At once the latter passes the countersign kitchenward to set the meal
in motion, and puts before us the little liqueur-glasses and the bottle
of vodka. While we still gasp and blink over this, he has gotten
the cold _zakuska_ of black rye-bread and butter, _sardinka_, salty
_beluga_, and cold ham, and has started us on the first course. Then
comes in, after the omni-inclusive _zakuska_, a big pot of cabbage-soup
which we are to season with a swimming spoonful of thick sour cream.
The chunky pieces of half-boiled meat floating in it are left high
and dry by the consumption of the liquid. The meat becomes the third
course, which we garnish with mustard and taste.
“Voyons!” the Frenchman observes. “Of the Russian cuisine and its
method of preparing certain food-substances one may not approve.
Frankly it calls for the sauce of a prodigious appetite. But
contemplating the _obeid_ as an institution so evolved as to fit into
the general scheme of life, it finds merit. The Russian meal is a guide
to Russian character.”
“What signifies this mélange of raw fish, eggs, and great slices of
flesh, and mush of cabbage-soup?”
“Not that the Russian has no taste. It is that he sacrifices his finer
susceptibilities to his love of freedom. A regular hour for meals
would seem to him a sacrifice of his leisure and convenience to that
of the cook. The guiding principle of the national cuisine is that all
dishes must be capable of being served at any time that the eater feels
disposed.”
This is a problem to put to any kitchen, we allow. Napoleon’s chef
met it by relays of roasting chickens. But one cannot keep half a
dozen fowl going for each household of the one hundred and forty
million inhabitants of Russia. Thus sturgeon is provided, and sterlet,
parboiled so that it tastes like blotting-paper; and the filet
that is called “biftek,” and the oil-sodden “Hamburger,” that is
dubbed “filet.” These can be started at nine in the morning, and be
removed at any time between that hour and nine at night, without any
appreciable change in taste or texture. The cook of the restaurant,
like his brethren of the Empire, has laid his professional conscience
sacrificially upon the national altar of unfettered meals. If the
_obeid_ is not a triumph in culinary art, it is at least a signal
example of domestic generalship.
We have advanced without a hitch to roast partridge, with sugared
cranberries, which our friend washes down with good red wine from the
Imperial Crimean estates. We get through a hard German-like apple-tart,
and reach the last item of cheese.
When the mighty meal is over, we order tea, light cigarettes, and lean
back in the armchairs to chat and note how our neighbors are getting
through the time.
At the far end of the room a Russian has joined the French lady and
her escort. They are celebrating some occasion that requires heaping
bumpers of champagne. The babble of their conversation is in the air.
It seems to refer to the comparative appreciation of histrionic talent
in Rouen and Vladivostok!
Somebody is being treated to a dressing-down in the latest Parisian
argot. “Ces sont des betteraves là-bas!” one hears scornfully above the
murmurs.
Across the way some Germans are engaged with beer-schooners. One of
them gets excited and brings his fist down upon the table. “Arbeit in
Sibirien nimmer geendet ist; they always want more advice about their
gas-plants.”
In the lull that follows the explosion, a gentle English voice floats
past from the seat behind us. “And so I told him that the station had
nearly enough funds, but we needed workers, more workers.” It is the
English medical missionary on his way to Shanta-fu, discussing China
with the American mining-engineer, bound for Nerchinsk.
The piano, under the corner ikon with its ever-burning lamp, tinkles
out suddenly, and a man’s voice starts up--
You can hear the girls declare,
He must be a millionaire.
He misses a note every now and then, which does not embarrass him in
the least. Caroling gayly to his own accompaniment, he forges ahead.
The crowd in the armchairs around the room, consuming weak tea or
strong beer, and smoking, all join with an untroubled accord and
versatile accents, French, English, and Russian, in the blaring chorus,
“The man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.”
The train rocks faster on the falling grade; little by little the
mountains drop away; gradually the mighty forests become dwarfed into
scattered clumps of straggly birches, and the great trees dwindle into
bushes; lower and still lower fall the hills, until all is flat. As far
as the eye can see are the snow-covered wastes, treeless, houseless,
lifeless. The lowest foothills of the Urals have been passed. It is the
beginning of the great steppes.
