DIPLOMATS--OFFICIAL AND OTHERWISE
It was less than a week after my early morning advent in Petrograd when
I once more passed before the candle-lighted ikons in the Nicolaiski
Station and out to the platform. This time the station was far from
deserted. A line of soldiers, a picked escort of stalwart men in
dun-colored coats, stood at attention. The tall, dark, handsome young
Foreign Minister, Tereshchenko, towered above the genial white-vested
person of the American Ambassador Francis. The American colony was out
in force.
The Provisional Government of Russia, successor of Tsar and
bureaucracy, between Cabinet crises and food problems, had found time
to prepare to entertain. Ambassador-Extraordinary Root and the special
diplomatic mission to Russia were due to arrive at any moment.
Earlier in the day I had wandered curiously through the great corridors
of the rambling old Winter Palace and watched the servants putting the
finishing touches upon the mansion of the Czars. With the true Russian
sense of the dramatic, the new hosts of all the Russias had chosen to
be at home to their republican brothers from over the seas in the very
premises where royal heads were once held highest and lackeys’ backs
once bent lowest.
The huge red stucco building--acres and acres of it--had been swept and
dusted and polished until Nicholas himself could have found no spot at
which to point the imperial finger of disapproval. The big mahogany
bath-tub in the ambassador’s suite had been scrubbed for the last
time. The nudity of the tiny ultra-modern brass bed, cowering behind
the crushed-mulberry curtains, had been only partly covered with fresh
linen and a new silk eiderdown quilt. The huge oval-topped mahogany
table from which Peter the Great had taken his caviar and vodka was
prepared to serve ham and eggs American style. As I looked from behind
the pink silk curtains out on the blue waters of the Neva, sparkling
in the spring sunshine, I wondered what the coming of these Americans
would mean to Russia.
While official Russia was getting ready to welcome my countrymen, I
had been trying to find out what unofficial Russia was thinking about.
With the help of an interpreter, I had been listening to the babble of
voices that sounded through the golden days and white nights. Already I
had learned that revolution is a term as variable as truth, and newly
mined by every man who speaks it.
I discovered that the Revolution that overthrew the Tsar and absolutism
was a simple thing, beautifully logical, gloriously unanimous. Every
one wanted it; every one was glad when it came. The monarchy that had
brought such desperate misery to the millions crumbled to dust with the
first vigorous blow of the rising peoples like a thing long since dead.
The heavy heart of Russia lifted in a mighty shout of joy: “Svoboda!
(Freedom.) We are free!”
For the moment this was enough. That single word, with its age-old
power of placing man on the mountain-tops, made Russia happy.
Soon her people began to be specific.
“Freedom for the peasant,” they said. “Freedom for the worker.”
“Freedom for the soldier.” “Freedom for the Jew.” “Freedom for women.”
Russia still rejoiced, but with certain vague mental reservations
faintly disturbed by this diversity. Then came definition. Each man
translated revolution into the terms of his own life.
Nicolai Voronoff, whom I met at dinner one night, voiced the
conservative intellectuals’ idea of freedom.
“Things could not go on as they were,” he said. “We had to have
freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly,
inviolability of person--freedom as you Americans and English know it.”
Old Chekmar, the peasant delegate from a remote south Russian village,
spoke of freedom in terms of land.
“Freedom for the peasant,” he said. “Yes, yes, land--we shall have
land. The Tsar Alexander gave it to us when he freed the serfs, but the
landlords have kept it away. Mother earth--it is ours at last!--God’s
and the people’s.”
Chekmar tossed his fine old head in a gesture of pride and exaltation
as he said it, and his dull blue eyes were lit with the fervor of
young ideals.
The same light was in the eyes of Andrey Krugloff, from the great
Putiloff works, when he said: “Freedom for the worker. The day of the
proletariat has come. The men who use the tools shall control them,
the fruits of labor shall belong to labor. We will put an end to
capitalistic exploitation; we will do away with poverty; the workers of
the world shall unite.”
Ivan Borovsky, who had come from the front to attend the all-Russian
convention of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, saw freedom in terms
of the soldiers. “Peace, peace,” he said. “We dig our graves and call
them trenches. What is the use of freedom to a man in his grave? We
will stop this bloody slaughter. This is not our war. This is the
Tsar’s war. The soldiers of all the world shall rise as we have done.
They will throw off the yokes of kings and kaisers, and we will all
make peace. There shall be no more court-martial, no more capital
punishment. We will have honest, democratic peace. Then we can go back
to our farms and our factories and put an end to all wars.”
