WITH THE RUSSIAN WORKMAN
Yusofka for a week-end--An exciting journey--A late
welcome--Guarded slumber--The story of Yusofka--The Black Country
of Russia--Time of small consequence to Russian workmen--Russian
holidays numerous--The working-day--Cost of living not low--Coal
mines--The Artel--Morality--The drink question--Through a Russian
coal mine--The Russian engineer an obstacle to
progress--Child-labor laws good--Conditions compared with Scotland
and Pennsylvania--Comparative wage scale--Standards of
living--Departure from Yusofka.
Mr. Medhurst, the charming and companionable British consul for
southeast Russia, urged my visiting Yusofka in the government of
Yekaterinoslaff.
“Come down for a week-end,” he urged. “You will see the deepest mines
and the biggest mills in the country. You will find conditions favorable
for visiting the workmen in their homes as well as watching them at
work. And, besides, you will see a British colony in Russia that I am
prouder of than anything else in this whole country.”
We were then in Rostov-on-Don. Yusofka is difficult to reach from any
point, but Mr. Medhurst wired Mr. Arthur Hughes, who was in command of
the “works” at Yusofka that we were leaving Rostov early that evening,
and would reach a certain junction at 1 A.M. From this junction to
Yusofka the railroad is owned by the New Russia Company, and a special
train would have to be sent to meet us.
The ride to Tagenrock on the Sea of Azov through the gathering night was
quickly made, and from there our road turned west and inward. Mr.
Medhurst told me fascinating tales of ancient Greek towns along the way,
towns lost to the world centuries ago. The mounds of crumbled dwellings,
storm-swept through long years, are almost wholly screened by the soil
and turf that sea-winds have blown over them, but the story of their
forgotten glory will be disclosed when science or commerce toss aside
the accumulations of the centuries revealing the buried temples, the
homes of the traders, the relics of a dead civilization.
In a drenching rain-storm we transferred to the private train that was
to convey us to Yusofka. It wasn’t much of a train--a small freight
engine, and a box-car--but it answered the purpose. We rattled noisily
through the black, tempestuous night toward the flaring furnaces of
Yusofka which we could plainly see ahead. Suddenly there was a
tremendous shriek from the engine, the brakes shut down and the train
brought to such a rough standstill that both Medhurst and I fell over.
The grimy head of the engineer poked through the door and in a terrified
voice the man cried:
“Oh, barin, barin [master, master], what’s to be done? Another train is
coming this way on our track!”
There was no doubt in my mind what was to be done. In the phrase of the
sea I would order “full speed astern.”
Not so Medhurst.
With the nonchalance of an Englishman in full command of himself and the
situation Medhurst replied:
“Go back to your engine. Open your whistle, ring your bell--if you have
one--drive ahead at top speed, make enough noise to warn every train on
the track; if they don’t hear--run through them!”
I trembled at these words. But Medhurst knew the men he was dealing
with. The other train pulled up and backed away the instant our whistle
began to toot, and we rolled into Yusofka station in safety.
Mr. Hughes had sent a carriage for us, a great open barouche drawn by a
pair of magnificent black Orloff horses that traveled over the ground
much faster than the local trains.
The Hughes’ house is like a delightful English country home, built for
comfort, with ample room for guests, and a large stable across the
court.
Arthur Hughes welcomed us, and led us directly to a tempting supper--hot
soup and a cold bird.
“You’ll forgive my sending a goods-car for you, gentlemen,” he began,
almost before we got into the house; “but the mother of one of the men
fell ill and we had to send her to a hospital on another line. I knew
you would rather ride in the goods-car, so I sent her off in the regular
car.”
It was nearing four o’clock when Hughes showed me my room. As he said
good night he lingered at the threshold as if anxious to say something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Say, old man, I hate like the deuce to say it--you are my guest and all
that, you know--but we are in bad times now. You won’t mind putting your
revolver within easy reach, will you?”
