THE CITY OF DREADFUL HUNGER
I did not leave Ekaterinburg by the train in which I had come thither. I
left by another train belonging to the Ministry of Communications, and
which was one of the good old trains of the International Sleeping-Car
Company in which, before the war, I had travelled in every part of
Europe. In Russia such trains used generally to contain well-to-do
people, officers and Government functionaries of high rank, landowners
and wealthy merchants. The servants were very attentive, the wine was
good, and everything went smoothly. The contents of the train by which
I travelled were very different, the dominating type being the Russian
mechanic or chauffeur type with high boots, peaked cap, dirty clothes,
and unpleasant manners. One of the four men in my compartment was a Red
Finn, by trade a carpenter, and by nature very gentle and obliging, who
was being sent to Finland by the Bolshevik Government in order that he
might help to stir up trouble there.
Another of my travelling companions was a Commissar who had been in
charge of the Omsk railways, but who had lost that post because of
differences he had had with the other Commissars at Omsk. He expected
to get a better post in Moscow, but when he arrived in that city, he so
little liked the looks of it that he asked for an appointment in Kharkov
instead, and, I believe, got it. What interested me chiefly in him was
the fact that he knew Yurovsky very well, though he did not go to see
him on this occasion, and had, I am convinced, been one of the persons
who had taken part in the murder of the Tsar. But about that terrible
tragedy he maintained absolute silence, and I never even learned his
name. It was probably Metvietev, Lovatnykh, Partin, or Kostusov, but I
shall call him Metvietev. He was pot-bellied—an inexcusable offence in
a man of only about thirty-five years of age—he habitually read, in a
Russian translation, the filthiest of Zola’s novels; and he sponged in
the greediest and most shameless way for food on the Red Finn. I slept
in Metvietev’s compartment one night, as there was a typhus case in my
own compartment, but I went back again to the typhus case next day,
as Metvietev was so very restless in his sleep that I feared he might
accidentally shoot me during the night with a loaded revolver which he
kept under his pillow.
The carriages in Russia are not now divided into classes, nor are there
first and second class waiting-rooms at the railway stations, nor any
other outward evidences of there being more than one class of people
in the country. Travellers by train or tramcar never buy tickets. They
manage to get permission to travel from some Commissar, and, if they are
not Bolsheviks or employees of the Bolsheviks, they find it practically
impossible to get such permission. All who travelled with me were either
Communists or employees of the Communists—which is not quite the same
thing—and they were looking forward to lucrative posts in Moscow or in
the provinces, even as faithful adherents travelling to Rome with Cæsar
after Pharsalia might have looked forward to governorships in the East,
Spain, Gaul, and Africa.
We went to Moscow by way of Yaroslav, and our entry into the Red Citadel
of Bolshevism was extraordinarily impressive, almost as impressive,
though in quite a different way, as if we had entered that ancient city
immediately after Napoleon’s retreat from its blackened walls. Moscow is
the dead heart of a burnt-out conflagration. Ekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk
are fresh wood on which the fire has seized practically for the first
time, and the tongues of Red flame that shoot up from them seem at first
glance to be a beautiful and inspiring sight. But in another year Siberia
and the Urals will be, like Moscow, a pile of dust and ashes covering the
grave of lost illusions.
At 9 o’clock in the morning we were passing through a delightful piece
of rich country. The deep white snow contrasted sharply with the dark
pine-woods, above which rose the bright blue domes of village churches;
and the whole scene, painted just as it was, would have made a striking,
soothing, and delightful picture. Then we suddenly entered a scene of
indescribable desolation, the desolation of a ruined civilization. I am
not drawing on my imagination, or even on my memory, for what I saw.
I am transcribing, with a necessary change in the tenses, the notes I
wrote in the train with the scene I described before me. I came to Moscow
with an open mind, quite prepared, if the facts justified it, to draw as
flattering a description of Red Moscow as I had drawn of Red Krasnoyarsk
or Red Ekaterinburg. But the scene made a more dismal impression on me
than had ever been made by any of the war-wrecked cities I had visited.
