Chapter XX: Revolution Takes a Holiday

Ex-Tsar Nicholas and two able-bodied assistants could have conducted a successful counter-revolution on December 25, 1917. But the Tsar, whatever else may be said of him, was a Russian, so he was otherwise engaged.

On a holiday no Russian, high or low, orthodox, old believer or unbeliever, Jew or Gentile, has time for anything but play. The Russian calendar, lagging nearly two weeks behind the schedule of western Europe, provided the foreigners with a double portion of festivity. In the midst of war and revolution, we not only celebrated Christmas, but we celebrated it twice.

To my sunshine-fed California soul, that Christmas stepped ready-made from a fairy tale. The lazy lie-abed sun doesn’t get up until nearly noon, and before the afternoon is half gone it has brushed the snow with streaks of coral and rose, and departed, leaving a glowing memory painted upon the horizon.

Petrograd, before she puts on her white cloak of winter, is just a bit shabby. The red and yellow stucco palaces could do with a new coat of paint. Here and there the plaster is badly in need of patching, and the ornate scroll-saw ruffles around the buildings are pathetically like cheap lace. When the beauty of winter comes toppling out of the heavens, she stretches her arms and catches it all. The snow piles in billows on roofs and chimneys, and the icicles hang like crystal fringes from the woodwork. Against the background of the white snow, the faded yellows and the bricky reds become warm and glowing. The little trees in the palace courtyards, stripped of leaves and clothed in swan’s feathers, are like ghosts or shadows of trees, so vague and frail they are.

Christmas against such a background must have elements of beauty, however empty the shops or troubled the people. Vera and Ivan take their play-time seriously. Because they wept yesterday and die to-morrow, they play the more lustily to-day. Though revolution raged, machine-guns rattled, and cabinets fell, the ballet pursued its uninterrupted course to the end of the season. At the Marinsky Theater, Karsavina and Smirnova fought to hold the honors of the dance against all new comers, and Shalyapin sang the parts that made him famous in the days of Nicholas with all his accustomed gusto. When the proper time arrived, the winter slides for the children were put in their usual places in the parks, and until the snows came the “American mountain” (roller-coaster) in the Russian Coney Island had done a record-smashing business.

Of course they would celebrate Christmas--revolution or no revolution! It never occurred to any one that it might be otherwise.

As the date of our holiday drew near, my Russian friends plied me with questions. To the chef of the Hotel Europe, an American mince pie was a riddle without an answer. The Red Cross Mission gave a luncheon for the American correspondents Christmas Day, and Major Allen Wardwell and I were commissioned to go shopping. Colonel Robins suggested turkey, mince pie, and a Christmas tree as desirable trimmings, and we had great fun and many adventures achieving them.

The luncheon table was set in a large, high-ceilinged room with red velvet hangings. A crackling fire blazed on the hearth, and in the center of the table a gleaming tree stepped from a mossy bed of crimson tulips. We pulled down the blinds and shut out war and revolution, while we laughed merrily over the Russian conception of mince pie, and wondered secretly, each in his own terms, what they were doing off there across the world at home.

Major Thatcher and Major Webster had the bad judgment to choose that day upon which to go to bed with colds, so we had a second celebration in their rooms. On the way back to the hotel, I stopped at the old police station to leave a book and a “Merry Christmas” for Jacob Peters.

“It’s a Christmas box,” he said, a wistful smile lighting his tired face. He was weary and disillusioned and hungry for an open fireplace, his little girl, and his British “missis.” “There is nothing in the world like an English Christmas,” he said.

We talked for a few minutes, then I hurried back to the hotel to dress. In the National City Bank Building, that night, the whole American colony came out to celebrate Christmas. That party was a triumph, taxing all the ingenuity of a clever woman and half a dozen resourceful men. It was a supper dance, and the miracle of providing food for two hundred people with Petrograd’s cupboard stripped almost bare was a real achievement. The presiding genius was Mrs. Mildred Farwell, an American who quietly did any number of nice things not only for the Americans, but for many poor stranded Russians whose lives had unfitted them to meet the topsy-turvy order.

All Russia contributed to load the buffet with eatables of the “kind that mother used to make,” and many a Russian cook was a wiser person before the party was over. They brought baking powder from Vladivostok, six thousand versts away, to make American layer cakes. The eggs came from Pskoff, up near the Russian front. The Ambassador’s pantry was robbed of its white flour. And the turkeys came from heaven knows where.

