FATHER GAPON AGAIN
The morning of December 4th was damp and misty, but from an early hour
crowds of working people were standing in the slushy snow outside
the queer old arrangement of two or three huge sheds which is known
as “Salt Town.” It is across the Fontanka canal from the School of
Engineers, not very far from the two churches that commemorate the
murder of two Tsars. I suppose it has been used at some time or other
as a depôt for a Government salt monopoly, and so received its name. In
ordinary peaceful years, it now serves as a suitable place for military
lectures and engineering experiments such as trained the Russian
officers for their overwhelming defeats. But in the stir of revolution,
popular meetings of every kind assembled there, because its gaunt white
walls and iron roofs would hold such large crowds of work-people under
cover, and it supplied accommodation for the coats and goloshes of the
intellectual.
I had already attended an immense all-night meeting there to denounce
the Government for encouraging the priests and hooligans in their
slaughter of the Jews. That very morning of December 4th the school
teachers were assembled in one of the halls to discuss whether they
too should strike and claim the right of union. But the main interest
of the day was centred in the other large hall, where the followers
of Father Gapon--the men who had appealed in procession to the Tsar
himself on the 22nd of January before--were now gathering together
for the first time since that childlike appeal had been answered by
massacre.
The meeting was called for ten o’clock in the morning, either to elude
the police or to save the expense of light. A Russian meeting is, I
think, very seldom less than an hour late, because the Russians are
by nature a courteous people, and it is obviously impolite to begin
before every one who wishes to come has had a chance of being in time.
But long before eleven there was not standing room for another soul,
and fifteen hundred men and women were waiting with that inexhaustible
Russian patience. Their pallid faces, many of them grim with hunger,
looked spectral under the dim twilight of a Russian morning, as I
watched them turned upwards in silence to the platform.
Two whispered rumours were going round. One that the Social Democrats
intended to break up the meeting; the other, that Father Gapon was not
coming after all, and both rumours were almost unique among the rumours
I have heard in wars and revolutions, for both were true.
At last the meeting was called upon to declare whom it would have
for chairman, and one great shout went up for “Barashoff.” I do not
know who Barashoff was, or how he had gained the confidence of the
work-people, but his election was at once taken to prove that the
Social Democrats present were comparatively few. He came forward--a
middle-aged, reddish-bearded man, with no apparent gift of voice or
influence--and I do not know what has become of him since, or what
prison received him. But there he stood beside me on the platform and
announced to the meeting that first they would sing the Hymn of the
Fallen, in honour to the victims of that Bloody Sunday when last they
had met together.
The whole audience rose, and stood in absolute silence till some one
gave out the first note. The hymn consists of only one line, three
times repeated, and its only words are, “To their eternal memory.” Yet
all the church services I have heard were frivolous compared to it.
For it celebrated the martyrdom of men and women whom the worshippers
had known, and whose danger they had shared. I do not know what it is
that gives so profound a solemnity to Russian popular music, or how
it comes that a Russian crowd produces such a deep volume of musical
sound. Perhaps there is an unconscious influence from the old Church
music, always so solemn and grave, so free from sentiment and tune.
More likely the nature of both arises from the monotonous unhappiness
of Russian life, the melancholy of long oppression, and the nearness of
death from day to day; at all events, it must have a different origin
from the comfortable and profane spirit that produces “A little bit off
the top” or “The old bull and bush.”
When the hymn had been sung, we were definitely told that Father Gapon
would not be present, but had sent a letter, which was read. It called
upon the work-people to take courage again, and to set about rebuilding
the unions and clubs which had been destroyed by the massacre. While
the letter was being read, great excitement arose among the audience
because police spies had been discovered among the teachers’ conference
in the neighbouring hall. Spies, disguised as schoolmasters, disguised
as women! Teachers are not a militant race; should not the hard-handed
work-people flow over into the conference and protect the innocent
instructors of the coming State? It is spies that drive men crazed with
hatred, and even the reptile governments that use them shoot them.
That very morning the post and telegraph clerks had proclaimed that
they would never end their strike until the enormous system of spying
into letters, newspapers, and telegrams had been abolished. Of all
the methods by which a cowardly government can harass the people who
feed it, none is more despicable than the entanglement of espionage
with which it surrounds itself. But as to abolition, what would then
become of all those swarms of censors, blackers-out, interpreters,
letter-openers, secret police, cabdrivers, porters, and provocative
agents who seek their meat from Government? Will not all these men
struggle for existence like others, being human creatures, though no
one would suppose so? Or who will pay the rent of all those houses,
like that house beside the Moika Canal where muffled figures hang
carelessly about the doors, and sledges stop for no apparent reason,
and the men and women who come out have acquired the look of vultures?
But for the moment the Government which feeds the vultures was afraid
for its own skin. The police and spies slunk out of the conference
without compulsion, and in the workmen’s meeting the five-minutes’
speeches began. They went with that extraordinary dash and fire which
appear to be the common heritage of nearly all Russian speakers. How
they have managed to inherit such a power is one of the mysteries of
this mysterious revolution. In a land where public speaking has usually
been punished by exile or death, we find a whole race of orators.
Carlyle used to speak of a “great dumb Russia” with admiration, and
foretell a strange time when Russia found her voice. That autumn
she had found her voice, and certainly the time was strange. One
workman after another got up and said his brief say, without pause
or hesitation, inspired by that passion of conviction which only
unendurable wrong can give. A woman also spoke, with similar brevity
and power.
