The dawn in Russia E-Book

Henry Woodd Nevinson

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Away in the western quarter of St. Petersburg, at some distance from the fashionable centre, stands a rather decrepit hall of debased classic. In England one would have put it down to George II.’s time, but in St. Petersburg everything looks fifty years older than it is, because fashions used to travel slowly there from France. Among the faded gilding of stucco pilasters and allegorical emblems of the virtues and the arts, are hung the obscure portraits of long-forgotten men—philosophers, governors, and generals—who were of importance enough in their day to be painted for the remembrance of posterity. Glaringly fresh among the others hangs the portrait of the hesitating gentleman whom the accident of birth has left Autocrat of Russia, whether he likes it or not. The hall was dedicated to the discussion of “Free Economics” by some scientific body, but never before had economics been discussed there with such freedom as during those November nights when the Central Strike Committee, or Council of Labour Delegates, chose it for their meetings.

Leseprobe

THE DAWN IN RUSSIA

THE DAWN IN RUSSIA

OR

SCENES IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

BY

HENRY W. NEVINSON

ILLUSTRATED

1906

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383838531

THE DAWN IN RUSSIA

OR

SCENES IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

INTRODUCTION

I have not attempted in this book to do more than describe some of the scenes which I witnessed in Russia during the winter of 1905–1906, while I was acting there as special correspondent for the Daily Chronicle. For the most part, the descriptions are given in the same words which I wrote down at the time, either for my own memory or for the newspaper. But the whole has been re-arranged and rewritten, while certain scenes have been added for which a daily paper has no room. I have also inserted between the scenes a bare outline of the principal events that were happening elsewhere, so that the significance of what I saw may be more easily understood, and the dates become something better than mere numbers.

But to realize the meaning of the earlier chapters, a further introduction is necessary, and it is difficult to know where to begin. For there is never any real break in a nation’s history from day to day, and the movement of 1905 was not the first sign of change, but only the brightest. The story of the undaunted struggle for freedom in Russia during the last fifty years has been admirably told by Stepniak, Kropotkin, Zilliacus, Miliukoff, and many other writers. In books that are easily obtained, any one may learn the course of that great movement—the changes in its aims and methods, the distinctions in its parties, and the martyrdoms of its recorded heroes. So for this present purpose of chronicling a few peculiar or unnoticed events and situations which would hardly have a place in history at all, perhaps it will be enough if I begin the skeleton annals with the outbreak of the war between Russia and Japan in February, 1904.

A DEMONSTRATION BY THE KAZAN CHURCH, ST. PETERSBURG.

From The Marseillaise.

It is true that for some time earlier the revolutionary movement had obviously been gathering strength. Within two years there had occurred outbreaks among the peasants, student risings in Moscow, and a demonstration in front of the great classic building called the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Some soldiers at Toula had actually refused to kill the work-people. The Zemstvos, or District Councils of landowners and upper-middle classes, had ventured to recommend economic reforms, and a student from Kieff had assassinated Sipiaguine, the Minister of the Interior. To counteract these evils, heightened by a period of industrial depression, Plehve had been promoted from the Governorship of Finland to the Ministry of the Interior; a manifesto had been issued (March 12, 1903), removing the responsibility of the village communes for individual taxation, and promoting religious toleration; and the Jews of Kishineff had been massacred, with the connivance of the Government, and probably at its direct instigation (April 20, 1903). The Armenian Church in the Caucasus was deprived of £3,000,000 of its funds, the public debt of Russia rose to £700,000,000, about half of the interest on which had to be paid to foreign countries, and Witte was appointed President of the Committee of Ministers, while his assistant Pleske succeeded him in what was then regarded as the far more important position of the Ministry of Finance.

It was obvious that the Government—which we may call Tsardom or Oligarchy as we please—had in any case entered upon the way to destruction, and that the revolution was already at work. Indeed, the Social Democrats had met in secret in 1903, and published a “minimum programme” demanding a Republic under universal adult suffrage. But still the disastrous war with Japan hastened these tendencies, and its outbreak may conveniently be taken to mark a period, for the dates of wars are definite and the results quick.