Little curly blond-haired Petroff, who brought me my morning _chei_
(tea), with a smile that sparkled like the sunshine on the Neva,
defined revolution in his own way when he refused to accept my first
tip. “We are free now,” he explained. “We will get our regular per cent
of the bill for service.”
So it went. Revolution was to every man the sum of his desires. Yet
above and beneath and beyond each man’s interpretation was the deeper
thing that old Chekmar voiced when he spoke of land as “God’s and
the people’s.” It was not only of himself that Chekmar thought when
he said, “It is ours!” Personal greed could never have brought that
light into his dull blue eyes. Something more than his own hours and
wages sounded through the words of Andrey Krugloff. Hours and wages
alone were not enough to lift his heavy face out of the mold of common
clay. It was the knowledge that they were one with the great living,
breathing human mass--the people--that filled their eyes with visions.
The honeymoon of Revolution was already waning on that day when the
American commission came to Petrograd; but the consciousness of “the
people” as an entity still remained. Slowly the years of political and
economic slavery, land hunger, and hideous physical poverty imposed
upon the many by the few had brought about a mass consciousness that
was the most vital force in revolutionary Russia.
I discovered with surprise that the Tsar’s name was seldom mentioned.
He ceased to count for anything. A month after the first revolutionary
attack, he was as completely forgotten as if he had never lived. When
Vera and Ivan tore the double-headed eagles from the great wrought-iron
fence around the Winter Palace, and ripped the imperial coat-of-arms
from the buildings to make bonfires in the streets, all that there was
of Nicholas, even his memory, was burned.
With the tragic failure of the first Revolution of 1905 and 1906, when
the Workers tried to take control and lost everything, still fresh in
their memory, they were trying desperately to coöperate, to give and
take, to use the power of the intellectuals and at the same time direct
revolution into the channels through which they wanted it to flow.
They were theorists who had always been denied the right of action.
Never having been allowed to try to put any of their theories into
practice, they had never learned how to compromise. Each group was
willing to die for its own particular definition of revolution, but no
group was able to yield to the theory of another. Consequently, Cabinet
crises followed Cabinet crises.
[Illustration: Around the statue of Alexander III, symbol of old
Russia, the talking multitudes surged]
[Illustration: First Soviet of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies]
[Illustration: Alexander Kerensky in the study of the Tzar]
[Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman The great stucco Winter Palace in
which the American guests were housed]
Prince Lvoff and the scholarly Miliukoff had already been retired to
private life before the Root Commission reached Russia. Miliukoff,
student of English institutions, saw freedom for Russia in the terms
of a constitutional monarchy. To him, and to the liberals who gathered
around him, this was a sufficiently radical step for a country that had
only yesterday crawled out from under the iron boot of absolutism. He
and his followers were a hopeless minority, and, in spite of their past
struggles for Russian freedom, were soon discarded, with the monarchial
idea. They were liberals and could not follow Russia into the new
social realms she was so eager to explore.
The demand of the people for a republic was insistent. The republican
idea satisfied some, but not enough. A social democracy--a socialist
state--became the loudest cry of the articulate proletariat.
I heard it on the street corners and in the crowded trams, along the
wide paths of the parks, and in the assembly rooms of palaces whose
ancient walls might well have shuddered at the strangeness of such
sentiments.
Much of the time they talked of war, and I heard unkempt soldiers
in dilapidated uniforms and workmen in shoddy suits demanding “an
interbelligerent conference,” “statement of Allied war aims,”
“publication of the secret treaties,” as glibly as workingmen at home
discuss hours and wages.
Here and there a group talked of the coming of the American Commission.
Usually the spokesman was an unofficial diplomat returned from the
United States and bringing his own decided idea of us and our faults.
There were many of these in Petrograd in the days of early June. Some
of them hailed from Hester Street; and Hester Street and New York’s
East Side became formidable factors in complicating the international
situation. They had seen all of the worst and none of the best of
America. They sat at the tables in the tea-room where the members of
the Soviet of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies gathered around the
samovar, and told stories of poverty and suffering on the East Side.
“Root is coming to make you fight,” they said. “Root doesn’t care
anything about the Revolution. He’s a capitalist, a corporation
attorney, a hide-bound reactionary. In the United States he’s against
the workers.”
