given a room in our hotel to an officer of Semenoff, when the officer
showed an order signed by the Ataman that quarters should be provided.
There was but one room in the hotel available--a room which had been
occupied by the colonel who had ordered Captain B---- arrested. This
colonel had not lived in the room for weeks, but had moved to the
hotel across the street, leaving in his room in our hotel a small grip.
It was charged that the order for quarters was an old one, and that
since it had been signed the officer had had trouble with the Ataman.
But Captain B---- did not know this, and accepted the order for
quarters for what it appeared to be on its face--still in force.
But the principal crime committed by Captain B---- was said to be
having allowed the officer out of the good graces of the Ataman,
to sleep in a room while the colonel’s bag remained in a closet.
It may have been that the bag had been opened, or it may have been
that the bag contained documents which would have caused the colonel
trouble with the Ataman. But it all appeared to me as a fine piece of
subterfuge, if the facts were as given. But one rarely gets the facts
in Siberia.
Romanoff and I remained with Mrs. B---- through the evening, waiting.
When she was not crying dolefully and wringing her hands, she was
playing for us on her piano, stopping at times to listen to footsteps
in the hall to see if they could be those of her husband, coming back.
Romanoff’s room was right across the hall, and he stepped out for a
minute, leaving the B---- door open. While he was absent, Mrs. B----
stopped playing suddenly and listened. Then she cried out in terror
and ran into the hall. I had heard nothing startling, and wondered
what had caused her perturbation. She ran in again presently, crying
“Meescha! Meescha!,” or so it sounded to me, and pointed to the corner
of her room, where a large sack stood. It was a sack of sugar, and as I
approached it, I heard a rustling.
I looked in and saw two mice and then held the top of the sack shut so
they could not escape into the room. Finally I dragged the sack out
into the hall, close to the open door of the officers’ mess-room. It
was full of dining officers, and some of them looked out in surprise
at seeing me dragging a heavy sack through the hall. I opened the sack
and let the mice escape. They ran into the dining-room, but as no one
had noticed them it did not matter. So I dragged the sack back to Mrs.
B----’s room.
About ten o’clock Captain B---- came striding down the hall. I supposed
the colonel had held him prisoner a few hours so as not to be too ready
to show any regard for my attitude. And being in Asia, the colonel had
to “save his face.”
Captain B---- wrung my hand, and I pushed him gently through the door
to his wife. I went back to my own room, wondering if I had prevented
an execution.
XIX
NEW FRIENDS, PRISONS, AND OTHER THINGS
Three British officers came to Chita to observe conditions for their
government. Lieutenant-Colonel H---- of the General Staff, Major K----
of the British Indian Army, and Captain P---- who was an expert on
railroad conditions and gave his attention to matters pertaining to the
Trans-Siberian.
This trio made my life a joy, for they were jolly chaps, keen on their
work and keen on play when it was time to play, as is the Briton
the world over. These gentlemen were much amused at first by my
“Americanism,” but in a short time they discovered that my American
idioms were provided chiefly for their entertainment and they declined
to take my exaggerated slang seriously.
And as I spent much time in foretelling what would happen in Siberia,
they dubbed me “Old Moore” after the ancient and celebrated prophet in
England who publishes the prophetic “Old Moore’s Almanac.”
And as we got franker, they asked questions in gentle criticism of
American institutions and I in turn told them what was wrong with
England and the British Empire. Colonel H---- had come through the
United States on his way to Siberia, and was puzzled by some of the
characteristics of American journalism, as well as startled by the
hospitality that had been accorded to him by new friends in New York,
and in the clubs of that city. Being a lover of tennis, a New York
tennis club had made his stay in the city a delight. He was still in
something of a daze over the way in which the courts and club-house had
been turned over to him to use as his own.
Major K---- had with him his Indian orderly, who spent most of his
time lurking in the lower hall of the hotel, waiting to pounce upon
his officer and demand if there was anything that could be done. He
had been with Major K---- about sixteen years, and fairly worshiped
him. And it was most amusing, and significant, that in a very short
time this Hindu was prattling Russian to the waiters and samovar girls.
