THE PARTIES OF POLAND
Outside the discussion of an English Education Bill, I suppose that
upon the world’s surface you would not find such an atmosphere of
energetic pettiness and trivial virulence as in Warsaw. Not that the
ultimate aims of the chief combatants are petty, but that many natures
take so much more delight in clawing their friends over trifles than in
uniting against the common enemy.
In speaking of the Poles in St. Petersburg, I have already described
a Polish restaurant there which was sharply divided by an invisible
but impassable line into two camps, both violently Polish, and both
so hostile to each other that the girls of one would not speak or eat
with the girls of the other, nor even with the men. Warsaw displayed a
similar division in almost every street. Very likely it is the price
that Poles pay for the strong individuality which has given them so
many poets, artists, and musicians. The consequence is that in Warsaw,
the parties are continually shifting, and grow like polyps by splitting
themselves into fractions, so that the political student, after weeks
of labour, goes to bed one night happily conscious of having mastered
the situation at last, and wakes up in the morning to find the whole
thing changed.
But before describing what I believe to have been the condition of
Polish parties one post time on a February morning, it may be well to
estimate the strength of the common enemy’s position, as one of the
enemy’s leaders himself defined it. Of the three highest officials in
Poland he was the most experienced in the country and spoke with the
greatest authority. Even the extra number of footmen who took my coat
symbolized a power of life and death.
“Martial law,” he began at once, “will be unflinchingly maintained,
at all events till the Duma meets. These Poles are an unreasonable,
unpractical people, full of crazy notions. They need a strong hand.
They mistake kindness for fear. They must be firmly dealt with. They
like it really--in his heart every Pole likes it. Since we proclaimed
martial law last November there has been no disturbance. And for forty
years before that--ever since we crushed the Polish revolution in
1864--order had reigned.”
I smiled inwardly, remembering that well-worn quotation about the
order that reigned in Warsaw, and I looked at the speaker with fresh
interest. I had often heard of him as the perfect type of the
thorough-going reactionaries, the real old Russian bureaucrats,
who were fighting the revolution at the last ditch for their ideal
of empire, their privileges, and their pay. A tall and shapely man
of about fifty, diplomatically courteous and grave, he became the
furniture of the official palace very well, but in his round, bright
eyes I sometimes detected the alert and watchful look of a racoon
when he confronts you suddenly in the forest. He afterwards described
me to a friend as a terrible revolutionist, and as I remained almost
silent during the conversation, being overcome by the superiority of
his French, that showed a penetration which gave greater value to his
judgments.
“Yes,” he repeated, “these Poles have always been an unreasonable and
unpractical people, full of flighty notions. You may now divide them
into Nationalists and Socialists--both about equally absurd. I need
not speak of the Socialists and the nonsense they talk of equality and
nationalization. They are the same everywhere. In Poland we found them
doing a certain amount of harm among the peasants; so we quartered
troops in the villages, and now the peasants have turned against the
Socialists like other right-minded men. Indeed, the Jewish Bund is the
only troublesome Socialist body now left, and we are dealing with them.
They will tend to disappear.
“The Nationalists are equally helpless. They make a mighty fuss about
the suppression of their language, but in our Empire we must have one
common language, and it must be Russian. Then as to their Catholic
religion: the Poles are a singularly fanatical people. Their attachment
to their superstitious rites is most extraordinary. Even the educated
classes are little better than fanatics in their religious beliefs.
They are incapable of any breadth of view, and if we gave the people
the chance, they would show themselves utterly intolerant of the
Orthodox Church. They would insult and persecute our fellow-believers.
Such things we cannot allow, and we will not.
“Nor can we yield to their talk about autonomy and separation. It is
all very well for England to grant autonomy to her Colonies over the
sea. She has not granted it to Ireland, and she does not grant it to
India. We have not the least desire to become a powerless confederation
like Austria, in perpetual danger of disruption. That would be even
worse than to become like Germany, continually hampered by her
Socialists. Any kind of separation would mean immediate ruin to Poland
and her industries. Russia, Siberia, and the Far East are her only
markets. If she were separated from us, first she would starve, next
she would be swallowed up by Germany, and foolish as the Poles are,
they still have sense enough to hate the Germans more than they hate
us.
“It is true that in a weak moment our Government made concessions
to Finland, and that has encouraged the Poles to hope for the same.