When still about fifty miles from the capital, we began to pass large
numbers of “sick” engines and abandoned trains, until, finally, we ran at
full speed for hours at a time between a double row of derelict waggons
and locomotives. There were in all about one thousand ruined engines
and twenty times that number of deserted waggons, but this is only a
very rough estimate, as it was impossible for me to keep count owing to
the speed at which we travelled, and to the fact that we sometimes ran
between triple lines of abandoned rolling-stock. The engines were cold
and rusty and far beyond all hope of repair, while the trucks were in a
similarly pitiable condition, with their sliding-doors wrenched loose
and hanging down like broken arms, their interior half full of snow, and
their woodwork in many cases torn away, presumably for firewood.
The Bolsheviks were apparently making no attempt to repair or utilize any
of these railway waggons. They confined themselves to painting on them in
huge letters their eternal inscription “R.S.F.S.R.” (Russian Socialist
Federative Soviet Republic); as if it were not clear enough, without that
inscription, that such derelicts could not possibly belong to any other
kind of Government. They have painted the same letters in red across
the map of Russia, with the result that Russia is to-day in the same
condition as those abandoned trains.
To add to the hopelessness of the scene, there were several wrecked
and upturned trains lying along the track, and they also have the same
initials. That all these wrecks could be accidental I cannot believe, for
I know that the railwaymen sometimes go on strike, that these strikes are
repressed with relentless severity, and that the men who take part in
them are branded as traitors to the Republic and prevented from giving
the public their own version of the dispute either by word of mouth
or through the Press. That they should, in their madness and despair,
deliberately wreck their trains and perish with them is just what I
should expect a Russian Bolshevik to do under the circumstances. He can
no longer obtain sympathy from Socialist workmen abroad as he could
when he was persecuted by the Tsar, so he hurls himself to destruction,
sacrificing at the same time as many other lives and as much property as
he can.
The whole effect was appalling, especially on me who had last been in
Moscow in 1914 when that great city was bursting with life and with all
kinds of supplies. Many of my readers have doubtless been accustomed,
during the last six years of universal frightfulness, to entering ruined
cities and seeing tens of thousands of abandoned trucks, but this was
the capital of a great European Empire that we were approaching. Imagine
how an Englishman returning from abroad would feel if he found most of
the track between Southampton and London crowded with deserted trains
and cold, rusty engines; if he saw the grass growing on the deserted
platforms of great railway stations; found overturned rolling-stock and
abandoned machinery littering the fields on both sides of the line; and,
worst symptom of all, discovered that the English people looked on at
this ruin with complete apathy and unconcern.
That this can ever happen may seem unlikely, but, if there is any truth
in the teaching of past history, it is certain to happen, for our present
form of civilization is as frail as the many forms which have preceded
it, and has no more chance of permanence than the Egyptian or the
Babylonian. As surely as trees grow up and delight us with the beauty
of their youth and the majesty of their maturity, and then decay and
disappear, so surely will the great capitals of the world pass away.
Formerly the signs of desolation in a mighty metropolis were the cold
altar-stone, the roofless hut, the deserted palace; but in future these
signs will be hundreds of miles of grassy railway tracks covered with
abandoned trucks, gigantic masses of rusty machinery amid which the birds
will build their nests and the spiders weave their webs, and underground
passages once reverberating every minute of the day and night with the
thunder of electric trains, but now solitary as those underneath the
Great Pyramid.
The extraordinary change which took place in the whole scene on the
day I entered Moscow could not have been more striking, had it been a
representation on the stage with a quiet but convinced anti-Bolshevik
of extreme artistic and organizing ability as stage-manager. The very
snow, dazzlingly white in the morning, had everywhere become soiled,
wet, and trampled in the evening, and all the beauty of the dawn had
passed out of the sordid and melancholy earth. At the dilapidated
suburban stations which we passed, we saw gangs of wretched and sometimes
villainous-looking men and women setting out into the country with bags
to collect food and fuel from the villages. Among them were schoolboys,
editors, teachers, poets, sculptors; so that, instead of leaving genius
leisure to pursue its bent, Bolshevism will make every manifestation of
genius impossible by the necessity it imposes on all of spending their
whole time satisfying the elementary craving for food and warmth. This
is a rebarbarization, a return to the condition of the cave-man and the
Ice Age; and it may quite possibly be the malady of which all our modern
civilization will perish.
