Chapter II: Diplomats--Official and Otherwise

It was less than a week after my early morning advent in Petrograd when I once more passed before the candle-lighted ikons in the Nicolaiski Station and out to the platform. This time the station was far from deserted. A line of soldiers, a picked escort of stalwart men in dun-colored coats, stood at attention. The tall, dark, handsome young Foreign Minister, Tereshchenko, towered above the genial white-vested person of the American Ambassador Francis. The American colony was out in force.

The Provisional Government of Russia, successor of Tsar and bureaucracy, between Cabinet crises and food problems, had found time to prepare to entertain. Ambassador-Extraordinary Root and the special diplomatic mission to Russia were due to arrive at any moment.

Earlier in the day I had wandered curiously through the great corridors of the rambling old Winter Palace and watched the servants putting the finishing touches upon the mansion of the Czars. With the true Russian sense of the dramatic, the new hosts of all the Russias had chosen to be at home to their republican brothers from over the seas in the very premises where royal heads were once held highest and lackeys’ backs once bent lowest.

The huge red stucco building--acres and acres of it--had been swept and dusted and polished until Nicholas himself could have found no spot at which to point the imperial finger of disapproval. The big mahogany bath-tub in the ambassador’s suite had been scrubbed for the last time. The nudity of the tiny ultra-modern brass bed, cowering behind the crushed-mulberry curtains, had been only partly covered with fresh linen and a new silk eiderdown quilt. The huge oval-topped mahogany table from which Peter the Great had taken his caviar and vodka was prepared to serve ham and eggs American style. As I looked from behind the pink silk curtains out on the blue waters of the Neva, sparkling in the spring sunshine, I wondered what the coming of these Americans would mean to Russia.

While official Russia was getting ready to welcome my countrymen, I had been trying to find out what unofficial Russia was thinking about. With the help of an interpreter, I had been listening to the babble of voices that sounded through the golden days and white nights. Already I had learned that revolution is a term as variable as truth, and newly mined by every man who speaks it.

I discovered that the Revolution that overthrew the Tsar and absolutism was a simple thing, beautifully logical, gloriously unanimous. Every one wanted it; every one was glad when it came. The monarchy that had brought such desperate misery to the millions crumbled to dust with the first vigorous blow of the rising peoples like a thing long since dead. The heavy heart of Russia lifted in a mighty shout of joy: “Svoboda! (Freedom.) We are free!”

For the moment this was enough. That single word, with its age-old power of placing man on the mountain-tops, made Russia happy.

Soon her people began to be specific.

“Freedom for the peasant,” they said. “Freedom for the worker.” “Freedom for the soldier.” “Freedom for the Jew.” “Freedom for women.”

Russia still rejoiced, but with certain vague mental reservations faintly disturbed by this diversity. Then came definition. Each man translated revolution into the terms of his own life.

Nicolai Voronoff, whom I met at dinner one night, voiced the conservative intellectuals’ idea of freedom.

“Things could not go on as they were,” he said. “We had to have freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, inviolability of person--freedom as you Americans and English know it.”

Old Chekmar, the peasant delegate from a remote south Russian village, spoke of freedom in terms of land.

“Freedom for the peasant,” he said. “Yes, yes, land--we shall have land. The Tsar Alexander gave it to us when he freed the serfs, but the landlords have kept it away. Mother earth--it is ours at last!--God’s and the people’s.”

Chekmar tossed his fine old head in a gesture of pride and exaltation as he said it, and his dull blue eyes were lit with the fervor of young ideals.

The same light was in the eyes of Andrey Krugloff, from the great Putiloff works, when he said: “Freedom for the worker. The day of the proletariat has come. The men who use the tools shall control them, the fruits of labor shall belong to labor. We will put an end to capitalistic exploitation; we will do away with poverty; the workers of the world shall unite.”

Ivan Borovsky, who had come from the front to attend the all-Russian convention of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, saw freedom in terms of the soldiers. “Peace, peace,” he said. “We dig our graves and call them trenches. What is the use of freedom to a man in his grave? We will stop this bloody slaughter. This is not our war. This is the Tsar’s war. The soldiers of all the world shall rise as we have done. They will throw off the yokes of kings and kaisers, and we will all make peace. There shall be no more court-martial, no more capital punishment. We will have honest, democratic peace. Then we can go back to our farms and our factories and put an end to all wars.”