He swore that the Russian language was borrowed from his own precious
Hindustani, indicating that all Asia is linked together far closer than
the casual observer might believe.
And I wonder if Britain’s old fear of Russia was not based on an
understanding of the fact that India and Russia might find it easier to
coalesce into one nation than India and England. India and Russia have
had much the same training in understanding and submitting to a form
of government headed by a cruel and powerful emperor. They respect the
sword and scoff at the commoner who presumes to rule too kindly.
Both countries have produced large numbers of ignorant peasants with
profligate native ruling classes. Also, both countries are filled with
diversified tribes, with climates ranging from tropical to frigid
zones, or at least with magnificent distances. Also, both countries are
very rich in natural resources, yet in those countries the human race
has allowed itself to be most enslaved. India had her great Moghuls,
Russia has had her cruel dynasties. And the masses of the peoples are
more concerned with their crops than with their capitals.
In this latter respect I have not found the Russian peasant hard to
understand. The Russian noble and land-owner presents to me a greater
problem. Here is a country in which the people love the land--they
love to sow and reap, to dig and make the land produce. In fact, they
demand little else. Yet the history of the Russian peasant is one of a
constant fight to use and possess the land, while the great land-owner
and the government, have persisted in thwarting him. This insistence
upon preventing the peasants from having the land comes from the feudal
idea that the upper class must be master of the land and master of its
servitors.
So Russia has been ruled, and the peasant controlled, by a monopoly of
land. To allow that monopoly to wane, as the upper class saw it, was
to lose the power of ruling, which under the old régime was closely
identified in Russia with taxation and what we call graft. In order to
maintain these powers, the dynasty and its parasitic satellites, kept
the people ignorant. The result was Bolshevism--war between those who
own property and those who have been prevented from owning property.
So ignorance has almost destroyed the upper class in Russia, and will
destroy more of the common people than the most cruel dynasty could
execute and kill in prisons in a thousand years of ruthless reign.
It is necessary in considering the people of Siberia to recall some
of the facts of its history. We know that the Czars and their agents
put “dangerous people” into cold storage in Siberia. And the thinker,
the idealist, the protesters against the government were classed as
criminals, and imprisoned with criminals. This, curiously enough,
established a bond of fellowship between the most vicious cut-throats
of the Empire and the highest-minded men and women it had produced.
If a man or woman has spent half a lifetime in a stone cell where
the temperature drops as low as eighty degrees below zero for merely
daring to think of government, criticise it, and demand justice for the
ignorant people, that man or woman is not going to worry about cruel
methods in retaliation if freedom ever comes. And when such a political
convict has been chained to a murderer for work, and lives in such a
cell with a murderer, these two will join hands against the common
enemy. Centuries were spent building up such hatreds. Why should we
wonder at the cruelties practiced when the prisons were opened?
I saw in Chita one of the old prisons. It was empty, with the cell
doors hanging from broken hinges--hideous doors of planks painted a
dull yellow, with small holes cut in them for passing in food, and the
edges of the holes stained black with the grime of countless dirty
hands which for unknown years had delivered food to prisoners. I got
into this prison unexpectedly one cold day while seeking another
prison--Semenoff’s military prison. And I wandered through it, and
examined it in detail.
Stone benches had served as beds--two to a cell. The remains of the
sanitary appliances, if they could be described as sanitary at all,
were most crude. I went into one of these cells and shut the door, and
sat on the stone bench. The hole in the door, six inches square, gave
scarcely any light from the corridor. I put my flashlight on the walls,
and found them scratched on every inch with names, initials, and dates.
One wall was covered with rows upon rows of scratches in the stone. At
first I thought there had been a rude attempt at interior decoration,
but the word for “years” was dimly revealed in many places. Every
scratch represented a year spent by human beings in that stone grave!
