THE HOMING EXILES--TWO KINDS
In a great, bare room, furnished with rows of narrow cots like a
hospital, but with none of the crisp whiteness of the hospital, nor any
of its promise of relief and restoration, a young man, propped with
pillows, played on a concertina. He was white, emaciated, near the end
of his young life. His eyes were like banked fires. He sat up in bed
and in the intervals of coughing made the most wonderful music on that
concertina, much more wonderful than I had ever dreamed the humble
instrument could produce. The man was a true musician, and he had had
many years of practice on his concertina, for it had been the one
friend and solace of a solitary confinement which lasted nearly a dozen
years. All around him in that bare room men lay in bed and listened
to him. Some, however, were asleep. Even music could not break their
weary rest. All were sick. Some were as near death as was the musician.
Siberia had done its work with them. They had come home to die.
On a soap box, or its equivalent on a corner of the Nevski Prospect
near the Alexander Theater, another young man stood and poured out a
passionate speech to the crowd of soldiers, workmen and workwomen and
idle boys who had paused to listen. The man was about thirty years
old, and his clothes, it was plain to see, had never been purchased in
Russia. They were American clothes of fair quality, and of that stylish
cut possible to buy for twenty-five dollars in almost any department
store. He wore a derby hat, tipped back on his head, a soft collar and
a flowing tie. He talked rapidly and with many gestures, and the crowd
listened with rapt interest to his speech. I, too, stopped to listen.
“What is he saying?” I asked my interpreter.
“I don’t like to tell you,” she replied.
I insisted, and this is an almost literal translation of what that man
said, on that Petrograd street corner, on an August day, 1917:
“You people over here in Russia don’t want to make a mistake of setting
up the kind of a republic, of the kind of phony democracy like what
they’ve got in the United States. I lived in the United States for ten
years, and you take it from me, it’s the worst government in the world.
They have a president who is worse than the Czar. The police are worse
than Cossacks. The capitalist class is on top there just like they were
in the old days in Russia. The working class is fighting them, and they
are going to win. We are going to put the capitalists out just like you
put them out here, and don’t you let any American capitalists come over
here and help fasten on you a government like that one they still have
in America. It’s the capitalists that plunged America into war. The
working class never wanted it.”
These are two types of exiles which Russia has called back to her bosom
since the revolution, both of which constitute another grave problem
with which the distracted people are struggling. The sick ones, of
whom there are thousands, came back and more of them are coming from
Siberia at a time when food suitable for the sick is impossible to
obtain. There was almost no milk. Eggs were hard to get and were not
very fresh. Food of all kinds was getting scarcer every day. There was
a fuel shortage that threatened to make all Russia spend a shivering
winter, and what was to become of the sick was and still is a grave
question. There is a great shortage of many medicines. If fighting is
resumed the hospitals will be overcrowded. Doctors and nurses will be
scarce. Yet the exiles continue to come back, the long stream from the
remote villages continues to hold out its longing hands to the people
back home, who cannot deny them. And nearly all the exiles come back
sick and homeless and penniless. Russia must take care of those freed
Siberian exiles, and I don’t quite see how she is going to do it,
unless the miracle happens and they find a way of restoring peace and
order in the land. In that case they can do anything. They can even
deal with the kind of exile I heard talking on the Nevski.
Carlyle says that of all man’s earthly possessions, unquestionably
the dearest to him are his symbols. They have the strongest hold on
us without a doubt. At the time of the French revolution the sign
and symbol of the old régime was the Bastille, that state prison in
Paris which was the living grave of the king’s enemies, or of almost
anybody who made himself unpopular with one of the king’s favorites.
When the French people rose up in their might and swept the old régime
out, the first thing they did, obeying a common impulse, was to tear
down and destroy utterly the Bastille. In Russia the sign and symbol
of the autocracy was the exile system, and particularly Siberia. The
first thing the Russian people did when they rose up and dethroned
the Romanoffs was to send telegrams to every political prison and to
every convict village in Siberia that the prisoners and exiles were
free. They sent orders to all the jailers and guards that the exiles
were to be furnished with clothing and money and transportation to
the railroads, and the railroads were directed to bring them back to
Petrograd.
