THE MAN ON HORSEBACK
September came. The padlocked doors of Nizhni Novgorod and the quiet
waters of the Volga seemed far, far away. Farther still were the hectic
days of early June when the recalcitrant machine-guns sputtered up and
down the Nevsky. The white nights were gone. The soldier lovers and
their sweethearts strolled beside the Neva now only at the invitation
of the infrequent moon.
The War Hotel had undergone a transformation. After living for a whole
summer each unto himself alone, breakfasting, lunching, teaing, and
dining in our own rooms, we suddenly came out of hiding and looked one
another over.
The bloodstains of the Revolution had been scoured from the
rose-colored carpet in the drawing-room. The boards had come down
from the broken windows, and new glass and gorgeous crushed mulberry
curtains had taken their place. The dining-room, a few weeks ago the
repository of armless chairs and legless tables, dumb victims of the
vengeance of an angry mob, now fronted the world arrayed in white
napery.
It was a setting for luxury, but there was none. When Feodor served
luncheon, the first course was often chopped meat and _kasha_ stuffed
into cabbage leaves, and the second the same chopped meat and _kasha_
inadequately hidden by the half of a cucumber. There was no third. We
had the best the market offered, and the cook was sorely tested to
disguise its limitations.
A new spirit was abroad in the streets. The ghost of Peter walked
with firmer tread. Many of the predicted calamities of the foregoing
weeks had failed to materialize. Finland had not revolted. Ukraine was
still a part of Russia. The railroad strike continued only a threat.
The breach between Kerensky and Korniloff, scheduled for the Moscow
conference, had been averted.
The reactionaries still clamored for the strong hand of a dictator. The
Bolsheviki still cried, “Down with the bourgeoisie.” Kerensky strove
desperately to follow a middle course satisfactory to both. He knew his
people well enough to realize that the first attempt to use force, even
if he had it to use, would result in a reaction that would ultimately
mean the downfall of his government.
In the hours I had spent at the Soviet, in the Peasants’ Convention,
and talking with soldiers and workmen everywhere, I had become
convinced there was no power in Russia that Kerensky or any other
man could use; that the masses would regard any attempt to instal a
dictator as an attack on their Revolution and would desert the man
responsible for it.
I ventured this opinion one night at dinner. Mrs. Pankhurst, the
English suffragist, was there, and four or five others. They laughed
at the idea; said Russia must have a strong hand; called Kerensky a
weakling, and declared that only Korniloff could save the situation. He
would rule with an iron hand.
One group of foreigners in Petrograd saw clearly the hopelessness of
trying to impose a man on horseback upon the Russian workers. They
were the members of the American Red Cross Mission to Russia. They
came quietly into town one afternoon in August, with seventy tons of
surgical supplies in their kit-bags, a large amount of common sense in
their heads, and a wealth of human sympathy in their hearts. I was at
the Nicolaievski Station when they arrived, twenty-nine of them, all in
uniform of the American Red Cross. I looked at them and said to myself:
“I wonder what sort of a dent you will make in Russia.”
In one of the uniforms was the ample girth and the smiling round face
of Colonel William B. Thompson, who was financing the mission. To the
left of him, towering like an iron-gray mountain above the crowd, was
Dr. Frank Billings of Chicago. On the other side, Raymond Robins, dark
and determined, with a ready-for-anything look about him. There was
something big about this trio, and they went to work on the Russian job
in the best American spirit--with their sleeves rolled up.
They met the Russian aristocrat and the Russian bourgeois. Then they
met the Russian people. Breshkovskaya and Tchaikovski, grandmother and
grandfather of the Russian Revolution, opened for them a door through
which they looked down a long vista of hard years at the stupendous
struggle of a brave crowd.
They saw that the old altars had been broken to bits, and the one
vital, hopeful thing remaining was the devotion of the masses to their
Revolution. They had no faith in the altruistic intention of the
German, and believed for Russia to stop fighting would be suicidal.