Dark, damp, terribly cold and full of vile odors though it was nearly a
year since the prison had been emptied of its human misery, this cell
in ten minutes told me more about Siberia than all the historians and
diplomats and students of Russia could have told me in a lifetime of
reading or lecturing.
[Illustration: SIBERIANS CELEBRATING THE SIGNING OF THE ARMISTICE]
[Illustration: ROOM IN HOUSE AT EKATERINBURG WHERE THE CZAR AND HIS
FAMILY ARE REPUTED TO HAVE BEEN EXECUTED]
And on one of these walls, was inscribed a date and this sentence:
“Nicolai died last night--he missed freedom by fourteen hours after
waiting twenty-two years,” and the date scrawled near it, represented
the date on which the prisons of Siberia had been opened under the
Kerensky régime.
Just imagine waiting twenty-two years in such environment for the
overthrow of the Czar, and then missing freedom by fourteen hours!
If you had, would you dare tell a former Siberian convict to be more
gentle in dealing with those who upheld the system of the old régime?
And would you be too ready to accept somebody’s word that a new
dictator who wanted to set himself up to rule Russia would not restore
the old prison system?
When Washington or London or Paris is puzzled about Russia and what
course to pursue with that country, I would like to take a group of
the diplomats to such a Siberian prison as I saw and let them spend a
single night in it with the doors locked and not quite sure how many
years it would be before somebody bade them come out into the light of
day. I believe they would appreciate better the doubts and suspicions
of the Russian people about government in the making.
I wished to make a note of what was on the wall of that cell, but it
was too cold to unbutton my coat and get out pencil and note book. I
read it over and over--I can still see it in my mind’s eye. It was
seventy-two below zero that morning, and I was willing enough to walk
out and get into my drosky and go about my business. And I thought of
Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin and
a lot of people who had done something for human liberties--and mine.
Chita was the place to which the group of revolutionists known as “The
Decembrists” had been sent, back about 1840. And an old man in Chita
who had spent years as an exile, had a collection of branding irons and
other implements of torture used on convicts in a private museum. Among
other things were figurines of convicts made by convicts, complete in
every detail, even to the leg chains and the convict clothing. These
figurines, including the chains, had been moulded out of convict bread!
And in Chita I saw “Damskaya Oolitsia,” or “The Street of the
Dames.” This consisted of two rows of log houses near the railroad
tracks, which had been built by the wives of the Decembrist exiles
for habitations, these gentlewomen having followed their husbands
into exile and having been granted the right to build a street for
themselves.
These wives were not allowed to communicate with their husbands, who
were worked outside the prisons in chain-gangs. But with that feminine
ingenuity for outwitting locksmiths when there is love in the heart,
these brave women managed to talk with their husbands. The clever trick
was accomplished by hiring a carriage from the aborigine Buriats of the
locality, and driving past the chain-gangs. When close to the working
convicts, the horse was made to balk. The women, pretending to be
arguing with the driver and demanding that he make the horse go on,
shouted in French.
The Russian guards of course did not understand French, but the
convict-husbands did. Thus messages of hope were transmitted, and news
of what was going on in Petrograd and Moscow in revolutionary circles,
with probably information that pardons were being sought, was given to
the exiles.
Many of these brave and loyal women remained in Chita till their
deaths. Most of the husbands died in prison, and the widows went back
to the cities of Europe.
The new Czar came to the throne--he who was to lose it. There is a
grotto in the forests back of Chita to commemorate his visit to the
city while he was the Crown Prince. He made the journey by sledges,
for at that time there was no railroad. He might have learned a lot in
Chita about government, but the Second Nicholas was weak and stubborn
and would not heed even the advice of his greatest statesman, Count
Witte. And the prisons of Nicholas the Second brought about his ruin
and the ruin of his Empire. After all, I wonder if prisons cannot teach
lessons in freedom.
