THE OPEN LAND
Under the waning moon, before the dawn of a December day, I drove out
of the town of Toula in my tiny sledge--so close to the snow that
the great black horse with his high yoke looked monstrous in the
twilight. It is a typical Russian town, about a hundred miles south of
Moscow, and as nearly as possible in the centre of the country. Two
great roads cross each other there, and pass on to the points of the
compass. Oldish churches, surrounded by a fortified wall, make a kind
of Kremlin. Ancient houses conceal cavernous shops in the thickness
of their own walls. Across a wooden bridge stands the Government
small-arms factory, with workmen’s villages beyond. Strange figures in
filthy rags moved up and down, beggars and shaggy peasants, high-school
boys, and fur-capped girls. It has long been rather a revolutionary
little town, and during the strike, ten days before, nineteen workmen
had been shot upon the street.
In spite of solemn warnings, I had come out from the cities to see
something of the country, having with difficulty induced a ruined
German-Russian to venture with me as interpreter, for the sake of
bread. As usual, the danger was nothing compared to the fear. What
danger there was in the villages came from the police agents and
officials, who hounded on the peasants with the cry that every stranger
was a revolutionist conspiring against the Tsar to rob them of God and
the land. For in those progressive days the police were dreading lest
they should lose their livelihood of flogging and brutality at fifteen
shillings a week.
My road went uphill to a high and bare plain, over which the snow was
driven by the wind in showers so blinding that the horse kept turning
round and appealing to us as reasonable beings to return. Horizon,
road, and every mark were lost in whirling grey. But, after we had
struggled on for two or three hours, the snow ceased to fall, and the
wintry sun appeared low in the sky, making the distant ridges of the
wide country shine with pale crimson or gleam like a far-off sea.
Most of the land was bare and open ground, the snow blotting out the
“stripes” where the peasants grew their crops in summer. But as we went
further, lengths of forest came into view, looking brown at a distance,
though generally made up of young silver birch, their silky white stems
flecked with black. Birch woods supply the fuel of the country; next to
food, the first necessity of the peasant’s life. There was some oak,
but very little fir or pine. The birch in this region is the favourite,
either because it grows best or burns best; and it is almost the only
fuel in Moscow.
The peasants’ wooden sleighs passing to and fro bore loads of sawn
birch, dragged by miserable little ponies, so caked with mire that
their coats looked like a crocodile’s armour. At their side floundered
the peasants in sheepskin jackets, with the wool side turned inwards.
The jacket was gathered with a belt round the waist, and the skirt
stuck out all round, reaching to the knees. Then came the high
top-boots of felt or bast, rarely of leather. Men and women were not
to be distinguished, except that, instead of a cap, the women usually
wore a handkerchief or shawl knotted over head and ears. There was no
special grace about the costume; but even the rich ladies of Russian
cities find it hard to appear graceful when padded round with fur and
wool six or seven inches deep. At the best, they can only appear rich.
Beside the road at one place stood a mouldering wooden inn
(_tractir_), where passers-by could get thawed and have a glass
of tea at three farthings. The owner of the estate, being something
of a philanthropist or a teetotaller for others, had forbidden beer
and spirits, so that the innkeeper was pale with anxiety how to pay
his £4 rent, to say nothing of the taxes. Should he borrow, and go to
ruin that way, or allow himself to be flogged to prove his poverty? I
suggested that times were changing, and flogging might cease, but he
only smiled with the politeness of superior knowledge. “No flogging, no
taxes,” was to him the law of government.
In one corner hung three great icons, or holy pictures of the saints,
glittering with tin and brass--very different in size and expense from
the miniature icon which hangs in every bedroom of the wealthy Russian
hotels, as a kind of apology to God, like our grace at a City dinner.
Otherwise, there was no ornament in the house, except one of those
ill-omened iron mugs, for which the crowd crushed each other to death
on the coronation day of the present unhappy Tsar, nine years before,
when the plain of Khodinsky Polé, on the north-west outskirts of
Moscow, stood thick with suffocated peasants.
