Chapter XVIII: Tsars and Peasants

When the peasants in a remote South Russian village received word from the great city that the “Little Father” had been put off his throne, and that they, the Russian people, were now the rulers of the land, they shook their heads skeptically.

The message that brought the news invited them to send delegates to a congress of workmen, soldiers, and peasants in the far-away capital. Some were for doing it; others counseled differently. Finally they hit upon a plan that satisfied every one. They elected the most disreputable of the village characters to go to Petrograd.

“But why--” asked the bewildered squire of the big estate--“why did you choose these? Semon is a thief, and--”

“Once before they fooled us,” explained the peasant spokesman. “It may be true that the Tsar is no longer the ruler of Russia, but it may be just another trick. In 1905 they told us to send delegates to Petrograd, and what did they do? They put our people in prison. If this is a trick, they will put the thieves in jail and we will be well rid of them. If it is the truth, we can send others to take their places.”

Out on the banks of the ice-bound Yenesei, up on the northern edge of Archangel, down on the Bessarabian plain--all over the great white land--little handfuls of peasants, bundled up in their fur-lined _shubas_, were putting their canny caution to work on this thing that was said to have happened in the City of Peter.

It was a caution born of years filled with slaughtered hopes and broken promises. All over Russia men and women eager to believe in the dawn of freedom were fortifying themselves, in one way or another, against a recurrence of the disappointments of the past.

To the peasant, revolution means land, freedom means land. He knows land. He wants land. He thinks in terms of land. Land means food for his children, warmer _shubas_ for himself, and education for the next generation. Land means life.

No revolutionary party that did not make land to the peasants the first plank in its platform could hope to survive in Russia. Ever since Alexander freed the serfs, the peasant has believed himself the rightful owner of the land. Under serfdom the land-owners dictated the entire terms of living of the peasants. They were flogged, sent to military service, and even forced into unwelcome marriages, as punishment for trivial offenses. Even when they were exemplary in the eyes of their owners, their right to marry as they chose was subject to the whim or the economic advantage of their owner. In return for their services upon the estate of the land-owner, the serfs were allowed a certain amount of land from which to take their own living. It was to the advantage of the land-lords to feed his serfs sufficient to keep them in good condition for their service to him.

After the serfs were freed, the situation changed. The peasants, instead of receiving the land from which they were used to making their living, frequently received inferior land and a smaller quantity. Their bodies were free, but they found themselves economically more completely enslaved than they had been before. Their bitterness grew. In the early seventies there were agrarian uprisings in which bands of peasants burned the estates of the landlords. The landlord became the hereditary enemy, and the burning of his estate, which they regarded as their own, their habitual form of protest.

As soon as the peasants were convinced that a real revolution had taken place in Petrograd, they began demanding their land; and, since its distribution was delayed, they began to take it.

Many involved schemes of distribution were advocated by various groups. A minority believed in compensating the landlords, but the majority asked: “What is the use to pay for that which belongs to us? Why should we reward them for keeping us all these years from our own?”

The land program of the social revolutionists was the one that best met the demand of the mass of peasants, and they flocked to support it. After the success of the Bolshevist Revolution the right Social Revolutionists accused the Bolsheviki of having stolen their land program. Lenin and Trotzky replied that the plan of the Bolsheviki was to apply everything that was good, regardless of its origin.

How to capture and hold the support of the peasant was the chief problem of every revolutionary leader in Russia. The story of Nicholas Tchaikovsky, called the Grandfather of the Russian Revolution, who formed the first peasants’ council, is typical of the struggle. Tchaikovsky is one of the three survivors of the first revolutionary group. Before the March Revolution, Tchaikovsky, who had spent most of his life in exile or in prison, had made temporary peace with the government for the purpose of helping to win the war. He was working behind the lines along the front, establishing agricultural committees to sow the deserted land. When Rodzianko’s proclamation declaring the abdication of the Tsar reached him, he started immediately for Petrograd. He joined the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, but found himself entirely out of place there. He shook his fine old white head as he told me about it.

“I believed,” he said, “as I do now, that the defense of the country was the first consideration. Whenever I mentioned the war, they answered that the English and French bankers were the only ones who wanted the war to continue, and that the French and English people were as eager for peace as they were. Having lived in England for twenty-eight years, I knew better. I could not sleep. I lost my temper. They laughed at me. I found myself a reactionary, an imperialist. After three weeks I decided I could stand it no longer, and asked them to send a more patient delegate to take my place.