I laughed and assured him I was quite accustomed to that in Russia.
But Hughes was obviously chagrined that he had to make the request.
“The house is guarded,” he added, “and everything will probably be all
right, but we have to be prepared for anything, you know. Good night.”
Mr. Medhurst and I got up late next morning, and as we lingered over a
delicious English breakfast, eating slice after slice of toast and
marmalade, and drinking far more tea than usual, because it was English
breakfast tea, which is a rarity in Russia, he told me the romance of
Yusofka.
Fifty years ago Russia was almost completely given over to peasant life,
the simple wants of the people being supplied by home industries, which
are still maintained. Foreign prospectors were the first to realize the
vast possibilities of Russia’s natural resources and to begin to prove
them. The pioneer among these foreigners was one John Hughes, a
Welshman, who discovered in the government of Yekaterinoslaff, near the
Sea of Azov, rich deposits of iron and coal. Hughes was the hard-headed
son of a blacksmith who stubbornly fought his way upward until he had
become a master shipbuilder. He knew all about iron, and much about
steel. He knew, too, that in an undeveloped country like Russia, it
would be impracticable to utilize to advantage on any large scale the
richest iron deposits, if coal had to be transported. After a good deal
of searching he found both minerals in juxtaposition in south Russia.
Coal-mining was then so new a thing to Russia that there was no
coal-mining caste. It had to be created. John Hughes sent to Wales for a
number of tried Welsh miners, who came out with their families and set
up a British industrial community. The idea of Hughes was to make his
British men foremen, as soon as possible, in order to establish an
industrial class among Russian workmen.
Simultaneously with the inauguration of this enterprise, Russia began to
build thousands of miles of railroads, and to encourage the foreign
investor, subsidized the Company in the form of advance orders of such
magnitude that the New Russia Company, as it was called, in a few years
was employing twelve thousand workmen and paying an annual dividend of
over twenty per cent. The British workmen, to-day, are all foremen and
managers. The workmen are all Russians.
Thus the iron- and steel-workers and the coal-miners came into existence
in Russia. Other companies, especially under French and Belgian
initiative, followed John Hughes and his New Russia Company into the
field.
The English employers introduced British housing conditions, and British
systems so that the Russians early had the advantage of Western methods.
Wages were low, and still are, because throughout the country wages are
low. Sporadic strikes have occurred; but there are no trade unions as
yet. It seems to have been the policy of the foreign companies to pay
their workmen, who have come out to Russia from abroad, more than the
same men would have received at home, but to pay the Russian workmen the
current wages of the country.
The name Yusofka is a corruption of Hughesofka, from John Hughes. Mr.
Arthur Hughes, my host, the grandson of old John Hughes, was the only
member of the family left at the works of the New Russia Company to deal
with the men and look after the vast and valuable properties, the
holdings of the Company.
There is always a deal of romance about engineers who carry civilization
into the wilderness, who wrest earth’s treasures from remote plains and
unexplored mountains, whether in Mexico or the Andes, South Africa or
interior Russia. My experience has been that these men are always
workaday fellows who resent it when the picturesque and the heroic side
of their lives is mentioned; and Hughes was no exception. A rich man,
the son of a now wealthy family, educated at a leading English technical
school, and in the Carnegie works in Pittsburg, an expert in the
Bessemer process, a cultivated English gentleman in thought, instincts,
manner and speech; only thirty; master of twelve thousand restless,
wretched workmen, in a foreign country in time of revolution and general
lawlessness, and his life constantly threatened; once, when he rescued a
young Jewish girl from drunken Cossacks; again, when he recklessly
interfered to save a lot of stupid workmen from a Black Hundred
entanglement--such is Hughes. He lives absolutely alone, and coolly
attends to business day after day, striving to maintain the precedence
of his Company over all others in Russia, through the merit and quality
of the goods produced.
