I BECOME A CIVILIAN
On the day after we had seen Martel we were up early in the morning
discussing plans in connection with our registration. We then discovered
that the notice ordering registration was a day old. Thus we had only
two days during which to get registered, and as the Commandant’s office
only remained open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. we had not much time to spare,
especially as there would most probably be a crowd. As a matter of
fact, the queue was already about a quarter of a mile long at 7 o’clock
in the morning. On January 10 there were in Krasnoyarsk 4,575 White
Generals, staff officers, and officers of field rank, while the number
of subalterns and of civil officials was probably quite as great. All
these, as well as a great number of others who did not need to register
at all but who were anxious to be on the safe side, had lined up in a
queue outside the Commandant’s office; and, judging by the rate at which
they were being dealt with, it was clear that all could not be registered
within the allotted time.
Meanwhile we heard that we might at any moment be thrown out of our room
as housing accommodation was required for the Fifth Army, which was
expected in Krasnoyarsk within a few days. We were also told that a raid
would be made on us for belts and binoculars, and we feared that this
would result in our being stripped of everything.
In short, our condition was desperate. We had no money, and could not
therefore buy food or fuel or pay for medical attendance. If we did not
register within two days we ran the risk of being shot, and there seemed
to be no possibility of our being able to register within that time.
There might be some hope for us if only we could have a heart-to-heart
talk with some of the leading Commissars, but this we found, after many
trials, to be impossible owing first to the fact that these gentlemen
could never spare us more than two moments, and secondly to the fact that
they all hated the sight of us and would do nothing to assist us.
They were certainly very busy, and such a long queue was waiting on every
one of them that an interview of a few minutes meant a whole day standing
outside their door. And the interviews, when they were accorded, were
always unsatisfactory. I have already given the gist of them. “You can
go and work or fight for the Communists.” And then we were hustled out
before we had been able to state our case at all. Horrocks and I saw the
Red Governor, with the results I have already stated. Then Horrocks saw
a number of other people, and they hated him because he was neat, in
uniform, and English. One man he saw was suffering from a cruel scourging
that had been inflicted on him by Kolchak’s soldiers. His back was still
in bandages, and, though he was anything but polite, Horrocks marvelled
that he had not, under the circumstances, been positively rude.
All the local Communists whom I saw had been imprisoned at one time or
another by Kolchak and all the imported Communists had been in prison
under the Tsar. As they knew that England had backed up Kolchak and were
convinced that she was working for an imperial restoration, they were not
friendly.
One of them, who gave us several more minutes than any of the others,
presented a new view of our position. He said: “As you are prisoners of
war your proper place is in the Concentration Camp. You can go there at
once if you like.”
These words seem reasonable enough on paper, but it is not too strong to
say that they horrified us, for the concentration camp in question was
an awful place in which some forty thousand people were herded together
like cattle and were dying off like flies. This camp was situated at a
distance of some six or eight versts from Krasnoyarsk and had contained
German and Austrian prisoners, who were now guarding it, and from whom
we, British officers, had little mercy to expect. I had seen some of
these Siberian camps during the preceding winter and had come to the
conclusion that death would be better than confinement in some of them.
Dead bodies of typhus patients lay in some of the wards, while the dirt,
the stench, and the frightful blank look on the faces of the prisoners
reminded me of accounts I have read of mediæval dungeons. Their hospitals
were places of unmitigated horror, and in the wards allotted to Bolshevik
prisoners the latter, some of them mere boys, were allowed to lie with
insufficient clothing, insufficient warmth, and hardly any attendance.
Conditions were much worse now at Krasnoyarsk owing to the greater
overcrowding; and the only food given to the prisoners was a little
filthy black soup once a day. Typhus was raging in the Concentration
Camp; and, if we were sent there, most of us would certainly die. We bade
a hasty good-bye to the Commissar who made this proposition to us and
never troubled him again.
Among others whom I went to see was a Commissar of Political Affairs, a
clean-shaven, square-faced young workman from Petrograd who must have had
an awful experience under the Tsar or under Kolchak, or under both, for
he glared at me in exactly the manner Martel had described, answered me
in two grunts, and then turned his back on me. It was like interviewing
a tiger in his den or a seventeenth-century Sultan of Morocco in his
council chamber.
Finally I discovered that civilians were registered at an office where
there was no crowd, so I went in and registered myself as a civilian and
a journalist. This step, which was warmly approved of by my comrades,
eased the situation very much, for I was now able to see people quite
easily and to explain the plight in which my comrades found themselves
without at the same time betraying too much interest in them. I knew very
well that if discovered to be a British officer posing as a journalist
and wearing civilian dress I should be thrown into prison or perhaps
shot; and, if it had not been for the desperate position in which my
comrades found themselves, I would never have incurred the risks I ran.