We passed, it is true, some live but unhealthy-looking locomotives
drawing trains laden with firewood for the Red monster which once was
Holy Moscow, the dead heart of this typhus-stricken, Bolshevik-ridden
land. Moscow had nearly been frozen out, as well as starved out, during
the winter. Water-pipes had burst in every house, because they could
not be kept warm, and wooden houses had to be pulled down to supply
the inhabitants with fuel. At every verst or so we now saw piles of
timber which the peasants had been made to collect along the line, and
from which the trains were loaded up. At about twenty miles from the
city began a stately avenue of splendid villas, formerly the residences
of Moscow’s merchant princes, each surrounded by its forest of pine or
birch, each with its summer-houses and rustic bridges. They all looked
neglected but were not all deserted, as some of them had been converted
into orphanages and children’s hospitals.
We entered Moscow late in the afternoon, but, owing to my very anomalous
position, I did not venture into the city. I had no papers; and, if
arrested, anything might occur to me. Five years earlier I should,
immediately on arriving in the Nikolaevsky station, have entrusted
my baggage to one of the many sturdy porters, who then offered their
services clamorously and for a ridiculously low price, and afterwards
have taken a “taxi” to the National or the Hôtel Métropole. But there
were now no porters and no hotels. The National had been nationalized,
and the Métropole was the headquarters of the People’s Commissar for
Foreign Affairs, as well as of a large number of Communist leaders. I had
known some Moscow people in the old days, but was quite certain that they
were not in Moscow now, unless they were in some prison or cemetery. Even
if I succeeded in getting rooms somewhere, I should immediately be asked
for my identification papers and my permit to reside in the city, and
I had neither. I remained, therefore, in the train, but all the others
went out in great haste, for Moscow was the goal of their ambitions, the
centre from which they would radiate over Russia to rule provinces as
large as Great Britain. They were extremely anxious, therefore, to be
favourably impressed by the capital and to make all allowances for its
shortcomings. All were consequently enthusiastic, but there was none so
enthusiastic as Metvietev, who, having lived all his life in Siberia, had
never been in Moscow before.
The loss of a battle or of a throne is sometimes indicated on the
theatrical stage by messengers from without, bringing the dread news to
the General as he sits trembling in his tent or to the King as he cowers
in his palace; and the frightened faces of these bearers of evil tidings
tell the tale as eloquently as their words. Such bearers of disastrous
news were my travel-companions, who came back towards nightfall in ones
and twos with very lugubrious countenances and terrible stories about
conditions in Moscow. Metvietev was the gloomiest of all; his very face
was a tragedy, being white as that of a child who has seen a corpse for
the first time. For some moments he could not speak. Then he opened his
lips and told us of his experiences.
“I engaged two sleighs, one after the other,” he said, “and in both
cases the horses fell and could not rise again. They were weak for want
of food. I had to walk most of the way on foot, and the streets were
terrible. They cannot have been cleaned for the last year; they are
knee-deep in mud and water. Sleigh-drivers will not move a single step
for less than one thousand roubles. Ugh! I couldn’t possibly live here
for anything. It’s a terrible city, and the people look famished, as well
as the horses. No lights. No trams. It’s a nightmare——” and he waved his
hands as if warding off ghosts.
The second messenger of woe was an old engineer from the Urals, who had
not been in Moscow for years. There was a wild stare in his eyes as he
came in. “My God! My God!” was all he could say for some minutes, and I
was never able to get a very connected account of his impressions. I took
his remarks down in shorthand, however, such as they were; and here they
are: “This is no place for a man to live in.... My God! What a change!...
The trams don’t run any more.... Impossible to find a sleigh.... The
people are like walking skeletons.... I do hope they won’t want me to
stay here: I couldn’t do it.”
All the others told a similar story. Not one of the new arrivals could
get accommodation in the city, and even those who had families there
preferred to return to the train. That alone is eloquent testimony to
the condition of Lenin’s capital. Imagine travellers on their arrival
in London rushing back wildly to sleep four in a carriage, attached to
a train side-tracked about half a mile out of Victoria Station; for we
could not get into Nikolaevsky Station owing to the block of trains,
some of them abandoned, some of them belonging to Commissars. It would
not be much of a testimonial to the accommodation provided by the Ritz
and the Savoy or by any of the thousands of London’s humbler hostelries.
