Bolsheviki on the Onega front. Two others had been captured previously
to this and had been released by way of Stockholm, and had reported good
treatment. With these taken in July the Bolsheviki had taken also a
number of British soldiers, some army supplies, and some Y.M.C.A.
supplies. One of the secretaries had considerable money on his person
belonging to the Y.M.C.A. He was given permission to go to Archangel on
parole to take this money to "Y" headquarters, and he was given by the
Bolshevik command two messages. One was to negotiate the purchase of
the "Y" supplies captured, as the Bolsheviki did not consider these
things war booty and wished to pay for them. The other was a message to
the people of Archangel assuring them that when the Bolsheviki should
take their city there would be no reprisals but full political amnesty.
When this paroled American prisoner reached our lines he was taken to
British headquarters and there told that he could not go to Archangel on
any such mission. He appealed by telephone to the American Embassy and
arrangements were made for him to go to Archangel, virtually under
arrest. At British headquarters in Archangel he was ordered not to make
known any of the Bolshevist messages and an attempt was made to induce
him to break his parole. When he told of kindly treatment by the
Bolsheviki he was angrily denounced as a Bolshevik propagandist. He
returned to the front and re-crossed the line according to the terms of
his parole. These prisoners were sent to Moscow. They were not under
arrest nor restraint, nor were the British Tommies whom the Bolsheviki
held there as prisoners of war. These two men left Moscow September
fifth for home by way of Vologda and Archangel. They saw nothing of the
atrocities we read so much about, nor of the nationalization of women,
nor the separation of children from parents by state decree, nor the
other barbarities the British-American news factories give us so much to
read about.
*XIX*
*CONCERNING MILITARY INTERVENTION*
During the first half of 1918 there was considerable discussion in
America of the proposed military intervention in Russia. Mr. Roosevelt
favored it--insisted upon it. Mr. Wilson was understood to be opposed
to it, this understanding resting on the general interpretation of his
utterances. The debate, widespread, was before the fact. Now that the
fact is accomplished we may well look into the results.
The weak fashion in which we went into the enterprise has given rise to
the theory in some quarters that it will be claimed that we did not go
into it at all. If an armistice had been declared in Russia on November
11, or if America had then notified the Bolsheviki that we had no
military motives there, the affair could well have been charged up to
the war with Germany, and we might well claim that we had had no serious
intention of interfering in the affairs of Russia. But the armistice
did not even think of Russia. We were fighting a separate war there.
We in Russia were not even notified officially that there was an
armistice. We heard about it, and wondered where we came in. It was
after November 11 that most of our fighting took place and most of our
casualties were suffered. Not until March were we promised that we
should be taken home in the spring, and then no intimation was given us
that America was to withdraw. Rumors were industriously circulated
giving the impression that other Americans were on their way to take our
places, and not until our men were actually away did our "information"
permit us to realize that America had withdrawn from the expedition.
We intervened. We undertook to crush Bolshevism in Russia. We sent a
military and naval expedition there. We organized a civil war there.
It was unsuccessful. America lost a few men, England more, Russia many
more. How much more Russia suffered is not yet written. America
withdrew her troops. France, Serbia, Italy withdrew theirs. England
reluctantly withdraws hers.
Let us consider what this expedition meant to our own men. They were
only a few thousand men, to be sure, and their little event was so much
smaller than the big thing in France that it was naturally even
necessarily overlooked. Because I was with them, however, I know that
it was a big thing their government made them do. The men in France had
faith in their cause. The men in Russia had none. Over and over again
our men in Russia have argued with me that while we were fighting for
freedom in France we were fighting to kill it in Russia. Some said we
were fighting for the capitalists of England and France, others declared
that the Bolsheviki were more right than wrong, and everybody felt that
our government had made a great mistake and that a life lost there was a
life worse than thrown away. In this frame of mind American boys went
through all the dangers and privations and sufferings of a difficult
all-winter campaign and some of them went to their last battles.
