THE COMMITTEE MANIA
In writing a plain statement of the condition of anarchy into which
Russia has fallen, I am very far from wishing to create a prejudice
against the Russian people. I don’t want anybody to distrust or scorn
the Russians. I want the American people to understand their situation
in order that, through sympathy, patience and common sense, they can
find some way of helping them out of the blind morass that surrounds
them. All the educated Russians I have met like Americans and trust
them. They will not soon forget that the United States was the first
great power to recognize the new government and to hail the revolution.
The American ambassador, David R. Francis, is easily the most popular
diplomat in Petrograd. Every one knows him, and he rarely appeared
in a meeting or convention without being applauded. Over and over
again, during my three months’ visit to Russia, I was told that it
was to America they looked for help and guidance, and after the war
they want to enter into the closest commercial relations with us. One
business man said to me just before I left: “Tell your people that we
will never trade with Germany again unless the Americans force us to
do so. If they will supply us with chemicals, with manufactures and
machinery, we will gladly buy them. If they will send us experts for
our manufacturing plants we will be delighted to have them instead of
the Germans we used to employ, who never taught our people any of their
knowledge because they did not want us to develop.”
The Russians want us to help them establish public schools; to
show them how to build and operate great railroad systems; to farm
scientifically; to do any number of things we have learned to do well.
We mustn’t despise the Russians, we must help them. And we can’t do
that unless we understand them. Take, for example, the army situation.
It is very bad. The mass of the soldiers are in rebellion against all
authority. But consider the past history, the very recent past history
of those soldiers. Aside from brutal personal treatment at the hands
of some of the officers, they were cheated and starved and neglected
by the bureaucracy in Petrograd, and then again by their commanders
at the front. The Russian soldier’s wants are simple enough. He eats
the same food seven days in the week and rarely complains. This food
consists of soup made of salt meat and cabbage; kasha, a porridge
made of buckwheat; black bread and tea. “Ivan” wears coarse clothes
and big, clumsy boots, and he has none of the small comforts we think
essential to the fighting man in the field. But slight as the Russian
soldier’s equipment is he did not invariably get it in the old days.
It was stolen from him by a band of official crooks with which the
war department and the army were honeycombed. Every department of the
army, from the commissariat to the Red Cross, was full of corruption
and graft. The traffic in army supplies and ammunition, even in
hospital supplies, that went on constantly beggars description. Gen.
Sukhomlinoff, the former minister of war, who has been tried and
sentenced to life imprisonment for the part he played in this business,
was only one of the big thieves. Under him were myriads more, and among
them all the soldiers were often stripped of their overcoats in the
dead of winter, and of half of their rations the year round. When a
Russian soldier was badly wounded he might as well have been shot as
succored. I have seen these men, pitiful wretches, having lost one or
more arms or legs, blind perhaps, or frightfully disfigured, begging in
the streets of Petrograd. Clad in tattered uniform, pale and miserable,
these poor soldiers stand on the steps of the churches or on street
corners and beg a few kopecks from the passersby. There is no such
thing as a pension for them, no soldiers’ homes. They suffered for a
country that knew no such thing as gratitude. Russia sent her men into
battle without sufficient arms or ammunition with which to fight. It
fed them to the German guns without mercy, that a band of looters in
the government might buy sables and bet on horse races. It let them
shiver and freeze in shoddy uniforms that army contractors might grow
rich. And, after they were wounded, it let them beg their bread.
[Illustration: Kerensky watching the funeral of victims of the July
Bolshevik risings.]
Small wonder, then, after the revolution, that there was a great
popular demand for swift justice for the soldiers. The provisional
government announced that henceforth each regiment should have an
elected committee, an executive body which should have entire charge
of regimental affairs. Food, clothing, supplies of all kinds, were to
pass through the hands of these committees, and they were to hear and
pass on all complaints. The committees were the vocal organs of the
army. For the first time in Russian history the soldier was allowed
to speak. The plan might have worked excellently had the provisional
government not made the mistake of too much zeal in democratizing the
army. It gorged the soldiers with freedom, gave them such heady doses
of self-government that they got drunk on the idea and ran amuck like
so many crazed Malays. Kerensky decreed that the soldiers need not
salute their officers. “Well then, we won’t,” they said. “And just to
show how free we are we won’t wash our faces, or wear clean clothes, or
touch our caps to women, or stand up straight----” and from that it was
an easy journey to “We won’t take any orders from anybody.”
The government told the soldiers to elect their own officers, and they
did, after butchering a thousand or so of their old ones. They elected
them wisely in some instances, but in a great many more they did not.
They chose men, not for their capacity to lead in a military way, but
for their political views. In a Bolshevik regiment the best Bolsheviki
were elected. If there was a Minshevik majority the new officers were
pretty sure to be Minsheviki. And after they were elected nobody
respected them, nor did they dare give orders. But of all the madness
that took possession of the “free” soldiers, the committee madness went
farthest. The Russians love to talk. To make speeches, to heckle and
be heckled is the joy of their lives. The committee gave them a new
chance to talk, and they got the habit of calling a committee meeting
on every conceivable occasion. Petrograd heard with horror last summer
that the men in the trenches, when ordered to advance, actually called
meetings to discuss the orders and to vote whether or not they were to
be followed. They did this at times when the Germans were at the very
gates of an important strategic point.
