A VILLAGE “BOURGEOIS-CAPITALIST”
The room in which I found myself was a spacious one. On the right
stood a big white stove, always the most prominent object in a Russian
peasant dwelling, occupying nearly a quarter of the room. Beyond the
stove in the far corner was a bedstead on which an old woman lay. The
floor was strewn with several rough straw mattresses. Two strapping
boys, a little lass of ten, and two girls of eighteen or nineteen had
just dressed, and one of the latter was doing her hair in front of a
piece of broken mirror.
In the other far corner stood a rectangular wooden table, with an
oil lamp hanging over it. The little glass closet of ikons behind
the table, in what is called “beautiful corner” because it shelters
the holy pictures, showed the inmates to be Russians, though the
district is inhabited largely by men of Finnish race. To the left of
the door stood an empty wooden bedstead, with heaped-up bed-covers and
sheepskin coats, as if someone had lately risen from it. All these
things, picturesque, though customary, I took in at a glance. But I
was interested to notice an old harmonium, an unusual decoration in a
village hut, the musical accomplishments of the peasant generally being
limited to the concertina, the guitar, the balalaika, and the voice, in
all of which, however, he is adept.
“Good-morning,” I said, apologetically. I turned to the ikons and,
bowing, made the sign of the Cross.
“May I sit down just for a little moment? I am very tired.”
Everyone was silent, doubtless very suspicious. The little girl stared
at me with wide-open eyes. I seated myself opposite the big white
stove, wondering what I should do next.
In a few minutes there entered a rough peasant of about fifty-five,
with long hair streaked with grey, and haggard, glistening eyes. There
was a look of austerity in his wrinkled face, though at the same time
it was not unkind, but he rarely smiled. He nodded a curt good-morning
and set about his ablutions, paying no further heed to me. The old
woman mentioned that I had come in to rest.
I explained. “I set out from the nearest station early this morning
with a companion,” I said, “to ski here. We are looking for milk. But
we lost our way in the woods. I tumbled into a stream. My companion is
somewhere in the village and I will go and look for him later. But I
would like to rest a little first, for I am very tired.”
The old peasant listened, but did not seem interested. He filled his
mouth with water from a jug, bent over an empty bucket, and letting the
water trickle out of his mouth into the cup of his hands, scrubbed his
face and neck. I suppose it was warmer this way. When he had finished
I asked if I might have some milk to drink, and at a sign from the old
man one of the boys fetched me some in a big tin mug.
“It is hard to get milk nowadays,” grunted the old peasant, surlily,
and went on with his work.
The boys slipped on their sheepskin coats and left the cottage, while
the girls removed the mattresses and set the samovar. I rejoiced when
I saw the old woman preparing to light the stove. My legs gradually
thawed, forming pools of water on the floor, and one of the boys,
when he came in, helped me pull my boots off. But this was a painful
process, for both my feet were partially frozen.
At last the samovar was boiling and I was invited to table to have a
mug of tea. It was not real tea and tasted nothing like it, though the
packet was labelled “Tea.” Black bread and salt herrings made up the
meal. I did not touch the herrings.
“We have not much bread,” said the old man, significantly, as he put a
small piece in front of me.
While we were at table my companion of the night adventure came in,
after having searched for me all through the village. I wished to warn
him to be prudent in speech and repeat the same tale as I had told, but
he merely motioned reassuringly with his hand. “You need fear nothing
here,” he said, smiling.
It appeared that he knew my old _muzhik_ well. Taking him aside, he
whispered something in his ear. What was he saying? The old man turned
and looked at me intensely with an interest he had not shown before.
His eyes glistened brightly, as if with unexpected satisfaction. He
returned to where I sat.
“Would you like some more milk?” he asked, kindly, and fetched it for
me himself.
I asked who played the harmonium. With amusing modesty the old man
let his eyes fall and said nothing. But the little girl, pointing her
finger at the peasant, put in quickly that “_Diedushka_ [grandpa] did.”
“I like music,” I said. “Will you please play something afterwards?”