Slowly the daylight wanes. The gray darkness deepens steadily; it
seems to gather in over the gliding snow, and the peculiar gloom of a
Siberian winter’s night closes down. At each track-guard’s post flash
with vivid suddenness the little twinkling lanterns of the wardens of
the road. Involuntarily conversation becomes less animated and voices
are lowered; the spell of the sombreness is over all.
Soon the electric lamps are lighted, and from brazen ikon and sparkling
glasses flash reflections of their glitter. Curtains are drawn,
which shut out the enshrouding blackness. The piano begins tinkling
again; the waiters come and go with tea and liqueurs; the babble of
conversation rises; and the idle laughter is heard anew. Darkness may
be ahead, behind, and beside, but within there is light--enjoy it.
The train slows for a halt. Station-lamps shine mistily through the
brooding night. Lanterns bob to and fro on the platform as fur-capped
train-hands pass, tapping wheels and opening journal-boxes. At each
door a fire-tender is catching and stowing away the wood which a
peasant in padded sheepskins is tossing up from his hand-sled below.
It is Chelliabinsk, whose old importance as the clearing-house of the
convicts has been passed on to the new city of the railroad. Here the
just completed northern branch, linking Perm to Petersburg, meets the
old southern line from Samara and Moscow.
A short stop and the train moves on again. The day is done and
gradually each saunters into his own warm compartment, which the width
of the Russian gauge makes as large as a real room. One can read at
the table by the window, under the electric drop-light, or, propped
in pillows, one can stretch out luxuriously on the easy couch that is
nightly manoeuvred into an upper and lower berth. Practically always
after crossing the Urals, the number of passengers has so thinned out
that each may have a stateroom to himself.
Presently you push the bell labeled, “Konduktor.” A uniformed attendant
appears standing at the salute. “_Spate_” (sleep) is sufficient
direction. The sheets and pillows are dug out and the transformation of
the couch into a bed is effected. “_Spacoine notche_” (good-night) he
says, and you fall asleep to the rhythmic throb of the engine.
During the following hours the train enters the Tobolsk Government,
the oldest province of Siberia, whose 439,859 square miles of area,
nearly four times as large as Prussia, extend roughly from the railroad
northward to the Arctic Ocean, and from the Urals eastward so as to
include the lower basin of the Ob-Irtish river system. This ancient
province has seen much of Siberia’s history, whose predominant features
have been two, growth and graft.
[Illustration: BRIDGE OVER THE IRTISH]
[Illustration: ALONG THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY]
Out of evil, somehow, in a marvelous way has been coming good. In the
earliest days, with what smug satisfaction did the Stroganovs find
that the native inhabitants would trade ermine for glass beads! Yet
the fruit of their sharp dealing and purchased protection and special
privilege was the expedition that won Sibir, founded Tobolsk, and
opened to Russia the way into northern Asia. The imperial commissioner
who came to Tobolsk shortly after Kutchum Khan’s overthrow, to collect
the yassak tribute of ten sable-skins for each married man and five for
each bachelor, was detected culling the choice skins for himself, and
substituting cheap ones for his master. But his agents had sought out
the paths and extended the Russian Empire far into the northern forests.
By despotic oppression the inhabitants of Uglitch town, condemned for
testifying to the murder of Dimitri, the Czarevitch, came here into
exile in 1593, carrying with them the tocsin-bell that had tolled alarm
when the Czar wished silence. But they, together with the deported
laborers settled by the same arbitrary will along the Tobol River,
started the permanent settlement of the new realm.
A succeeding functionary called on the natives for a special tribute
of ermine for the Czarina’s mantle. He collected so many bales of it
that the taxed began to wonder at the stature of the “Little Mother,”
and sent a special deputy to Petersburg. The legate discovered that the
Empress was as other women, and on his disclosures the official was
unable to save his own, let alone the ermines’ skins. Yet while the
governor was plundering the fur-merchants of Tobolsk, the frontiers
were extending, until by 1700 they reached eastward to Kamchatka and
Lake Baikal, southeast to the Altai foothills at Kuznetz, and north to
the Arctic Ocean.
