Chapter VII: Old Rivers and New Doctrines

Leon Trotzky, Bolshevist leader, was secure in jail. Nicolai Lenin was in hiding. Those who believed he was in the employ of the German government declared he had escaped to Berlin. Those who still held to the belief that you can kill a movement by putting its leaders behind bars, or driving them underground, proudly boasted that the Bolsheviki were crushed.

One night several of us were having dinner in a little Italian restaurant. The argument of the evening--there was always an argument in Russia--was about the origin of the Bolshevist movement. One man declared that the thing was a German plot. There was a new member of the American colony at dinner that night. Williams was his name--Albert Rhys Williams. He was decidedly an American type, tall, with a pleasant, frank face and a delightfully inclusive smile. He had been in Belgium at the time of the German advance, and had written a book on his experiences in the claws of the German eagle. He had come to Russia some time before, but had been away from Petrograd, meeting the peasants and workers. He took no part in the discussions for some time. Finally he said:

“I wonder how many Bolsheviki you know?”

We looked from one to another, and had to admit that our acquaintance in that quarter was rather limited.

“You know, it makes such a difference when we know people,” he said. “There is Peters, now;” and he told the story of Peters, and of half a dozen others whom he had met.

“I think it would be ridiculous to suppose there is no German money in the Bolshevist movement,” he said, “because there is German money everywhere. But the movement itself is far more fundamental. Remember, Trotzky and Lenin are preaching to-day the doctrine they were preaching fifteen years ago. It seems to me short-sighted and dangerous to dismiss the Bolsheviki without more knowledge of him and his ideas.”

Mr. Williams’s story of Peters had interested me especially. I said I would like to meet him, and Mr. Williams promised to bring him to dinner the next night. They came. It was the first of many times, and they opened many windows on the Revolution to me that would otherwise have been closed.

Jacob Peters was thirty-two years old, and looked even younger. He was a Lett--an intense, quick, nervous little chap with a shock of curly black hair brushed back from his forehead, an upturned nose that gave to his face the suggestion of a question-mark, and a pair of blue eyes full of human tenderness. He spoke English with a London accent, and referred to his English wife as the “missis,” and to his little girl in the language of all adoring fathers.

“Why are you a Bolshevik?” I asked him.

“Well,” said he seriously, “I’ve lived in London, and I’ve seen them on the West Side living in luxury, in silks and satins, with gold plate and extravagant food; I’ve seen them on the East Side, sleeping out under the bridges at night. I don’t know much about your America, but I know that you too have an East Side and a West Side. We in Russia have fought too long and sacrificed too much to be content with that. We must find a better way, or our freedom will not be worth while.”

“What is your way?” I asked him.

“The Bolshevik believes in the shortest cut to socialism,” he answered. “We believe that the people who till the land and the workers who run the industries should control them; and that the masses of the people should rise up and put a stop to capitalistic and imperialistic exploitation, which is responsible for war.”

Not then, but on other occasions, I learned something of Peters’ life. His story is the story of most revolutionists of the Baltic provinces, where, in spite of German control,--or perhaps because of German oppression,--the revolutionists were more radical and more intense than in any other part of Russia. The richer landowners are known as “black barons,” the lesser landowners as “gray barons.” Peters was the son of a “gray baron.” He began to question life as a very small boy.

“I worked in the fields,” he told me, “and when the thunderstorm came up I prayed God to save me. Then, when the thunderstorm was over, I began asking is there a God. When the thunderstorm came again, I prayed. One day I was sent to see my grandmother. On the way I met a stranger. We walked together, and it was a long journey. I asked him about all the things that were troubling me. He gave me two pamphlets. One was called ‘The Tenth Man.’ I had wondered why father, who was not nearly so clever as the workers, should have a whole vote for himself, while the workers had only one vote for ten men. I read the pamphlets, and at school I told my comrades about them. We published a paper about it; but the teacher confiscated it and sent for my parents. My father beat me, and I hated him. From that moment I became a revolutionist.”

