Chapter XIII: The Grave of Hope

Mystery shrouded the Petrograd front. In the days that followed the battles of Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo only a few meager facts came out of the background of wildly conflicting rumors.

We knew that Kerensky, with that dazzling gift of his for momentarily overpowering men, had driven in an automobile into the midst of a detachment of rebel soldiers, and disarmed them.

We knew that the ragtag army of the Red Guard, fired by faith in their cause, had taught the Cossacks that it takes more than a military reputation to make a fighting man.

We knew that the sailor Dydenko had gone alone across No Man’s Land to plead the cause of the proletarian revolt, and had come back with the surrender of the opposing forces.

We knew that it was all over.

At heart the Cossacks were no more eager for killing their brothers than the rest of the Russians. They were the policemen of the Tsar because they had known no other calling, seen no other vision. The Revolution had broken their traditions, given them a new faith. They were no longer a unit ready to do the bidding of a master. Many of the younger Cossacks had already embraced the Bolshevist faith, and in the months to follow more and more of them were to desert the ways of their fathers.

There is something poignantly tragic in the picture of Kerensky out there alone beyond the edge of the city, where for an hour he was an uncrowned king. Like most of the Russian leaders of the revolutionary year, he came out of nowhere, flashed for a moment on the world’s screen, and disappeared into nowhere again. If some day he should emerge from that land of silence into which so many Russians are exiled by the changing fortunes of revolution, we may learn what really happened to him at Gatchina. The sailor Dybenko, in his report to the Soviet, declared that Kerensky, when he learned the soldiers had deserted him, said to General Krasnoff:

“Your Cossacks have betrayed me. I shall drive a bullet into my brain.”

According to Dybenko’s story, General Krasnoff suggested that the only courageous thing for the Minister-President of Russia to do was to go to Petrograd, and offered to give him an escort of eight men. To this Kerensky consented, but, while the escort was being formed, he asked to be allowed to clean himself up, and succeeded in changing to the uniform of a sailor and escaping in an _izvostchik_.

Leon Trotzky, in a telegram from the village of Pulkovo to his followers in Petrograd, said:

“On the evening of November 12 Kerensky sent a proclamation to the revolutionary troops to lay down their arms. The Kerensky troops had opened artillery fire. Our artillery replied and silenced the enemy. The Cossacks started an offensive attack but the withering fire of the sailors, Red Guards, and soldiers compelled them to turn back. We have cut into the ranks of the enemy--the enemy is running. Our troops are pursuing. Lettish sharpshooters are arriving from the front and approaching Kerensky’s rear. An order for his arrest has been issued.”

Kerensky’s associates in Petrograd tried to keep in touch with him to the last minute, but the scraps of information they received were unilluminating, for he himself could not tell how long he would be able to hold his men. Their distaste for killing each other was far greater than their loyalty to any individual or institution.

Meanwhile the city shuddered at the tales of frightfulness centered around the ancient Fortress of Peter and Paul, where the ministers of the Kerensky Cabinet and the military school cadets were imprisoned. Mothers, driven nearly mad by the stories of starvation, cruelties, and atrocities, appealed frantically to the city Duma and the American Red Cross Mission to investigate these reports.

At the request of the Duma and the American Mission, I became one of a committee of four to visit the prison and interview the inmates. Two of us--Daddy R. and M. Mikhailoff, of the London _Telegraph_--were Russians.

We walked in awed silence through the arched gate in the massive outer wall, each busy with his own thoughts. To the two Russians this was a day never to be forgotten. Both of them had been old revolutionists, and Mikhailoff had been a prisoner in this very fortress not many years before. For me the place was full of ghosts. They walked before me in a strange procession. I watched while Peter, who stalks the city by day and by night, killed his own son. I saw Catherine bury alive the critics who found her marital practices not to their liking. I saw the Decembrists--they who first fought to free the serfs--martyred before my eyes. Last of all, I saw the fortress gate swing wide on that glad March day when the revolutionists took possession of Petrograd, and men and women, with blinking eyes and tears of joy streaming down their faces, marched into the free world.

Mikhailoff brought me back to the moment.

“Listen! The bells--it’s the Gospodi pomilui [Lord save me],” he said. “It was the chimes that almost drove us mad. The monotony of them--the terrible regularity!”

