Chapter III: Part 3

Again I do not know how much our participation in this affair has vitiated the faith of small nations in our disinterested friendship for the weak. We may hope that the nations of South America have not taken the Russian campaign to heart as seriously as have the small nations of Europe. Whatever result our military intervention in Russia has had upon this faith, however, those of us who have been in Russia know that it has had a profound effect upon the Russian people. We have not destroyed their faith in us. One mistake could not do that. But we have disillusioned many of them concerning the soundness of our judgment if not the purity of our motives, and they will hereafter, I think, look carefully into our alliances before trusting themselves utterly to our guidance.

Having got into a bad job the governments found it expedient to suppress news, to manipulate news, and even to manufacture a little.

Whether we have actually prolonged Lenin's tenure of office and Trotsky's reign in power we cannot of course know. But this is quite conceivable, and they are still in office and in power two years after the November revolution. We know that the armed barrier that we have built around them and forced them to build in front of us has prevented us from reaching them with any of the more convincing proofs of our "friendly purpose" than the shrapnel and h.e. we have managed to get over into their lines. The business men and educators and engineers and uplifters that we were going to send have had to wait while we undertook to settle Russian turmoil by making more turmoil.

We organized civil war in Russia. The Russians were not fighting the Bolsheviki--not our way. They did not want to fight them--in our way. We made them. We conscripted them to fight for their own freedom. It was difficult, but we had our army there and the army made the peasant patriotic--our way.

The Russian hates conscription; but what were we to do? If he wouldn't fight voluntarily he was a damned Bolshevik and must be made to. And so, as ever, one thing leads to another--especially when we are not quite clear that the one thing is a right thing. The conscripted Russians who rebelled against us and went over to the Bolsheviki were of course a small proportion of the whole. All sorts of mixed motives and confused judgments and conflicting loyalties entered into the situation, but one thing clearly emerged. This was civil war. Every man's hand is set against his neighbor. And now as we confess the futility of our intervention and evacuate, the evil harvest is to be reaped. No peasant can escape it. No woman or child can escape it. Suspicion, recrimination, tale-bearing, jealousy, hatred of Russian for Russian is the harvest our intervention has left behind it.

*XX*

*CONCERNING RUSSIAN PEASANTS*

The peasants of North Russia are generally supposed to be the poorest and least progressive class of Russians, living in the poorest and least desirable part of the country. I think that if this is true the interest which all Russia holds for Americans can hardly be exaggerated.

The people of North Russia are peasants. The professional and trading classes are negligible--perhaps smaller than anywhere else in the white world. The towns are small and few and even the towns are peopled largely by peasants.

North Russia, humanly speaking, consists of long tortuous arteries of life called rivers. The banks of these rivers are thickly, almost densely, populated. Villages of from twenty to a hundred houses are strung along so continuously and here and there clustered about a great church so thickly that you wonder where there is land for all these people to cultivate. Never, however, do you find an isolated settler. If it is a forest nobody lives there. You find a village or nobody.

There can be no more hospitable people anywhere in the world than these Russian people are. Their doors are never closed against strangers, and with unfailing courtesy they offer the best they have. I have traveled nearly a thousand versts by sled over this northern country and stopped every six hours at a private house for a samovar and perhaps a bed. To have the best the house afforded given me once or twice and pay refused would not have impressed me so much, but to have uniform hospitality extended me as though it were my right and to have this done without consciousness of virtue made me feel that the world's championship in hospitality abides with the people of this bleak and inhospitable country.

They get their living from the soil in a very short season, and this is possible only because the summer day is twenty-four hours long. This means that in the short growing season the crops grow very rapidly, and it also means that all the work has to be done in that limited time. If the crops grow twenty-four or twenty-two or twenty hours, then the peasant must work the harder. The wife and mother and children must also work. Most of the farm work is done by each family for itself, but some of it is done by the whole village co-operatively. I spent a half-day working in a hayfield with peasants from Konetsgory who were eight versts from home. There were seventy-five of them, men, women, and children, and they stayed in that field five days and nights until the great stacks were finished. The hay was community property to which each family had a right in proportion to the number in the family. I noticed that they ate by families while at this work, the food being strictly private property. And I saw Mrs. "Smith" give Mrs. "Jones" some of her fresh cake, and other little private property courtesies. I asked if the families at Konetsgory not represented by workers in the field would have a right to any of the hay. Of course they would, because they were doing other work as directed by the staroster.

The staroster is a public official chosen by a meeting of the peasants whose duty it is to assess labor for any public or co-operative purpose. His assessments are compulsory upon men, women, children, and horses. With most of the men in the army, as is now and has been the case for so long, his chief labor resource of course is women. When there are exceptions to his authority such as doctors and school teachers, these persons do not count in the distributions of the co-operative products.