After a day or two I began to understand what Mr. Medhurst meant when he
urged me to remain at Yusofka a fortnight.
“Hughes will be delighted,” he said, “to have some one to whom he can
talk in his own tongue--and, besides, it makes another gun in the
house.”
As it turned out I remained ten days. During that time Hughes did
everything a perfect and generous host could do, not only in regard to
helping me to all of the information I wanted concerning the lives of
the workmen, but also to make my visit happy. Late afternoons we would
ride out over the rolling steppe, straight away as the crow flies, and
come back by the compass when night began to fall. Evenings I was
initiated into the intricacies of chess, which I had never before had
the boldness to approach.
The great industrial section of Russia corresponding to the “black
country” of England, is in the provinces of the south, chiefly about
Yekaterinoslaff. Here are the deepest coal-pits, the largest factories
and forges, the richest iron-mines. Here, across the miles of
intervening steppe, between the villages and towns, are always visible
the towering stacks of “works.” The nights are made fascinating by the
clouds of fire that ever and anon belch starward from the mighty
furnaces which melt the ore to fluid, and where are fashioned the rails
destined to join East with West and North with South, and the girders
which shall span the great rivers. The steppe is a place of vast
silence. The widest expanses of the world’s oceans are not lonelier. But
where the work and industry of man have possessed the steppes, claimed
the earth and all that lies beneath the fields of waving grain, reared
structures of stone and metal for the molding and fashioning of
civilization’s necessities from these crude riches, silence there is
none, neither night nor day. The summer winds which gently bow the corn
on the encircling fields are ladened with the sounds of mighty
hammer-strokes, grinding wheels, the shrieks of whistles and the labored
puffing of the engines. Over the steppe broods the mystic spell of
limitless nature. Over the industrial plains, which are the steppe in
transition, is the palpable heart-beat of the workaday world. And the
men whose labor is the soul of these great industries are themselves
like the country, of the past and of the future. Few have permanently
left the soil. The men who swelter in the glare and blinding heat of the
blast furnaces, who turn the cooling metal in the rolling-mills, pause
in their labor and see in the distance a hut of stone and mud with a
roof of thatch, and about it a farm--a farm too small and too poor to
support them and their families--yet to them home. The Russian workman
is an industrian through necessity. Some there are, of course, who have
tired of this dual existence and have relinquished the farm land. As
time goes on more and more will do this. The “working-class” will cease
to be the inert mass it is to-day, and will become a potent factor in
the country. But to-day this working-class is largely composed of men
who work in the mills and factories while their families work the land,
or rent their land, or who hire cheap labor for their land, or who
themselves drop their tools, lay by their picks and drills, quit the
furnace and the forge at spring-and harvest-time, and return to the open
to sow and to reap.
Russian workers, therefore, are workmen in the making, or at best, men
not yet weaned from the soil, workmen of the first generation, with the
blood and traditions and even the property of the peasant.
The phrase “Russian Workman” is really an anomaly. The Russian workman,
properly so-called, is a development of the future. Hewers of wood there
are in Russia, and drawers of water, but professional “workmen,” in the
technical English sense, referring to the men whose entire lives are
spent in the factories and workshops, are few. Industries there are
a-plenty: factories, foundries, mines and workshops; but a great part of
the men found in them are representative of a transition period, a
hybrid production, part peasant, part artisan. Serfdom in Russia was a
recognized institution until but yesterday, as it were, and to-day
eighty per cent. of the population are people of the land--tillers of
soil, guardians of cattle; and the man with the hoe is not technically a
workman.
Time has about the same value to the Russian workman that it has to the
Russian at large--_ceachass_, directly--in an hour or two, when we get
round to it! The Russian workman’s day is twelve hours long. But the
number of holidays, Church and State, are appalling to a European. At
Easter, for example, there are ten days marked in red on Russian
calendars. If a factory runs every working-day in the year, that means
two hundred and twenty days; but there are few workmen who pretend to
work even every working-day. Yet he must so regulate his living as to
have enough reserve from his wages to carry him through the holidays.
