TO THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS OF RUSSIA WHO FELL IN DEFENSE OF THE REVOLUTION: "AGAINST RICHES, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE FOR THE FEW, YOU BEGAN A WAR, AND WITH GLORY YOU DIED IN ORDER THAT RICHES, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE SHOULD BECOME UNIVERSAL."

An inscription on the granite slabs of the Memorial to Fallen Revolutionaries in the Mars Field in Leningrad. The texts were composed by A. V. Lunacharsky (1875-1933), the first People’s Commissar for Education.

INTRODUCTION

In Moscow I saw two peasant soldiers gazing at a poster being stuck up on a kiosk. “We can’t read a word of it,” they cried, indignant tears in their eyes. “The Czar only wanted us to plough and fight and pay taxes. He didn’t want us to read. He put out our eyes.”

“To put out the eyes” of the masses, to put out their minds and consciences, was the deliberate policy of the Russian autocracy. For centuries the people were steeped in ignorance, narcotized by the church, terrorized by the Black Hundreds, dragooned by the Cossacks. The protesters were thrown into dungeons, exiled to hard labor in Siberian mines, and hung up on gibbets.

In 1917 the social and economic fabric of the land was shot to pieces. Ten million peasants dragged from their ploughs were dying in the trenches. Millions more were perishing of cold and hunger in the cities while the corrupt ministers intrigued with the Germans and the court held bacchanalian revels with the notorious monk, Rasputin. Even the Cadet, Milyukov, was forced to say: “History does not know of another government so stupid, so dishonest, so cowardly, so treacherous.”

All governments rest upon the patience of the poor. It seems everlasting, but there comes an end to it. It came in Russia in March, 1917.

The masses felt that more vicious even than the Kaiser in Berlin was their own Czar in Petrograd. Their cup of bitterness was full. They marched forth against the palaces to end it all. First, out of the Viborg district, came the workingwomen crying for bread. Then long lines of workingmen. The police turned the bridges to prevent them entering the city, but they crossed on the ice. Looking at the red-flagged throngs from his window, Milyukov exclaimed: “There goes the Russian Revolution—and it will be crushed in fifteen minutes!”

But the workingmen came on in spite of Cossack patrols on the Nevsky. They came on in face of wilting fire from machine-gun nests. They came on until the streets were littered with their bodies. Still they came on, singing and pleading until soldiers and Cossacks came over to the people’s side, and on March 12, the Romanov dynasty, which had misruled Russia for 300 years, went crashing to its doom. Russia went mad with joy while the whole world rose up to applaud the downfall of the Czar.

It was mainly the workers and soldiers who made the Revolution. They had shed their blood for it. Now it was assumed that they would retire in the orthodox manner leaving affairs in the hands of their superiors. The people had taken the power away from the Czarists. Now appeared on the scene the bankers and lawyers, the professors and politicians, to take the power away from the people. They said:

“People, you have won a glorious victory. The next duty is the formation of a new state. It is a most difficult task, but fortunately, we, the educated, understand this business of governing. We shall set up a Provisional Government. Our responsibility is heavy, but as true patriots we will shoulder it. Noble soldiers, go back to the trenches. Brave workingmen, go back to the machines. And peasants, you go back to the land.”

Now the Russian masses were tractable and reasonable. So they let these bourgeois gentlemen form their “Provisional Government.” But the Russian masses were intelligent, even if they were not literate. Most of them could not read or write. But they could think. So, before they went back to the trenches, the shops and the land, they set up little organizations of their own. In each munition factory the workers selected one of their number whom they trusted. In the shoe and cotton factories the men did likewise. So in the brickyards, the glass-works and other industries. These representatives elected directly from their jobs were called a Soviet (Council) of Workmen Deputies.

In like manner the armies formed Soviets of Soldiers’ Deputies, the villages Soviets of Peasant Deputies.

These deputies were elected by trades and occupations, not by districts. The Soviets consequently were filled, not with glibly talking politicians, but with men who knew their business; miners who understood mining, machinists who understood machinery, peasants who understood land, soldiers who understood war, teachers who understood children.

The Soviets sprang up in every city, town, hamlet and regiment throughout Russia. Within a few weeks after the old state apparatus of Czardom went to pieces, one-sixth the surface of the earth was dotted over with these new social organizations—no more striking phenomenon in all history.

The commander of the Russian battleship Peresvet told me his story: “My ship was off the coast of Italy when the news arrived. As I announced the Czar’s fall some sailors shouted, ‘Long live the Soviet.’ That very day on board ship a Soviet was formed, in all aspects like the one in Petrograd. I regard the Soviet as the natural organization of the Russian people, finding its root in the mir (commune) of the village and the artel (co-operative syndicate) of the city.”

Others find the Soviet idea in the old New England town-meetings or the city assemblies of ancient Greece. But the Russian workingman’s contact with the Soviet was much more direct than that. He had tried out the Soviet in the abortive Revolution of 1905. He had found it a good instrument then. He was using it now.

