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INSIDE THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION
[Illustration: Logo]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
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MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: Catherine Breshkovskaia, the “Little Grandmother of the
Russian Revolution.”]
INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
BY
RHETA CHILDE DORR
_ILLUSTRATED_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1917
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1917,
By THE EVENING MAIL
COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and Electrotyped. Published November, 1917
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I TOPSY-TURVY LAND 1
II “ALL THE POWER TO THE SOVIET” 10
III THE JULY REVOLUTION 19
IV AN HOUR OF HOPE 30
V THE COMMITTEE MANIA 41
VI THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN 50
VII TO THE FRONT WITH BOTCHKAREVA 58
VIII CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD 65
IX AMAZONS IN TRAINING 75
X THE HOMING EXILES--TWO KINDS 84
XI HOW RASPUTIN DIED 97
XII ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS 107
XIII MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT 119
XIV THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS 129
XV THE HOUSE OF MARY AND MARTHA 141
XVI THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE 152
XVII GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR 162
XVIII WHEN THE WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS 172
XIX WHY COTTON CLOTH IS SCARCE 181
XX MRS. PANKHURST IN RUSSIA 189
XXI KERENSKY, THE MYSTERY MAN 199
XXII THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS 208
XXIII WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD? 217
XXIV RUSSIA’S GREATEST NEEDS 226
XXV WHAT NEXT? 235
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Catherine Breshkovskaia, the “Little Grandmother
of the Russian Revolution.” _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Typical crowd on the Nevski Prospect during the
Bolshevik or Maximalist risings 22
Kerensky watching the funeral of victims of the July
Bolshevik risings 42
Mareea Botchkareva, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and
Women of “The Battalion of Death.” 52
Prince Felix Yussupoff, at whose palace on the
Moika Canal Rasputin was killed, and his wife,
the Grand Duchess Irene Alexandrovna, niece of
the late Czar 92
Gregory Rasputin and some of his female devotees 108
Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky 142
The Grand Duchess Elizabeta Feodorovna, sister of
the late Czarina, and widow of the Grand Duke
Serge, who was assassinated during the Revolution
of 1905, now Abbess of the House of Mary and
Martha at Moscow 150
INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
TOPSY-TURVY LAND
Early in May, 1917, I went to Russia, eager to see again, in the hour
of her deliverance, a country in whose struggle for freedom I had, for
a dozen years, been deeply interested. I went to Russia a socialist
by conviction, an ardent sympathizer with revolution, having known
personally some of the brave men and women who suffered imprisonment
and exile after the failure of the uprising in 1905-6. I returned from
Russia with the very clear conviction that the world will have to wait
awhile before it can establish any coöperative millenniums, or before
it can safely hand over the work of government to the man in the street.
All my life I have been an admiring student of the French revolution,
and I have fervently wished that I might have lived in the Paris of
that time, to witness, even as a humble spectator, the downfall of
autocracy and the birth of a people’s liberty. Well--I lived for three
months in the capital of revolutionary Russia. I saw a revolution
which presents close parallels with the French revolution both in men
and events. I saw the downfall of autocracy and the birth of liberty
much greater than the French ever aspired to. I saw the fondest dream
of the socialists suddenly come true, and the dream turned out to be a
nightmare such as I pray that this or any country may forever be spared.
I saw a people delivered from one class tyranny deliberately hasten
to establish another, quite as brutal and as unmindful of the common
good as the old one. I saw these people, led out of groaning bondage,
use their first liberty to oust the wise and courageous statesmen who
had delivered them. I saw a working class which had been oppressed
under czardom itself turn oppressor; an army that had been starved and
betrayed use its freedom to starve and betray its own people. I saw
elected delegates to the people’s councils turn into sneak thieves and
looters. I saw law and order and decency and all regard for human life
or human rights set aside, and I saw responsible statesmen in power
allow all this to go on, allow their country to rush toward an abyss of
ruin and shame because they were afraid to lose popularity with the mob.
The government was so afraid of losing the support of the mob that
it permitted the country to be overrun by German agents posing
as socialists. These agents spent fortunes in the separate peace
propaganda alone. They demoralized the army, corrupted the workers in
field and factories, and put machine guns in the hands of fanatical
dreamers, sending them out into the streets to murder their own
friends and neighbors. Every one knew who these men were, but the mob
liked their “line of talk” and the government was afraid to touch them.
