Chapter XIV: Mother Moscow Weeps

It was midsummer when I went first to Moscow, and the trees against the old Kremlin wall were deep in green. Mother Moscow was haughty then--aloof, superior. She sat serene amid the golden domes of her churches that are “forty times forty,” an old, old lady, remote and inscrutable like the East, the mystery of the ages in her smile.

“Petrograd is not Russia,” she said. “Float it out to sea. Let the Germans take it. It is a plague-spot. It is of the West. We shall be well rid of it!”

Sometimes, in a mellower mood, she spoke of Petrograd as one might speak of a naughty child.

“Petrograd is behaving very badly, but it matters little. She is really of small consequence. Some day I may come to the limit of my patience, and then-- Well, we shall see!”

Poor Mother Moscow! How little she knew of that which was seething within her own ancient walls.

Old Ivan Valiki, high up in the heavens, faithfully thundered the hours above the citadel of church and state, and the music of the lesser bells, sometimes a mad, barbaric revel, sometimes a faint, wistful obbligato, accompanied him.

On the wide paths of the summer gardens the blind beggars chanted their prayers, as usual. Old Marya sat in the shade of the Sokolniki, crossing herself, and the little one beside her rattled a tin can for kopecks with one hand and made mounds in the sand with the other.

In the Thieves’ Market, on Sunday mornings, the Muscovites bartered for boots and baby-carriages, and women from the country sold pickled cucumbers and home-made sausage. Under the trellised arbors in the parks, family parties gathered around the brass samovars, and drank tea in the Moscow fashion, with a bit of sugar between their teeth. Their laughter and their song lacked neither merriment nor music, and Mother Moscow was satisfied with both.

Before the sacred shrine on the Iberian Gate a tiny lamp burned brightly, and an occasional soldier, strolling by, stopped to cross himself, and slowly to decipher the inscription that told how, by special provision of the Almighty, the ikon had been preserved from destruction throughout the raid of Napoleon.

Inside the Kremlin the conquered cannons of the Frenchmen, _Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité_ still mottoed on their iron sides, jostled the newly packed boxes of ammunition awaiting shipment to the front.

From Sparrow Hills at sunset the bulbous domes of star-spangled green and blue, the fluted golden cupolas, and gleaming crosses shone as they must have done on that day, so long ago, when Napoleon looked down upon the mystic city and demanded that the keys be brought.

To Mother Moscow all was as it had been--all was well. Mother Moscow’s eyes were full of the past, dimmed to the present, and blind to the future.

She could not dream of that scarred city soon to lie beneath the snows of winter.

As I wandered around the Kremlin, and its mystery and barbaric beauty laid a spell upon me, battle and bloodshed and the wild ways of revolution seemed as remote as the days of the Boyars.

But there were other hours--hours outside the Kremlin--when I saw a different picture and felt another impulse stirring beneath the ancient city’s calm.

There was the Governor-General’s palace, where, half the day and more than half the night, workmen and soldiers discussed the fundamental differences between political and economic revolutions. That cry, already so familiar in Petrograd, “All power to the Soviet!” grew louder and louder with each passing day, and I heard the hectic speeches punctuated with the same “Bourgeoisie!” “Counter-Revolution!” “Capitalists!”

There was a room, up near the top of a dingy hotel, where stacks of literature were piled ceiling-high, and returned exiles wrote revolutionary articles, addressed envelopes, formed committees, and passed resolutions, while Mother Moscow dozed.

Behind a desk in this room sat a dark-haired woman with deep, sad eyes. There was a cash-drawer in front of her, and all day long the people, from factory and trench and farm, filed past that desk and left their kopecks and their rubles. The money was to buy a press to print more and more Bolshevist leaflets, and a newspaper that should call the people to revolution.

The seeds of their propaganda fell on ready soil.

On the sides of the palaces of stone and stucco, huge posters announced the opening of the opera season of 1917 and 1918 under the direction of the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Committee. This in the famous Balshoi Theater, where imperial eyes had viewed the triumph of the greatest singers in all Europe!

Besides, if Mother Moscow had turned her face for a day toward the Iberian Virgin, she would have seen that the number of those who paused to cross themselves before the sacred ikon grew less and less, and the number of those who went by without even a glance in that direction continually increased.

Even when Mother Moscow invited Kerensky to her for that famous Moscow conference, her invitation was a summons, and she gave it in the spirit of a mother telling her child that it was time to come and be spanked. That meeting was pregnant with prophecy; but Mother Moscow did not heed.

There were men among the merchants and maufacturers in Moscow who saw the handwriting on the wall, but they did not read it entirely aright. They knew that all was not well in the stronghold of capitalism and ancient conservatism, but they thought all that was needed was a little more time and trouble to make the people ready to accept their will.

Here and there one remembered with misgiving the days of 1905, when Moscow became a storm-center of revolt, while Petrograd knew comparative quiet. Perhaps also here and there was one who remembered a prophecy of the Tsar. At that time the mighty men of Moscow sent petitions to Petrograd, urging the government to grant a constitution and other political reforms. The Tsar replied, rather wisely, that nothing short of economic reforms would ever satisfy the people, and recommended that the manufacturers grant these. Each group was willing to please the people, but it must be at the expense of the other. Neither was willing to sacrifice its own power.

