THE GRAVE OF HOPE
Mystery shrouded the Petrograd front. In the days that followed the
battles of Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo only a few meager facts came out
of the background of wildly conflicting rumors.
We knew that Kerensky, with that dazzling gift of his for momentarily
overpowering men, had driven in an automobile into the midst of a
detachment of rebel soldiers, and disarmed them.
We knew that the ragtag army of the Red Guard, fired by faith in their
cause, had taught the Cossacks that it takes more than a military
reputation to make a fighting man.
We knew that the sailor Dydenko had gone alone across No Man’s Land to
plead the cause of the proletarian revolt, and had come back with the
surrender of the opposing forces.
We knew that it was all over.
At heart the Cossacks were no more eager for killing their brothers
than the rest of the Russians. They were the policemen of the Tsar
because they had known no other calling, seen no other vision. The
Revolution had broken their traditions, given them a new faith. They
were no longer a unit ready to do the bidding of a master. Many of the
younger Cossacks had already embraced the Bolshevist faith, and in the
months to follow more and more of them were to desert the ways of their
fathers.
There is something poignantly tragic in the picture of Kerensky out
there alone beyond the edge of the city, where for an hour he was an
uncrowned king. Like most of the Russian leaders of the revolutionary
year, he came out of nowhere, flashed for a moment on the world’s
screen, and disappeared into nowhere again. If some day he should
emerge from that land of silence into which so many Russians are exiled
by the changing fortunes of revolution, we may learn what really
happened to him at Gatchina. The sailor Dybenko, in his report to
the Soviet, declared that Kerensky, when he learned the soldiers had
deserted him, said to General Krasnoff:
“Your Cossacks have betrayed me. I shall drive a bullet into my brain.”
According to Dybenko’s story, General Krasnoff suggested that the only
courageous thing for the Minister-President of Russia to do was to go
to Petrograd, and offered to give him an escort of eight men. To this
Kerensky consented, but, while the escort was being formed, he asked
to be allowed to clean himself up, and succeeded in changing to the
uniform of a sailor and escaping in an _izvostchik_.
Leon Trotzky, in a telegram from the village of Pulkovo to his
followers in Petrograd, said:
“On the evening of November 12 Kerensky sent a proclamation to the
revolutionary troops to lay down their arms. The Kerensky troops had
opened artillery fire. Our artillery replied and silenced the enemy.
The Cossacks started an offensive attack but the withering fire of
the sailors, Red Guards, and soldiers compelled them to turn back. We
have cut into the ranks of the enemy--the enemy is running. Our troops
are pursuing. Lettish sharpshooters are arriving from the front and
approaching Kerensky’s rear. An order for his arrest has been issued.”
Kerensky’s associates in Petrograd tried to keep in touch with him
to the last minute, but the scraps of information they received were
unilluminating, for he himself could not tell how long he would be able
to hold his men. Their distaste for killing each other was far greater
than their loyalty to any individual or institution.
Meanwhile the city shuddered at the tales of frightfulness centered
around the ancient Fortress of Peter and Paul, where the ministers of
the Kerensky Cabinet and the military school cadets were imprisoned.
Mothers, driven nearly mad by the stories of starvation, cruelties, and
atrocities, appealed frantically to the city Duma and the American Red
Cross Mission to investigate these reports.
At the request of the Duma and the American Mission, I became one of a
committee of four to visit the prison and interview the inmates. Two
of us--Daddy R. and M. Mikhailoff, of the London _Telegraph_--were
Russians.
We walked in awed silence through the arched gate in the massive outer
wall, each busy with his own thoughts. To the two Russians this was a
day never to be forgotten. Both of them had been old revolutionists,
and Mikhailoff had been a prisoner in this very fortress not many years
before. For me the place was full of ghosts. They walked before me in
a strange procession. I watched while Peter, who stalks the city by
day and by night, killed his own son. I saw Catherine bury alive the
critics who found her marital practices not to their liking. I saw the
Decembrists--they who first fought to free the serfs--martyred before
my eyes. Last of all, I saw the fortress gate swing wide on that glad
March day when the revolutionists took possession of Petrograd, and men
and women, with blinking eyes and tears of joy streaming down their
faces, marched into the free world.
Mikhailoff brought me back to the moment.
“Listen! The bells--it’s the Gospodi pomilui [Lord save me],” he said.
“It was the chimes that almost drove us mad. The monotony of them--the
terrible regularity!”
