THE GREAT BETRAYAL
Looking back, so much is clear!
On a gray November evening out on the Russian front not far from
Dvinsk, the gunners, delivering a daily salute to the German trenches,
heard a muttered command to stop firing. They turned to face a line of
soldiers in coarse mud-colored coats, their trench-tanned faces grimly
set beneath shaggy hats of sheepskin.
The gunners shrugged their shoulders and turned to the battery. “Stop
firing,” again came the command.
“Who said so?” asked one of the gunners.
“We say so,” a soldier answered. “Those are our brothers over there.
The war is finished. It was the Tsar’s war. They are workingmen and
peasants like us. They don’t want to fight us; we don’t want to fight
them. Stop firing.”
The gunner laughed.
“If you don’t stop shooting, we’ll shoot you. I tell you, you’re
killing our brothers,” said the soldier again, in the same quiet, final
tone.
From that hour the battery was silent. Through the Russian trenches the
word had gone that peace was coming. An armistice was to be arranged in
a few days, and Germany and Austria and all of Russia’s Allies were to
be asked to take part.
It was still November. The armistice negotiations were on. The great
parley at Brest-Litovsk had commenced. The Allies had not come,
but a special train had pulled out of Petrograd with the strangest
collection of envoys that ever went upon a foreign mission. There
were twenty-eight members, headed by Adolph Joffe, a Russian Jew, and
including a soldier, a sailor, a workman, a peasant, and one woman.
There were others in the delegation not so glad to go as these. They
were military experts, obeying orders from Smolney expressed in terms
that permitted no other alternative. They were officers of the Russian
army, thoroughly out of sympathy with the undertaking and the men who
were making it--every tenet of their codes, every fiber of their poor,
bewildered, uncomprehending beings outraged by this new topsy-turvy
world in which they had been plunged.
The train had arrived. The efficient Germans had built a special track
across that strip of No Man’s Land which divided their territory from
that of the Russians. Each member of the party was provided with his
own servant, a German soldier who spoke Russian. Shoes and clothes were
cleaned, and no detail of preparation had been neglected. In the rooms
to which the visitors were taken there was letter paper and _eau de
cologne_, for which the Russian has a special fondness.
The Russians proposed their terms of armistice. They demanded that
no troops be transferred from the eastern front to the fronts of the
Allies during the period of the armistice, and that fraternization take
place. General Hoffman declared that the armistice conditions were only
such as could be proposed to a defeated nation. The delegates asked
for instructions from the Commissaries, and were told to stand firm on
these conditions.
[Illustration: Meeting in the library of the Tauride Palace December 11
where in defiance of the People’s Commissaries the Constituent Assembly
was declared open]
[Illustration: The Constituent Assembly as it finally convened in the
Tauride Palace January 18]
[Illustration: The Russian delegation arrives at Brest-Litovsk]
Back in Petrograd, Trotzky was talking.
“In our negotiations with our present Allies and enemies, we will
be constantly on our guard,” he said. “Under no circumstances will
we allow them to distort the principles of general peace proclaimed
by the Russian Revolution. We will propound to them most categorical
questions, and every word pronounced by them or by us will be
transmitted by wireless to all the nations of the world, who will be
the judges of our negotiations.”
Petrograd waited, one ear turned in the direction of Brest-Litovsk, and
the other pressed against the world’s key-hole, listening for rumblings
of revolutions in other lands.
Night after night, in the white hall at Smolney, at the Peasants’
headquarters, in the Narodny Dom and the Cirque Modern, the men in the
mud-colored uniforms talked about it.
“We soldiers, we trench inhabitants, we must have something to say,” I
heard one of them declare; and another:
“We can not conduct peace negotiations by going up to the German
generals with a copy of Karl Marx in our hands.”
And a third:
“We must be able to speak loudly in revolutionary language, and
back our language up by cannon if necessary, but for revolutionary
purposes--not for the commercial interests of the Allies.”
“Slava, Slava, Slava” (Words, words, words), said another.
The discussion centered largely on the question of the removal of
troops.
“Prohibition of removal of troops to the front should cover reserves in
the rear as well, and also cannon,” said a delegate named Lapinsky. “It
is necessary for us to guard against all these things in order that the
Allied troops and masses should know that the Russian Revolution has no
intention of permitting them to be crushed by the Germans. We are not
concerned with ourselves only. We must remember that the Germans have
not accepted our peace terms. We must deal with the facts as they are.
