Chapter XVII: The Great Gray Wolf

The great gray wolf has always been howling at the Russian door.

When revolution was still only a vague dream of the future, an American traveler, finding his way into a peasant’s hut in a remote Siberian village, discovered an American flour-sack hanging beside the ikon on the wall. The peasant’s wife pointed to it, and with tears in her eyes explained that it was her most treasured possession. It came in the midst of the great famine, and brought the wheat that saved her babies’ lives.

The March Revolution began with cries of “Bread! Bread! Give us bread!”

Vera, who took her place in the bread line at three o’clock in the morning, saw the wolf skulking in the shadowy dawn. Ivan, who went without his lunch because, even at the cheap working-man’s restaurant in the Vyborg district, he must pay three rubles fifty for an insufficient meal, hears him growling.

From February to February, the wolf howled; yet somehow each succeeding group of Russian administrators managed to keep him at bay. Always next week he was coming; but, somehow, miracles do happen in Russia, and he never quite arrived. It was not until he made an alliance with the human enemy of Russia that he finally broke through and brought death to the hungry people.

Three days after the Bolshevik Revolution, a fatherly American official advised me to buy some sardines and retire for the next two weeks to the home of a woman friend.

“The people will be dying of starvation on the streets within a week,” he said, “and there won’t be any _izvostchiks_ to carry you around, because the horses will all starve to death.”

How little we knew the Russians! It was six months before that prophecy began to be true. Long after the allotted two weeks, Roger Treadwell, the American consul, and I, returning from a visit to a sick countryman, raced the length of the great white Nevsky in a sleigh drawn by a wonderful black horse groomed and fed to the pink of condition, while the driver, a peacock feather rakishly nodding in his cap, shouted a challenge to another _izvostchik_.

The Russian seems to be always equal to the emergency of the moment. It is in organizing the daily round of living that he seems to fail. As soon as the Bolsheviki took command, they sent commissaries to the grain districts to persuade the peasants to send supplies to Petrograd. They pleaded the need of the Revolution, and were more successful in getting a response than their predecessors had been. They discovered in the first days that carloads of cabbages and potatoes were rotting in the warehouses for lack of people to unload and distribute them. They put soldiers and Red Guardsmen to work, and when bread was scarce the multitudes were appeased with an extra ration of vegetables.

It was impossible at any time during the year to buy any of the necessities of life without standing in a queue. There were queues for bread, sugar, kerosene, tobacco, goloshes, and sweets. If cheap cloth was received in any one of the shops, a line of women immediately appeared outside the door in quest of a bargain. After the fall of Riga, when the Germans were expected, queues formed in front of the trunk shops. The families who could afford it kept what they called “queue maids,” who had no other occupation than to wait in line for provisions. In one of the “want ads” I found a request for a servant, stating, “For queue work only.” It became a regular source of livelihood for many people. Children left school to stand in the queues. At first they liked it. It was exciting to go out so early in the mornings, and stand with many new people, but as the days grew colder their little hands and feet, ill-clad, made the waiting torture.

The great mass of Russians in the cities had to do their own queue duty, and they came with their babies and baskets in their arms, their heads done in shawls or kerchiefs, and stood for endless hours, waiting to present a ticket entitling them to buy a pound and a half of sugar or the day’s ration of bread.

The rules of behavior in the queues were created by the people themselves. At first women who came with babies were allowed to go in without waiting. Then a woman who had no children hired her neighbor’s child for ten or twenty kopecs. The trick was soon discovered, and the real mothers lost their privilege.

I frequently stopped to listen to the people in the queues, and to get a better idea of their attitude toward the various governments I sent Marya, my interpreter, to stand in the lines. Marya was a Russian student who at eighteen had more knowledge stored away in her little black head than the Western woman of forty. She told me that the character of the queues changed with the goods the people were buying; but the people themselves were always in opposition to the government. Each time a new government came in, they would say, “Maybe they will abolish the queues”; but a few days later, when the lines remained the same, they declared the new Cabinet was no better than the old.

