A BLOODY ASSIZE
At the end of January I left St. Petersburg for Riga and the Baltic
Provinces. As in other parts of Russia, the hopes of change had
faded there, and the whole land lay prostrate under a bloodthirsty
suppression, the more savage because it was encouraged by a double
race hatred--the ancient feud of German, Russian, and Lett. As I came
at sunrise through the fir forests and frozen heaths of Livonia,
twenty-five men were being shot in cold blood among the sandhills
beside the railway. They were tied together in a row by their feet and
arms, and they fell together; but the firing was so bad that many were
hardly hit at all, and had to be finished off at close quarters before
they were heaped together into a trench already prepared for them.
When I reached the town, the first thing I met was a party of twenty
soldiers with fixed bayonets driving along four boys of eighteen or
nineteen, who marched with their hands in the pockets of their long
coats and their caps drawn low down over their pale and weary faces.
They were being taken to the castle, where, I was told, a hundred
more lay ready for killing, and would probably be slaughtered on the
sandhills next morning. It was a fitting entrance for me into these
once peaceful and civilized provinces, where now the bloody assize was
raging.
The daily papers in Riga are, for the most part, German, but, for
once, they were on the side of the Government and the Russian troops,
because the leaders of the attempted revolution and the victims in its
suppression were Letts. So they would not be likely to exaggerate the
injustice and brutality of the assize. Yet each of them, above its
tender German love-story or bit of art criticism, displayed columns
of tabulated slaughter, and the whole local news of the three Baltic
Provinces consisted of shootings, hangings, and floggings. The accounts
were generally arranged by villages. For instance, from one number of
the leading Riga paper I take the following reports, almost at random,
out of the columns that appeared above an excellent appreciation of
Ruskin’s “Præterita”--
“Tarwast.--The whole population of the village over the age of
fifteen was brought before the court-martial to-day. Six were
shot on the spot, including one woman; nine were flogged with
strokes varying from twenty-five to two hundred.”
I need not say that two hundred strokes of a wooden rod delivered by
soldiers on the naked body of either a woman or a man would mean
almost certain death in its most terrible form.
“Semzel.--Yesterday six revolutionaries were shot, and four the
day before. In the neighbouring parish of Lemberg twenty-four
were flogged.
“Kokenhusen.--Nine people were hanged here to-day.
“Dahlen.--A squadron of dragoons, half a troop of Cossacks, a
company of infantry, two cannon, and two machine-guns arrived
here to-day. Dahlen had elected a revolutionary parish council;
so a court-martial was held, and four men shot on the spot.
Several farms were destroyed by shells.
“Neuenmühle.--The schoolmaster was hanged on a telephone post
here to-day, for having allowed public meetings in his school.
Two young girls were flogged with rods for having stitched a red
flag.
“Wolmar.--This morning early, two boys, one only fifteen,
evidently much excited, ran up to a patrol of soldiers and
tried to catch hold of a rifle, saying they would show them
how to shoot. They were captured, and General Orloff, being
consulted by telephone, ordered their immediate execution. They
received the Sacrament, and were shot in the presence of a large
number of spectators. The execution appears to have exercised a
salutary impression upon the whole population of Wolmar.”
Village after village had that salutary impression exercised upon it,
and one week after another the papers told the same monotonous story of
cold-hearted bloodshed.
The German landowners, some of whom had suffered considerable losses
during the peasants’ rising, hounded on the military to vengeance. No
measures were harsh enough for them, no executions too bloody. They
taunted the Governor-General Sollogub with half-hearted mildness, and
clamoured for the appointment of the drunken butcher, General Orloff,
in his place. They appeared to long for the extermination of the race
which for centuries had been their servants. A daughter of a great
landowner, whom I met, said to me, “One of the peasants themselves told
me to-day that at least a third of them deserve to be shot, and he
hopes they will be. I was so glad to hear him say so.”
Certainly, for those who had run for refuge into the town, as most
of the German landowners had, life was unavoidably dull. Beyond the
restaurants, two music-halls, and a number of brothels, there was
nothing to distract a gentleman’s mind. The landowner pined for
the country life and healthy sport to which he was accustomed. His
imagination was haunted by the smoking ruin to which his ancestral
home had been reduced. When he had once enjoyed the newspaper columns
of executions and floggings which were served with his breakfast, new
every morning like the love of God, there was really nothing left
to beguile the tedium of existence till evening came. Even then the
entertainment was rather dreary--a German _café chantant_, with
sweet champagne and half a dozen girls whom the proprietor paid to be
pleasant. “I suppose I shall have to go and see that dancer again,”
said one of the nobility to me, as he yawned and stretched himself. “It
will be something to do. Her legs aren’t really good, I know, but in
these times we must all take what pleasure we can.”