This is simplified for him by the regulations of the Church which
prescribes long and stringent fasts. At these times the expenditure for
food is reduced to a minimum; likewise the efficiency and productivity
of the man. It is no uncommon thing for workmen of massive frame and
naturally strong physique to faint from exhaustion in the mills, during
the long fasts. Energy, crispness of action, interest in the work, are
all impossible under such conditions.
The working-day begins at six o’clock. It is the practice to begin on an
absolutely empty stomach--not even a glass of tea. At half-past-eight
there is a half hour for “breakfast,” which usually consists of tea and
pirogki--a kind of warm bread with chopped meat in the center, or fish.
From nine o’clock till one there is work without intermission, then
dinner. The usual dinner is a kind of soup called “stchi” or “borsch.”
This is more of a stew than a soup, for it contains chopped cabbage,
carrots and other vegetables, and a chunk of boiled meat. The soup is
gulped down first, then the meat. Sweets are only included on holidays.
This must suffice until six o’clock when the day’s work is done and the
workman returns to his hovel--be it farmhouse or lodging--and sits
alone with his steaming samovar drinking many glasses of tea, and for
solid food meat and potatoes, or fish and potatoes, and black bread. Tea
is always taken from a glass, and without milk or lemon. Nor is the
workman extravagant as to sweetening his tea by dropping several pieces
of sugar into every glass he drinks. Russian sugar is made very hard,
and on account of the excise is three times as costly as in neighboring
countries. The workman, like the peasant, places one hard lump between
his teeth and strains his tea through it. Thus one small lump answers
for a glass.
The cost of living is not particularly low in Russia, it is the standard
of living that is low. An English workman could not live on the same
fare as the Russian workman, and an American workman would not even try.
The actual prices of food-stuffs and rentals are lower than in England,
much lower than in America, but wages are proportionately lower, and the
variety of foods in the diet of the Russian workman is much less than of
the English or American workman.[21]
The wages of a common laborer are seventy-five copecks, or thirty-five
cents a day. Men of the type who attend the blast furnaces in the metal
works average sixty-five cents a day, while the rollers, who are
accounted skilled workmen and are paid by the month, receive one hundred
and twenty-five rubles or sixty-three dollars. These, however, are only
the very best men. The second men, who make up the majority, receive
from twenty-five to thirty dollars monthly. Coal-miners are sometimes
paid according to the amount of work they do, and sometimes by the
day--as in England and America--but their total income either way, does
not amount to more than fifteen or twenty dollars a month. The
[Illustration: Interior]
[Illustration: Exterior
Russian workmen and their “_artel_”]
rank and file of laborers do not average above twenty dollars a month.
These figures all refer to the best paid industries.
The first expenditure is for house rent. The common price for an
ordinary workman’s house is four rubles, or two dollars a month. This
includes two rooms and a kitchen--sometimes a cellar--frequently an
outside pantry which not uncommonly contains a stove in order that in
the summer months, when the heat is great, the cooking may be done
outside of the main house.
Workmen’s houses in industrial Russia are of three general types. First,
the houses built and owned by the companies and rented to the men, or
loaned to them without cost. Second, the average workman’s house, and
third, the _artel_, or lodging for single men.
The Company house is the poorest type. The occupants of these houses are
only the poorest workmen. There are unskilled artisans in every mill and
factory whose wages are small, so the Companies make up for this (in
small part) by giving them the rental. These houses, if rented, would
bring about one dollar or one dollar and a half per month.
One tenth of the wages goes for house rent. This is so general that it
may be stated dogmatically. Men living in free houses make from ten to
fifteen dollars a month. Men living in the four-ruble houses average
forty rubles, or twenty to twenty-five dollars a month.