But we shall not be able to allow Finland to remain on a different
footing from the rest of the Empire. Those concessions must rapidly be
withdrawn. We shall very likely have to conquer Finland over again.
That would be an easy task, and need cause us no apprehension. All
special rights in any part of the Empire must vanish, and the whole
Empire must be bound together into one. If we yield at any point, we
must yield in all, and that is impossible.
“It is impossible for our own safety. Here in Poland, for instance,
we have to defend a frontier where there is no natural barrier to
ward off an attack by Germany. Even if we gave up Poland as far as
the Vistula, it would not help us. In these days a river is no real
protection in war; if the Vistula were a mountain chain, that would
be a different question. As it is, we must maintain our two parallel
lines of fortresses in Poland, and especially the triangle of the three
main strongholds, of which Warsaw is one. The triangle is too large to
be surrounded, and it would secure us the time for mobilization. For
certainly we could not mobilize nearly so fast as Germany.
“That is the plain truth of the situation. People talk about Russia’s
internal troubles, but they are not of any importance. It is mainly an
agrarian question. The peasants think their land insufficient, because
they are too ignorant to cultivate it properly, and the redistribution
of the land by the communes every twelve years--it used to be every
year--deprives them of the valuable sense of ownership. We must abolish
the communal system, institute private ownership in land, and plant
several new colonies--in Siberia, for example. Then you will see
that Russia will easily regain her former condition of quietude and
prosperity.
“And, as to Poland again, you will find that if the Duma meets, it will
be compelled to govern Poland exactly as the Autocracy has governed it
in the past, and is governing it now.”
It was a frank and reasonable statement of the reactionary position,
and, if once the bureaucrat’s estimate of government and of human
nature be accepted, the position is easy to defend. Like most
Conservatives, the bureaucrats and reactionaries know pretty definitely
what they mean, and what they do not want; for even a prophet may
perhaps find it easier to see the past clearly than the future. To know
the object clearly is a great advantage in controversy, and in action
it means victory, unless the enemy knows still more definitely what he
intends to have. But in Poland there are so many intentions that the
battle for nationality and freedom is more than usually difficult.
At the back of all modern politics stands the workman, tending
with every decade to become the only kind of citizen that need be
considered. We must suppose therefore that the various Polish parties
who are battling for nationality and freedom have the advancement of
the workman ultimately in view, and certainly there are few European
countries where his advancement is more obviously desirable. In
commerce, Poland has suffered more than any other part of Russia
from the disasters of the last few years. About five years ago, the
time of ruin set in with a commercial depression, vaguely attributed
to over-production. Hardly was trade recovering when the outbreak
of the Japanese war checked every hope. Siberia and the Far East
had become, as my official rightly said, the chief markets for such
great industrial centres as Warsaw and Lodz. Then suddenly all orders
ceased, the goods already despatched could neither be recovered nor
paid for, and the railways were taken up by the army. Ordinary trade
dropped, and only those firms could look for any profit which received
Government orders for barbed-wire entanglements, empty shrapnel cases,
and metals for field railways--“goods” which must be paid for by the
starving peasants, and might just as well have been sunk in the sea
at once. Out of thirty-one ironworks, ten closed their gates, and the
rest blew out half their furnaces. It is true, the iron industry is
rather an artificial thing, which even in peaceful times lives chiefly
on Government patronage. For it has to import coke from Siberia, and
ore from Krivoy Rog in South Russia. But the losses in the iron trade
were equalled by disasters in other industries, and the only instance
of success I heard of during the war was that the big chocolate works
received large orders to supply officers at the front. It is not
the first time we have heard of “chocolate-cream soldiers.” Indeed,
chocolate is taking the place of the Homeric onions as the food of
heroes.
The war also ruined credit, and Polish trade lives on credit. Warsaw
depends entirely upon Berlin for money, and Berlin refused to lend.
On the top of the war came the strikes--political strikes, economic
strikes, general strikes, postal strikes. All through last year they
went on, and there was hardly a firm that did not lose from a third
to a half of its work. The severity with which the strikes were put
down only increased the resentment of the working-classes, and the
people deliberately preferred general ruin to the continuance of former
conditions, whether of government or industry.
