Empire in order to advance their education to our standards. Their
future is in their own hands, no matter how much we may attempt to aid
them. And my pessimism toward the peasant is primarily an attitude
toward him as he exists in his native environment. I am not attempting
to judge him by our standards. I am attempting to show him in such
a light that our people will give up attempting to judge him by our
standards, so long as he remains at home.
We must stop considering Russia and Siberia as filled with people
much like ourselves. They must be considered from an entirely new
angle--much as if they were people of another planet. In fact, that has
been and is our difficulty with all Asia. And when I say Asia, I do not
mean so much a place, as I mean a state of mind.
The question may be raised as to why we should consider the peasant
seriously. We do not have to if we do not want to, but we should,
for what happens in Russia during the next decade or two will have
serious effects upon us, our national existence, and the future of our
children. I do not mean this in a sense of what they may do to us, but
in the sense of what they may do with themselves. What has happened in
Siberia and all Russia during the last couple of years has alarmed us.
The happenings were the result partly of our belief in the last fifty
years, that what happened in Russia was no concern of ours. We have
suddenly awakened to the fact that injustice and intrigue and a weak
monarch on the other side of the world, can have a most decided effect
upon us. We got a good deal of amusement out of Wilhelm of Germany and
his “mailed fist” and “shining armor”--it was all a merry show to us.
We are just beginning to pay the piper. We have had a demonstration
that what foreign princes may do is decidedly our business. We may not
have learned the lesson fully.
It is apparent that Bolshevism made a powerful appeal to the peasants
of Siberia, as it did to the submerged class of all Russia. The
readiness with which these benighted people took up a saturnalia of
crime in order to right certain crimes which had been committed against
them, startled the world. The universality of Bolshevism in Russia
actually led many people of peasant-minds here and abroad, to suspect
that there was something good behind it all--it was hard to believe
that a nation of two hundred million human beings supposedly civilized,
could be so utterly wrong.
And while Bolshevism was wrecking a vast nation, it seemed impossible
to get any definite idea of what it was, and what it intended to do.
Many of our people are still in that frame of mind, despite the fact
that a nation has been wrecked. There are charges and counter-charges,
accusations and denials, and all the while wholesale murder is
going on. People at home, supposed to have brains, still argue that
Bolshevism is a good thing, a just thing, and the only justice in
government that there is. They have not seen the wreckage.
There are others who have seen the wreckage, but are so enamored of a
theory which they have upheld, that they will not admit the terrible
things they have seen because these things would prove them and their
theory to be wrong. These people could look at a train wreck in which a
hundred persons were killed, and say: “There is nothing to worry about.
This all means that we will build better cars and use safety devices.
And if we don’t like the color of the new cars, we will wreck the
trains till we get equipment that suits us. It is necessary that people
die in order to have cars which meet our tastes in colors. What happens
to the passengers does not worry us--we have theories of railroading
which must be carried out, even if in testing them everybody in the
country is killed.”
The arguments of the Bolshevist leaders made headway with the peasants
because the basis of Bolshevism is class-war. Bolshevism is founded
on the fallacy that it is the ability of the lower class which is
exploited, when it is the ignorance of the lower class which is
exploited. And the Bolshevist leaders have exploited this ignorance in
a more terrible way than ever the ruling class did under the old régime.
The ignorance, credulity, stupidity and cruelty of the Siberian
peasant passes our understanding. And in passing judgment upon these
forlorn people, who filled me with disgust by their willingness to
be dirty when it would be as easy to be clean, and in stressing
their revolting aspects, my purpose is to bring home to the reader a
clearer appreciation of the problems which face us when we attempt to
aid them. I believe that I am helping them in depicting them to the
generous-minded people of the United States and other countries.
We cannot leave them alone, even if we would. The point I want to
make is that all our agencies for welfare work, all our machinery
of government which takes up the Siberian and Russian problem, must
realize the difficulties ahead and understand that the problem differs
from any other problem we have ever attacked. It is Asia, white man’s
Asia. Despite white skin, we have on our hands a race not akin to
white, yellow or black. We readjust our minds when we come to deal with
the colored races. We must readjust our minds when we deal with the
Siberian, and keep that readjustment steadily, for the Siberian does
not constantly warn us by the color of his face that his mind presents
to us a barrier against mutual understanding. We must learn about
him, as he must learn about us. Centuries of serfdom, centuries of
autocratic rule, centuries of cruelty, have left their imprint on his
brain. “Half devil and half child” was written of the black races. It
is also a good thing to keep in mind when we consider Siberia.
The more the peasant disgusted me, the more I pitied him. We may say
that the drowning man who reaches up and catches the gunwale of a
life-boat full of women and children and upsets it in his frantic
efforts to save himself, is a fool. Yet we must realize that he is
responding to the natural instinct of self-preservation. He knows
decidedly that he is in danger of death, his brain is not working
normally, and his greatest impulse is to save himself--all idea of
sacrificing himself for the benefit of the majority or the helpless,
have been swamped by unreasoning fear.