There is something to warm the coldest blood in the thought of what
it must have meant to those poor desolate creatures, living in the
hopeless isolation of Siberia, to have the door of the cell open
one February day and hear the words,“You are free!” Sometimes the
announcement was prefaced by words of unheard of friendliness and
courtesy from wardens and jailers who had before been cruel and brutal
task-masters. “Please forgive me if I have been over-zealous in my
duties,” these men would say, and the prisoner would think that he
had gone mad and was dreaming. Then the announcement would come,
unbelievable in its wonder; the revolution had actually happened.
The Czar was gone. The prisoner was free. They heard that news in
the depths of mines, where men worked shackled and hopeless. They
heard it in lonely villages near the Arctic Circle. They heard it in
far lands, where homesick men and women toiled in sweatshops among
aliens. They were free, and Mother Russia was calling them home again.
I should think they would almost have died of joy at the tidings. No
generous mind can wonder that Russia called back her children, all of
them, without stopping to sort out the good and the bad, the well and
the sick, the desirable and the undesirable. Or without stopping to
calculate how she was going to take care of them when they got there.
But very early in the day it became evident that Russia was going to
face a serious problem in her returned exiles. In the very first days
of the revolution they opened all the prison doors in Petrograd as
well as in other Russian cities, and let all the prisoners out. Among
them were a number of politicals, and many of them immediately became
public charges. They had no money, no friends, no home. The revolution
had robbed them, in some cases, of all three. In some cases of long
imprisonment the homes and friends had been taken from them by death.
There had been a committee working secretly in behalf of political
prisoners, and now this committee, with a group in the Red Cross,
got together and formed a society which they call the Political Red
Cross, the committee in charge of returned exiles. For they saw plainly
that what had happened in the case of the Petrograd prisoners would
be repeated on a large scale when the Siberian exiles and those from
foreign lands returned. Another committee was formed in Moscow. They
sprang up in various cities, co-operating with the Zemstvoes or county
councils.
At the head of the work is Vera Figner, one of the most famous of the
old revolutionists, almost the last survivor of the nihilism of the
eighteen seventies. The Russians are said to lack organizing ability,
but the work done by this committee under Vera Figner’s direction
looks to me that once Russia gets a government that can govern and an
army that will fight the people of Russia will organize a civilization
that will teach Europe new things. The committee started with nothing,
not even machinery to work with. There is no such thing in Russia as
a charity organization society. Charity and benevolence there are,
mostly of the old-fashioned type, “Under the patronage of her imperial
highness, the Princess Olga,” or “the empress dowager.” There was no
well-organized society of any kind to appeal to to help take care of
some seventy-five thousand exiles hurrying home, an unknown number of
them sick, another unknown number poor and homeless, and all of them
strangers in a new Russia.
Vera Figner I saw in the Petrograd headquarters of the society. She
is a matronly woman, looking less than sixty, although she must be
older. She has a handsome face, with the deep, smoldering eyes of the
revolutionist, but her smile is quiet and kind. Near her at the long
committee table sat Mme. Kerenskaia, the estranged wife of the minister
president Kerensky. She is an attractive young woman with dark eyes and
abundant dark hair, who gives all of her time to the work of the exiles
committee. Mme. Gorki is another woman of prominence who works with
the committees, and Prince Kropotkin and his daughter, Mme. Lebedev,
whose husband was in the government when I left, are also constant
workers. The work was done through eight committees, one of which
collected money, a great deal of money, too. Hundreds of thousands of
roubles have poured in from all over Russia as well as from England,
America, France. Another committee collects clothes, and they are much
scarcer than money in Russia. A committee on home-finding also collects
sanitarium and hospital beds wherever they are to be found. A reception
committee meets the exiles and takes them to their various lodgings. A
medical and a legal aid committee take care of their own sides of the
work. All over Petrograd and Moscow they have established temporary
lodgings and temporary hospitals for the cure of the returned sick and
helpless. It was in such a refuge that I saw and heard the man with the
concertina.
