XXV FRENZIED FINANCE

Siberia is the land of Aladdins—Aladdins who can laugh at lamps so long as they possess money-printing machines. The German General Staff was the Magician who craftily suggested the use of the machines. And those first sponsors of Bolshevism, who were the creatures of the Magician, were the terrible jinns who gave their services to the financial wrecking of Great Russia, including Siberia. Said the Magician, “What you Russians want is land and money. There lies the land. Take it! As for money, print it!” So the Aladdins, instead of rubbing lamps, oiled up the printing-presses. And, presto—millions of rubles!

Such a suggestion would have passed as a species of light humor in any other country. Certainly it would not have been acted upon. But the Magician knew the child-like psychology of his Aladdins, for to their simple minds, a ruble is any piece of paper upon which the words “One Ruble” have been printed. And such paper is made more attractive than any genuine ruble if upon it is also engraved some crude picture, preferably that of a working man resting from his labors and surveying rich fields and bust factory chimneys.

First of all, the German Magician induced his jinns to steal from the Russian Treasury the gold which was behind the Imperial paper rubles—thus depreciating the value of those rubles (but only to those few who knew that the gold had gone to Germany). Next, and with characteristic inconsistency, the Bolshevists, while preaching a crusade against money,—in other words, capitalism—proceeded to print bales of money behind which they put no gold. Then they used money as their chief weapon to fight money!

From the standpoint of imagination, the whole scheme put to shame the wildest, most gigantic get-rich-quick dream ever born in the brain of a mortal. Those bales of stage money dramatized the cash wealth of the Bolshevists—actually visualized to every peasant and worker the tangible success of Bolshevism. Further, the Bolshevists, through their keen methods of distributing this wealth, were able to convince a poverty-stricken people that Bolshevism stood for everything that was generous and good. Already the Bolshevists had taken over the government. With pockets stuffed full of stage money, the people massed themselves in the defense of that new government.

If you have been desperately poor all your life, and a man thrusts hundreds of dollars into your hands to prove that he is your friend, you believe him. If he says he stands for the government which is behind those dollars, are you not likely to range yourself on the side of that government? And should a stranger from the other end of the world happen along and tell you that the fellow who had made you wealthy is a crazy man, will that stranger not need a pretty strong argument to win you away from him who made you rich without labor?

This is precisely how the scheme was worked in Siberia.

The Bolshevists carried out their program of winning over the people with great subtlety—a subtlety which suggests that the Magician was inspired of the Devil. The method of procedure was as follows: As the Bolshevist propagandists traveled by trains eastward from Vladivostok, and westward from Petrograd, they took with them chests and sacks of purposely rumpled, soiled and worn currency. Whenever they rolled into a station, they would call, say, upon a moujik for some trifling service—perhaps the filling of a tea-kettle with hot water; and when the moujik returned with the kettle, a Bolshevist would hand him five hundred one-ruble bills!

To a moujik, five hundred rubles represents years of hard work—it is a fortune. He stands and stares at his fistful of money. “This poor traveler is surely mad,” he concludes; “or he has made a terrible mistake.”

But neither of these is the truth. It is astounding enough—yet for the moujik not difficult to believe. For like all his fellows, this peasant has lived his whole life in the expectation that some such wonderful thing would happen when the Czar was pulled from his throne. And now the passenger tells the moujik that the money is all his. The miracle has come to pass!

“I am a Bolshevist,” says the traveler. “Therefore I am your friend. If a capitalist asks you to fill his tea-kettle, what would he give you? Five kopecks. I give you five hundred rubles. Comrade, your country is behind this money. Look! There are the fields and factories on the notes. The capitalists have worked you hard and given you little: I work you little and give you much. That is because I am a Bolshevist. If you will be a Bolshevist you will never want again. My brother, freedom has come to Russia! Uphold the revolution!”

The secret of the success of this plan lay in the fact that the miraculous conferring of wealth was general. The waiters in the station restaurant received a thousand rubles each for a bowl of cabbage soup. Clerks in nearby shops were paid exorbitant sums for various trifles. Drosky-drivers had their belts filled with money. Bath-attendants packed their tips away wrapped up in towels. In fact the whole population of the town, even the beggars on the street-corners, found that their pockets were bulging when that train pulled out. And since practically every one had the currency, there was no one to say it was bad. Therefore, it was considered good—unanimously.

Just as simple as that! They hated capital, yet were glad to have it! Having it, they were Bolshevists.

You of the United States may laugh at all this. But you must consider two things: First, the abysmal ignorance of the Siberian peasantry; and, second, that from the days of Aladdin, Asia has reeked with legends of magic wealth. So you have a whole people who, like that first moujik, are ready to credit any story—especially a story backed by real money. And the American, or other foreigner, who comes along and says that that money is worthless, and dares to laugh at it, may find himself facing a firing-squad.