Some men are born a thousand years too late, and are a menace to our
present civilization. Some men are born a thousand years too soon,
and having ideals a cycle in advance of human progress, likewise may
become a menace to organized society. But the Russian government lagged
behind human progress--even such progress as its own people made under
governmental oppression. So the government imprisoned thieves and
murderers--what we call criminals. But it also classed as criminals,
and rightly, nihilists and assassins who used violence against the
government. But it also classed as criminals, and imprisoned them, men
and women with the greatest visions and the greatest spirits in the
Empire. Thinking became a crime.
The government’s attitude toward a Tolstoy differed in no way from its
attitude toward a crack-brained agitator, except that it dared imprison
or execute the agitator, but only dared scowl at Tolstoy.
We of the United States condemned the Czar and his government of
parasites for its enmity toward Tolstoy, not understanding that
Tolstoy was not dangerous for what he himself actually did against
the government, but for what he instigated others to do. The ideals
of a Tolstoy, carried out by assassins, may wreck not only a criminal
government, but may topple over the whole structure of civilization
throughout the world.
I believe now that the Czar’s government, for all its hideousness,
understood that its revolutionists not only threatened the imperial
system but also menaced the lives of all the people in the Empire.
Revolution may be necessary when evolution, throttled by a few who
control the destiny of a people, is not permitted to operate. The
aspirations of the Russian people were beyond their abilities to carry
out. They accomplished a successful revolution. Will they be able to
hold the good they gained by it? If not, we can only say they did not
deserve the liberty they acquired.
It was as dangerous in Russia under the old régime to be ahead of the
times as it was to be behind them--as dangerous to be an idealist as
to be a cut-throat. The people, we knew, were ahead of their system of
government, and even the ignorant peasants who blamed the government
for all their woes from bad crops to taxes, were theoretically right.
But it is worse to pursue a theory of government and not to know what
to do with it once you have it, than it is to have no idealistic
theories and face conditions as they exist.
Columbus had a theory that by sailing to the westward he would reach
India. He discovered America. If he had sailed to destruction over the
edge of the “flat” world, only his crews and the three ships of his
venture, would have been lost. It is quite another matter to embark
with a whole nation, or group of nations, into unknown seas. The nation
and all it has gained by centuries of evolution, may be lost, and the
children of a few survivors be thrown back into barbarism. That is what
the idealists of the Czar’s Empire have done, directing a vast but
ignorant population. And the people of Russia are still waiting for a
pilot who can cry “Land ho!”
XX
THE SOBRANIA
The city of Chita being in an unsettled condition as the result of
the Bolshevist troubles passed, and not knowing when more similar
troubles might occur, the people never gave up for a single night
their amusements. High schools produced amateur plays, there were
masque balls, banquets, benefits, motion pictures, and theatres.
The empire lay shattered, and foreign flags flew over their public
buildings, marking the garrisons of foreigners doing police duty for
the Siberians--they gave themselves up to making merry.
And when the Siberian goes out for an evening’s entertainment, he does
not return home till the small hours of morning. The result is that
little work or business is done the following day before noon, and
there is not much activity in business after two o’clock.
No matter what came up, I could not expect to find anyone at the
staff headquarters of Semenoff before eleven o’clock. There might be
a report at daylight that a train had been attacked by Bolshevists
twenty miles away; it could not be verified before noon. If I got a
message in cipher from Vladivostok at nine o’clock in the morning that
Russians had attacked Japanese troops near Chita, and asking me to
get the details, in fifteen minutes I could have the Japanese version
of the affair, but it would take forty-eight hours to get the Russian
statement of what had happened.
If my telegram came over the regular Russian wire, it might be
delivered to the hotel proprietor, who would call my attention to it
the following week. In the meantime, messages for the Czecho-Slovak
commandant, or a French correspondent of whom I had never heard, or
some British officer, would be brought to my room at all hours of the
night. My room was a receiving station for all telegrams which the
Russian operators did not know where to deliver--and when one came for
me, it was mis-delivered, generally.
