station and wait for the train which was due to arrive from Irkutsk at
nine o’clock in the evening of January 31st.
It seemed to be the coldest weather I had ever experienced when with
Captain B----, Mrs. B----, and Werkstein, I set out from the Hotel
Select. There was a gentle breeze blowing--a barely perceptible
movement of the air--which intensified the seventy-below temperature.
In the five minutes we were crossing the square before the station,
walking against the pressure of a zephyr barely strong enough to stir
a feather, the tears ran out of my eyes and froze on my cheeks, and my
nose was frost-bitten before I could get the fur band of my cap across
it.
I looked back at the line of shops and restaurants. The lights were
shining through a gray haze of frozen fog, the doors were shrouded with
arches of icicles like entrances to fairy grottoes.
We plunged into the dark labyrinth of lines of cars in the yards. A
private train of Semenoff, with the palatial coaches of the old days,
protected by a few stamping sentries. Nearby was the Ataman’s armored
cars, with the muzzles of field-pieces and machine-guns jutting out
over the steel sides which were gleaming white with hoar frost in the
pale light of the chilled stars. A dim light spilling from our private
car, revealed letters a yard high painted on the end of an armored
box-car, in Russian “Cemehobr,” or Semenoff.
I could see in the distance, lights in the upper rooms of the Ataman’s
residence. Probably a council of state was being held--or only an
informal gathering of women who had recently been brought up from
Harbin. Above the clamor of the crowds of refugees in the station, I
heard the howling of wolves in the hills.
We got aboard the colonel’s car, and went to bed. The train which was
due at nine that night to pick us up, did not pull us out of the city
of convicts till nine in the morning of February 1, 1919.
I was started on my journey for New York, exactly on the other side of
the world. I was content.
XXIII
CHITA TO VLADIVOSTOK
In about five days we reached Manchuria Station, also known as
Mandchuli. At this station we had to change trains, for it was the end
of the Baikal division of the railroad and trains for Vladivostok were
made up there.
This line being the Chinese Eastern, all stations had our American
officers on duty, these men being railroad men serving in the Russian
Railway Service. Though we had come this far in the private car of the
Russian colonel bound for Harbin, it was advisable to arrange for room
in the Vladivostok train where the train was made up, for it would be
next to impossible to get accommodations out of Harbin.
I had asked my telegraph operators at Chita to notify by wire the
American officer on duty at Manchuria Station the time my train left
Chita, and to have him hold for me a coupé, or sleeping compartment,
in the proper Vladivostok train. But my operators gave the time I went
aboard the private car as time of my departure, saying I had left
on Number Four at nine in the evening of January thirty-first. But
the Number Four which picked up our car did not leave till nine the
following morning. And we made such slow progress, being five days in
getting to Manchuria Station, that reservation had been made for me on
the Vladivostok train departing the morning before I arrived.
As we pulled into Manchuria Station in the gray dawn of seven o’clock,
I saw the frost-covered steel cars of the Vladivostok train lying
alongside us. It was due to leave at nine o’clock.
We hastened out of our car with our numerous bags, boxes of food, and
cooking utensils. Captain B---- stood guard over our property, Mrs.
B---- went to the crowded station restaurant for hot tea, and I went
to the telegraph office to find which compartment of the Vladivostok
train had been reserved for me. I passed the train on the way to the
station, and it was already packed full of people--in seats, aisles and
on platforms.
Nobody in the telegraph office had ever heard of reserving anything for
me. Neither had the sleepy men in the station-master’s office. I asked
for the American officer to whom I had telegraphed--he had been sent to
Harbin to hospital, ill. (He died there immediately.) Yes, there was
another officer in his place--name unknown, whereabouts unknown. He
generally appeared about nine o’clock.
Hastening back to Captain B---- with the bad news, we visited the
Vladivostok train to see if we might secure some space. That is, we
went near to it, and watched mobs fighting to get aboard every car. It
was hopeless. The weather was fifty below zero. We saw the Vladivostok
train pull out at nine, leaving us in a swarming station, high and dry
on our baggage, to wait till nine o’clock the next morning.