Ah! Why was everything different all at once--suspicions evaporated,
fears dissipated? I felt the change intuitively. The Finn had
somehow aroused the crude old man’s interest in me (had he told him
who I was?), but by my passing question I had touched his tenderest
spot--music!
So Uncle Egor (as I called him), producing an old and much be-fingered
volume of German hymn tunes which he had picked up in a market at
Petrograd, seated himself nervously and with touching modesty at the
old harmonium. His thick, horny fingers, with black finger-nails,
stumbled clumsily over the keys, playing only the top notes coupled in
octaves with one finger of his left hand. He blew the pedals as if he
were beating time, and while he played his face twitched and his breath
caught. You could see that in music he forgot everything else. The
rotten old harmonium was the possession he prized above all else in the
world--in fact, for him it was not of this world. Crude old peasant as
he was, he was a true Russian.
“Would you like me to play you something?” I asked when he had finished.
Uncle Egor rose awkwardly from the harmonium, smiling confusedly when
I complimented him on his achievement. I sat down and played him some
of his hymns and a few other simple tunes. When I variegated the
harmonies, he followed, fascinated. He leant over the instrument, his
eyes rooted on mine. All the rough harshness had gone from his face,
and the shadow of a faint smile flickered round his lips. I saw in his
eyes a great depth of blue.
“Sit down again, my little son,” he said to me several times later,
“and play me more.”
At mid-day I lay down on Uncle Egor’s bed and fell fast asleep. At
three o’clock they roused me for dinner, consisting of a large bowl of
sour cabbage soup, which we all ate with brown polished wooden spoons,
dipping in turn into the bowl. Uncle Egor went to a corner of the room,
produced from a sack a huge loaf, and cutting off a big square chunk,
placed it before me.
“Eat as much bread as you like, my son,” he said.
He told me all his woes--how he was branded as a village “grabber,
bourgeois, and capitalist,” because he had possessed three horses and
five cows; how four cows and two horses had been “requisitioned”; and
how half his land had been taken by the Committee of the Village Poor
to start a Commune on.
Committees of the Village Poor were bodies from which were excluded all
such as, by enterprise, industry, and thrift, had raised themselves to
positions of independence. Composed of the lowest elements of stupid,
illiterate, and idle peasants, beggars and tramps, these committees,
endowed with supreme power, were authorized to seize the property of
the prosperous and divide it amongst themselves, a portion going to the
Government.
The class of “middle” peasants, that is, those who were half-way to
prosperity, incited by agitators, sided at first with the poor in
despoiling the rich, until it was their turn to be despoiled, when
they not unnaturally became enemies of the Bolshevist system. The
imposition of a war tax, however, finally alienated the sympathies of
the entire peasantry, for the enriched “poor” would not pay because
they were technically poor, while the impoverished “rich” could not
pay because they had nothing left. This was the end of Communism
throughout nine-tenths of the Russian provinces, and it occurred when
the Bolsheviks had ruled for only a year.
“Uncle Egor,” I said, “you say your district still has a Committee of
the Poor. I thought the committees were abolished. There was a decree
about it last December.”
“What matters it what they write?” he exclaimed, bitterly. “Our
‘comrades’--whatever they want to do, they do. They held a Soviet
election not long ago and the voters were ordered to put in the Soviet
all the men from the Poor Committee. Now they say the village must
start what they call a ‘Commune,’ where the lazy will profit by the
labour of the industrious. They say they will take my last cow for the
Commune. But they will not let _me_ join, even if I wanted to, because
I am a ‘grabber.’ Ugh!”
“When they held the election,” I asked, “did you vote?”
Uncle Egor laughed. “I? How should they let me vote? I have worked all
my life to make myself independent. I once had nothing, but I worked
till I had this little farm, which I thought would be my own. Vasia
here is my helper. But the Soviet says I am a ‘grabber’ and so I have
no vote!”
“Who works in the Commune?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he replied. “They are not from these parts. They thought
the poor peasants would join them, because the poor peasants were
promised our grain. But the Committee kept the grain for themselves,
so the poor peasants got nothing and are very angry. Ah, my little
son,” he cried, bitterly, “do you know what Russia wants? Russia, my
son, wants a Master--a Master who will restore order, and not that
things should be as they are now, with every scoundrel pretending to be
master. That is what Russia wants!”