“I started to work to create a council of peasants to bring in a more sensible current. Delegates from twenty-seven provinces came, and on May 4 the council was held. There were thirteen hundred and sixty delegates, and a Central Executive Committee of two hundred and fifty members remained in Petrograd to carry on the work. About a hundred of these kept going back and forth to the provinces; but every time they came back they reported that the Bolshevist influence had swept through the local peasant councils, and they found themselves entirely out of the trend. Some of them became Bolsheviki. The others could not stem the tide, and soon we found that the peasants had a great distrust of the Central Executive Committee. What are we to do now?” he said. “I don’t know.”

Tchaikovsky was utterly at sea. Fine, brilliant old idealist that he was, he could neither control nor understand the course of the Russian mass. His executive committee was completely repudiated, and all he could do was to shake his head. His last hope was the Council of the Republic; and when that was disbanded by order of the Bolsheviki he was in despair. He came one day to a meeting of the railroad workers, where he made a speech of protest against the Council of People’s Commissaries, and threatened them with terroristic methods. His long beard shaking, his kind eyes aflame, he lifted his clenched fists and shouted:

“We know how to use the terror against tyrants. We have used it in the past, and we will use it again.”

I went to three national peasants’ conventions in Petrograd, another in Moscow. They started peacefully enough, but before they were over, the bearded men from the far-away places were shaking their fists in one another’s faces, and generally it ended with the majority going over to the left and the minority starting another convention all its own. Old Nicholas Tchaikovsky was left behind early in the struggle, and the contest for control of the peasants rested with Chernoff and Marie Spiridonova.

Soon after the Bolshevist Revolution, the peasants met in national convention, and there were stormy days and nights before the majority finally recognized the government of the People’s Commissaries and elected delegates to the National Council of the All-Russian Soviet. The peasants stated the terms upon which they would enter the Soviet. Trotzky and Lenin at first fought compromise on those terms. The peasants said they would enter the convention if they were given a representation of a hundred and eight members, but would accept nothing less than this, which was a number equal to that of the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Councils.

The agreement on the peasants’ terms was reached one morning at three o’clock, and the next day a great celebration took place. The Pavlovski regiment was chosen as honorary escort to the incoming delegates, and marched to the headquarters of the Executive Committee of the Peasants’ Soviets. They were joined by a great crowd of sailors, Red Guardsmen, and women. They marched with red banners, singing and cheering as they went.

At Smolney they crowded into the great auditorium, and packed the halls. They overflowed into the courtyard, and hundreds of them who could not get in held an impromptu meeting outside. They called it the Marriage Day of Revolution, and one patriarchal peasant well over his threescore and ten, with snowy hair and ruddy cheeks, a typical villager whose language was the crudely picturesque dialect of his _gubernia_, said:

“I was not walking to Smolney to-day. I was carried through the air on the wings of my enthusiasm.”

His name was Stackhoff, and there were still stranger days in store for him; for they were to put him on a train and whisk him away into the land of the Germans to take part in the armistice negotiations at Brest-Litovsk.

“We are all used to seeing young men fighting,” said a factory worker, thrilled by the words of the aged peasant; “but when we see such spirit and determination in the old, Russia can not perish.”

“Who will dare now to raise a threat against our Revolution, when it is defended by the masters of the land and the masters of the arms?” asked another.

Through the summer and winter the peasants kept flocking to Petrograd. Sometimes they were sent as delegates to a convention. Quite as often they came from some far-away province, sent by their fellow villagers to find out what was really going on in Russia.

The case of Mikhail Ivanovitch was typical. The gubernia where Mikhail lived was hundreds of versts from Petrograd. Mikhail had never been farther away from his little thatched hut than the distance of a fair day’s drive, there and back, for his sturdy Siberian pony. It was seven days after the overthrow of the Tsar before Mikhail knew there had been a revolution in Petrograd. The Korniloff fiasco had been replaced by a new crisis in the surging capitol before Mikhail and his friends put their heads to work on the tangled mystery. Eight months passed, and he and his neighbors were still groping about in the dark. They wanted to play their part, but they didn’t know what to do. When news of the Bolsheviki Revolution finally arrived, they made up their minds that Mikhail must go to Petrograd and find some one who would come back and tell them all about it.

There came a day when Mikhail stood up in the great white hall in Smolney, his voice trembling with excitement and his blue eyes, under the sun-bleached bangs of brown hair, wide with wonder.

“I came from far away,” he said. “We are dark there--very dark. We want to do the right thing, but we don’t understand. You must send some one to tell us. We will pay--the money does not matter. The revolution came, and they told us the ‘Little Father’ was no longer here. They told us we would have land and peace and implements for our farms. The same officials were still in the same offices, but instead of being cross and brutal to us they were polite to us now; yet they refused what we wanted just the same, and things did not get done any better than before. We were still poor, and they kept our land. Then you made a revolution. The officials were a little more polite, but that was all the difference.”

