XXIV THE PEASANTS

The problem of Siberia is the peasant-minded population. I use this term to avoid confusion with what is the popular conception of “peasant,” that is, a tiller of the soil, a rude and ignorant farmer or farm-hand, the human being described in Russian as “moujik.” The mass of the people is peasant-minded, whether working in cities or in the wilderness. The fact that those in the cities have acquired urban characteristics, does not to my mind prevent them from having mental calibers on a par with the rural population when it comes to knowledge of government, or minds revealing any alertness toward new ideas or reaction to anything with which they are unfamiliar. This vast population appears to be mentally static.

The stupidity of these people never ceases to amaze Americans. Many of our soldiers who were Russians and had been for years in the United States, apparently must make a great mental effort to comply with the simplest request. Their brains seem to be congealed. And the Siberian, asked a simple question in his own language by one speaking Russian perfectly, acts like a man rousing himself from deep slumber before he can comprehend the question, much less answer it.

Our knowledge of Russia has been gained from two sources—histories and books on government telling us of official and court life, and the Russian novelists. One class of writer deals with a few exalted personages, the other class tells us of the common people. Really, there is no history of Russia, for such history as we have concerns the figures of the Imperial dynasties and their satellites. Reading this, is something like attempting to get the history of the United States by being able to read only scenes from meetings of the cabinets of our presidents, and personal gossip about the characters of notable people, and how they acted in times of national stress.

Now I believe that Tolstoy, Gorky and other Russian novelists, did the Russian peasant more damage than all the Czars. They did not reveal the peasant to us, despite their brilliancy as novelists. They idealized the peasant. They built up a great illusion. I am not saying that after six months in Siberia I know more about the Siberian peasant than the novelists, but I am saying that they did not tell us the things we should know about him. They made the outer world believe that the peasant, once free of the Czars, would throw off his chrysalis of tyranny and emerge as a beautiful creature, living a life of sobriety, industry, and good behavior.

These novelists led us to believe that freedom in Russia was a matter of legislation, emanating from the halls of the Duma; they led us to believe that imperial bureaucracy was responsible for the woes of the people, when as a matter of fact, the people were responsible for that very imperial bureaucracy. We were led to believe that a machine-gun government would transform itself into a printing-press government once the old régime was shattered. We saw it shattered—and the vast Empire became a shambles.

Freedom is in the hearts of a people, and not in legislative halls. The congress of a nation is but an expression of the freedom which the people feel in their hearts—the machine, but not the fuel which drives it. It is futile to send representatives of the people to a congress if the people do not know what they want to express. It results only in autocracy, in exploitation. If a law-maker finds that he gets as much credit for making a bad law as he gets for making a good law, neither law being understood, he soon disregards the people and works for his own ends, thus usurping power which has not been delegated to him. He becomes master instead of servant. People are responsible for their government.

A wave of joy swept the United States when the news came that the Czar had fallen. We had a mental picture of two hundred million human beings able now to enjoy a liberty similar to our own. It was a great emancipation.

I believe it will take several hundred years before the mass of the people of Russia will have attained a mental capacity on a par with the civilization which we know. They are still in the dim twilight of medieval times, though they are playing with modern machinery.

And when it comes to turning such a nation from an absolute autocracy into a liberal republic, in which one man’s vote is as good as another’s, it is impossible without the element of time. A country so vast and so various, with the blood of so many nations running through the people, and especially a people holding the Asiatic viewpoint of government, cannot be administered immediately according to our ideal. The best that can be hoped for is a constitutional monarchy, and even if that form of government is gained, it will be for some time a dictatorship.

I am forced to this conclusion. All the pity, all the sympathy we may feel for this benighted people, will not alter the facts. We cannot swing a magician’s wand and hand freedom to these people on a silver salver. We have got to face facts, and realize that the Tolstoys and Gorkys have misled us about the Russian peasant. For once given a free hand, this sublimated peasant has produced a tragedy, with himself the victim, which outdoes any tragedy the human race has ever wished itself into.