Little curly blond-haired Petroff, who brought me my morning _chei_ (tea), with a smile that sparkled like the sunshine on the Neva, defined revolution in his own way when he refused to accept my first tip. “We are free now,” he explained. “We will get our regular per cent of the bill for service.”

So it went. Revolution was to every man the sum of his desires. Yet above and beneath and beyond each man’s interpretation was the deeper thing that old Chekmar voiced when he spoke of land as “God’s and the people’s.” It was not only of himself that Chekmar thought when he said, “It is ours!” Personal greed could never have brought that light into his dull blue eyes. Something more than his own hours and wages sounded through the words of Andrey Krugloff. Hours and wages alone were not enough to lift his heavy face out of the mold of common clay. It was the knowledge that they were one with the great living, breathing human mass--the people--that filled their eyes with visions.

The honeymoon of Revolution was already waning on that day when the American commission came to Petrograd; but the consciousness of “the people” as an entity still remained. Slowly the years of political and economic slavery, land hunger, and hideous physical poverty imposed upon the many by the few had brought about a mass consciousness that was the most vital force in revolutionary Russia.

I discovered with surprise that the Tsar’s name was seldom mentioned. He ceased to count for anything. A month after the first revolutionary attack, he was as completely forgotten as if he had never lived. When Vera and Ivan tore the double-headed eagles from the great wrought-iron fence around the Winter Palace, and ripped the imperial coat-of-arms from the buildings to make bonfires in the streets, all that there was of Nicholas, even his memory, was burned.

With the tragic failure of the first Revolution of 1905 and 1906, when the Workers tried to take control and lost everything, still fresh in their memory, they were trying desperately to coöperate, to give and take, to use the power of the intellectuals and at the same time direct revolution into the channels through which they wanted it to flow. They were theorists who had always been denied the right of action. Never having been allowed to try to put any of their theories into practice, they had never learned how to compromise. Each group was willing to die for its own particular definition of revolution, but no group was able to yield to the theory of another. Consequently, Cabinet crises followed Cabinet crises.

Prince Lvoff and the scholarly Miliukoff had already been retired to private life before the Root Commission reached Russia. Miliukoff, student of English institutions, saw freedom for Russia in the terms of a constitutional monarchy. To him, and to the liberals who gathered around him, this was a sufficiently radical step for a country that had only yesterday crawled out from under the iron boot of absolutism. He and his followers were a hopeless minority, and, in spite of their past struggles for Russian freedom, were soon discarded, with the monarchial idea. They were liberals and could not follow Russia into the new social realms she was so eager to explore.

The demand of the people for a republic was insistent. The republican idea satisfied some, but not enough. A social democracy--a socialist state--became the loudest cry of the articulate proletariat.

I heard it on the street corners and in the crowded trams, along the wide paths of the parks, and in the assembly rooms of palaces whose ancient walls might well have shuddered at the strangeness of such sentiments.

Much of the time they talked of war, and I heard unkempt soldiers in dilapidated uniforms and workmen in shoddy suits demanding “an interbelligerent conference,” “statement of Allied war aims,” “publication of the secret treaties,” as glibly as workingmen at home discuss hours and wages.

Here and there a group talked of the coming of the American Commission. Usually the spokesman was an unofficial diplomat returned from the United States and bringing his own decided idea of us and our faults. There were many of these in Petrograd in the days of early June. Some of them hailed from Hester Street; and Hester Street and New York’s East Side became formidable factors in complicating the international situation. They had seen all of the worst and none of the best of America. They sat at the tables in the tea-room where the members of the Soviet of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies gathered around the samovar, and told stories of poverty and suffering on the East Side.

“Root is coming to make you fight,” they said. “Root doesn’t care anything about the Revolution. He’s a capitalist, a corporation attorney, a hide-bound reactionary. In the United States he’s against the workers.”

Most of these men were honest revolutionists, soap-boxers, actuated by nothing more than hatred of the capitalistic system and a distrust of all things bearing a government stamp. There were other unofficial diplomats in Petrograd whose words had a different origin. They were under orders from Berlin, and their business was to discredit America and the Allies and make the Russian masses believe the German people were the true friends of Revolution. They conducted a telling and profitable propaganda. To begin with, they had linguistic and geographical advantages that the Allies could not overcome. Many Germans speak Russian, still more Russians speak German. Being next-door neighbors, the Germans understood the Russian psychology.

