Chapter XIX: Women in the Revolution

There was no feminist movement in Russia.

People usually become class-conscious in response to class oppression. In the old days in Russia the rights of women were slightly fewer than those of men, but the difference was so small as to be negligible. Their separate grievance as a class was swallowed up in the greater grievance of the mass. Russia’s struggle was the struggle of human beings as human beings, rather than human beings as males or females.

In the days of the terrorists, women claimed the right to throw bombs as well as men. It was granted them. With equal generosity, the government rewarded them with hard labor, exile in Siberia, and even hanging. They spent their strength and their blood as lavishly, as recklessly, as courageously, as any of their brother Nihilists.

When freedom came to Russia, no one questioned the right of women to share it. Instead of becoming feminists, they became Cadets, Social Revolutionists, Mensheviki, Maximalists, Bolsheviki, Internationalists, or attached themselves to one or another of the parties and shadows of parties.

Here, as elsewhere, governmental honors were largely to the male; but the mundane business of making the world of meat and drink was largely left to women. Women in Russia do what women of the Western world do. At the big democratic convention in the Alexandrinski Theater, I counted the number of seats occupied by women. There were sixteen hundred delegates, and twenty-three of them were women. Many other women were in evidence, but they were behind the samovars, serving tea and caviar and sausage sandwiches. Some wore red armbands, ushered the men to their seats, took stenographic reports of proceedings, and counted ballots. It was so natural that it almost made me homesick.

Revolution did not lessen the burden that war had placed upon the back of the mass of Russian women. Increased disorganization of the country necessitated increased effort on the part of women to keep their families from starvation. They tilled the fields and tended the cattle; they swept the streets and mended the railway tracks, and stood for endless hours in front of the food-shops to get bread and milk for their babies. Their hopes were invested in the success of the Revolution just as firmly as those of their men, but they had less time for talking. They poured out of the factories to march, and once they were prepared even to fight. They were the silent heroines of revolution, as they had been of war; and, though they had much cause, they had little time for weeping.

Only five women climbed out of the mass to high seats of honor. They were Katherine Breshkovskaya, Marie Spiridonova, Countess Panina, Alexandria Kolontai, and Madame Bitsenko.

The age has produced no finer spirit in any land than that of the wonderful old Babushka (Grandmother) of the Revolution. The heights of joy and the depths of disappointment have been hers during the year; but she has remained, in spite of everything, the big, strong, steady soul who survived half a century and more of persecution that Russia might be free. Her long revolutionary life has been filled with every conceivable kind of suffering, but she never for a moment lost faith in the ultimate success of the cause to which she dedicated herself.

When the Revolution came, she was in exile in Siberia, and they brought her home and gave her a reception such as no queen has ever known. They took her protesting to the Winter Palace, and installed her there. She insisted on the tiniest little room to be found in the great building, and asked to be allowed to live in the simplicity she had always known. Her door swung always on a friendly hinge, and it was in this room, sitting behind a big flat-topped mahogany desk, that I first met her. She was seventy-three years old; but by the light in her eyes, the ring in her voice, and the courage in her soul, she appeared to me to be the youngest, the strongest, and perhaps the sanest person I had found in Petrograd.

An odd procession tramped up and down the marble staircase to place its hopes and fears in the crucible of her wise old head and her stout, kind old heart. Once I found her with a comrade of the old Siberian days, who came to her to mend his broken dream. He had fought and suffered for free Russia, and returned to find himself exiled anew to that saddest of all exiles. The young radicals spoke of him as “an old fogy,” and said, with a meaningful smile, of the man who had clanged his chains across the prison floor through many dreary years: “He calls himself a Socialist.” He came to the Babushka for a new faith in himself and tolerance of his accusers. She nodded, put a pair of motherly arms around him, and kissed him on both cheeks.

“Babushka knows. Have they not said that she was all very well for her day, but her day is done?”

When he had gone, she turned to me with a tiny sigh.

“It is a friend of mine,” she said--“a man who was twenty years in prison. Yet he is strong, but men--I think they are not so strong as women. I think they can not suffer so much. They have not such stout hearts. They get discouraged.”