The peasant has been described by Russian novelists as “inscrutable,” the inference being that behind the “dreamy eyes” and simple expressions on the faces of these people there were deep thoughts and a yearning for an ideal existence—some mysterious greatness which if we could once understand it, would reveal to us a wonderful race.

I consider this inscrutability to be of the same quality which exists in the eyes of a simple old cow, which being invited into the parlor and turned loose, kicks the walls out of the building and dies under the wreckage of the roof. It is an ignorance deeper than we of the United States are capable of comprehending—a childish mentality in a white person who appears good-natured, religious, kind and hospitable under a restraining government, but who will kill his neighbor simply for the purpose of doing something dramatic.

It may be charged that my pessimism on the peasant is exaggerated, and that the Russian in this country disproves my assertions that hundreds of years must elapse before the peasant can meet our standards of intelligence. What the Russian peasant does in this country has nothing to do with the case except to show that removed from Russia he forges ahead. But the Russian who comes here is of a higher type than those of his fellows he leaves behind—he must be energetic, ambitious, adventurous, aspiring to better things to take the trip of his own initiative and to have acquired by himself passage-money. If he gets aid from relatives already here in order to make the journey, there are members of his family who have shown ability in getting ahead. If he is compelled to escape from his country, that fact indicates that he was not satisfied with his lot at home—he is not given to dumb submission.

But we cannot import to this country all the peasants in the Russian Empire in order to advance their education to our standards. Their future is in their own hands, no matter how much we may attempt to aid them. And my pessimism toward the peasant is primarily an attitude toward him as he exists in his native environment. I am not attempting to judge him by our standards. I am attempting to show him in such a light that our people will give up attempting to judge him by our standards, so long as he remains at home.

We must stop considering Russia and Siberia as filled with people much like ourselves. They must be considered from an entirely new angle—much as if they were people of another planet. In fact, that has been and is our difficulty with all Asia. And when I say Asia, I do not mean so much a place, as I mean a state of mind.

The question may be raised as to why we should consider the peasant seriously. We do not have to if we do not want to, but we should, for what happens in Russia during the next decade or two will have serious effects upon us, our national existence, and the future of our children. I do not mean this in a sense of what they may do to us, but in the sense of what they may do with themselves. What has happened in Siberia and all Russia during the last couple of years has alarmed us. The happenings were the result partly of our belief in the last fifty years, that what happened in Russia was no concern of ours. We have suddenly awakened to the fact that injustice and intrigue and a weak monarch on the other side of the world, can have a most decided effect upon us. We got a good deal of amusement out of Wilhelm of Germany and his “mailed fist” and “shining armor”—it was all a merry show to us. We are just beginning to pay the piper. We have had a demonstration that what foreign princes may do is decidedly our business. We may not have learned the lesson fully.

It is apparent that Bolshevism made a powerful appeal to the peasants of Siberia, as it did to the submerged class of all Russia. The readiness with which these benighted people took up a saturnalia of crime in order to right certain crimes which had been committed against them, startled the world. The universality of Bolshevism in Russia actually led many people of peasant-minds here and abroad, to suspect that there was something good behind it all—it was hard to believe that a nation of two hundred million human beings supposedly civilized, could be so utterly wrong.

And while Bolshevism was wrecking a vast nation, it seemed impossible to get any definite idea of what it was, and what it intended to do. Many of our people are still in that frame of mind, despite the fact that a nation has been wrecked. There are charges and counter-charges, accusations and denials, and all the while wholesale murder is going on. People at home, supposed to have brains, still argue that Bolshevism is a good thing, a just thing, and the only justice in government that there is. They have not seen the wreckage.

There are others who have seen the wreckage, but are so enamored of a theory which they have upheld, that they will not admit the terrible things they have seen because these things would prove them and their theory to be wrong. These people could look at a train wreck in which a hundred persons were killed, and say: “There is nothing to worry about. This all means that we will build better cars and use safety devices. And if we don’t like the color of the new cars, we will wreck the trains till we get equipment that suits us. It is necessary that people die in order to have cars which meet our tastes in colors. What happens to the passengers does not worry us—we have theories of railroading which must be carried out, even if in testing them everybody in the country is killed.”

