Chapter IX: The Centrabalt Makes an Exception

Since the days of the March Revolution, women have not been permitted aboard the Russian fleet. The sailors, with the memory of Rasputin still fresh in their minds, settled this as soon as they took command.

“Women have played so much hell in politics in the past, we better not take any chances in the future,” one of them suggested.

For seven months the rule was rigidly kept. One afternoon in October, I, all unmindful of the prohibition, walked up the gang-plank of the _Polar Star_ as she lay on the gray waters of the Gulf of Finland.

Half hidden in the heavy gray autumn mist were the battleships of the Baltic Fleet, decked in their proud new names of revolution. There was the one time _Nicholas II_, now the _Tavarisch_ (Comrade). There, also, were the _Grazhdanin_ (Citizen), formerly the _Tsarevitch_; and, most important of all, the _Respublica_ (Republic). Not far away lay a wounded cruiser recently returned from battle with the Germans in their attack on the islands at the entrance to the Gulf. A British submarine, came unscathed through the fighting, rode safe and snug in the tidy little harbor.

Mr. Williams was with me that afternoon, and an English friend of the _Polar Star’s_ captain. The captain gave me a puzzled, almost frightened look as he saw me stepping aboard. The Englishman introduced us, and explained our desire to see the famous yacht.

“I’m very sorry,” the captain said politely, “but women are not allowed aboard the fleet, It is a rule of the committee.”

I must have looked my disappointment. The captain glanced sympathetically at me, then at a closed door at the end of a long passage.

“The committee is meeting in there in the Tsar’s quarter. Perhaps they will make an exception. I will ask,” he said.

If a Russian naval officer had been told, a year before, that the day would come when he would have to ask permission of the sailors to bring a guest aboard his own command, he would have sent for the ship’s doctor and ordered a padded cell prepared for his informant.

I thanked him, and he disappeared. A few minutes later he returned. The permission had been granted. He led the way into the officers’ saloon and from there to his own cabin.

All of the sacred precincts of the old days were closed to us. They were still sacred, but sacred to the new owners of the Russian navy--the delegates of the fleet, the Russian sailors.

The captain was speaking:

“They used to cover this with velvet when the Tsar was on board,” he said, with a sweep of his hand. “I’m sorry I can not show you the Tsar’s quarters. You would be interested. They have left the grand piano and some of the most valuable things in Petrograd.”

He led us to a point where we could peep curiously down a long passage, lined on either side with the cabins de luxe of the Tsarevitch, the Grand Duchess Titania, and other members of the Imperial family, to a closed door at the end.

Behind that closed door was the organization of “common” sailors ruling the Russian waters--one of the most characteristically new things in all new Russia.

While the captain turned to speak to a soldier who had come up, we held a hurried consultation, mustered our various credentials, and appealed to the ship’s officer once more to act in the capacity of go-between and ask the committee to receive us.

Again he left, and we waited anxiously for the closed door to open. A few minutes later, in the great saloon where Nicholas II once dispensed hospitality and favors, sixty Russian sailors, sitting in daily session in their regular headquarters, gallantly offered me the freedom of the Baltic Fleet.

The president arose, shook hands with us, and made a brief speech of welcome to the Americans, asking the captain to interpret it to us. Then the secretary arose, and on behalf of the committee invited us to dine at the Sailors’ Club in Helsingfors that night.

“We sent some one to telephone for our band-master who is an American,” he said. “Until he comes we will go on with the business of our meeting, if you will permit.”

The business before the Baltic Fleet concerned soldiers on the Riga front. News of the distress of the northern army had reached them, and they were collecting money and buying warm clothing to send to the men who were hungry and cold in the trenches.

With the help of the captain, we had discovered so much when the band-master arrived.

In that committee meeting were eight Mensheviki, three Anarchist communists, nine Social Revolutionists, and forty-five Bolsheviki. Those figures were the most significant I found in all of Russia. Before the Korniloff rebellion there had been only eighteen Bolsheviki in the committee, and no Anarchists. The men were chosen by the vote of the entire fleet, and they reflected the complete swing to the left that was taking place in Russia from Vladivostok to the Black Sea.