Statistically it is a little thing, if you must measure everything by
statistics, but I have been made to feel how terribly great a thing was
the death of one man who as I held his hand cursed the fate that made
him die in a fight for which he had no heart.
It was a high degree of sportsmanship that enabled these men to see it
through. If Mr. Wilson told his colleagues at Paris that "if" American
troops were sent to Russia they would mutiny he might have based his
opinion on information as to what American troops in Russia had already
said on that particular subject.
It is difficult to imagine a more unmoral situation than that of an army
fighting without a sense of unction and against its sense of right, but
this is what military intervention in Russia imposed on a small army of
Americans.
I can testify of my personal knowledge that this was equally true of
Canadian and British soldiers. I have heard that it was true of the
French, the Italians, and the Serbians.
These men are all home now with their grievance. Few of them are proud
of the expedition, or glad they had a part in it, or grateful to their
country for its support, or willing to go again. Military intervention
has been a tragedy in their lives and was an injustice to them such as
no government may with impunity impose on its citizens.
We may not easily estimate the harm that military intervention has done
in the lowering of our standards of national rights and in devitalizing
our ideals of international relations. The precedent that has been
established, however, is most unfortunate and may in the future be used
to strengthen the hands of some one who may be trying to lead us into a
more serious error of the same sort. I must, moreover, say that this
enterprise has done considerable harm to the most important friendship
in the world--that of England and America--as far as so great a thing
could be affected by the few thousands of men who were directly engaged
in the expedition. Our governments do not know about this, of course,
but the men know. No thoughtful person could hear these men of either
nation talk about the other nation without seeing the awfulness of the
thing that has been done. It is not at all similar to the attitude of
the soldier who knew the British in France, nor to his disillusionment
about the French. It is very much worse. It is enmity. And it is clear
to me that it is directly due to the fact that our men had to fight in a
bad cause, with unwilling minds, beclouded consciences, and rebellious
hearts.
Again I do not know how much our participation in this affair has
vitiated the faith of small nations in our disinterested friendship for
the weak. We may hope that the nations of South America have not taken
the Russian campaign to heart as seriously as have the small nations of
Europe. Whatever result our military intervention in Russia has had
upon this faith, however, those of us who have been in Russia know that
it has had a profound effect upon the Russian people. We have not
destroyed their faith in us. One mistake could not do that. But we
have disillusioned many of them concerning the soundness of our judgment
if not the purity of our motives, and they will hereafter, I think, look
carefully into our alliances before trusting themselves utterly to our
guidance.
Having got into a bad job the governments found it expedient to suppress
news, to manipulate news, and even to manufacture a little.
Whether we have actually prolonged Lenin's tenure of office and
Trotsky's reign in power we cannot of course know. But this is quite
conceivable, and they are still in office and in power two years after
the November revolution. We know that the armed barrier that we have
built around them and forced them to build in front of us has prevented
us from reaching them with any of the more convincing proofs of our
"friendly purpose" than the shrapnel and h.e. we have managed to get
over into their lines. The business men and educators and engineers and
uplifters that we were going to send have had to wait while we undertook
to settle Russian turmoil by making more turmoil.
We organized civil war in Russia. The Russians were not fighting the
Bolsheviki--not our way. They did not want to fight them--in our way.
We made them. We conscripted them to fight for their own freedom. It
was difficult, but we had our army there and the army made the peasant
patriotic--our way.
The Russian hates conscription; but what were we to do? If he wouldn't
fight voluntarily he was a damned Bolshevik and must be made to. And
so, as ever, one thing leads to another--especially when we are not
quite clear that the one thing is a right thing. The conscripted
Russians who rebelled against us and went over to the Bolsheviki were of
course a small proportion of the whole. All sorts of mixed motives and
confused judgments and conflicting loyalties entered into the situation,
but one thing clearly emerged. This was civil war. Every man's hand is
set against his neighbor. And now as we confess the futility of our
intervention and evacuate, the evil harvest is to be reaped. No peasant
can escape it. No woman or child can escape it. Suspicion,
recrimination, tale-bearing, jealousy, hatred of Russian for Russian is
the harvest our intervention has left behind it.