The arguments of the Bolshevist leaders made headway with the peasants because the basis of Bolshevism is class-war. Bolshevism is founded on the fallacy that it is the ability of the lower class which is exploited, when it is the ignorance of the lower class which is exploited. And the Bolshevist leaders have exploited this ignorance in a more terrible way than ever the ruling class did under the old régime.

The ignorance, credulity, stupidity and cruelty of the Siberian peasant passes our understanding. And in passing judgment upon these forlorn people, who filled me with disgust by their willingness to be dirty when it would be as easy to be clean, and in stressing their revolting aspects, my purpose is to bring home to the reader a clearer appreciation of the problems which face us when we attempt to aid them. I believe that I am helping them in depicting them to the generous-minded people of the United States and other countries.

We cannot leave them alone, even if we would. The point I want to make is that all our agencies for welfare work, all our machinery of government which takes up the Siberian and Russian problem, must realize the difficulties ahead and understand that the problem differs from any other problem we have ever attacked. It is Asia, white man’s Asia. Despite white skin, we have on our hands a race not akin to white, yellow or black. We readjust our minds when we come to deal with the colored races. We must readjust our minds when we deal with the Siberian, and keep that readjustment steadily, for the Siberian does not constantly warn us by the color of his face that his mind presents to us a barrier against mutual understanding. We must learn about him, as he must learn about us. Centuries of serfdom, centuries of autocratic rule, centuries of cruelty, have left their imprint on his brain. “Half devil and half child” was written of the black races. It is also a good thing to keep in mind when we consider Siberia.

The more the peasant disgusted me, the more I pitied him. We may say that the drowning man who reaches up and catches the gunwale of a life-boat full of women and children and upsets it in his frantic efforts to save himself, is a fool. Yet we must realize that he is responding to the natural instinct of self-preservation. He knows decidedly that he is in danger of death, his brain is not working normally, and his greatest impulse is to save himself—all idea of sacrificing himself for the benefit of the majority or the helpless, have been swamped by unreasoning fear.

The Siberian peasant knew something was wrong when he was prevented from having the soil. He loves the soil, and he loves to make it produce. He and his forbears have been in the clutches of a governmental system so asinine as to thwart him in his desire to work the land. He endured this serfdom in fact, for ages, he endured serfdom under another guise since official serfdom has been abolished. Instigated and aided by the Bolshevists, who were in turn backed by Germany, he wrecked the government of his oppressors, and finds himself caught in the wreckage. If the thing works out in the way Germany hopes, the peasant stands simply to change masters.

The peasant has been glorified by the Russian novelists for his quality of endurance, rather than for his accomplishments. His submission was extolled, and we gave his submission a wrong valuation. We pitied him, and he became a martyr in our eyes, with all the virtues that go with martyrdom. Freed of his chains, he mistook license for liberty, and we were shocked to find that he whom we regarded as a kind man who had been wronged, could only emulate his late masters in cruelty, murder and injustice to his own kind.

It may be said that the people of Siberia, being the rudest of Russians, are not at all typical, and that as the Siberians are the descendants of exiles, or former exiles, they have experienced a degeneration which prevents them from being representative of the corresponding class in European Russia. There may be something in that idea.

And I grant that judging the people of Siberia during a revolution, may be like judging the people of San Francisco while they were camping among the ruins of their city after the earthquake—that conditions were abnormal, and reduced to a primitive state.

But if people seem to prefer being filthy to being clean, when the desirable condition calls for but little effort, it is obvious that in normal times, they were inherently filthy. And I experienced filth, day after day, in trains, railway restaurants and hotels, which I cannot hint at, much less describe. Sanitation is the beginning of civilization. When conductors on trains, and passengers on trains, will create and permit without protest, a condition of squalor and unsanitary conditions such as I saw, and which the wildest animal avoids, there is something wrong mentally with such a people. And when a suggestion that conditions might be improved is met by a stare of amazement that anyone should find these things revolting, one begins to wonder if government by a knout was not actually needed. But we know that the knout, censorship, repression, and the barriers against outside ideas and education are responsible for these conditions. These people are victims of a government that was criminal.