The skilled men are so few that they occupy the better type of house
such as usually is occupied by foremen.
The _artel_, or lodging-house, is a curious institution common
throughout Russia. From twelve to sixteen single men live together in
specially-built houses consisting of one large, common sleeping-room, a
common kitchen and eating-room, and a small ante-room for the
caretaker. The caretaker is usually an old woman. She scrubs the
floors, does all the chores, and acts in every capacity. The living is
of the crudest and cheapest. Twelve rubles, or six dollars a month is
the common price paid by each lodger. This includes food. One ruble or
fifty cents additional is paid for the rent. The caretaker gets the
difference between expenditures for the food and supplies and the total
amount paid by the men. The sleeping accommodations are very simple. In
some artels there are plank platforms one foot to eighteen inches from
the floor, and on these the men lie like packed sardines; in others,
each man has a crude bed. There is a stove at one end of the room, and
on the walls usually colored pictures--chromos--the only decoration save
the ever present icon in the corner near the ceiling.
The morality of the Russian workman is mainly negative. Religion is
everywhere, or, at least, ecclesiasticism. But what religion is, or
means in Russia, is hard to determine. Church-going is general. The most
striking building in each village and town is the church. The clatter
and din of church-bells breaks out at any hour. Within are invariably
garish decorations of gilt and gold. The workmen, like the peasants,
always remove their hats and cross themselves many times when passing a
church, and when they enter they have every appearance of piety and
devotion. Russian churches do not have pews or seats: the congregation
stands, or individuals (at their own will and pleasure, so far as I
could discover) kneel and pray, and bow forward until their foreheads
rest upon the paved floor. I have seen a cab-driver asleep upon the box
of his cab when hit upon the back by a companion, awake startled, and
instantly, as by instinct, whip off his hat and cross himself. On every
hand are evidences of ecclesiastical power and influence. And yet--what
does it stand for? One is not shocked or surprised to find a drunken
priest on the street. The most devout drink to excess at stated times.
They pillage, plunder and steal goods and chattels and other men’s
wives. So far as one can judge religion has no grip whatever upon the
hearts of the people, no influence on their conduct of life. At the same
time the forms of the church are scrupulously maintained. The fasts are
adhered to to the physical detriment of the people, and no house is
without its icon. But there is no commandment that is not lightly
broken.
It would be wrong, however, to convey the impression that the Russian
workman is a drunkard. He is not. He drinks at certain stated times
only, usually when he draws his pay. Drink does not seriously interfere
with business in Russian industrial centers. There are drunkards in
every community in Russia, as in most countries, but on the whole the
per capita consumption of alcohol among the workmen is not great and
with the exception of the one day in the month which follows the pay-day
the workmen are not given to drunkenness; Sundays and holidays might be
added.
Morality is a totally different question. A gentleman who for thirty
years has been the paymaster of one of the largest “works” in Russia,
went so far as to say to me: “Morality is unknown among Russian
workmen.” In this respect industrial Russia to-day is not unlike
industrial England immediately after the industrial revolution. The
breaking-up of the homes and emigration have always resulted in a
lowering of ethical and moral standards.
Compared with the English and American workman the Russian is inferior.
Physically he should be capable of greater endurance and effort, for his
frame is large and heavy, but weakened by his insufficient diet, and
too rigid adherence to the fasts prescribed by the church, he has so
undermined his strength, and so reduced his capacity, that in the run of
months and years he is worth only one third of an English workman, and
not more than one fourth of an American. “A Russian looks a long time at
his work before he begins,” said a mine foreman to me. Figures furnished
me by superintendents and employers demonstrated that the average
English workman can do the work of three Russians. The Russian is
listless. He does not understand the reason for hurry. To-morrow is as
good as to-day. He has not been trained by discipline, nor encouraged by
the reward which should accrue to the thrifty and the pushing. Looked at
critically he is good raw material--but very raw and very crude. Like
the country at large, the Russian workman promises well under proper
conditions, and if sufficient time and capital are invested in him, he
will develop an adequate earning capacity. But his religion must first
be tempered with intelligence. He must learn to make the best use and
the most use of his naturally strong physique, and his economic
condition must so alter that it will appear to him worth his while to
devote himself with more heart to his work. He must adopt a much higher
standard of living, and demand recompense for his labor that will enable
him to maintain that advanced standard. Under the present system
industry is not rewarded by promotion. A miner, for example, can never
become a stager, nor a stager an engineer. Having once taken the
examination for the lower post all further advancement is precluded.