When the Allies began to arrive in Siberia, and the Bolshevist leaders found it convenient not to remain, they naturally took their money-machines with them. But this worked the new régime no noticeable hardship. For the larger business concerns, realizing the beauty of a plan which permitted each firm to establish its own Treasury, began to print their own currency. And there was a mad riot of money manufacturing.

It was most profitable for the business houses—it had its shortcomings for the public. For instance: You drop in at the balconied “Zolotoi Roq” (this restaurant has been dubbed the “Solitary Dog” by the doughboy), and order your five o’clock stakahn chai. The tea is served in a glass. Your cake is about the size of a political campaign button. The bill is four rubles. Being a newcomer to Vladivostok, you hand out, unwisely, an Imperial twenty-ruble note. The waiter brings back sixteen rubles in change. You count it, give him one, and fold the other fifteen away—carefully.

Farther down the Svetlanskaya, which is the Broadway of Vladivostok, you drop into a shop for a new shaving-stick and a picture-postcard. “Four rubles, pshaltza.” You fish out that fifteen rubles from the “Zolotoi Roq” and offer four of them. The clerk looks at the money, then lifts shoulders and eyebrows. What is the matter? The rubles are good only at the “Zolotoi Roq.” You demur. But for you an argument in Russian is a fearsome thing. “Oh, well, nitchyvo.” (You are acquiring already the native frame of mind!) But as you have no other small change,—you will grow wiser later!—out comes another precious twenty-ruble Imperial.

And what do you get this time? Imperial roubles, good elsewhere in town? Niet! You receive sixteen exquisite new rubles which have just come off the presses of that particular shop, and—they are good only at that shop!

Being an officer, you are blessed with many pockets. So now you plot out, as it were, your khaki façade. The upstairs right hand, as Barrie would say, becomes the Imperial pocket; the upstairs left, is sacred to your American money; while the downstairs, right and left, is given over respectively to the “Zolotoi Roq” and the shaving-stick store. In other words, you are a walking bank for at least two establishments in that town. You are virtually holding some of their money in escrow. You may have it, but eventually it will belong to them. And it will be your fate to wear out your field boots carrying that money back to the place of its redemption. Yes, the light has dawned upon you—your lower pockets are mortgaged!

It is probably at this point in your Siberian monetary education that you wish on your soul that you had brought along your own little printing-press! (And you feel sure that you could have produced better looking rubles than even General Horvat’s American-made ones—with their pictures of a lightning express.) But lacking the press, a supply of cigar-store certificates from home would come in handy. For you learn that the doughboys have already successfully put into circulation the pink coupons of a certain popular cigarette.

But the monetary problem in Vladivostok is comparatively simple. This is borne in upon you when you leave the city for the interior. (If you leave on one of the innumerable Russian holidays, and all the shops are shut up, you must overeat at the “Zolotoi Roq” to get rid of that currency, but you must carry with you the paper belonging to the closed shops.) For once en route, you begin to acquire various kinds of Bolshevist money. And some of this money is good only in its particular zone. If you pass out of that zone without knowing it, you find that money worthless.

So travel through any single province is as complicated, from the standpoint of money, as if you had been passing through several different countries. Suppose the same conditions obtained in the United States. In going from New York to Philadelphia, you would have to get rid of your New York money in exchange for Philadelphia money—if you could. (Less discount for exchange.) When you reach Trenton, you wish to buy a sandwich. But the vendor will not take your Philadelphia money. So you offer a coupon off a Liberty bond—value five dollars—and receive in exchange some Trenton money, good only in Trenton. It is either that or go without the sandwich! If you travel as far as New Orleans, you have eleven kinds of money, no one kind of which has any value to you.

Returning from the Trans-Baikal, I saw a sick man attempt to purchase a bottle of milk from farm women who had set up a little market near the Androvka station. The women were peasants. Their heads were wrapped in old shawls. In the sixty-degrees-below-zero temperature, their breath came like plumes of white smoke from their nostrils. They looked at the sick man’s money and folded their arms, refusing to take it. “But it is good in Nikolsk,” he pleaded. “Then go to Nikolsk and spend it,” they returned. Shivering and hungry, the sick man climbed back into the coupé of his car. His pockets were full and his stomach was empty! He was as helpless as old King Midas.

In Siberia, a country fairly underlaid with precious metals—gold, silver, platinum and copper—there is no metal money to be seen. In fact coins are a curiosity, and even the beggar’s metal kopeck has disappeared. Where is this money? Hidden in the niches between the logs of huts, buried under frozen cabbages, sewed into ragged clothes. And anything takes its place. In Chita, in the sobrania, or city club, playing cards passed as currency—on them their denomination marked by a rubber stamp. (And now you find yourself longing for a rubber stamp!)