While observing the peasants, and while discussing them in this book, I have tried to keep an open mind. I have not hesitated to reveal their worst side. I am willing to bring out in full force their exasperating habits of dilatoriness, their slow mental and physical gear which we describe as laziness, that we may realize their problem, and our problem in aiding them.

There is another side to the shield. It is my opinion that the only hope which Russia has for regeneration, no matter how long it may take to do the work, lies in the peasant class. Not the actual stolid peasant, but in men and women from the peasant class. That is the difference and distinction in my whole statement. Breshkovsky, “Grandmother of the Revolution” is of the peasant class, but not peasant-minded.

There are among the millions of peasants in Russia, men and women who are beyond their class in mental attainments. That ability may be latent, but it will rise to the top as surely as water seeks its own level. This quality of genius runs through the whole human race in all lands.

The genius of Russia under the old régime could only express itself in protest against government, which was the biggest job at hand for the genius. And this expression frequently came in the form of literature. When Tolstoy and Gorky extolled the peasant, one a noble and the other a commoner, both were merely praying that the latent genius in a few individuals have a fair chance to come to flower. They were fighting oppression, though they gave us an idea that if the peasants all had a chance, all would reveal the quality of genius. That hope is absurd, in Russia or elsewhere. What we want, in Russia and at home, is that the peasant-minded people have comfort and justice though they persist in remaining peasant-minded, and that when an individual reveals extraordinary ability, he may develop it, and not be broken on the wheel for daring to lift himself out of the rut.

My ideal is not a nation of peasants by any means. But I do insist that a large mass of our own population prefers to be peasant-minded, and fights against being anything else. There is but a small proportion of our population which demands art in literature, pictures, or anything else. There is a mental Bolshevism all about us at home. There is a clearly defined hostility against mental accomplishments, expressed in many newspaper cartoons, in fiction, and in the utterances of demagogues. Our small-town hoodlum who resents the well-dressed stranger as a “dude,” and despises good grammar and evidences of an education, is at heart a Bolshevist—he is hostile to the “upper class” just as is the Siberian peasant. The man in the motor car, who has no consideration for the pedestrian, is at heart a Cossack. Both classes are in a dangerous frame of mind.

Here at home we urge our young folks to get educations. Then we joke about the college professors who get less in wages than laborers. We all like to see labor well-paid, but while teachers get starvation wages, we cannot consistently argue the value of education. The college professor may say he gets more out of life than the laborer—what the laborer says to his children is the thing we must consider. We must be careful that we do not build up a class-war based on an ignorance which has no ideas of relative values, which is the trouble in Siberia. The Bolshevists turned the janitor of a college into president of the college, and made the president do duty as janitor. Without hatred for education, the Siberians could not do such a thing.

When I assert that the salvation of Russia lies in the hands of the peasant class, I mean the peasant who has brains and wants to develop them, not the peasant who wants to kill everybody wearing a white collar. I do not mean that Russia should be led by the professional agitator or the demagogue, or the silk-stockinged revolutionist, but men who spring from the people and have the balance of sanity.

Russia will develop its own Lincoln; but before that time, I believe it will have a national Napoleon. The latter will do it a service by first coördinating and stabilizing the national spirit, and bringing the shattered remnants of the vast land under one government. That is the only kind of ruler the people will understand and obey now. If they had to-day an ideal president directing the country under an ideal form of government, he would probably be sacrificed by the warring factions before he could get his program of regeneration under way.

We must bear in mind the fact that the mass of the Russian people got their official freedom in the days of our Civil War, and their actual freedom as recently as when the Czar’s government was overthrown. They do not know what to do with it yet. They are literal minded, and when we speak to them of equality in rights and of opportunity, they interpret it to mean equality in all things—one man as good as another, one man as wise as another, one man as rich as another. They do not understand political equality. To disagree with them is fatal if they have the power to kill.

We have people at home, who have lived for years under our form of government, who do not yet grasp our meaning of liberty and freedom. We cannot expect the Siberians to grasp the principles of republican government over night. They have had no demonstration of our system of government, and they find some of their own people who have experienced our system of government, going back to Siberia to slander us. They go back with the cry that they were exploited here, in our mills and packing-houses. Their ignorance was exploited, and our government is blamed. They assert that their ability was exploited. They do not realize that in confessing that they were exploited, they are admitting ignorance. That may not excuse their exploitation, but it accounts for it.