The demands made in those little speeches of condensed flame and
rushing words were for rights which English workmen have long ago won
for themselves. The object of the meeting was to re-establish the
eleven unions of workmen which Father Gapon had instituted before the
massacre of last January. Such unions were hardly to be distinguished
from the trade unions of our country, and there was nothing in the
least Utopian or savage about the Gapon programme. His followers
refused even to call themselves a party. They had no newspaper as their
organ. The _Word_ (_Slovo_), which had once most befriended
them, had lately gone over completely to the reaction. One of the most
applauded speakers at that morning’s meeting denounced the leaders who
urged the workmen to organize themselves into armed bands, whereas
knowledge, he said, must come before arms, and not battalions but
unions must be organized. Only one other purpose remained before the
meeting--to demand complete amnesty for Father Gapon and all political
offenders, especially for those who had taken on themselves the
hateful task of political assassination in the time of darkness before
freedom appeared.
From time to time a Social Democrat raised his arm and burst into a
violent and threatening speech against the meeting. Once there was a
deliberate attempt to empty the hall by a free fight, and the timid
began edging out at the doors, chiefly under the belief that the
yelling democrat who was denouncing the Gaponists was secretly an agent
of the police. It may have been so, but I think he was only a Social
Democrat insisting upon the creed by which alone the Marxists would
drive the world to salvation. This Catholic kind of Social Democrat is
often distinguished by a certain intolerance and pedantry which give
a power and consistency such as religious Catholicism has, but form a
barrier against wider sympathies and human freedom. “No salvation but
by us” is their motto, and when an erring meeting cries them down, they
feel defrauded of their right to redeem mankind.
On the other hand, a speaker who brought greetings from the Belgian
Anarchists was politely listened to, though in the towns Russia has no
Anarchist party now. Tolstoy bears an honoured name such as Rousseau
bore in France, and his portrait is welcome in shop-windows; but among
revolutionists his Anarchism is too gentle, and his Christianism too
dull. Outside his own circle of disciples among the peasants, the flame
of his spirit may kindle many, but his actual followers are few. When
every one is remodelling the State with impassioned zeal, it seems
hardly opportune to raise the question whether it is not better to have
no State at all.
The speeches were over by about one, and then the meeting split up into
groups to reorganize the unions. By an arrangement among one or two
friends, we left the Salt Town separately, and gradually reassembled in
a room above a little restaurant, some distance away. There we found
Father Gapon himself hiding from the police, with a bottle of beer
before him, and a few supporters at his side, rather obviously his
inferiors. At the time he was not afraid of political arrest. Probably
Durnovo himself would hardly have dared to strike at him then. But the
danger was that he might be handed over to the Church as a renegade
priest and imprisoned till death in some monastery for the good of his
soul.
Outwardly there was little of the priest left about him then, unless
it was his evident want of the commonplace kinds of knowledge that
most people have. It was said that his stay in England that summer
had changed him so much that his own friends could not recognize him,
and he had been present at the meeting unobserved. But there was not
really much difference, except that he had cut his hair and beard like
ordinary men, and put on modern clothes instead of the survival of
classical raiment which most European priests prefer. The transparent
eyes of lightish brown, generally looking down or cast a little
sideways--these were the same. So were the nose and thin face, the
thin and delicately arched eyebrows, the thin hands and slight figure,
the blood just showing under the pale brown skin--a rare thing in a
Russian; and, indeed, both by name and race I believe he comes of a
Dnieper Cossack or, some say, a Greek stock. If the Russian police
cannot see these things, Scotland Yard could beat them. The outward
look seemed to reveal at once a delicate and sensitive nature rather
than strength of resolution or fire of purpose--one of those natures in
which we easily detect the child still lying hid beneath the maturity
of manhood. Something of a child’s craft, perhaps, lay there too, and
of a woman’s methods, unwilling to be hated or despised even by the
enemy. Equally childlike was that evident love of pleasure which made
him rejoice in Paris and London as in glorious bazaars where the toys
were all real things, and the dolls were living women, all made to
squeak and shut their eyes.
Yet this was the man who struck the first blow at the heart of tyranny
and made the old monster sprawl. At first, perhaps, his heart was
simpler in its ignorance, and pleasure, being unknown, did not move
him. But when theorists condemned him for opportunism, as they did
daily, I remembered that he, at all events, knew the work-people in
their daily life and not as an abstract proletariat, and that he, at
all events, had accomplished something. It is much to be regretted,
but it sometimes happens that the opportunist is the only man who does
accomplish something.
The conversation naturally ran upon the meeting, and upon a danger to
the movement that would very likely arise from the unbending attitude
of the Social Democrats, who with impracticable pride hated a Social
Revolutionary more than a Grand Duke, just as true Catholics enjoyed
burning a Protestant more than a pagan. To Father Gapon the great
danger before the country appeared to be the immense conflict between
the Social Democrats, representing the town work-people, and the host
of peasants, numbering over four-fifths of Russia’s population. But as
he spoke, warning voices were heard, a danger appeared before us all,
and suddenly the picturesque little figure had vanished, and the rest
of us were drinking beer over a sleepy game of cards, till with a yawn
we rose, and one by one made our way down the busy street.
That afternoon Father Gapon escaped into Finland, and France swallowed
him for a time.