The Chinese customs authorities demanded my lockers, and collected
eighty-four rubles in customs duty. A long line of Russians and
Chinese, which reached the entire length of the long and dark corridor
in the station, waited before the closed ticket window--to buy tickets
for the train leaving twenty-four hours later. Many of them had
been camping there for days, having food brought to them from the
restaurant, in order to buy tickets, which incidentally, gave them only
the right to try and get aboard the train.
We breakfasted in the restaurant, it requiring two hours before we were
served. And we waited more than an hour before we could get a seat,
while Russians and Chinese held the seats and read newspapers over a
single cup of tea.
Shortly after nine the American railway officer appeared, and told me
that he had reserved space in the Vladivostok train the morning before.
As we had not claimed it, he had come to the conclusion that we had not
left Chita at all, so did not make any reservation in the next train.
In disgust Captain B---- suggested that we go to the local _sobrania_
and kill time eating. We walked there, some dozen blocks distant, in
the face of a gentle breeze, which intensified the bitter cold.
On the way, Captain B---- chanced to look at me. Without warning he
shoved me toward a small snow bank, and thrust a handful of snow into
my face, rubbing it in hastily. My nose and cheeks were freezing, and
I did not know it. But before we reached the _sobrania_ I was chilled
to the marrow, and shook so hard after I had sat down at a table, that
the dishes rattled. My teeth chattered for a couple of hours, and my
shivers were so violent that I had difficulty in drinking the hot tea I
ordered. In fact, I shivered violently for two days and nights, though
I sat nearly all day in the _sobrania_ restaurant with my back against
a slightly warm wall-stove.
We spent the night once more in the colonel’s car, but were up before
daylight in order to begin our offensive for space in the next
Vladivostok train. With Captain B---- and Werkstein, I ran down the
whole length of the train as it arrived in the terribly cold morning
with only the light from the frozen stars, seeking for the best cars.
We identified the steel cars from the wooden ones by their coats of
hoar frost.
The great mob in the station surged out and attacked the train before
the sleepy passengers began to get off with their baggage. Immediately
there was a terrific jam.
[Illustration: SOME AMERICAN RAILROAD MEN OF THE “RUSSIAN RAILWAY
SERVICE”]
[Illustration: WASHING CLOTHES IN SIXTY-BELOW-ZERO WEATHER]
We fought our way into a car, inch by inch, shouldering through
the disembarking passengers and clambering over their bundles and
bales. The first compartment we could get into was still full of
sleepily-protesting passengers, six being jammed into a compartment
designed to hold four. The place was in a filthy condition, floors,
berths, and window-ledges being covered with food refuse, cigarette
stubs, dirty papers, candle-wax, mud which had melted out of ice
tracked in at various stations. The single guttering candle revealed it
to be in a condition worse than a pig-sty.
“We will hold this,” said Captain B----. “You remain here and I will
see the provodnik and pay him to clean it, and see that it is locked.
Then we will move our baggage in.”
He returned presently, having given the provodnik twenty rubles for
cleaning, and surety of possession. I suggested that my orderly be left
to hold it against the mob already swarming in and thrusting the door
open as they passed to look in. Captain B---- said that it was safe
enough, and that we would breakfast at the station while the coupé was
being cleaned, when we would begin moving our baggage. I doubted the
safety of this move, but as he was running things and asserted that the
station master was a friend, I felt assured that he was right.
After breakfast, still before dawn, I sent my orderly to get our
tickets. He came back saying that the line was so long that he could
not get to the window. Inquiry developed the fact that I could get a
military pass by seeing the Czech officer in charge of transportation.
We found him far up the railroad yard in a third-class car, with a lot
of his soldiers eating their breakfast. He sat on a shelf and scribbled
a pass.
Now our baggage must be moved to the coupé we had set aside in the
Vladivostok train. I left my orderly to look after the transfer with
the aid of a hired porter, and hastened to the compartment we had
chosen.