One of my Russian orderlies, who had been in this country some ten years, first as a steel worker in Pittsburgh, and then as a barber, told me how he had finally induced his brother to come to America and work. So he sent his brother passage-money. The brother got aboard a ship for America—and found himself practically sold into slavery in the Argentine, where he worked more than a year for miserable food and quarters. By that time he had been located by his brother of Pittsburgh, who sent passage-money to come to New York and fare to Pittsburgh. But he got aboard a ship for Russia, having had enough of “America.” He was killed as a Russian soldier in the war against Germany. He told everybody in his home town what a terrible place America was. The United States was blamed because he could not get here when his ticket was purchased for him—so far as he was concerned, life as a peon in a turpentine camp in the Argentine represented labor conditions in the United States. He never could be made to understand that Argentina was not the United States. It was all “America.”

In the same way, immigrants from Russia have been lured to Russian boarding houses in this country, stripped of their little cash and few belongings, and turned adrift. They blame the United States, when it was their own countrymen who robbed them. Their ignorance was being exploited.

We at home hear that the Trans-Siberian Railroad is running. So are our transcontinental lines. A railroad is a railroad, to us. In Siberia, however, it took me ten days to go by rail a distance that would take ten hours at home. There I traveled in what we would consider a fairly good cattle-car; here I moved in a palace on wheels. There, I was glad to pay a dollar for a bowl of greasy cabbage soup; here, I got a complete meal served in luxurious surroundings, for a dollar.

These are some of the reasons why we require a mental readjustment when we think of Siberia. It is impossible to use the same terms and convey the same idea. And these differences in usual things and usual terms, explain the difficulty we have had in visualizing and understanding Bolshevism. We think of a theory at home; in Siberia we see the result of the theory.

Returning home I heard a man in the Twentieth Century Limited explaining some of the virtues of Bolshevism. He had never been in Siberia. Our train was moving nearly sixty miles an hour, and we were clean and comfortable, plenty of food at hand. As this man talked, I smiled in remembrance of an engineer in Siberia who had demanded a bottle of vodka before he would haul our train any farther—and when he got it, proceeded to get drunk and let his train almost run away during the night as it descended a steep grade in the Khingan Mountain range.

I wondered if the passenger in the Twentieth Century, who extolled the virtues of Bolshevism, would have been willing to ride in the Twentieth Century any longer if our engineer had suddenly stopped and demanded a bottle of whiskey before he proceeded. That would have been Bolshevism in fact. It was easy to theorize in safety with a sober engineer at the throttle. A Bolshevist at the throttle of government may make a good engineer, to hear our boudoir Bolshevists talk. I observe a strange reluctance on their part to go to Russia where Bolshevism is running things.

To me, the horror of the peasant in Siberia, was the realization that his children and grandchildren had little hope to be better off. I do not mean that the old régime will come back with all its terrors; but no matter what form of government may flourish in Petrograd, it will be many years before the leaven of the most enlightened rule can penetrate the minds of these people and bring to the surface such good qualities as are deeply imbedded in their brains, sealed up under layers of ignorance, superstition, and submission.

They believe we are not there to help them, but to protect our own investments. We are losing their confidence every day that we remain in Siberia without doing something constructive, in which they have understanding. If we want to do welfare work, do it, but without an expedition on the ground; if we want to use our troops in cleaning up the Bolshevists, get into action. They will understand either activity by itself but they cannot understand military occupation without action, and they cannot understand relief work carried on under inactive bayonets. We have talked too much about our friendship for Russia, and done little or nothing to aid the country in reëstablishing itself with a government.

Whatever assurance we may give Kolchak, or other leaders, that we will back them up, we will gain little unless our actions win the confidence of the peasant masses, and the so-called “workers.” I group them together.