Most of these men were honest revolutionists, soap-boxers, actuated
by nothing more than hatred of the capitalistic system and a distrust
of all things bearing a government stamp. There were other unofficial
diplomats in Petrograd whose words had a different origin. They
were under orders from Berlin, and their business was to discredit
America and the Allies and make the Russian masses believe the German
people were the true friends of Revolution. They conducted a telling
and profitable propaganda. To begin with, they had linguistic and
geographical advantages that the Allies could not overcome. Many
Germans speak Russian, still more Russians speak German. Being
next-door neighbors, the Germans understood the Russian psychology.
They knew that nothing in the world meant anything to the mass of the
Russians but saving their Revolution, and they simulated a sympathy
for revolution that they were temperamentally incapable of possessing.
They pictured Germany as hungry for democratic peace, and the Allies
as imperialists who would not stop fighting until they had crushed
the German masses and divided the German territory. They accused the
Allies of trying to continue the war for the purpose of destroying the
Revolution. They took the passion and idealism of the Russian mass and
tried to turn it to their own ends.
They also had something to say about the coming of the American
Commission, and they said it where it would take effect.
For the most part, unofficial Russia was too engrossed in its own very
important business to pay much attention to the tall, gray-haired,
distinguished American who was coming to town. Unofficial Russia was
concerned chiefly with defining revolution, and each individual group
was possessed of a passionate necessity for making the other groups
accept its definition.
All together, it was not a happy situation into which the imperial
train was bringing the American diplomats that June afternoon. The
train, looking almost as it did when the royal family last journeyed
forth from Petrograd, slipped into view on the appointed second.
At ten o’clock next morning Ambassador Root sat in a corner of the huge
drawing-room in his suite at the Winter Palace with his back to the
light. Half a dozen of us foreign correspondents sat stiffly upon the
edges of flower-brocaded chairs drawn in a circle around him, while he
introduced the Washington Code into Petrograd.
The Washington Code is a Maxim silencer. It is a gentleman’s agreement
to which an occasional lady is reluctantly admitted. A great man sits
in a corner--with his back to the light--and announces that he would
like to be able to discuss quite openly everything that happens and
even to have the benefit of your advice. Of course, if he is to do
so, he must be assured that all he says will be held in strictest
confidence. You--perhaps because you are flattered by the great man’s
confidence, perhaps because of your curiosity--joyfully consent.
Sometimes you consent only because you know the folly of cutting off
your ears merely because your lips are sealed.
The Washington Code was the only check to speech in all that great
land swamped beneath a flood of words.
Those morning conferences became a regular institution. We did most
of the talking while Mr. Root sat silently listening. Occasionally he
made one of those simple, pat, nut-shell comments for which he has such
an amazing talent, and we regretted the “made in America” rules for
correspondents.
From time to time, special missions took flying trips out of Petrograd
to study some particular phase of the complex situation. The military
men went to the front; the naval representatives took in a mutiny
of the Black Sea Fleet; the bankers investigated Russia’s depleted
treasury; and the religiously inclined went to Moscow to discover the
future status of the Russian Church.
There was no official life of any kind. When the Commission donned
its Prince Alberts and paid its first two formal visits, they found
the Foreign Minister in a sack-suit and tan shoes and the members of
the Council dressed like workingmen. The young men of the Provisional
Government were growing old overnight with the burden of the task upon
them. And the members of the Soviet were groping endlessly for that
hidden road which idealism and reality may travel in equity.
Every man, from the young Minister President, Alexander Kerensky--whose
health was already giving way under the frightful strain of trying
to make the dilapidated economic machine inherited from the Tsar’s
régime supply the exhaustive demands of war and revolution--to the
most insignificant little delegate in the Soviet, was working with his
sleeves rolled up to remold Russia nearer to his heart’s desire.
As the Soviet moved, so Russia moved. It was the mouth-piece of the
awakened masses. Already it was the government behind the government.
Charles Edward Russell was the only member of the Commission who
was able to get the least bit close to the Council of Workmen’s and
Soldiers’ Deputies. They treated him with more courtesy than any other
official foreign representative, though they looked upon him as a
renegade socialist.
I went with him to the Soviet one day when he was to speak. His
buttonhole flaunted the reddest red ribbon in Petrograd, and his white
linen collar, the only one in the huge assembly, was encircled by
a flaming scarlet tie. They listened to his message, but it had no
meaning for them. He had come to Russia to help make Russia fight, and
the dream of the Russian revolutionist was not only to stop Russia
from fighting, but to put an end to all wars. Separate peace was no
part of the revolutionary scheme. Even the most radical members of the
Soviet were playing for larger stakes. Internationalism was at the
bottom of their creed, and it was not until ten months after the fall
of the Romanoffs that I heard a revolutionist admit the possibility of
separate peace. It was at a meeting in the Duma, when Leon Trotzky,
after the armistice negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, said:
“We have given the Allies a month to come into the peace negotiations.
