A RUSSIAN BORDER VILLAGE
Of the three former capitals of Poland the city of Cracow, the last of
Polish territory to lose its independence, is now an Austrian fortress.
One day, shortly after my arrival, I was driving in the suburbs of the
city when my attention was directed to a number of low, grass-covered
mounds scattered about at regular intervals in the level plain outside
the city. To all appearances these mounds were nothing more than slight
elevations of land sinking, in a direction away from the city, almost
imperceptibly into the surrounding landscape. In all probability,
if it had not been for a certain regularity in the positions which
they occupied, I should not have noticed them. I had never seen a
modern fortified city and I was therefore considerably surprised when
I learned that these gentle elevations were fortifications and that
beneath these grass-grown mounds enormous guns were concealed, powerful
enough to keep a vast army at bay. These facts served to remind me
that Cracow was a border city, guarding a frontier which divides, not
merely two European countries, but two civilizations--I might almost
say, two worlds. Cracow is, as a matter of fact, ten miles from the
Russian frontier, and, although the people in Russian Poland are of the
same race or nationality as those who live in the Austrian province of
Galicia, speaking the same language and sharing the same traditions,
the line which divides them marks the limits of free government in
Europe.
Now, there were several things that made this frontier, where eastern
and western Europe meet, peculiarly interesting to me. In the first
place, I knew that thousands of people, most of them Poles and Jews,
who were unwilling or unable to pay the high tax which Russia imposes
upon its emigrants, were every year smuggled across that border in
order to embark at some German or Austrian port for America. I knew
at the same time that Jews and, to a lesser extent, perhaps, Poles,
outside of Russia were making use of this same underground railway
to send back, in return for the emigrants who came out, another kind
of contraband--namely, books and bombs. In fact, I had heard that a
few years ago, when Russian Poland was all aflame with civil war, it
was from Cracow that the Jews, who were the leading spirits in that
movement, directed the revolution.
Naturally all this served to increase my natural curiosity in this
border country. So it was that one cool, clear day in September I
rented a little droske for the day and started, in company with my
companion, Doctor Park, for the Russian border.
We drove leisurely along a splendid military road, between broad
fields, in which peasants were gathering, in the cool autumn sunlight,
the last fruits of the summer's harvest. A country road in Galicia, as
is true in almost any part of Europe, is a good deal more of a highway
than a country road in most parts of America. One meets all sorts of
travellers. We passed, for example, just beyond the limits of the city,
a troop of soldiers, with the raw look of recruits--red-faced country
boys they seemed, for the most, bulging out of their military suits and
trudging along the dusty road with an awkward effort at the military
precision and order of veterans. Now and then we passed a barefoot
peasant woman, tramping briskly to or from the city, with a basket on
her head or a milk can thrown over her shoulder.
Once we stopped to watch a group of women and girls threshing. One
woman was pitching down sheaves of rye from the barn loft, another was
feeding them to the machine, and all were in high glee at the wonderful
way, as it seemed to them, in which this new invention separated the
grain from the chaff. They were so proud of this little machine that,
when we stopped and showed our interest in what they were doing, they
insisted on showing us how it worked, and took pains to explain the
advantages over the old-fashioned flail. There was a man sitting on a
beam outside the barn smoking a pipe, but the women were doing the work.
On this same journey we stopped at a little straggling village and
spent an hour or two visiting the homes of the people. We saw the house
of the richest peasant in the village, who owned and farmed something
like a hundred acres of land, as I remember; and then we visited
the home of the poorest man in the community, who lived in a little
thatch-roofed cottage of two rooms; one of these was just large enough
to hold a cow, but there was no cow there. The other room, although it
was neat and clean, was not much larger than the cow-stall, and in this
room this poor old man and his daughter lived. Incidentally, in the
course of our tramp about the village, Doctor Park managed to pick up
something of the family histories of the people and not a little of the
current gossip in the community, and all this aided me in getting an
insight, such as I had not been able to get elsewhere, into the daily
life and human interests of this little rural community.
At one point along the road we stopped for a few minutes at a wayside
tavern. It was a log structure, with one great, long, low, desolate
room, in one corner of which was a bar at which a sour-faced woman
presided. Two or three men were lounging about on the benches in
different parts of the room, but here again the woman was doing the
work.
Every mile or two it seemed to me we met a wagon piled high with great
bulging bags as large as bed ticks. In each case these wagons were
driven by a little shrewd-faced Jew. These wagons, as I learned, had
come that morning from Russia and the loads they carried were goose
feathers.
