LIBERTY IN PRISON
In St. Petersburg the successors of the original Strike Committee had
declared the general strike at an end, on January 1st. The thing had
not been a success. Either because the leaders were in prison, or that
the work-people were harassed by the frequent repetition of strikes
when funds were low, only about 20,000 remained away from work, and
most of these were locked-out by the employers. Outwardly, the city
continued quiet, in spite of the deep indignation excited by the arrest
of all the popular leaders and editors, and afterwards by the murder of
a musical student named Davidoff, who was shot by Okounoff, an officer
of the Guards, for keeping one foot on a chair while the National
Anthem was being played in a restaurant on the Russian New Year’s Eve
(January 13th).
Then came the first anniversary of Vladimir’s Day or Bloody Sunday
(January 22nd). The city was filled with troops. All the previous
night cavalry patrols went up and down the streets, and on going into
the large courtyards, round which most of the dwelling-houses are
arranged, I found many of them full of soldiers, sitting round fires
with piled arms. Guns were concealed at convenient points, and all
preparations laid for repeating the massacre of the previous year. But
the Strike Committee had issued an appeal calling upon the workmen to
observe the day only by quitting the factories, staying at home, and
drawing down the blinds;[3] and though, in answer to this, the masters
placarded a notice threatening with dismissal any one who remained
away from work, the Strike Committee still had power enough to ordain
a passive resistance.
All the morning of the day--it was a Monday--I was down the
Schlüsselburg Road, where a disturbance was most likely to occur; but,
on the surface, everything was still. The steam-trams carried soldiers
with fixed bayonets as a guard, but otherwise the troops were kept
rather carefully out of sight. Wherever the police saw blinds down, or
other signs of mourning, even in the main streets of the city, they
entered with their revolvers, and sometimes a little knot of spectators
gathered, but there was no appearance of organized resistance or
demonstration at all. The sun shone, but it was intensely cold. Upon
the Neva, a few people were crossing with loaded sledges, a few on
foot were following the fir branches that marked the paths. Women were
washing clothes by letting them down through square holes they had cut
in the ice, and then beating them with wooden slats. Men were sinking
bag-nets through the ice for fish. Otherwise there was hardly a sign
of life. Nearly all the mills were closed, and those that pretended
to continue work were held by a strong military guard, with sentries
before the gates. No throngs of excited work-people now moved along the
footways or stood at street corners. In one or two of the churches, a
memorial service was being held for the dead, but for the most part
the priests refused to open their churches for the purpose, and the
work-people observed a nobler celebration by remaining at home in their
darkened rooms.
While visiting a great naval ironworks, closed, like most Government
things, for want of cash, I heard from one of the chief engineers an
enlightening instance of the Russian Government’s methods in conducting
foreign warfare. For the Japanese War, the works had turned out
many large guns, fitted with telescopic sights. When the engineers
offered to teach the officers the use of these sights, their offer
was scornfully refused, and the Government allowed the guns to be
dispatched to the war without a man who understood them. So complete
was the ignorance, that the cleaners covered the sights, glasses and
all, with vaseline, and, from first to last, no advantage was taken of
the invention. Yet these are the people who talked of the Japanese as
“yellow monkeys,” sure to scuttle into the sea at the first sound of a
Russian gun. And, what is worse, these are the people who have dictated
England’s foreign policy for over half a century. Even the Social
Democrats, who make no pretence to military knowledge or ambition,
could hardly defend their country’s interests worse.
During the late afternoon, and far into the night, I was driving
through the workmen’s quarters upon the Petersburg Island and other
districts north of the main river. All the streets were hushed and
empty. Where, as a rule, the pavements are crowded with men and women
going home or shopping for next day, a stillness like death reigned
now. Even when the hands from some working factory came out between
the lines of pickets watching the gates, they hurried fast home,
and in a few minutes all was silent again. Perhaps the Tsar and his
minister congratulated each other that order was restored, and the
corpse of freedom lay quiet at last. They did not consider that the
very silence was an evidence of the revolution’s continued power--a
proof that the committee which had defied them could still count on the
working-people’s loyalty to its desire.
In the first and, I believe, the only number of one of the many satiric
papers which had lately been suppressed in St. Petersburg, a cartoon
represented the Government as a hideous vampire gloating over the body
of a young girl in Russian costume. “I think she’s quiet at last,”
says the monster with satisfaction, but still a little dubiously. That
picture exactly expressed the situation at the time of my return to St.