Kerensky and Breshkovskaya held the same belief, but they knew also
that the war-weary multitudes were possessed of a consuming longing for
peace; that German propaganda was working to discredit the Allies and
to convince the Russians that the German people sympathized with their
Revolution and shared their longing for democratic peace. Almost daily
they were supplementing their propaganda by blowing up munition plants
and laying whole towns in ruins.
Raymond Robins, who brought to his study of the situation valuable
experience in the American labor movement, said to me, in one of the
first conversations we had:
“The only binder that will hold New Russia together is the Revolution.
The only way to help Russia is to help her make a success of that
Revolution.”
The Provisional Government was in power. At its head was Alexander
Kerensky, the young man. He and Katherine Breshkovskaya, the old,
old woman, in spite of the fact that the forced offensive on the
southwest front in July had weakened both, were at this time still the
mouth-pieces of the majority. They were the only government there was.
The Mission invested its energies in trying to help the government in
its difficult problems of administration. Unfortunately, most of the
other Allied representatives failed to share their opinion, or the
results might have been different.
Suddenly Riga fell. The news of its actual occupation surprised no one.
It had long been conceded in Petrograd that the Germans could take
it whenever they chose. From the military standpoint, it had little
significance. It was chiefly useful to the German militarists as a
scalp to dangle before the war-weary section of their own populace. The
Russian advocates of a dictator seized upon it as a weapon with which
to attack Kerensky. They blamed the leniency of the Kerensky policy
and the breakdown of the army for the fall of Riga. There were charges
and counter-charges. The soldiers vehemently denounced their officers,
accusing them of betraying the city to the Germans. One regiment of
Lettish troops had refused to retreat when ordered, and fought until
they were wiped out almost to a man. Most of them were Bolsheviki, and
they asserted that their officers were selling Riga to defeat their
Revolution.
The Germans were reported marching on Petrograd. Refugees fleeing from
Riga poured into the city. There was not a spare room anywhere. Almost
as many people were trying to get out of the city as were trying to get
in. They stood in queues before the railway offices all day and all
night, trying to buy tickets that would take them anywhere beyond the
reach of the Germans.
The anniversary of the sixth month of Russian freedom was at hand.
Petrograd, ready at all times to expect the worst, believed there would
be some tragic celebration of the day. Part of it trembled in its boots
for fear of a Bolshevik uprising; more of it predicted a German air
raid; some of it longingly scanned the horizon for a Russian Napoleon.
Nobody was prepared for what happened, and everybody was still more
amazed by what did not happen. When the official announcement was made,
“the Korniloff adventure has been liquidated,” the populace was still
gasping.
Every man, woman, and child in Petrograd believed the city was about
to become the battleground of the bloodiest conflict the world had
ever seen. What else was there to believe? Were not the troops of
General Korniloff, counted the strongest man in the Russian army,
marching on Petrograd to capture the capital and proclaim their
leader military dictator? Was not the advancing horde headed by
the “savage” division--wildest of the wild Cossacks? Were not the
government soldiers, charged with protecting the country against
counter-revolution at any cost, marching out to meet them in bloody
combat? Korniloff had announced his dictatorship, and offered Kerensky
the portfolio of Minister of Justice. Kerensky had declined.
In the War Hotel, storm center of the storm center, we sat and awaited
the inevitable. I dined that night with a Polish doctor who talked in
low, mysterious tones. All around us were officers with various degrees
of political belief, ranging from princes suspected of monarchistic
tendencies to the most radical of the radicals. All were talking in
low, mysterious tones. We spoke of Korniloff.
“He is a very desperate man; a very courageous man,” he said. “I was
in the battle of Mukden with him, and he remained when all the others
of the staff had gone. He is very determined. I do not know what will
happen, but I know he is a determined man.”
This fact no one questioned. Whatever the political slant of the
speaker, it never occurred to any one to suggest that the man whose
military exploits are almost legendary might have started something he
could not finish.
“He is determined; but Kerensky is also a determined man,” one Russian
told me that night. “So it will be a fight to the finish.”