A little farther on we came up with a foot passenger who was making
toward the border with great strides. He turned out to be a Jew, a
tall, erect figure, with the customary round, flat hat and the long
black coat which distinguish the Polish Jew. Our driver informed us,
however, that he was a Russian Jew, and pointed out the absence of the
side curls as indicating that fact. Although this man had the outward
appearance, the manner, and the dress of the Jews whom I had seen in
Cracow, there was something in the vigorous and erect carriage that
impressed me to such an extent that I suggested that we stop and talk
with him. As we were already near the border, and he was evidently from
Russia, I suggested that Doctor Park show him our passports and ask him
if they would let us into Russia.
He stopped abruptly as we spoke to him, and turned his black, piercing
eyes upon us. Without saying a word he took the passports, glanced them
through rapidly, tapped them with the back of his hand, and handed them
back to us.
"That is no passport," he said, and then he added, "it should have the
visé of your consul."
Having said this much he turned abruptly, without waiting for further
conversation, and strode on. We soon came up with and passed him,
but he did not look up. A little later we halted at the border. I
looked around to see what had become of our wandering Jew, but he had
disappeared. Perhaps he had stopped at the inn, and perhaps he had his
own way of crossing the border.
I was reminded of this strange figure a few months later when I noticed
in one of the London papers a telegram from Vienna to the effect that
some thirty persons had been arrested at Cracow who were suspected
of being the ringleaders "in what is believed to be a widespread
revolutionary organization of Russian refugees." The report added
that "a whole wagon-load of Mannliches rifles, Browning pistols,
and dynamite grenades, together with a large number of compromising
documents and plans of military works, were seized as a result of
searches by the police in the houses of the arrested men."
I had frequently seen reports like this in the newspapers before this
time, but they had a new significance for me now that I had visited
the border country where this commerce with what has been called
the "Underground" or "Revolutionary" Russia was part of the daily
experience of the people. It all recalled to my mind the stories I
had heard, when I was a boy, from my mother's lips of the American
Underground Railway and the adventures of the runaway slaves in their
efforts to cross the border between the free and slave states. It
reminded me, also, of the wilder and more desperate struggles, of which
we used to hear whispers in slavery time, when the slaves sought to
gain their freedom by means of insurrection. That was a time when,
in the Southern States, no matter how good the relations between the
individual master and his slaves, each race lived in constant fear of
the other. It is in this condition, so far as I can learn, that a great
part of the people in Russia are living to-day, for it is fatally true
that no community can live without fear in which one portion of the
people seeks to govern the other portion through terror.
The Austrian and Russian border at Barany, the village at which we
had now arrived, is not imposing. A wire fence, and a gate such as is
sometimes used to guard a railway crossing, are all that separate one
country from the other. On one side of this gate I noticed a little
sentinel's box, marked in broad stripes, with the Austrian colours,
and at the other end of the gate there was a similar little box marked
in broad stripes, with the Russian colours. On the Austrian side there
was a large building for the use of the customs officials. On the
Russian side there was a similar building with the addition of a large
compound. In this compound there were about twenty Russian soldiers,
standing idly about, with their horses saddled and bridled. The reason
for the presence of the soldiers on the Russian side of the border was
due to the fact that it is the business of the customs officers not
merely to collect the tolls on the commerce that crosses the border at
this point, but to prevent any one entering or leaving the country.
As Russia imposes an almost prohibitive tax on emigration, most of the
Russian emigrants are smuggled across the border.
At the same time it is necessary to closely guard the frontier in order
to prevent, as I have said, the importation of books and bombs, the two
elements in western civilization of which Russia seems to stand most in
fear.
Leaving our droske on the Austrian side of the boundary, Doctor Park
and myself applied at the gate between the two countries. A big,
good-natured Russian official grinned, but shook his head and indicated
that we could not be allowed to cross over. Our driver spoke to him in
Polish, but he did not understand, or pretended he did not. Then we
found a man who could speak Russian as well as German, and through him
we explained that we merely wanted to visit the town and be able to say
that we had at least touched Russian soil. On this the man permitted
us to go up to the customs office and make our request there. At the
customs office we tried to look as harmless as possible, and, with the
aid of the interpreter we had brought with us, I explained what we
wanted.
At the customs office every one was polite, good-humoured, and
apparently quite as much interested in us as we were in them. I was
told, however, that I should have to wait until a certain higher
and more important personage arrived. In the course of half an hour
the more important personage appeared. He looked us over carefully,
listened to the explanations of his subordinates, and then, smiling
good-naturedly, gave us permission to look about the village. With this
gracious permission we started out.