The Siberian peasant knew something was wrong when he was prevented
from having the soil. He loves the soil, and he loves to make
it produce. He and his forbears have been in the clutches of a
governmental system so asinine as to thwart him in his desire to
work the land. He endured this serfdom in fact, for ages, he endured
serfdom under another guise since official serfdom has been abolished.
Instigated and aided by the Bolshevists, who were in turn backed by
Germany, he wrecked the government of his oppressors, and finds himself
caught in the wreckage. If the thing works out in the way Germany
hopes, the peasant stands simply to change masters.
The peasant has been glorified by the Russian novelists for his quality
of endurance, rather than for his accomplishments. His submission was
extolled, and we gave his submission a wrong valuation. We pitied him,
and he became a martyr in our eyes, with all the virtues that go with
martyrdom. Freed of his chains, he mistook license for liberty, and we
were shocked to find that he whom we regarded as a kind man who had
been wronged, could only emulate his late masters in cruelty, murder
and injustice to his own kind.
It may be said that the people of Siberia, being the rudest of
Russians, are not at all typical, and that as the Siberians are the
descendants of exiles, or former exiles, they have experienced a
degeneration which prevents them from being representative of the
corresponding class in European Russia. There may be something in that
idea.
And I grant that judging the people of Siberia during a revolution, may
be like judging the people of San Francisco while they were camping
among the ruins of their city after the earthquake--that conditions
were abnormal, and reduced to a primitive state.
But if people seem to prefer being filthy to being clean, when the
desirable condition calls for but little effort, it is obvious that in
normal times, they were inherently filthy. And I experienced filth,
day after day, in trains, railway restaurants and hotels, which I
cannot hint at, much less describe. Sanitation is the beginning of
civilization. When conductors on trains, and passengers on trains,
will create and permit without protest, a condition of squalor and
unsanitary conditions such as I saw, and which the wildest animal
avoids, there is something wrong mentally with such a people. And when
a suggestion that conditions might be improved is met by a stare of
amazement that anyone should find these things revolting, one begins
to wonder if government by a knout was not actually needed. But we
know that the knout, censorship, repression, and the barriers against
outside ideas and education are responsible for these conditions. These
people are victims of a government that was criminal.
While observing the peasants, and while discussing them in this book, I
have tried to keep an open mind. I have not hesitated to reveal their
worst side. I am willing to bring out in full force their exasperating
habits of dilatoriness, their slow mental and physical gear which
we describe as laziness, that we may realize their problem, and our
problem in aiding them.
There is another side to the shield. It is my opinion that the
only hope which Russia has for regeneration, no matter how long it
may take to do the work, lies in the peasant class. Not the actual
stolid peasant, but in men and women from the peasant class. That is
the difference and distinction in my whole statement. Breshkovsky,
“Grandmother of the Revolution” is of the peasant class, but not
peasant-minded.
There are among the millions of peasants in Russia, men and women who
are beyond their class in mental attainments. That ability may be
latent, but it will rise to the top as surely as water seeks its own
level. This quality of genius runs through the whole human race in all
lands.
The genius of Russia under the old régime could only express itself in
protest against government, which was the biggest job at hand for the
genius. And this expression frequently came in the form of literature.
When Tolstoy and Gorky extolled the peasant, one a noble and the other
a commoner, both were merely praying that the latent genius in a few
individuals have a fair chance to come to flower. They were fighting
oppression, though they gave us an idea that if the peasants all had a
chance, all would reveal the quality of genius. That hope is absurd,
in Russia or elsewhere. What we want, in Russia and at home, is that
the peasant-minded people have comfort and justice though they persist
in remaining peasant-minded, and that when an individual reveals
extraordinary ability, he may develop it, and not be broken on the
wheel for daring to lift himself out of the rut.
My ideal is not a nation of peasants by any means. But I do insist that
a large mass of our own population prefers to be peasant-minded, and
fights against being anything else. There is but a small proportion of
our population which demands art in literature, pictures, or anything
else. There is a mental Bolshevism all about us at home. There is a
clearly defined hostility against mental accomplishments, expressed
in many newspaper cartoons, in fiction, and in the utterances of
demagogues. Our small-town hoodlum who resents the well-dressed
stranger as a “dude,” and despises good grammar and evidences of an
education, is at heart a Bolshevist--he is hostile to the “upper class”
just as is the Siberian peasant. The man in the motor car, who has no
consideration for the pedestrian, is at heart a Cossack. Both classes
are in a dangerous frame of mind.
