WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD?
Will the German army get to Petrograd and Moscow? The answer to this
question is, they probably can if they want to, but it is hardly
possible that they do. If they have that object, and if they succeed
in taking Moscow it will simply add one more to the psychological
blunders committed by the German government since the war began. The
disorganized Russian army might not pull itself together and fight
for Petrograd, but the army and the people would fight to the death
for Moscow. It is their holy city, their crown of glory, their dream.
Moscow is Russia, and one who has never seen it knows not the Russian
people.
Petrograd is a modern European city, built by Peter the Great in the
early part of the eighteenth century and by Catherine II, also called
“the Great,” in the latter half of the same century. Peter, who would
have been a master man in any century and in any country, whether born
in a palace or a farmhouse, was all the more a marvel because he was
a Russian, born at a time when the Russian people were still medieval
and still oriental. Peter didn’t allow the fact that he was heir to an
oriental autocracy to interfere with his ambitions or his activities.
He left the golden palace in the Kremlin, left Moscow, the capital,
and sacred heart of the empire, left Russia altogether, and went off
to become a day laborer in the shipyards of England and Holland. Peter
learned what he could in a short time and went back to establish
western civilization in Russia. He chose the site of his new capital
much as the United States Steel Company chose the site of Gary, Ind.,
for its nearness to a good harbor, its easy access to trade routes and
its fine front view of the best commercial centers. Peter called his
city “a window toward Europe.”
Petersburg, as it was styled by the half German Peter, was a more
stupendous piece of engineering than Gary, Ind., although the steel
town is one of the greatest triumphs of engineering this country can
boast. It was built on a marsh which nowhere rose above the muddy
waters of the Neva more than two or three feet, and in most places was
partially or wholly submerged. That marsh never has been completely
drained. When, in 1765, St. Isaac’s Cathedral was built to replace
a small wooden church of Peter’s time, they first had to drive over
twelve hundred huge piles into the soft ground. Of the 40,000 workmen
who toiled under Peter’s direction to create the first Petrograd a
majority died from exposure and cold, and of fevers bred in the miasmas
of the bogs.
Catherine, who became czarina a little more than half a century later,
vastly improved the city. She enlarged it, erecting many splendid
palaces and public buildings, and bringing in a vast amount of western
culture in the way of libraries, art galleries and theatres. The
monuments of Peter and Catherine are the most conspicuous objects in
the capital. The ghosts of Catherine and Peter may be said to walk in
every street in Petrograd. But the Russians, for all their admiration
for their greatest monarchs, have little real love for the city they
built.
The ghost of Ivan the Terrible walks through the streets of Moscow;
nevertheless, the Russians love the place as the Mohammedans love
Mecca. It is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and one
of the strangest. It has hundreds of churches, so gorged with art
treasures and with gold, silver and jewels that it dizzies the mind
to contemplate them. It has the ancient wall, foliage-hung, that
enclosed the Moscow of the thirteenth century, and it has the Kremlin,
or fortress, which antedates the town. Inside the Kremlin is the old
palace of the rulers of Russia built, in part, centuries before they
became czars. The first Kremlin palaces were built by the dukes of
Moscow in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Some of the most beautiful of the treasure churches of the Kremlin were
built by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. One of these,
just outside the walls, the Cathedral of St. Basil, is a gem of such
radiance supreme that the half-mad Ivan determined that it should never
be surpassed. When it was finished he called the architect to him and
asked him if he thought he could ever design a better church. The
architect, in the pride and joy of his achievement, modestly said that
he thought he might. “You never will,” said the terrible Ivan, and he
had the man’s eyes burned out with red-hot irons.
In the great square in front of the Kremlin still stands the high place
of execution where Ivan and the other almost as terrible czars tortured
and slew their victims. In a side street still stands the wonderful
golden house which was the home and seat of the Romanoff boyars, and
where the first (or second) czar of Russia was born. Moscow is the very
symbol of czardom; nevertheless the Russians love it as their heart.
Germany might send her armies there, but they could no more take it, or
hold it, than they could take and hold Washington. Inside the Kremlin
walls lie heaped thousands of bronze cannons, bright and beautiful
as snakes, all decorated with eagles and N’s and ambitious mottoes.
Napoleon Bonaparte left them there when he fled, defeated and routed by
the Russians, only to be still more soundly defeated by snow and storm
and bitter cold. Those cannon are evidence indeed of the invincibility
of Moscow.
Germany ought to know that a march on Moscow, however easy, would
result in unifying the Russian army against the foe. Perhaps Germany
does not know this, for she seems not to know anything about the hearts
and minds of any people. The mechanics of nationality she knows and
understands. The psychology of it she never understands. However, I
do not believe that Germany’s recent attack and partial conquest of
the islands before Riga are a prelude to a march on the capital or on
Moscow. What Germany probably wants is the splendid loot to be found in
Courland and Esthonia. Riga, which is a city of 400,000 inhabitants,
is, next to Petrograd, the most important port on the Baltic Sea. Out
from Riga go immense exports of timber, flax and hemp, linseed and many
cereals. The country east and south of Riga produces these things in
great quantity, and Germany needs them in her business just now, and
needs them badly enough to risk a few of her ships and men to get them.