Once a messenger from Kerensky interrupted us with news of a mutiny in one of the regiments.

“I must go immediately,” she said, “and talk to these naughty boys who have been listening again to bad advice.”

Another time an invitation from the American Red Cross came.

“Of course I will go to my dear Americans,” she said, “and spend the whole afternoon if they want me.”

We had no better friend in all of Russia. She loved America and Americans, and never tired of talking of her experiences in our country. She asked about Jane Addams, and Alice Stone Blackwell, Ernest Poole, and Arthur Bullard.

“They were all so good to me,” she said. “While I was in Siberia they sent me papers and letters. Not once did they forget me. That is how I learned to speak the English. I do not speak it very well.”

I asked what America could do to help Russia.

“Never let us alone,” she answered. “We need you. All that you do now, do more. We need you much. Our dangers are from ourselves only. Our interior construction is very difficult. When the war is over, our hands will be quite free. But that is difficult too, for our soldiers are tired, and very, very dark. They do not understand the danger to Russia. The country is large, rich--very rich, but not enough civilize-ed,” she said. “We need aid--we need teachers. How to do it--that is the question.”

We talked of Russian women.

“They are very good, our women. But they are not active enough; they are not energetic,” she said. “Before it was always waiting--what will be permitted. We had no liberty to act by ourselves. Now, when we have liberty, we have not the experience. I can work because I fear nothing. I fear-ed nothing all my life. I have always worked. The initiative is a great thing. You have much of it, but the Russian women--the instinct and the moral forces are all right, but there is not the will to do.”

Every big and little problem of Russia lay heavily on the grandmother’s heart; but she refused to permit her vision of the future to be blurred by the tragedies of the present. From the days of her childhood as the daughter of a wealthy land-owner, through solitary confinement in the dungeon of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, and dreary years of hard labor on the Siberian steppes, her life has always been touched with consciousness of the sorrow of others.

“When I look back upon my past life, I can not remember a time when my child soul did not suffer at the contradiction between reality and the teachings of Christ,” she said. “As a tiny girl of five, my heart was always breaking for some one else. Now it was for the driver, now for the chamber-maid, now for the laborer. Sometimes it was those poor oppressed serfs. Always I have known that I would go safely through everything and see the bright days of freedom. Always I was listening for the ringing of the bells, and wondering that they kept me waiting.”

At the opening meeting of the Council of the Republic, I saw Kerensky place the gavel in her hands and ask her to be the first presiding officer. It was as gracious and beautiful a tribute as has ever been paid to woman anywhere; and the old grandmother, a white kerchief over her snowy curls and another around her neck, graced her position.

I saw Babushka for the last time just before the fall of the Kerensky government. Immediately afterward she went into retirement. Stories of her arrest were spread broadcast over the world, but they were not true. The young revolutionists, though they differed from her politically, had far too profound a feeling of respect for her down in their hearts to harm her. She lived quietly in Petrograd for a time, on the fifth floor of an apartment-house. Later she went to Moscow.

I left Russia without seeing Babushka, but I learned that she was safe, and I knew that, in spite of disappointments, she was adjusting herself to the changed conditions and holding the faith that her country can not be permanently enslaved by a kaiser any more than it could be by a tsar.

Except for their courage and their revolutionary faith, no two women could be much more unlike than Breshkovskaya and little Marie Spiridonova.

If the annals of the Bolshevist government are truly written, they will record many a night when Marie Spiridonova and Nicolai Lenin matched wits and followers in the great game of revolutionary politics. Less than five feet tall and considerably under ninety pounds, she was the smallest and frailest but one of the most powerful persons in that vast country--the Little General of peasant Russia.

I see her always as I saw her many times during this great red Russian year--against a background of masses upon masses of burly figures in dun-colored coats, her tiny hands waving frantically in the air while she shouted, with all the force and fire of a spirit of flame:

“Tavarischi! Tavarischi! Tiche, tiche!” (Comrades! Comrades! Hush, hush!)