The course of that ruinous campaign, unequalled, I suppose, in history for the uninterrupted succession of its disasters, need not concern us now. It wasted many millions of money, borrowed by a country which is naturally and inevitably poor. It revealed an incompetence in the ruling classes worse than our own in South Africa, together with a corruption and a heartlessness of greed compared to which even the scandals of South Africa seemed rather less devilish. It kept from their work in fields and factories about a million grown men, who had to be fed and clothed, however badly, by the rest of the population, and it killed or maimed some two or three hundred thousand of them. Otherwise the war can hardly be said to have concerned the Russian people any more than ourselves, so general was their indifference both to its cause and to its failure. “It is not our war, it is the Government’s affair,” was the common saying. Tolstoy is a prophet, and the mark of a prophet is that he speaks with the voice of God and not with the voice of the people; but in his protest against the war (published in the Times of June 27, 1904) he uttered a denunciation of the Government with which nearly the whole of Russia’s population would have agreed. Of the head of that Government himself, he wrote:—

“The Russian Tsar, the same man who exhorted all the nations in the cause of peace, publicly announces that, notwithstanding all his efforts to maintain the peace so dear to his heart (efforts which express themselves in the seizing of other people’s lands and in the strengthening of armies for the defence of those stolen lands), he, owing to the attack of the Japanese, commands that the same should be done to the Japanese as they had begun doing to the Russians—namely, that they should be slaughtered; and in announcing this call to murder he mentions God, asking the Divine blessing on the most dreadful crime in the world. This unfortunate and entangled young man, recognized as the leader of 130,000,000 of people, continually deceived and compelled to contradict himself, confidently thanks and blesses the troops which he calls his own for murder in defence of lands which he calls his own with still less right.”

While the myth of Russia’s military and naval power—a myth which for fifty years had misguided England’s foreign policy, checked any generous impulse on the part of our statesmen, and driven them to breach of national faith, callousness towards outrageous cruelty, and every moral humiliation that a proud and ancient people can suffer—while this overwhelming myth was being dissipated month by month in the Far East, the characteristic methods by which the Russian Tsar and Oligarchs sought to maintain their hold upon the wealth and privileges of State were being revealed in the so-called Königsberg case. It was discovered that even in a foreign capital like Berlin, the Russian Government employed a little army of spies, under a recognized and highly-paid official, to search the homes of Russian Liberals, to watch their goings, and open their letters. It was also shown that, even under a comparatively civilized government like the German, the authorities were ready to bring their own subjects to trial for alleged verbal attacks upon the Tsar; while a Russian Consul, probably in obedience to orders from home, would tell any lie and garble any document to support the charge.

On June 17th the air was cleared by the assassination of General Bobrikoff, the Russian tyrant of Finland, and on July 8th that deed was followed by the assassination of Plehve. In all the history of political murder, I suppose, there has never been a case in which the victim received less pity, or the crime less condemnation. The pitiless hand of reaction was for the moment stayed. The birth of an heir to the uneasy crown inspired the Tsar with such amiability that, as father of his people, he abolished the punishment of flogging among his grown-up subjects. Prince Sviatopolk Mirski, who was justly regarded as something of a Liberal as princes go, succeeded Plehve at the Interior, released some political prisoners, advocated decentralization with the development of the Zemstvos, and promised better education, liberty of conscience, and freedom of speech.

Again the Zemstvoists, taking their courage as moderate Liberals in both hands, met secretly in St. Petersburg, and drew up a kind of Petition of Rights to be presented to the Tsar. There were one hundred and six members present at the secret conferences, thirty-six of them belonging to the caste of the nobility, and their Petition began with the complaint that the bureaucracy had alienated the people from the Throne, and that by its distrust of self-government it had shown itself entirely out of touch with the people. In place of the bureaucratic system, the Petition demanded an elected Legislature of two Houses, together with freedom of conscience, the press, meeting, and association, equal civil and political rights for all classes and races, and similar methods of justice for the peasants as for other men.

The Zemstvo petition was issued on November 22, 1904. A month later (December 26th) it was repeated in still more direct and urgent terms by the Moscow Zemstvo, which had always taken the lead in reform, being inspired by its President, Prince Sergius Troubetzkoy, Professor of Philosophy in the University since 1888. But, in the meantime, student riots had again occurred in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the censorship had been renewed, and on the same day as the Moscow petition there appeared an Imperial manifesto proclaiming “the unshakable foundations of the Russian State system, consecrated by the fundamental laws of the Empire,” and announcing the Tsar’s determination to act always in accordance with the revered will of his crowned predecessor, while he thought unceasingly upon the welfare of the realm entrusted to him by God. The manifesto went on to admit that when the need of this or that change had been proved to be mature, the Tsar was willing to take it into consideration, and upon this principle he undertook to maintain the laws, to give local institutions as wide a scope as possible, to unify judicial procedure throughout the Empire, to establish State insurance of workmen, and to revise the laws upon political crime, religious offences, and the press. But the tone of the whole manifesto was felt to be reactionary, and there was no guarantee that its promises would be observed. When our own Charles I. made concessions, the people shouted, “We have the word of a King!” But they soon found that assurance was a shifty thing to trust to, and since then the words of kings have counted for no more than the words of men.