At one shop, I offered coupons cut from Imperial bonds. Such coupons being good everywhere, I had faith in them. But, alas, mine were declined. What did a close reading of the small Russian type reveal? The canny bond-holder had clipped his coupons and put them into circulation a little prematurely. And if I wanted to spend them, I had only to wait a small matter of six Siberian winters. The coupons were not due for payment till 1925! (If a Czar ever comes back to the throne of Russia, he is that many coupons ahead!)

The postage-stamp money is the greatest nuisance of all. It is ungummed, and may be termed cubist cash, for it is wrapped into cubes bound round by a paper band. These cubes are popularly supposed to contain two rubles’ worth of ten-kopeck stamps, and “2R” is written on each band. The trusting stranger does not question the value of the packets. Few people ever remove the bands to verify. This is left to the tireless and over-suspicious Chinese. And it is invariably your bland-faced laundryman who shows you that your packets are short. From another aspect, the broken cubes have their drawback. They are little and elusive, these stamps. Your cold fingers are all thumbs. So it is fatal to attempt to do business with stamps in a brisk wind.

The unlimited variation in money complicates every petty detail of life in Siberia. Because each purchase resolves itself into an argument over the merit of the paper you offer—or take. And I found it less wearing to wash my own handkerchiefs than to engage in a wordy battle with a Russian-speaking Chino. The illogical variation in the sizes of paper money presents complications within complications. For size, in the case of Imperials, has nothing to do with value. A thousand-ruble note is as ample as your commission from the President. Which leads you into the assumption that a small note is of small value. Not so. In this land of topsy-turvy, a twenty-or forty-ruble note is one-sixth the size of a five-ruble note. (And by virtue of somebody’s whim, a ten-ruble note is only slightly smaller than a five!) And if an Allied officer gets thoroughly acquainted with a five-ruble note, can you blame him if he tips his drosky-driver with a tiny twenty-ruble note which he mistakes for twenty kopecks?

Even in a land where unbacked money is good, there is actually some money that is bad! Siberia is papered with Imperial counterfeits. This increases the strain on the newcomer. One must become an expert in identifying money, or go broke. Some notes are good if there is a dot in one corner of the engraved border: if the dot is missing, so is the value. The counterfeit Imperial twenty-ruble notes have the zero standing straight up: the genuine have the zero a little askew—the counterfeiter having improved on the Imperial engraving!

You soon learn all sorts of devices by which you return to circulation your bad money. You contrive to pay off drosky-drivers hastily, and in dark streets. For the first time in your life you delight in tipping the hat-bandits at the doors of restaurants. By the time these rascals have discovered your iniquity, you have disappeared into the frozen night. Gamblers palm off their faulty currency in the excitement of the game, there being no time to submit the pot to cross examination. But beware, oh stranger, the too-obliging person who would turn your American money into rubles!

In addition to counterfeiting, there is another worry. The banks of some inland cities devised a method of depreciating vast quantities of Bolshevist money not held by themselves. In this way: They stamped their own; and generously offered to stamp, before a certain date, any currency that was submitted to them for marking. But the date set followed close upon the announcement, which excluded from the benefits of the plan, all persons who did not learn of the offer and so failed to have their money stamped on time. The banks, since they refused to recognize unstamped notes, now had—by this system of crossing their fingers—the bulk of the “good” money!

The poorest kinds of money are continually forced to the surface. The better kinds—Imperials and Kerenskys—emerge reluctantly. At Chita, my hotel charged exorbitant rates, based on Bolshevist scrip. I had only Imperials. A Cossack officer who was a friend had only Bolshevist notes. So when I paid my weekly bill, I swapped my Imperials with the Cossack—and paid the greedy proprietor in the poorer paper.

With money good to-day and not so good to-morrow, or vice versa, what a field for speculation presents itself! And fortunes are being made on the rise and fall of Imperials. With rubles ten for a dollar in Vladivostok, and seven for a dollar in Khabarovsk (for rubles are dearer sometimes in inland cities), you have only to buy a gripful at the one place, hop a train and rake in a fortune at the other. Return and repeat. And as the rate changes from day to day, there is always a lively interest in the fluctuation. It is said that when a Russian baby is born in Vladivostok, he immediately asks the doctor, “How much are rubles to-day?”

Why should anyone wonder that Siberia is largely Bolshevist? Our Committee on Public Information tried to fight Bolshevism with movies, by word of mouth, through millions of pamphlets printed in Russian in the United States, and with a telegraphic news service. The Bolshevists handed out real cash. The people still believe that they have found Rainbow’s End. They are drugged with money—they are drunk on it!

What solidarity has a country once its financial system has gone to pot? If we want to buy Siberian raw materials, what money can we offer them? And if they buy from us—? If we recognize the Bolshevist government, shall we recognize its money? Will we take that money at face value? If not at face value then at what price?

If the Bolshevist money be declared no good, there will be another revolt. On the other hand, if those billions are redeemed, the country that redeems them will be beggared. Why? Because no one knows the amount outstanding—and who could stop those busy printing-presses?