*XX*
*CONCERNING RUSSIAN PEASANTS*
The peasants of North Russia are generally supposed to be the poorest
and least progressive class of Russians, living in the poorest and least
desirable part of the country. I think that if this is true the
interest which all Russia holds for Americans can hardly be exaggerated.
The people of North Russia are peasants. The professional and trading
classes are negligible--perhaps smaller than anywhere else in the white
world. The towns are small and few and even the towns are peopled
largely by peasants.
North Russia, humanly speaking, consists of long tortuous arteries of
life called rivers. The banks of these rivers are thickly, almost
densely, populated. Villages of from twenty to a hundred houses are
strung along so continuously and here and there clustered about a great
church so thickly that you wonder where there is land for all these
people to cultivate. Never, however, do you find an isolated settler. If
it is a forest nobody lives there. You find a village or nobody.
There can be no more hospitable people anywhere in the world than these
Russian people are. Their doors are never closed against strangers, and
with unfailing courtesy they offer the best they have. I have traveled
nearly a thousand versts by sled over this northern country and stopped
every six hours at a private house for a samovar and perhaps a bed. To
have the best the house afforded given me once or twice and pay refused
would not have impressed me so much, but to have uniform hospitality
extended me as though it were my right and to have this done without
consciousness of virtue made me feel that the world's championship in
hospitality abides with the people of this bleak and inhospitable
country.
[Illustration: The women work in the fields with the men.
Russians love their homes and their villages devotedly.]
They get their living from the soil in a very short season, and this is
possible only because the summer day is twenty-four hours long. This
means that in the short growing season the crops grow very rapidly, and
it also means that all the work has to be done in that limited time. If
the crops grow twenty-four or twenty-two or twenty hours, then the
peasant must work the harder. The wife and mother and children must
also work. Most of the farm work is done by each family for itself, but
some of it is done by the whole village co-operatively. I spent a
half-day working in a hayfield with peasants from Konetsgory who were
eight versts from home. There were seventy-five of them, men, women,
and children, and they stayed in that field five days and nights until
the great stacks were finished. The hay was community property to which
each family had a right in proportion to the number in the family. I
noticed that they ate by families while at this work, the food being
strictly private property. And I saw Mrs. "Smith" give Mrs. "Jones"
some of her fresh cake, and other little private property courtesies. I
asked if the families at Konetsgory not represented by workers in the
field would have a right to any of the hay. Of course they would,
because they were doing other work as directed by the staroster.
The staroster is a public official chosen by a meeting of the peasants
whose duty it is to assess labor for any public or co-operative purpose.
His assessments are compulsory upon men, women, children, and horses.
With most of the men in the army, as is now and has been the case for so
long, his chief labor resource of course is women. When there are
exceptions to his authority such as doctors and school teachers, these
persons do not count in the distributions of the co-operative products.
In all distributions of land and products now women are counted. This
is a result of the revolution and has been brought about not because it
was legislated but as a spontaneous product of the common sense of
right. When Russia does have an election, as we must hope some day she
will, these peasant people all assume as a matter of course that women
will vote.
Americans do not need to be told how backward Russia is in the matter of
machinery and especially agricultural machinery. But I gave myself a
surprise one day by going to every house in a small village and finding
in every house but one a one-horse cast-steel modern plow. I found also
some very good harrows and a few hand-wheel sewing machines, but
practically nothing else that could be called modern. I have since seen
two mowing machines and one hay-rake. The absence of machinery here is
practically as universal as it has been represented. There is no
prejudice against it and the people are not ignorant of it. They want
it, and they have plenty of money to buy it with, but it is not here to
buy, and the money has uncertain value.