On going out, we met a strong body of soldiers driving three prisoners
rapidly along the street. Flanking files had been thrown out upon the
pavements, and a large rearguard followed. One of the prisoners was
a ragged man without a hat, and his arms were pinioned to his sides.
The other two were women, with white handkerchiefs over their heads,
showing they were Letts. They passed very quickly, the soldiers, with
fixed bayonets, urging them continually onward from behind. A feeling
of intense excitement prevailed. The soldiers were terrified of a
rescue. An eager though cautious crowd followed at some distance, like
the children who follow bullocks to the slaughter-houses in Aldgate. So
they hastened along the road out of the town towards the sandhills, and
in half an hour the man and two women were dead and left warm in their
graves.
The Letts boast themselves to be the Irish of Russia. They are
the ancient peasant race, whose land has fallen into the hands of
alien conquerors, now supported by a foreign military power. For
eight centuries the country of the Letts and the smaller tribes of
Lithuanians and Esthonians has been the prey of Germans, Swedes,
and Russians in turn. But the Germans, the descendants of the
Sword-Brothers and the Teutonic Order, who first introduced the laws
of conquest and Christianity among them,[5] have remained the chief
owners of the great estates, and the culture of the towns is mainly
German also. All three tribes come of an imaginative and artistic
stock. Many of the leading writers and artists of Russia are Letts,
and in their own strange language--probably the most ancient in
Europe, and most nearly akin to old Sanskrit--they possess an immense
collection of primitive folk-songs and legends. They are not so
advanced--not so artistic in form and feeling as the Lithuanian songs,
which are familiar in German translations, such as the beautiful and
characteristic song set to music by Chopin. But the Lettish songs
follow the ancient Asiatic form, seldom more than four or six lines
long--simple outbursts of joy and sorrow over the great events of all
human life, birth and spring and love and harvest and winter and death.
They are full of prehistoric myth and lore. Herder translated a few
when he was a parson in Riga about a hundred and forty years ago, but I
cannot find that even the Germans have taken the trouble to translate
them with any completeness. For the tongue has been despised and
neglected, just as Irish was in former years.
The race is like the language. Ages have passed over the people since
first they settled down among the sandy heaths and quiet watercourses
of the Baltic shore. Their hair and eyes have changed from dark to
fair. Their religion has changed from primitive nature-worship to
Catholicism, and then to Lutheranism. Evangelical they still remain,
though Russia has tried hard for twenty-five years to make them
Orthodox. But at heart they continue as they originally were, speaking
the same tongue, doing the same work, and building the same houses.
On almost any farm you may see the conical outdoor kitchens, modelled
on the very huts that they built as they walked from Asia before man
learnt his letters. Even their modern farmhouses are constructed on a
very ancient type. They are made entirely of wood without any iron,
even without nails, the corner joints being dovetailed together with
perfect skill. The roofs too, though sometimes thatched with reeds, are
nearly always formed of wooden slabs like slates. Round the central
house of two large rooms, with high lofts for winter storage, several
wings or extra chambers are thrown out, for the labourers (Knechte),
or for poorer people who cannot afford a house of their own, but pay
a rent in money or work. In this way I have seen five other families
gathered round one peasant court or farm (Gesinde, as it is called,
the old German word, like the use of Knechte, marking the date of the
Prussian occupation).
This peculiarity probably springs from the ancient Lettish habit
of living in isolation, like the Boers, and not huddled together
in villages, like the Germans or Russians. The peasants’ homes are
generally at least a mile or two apart. The country is divided into
large parishes, but a village can hardly be said to exist, and probably
this isolation has made the people an easier prey to their successive
conquerors. There are no Lettish towns at all, for such places as
Riga and Dorpat and Mitau were entirely German, but for some hardly
perceptible traces of the Swede, till the curse of Russia fell upon
them, little over a century ago. Indeed, to enter one of these old
towns even now, and to live among the spires and tiled roofs after
the bulbous domes and green iron of Russia, is like going back from
Gorky’s sombre desperation to the smile and sunlight of “Meister’s
Apprenticeship.”