Such was the outlook of workmen in the towns. But about eighty per
cent. (something over 8,000,000) of the Poles are agriculturists, and
nearly half of these have no land of their own, but are forced to
wander round as labourers, some 200,000 of them going into East Prussia
yearly for the harvest, and most of them working in towns from time
to time. It is true that the peasants are slowly buying more and more
land from the bankrupt old nobility, who used to own Poland, and were
the chief cause of her ruin as a nation. The average price they pay for
the land is from £5 to £6 an acre, and the average peasant holding is
seventeen acres. But this division into plots is at present lowering
the standard of agriculture, and so things will go from bad to worse
till the peasant gains a little learning, and puts science into his
primitive methods. At present more than half of the populations cannot
write or read, and the proportion of schools to the number of children
is actually decreasing. In Warsaw alone there are 60,000 children for
whom there is no place in school, and the amount spent on education
per head of the population is 6_d._, as compared with 9_s._
7_d._ in Berlin. Yet the Poles justly boast themselves better
educated and more intelligent than average Russians. In brains and
Western knowledge they are immensely in advance.
The population, which is thicker on the ground than in France,
increases very rapidly, and that is one of the reasons why wages in the
last ten years have remained stationary in Warsaw, though the cost of
living has doubled. In the country a farm labourer’s wage is 9_d._
a day. In the towns the unskilled workman gets about 14_s._ a
week, and the unskilled woman from 6_s._ to 12_s._. But a
skilled workman, such as a weaver, will make £2 10_s._ or even £3
a week for nine hours’ work a day. The rent of two fairly good rooms
with kitchen, on the fourth floor, is from 4_s._ to 5_s._
a week. But owing to the large numbers of the unskilled, it is very
common to find four families living in one room, and the standard
of life, especially among the Polish Jews, who number 1,500,000 of
the population, is very low, as any Londoner may see by walking down
Whitechapel. As usual, the Jews are regarded as the worst of all
work-people, though they make most money in dealing. On the other hand,
the overseers in mills, whether German or English, spoke very highly
to me of the Poles as mechanics, especially of the girls. “When they
will work, these Poles are first-rate,” said an English manager in
a lace works. “But they are butterflies, all butterflies,” he added
with a sigh. “I sent my little boy to school here, and they taught him
languages well, but unveracity better. So now I’ve sent him to England,
where at least he’ll learn nothing.”
In the accounts I heard or read of Polish trade, two other points
appeared to me unhappily characteristic. One was that Polish hides
have to be sold at a cheaper rate than their apparent value, because
they are scarred and spoilt by the cruelty with which the Polish
peasants use their heavy whips. The same is true even of the pigs,
in which Poland does an immense trade; both the skins and the bacon
are deteriorated by the cruelty of the swineherds. The other point I
discovered in a Consular Report, which noticed that in Poland there
is a very large demand for antiquities--“family portraits, signet
rings, blood-stained weapons, and so on”--and suggested that, though
Germany has almost entirely ousted English trade from the country, an
opening for romantic Birmingham goods might here be found. It certainly
seems a needless sorrow that any one who desires a family portrait or
blood-stained weapon should be without it.
From all this it appears that the Polish parties have enough scope for
their labours on behalf of the workmen and labourers, even without the
internecine intrigues and animosities with which they enliven their
task, like British sects battling for the Kingdom of Heaven. Among
the leading parties on the extreme right stands the solid phalanx of
officials and reactionaries; but it is not to be called Polish. It
is manned from the 300,000 Russians who are distributed among the
10,000,000 Poles. It is the party of “the Garrison.” For no Pole can
become an official--not even a policeman--unless he is first thoroughly
Russianised and joins the Orthodox Church, and even in Russia it
is only the officials and priests who are genuinely reactionary on
principle, because it is they who are fighting for their existence in
their last dirty ditch.
But next to the reactionaries, though far removed, came a genuine
Polish party, who called themselves sometimes Realists, sometimes
Conciliators, because they represented their aims as real or tangible
things, and they were willing to act as peacemakers between Government
and people. They were the moderate Opportunists, the cautious
bourgeoisie (if any Pole is cautious), and they looked to the Duma
for salvation by gradual reforms. Still, they would struggle, however
gently, for autonomy, and, conscious of their own weakness in numbers,
they were willing to lend the weight of their intellectual powers
(which they believed to be considerable) to any union of moderate
Nationalist parties.