I deal with this matter at some length because, of all the Britishers
who arrived in Moscow during the last year, I am probably the only one
who arrived unexpectedly and without having had preparations made to
impress him favourably. When, about a month later, the Bolshevik Foreign
Office accidentally learned of my presence in town, it almost wept
tears of blood in its chagrin at my arriving by the back-door, so to
speak, and seeing things for myself. In all other cases it had sent a
smooth-tongued interpreter to meet the new arrival, to keep him clear of
all objectionable sights and persons, and to stick to him like a leech
during his stay in Russia. An account of the minuteness of the care taken
by the Bolsheviks to ensure that a favourable impression was made on
British journalists and members of British Labour Deputations would be
amusing but hardly credible.
After a few days I ventured out of the train and began renewing my
acquaintance with Moscow, always returning to sleep in my carriage at
Nikolaevsky Station. It was a dismal experience if only on account of the
food question, for I could get no food whatever till 6 o’clock in the
evening, and I had to go on foot all the time, wading mostly through icy
water. As I had only one pair of boots and could not get them dried, I
developed a disease resembling trench foot. Let a Londoner imagine the
tram, bus, underground, taxi, cab, and all the other passenger services
to be completely broken down, so that he is compelled to walk every day
from Hampstead to his office in the city. He would find it hard enough
even if he had not to contend with insufficient food, frequent pools
of water, and masses of half-melted snow. Many of the Moscovites have
to walk fourteen miles a day. They get food in their offices or in the
public eating-houses, but it is only black bread, weak cabbage soup,
and imitation tea. I say “their” offices, but all offices in Moscow are
governmental, and everybody is a Government servant. It is one of the
strangest sights I have ever seen, this great mass of wretched-looking
people drifting into the centre of the city every morning like the
_débris_ of a broken army, and then drifting listlessly home again in
the evening. At other times there are not many people on the streets.
The Kuznetsky Most, the Bond Street of Moscow, and also the adjoining
streets had at one time consisted almost entirely of magnificent shops.
These were nearly all closed, and sometimes soldiers stood on guard at
the doors. Those of them that were open sold milk or honey at impossible
prices, but as they never seemed to have more than a quart of milk or
a pound of honey in stock, it seemed difficult to understand why they
remained open at all. In shop-windows as large and as stylish as the best
in Regent Street, I have seen nothing in the window save a small plateful
of carrots or about a dozen frost-bitten potatoes; and these were being
sold at the same price as the diamonds which they had replaced.
Across the whole front of the Métropole and the National were painted in
enormous letters the words “Dom Sovietov” (House of the Soviets). Both
buildings were occupied by Government offices or by the Commissars or
by foreign guests of the Reds. Over the domed Court of Justice in the
Kremlin flew the Red flag, and underneath that emblem of Terror lived
Lenin. Trotsky had rooms in the Cavalry Barracks close by; and it was
much more difficult to enter the Kremlin now than it had been in the
time of the Tsar. All the gates were guarded by Red soldiers, and nobody
could enter without a pass, which it was practically impossible for a
non-Bolshevik to get.
Many of the British Labour men and others who have visited Moscow
during the last year were never there before, so that they cannot
appreciate the lamentable change that has taken place in this typical
and original Russian city. I was in Moscow in 1906 and again in 1914;
and on both occasions I was struck by its abundant and genial life, and
its superabundance of food and drink. Something of the pleasure which
it gave me may be got by the reader if he goes to see a Russian company
play “Boris Gudenov” with its crowds of _muzhiks_, peasant girls, boys,
and boyars, all of them big-limbed, handsome, and endowed with those
powerful and melodious voices which are one of the many great gifts of
nature to the Russian race—all of them dressed in the long-skirted,
startling, and semi-oriental costumes of their time and country. It was
the carnival season when I first visited Moscow, and the superabundance
and superexcellence of the food, as well as the healthy appetites of
the people, would have rejoiced the heart even of a dyspeptic. In one
huge popular restaurant under the shadow of the Kremlin the waiters were
sturdy boys in old Russian dress, with long, bright-coloured _kaftans_
fastened at the waist by leathern belts studded with glittering silver
rivets. Huge _muzhiks_, whose long beards gave them the same massive
masculine dignity as its noble antlers give to an old stag, consumed
more pancakes than I could count. Philippov’s famous tea-shops were
piled high with truck-loads of exquisite confectionery, and if you
visited a friend at any hour of the day or night a steaming samovar was
immediately placed on the table, and enough bread, Siberian butter,
caviar, cheese, delicious home-made jams, and cakes to last one for days.