“There is a Turkish saying,” said Marya, “that it is no good for the world to be wide if my shoes are too narrow; and the women say: ‘It is no good for the government to be Socialist if the queues grow longer every day.’”

The bread queues were made up of working-women, servants, a few students, and school-children. The school-children brought their books and studied their lessons. When it was not too cold, the women brought needlework or crochet. A few read newspapers for the first time in their lives, having had no time at home. The high cost of living was the chief topic of discussion, and politics had little place here. As Marya wisely said:

“Mothers who are worrying about their babies left at home alone, and who are afraid to get no bread for them, don’t care for politics.”

The tobacco queues were made up largely of soldiers who were buying to sell again. They expected to make money, so their mood was better, and they laughed and joked as they stood waiting.

The chocolate queues were composed of men and women of the bourgeoisie who could afford to buy sweets. Conversation here was about the disorganization of the army, the roughness of the soldiers, their want of good manners, the Socialism that would ruin Russia, the impossibility of living in Petrograd now, and frequently a regret for the days of the régime, “when, at least, we had some order.”

The kerosene queues were like the bread queues. They were made up of poor people letting rooms without electricity. The conversation was of hard times--perhaps of a grandmother who “eats much, but is not even able to stand in a queue.”

The theater-ticket queues, which became smaller as the bread lines grew larger, were composed of students and re-sellers. The students chatted gaily of the soprano of Z., or the feet of the ballerina X. The speculators did not talk at all, and the students treated them rather disdainfully.

The trunk queues were the strangest of all. Marya described them as “respectable people whom fear has obliged to forget their respectableness.” She said it was universal, direct, equal, and open fear. They had completely lost their wits. They were afraid of Germans, of Socialists, of peasants, of soldiers. They feared to lose their peace, their comforts, and their lives. They feared to stay in Petrograd, and they feared equally to leave.

Marya was even more critical of the people who stood in queues waiting for the street-cars. She said that all civilization, good manners, and delicacy comes off when a Petrograd inhabitant wants to get into a car. The street-car queues were made up chiefly of teachers, clerks, business men, students, and small officials. They were cold, fearful of being late, and preoccupied. They buried themselves in their newspapers and seldom spoke.

Heaven help Vera and Ivan if their shoes followed in the footsteps of most shoes and wore out. To get a new pair, Ivan had to stay away from the factory for a whole day. In the evening, when the factory closed, he took his place in a long line on the Morskaya, and settled down to twenty-four hours of waiting. He borrowed a few wooden paving-blocks from the pile that was always waiting to patch up the holes in the street, and made himself as comfortable as the weather permitted. For the length of a block in either direction were hundreds just like him. All night he would sit there, chattering with his neighbor or dozing off to sleep. Sometime the next day he would be rewarded with--no, indeed; not a pair of shiny new boots, but simply a numbered ticket that entitled him a month later to take his place in line again and get his boots.

It was estimated that Russia’s grain crops were only fifty to sixty per cent. of normal. At the time of the downfall of the Tsar forty per cent. of her locomotives and rolling stock was out of commission. For three years fifteen million of her men had been out of production. Russia’s front had been mobilized without regard to her rear. The burden of feeding the fifteen million had fallen upon women, old men, children, and the young men who were not fit for military service. To overcome even partially this great loss of man-power, it would have been necessary to apply every possible kind of modern labor-saving device and obtain from the remaining workers the maximum of efficiency. Russia did neither of these two things.

Labor-saving machinery was not used to any great extent in the old days, because there was so little value put upon labor. Man-power was the cheapest thing to be had in Russia. The Russian worker had no stake in his job, and was as careless of time as the ruling class was careless of man-power.