Petersburg. Was the sucked and tortured body of freedom really quiet at
last? The vampire was anxious and dubious. But it certainly looked as
though she were dead; at all events, she lay very still.
[Illustration:
_Art Reproduction Co._
“I THINK SHE’S QUIET AT LAST!”
From the _Vampire_.]
All my former friends were in prison now. One after another I called
upon those who had welcomed me so joyfully before, when the world was
bright with hope; and one house-porter after another told me they
had gone away for a few days, and it would be useless to leave any
message. We soon learn the meaning of that formula in Russia. It means
that the police have come, probably in the middle of the night, have
routed up the man or woman, seized all papers, money, and anything else
useful, and driven their victim away in the darkness to some “House of
Inquiry” on suspicion of holding the same kind of political views as
the majority of English people. In the House of Inquiry the suspect
is generally kept from four to six months, while his spirit is being
broken down and evidence raked together against him. He may then be
brought up for trial before a judge and sentenced to two years’, five
years’, or ten years’ imprisonment or exile, according to the state of
the judge’s political opinions or digestion. He may also be condemned
by “administrative order,” without coming before a tribunal at all.
I believe no “political” has been tried in open court before a jury
since Vera Sassoulitch was acquitted for the attempted assassination
of the elder Trepoff in 1878. No Russian jury can ever be trusted to
condemn. But the Russian suspect has two advantages still--he may be
thrown out of prison as unexpectedly as he was thrown in, and with
as little reason given. He may also call upon any one he pleases,
not necessarily a barrister, to take up his defence, if he is brought
before a tribunal. He may thus obtain the satisfaction of having his
case defended on the broad lines of human reason and obvious justice,
instead of listening to some professional pleader, stultified by legal
training, while he struggles to elude condemnation on a verbal error or
by some uninspiring precedent in commercial fraud. It is very seldom,
however, that the most convincing defence makes the least difference to
the sentence, for that has been decided beforehand.
A day or two after my return to St. Petersburg, I was shown a letter
from a friend who had been locked up in a House of Inquiry for speaking
at Liberal meetings and for feeding the children of work-people
during the second general strike. He had sometimes written, also, for
a Progressive newspaper, and it must be remembered that the Tsar’s
Manifesto of October 30th had granted freedom of the press as well as
freedom of public meeting. Yet the suspicion of these three crimes
was sufficient to show that he must be put out of the way like a mad
dog. The letter was written on three sides, and each side marked by
a broad yellow cross drawn diagonally from corner to corner as a
proof that the prison authorities had read it. Yellow seems to be the
favourite official colour in Russia, as I noticed before in the case
of the “yellow ticket” or passport which binds the prostitutes almost
hopelessly to their way of life; and the yellow cross, signifying the
gaoler’s approval of the contents, shows that the prisoner did not in
any way exaggerate his condition. The letter was written simply for
the information of another friend who had hitherto escaped the common
martyrdom which rewards all lovers of freedom in Russia. I translate a
part of it:--
“My cell is five paces long by two wide. It has a window, the
bottom of which is just above the level of my eyes, so that I
can’t look out. There is a bed, a chair, and a table, all of
iron and fastened with clamps to the wall. In the daytime the
cell is fairly light, and the electricity is turned on from
eight to nine in the evening.
“At six I get up. At half-past six a hand is thrust through ‘the
eye’ (spy-hole) in the door with some black bread. At seven a
different hand pours boiling water into my jug in the same way.
I have to buy my own tea. At ten I am led through the corridor
into a little court, where I am allowed to walk round and round
for twenty-five minutes with other ‘politicals.’ But if we
speak or look at each other or say ‘good-morning,’ the walk is
stopped--and it is my only chance of getting a breath of air.
At eleven a bell rings, and the ‘eye’ is opened for letters or
any orders for purchases that I want to send. But I am allowed
to order things only four times a week, and, of course, only as
long as my money lasts. At the same time a hand pours in boiling
water again for tea. From half-past eleven till twelve is
dinner-time, and I get a biggish basin of watery barley soup or
pea soup, or else a thin fluid with scraps of meat and cabbage
floating in it.
“There is rather a good prison library, especially strong in
political economy. But it is very hard to get the books I want,
and the pages are defaced by the gaolers, who always think the
dots and hyphens are signals from the prisoners to each other.