Perhaps we can give them a little more time if they need it, but we
can’t go on forever. Russia is bleeding to death, and to save her we
have to get back to the mills and the farms and the factories.”
They believed that the failure of internationalism in 1914 did not
necessarily mean the failure of internationalism in 1917, for now the
internationalists of the world had before their eyes the example of
Russia and the Russian Revolution. The revolutionists had no hope
from the German autocracy, but they were confident that if they could
but speak loud enough, the masses of the German people would rise and
overthrow their government, as the Russian workers, soldiers, and
peasants had done.
A few men believed, with the elder Liebknecht, that the German people
could never be free until the German military power was defeated at
arms, and these tried frantically to continue the war.
“Peace, but not separate peace,” was the phrase on every Russian tongue.
The Root Commission realized this, and it realized also that the
question was not whether the government had the will to go on fighting,
but whether it had the power. The mission was interested in helping
to give Russia that power. Perhaps what it failed to realize was that
Russia’s spiritual needs were as great or greater than her material
needs. The thing above everything else that Russia needed to keep
her in the war was a cause. Root, “battered old campaigner,” as he
styled himself, was not unmoved by the sincerity and immensity of the
movement in which Russia was engrossed. It was not his day--it was the
day of the diplomats from Hester Street. He might not agree with their
judgments or approve their methods, but I think he felt himself in the
presence of something big, something epochal.
For three years, Ivan had fought desperately in the trenches, simply
because the Little Father had told him to. Sometimes it was for love of
the Little Father that he fought. More often it was for fear of him and
his generals. More often still it was only in response to that blind
obedience to orders which absolutism instils in those whom it enslaves.
Sometimes Ivan did not know until he reached the big city of Petrograd
what enemy of Holy Russia it was that he must fight.
Manpower was cheap in Russia. Russia was correspondingly careless as
to how she wasted it. Ivan fought as no other soldier in the world is
asked to fight--fought with bare hands, fought with pitchforks, fought
with guns that he took from the hands of comrades as they fell in
battle.
One day Ivan discovered that the Tsar, in whom he had believed, was
just a little man whom he was able quite easily to put aside. The
general, the colonel, the captain of the regiment--they too were little
men. He need not salute them; he need not respect them; he need not
obey them.
The great driving force--fear--was gone. That greater driving force of
war--a cause--Ivan had never known. No one had bothered to give him
one. No one had cared enough.
Suddenly the facts were changed. The old gods were swept away in a
single hour. Tsar and church and country crumbled together. Revolution
took their place. Russia had a cause. “Save the Revolution!” became the
rallying cry. To save the Revolution, and what it meant to each, became
the common faith. However men differed in their definition of terms,
they were all agreed as to the slogan. Russia would follow no other
flag.
Ivan was tired of war--tired to death. Being Russian, he had no relish
either for killing or for dying; but when the occasion demanded, he did
both with a degree of resignation and despatch that is almost Oriental.
Living always in the shadow of danger, he acquired an indifference
to it as sublime as it is tragic. Essentially a fatalist, he accepted
the facts of life as they came to him, and contented himself with
thinking occasionally of that day of the people off there in the vague
future when all would be different. He wasn’t interested in other men’s
territory. Constantinople had no meaning for him. He was not naturally
imperialistic or militaristic. He wanted to govern himself and let
other people govern themselves.
Freedom had come, and he wanted desperately to enjoy it, to use it to
its limit and still to save it.
Diplomatically, Germany was in the strategic point. She pressed her
advantage. She asked Ivan to do what he wanted to do--to stop fighting.
The Allies asked Ivan to do what he did not want to do--to go on
fighting.
The Root Commission made it plain that, underlying the whole question
of aid to Russia, was the fundamental question of whether Russia was
going to continue in the war.
The July offensive was the answer of Kerensky to the Allies. It was a
blunder from its inception--a forced offensive for which Ivan was not
psychologically prepared. He invested no part of his faith in it, and
he chose to be shot as a coward and traitor rather than continue it. A
few picked men went into battle and put up a brilliant and courageous
fight; but the rank and file of the Russian soldiers were not behind
them. Ivan could no longer be driven to battle by the whip of fear, and
he had not yet come to know Germany as a greater enemy to himself than
to the Tsar.
The Root Commission waited to see the offensive well started before it
left Petrograd, but did not remain to see the tragic end.