She rattled a futile little bell occasionally; but, in the midst of that clatter of dumb men who had suddenly found their tongues, its voice was like the bleat of a lamb.

She was as incongruous in those great crowds of hairy, horny sons of field and trench as the tinkling bell; yet she handled herself and her followers with the skill of a trained politician and the tact of a mother.

By all the laws of human limitations, she should be dead. She was sentenced to death by the order of the Tsar’s government, when she was a girl only just barely awakened to a knowledge of the tragedy of life in her native Russia.

In her first twenty-four hours in prison she died a hundred deaths at the hands of the Cossack officers charged with the pleasant duty of torturing her. Still she lived on, and her tormentors paid quietly, swiftly, and unofficially with their lives for what they had done to her. Marie Spiridonova’s companions had sworn that it should be so, and it was.

During ten years at hard labor in Siberia, death should have come to relieve her, but it did not.

When the news that Russia was free flashed across the steppes and into the vast white silences of northeastern Siberia, it found Marie Spiridonova alive and waiting.

Two bright red spots flamed on her thin cheek-bones, and her narrow chest was racked by a wicked cough. They brought her home to Petrograd and put her tenderly to bed in a refuge prepared for home-coming exiles--put her to bed to die.

Through the turbulent spring and summer she played her part in revolution from that narrow refugee cot. By fall she had become the central figure at every meeting of the peasants’ delegates, who were pouring ceaselessly into Petrograd from all parts of Russia.

Her story begins thirty years ago, in the government of Tamboof. There, in a little house not far from the prison where she was afterward incarcerated, Marie lived with her mother and two sisters. She received unusual educational advantages, and planned to be a doctor; but as she grew older she became so engrossed in the sorrows of the Russian people that she gave up all thought of everything but revolution.

Tamboof was in the grip of a governor notorious even beyond the borders of his _gubernia_ for his frightful cruelties. The peasants lived in hourly terror that he would set the Cossacks on them, order them flogged, or, worse still, burn their homes.

The stories of his cruelties mounted one upon the other; and to Marie Spiridonova, brooding over them, it seemed that she and this man could no longer breathe the air of the same earth.

They both chanced to be in a certain small village when a peasant girl was captured, submitted to frightful outrage by a band of Cossacks, and finally thrown into a lake.

The governor knew. He neither hindered nor punished. It was too much. There was one pair of violet eyes in the village that night that did not close. Marie Spiridonova lay awake until morning, and by morning she knew what she must do. She obtained a revolver. She found the governor of Tamboof at the railway station, with his Cossack guard. She fired five fatal shots before the Cossacks, with drawn swords, closed in on her. She saw them coming, and tried to take her own life, but they were too quick. They hurled her to the sidewalk, calling to each other to “Strike her! Slash her!” They dragged her down the steps, her head bumping as she went, and lifted her by her long brown braids into an _izvostchik_.

In the jail she was stripped and flogged and taunted with shouts of “Now, then, deliver us a thrilling speech!” They burned her body with lighted cigarettes, and stamped on her little feet with their heavy boots. When other forms of torture bored them, they kicked her back and forth across the cell from one to another like a football, shouting: “Now, then, tell us who your comrades are!” or, “Cry out then, you wretch, if you don’t like it!”

Marie Spiridonova did not cry out. She delivered no thrilling speeches. She spoke no comrade’s name. That is not the stuff of which the Russian Revolution was made.

The next night they took her back to Tamboof. Much of the time she was mercifully senseless, and remembers vaguely as a series of horrible nightmares her brief intervals of consciousness. They tried her, and sentenced her to death, and when they asked her on the day of judgment if she had anything to say for herself, she replied:

“I am about to be sent from this life. You may kill me over and over again, as you have already done. You may subject me to the most horrible penalties. But you can add nothing to what I have already endured. I do not fear death. You may kill my body, but you can not destroy my belief that the hour of the people’s freedom and happiness is coming.”