I next passed a great smelting works, newly finished, its fine furnaces
and machinery never used, but already deserted and allowed to go
to ruin. I could not discover whose money had been devoted to this
characteristic fraud, or into whose pockets it had passed. Then came a
few small gardens and summer residences built on the Crown land; for
most of the land in that district is part of the Tsar’s vast estates,
amounting to a fortieth part of the whole of European Russia, not
counting the landed property of the Imperial family. But all the
houses were deserted and empty, and one was burnt, and smouldered still.
Driving further on, I came to a large country house, where one of the
ancient families of the Russian nobility was still living in the midst
of its own land. I happened to be bringing them letters from friends,
as the post was not working, and I found a house-party there, beguiling
the winter day with much the same occupations as a house-party in
England--doing embroidery, playing battledore with racquets and a
soft ball, pushing a marble up a kind of bagatelle-board, examining
their guns, and taking the dogs for walks in the woods. At a wandering
luncheon of various courses, they maintained a quiet converse, marked
by the gracious silliness, the “cheerful stoicism,” which is the
justification of the aristocrat’s existence.
It was all a fine piece of self-reserve, for inwardly their mood was
serious and apprehensive. They had just heard that the country-house of
a friend and neighbour had been burnt to the ground by his peasants,
though the family had escaped with their lives. One of the ladies had a
son in the army, and they had just heard of a terrible riot and mutiny
in his garrison town. Another lady’s son had married a rich heiress,
and they had just heard that the three country residences of her
parents had been utterly destroyed by the peasants, and now she was
rich no more. From every side came tales of loss and danger, and no one
could say what the end would be.
For themselves, they were just waiting helplessly to see what would
happen. Polite, charming, highly educated, well dressed, healthy, fond
of sport and country life, full of good will and high intentions,
they were so like our own country squires and aristocracy at their
best--so like the people who used to be held up to us as the school
of manners and the producers of the fine old English stock--that only
the dreariest of Social Democrats could have refused them sympathy.
They were themselves fairly conscious of the absurdities in their own
position, but the only protest or complaint that they made was to
say they were getting a little tired of perpetual parallels between
themselves and the aristocrats of the French Revolution, whose heads
were cut off so rapidly.
In the afternoon my sledge took me further into the unlimited and
desolate country, till at last we came to a village fairly typical of
that district--not a rich part of Russia nor yet so starving poor as
the famine provinces which lay close by it. The village was built in
one long street, with about forty separated cottages on each side.
A few of the cottages had bits of brick in the walls or round the
windows, but wood was almost the only building material, and the
roofs, though sometimes of flat iron plates, painted green, were
generally thatched. In this particular village there was no school
and no church, but from the high ground above it I could see a church
about two miles off, and that, no doubt, was near enough. There were
two shops and an inn, all just like the other cottages. Each house had
a separate wattle shed near it, for fodder, stores, and perhaps to
shelter the beasts in summer. In winter they have to be brought into
the dwelling-house for warmth.
By the invitation of a peasant I went into his cottage. The man was
rather above the ordinary type, being tall and straight. But he had
the thoughtful and quiet look of the average peasant, as well as the
long, dark hair and shaggy appearance. His wife was quite the usual
woman--short, ungainly, and possessing no visible beauty except,
perhaps, patience. On the faces of both was the green look of hunger,
almost invariable in the peasants I have seen. The outside door of the
house opened into the cattle-room, where a sickly cow was dragging out
the winter. There was room for a horse, but the people had been obliged
to sell their horse that autumn to pay the taxes and their debts to the
Koulak or village usurer. From the Koulak, too, I suppose, they would
borrow the money to hire another horse in the summer, as they said they
intended. For no peasant can get through his work without a horse.
A wooden partition separated the cattle from the dwelling-room, the
house being designed exactly like an Irish cabin, except that the
white brick construction of the stove projected on both sides of the
partition, thus warming the cow and the family both. As every one
knows, the peasant’s stove is a large and wonderful edifice, full of
mysterious holes and caverns for cooking and baking, and even for the
dry roasting process which serves the family as a bath. Close beside it
were two broad, wooden shelves on which the inmates slept--the parents
above, the five children underneath. There was no bedding of any kind,
except one worn coverlet or shawl on each shelf.