After the Czar’s overthrow there was a short season of good will amongst all classes known as the “honeymoon of the Revolution.” Then the big fight began—a battle royal between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat for the mastery of state power in Russia. On the one side the capitalists, landlords and finally the intelligentsia lining up behind the Provisional Government. On the other side the workmen, soldiers and peasants rallying to the Soviets.

I was set down in the midst of this colossal conflict. For fourteen months I lived in the villages with the peasants, in the trenches with the soldiers, and in the factories with the workers. I saw the Revolution through their eyes and took part in most of the dramatic episodes.

I have used the names Communist and Bolshevik interchangeably, though the party did not officially change its name to Communist until 1918.

In the French Revolution the great word was “Citizen”. In the Russian Revolution the great word is “Comrade!”— tovarishch. I have written it more simply tovarish.

For the right to use here some of my articles I am indebted to the editors of Asia, the Yale Review, the Dial, the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Evening Post.

The visitor to Soviet Russia is struck by the multitudes of posters—in factories and barracks, on walls and railway-cars, on telephone poles—everywhere. Whatever the Soviet does, it strives to make the people understand the reason for it. If there is a new call to arms, if rations must be cut down, if new schools or courses of instruction are opened, a poster promptly appears telling why, and how the people can co-operate. Some of these posters are crude and hurried, others are works of art. Two of them are reproduced in this book in almost the exact colors of the originals. The cost has been borne by friends of Russia, and the reader is particularly indebted to Mrs. Jessie Y. Kimball and Mr. Aaron Berkman.

Part 1 - THE MAKERS OF THE REVOLUTION

With the Peasants, Workers and Fighters

CHAPTER 1: THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE CITY

On a white night of early June 1917, l first entered Petrograd, the city that lies almost within the Arctic Circle. Though it was midnight, the wide squares and prospekts bathed in the soft spectral light of this northern night were all alluring.

Past blue-domed barbaric churches and the silver rippling Catherine Canal we drove along the Neva, while across the river the slender spire of Peter and Paul rose like a golden needle. Then by the Winter Palace, the burnished dome of Saint Isaac’s and countless shafts and statues to the memory of Czars who had gone.

But all these were monuments to rulers of the past. They had no hold on me for I was interested in the rulers of the present. I wanted to hear the great Kerensky then at the zenith of his spell binding powers. I wanted to meet the ministers of the Provisional Government. I met many of them, heard them and talked with them. They were able, amiable and eloquent. But I felt they were not real representatives of the masses, that they were “Caliphs of the passing hour”.

Instinctively I sought out the rulers of the future, the men in the Soviets elected directly out of the trenches, factories and farms. These Soviets had sprung up in almost every army, city and village of Russia, over one-sixth of the surface of the earth. These local Soviets were now sending their delegates to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd.

Cheidze, the President of the Soviet Congress, asked me why I came to Russia.

“Ostensibly as a journalist,” I told him. “But the real reason is the Revolution. It was irresistible. It drew me here like a magnet. I am here because I could not stay away.”

He asked me to address the Congress. The “Soviet News” (Izvestia) of July 8, reports my words thus:

"Comrades: I bring you greetings from the Socialists of America. We do not venture to tell you here how to run a Revolution. Rather we come here to learn its lesson and to express our appreciation for your great achievements. A dark cloud of despair and violence was hanging over mankind threatening to extinguish the torch of civilization in streams of blood. But you arose, comrades, and the torch flamed up anew. You have resurrected in all hearts everywhere a new faith in freedom.

Equality, Brotherhood, Democracy, are great and beautiful words. But to the unemployed millions they are merely words. To the 160,000 hungry children of New York they are hollow words. To the exploited classes of France and England they are mocking words. Your duty is to change these words into reality.

You have made the Political Revolution. Freed from the threat of German militarism your next task is the Social Revolution. Then the workers of the world will no longer look to the West, but to the East—toward great Russia, to the Field of Mars here, in Petrograd, where lie the first martyrs of your Revolution.

“Long live free Russia!” “Long live the Revolution!” “Long live Peace to the World!”

In his reply Cheidze made a plea for the workers of all nations to bring pressure to bear on their governments to stop “the horrible butchery which is disgracing humanity and beclouding the great days of the birth of Russian freedom”.

A storm of cheers, and the Congress took up the order of the day—the Ukraine, Education, War-Widows and Orphans, Provisioning the Front, Repairing the Railways, etc. This should have been the business of the Provisional Government. But that Government was flimsy and incompetent. Its ministers were orating, wrangling, scheming against one another and entertaining diplomats. But somebody must do the hard work. By default it was already passing into the hands of these Soviets of the people.

Enter the Bolsheviks

This First Congress of Soviets was dominated by the intelligentsia —doctors, engineers, journalists. They belonged to political parties known as Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary. At the extreme left sat 105 delegates of a decided proletarian cast—plain soldiers and workingmen. They were aggressive, united and spoke with great earnestness. They were often laughed and hooted down—always voted down. “Those are the Bolsheviks,” my bourgeois guide informed me, venomously. “Mostly fools, fanatics and German agents.” That was all. And no more than that could one learn in hotel lobbies, salons, or diplomatic circles.

Happily, I went elsewhere for information. I went into the factory districts. In Nizhni I met Sartov, a mechanic who invited me to his home. A long rifle stood in the corner of the main room.