They have accepted our formulæ applying the principles to the Russian
camp,--not to the German camp,--to the Poles and others whom they have
subjugated. We must see that imperialism in Austria and Germany does
not triumph.”
The guns on the Russian front were still. The last shot to echo across
to us in Petrograd was that with which the Russian General Skaloon at
Brest-Litovsk dramatically ended his life in a room adjoining that in
which the armistice conference was being held.
General Hoffman had accepted the terms “such as could be proposed only
to a defeated nation.” The fact that he was humoring the Russians,
that he might trick them the more thoroughly in the end, was not
evident. The Bolsheviki, disappointed that the Allies had refused to
consider coming into their conference, found crumbs of comfort in the
concessions of Germany.
“It must mean,” they argued, “that the Kaiser fears the German masses.
They will make him accept our honest, democratic peace.”
December 15 saw the armistice signed, and by noon of the 17th it had
gone into effect.
The night before, at a rump convention of the Peasants’ Deputies, I
heard Leon Trotzky make his report of the proceedings at Brest. He
talked for three hours, answering the questions of his soldier peasant
audience.
The meeting began in a fashion typical of those days in Russia, where
night after night in every available hall in Petrograd men were
shaking their fists in one another’s faces.
The Peasants’ Convention had split in its attitude toward the People’s
Commissaries. The Bolshevist members and the Left Social Revolutionists
anticipated welcoming Trotzky as Commissary of Foreign Affairs. The
center faction, led by Chernoff, refused to acknowledge him in any
capacity but that of private citizen.
In the midst of the discussion, Trotzky arrived. The Bolsheviki jumped
to their feet and started a rousing demonstration in which the majority
joined. The others sat stolidly in their chairs, and some whistled--the
Russian equivalent of a hiss. For ten minutes pandemonium reigned.
Trotzky stood silent, head up and eyes flashing behind his glasses.
Finally he crossed the room to the adjoining hall, opened the door, and
walked in. I followed him. The room was dark, except for a green-shaded
student-lamp upon a table near the rostrum. Trotzky sat down at the
table. Soon a crowd of soldiers came pouring through the door. More and
more followed, until every seat in the council chamber and every inch
of space in aisles and stairways was packed.
They elected a temporary chairman, and resolved to hear the report of
the Commissary of Foreign Affairs. Trotzky arose to speak, and this
time the demonstration met no opposing voice.
He reviewed the general international situation, then analyzed the
armistice terms.
“We will ask the Germans first if they accept our terms of peace--peace
without annexation, contributions, and self-definition of nations,”
said Trotzky. “Then we will ask what Germany means by those terms--how
does she apply them? When we understand each other fully, we will
have a week’s interruption to let the people of the world know what
we are doing. We want general peace. We have given the Allies a month
in which to make peace. If they want more time, I suppose we can give
them a little more, but we can not continue the slaughter for their
sakes. We want general peace, but we can not let Russia bleed to
death. We can not go on forever. We must get back to our farms and
our factories. The Kaiser hates the Revolution, and most of all the
Soviet government, but he recognizes the demand of the masses. We did
not send any diplomats to Brest-Litovsk, it is true. Our people have
spent more time in Siberian prisons than in diplomatic offices, but
our program is right, and so long as we fight for that we can not die.
We do not go before the governments of the world as a defeated nation,
but as a victorious one. Our position is the stronger because we have
no secret desires and can be quite honest. The Allies have refused to
send delegates to the peace conference, but we must look out for the
interests of the masses of the Allied countries, and we will do so. We
must have a peace, because we must save the cultural possessions of the
age and preserve the revolutionary energy of the proletariat.”
Down from Berlin to No Man’s Land came a supply of tobacco, accordions,
flashlights, bad whisky, and Hindenburg _schneights_ (knives). Behind
the German lines the soldier merchants set up their wares, and the
Russians in worn boots and faded coats walked out across No Man’s Land
to trade with them. The Germans asked for soap, bread, and clothing;
also they would sell for rubles--old picture rubles of the Tsar’s
régime. They turned up their noses at “Kerensky” money, and would have
none of the Bolshevist issue.
The Russian soldiers had little bread to give them--they had all too
little for themselves--and less clothing. But they told their German
brothers, with shining, thankful eyes, how glad they were that peace
was coming--that they would no longer have to kill each other. They
advised them to go home and make a revolution, as they had done, and
promised that in this new world of brothers there should be an end to
wars.
