Chapter VI: Courting Arrest

A journey in the interior--Warned back--The start--A typical Volga
province--Causes of the famine--Arrival at Tsaritzin--Two medical
students--“Open! Open to the Police!”--The search--Condition of the
peasants--Pesky--A group of remarkable personalities--Village
customs--A dramatic meeting--A night ride--A sudden interruption in
our plan.

Occasional massacres of Jews, of Armenians, of Tartars, of intellectuals in interior towns--these the world knows about. Massacres are instituted to accomplish certain definite results, such as the terrorizing of a section of the population into passivity, or to coerce popular opinion in a given direction. But these occur only at intervals, and in widely different sections of the empire. Police misrule, on the other hand, is constant, and exists everywhere. The tourist in Russia is met by the police at the frontier--his books are liable to confiscation, his private papers to minute examination; once settled in St. Petersburg or Moscow his letters are very likely opened and frequently parts of them extracted. I remember that at one time all of my letters were regularly opened by the police before they were delivered to me, and more than once a page or two, or perhaps a whole sheet, would be missing when my letter was finally delivered. The power of the police is as omniscient as it is omnipresent. It is the one authority in czardom that can descend upon the Czar himself. About the time of the convocation of the Duma a Moscow publisher brought out a complete set of the Emperor’s speeches. The volume was small, and it was not edited nor annotated in any way, yet the police confiscated the whole edition and forbade its circulation! The weakness and true character of Nicholas II was so plainly revealed in the collection that this step was held to be justifiable.

To meet this police power casually, or to read about it, is one matter. To live under its absolute domination is quite another. The so-called agrarian revolts are often insurrections against the intolerable will of the police.

After leaving the Caucasus I traveled to the town of Saratoff, the capital of the province of the same name, there to begin a journey of a few hundred miles through the peasant country. Spring was fast approaching, at which time the ravages of hunger with greater or less rigor sweep over the peasant villages of central Russia year after year. Incidentally I saw rather more than I anticipated, particularly of the rural police.

“You will not be permitted to travel through the district,” I was told in Saratoff city. “Every correspondent who attempts it is arrested or turned back for one reason or another.”

I had come more than one thousand miles to make this journey and consequently I was not of a mind to be unofficially turned aside. I procured an interpreter, and arranged for horses and a peculiarly Russian wagon with a body of wicker like a great basket, called a _tarrantass_.

A _troika_, with loud, jingling bells, carried us out of Saratoff city and straight away to the north, away from all railroads and towns of size. The fast greening steppe rolled to hillocks on the east and the hillocks mounted to hills, higher and higher, farther and farther to the east, till the heights of the Urals seemed to loom vaguely in the purple distance.

Two hours out from Saratoff houses became fewer. As far as the eye could reach to west and north was the boundless, lone steppe. Now and then we passed a miserable village with ugly houses of stone and mud and crumbling, thatched roofs. Twice during the ride we passed the ruins of a landlord’s house, reduced to ashes by infuriated peasantry. Telegraph poles lay felled along the roadside.

Saratoff government borders on the majestic Volga. No mightier or lovelier river winds through the dominions of the Czar. Fields which might be fertile, and dessiatines with wonderful possibilities for rich production, roll backward from its banks many miles. Yet here men faint from hunger; women sink beneath the burden of days, and little children waste to shadows, and die. The ugliest of diseases root among the people and flourish like weeds in a pasture--not because nature has been scant in her provision of resources, but because all development of agricultural lands is still unknown. “Dry farming” has never been heard of; and irrigation projects which could so easily be carried out have never been thought of. But more than all the rest, perhaps, is the iniquitous system of landholding that still continues. Where one man owns one hundred thousand dessiatines,[7] two thousand men possess _one_ dessiatine each! The man with the hundred thousand is rich and lives in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, or Paris, and only occasionally visits his “estates” here in the interior. The two thousand are born, fret through their weary lives, and die on the little patch of once good, but now exhausted, land which originally their fathers held when serfdom was abolished, or their fathers’ fathers of many generations ago bought when colonization was encouraged by Catharine, or Elizabeth, or Peter. And as the demands of life to-day have multiplied since the time of Catharine, or even Alexander I, while the peasant holdings have remained the same, the impossible condition which so extensively prevails throughout central and eastern Russia is easy to understand.