The children had made their shelf into a day-nursery as well as a bed,
for they were all rolling about on it and biting each other, imagining
a game of wolf, I think, though wolves are not common there. All were
bare-legged, and quite naked but for loose red shirts reaching to their
knees. Of course, they went out sometimes, but there were not enough
clothes to send them all out together at once in winter. The furniture
of the home was a wooden box, which was the seat of honour, a short
bench, a table, and a small wooden loom, on the universal model of
primitive manufacture. Both man and woman could weave, and they were
making yards of a coarse stuff dyed with red madder, exactly the same
as the women make for their petticoats on Achill Island.
Probably the loom brought in an important part of the family’s income,
for the sale of the horse showed that they could not live off the
land alone. Yet the man boasted that his bit of land, on which he
grew potatoes, oats, and rye, was his absolute property, and when I
tried to ask him whether the village community did not redistribute
his land with the rest every twelve years, as I had read in books, he
became very violent and showed no scientific interest at all in the
sociological importance of the Mir. The working of the Mir was the only
thing I thought I did understand when I came to Russia, and it was
disconcerting to find that the first peasant I spoke to had never heard
of such an arrangement. I still do not know what mistake he or I can
have made. He may have been only insisting on the peasant’s touching
faith that the land is the natural possession of the man who cultivates
it, and can never be taken from him, even by the Tsar. Anyhow, he was
terribly afraid that I had come to shake that belief in some way, and I
thought it best to turn the conversation to the cow.
As to the Tsar’s recent promise to remit next year half the annual
payment still due to the Treasury for the original purchase of the
land, this peasant, in common, I believe, with all others, thought
nothing of it. To them the manifesto was so much “dirty paper.” They
knew very well that even if half were remitted, the Crown agents would
come down upon them for arrears. They also knew dimly that since the
liberation of the serfs more than forty years ago, the peasants have
paid the extreme value of the land twice over. So they have ceased to
concern themselves about any manifesto which does not surrender to them
the mass of land which they regard as rightfully theirs.
While I was in the cottage, an old man came up with a canvas bag over
his shoulder, and knocked at the door. Though obviously in the sink of
poverty, he was not a professional beggar, but only one of that large
class of peasants who are driven by age or misfortune to go round the
villages and ask for scraps to keep them alive till better times.
Accordingly he came in as if for a friendly call, laid his bag on the
table with its mouth open, and joined in the conversation. When we were
going out again, the woman slipped some squares of black bread into
the bag as though by stealth, and he took it up and walked off without
further remark on either side. It was the perfection both of appeal and
kindliness.
[Illustration: TOLSTOY’S HOME.]
[Illustration: PEASANTS.]
At parting, I looked again at the peasant and his wife, in their clean
poverty, with the marks of their almost passionate labour upon them
and their five children growing up round their knees, and certainly it
did seem incredible that these were just the people who are marched
off to the village police-court, are tied face downwards to a sloping
bench, have their clothes turned up, and are flogged with whips or
rods by officials and police because they cannot pay the taxes for the
Japanese war, or for the interest on the French loans.
Yet, in the last resort, it is upon violence almost as brutalizing and
indecent that all Empires are founded, and I was all the more ready
to welcome what Tolstoy said to me next day, when he received me--as
generously as he receives every one--in his “Bright Home” (_Jasnaia
Poliana_) as the country-house is called. He told me that, among the
many other plans of work which he could not live to finish, he was then
engaged on a book to be called “The End of an Age.”
“You are young and I am old,” he said, “but as you grow older you will
find, as I have found, that day follows day, and there does not seem
much change in you, till suddenly you hear people speaking of you as an
old man. It is the same with an age in history; day follows day, and
there does not seem to be much change, till suddenly it is found that
the age has become old. It is finished, it is out of date.
“The present movement in Russia is not a riot, it is not even a
revolution, it is the end of an age. And the age that is ending is the
age of Empires--the collection of smaller States under one large State.
There is no true community of heart or thought between Russia, Finland,
Poland, the Caucasus, and all our other States and races. Or what have
Hungary, Bohemia, and Styria, or the Tyrol to do with Austria? No more
than Canada, Australia, India, or Ireland have to do with England.
People are now beginning to see the absurdity of these things, and
in the end people are reasonable. That is why the age of Empires is
passing away.
“They tell me, for instance, that if the Russian Empire ceased to
exist, swarms of Japanese would overrun our country and destroy our
race. But the Japanese also are reasonable people, and if they came and
found how much better off we were without any Empire at all, they would
go home and imitate our example.”