The Russian’s attitude toward his job was the attitude of the slave laborer--something done because it had to be done. The greatest flaw in his revolutionary teaching was that it had not given him a knowledge of the interdependence of people. He had not learned that the only way he could get his share of grain from the peasant was to make the cloth or the plow that was as necessary to the peasant and his wife as bread was necessary to him.

Nothing in the Russian system had helped to teach the worker his importance in the social scheme and his social responsibility as a producer. That was a thing he had to discover for himself. The leaders realized this, and the shop committees tried to make the men realize it; but it was the sort of thing that could be learned only through bitter experience.

Time was of so little value in Russia that nobody ever bothered to learn how to save it. Production naturally decreased steadily in the first three years of the war, and kept on decreasing after the Revolution. The shop committees did not make the confusion, but, like the committees in the army and in the fleet, they were outgrowths of the confusion that followed the fall of the Tsar, and the economic revolution that deposed the owner from his control over his factory. They were the effort of the men themselves to establish something that would bring order out of confusion. That they failed was due to lack of experience and not to lack of good intentions.

The gray wolf cared not how his hour came, only that it came.

Even the foreign colony, whose members were far better off than the Russians, heard the gray wolf howling. We were a hungry lot from morning until night. Most of us developed an appetite such as we had never known. We scraped the plates clean. The first time I dined with a man who put the left-over sugar in his pocket, I gasped. It was not until I had drunk many glasses of sugarless tea and eaten many breadless meals that I was able to overcome sufficiently the inhibitions of my early training to permit me to follow his example. Even to the end, I had a guilty sense of committing a horrible crime every time I whisked the last piece of black bread surreptitiously into my hand-bag. Usually, by dint of much scheming, I managed to keep a small quantity of food on hand for the hungry mortals who drifted through my little blue room each day. The original supply came with me in cans across Siberia from China, and it seemed to partake in its stretching quality of the nature of the widow’s cruse.

On the mornings when there was breakfast, I ordered two portions, to have bread for afternoon tea and late suppers. Stewart P. Elliott, a fellow San Franciscan, was an American whom the colony will never forget. He was always turning up with life-savers in the shape of boxes of biscuits or cans of condensed milk. In December, when my supplies of sugar and tea were just about exhausted, Charles Smith, the new Associated Press correspondent, arrived from Peking with tea and crackers and all sorts of priceless possessions, including two cakes of soap and a box of talcum powder. So precious a gift I had never received before.

In Russia, one’s room is one’s castle. Visitors are never announced, and one must be prepared at all times for unexpected callers. The first time the hotel clerk sent an early-morning visitor up to discover me with an unmade bed, my prudish American instincts drove me in search of a screen. Once so camouflaged, I could ignore its presence in perfect calm.

Life was naked in Russia--bare as the arms of the silver birches before winter came to cover them up. All that was real, all that was vital,--the best and the worst of men,--lay close to the surface. Heroes have never appealed to me; but the amazing number of simple, unobtrusive virtues that the ordinary mortal can carry about his human person is a miracle that never ceases to thrill me. There is a bond between those of us who searched for values beneath the turmoil of the revolutionary year that would be hard to break. A broader base of friendship, a deeper comradeship, is building for men and women the world over in the stress of these days of living under the shadow of death and disaster. Perhaps it is one of the best things we shall save out of the wreck of the war.

We were a strange lot, we Americans. We divided naturally into two camps. Some of us were uncompromising idealists, and some pragmatists, and more were the usual complex mixture of both. Most of us took away from Russia what we brought. One of us brought the Columbia School of Journalism, and, no matter how revolution raged or food prices soared, Columbia’s star remained undimmed.

A few men whose lives had been cast in entirely different places saw a new vision, and they will never be the same again. Colonel Thompson was one of these. The real test of his interest in Russia came one day soon after the fall of the Kerensky government, upon which he had banked all his hopes.

“I’ve been out walking around the streets today and looking into the faces of the Red Guard,” he said. “They’ve got fine faces. They’re real--they’re sincere. Perhaps these people need us now more than ever.”