The sailors, almost to a man, believe in the principles of internationalism, in the socialization of land and the control of industry by the workers. To them the Revolution meant the ultimate realization of all these dreams. Up to the time of the Korniloff rebellion, they were inclined to adopt the Mensheviki methods and to be patient. The Korniloff affair, regarded by them as an attack on the Revolution, swept away patience and shoved them into the ranks of the extremists.

Patriotism, in the old sense, was absolutely lacking among the sailors, as it was among the workmen; but there was a more burning form of patriotism aboard the fleet in October than any inspired in the past by the thought of the Tsar or the greatness of all the Russias--patriotism for the Revolution. The sailor, partly because he is of a more adventurous and daring spirit, partly because he has more education and has drunk more deeply from the fountain of radical books, naturally took a more extreme position than the soldier. There was only fifteen per cent. illiteracy in the Russian navy, while seventy-five per cent. of the soldiers were unable to read or write.

The committee governing the fleet was composed of six sub-committees. Food for officers and men was controlled by the supply committee, which decided the menus. The sailors gave themselves tea and bread and butter at eight o’clock; soup and meat at twelve; potatoes, rice, or _kasha_ at six; and tea again at eleven. On Sundays fruit compôte was added. The officers’ fare was much more varied and more extensive.

A _komplectatsea_, or “make-up committee,” decided all problems relating to the crews. A “selection committee” studied the men to find promising material to make officers. The judiciary committee was the new disciplinarian. Disputes between officers and men were submitted to it, and when the offenses were serious civil lawyers were employed to defend the men.

Discipline in the old days was entirely in the hands of the officers, from whom there was no appeal. If an officer was naturally an amiable fellow, fortunate were the men who served under him. If his good nature was dependent upon his luck at cards, the quality of his wine, or the momentary condition of his department of the interior, the lot of the sailor might not be a happy one.

Fortunately for the sailors, the average of humanity is fairly decent, whether it be Russian or anything else, and there were men in the Russian navy who did not abuse their power. But there were enough of the other kind to stir a deep and intense bitterness in the breast of the Russian sailor, and this hatred found tragic utterance when the Revolution came.

The Englishman who was with us had been aboard one of the ships during the March Revolution.

“In the passion of the moment, they killed some of the good ones and left some of the bad ones,” he said. “Just one man was killed on our ship. He was a high-handed, hot-headed chap, and when they told him of the Revolution he scoffed at them--said there wasn’t any new régime in Petrograd, and never would be. His servant whipped out a gun. ‘We’ll show you whether there is a new régime,’ he said, and shot him.”

Many of the crews simply arrested their officers, and some asked them to sign a paper declaring they would support the Revolution. As nearly as I can learn, sixty-five men were killed on the Baltic Sea Fleet, and a hundred on the Black Sea Fleet. The first day of the Revolution, the sailors revenged themselves on the whole order of discipline, and it was hot blood that determined life and death. When the committee was formed, the killing was stopped.

At the time of the Korniloff rebellion, four officers belonging to one of the ships were taken out and killed, against the protest of the Central Committee. Once more the sailors, maddened by what they believed to be an attack on the Revolution, took things into their own hands. They put three questions to their officers:

“Do you belong to the Soviet and Kerensky, or Korniloff?

“If Korniloff takes Petrograd, will you go to take it from him?

“If Korniloff tells you to go to Petrograd and fight the Provisional Government, will you go?”

Their answers to these questions saved or cost them their lives. The sailors formed their own committee and pronounced the death sentence.

The lot of the naval officer in Russia was no more enviable than that of the army officer; but it was a direct and logical result of the régime that made masters of the few and slaves of the many.