During the evening Arno Dosch Flurot, an American correspondent, came
in to advise me to leave the hotel and go somewhere else for the night.
“The hotel may still be here in the morning, but it may not, and there
is no use in taking chances,” he said.
Rumor had promised me so many tragic ends--she had cried “Wolf, wolf!”
so many times--that I had become skeptical.
The lobby was swarming with excited officers. Messengers from the
staff and the various embassies dashed in and out all evening. A few
of the officers were loyal to Kerensky, and their faces were grim and
troubled. Most of the others were waiting with open arms to welcome
the Dictator, and they made no attempt to hide the joy they felt. For
them it was all settled. Kerensky would be overthrown--Korniloff would
capture the city. The death penalty would be restored; the leaders of
the Soviet would be hanged. Russia’s troubles would be over.
I could not see Russia in such simple terms. I did not believe that
the Russian Revolution could be understood in the terms of the French
Revolution. I felt very small and alone when, at midnight, I left the
chattering groups and went up to my little room. I was too engrossed in
what was going to happen to Russia to care the least bit about what
happened to me. I sat down before my typewriter and wrote until three,
and then went to bed.
At five o’clock I was awakened from a sound sleep by a loud knocking.
I jumped quickly up and opened the door. I looked out upon a sea of
cutlasses. The hall was filled with Russian sailors, perhaps a couple
hundred of them, husky chaps with rifles in their hands, and every
rifle topped with the most bloodthirsty-looking blade I had ever seen.
Life holds no further terrors for the man or woman who has faced two
hundred such weapons all gathered in one spot. An Atlantic Ocean
submarine would seem like a friendly neighbor come to call.
Still dazed with sleep, I looked at them uncomprehendingly. What had
happened? Were they Bolsheviki from Kronstadt who had captured the
hotel? Was the city already in the possession of Korniloff? Was the
battle going on downstairs at that very moment?
There was no one to answer my questions. I said something in English.
A smile passed over the faces of the half dozen sailors nearest me.
“Nechevo,” they said in chorus.
It is the most reassuring word in the Russian language--the first I
learned, and the last I shall forget. It means “Never mind,” “Don’t
worry,” and other things of a kindred nature.
“Kharasho?” I asked.
“Kharasho nechevo,” came back the double reassurance.
I had learned that, so far as I was concerned at least, everything was
all right. I closed the door and dressed.
Fifteen minutes later there was a great clatter of guns and marching
feet, and when I went out into the hall again our visitors had gone.
On all the landings, women, pale and terrified, were huddled in small
groups, talking. A thousand sailors had taken possession of the hotel,
examined passports, searched rooms, and arrested fourteen officers.
They were not from Korniloff or Kerensky, but from the government
behind the government--the Soviet. The Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies
had decided to take things into their own hands and arrest all officers
whom they suspected of counter-revolutionary tendencies.
I stopped to talk with some of the women. One of them spoke to me in
English--beautiful English. Her husband had been arrested but released
immediately.
“This hotel is a terrible place,” she said. “We Russians are mad, quite
mad, all of us. Why do you stay here when you do not have to? I would
go away--far, far away, to England or your America.”
She was a Russian princess, and from that morning on I saw much of her.
She was exquisitely pretty and completely helpless, a typical flower of
Russian culture. I told her once that she reminded me of an orchid.
“Ah, _orchidée_,” she said. “I like that; they are so beautiful.” Then,
nodding her head with a wise little smile, she said. “But I know what
you mean. You mean that I am a parasite.”
Always after that I called her “Orchidée.” The pathos of her
helplessness appealed to me, and also a certain loyalty that kept her
in Petrograd with her husband, when most of her friends had fled to the
Caucasus or the Crimea or gone abroad.
“I love my husband,” she told me. “It is very bourgeois of me, I know,
but I can’t help it.”
Her husband was an officer in the Guard, and she lived in hourly terror
of his arrest. This day he had escaped, but there were others who were
not so fortunate. At lunch-time several familiar figures were absent
from the dining-room, and here and there a woman with troubled eyes sat
alone.