In all distributions of land and products now women are counted. This is a result of the revolution and has been brought about not because it was legislated but as a spontaneous product of the common sense of right. When Russia does have an election, as we must hope some day she will, these peasant people all assume as a matter of course that women will vote.

Americans do not need to be told how backward Russia is in the matter of machinery and especially agricultural machinery. But I gave myself a surprise one day by going to every house in a small village and finding in every house but one a one-horse cast-steel modern plow. I found also some very good harrows and a few hand-wheel sewing machines, but practically nothing else that could be called modern. I have since seen two mowing machines and one hay-rake. The absence of machinery here is practically as universal as it has been represented. There is no prejudice against it and the people are not ignorant of it. They want it, and they have plenty of money to buy it with, but it is not here to buy, and the money has uncertain value.

There is so much printed matter in America proving eighty-five per cent illiteracy among the Russian people that I approach this subject timidly. I cannot find the eighty-five per cent. I have yet to find one child ten years of age who cannot read and write, and the subject is of such interest to me that I always inquired about it. I found some old peasants who could not and some who could but sensitively would not write their names for me. I had Russian soldiers line up by hundreds to sign their names in a register and not a man would fail to write his own. I had peasants tell me that they knew how to read and write when they were children but had forgotten it since. I have no statistics on the subject, but it would be interesting to have the statisticians go up the Dvina River looking for the eighty-five per cent. In almost every village the best house is the schoolhouse. When it is not the best it is still a very good house. Among hundreds of villages there is not one of twenty houses or more that does not maintain a school eight months of the year.

Russia has but one church. I met a few dissentients--evangelicals and atheists--but the dissent is not organized and there is very little propaganda of reform. The Bolsheviki at first prohibited the church as an evil thing. Many of the un-Bolshevik Russians have dropped the church as a useless thing. But nobody seems to have undertaken to reform the church. And yet one of the greatest reforms in ecclesiastical history is taking place. In a moment and without warning the physical and militant props dropped out from under this institution and it had to stand alone or sink. Some of it did sink. Some of it was scuttled by the Bolsheviki. Then came the aftermath--the afterthought of the people. They missed something. They had not entirely outgrown the church. They had hated its arrogance and exactions, but they still believed what it had taught them and felt its spell. Now that they were free from it they voluntarily returned to it. But it is with a new attitude. These Russians go to church now looking for something that they hardly find. And the priest's only resources now are spiritual--superstition, art, inspiration, service, truth--perhaps he will make use of all in the struggle for existence.

I was interested in the attitude of the peasants toward their priest in a large village that we were about to evacuate. The Bolsheviki would be there shortly after we should leave, and as they were reputed frequently to shoot priests the military had arranged to take him with us. He had received for his worldly needs a house to live in, the use of some land which he and his wife had cultivated as peasants do, a certain amount of money, and certain ecclesiastical emoluments. When the committee of peasants came to settle with him they said: "You are favored above the rest of us. You are taken to a place of safety while we are left to the cruelty of the Bolsheviki. The first thing they will do will be to demand much food from us. After that they may kill us. So you must help with the food. You may take with you only eight bags of flour. You may not sell your hay. You may sell your cow, but not the yearling." There was no appeal, as this had all been decided upon by vote, in a meeting. They took no money from him, nor gold, as they are told the Bolsheviki do not consider gold has any particular value. They were careful to see that he left everything pertaining to the church.

Talking with the priest afterward, having helped him build a fence around "his" haystack, I asked him what he should do in the future. He said he supposed he would be assigned to another church, but he wished he could get a permanent job with the Y.M.C.A.

The sense of private property is very strong among these people. They are jealous of what they own, and normally acquisitive. These easy expropriations and confiscations arise not from an absence of interest in private property but from the presence of a strong sense of common right and communal responsibility. Private property is not so "sacred" as with us but the acknowledgment of common responsibility is more general.

I had occasion at one time to sell quickly about three hundred thousand roubles' worth of supplies. I took a hurried trip through a string of villages sending messengers to others, calling upon the president of the co-operative society in each, and within a week I had sold out to the co-operatives of twenty-two villages. My chief concern had been that these goods should reach the peasants at cost, and they did. Each co-operative gave me a statement showing the number of houses and of people in the village, and showed me a statement giving the amount of money that had been collected from each family as purchasing capital. The staples, such as flour, sugar, and soap, were mostly distributed among the houses within twenty-four hours. Every family was given the privilege of buying its quota whether it had put up any purchasing capital or not. These were their regular practices.