My cipher messages were transmitted as numbers, and when Russian
operators received them, they always left out thirty or forty numerals
in the middle of the message so that when it was being deciphered, the
last half of it did not decipher at all, but when transformed into
letters looked like an alphabet that had run _amok_. I generally asked
for it to be repeated to my own signal corps operator over our private
wire, but that wire was open for us but an hour in the forenoon and an
hour in the afternoon. So if I got a defective message over the Russian
wire five minutes after my wire was closed in the morning, I had to
wait until afternoon before I could with any surety of getting the
message through tell Vladivostok to repeat. And the repeated message
would not reach me till the next morning.
I suspect that there was a system of sabotage being practiced on us.
There was every evidence that Semenoff’s officers in charge of the
commercial telegraph office had held up our cipher messages until
they had made an effort to decipher them. Or knowing that they had
done something which they did not want reported or contemplated doing
something, they held up the message as long as possible. For instance,
if Semenoff had his armored train in the station and the engines with
steam up ready to move up the line for some purpose, any message I sent
through at that time was suspected to contain the information that his
armored train was about to move in a certain direction. So the message
was not put on the wire till the movement was completed.
Yet what appeared to be sabotage, or a blockade system on information,
might well be the result of stupidity induced by late hours and too
much vodka. It was noon before the population appeared to have a lucid
interval in their existence, and having acquired a clear head again,
the chief ambition in life immediately was to become befuddled with all
possible speed.
I discovered the old “Imperial” vodka being sold on the streets, the
vendors setting up in business with an old box and a dozen bottles of
the liquor. I refer to it as Imperial because it was vodka made under
the old régime as revealed by the paper seals over the corks, and the
payment of imperial taxes, vodka having been a government monopoly. A
pint bottle could be purchased for about twelve rubles on the streets,
the same costing forty rubles in the restaurants.
It was said that there were millions of rubles worth of this vodka
in storage in Chita, which had been taken over by Semenoff, and
which aided his finances to an appreciable extent. No doubt somebody
collected a fee to allow it to be sold, and no doubt it was sold to the
dealers by the agents of Semenoff, who had acquired it by simply taking
it. Siberians using the whole of the wide street below my windows in
order to walk past, could be seen any minute of daylight.
The Russian calendar is full of holidays. One holiday in a week, ruins
the week--and the Russian for a week. He generally starts celebrating
the day before the holiday, and uses the day after the holiday to
extend the merriment. And most weeks while I was in Chita contained two
holidays.
I subscribed for the local newspapers on arrival. There were three
dailies. I got about one of each every week. Out of curiosity I made
inquiries, but there was always a good excuse--the printers had been
drunk, there had been a holiday, there was going to be a holiday, the
press was broken, or Semenoff had confiscated the whole edition and
arrested the editor. I would not care to be a publisher or journalist
in Siberia.
Whether a paper came out on a certain day or not, however, the newsboys
every night cried the “Nash Put” (Our Way), or the “Za Baikalsky”
(Trans-Baikalist) every night. The date of the paper might be three
days old. _Nitchyvo._ The buyer could not stop in the excessive cold
to hunt for a mere date, but bought his paper while going ahead at a
jog-trot. I never saw a native protest. Either he had not read the
paper of that date, or he did not care. Perhaps he could not read. A
Siberian acquires a certain social standing by being seen purchasing
a paper. Anyhow, he is probably on his way somewhere to drink vodka
and will forget all about the paper when he reaches his destination.
There was something about the Siberian buyer of newspapers which
reminded me of the young police reporter in San Francisco who wore
mauve gloves, had a gold-headed cane and carried with him everywhere a
copy of the _Atlantic Monthly_. He never read it. When he wore out one
copy carrying it, he bought another. It gave him a reputation with the
public and the staff of the newspaper for being a bright young man with
considerable erudition.
These general statements on private and public entertainment may make
it appear that amusement is, after all, rather haphazard in Siberia,
and breaks out in sporadic sprees. It would be misleading to convey
this idea. For amusement and entertainment is systematized by the
Siberian, in what they call a _sobrania_. As near as I can define it,
this institution is a sort of “circle,” or club, and the idea might
well be copied with some modifications in cities, or more especially,
small towns in the United States.