Inside the council chamber at Brest-Litovsk, the German Foreign
Minister reminded delegates of the season of the year.
“It is an auspicious circumstance that the negotiations open within
sight of that festival which for centuries past has promised peace on
earth, good will to men,” he said. “Our negotiations will be guided by
the spirit of peaceable humanity and of mutual esteem.”
It was Saturday, December 22. Prince Leopold of Bavaria was there. The
Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, with a delegation of eight
Austrians, was there; and from Bulgaria, Minister Popoff and four
assistants, Nesimy Bey, former Minister of Foreign Affairs from Turkey,
Ambassador Hakki, General Zekki, and under foreign secretary Hemit Bey.
The plenipotentiaries of the Central Powers were taking the delegation
seriously. General Hoffman paid gallant compliments to Madame Bitzenko,
and laughingly suggested that they have their photographs taken
together. Von Kühlmann asked the chief of the Russian delegation to
state the main principles of the Russian peace proposal. The Russian
demands numbered fifteen, applying the now famous formula to the world
situation. On Christmas the Germans submitted their counter-proposals.
In Petrograd we listened day and night for the ticking of a wireless
message from Brest-Litovsk. A German and Austrian delegation arrived,
and took up headquarters at the Hotel Angletaire and at the Grand just
around the corner. Little blond Petroff came in, loudly protesting that
he had no platters on which to bring me my dinner, because they had all
been taken to feed the Germans. Occasionally, with some of my American
friends, I sat at dinner at a table adjoining that at which the Germans
were dining. We regarded them curiously, and they looked upon us with
equal suspicion.
I spent much of my time at Smolney those days, anxious for the first
word that would indicate the Russian attitude toward the German peace
terms. One day there was a rumor abroad that Russia would reject the
counter-proposal.
At Smolney that night the Executive Committee listened to a report,
and voted for its rejection. The resolution declared that the dominant
parties in Germany, compelled by a popular demand to grant concessions
to the principles of a democratic peace, were nevertheless trying to
distort the idea to aid their own annexationist policy.
Already Germany was showing her hand. She contended that the will
of the people of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland had already been
manifested. The Russians declared this allegation to be devoid of all
foundation.
“Under martial law and under the yoke of a military censorship, the
peoples of the occupied countries could not express their will,”
they said. “The documents upon which the German government bases
its allegation at Brest prove the manifestation of the will of a few
privileged groups only, and in no way the will of the masses in those
territories.
“We now declare that the Russian Revolution remains faithful to the
policy of internationalism. We defend the right of Poland, Lithuania,
and Courland to dispose of their own destiny, actually and freely.
Never will we recognize the justice of imposing the will of a foreign
nation on any other nation.”
The Russian Soviet appealed to the people of Germany, Austria, Turkey,
and Bulgaria in these words:
“Under your pressure, your governments have been obliged to accept the
motto of no annexations and no indemnities, but recently they have
been trying to carry on their old policy of evasion. Remember that the
conclusion of an immediate democratic peace will depend actually and
above all on you. All the people of Europe look to you, exhausted and
bled by such a war as there never was before, that you will not permit
the Austro-German imperialists to make war against Revolutionary Russia
for the subjugation of Poland, Lithuania, Courland, and Armenia.”
The Soviet bombed the German trenches with propaganda. On January 2
they circulated a pamphlet in the German lines declaring that the peace
conditions submitted by the Central Powers showed the German promises
of a democratic peace to be unconscionable lies.
The pamphlet asserted that Germany wanted to free the peoples on
Russia’s western frontier from the sphere of revolution, in order to
subjugate them to the German will, that they might impose an Austrian
monarchy on Poland and make Lithuania and Courland German duchies.
The Russians asked for transfer of any further negotiations to
Stockholm. In Germany the military party declared that the break
between Russia and Germany was caused by this demand, keeping their
people in ignorance for some time of the fact that the break had come
from Germany’s refusal to evacuate Russian territory.
Trotzky himself went to the second conference, protesting that his
government would not yield.
“We did not overthrow the Tsar to bow to German imperialism,” he said.
Germany practically delivered an ultimatum: “Parleys at Brest-Litovsk
or none.”
“Our government placed at the head of its program a world’s peace,
but it promised the people to sign only a democratic and just peace,”
Trotzky said. “The sympathies of the Russian people are with her Allies
and with the working classes of Germany.”
