Family and Christian WHERE IS YOUR PASSPORT?
Name: Signature:
Profession: Please order your passport
Age: two days before leaving
Confession: Russia.
Arrived from ..........
This to be at once filed with the police department, and the passport
not to be given back until we should notify the same big
official,--whose duty it was to stay right there and watch all guests
of that hotel, and who must be notified twenty-four hours before we
leave the city,--when he will return the passport two hours before the
said time set, and give it to me only upon my paying him the
government fee of ten _rubles_ (five dollars) in good yellow gold.[3]
And right outside the door of our apartments, seated at a little
table, are two officials, pen and paper in hand, who set down the hour
and the minute of the day we enter and come out. They were there when
we went to breakfast; they, or others as fox-jowled and lynx-eyed,
were also there when we returned from the theater late at night, and
they are there all through the day. Our Swedish guide, who does the
duties of courier and shows us about the great city, is also
registered at the police department, and he has to hand in every night
a written report of what he has done with us all through the day,
where we have gone, what we have seen, and we suspect even what we may
have said. On the streets, big sword-begirded policemen stand at the
intersections of the ways, pull out a little book from their pockets
and make note of our passing that particular spot at that certain
hour; at night these reports also are handed in to the central police
office to be checked up against the statements of the guide and the
spies at the hotel.
[Footnote 3: I have subsequently learned that the legal fee is about
three _rubles_ ($1.50), the charge of ten _rubles_ being impudent
graft.]
[Illustration: ALONG THE NEVSKY-PROSPEKT.]
[Illustration: OUR DROSCHKY, ST. PETERSBURG.]
We are in the capital city of the mighty Russian Empire; in the
capital created by Peter the Great amidst and upon the marshy delta of
the river Neva; a city of more than a million inhabitants; a city
spread out over vast distances; a city whose disproportionately wide
streets and boulevards are paved with wood, wood that is rotting all
the while, leaving big holes into which a horse, a team, may plunge
and disappear, because only wood will float upon the marshy mire of
the mucky islets, and stone and brick will eventually sink from sight;
a city whose top-heavy palaces and public edifices are so
treacherously set upon the sands that they must constantly undergo
costly repairs; a city builded upon foundations so unstable that the
springtime floods of the river Neva ever threaten permanently to wipe
out its very existence; a city where the palaces of the always
widening circle of the Imperial princes of the blood, and of the upper
nobility, and of the great bureaucratic chiefs, are builded with an
arrogance of dimension, an elaborateness of design, a lavishness of
cost that beats anything an American billionaire has ever tried to do,
or dreamed of doing in San Francisco or New York; and yet a city
abounding in the mean, small, log and wooden cabins of the very poor;
a city where penury and poverty and dire pinch protrude their squalid
presence in continual tragic protest against the flaunted and wanton
riot of unmeasured wealth, possessed by the very few.
This morning as I walked upon the Nevsky Prospekt, the Broadway of the
Imperial capital, and watched the movement of mankind along the way,
and beheld the extraordinary contrasts between those who walked and
those who rode; as I saw the burly policeman arrest the shabby
foot-farer for nearly being run down, while he let the haughty grandee
drive freely on; as I beheld poverty and wealth in such flagrant
contrast, and realized that a standing army is kept ever armed and
girt to protect and uphold the privilege and security of the rich; as
I beheld the surly, sour, sombre faces of those who wore no gaudy
covering of broadcloth and gold lace, my fancy harked back to the
time, somewhat more than a century ago, when the King and Nobles of
France drove through the Rues of Paris in all their glittering
splendor, trampling down in their pride of power the pedestrian who
failed to escape from their sudden approach. How secure they felt in
their arrogant enjoyment of prerogative and rank! How contemptuously
they disdained the humble claims of the glitter-proletarian, of the
peasant on the land! Louis XIV had cried "_L'etat c'est moi._" Was
that not enough! And yet, I had stood in the Place de la Concorde,
almost on the very spot where, inspired by the hatred of the
Sansculottes, Mademoiselle La Guillotine had bit off the dull head of
Louis XVI, and cut through the fair throat of Marie Antoinette.
It may be possible for Russia and her governing men, her Bureaucratic
Autocracy, yet a little while to postpone the fateful hour. By means
of foreign wars it may be possible to play the old game of diverting
the public mind from its own bitter ills; by promises of fair and
liberal dealing it may be possible to calm the public mind--cajole it
until the promises are duly broken, as is invariably the case.
Whatever fair-speaking and fat-feeding officialdom may to the contrary
assert, the impression I gain amidst all this splendor and pomp and
glare of supreme, concentered power of the few is that, beneath this
opulent exterior, deep down in the hearts and even below the conscious
working of their minds, there to-day abides among the masses of the
Russian people--who after all hold in their hands the final power--a
profound and monstrous discontent: a discontent so deep-rooted and so
intense that when the inevitable hour strikes, as strike it must, the
world will then behold in Russia a saturnalia of blood and tears, a
squaring of ten centuries' accounts, more fraught with human anguish
and human joy than ever dreamed a Marat and a Robespierre, more
direful and more glad than yet mankind have known.