Germany is not after conquest, this trip; she is after food and fuel
and supplies. A little south of Riga lie the Governments of Kovno,
Vilna and Minsk, and a little south and west lies Russian Poland,
already partially in German hands. I traveled through part of that
country last summer and watched through the train windows vast fields
of rye and wheat, and thousands of acres of potatoes. I did not see
many sugar-beet fields, but they lie somewhere in that region--hundreds
of thousands of acres of them, already harvested or waiting to be
harvested. And Germany is hungry for those harvests.
There may be other reasons why Germany is pounding so desperately at
the defenses of Riga. Not very far away, to the north, washed by the
same Baltic Sea, lies the grand duchy of Finland, the one province of
the Russian empire which has shown friendliness to Germany. Finland
is also the one province which has already declared its unalterable
determination not to belong further to the Russian empire. Finland
wishes to set up a separate government and to be an independent state.
At least the mass of the people, expressing themselves through a
Socialist majority in the local Diet, has declared for this policy.
It would be tremendously to the advantage of Germany to have the
big Russian empire split up into separate states, and the German
government has worked assiduously to encourage the Finnish people in
their secession policy. Finland is such a Mecca for German agents, and
so many Finns are in the pay of these agents, that the provisional
government last July practically shut the grand duchy off, marooned
it, so to speak, from the rest of the empire. A traveler cannot go
to Finland from Russia without special permission obtained from the
war ministry. A resident of Petrograd could not go down to one of the
numerous and charming Finnish seaside towns near the capital, even for
a week-end visit, without such a permit. I have spent some time in
Finland and know a great many people in Helsingfors, the capital. I
tried to get a permit to stop in Helsingfors on my way out of Russia,
but the war ministry refused to grant the permit.
When the traveler left Russia for England or the United States, for
any country, for that matter, he had to take a certain train leaving
Petrograd at 7.30 o’clock in the morning, and he left that train just
once before he reached the frontier. That once is at Beli Ostrov,
for the customs inspection. After that the traveler was a prisoner
in his train until he reached Tornea, where he was finally inspected
and convoyed across a narrow stretch of water to Sweden. That was the
attitude of the Russian provisional government toward Finland.
The grand duchy is rightly considered one of the greatest menaces to
the future integrity of the empire. It is rightly considered by Germany
a hope for the future of Germany, and it may very well be that the
German navy expects and hopes to follow up the conquest of the Baltic
port of Riga with a conquest of the Baltic port of Helsingfors. Finland
detests Russia to such an extent that she is apparently blind to the
danger of a friendship with Germany. For fifty years she has hated and
feared Russia, and she apparently cannot get it into her head that the
thing she hated and feared has gone forever. I have observed this state
of mind in Poles as well as Finns. They have hated Russia so long that
they cannot stop all at once. The Finns have hated Russia so hard that
they would not even look at the Russian soldiers quartered on them by
the old government. I spent the winter of 1913 in Helsingfors, and
it was one of the sights of the place to me to watch the Finns cut
the Russians in the street every day. A regiment of Russians marched
through the streets, bands playing, swords clanking, feet tramping,
a gorgeous sight. But the soldiers might as well have been invisible
phantoms for all the notice taken of them by the Finns. They walked
quietly along, attending to their business, conversing or chatting with
their neighbors, never looking at the Russians. In fact, it was a point
of honor with the Finns never to look at a Russian. As for speaking
to one, knowing him, inviting him to his house, a Finn who did such a
thing would have been ostracized. Even the smallest children knew that.
This being the state of mind of the Finns, it is explainable in a
measure why, in order to wring their independence from Russia now,
they are willing to run a very great risk of being absorbed or badly
exploited by the Germany of after the war. They became part of the
Russian empire willingly, having been on very bad terms for a number
of years with their old over-lord, Sweden. This was in 1801. Then the
Czar made a solemn compact with Finland, both for himself and his
heirs, that the country should have almost complete autonomy. It was
to maintain its own army, which would never be called upon to serve on
Russian soil, but should defend the Finnish coast and border in case
Russia was involved in war.
Finland was to have her own coinage, postal systems, schools, courts,
language and her own local diet. The Czar retained the right of vetoing
legislation, the right to collect foreign customs and other imperial
rights. Almost every promise made in that treaty has been broken by
the czars of Russia, especially by Nicholas II, now in Siberia. This
Nicholas tried to break the treaty altogether, abolish it, but the
Finns were too intelligent, too clear-headed and too united to let
him do it. Their resistance to his tyrannous treachery is a thrilling
story in itself. Finland has never broken any part of her treaty with
Russia, but now she wants to abolish the treaty. The contention is that
the treaty was made with the czars of Russia, and, now that there are
now no more czars, the treaty has ceased to hold good. Finland is full
of German agents, and they must have invented this brilliant piece of
reasoning and taught it to the Finnish Socialists. At all events, they
must have fostered it with might and main, and perhaps the German navy
believes that a visit to Helsingfors would convert the whole country to
it.
There is even a better reason why the German navy has been pounding
away in the Gulf of Finland, and why in the spring it will pound again.
Germany seeks to separate still further Russia and her allies. There
are only three ways by which Russia can communicate with Europe and
America. One of these ways is across Siberia and the Pacific Ocean, a
long distance. Another way, through Archangel, is a summer way only.
The third and shortest way is through Finland and Sweden. If Germany
can partially take Finland and seize the railroad which leads to
Sweden, and there is only one main line of railroad, she can cut Russia
off from her allies very effectively. Perhaps her next step would be to
interfere, by means of submarines, with Russia’s other outlet in the
Pacific.