The story of Marie Spiridonova rang from one part of the world to the other. It made little difference what the governor or the Tsar did to her, for in that hour the Russian people enthroned her in their hearts. Her youth, the depth of her passion, her tiny, frail, girlish form,--even her name itself,--became a pledge-word by which men swore that Russia should be free.

In France they formed a league to save her, and England and America were quickly aroused to pity and to action. Perhaps because of the storm of protest at home and abroad, the death sentence was commuted to hard labor in Siberia. Marie Spiridonova asked no mercy for herself. She rejected personal pity.

“If the people of America are interested in the fate of this Russian girl, tell them they must rather interest themselves in the fatherland of this girl,” she said. “I want nothing personally, because for a long time I have not existed personally. My heart and my soul are given to the cause of the people.”

It is so with all the Russian revolutionists. Theirs is a movement of ideas rather than of individuals. They shrink from discussing themselves as individuals, and prefer always to dwell upon the cause for which they fight.

In spite of this, the life of a revolutionist goes on in much the same channels as that of other people. They have their personal joys and sorrows, their great loves and little hates, their happiness and their own small individual heartbreaks. Marie Spiridonova was no exception to this rule. While she was in exile she met Alexander Dekonsky, a revolutionist from south Russia. He was young like herself, and apparently as full of revolutionary fire. They had their cause in common, and youth and life and loneliness. They fell in love.

In the prison where Marie Spiridonova was incarcerated there were nine other women politicals. When the news came that Russia was free, the order of release contained the names of only eight of them. The jailer read them slowly, and the women looked from one to another with faces of joyful unbelief. The impossible was a fact. The thing for which they had dreamed and worked and suffered, and for which many of their comrades had already died, had happened. The jailer came to the end of the list. Two sharp streaks of pain appeared in the eyes of the two neglected ones. With trembling lips they spoke.

“What about us?” they asked forlornly.

The jailer shook his head. He was going to take no chances. The Revolution might not be such a success as it appeared. He would wait for other advices.

“You stay,” he answered.

“Then none of us will go!” said Marie Spiridonova, with one of those impulsive decisions characteristic of her.

They settled back to more waiting; but the prison walls that day could not keep down their bounding spirits or shadow their joy.

The next day a second telegram arrived, ordering the release of the two neglected ones, and the ten started joyfully on their pilgrimage to Petrograd.

Their journey was a triumphal procession through the length of Siberia. No other but Babushka received such a welcome as that which the people gave to this slip of a girl who had won the distinction of being the most famous and most loved of all the “Terrorists” of Russia.

She needed all the love and sympathy that Russia could give her, for she was soon to bear a greater torture than any that gendarmes or Cossack officers had been able to invent for her.

When the records of the _Okhranka_ (the secret police) were captured, they contained the names of the spies and _provokators_ who for years had been masquerading as revolutionists only that they might betray their comrades to the agents of the Tsar. The name of Alexander Dekonsky was on the list. According to the records, there was documentary evidence to prove that he was the chief _provokator_ of all the great South Russian district, and that many revolutionists had paid with their lives on the gallows for their faith and friendship for him. Marie Spiridonova was sick in bed when they told her the news. Dekonsky had been arrested by the Soviet of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies at Odessa, and was imprisoned there.

Once again death crept close to the frail form of Marie Spiridonova, and once again death refused to release her. She lived through this as she lived through other tragedies. For three weeks she hid herself away from all her old friends. During this time Dekonsky escaped from prison. Many Russians believe that he was released by his guards at the request of his sweetheart of Siberian days. When Marie Spiridonova once more appeared in Petrograd, she gave out a public statement in which she declared Dekonsky innocent; then she threw herself more intensely than ever into the Revolutionary struggle.

I met her first at the Democratic Convention in the Alexandrinsky Theater. She sat in the front row, surrounded, as always, by men whose huge bulk emphasized her smallness. Her hair was done in two braids, wrapped around her face, and pulled rather low on her forehead to hide the scars the Cossack officers had left there. She wore, as always, a severe blue serge dress with a turnover collar of white lawn, and the severity of her clothes accentuated the Quaker look of her. The red spots burned brighter than ever on her cheek-bones that night, and her violet eyes were like tiny candles set in deep shadows. She was the spokesman of her party, the radical wing of the Social Revolutionists, and occasionally she walked to the platform and delivered a brief but intense appeal on behalf of her group.