“Every workingman has a gun now,” Sartov explained. “Once we used it to fight for the Czar—now we fight for ourselves.”

In another corner hung an ikon of Saint Nicholas, a tiny flame burning before it.

“My wife is still religious,” Sartov apologized. “She believes in the Saint—thinks he will fetch me safely through the Revolution. As though a saint would help a Bolshevik!” he laughed. “Yeh Bogu! There’s no harm in it. Saints are queer devils. No telling what one of them may do.”

The family slept on the floor, insisting that I take the bed, because I was an American. In this room I found another American. In the soft gleam of the ikon-light his face looked down at me from the wall, the great, homely, rugged face of Abraham Lincoln. From that pioneer’s hut in the woods of Illinois he had made his way to this workingman’s hut here upon the Volga. Across half a century, and half a world, the fire in Lincoln’s heart had leaped to touch the heart of a Russian workman groping for the light.

As his wife paid her devotion to Saint Nicholas, the great Wonder-Worker, so he paid his devotion to Lincoln, the great Emancipator. He had given Lincoln’s picture the place of honor in his home. And then he had done a startling thing. On the lapel of Lincoln’s coat he had fixed a button, a large red button bearing on it the word, Bolshevik.

Of Lincoln’s life Sartov knew little. He knew only that he strove against injustice, freed the slaves, that he was reviled and persecuted. To Sartov, that was the earnest of his kinship with the Bolsheviks. As an act of highest tribute he had decorated Lincoln with this emblem of red.

I found that factories and boulevards were different worlds. A world of difference, too, in the way they said the word “Bolshevik . Spoken on the boulevards with a sneer and a curse, on the lips of the workers it was becoming a term of praise and honor.

The Bolsheviks did not mind the bourgeoisie. They were busy expounding their program to the worker. This program I got first hand from delegates coming up to the Soviet Congress from the Russian Army in France.

“Our demand is, not to continue the war, but to continue the Revolution,” these Bolsheviks blurted out.

“Why are you talking about Revolution?” I asked, taking the role of Devil’s Advocate. “You have had your Revolution, haven’t you? The Czar and his crowd are gone. That was what you were aiming at for the last hundred years, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” they replied. “The Czar is gone, but the Revolution is just begun. The overthrow of the Czar is only an incident. The workers didn’t take the government out of the hands of one ruling class, the monarchists, in order to put it into the hands of another ruling class, the bourgeoisie. No matter what name you give it, slavery is the same.”

I said the world at large held that Russia’s task now was to create a republic, like France or America; to establish in Russia the institutions of the West.

“But that is precisely what we don’t want to do,” they responded. “We don’t cherish much admiration for your institutions or governments. We know that you have poverty, unemployment and oppression. Slums on one hand, palaces on the other. On the one side, capitalists fighting workmen with lockouts, blacklists, lying press, and thugs. Workmen on the other side, fighting back with strikes, boycotts, bombs. We want to put an end to this war of the classes. We want to put an end to poverty. Only the workers can do this, only a communistic system. That is what we are going to have in Russia.”

“In other words,” I said, “you want to escape the laws of evolution. By some magic you expect suddenly to transfer Russia from a backward agricultural state into a highly organized co-operative commonwealth. You are going to jump out of the eighteenth century into the twenty-second.”

“We are going to have a new social order,” they replied, “but we don’t depend on jumping or magic. We depend upon the massed power of the workmen and peasants.”

“But where are the brains to do this?” I interrupted. “Think of the colossal ignorance of the masses.”

“Brains!” they exclaimed hotly. “Do you think we bow down before the brains of our ‘betters’? What could be more brainless and stupid and criminal than this war? And who are guilty of it? Not the working classes, but the governing classes in every country. Surely the ignorance and inexperience of workmen and peasants could not make a worse mess than generals and statesmen with all their brains and culture. We believe in the masses. We believe in their creative force. And we must make the Social Revolution anyhow.”

“And why?” I asked.

“Because it is the next step in the evolution of the race. Once we had slavery. It gave way to feudalism. That in turn gave way to capitalism. Now capitalism must leave the stage. It has served its purpose. It has made possible large-scale production, world-wide industrialism. But now it must make its exit. It is the breeder of imperialism and war, the strangler of labor, the destroyer of civilization. It must in its turn give place to the next phase—the system of Communism. It is historic mission of the working class to usher in this new social order. Though Russia is a primitive backward land it is for us to begin the Social Revolution. It is for the working class of other countries to carry it on.”

A daring program—to build the world anew.

No wonder the ideas of James Duncan of the Root Mission seemed trivial as he came with tedious talk of craft unions, the union label, and the eight-hour day. His hearers were amused or bored. Next day a newspaper reported the two-hour speech thus: “Last night the Vice-President of the American Federation of Labor addressed the Soviets. Coming over the Pacific he evidently prepared two speeches, one for the Russian people and the other for the ignorant Eskimos—obviously last night he thought he was addressing the Eskimos.”

For the Bolsheviks to put forward a big revolutionary program was one thing; to get it accepted by a nation of 160,000,000 was quite another—especially as the Bolshevik Party counted then not more than 150,000.

