parts of Russia the bodies have been brought and are laid just
inside the wall and all the way round. A footpath follows the wall and
encloses the graves on the other side. The centre of the square is
at present a grass-plot with flowers and shrubs. The whole thing is
naturally on a very large scale.
One lovely evening, after a most enthusiastic gathering inside the
People’s Hall, we were taken in a decorated tramcar to see the
Martyrs’ Memorial. I have experienced nothing in my life so moving and
impressive. A great crowd from the meeting accompanied us, and stood in
silent groups outside the wall whilst we walked slowly round. The eyes
of the leaders shone with the light of a great pride and a deep passion
as they approached one by one the graves of their honoured dead. The
pride melted into tears at some of the graves, when we stopped in our
walk and sang slowly a verse of the plaintive martyrs’ hymn, a sad and
haunting melody with just a single note of triumph in it. One after
another the heroes were pointed out to us. Here was a man who had
been tortured to death. Here was one who was shot by hired Government
assassins. Here lay one who was blown to bits by his own bomb; here a
tender girl who gave up her life for the cause.
The tears were quickly dried. Russian revolutionaries do not weep
easily. Instead of tears a hard glitter filled the eyes of a fierce
fellow. “But we will be avenged,” he shouted. “For every one of our
comrades who has died like this we will send ten of the bourgeois to
their graves.” I shuddered in the presence of a terrible fanaticism.
Poor ghosts! If they could rise from the dead would they not tell us to
make no more human sacrifices to their memory? Would they not speak to
us of a better way?
I tried hard to get a copy of the mournful song we sang on this and
many occasions subsequently. I was several times promised it but it
never came. The words I never knew for they were Russian, but the
melody I captured and I give it as it printed itself upon my mind. It
will be recognised by Russian readers.
[Music: SONG OF THE MARTYRS]
This habit of seeing ghosts brought me a good deal of chaff not only
from the Communists but from my own friends. One of the Communists made
a speech in defence of violent methods and gave a sidelook at me when
he reminded the British Delegates that “once on a time the British
Government made its king shorter by a head,” as did the people of
France.
“It is quite true,” I said afterwards to a group of Communists who were
discussing with us the meeting. “King Charles the First was executed
three hundred years ago in England. But it was after a proper trial by
the recognised Courts of Justice. He was found guilty of the charges
laid against him. And we did not shoot his wife and children. But if
the idea of his execution was to get rid of kings it was the wrong way;
for kings we have still with us. And they will remain with us so long
as the king-idea continues to be acceptable to the human mind. The
Allies will never destroy the idea of Communism with their guns. The
Communists can never destroy the idea of kingship and capitalism with
their scaffolds. Only a good idea can slay a bad one. Only by proving
that there is more manliness in democracy than autocracy, and more
morality in Communism than in capitalism will the one institution give
way to the other.”
Of course I spoke to people who could never be convinced in a thousand
years of argument. Neither could they understand the distinction one
made between the system and the individual. To them all is the same.
And individuals must be made responsible for the suffering which is
caused by the system, even though they may themselves be tender and
pitiful, and innocent of wrong.
It was the great point of difference which separated spiritually my
hosts and me. “You can never build a permanent system on hate,” I said
again and again; but they believe they can. And because of this belief
they have no pity to spare for the innocent children of a hated monarch
and his foolish, fanatical wife, all shot in the name of Authority for
the crime of being themselves.
Their poor ghosts flitted in and out of the compartments in the train
which was lent to us in our journey from Saratov to Reval, the train
belonging to the Czar’s daughters. And following them, in tragic
sequence, the endless procession of ghosts tramping their way through
the snows to Siberia to the crack of the Cossack whips.
Russia is full of ghosts.