The political situation was critical. Kerensky was already balancing on a tight-rope. The cry of “All Power to the Soviets,” was growing louder and more insistent. Marie Spiridonova, though she was not a Bolshevik, inclined toward the Bolshevist program. She knew that the land-hunger of the peasants could not long go unsatisfied, and that no government that did not recognize this immediate demand could possibly survive. To those of us who believed that the wisest policy for Russia was to stand by Alexander Kerensky, the intense little bundle of enthusiasms that was Marie Spiridonova seemed a real fire-brand.

In the tea-room where, in intermissions, we worshiped at the shrine of the bubbling samovar, or lined up at the counters for black bread and butter sandwiches, I had the first of many talks with her. She seemed pathetically frail and exhausted, and told me that she was sleeping only about two hours a night. All day long, in and out of convention, the peasants came flocking to see her, and would talk to no one else. When she wasn’t in convention, or party caucus, or meeting delegations from the front and the villages, she was editing a newspaper for distribution among the peasants.

When the November Revolution overthrew the coalition government and placed the Bolsheviki in power, it was the voice of Marie Spiridonova more than any other that brought about the combination of the left Social Revolutionists and the Bolsheviki.

She argued that to stay aloof from the government of the People’s Commissaries was to put oneself, in effect, on the side of the counter-revolutionists. She was offered a place in the Cabinet, but refused, believing she could do better work simply as a leader of the peasants. Many times in the year I have seen her and Chernoff contest for the control of the bearded men in the faded brown coats, and in the end little Marie Spiridonova always came away with the honors.

The first woman to accept a place in the Cabinet was Countess Panina, who became Assistant Minister of Public Welfare in one of the early Kerensky governments, and was later transferred to the Department of Education. Countess Panina was perhaps the best representative of a small group of big-spirited, high-thinking women of the aristocracy who were in protest against the oppression of the Tsar. She was a rebel in the days of autocracy, but the ever-increasing radicalism of the revolutionists made her seem more and more the conservative as the months went on. She did a big job as well as the facilities permitted, until her arrest following the downfall of Kerensky.

Her successor was Alexandria Kolontai, the Bolshevik. I had imagined Kolontai as a large woman with short black hair and a defiant manner--a picture conjured unconsciously from all the wild stories about her that were afloat. Instead, she was a mild-looking little person, with large soft blue eyes, and wavy brown hair tinged with gray, caught in a simple knot behind her head. She had been arrested following the July riots, when an effort was made to prove Lenin and Trotzky pro-German; but she was released because of lack of evidence to hold her.

I met her first at Smolney Institute, immediately after the Soviet had taken over the government. The Bolsheviki were trying to form the first Council of the People’s Commissaries. Kolontai had been mentioned as Commissary of Welfare. A friend introduced me to her, and we had tea together. She proved to be a simple, cultured, gracious person, and the author of an extensive and authoritative volume on the subject of maternity compensation.

“Are you going to be a minister?” I asked her.

“No, indeed,” she answered, with a laugh. “If I were to be a minister, I should become as stupid as all ministers.”

Notwithstanding her denial, she was installed a few days later in the Ministry of Welfare. Several months afterwards I went to see her, to ask about facilities for the distribution of the condensed milk that the Red Cross had just received from America. I wickedly reminded her of that other day.

“And I am getting stupid,” she said. “But what are we to do? There are so few of us to do the work.”

Kolontai was a product of the upper class. She was married to a Russian engineer, and, according to the story she told me, had never even thought of social conditions until 1889, when she went with her husband to spend a week in a factory town.

“I was given permission to spend my days in the factory, and it made such a profound impression on me that it changed my whole life. I went away feeling I could not live unless I did something to help change the condition of the Russian workers. I knew no Socialists, but I began to read, and found my way to Socialism through books. Later I went to Zurich and took a course in economics, became a revolutionist, and spent nine years in exile.”