At the age of fifteen Peters left home and went to work in a shop. He joined a revolutionary organization, and was four times thrown into prison. He and his comrades were stood up against a wall while they counted out every tenth man and killed him. He saw his best friend shot down in this fashion, and dozens of other comrades. Every act of oppression and repression only made him a more determined revolutionist. He escaped from prison, and lived in France, Switzerland, and England, helping as best he could his companions still in Russia. At the time of the Revolution in March he was holding an excellent position as manager of the import department of a large English mercantile company. He wore a frock-coat on Sundays, and walked out with his English “missis” and his little girl in the height of order and respectability.

But the call of free Russia, the call of the Revolution, was too strong for him. He came back to rejoice and fight. He became the leader of the Lettish Socialists, and worked day and night for the cause in which he believed. He made flying trips to Petrograd, and usually managed to drop in for a few minutes while he was there. One night he drew a slip of paper from his pocket and asked me if I recognized the signature. I gasped.

“Why, it’s Lenin,” I said. “Then he’s here?”

Peters nodded.

“I’ve seen him to-day,” he said. “This is the candidate’s ticket for the Constituent Assembly. They have given him to me, because our district is the most radical and we can elect him there.”

“And you are absolutely sure that Lenin is an honest revolutionist and not a pro-German?” I asked.

He raised his head with a toss of defiance and his blue eyes flashed fire.

“If I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t have this,” he said.

We had bitter arguments, but he did not resent my disagreement. He knew that I was trying honestly and sympathetically to understand all of the forces at work in the Revolution, and he respected that effort. Through him I met many other Bolsheviki, and they talked frankly of their dreams and their schemes.

One day a man showed me a letter from Trotzky, written in prison. It was a call to his followers--not for himself, but for his ideas. They told me that he was in constant touch with the men of his party, and was doing quite as effective work in prison as he could have done out.

Jacob Peters told me much of the methods by which prisoners communicated with each other and the outside world. Occasionally a newspaper was smuggled in, and the man who received it read it hidden half under a blanket, with one eye on the spy-hole in the door, watching for the guard, and then tapped its contents on the wall to the prisoner in the next cell. By a system of dots placed according to a prearranged code under the letters in a book, the men inside the prison were kept informed of what their comrades outside were doing.

The most elaborate scheme Peters concocted was carried out with the aid of a girl revolutionist. He was trying to escape, but he was deep in the black books of the prison officials and was allowed no reading matter. He took a piece of black bread, chewed it until it was in a sticky paste, and spread it on his arm to dry. Once dry it was as tough as a piece of parchment. He put his message on one side and rolled the parchment into a small ball. Just as the girl was leaving, he asked permission of the guard to kiss her good-by through the bars. The guard, seeing no harm in an innocent kiss, consented. The girl was immediately on the alert for a message. Peters slipped the ball into his mouth, and in the kiss transferred it to hers. She carried out his directions, and he succeeded in escaping.

As July wore into August, there was little going on in Petrograd, and I decided to take a journey to see if I could find out how the new doctrines were being received in some of the older and more remote parts of Russia. Various stories of the dangers of travel came to us.

Russian acquaintances and old residents in the foreign colony discouraged attempting travel; but an American friend, Helen Smith, a kindred spirit in eagerness for the trail, agreed to go with me. Miss Smith, who is an expert on the subject of peasant art, had traveled to Russia four times since the war. She spoke the language, and had a genuine understanding and a very real appreciation of the people. The pictured dangers had very little reality for either of us. We determined to go to Moscow, and from there to Nizhni Novgorod by rail, then up the Volga in a river steamer.

There has always been a strange lure for me in names. “Mother Volga,” as the Russians call the largest and most romantic river in Europe, was one of the places in which I believed as one believes in fairies one never expects to see. The Russians speak its name with a caress. No other river in the world, unless it be the Nile, has been surrounded by so much story.

The Volga is the great highway of Russia from Petrograd to the Caspian Sea. To Nizhni Novgorod, where the Volga and Oka rivers meet, the commerce of the world comes flowing. Here they hold the most famous of Russia’s sixteen hundred annual fairs.