When serfdom was abolished in 1861 a certain patch of land was given to each village, and the village council, called the _mir_, parceled out this land to the individual villagers, re-allotting the parcels every three, five, or seven years according to the vote of each village. Since 1861 the population of many villages has doubled, and some have trebled, but the aggregate landholdings have remained what they were at the beginning. A tract of land that was barely enough for the maintenance of, say, two thousand souls in 1861 is entirely inadequate in 1907 for four or five thousand. Hence, throughout this vast district of central and eastern Russia, life has death for neighbor. The pall of famine descends upon the region in years when the crops are yielding most plentifully. Years when a frost comes, or a drought, or a blight, the situation attains the proportions of a calamity.

Dusk was gathering when we rumbled heavily into Tsaritzin, a village of 1800 inhabitants, fifty-five versts from Saratoff. Our driver pulled up before a square cottage, no better than the average, and to all appearances like the rest in the village. Before we had lifted our cramped and much-shaken limbs from the springless wagon that had brought us all the distance, two young men, strangers to us both, but bursting with cordiality and pleasure at our arrival, rushed out to greet us. They were two medical students from the temporarily closed University of Moscow, come here to direct the distribution of famine relief. We were their first visitors in several months, and, as we soon were able to see, their existence is dreary enough in this remote place. They come to serve the peasants, to administer famine relief, to look after their physical ailments and to teach them, all they can of the rudiments of education. At every turn they are hampered and harassed by the local police.

The glamour that was wont to shine round the young men and women who inaugurated the “settlement” movement in England and America, young people of education and culture who took up their living in the midst of the darkest corners of great cities to share the results of their larger opportunities with tenement dwellers, pales before the life and works of intellectual young Russia. The government closed the universities, for they were centers of revolt. But students who have lived, however briefly, in the blaze of active idealism, and who have been touched by the fire of enthusiasm to hasten the coming of Russia’s better day, are not content to return simply to their homes to await the opening of their universities at the will and pleasure of a reactionary, timid government. The free life, the glad life for Russia and all her people, is their goal. The movement tending toward that goal is their cause.

We sat down with our delighted hosts to a simple evening meal, and were still lingering over a companionable samovar when a clock in an adjoining room struck ten. The striking had scarcely ceased when a series of heavy blows descended upon the shutters of one of the windows and a voice bawled out:

“Open! Open to the police!”

One of our hosts groped through the adjoining room to light a small oil-lamp near the door. We in our room heard the crude rear door crack on its rusty hinges as it was swung wide. The tramp of heavy feet crossed the uneven floor, accompanied by the clank of spurs and the rattle of a dangling saber. A young officer of police swaggered into the room where we sat. At the threshold he paused, partly turned and bawled an order to the men behind him. The grounding of arms echoed his words.

“Your passports,” demanded the officer without preliminary.

“How many soldiers have you with you?” asked my companion.

“You may count,” replied the officer.

“One, two, three, five, seven, ten! Good. There are two of us.”

The officer betrayed his impatience. We handed him our American passports--which we naïvely thought would be sufficient to induce him to respect us. At that time I had not yet learned that in the heart of Russia to be an American citizen means no more than to belong to one of the tribes of the Iroquois Indians. We were possessed of other credentials in addition to our passports, however, and these were finally accepted, though with evident reluctance.

During the examination, our student-hosts sat nonchalantly by, smoking cigarettes. The ceremony was familiar enough to them. Their quarters were searched by this same officer and his men sometimes two or three times a week, and any book, pamphlet, or piece of handwriting that he took a fancy to declare “dangerous” was confiscated.

When the officer and his ten soldiers withdrew we

could hear other feet outside the window. Curiosity prompted me to look out, so we unbarred the shutter and let the lamp-light flood the yard. Thirty more brown-coated soldiers were drawn up in two phalanxes.

Later we wondered, my companion and I, why this search officer brought forty soldiers with him. Thirty-six hours later, when we were really arrested and carried off to prison, the work was done by one police officer and one rural guard.