Scattered through the three Provinces there are about a million and a
half of Letts living in this way. Most of them now own their patches of
land, or are buying slowly, by annual payments. They till the ground in
summer, and in winter they weave with their own looms, spin with their
own spinning wheels, feed the cattle in the barns, and slide the wood
over the snow from the forests. It is not a bad kind of life. Compared
to ordinary Russian peasants, the people are rich beyond dreams, and
things went pleasantly in the Provinces till the hideous system
called Russification began just a quarter of a century ago, upon the
accession of Alexander III.--“The Camel,” as they still call him. It
was completed, as far as laws can go, in 1889, by the introduction
of Russian jurisdiction and language. Since then, the object of the
Russian Government has been to thwart German industry, to stifle German
culture, and to inflame the Letts against the Germans in hopes that
the two races may exterminate each other. So far the design appears
likely to succeed. Corrupt Russian officials govern, ignorant Russian
professors have taken the place of men like Harnack at the Dorport
University, untrained Russian teachers pretend to educate children
by means of a language that no child understands, the ancient rights
of the provinces have been taken away one by one, and by continual
incitement the Letts were at last goaded into burning the country
houses of the German landowners.
There are about seven hundred estates in Livonia alone, including the
various Crown lands, and in the three Provinces taken together it was
estimated that two hundred and fifty country houses had been burnt.
This was said to represent about fifteen per cent. of the total of
existing estates. In many cases, no doubt, the landowners were leading
a monotonous and stupid kind of life, and the loss of their possessions
will open to them a wider horizon, with new chances of happiness.
But as a rule they are a pleasant, healthy kind of people, like
the country gentlemen who used to exist in England, and the Lettish
peasants felt no violent personal animosity towards the man whom they
were accustomed to call Master. One of the largest landowners, for
instance, the proprietor of four separate estates, thus described to me
how the trouble began in his favourite country house:--
“It was last December. Owing to the disturbances throughout the
country, I had sent my wife and children into Riga. One day a
deputation of peasants came and rang at the front door. I received them
in the hall.
“‘Master (Herr),’ they said; ‘we are heartily sorry, but we have
condemned you to death.’
“‘Oh, you have condemned me to death, have you?’ I answered.
“‘Yes, master,’ they said. ‘We are heartily sorry. You are a good
master, and we have nothing against you, but we have condemned you to
death.’
“‘All right,’ I answered; ‘what’s your reason?’
“‘You see, you have more land than we have,’ they said.
“‘Certainly,’ I answered; ‘but many of you have more land than others.’
“‘Yes, that is true,’ they said; ‘but all the land is ours by right.
Your fathers took it away from us seven hundred years ago, and now we
are going to nationalize it all.’
“‘Well,’ I answered; ‘I suppose you must do what you like. When are you
going to begin?’
“‘Oh, master,’ they said, ‘we are heartily sorry. You are a good
master, but we have just condemned you to death, and now we have come
to warn you first. Master, we strongly advise you to escape.’
“So the conversation went on. A few days later, they made an attack
upon the house in the evening. But I had armed two of my own servants;
we fired a gun from a window, and they all went away again. But after
that my wife was so frightened that I came into Riga, and now the
peasants are sending us firewood and vegetables twice a week by sledge,
because they have heard such things are dear in town.”
It is easy to imagine the peculiar confusion that would arise in such
kindly and childlike minds when young students and orators, like the
almost mythical leader “Maxim,” come out to their isolated farms
and preached Karl Marx to them, and the socialisation of wealth, or
the glories of a Lettish republic. Social change and the sense of
nationality were equal motives in the rising. Excited by wild hopes,
inspired by man’s natural longing for equality, by race hatred, and by
the oppressions of a stupid and savage Government from abroad, they
turned upon the country houses, the church records, the Government
offices, and the portraits of the Tsar as the symbols of all that stood
between them and happiness.
Certainly the German landowners suffered, and a few were assassinated.