A “master”--now one of the most dangerous words to use in Russia,
because it is the most natural!
“Do you mean--a ‘Tsar’?” I queried, hesitatingly. But Uncle Egor merely
shrugged his shoulders. He had said his say.
That night I slept on the rickety wooden bedstead side by side with
Uncle Egor and covered with the same coverlets and quilts. There
were long whisperings between him and my Finnish guide before we
retired, for early in the morning we were going on to Petrograd, and
arrangements had to be made to drive to the nearest station by devious
routes so as not to be stopped on the way. I was nearly asleep when
Uncle Egor clambered in by my side.
It was long before dawn when we rose and prepared to set out. Uncle
Egor, one of his daughters, the Finn, and I made up the party. To evade
patrols we drove by bye-ways and across fields. Uncle Egor was taking
his daughter to try to smuggle a can of milk into the city. What he
himself was going to do I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me.
We arrived at the station at four in the morning, and here I parted
from my Finnish guide, who was returning with the sledge. He positively
refused to take any reward for the service he had rendered me.
Our train, the only train of the day, was due to start at six, and the
station and platform were as busy as a hive. While the young woman got
tickets we tried to find places. Every coach appeared to be packed,
and the platform was teeming with peasants with sacks on their backs
and milk-cans concealed in bundles in their hands. Failing to get into
a box-car or third-class coach, where with the crush it would have
been warmer, we tried the only second-class car on the train, which we
found was not yet full up. Eventually there were fourteen people in the
compartment intended for six.
At length the train rumbled off. Wedged in tight between Uncle Egor and
his daughter, I sat and shivered. The train was searched by Red guards
on the journey, and it was found that quite half the supposed cans of
“milk” carried by the peasants were packed to the brim with matches!
There was no end of a tumult as the guards came round. Some people
jumped out of the windows and fled. Others hid under the train till the
compartment had been searched and were then hauled in again through the
windows by willing hands from inside.
The Bolshevist Government, you see, had laid a special embargo on
matches, as on many things of public use, with the result that they
were almost unobtainable. So that when you did get them from “sackmen,”
as the people were called who smuggled provisions into the city in bags
and sacks, instead of paying one copeck per box, which was what they
used to cost, you paid just one thousand times as much--ten roubles,
and felt glad at that. The design, of course, was to share such
necessities equally amongst the populace, but the Soviet departments
were so incompetent and corrupt, and so strangled by bureaucratic
administration, that nothing, or very little, ever got distributed, and
the persecuted “sackmen” were hailed as benefactors.
At one moment during the journey one of the other peasants bent over
to Uncle Egor, and, glancing at me, asked him in an undertone “if his
companion had come from ‘over there’”--which meant over the frontier;
in reply to which Uncle Egor gave him a tremendous kick, which
explained everything, and no more was said.
I had one nasty moment when the train was searched. Despite mishaps I
still clung to the little parcel of shoes for Maria. As they were tied
round my waist I did not lose them even when I tumbled into the stream.
Some people got up when the searchers came, but having no milk-can or
sack I moved into the corner and sat on the parcel. When the soldier
told me to shift along to let him see what was in the corner I sat the
shoes along with me, so that both places looked empty. It was lucky he
did not make me get up, for new shoes could only have come from “over
there.”
At nine we reached the straggling buildings of the Okhta Station, the
scene of my flight with Mrs. Marsh in December, and there I saw a most
extraordinary spectacle--the attempted prevention of sackmen from
entering the city.
As we stood pushing in the corridor waiting for the crowd in front of
us to get out, I heard Uncle Egor and his daughter conversing rapidly
in low tones.
“I’ll make a dash for it,” whispered his daughter.
“Good,” he replied in the same tone. “We’ll meet at Nadya’s.”
The moment we stepped on to the platform Uncle Egor’s daughter vanished
under the railroad coach, and that was the last I ever saw of her.