But the opening of the next year (1905) was marked by the appearance of a new element in revolution. Certainly, there had been strikes and riots in the great cities before; there had been peasant risings and other forms of economic agitation in various parts. But as a whole the revolutionary movement as such had been inspired, directed, and even carried out by the educated classes—the students, the journalists, the doctors, barristers, and other professional men. It had been almost limited to that great division of society which in Russia is called “The Intelligence.” The word is fairly well represented by our phrase “educated classes”—a phrase which embodies our greatest national shame. It includes all who are not workmen or peasants, and so is much wider in significance than the French term “The Intellectuals,” with which it is often confused. In England, for instance, it would include the House of Lords, the clergy, army officers, country gentlemen, and the leaders of society whom no Frenchman would dream of classing among the intellectual.

It was “the Intelligence” who hitherto had fought for the revolution. It was they who had suffered scourgings and exile and imprisonment and madness and violation and the gallows in the name of freedom. It was they who had endured the horror that most people feel in killing a man. And, above all, it was they who had devoted their lives, their careers, and reputations to going about among the peasants and working-people to show them that the misery and terror under which they lived were neither necessary nor universal. At length the firstfruits of their toilsome propaganda, continued through forty years, were seen, and the revolutionary workman appeared.

He was ushered in by Father George Gapon, at that time a rather simple-hearted priest, with a rather childlike faith in God and the Tsar, and a certain genius for organization. His personal hold upon the working classes was probably due to their astonishment that a priest should take any interest in their affairs, outside their fees. We have seen the same thing happen in England, when Manning and Westcott won the reverence due to saints because they displayed some feeling for the flock which they were paid large sums to protect. Father Gapon, with his thin line of genius for organization, had gathered the workmen’s groups or trade unions of St. Petersburg into a fairly compact body, called “The Russian Workmen’s Union,” of which he was President as well as founder. In the third week in January the men at the Putiloff iron works struck because two of their number had been dismissed for belonging to their union. At once the Neva iron and ship-building works, the Petroffsky cotton works, the Alexander engine works, the Thornton cloth works, and other great factories on the banks of the river or upon the industrial islands joined in the strike, and in two days some 100,000 work-people were “out.”

With his rather childlike faith in God and the Tsar, Father Gapon organized a dutiful appeal of the Russian workmen to the tender-hearted autocrat whose benevolence was only thwarted by evil counsellors and his ignorance of the truth. The petition ran as follows:—

“We workmen come to you for truth and protection. We have reached the extreme limits of endurance. We have been exploited, and shall continue to be exploited under your bureaucracy.

“The bureaucracy has brought the country to the verge of ruin and by a shameful war is bringing it to its downfall. We have no voice in the heavy burdens imposed on us. We do not even know for whom or why this money is wrung from the impoverished people, and we do not know how it is expended. This is contrary to the Divine laws, and renders life impossible. It is better that we should all perish, we workmen and all Russia. Then good luck to the capitalists and exploiters of the poor, the corrupt officials and robbers of the Russian people!

“Throw down the wall that separates you from your people. Russia is too great and her needs are too various for officials to rule. National representation is essential, for the people alone know their own needs.

“Direct that elections for a constituent assembly be held by general secret ballot. That is our chief petition. Everything is contained in that.

“If you do not reply to our prayer, we will die in this square before your palace. We have nowhere else to go. Only two paths are open to us—to liberty and happiness or to the grave. Should our lives serve as the offering of suffering Russia, we shall not regret the sacrifice, but endure it willingly.”

On the morning of Sunday, January 22, 1905, about 15,000 working men and women formed into a procession to carry this petition to the Tsar in his Winter Palace upon the great square of government buildings. They were all in their Sunday clothes; many peasants had come up from the country in their best embroideries; they took their children with them. In front marched Father Gapon and two other priests wearing vestments. With them went the ikons, or holy pictures of shining brass and silver, and a portrait of the Tsar. As the procession moved along, they sang, “God save our people. God give our Orthodox Tsar the victory.”

So the Russian workmen made their last appeal to the autocrat whom they called their father. They would lay their griefs before him, they would see him face to face, they would hear his comforting words.

But the father of his people had disappeared into space.

As the procession entered the square, the soldiers fired volley after volley upon them from three sides. The estimate of the killed and wounded was about 1500. That Sunday—January 9th in Russian style—is known as Bloody Sunday or Vladimir’s Day, after the Grand Duke Vladimir, who was supposed to have given the orders.

Next morning Father Gapon wrote to his Union: “There is no Tsar now. Innocent blood has flowed between him and the people.”

“HOMUNCULUS” AND THE S. D. (SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC) RATS.

From Burelom (The Storm).

Innocent blood has flowed before and tyrants still have reigned. They have been feared, they have won their way, and men have served them. Mankind will endure much in the name of government, but to be governed by a coward is almost beyond the endurance of man.

On January 24th a new office of Governor-General of St. Petersburg was created, and Trepoff received the first appointment.

Disturbances continued in Warsaw, Lodz, and Sosnowice, the industrial centres of Poland, and on January 31st 200 work-people were killed and 600 wounded in the streets of Warsaw.