It was part of the Russian Government’s scheme that they should suffer,
and one of the strangest things in the whole situation of these Baltic
Provinces was the unanimity with which, not only every Lett, but every
German whether in town or country, rejected the idea of appealing to
the German Empire for protection. The suggestion of such a thing made
the mildest German mad. It united German and Lett like comrades in arms
against a common enemy. The Germans cling to their German language
and culture; they will go to any trouble and expense to avoid Russian
education; they have the utmost contempt for Russian law and justice;
by union with Germany they would gain immensely in government and
probably in trade. Yet from Russia they will endure any hardship rather
than look to Berlin for help. It is a remarkable instance of the truth
that man is governed, not by his interests, but by his tastes. Hearing
the protest repeated with vehemence by a beautiful German lady whose
home had been burnt down, I asked her the reason, and she said: “We
could not endure to be told at every corner not to spit and not to
lean out of the window.”
So the landowners suffer, and bear those ills they have. But the man
whose suffering to me seemed least deserved was not a landowner, but
a country parson. He was so old that I may mention his name without
harm, and it is known to the scholars of Europe; for he was Pastor
Bielenstein, the greatest authority upon the Lettish language and
literature, and authorities are very few. I found him in Mitau, the
Courland capital, a quiet German town not far from Riga. There he had
taken refuge in a few small rooms, when the peasants chased him from
the parsonage, which had been his for sixty years and his father’s
before him. In mind and appearance he belonged to an age that Germany
has long left behind--the simple age of the Humboldts and the Grimms.
He must be one of the very few Germans left who remember the death of
Goethe, and to listen to him was like conversing with those gentle
followers of learning a century ago, who combined a zeal for knowledge
with a childlike trust in “the dear God.” All the sixty years in his
parish had been devoted to the cure of souls and the collection of
every fragment of Lettish literature--folk-songs, riddles, proverbs,
and legends. Volume after volume appeared, and there they all stand
as a monument of German industry, though, unhappily, intelligible
only to Lettish speakers. Having lost his sight over his work, and
growing very old, with his aged wife and grandchildren around him, he
determined to write one more book and then depart in peace. The title
of the book was “The Happy Life,” and hardly had he published it when
the peasants came to his church, ordered him to leave out the Tsar from
his prayers, attacked his house, shot his sexton, held eight rifles at
his daughter’s heart, burnt his library, smashed his china, trampled
on his harpsichord, and made a bonfire of his furniture in the garden,
kindling it with his manuscripts. Thus he was driven out, blind, aged,
and poor, to begin a new volume of a life which he thought was ending
happily.
“But we do not regret the title of my book, do we, dear wife? We have
not lost our trust in the dear God,” he said, bending his tall, slim
figure to kiss the old lady’s hand.
“No,” she answered. “We have lost our best china, but our guest will
kindly excuse it.”
While we were thus conversing, the pastor of a neighbouring parish
entered, a little excited over a scene in which he had just taken part.
There had been an execution in his village that morning, and it was his
duty to conduct the funeral of the young revolutionist who was shot.
For some reason the officer in command had ordered a party of horse and
foot with two guns to attend the ceremony and prevent any disturbance.
“The coffin and I were surrounded by soldiers along the whole route,”
said the pastor; “and when we came to the grave, the people were kept
three hundred yards away. The result was that they could not hear a
word of the sermon which I had prepared with special care for the
occasion. As it was in Lettish, the soldiers did not understand it, and
all my pains were entirely thrown away.”
So each suffered in his fashion.
All through the open country parties of cavalry went trotting from farm
to farm. Infantry drove in sledges, holding their rifles ready. General
Orloff had then made his headquarters at Segewold, some forty miles
north of Riga, and obtaining a sledge there with a Lett driver who
spoke German, I was able to travel far through the low hills and wooded
valleys where the troops were at their work. The ruins of ancient
castles built by the Prussian Orders are rather frequent in that
neighbourhood, and the modern country houses which have taken their
place are especially fine--great mansions like our own “outposts of
barbarism,” some with gables and mullions, some with classic pediments
and columns in the “Georgian style.” But all were empty now, and not
a sound arose even from the stables and barns. One great house, as
famous as any monastery for its liqueurs, had been burnt to a cinder of
ruin, and there was hardly a farm around which had not lost a father
or son, hanged for burning it. The farms we passed appeared to be
equally empty; but when the driver gradually discovered that I had no
direct concern for Russian Government or German landowners, he began
to spread communications along the road by a system of signals and
cries. Faces would then peer out from the entrances of fowl houses,
or sudden questions would come from the depths of a holly bush. In
the quick conversations that followed I heard the word “Cossacks”
constantly repeated, for every mounted soldier is to them a Cossack,
and the question they always asked was whether the soldiers were
coming. Too often they were coming. We had seen them behind us, or had
watched a party moving down a hill, or cautiously making their way
through woods. The infantry in sledges were harder to distinguish; but
they were less numerous, and they went in obvious terror. Under their
houses some of the peasants had dug deep holes to hide in, and some
had taken to caverns in the sandstone hillsides, covered among the
woods. But it was chilly weather for that kind of life. The soldiers
were everywhere. In every parish a certain number of victims had to be
offered up to create a salutary impression, and all I can hope is that
our lonely little sledge, passing almost unobserved along the lanes,
may perhaps have saved one or two by its warnings. That it was allowed
to pass unobserved must be put down to kindly fortune, for I had
applied for the necessary permission to visit the country districts,
but had applied utterly in vain. I have often noticed that the agents
of justice display a peculiar shyness about the presence of spectators
when they are killing men and women as the law directs.