He declared that the refusal of the Central Powers to transfer
the conference to a neutral site could be explained only by the
determination of the government and the annexationist groups to base
their dealings, not on reconciliations of peoples, but on the war map.
“But war maps disappear while peoples remain,” said Trotzky.
“Annexationist agitators are trying to persuade the German people
that behind the open and frank policy of Russia is a British or other
stage-manager. Therefore we have decided to remain at Brest-Litovsk,
so that the slightest possibility of peace may not be lost; so that
it may be established whether peace is possible with the Central
Powers without violence to the Poles, Letts, Armenians, and all other
nationalities to which the Russian Revolution assures full right of
development, without reservation or restriction.”
At this session General Hoffman protested against wireless messages
containing abuse of German military institutions and revolutionary
appeals to the German troops. He declared they transgressed the spirit
of the armistice by attempting to introduce civil war into the Central
Powers.
Trotzky replied that all German newspapers were freely admitted into
Russia. General Hoffman said he was not referring to the press, but to
official government utterances. Kühlmann said that non-interference in
Russian affairs was the fixed principle of the German government, and
that his government had the right to demand reciprocity.
Trotzky responded with an invitation to criticism:
“The Russians will recognize it as a step forward if the Germans
freely and frankly express their views regarding internal conditions in
Russia so far as they think it necessary.”
Trotzky demanded, on behalf of the Russians, the immediate repatriation
of deported Poles and Lithuanians, and the liberation of Bohemians,
Czechs, and others arrested for participation in pacifist propaganda,
declaring the return of refugees to Poland and Lithuania of the utmost
importance in the question of self-determination, and insisting that
the Russians would not abandon their demands. The session ended in
disagreement. General Hoffman charged the Russian delegation with
speaking as if “it stood victorious in our countries and could dictate
conditions.”
Kühlmann announced that it would be necessary to hold a consultation
between the Teutonic Allies before any further statement could be made.
Meanwhile, the anti-Bolshevist Rada from the Ukraine was holding
separate peace parleys with the Central Powers, and, unlike the Soviet
government, its negotiations were secret.
All sorts of rumors found their way to us in Petrograd. German soldiers
arriving from the front said they had deserted the army and, with
several thousand others, were encamped in a wood behind the German
lines, where, equipped with machine-guns, they were defying a German
advance on Russia. Strikes were breaking out in Austria and Germany. In
Petrograd the third congress of the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’
Deputies met on January 23. On the 27th Leon Trotzky made his report.
It showed that at last the Germans, convinced that resistance upon the
part of the Russians was impossible, were unmasking their real aims.
“Practically,” he said, “the German terms mean that the governments of
Austria and Germany take into their own hands the destiny of the Poles,
the Letts, the Lithuanians, and the Esthonians.”
Trotzky drew a comparison between the present peace aims, and the
peace terms of the Reichstag resolution of July supporting a peace
without indemnities and annexations, and the peace terms of the Germany
of December 25, which lured the Russians to trust the democratic
utterances of the enemy. He showed that the new frontiers were planned
not only to subjugate all the people within the conquered territories,
but to make further German aggression easy.
“The whole German argument was based on the assumption that the Russian
government would understand, but be silent and grateful to the Germans
for saving their faces by giving a mock-democratic character to their
peace,” said Trotzky. “The bourgeois governments can sign any kind of a
peace; the governments of the Soviet can not.”
He declared that the Ukrainian Rada was at that moment trying to make a
separate peace, and insisted that, whatever happened, he would not sign
a “non-democratic peace.”
Trotzky sparred for time. He knew that his government could not live
surrounded by countries practising a different social creed. He counted
on the spread of revolt simultaneously in the Ukraine, in Finland,
in Austria, and in Germany. He did not foresee the German-inspired
invitation to German troops to put down revolution in Finland, Ukraine,
and the Baltic provinces.
On the ninth of February the Ukraine, upon which France had banked to
keep Russia from making a peace, concluded a separate peace herself.
The following day the Soviet government announced its withdrawal from
the war, and also its determination not to sign an annexationist
treaty, declaring its firm belief that the workers of Germany and
Austria would not permit any new offensive against the workers of
Russia.
Five days later Germany announced her intention to resume military
operations against Russia. On the 18th, to the amazement of the
populace behind the Russian line, the German troops along the entire
front advanced.