Most of these young comrades of mine were ignorant of Russian, and all
they could do to assist was to sell their clothes in the market-place
in order to raise money. This the poor lads did with the utmost gaiety.
The market-place was full of White refugees and local _bourgeois_ in the
same position as ourselves, and all selling fur coats, boots, and every
kind of clothing, as well as diamond rings and jewelry. Diamonds worth a
hundred pounds were sometimes sold for a few pence. The White officers
and their wives who were stranded in echelons far down the line or
imprisoned in the concentration camp and prevented from leaving it were,
owing to their lack of money, at the mercy of Red speculators, some of
them Jews, who bought from them diamonds and valuable furs for the most
ridiculous prices.
Our officers and men used to go to the market-place laden with good
British army blankets, “British warms,” and various articles of dress,
and stand among the crowd till a likely purchaser came along, fingered
their wares, and began to bargain with them. These speculators were
always civilians, and they sometimes spoke a little English, having been
in America. After having parted one day with a fur coat at “an alarming
sacrifice,” one of our junior officers, a Canadian of some nineteen years
old, promptly invested the proceeds in a small bag of nuts and a pair
of skates and nearly broke his head the same day trying to skate on the
Yenisei.
I had no time to sell anything myself owing to the subterranean
activities in which I was now engaged for the benefit of all our party.
I did try to sell several British sovereigns and a silver chain-work
purse to a Commissar, but as his wife took a fancy to these objects and
asked me to give them to her for nothing I let her have them. Her husband
insisted, however, on giving me afterwards a small sum of money, about
one hundred Soviet roubles, and though this was a ridiculously low price
I cheerfully accepted it, for I was engaged at that moment in certain
delicate negotiations with that Commissar, and, in the event, my little
present had a decisive influence on the result of these negotiations. I
also distributed most of my clothing and other belongings, as well as
some uniforms and a typewriter which did not belong to me, in quarters
which would be likely to help, not only myself, but all our party.
All danger of our being shot was now at an end owing to a prolongation
of the period for registration, and to the fact that Horrocks had
succeeded in getting everybody registered. He may have been helped by
one of our ex-interpreters, a Russian civilian who had got a place in
the Commandant’s office and became a sincere red-hot Bolshevik, but his
success was principally due to his own energy in finally bursting into
that office without awaiting his turn. Unfortunately he got me also
registered as an officer, and, as he had forgotten what unit I belonged
to, he put me down as “Irish Guards.” I thus acquired a dual personality,
and, when my civilian self went west, my military double remained behind
in Krasnoyarsk, for a message which came through to the British War
Office, after I had left, represented me as being still on the strength
of the captured party. As we had to report once a week, and as the Town
Commandant had never seen me, I conclude that Horrocks had permitted
somebody to personate me. It was probably some unfortunate man, hunted
and in dire danger—perhaps the Czech officer who had previously asked to
join our party.
I hear some of my readers groaning in spirit at all this terrible
duplicity, at all these cruel deceptions practised by us on the poor
Bolsheviks. Well, let them groan! What we did was wrong, and we shall
endeavour to atone for it by contrition, a life of penance, and a firm
determination not to do it again. But, considering the circumstances of
the case, I do not think that the average sinful man will care to cast
the first stone.
The question of getting money still remained to be solved, and, as a
means of solving it, I proposed that we should all give English lessons.
Even those who did not speak Russian could, I urged, give lessons on
the Berlitz system; and I thought the scheme a good one from other
points of view than the financial, inasmuch as it would give our people
something to do, enable them to move about a bit and to make friends in
the town who might possibly be of use to them, and even result perhaps in
some of them getting board and lodging in private families. The latter
result would relieve the congestion in our crowded quarters, and lessen
the chances of our falling victims to typhus or some other contagious
disease. All the money earned in this way would go into a common fund.
This scheme was taken up with enthusiasm, and we soon had half a dozen
of our officers giving lessons, while several got board and sleeping
accommodation outside. The busiest of us all was Sergeant Rooney, an
Irishman who spoke Italian, French, and German as well as he spoke
English and who got more applications for lessons in these languages than
he could deal with. Being also an accomplished musician he was asked to
play the piano at a local cinema. I tried to get him a job as organist in
the Polish church, but was rather afraid that if he passed rapidly to the
church after officiating at the cinema, he might inadvertently treat the
congregation to rag-time.