At each end of the platform stood a string of armed guards, waiting
for the onslaught of passengers, who flew in all directions as they
surged from the train. How shall I describe the scene of unutterable
pandemonium that ensued! The soldiers dashed at the fleeing crowds,
brutally seized single individuals, generally women, who were least
able to defend themselves, and tore the sacks off their backs and out
of their arms. Shrill cries, shrieks, and howls rent the air. Between
the coaches and on the outskirts of the station you could see lucky
ones who had escaped gesticulating frantically to unlucky ones who
were still dodging guards. “This way! This way!” they yelled, wildly;
“Sophia! Marusia! Akulina! Varvara! Quick! Haste!”
In futile efforts to subdue the mob the soldiers discharged their
rifles into the air, only increasing the panic and intensifying the
tumult. Curses and execrations were hurled at them by the seething
mass of fugitives. One woman I saw, frothing at the mouth, with blood
streaming down her cheek, her frenzied eyes protruding from their
sockets, clutching ferociously with her nails at the face of a huge
sailor who held her pinned down on the platform, while his comrades
detached her sack.
How I got out of the fray I do not know, but I found myself carried
along with the running stream of sackmen over the Okhta Bridge and
toward the Suvorov Prospect. Only there, a mile from the station, did
they settle into a hurried walk, gradually dispersing down side streets
to dispose of their precious goods to eager clients.
Completely bewildered, I limped along, my frost-bitten feet giving me
considerable pain. I wondered in my mind if people at home had any
idea at what a cost the population of Petrograd secured the first
necessities of life in the teeth of the “Communist” rulers. Still
musing, I came out on the Znamenskaya Square in front of the Nicholas
Station, the scene of many wild occurrences in the days of the Great
Revolution.
You could still see the hole in the station roof whence in those days a
machine-gun manned by Protopopoff’s police had fired down on the crowds
below. I had watched the scene from that little alcove just over there
near the corner of the Nevsky. While I was watching, the people had
discovered another policeman on the roof of the house just opposite.
They threw him over the parapet. He fell on the pavement with a heavy
thud, and lay there motionless. Everything, I remembered, had suddenly
seemed very quiet as I looked across the road at his dead body, though
the monotonous song of the machine-gun still sounded from the station
roof.
But next day a new song was sung in the hearts of the people, a song of
Hope and a song of Freedom. Justice shall now reign, said the people!
For it was said, “The Tsarist ways and the Tsarist police are no more!”
To-day, two years later, it was just such a glorious winter morning as
in those days of March, 1917. The sun laughed to scorn the silly ways
of men. But the song of Hope was dead, and the people’s faces bore the
imprint of starvation, distress, and terror--terror of those very same
Tsarist police! For these others, who did not make the Revolution, but
who were encouraged by Russia’s enemies to return to Russia to poison
it--these others copied the Tsarist ways, and, restoring the Tsarist
police, made them their own. The men and women who made the Revolution,
they said, were the enemies of the Revolution! So they put them back
in prison, and hung up other flags. Here, stretched across the Nevsky
Prospect, on this winter morning there still fluttered in the breeze
the tattered shreds of their washed-out red flags, besmirched with the
catch-words with which the Russian workers and the Russian peasants had
been duped. There still stood unremoved in the middle of the square
the shabby, dilapidated, four-months-old remains of the tribunes and
stages which had been erected to celebrate the anniversary of the
Bolshevist revolution. The inscriptions everywhere spoke not of the
“bourgeois prejudices” of Liberty and Justice, but of the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat (sometimes hypocritically called the “brotherhood of
workers”), of class war, of the sword, of blood, hatred, and world-wide
revolution.
Looking up from my bitter reverie I saw Uncle Egor, from whom I had got
separated in the scramble at the railway station. I wanted to thank and
recompense him for the food and shelter he had given me.
“Uncle Egor,” I asked him, “how much do I owe you?”
But Uncle Egor shook his head. He would take no recompense.
“Nothing, my little son,” he replied, “nothing. And come back again
when you like.” He looked round, and lowering his voice, added
cautiously, “And if ever you need ... to run away ... or hide ... or
anything like that ... you know, little son, who will help you.”
[Illustration: A DAUGHTER OF THE SOIL]