On February 17th the Grand Duke Sergius, Governor-General of Moscow, uncle to the Tsar, conspicuous for his cruelty, and, even among the Russian aristocracy, renowned for the peculiarity of his vices, was assassinated as he drove into the Kremlin.

This event and other outbreaks that were continually occurring in the great centres of industry, inspired a remarkable manifesto and rescript that appeared on March 3rd and were characteristic of the hesitating fugitive in Tsarkoe Selo. The manifesto took the form of a pathetic address to the people whom he had misgoverned with such disaster:—

“Disturbances have broken out in our country” (it said) “to the joy of our enemies and our own deep sorrow. Blinded by pride, the evil-minded leaders of the revolutionary movement make insolent attacks upon the Holy Orthodox Church and the lawfully established pillars of the Russian State....

“We humbly bear the trial sent us by Providence, and derive strength and consolation from our firm trust in the grace which God has always shown to the Russian power, and from the immemorial devotion which we know our loyal people entertain for the Throne....

“Let all those rally round the Throne who, true to Russia’s past, honestly and conscientiously have a care for all the affairs of the State such as we have ourselves.”

In the rescript that followed on the same day a form of Legislative Assembly was promised in these words—

“I am resolved henceforth, with the help of God, to convene the worthiest men, possessing the confidence of the people and elected by them, to participate in the elaboration and consideration of legislative measures.”

Buliguine, who had now succeeded Mirski as Minister of the Interior, and was probably the author of the rescript, was appointed to organize the elections. But a counterblast of reaction swept over the distracted Tsar; Trepoff was made Assistant-Minister of the Interior and Chief of the Police, with full power to forbid all congresses, associations, or meetings, and Buliguine resigned, though he remained nominally in office till the end of October.

Outbreaks in the country became continually more serious. In June there was fierce rioting in Lodz, the great manufacturing town of Poland, and in the Baltic port of Libau. In the same month the great battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea fleet mutinied at Odessa, threw two big shells into the town, burnt the docks, and steamed away to the mouth of the Danube for refuge.

Mid-August brought another manifesto, which began with the usual precepts of maudlin falsehood—

“The Empire of Russia is formed and strengthened by the indestructible solidarity of the Tsar with the people and the people with the Tsar. The concord and union of the Tsar and the people are a great moral force, which has created Russia in the course of centuries by protecting her from all misfortunes and all attacks, and has constituted up to the present time a pledge of unity, independence, integrity, material well-being, and intellectual development.

“Autocratic Tsars, our ancestors, constantly had that object in view, and the time has come to follow out their good intentions and to summon elected representatives from the whole of Russia to take a constant and active part in the elaboration of laws, attaching for this purpose to the higher State institutions a special consultative body, entrusted with the preliminary elaboration and discussion of measures, and with the examination of the State Budget.

“It is for this reason that, while preserving the fundamental law regarding autocratic power, we have deemed it well to form a State Duma, and to approve regulations for the elections to this Duma.”

This consultative Duma was to lay its proposals before the Council of State, which might submit them to the Tsar if it approved. The Duma was to meet not later than January, 1906, and was to consist of 412 members, representing 50 governments and the military province of the Don, only 28 of the members representing towns. The members were to be paid £1 a day and fares, and were to sit for five years, unless the Tsar chose to dissolve them. Their meetings were to be secret, except that the President might admit the Press if he chose.

On September 7th a race-feud broke out between the Mohammedan Tartars and the Armenians at Baku, on the Caspian, and spread to Tiflis and all along the southern slopes of the Caucasus. The destruction of the great oil-works at Baku involved a loss of many millions of pounds, and further embarrassed the railways and manufacturing districts, which depended almost entirely on naphtha for their fuel.

On September 25th an assembly of 300 representatives of the Zemstvos of the empire was gathered in a private house at Moscow to consider their attitude towards the promised Duma, which was regarded as a concession to their previous representations during the year. They recognized that the Duma of the August manifesto would not be either a representative or legislative assembly, but, regarding it as a possible rallying-point for the general movement towards freedom, they agreed to obtain as many seats as possible, so as to form a united group of advanced opinion.

They further drew up a programme of their political aims, including the formation of a National Legislative Assembly; a regular budget system; the abolition of passports; equal rights for all citizens, including peasants; equal responsibility of all officials and private citizens before the law; the liberation of the villager from the petty official (natchalnik); inviolability of person and home; and freedom of conscience, speech, press, meeting, and association.

The programme is important, as indicating what to the average Liberal politician in England would appear the most obvious abuses of the Russian system, because nothing is here demanded which has not long ago been obtained for our own country by the efforts of our upper and middle classes in the past.