After one of the last occasions when, at their behest, the Bolsheviki
went out and shot up Petrograd, Lenine, the arch leader, and some of
his principal gangsters deemed it the part of discretion to retire
from Russia temporarily, and they got to Sweden without the slightest
difficulty, no attempt having been made to stop them. Some of the minor
employees of the Kaiser were arrested, among them a woman in whose name
the bank account appeared to be. But she too, and probably all the
others, were later released.
A government like this could not bring peace and order into a
distracted nation. It could not establish a democracy. It could not
govern. The sooner the allied countries realize this the better it will
be for Russia and for the world that wants peace. It is not because I
am unfriendly to Russia that I write thus. It is because I am friendly,
because I have faith in the future of the Russian people, because I
believe that their experiment in popular government, if it succeeds,
will be as inspiring to the rest of the world as our own was in the
eighteenth century. I think the most unkind thing any friend of Russia
can do is to minimize or conceal the facts about the terrible upheaval
going on there at the present time. Russia looks to the American people
for help in her troubled hour, and if the American people are to help
they will have to understand the situation. No discouragement to the
allies, no assistance to the common enemy need result from a plain
statement of the facts. The enemy knows all the facts already.
Everything I saw in Russia, in the cities and near the front, convinced
me that what is going on there vitally concerns us. Every man,
woman and child in the United States must get to work to give the
help so sorely needed by the allies. Whatever has failed in Russia,
whatever has broken down must never be missed. We must supply these
deficiencies. Our business now is to understand, and to hurry, hurry,
hurry with our task of getting trained and seasoned men into France.
After what I saw in the neighborhood of Vilna, Dvinsk and Jacobstadt,
I know what haste on this side means to the world. There are several
reasons why the whole truth has not before been written about the
Russian revolution. It could not be written or cabled from Russia.
It could not be carried out in the form of notes or photographs. It
could not even be discovered by the average person who goes to Russia,
because the average visitor lives at the expensive Hotel d’Europe,
never goes out except in a droshky, and meets only Russians of social
position to whom he has letters of introduction, and who naturally
try to give him the impression that the troubled state of affairs is
merely temporary. The visitor usually knows no Russian and cannot read
the newspapers. There are two good French newspapers published in
Petrograd, but the average American traveler is as ignorant of French
as of Russian. Even if he could read all the daily papers, however, he
would not get very much information. The press censorship is as rigid
and as tyrannical to-day as in the heyday of the autocracy, only a
different kind of news is suppressed. One of the modest demands put
forth by the Tavarishi (comrades) when I was in Petrograd was for a
requisition of all the white print paper in the market, the paper to be
distributed equally among all newspapers, large and small. The object,
candidly stated, was to diminish the size and the circulation of the
“bourgeois” papers.
A great deal of news, as we regard news, never gets into the papers at
all, or is compressed into very small space. For example there have
been a number of terrible railroad accidents on the Russian roads. Most
of these one never heard of unless some one he knew happened to be
killed or injured. Sometimes a bare announcement of a great fatality
was permitted. Thus an express train between Moscow and Petrograd was
wrecked, forty persons being killed and more than seventy injured. This
wreck got a whole paragraph in the newspapers, with no list of the
dead and injured and no explanation of the cause. The fact is that the
railroads are in a condition of complete demoralization and the only
wonder is that more wrecks do not occur.
An acquaintance of mine in Moscow, the wife of a colonel in the British
army, was anxious to go to Petrograd to meet her husband who was
expected there on his way from the front. My friend’s father, who is
the managing head of a large Moscow business concern, tried to prevail
on her to wait for her husband to reach her there, but she was anxious
to see him at the earliest moment and insisted on her tickets being
purchased. The day after she was to have gone her father called on me
and told me of his intense relief at receiving, an hour before train
time, a telegram from the colonel saying that he would be in Moscow the
next morning.