On the other hand, there was, perhaps, too little reserve about another
habit practised by the officers in command--the habit of ordering
executions by telephone in the presence of the condemned. In Riga I
had heard of instances, and they appeared to me to show a peculiarly
cold-hearted brutality, though I do not quite understand why. The
driver told me of a similar case which had happened in Segewold.
After the rapid court-martial and sentence, the officer rang up on
the telephone: “Hullo! Is that the sergeant? All right. Have a firing
party here six o’clock to-morrow morning. Three prisoners to be shot.
Six men will be enough. No, better bring ten perhaps. Mind they’re not
late. Six o’clock to-morrow morning. Three prisoners. All right.” Then
he rang off, and the prisoners were led away. It was like ordering the
funeral lunch in the hearing of the sick.
As a contrast to these things I may mention an occurrence that was
thought humorous, and was known to every one in Riga at the time.
It concerned a young Lettish schoolmistress who was sentenced to be
flogged. Not understanding either the sentence or the brutal orders
and gestures of the soldiers, whose duty it was to carry it out, she
thought she was to be violated, and that story was an inexhaustible
subject of mirth among the commercial and landowning classes in the
Riga restaurants. I have heard it translated into four languages so
that no one present might miss the full humour of the situation.
So it went on. In the country the people died by hundreds. They were
flogged, they were hanged, they were shot. Their wooden farmhouses were
burnt to the ground. Their children were turned out in the winter to
starve. Men and women alike were slaughtered by hundreds, and no one
had pity on them. I heard no single word of pity or of understanding
spoken in any language, and week after week the bloody assize went on.
Thank God, there were reprisals, however few. Soldiers on the march
through the town moved in single file for fear of bombs, and even that
did not always save them. The assassinations of policemen upon the
streets averaged one or perhaps two a day. The police lived in terror,
and as they went their rounds in groups of two or three, they were
escorted by an equal number of soldiers with fixed bayonets. Continual
alarms arose from every quarter of Riga; the reports of revolvers or
rifles would suddenly be heard, and this way and that the people ran.
Two or three days after I arrived there was a gallant rescue from the
very police-station itself. At eight o’clock in the morning two women
came to the door with food for five prisoners who were lying under
sentence of death for the assassination of a police officer named
Porschetsky. As they were going away, eight or ten men entered. Some
seized the police on duty, killing one and wounding two others who
resisted, and four went to the cells and released all five prisoners,
who walked quietly in different directions down the streets and
escaped, though without their hats. One of them was recaptured two days
later while foolishly tying on a false beard in a barber’s shop. His
sister who was with him, fell on the floor, and clinging to the knees
of the police implored for mercy. The barber fainted with excitement,
and the man was dragged away and shot.
The same afternoon a young boy passing my hotel was bayoneted to death
by a soldier for refusing to halt at command. Whether he was another of
the five or simply did not hear the order, I did not discover. He was
under twenty, dark haired, with the clear and intellectual face that
characterises the Lettish students, artists, and other revolutionaries
of the towns.
Of the same type was another boy who was shot the following Sunday
morning at nine o’clock just outside the castle wall. There were eight
in the firing party. “One, two, three--fire!” said the sergeant, and
the boy fell like a dummy on the stage, to the edification of the
early churchgoers who crowded round to examine the body. And with that
typical scene in my mind I was obliged to take leave of the Baltic
Provinces, marked in every economic map as one of the few fairly
prosperous regions of the Russian Empire.