In the afternoon, especially when it gets dark, I lie on my bed,
or walk up and down the cell, till at eight o’clock, as I said,
the electric light is turned on for an hour. About six I get the
boiling water and soup again. Sometimes letters reach me, but
they are always kept till they are old. Sometimes I am allowed
a visit of three minutes’ conversation through the ‘eye’ in the
door. Of course, the gaoler is always within hearing.”
The treatment is not worse, it is perhaps rather better than the
peculiarly brutalizing treatment of prisoners in England. There is
something distinctly paternal in the provision of a library especially
strong in political economy. But it must be remembered that this friend
of mine had never been accused, had never been tried, and was only
suspected of a crime which all the Liberals of England, from the Prime
Minister downwards, commit every waking hour of their lives amid the
applause of our nation; unless, indeed, it be urged against him that
he fed the children of strikers--an offence from which our official
Liberals are often exempt.
The particular prison in which this man was confined, was, as I said, a
House of Inquiry, but the number of arrests had been so enormous since
the Moscow rising that the suspects were now being thrust into the
ordinary prisons straight away, or into any hole where they could be
kept tied up. Just across the breadth of river from the Winter Palace
of the Tsars, and the dilettante picture-gallery of the Hermitage,
glitters the long-drawn brazen spire which marks the old fortress of
St. Peter and St. Paul, the citadel and grave of Peter the Great.
Encased in monotonous marble slabs, and surrounded by hideous emblems
of death and glory, there lie the bodies of all those melancholy
tyrants from Peter downwards. Perhaps there are some people still left
among the royal family who sincerely reckon those dull tombs among
Russia’s treasures; but close beside the church along the Neva, so low
that some of the cells are beneath the river level, run the dungeons
which form the true Martyrs’ Memorial of the country--the places that
will some day be honoured like the graves of the saints, for they are
consecrated by the blood and suffering of hundreds of men and women
who fought for freedom, though they seemed to fight in vain. This was
the prison where again the foremost champions of freedom were now
cooped up. Khroustoloff was there, the man of genius who organized the
first general strike and was the chairman of the Workmen’s Council
when I used to attend their sittings two months before. Not long after
my return, the rumour went that he had been shot in the prison yard.
Nothing was known for certain, but the thing was only too likely, for
a tyranny does not spare its finest enemies, and Khroustoloff will be
known to all Russian history as the man who forced the Government to
defend itself by that lying Manifesto with which it betrayed the people
as with a kiss.
Just outside the fortress the Tsar is building a palace for his former
mistress--a Polish dancing girl, said to have been attractive without
beauty--and less than a mile further up the river on the same bank,
stands the large modern prison called the Cross (Kresty), whether from
its shape or as an emblem of salvation, is uncertain. It is a dreary,
red-brick building of the ordinary type, like Wormwood Scrubbs, and the
officials hang their windows with caged birds as ornaments in keeping
with the architecture. That prison also was crammed with “politicals.”
In fact, it was the same story in all the prisons of Russia--the same
thing as I had seen in Moscow, Kieff, and Odessa. Somehow room had to
be found in the gaols for 20,000 Liberals--that was the lowest estimate
I heard at the time, and a few weeks afterwards the moderate estimate
rose to 70,000, and a high estimate of 100,000 was commonly accepted.
We cannot wonder that a bankrupt Government felt only too delighted
when it could kill off its prisoners by batches of thirty-five together
as in Moscow, or of forty-five together as happened at Fellin in
Esthonia just after Vladimir’s Day, when that number of journalists and
men of letters were collected there and shot in bloody comradeship.
The dead are so cheap in their subterranean cells.
English people are constantly marvelling, with some superiority in
their tone, why it is that the Russian revolution has brought to
light no man or commanding genius--“no Cromwell,” that is their usual
phrase--to direct its energies to victory. Let them search the dungeons
and the graves. Perhaps they may find a Cromwell there.
Till quite lately the very noblest of the “politicals” would naturally
have been sent to the Schlüsselburg--the old fortress-prison standing
on an island where the Ladoga Lake pours out the great stream of
the Neva some forty miles above the city. But three days before the
anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a ukase was issued converting that
ancient dungeon into a mint, and removing the few prisoners who still
remained. I believe there were only five of them--old men and, perhaps,
women who had tried to do something for freedom once, and in their
living graves had already become myths of the dreadful past. About
their identification and their removal to other dungeons there was much
mystery, and the rumour ran that two of them had strangely disappeared,
as well as others whose fading names and records were recalled by
memories growing obscure.