Here at home we urge our young folks to get educations. Then we joke
about the college professors who get less in wages than laborers. We
all like to see labor well-paid, but while teachers get starvation
wages, we cannot consistently argue the value of education. The college
professor may say he gets more out of life than the laborer--what the
laborer says to his children is the thing we must consider. We must
be careful that we do not build up a class-war based on an ignorance
which has no ideas of relative values, which is the trouble in Siberia.
The Bolshevists turned the janitor of a college into president of the
college, and made the president do duty as janitor. Without hatred for
education, the Siberians could not do such a thing.
When I assert that the salvation of Russia lies in the hands of the
peasant class, I mean the peasant who has brains and wants to develop
them, not the peasant who wants to kill everybody wearing a white
collar. I do not mean that Russia should be led by the professional
agitator or the demagogue, or the silk-stockinged revolutionist, but
men who spring from the people and have the balance of sanity.
Russia will develop its own Lincoln; but before that time, I believe it
will have a national Napoleon. The latter will do it a service by first
coördinating and stabilizing the national spirit, and bringing the
shattered remnants of the vast land under one government. That is the
only kind of ruler the people will understand and obey now. If they
had to-day an ideal president directing the country under an ideal form
of government, he would probably be sacrificed by the warring factions
before he could get his program of regeneration under way.
We must bear in mind the fact that the mass of the Russian people got
their official freedom in the days of our Civil War, and their actual
freedom as recently as when the Czar’s government was overthrown.
They do not know what to do with it yet. They are literal minded,
and when we speak to them of equality in rights and of opportunity,
they interpret it to mean equality in all things--one man as good as
another, one man as wise as another, one man as rich as another. They
do not understand political equality. To disagree with them is fatal if
they have the power to kill.
We have people at home, who have lived for years under our form of
government, who do not yet grasp our meaning of liberty and freedom.
We cannot expect the Siberians to grasp the principles of republican
government over night. They have had no demonstration of our system of
government, and they find some of their own people who have experienced
our system of government, going back to Siberia to slander us. They
go back with the cry that they were exploited here, in our mills and
packing-houses. Their ignorance was exploited, and our government
is blamed. They assert that their ability was exploited. They do
not realize that in confessing that they were exploited, they are
admitting ignorance. That may not excuse their exploitation, but it
accounts for it.
One of my Russian orderlies, who had been in this country some ten
years, first as a steel worker in Pittsburgh, and then as a barber,
told me how he had finally induced his brother to come to America and
work. So he sent his brother passage-money. The brother got aboard a
ship for America--and found himself practically sold into slavery in
the Argentine, where he worked more than a year for miserable food
and quarters. By that time he had been located by his brother of
Pittsburgh, who sent passage-money to come to New York and fare to
Pittsburgh. But he got aboard a ship for Russia, having had enough
of “America.” He was killed as a Russian soldier in the war against
Germany. He told everybody in his home town what a terrible place
America was. The United States was blamed because he could not get here
when his ticket was purchased for him--so far as he was concerned,
life as a peon in a turpentine camp in the Argentine represented labor
conditions in the United States. He never could be made to understand
that Argentina was not the United States. It was all “America.”
In the same way, immigrants from Russia have been lured to Russian
boarding houses in this country, stripped of their little cash and few
belongings, and turned adrift. They blame the United States, when it
was their own countrymen who robbed them. Their ignorance was being
exploited.
We at home hear that the Trans-Siberian Railroad is running. So
are our transcontinental lines. A railroad is a railroad, to us.
In Siberia, however, it took me ten days to go by rail a distance
that would take ten hours at home. There I traveled in what we would
consider a fairly good cattle-car; here I moved in a palace on wheels.
There, I was glad to pay a dollar for a bowl of greasy cabbage soup;
here, I got a complete meal served in luxurious surroundings, for a
dollar.
These are some of the reasons why we require a mental readjustment when
we think of Siberia. It is impossible to use the same terms and convey
the same idea. And these differences in usual things and usual terms,
explain the difficulty we have had in visualizing and understanding
Bolshevism. We think of a theory at home; in Siberia we see the result
of the theory.
Returning home I heard a man in the Twentieth Century Limited
explaining some of the virtues of Bolshevism. He had never been in
Siberia. Our train was moving nearly sixty miles an hour, and we were
clean and comfortable, plenty of food at hand. As this man talked, I
smiled in remembrance of an engineer in Siberia who had demanded a
bottle of vodka before he would haul our train any farther--and when he
got it, proceeded to get drunk and let his train almost run away during
the night as it descended a steep grade in the Khingan Mountain range.
I wondered if the passenger in the Twentieth Century, who extolled
the virtues of Bolshevism, would have been willing to ride in the
Twentieth Century any longer if our engineer had suddenly stopped and
demanded a bottle of whiskey before he proceeded. That would have been
Bolshevism in fact. It was easy to theorize in safety with a sober
engineer at the throttle. A Bolshevist at the throttle of government
may make a good engineer, to hear our boudoir Bolshevists talk. I
observe a strange reluctance on their part to go to Russia where
Bolshevism is running things.