The first thing I noticed was that the smooth, hard road upon which
we had travelled from Cracow to the frontier broke off abruptly on
the Russian side of the border. The road through the village was full
of ruts and mudholes and the mournful and mud-bedraggled teams which
were standing near the gate, waiting to cross the border, showed only
too plainly the difficulties of travel in the country through which
they had passed. Now I had learned in Europe that roads are a pretty
good index of the character of the governments that maintain them,
so that it was not difficult to see at the outset that the Russians
were very poor housekeepers, so to speak, at least as compared with
their Austrian neighbours. This was evidently not due to a lack of men
and officials to do the work. Counting the civil officials and the
soldiers, I suppose there must have been somewhere between twenty and
thirty persons, and perhaps more, stationed at this little border
village, to collect the toll on the petty traffic that crossed at this
point. They were, however, but part of the vast army of officials and
soldiers which the Russian Empire maintains along its western border
from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to keep the watch between the east
and the west; to halt, inspect, and tax, not merely the ordinary
traffic, but the interchange of sentiments and ideas.
I could not help thinking how much more profitable it would be if these
soldiers, clerks, and officials, and the vast army of frontiersmen to
which they belonged, could be employed, for example, in building roads
rather than maintaining fences; in making commerce easier, opening the
way to civilization, rather than shutting it out.
Indeed it was no longer strange that, with all the vast resources
which Russia possesses, the masses of the people have made so little
progress when I considered how large a portion of the population had no
other task than that of holding the people down, hindering rather than
inspiring and directing the efforts of the masses to rise.
I had not gone far on our stroll about the village before I discovered
that the Pole who so kindly volunteered to help us was a man of more
than ordinary intelligence. He had seen something of the world, and
I found his rather gossipy comments on the character of the different
individuals we met, and upon the habits of the people generally in the
village, not only entertaining but instructive. He had, for example, a
very frank contempt for what he called the stupidity of the officials
on both sides of the border, and it was clear he was no lover of the
soldiers and the Government. At one time, as we started down a side
street, he said: "There's a gendarme down there. He is just like one
of those stupid, faithful watch-dogs that bristle up and bark at every
person that passes. You will see presently. He will come puffing up the
street to halt you and turn you back."
"What shall we do when we meet him?" I asked.
"Oh, there's nothing to do but go back if he says so, but you will,
perhaps, be interested to observe the way he behaves."
Presently we noticed a soldier clambering hastily over an adjoining
fence, and in a few minutes he had come up with us, his face all
screwed up in an expression of alarmed surprise.
"This is the gendarme I was telling you about," said our guide quietly,
and continued speaking about the man just as if he were not present.
As we were not able to talk with this soldier ourselves, and as he did
not look very promising in any case, we strolled leisurely back while
our guide entered into a long explanation of who and what we were. I
imagine that he must have put a good deal of varnish on his story, for
I noticed that, as the soldier glanced at us from time to time, his
eyes began getting bigger and bigger, and his mouth opened wider and
wider, until he stared at us in a stupid, awestruck way. Finally the
interpreter announced that the gendarme had come to the conclusion that
we might go down the road as far as we wanted to, only he would be
obliged to accompany us to see that we did not break the peace in any
way.
Under the direction of our self-appointed guide we visited a dusty,
musty little bar-room, which seemed to be the centre of such life as
existed in the village. We found a few young country boys lolling about
on benches, and the usual shrewish, sharp-faced, overworked woman, who
grumblingly left her housework to inquire what we wanted.
The contents of the bar itself consisted of rows of little bottles of
different coloured liquors, interspersed with packages of cigarettes,
all of them made and sold under the supervision of the Government.
I purchased one of these little bottles of vodka, as it is called,
because I wanted to see what it was the Government gave the peasants
to drink. It was a white, colourless liquid, which looked like raw
alcohol and was, in fact, as I afterward learned, largely, if not
wholly, what the chemists call "methylated spirits," or wood alcohol.
We visited one of the little peasant houses in the neighbourhood of
the customs office. It was a little, low log hut with a duck pond in
front of the doorway and a cow-pen at right angles to the house. There
were two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen. In the kitchen, which had an
earthen floor, three or four or five members of the family were sitting
on stools, gathered about a large bowl, into which each was dipping his
or her spoon. The bedroom was a neat little room, containing a high
bed, a highly decorated chest of drawers, and was filled with curious
bits of the rustic art, including among other things several religious
pictures and images.
Although everything in this house was very simple and primitive,
there was about it an air of self-respecting thrift and neatness that
showed that the family which lived here was relatively prosperous and
well-to-do.
Quite as interesting to me as the houses we visited were the stories
that our guide told us about the people that lived in them. I recall
among others the story of the young widow who served in the customs
office as a clerk and lived in a single room in one corner of the
peasant's cottage to which I have just referred. She was a woman,
he told me, of the higher classes, as her enterprising manner and
intelligent face seemed to indicate; one of the lesser nobility, who
had married a Russian official condemned for some fault or other to
serve at this obscure post. He had died here, leaving a child with the
rickets, and no means.