At Viborg and at some of the other points, the fate of the officers was far worse than at Helsingfors, and the stories told about the deaths they died are not pretty ones. The training and tradition of a naval officer unfitted him for faith in the new order, contradicted the belief of a lifetime and the heritage of generations. The chasm that yawned between officers and men was too wide to be bridged in a day. A few made an honest effort to cross over it, and the men seemed pathetically grateful to them. Others took orders from the sailors for the same reason that the sailors had once taken orders from them--they were afraid to do otherwise. Some were merely biding their time, convinced that the topsy-turvy order would change and they would come into their “own” again. But one thing was evident here as elsewhere in Russia: that, whatever happens, nobody’s “own” will ever again be quite what it has been in the past.

Admiral Verderevsky, the Minister of Marine, said that discipline was destroyed at its root not at the moment of the Revolution, but long before; that new and democratic forms should have been created long ago; and that it could never be restored by the lash or the guillotine. Verderevsky blamed former Minister of War Goutchkoff for lack of discipline in the navy.

“He called me a pessimist,” said Verderevsky. “He told me the fleet was bad, but the army magnificent. If my pessimism had been interpreted differently then, we should have had a new discipline this autumn.”

Before the committee adjourned, on the afternoon of our visit, they puzzled their heads over many problems of discipline; and the young secretary, Theodore Averitchkin, who took us to the Sailors’ Club, shook his head seriously as he unfolded the difficulties.

“Instruction is what we need,” he said, as we drove through the spick-and-span streets of tidy little Helsingfors. “When the people got freedom, they forgot that they had not learned for three hundred years, and the masses who didn’t know anything understood freedom in their own way. The people who should educate us sit back and call us traitors. We are not traitors--it is bourgeois lying that is spread all over Europe about us. Tolstoy said that calumny was like a snowball, gathering snow as it rolls, and becoming bigger and bigger. Only those who are without honor can say that we are traitors. They forget the hundreds of our comrades who are in the grave of the Baltic Sea. There are not, and there never will be, traitors in the Baltic Fleet. Why don’t the people who talk so much about traitors come and give us some instruction? They don’t want to part with their fine automobiles and beautiful women. We are not asking for palaces and automobiles. We are asking only that all shall have a chance to learn and enough to eat.”

Averitchkin spoke with the burning ardor of a convinced propagandist, and there was no doubt of his sincerity.

The Sailors’ Club was a distinct surprise. I expected to see the usual Russian meeting-place: a big, stuffy, barnlike hall with a litter of dirt and cigarette stubs underfoot. Instead, we drew up before a five-story building, and six husky, clear-eyed sailor boys opened the door and welcomed us into the lobby of a first-class hotel. There were velvet carpets underfoot, cut-glass chandeliers overhead, palms and bay trees stationed at correct intervals, and not even the ghost of a cigarette stub in sight. The easy-chairs were filled with men in sailors’ uniforms, talking comfortably in small groups. In the dining-rooms others were gathered around little tables with snowy linen and shining silver.

The head commissariat led the way, beaming with pride over my compliments. As we went from place to place, he explained that the club belonged to all the sailors of the world, and that any man would find a welcome there. There were ten thousand active members, and the men on shore leave spent most of their time there. Meals were served at cost, and the organization was run like any millionaires’ club to cater to the comforts of its members. In the days before the Revolution no sailor would have been allowed in such a building. Now the place was swarming with them, and they graced it as to the manner born.

The bourgeois feared and hated the sailor most of all the revolutionists; but he was the cleanest, staunchest, finest-looking man I found in revolutionary Russia. There was real stamina here. He knew what he wanted, and was determined to get it. War-weariness played little part in his psychology. He was willing to fight Germans, if he believed Germans to be the enemies of revolution. Six hundred of him formed a volunteer battalion of death and went to the Riga front to fight with the soldiers in the trenches, and the battalion was practically annihilated.

If the majority of the Russian sailors could have been convinced that to save Free Russia they must fight Germany, they would have fought. When the actual existence of their vessels was threatened, as it was in the Gulf of Riga in September, they did fight. Patriotism for their Revolution and pride in ownership of their fleet were uppermost. The first question the sailors on the _Respublica_ asked Mr. Williams was:

“Are the American ships as clean as this?”