XIX NEW FRIENDS, PRISONS, AND OTHER THINGS

Three British officers came to Chita to observe conditions for their government. Lieutenant-Colonel H—— of the General Staff, Major K—— of the British Indian Army, and Captain P—— who was an expert on railroad conditions and gave his attention to matters pertaining to the Trans-Siberian.

This trio made my life a joy, for they were jolly chaps, keen on their work and keen on play when it was time to play, as is the Briton the world over. These gentlemen were much amused at first by my “Americanism,” but in a short time they discovered that my American idioms were provided chiefly for their entertainment and they declined to take my exaggerated slang seriously.

And as I spent much time in foretelling what would happen in Siberia, they dubbed me “Old Moore” after the ancient and celebrated prophet in England who publishes the prophetic “Old Moore’s Almanac.”

And as we got franker, they asked questions in gentle criticism of American institutions and I in turn told them what was wrong with England and the British Empire. Colonel H—— had come through the United States on his way to Siberia, and was puzzled by some of the characteristics of American journalism, as well as startled by the hospitality that had been accorded to him by new friends in New York, and in the clubs of that city. Being a lover of tennis, a New York tennis club had made his stay in the city a delight. He was still in something of a daze over the way in which the courts and club-house had been turned over to him to use as his own.

Major K—— had with him his Indian orderly, who spent most of his time lurking in the lower hall of the hotel, waiting to pounce upon his officer and demand if there was anything that could be done. He had been with Major K—— about sixteen years, and fairly worshiped him. And it was most amusing, and significant, that in a very short time this Hindu was prattling Russian to the waiters and samovar girls. He swore that the Russian language was borrowed from his own precious Hindustani, indicating that all Asia is linked together far closer than the casual observer might believe.

And I wonder if Britain’s old fear of Russia was not based on an understanding of the fact that India and Russia might find it easier to coalesce into one nation than India and England. India and Russia have had much the same training in understanding and submitting to a form of government headed by a cruel and powerful emperor. They respect the sword and scoff at the commoner who presumes to rule too kindly.

Both countries have produced large numbers of ignorant peasants with profligate native ruling classes. Also, both countries are filled with diversified tribes, with climates ranging from tropical to frigid zones, or at least with magnificent distances. Also, both countries are very rich in natural resources, yet in those countries the human race has allowed itself to be most enslaved. India had her great Moghuls, Russia has had her cruel dynasties. And the masses of the peoples are more concerned with their crops than with their capitals.

In this latter respect I have not found the Russian peasant hard to understand. The Russian noble and land-owner presents to me a greater problem. Here is a country in which the people love the land—they love to sow and reap, to dig and make the land produce. In fact, they demand little else. Yet the history of the Russian peasant is one of a constant fight to use and possess the land, while the great land-owner and the government, have persisted in thwarting him. This insistence upon preventing the peasants from having the land comes from the feudal idea that the upper class must be master of the land and master of its servitors.

So Russia has been ruled, and the peasant controlled, by a monopoly of land. To allow that monopoly to wane, as the upper class saw it, was to lose the power of ruling, which under the old régime was closely identified in Russia with taxation and what we call graft. In order to maintain these powers, the dynasty and its parasitic satellites, kept the people ignorant. The result was Bolshevism—war between those who own property and those who have been prevented from owning property. So ignorance has almost destroyed the upper class in Russia, and will destroy more of the common people than the most cruel dynasty could execute and kill in prisons in a thousand years of ruthless reign.

It is necessary in considering the people of Siberia to recall some of the facts of its history. We know that the Czars and their agents put “dangerous people” into cold storage in Siberia. And the thinker, the idealist, the protesters against the government were classed as criminals, and imprisoned with criminals. This, curiously enough, established a bond of fellowship between the most vicious cut-throats of the Empire and the highest-minded men and women it had produced.

If a man or woman has spent half a lifetime in a stone cell where the temperature drops as low as eighty degrees below zero for merely daring to think of government, criticise it, and demand justice for the ignorant people, that man or woman is not going to worry about cruel methods in retaliation if freedom ever comes. And when such a political convict has been chained to a murderer for work, and lives in such a cell with a murderer, these two will join hands against the common enemy. Centuries were spent building up such hatreds. Why should we wonder at the cruelties practiced when the prisons were opened?

I saw in Chita one of the old prisons. It was empty, with the cell doors hanging from broken hinges—hideous doors of planks painted a dull yellow, with small holes cut in them for passing in food, and the edges of the holes stained black with the grime of countless dirty hands which for unknown years had delivered food to prisoners. I got into this prison unexpectedly one cold day while seeking another prison—Semenoff’s military prison. And I wandered through it, and examined it in detail.

Stone benches had served as beds—two to a cell. The remains of the sanitary appliances, if they could be described as sanitary at all, were most crude. I went into one of these cells and shut the door, and sat on the stone bench. The hole in the door, six inches square, gave scarcely any light from the corridor. I put my flashlight on the walls, and found them scratched on every inch with names, initials, and dates.

One wall was covered with rows upon rows of scratches in the stone. At first I thought there had been a rude attempt at interior decoration, but the word for “years” was dimly revealed in many places. Every scratch represented a year spent by human beings in that stone grave! Dark, damp, terribly cold and full of vile odors though it was nearly a year since the prison had been emptied of its human misery, this cell in ten minutes told me more about Siberia than all the historians and diplomats and students of Russia could have told me in a lifetime of reading or lecturing.