The mass of the people of Siberia lean more toward Bolshevism than they do toward us. Not that they are actively Bolshevist, but they have in the backs of their heads a secret love for the theory, for it promises them a chance to get rich quick. All ignorant people have a strong tendency to greed—they want to take from those who have. That is all Bolshevism is, and that is why I maintain that the masses are largely Bolshevist in their sympathies.

The longer we hesitate, the longer we take to reach a decision, the more these masses are slipping away from us. The crisis will come in the winter of 1920, because the people were Bolshevist in their tendencies with fairly good food supplies. They will turn to Bolshevism wholly, in order to force us into feeding them, if crops have been scanty and the food reserve has been consumed. They do not appear to be yet ready to settle down to steady and regular work, because they have not been assured that their earnings or accumulations will be protected for them by a decent government.

We have failed to do much in nearly a year of occupation, and they have done less because they were waiting for our lead. They had no real grievance when they objected to our presence in the country last winter. They will have a grievance if things do not suit them next winter, for they will say: “You told us you were going to help. We waited for you to help, and now we are in misery. It is your fault.”

We must remember that we are dealing with a people who not only may become Bolshevists, but a people who have been Bolshevists, and rather liked it. They will get at it again if we do not watch out. So far, we have done little or nothing to gain either their friendship, or their wholesome respect for our military powers. And they are being whispered to all the time by influences which know how to make them react to certain ideas.

What have the Allies done in Siberia, except to control the Trans-Siberian Railroad? Our relief work was discredited by the peasants on the plea that we were giving them things in order to get them off their guard, induce them to be good, and grab their railroad. They asserted that we were trying to bribe the Bolshevists into being good, and that the Bolshevists would as soon get property from the capitalists by having it given to them as by taking it. We cannot expect to subsidize Bolshevism by those methods, for the more we give, the more they will demand. It is the old game of paying tribute to bandits so they will not rob your caravans—a scheme as old to Asia as the Arabian Nights tales.

If we are going to remain in Siberia, we must back some horse. We must either go against the peasants and compel them to behave, or we must go in with them on some basis they will understand. We have been dealing with big fellows, believing that the “leaders” knew what to do, yet we have not supported any of the “leaders.” Throw in with Kolchak and back him up, regardless of monarchist intrigues, and then if he attempts to betray us and Russia, denounce him, and back such leader as is willing to carry out what we suppose to be the wishes of the people.

But if we think that we can follow the wishes of the people, we will make a mistake. That is the mistake we have made already. We have been waiting for Russian “public opinion” to coagulate. It cannot be done. There are a thousand Russian “public opinions.”

We have got to follow our own public opinion as to what should be done, with consistency to our ideals of government, and then go ahead. There will be factions in Siberia and Russia who will object, because the people do not know what they want. They believe they are free, and that freedom means doing as they please. As a matter of fact, they abhor any government which attempts to control them. It has taken us twenty years in the Philippines to prove to the Filipinos, a people composed of various tribes, that we are working for their good. Some of the “leaders” want a freer hand in leading than they get. I doubt if we want to take on the same problem in Russia, I doubt if it is necessary. But we have not told any Russians at present writing what we intend to do for them, if anything.

The peasants cannot read their daily newspapers in order to form opinions. They can only believe what they are told, so what they believe depends upon who does the telling. And in Siberia one will believe anything. I myself, after three weeks without news, gave credence to absurd rumors.

Actions speak louder than words with the peasants of Siberia. We have been long on promises and short on deeds—at least deeds which the peasants can understand. We declined to act with the Japanese against “agitating peasants.” Neither the Japanese nor the Siberians could understand what we were driving at. Both understood our troops to represent force to be used against disorder. We maintained that our force was not to interfere with anything the Siberians wished to do with their own country. So the “agitating peasants” began to interfere with us, and we have killed and wounded in our casualty lists from Siberia. We wished to avoid killing any Siberians. They reasoned that we must be in the wrong by being there at all, and killed Americans. This indicates that we have not made the proper impression on the peasants. The problem of Siberia is the peasant, and we ignore him—at least we do not consider how he will react to what we do. He fears that we will betray him. It is much more likely that, as we are conducting ourselves in Siberia, he will betray us.