As soon as the assembly broke up, Prince Sergius Troubetzkoy, the true leader of these Liberal or Zemski delegates, the President of the Moscow Zemstvo, and for a month past the Rector of the University, went to St. Petersburg to urge the Government to allow public meetings, and while speaking on behalf of free speech at the Ministry of Public Education, he suddenly died. He was only forty-three, and it is tempting to speak of him as the first of the Girondists to fall. But all through what I have seen in Russia, I have avoided even a mental reference to the French Revolution as carefully as I could. For history is a great hindrance in judging the present or the future.

The manifesto of October 19th, announcing the final conclusion of the peace with Japan, by which the Russian Government was compelled to abandon all for which it had striven during many years in the Far East, was hardly noticed in the gathering excitement of the days.

On October 21st, the workmen again appeared unexpectedly upon the scene, and delivered their first telling blow by declaring a general railway strike. The strength of the movement was that it disorganized trade, made the capitalist and commercial classes very uncomfortable, and, above all, that it prevented the Government from sending troops rapidly to any particular point of disturbance. The weakness was that, as in all strikes, the strikers were threatened with starvation while their employers suffered only discomfort; that the peasants, being unable to get their produce to market, began to regard the revolution with suspicion; and that the Government succeeded in running a military train between St. Petersburg and Moscow (only a ten hours’ journey) nearly all the time.

The objects of the strikers were in the main political, as could be seen from the demands presented to Witte by a deputation on October 24th—

“The claims of the working classes must be settled by laws constituted by the will of the people and sanctioned by all Russia. The only solution is to announce political guarantees for freedom and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, elected by direct, universal, and secret suffrage. Otherwise the country will be forced into rebellion.”

To this petition Witte’s reply was peculiarly characteristic—

“A Constituent Assembly is for the present impossible. Universal suffrage would, in fact, only give pre-eminence to the richest classes, because they could influence all the voting by their money. Liberty of the press and of public meeting will be granted very shortly. I am myself strongly opposed to all persecution and bloodshed, and I am willing to support the greatest amount of liberty possible.... But there is not in the entire world a single cultivated man who is in favour of universal suffrage.”

Undeterred by any fear of exclusion from the circle of culture, the workmen continued their demands for universal suffrage and a Constituent Assembly, and on October 26th the Central Strike Committee—or Council of Labour Delegates, as it was properly called—sitting in St. Petersburg, declared a general strike throughout Russia. About a million workers came out.

This was the second workmen’s blow, and it shook Tsardom from top to bottom.

Four days after the beginning of the strike, the famous Manifesto of October 30th (17th in Old Style) was issued, promising personal freedom and a constitution. The document began with the harmless necessary cant—

“The troubles and agitations in our capitals and numerous other places fill our heart with great and painful sorrow.... The sorrow of the people is the sorrow of the sovereign.... We therefore direct our Government to carry out our inflexible will in the following manner:—

“I. To grant to our people the immutable foundations of civil liberty, based on real inviolability of person, and freedom of conscience, speech, union, and association.

“II. Without deferring the elections to the State Duma already ordered, to call to participation in the Duma (as far as is possible in view of the shortness of time before the Duma assembles) those classes of the population now completely deprived of electoral rights, leaving the ultimate development of the principle of electoral right in general to the newly established legislature.

“III. To establish it as an immutable rule that no law can ever come into force without the approval of the State Duma, and that it shall be possible for the elected of the people to exercise a real participation in supervising the legality of the acts of authorities appointed by us.”

This manifesto was greeted by an outburst of joy unequalled in the melancholy annals of Russia. Righteousness and peace kissed each other upon the streets; and so did professors, students, and even working people. Red flags paraded the squares, generals saluted them, soldiers joined in the Marseillaise of labour. But the Central Strike Committee was not overcome by the general hallucination. They rightly refused to trust the Tsar without guarantees, and they continued to press their demands for a political amnesty and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. They also demanded the restoration of its old liberties to Finland, and the dismissal of Trepoff. When anti-Jewish riots broke out at Kieff, Warsaw, and especially at Odessa, they steadily and justly maintained that the “Black Hundred” or “Hooligans” of the massacre and pillage were encouraged by the police and the priests, who wished to make out that the Russian people were opposed to political liberties.

The panic of the Government continued. They could not measure the strength of this new force among the work-people, or of this new instrument, the general strike. They were uncertain, also, about the army, which, together with the police and officials, formed their sole protection from ruin. Pobiedonostzeff, the aged Procurator of the Holy Synod, and the embodiment of an obstinate and narrow tyranny in Church and State, resigned. On November 4th, an amnesty was proclaimed for political offenders, though certain qualifications and categories were added.

On the same day a manifesto restored the old liberties of Finland, abolishing the decree of February 15, 1899, by which the autocratic principle, the dictatorship, and the employment of Russian gendarmes had been imposed upon the duchy contrary to its original constitution, and repealing also the military law of July 12, 1901, which compelled recruits to serve outside their own country.