There is so much printed matter in America proving eighty-five per cent
illiteracy among the Russian people that I approach this subject
timidly. I cannot find the eighty-five per cent. I have yet to find
one child ten years of age who cannot read and write, and the subject is
of such interest to me that I always inquired about it. I found some
old peasants who could not and some who could but sensitively would not
write their names for me. I had Russian soldiers line up by hundreds to
sign their names in a register and not a man would fail to write his
own. I had peasants tell me that they knew how to read and write when
they were children but had forgotten it since. I have no statistics on
the subject, but it would be interesting to have the statisticians go up
the Dvina River looking for the eighty-five per cent. In almost every
village the best house is the schoolhouse. When it is not the best it is
still a very good house. Among hundreds of villages there is not one of
twenty houses or more that does not maintain a school eight months of
the year.
Russia has but one church. I met a few dissentients--evangelicals and
atheists--but the dissent is not organized and there is very little
propaganda of reform. The Bolsheviki at first prohibited the church as
an evil thing. Many of the un-Bolshevik Russians have dropped the
church as a useless thing. But nobody seems to have undertaken to
reform the church. And yet one of the greatest reforms in
ecclesiastical history is taking place. In a moment and without warning
the physical and militant props dropped out from under this institution
and it had to stand alone or sink. Some of it did sink. Some of it was
scuttled by the Bolsheviki. Then came the aftermath--the afterthought of
the people. They missed something. They had not entirely outgrown the
church. They had hated its arrogance and exactions, but they still
believed what it had taught them and felt its spell. Now that they were
free from it they voluntarily returned to it. But it is with a new
attitude. These Russians go to church now looking for something that
they hardly find. And the priest's only resources now are
spiritual--superstition, art, inspiration, service, truth--perhaps he
will make use of all in the struggle for existence.
I was interested in the attitude of the peasants toward their priest in
a large village that we were about to evacuate. The Bolsheviki would be
there shortly after we should leave, and as they were reputed frequently
to shoot priests the military had arranged to take him with us. He had
received for his worldly needs a house to live in, the use of some land
which he and his wife had cultivated as peasants do, a certain amount of
money, and certain ecclesiastical emoluments. When the committee of
peasants came to settle with him they said: "You are favored above the
rest of us. You are taken to a place of safety while we are left to the
cruelty of the Bolsheviki. The first thing they will do will be to
demand much food from us. After that they may kill us. So you must
help with the food. You may take with you only eight bags of flour. You
may not sell your hay. You may sell your cow, but not the yearling."
There was no appeal, as this had all been decided upon by vote, in a
meeting. They took no money from him, nor gold, as they are told the
Bolsheviki do not consider gold has any particular value. They were
careful to see that he left everything pertaining to the church.
Talking with the priest afterward, having helped him build a fence
around "his" haystack, I asked him what he should do in the future. He
said he supposed he would be assigned to another church, but he wished
he could get a permanent job with the Y.M.C.A.
The sense of private property is very strong among these people. They
are jealous of what they own, and normally acquisitive. These easy
expropriations and confiscations arise not from an absence of interest
in private property but from the presence of a strong sense of common
right and communal responsibility. Private property is not so "sacred"
as with us but the acknowledgment of common responsibility is more
general.
I had occasion at one time to sell quickly about three hundred thousand
roubles' worth of supplies. I took a hurried trip through a string of
villages sending messengers to others, calling upon the president of the
co-operative society in each, and within a week I had sold out to the
co-operatives of twenty-two villages. My chief concern had been that
these goods should reach the peasants at cost, and they did. Each
co-operative gave me a statement showing the number of houses and of
people in the village, and showed me a statement giving the amount of
money that had been collected from each family as purchasing capital.