They knew that nothing in the world meant anything to the mass of the Russians but saving their Revolution, and they simulated a sympathy for revolution that they were temperamentally incapable of possessing. They pictured Germany as hungry for democratic peace, and the Allies as imperialists who would not stop fighting until they had crushed the German masses and divided the German territory. They accused the Allies of trying to continue the war for the purpose of destroying the Revolution. They took the passion and idealism of the Russian mass and tried to turn it to their own ends.

They also had something to say about the coming of the American Commission, and they said it where it would take effect.

For the most part, unofficial Russia was too engrossed in its own very important business to pay much attention to the tall, gray-haired, distinguished American who was coming to town. Unofficial Russia was concerned chiefly with defining revolution, and each individual group was possessed of a passionate necessity for making the other groups accept its definition.

All together, it was not a happy situation into which the imperial train was bringing the American diplomats that June afternoon. The train, looking almost as it did when the royal family last journeyed forth from Petrograd, slipped into view on the appointed second.

At ten o’clock next morning Ambassador Root sat in a corner of the huge drawing-room in his suite at the Winter Palace with his back to the light. Half a dozen of us foreign correspondents sat stiffly upon the edges of flower-brocaded chairs drawn in a circle around him, while he introduced the Washington Code into Petrograd.

The Washington Code is a Maxim silencer. It is a gentleman’s agreement to which an occasional lady is reluctantly admitted. A great man sits in a corner--with his back to the light--and announces that he would like to be able to discuss quite openly everything that happens and even to have the benefit of your advice. Of course, if he is to do so, he must be assured that all he says will be held in strictest confidence. You--perhaps because you are flattered by the great man’s confidence, perhaps because of your curiosity--joyfully consent. Sometimes you consent only because you know the folly of cutting off your ears merely because your lips are sealed.

The Washington Code was the only check to speech in all that great land swamped beneath a flood of words.

Those morning conferences became a regular institution. We did most of the talking while Mr. Root sat silently listening. Occasionally he made one of those simple, pat, nut-shell comments for which he has such an amazing talent, and we regretted the “made in America” rules for correspondents.

From time to time, special missions took flying trips out of Petrograd to study some particular phase of the complex situation. The military men went to the front; the naval representatives took in a mutiny of the Black Sea Fleet; the bankers investigated Russia’s depleted treasury; and the religiously inclined went to Moscow to discover the future status of the Russian Church.

There was no official life of any kind. When the Commission donned its Prince Alberts and paid its first two formal visits, they found the Foreign Minister in a sack-suit and tan shoes and the members of the Council dressed like workingmen. The young men of the Provisional Government were growing old overnight with the burden of the task upon them. And the members of the Soviet were groping endlessly for that hidden road which idealism and reality may travel in equity.

Every man, from the young Minister President, Alexander Kerensky--whose health was already giving way under the frightful strain of trying to make the dilapidated economic machine inherited from the Tsar’s régime supply the exhaustive demands of war and revolution--to the most insignificant little delegate in the Soviet, was working with his sleeves rolled up to remold Russia nearer to his heart’s desire.

As the Soviet moved, so Russia moved. It was the mouth-piece of the awakened masses. Already it was the government behind the government. Charles Edward Russell was the only member of the Commission who was able to get the least bit close to the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies. They treated him with more courtesy than any other official foreign representative, though they looked upon him as a renegade socialist.

I went with him to the Soviet one day when he was to speak. His buttonhole flaunted the reddest red ribbon in Petrograd, and his white linen collar, the only one in the huge assembly, was encircled by a flaming scarlet tie. They listened to his message, but it had no meaning for them. He had come to Russia to help make Russia fight, and the dream of the Russian revolutionist was not only to stop Russia from fighting, but to put an end to all wars. Separate peace was no part of the revolutionary scheme. Even the most radical members of the Soviet were playing for larger stakes. Internationalism was at the bottom of their creed, and it was not until ten months after the fall of the Romanoffs that I heard a revolutionist admit the possibility of separate peace. It was at a meeting in the Duma, when Leon Trotzky, after the armistice negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, said:

“We have given the Allies a month to come into the peace negotiations. Perhaps we can give them a little more time if they need it, but we can’t go on forever. Russia is bleeding to death, and to save her we have to get back to the mills and the farms and the factories.”