The fair lasts for forty days; and for ninety-nine summers rug merchants from Persia, trappers from Siberia, silk dealers from China, wool kings from Manchuria, Turks and Arabs, Gypsies and Caucasians, Eastern and Continental tradesmen of all kinds, have come as regularly as the hot breezes that blow off the lazy, sleepy Old Volga. The exotic color, the weird customs, the strange play of the children of this patch-quilt earth all gathered under the same piece of sky, have made it a prolonged fête day and night from beginning to end.

Here, on the hundredth anniversary, we found the fair pathetically trying to pretend itself open. We drove through streets, miles and miles of streets, whose sides were packed solidly with bazaars. They were yellow-painted and green-roofed, as always, but padlocked doors told the story. The 200,000,000-ruble fair on the banks of the ancient river was virtually closed. In one of the main buildings a band tried hopelessly to rouse the spirits of the crowd; but the result was more gruesome than laughter at a funeral. There was little for sale: a sordid mass of tawdry trinkets made in Germany and Japan, a few sugarless sweetmeats--that was all.

Our boat sailed at eight o’clock at night, picking its way between the twinkling red and green lights gathered at the meeting of the rivers. Before we went, we took an elevator to the top of the bluff to dine in an out-of-doors café. Food seemed quite as scarce here as in Petrograd, and even more expensive. We ordered some beef cutlets (the Russian equivalent of hamburg steak). We waited and we waited; they did not come. We enlisted the efforts of the head waiter, who poured an avalanche of words upon his assistants. Still they did not come. The hour of sailing drew nearer and nearer. We watched the clock, and, when there was not another second to spare, prepared to leave. The cutlets arrived. We wrapped them in paper napkins and took them with us.

It was well we did; for war and revolution, whatever else it had done, had certainly robbed the Volga chefs of all their far-famed talents. I tried from six o’clock to eleven one night to persuade the cabin-boy to get me something to eat.

I wondered, as I looked at the fertile fields along the Volga, how much they knew of the part they would play in the coming course of revolution. Even the gods seemed cruel to the cities of the north; for on the Volga, where transportation facilities were adequate, the spring rains had been so light that the crops were far below normal; and down in the south, where weather conditions had proved ideal, the railways were too disorganized to move the grain.

The boat stopped at every little town along the way, and the landings were a series of Rapine pictures. Now it was a gang of stevedores in full cotton trousers with inch-wide stripes of gay color, and crude straw sandals upon their unstockinged feet. They dragged their heavy cargoes down to the boat’s edge with ropes held over their shoulders, singing a weird rhythmical tune of the Volga to time their movements. Again, it was a group of gypsies on the dock’s edge, camped for the night--the naked brown babies swarming under the feet of the Volga giants, who dodged them uncomplainingly.

Everywhere we found the people talking revolution, and the phrases that sounded through the streets of Petrograd were familiar here. We bought the newspapers. Several of them were trying desperately to rouse the people to the great Germanic danger. Miss Smith read them to me. Many of the appeals were from the Zemstvo Unions. One from the Kineshna Revolutionary Committee said:

“We are facing a great disaster for free Russia. Absolute ruin threatens us, and the triumph of the armed fist of William, if we are not bold enough to oppose to him a steel-like strength of the revolutionary army. Famine and its results threaten us, and the counter-revolution is making use of this. We must at once be bold enough to rectify our food question, to exert great efforts over this and other dangers. Anarchy and counter-revolution threaten to restore the old régime under William.

“A despicable peace, giving us into the claws of our enemy, threatens us unless we take immediate steps. All who can must be ready to go to the front to take the place of the worn and exhausted warriors--ready to hurl back the enemy or die in the attempt. It is a question of saving the land and the Revolution. The army is in need of ammunition, food, clothing, and uninterrupted transfer. The workmen must place the interests of the land and the Revolution above all else and raise their standard of work to the maximum. The peasants must give all the bread they can spare. All to work, to work! The danger is great!”

There was no doubt that the new doctrines had found their way to the banks of the old rivers. Petrograd was not the only place where revolution interfered with work, and proclamations and counter-proclamations kept the populace in a turmoil of doubt and desire.