SIBERIANS CELEBRATING THE SIGNING OF THE ARMISTICE

ROOM IN HOUSE AT EKATERINBURG WHERE THE CZAR
AND HIS FAMILY ARE REPUTED TO HAVE BEEN EXECUTED

And on one of these walls, was inscribed a date and this sentence: “Nicolai died last night—he missed freedom by fourteen hours after waiting twenty-two years,” and the date scrawled near it, represented the date on which the prisons of Siberia had been opened under the Kerensky régime.

Just imagine waiting twenty-two years in such environment for the overthrow of the Czar, and then missing freedom by fourteen hours! If you had, would you dare tell a former Siberian convict to be more gentle in dealing with those who upheld the system of the old régime? And would you be too ready to accept somebody’s word that a new dictator who wanted to set himself up to rule Russia would not restore the old prison system?

When Washington or London or Paris is puzzled about Russia and what course to pursue with that country, I would like to take a group of the diplomats to such a Siberian prison as I saw and let them spend a single night in it with the doors locked and not quite sure how many years it would be before somebody bade them come out into the light of day. I believe they would appreciate better the doubts and suspicions of the Russian people about government in the making.

I wished to make a note of what was on the wall of that cell, but it was too cold to unbutton my coat and get out pencil and note book. I read it over and over—I can still see it in my mind’s eye. It was seventy-two below zero that morning, and I was willing enough to walk out and get into my drosky and go about my business. And I thought of Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin and a lot of people who had done something for human liberties—and mine.

Chita was the place to which the group of revolutionists known as “The Decembrists” had been sent, back about 1840. And an old man in Chita who had spent years as an exile, had a collection of branding irons and other implements of torture used on convicts in a private museum. Among other things were figurines of convicts made by convicts, complete in every detail, even to the leg chains and the convict clothing. These figurines, including the chains, had been moulded out of convict bread!

And in Chita I saw “Damskaya Oolitsia,” or “The Street of the Dames.” This consisted of two rows of log houses near the railroad tracks, which had been built by the wives of the Decembrist exiles for habitations, these gentlewomen having followed their husbands into exile and having been granted the right to build a street for themselves.

These wives were not allowed to communicate with their husbands, who were worked outside the prisons in chain-gangs. But with that feminine ingenuity for outwitting locksmiths when there is love in the heart, these brave women managed to talk with their husbands. The clever trick was accomplished by hiring a carriage from the aborigine Buriats of the locality, and driving past the chain-gangs. When close to the working convicts, the horse was made to balk. The women, pretending to be arguing with the driver and demanding that he make the horse go on, shouted in French.

The Russian guards of course did not understand French, but the convict-husbands did. Thus messages of hope were transmitted, and news of what was going on in Petrograd and Moscow in revolutionary circles, with probably information that pardons were being sought, was given to the exiles.

Many of these brave and loyal women remained in Chita till their deaths. Most of the husbands died in prison, and the widows went back to the cities of Europe.

The new Czar came to the throne—he who was to lose it. There is a grotto in the forests back of Chita to commemorate his visit to the city while he was the Crown Prince. He made the journey by sledges, for at that time there was no railroad. He might have learned a lot in Chita about government, but the Second Nicholas was weak and stubborn and would not heed even the advice of his greatest statesman, Count Witte. And the prisons of Nicholas the Second brought about his ruin and the ruin of his Empire. After all, I wonder if prisons cannot teach lessons in freedom.

Some men are born a thousand years too late, and are a menace to our present civilization. Some men are born a thousand years too soon, and having ideals a cycle in advance of human progress, likewise may become a menace to organized society. But the Russian government lagged behind human progress—even such progress as its own people made under governmental oppression. So the government imprisoned thieves and murderers—what we call criminals. But it also classed as criminals, and rightly, nihilists and assassins who used violence against the government. But it also classed as criminals, and imprisoned them, men and women with the greatest visions and the greatest spirits in the Empire. Thinking became a crime.

The government’s attitude toward a Tolstoy differed in no way from its attitude toward a crack-brained agitator, except that it dared imprison or execute the agitator, but only dared scowl at Tolstoy.

We of the United States condemned the Czar and his government of parasites for its enmity toward Tolstoy, not understanding that Tolstoy was not dangerous for what he himself actually did against the government, but for what he instigated others to do. The ideals of a Tolstoy, carried out by assassins, may wreck not only a criminal government, but may topple over the whole structure of civilization throughout the world.

I believe now that the Czar’s government, for all its hideousness, understood that its revolutionists not only threatened the imperial system but also menaced the lives of all the people in the Empire.

Revolution may be necessary when evolution, throttled by a few who control the destiny of a people, is not permitted to operate. The aspirations of the Russian people were beyond their abilities to carry out. They accomplished a successful revolution. Will they be able to hold the good they gained by it? If not, we can only say they did not deserve the liberty they acquired.

It was as dangerous in Russia under the old régime to be ahead of the times as it was to be behind them—as dangerous to be an idealist as to be a cut-throat. The people, we knew, were ahead of their system of government, and even the ignorant peasants who blamed the government for all their woes from bad crops to taxes, were theoretically right. But it is worse to pursue a theory of government and not to know what to do with it once you have it, than it is to have no idealistic theories and face conditions as they exist.

Columbus had a theory that by sailing to the westward he would reach India. He discovered America. If he had sailed to destruction over the edge of the “flat” world, only his crews and the three ships of his venture, would have been lost. It is quite another matter to embark with a whole nation, or group of nations, into unknown seas. The nation and all it has gained by centuries of evolution, may be lost, and the children of a few survivors be thrown back into barbarism. That is what the idealists of the Czar’s Empire have done, directing a vast but ignorant population. And the people of Russia are still waiting for a pilot who can cry “Land ho!”