And, having done justice to all this, one discovered that it was merely
intended to stay the appetite until a larger meal arrived with its soup,
meat-patties, meat, _kasha_, vegetables, sweets, Caucasian wine, and tea.
(The reader will, I hope, excuse all these gastronomical details, for I
wrote these words in a famished and cheerless Moscow.)
Nor was all this plenty confined to the upper classes, for the peasants
and workmen were not worse off. Sheep were so plentiful in the country
that, in the heart of Siberia at least, they could be bought for half
a crown each, while fine horses were so numerous that, even when one
was sufficient, three were harnessed to a sleigh or carriage and driven
by a brilliantly dressed _izvoshchik_ who cracked his whip and laughed
from sheer joy of life as he sped along the street or across the steppe.
In comparison with the peasant of Western Europe the _muzhik_ had an
enormous amount of land, and he seemed to me, for I had also lived in
the country districts, to be by far the happiest of his class in all
the world. He had two holidays on an average every week, and he enjoyed
those holidays ideally, watching the young people dance light-heartedly,
if he were no longer young himself, and listening to the beautiful old
folk-songs sung to the accompaniment of the _balalaïka_.
The change that has taken place now is the change from joyous life to a
condition of torpor not far removed from death. Philippov’s is closed,
and throughout all this City of Dreadful Famine not even a crust of bread
or a cup of tea can be had. Six years ago the cheap tea-houses for the
workmen were very “jolly” and comfortable places, where you could get
as much tea, bread, and butter as you liked for about twopence—I have
eaten in them myself. Almost all of them are now closed, and the contrast
between their cheerful blue-and-yellow signs and the emptiness of the
desolate and locked interior strikes a chill to the heart. The few that
are open only sell hot water coloured with strawberry leaves, and are
as melancholy as a charnel-house. The bakers’ shops once filled with
bright and willing assistants in long white aprons have been replaced by
huge bare Government offices as uninviting as crematoria; and even these
only give out bread on tickets. Their very signs have all the dreadful
uniformity of Socialism: “Government Provision Store No. 29,” instead
of the cheerful Russian equivalent for “John Smith, Baker.” Instead of
finding inside these gloomy mausolea honest John and his sons, proud
of their little shop, sure that their bread is the best-baked bread in
Moscow, and always busy arranging their window attractively, you find
a venomous and overbearing official of the Soviet Government who knows
nothing about baking, takes no interest in it, is under no obligation to
please his customers or to make his shop look attractive, and is in a
permanently embittered state of mind because the Soviet Government has
not given him a better post.
Of all the mistakes which the Soviet Government has made, the greatest,
to my mind, is the killing of ambition, private initiative, legitimate
desire for gain, praiseworthy parental anxiety to put a little money by
for the education of the children. This is cutting away the roots of
the tree, and will make the Russian people wither from off the face of
the earth. But, bad as this system is in Russia, it would be worse in
England. Russia is a huge country in a primitive stage of civilization,
and dwellers in remote steppes will not be affected by Bolshevism for
years. Great Britain, on the other hand, is a compact and complicated
piece of machinery which would be irretrievably ruined by a Soviet
Government in six months. Moreover, the national character of the
Englishman would rapidly degenerate under Bolshevik rule, for he owes
almost everything he has to individual initiative, and when he becomes
a Government servant he often becomes a nuisance. Those who remained at
home during the war can speak with more authority on this subject than
I can, but in the Army I found that the dentists, tailors, clerks, and
other civilians who were employed to carry out their old work under
military direction and with an assured salary, lost in most cases all
their courtesy, all desire to care for the instruments entrusted to them,
and 95 per cent. of their efficiency.