In practical politics (if Polish politics ever became practical) the
Realists, who were called a staff without an army, were expected
to unite with the National Democrats, who were an army without a
staff. Certainly the National Democrats were numerous and confident.
They alone of all the Polish parties were doing what we should call
election work for the Duma; for though their meetings were forbidden
by the Government, those who attended them were not necessarily shot.
I was myself present at one of those meetings, held in an upper room
decorated with pictures of dead animals, and some seventy or eighty
gentlemen were there, for the most part substantial and elderly. There
was something a little pathetic about the performance, for they had met
to practise how to do it, and they reminded me of a class of dockers
I once tried to teach writing in Poplar, because they had escaped
the School Board. It is now eighty years since there was anything in
the least like an election in Poland, and that was for the Polish
Parliament which preceded the revolution of 1831. The tradition of how
to vote had died since then, and those few comfortable gentlemen in
the upper chamber were trying to recover it. Each received a pencil
and a little square of blank paper, and after they had followed their
instructions to the best of their ability, the papers were collected
and mistakes pointed out. As a first lesson in the nomination of
candidates, the result showed considerable promise, and the teacher,
who had studied in England, expressed much satisfaction at the progress
made.
The twelve wards into which Warsaw was divided had to choose eighty
electors between them, and upon these eighty fell the choice of the
two members who were to represent Warsaw in the Duma. These two were
counted among the thirty-six who would stand for Poland as a whole. The
Jews, who make up a third part of Warsaw’s population, were the only
formidable opponents to the National Democrats. But the Jews are nearly
all Socialists, and as the Socialists had up to that time refused to
recognize the Duma or take any part in the elections, the National
Democrats expected to secure all the “college” of electors.
Their programme was more advanced than I should have supposed from the
rather venerable appearance of their meeting. They aimed at complete
Polish autonomy in a Russian Federation. They demanded the use of
Polish in schools and law-courts; the appointment of Poles to all
offices of local administration; complete local self-government for
towns and country districts; and some included the restoration of the
Polish Parliament as it existed from 1813 to 1831. This programme
was obviously very much more Nationalist than Democratic, but, in
spite of the demand for Home Rule, there was no intention whatever of
breaking away from Russia. My reactionary official was again right in
saying that the Poles, like the Baltic Provinces, would rather suffer
under Russia than under Germany. The one thing that ended the great
general strike was the cry purposely, though falsely, raised by the
masters, “The Prussians are coming!” Germans may think it difficult
to understand, but, outside Germany, a certain pleasantness of manner
counts for something in the affairs of life, and very few people really
enjoy being goaded along the regulation road to official perfection.
Next to the National Democrats came the Progressive Democrats, who
bridged the gulf from respectability to Socialism, like Mr. John Burns,
let us say, or practical leaders of his type. They were what we should
call extreme Radicals, but they liked to borrow the word “Fabians,”
not having yet discovered that the Fabian Society ceased to count in
the advance of thought or politics after the support its majority gave
to the South African War. Like academic people among ourselves, they
are fond of repeating that they demand evolution, not revolution,
but their opposition to the Government is nevertheless sincere, and
many of them were in prison. The gradual nationalization of the land,
with compensation but compulsory sale where an owner possesses over a
certain maximum, is a great point in their programme, and their aims
in general are rather social than political, though they, too, demand
a Polish Parliament and a military system under which Polish recruits
shall remain in Poland. Like the Socialists, they refused to take any
part in the elections, because under martial law there could be no
freedom of choice. Otherwise, they would have formed the natural allies
of the Constitutional Democrats elsewhere.
The powerful party known as National or Polish Socialists came very
near to these. In fact, no one but a Pole could have discovered in
their programmes any distinction calling for passionate antipathy. They
followed the usual Socialistic lines, with Polish autonomy thrown in,
and they also prided themselves on their practical or “real” policy.
Next to them, but separated by the impassable abyss of family
animosity, came their bitterest enemies, the Social Democrats, with
their usual maximum and minimum programmes, that require no further
definition. For the Gospel of St. Marx upholds the doctrine of faith
all the world over, and its canon allows no variation of circumstance
or nationality. In Poland, perhaps, its followers show themselves a
little more pedantic and superior than elsewhere, and it is their
intolerance of every other form of progress which has done most to
keep the parties divided, and maintain the enemy in power. Possibly
for this reason, combined with the imprisonment of all their leaders,
they appeared, whilst I was in Warsaw, to have lost ground, in spite of
their careful organization and superhuman rectitude.