Mikhail hesitated for a moment, hunting for words.

“I know things have changed,” he said, “because it used to be that one could hardly even look at a palace, and now I may look at all the palaces as long as I like. I may go inside, and they tell me that I may even see Tsar Lenin himself.”

Mikhail was the first of the peasants who had called Lenin “Tsar,” and his audience roared with delight. They appointed a committee to take him to see the chief of the People’s Commissaries, and when they sent him back to his _gubernia_ there was little he did not know about the wild ways of revolution.

The Russian peasant is locally minded, and tied all his life to his one little patch of earth. He has thought little of Russia as a whole. Patriotism, as the French peasant knows it, is quite foreign in Russia. It was as easy for the Russian peasant to accept the doctrine of internationalism as that of nationalism. The Bolshevist idea of a community Soviet, electing delegates to a national Soviet, which could in turn elect delegates to an international Soviet forming the brotherhood of the peoples of all the world, appealed to his need for local self-government, and gave him at the same time a large ideal. It took little more effort to conceive oneself as belonging to a world than it took to imagine oneself part of an empire as vast as Russia.

Even the city workers have a strong pull back to the soil. Many of them work in the factories in the winter, and return to the villages to help harvest the crops in summer. A friend of mine asked an _izvostchik_ where he came from.

“I am one of Count Cherimesoff’s peasants,” he said.

“How long have you been in Petrograd?” my friend questioned.

“Thirty-five years,” he answered.

After thirty-five years he still thought of himself, not only as a peasant, but as the property of a particular estate.

I once said to a peasant from the government of Pskoff:

“Are you a Russian?”

“No; we are Pskovians.”

A hungry student, who went to Pskoff during the holidays for the purpose of getting enough to eat, visited the local Peasants’ Council. The business before the meeting had to do with a drunken member. He had been drinking _hunja_, a home-made substitute for vodka, and was captured with a bottle of it in his possession. The council discussed his case, and wrote a paper to send to the committee whose business it was to handle such offenders. It takes much time to write a paper at a peasants’ meeting, and while it was being compiled the bottle, which was to have been offered as evidence, was emptied of its contents. An investigation was made, and it was found that one of the peasants had drunk it. The council debated some minutes, then wrote at the bottom of the paper:

“The hunja being taken by Stepanoff, he is added to above-mentioned bottle and man, and sent to the committee.”

The local Peasants’ Soviets were not always as expeditious as an efficiency age might demand; but usually there was a crude, simple justice in their decisions that was unknown in the days when their destinies were decided by the high-handed officers of the Tsar.

Most of the land-owners insisted that the peasant was at heart bourgeois, and that his interest in revolution would cease as soon as he got his land. Not long after the Bolshevik Revolution, I talked one day with one of the former secretaries in the Foreign Office. He was managing the strike of the employees of the various ministries against the Soviet government, and explained an elaborate scheme by which he and his associates expected to cut off the grain districts of the south and starve the revolutionary masses of the cities into submission.

“The Bolsheviki,” he said, “are our real enemies. We don’t care about the theoretical Socialists--they just talk. But with the Bolsheviki it is a fight to a finish, and of course in the long run it can result only one way. When the soldier peasant returns to his earth and his family, he will become bourgeois. The peasant does not want to own land, as the Socialists want it. He wants his own private property. Eventually he will be on our side.”

Many of the revolutionists shared the same belief about the peasants; but thus far they had proved as Nicholas Tchaikovsky said--as radical as the city workers.

The greatest difficulty that each succeeding government experienced was that of making the peasants give up their grain. They wanted plows, cotton for their looms, shoes for themselves and their children; and the rubles they received had depreciated so greatly in value that they had no purchasing power. The peasants looked upon them as so many scraps of worthless paper.

A Russian who had two estates down in the south told me of an excursion that he made to the government of Chernigoff in September. He went there to try to induce the peasants to sell their grain to the army.

“There was one village,” said he, “where there were two thousand inhabitants. It was in the heart of the rich grain country. Since the previous December no official had been allowed to enter the village. The people had isolated themselves from the rest of Russia, and officials remained away under threat of being killed. I went alone on horseback, with a rifle and some ammunition. As I neared the place I saw the villagers coming out to meet me. I told them they must give bread to the army, which was in danger of starving at the front. I made what I thought was a forcible plea. When I finished, an old gray-haired peasant, who seemed to be the spokesman of the crowd, said:

“‘That’s all very clever talk, but now listen to what we have to say. You want our bread. You offer to give us five rubles a _pood_ (forty pounds). What is five rubles to us? We want to buy shoes. For shoes we must pay a hundred rubles. We will keep our grain.’