Bolsheviks Trained in America

Many factors, however, were conspiring to give Bolshevik ideas prestige with the people. In the first place the Bolsheviks understood the people. They were strong among the more literate strata, like the sailors, and comprised largely the artisans and laborers of the cities. Sprung directly from the people’s loins they spoke the people’s language, shared their sorrows and thought their thoughts.

It is not quite correct to say that the Bolsheviks understood the people. They were the people. So they were trusted. The Russian workingman, betrayed so long by the classes above him, puts faith only in his own.

This was brought home to a friend of mine in a grotesque manner. Krasnoschekov is his name, now President of the Far East Republic. Coming from the Workers’ Institute in Chicago, he entered the lists as a champion of the workers. An able, eloquent man, he was elected President of the City Council of Nikolayevsk. The bourgeois paper promptly appeared with an assault upon him as an “immigrant roustabout.”

“Citizens of great Russia,” it asked, “do you not feel the shame of being ruled by a porter, a window cleaner from Chicago?”

Krasnoschekov wrote out a hot reply, pointing out his distinction in America as lawyer and educator. On the way to newspaper with his article he turned in at the Soviet, wondering how much this assault had hurt him in the eyes of the workers.

“Tovarish Krasnoschekov!” someone shouted as he opened the door. With a cheer the men rose to their feet. “Nash! Nash!” (Ours! Ours!) they cried, grasping his hand. “We just read the paper, comrade. It made us all glad. We always liked you, though we thought you were a bourgeois. Now we find out you are one of us, a real workingman, and we love you. We’ll do anything for you.”

Ninety-six per cent of the Bolshevik Party were workingmen. Of course the Party had its intelligentsia, not sprung directly from the soil. But Lenin and Trotsky lived close enough to the hunger line to know the thoughts of the poor.

The Bolsheviks were mostly young men not afraid of responsibility, not afraid to die, and, in sharp contrast to the upper classes, not afraid to work. Many of them became my friends, particularly the exiles returning on the immigrant tide now flowing back from America.

There was Yanishev, who was literally a workman of the world. Ten years earlier he had been driven out of Russia for inciting his fellow-peasants against the Czar. He had lived like a water-rat on the docks of Hamburg; he had dug coal in the pits of Austria and had poured steel in the foundries of France. In America he had been tanned in leather-vats, bleached in textile mills and clubbed in strike-lines. His travels had given him a knowledge of four languages and an ardent faith in Bolshevism. The peasant had become now an industrial proletarian.

Some satirist has defined a proletarian as a “talking workingman”. Yanishev was not a talker by nature. But now he had to talk. The cry of millions of his fellow-workers for the light drew the words to his lips and in mills and mines he spoke as no intellectual could speak. Night and day he toiled until midsummer came and he took me on a memorable trip to the village.

Another comrade was Woskov, formerly agent of New York Carpenters’ Union No. 1008, now in the Workers’ Committee that ran the rifle factory at Sestroretsk. Another was Volodarsky, virtually a galley-slave of the Soviet and deliriously happy in it. Once he exclaimed to me: “I have had more real joy in these few weeks than any fifty men ought to have in all their lives!” There was Neibut, with his pack of books and with eyes glowing over the English in Brailsford’s The War of Steel and Gold! To Bolshevik propaganda these immigrants brought Western speed and method. In Russian there is no word “efficient”. These young zealots were prodigies of efficiency and energy.

The center of Bolshevik action was Petrograd. In this there is the fine irony of history. This city was the pride and glory of the great Czar Peter. He found a swamp here and left a brilliant capital. To make a foundation he sunk into these marshes forests of trees and quarries of stone. It is a colossal monument to Peter’s iron will. At the same time it is a monument of colossal cruelty, for it is built not only on millions of wooden piles, but on millions of human bones.

Like cattle the workmen were herded in these swamps to perish of cold and hunger and scurvy. As fast as they were swallowed up more serfs were driven in. They dug the soil with bare hands and sticks, carrying it off in caps and aprons. With thudding hammers, cracking whips, and groans of the dying, Petrograd rose like the Pyramids, in the tears and anguish of slaves.

Now the descendants of these slaves were in revolt. Petrograd had become the Head of the Revolution. Every day it started out missionaries on long crusading tours. Every day it poured out bales and carloads of Bolshevik gospel in print. In June, Petrograd was publishing Pravda (Truth), ‘the Soldier, The Village Poor, in millions of copies. “All done on German money,” said the Allied observers, as ostrich-like, they sat with heads buried in the boulevard cafes, believing what they preferred to believe. Had they turned the corner they would have seen a long line of men filing past a desk, each laying on it a contribution, ten copecks 2 ten rubles, maybe a hundred. These were workers, soldiers, even peasants, doing their bit for the Bolshevik press.

The greater the success of the Bolsheviks, the louder the hue and cry against them. While the bourgeois press praised the sense and moderation of the other parties, it called for an iron fist for the Bolsheviks. While “Babushka” and Kerensky were given regal quarters in the Winter Palace, the Bolsheviks were thrown into jail.