It was a long journey for a Wall Street millionaire.

There was another American, a New York banker, as fine a type as I have ever met. The Russian struggle thrilled him as nothing else had ever done.

“I never wanted anything so much in my life as I want to help Russia,” he said. “If I were thirty years old and had no family, nothing on earth would take me away from here.”

I did not know until I had returned to America just how deeply the Russian Revolution had gone with him. He went to his firm and told them he was no longer of any use to them. “I’m not interested in the same things,” he said. Soon afterward he went to France to do a piece of humanitarian work for the government.

Everywhere, day and night, we fought the endless battle of revolution.

“You do not know the Russians,” said the old residents, shaking their heads at those of us who professed to find something more vital than German money at work among the masses. “If you had lived here as long as we have--”

“That’s just it,” we replied; “you have lived here too long. Your roots are buried too deep in Russia’s past. You see the Russians as slaves. You can not see them as human beings.”

It raged across tea-tables in the charming apartment of the naval attaché, where we gathered occasionally to eat the tiny hot white rolls which, wolf or no wolf, found their way to Mrs. Crosley’s tea-tray every Thursday afternoon. It stormed around General Judson’s dinner-table. We carried it into the Turkish Room, where we curled up on the great wide Russian divan for coffee, and upstairs to the shiny ball-room, where we one-stepped and waltzed to an American phonograph.

As prophets the old residents were hopeless failures. They were always backing a “man on horseback,” or setting a date for the restoration of the monarchy, then moving it up a week or two as time found their predictions unfulfilled.

If Petrograd offered no sensation for a day, there was always Captain Harry Brown’s communiqué to give us a real thrill. Captain Brown was an oldtime New York newspaper man attached to the Red Cross Mission, and he wrote for an exclusive circulation a daily summary of all the rumors that came in from all parts of Russia. Neither truth nor fiction could ever rival those documents for interest. They were an amazing combination of both.

There was much good talk in my little blue room. All kinds of people found their way there. Every shade of political opinion was expressed. Most often it was of Russia we talked, but sometimes we wandered far, far away. The fight we fought so good-naturedly was the same that is being fought on the battlefield of the world--the struggle of the old and the new.

One night the Baltic states was the topic, and there was a Czech whose burning spirit would have withered the Kaiser if we could only have produced him at that moment.

“No matter who makes peace, the Czecho-Slavs will go on fighting until they give us back our country,” he said. “We are attacking from four directions, and we are going straight to Berlin. We’re going to get the Kaiser; and when we get him, we’ll feed him on pigs’ liver--raw--half a pound a day.”

Another night we listened to a handsome young Serb who was trying to help the Russian radicals make Socialists of the Austrian prisoners and organize them to resist German attacks on Russia. There had been a meeting of the Austrian prisoners that day in the Cirque Modern, and two thousand of them had pledged themselves to defend the Russian Revolution against a German attack, and to work to get revolutionary propaganda to the German and Austrian trenches.

Sometimes it was Raymond Robins who held our attention, and no one saw better than Raymond Robins the significance of Russia’s place in the future settlement of the international problem. He knew that, from a practical as well as an ethical viewpoint, the Allies must not abandon Russia to the Germans. Most often the talk turned to the necessity for making the people at home understand the complex and difficult situation as it really is.

Sometimes it was Arthur Ransom, the English writer, who said things that any of us would like to have said--fine, true, penetrating things, like a flashlight in dark places. He had lived a long time in Russia, and had wandered over the country in a cart, learning the stories of the land from Cossacks with whom he camped on the roadside, and from peasants who lit their samovars for him.

Frequently there came a knock that brought us promptly back to the moment. Late one night John Reed came in to announce that they were shooting in the Winter Palace Square. The wine-cellars of the Tsar had been broken open, and a new danger was facing the Soviet government.