I had come to find Marie Spirodonova, one of the most appealing as
well as the most tragic figures of the revolution of 1905-06. She
was the Charlotte Corday of that revolution, for like Charlotte she,
unaided by any revolutionary society, freed her country of one of
the worst monsters of his time. She shot and killed the half-mad and
wholly horrible governor of Tambosk. And like Charlotte she paid for
that deed with her life. She lived indeed to return to Russia, but her
span after that was short. Marie Spirodonova was in the last stages of
tuberculosis when they brought her back to Russia. Ten years’ solitary
confinement had done that for her. The first sentence of death,
afterward commuted to twenty years’ exile, would have been shorter
and more merciful. When I saw her, she was in bed, so wasted that she
looked like a child. The flush of fever on her cheeks gave her a false
look of health, and she looked almost as beautiful as on the day when
she stood in the prisoner’s dock and told the judges how and why she
killed the monster of a governor. Her voice was all but gone now, and
it was in a hoarse whisper that she greeted me, and asked news of her
one or two friends in America. I could stay only a few minutes, she was
so weak. It is hardly possible that she still lives, although no news
of her death has reached me.
Until the last breath she must have kept her iron will and indomitable
spirit. Ten years in a solitary cell could not break that spirit, as
the story of her release shows. When the first telegram came to the
distant prison, where she and nine other women were confined, the names
of only eight of them were specifically mentioned.
“But what about us?” wailed the two forgotten ones.
The warden of the prison perhaps did not entirely believe in the
success of the revolution, and wanted to be on the safe side. “You
stay,” he said.
“Then none of us will go,” said Marie Spirodonova, and they all stayed
until the next day when another telegram arrived setting them all free.
In the same spirit Spirodonova refused to leave her companions after
they reached Petrograd. She was so famous, so sought after, that she
could have chosen among a dozen hospitable homes, in the country, in
the Crimea or the bracing mountains of the Caucasus. But she said she
would not have anything her old prison mates did not have, so Marie
Spirodonova, daughter of a general, and the concertina player, child
of a peasant, die as they lived, revolutionists, spurning all the
comforts of life, all the protection and security of home, all the
plaudits of the world. They lived and died for Russia as surely as
though they died on the battlefield.
Of the same type is the most celebrated exile of all, Catherine
Breshkovskaia, the Babushka, or little grandmother of the revolution.
They brought Babushka back to Petrograd in the first rush. They gave
her a reception at the station such as no crowned head in Europe ever
had, and they took her to the Winter Palace and told her that when the
Czar moved out he left it to her. Babushka lived in the Winter Palace
when she was in Petrograd, which was seldom. Most of the time she was
touring rural Russia and trying to make her peasants understand what
the revolution meant, and that they would make the country a worse
place than it ever was before unless they stopped fighting to grab all
the land in sight without any regard to right and justice. “I know
them,” she said in a brief talk I had with her in the palace. “If I can
only live long enough to reach them in numbers, I can deal with them.
They have listened to a pack of nonsense, but I shall tell them better.”
Breshkovskaia is past seventy years old. She is growing very deaf,
and her weight makes traveling difficult. Yet her mind is clear and
vigorous, and when she makes a speech she manages somehow to call
back the voice and the strength of a woman of forty. Spirodonova,
Breshkovskaia, Kropotkin, Tschaikovsky and almost every one of the old
revolutionists are eager adherents of the moderate program of the early
provisional government, before the Bolsheviki crowded in with their
cry of “All the power to the Soviets!” They want the war fought to a
finish, and they want order restored in Russia. It is quite otherwise
with another type of exile, and I am sorry to say some of this other
kind were made in the United States of America.
[Illustration: 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.]