In the days before the war the National City Bank Building was the Turkish Embassy, and for a night it took on all its former glory. The huge mirrors reflected a whirling company of women in shimmering frocks and men whose evening clothes had not been out of their creases for many a day. There was a balalika band, and between one-steps and waltzes couples chattered in palm-secluded corners. Not a speech was made that night. Mrs. Farwell was determined that we should play, and play we did.

December 25 on the Russian calendar fell on Monday. Sunday morning I crossed the Neva with a friend, and drove to the quiet woods out on the islands. It was a favorite haunt of mine; for here winter, whose mysteries I was discovering for the first time, was at its best. The bough-bent pines and spruces groaned beneath the white weight upon their outstretched arms, and the deserted forests were big, silent, and untroubled.

To-day the woods came marching toward me. Along the sidewalk a procession of shabby men and worn-looking women hurried homeward, and over the shoulder of each was a tiny tree. In the forest we found the scars--lovely pines clipped off at the top, baby spruces cut off at the roots, familiar families broken up.

“It’s a shame,” said my companion warmly. “It’s vandalism, nothing else.”

At first I too could see only the scars there in the great whiteness. Then it was night, and through the windows of Petrograd I saw the trees. They were candle-lighted, and the shining eyes of little children looked upon them with delight.

“It’s the price,” I said. “A different destiny, but who knows--perhaps a happier one. Perhaps it is better to make the gift of a glorious hour, to find immortality in the memory of a child, than to live on to a green old age.”

“Perhaps,” he said.

That afternoon, along the Sadovaya, where peasant women and crippled soldiers sold herrings and candles, apples and sausages, crude toys and painted cradles, sugarless candy and ugly dolls, I found the mothers of Petrograd pathetically trying to contribute to that hour. They paid thirty rubles a dozen for tiny apples, and twelve rubles a pound for candy. It was a lean Christmas, but it was Christmas nevertheless. The world stopped for three days; war, revolution, hunger, mattered not. All of them must make way for Christmas. The restaurants and the hotel dining-rooms were closed, and, unless we had taken the precaution to lay in a supply of sardines beforehand, or had friends with a farther vision than our own, we might have gone hungry.

At midnight Christmas Eve I crossed the square to St. Isaac’s for the Christmas service. The church was deserted. I stood alone in the dark under the towering columns, waiting; but nobody came. Back in the hotel, I discovered that the service was to be at four in the morning. At four, with some friends, I returned. This time the church was lighted, and the priests were there in their gold robes. There was a table where communion bread and candles were for sale. We bought the bread and the candles, and listened while the rich, deep voices of the priests sang the holiday mass. In other days that church had been packed. This morning it was practically empty. A few servant girls, a few soldiers, here and there a tired mother with four or five children--that was all. They were celebrating, but not in the cathedrals.

We went back to the hotel to make tea and to fight the battles of the world--religion, economics, wars, and all the rest of it--until seven o’clock. At the Europe that night we relit the tree, and sat around the fire, talking of home.

During the holiday week all of Petrograd went to the ballet, or the opera, or some other place of amusement within its means. There were morning matinées and afternoon matinées and festival performances of all sorts.

One afternoon we had a box at the Marinsky Theater. The ballet was “The Hunchback Horse.” The old Russian fairy tale, in its wonderful Bakst setting, was done as it is done in Petrograd and nowhere else. Another night it was a festival performance of Glinka’s opera, “Russlan and Ludmilla,” celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of its initial production. Shalyapin sang, and there was a gorgeous ballet with costumes that must have come from the treasure-chests of ancient nobles.

Another afternoon I was going with Edgar Sisson, Arthur Bullard, and some other Americans to hear “Boris Gudonof.” I arrived at the theater, and found myself sole occupant of the box. I sat there, wondering what had happened to every one else and turning possible revolutions over in my mind, when a messenger arrived with word that a message from President Wilson was coming over the wires.

It was the thing for which we in Petrograd had hoped above everything else in the world. Russia in that hour seemed utterly alone. She had been pleading with the other powers to state their war aims and to come to a peace conference, but they had remained silent. At last America was speaking. The message came in fragments, a bit here and a bit there. It was two days before we had the full text; but we knew from the first paragraph that President Wilson was sounding Russia’s right to the friendship and the protection of our country.