They took Dvinsk with little opposition. It was late afternoon in a
snow-clad village beyond the Dvinsk lines not far from the point at
which, in November, the infantry had ordered the Russian gunners to
stop firing. Word had come that the Germans were advancing. A shudder
passed through the village. There was a hurried gathering. Some
suggested fleeing, others counseled waiting.
“It’s a mistake,” said a white-bearded peasant. “We are not at war.
They are our brothers--we must go and tell them.”
They appointed a committee, improvised a white flag, and set out on
their errand. A short distance from the village they met the advancing
Germans. They held their white flag bravely aloft, and a soldier
spokesman began to explain:
“It is all a mistake--Russia is not at war. We do not want to fight our
German brothers--”
The sentence was never finished. The committee did not come back.
Instead, to the waiting women with frightened children clinging to
their wide calico skirts, and with a terrible fear in their eyes, there
came the Germans.
Germany was marching over the prostrate and bewildered form of the
country she had tricked and betrayed. Uncomprehension and despair
settled upon Petrograd. The People’s Commissaries met in all-night
session. Trotzky wanted to fight, even though effective resistance was
impossible. Lenin opposed him. There was nothing to fight with. The
army had reached the limit of disorganization. Economic chaos reigned
behind the lines. There was neither an army at the front nor a nation
behind capable of supporting an army.
All night the Commissaries debated. Toward dawn Lenin’s will finally
prevailed. A proclamation was issued protesting against the German
advance, but stating:
“The Council of People’s Commissaries regards itself as forced formally
to declare its willingness to sign a peace upon the conditions dictated
by the delegates of the Quadruple Alliance at Brest-Litovsk.”
The information was sent by wireless to Germany. The Germans demanded
written confirmation. It was despatched to Dvinsk by special messenger.
Still the Germans’ advance continued. They occupied Esthonia, overran
the Ukraine, and created a Turkish offensive in the Caucasus. They
made no answer to the People’s Commissaries, and on February 22 the
Bolsheviki called on the people to organize guerrilla warfare and
resist the invaders.
Again the Bolsheviki appealed to the German working classes.
“Once more the German working class in this threatened hour has shown
itself insufficiently determined to stay the criminal hand of its own
militarism. We had no other choice but to accept the conditions of
German imperialism until a revolution changes or cancels them. The
German government is not hastening to reply to us, evidently aiming to
seize as many important positions in our territory as possible. The
enemy has occupied Dvinsk, Werder, and Lutsk, and is continuing to
strangle by hunger the most important centers of the Revolution. We
even now are convinced firmly that the German working classes will rise
against the attempts of the ruling classes to stifle the Revolution,
but we can not predict with certainty when this will occur. The German
imperialists may hesitate at nothing for the purpose of destroying the
authority of the councils and taking the land from the peasants.”
The Commissaries called on all loyal councils and army organizations to
use all efforts to recreate the army.
The next day Kühlmann submitted a new offer of peace, imposing yet
more drastic terms upon the broken country, and demanded that it be
accepted within forty-eight hours.
Again Lenin insisted that it must be accepted.
“Their knees are on our chests and our position is hopeless,” he
said. “This peace must be accepted as a respite enabling us to
prepare a decisive resistance to the bourgeoisie and imperialists.
The proletariat of the whole world will come to our aid. Then we
shall renew the fight. All the bourgeoisie in Russia is jubilant at
the approach of the Germans. Only a blind man, or men infatuated by
phrases, can fail to see that the policy of a revolutionary war without
an army is water in the bourgeois mill. In the bourgeois papers there
is already exaltation in view of the impending overthrow of the Soviet
government by the Germans. We are compelled to submit to a distressing
peace.”
Trotzky was absent from this meeting, and the Central Executive
Committee, by a vote of a hundred and twelve against eighty-four,
accepted Lenin’s view; and the decision was telegraphed to the German
government.
“Surely now hostilities would cease!” thought the Russians.
A new peace deputation was elected. Trotzky, who favored fighting, was
displaced as Foreign Minister. The German government did not reply to
the Russian acceptance. The German troops kept marching on. The Soviet
government called upon the people:
“Resistance becomes the principal task of the Revolution.”
The workers filled the ranks of the volunteer “Red Army,” led by
officers of the bourgeoise. There was hardly a factory worker left in
Petrograd, and, untrained as they were, they were soldiers because they
had a cause. The German advance was checked at Pskoff. The Red Guards
recaptured Orsha. The regular troops, an uncomprehending horde of
bewildered and dilapidated soldiers, fled in panic before their “German
brothers,” looting and pillaging as they went.