Another time our guide pointed out to us a more imposing building than
the others we had seen, though it was built in the same rustic style
as the smaller peasants' cottages around it. This house, it seems,
had at one time belonged to one of the nobility, but it was now owned
by a peasant. This peasant, as I understood, had at one time been a
serf and served as a hostler in a wealthy family. From this family
he had inherited, as a reward for his long and faithful service, a
considerable sum of money, with which he had purchased this place and
set himself up, in a small way, as a landlord.
I gained, I think, a more intimate view of the peasant life in Poland
than I did in any other part of Europe that I visited. For that reason,
and because I hoped also that these seeming trivial matters would,
perhaps, prove as interesting and suggestive to others as they were to
me, I have set down in some detail in this and the preceding chapters
the impressions which I gathered there.
In the little village of Barany, in Russian Poland, I had reached the
point farthest removed, if not in distance at least in its institutions
and civilization, from America; but, as I stood on a little elevation
of land at the edge of the village and looked across the rolling
landscape, I felt that I was merely at the entrance of a world in
which, under many outward changes and differences of circumstance,
there was much the same life that I had known and lived among the Negro
farmers in Alabama. I believed, also, that I would find in that life of
the Russian peasants much that would be instructive and helpful to the
masses of my own people.
I touched, before I completed my European experiences, not only the
Austrian, but the Russian and German Polish provinces, but I should
have liked to have gone farther, to Warsaw and Posen, and looked deeper
into the life and learned more of the remarkable struggle which the
Polish people, especially in these two latter provinces, are making
to preserve the Polish nationality and improve the conditions of the
Polish people.
In this connection, and in concluding what I have to say about my
observations in Poland, I want to note one singular, and it seems
to me suggestive, fact: Of the three sections of the Polish race,
German, Russian, and Austrian, there are two in which, according to
the information I was able to obtain, the people are oppressed, and
one in which they seem to be, if anything, the oppressors. In Russian
Poland and in German Poland the Polish are making a desperate struggle
to maintain their national existence, but in these two countries the
Poles are prosperous. Russian Poland has become in recent years one
of the largest manufacturing centres in Europe, and the masses of the
Polish people have become prosperous citizens and labourers. In German
Poland the Polish peasants have, within the past forty years, become
a thrifty farming class. The large estates which were formerly in the
hands of the Polish nobility have been, to a very large extent, divided
up and sold among a rapidly rising class of small landowners. In other
words, what was originally a political movement in these two countries
to revive and reëstablish the kingdom of Poland has become a determined
effort to lift the level of existence among the masses of the Polish
people.
In Austrian Poland, on the contrary, where the Austrian Government, in
order, perhaps, to hold the political aspirations of the Ruthenians in
check, has given them a free hand in the government of the province,
they have vastly greater freedom and they have made less progress.
I am stating this fact baldly, as it was given to me, and without
any attempt at an explanation. Many different factors have no doubt
combined to produce this seeming paradox. I will merely add this
further observation: Where the Poles are advancing, progress has begun
at the bottom, among the peasants; where they have remained stationary
the Polish nobility still rules and the masses of the people have not
yet been forced to any great extent into the struggle for national
existence. The nobles are content with opportunity to play at politics,
in something like the old traditional way, and have not learned the
necessity of developing the resources that exist in the masses of
the people. On the other hand, oppression has not yet aroused the
peasants as it has, particularly in Germany, to a united effort to help
themselves.
I mention this fact not merely because it is interesting, but because
I am convinced that any one who studies the movements and progress of
the Negroes in America will find much that is interesting by way of
comparison in the present situation of the Polish people and that
of the American Negroes. My own observation has convinced me, for
example, that in those states where the leaders of the Negro have been
encouraged to turn their attention to politics the masses of the people
have not made the same progress that they have in those states where
the leaders, because of racial prejudice or for other reasons, have
been compelled to seek their own salvation in educating and building
up, in moral and material directions, the more lowly members of their
own people.
I do not wish to make comparisons, but I think I can safely say, by
way of illustration, that in no other part of the United States have
the masses of the Negroes been more completely deprived of political
privileges than in the state of Mississippi, and yet there is, at the
same time, scarcely any part of the country in which the masses of the
people have built more schools and churches, or where they have gained
a more solid foothold on the soil and in the industries of the state.
In calling attention to this fact I do not intend to offer an excuse
for depriving any members of my race of any of the privileges to
which the law entitles them. I merely wish to emphasize the fact
that there is hope for them in other and more fundamental directions
than ordinary party politics. More especially I wish to emphasize
one fact--namely, that for the Negroes, as for other peoples who are
struggling to get on their feet, success comes to those who learn to
take advantage of their disadvantages and make their difficulties their
opportunities. This is what the Poles in Germany, to a greater extent
than any of the other oppressed nationalities in Europe, seem to have
done.