There is, moreover, a voice calling for these definitions of principle and of purpose which is, it seems to me, more thrilling and more compelling than any of the many moving voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian people. They are prostrate and all but helpless, it would seem, before the grim power of Germany, which has hitherto known no relenting and no pity. Their power, apparently, is shattered, and yet their soul is not subservient. They will not yield either in principle or in action. The conception of what is right, of what is humane and honorable for them to accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness of view, a generosity of spirit, and a universal human sympathy which must challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind; and they have refused to compound their ideas or desert others that they themselves may be safe. They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in what, if in anything, our purpose and our spirit differs from theirs; and I believe that the people of the United States would wish me to respond with utter simplicity and frankness. Whether their present leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace.

All that week Russia celebrated busily and gaily. On New Year’s Eve I found myself at the peasants’ headquarters on the Fontanka Canal. There were about a hundred of us crowded together in a small room to watch the New Year come to Petrograd. Marie Spiridonova was our hostess.

We sat on benches at long tables, and ate soup, roast pig, meat cutlets, and Russian pasties made of light bread and filled with chopped cabbage and chopped meat.

The room was lit with candles planted in the necks of bottles or poised upon the pointed spears of desk-files. In one corner was a Christmas tree, a sad little tree with crude red crape paper ornaments and anemic-looking candles. Outside the door, lighting the hall, where from time to time we adjourned to dance the Russian waltz or the mazurka, was a single kerosene lamp.

Beside me sat a pale-faced girl with short hair, deep circles beneath her eyes, and that look of utter exhaustion which characterized all the revolutionists in those disappointing days full of the weary work of trying to make reality match dreams.

At the end of the table was a typical great Russian peasant, his gray belted blouse buttoned beneath a shaggy growth of blond beard, his round blue eyes wide with questions. The toast-master was a Russian Jew with the face of a poet or a musician. The year before he would not have been allowed to live in certain parts of Petrograd unless he paid a bribe to some official for overlooking the fact of his race. This hour was his. Whatever the new year might hold, he had been a free man among men. A year since he had been an exile in a strange land, and “free Russia” a shadowy dream. A year hence-- No one could say; no one could think that far. They took the moment, conscious of all its possibilities, and gloried in it.

It was a strange evening’s entertainment--an odd but typical Russian mixture of comedy and tragedy. They made speeches, and parodied the eloquence of the day by talking a strange and meaningless jumble of words, switching with lightning rapidity from one topic to another, while the crowd rocked with laughter at the strange effects they produced. Just at the merriest moment, when the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs had been tried and found guilty of a number of amusing offenses against the Revolution, and the company had voted to deprive him of his _sladky_ (dessert), some one proposed that they sing the hymn of eternal memory to the comrades who had fallen in the Revolution. Silently they stood, and, while the church bells outside chimed a requiem to the great red year of tragedy and glory, they sang the solemn tribute to their dead.

Marie Spiridonova went from table to table, trying to make the strange ones feel at home. She was sitting beside me, quietly talking, when a sudden murmur ran through the crowd and a flare of light touched the ceiling. We looked up to find the doorway filled with flames. The lamp had caught fire. The little revolutionist made a bound toward it, and threw a coat over the burning mass. The spirit of panic had run like flames through the room, and at least half of the occupants were on their feet, rushing for the door. Spiridonova lifted her tiny hands and waved them as I have seen her do so many times in the peasants’ conventions.

“Tavarischi! Tavarischi! Tiche! Tiche!” she cried, and they settled quietly back in their places.

On New Year’s night the first volunteer army of the Revolution left Petrograd for the front. They gathered in the Mikhailovsky Menage, which has seen many strange meetings in the revolutionary year. In the old days the aristocracy came here to watch “officers and gentlemen” take part in riding competitions. Since the war it has been used as a garage for armored motor-cars, and many a sharp contest between revolutionary leaders took place here. The meeting was called for two o’clock, and Nicolai Lenin was to review the forces. As usual, it was seven before the ceremonies started. Two armored cars, decorated with evergreens and red banners, stood watch at the entrance. Inside a third armored car had been trimmed for use as a tribunal. On either side of the huge building were rows of formidable mud-colored motors.

The place was swarming with men. They were a tatterdemalion lot, who made up in spirit what they lacked in equipment. There were a few soldiers among them, but most of them were factory workers. They had no uniforms, no blankets; some of them wore short jackets and some of them long coats. They were going they knew not where, but going to fight the foes of revolution. Their tin pails and meager packs were strapped to their backs or tied on with rope or string, and each man’s most precious possession was his rifle. They were bound for the trenches, to fill up the gaps left by deserting soldiers. Most of them were undersized; some were mere boys; but all were fired with faith in their cause.