We stood still till the sound died away, then passed indoors to a crowded waiting-room. The place was dirty, and the air foul. The floor was littered with cigarette stubs, and heaped on a table in one corner was a strangely assorted pile of paper bundles of food, brought by relatives for the prisoners.

Through a door at one side of the room unshaven soldiers, in mud-colored uniforms, passed ceaselessly in and out. Most of the occupants were women, poor women with _platoks_ tied over their heads, and prosperous, well dressed women with diamonds in their ears. Some sat dejectedly against the wall, waiting. Some, in high-pitched, nervous voices, demanded to see their sons and brothers immediately. The guards replied wearily but patiently.

Daddy R. was for quietly sitting down with the waiting ones, in Russian fashion. We prodded him into action, and made our way past two sentries to an inner office. At the desk sat a soldier _commissaire_. His eyes were heavy with sleep and his young face gray with fatigue. In a corner of the office two exhausted comrades lay asleep on the floor. By sheer effort of will, the _commissaire_ kept on answering questions fired at him from a dozen tongues. In time our turn came. He read our passes, glanced at the seals, gave a hurried order to a guard, and bowed us out.

We passed through a succession of dingy offices, up a dark stairway, and down a long corridor.

“It’s the Troubetskoy bastion,” Mikhailoff whispered in an awed undertone.

Our guide motioned us to wait. At the other end of the hall some sailors and soldiers were talking. One of them looked up, saw me, and, detaching himself from his comrades, brought a chair, which he offered with a pleasant “Pazhal’sta.”

A few minutes later the commandant of the bastion appeared, a bunch of keys jangling in his hand. He wore the uniform of an officer, and spoke a little English. Like the others, he was pale and haggard, and later in the day he confided to me that he could not live through another five days like those just past.

“Up to the time of the last Revolution,” he said, “there were only three or four members of the old régime in the entire prison. We were not prepared with food or fuel to take care of many more. Suddenly, in a single day, we had to find quarters and provisions for nearly three hundred. Then, there were the mobs. I have not felt secure for a single second.”

He took us first to a tier of cells in which the military school cadets were imprisoned. At the door of the first cell he asked if we preferred to talk to the boys alone.

“They might feel freer,” I said, and he nodded and withdrew.

They all told virtually the same story. They had been terribly frightened on their way to the prison, for the crowds had tried to take them from the convoy.

“They have killed our comrades!” the mobs shouted. “They are trying to destroy our Revolution. It is time to stop their cake-eating. Throw them in the river! Put a bullet through them!”

Once a group of them were lined up against a wall; but the convoy fought off the crowd. In the first twenty-four hours in prison, things had been bad because the cells were damp and cold and there was no food; but the boys explained the conditions as the commandant had done, and blamed no one.

In another part of the bastion we found the members of the Kerensky Cabinet. Tereshchenko, the late Foreign Minister, sat cross-legged on his cot, a cigarette in his mouth. He greeted us pleasantly; and in the softest, most musical English I ever heard inquired for news of the French front and of Moscow.

The cell was as large as an ordinary American bedroom, and was equipped with modern sanitary conveniences and provided with an iron cot and table. He said he had everything he wanted, and believed his release merely a matter of a few days. If he could have foreseen the long months of imprisonment, I doubt whether he would have presented such a cheerful front that afternoon. Just before I left Petrograd I heard of him again. The dark-haired, debonair boy statesman had disappeared. His shoulders had begun to droop, and a gray beard hung from his chin. The Minister of Rumania, during the day that he spent in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, met him in the exercise-yard.

“I see you now,” Tereshchenko said to the Rumanian, “but I shall not see you again. My shame that my country has imprisoned the diplomatic representative of another country is too great.”

In similar cells we found Kishkin, Bourtzeff, Rutenberg, Paltchinsky, and other men arrested after the fall of the Winter Palace. The top of Rutenberg’s head had been grazed by a bullet on the night of his arrest. The ministers were marched from the Winter Palace to the fortress. The prison guard, discovering a crowd in the darkness, thought it was a mob attacking the fortress, and opened machine-gun fire to frighten them away. Ministers and convoy alike followed the Russian custom in such cases, and fell flat on their faces in the middle of the street. Rutenberg was a little slower than the others.

He was rebellious against imprisonment, and complained of the quality of the food.