In the past all parties suffered for their principles. Now it was chiefly the Bolsheviks who suffered. They were the martyrs of today. This gave them prestige. Persecution lifted them into prominence. The masses, now giving heed to Bolshevik doctrine, found it strangely akin to their own desires.

But it was not the sacrifice and enthusiasm of the Bolsheviks that was finally to bring the masses under their banner. More powerful allies were working with them. Hunger was their chief ally—a threefold hunger: a mass hunger for bread, and peace, and land.

In the rural Soviets rose again the ancient cry of the peasants, “The land belongs to God and the people.” The city-workers left out God and cried, “The factories belong to the workers.” At the front the soldiers proclaimed, “The war belongs to the devil. We want nothing to do with it. We want peace.”

A great ferment was working in the masses. It set them organizing Land Committees, Factory Committees, Committees of the Front. It set them talking, so that Russia became a nation of a hundred million orators. It sent them into the streets in tremendous mass demonstrations.

CHAPTER 2: PETROGRAD DEMONSTRATES

The spring and summer of 1917 were a series of demonstrations. In this, Russia always excelled. Now the processions were longer, led not by priests but by the people, with red banners instead of ikons, and instead of church hymns, songs of Revolution.

Who can forget Petrograd of July first! Soldiers in drab and olive, horsemen in blue and gold, white-bloused sailors from the fleet, black-bloused workmen from the mills, girls in varicoloured waists, surging through the main arteries of the city. On each marcher a streamer, a flower, a riband of red; scarlet kerchiefs around the women’s heads, red rubashkas on the men. Above, like crimson foam, sparkled and tossed a thousand banners of red.

As this human river flowed it sang.

Three years before I had seen the German war machine rolling down the valley of the Meuse on its drive towards. Paris. The cliffs resounded then to ten thousand lusty German voices singing “Deutschland uber Alles,” while ten thousand boots struck the pavement in unison. It was powerful but mechanical, and, like every act of those grey columns, ordered from above.

But the singing of these red columns was the spontaneous outpouring of a people’s soul. Some one would strike up a revolutionary hymn; the deep resonant voices of the soldiers would lift the refrain, joined by the plaintive voices of the workingwomen; the hymn would rise, and fall, and die away; then, down the line, it would burst forth again—the whole street singing in harmony.

Past the golden dome of Saint Isaac’s, past the minarets of the Mohammedan Mosque, marched forty creeds and races, welded into one by the fire of the Revolution. The mines, the mills, the slums and trenches were blotted from their minds. This was the day the people had made. They would rejoice and be glad in it.

But in their joy they did not forget those who, to bring this day, had marched bound and bleeding to exile and death on the plains of Siberia. Close at hand, too, were the martyrs of the March Revolution; a thousand of them lying in their red coffins on the Field of Mars. Here the militant strains of the Marseillaise gave way to the solemn measures of Chopin’s Funeral March. With muffled drums and lowered banners, with bowed heads, they passed the long grave, weeping or in silence.

One incident, trivial in itself, but significant, marred the peace of the day. It was on Sadovaya where I was standing with Alex Gumberg, the little Russian-American, friend and pilot to so many Americans in the days of the Revolution. The wrath of the sailors and workingmen was roused by a red banner with the inscription “Long live the Provisional Government”. They started to tear it down and in the melee someone shouted “The Cossacks are coming”.

The very name of these ancient enemies of the people struck terror into the crowds. White-faced, they stampeded like a herd, trampling the fallen and yelling like madmen. Happily it was a false alarm. The ranks reformed and with songs and cheers took up the march again.

But this procession was more than an outburst of emotion. It was sternly prophetic, its banners proclaiming: “Factories to the Workers! Land to the Peasants! Peace to all the World! Down with the War! Down with the Secret Treaties! Down with the Capitalist Ministers!”

This was the Bolshevik program crystallized into slogans for the masses. There were thousands of banners, so many that even the Bolsheviks were surprised. Those banners were signals indicating a big storm brewing. Everybody could see that, and everybody did see it, except those sent to Russia specifically commissioned to see it—the Root Mission for example. While these gentlemen were in revolutionary Russia they were absolutely isolated from the Revolution. As the Russian proverb goes: “they went to the circus, but they did not see the elephant.”

On this July 1st the Americans were invited to a special service in the Cathedral of Kazan. In the church they knelt to receive the kisses and blessings of the priests, while the streets outside rang with songs and cheers from the vast procession of exalted people. Blind men! They did not see that faith that day was not in the mass within those musty walls but in the masses without.

Yet they were no blinder than the rest of the diplomats cheering the first glowing reports of Kerensky’s drive on the Eastern Front. The drive, like its leader, a dazzling success at first, turned into a tragic fiasco. It slaughtered 30,000 Russians, shattered the morale of the army, enraged the people, forced a cabinet crisis, and brought the disastrous repercussion in Petrograd, the armed upheaval of July sixteenth.