The staples, such as flour, sugar, and soap, were mostly distributed
among the houses within twenty-four hours. Every family was given the
privilege of buying its quota whether it had put up any purchasing
capital or not. These were their regular practices.
The meeting of all the peasants by vote determines many matters of minor
as well as major importance. The president of the co-operative at
Shamova told me that he had asked the meeting to permit him to buy
sardines, but they had voted against it. He wanted some sardines for
himself, but could not buy them in the name of the co-operative. Would
I sell them to him individually if he would sign a bond not to sell any
at a profit? One committee had come under instructions to buy only
flour and sugar, and as I had to ration these out with other goods in
order to dispose of my cargo quickly they had to row their great
carbosse back in the wind and rain twenty versts and call a meeting of
the peasants for revised instructions. Married women and widows vote in
these peasant meetings. One committee came with fifty thousand roubles
in its bundle, but with instructions not to spend more than half of it
unless they could buy cloth.
It seems to me almost unnecessary to say that I have found the Russian
people and the Russian soldiers scrupulously honest in all my dealings
with them.
The difference between their standards of morality and ours has been
often dwelt upon by our writers. This difference as I found it
consisted in the fact that they talk about sex more easily than we do
and think about it less vulgarly. I believe the peasant woman is as
virtuous as the average woman anywhere. And an intimate acquaintance
with thousands of soldiers throughout the winter has given me this
belief. Attractive women are not so rare as to fully explain the
unusually excellent medical reports of the N.R.E.F. And nowhere in the
West has the family tie been stronger nor the family organization so
rigidly maintained.
The war-weariness of these Russian people is beyond words to describe.
They are not in any sense militant in spirit. They do not believe in
war. Passive resistance they will resort to in a thousand ways and with
rare cunning and courageous persistence, but organized warfare is not to
their taste. Who rules Russia against her will or ideals from now on
will have a rocky road to travel, and who looks to her for militant
alliance is doomed to certain disappointment. I have had a Russian
officers' club in charge for two months and can say from personal
knowledge of these men that from colonels down they are utterly sick of
war and distrustful of its consequences. Before I went to Russia I felt
that Tolstoy had perhaps weakened the Russian spirit with his doctrine
of non-resistance. Now I think he only gave expression to what is most
common in the ideals of the Russian mind.
In politics the Russian people are amateurs. They do not know the game.
Not our game. They do not understand the compromises that are essential
to the democratic state. They cannot agree to disagree in amity. They
are inclined to be dogmatic. Like our own youth they are in search of
the absolute in truth and righteousness and frequently think they have
found it. But no higher ideals are to be found in any people than the
political ideals of these Russians, and their interest in politics is a
keen and vital one. I have attempted a number of speeches on political
subjects to Russian soldiers by the aid of an interpreter and have been
gratified both because I was understood and because I was asked
questions that indicated real intelligence in political matters.
I have witnessed a few peasants' meetings. At one the ownership of a
horse was hotly contested. A woman found the horse astray in the woods.
A boy claimed it, but it appeared that he had found it also only a few
days before. It probably had been owned in one of the villages that had
been burned in the fighting. The debate was loud and warm. The peasants
ranged themselves on the two sides and under the force of argument some
of them changed their opinion and so changed sides, arguing with each
other. Everybody argued. There was never an equal division. But the
Russian does not like majority votes. He insists on unanimity. There
came a calm, and an old peasant stood aside and said that neither
claimant had a good title to the horse, as its real owner might appear
and claim it, but suggested that if the boy would pay the woman ten
roubles for finding the horse he should hold it for six months and if by
that time no owner should appear the horse should be given to the
staroster as the property of the village. Everybody slowly went over to
the old peasant and the question was settled. The boy refused to pay
the ten roubles, so the woman paid ten roubles to him and took the
horse.
I do not know that they always do justice in the management of their
local affairs, but I am sure that if injustice is done everybody is
clearly responsible for it, for everybody seems to take a hand in
everything.