The whole argument, which ran on with a half-ironic simplicity of this
kind, was magnificent, not so much for its daring as for its quiet
confidence in human reason. I remembered how for the last twenty years
all the brazen trumpets of vulgarity had been sounding the note of
Empire over us as the one great and stirring purpose of existence.
And here was this rugged old man calmly telling me, as though it
were something of a platitude, that we had just come to the end of
an age--the age of Empires. There he sat in the familiar grey shirt
without coat or collar, the belt round the waist, and the high leather
top-boots (for he had just tramped round his land in the snow), quietly
following out the exact logic of his principles, no matter where it
might lead him. He was seventy-seven, and in terms of years one was
forced, as he said, to call him old. The spirit had retired more deeply
into the shrunk and wrinkled form. But under the shaggy brows, the
grey-green eyes still looked out with the clearness of profound thought
and fearless simplicity which have made him the greatest rebel in the
world.
As to the present condition of his own country, he believed, as is well
known from his writings, that the return of the land to the peasants
is the only possible cure for Russia’s misery. He told me that he
would accept Henry George’s method of nationalization, or any other
which gave the peasants a true hold on the land they work. He quoted
Kropotkin’s investigations into “intensive culture” to prove that,
with improved methods, there is plenty of land in Russia to maintain
an immensely increased population. As things stood, less than a third
of the cultivated land was held by peasants or village communities,
and less than a quarter of the cultivable land was used at all. The
Tsar should at once restore the land to the peasants. With their long
experience of the communal system, they could then manage very well
for themselves without any State at all, as they had successfully
proved in the Siberian colonies; for communism ran in the Russian
blood, and its ideal had never been lost in the country.
When I suggested that a town question had also arisen now, besides the
claim of peasants to the land, he admitted that town influence was the
greatest danger. “Towns,” he said, “are the places where mankind has
begun to rot, and unhappily the rottenness spreads. The mistake of our
Liberal politicians in the towns is that they are always preaching the
blessings of some English or American constitution. But constitutions
of that kind, having once been realized, have already become things
of the past. They belong to a different age from ours, and an ideal,
whether in statesmanship or art, is never a thing of the past, but
always of the future. For Russia as she exists now, we ought to aim at
something entirely different from your worn-out methods of government.”
So he conversed through the winter morning, eager to speak, and as
eager to hear. He asked much about Central Africa from which I had
lately returned, and much about the new national movement in Ireland,
nor should I have been surprised if he had continued the conversation
in Gaelic, so fresh and vigorous was his interest in the world. Only
when I told him rather carelessly, that the intellectual movement
there was producing a large number of poets, his face fell, and he
turned to other things, merely remarking that poets were very little
good. In passing, he said he had been pleased to find that his fellow
Puritan, Mr. Bernard Shaw, thought very lightly of Shakespeare, in whom
he had never himself discovered any satisfaction, though he had read
him once all through in English, and twice in German.
But it was not his interest in the common affairs of the world that
gave him his true attraction. Apart from all this, there hung over
him that separate and distinguishing grace which our fathers called
sanctity and considered a thing to be worshipped. It was the grace of
a toilsome and abstemious life, unflinchingly devoted to one high aim,
and sacrificing all worldly pleasure and success to an ideal which
could never be reached. I believe the modern name for it is fanaticism.
I say one high aim, for I see no reason to agree with the many critics
who draw a sharp dividing line in his career and in the process of
his mind. All the principles of his later teaching are to be found
illustrated in the two great imaginative works of his earlier manhood,
and if there is any fault to be found with a life so courageous and
inspiring, I should seek it only in a rather inhuman and remorseless
consistency of reason--a logic which, having for instance, condemned
the pleasures of sense, would doom the human race to rapid extinction
because life cannot be maintained and handed on without pleasure. But
such returns to the strict Christianity of earlier centuries ought not
to astonish people who call themselves Christians, especially as there
seems no danger at present that the logic of their teaching will be
followed in human action. And, in any case, I should rather leave it to
others to reveal such limitations as they may find in so beneficient
and gracious a personality.
[Illustration: TOLSTOY IN MIDDLE AGE.]