Chapter XXVIII: The United States in Asia 316 (8)

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.

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?

XXVI

LEAVES FROM MY NOTE BOOK

Siberia is one of the richest lands in the world in undeveloped resources. The wealth in its plains and hills, its rivers and forests, is beyond computation. Our wheat fields of the northwest in comparison to the wheat plains of Siberia are but backyard gardens.

Thousands of square miles in Siberia are literally underlaid with precious metals, its great forests are filled with fur-bearing animals, its rivers teem with great fish, its bird-life offers unlimited food possibilities.

Siberian butter in normal times is shipped to Europe by train-loads and much of it sold through Denmark as Danish butter. Siberian honey is famous for its flavor. Fur and hair, hides and meat, vegetables and forage--Siberia could feed the world if its agricultural industries were operated under modern methods.

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We think of Siberia as a land buried in snow most of the year. There is snow in the foothills of the Urals and beyond, and far to the north, but early in February, traveling from Chita to Vladivostok, a distance of some two thousand miles, I saw brown plains from horizon to horizon day after day without a patch of snow the size of my hand. There is very cold weather, it is true, but with proper clothing, homes properly heated, trains and shops properly equipped for keeping out the cold, the low temperatures do not cause much discomfort. However, it is not comfortable to remain out of doors very long during the bitter cold. The seventy-two-below weather registered in Chita, and mentioned elsewhere in this book was not so terrible as it sounds, when there was absence of wind. The air in Chita was very rare, as that city has an elevation of nearly five thousand feet above sea level, and is just below the High Plain of Vitim. The climate is invigorating.

* * * * *

Transportation is the great problem of Siberia. I have heard it said by Colonel Emerson, general manager of the Great Northern Railway, that the Trans-Siberian Railway loses money on freight charges of five cents per ton mile. Our American railways operated before the war at good profits with freight charges computed in mills per ton mile.