The Armed Demonstration

July 1st gave warning of the coming storm. July 16th saw it break in fury. First long files of older peasant soldiers with placards: "Let the 40-year-old men go home and harvest the crops." Then barrack, slum and factory belching out torrents of men in arms who converged on the Tauride Palace, and, for two nights and a day, roared through its gates. Armored cars, with sirens screaming and red flags flying from the turrets, raced up and down the streets. Motor trucks, crammed with soldiers, bayonets jutting out on every side, dashed by like giant porcupines on a rampage. Stretched full length on the car fenders lay sharp-shooters, rifles projecting beyond the lamps, eyes on the watch for provocators.

This outpouring was much bigger than the river that ran through these streets on July first, and more sinister, for it glittered with steel and hissed with curses—a long grey line of wrath. It was the spontaneous outburst of men against their rulers—ugly, reckless, furious.

Under a black banner marched a band of Anarchists, with Yarchuk the tailor at the head. On him was the stamp of the sweat-shop. Long bending over the needle had left him undersized. Now, in place of a needle, he was wielding a gun—the symbol of his deliverance from slavery to the needle.

Gumberg asked him, "What are your political demands?"

"Our political demands?" hesitated Yarchuk.

"To hell with the capitalists!" interjected a big sailor. "And our other political demands," he added, "are—to hell with the war and to hell with the whole damn Cabinet."

Backed up in an alley was a taxi-cab, the nozzles of two machine-guns poking through the windows. In answer to our query, the driver pointed to a banner reading, "Down with the Capitalist Ministers".

"We are tired of begging them not to starve and kill the people," he explained. "When we talk they won’t listen; but wait till these two pups (sobachki) speak!" He patted the guns affectionately. "They will listen then all right."

A mob with nerves at trigger-tension, with such weapons in its hands, and such temper in its soul, did not need much provocation. And provocators were everywhere. Agents of the Black Hundred plied their trade of dissension among the crowds, inciting to riot and pogroms. They turned loose two hundred criminals from Kresty to pillage and loot. In the ensuing ruin they hoped to see the Revolution killed and the Czar restored. In some places they did bring on frightful slaughter.

At a tense moment, in the tight-packed concourse of the Tauride, a provocatory shot was fired. From that shot sprang a hundred. From every quarter rifles blazed, comrades firing point blank into comrades. The crowd screamed, crashed up against the pillars, surged back again, and then fell flat upon the ground. When the firing ceased, sixteen could not rise. During this massacre a military band two blocks away was playing the Marseillaise.

Fighting in the streets is panicky business. At night, with bullets spitting from hidden loopholes, from roofs above and cellar-ways below, with the enemy invisible and friends poring volleys into friends, the crowds stampeded, back and forth, fleeing from a hail of bullets in one street only to plunge into leaden gusts sweeping through the next.

Three times that night our feet slipped in blood on the pavement. Down the Nevsky was blazed a trail of shattered windows and looted shops. The fighting ranged from little skirmishes with nests of provocators, to the battle on Liteiny, which left twelve horses of the Cossacks stretched upon the cobbles. Over these horses stood a big izvoschik (cabman), tears in his eyes. In time of Revolution the killing of 56 and wounding of 650 men might be endured, but the loss of 12 good horses was too much for an izvoschik's heart to bear.

The Bolsheviks Control the Rising

Only Petrograd’s long experience in barricade and street fighting, and the native good sense of the people, prevented the shambles from being more bloody than they were. Upon the chaotic insurgent masses was brought to bear a stabilizing force in tens of thousands of workingmen, backed by the directing mind of the Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks saw clearly that this uprising was a spontaneous elemental thing. They saw these masses striking out powerfully but rather blindly. They determined that they should strike to some purpose. They determined to let the full force of this demonstration reach the Soviet Central Executive Committee. This was a committee of 256 selected by the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets before it adjourned. It was in permanent session in the Tauride Palace, and upon it the masses were converging.

The Bolsheviks alone had influence over these masses. All parties implored them to use it. Placing their speakers upon the central portico, they met each regiment and delegation with a short address.

From our vantage-point we could view the whole concourse crammed with people, with here and there a man lifted upon his artillery horse, while many banners marked out a red current through the solid mass.

Below us was a sea of upturned faces, the fears, and hopes, and angers written on them but half legible in the twilight of the Russian night. From down the street could be heard the roar of marching hosts, cheering the armored cars. The automobile searchlights focusing on the speaker, silhouetted him against the walls of the Palace, a gigantic figure in black. Every gesture, ten times magnified, cut a sweeping shadow across the white facade.

"Comrades," said this giant Bolshevik, "you want revolutionary action. The only way to get it is through a revolutionary government. The Kerensky Government is revolutionary in name only. They promise land, but the landlords still have it. They promise bread, but the speculators still hold it. They promise to get from the Allies a declaration of the objects of the war, but the Allies simply tell us to go on fighting.

"In the cabinet a fundamental conflict rages between the Socialist and the bourgeois ministers. The result is a deadlock and nothing at all is done.

"You men of Petrograd come here to the Soviet Executive Committee saying, ‘Take the Government. Here are the bayonets to back you!’ You want the Soviets to be the government. So do we Bolsheviks. But we remember that Petrograd is not all of Russia. So we are demanding that the Central Executive Committee call delegates from all over Russia. It is for this new congress to declare the Soviets the government of Russia."