“And what do you think happened to that train my daughter was to have
taken?” he asked. It was the regular night express to Petrograd,
corresponding somewhat to the Congressional Limited between New York
and Washington. A few miles out of Moscow a difference arose between
the engineer and the stoker, and in order to settle it they stopped the
train and had a fight. One of the men hit the other on the head with a
monkey wrench, injuring him pretty badly. Authority of some kind stepped
in and arrested the assailant. The engineer’s cab was blood-stained,
and some authority unhitched the engine and sent it back to Moscow as
evidence. The train all this time, with its hundreds of passengers,
stood on the tracks waiting for a new engine and crew, and if it was
not run into and wrecked it was because it was lucky.
About the middle of August an American correspondent traveled on that
same express train from Petrograd to Moscow. The night was warm, and
as the Russian occupants of his carriage had the usual constitutional
objection to raised windows, he insisted on leaving the door of the
compartment open. In the middle of the night a band of soldiers boarded
the train and went into every one of the unlocked compartments, five in
all, neatly and silently looting them of all bags and suitcases. The
American correspondent lost everything he possessed--extra clothes,
money, passport, papers. There was a Russian staff officer in that
compartment and he lost even the clothes he traveled in, and was
obliged to descend in his pajamas. The conductor of the train admitted
that he saw the robbery committed, that he raised no hand to prevent
it, nor even pressed the signal which would have stopped the train.
“They would have killed me,” he pleaded in extenuation. “Besides, it
happens almost every night on a small or large scale.”
There is only one way of getting at the facts of the Russian situation,
and that is by living as the Russians do, associating with Russians,
hearing their stories day by day of the tragedy of what has been called
the bloodless revolution. This I did, as nearly as it was possible,
from the end of May until the 30th of August, in Petrograd, Moscow and
behind one of the fighting fronts. In Petrograd I lived in the Hotel
Militaire, formerly the Astoria, the headquarters of Russian officers
and of the numerous English, French and Roumanian officers on missions
in Russia. This was the hotel where the bitterest fighting took place
during the revolutionary days of February, 1917. The outside of the
building is literally riddled with bullets, every window had to be
replaced, and the work of renovating the interior was still going on
when I left. Under the window in my bedroom was a pool of dried blood
as big as a saucer, and the carpet was stained with drops leading from
the window to the stationary washbowl in the alcove dressing room. Over
the bed were two bullet holes.
Since the revolution the Hotel Militaire has been a garrison, soldiers
sleeping in several rooms on the ground floor and two sentinels
standing day and night at the door and at the gateway leading into
the service court. I do not know why, when I asked for a room, the
manager gave it to me. Two other women writers had rooms there, but
one was in a party which included American officers, and the other
was introduced by an English officer attached to the British embassy.
However, I took the room and was grateful, because whatever happened in
Petrograd was quickly known in the hotel. Also, it faced the square on
which was located the Marie Palace, where the provisional government
held many of its meetings, and where several important congresses were
held. Whenever the Bolsheviki broke loose this square always saw some
fighting. It was an excellent place for a correspondent to live.
I spent much of my time in the streets, listening, with the aid of
an interpreter, a young university girl, to the speeches which were
continually being made up and down the Nevski Prospect, the Litainy and
other principal streets. I talked, through my interpreter, with people
who sat beside me on park benches, in trams, railroad trains and other
public places. I met all the Russians I could, people of every walk of
life, of every political faith. I spent days in factories. I talked
with workers and with employers. I even met and talked with adherents
of the old régime. I talked for nearly an hour with the last Romanoff
left in freedom, the Grand Duchess Serge, sister of the former empress,
widow of the emperor’s uncle. I went, late at night, to a palace on the
Grand Morskaia where in strictest retirement lives the woman who has
been charged with being the closest friend and ally of Rasputin, the
one who, at his orders, is alleged to have administered poison to the
young Czarevitch. I traveled in a troop train two days and nights with
a regiment of fighting women--the Botchkareva “Battalion of Death”--and
I lived with them in their barrack behind the fighting lines for nine
days. I stayed with them until they went into action, I saw them
afterward in the hospitals and heard their own stories of the battle
into which they led thousands of reluctant men. I talked with many
soldiers and officers.
Russia is sick. She is gorged on something she has never known
before--freedom: she is sick almost to die with excesses, and the
leadership which would bring the panacea is violently thrown aside
because suspicion of any authority has bred the worst kind of license.
Russia is insane; she is not even morally responsible for what she is
doing. Will she recover? Yes. But, God! what pain must she bear before
she gets real freedom!