Also, the line between industrialism and peasantry must be more sharply
drawn. The man who is farmer in summer and plate-roller in winter may
be none the less a good farmer, but he is very much less valuable as a
plate-roller. The two lines of life are parallel, but they don’t
interlace.
One day I climbed into a huge metal basket and was lowered twenty-five
hundred feet toward the earth’s heart. The walls of the shaft were of
splendid firm masonry, great blocks of stone like granite. The engines
which controlled the descent were equipped with the most modern patents
for haulage, automatic brakes and indicators. At another mine I gingerly
placed one leg in a small wooden affair like a nail keg, grasped a hemp
rope from which the keg was suspended with one hand, and was swung out
over a dark well, called a shaft, and with the other hand and the other
leg (the one _outside_ the keg) maintained an unsteady balance, and
saved myself from too violent contact with the sides, as two horses
jogged round a ring, unwinding a drum allowing the keg and its load to
go jerkily bottomward. Here the shaft sides were of timber--crude,
wooden slats interlaced after the fashion of a crib.
The former was the result of the English influence; the latter was pure
Russian.
Between the Russian miner and the French, Belgian, or British miner is
this difference: the Russian has not the blood of coal-miners in his
veins, nor the traditions of underground workers handed down to him from
preceding generations. Whereas the others are generally miners by
tradition and breeding, the Russian is really a peasant driven from his
land to seek a living where he can find it. Mining is a casual choice
with him, he would as lief be in the rolling-mill, or tending one of the
coke-ovens.
This system of labor which permits workmen to spend part of the year on
their farms and part in the mines and mills, is a symptom of Russia’s
industrial revolution. The workers who do this are called “the
go-aways,” and make up a large percentage of the workmen in the
industrial districts of south Russia, with the result that they are poor
agriculturists and second-rate workers. Slowly the system will pass, and
industrial towns composed of a permanent population be established. The
Russian peasant has been on the land so long that he has little ambition
to leave it. When the land is worked out, exhausted, and the annual
harvest is no longer sufficient to keep the souls and bodies of his
family together, he goes off to the towns. The vast area of European
Russia given solely to agriculture, makes it often necessary for the
peasant to travel far to find winter employment. Thus north Russians
have a journey of fifteen hundred, or two thousand miles to the south
Russian mines and factories. This is a goodly distance for a peasant.
When harvest-time comes year after year, the worker more and more
shrinks from going back to his patch of land to reap the meager harvest,
and each year some give up the thought and remain at their work. Many
more, however, have a bred-in-the-bone love for the soil, and with a
political revolution in the atmosphere, with a general cry from one end
of the empire to the other of “Land--Land,” they come up out of the
black depths of the coal-pits and back to their dessiatines in the hope
that one day other dessiatines will be given them, and they may leave
their proletarian life forever. Naturally, this condition does not
produce miners or other workers of the best type, and hence the
coal-miners of the Donitz basin do not compare favorably with the
coal-miners of England or America.