To such mysteries another mystery now succeeded; for every one,
except the few who clung to the orthodox photographic faith about the
inexhaustible ingots of the Russian treasury, was marvelling why the
terrible fortress had been converted into a mint, of all things, and
whence the bullion was to come for coinage there. I am inclined to
think that the Government was misled, like most people, by treacherous
parallels from history, and, knowing the Schlüsselburg’s evil name, had
feared a second Fall of the Bastille. It was a needless anxiety. The
Schlüsselburg is too far away for popular frenzy; but the Peter-Paul
fortress is close at hand and its abominations grow.
In any case, the conversion of a blood-stained fortress into an empty
coin chest made no difference to the situation. The reaction went
trampling along its course, and under it the country lay paralyzed.
During the four weeks after the collapse of the Moscow rising (January
7th to February 7th), 78 newspapers were suspended, 58 editors
imprisoned, 2,000 post and telegraph assistants dismissed, over 20
workmen’s restaurants closed in St. Petersburg to prevent relief to the
unemployed, a state of siege was declared in 62 towns, a minor state of
siege in 34 towns, 17 temporary prisons were opened, 1,716 “politicals”
were imprisoned in St. Petersburg alone, and 1,400 “politicals” were
summarily executed under martial law, not including the large and
uncertain numbers that were put to death in Moscow after law and order
had been re-established.[4]
Such was the terrified blood-thirstiness of that unhappy little body of
men called the Committee of Ministers, who went down to Tsarskoe Selo
by a guarded train along a guarded line nearly every day to discuss
how best they could stifle down the hopes of liberty, and retain for
themselves and their narrow circle of friends or patrons the cash, the
medals, the jobbery, the social distinction, the female affection, and
all the many other delights of power. They did not number more than
eight or ten poor mortals, not removed by many years from the abyss
of death, and, from all I hear, only two or three of them had been
born more brutal or scoundrelly of nature than ordinary rulers are.
One would have liked to listen to their conversation in those trains,
as, with unctuous regret for the stern necessity laid upon them, they
decided how many more should die. Some, like distracted Witte, whom
we have heard blubbering over the wickedness of the dear children he
was compelled to butcher; or like Count Dmitri Tolstoy, the Minister
of Education, formerly President of the Academy of Artists; or like
Shipoff, Minister of Finance to the penniless State, who only a year
before had voted for universal suffrage; or like Nemeschaeff, Minister
of Communications, who had been a chef to a railway, almost as good
as a workman, and also had voted for universal suffrage; or like
Birileff, Minister of Marine, who among Russian officers passed for a
type of incredible integrity because he had abstained from swindling
his country when he had the power; or like Rediger, the incapable
but comparatively honest Minister of War--all these had once enjoyed
a pleasing reputation for Liberalism, as had Prince Obolensky, the
new Procurator of the Holy Synod, and successor to Pobiedonostseff
as keeper of Russia’s orthodoxy. At one time probably nearly all of
them had received the compliment of being thought a little dangerous
by their relations, and now, under the ancient curse of tyrants, they
were consumed by the knowledge of the virtue they had left behind.
But they could not turn back--they had entered upon a road with iron
walls. For guide to the entrance of that road they had deliberately
chosen Durnovo, the new Privy Councillor, lately made permanent in his
Ministry of Interior. And beside Durnovo stood his uneducated relation
Akinoff, new-appointed Minister of Justice.
Thus was the Committee of Ministers helplessly committed to preserve
in wealth and power that handful of useless human beings who may be
called the Tsardom or the Government or the ruling classes--the same
kind of men who for generations past have brought all that long tale
of poverty, ignorance, and bloodshed upon the Russian people. Nothing
could save them from the fatality of their own choice. They were forced
to go on with it now, driven day by day a few steps further along
the inevitable road. So day by day they gave their orders to General
Diedulin, the new Chief of Police and Durnovo’s assistant at the
Interior, and day by day the noblest and most thoughtful men and women
of Russia were shot, imprisoned, or dragged away to the oblivion of
Siberia.