It was a hopeless situation. The Red Guards had not only to fight
the highly organized German legions, but they had to disarm the
panic-stricken Russian soldiers. In the rear they were fighting
Kaledin, Korniloff, and the troops of the Ukrainian Rada. None of these
were fighting the Germans. In action they had aligned themselves
with German absolutism, and were seeking to overthrow the Russian
democracy--the Soviet government.
The diplomats had been so busy hunting for German money in the camp
of the Bolsheviki that they had overlooked entirely the Ukraine, the
Baltic provinces, and Finland. The Ukraine situation has been shot
through with Austrian and German money since the beginning of the
Revolution. It had been a hot-bed of intrigue. More potent than the
power of money was the natural economic desire of the upper classes in
each of these places. It was not the Ukrainian worker and peasant who
made a separate peace with Germany. It was not the Finnish Red Guard
who invited the Germans in to subjugate their fellow countrymen. It was
not the class-conscious masses of the Baltic provinces, crushed beneath
the boot of the German-bred Black Barons, who cried to the Kaiser for
deliverance.
Something more dangerous to the peace of the world than a government
of workers, peasants, and soldiers had been carefully builded by the
German agents.
When Prince Leopold of Bavaria told his advancing troops they were
going upon a mission of altruism and humanity, he neglected to tell
them that the people whom they were going to save were not the masses
of the Russians, trying to work out their own salvation against
desperate odds, but the land barons and monarchists of the old order
whom the Revolution overthrew.
The Russians were blind to the true character of the men who came to
Brest-Litovsk to negotiate a kaiser’s peace; but the blindness of those
Russian dreamers was lucid vision as compared with the blindness of
the enlightened democratic world as to the real significance of the
various forces at work upon the Russian tragedy. We will pay for that
blindness,--we must pay,--for democracy is not safe in the world while
Russia is enslaved. No settlement of the international situation will
be lasting that does not leave the peoples of Russia free to work out
their own democratic salvation.
The failure of Allied diplomacy in Russia was due to the undemocratic
nature of the existing diplomatic system.
It is not enough to know the movements of kings and kaisers, the
pleasure of military leaders, of the will of the aristocracy. In
a fight for democracy, the people, in the last analysis, are the
important factor. The true study of democratic diplomacy is the
study of the movements of the masses undisturbed by our own beliefs,
preconceptions, or prejudices.
They were difficult--those Russians; difficult as dreamers and children
always are. They lashed us with their scorn. They impugned our motives.
They “swept into the ash-barrel of history” our secret treaties and
dismissed us as capitalists and imperialists.
The German autocracy, arch-enemy of all democracy, had succeeded in its
gigantic scheme to drive a wedge between Russia and her Allies--had
trapped Russia into the belief that the German people wanted nothing
but an honest democratic peace, and that only the Allies stood between
them and their desire. In their minds, our aloofness gave color to the
declaration of their leaders:
“Our Revolution will be crushed by the imperialism of the western
democracies.”
Germany proposed new peace terms. The Russian delegates did not even
stop to examine them. They said they knew they must sign whatever the
terms might be. They signed a peace that was not a peace--a peace that
Germany disregarded more flagrantly each passing hour--a peace that
will never be a peace.
“It is our peace of Tilsit [1810],” Lenin said; “but we will finally
attain our peace of 1814. Probably we shall not have to wait so long,
because history is moving faster in these days.”
Truly, the Commissary of Commissaries was right: “their knees are upon
our chests.”
A MESSAGE TO MARS
We were five in the little blue room in the War Hotel that night. It
was one of my last in Petrograd. The electric lights, fickle at best,
had failed entirely.
The tiny sputtering flame of the olive-green candle disclosed distant
vistas in the eyes of Zamiatin.
Zamiatin was one of the younger of the Russian writers--a deep, quiet,
imaginative chap, who talked in fables, with long spaces of silence
between.
The Bolsheviki were the subject of our discussion. We argued
breathlessly, with flushed faces and shining eyes, as one always argued
in Russia during the hectic nights and days of the red Russian year.
Zamiatin put down his glass of tea, and with his forefinger began to
trace the crimson pattern on the Bokhara table-cover.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “a little fellow about thirteen or
fourteen, I read a book--I have forgotten the name--a Russian version
of something like ‘A Romance of Two Worlds.’ It set strange imaginings
whirling in my brain. I told my comrades about it, and they became as
excited as I.