On the way through the crowd I met Captain B---- who went with me. We
found the car a seething mass of humanity, struggling with their boxes
in the corridor, and making a fight to gain entrance to every coupé
which had been preëmpted by the earliest, luckiest and strongest of the
travellers.
To our surprise we found the coupé which we had hired cleaned, full.
There was a burly Russian soldier, a Japanese officer, and a pair of
Russian civilian speculators lying in the berths, and the whole place
was crammed with baggage. They protested wildly at supposed intrusion.
Captain B----, being in Russian uniform overcoat with gold shoulder
straps, informed them all that they must get out, as he had reserved
the coupé. This met with violent opposition as the party inside was
well settled.
Captain B---- called for the provodnik, and as that worthy could
or would not come, he seized the baggage nearest at hand and began
pitching it out on the heads of those in the corridor.
I managed to get a window open, and he pitched bags and grips out on
the mob outside. The effect was magical. Our squatters needed their
personal effects more than they wanted the coupé, and they dashed out
to salvage their things, expressing themselves in Russian and Japanese
as not at all admirers of Captain B----.
I was left holding the fort. Captain B---- hunted up the provodnik, and
with a few properly placed kicks, induced him to once more clean the
coupé. He tearfully announced that there was no outside lock on the
door.
Finally, we got our baggage in after a lot of labor and fighting, and
never left that coupé unguarded for a minute the next three days on the
way to Vladivostok.
Late one night the Russian conductor managed to get in on the plea that
he wanted to see our tickets. He at once announced that he was going to
put two more passengers in the coupé, and that the lower berths would
have to be shared, despite the fact that it was plain there was barely
room for us to get in or out, or to turn round once inside. Captain
B---- referred him to me telling him that the coupé was reserved
for an American officer, and that he himself had nothing to do with
the matter. I lifted myself on one elbow, and reached for my pistol
holster. The conductor and his two villainous passengers faded away,
and presently we heard a rumpus in the next coupé, where the two men
were installed over the protests of some women.
Of course, the conductor probably got a thousand rubles to provide
quarters for the two men, whether they had tickets or not, as the
speculators pay well for accommodation. They made themselves so
obnoxious in the coupé which they got into that the women occupants
were forced to get off the train at the next station and wait
twenty-four hours for the next train.
At every station we were besieged by incoming passengers, who would
thrust the door of the coupé open and insist that they be allowed to
enter, and when we refused, they made insulting remarks. Then they
camped on their baggage outside the door and sang ribald songs all
night, or thrust burning cigarettes through the aperture we left for
air by opening the door an inch and keeping the chain on. Or they took
occasion to block us in the passage if we attempted to leave the coupé.
In order to allow Mrs. B---- to leave the coupé, I had to carry my
pistol in my hand ahead of her, and wait for her to come back. And
while the three of us got off at stations for tea, my orderly was left
with his automatic in his hand to keep off all comers. We never pointed
a gun at anybody, but having it in hand, it prevented burly Manchus,
Russians and others from insisting that they had a right to come in.
At one station down the line where we were to get coal for our engine,
we were delayed several hours because there was no coal. The mine was
not far away, but with typical Siberian procrastination, the coal was
allowed to run short at the station. When a train arrived which needed
coal, it was time enough to order an engine and a dozen coal cars to
proceed to the mine, load up, and return with a supply. So we lay in
the yards, and kept other trains at other stations waiting, till we
had coaled and released traffic in both directions. The branch line
running to the mine could have kept the coal yards full, with a switch
engine and one coal-car, but that would require planning ahead, and
doing something before it was actually necessary to do it.
At another station, we waited five hours to change a hot “brass” on a
journal. This job at home takes some ten minutes. As I watched a poor
Chinese mechanic scraping the bearing in forty-below weather, using a
primitive tool, I realized that the “hordes of cheap labor in Asia”
need not worry us at home. This mechanic would put the semi-cylindrical
bearing into the journal-box and take it out. Where it showed oil
stains, the metal had to be scraped away to get a good fit for the
bearing. He always scraped too much off where the oil showed it to be
ill-fitting, and of course, when he put it in again, oil revealed that
the spots which he had not scraped, now stuck up. So he scraped these
spots away and repeated the process.