On November 9th Trepoff sent in his resignation, and Durnovo, since infamous for his brutality, took office. The same day a violent but ill-considered mutiny broke out among the sailors and gunners at Kronstadt.

From that moment the Government began to recover courage, and we may mark the gradual revival of reaction. Perhaps it was immediately due to the refusal of the Liberal Zemstvoists to take part in a ministry under Witte, unless the promises of the manifesto were guaranteed, and a Constituent Assembly convened. In any case the change was quite apparent in a manifesto of November 12th, declaring the present situation unsuitable for the introduction of reforms, which would only be possible when the country was pacified.

Next day a ukase proclaimed martial law in Poland, and excluded that country from the manifesto, on the pretence that the Poles were plotting against the integrity of the Russian Empire by establishing a separate nation of their own.

The Central Strike Committee answered this ukase on the morrow (November 14th) by declaring another general strike in sympathy with Poland, and Witte, on his side, retaliated by posting an appeal to the work-people, conceived in his most unctuous and fatherly style. It ran—

“Brothers! Workmen! Go back to your work and cease from disorder. Have pity on your wives and children, and turn a deaf ear to mischievous counsels. The Tsar commands us to devote special attention to the labour question, and to that end has appointed a Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which will establish just relations between masters and men. Only give us time, and I will do all that is possible for you. Pay attention to the advice of a man who loves you and wishes you well.”

This appeal was immediately followed (November 17th) by a manifesto to the peasants, reducing their payments for the use of land by one-half after January, 1906, and abolishing it altogether after January, 1907. These payments were still being made under the land settlement that followed the emancipation of the serfs in the early sixties, and their nominal value to the Government was seven million pounds a year. But the apparent generosity of the remission is diminished by the consideration that the peasants had already paid the economic value of the land many times over, and pressure could still be brought upon them to make up the heavy arrears due to successive famines.

Three days later (November 20th), the Central Strike Committee declared the strike at an end. This second general strike was felt to have been a failure. People and funds were still exhausted by the first. Comparatively few of the great factories came out; the object of the strike was too remote from the workman’s daily life to persuade him to endure the starvation of his family for it. So the strike failed. It produced nothing; it did not frighten or paralyse the Government.

Nevertheless, the Strike Committee remained the most powerful body of men in the Empire, and their order commanding the cessation of the strike called hopefully upon the working classes to continue the revolutionary propaganda in the army, and to organize themselves into military forces “for the final encounter between all Russia and the bloody monarchy now dragging out its last few days.”

Such was the situation when, on November 21st I landed at the revolutionary little port of Reval, and went on to St. Petersburg by the first train which had run since the strike ended.

CHAPTER I

THE STRIKE COMMITTEE

Away in the western quarter of St. Petersburg, at some distance from the fashionable centre, stands a rather decrepit hall of debased classic. In England one would have put it down to George II.’s time, but in St. Petersburg everything looks fifty years older than it is, because fashions used to travel slowly there from France. Among the faded gilding of stucco pilasters and allegorical emblems of the virtues and the arts, are hung the obscure portraits of long-forgotten men—philosophers, governors, and generals—who were of importance enough in their day to be painted for the remembrance of posterity. Glaringly fresh among the others hangs the portrait of the hesitating gentleman whom the accident of birth has left Autocrat of Russia, whether he likes it or not. The hall was dedicated to the discussion of “Free Economics” by some scientific body, but never before had economics been discussed there with such freedom as during those November nights when the Central Strike Committee, or Council of Labour Delegates, chose it for their meetings.

Admission was by ticket only, and I obtained mine from a revolutionary compositor, hairy as John the Baptist, and as expectant of a glory to be revealed. On the first night that I went, the big chamber, with its ante-room half separated by plaster columns, was crowded with working people. So was the entrance hall, where goloshes are left, in Russian fashion, so that the floors may not be dirtied. Some of the men wore the ordinary dingy clothes of English or European factory-hands, making all as like as earwigs. Some had come dressed in the national pink shirt, with embroidered flowers or patterns down the front and round the collar. But most wore the common Russian blouse of dark brown canvas, buttoned up close to the neck, and gathered round the waist by a leather belt.

Many women were there, too, but as a rule they were not working women from the mills. Some may have been artisans or the wives of artisans, but most were evidently journalists, doctors, or students, from the intellectual middle classes, which in Russia produces the woman revolutionist—the woman who has played so fine a part in the long struggle of the past, and was now elated above human happiness by the hope of victory. For Russian women enjoy a working equality and comradeship with men, whether in martyrdom or in triumph, such as no other nation has yet realized.