I know that in England one of the pleasant myths circulated by the
Tsar’s hirelings, or sanctimonious patrons, is that Siberian exile has
been abolished. It is as untrue as the similar myth about flogging
the peasants for taxes. In St. Petersburg on January 26th, I met a
lady whose brother, a conspicuous barrister in a large city of Central
Russia, had just been exiled to Siberia for five years because he took
the chair at a public meeting. Like so many other confiding people, he
was fool enough to trust to a Tsar’s Manifesto, and now as a reward for
his simple faith, cut off from his friends, his family, and his career,
he is moving by stages from prison to prison towards the dreary spot
where the best years of life must be spent, even if he ever returns. It
would, indeed, be unthrifty of the Government, when they have crammed
the Russian prisons to bursting point, not to take advantage of the
Siberian system so providentially organized by their predecessors in
office.
On the whole horizon of St. Petersburg life only one sign of hope
appeared. In the lecture theatre of the Mokhovaya, leading out of
the Nevsky, where the educated revolutionists of the middle classes
are accustomed to hold their meetings, a quiet body of men used to
assemble every afternoon, with a few quiet men and women to listen.
They were the Constitutional Democrats, whose meetings Witte had been
compelled, not to permit, but to ignore, because in case of refusal
they threatened to remove into Finland, and it was not so easy to
spy upon them there. Delegates had arrived from all parts of the
Empire--Mohammedan Tartars from Kazan, Armenians from the Caucasus,
heathen Mongols from the uttermost parts of the East, speaking no human
tongue, nor to be understood by any, had not old Professor Clementz
been discovered still alive among his specimens of anthropology.
Banished in his prime to the extremity of Mongolia in the hope that he
might die of savagery and cold, he had dwelt so many years among the
heathen that in face and language he could hardly be distinguished from
them, and now they found in him their friend, the one man in the city
to whom their monosyllabic squeaks and sounds conveyed a human meaning.
So the delegates met, and listened and debated, discussing the
tactics to be employed if ever time should overtake the promised Duma,
which continually receded. What was the right course for men who
hoped nothing from violence and yet would fight for freedom; men who
distrusted haste, believed in law, and yet aimed at revolution? Being
concerned with subjects so far-reaching, their debates were naturally
more abstract than is usual among hardened old Parliamentarians like
ourselves, to whom “the middle of next week” expresses an unimaginable
and negligible distance of time. But they boasted themselves practical
as Russian parties go, and at all events they were not hampered, as our
Liberals usually are, by class tradition and social influence. I mean,
for instance, they would never endure anything so ludicrous as a House
of Lords in their constitution, and if they should ever come to real
power, they would enjoy the very unusual advantage of a clear field.
But their immediate object was to form a strong block of opposition
to the representatives of the six reactionary parties with which the
Government designed to flood the Duma when the elections came--such
parties as the Octobrists, or nominal supporters of the Manifesto; the
party of “Legal Order,” or Law and Order, as we say; and the party of
Industry and Commerce.
Beside the platform at their meetings stood a large death-bed portrait
of Sergius Troubetskoy, the Rector of Moscow University, who had
suddenly died in the previous September while pleading for freedom of
speech, as I mentioned in the Introduction. Across the portrait was
written the inscription, “The Champion of Freedom,” and the spirit of
the great Zemstvoist leader might well be said to direct the methods
and purposes of the assembly. Among the living leaders present were
Petrunkevitch, who had succeeded to Troubetskoy’s position upon the
Moscow Zemstvo; Struve, long the exiled editor of the Russian paper,
_Emancipation_ (_Osvobojdenie_) in Paris; and Miliukoff, so
well known in France through David Soskice’s translation of his book
on Russian culture, and in England and America through his own Chicago
lectures upon _Russia and its Crisis_. He almost alone among
all the Russians I met in St. Petersburg at that time still retained
the power of hope and enthusiasm undiminished, in spite of all the
disasters of the past seven weeks.
“The reaction,” he said to me, “cannot last very long. The
Moscow rising was a great mistake, and at the end of it I too
almost despaired. I thought all the educated people and the
well-to-do would be permanently set against change. But the
Government’s violence has kept them on our side. The “classes”
are as much sickened by the slaughter as other people. They have
learnt that it is the Government, and not the revolutionists,
who are the party of destruction and disorder. Reaction? Why, it
is already over. The spirit of the thing is dead.”
Coming at such a time, such words were startling in their confidence.
But then Professor Miliukoff is one of those few happy people who have
carried with them the glories of youth into middle age, and there is
no glory of youth more enviable than the wisdom which, as the Preacher
said, is the mother of holy hope.