At Tobolsk in 1710 Peter the Great established the capital of his
reorganized province of Siberia. Prince Gagarin, whom he appointed
its first governor, found here a systemless extortion unworthy of an
efficient statesman. With the thoroughness of genius he built up in
the unhappy province a regular organization of rascality. His pickets
patrolled the roads into Russia, to prevent the escape of those who
might carry the tale of his oppression. He arranged with high officials
at Court that any petitioners who evaded this frontier net should be
handed over to an appropriate committee. Thus fortified, he began
collections of as much as could be wrung from his luckless subjects.
Every traveler paid Gagarin’s tariff, every farmer sent him presents of
stock, every trapper forwarded the best of his catch. The fur-trader’s
donations and the merchants’ loans were assisted into Gagarin’s
warehouses by thumbscrew and thonged knout.
While these things passed in Tobolsk there came periodically to
Petersburg delegations of outwardly contented citizens attesting the
wisdom of their governor. They brought to the Czar and the Grand
Dukes, in addition to the punctiliously rendered tax yassak, gifts of
especially fine furs. Such was the completeness of Gagarin’s control
that not an echo of the true state of affairs reached the ears of the
astute Peter.
At length, in 1719, Nesterov, the Minister of Finance, was privately
approached by some Tobolsk merchants and was supplied with evidence
sufficient to hang half the officials in Siberia. In a dramatic
presentation the Minister furnished this to the Imperial Senate,
showing so bad a case that Gagarin’s own agents in the ducal circle
rose up against him. The Czar sent Licharev, a major of the Guard,
to Siberia, to proclaim in every town and hamlet that Gagarin was a
criminal in the eyes of the Emperor. As this messenger approached
Tobolsk, official after official came out to turn state’s evidence,
trying to assure his personal safety. The highways to Russia were
guarded by Peter’s own troops, with orders to seize all outgoing
travelers who might be transporting Gagarin’s accumulated spoil, which
with commendable prudence the Czar had allocated to himself.
When Peter was in England he had remarked casually to an acquaintance,
“In my realm I have only two lawyers, and one of these I intend to
hang as soon as I get back.” It was particularly unfortunate for
this ex-governor that the remainder of the legal profession did not
feel himself called upon to explain to Peter the Gagarin campaign
contributions. No one ever needed an attorney more. He was under trial
before an imperial judge who did not know a technicality from a tort,
and whose preliminary procedure was to order a reliable gallows.
For some score of years subsequent to Gagarin, the governors of Siberia
were, in any event, moderate. The province grew apace, increased by
exiles, by land-seeking colonists, by raskalniks,--nonconformists of
the Greek Church, self-called “Old Believers,”--who preferred to come
to Siberia rather than follow Peter’s orders and shave off their beards.
Then Chicherin the Magnificent came. His life was a round of
celebrations. Wonderful stews he concocted for his sybaritic revels.
At _obeid_ an orchestra of thirty pieces supplied the music. Artillery
in front of the residency saluted him with salvos when he drove out.
In Butter-Week all Tobolsk drank the spirits which their governor
bountifully provided. It is hardly necessary to say that the money for
these entertainments did not come from Chicherin’s private purse: the
city merchants groaned over forced loans and benevolences; and at last
their cry reached the throne, and Chicherin too was removed.
With his passing, the Tobolsk Province fell to less spectacular
rulers, but under good and bad it grew steadily, until in 1860 there
were a million inhabitants within its borders, a population which
at the present time has risen to a million and a half. Some forty
thousand of these are exiles; some eighty thousand raskalniks; and
forty thousand Tatars, who feed the flocks where their ancestors once
bore sway, living peacefully side by side with the Russians. Some
fifteen thousand are descendants of the Samoieds and Voguls with whom
the first Stroganov from the adjoining Russian province of Archangel
traded his wares. Some twenty thousand are Ostiaks whose forebears were
alternately allies and enemies of Yermak.