One of the great drawbacks to the progress of the
[Illustration: A Russian coal-miner]
coal industry among Russians, is the Russian engineer. Russian law
provides that the chief engineer at each colliery shall be a Russian, or
at least, shall possess a Russian certificate, which amounts to the same
thing. There seems to be universal agreement that the Russian mining
engineer is rarely a practical man. Trained in a mediocre technological
school he comes to a colliery resplendent in a long coat with silver
buttons and gold insignia. This coat rarely comes off. A Russian
engineer never goes down into a pit if he can avoid doing so. I can
testify that I usually saw them strutting about above ground, and always
wearing their good clothes--looking much more like officers on parade
than practical engineers. The feeling against these dressed-up
theoreticians is very strong among pit-foremen, managers, and all
practical miners.
If a coal-miner becomes expert in any particular line of work he may
become a section-boss, but as for working up from the ranks, it is
unheard of, and impossible, according to present laws. If a man desires
to become a manager he must make up his mind to this before going into
the mines at all, then pass a manager’s examination, after which he may
never occupy any other post.
The Russian coal-miner, like most Russian workmen, persists in clinging
to the inherited idea that the land is where man belongs, that the land
is for the people, and his work in the mines is merely to supply him
with food and raiment till the people shall come into possession of the
land, when he will lay down his tools and go back to the soil. This is
the prime reason for his backwardness.
The Russian coal-miner is naturally careless and lackadaisical. Time is
meaningless to him. He lacks caution in his work, and handles explosives
as if they were minerals as harmless as coal. The government,
understanding this characteristic, largely removes responsibility from
the workman and places it upon the employer by granting high
compensation in cases of accident. The employer, therefore, takes
extraordinary precautions through his managers. This system is by no
means a bad one, for in presupposing the ignorance and carelessness of
undisciplined workmen, the chance for accident is reduced to a minimum.
The government also protects the children; no boy may be employed at
manual labor, or for a full day, until he has attained his fifteenth
year. At the age of thirteen a boy may go into an office for half-days.
To encourage schooling a boy who passes the third grade in the common
schools is excused from sixteen months’ soldiering. These are
comparatively recent regulations, copied, I believe, from Germany. There
is no gainsaying their value and reasonableness. That such wise laws as
these should be found in connection with an industry where there are
such absurd restrictions as, for instance, the preventing of practical
miners from becoming superiors, is typically Russian.
Not political revolution alone threatens Russia to-day. Industrially,
there is every symptom of the disorganization which precedes an
industrial revolution. I found Russian workmen agitating armed revolt
because they wanted more land! That is the slogan of the peasants. The
working-men stand for supporting the peasants in this, in order, as some
of them expressed it, that they may quit the industries, and return to
the land. So long as workmen look upon their work as a temporary
expediency, Russia will not develop a strong working-class. But this is
only incident to the transition. Revolution, armed or unarmed, must
evolve change, and with the wider liberties and scope for individual
development which Russia soon will have, the workmen will have
opportunities to develop their own industries. For the present the prime
thing is change, immediate and radical change. It matters not what the
shibboleth so long as it leads to this.
Thus far the workmen have not been allowed to consider themselves as a
class--any form of organization is prohibited by the government. Any
effort toward “industrial betterment,” improved conditions, or any of
the reforms which are common movements in England and America, are
unheard of and unknown in Russia. The wonder is that the Russian workman
is as good as he is under existing conditions. Given freedom of belief,
freedom from ecclesiastic superstition, freedom from civil
slavery--freedom of organization, and the Russian workman will develop a
vista leading to his own better day.
The tenth day of my stay in Yusofka I was called back to Moscow by
telegram. The call was urgent so I determined to catch a train from a
station some fourteen miles away, which left just at dawn. Hughes
himself put me into the same barouche that had brought Mr. Medhurst and
me to the home I now left with genuine regret, and drawn by the same
black Orloffs.
“I’m sending two trusted men with you,” Hughes said, as I gripped his
hand in farewell; “both are well armed.” And we rolled out of the gate
and into the cool night where furnace fires belched flaring flames above
near and far horizons, and where the rattle of mineshaft wheels and cars
intruded upon the stillness which properly is the birthright of night,
but here is unknown.