Dark settled early upon the big garage. By four o’clock it was quite black. For a while we stood there, unable to distinguish one face from another, listening to them sing. Then candles were brought. One man came with a balalika, another with a tambourine, a third with an accordion. They struck up a lively village tune, and a couple of soldiers, packs and guns still on their backs, began to dance. A ring was quickly formed, and, one after another, the men from the various provinces clicked off the favorite dances of their villages. Three times the word came that Lenin had arrived, and the men lined up to salute him. Each time it was a false alarm, and they went back to their dancing.

At last he came, and a mighty cheer went up. His brown eyes were shining, and the chill winter evening had painted two bright spots upon his cheeks. He wore a black fur cap and a black overcoat, and there was a brisk, pleasant cheeriness about him that the rogues’-gallery pictures of him do not suggest.

“He looks like a prosperous French bourgeois banker,” said an Englishman standing beside me.

“No,” I answered; “more like a contented Irishman behind a freshly filled pipe.”

I was standing beside the tribunal, and he stopped to shake hands with me before he climbed to the improvised platform. He spoke briefly, telling the men that the fate of the Revolution was in their hands and they must guard it against all foes. He spoke well, but without the eloquence with which I had seen Trotzky sweep so many crowds.

When he had finished, the chairman asked Albert Williams to speak. He had been studying Russian strenuously, and decided to try to talk to the men in their own language. They were as delighted as children over his effort, and when he began groping frantically for a word, Lenin laughingly supplied it. When he finished they cheered him until the building rocked. He had stolen the honors from the Commissary of Commissaries, and none was more pleased than Lenin himself.

He talked with us for a few minutes, then drove away in a closed limousine with two or three other men. He had hardly got out of sight when a bullet came crashing through the windows of his car and whizzed over his head. A man sitting beside him was slightly injured, but Lenin was unhurt. It was the first of many attempts upon his life. No one ever knew who had fired the shot. The next holiday date on the Russian calendar was January 8. That was the day of the “Blessing of the Waters.” Except for the great Easter, there was formerly no holier day in all of Holy Russia. All over the Empire the people, from the Tsar in the Winter Palace to the simplest peasant in the most remote village, always turned out in festival processions. The priests, in splendid robes, with painted ikons and silken banners held aloft, marched to the banks of the frozen rivers, followed by the singing multitudes. This year the great day passed unnoticed.

At the appointed hour for the ceremony I left the War Hotel and crossed the square to the huge St. Isaac’s Cathedral. I looked through the door into a vast empty cavern. I made my way toward the Neva. There was no procession in sight. Not a living thing was abroad on the banks of the river. Instead of the usual mighty gathering, a handful of people, perhaps a dozen at most, had started out, grown discouraged, and turned back. For the first time in the memory of the oldest peasant in Russia, the waters went unblessed.

It was a significant fact. When the Tsar crashed down from his throne in March, he carried more with him than the rest of the world dreamed at that moment. His picture shared a place on the wall beside the sacred ikon. He represented on earth that which God represented in heaven. It was a dangerous partnership; for when the state fell, the Church tottered also.

The Russian Church of the past was on the side of the established order. It was as much a tool of absolutism as the secret police. The priests were used to help intrench the Tsar, enforce the will of the bureaucracy, and carry out the orders of the gendarme. The deep religious craving of the Russian nature was perverted to keep the people in subjection. The Church was not of the people, nor for the people. When the great crisis came, they repudiated it. Despite all attempts at democratization, the people drifted further and further away. The lamps before the sacred shrines on the street-corners went out, and the number of the passers-by who stopped to cross themselves grew smaller and smaller. The great power of the Russian Church, around which so much of the life of the past clustered, was gone. No one could predict what the future would hold. On that day there was some discussion about it. Some said that reaction would come and a disillusioned people would return to their old gods.

“Some day,” I heard one Russian say, “the peasant will awake in the midst of his misfortunes, and recall that on January 8, 1918, the waters were not blessed. To this he will attribute all his troubles.”

The Russian peasant, mystic, simple, childlike person that he is, accepts or rejects the whole. In his past the Church pervaded every aspect of his life. It was one of the few streaks of color that pierced the drabness of existence. When his disillusionment came, it was complete.

Some said that the Russian would attempt to construct an ethical religion upon the ruins of the picturesque orthodox church; some that he will substitute a new faith for his saints of other days. Some hope that the freed priests, whose very existence depended upon their submission to the evils of the old order, may become new leaders and helpers.

No one can tell. In the meantime, the candlesticks before the ikons are empty.