The capital city, Tobolsk, on the Tobol River hard-by its junction with
the Irtish, has grown from a precariously held camp of two hundred and
fifty fugitive Cossack soldiers to a city of thirty thousand. Tiumen,
the easterly city on the Tura River, another of Yermak’s camps, has
grown into a great distributing-centre for produce brought by the
river-highways. From the railway line northward as far as the city of
Tobolsk extends a farm-belt, a continuation of the black-earth region
of great Russia. The fertility of the land may be judged by the number
of villages met as the train speeds on, and the large proportion
of enclosed fields on both sides of the track. Some of the finest
agricultural soil in the world lies here, such soil as composes the
prairies of Minnesota and Dakota. Three million head of live stock
graze in the district, which has a yearly production of ten million
hundredweight of wheat alone, four million of rye, and nine million of
oats. Five million more settlers may live and thrive, and the harvest
will feed the ever-growing cities of Europe when Siberia comes to be
the new granary of the old world. The stress and turmoil of Tobolsk are
passed. Happy the people who have no annals!
Gradually, as the train rolls eastward beyond the Ishim River Valley,
the farm country opens out into the unfenced prairie of the Great
Steppe. The clustered wooden villages that flanked the line through
Tobolsk appear less and less frequently, till at last we seem to glide
over an immense white sea, frozen into perpetual calm and silence. Here
and there a gray thicket of stunted trees and bushes, here and there a
grove of naked-limbed birches, mutely exhibit Nature’s desolation.
As the sullen landscape bares itself, one thinks of the prison
caravans tramping these wastes; of the early neglected garrisons which
Elizabeth’s favorite General Kinderman proposed to victual on crushed
birch-bark and relieve the Crown of their expense; of all the misery
and the wrong that the steppes of Siberia have symbolized. No sign
of man’s handiwork or of Nature’s kindliness is seen,--only the cold
snow and the bare birches, while regularly as the ticking of a clock
the telegraph-poles and the verst-spaced stations snap back into the
wastes. The dominant reflection is not, how great is the achievement
which has mastered these steppes! but, how infinitesimal is all that
man has done in this ocean of untrodden snow! Hour after hour we are
driving on. Yet never is there passed a landmark to conjure into
imagination a picture of progress. One moves as in a nightmare, where
he runs for seeming ages, hunted forward, yet can never stir from the
spot. The horizon-bounded circle of vision is as the ever-receding
rim of a giant dome, the rails ahead and behind bisecting its white
immensity. Above, the vast bowl of the blue sky dips and meets it,
imprisoning us. Where are the fields and villages; the bustling
activity of human life that tells of man’s mastership? Hour after
hour passes without a change in the drear monotony of the landscape;
for miles on miles not a trace is seen of human dominion. Grim Nature
spreading her shroud over plain and pasture is despot here, and Winter
is ruler of the Siberian Steppe.
One could ride due south a thousand versts, through Golodnia the
“hunger steppe” to the borders of Turkestan, and find the same
monotonous plain, snow-covered save where the dryness of the south
has thinned its fall. One could ride from the Caspian Sea due east
to China, with each day’s march a counterpart of the rest. Five
hundred thousand square miles of area are covered with grass and
gaudy flowers in the spring, with low brush and green reeds where
the salt swamp-lakes receive the tribute of snow-fed streams. In
midsummer the growing grass scorches under a heat of 104°. In winter
snow is everywhere,--in feathery flakes that the midday sun does not
soften during whole months of a cold which is a ferocity. Thirty to
forty degrees below zero is not unusual, and the land is swept by
bitter winds that pierce like daggers through doubled furs and felts.
Yet there dwell on the central plateau of Asia a million people,
and one million cattle and three million sheep are scattered over
the tremendous range. As the herds have become hardened through the
centuries and survive in measure despite the severity, so also have
the men. From the train-windows now one may chance to see infrequent
straggling herds of long-horned cattle, lean and gaunt, scratching away
the snow in search of food. Mounted on little shaggy ponies are figures
buried in skins, who keep guard over them.
One detects a new type among the crowds at the stations,--flat faces,
round eyes, square thickset bodies. Here on the borderland, the old
race has fused with the Slav and has become metamorphosed. The sons
of the Tatars, whose very name was distorted into that of a dweller
in Tartarus by those who feared their fierce valor, have become
shopkeepers, train-hands, waiters, and butchers, who come to sell meat
and milk to the chef of the wagon restoran. Sometimes, at the stops,
figures, gnome-like in enveloping red capote and grotesquely padded
furs, hold their ponies with jealous rein, staring curiously at the
locomotive and passengers.