“Off there in the big black sky above the silver birches was a planet
called Mars, peopled like ours with human beings. We made up our minds
to get into communication with those other people. We thought of many
plans. Finally we conceived the idea of building a great letter ‘A’
and setting it on fire. We believed Mars would see and answer us, and
in a very short time we would arrange an alphabet and carry on long
conversations. Perhaps it would revolutionize the whole universe--who
knew? We were on fire with the idea.
“We told our parents about it, but somehow they did not seem to realize
its importance. There was a famine in the village that year, and they
were busy trying to get food to the people. They had no time for us and
our great scheme.
“But this did not discourage us. We went on just the same. We cut
down logs in the forest, and built a monster ‘A,’ bigger even than
our dreams of it. The great night came. We set it on fire, and then,
standing in breathless silence, eyes fastened on the velvet blackness,
we waited. We waited and we waited. Nothing happened. Mars did not
answer.”
Zamiatin lifted his finger from the crimson spot upon the Bokhara
cover, and settled back in his chair. For a moment we sat there, tense
and quiet as that group of small boys on the edge of the forest a score
of years ago.
They built a letter “A” there in the City of Peter in the fall of 1917.
They set it afire. Then--simple, trusting, hoping children that they
are--they waited--and waited. There was nothing wrong with the letter
“A,” but Mars did not answer.
Blinded by schemes of conquest and dreams of Empire, Mars could not see.
“Universal peace; brotherhood; no annexations or contributions; and
self-definition of nations--”
It was an alphabet Mars could not comprehend, born of a blind faith the
glory and beauty of which Mars can not know, and the rest of us only
half suspect.
Zamiatin was not a Bolshevik. He belongs to the Russian
_intelligentzia_. Like the others, he had preached theoretical
revolution, but his spirit shrank from the hard, accomplished fact.
But Zamiatin, with his boy’s experience and his artist’s visioning, had
seen the letter ‘A,’ and felt the wonder and the tragedy of the dream
of those men drawn back from exile to flash flaming signals at the
universe.
* * * * *
The train that carried me away from Petrograd was almost the last to
pass in safety through war-torn Finland. Troubled days were full upon
her, but the frozen face of her was as calm and peaceful as a sleeping
child.
The City of Peter lay behind me, wrapped in the gray morning mist.
Tragedy was in the air. That vague, frightful thing--the Terror--was
on every man’s tongue. Apprehension was in every man’s eye. Lurking
there in the black shadows of every human brain were the words: “The
Germans!” To a few they were a secret hope--restored titles, estates
returned. To the mass--death and destruction and shattered dreams.
I looked through the mist down a long vista of coming years, and asked
of the mysterious, inscrutable city what would be left of the hour and
the place for another age.
Time seems to have his own peculiar sense of values. He sifts out most
of the things we would save. For every time the world of to-day thinks
of the Franco-Prussian War it speaks a hundred times of the French
Revolution. Out of the defeat of France there came that great historic
milestone marking the struggle of the mass to climb from under.
Out of the success of Prussia there came Prussian militarism, to breed
its own ultimate destruction. Time may reject the battle of the Somme
and the Gallipoli campaign, and dismiss the blockade and the submarine
with a word; possibly he will have forgotten entirely the names of
Cabinet ministers and great generals: but I doubt whether he will
discard the Russian Revolution.
Revolution is the blind protest of the mass against their own ignorant
state. It is as important to Time as the first awkward struggle of the
amœba. It is man in the act of making himself.
Time will be able to overlook the pathetic, the tragic, the cruel, the
silly forms of expression that revolt frequently takes, and see only
the magnificent urge behind those expressions.
Time will have all the advantage over us. He will be able to keep his
emotions from getting tangled up in the situation. He will be able
to put the Bolsheviki and the Mensheviki, the Cadets and the Social
Revolutionists, in their proper pigeonholes.
Time will give to the world war, the political revolution, and the
social revolution their true values. We can not do it. We are too close
to the facts to see the truth.
To have failed to see the hope in the Russian Revolution is to be as a
blind man looking at a sunrise.
Mingled with my sorrow, the morning I left Petrograd, was a certain
exultant, tragic joy. I had been alive at a great moment, and knew that
it was great.
THE END
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.