We were held up one night at a tiny telegraph station on the plains.
After six hours wait, Captain B---- and I attempted to ascertain when
we might expect to go on. We learned that there was a wreck two versts
ahead. There were two cars off the track--freight cars. It developed
later that the reason we had to wait so long to get two freight cars
off the track, was due to the fact that some cases containing books
had been smashed in the wreck, and the books scattered along the
line. Before that freight train would come in, these cases had to be
repacked and renailed till they presented their original appearance as
near as it was possible to make them, by Siberian railroad men working
with a single old lantern which burned lard-oil. While they tinkered
with cases of books in semi-darkness, the train for Vladivostok, and
all other traffic for miles in both directions, were held nearly all
night. Fancy an American passenger train held till smashed cases of
freight could be rebuilt and repacked!
We got into Vladivostok three days late. The transport in which I
should have sailed for home departed the day before I arrived. And a
notice in headquarters warned me not to go near the Trans-Siberian
station because there were many cases of typhus among the refugees
sleeping in the corridors! It is needless to state that I calmly went
there for my baggage without worrying about typhus after living so many
days in trains and stations reeking with typhus and other diseases. But
one gets very finicky living at headquarters. Incidentally, there was a
lot of tiger hunting done on the stairs of headquarters at Vladivostok.
The whole staff became inveterate tiger hunters, and remained so, till
a big Siberian tiger came down near Vladivostok and killed a bull and
ate it.
On the fifteenth of February, 1919, I was aboard the Russian steamer
_Simbirsk_ when it pushed out through the ice in the bay. But I was not
yet out of Siberia. The stewards never cleaned our rooms or made up our
berths, the ship still had the same old Siberian smell, the decks and
carpets in salon and passage-ways remained consistently filthy, and we
had to put to sea without an adequate supply of fresh water.
In two days I reached Tsuruga, Japan, went to Yokohama by train, and
caught the _Tenyo Maru_ for San Francisco. When ashore in Japan, I
found once more that the world was going on in its old way--trunks
could be checked, tickets purchased which insured the right to a seat
in a train, beds were clean, food came soon after being ordered. I
felt as if I had escaped from an insane asylum. I had had enough of
Bolshevism to last me the rest of my life. And I suggest that when any
men or women develop a leaning for Bolshevism in this country, that
they be shipped to Siberia. The trip will kill or cure.
XXIV
THE PEASANTS
The problem of Siberia is the peasant-minded population. I use this
term to avoid confusion with what is the popular conception of
“peasant,” that is, a tiller of the soil, a rude and ignorant farmer
or farm-hand, the human being described in Russian as “_moujik_.” The
mass of the people is peasant-minded, whether working in cities or
in the wilderness. The fact that those in the cities have acquired
urban characteristics, does not to my mind prevent them from having
mental calibers on a par with the rural population when it comes to
knowledge of government, or minds revealing any alertness toward new
ideas or reaction to anything with which they are unfamiliar. This vast
population appears to be mentally static.
The stupidity of these people never ceases to amaze Americans. Many of
our soldiers who were Russians and had been for years in the United
States, apparently must make a great mental effort to comply with the
simplest request. Their brains seem to be congealed. And the Siberian,
asked a simple question in his own language by one speaking Russian
perfectly, acts like a man rousing himself from deep slumber before he
can comprehend the question, much less answer it.
Our knowledge of Russia has been gained from two sources--histories
and books on government telling us of official and court life, and
the Russian novelists. One class of writer deals with a few exalted
personages, the other class tells us of the common people. Really,
there is no history of Russia, for such history as we have concerns the
figures of the Imperial dynasties and their satellites. Reading this,
is something like attempting to get the history of the United States
by being able to read only scenes from meetings of the cabinets of our
presidents, and personal gossip about the characters of notable people,
and how they acted in times of national stress.