Each crowd met this declaration with cheers and loud cries, "Down with Kerensky"; "Down with the Bourgeois Government"; "All Power to the Soviets".

"Avoid all violence and bloodshed," was the parting admonition to each contingent. "Do not listen to provocators. Do not delight your enemies by killing each other. You have amply shown your power. Now go home quietly. When the occasion for force arises we will call you."

In the swirling flood were cross currents made by the Anarchists, the Black Hundreds, German agents, hoodlums, and those volatile elements which always join the side with the most machine-guns. One thing was now clear to the Bolsheviks: the revolutionary workmen and soldiers around Petrograd were overwhelmingly against the Provisional Government and for the Soviet. They wanted the Soviet to be the government. But the Bolsheviks were afraid this would be a premature step. As they said, "Petrograd is not Russia. The other cities and the army at the front may not be ripe for such drastic action. Only delegates from the Soviets of all Russia can decide that."

Inside the Tauride the Bolsheviks were using every argument to persuade the members of the Soviet Executive Committee to call another All-Russian Congress. Outside the Tauride, they were using every exhortation to quiet and appease the clamoring masses. This was a task that taxed all their wits and resources.

The Sailors Demand "All Power to the Soviets"

Some contingents came to the Tauride very belligerent. The Kronstadt sailors arrived in a particularly ugly temper. In barges they came up the river, eight thousand strong. Two of their number had been killed along the way. It had been no holiday excursion, and they had no intention of gazing at the walls of the Palace, filling the courtyard with futile clamor, then turning around and going home. They sent in a demand that the Soviet produce a Socialist Minister, and produce him at once.

Chernov, Minister of Agriculture, came out. He took for his rostrum the top of a cab.

"I come to tell you that three bourgeois Ministers have resigned. We now look to the future with great hope. Here are the laws which give the land to the peasant."

"Good," cried the hearers. "Will these laws be put into operation at once?"

"As soon as possible," Chernov answered.

"Soon as possible!" they mocked him. "No, no! We want it now, now. All the the land for the peasant now! What have you been doing all these weeks anyhow?"

"I am not answerable to you for my deeds," Chernov replied, white with rage. "It is not you that put me in my office. It was the Peasants’ Soviet. To them alone I make my reckoning."

At this rebuff a howl of derision went up from the sailors. With it went the cry: "Arrest Chernov! Arrest him!" A dozen hands stretched out to clutch the Minister and drag him off. Others sought to drag him back. In a vortex of fighting friends and foes, his clothes torn, the Minister was being borne away. But Trotsky, coming up, secured his release.

Meanwhile, Saakian scrambled up on the cab. He struck an attitude of stern command.

"Listen!" he cried. "Do you know who is now addressing you?"

"No," a voice called out. "And we don’t give a damn."

"The man who is now addressing you," resumed Saakian, "is the Vice-President of the Central Executive Committee of the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Deputies."

This prodigious title instead of serving to impress and quiet the crowd, was greeted by laughter and cries of "Down with him!" (doloi , doloi). But he had come out to tame this mob, and with great vim he fired into it a fusillade of short abrupt sentences.

"My name—Saakian!" (The mob: "Down with him!")

"My party—Socialist-Revolutionary!" ("Down with him!")

"My official religion—according to the passport—Armenian-Gregorian!" ("Down with him!")

"My real religion—Socialism!" ("Down with him!")

"My relation to the war—two brothers killed." A voice: "There should have been a third."

"My advice to you—trust us, your leaders and best friends. Stop this foolish demonstration. You are disgracing yourself, disgracing the Revolution, bringing disaster to Russia."

These sailors were already enraged. To slap them in the face thus was an idiotic act. Pandemonium broke loose. Again Trotsky to the rescue.

"Revolutionary sailors, pride and flower of the revolutionary forces of Russia!" he began. "In this battle for the Social Revolution we fight together. Together, comrades, our fists beat upon the doors of this Palace until the ideals for which our blood has flowed shall at last be incarnated in the constitution of this country. Hard and long has been the heroic struggle! But out of it will come a free life for free men in a great free land. Am I not right?"

"Right you are, Trotsky," yells the crowd.

Trotsky moves away.

"But you haven't told us anything," they cry. "What are you going to do about the Cabinet?" They may be a mob, with an appetite for flattery, but they are not so unthinking as to be pacified by phrases.

"I am too hoarse to talk more," he pleads. "Riazanov will tell you."

"No, you tell us!" Trotsky again mounts the cab.

"Only the All-Russian Congress can assume full power of government. The Labor Section has agreed to call this congress. The Military Section will without doubt follow. In two weeks the delegates can be here."

"Two weeks!" they cry in astonishment. "Two weeks is too long. We want it now!"

But Trotsky prevails. The sailors acquiesce, cheering the Soviets and the coming Revolution. They move peacefully away, convinced that the Second All-Russian Congress will be called.

Downing the Demonstration, then the Bolsheviks

This is precisely what the leaders in the Soviet Executive Committee do not want. They are dead set against the Soviet becoming the government. They have many reasons to give. But the real reason is fear of these very masses by whom they have been lifted to their exalted stations. The intelligentsia distrust the masses below them. At the same time they exaggerate the abilities and good intentions of the grand bourgeoisie above them.