Toward midnight we rolled ourselves in our blankets and lay down on the floor to sleep. This is the common thing in peasants’ houses. The children and the very old sleep over the square, brick stove, on a little platform designed for the purpose, but the rest of the family, and strangers, are content with the floor. All that night we heard the slow tread of feet outside the windows. Two soldiers were keeping guard. Not till the larks had been up an hour in the adjoining fields, and day was fairly come, did these sentinels retire.

Early next morning peasants from the village began to wait upon us. We were friends of their friends and that was enough. They unbared the hardness of their lives with perfect freedom. One old man told us that he had been in jail no less than eight times because he had repeatedly volunteered to carry to the Czar--their “Little Father”--the petition of the village setting forth their wrongs. It seemed still to be the firm belief of these peasants that their condition was as it was because the Czar had never come to know of their plight. It was a striking fact throughout Russia that often among the most revolutionary peasants there was even down to the spring of 1906 strong loyalty to the Czar. Their revolt was against the government hedged round the Czar, and barring the “Little Father” from his people. The first Duma dispelled this belief almost universally, but the first Duma was, at this time, a month away.

Three old muzhiks with long, white beards and clear, blue eyes told the story of how they and five others had gone as a deputation to the then governor of the province, hoping that he would open the way to the Czar for them. As a result of their faith they were stripped to the waist and flogged. Another was of a much larger deputation--more than sixty; thirty of these were sent to prison for a short time, and thirty-six received one hundred blows each. When they found that we were sympathetic listeners, they begged us to come and see the roofs of some of their houses which were being daily torn away to feed the horses. As the roofs were largely composed of straw-thatch, there was a certain amount of nourishment in them--a last resource in the fight against the universal hunger.

“Do you have big land-owners in America?” one man asked eagerly. “Are people prevented from earning enough to live on year after year?” All of the questions asked us were vital. They were frank enough about owning to revolt. “What’s to be done?” they said. “The mere renting of land is eighteen rubles (nine dollars) a dessiatine for a season. Where’s the money to come from to pay for this? The land is ours. We do the work, and we should have it.”

That very week a Cossack officer and a police officer had summoned all the people of the village together and warned them that if any of the land belonging to the landlords was touched, that “the village would be fired from the four corners, and they would not be responsible for what happened to the people in the village.” The land referred to belonged to two vast estates whose owners had not even seen them for years--_several hundred thousand acres lying absolutely idle_!

The welcome we received at Pesky, our next stopping-place, was, if possible, more demonstrative than at Tsaritzin. The group of “intellectuals” here numbered four, two women and two men. They had gathered there in early November and in six months we were their first visitors. One of the students was acting as village school-master. The other was devoting himself entirely to the famine relief-work.

The women were both remarkable personalities. They had first met each other in a St. Petersburg prison, where they had both been confined for political offences. One, a woman of twenty-five, large and strong, and fearless, still carried the mark of a Cossack _nagaika_[8] across her forearm, and in one of her shoulders was a Cossack bullet. Her husband at the time of my visit was in prison. She had received an ordinary finishing-school education and begun the study of medicine. During the war she volunteered as a nurse in the Red Cross organization and was sent to Manchuria, but she was returned home for “scattering seeds of sedition” among the army. Pesky we found to be in an even more serious condition than Tsaritzin. The total population was about twenty-one hundred and the number of meals dispensed each day was more than eighteen hundred. In other words, only three hundred souls, or less than seventy-five families, were self-supporting.

One who passes through this district well understands how the peasants have come to feel that it is better to chance the bullets and the Cossack nagaika than endure passively the long-drawn sufferings of the life on their inadequate dessiatines. They are almost without hope; and the hopeless are ever fearless. Industry intensified and lengthened to most cruel drudgery has little reward. Severest toil, early and late, and desperately constant while the season lasts, still is not productive of sufficient recompense to supply bread through the months when the fields lie buried under snow-drifts.

There was no mistaking the attitude of the peasants toward the young relief-workers, as we walked through the village streets with them. Children ran beside them, or called out to them. Old women addressed the women as “sister.” To the men they were “comrades.”