In the boat in which I crossed the Atlantic last May there were three
Russian men who had spent some years in America and were on their
way back to Petrograd. These men were not exiles, but they had found
Russia intolerable to live in and had gone to America, which had been
so kind to them in a material way that they were able to go back to
Russia in the first cabin of an ocean liner. All three were pronounced
pacifists and one was a readymade Bolshevik. He was for the whole
program, separate peace, no annexations or contributions, no sharing
the government with the bourgeois, no compromise on anything. A real
Bolshevik. And made on the east side of New York. This man used to talk
to me on deck and in the saloon about how the Soldiers’ and Workmen’s
Delegates were going to dictate terms of peace to the allies, and how
the social revolution was going to spread all over the world, and
especially all over America, and then he would hasten to assure me that
he wasn’t nearly as radical as some of the Tavarishi I would meet in
Russia, and he wasn’t. When we reached the Finnish frontier and stopped
at Tornea for examination I had the pleasure of seeing all three of
these men taken into custody by some remnant of authority existing
in the army, and taken down to Petrograd under guard as men who had
evaded military duty. My friend declared that nothing would ever induce
him to put on a uniform or to fight. Not he. And the others rather
less confidently echoed his defiance. Finally one of them said: “on
the whole, I think I will enlist. They need educated men at the front
to talk peace to them.” Thus at least one emissary of the Kaiser was
contributed to poor, bleeding Russia by the United States.
Just one more case, because it is typical of many. This man was a
real exile, and for eleven years he had lived in Chicago. Born in a
small city of western Russia, he joined, when still a youth, what was
known as the Bund, a socialist propagandist circle of Jewish young men
and women. The youth’s parents, quiet, orthodox people, knew nothing
of his activities, nor of the revolutionary literature of which he
was custodian and which he had concealed in the sand bags piled up
around the cottage to keep out the winter cold. On May 31, 1905, the
Tavarishi, or comrades, in his town organized a small demonstration
against the celebration of the Czar’s birthday. The next day the
police began searching houses and making arrests among the youth of
the town, and they found the books hidden in the sandbags. The boy
fled, and found refuge in the next town. Money was raised, a passport
forged and the youth finally got to England via Germany. He didn’t like
England and in 1906 he crossed to the United States. He didn’t like the
United States either, and his whole career in Chicago was a history of
agitation and rebellion. He was one of the founders of a socialist
Sunday school in Mayor Thompson’s town, where children of tender years
are given a thorough education in Bolshevik first principles.
When the Russian revolution broke and Russian consuls all over the
world advertised for exiles to be taken back to Russia’s heart, this
man presented himself as one of the returners. He showed me the
certificate issued by the Russian consulate in Chicago. It says that it
was issued in accordance with the orders of the provisional government
and records that the said ---- ---- was paid the sum of $157.25 and
was given transportation from Chicago to Petrograd, via the Pacific
Ocean and the Trans-Siberian railroad. At Vladivostock he received more
money, and on his arrival in Petrograd he was given a small weekly
allowance in addition to his free lodgings. He had a good time on the
journey, he said. There was a band at most of the stations where the
train stopped, crowds, flowers and much cheering. It was agreeable to
get back to Petrograd also and be met by a committee. But the habit
of hating governments was so settled in his system that within a
week he was talking against the one that had paid his way back, and
he was talking hard against the one which had taken him in and given
him a free education and a job and a chance to establish a socialist
Sunday school with perfect impunity. He was in with all the Bolshevik
activities except one. He had no stomach for fighting. The spirit was
willing but the flesh was weak. It got to a point where it was hard to
be a Bolshevik in good standing and never do any gun work, so this
exile determined to go back to Chicago. When I knew him he was haunting
the committees and various ministries trying to persuade them to give
him the money with which to return.
“You don’t think they can draft me into the American army, do you?” he
asked me anxiously. “I am a Russian subject. I don’t see how they could
do it legally.”
I don’t know how many men of this kind went back to Russia from the
United States, but there were enough of them to be conspicuous, and the
Russian radicals believe them to be far more reliable witnesses than
the Root Commission, which made a remarkably good impression on the
educated people but none at all on the Tavarishi. “Don’t you believe
that the United States is in this war for democracy,” shouted one
Nevsky Prospect orator. “The United States is just as imperialistic as
England. You oughtta read what Lincoln Steffens and John Reed wrote
about the United States and Mexico.” These men will do Russia all the
harm they can, and then they will come back to America and do us all
the harm they can. If I had my way they would go from Ellis Island,
with all the rest of their kind still remaining here, to some kind of a
devil’s island in the South Seas and be kept there until they died.