They believed that the failure of internationalism in 1914 did not necessarily mean the failure of internationalism in 1917, for now the internationalists of the world had before their eyes the example of Russia and the Russian Revolution. The revolutionists had no hope from the German autocracy, but they were confident that if they could but speak loud enough, the masses of the German people would rise and overthrow their government, as the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants had done.

A few men believed, with the elder Liebknecht, that the German people could never be free until the German military power was defeated at arms, and these tried frantically to continue the war.

“Peace, but not separate peace,” was the phrase on every Russian tongue.

The Root Commission realized this, and it realized also that the question was not whether the government had the will to go on fighting, but whether it had the power. The mission was interested in helping to give Russia that power. Perhaps what it failed to realize was that Russia’s spiritual needs were as great or greater than her material needs. The thing above everything else that Russia needed to keep her in the war was a cause. Root, “battered old campaigner,” as he styled himself, was not unmoved by the sincerity and immensity of the movement in which Russia was engrossed. It was not his day--it was the day of the diplomats from Hester Street. He might not agree with their judgments or approve their methods, but I think he felt himself in the presence of something big, something epochal.

For three years, Ivan had fought desperately in the trenches, simply because the Little Father had told him to. Sometimes it was for love of the Little Father that he fought. More often it was for fear of him and his generals. More often still it was only in response to that blind obedience to orders which absolutism instils in those whom it enslaves. Sometimes Ivan did not know until he reached the big city of Petrograd what enemy of Holy Russia it was that he must fight.

Manpower was cheap in Russia. Russia was correspondingly careless as to how she wasted it. Ivan fought as no other soldier in the world is asked to fight--fought with bare hands, fought with pitchforks, fought with guns that he took from the hands of comrades as they fell in battle.

One day Ivan discovered that the Tsar, in whom he had believed, was just a little man whom he was able quite easily to put aside. The general, the colonel, the captain of the regiment--they too were little men. He need not salute them; he need not respect them; he need not obey them.

The great driving force--fear--was gone. That greater driving force of war--a cause--Ivan had never known. No one had bothered to give him one. No one had cared enough.

Suddenly the facts were changed. The old gods were swept away in a single hour. Tsar and church and country crumbled together. Revolution took their place. Russia had a cause. “Save the Revolution!” became the rallying cry. To save the Revolution, and what it meant to each, became the common faith. However men differed in their definition of terms, they were all agreed as to the slogan. Russia would follow no other flag.

Ivan was tired of war--tired to death. Being Russian, he had no relish either for killing or for dying; but when the occasion demanded, he did both with a degree of resignation and despatch that is almost Oriental. Living always in the shadow of danger, he acquired an indifference to it as sublime as it is tragic. Essentially a fatalist, he accepted the facts of life as they came to him, and contented himself with thinking occasionally of that day of the people off there in the vague future when all would be different. He wasn’t interested in other men’s territory. Constantinople had no meaning for him. He was not naturally imperialistic or militaristic. He wanted to govern himself and let other people govern themselves.

Freedom had come, and he wanted desperately to enjoy it, to use it to its limit and still to save it.

Diplomatically, Germany was in the strategic point. She pressed her advantage. She asked Ivan to do what he wanted to do--to stop fighting. The Allies asked Ivan to do what he did not want to do--to go on fighting.

The Root Commission made it plain that, underlying the whole question of aid to Russia, was the fundamental question of whether Russia was going to continue in the war.

The July offensive was the answer of Kerensky to the Allies. It was a blunder from its inception--a forced offensive for which Ivan was not psychologically prepared. He invested no part of his faith in it, and he chose to be shot as a coward and traitor rather than continue it. A few picked men went into battle and put up a brilliant and courageous fight; but the rank and file of the Russian soldiers were not behind them. Ivan could no longer be driven to battle by the whip of fear, and he had not yet come to know Germany as a greater enemy to himself than to the Tsar.

The Root Commission waited to see the offensive well started before it left Petrograd, but did not remain to see the tragic end.