Kolontai shares the general Bolshevist feeling of the hopelessness of their cause, but she said:

“Even if we are conquered, we have done great things. We are breaking the way, abolishing old ideas. The creative work of lifting the culture of the world will come first to other countries.”

She changed the name of the Ministry from Social Welfare to Social Security, to make it more in keeping with the Soviet idea of benefits as a right rather than a gift. The revenue for the department was raised largely by a monopoly on playing cards. They were sold at thirty rubles a dozen. Kolontai, on the theory that cards were not a necessity of life and therefore should be heavily taxed, raised the price to three hundred and sixty roubles a dozen. The purchasers complained, but ordered as many as three hundred to five hundred decks.

When Kolontai took charge, the officials went on a strike and took the key from the treasury. For two weeks the whereabouts of the key remained a mystery. Then Kolontai sent for a band of Red Guard and sailors, and her order, backed by their bayonets, was obeyed.

She reorganized the department from below, but installed democratic management, giving every employee a vote. There were four thousand minor employees drawing very miserable salaries, while a few figureheads received as much as twenty-five thousand rubles a year. She readjusted the scale so that six hundred rubles a month became the highest salary paid any one.

There are two and a half million maimed soldiers in Russia, and in January there were four million others who were sick or wounded. These, and nearly a half a million dependent children, came under the care of the department.

Russia’s infant mortality rate is the highest of any so-called civilized country. Kolontai, in an effort to correct this, opened a Palace of Motherhood, with a maternity exhibition and training classes to prepare a mother for the coming of her child. She planned this as a model for similar houses to be established all over Russia. It was arranged that mothers could come there for eight weeks prior to the birth of the child, and remain for eight weeks afterward, while substitute mothers went into the homes to take care of the other children.

Several measures were passed by the Council of People’s Commissaries to protect maternity, and these were under the jurisdiction of Kolantai’s department. The work-day for nursing mothers was reduced to four hours, and a compulsory rest period before and after the birth of the child was established.

“Little republics” were established in all the homes for older children and for the aged, and self-government was introduced. The social program included an adequate scale of compensation for the disabled victims of the war, many of whom were forced to beg on the streets. This entailed a tremendous expenditure, and I asked Madame Kolontai how it would be possible to raise so much money.

“We found money for war,” she answered. “We shall find money for this.”

She asserted that graft in the department reached into millions of rubles, and that the elimination of this alone would go far toward realizing some of her schemes. She proposed also requisitioning the monasteries and convents, which were the repositories of untold wealth in lands and jewels, and turning them into children’s homes and asylums.

Madame Bitsenko, the fifth member of the group, was the only woman on the peace delegation to Brest-Litovsk. The peace delegation had been gone from Petrograd several days before I even learned there was a woman among the envoys. Daddy R. spoke of her quite casually one morning.

“What, a woman on the peace board!” I said in amazement. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I didn’t think anything of it.”

It was rather typical of the Russian attitude. It didn’t occur to any one to be surprised to find a woman in a position of power. There was no more sex-consciousness on the part of the men than on the part of the women.

A few other women were flashed upon the revolutionary screen, in one capacity or another. Vera Figner did a notable piece of work for the home-coming exiles. Madame Sheskina Javien’s name was associated with the suffrage fight, and there were several women doctors who played an unspectacular but very necessary rôle.

Russian women are handicapped, like Russian men, by lack of experience. Up to the time of the Revolution, women were allowed to study law, but not to practise it. Many women studied law for the sheer joy of putting their brains to work on solid food; but when they had digested the theory, there was no practice upon which to test it. Well rounded human beings are developed in combined thought and action. The intelligent Russian woman has a larger fund of general cultural knowledge than the average educated American, but she has been denied the opportunity for applying her knowledge as she acquires it.

Russian women talk brilliantly upon many subjects, but most of them jump quickly about from one subject to another, and frequently, after an hour of conversation with one, I found myself groping frantically about, trying to reduce what had been said to a few simple facts capable of application.