We stood still till the sound died away, then passed indoors to a
crowded waiting-room. The place was dirty, and the air foul. The floor
was littered with cigarette stubs, and heaped on a table in one corner
was a strangely assorted pile of paper bundles of food, brought by
relatives for the prisoners.
Through a door at one side of the room unshaven soldiers, in
mud-colored uniforms, passed ceaselessly in and out. Most of the
occupants were women, poor women with _platoks_ tied over their heads,
and prosperous, well dressed women with diamonds in their ears. Some
sat dejectedly against the wall, waiting. Some, in high-pitched,
nervous voices, demanded to see their sons and brothers immediately.
The guards replied wearily but patiently.
Daddy R. was for quietly sitting down with the waiting ones, in Russian
fashion. We prodded him into action, and made our way past two sentries
to an inner office. At the desk sat a soldier _commissaire_. His eyes
were heavy with sleep and his young face gray with fatigue. In a corner
of the office two exhausted comrades lay asleep on the floor. By sheer
effort of will, the _commissaire_ kept on answering questions fired at
him from a dozen tongues. In time our turn came. He read our passes,
glanced at the seals, gave a hurried order to a guard, and bowed us
out.
We passed through a succession of dingy offices, up a dark stairway,
and down a long corridor.
“It’s the Troubetskoy bastion,” Mikhailoff whispered in an awed
undertone.
Our guide motioned us to wait. At the other end of the hall some
sailors and soldiers were talking. One of them looked up, saw me, and,
detaching himself from his comrades, brought a chair, which he offered
with a pleasant “Pazhal’sta.”
A few minutes later the commandant of the bastion appeared, a bunch of
keys jangling in his hand. He wore the uniform of an officer, and spoke
a little English. Like the others, he was pale and haggard, and later
in the day he confided to me that he could not live through another
five days like those just past.
“Up to the time of the last Revolution,” he said, “there were only
three or four members of the old régime in the entire prison. We were
not prepared with food or fuel to take care of many more. Suddenly, in
a single day, we had to find quarters and provisions for nearly three
hundred. Then, there were the mobs. I have not felt secure for a single
second.”
He took us first to a tier of cells in which the military school cadets
were imprisoned. At the door of the first cell he asked if we preferred
to talk to the boys alone.
“They might feel freer,” I said, and he nodded and withdrew.
They all told virtually the same story. They had been terribly
frightened on their way to the prison, for the crowds had tried to take
them from the convoy.
“They have killed our comrades!” the mobs shouted. “They are trying to
destroy our Revolution. It is time to stop their cake-eating. Throw
them in the river! Put a bullet through them!”
Once a group of them were lined up against a wall; but the convoy
fought off the crowd. In the first twenty-four hours in prison, things
had been bad because the cells were damp and cold and there was no
food; but the boys explained the conditions as the commandant had done,
and blamed no one.
In another part of the bastion we found the members of the Kerensky
Cabinet. Tereshchenko, the late Foreign Minister, sat cross-legged on
his cot, a cigarette in his mouth. He greeted us pleasantly; and in the
softest, most musical English I ever heard inquired for news of the
French front and of Moscow.
The cell was as large as an ordinary American bedroom, and was equipped
with modern sanitary conveniences and provided with an iron cot and
table. He said he had everything he wanted, and believed his release
merely a matter of a few days. If he could have foreseen the long
months of imprisonment, I doubt whether he would have presented such a
cheerful front that afternoon. Just before I left Petrograd I heard of
him again. The dark-haired, debonair boy statesman had disappeared. His
shoulders had begun to droop, and a gray beard hung from his chin. The
Minister of Rumania, during the day that he spent in the Fortress of
Peter and Paul, met him in the exercise-yard.
“I see you now,” Tereshchenko said to the Rumanian, “but I shall not
see you again. My shame that my country has imprisoned the diplomatic
representative of another country is too great.”
In similar cells we found Kishkin, Bourtzeff, Rutenberg, Paltchinsky,
and other men arrested after the fall of the Winter Palace. The top
of Rutenberg’s head had been grazed by a bullet on the night of his
arrest. The ministers were marched from the Winter Palace to the
fortress. The prison guard, discovering a crowd in the darkness,
thought it was a mob attacking the fortress, and opened machine-gun
fire to frighten them away. Ministers and convoy alike followed the
Russian custom in such cases, and fell flat on their faces in the
middle of the street. Rutenberg was a little slower than the others.
He was rebellious against imprisonment, and complained of the quality
of the food.
“We live hourly in fear of our lives,” he said.
It was true--they did. It was quite plain that their position was
a precarious one, because they were in a sense hostages, and any
violence done to the Bolshevik leaders would very quickly have met
with retaliation from the Bolshevik followers in the prison garrison.