The workmen were delegates from the various trades of the capital and some of the provinces—railway men, textile hands, iron workers, timber workers, and others. About five hundred of them had been chosen, and each delegate represented about five hundred other workers. But round the long green table in the middle of that decrepit hall, under the eyes of the hesitating little Tsar’s portrait, sat the chosen few whom the delegates had appointed as their executive committee. Between twenty and thirty of them were there—men of a rather intellectual type among workers, a little raised above the average, either by education or natural power. A few wore some kind of collar, a few showed the finest type of Russian head—the strong, square forehead and chin, the thoughtful and melancholy eyes, the straight nose, not very broad, and the dense masses of long hair all standing on end. A few seemed to be bred just a trifle too fine for their work, as dog-fanciers say. There they sat and spoke and listened—the members of that Strike Committee which had won fame in a month—just a handful of unarmed and unlearned men, who had shaken the strongest and most pitiless despotism in the world.

In the middle, along one side of the table, was their president, the compositor Khroustoloff—or Nosar, as his real name was—a man of about thirty-five, pale, grey-eyed, with long fair hair, not a strong-looking man, but worn with excitement and sleeplessness. For there was no time now for human needs, and his edge of collar was crumpled and twisted like an old rag. Yet he controlled an excited and inexperienced meeting with temper and ease, showing sometimes a sudden flicker of laughter for which there is very little room in Russian life. Neither for sleep, nor human needs, nor laughter, was there time, but in front of Khroustoloff and of all those men lay the prison or the grave, and in them there is always time enough.

That night, as long as I was there, the meeting was occupied with the discussion of the eight-hours’ day. One of the executive read out the reports received from all the factories represented by delegates as to the hours of labour at present. In some cases, the masters had conceded an eight-hours’ day after the first strike. In others, they had come down to nine, in others to ten. Most had absolutely refused a reduction. These reports, though monotonous and many, were listened to with the silence that characterizes a Russian meeting. It was broken only now and then by a little laughter or a murmur of anger. I have never heard a Russian speaker interrupted even by applause.

The evening before I had attended a meeting where a dull but deserving speaker, to whom no one wanted to listen, went on for an hour and twenty minutes in a silence like an African forest’s, with only an occasional whisper of breezy dresses as the audience changed their position at the end of some uninteresting clause. Ages of dumb suffering have given these people the interminable patience of mountains, and a public meeting is so new to them that they find a fearful pleasure in speeches which our free-born electors would howl down in three minutes. Any meeting of British trade-unionists would have polished off the Strike Committee’s business in an hour, but when I came away, though it was past two in the morning and the meeting had begun at six in the afternoon, the discussion was still proceeding with healthy vigour, and there were plenty of other subjects of equal importance still to be settled. The Committee, in fact, sat almost in permanence night and day.

As soon as the reports were all read, the executive gathered up their papers and adjourned into an upper room to consider their decision. During their absence, the other delegates broke up into groups according to trades, for the discussion of their own affairs. Standing on a chair, a man would shout, “Weavers, this way, please!” “Engineers, here!” or “Railway-men, this way!” and the various workers clustered round in swarms. A fine hum of business arose, and a buzz of conversation with outbursts of laughter too, for all spirits still were high with success and the confidence of victory. At last, as the executive remained over an hour in conference, a yellow-haired young workman with a voice like the Last Trumpet, raised the Russian “Marseillaise,” and in a moment the room was sounding to the hymn of freedom. Russian words—rather vague and rhetorical words—have been set to the old French tune, and even the tune has been altered at the end of the chorus, to make room for the words, “Forward, forward, forward!” which come in suddenly, like the beating of a drum. It was sung in all the streets of all the cities, but I heard it first in the midst of German territory, upon the Kiel canal. For as I was coming over, the only passenger upon the Russian boat, we met an emigrant ship bound for the refuge of freedom, as England still was at that time, and at the sight of our Russian flag the emigrants all burst into the song, the men waving their hats and the women their babes in defiance.

After the “Marseillaise,” the workmen turned to national songs, one of which was almost as magnificent, and was touched with the immense sorrow of Russia. All had one burden—the hatred of tyrants, the love of freedom, the willingness to die for her sake. To us, such phrases have come to bear an unreal and antiquated sound, for it is many centuries since England enjoyed a real tyranny, and the long comfort of freedom has made us slack and indifferent to evil. But in Russia both tyranny and revolt are genuine and alive, and at any moment a man or woman may be called upon to prove how far the love of freedom will really take them on the road to death.

A few days before this workmen’s meeting, I had been at an assembly of the educated classes to protest against capital punishment. One speaker—a professor of famous learning—was worn and twisted by long years of Siberian exile. He was the worst speaker present, but it was he who received the deep thunder of applause. Another had, with Russian melancholy, devoted his life to compiling an immense history of assassination by the State. Before he began to speak, he announced that he was going to read the list of those who had been executed for their love of freedom since the time of Nicholas I. Instantly the whole great audience rose in silence and remained standing in silence while a man might count a hundred. It was as when a regiment drinks in silence to fallen comrades. But few regiments have fought for a cause so noble, and few for a cause in which the survivors still ran so great a risk.