Now I believe that Tolstoy, Gorky and other Russian novelists, did the
Russian peasant more damage than all the Czars. They did not reveal the
peasant to us, despite their brilliancy as novelists. They idealized
the peasant. They built up a great illusion. I am not saying that after
six months in Siberia I know more about the Siberian peasant than
the novelists, but I am saying that they did not tell us the things
we should know about him. They made the outer world believe that the
peasant, once free of the Czars, would throw off his chrysalis of
tyranny and emerge as a beautiful creature, living a life of sobriety,
industry, and good behavior.
These novelists led us to believe that freedom in Russia was a matter
of legislation, emanating from the halls of the Duma; they led us to
believe that imperial bureaucracy was responsible for the woes of the
people, when as a matter of fact, the people were responsible for that
very imperial bureaucracy. We were led to believe that a machine-gun
government would transform itself into a printing-press government once
the old régime was shattered. We saw it shattered--and the vast Empire
became a shambles.
Freedom is in the hearts of a people, and not in legislative halls.
The congress of a nation is but an expression of the freedom which the
people feel in their hearts--the machine, but not the fuel which drives
it. It is futile to send representatives of the people to a congress if
the people do not know what they want to express. It results only in
autocracy, in exploitation. If a law-maker finds that he gets as much
credit for making a bad law as he gets for making a good law, neither
law being understood, he soon disregards the people and works for his
own ends, thus usurping power which has not been delegated to him. He
becomes master instead of servant. People are responsible for their
government.
A wave of joy swept the United States when the news came that the
Czar had fallen. We had a mental picture of two hundred million human
beings able now to enjoy a liberty similar to our own. It was a great
emancipation.
I believe it will take several hundred years before the mass of the
people of Russia will have attained a mental capacity on a par with
the civilization which we know. They are still in the dim twilight of
medieval times, though they are playing with modern machinery.
And when it comes to turning such a nation from an absolute autocracy
into a liberal republic, in which one man’s vote is as good as
another’s, it is impossible without the element of time. A country so
vast and so various, with the blood of so many nations running through
the people, and especially a people holding the Asiatic viewpoint of
government, cannot be administered immediately according to our ideal.
The best that can be hoped for is a constitutional monarchy, and even
if that form of government is gained, it will be for some time a
dictatorship.
I am forced to this conclusion. All the pity, all the sympathy we may
feel for this benighted people, will not alter the facts. We cannot
swing a magician’s wand and hand freedom to these people on a silver
salver. We have got to face facts, and realize that the Tolstoys and
Gorkys have misled us about the Russian peasant. For once given a free
hand, this sublimated peasant has produced a tragedy, with himself the
victim, which outdoes any tragedy the human race has ever wished itself
into.
The peasant has been described by Russian novelists as “inscrutable,”
the inference being that behind the “dreamy eyes” and simple
expressions on the faces of these people there were deep thoughts and a
yearning for an ideal existence--some mysterious greatness which if we
could once understand it, would reveal to us a wonderful race.
I consider this inscrutability to be of the same quality which exists
in the eyes of a simple old cow, which being invited into the parlor
and turned loose, kicks the walls out of the building and dies under
the wreckage of the roof. It is an ignorance deeper than we of the
United States are capable of comprehending--a childish mentality in a
white person who appears good-natured, religious, kind and hospitable
under a restraining government, but who will kill his neighbor simply
for the purpose of doing something dramatic.
It may be charged that my pessimism on the peasant is exaggerated, and
that the Russian in this country disproves my assertions that hundreds
of years must elapse before the peasant can meet our standards of
intelligence. What the Russian peasant does in this country has nothing
to do with the case except to show that removed from Russia he forges
ahead. But the Russian who comes here is of a higher type than those
of his fellows he leaves behind--he must be energetic, ambitious,
adventurous, aspiring to better things to take the trip of his own
initiative and to have acquired by himself passage-money. If he gets
aid from relatives already here in order to make the journey, there are
members of his family who have shown ability in getting ahead. If he is
compelled to escape from his country, that fact indicates that he was
not satisfied with his lot at home--he is not given to dumb submission.