We drove about the city like grandees. Our _landau_ was just such as
Russian nobles like best to use; our splendid pair of sorrel stallions
pranced upon their heels and neighed and ran just as all nobles'
horses should; and our well-distended driver, of enormous and
deftly-padded girth, sat belted with a big embroidered band, and
guided the horses he never dreamed to hold, and helloed loudly to
those who did not fly out of the way, just as would any driver of the
Blood! We almost ran over some slow-moving man or woman, foot-weary
wretch, at every crossing of a street!
Many palaces and public buildings we visited--enormous edifices, all
of them, with innumerable and extensive halls and immense chambers
finished in gold and alabaster and gaudy hues, with countless servants
and lackeys in livery and lace, gold lace, to care for them, and watch
over them, and fatten upon a government graft or easy-gotten fee.
Suites of enormous apartments they were, which are never used and
never are likely to be used.
The paintings of the great masters collected in the galleries of the
Hermitage and Winter Palaces, accumulated by the Czars, are among the
most renowned in Europe. The reception halls and audience chambers and
ballrooms and dining halls of these palaces are designed and intended
to dazzle and impress whosoever are given the chance of beholding
them. At the same time, the library and study of the late Czar,
Alexander III, is a small and plainly furnished room, with the
atmosphere and markings of a man of simple tastes, who laboriously
worked, worked as no other official of the Bureaucracy in Russia
pretends to work.
[Illustration: OUR SQUEALING STALLIONS.]
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF OUR LADY OF KAZAN.]
We traversed the suites of apartments used by the Imperial family,
when sojourning in St. Petersburg during those portions of the winter
season when the court there gathers, and we noted the outer guardrooms
where night and day stand the faithful watchers with sleepless vigil,
and we realized, perhaps for the first time, that this man, so steeped
in power, is after all but a prisoner of the system which locks him in
and binds him fast and robs him of that independence of action which
you and I enjoy. He is become but a creature of the great machine that
governs, a slave of the system which Peter the Great set up for the
furtherance of his Imperial will, a system of government which has so
developed and spread out that to-day the Czar of all the Russias is
merely the puppet of its will, the tool of the greedy, grasping,
intriguing, governing Bureaucracy.
On approaching the city, our straining eyes first caught sight of the
gilded, glittering domes and spires of the great cathedrals and
churches with which it is so abundantly supplied. The domes of St.
Isaac, of our Lady of Kazan, of Alexander Nevsky, and the spires of
St. Peter and St. Paul, each and all told us that whatever else we
might discover, we were yet entering a city and a land where the
people counted not the cost of the splendid housing of their faith.
And so we have found it. The wealth of gold and of silver, of precious
stones and of priceless stuffs with which these churches are adorned
and crammed, excels anything of which the western brain has ever
dreamed. Each great church is famed and honored for its particular
beneficence, its peculiar holiness, and to each one comes in
procession perpetual an innumerable throng to pray and worship and to
receive the blessings flowing from that especial fane. Even in the
ancient log cabin, said to be the actual house erected by Peter
himself, is established a shrine, where priests continuously intone
the beautiful service of the Russian church and where thousands of
devoted worshipers swarm in and out all the day long, and the night as
well, praying to Imperial Peter's now sainted ghost.
In the noble chamber of the golden-spired cathedral of St. Peter and
St. Paul lie the white marble tombs of the Romanoffs, where is also
kept up throughout the day and night yet another sumptuous service for
the repose of the souls of the illustrious dead. In the great
monastery of Alexander Nevsky is each day maintained a simple and
splendid choral service which multitudes attend, and where the
melancholy Gregorian chanting and intoning of the black-robed
long-bearded monks reveal new organ stops in the human voice.
Naturally, an American has great sympathy for the Russian people
who have so little, while he has so much. In America we send our girls
and boys to school as a matter of course. Here in the ornate center of
autocracy, I have seen no building that I recognized as a common
school, nor in Russia is there such a system, as we know it.
[Illustration: OUR IZVOSTCHIK.]
To the western mind three things stand out above all else in Russia:
(1) The concentrated wealth and privilege of the few--the big grafters
who have seized it all.
(2) The opulence and extraordinary power of that ecclesiastical
organization, the "Holy Orthodox Church" itself an engine of the
autocratic rule,--used to cover atrocious authority with gilded
cassock and priestly cope.
(3) The profound poverty and hopeless subserviency of the Russian
people--those who are robbed and ruined by the grafters and hoodooed
by the Church.