Another menace had come to Petrograd, for the moment more threatening even than the gray wolf. Unknown to all of us, a sleeping serpent had been lying beneath the city’s surface, waiting for the hour to stir and strike. The city was mined with wine-cellars, and the forces working to prevent any government of the people from succeeding in the restoration of order took advantage of them.

The Revolutionary Committee discovered eight hundred such places. In one wine vault alone there were twelve hundred thousand bottles. In the Tsar’s cellar the champagne had lain undisturbed for three hundred years. The wine in the cellars at the Winter Palace was valued at thirty million rubles. The government of People’s Commissaries, desperately in need of foreign credits, thought first of trying to sell it to England and America. Some of the members opposed this.

Just after the trouble began, I went to the office of Jacob Peters, and found him and the Military Revolutionary Committee frantically trying to devise some way to meet the crisis. They realized that all that was needed to bring a real reign of terror to the city was to madden the soldiers with drink.

While I talked to Peters, the telephone bell on his desk kept interrupting. Each time he took down the receiver, it was to discover that trouble had broken out in some new and unexpected part of the city. He was pale and worried.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I was afraid of this, and I voted to put the wine in the Neva; but we needed money so badly, some of the others thought it was a shame to destroy it. The sailors were going to load it on the barges and take it to Kronstadt to keep until we could send it away. But provokators told the soldiers the sailors were taking it to drink. Now we are going to break the bottles, and pump out the cellars, and finish with it all.”

It was harder to do than to say. For weeks afterward they kept discovering more and more wine-cellars.

The wine pogroms seem always to have started in the same way. Some unknown person would telephone to a hospital where there were convalescing soldiers, or to a barracks in the neighborhood, and announce that there was free wine to be had at such and such an address. As the crowd began to gather, there was usually some one in the street with a few bottles of wine to get things started. Before long the soldiers were demanding wine and more wine. Some one conveniently broke in the door, or perhaps an irate proprietor in opposition to the Soviet government invited them in to help themselves. Frequently, before the disturbance was quelled, there was shooting.

The People’s Commissaries went systematically to work to find all the cellars. Wherever they discovered one, they sent in a group of trusted soldiers and Red Guardsmen whose revolutionary spirit was sufficiently strong to withstand the temptation of the liquor, to smash the bottles.

One afternoon I was motoring over on the Petrograd side of the Neva, when I passed a big public garden. A guard of soldiers had been placed around the entrance to warn all passers-by to walk in the street. A fire-engine was busily pumping. At first I thought it was a fire, but I saw neither smoke nor flames. I got out of the car, and asked one of the guards what was happening. He told me they were smashing three hundred thousand bottles and pumping the wine out with the fire-engine.

From a back entrance two soldiers came with a third whose steps were suspiciously unsteady. His companions, leading him off to arrest, were pouring a volley of abuse upon him, accusing him in picturesque language of being a traitor to the Revolution and several kinds of good-for-nothing with which only the Russians are familiar. The man had slipped in through the back gate when no one was looking. The young soldier in command of the crowd ordered that an extra guard be placed at the gate and no one allowed to pass.

They did their work in the same way all over the city. But new wine-cellars came to light faster than they could destroy them, and before the dragon was finally slain several poor deluded fellows lost their lives. The night the Winter Palace cellars were broken into, we thought the whole populace was going to be killed; but it later developed that the sounds we had taken for shots were nothing more fatal than popping corks, and the soldiers who lay on the white snow were not dead, but merely dead drunk.

This method of provocation was not new in Russia. It had been used in the old days by the Black Hundred, and in the retreat from the southwestern front the Germans resorted to it. They captured a town, stocked the houses with liquor, and retreated again. When they had gone, the Russian soldiers drank the wine, and the horror of outrages committed in the debauch that followed was one of the most tragic things in those unhappy July days. When havoc was complete, the Germans came with cameras and made photographs, which were sent back to Berlin for propaganda purposes.