“We live hourly in fear of our lives,” he said.

It was true--they did. It was quite plain that their position was a precarious one, because they were in a sense hostages, and any violence done to the Bolshevik leaders would very quickly have met with retaliation from the Bolshevik followers in the prison garrison. The stories of outrages circulated so freely outside the prison were more of a menace to the men inside than anything else could have been, because they helped to keep alive the bitterness and hatred that made their position so critical.

Vladimir Bourtzeff and Daddy R. were old friends, and when the guard unlocked the door of Bourtzeff’s cell, they threw themselves into each other’s arms and kissed on both cheeks. Bourtzeff, who uncovered the ring of spies and provokators headed by the infamous Azeff, had many times suffered imprisonment and exile at the hands of the Tsar. Now, with the turn of Revolution, he was proclaimed a reactionary. His paper was suppressed by Kerensky, and General Verkhovsky, the young Minister of War, sued him for libel. With the overturn of the government, he made a bitter attack upon the Bolsheviki, accusing Lenin of being a German agent and a traitor to Russia.

From the cells occupied by the Kerensky ministers we went to those in which the prisoners of the old régime had spent the revolutionary year, ignorant of the seething life beyond their prison walls. As we entered the cell of Soukhomlinoff, Minister of War under the Tsar, the two Russian members of the party led the way. Soukhomlinoff arose and stepped forward to meet us. As if with a single impulse, the two revolutionists put their hands behind their backs and bowed low before him. They were ancient enemies--they could not shake hands.

Soukhomlinoff started, recovered himself, and bowed low in return. He turned to me, inviting me to a seat on his cot, and apologized that he had nothing better to offer. He wore a comfortable lounging robe, and there was a certain air of ancient elegance about him, despite his position and his prison cell. His hair--what there was of it--was quite white, and there were pouches under his faded old blue eyes, and deep lines in his face. The table beside him was as shipshape as a sailor’s kit-box. He picked up a portfolio and opened it. His old hand shook as he untied the string and revealed a pile of foolscap closely written in a small, fine hand.

“It is here,” he said--“my case. It is all here. I have written this to prove that I am innocent.”

He fingered the paper tenderly. It was the work of many dreary hours. We let him talk about it for a few minutes, then asked how he fared there in prison under the Bolshevist régime.

“I have no complaint,” he said. “Perhaps it is better than before, because they give us the newspapers. That means much to a man in prison. To-day I am very happy because my wife has just been to see me. She is very good to me, and comes as often as they will permit her. Those are great days--the days of her visits.”

It was for this wife, young and considered a very beautiful woman according to the Russian standard, that Soukhomlinoff is supposed to have sold his country in those days when the Russian troops fell like dead leaves in an October wind because they had nothing but naked hands with which to meet the mighty cannon of the advancing Germans.

Our last visit that day was to the arch villain of the old régime, Biletsky, chief of the Tsar’s secret police. Biletsky has many sins written large against his name. Few men within the length and breadth of all the Russias have been responsible for more broken hopes, more crushed lives, more human wrecks, than the master detective. He was a big fellow with iron-gray hair and beard, and a pair of sharp brown eyes, quick-shifting and penetrating. He was able, shrewd, and as hard as his reputation implied.

He was glad to talk--grateful, I think, for a chance. He welcomed the Bolshevik régime. Possibly it was because he believed, with most of the men of the old order, that the quickest way to restore the monarchy was to give the radicals a loose line and help them to create all the disorder possible. Perhaps it was because he thought new names on the prison roster, new hates in the revolutionary heart, would detract attention from the old. Perhaps it was only because he believed any change might hold the possibility of greater leniency for himself. Perhaps it was, as he said, because the Bolsheviki had given him newspapers and put him once more in touch with the world from which he had been so long isolated.

It was quite dark when we left the prison. As I passed one of the cells in which the cadets were being held, I peered through the peep-hole in the door, and saw a group of boys with a pack of cards spread out on the mattress before them. The city was saving electric light, and the current had not yet been turned on for the night. A stub of candle lit up their faces, and revealed them intent upon their game. If they were in danger they had forgotten it.

We came away, agreed upon one thing: whatever might come of chaos and disorder in this new régime, the Peter and Paul of to-day would never be a match for that Peter and Paul of the old days when violence and cruelty was an organized and deliberate policy.