In the following days we lived as much in the dark as to the actual
state of affairs as if we had been in America.
Kerensky declared Korniloff counter-revolutionist and traitor. The
Workmen and Soldiers in Petrograd, convinced that their Revolution and
their throats were both in danger, worked day and night in the munition
plants, and prepared to throw a trench around the great city. Another
part of the populace looked upon Korniloff as a deliverer, and waited
impatiently for his coming.
All over Russia the people, unable to get the truth, traded in rumor.
Down in the Caucasus the newspapers came out with lurid details of
battles in the Nevsky and thousands of dead bodies strewing the streets.
While we were still in the dark as to what was happening, I went one
morning to the Winter Palace, and climbed the stairs to Katherine
Breshkovskaya’s little room. Through all the troubled days of the last
six months, she had been the right-hand lieutenant of Kerensky.
I found her, slipping her cloak over her calico wrapper and starting
out to rally the soldiers to the support of the government. She was
seventy-three years old. I had formed the habit of dropping in on the
Babushka, who loved Americans and always had a radiant welcome. I
climbed the marble stairs as one would climb a mountain, to get away
from the tangle of petty things below, to look out over a distant
vista, to see a broad view. Always I came away with the sense of
having been on the heights, close to something big and fine, with
a grandmotherly kiss upon my cheek and the memory of a friendly
hand-clasp. Once, knowing well the burden of her answer, but curious to
know how she would phrase it, I asked:
“What do you think of Kerensky?”
She lifted her chin high and, with the ring of sincere faith in her
voice, spoke in her quaint English:
“Very well I think of him. He is a square man, and, what is better, he
is not selfish. He needs no glory. He works only for the welfare of the
people, and not only his people but for all the Allies, too. He is all
around a good man. It is not strange to have a good man; but to have a
man who is good and brave and clever is unusual. I esteem him from the
profound of my soul.”
During the Korniloff rebellion she amply proved her faith; for day and
night she went from barracks to barracks, urging the soldiers to stand
by Kerensky.
From Babushka I went to Red Cross Headquarters at the Hotel Europe, to
find a dismal group. Some suave and kindly gentleman had just confided
to Colonel Thompson, quite pleasantly, that the hangings would begin at
three o’clock that afternoon.
“If the old crowd comes back to Russia, I’m through. I don’t want to
stay,” said the Colonel; and Raymond Robins nodded a gloomy second.
If the weight of Russia and of the world had been upon our shoulders,
we could have been no more serious about it. We wept for the Petrograd
front. We wept that only a few miles distant Russians were killing
Russians, and nothing could be done to stop it. We might have saved
our tears. The “savage” forces of General Korniloff and the troops
of Kerensky had taken things into their own hands and were settling
them in their own way. They were using the new Russian method of
liquidation--they were fraternizing. The only shot fired was that with
which one of Korniloff’s officers killed himself. The soldiers turned
the bloody civil war into a fiasco. The “wild” Cossacks refused to kill
their fellows. Korniloff was captured and placed under arrest, and the
government announced that the Korniloff adventure had been liquidated.
The serious consequences were of another nature than bloodshed. The
workers declared themselves through with all attempts to coöperate
with the bourgeoisie. Korniloff’s friends accused Kerensky of double
dealing. He was unable to explain himself to the satisfaction of his
followers, and they began to distrust him. As nearly as I can gather
from the investigation of many stories, Kerensky became possessed of
knowledge that Korniloff, probably without his own knowledge, was
being used by counter-revolutionists to overthrow the government.
Kerensky made overtures to trap Korniloff into admissions that would
condemn him. By the time he had gained his object, he had involved
himself so far that it was impossible to explain. His intentions were
unquestionably of the highest, but his methods were not those that a
popular hero can use and remain on the high pedestal that his followers
demand.
The first attempt to instal a man on horseback resulted in driving the
radical forces further and further to the left and creating a mass
solidarity that was ultimately to prove fatal to the existing order.
The Korniloff adventure paved the way for the Bolsheviki Revolution.