Now that political equality had come, the first pæans of rejoicing had hardly sounded before the economic demands found voice. Strikes in Moscow grew more and more frequent. Production steadily decreased. Many of the owners closed their factories on the ground that they could not be run upon the terms of the workers except at a loss. Some shut down because they thought it would the more quickly bring the workers to their senses. Industry was completely disorganized.

It was not until four days after the Bolshevist uprising in Petrograd that Mother Moscow suddenly became aware that she was to be the battleground of a class conflict quite as determined and far more bitter than any that had torn the scorned City of Peter.

It was Friday night, November 9, when the first stray shots near the Moscow Duma signaled the coming trouble. At three the following morning the populace awoke to the alarm of a heavy fusillade. For seven days the firing continued almost ceaselessly. There were pickets on every corner, and on Tuesday heavy artillery sent the guests of the Metropole and National hotels to the cellars in search of safety. The American Red Cross Mission turned its headquarters in the National Hotel into a first-aid station.

The military school cadets, reinforced by some of the older officers, were intrenched in the city Duma, the Riding Academy, and the Kremlin. The Bolsheviki conducted their military operations from the Governor-General’s palace. As the attack gained strength, the cadets were forced back into the Kremlin.

The Bolshevist army was made up largely of factory workers. The Moscow garrison, as a whole, had agreed to remain neutral; but twenty thousand soldiers offered to fight with the Bolsheviki, and it was estimated that about five thousand took part. The critical moment came with the arrival of a company of sailors and Red Guards, sent from Petrograd to reinforce the Soviet. Kaledin was supposed to be marching to the rescue of Mother Moscow at the head of the Don Cossacks, but his coming was as mythical a performance as that of Kerensky’s at Petrograd.

When the surrender finally came, the cadets had been driven into a corner of the Kremlin. Telegraph and telephone wires had been broken by bullets, and Mother Moscow was cut off from all contact with the outside world. Street-car tracks were torn up, windows were smashed, the stucco sides of the quaint old houses were peppered with bullet-holes, and here and there the front of a building had been crashed in or the entire top story swept away.

The damage done to the Kremlin was slight--nothing compared to what we had feared; and if anything could dry Mother Moscow’s tears and restore her ancient self-respect, it was this crumb of comfort.

Here, as in Petrograd, the defense of the Provisional Government centered around the Duma, and both bodies were dissolved by the Bolsheviki. Mayor Rudineff held up his hands when I asked him what he intended to do.

“We would like to issue an appeal warning the people against the ruinous policy of the Bolsheviki,” he said; “but, unfortunately, the liberty of the press being suppressed, it is impossible.”

While only a handful of people were killed in the Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd, Moscow’s death toll is estimated at from seven hundred and fifty persons to twice that number. Probably the former figure is more nearly correct.

Close beside the Kremlin wall, in the holiest of holy places, the workmen and soldiers of Moscow dug the great trench that was to receive the bodies of their fallen comrades. All day they dug, and when night came they continued their work by the light of torches. The ghostly linden trees have stood watch over many strange scenes there on the edge of the Red Square, but none stranger than this crowd of silent men, speechlessly turning the earth through the long, chill, dark hours. By daybreak they had finished.

It was the day of the proletariat. All others stayed indoors. The streets, but for the mourners of the proletarian dead, were deserted. At eight o’clock in the morning the procession started, and all day long the people filed past--a vast, endless throng of them, men, women, and little children. There were no priests, no prayers. Strong young soldiers in mud-colored coats carried the red coffins on their shoulders, and above the heads of the crowd the crimson banners flowed like a river of blood.

A sobbing, singing mass of human beings, tragic and triumphant, filled the vast square. Cavalry troops rode by at attention, and girls with _platoks_ on their heads carried great oval bandboxed wreaths of artificial flowers. Sometimes a military band went by, playing a funeral march, and sometimes the voices of the marchers lifted in the deep, rhythmical strains of the “Hymn of Eternal Memory.” Men and women, old and young, wept as they saw the coffins lowered into that yawning trench.

If Mother Moscow wept that night, her tears fell quietly. She was in the presence of something big, something terrible, something magnificent--something unlike anything her old eyes had ever seen before.

There was another day, another funeral, another crowd of broken-hearted men and women. Their crumbs of comfort were more meager, for theirs was the bitterness of defeat; but they also hugged the faith that the stalwart boys who lay stretched in their coffins had died defending an ideal.

Worlds of space lay between those two groups of mourners--they had no single thing in common but their grief. Their dead lay in the darkened recesses of great churches, and priests in funeral robes of black and silver said many masses for the repose of their souls. There were no red coffins, no crimson banners, no singing multitudes--only prayers and silent tears.

When it was all over--the killing and the burying--and there was nothing left but the joy of victory and the rancor of defeat, some one suddenly discovered that the light before the shrine of the Virgin on the Iberian Gate had gone out.

All that was left of the sacred ikon was one bullet-wounded angel. Two soldiers passing by the shrine halted.

“Look!” said one of them. “They said it was holy. It was just another of the d----d lies they have been telling us!”