The stories of outrages circulated so freely outside the prison were
more of a menace to the men inside than anything else could have been,
because they helped to keep alive the bitterness and hatred that made
their position so critical.
Vladimir Bourtzeff and Daddy R. were old friends, and when the guard
unlocked the door of Bourtzeff’s cell, they threw themselves into each
other’s arms and kissed on both cheeks. Bourtzeff, who uncovered the
ring of spies and provokators headed by the infamous Azeff, had many
times suffered imprisonment and exile at the hands of the Tsar. Now,
with the turn of Revolution, he was proclaimed a reactionary. His paper
was suppressed by Kerensky, and General Verkhovsky, the young Minister
of War, sued him for libel. With the overturn of the government, he
made a bitter attack upon the Bolsheviki, accusing Lenin of being a
German agent and a traitor to Russia.
From the cells occupied by the Kerensky ministers we went to those
in which the prisoners of the old régime had spent the revolutionary
year, ignorant of the seething life beyond their prison walls. As we
entered the cell of Soukhomlinoff, Minister of War under the Tsar, the
two Russian members of the party led the way. Soukhomlinoff arose
and stepped forward to meet us. As if with a single impulse, the two
revolutionists put their hands behind their backs and bowed low before
him. They were ancient enemies--they could not shake hands.
Soukhomlinoff started, recovered himself, and bowed low in return. He
turned to me, inviting me to a seat on his cot, and apologized that
he had nothing better to offer. He wore a comfortable lounging robe,
and there was a certain air of ancient elegance about him, despite his
position and his prison cell. His hair--what there was of it--was quite
white, and there were pouches under his faded old blue eyes, and deep
lines in his face. The table beside him was as shipshape as a sailor’s
kit-box. He picked up a portfolio and opened it. His old hand shook as
he untied the string and revealed a pile of foolscap closely written in
a small, fine hand.
“It is here,” he said--“my case. It is all here. I have written this to
prove that I am innocent.”
He fingered the paper tenderly. It was the work of many dreary hours.
We let him talk about it for a few minutes, then asked how he fared
there in prison under the Bolshevist régime.
“I have no complaint,” he said. “Perhaps it is better than before,
because they give us the newspapers. That means much to a man in
prison. To-day I am very happy because my wife has just been to see me.
She is very good to me, and comes as often as they will permit her.
Those are great days--the days of her visits.”
It was for this wife, young and considered a very beautiful woman
according to the Russian standard, that Soukhomlinoff is supposed to
have sold his country in those days when the Russian troops fell like
dead leaves in an October wind because they had nothing but naked hands
with which to meet the mighty cannon of the advancing Germans.
Our last visit that day was to the arch villain of the old régime,
Biletsky, chief of the Tsar’s secret police. Biletsky has many sins
written large against his name. Few men within the length and breadth
of all the Russias have been responsible for more broken hopes, more
crushed lives, more human wrecks, than the master detective. He was a
big fellow with iron-gray hair and beard, and a pair of sharp brown
eyes, quick-shifting and penetrating. He was able, shrewd, and as
hard as his reputation implied.
[Illustration: The Minister of Rumania and his staff just before his
brief incarceration in the Fortress of Peter and Paul]
[Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman “Old Ivan Veliki high up in the
heavens faithfully thundered the hours above the citadel of church and
state”]
He was glad to talk--grateful, I think, for a chance. He welcomed the
Bolshevik régime. Possibly it was because he believed, with most of the
men of the old order, that the quickest way to restore the monarchy
was to give the radicals a loose line and help them to create all the
disorder possible. Perhaps it was because he thought new names on the
prison roster, new hates in the revolutionary heart, would detract
attention from the old. Perhaps it was only because he believed any
change might hold the possibility of greater leniency for himself.
Perhaps it was, as he said, because the Bolsheviki had given him
newspapers and put him once more in touch with the world from which he
had been so long isolated.
It was quite dark when we left the prison. As I passed one of the cells
in which the cadets were being held, I peered through the peep-hole in
the door, and saw a group of boys with a pack of cards spread out on
the mattress before them. The city was saving electric light, and the
current had not yet been turned on for the night. A stub of candle lit
up their faces, and revealed them intent upon their game. If they were
in danger they had forgotten it.
We came away, agreed upon one thing: whatever might come of chaos and
disorder in this new régime, the Peter and Paul of to-day would never
be a match for that Peter and Paul of the old days when violence and
cruelty was an organized and deliberate policy.