The executive returned from their consultation, and at once the meeting was quiet. President Khroustoloff, in a clear and reasonable statement, announced that, in the opinion of the executive, a fresh general strike on the eight-hours’ question would at present be a mistake. The eight-hours’ day was an ideal to be kept before them; they must allow no master who had once granted it to go back on his word; they must urge the others forward, little by little, and in the meanwhile organize and combine till they could confront both capitalism and autocracy with assurance. Another member of the executive spoke in support of this decision, and then the delegates of the opposite party had their turn. It was the old difference between the responsible opportunist, who takes what he can get, and the man of the ideal, who will take nothing if he cannot have all. The idealists pointed to the evident intention of Witte’s Government to thwart the workmen’s advance. They pointed, with good reason, to the gradual renewal of police persecution during the last few days, and to the encouragement given to masters who declared a lock-out. They urged that it was best to fight before the common enemy regained his full power, and that the general strike, so efficient before, was still the only weapon the workmen had. It was all true. Yet the recent strike had almost failed, and it was just because a general strike was the workmen’s only weapon that it should be sparingly used. A second failure within a fortnight would show the Government that freedom’s only weapon was not so dangerous after all. In the end the executive had its way; they were supported by three hundred votes against twenty; and there could be no question of the wisdom. The weapon of a general strike is too powerful to be brought out, except for some special and all-important crisis. It is like an ancient king, more feared when little seen.

Freedom at that moment was just hanging in the balance. One almost heard the grating of the scales as very slowly the balance began to swing back again. Already things were not quite so hopeful as they had been, and many good revolutionists spoke of the future with foreboding. The first fine rapture of liberty was over, and people who had eagerly proclaimed themselves Liberals three weeks before, now began to feel in their pockets, to hesitate and look round. In subdued whispers commerce sighed for Trepoff back again, and the ancient security of a merchant’s goods. They pretended terror of peasant outbreaks, and the violence of “Black Hundred” mobs, organized by the police just to show the dangers of reform. But it was reform itself that they dreaded, and the name of Socialism was more terrible to them than the tyranny.

Day by day the police were becoming active again. As family men with a stake in the country, they could not be expected to see their occupation taken from them without a struggle. They had the same interest in the ancient régime as the Russian aristocracy in Paris or Cannes; and for their livelihood the misery of the people was equally essential. Whenever they dared, they planted themselves in front of the doors and drove the audience away from a meeting; and the audience had to go, for except to bombs and revolvers there was no appeal. Every day I watched the police hounding groups of tattered and starving peasants or workmen along the streets, because they had ventured to come to St. Petersburg without passports, and had to be imprisoned till a luggage train could take them back to their starving homes. In spite of the manifesto, the censor of the post-office was active again. It is a terrible thing for a civil servant to feel that his work does not justify his pay. So the censor blacked out a cartoon in Punch representing the Tsar as hesitating between good and evil, and then he felt he could look the world in the face.

Already the people recognized that as yet they had no guarantee of freedom. As long as the Oligarchs controlled the police and the army, freedom existed only on sufferance. No one knew what the army would do, and no one knew what the fighting power of the revolution was. Those unknown factors alone terrified the Oligarchs into reform. But all the promises were only bits of paper. It had long been proved that the Tsar’s word went for nothing. At the birth of his son he had abolished flogging, but the taxes had been “flogged out” of the peasants just as before. Manifesto after manifesto had been issued without the least result, beyond winning the applause of an English writer or two. So far the Tsar’s pledges of reform had been no more effectual than his Conference of Peace and he could only become harmless if he had no power to harm.

Yet the outward appearance of freedom surpassed all hope and imagination. Nothing like this had ever been seen in Russia before. Newspapers dared to tell the truth. Meetings were held which a few weeks before would have sent every speaker to the cells. The Poles gathered in a great assembly demanding the overthrow of absolutism and solidarity for the revolution among all the states of the Empire. Women and children taunted the patrols of Guards and Cossacks as they rode the streets. Ladies threw open their nice clean rooms for workmen to meet in. The students’ restaurants hummed with liberty. The air sounded with the “Marseillaise.”

“In Russia now, everybody thinks,” said a revolutionist to me, “and where people think, liberty must come.” Thought and liberty were to bring him death in a few weeks, but for the moment it seemed impossible that any reaction could bring the old order back. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not restore that ancient tyranny. The spring of freedom had come slowly up that way, but at last it was greeted as certain, and so it seemed to me when in the darkness of early morning I left that workmen’s meeting still hot with discussion in the mouldering hall, and tramped home through slush and thawing snow, watching the rough floes of drifting ice as they settled down into their winter places upon the Neva.