Below them--far below them, they would say--came the Proletariat
Socialists, the workman’s party, who refused all “truck” with
students or lawyers, or any other members of the “Intelligenzia”
and bourgeoisie. They were the extremists; thirty years ago they
would have been called Nihilists, though untruly. They preached
revolutionary violence of any kind, and took the immediate happiness of
the working man as their motive and rule in all conduct. Beyond that,
they possessed the immense advantage of being entirely free from all
doctrines, theories, and abstractions. For they held by the simple and
obvious fact, that a certain amount of pleasure may be obtained from
life, and the working man does not get it.
There remains but one party of importance, but it is a little difficult
to place it in rank with the rest. For the Bund is not specially a
Polish party. As I have shown, it spreads through Kieff, Odessa,
and all Southern Russia. But in Warsaw it is particularly strong,
because, beyond all others, it is the Jewish party. In social aims it
agrees with the Social Democrats, but its methods are more definite
and more violent. In Warsaw, its members were at that time collecting
arms, organizing bands, and conducting propaganda in meetings that
were protected by armed groups. Their programme was to carry on
the revolution by a series of general strikes, combined with armed
demonstrations and attacks upon Government buildings or officials,
and they looked forward to a general and violent insurrection of all
Socialists in Russia. Obviously, the first care of such a party should
be to win over the enemy’s armed forces, for as long as the Russian
Government could trust the army to do the slaughtering for them, a
violent insurrection was outside serious consideration. Accordingly,
the Bund was continually sending out agents to work among the soldiers.
These agents endeavoured to establish in the army a large society of
men, who should take an oath never to fire upon their fellow-citizens.
There were minor points--a demand for better treatment, a refusal to
act as officers’ servants, or to serve outside their home district. But
not to fire on citizens was the main thing, and if once that pledge
could be imposed upon the Russian army as a whole, the Government, with
all its frippery and all its brutality, would vanish in a week.
I have already given my reasons for seeing little hope of such a
solution. Obedience is the easiest form of sloth, and as soon as you
put a man into uniform you render obedience almost irresistible.
Further, a soldier demands pay, clothes, food, and hitherto there has
existed no definite power in Russia, except the Crown, to which he
could look for these necessities.
But it was no wonder the Government regarded the Bund as their most
dangerous enemy in a hostile nation. Under the unpopular bywords
of “Anarchist” and “Jew,” the members of the Bund were seized and
executed without mercy or regret. Upon the river bank, half a mile
north of the city, stands the great fortress called the Citadel. I
happened to see more of it than most travellers, for, by good luck, I
managed one afternoon to penetrate far within the gates before I was
arrested. But still I could not identify Pavilion 10, where some six
hundred political prisoners were then crowded together, nor the places
of execution, where so-called Anarchist Jews were shot. The official
number of the executed in the month then stood at only sixteen, but
it was impossible to estimate the true figures, when the only form of
trial was a secret court-martial, and when fishermen on the Vistula
reported, as they did while I was there, that they had seen bodies
appearing through holes in the ice below the Citadel, with faces
mutilated to prevent recognition.
As in the rest of Russia, all the prisons were so overcrowded that the
prisoners were dying of filth and disease. The town prison in Warsaw
had four hundred politicals, and sixty of them were crammed into a room
built for twenty-five. But if only as a relief from the dreariness
of futile party distinctions, let me end with the official statement
concerning two Jewesses, arrested as the accomplices of a man named
Gramen, who had been shot for manufacturing bombs. Governor-General
Skallon gave it out that it went against his feelings of humanity to
shoot women, and accordingly he offered to appeal to the Tsar himself
on behalf of these two, if they would only promise never to take part
in the revolution again. They both replied that if they were ever
released, they would fling themselves into the movement with more
enthusiasm than ever. So both were shot. And that one solid instance
of invincible heroism proves that even Poland, in spite of all her
divisions and abstractions and intrigues, is not beyond the hope of
liberty, since even in the wilderness of her parties that kind of
courage is seen to blossom.
[Illustration: 1905
1906
From _Jupel_ (_Sulphur_).]