To me, the horror of the peasant in Siberia, was the realization that
his children and grandchildren had little hope to be better off. I do
not mean that the old régime will come back with all its terrors; but
no matter what form of government may flourish in Petrograd, it will be
many years before the leaven of the most enlightened rule can penetrate
the minds of these people and bring to the surface such good qualities
as are deeply imbedded in their brains, sealed up under layers of
ignorance, superstition, and submission.
They believe we are not there to help them, but to protect our own
investments. We are losing their confidence every day that we remain
in Siberia without doing something constructive, in which they have
understanding. If we want to do welfare work, do it, but without an
expedition on the ground; if we want to use our troops in cleaning up
the Bolshevists, get into action. They will understand either activity
by itself but they cannot understand military occupation without
action, and they cannot understand relief work carried on under
inactive bayonets. We have talked too much about our friendship for
Russia, and done little or nothing to aid the country in reëstablishing
itself with a government.
Whatever assurance we may give Kolchak, or other leaders, that we will
back them up, we will gain little unless our actions win the confidence
of the peasant masses, and the so-called “workers.” I group them
together.
The mass of the people of Siberia lean more toward Bolshevism than they
do toward us. Not that they are actively Bolshevist, but they have in
the backs of their heads a secret love for the theory, for it promises
them a chance to get rich quick. All ignorant people have a strong
tendency to greed--they want to take from those who have. That is all
Bolshevism is, and that is why I maintain that the masses are largely
Bolshevist in their sympathies.
The longer we hesitate, the longer we take to reach a decision, the
more these masses are slipping away from us. The crisis will come
in the winter of 1920, because the people were Bolshevist in their
tendencies with fairly good food supplies. They will turn to Bolshevism
wholly, in order to force us into feeding them, if crops have been
scanty and the food reserve has been consumed. They do not appear to be
yet ready to settle down to steady and regular work, because they have
not been assured that their earnings or accumulations will be protected
for them by a decent government.
We have failed to do much in nearly a year of occupation, and they
have done less because they were waiting for our lead. They had no
real grievance when they objected to our presence in the country last
winter. They will have a grievance if things do not suit them next
winter, for they will say: “You told us you were going to help. We
waited for you to help, and now we are in misery. It is your fault.”
We must remember that we are dealing with a people who not only may
become Bolshevists, but a people who have been Bolshevists, and rather
liked it. They will get at it again if we do not watch out. So far, we
have done little or nothing to gain either their friendship, or their
wholesome respect for our military powers. And they are being whispered
to all the time by influences which know how to make them react to
certain ideas.
What have the Allies done in Siberia, except to control the
Trans-Siberian Railroad? Our relief work was discredited by the
peasants on the plea that we were giving them things in order to get
them off their guard, induce them to be good, and grab their railroad.
They asserted that we were trying to bribe the Bolshevists into being
good, and that the Bolshevists would as soon get property from the
capitalists by having it given to them as by taking it. We cannot
expect to subsidize Bolshevism by those methods, for the more we give,
the more they will demand. It is the old game of paying tribute to
bandits so they will not rob your caravans--a scheme as old to Asia as
the Arabian Nights tales.
If we are going to remain in Siberia, we must back some horse. We must
either go against the peasants and compel them to behave, or we must go
in with them on some basis they will understand. We have been dealing
with big fellows, believing that the “leaders” knew what to do, yet we
have not supported any of the “leaders.” Throw in with Kolchak and back
him up, regardless of monarchist intrigues, and then if he attempts to
betray us and Russia, denounce him, and back such leader as is willing
to carry out what we suppose to be the wishes of the people.
But if we think that we can follow the wishes of the people, we will
make a mistake. That is the mistake we have made already. We have been
waiting for Russian “public opinion” to coagulate. It cannot be done.
There are a thousand Russian “public opinions.”
We have got to follow our own public opinion as to what should be done,
with consistency to our ideals of government, and then go ahead. There
will be factions in Siberia and Russia who will object, because the
people do not know what they want. They believe they are free, and
that freedom means doing as they please. As a matter of fact, they
abhor any government which attempts to control them. It has taken us
twenty years in the Philippines to prove to the Filipinos, a people
composed of various tribes, that we are working for their good. Some
of the “leaders” want a freer hand in leading than they get. I doubt
if we want to take on the same problem in Russia, I doubt if it is
necessary. But we have not told any Russians at present writing what we
intend to do for them, if anything.
The peasants cannot read their daily newspapers in order to form
opinions. They can only believe what they are told, so what they
believe depends upon who does the telling. And in Siberia one will
believe anything. I myself, after three weeks without news, gave
credence to absurd rumors.