We entered many homes during the two days that we remained in this village. In each hut, however small, in every cottage, no matter how keen the distress, we were welcomed with obvious gladness. In one cramped hovel we found a young mother prostrate upon a pile of rags on the floor, very low with typhoid fever. Immediately beside her lay a child of three with scarlatina, and suspended from the ceiling over both their heads a crude cradle in which lay an unweaned baby which the mother was still nursing! In another we found a girl of eight wasted to a skeleton with inherited syphilis. An older sister had died of the same disease two months before. A boy lay at death’s door with scurvy. And so, from house to house we went looking upon scenes too dreadful to portray. Yet everywhere a smile greeted our entrance. In one house we found a very young girl about to become a mother. The Russian peasant is very strict in his attitude toward young girls, and sad and heavy is the lot of any peasant girl who sins. This girl dared not show herself out of her hut for fear of being publicly hooted. She was much exercised over the fate of her child, for she told us that the priest would not bless it at birth. Her mother then begged one of our party to come

and offer some little prayer which would save the child from the damnation which should justly fall upon the child-mother. An old man with a long white beard rushed out from another house as we passed and exhibited a wounded foot which he begged us to bandage.

Finally we were taken to the local “Duma” building, a town hall where all the males of twenty-one years of age and over gather from time to time to discuss the affairs of the community. About forty men followed us there and at the first opportunity began pouring out questions. Almost without exception these queries had to do with the land. In America did all the people starve half the year unless given food by the government, or by some other agency? What did we do with landlords in America who could not possibly work or use the land and yet would not allow the people to use it? These and other questions were put to us with great directness. At last I asked them what they proposed to do for themselves.

There was silence for a minute. Then one man, more outspoken than the rest, said: “We look to the Duma to give the land to us. We feel that it belongs to us, and we have confidence in the Duma.”

“And if you do not get it?”

The men stirred uneasily, then: “The soldiers have robbed us of our guns,” said one at last, “but we have left to us our wood-axes and our scythes. We cannot endure starvation any longer.”

This is the spirit that led to something over sixteen hundred “agrarian disturbances” during the year 1906--incipient _jacquerie_, foreshadowing, I believe, greater uprisings soon to overtake Russia.

That night about ten o’clock as we sat in the house of our friends we heard the soft tinkling of a _ballilika_ outside the windows, and presently the sound of many voices singing. They were low and restrained, but the words were clear. The music fairly thrilled us as we sat round the oil-lamp and our last samovar. It was the stirring _Marche Funebre_ with words by Gorky.

At midnight we left Pesky. Our friends feared that perhaps they had been indiscreet in allowing the discussion in the little Duma building to continue so long. Free speech is a dangerous thing in Russia, even under the constitution. My companion and I, in our eagerness to grasp the actual state of mind of the peasants, had encouraged plain speaking. We had even spoken with more frankness than discretion ourselves. There had been forty or more men in the room when we began our “interview” and the number had soon swelled. We were hopeful that all were friendly, but in Russia one never knows.

The night was wonderful, moonless but starried. As we drove out of the yard our friends, the four who were feeding, tending, and revolutionizing Pesky, took up the refrain the peasants had sung in serenade two hours before. The last sounds we heard were the voices of this brave little band singing ever so softly, but with, oh, so much feeling, the refrain of the peasants’ _Marseillaise_.

Our road turned out to be terribly rough. In places it ran to a mere trail which more than once we lost. Then we had to retrace our way, or circle about till we found it again. The wagon in which we rode was springless and every jolt became painful. A little after three o’clock the larks began to sing. With the earliest light in the east we could see them quivering high in air, joyously hailing the day. The dawn wind came up chill and struck us to the marrow. We shivered and drew our blankets closer around us. Five o’clock had sounded when we drove into a post-station village where we were to change horses. We told the men to make ready the fresh _troika_ quickly; in the meantime we would order a samovar and eggs at the post-house. The aged mistress of the place was already stirring when we entered and she promised us the tea and eggs “directly.” But before the water had come to the boil we were placed under arrest and our plans for the remainder of our trip altered “in the name of the Czar.”