Even in the hospitals it got so that the doctors and the nurses were
without authority. If a man was ordered to take a pill he wanted to
call a committee meeting to discuss the thing. It is an actual fact
that men refused to take treatment or undergo operations until they
had consulted the Tavarishi about it. From that to refusing to obey
any orders is a short step, and Red Cross nurses have told me some
fantastic stories about life in Russian lazarets. Some wounded men
refused to take their clothes off and insisted on wearing them, boots
and all, to bed. Others refused to go to bed at night, preferring to
snooze during the day and wander around in pajamas and dressing gowns
at night. Some insisted on being discharged before they should be,
while others, on being discharged, declined to go.
They were not like that in all hospitals, of course. Ivan is a great
child, and very often he is a stupid and an unruly child. But often
he is good, especially when he is sick and suffering and in need of
women’s care and kindness. I don’t want to describe the bad hospital
conditions without admitting that they have the other kind, too, in
Russia. I remember seeing at the corner of a street below a big
lazaret in Petrograd a dozen discharged wounded men and a group of
nurses and orderlies. They were waiting for the tram which was to carry
the men to the railroad station. Some still wore bandages, some were
on crutches, some walked with the aid of sticks. Two were blind. But
all were wildly happy at the prospect of going home to the old village.
The nurses and orderlies shared in the excitement. Some of them were
going to the station, and had their arms full of bundles, clothes, food
and souvenirs of battle. One nurse carried a competent looking cork
leg, the future prop of a pale young fellow on crutches. The car swung
around the corner, full of passengers, idle soldiers mostly, but even
they, at the command of the energetic sister, vacated their seats for
the invalids. They climbed aboard, and those who were most helpless
were lifted. The cork leg was handed in through an open window and
delivered to one of the more able-bodied men. There had been plenty
of time for farewells before, but parting was difficult, and for five
minutes after boarding the car the men continued to shake hands with
the nurses, to shout last messages, and to kiss their hands to those on
the sidewalk. The nurses patted their charges’ arms and shoulders, and
called anxious admonitions. “Take care of that leg, Ivan Feodorovitch.
You know how to bandage it. Don’t try to walk too much, and keep out of
the sun.” You didn’t have to know a word of Russian to understand what
those nurses were saying.
The street car conductor wrung her hands and begged to be allowed to go
on. The time schedule had to be observed. “Please, sister, please,”
she entreated, and at last she was permitted to ring the bell and send
her car forward. As it turned the corner the men were still waving and
laughing and wiping the tears from their cheeks. I don’t believe those
men had called any committee meetings before obeying their nurses, or
ever reminded the doctors that it was a free country now and they could
take medicine or not as they pleased.
You certainly got tired of that overworked phrase “It’s a free country
now.” You hear it on all sides in Russia. “It’s a free country,” says
a man with a third-class ticket taking possession of a first-class
compartment. “It’s a free country,” declares a soldier, tossing a
handful of sunflower seed shells on a woman’s white shoes in a street
car. “It’s a free country,” say a group of men, stripping off their
clothes before a crowd of women and children and taking a bath in the
Neva. This occurs frequently on the Admiralty quay, a great pleasure
resort in Petrograd.
“They called them Sans Culottes during the French Revolution,” said a
clever woman writer in one of the newspapers. “Our men will go down to
fame as Sans Caleçons. The difference, perhaps, between a political and
a social revolution.” The first French phrase means without trousers.
The second carries the denuding process to its concluding stage.
In this kind of a free country nobody is free. Try to imagine how
it would be in Washington, in the office of the secretary of the
treasury, let us say, if a committee of the American Federation of
Labor should walk in and say: “We have come to control you. Produce
your books and all your confidential papers.” This is what happens to
cabinet ministers in Russia, and will continue until they succeed in
forming a government responsible only to the electorate, and not a
slave to the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates. Of course,
the simile is grossly unfair to the American Federation of Labor. Our
organized labor men are the most intelligent working people in the
community, and most of them have had a long experience in citizenship.
Above all, their loyalty, as a body, has been amply demonstrated. The
Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates has among its members
loyal, honest, intelligent men and women. But it has also a number of
extreme radicals, people who would dishonor the country by concluding a
separate peace with Germany, and who care nothing for the interests of
any group except their own. Nobody in Russia has very much experience
in citizenship, and the working people have less than others. Yet
the soviet, to give the council its local name, deems itself quite
capable of passing on all affairs of state, not only in Russia but in
the allied countries as well. The soviets have had the presumption to
announce that they are going to name the peace terms, although Russia
has virtually ceased to fight. “No annexations or contributions,” is
the formula, very evidently made in Germany. I am sure that not one in
a thousand knows what this means.
“Have you ever thought,” I asked a member of the Petrograd council,
“what your program would mean to the working people of Belgium? Don’t
you think that the farmers and artisans of northern France are
entitled to compensation for their ruined homes and blasted lives?”
“Yes, but not from Germany,” was the astounding reply. “All countries
should contribute.”
“If I were a cashier in a bank and stole a million dollars of the
depositors’ money, do you think I ought to be made to pay it back, or
should all the employés be taxed?” To this question I got no answer.
There isn’t any answer.
In all this confusion of mind, this whirlwind of ideas and theories,
are there no Russians who can think clearly? Are there no brave and
courageous people left in Russia? None who realize the ruin and
desolation which is being prepared for them? There are. Russia has its
submerged minority of thinkers. It has at least two fighting elements
which are ready to die to restore peace, order and bright honor to
their distracted land. These two elements are the Cossacks and the
women.