“‘All right,’ I answered. ‘If you want to keep your grain you can keep it; but you need petrol, and sugar for your tea, and iron for your plows. If you do not give us grain we will not give you these.’

“The old peasant smiled and beckoned me to follow him. He led me to a window where a couple of crude pine torches cut from a near-by wood had been placed.

“‘Those were the lights our grandfathers used,’ he said. ‘They are good enough for us. You can keep your petrol.’

“‘But sugar--you must have sugar for your tea.’

“‘Our grandfathers needed no sugar for their tea. They got along without tea, and they had as much bread as we have.’

“What about iron for your plows?’ I asked. Sure, here at any rate I had him stumped.

“He led me to a shed at the back of his house, and showed me a small, primitive, old-fashioned _sochar_ plow, in use now only in the most backward sections.

“‘Do you see that blade?’ he asked. ‘Our fathers used those, and they had bread. There’s enough steel on the old plows in the village to make new plows to last four years. You can keep your petrol and your sugar and your iron,’ he said triumphantly.

“‘You know,’ I said, playing my trump card, ‘we can bring troops down here and force you to give up your grain for the good of your country.’

“‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘We are only two thousand, and if you brought a whole regiment you could beat us. But we will recall our own peasants from the front, and when they come, do you suppose they will fight for you? No, they will fight for us.’

“It was no use--all threats had failed. I tried persuasion.

“‘But please, please,’ I said. ‘Your brothers are starving--please give us some grain for the army.’

“‘Yes,’ he said; ‘we will give you bread. We will give you two thousand _poods_ of bread for our brothers at the front.’

“‘We will be glad to pay you--’ I began.

“He interrupted.

“‘No,’ he said; ‘it is a present--we will not sell you bread. We have no use for your rubles. They are scraps of paper.’”

The same official told me that he had visited the village of Radouel, and found the people without bread, while two kilometers away the peasants were feeding bread to the pigs and selling the pigs for lard.

“Why should we sell bread for five rubles a _pood_, when we can get a hundred and twenty rubles a _pood_ for pork fat?” the peasants asked.

Price-fixing on grain in Russia had no good results. The peasant who could neither read nor write knew enough to realize that money is paper when its purchasing power is gone. Unless it could be transmuted into farm implements, it was of less value to him than his grain.

The dream of the Soviets was communally owned modern farm machinery that would lift Russian agriculture out of its primitive state and lessen the dreary drudgery of the peasant’s desperate struggle for life.

No one who has not seen those peasant homes can know the sordidness of that struggle. Often the live stock, which was the peasants’ entire fortune, shared the same roof with the family. In one peasant hut I found the cow occupying the most comfortable corner of the room. I picked my way to the door through a barn-yard full of oozing black mud and refuse. A flock of chickens ran in and out, leaving the marks of their feet on the floor; and the barefoot peasant’s wife, on her frequent excursions to and fro, tracked the vile-smelling slush in with her. Plumbing there was none. Except in the big cities, there is none worthy of the name in Russia. The peasant’s weekly steam bath is his one debauch of cleanliness.

Every village has its public bath. In the more primitive ones, a fire is built in a Russian stove. When the stones are thoroughly heated, tubs of water are thrown over them, and the steam pours forth. The bathers, after a good scrubbing, climb up on the wooden shelves that are built in tiers along the walls, and enjoy a thorough steaming. The fires are kept burning, and occasionally one of the bathers throws a fresh dipper of water on the stones.

The samovar was frequently the one luxury. In the days before the vodka prohibition, the white liquor was the peasant’s only escape from the sordidness of life. It was a poor escape, because it meant that his wife and children paid with greater misery for his momentary relief. The unhappy peasant, harassed by political and economic oppression, did what miserable people do the world over--tried to make some one else miserable. Usually the peasant took it out on his wife, who in turn took it out on the children. Given the least opportunity, the Russian is the kindest, simplest, happiest soul in the world. Illiterate as he is, he frequently reveals a deeper wisdom than his more fortunate brothers overseas. We can teach him plumbing and tilling and business management. We can help him to a knowledge of things that grow between the covers of books. But we can learn from him also--those truths that are minted in misery, those truths that come out of the depths of the forest and off the vast silent spaces of the steppe, into the soul of a man.