[Illustration: DINING-CAR SALOON, VIEW OF THE LIBRARY]
Looking long from the windows at this steppe, a drowsy hypnotism steals
over the mind--a dull stupor of unbroken monotony. It is better to do
as the Russians--pay no attention whatever to the landscape outside,
but make the most of the life within the moving caravansary,--cards and
cigarettes and liqueurs, tea and endless talk, with yarns that take
days for the spinning.
The uniformed judge, passing by, joins you. He is traveling to a
new appointment with his swarming family of children, shawl-decked
females of unknown quality and quantity, the household bedding, and
the ancestral samovar, all crowded into one stifling compartment. He
discusses volubly the confusions of the Code, and propounds a unique
theory of his own as to Russian jurisprudence, to the effect that all
the best laws of other nations have been adopted, with none of the old
or conflicting enactments repealed. The general drops into the circle.
He is interesting when one has pierced the crust, but dogmatic. At
every station the soldiers of the garrison, not on sentry-duty, jump to
one side, swing half-around, and stand at the salute until he passes,
to the huge inconvenience of the porters. He would undoubtedly vote the
Democratic ticket to repay Mr. Roosevelt for putting Russia under the
alternative of stopping the war perforce, or forfeiting sympathy, when
Japan was said to be breaking under the strain.
“Russia was beaten this time. What of it? _Nietchevo!_” says the
general.
“_Nietchevo_,” we echo, as we sip our tea.
“But the Japanese are wily insects,” observes his companion, the young
service-medaled major. “I was in Vladivostok when our prisoners came
back. They tried to get money for the checks the Japanese had given
them. That was how the big mutiny began. You know, when our men were
taken captive, the Japanese treated them very well, much good food,
vodka, let them write home all about it, and gave them enormous pay,
six yen, three dollars a month, charging the expense all up to the Czar
for after the war. When at last the prisoners were to be released, the
Japanese promised every man double pay, twelve roubles. But they gave
them the money? No, the insects gave them each an order payable by the
Russian commander in Vladivostok. So the transports came, and these men
were sent ashore with these checks in their hands, and they went up to
the commandant of the city, and asked for their cash that the Japanese
had promised. What money did the commandant have for them? What could
he do? He ordered them to go away. So they stood and discussed on the
street-corners. And more men still came from the transports. Then they
said, ‘We will ask the general of the forts.’ So they marched to the
forts in a big crowd, and the general he also told them to go away. For
a long time they talked and they persuaded the sailors to help them. So
they went again to the forts, and the sailors shot at the forts, and
the general ordered the artillery to shoot. But the artillery would
not, so the men broke in and killed the officers and got arms and went
back to the city commander. Him, too, they killed, and all Vladivostok
was in mutiny for two weeks. Not an officer dared show himself. General
Orlov persuaded them to let him into the town. Then many were shot, but
at last the city was quiet. The Japanese are very sly insects.”
His story ends and the two officers go back to join their families. The
train throbs on across the steppe.
The German gas-plant drummer, with his new Far Eastern outfit, is
gathering from the missionary doctor details of treaty-port life,
which are being treasured up as valuable reference data. The French
fur-merchant dips back into his library copy of de Maupassant.
The rigor of the outside scene seems at length to be changing. A few
scattered houses appear, and trees and fenced fields, and villages,
with curling smoke rising from the chimneys. Men and children are
walking about, and finally we come to the Irtish River, over which the
train rumbles on a half-mile bridge. Spires and gilt domes are visible,
dark wooden houses, and bright white-painted churches with green roofs.
Droshkies and carts are passing in the streets, and presently we draw
up to the station of Omsk, the second city of Siberia.
The junction of the Trans-Siberian Railway with the Irtish River, which
is 2520 miles long and open from April to October, would of itself
make Omsk a centre of great strategic importance. But in addition to
this main river-highway, which is navigated by some hundred and fifty
steamers, there are affluents by which one can sail from the Urals
to the Altai, from the Arctic Ocean to China, and these lines of
communication centre here.