The meeting of all the peasants by vote determines many matters of minor as well as major importance. The president of the co-operative at Shamova told me that he had asked the meeting to permit him to buy sardines, but they had voted against it. He wanted some sardines for himself, but could not buy them in the name of the co-operative. Would I sell them to him individually if he would sign a bond not to sell any at a profit? One committee had come under instructions to buy only flour and sugar, and as I had to ration these out with other goods in order to dispose of my cargo quickly they had to row their great carbosse back in the wind and rain twenty versts and call a meeting of the peasants for revised instructions. Married women and widows vote in these peasant meetings. One committee came with fifty thousand roubles in its bundle, but with instructions not to spend more than half of it unless they could buy cloth.

It seems to me almost unnecessary to say that I have found the Russian people and the Russian soldiers scrupulously honest in all my dealings with them.

The difference between their standards of morality and ours has been often dwelt upon by our writers. This difference as I found it consisted in the fact that they talk about sex more easily than we do and think about it less vulgarly. I believe the peasant woman is as virtuous as the average woman anywhere. And an intimate acquaintance with thousands of soldiers throughout the winter has given me this belief. Attractive women are not so rare as to fully explain the unusually excellent medical reports of the N.R.E.F. And nowhere in the West has the family tie been stronger nor the family organization so rigidly maintained.

The war-weariness of these Russian people is beyond words to describe. They are not in any sense militant in spirit. They do not believe in war. Passive resistance they will resort to in a thousand ways and with rare cunning and courageous persistence, but organized warfare is not to their taste. Who rules Russia against her will or ideals from now on will have a rocky road to travel, and who looks to her for militant alliance is doomed to certain disappointment. I have had a Russian officers' club in charge for two months and can say from personal knowledge of these men that from colonels down they are utterly sick of war and distrustful of its consequences. Before I went to Russia I felt that Tolstoy had perhaps weakened the Russian spirit with his doctrine of non-resistance. Now I think he only gave expression to what is most common in the ideals of the Russian mind.

In politics the Russian people are amateurs. They do not know the game. Not our game. They do not understand the compromises that are essential to the democratic state. They cannot agree to disagree in amity. They are inclined to be dogmatic. Like our own youth they are in search of the absolute in truth and righteousness and frequently think they have found it. But no higher ideals are to be found in any people than the political ideals of these Russians, and their interest in politics is a keen and vital one. I have attempted a number of speeches on political subjects to Russian soldiers by the aid of an interpreter and have been gratified both because I was understood and because I was asked questions that indicated real intelligence in political matters.

I have witnessed a few peasants' meetings. At one the ownership of a horse was hotly contested. A woman found the horse astray in the woods. A boy claimed it, but it appeared that he had found it also only a few days before. It probably had been owned in one of the villages that had been burned in the fighting. The debate was loud and warm. The peasants ranged themselves on the two sides and under the force of argument some of them changed their opinion and so changed sides, arguing with each other. Everybody argued. There was never an equal division. But the Russian does not like majority votes. He insists on unanimity. There came a calm, and an old peasant stood aside and said that neither claimant had a good title to the horse, as its real owner might appear and claim it, but suggested that if the boy would pay the woman ten roubles for finding the horse he should hold it for six months and if by that time no owner should appear the horse should be given to the staroster as the property of the village. Everybody slowly went over to the old peasant and the question was settled. The boy refused to pay the ten roubles, so the woman paid ten roubles to him and took the horse.

I do not know that they always do justice in the management of their local affairs, but I am sure that if injustice is done everybody is clearly responsible for it, for everybody seems to take a hand in everything.

An American "Y" man said to me once that he thought the reason the Russians were so ostensibly fond of Americans was because they are so much like us. Perhaps there is some truth behind his remark, but in many ways they are decidedly unlike us, and not all these divergencies are by any means to their disadvantage.

I do not anticipate that their political development will parallel that of America. I do not see why it should, nor do I see how it can. Their national ideals cannot take form in the molds cast by Jefferson and Hamilton. And in their struggle for freedom and righteousness it is quite conceivable that they will evolve political forms and practices adapted to the modern days and conditions.

Military men who characterize the Russian peasant as lazy, indolent, and indifferent do not know what they are talking about. They do not see through the peasant's whiskers. They resent too strongly the peasant's aversion to the military profession. The peasant is no mollusc as they learn who have to do with him long. He will fight a long fight for his freedom, and fight it in his own way. And he will win it, may I predict, and win it so gloriously that light will shine once more again from the East even into the West.

Standing on the key at Archangel and waving farewells to the American soldiers who filled the decks and rigging of a transport slowly moving off with the current, an educated Russian friend said to me: "They are good boys, I am glad they came and glad they are going away. But now as never before Russia knows that she cannot be a second America. Now we do not want to be a second America. Russia must find her own way, for herself." He had to wipe tears from his face as he turned for a moment from the ship to say, "And you will go soon too?"

"Yes."

"But I shall stay here, and die fighting for Russia--fighting men who love Russia perhaps as much as I do."

THE END