I arranged to give lessons myself in the family of a Commissar, but they
beat me down to four roubles—a fraction of a halfpenny—per hour plus one
meal per day and the right to sleep on the floor in the corner of the
drawing-room after everybody had gone to bed. I pointed out that a packet
of ten cigarettes cost twenty-four roubles, whereat the Commissar’s young
wife laughed musically, and said that the German prisoners only got four
roubles.
This and a hundred incidents like it showed a great change from the
old days of the Russian landowner and official, who were very generous
with their money and very courteous to the foreign teacher, whom they
always treated as one of the family. Whatever happens in Russia, the old
magnificent life of the leisured classes is gone for ever. With it are
also gone all the good as well as many of the evil customs which flourish
in a state of society like that which obtained in Russia seven years
ago, like that which obtained at an earlier period among the Virginian
slave-owners and the French noblesse. All titles, even that of “Mr.,”
have disappeared. If you write the word “Mr.” before a man’s name on a
letter, the recipient will probably be arrested. “Comrade” is the proper
word to use. In the same way, all the elaborate ceremonial of ordinary
intercourse has been ruthlessly “cut out.” You spend no time in the
semi-Oriental preliminaries with which the old-régime Russian ushered
in a conversation. You plunge into the middle of your subject, say what
you have got to say in as few words as possible, and then clear out.
The continual hand-shaking which was somewhat of a terror in Russian
life has greatly diminished. Large printed notices, “No Hand-shaking,”
are displayed in all Government offices, and Trotsky, when he visited
Ekaterinburg during my own stay in that town, imposed a fine of one
hundred roubles a time on persons in his train who shook hands or offered
to do so. The reason he gave was that the custom was a waste of time
and calculated to spread typhus and other diseases which then raged in
Ekaterinburg. Formerly, if a man called at a house while the family
were at table, he was invariably asked to share in the meal; and I once
remember an old Russian lady asking me if there was any truth in an
almost incredible report she had heard that in England this custom was
not observed. Dear old lady, if a telegraph boy had brought her a message
while she was dining in a London hotel she would probably have asked him
to have something to eat.
The present lack of food and the mad hurry of the Bolsheviks have swept
all that away. Busy Commissars now wolf their meals at tables strewn
with papers, while keeping up a conversation on business subjects with
dozens of famished people standing around them. In White circles food
is too scarce for hospitality to be exercised. With one lump of sugar
costing thirty roubles and a single cigarette ten roubles, anything
like lavishness is out of the question. The result, curiously enough,
is a development of greed and individualism, and an approximation to
the manners of feverish Wall Street business-men, though the Bolsheviks
detest any approach to the manners and customs of capitalistic America.
The old state of things was a sort of patriarchal Communism. The lady of
a country house had often no idea of how many strange people had drifted
into the servants’ quarters and were living peacefully there—the old
women knitting socks, the young women bringing forth babies, and all
eating up the master’s food.
The same patriarchal Communism was apparent in other aspects of the
Russian character, and sharply differentiated the Muscovite from the
peoples of the West. It made him extremely picturesque and refreshing,
but it also had its drawbacks; for if the Russian was wasteful with his
own money, he also expected you to be wasteful with yours, and when he
borrowed any from you he generally forgot the debt as quickly as he
forgot your debt to him. Nothing so jarred on him as the discovery in a
friend of what he considered to be penuriousness, even though it were
only ordinary prudence and a praiseworthy desire to live within one’s
means. This discovery the Russian troops made in France and Salonika, and
it caused them to despise the French in both places, and to call them by
the worst term of reproach they could think of—“Jews.”
Their own hardships at present have changed the Russians profoundly and
perhaps permanently, and will probably call into existence a new class
of bureaucrats, _bourgeois_, and farmers who will be harder, greedier,
less polite, less hospitable and less picturesque than the old. They will
be more individualistic, however, and more hard-working. Bolshevism will
finally cure them of their communistic tendencies. It will also, I must
admit, destroy the aversion of some of them to manual labour. A Russian
gentleman had formerly as great a horror of manual labour as an Indian
Sahib. He considered it degrading, and, even if he only dropped a book on
the floor, he expected a servant to pick it up for him. The Bolsheviks,
to give them their due, are fighting hard against this prejudice.
Trotsky, when he was at Ekaterinburg last February, used to shovel snow
himself on the railway, and he made everybody in his train follow his
example. Chicherin and the other Commissars carry on conversations with
visitors while hammering nails into the wall and doing odds and ends of
carpentry work in their offices. They mean perhaps to indicate, somewhat
theatrically, that the day of the manual worker has come, but if they
succeed in destroying the Russian prejudice against manual labour as
servile, they will have succeeded in doing at least one good thing, and,
when they finally pass away, they will leave behind them a name “link’d
to one virtue and a hundred crimes.”