They do not want the Soviets to take the power. They have no intention of calling a Second All-Russian Congress in two weeks, two months, or at all. But they are frightened by these turbulent crowds crashing into the courtyard, hammering at the doors. Their tactics are to placate the mob, and they seek help from the Bolsheviks. At the same time these intelligentsia play another game. They join the Provisional Government in calling regiments from the front “to quell the mutiny and restore order in the city.”

On the third day the troops arrive. Bicycle battalions, the reserve regiments, and then long grim lines of horsemen, the sun glancing on the tips of their lances. They are the Cossacks, ancient foes of the revolutionists, bringing dread to the workers and joy to the bourgeoisie. The avenues are filled now with well-dressed throngs cheering the Cossacks, crying “Shoot the rabble.” “String up the Bolsheviks.”

A wave of reaction runs through the city. Insurgent regiments are disarmed. The death penalty is restored. The Bolshevik papers are suppressed. Forged documents attesting the Bolsheviks as German agents are handed to the press. Alexandrov, the Czar’s prosecutor, hales them before the bar, indicted for high treason under section 108 of the Penal Code. Leaders like Trotsky and Kollontai are thrown into prison. Lenin and Zinoviev are driven into hiding. In all quarters sudden seizures, assaults and murder of workingmen.

In the early morning of July 18th I am suddenly wakened by piercing cries from the Nevsky. With the clattering of horses’ hoofs are mingled shouts, desperate pleas for mercy, curses—one terrible blood-curdling scream. Then, the thud of a falling body, the groans of a man dying, and silence. An officer coming in explains that some workingmen had been caught pasting up Bolshevik posters along the Nevsky. A squad of Cossacks had ridden them down, lashing out with whips and sabres, cleaving one man open, and leaving him dead on the pavement.

At this new turn of events the bourgeoisie are elated. Ill-based elation! They do not know that the screams of this murdered workman will penetrate the furthermost corners of Russia, rousing his comrades to wrath and arms. This July day they cheer the Volynsk regiment, as with band playing it enters the city to suppress this uprising, whose purpose is to offer all power to the Soviets. Ill-starred cheers! They do not know that on a coming November night they will see this regiment in the forefront of the rising that triumphantly delivers all power to the Soviets.

The troops are called in to conquer Petrograd; but in the end Petrograd conquers them. The infection of this Bolshevik stronghold is irresistible. It is a huge blast furnace of the Revolution, burning away all dross and indifference. No matter how cold and sluggish they may enter the city, out of it they go fired by the spirit of the Revolution.

The city rose in tears and blood, in hunger and cold, in the forced labor of myriads of the starved and beaten. Their bones lie buried deep in the mud below. But their outraged spirits seem to live again in the Petrograd workingmen of today—spirits, powerful and avenging. The serfs of Peter built the city; presently their descendants will be coming into their own.

It does not appear thus in midsummer 1917. The black shadow of reaction hovers over them. But the Bolsheviks bide their time. History, they feel, is on their side. Their ideas are working out in the villages, in the fleet and at the front. To these places I now make my way.

CHAPTER 3: A PEASANT INTERLUDE

"Go out among the forests and the people," said Bakunin.

"In the capitals the orators thunder and rage, But in the village is the silence of centuries."

We craved a taste of this silence. Three months we had heard the roar of Revolution. I was saturated with it; Yanishev was exhausted by it. His voice had failed through incessant speaking and he had been ordered by the Bolshevik Party to take a ten days’ respite. So we started out for the Volga basin bound for the little village of Spasskoye, from which Yanishev had been driven out in 1907.

It was high noon one August day when we left the Moscow train and set out on the road leading across the fields. Sun-drenched in these last weeks of summer, the fields had turned into wide rolling seas of yellow grain, dotted here and there with islands of green. These were the tree-shaded peasant villages of the province of Vladimir. From a rise in the road we could count sixteen of them, each with its great white church capped with glistening domes. It was a holiday and the distant belfries were flooding the fields with music as the sun had flooded them with color.

After the cities this was to me a land of peace and quiet. But to Yanishev it was a land of poignant memories. After ten years of wandering the exile was returning home.

"In that village over there," he said, pointing to the west, "my father was a teacher. The people liked his teaching, but one day the gendarmes came, closed the school, and led him off. In the next village Vera lived. She was very pretty and very kind and she was my sweetheart. I was too bashful to tell her then, and now it is too late. She is in Siberia. In the woods yonder a few of us used to meet to talk about the revolution. One night the Cossacks came riding down on us. That bridge is where they killed Yegor, the bravest of our comrades."

It was not a happy home-coming for the exile. Every turn in the road started up some recollection. Handkerchief in hand Yanishev walked along, pretending that it was only perspiration he was wiping from his face.

As we came across the village green of Spasskoye we saw an old peasant in a bright blue smock sitting on a bench before his hut. He shaded his eyes, puzzled by the appearance of these two dust-stained foreigners. Then in joyful recognition he cried "Mikhail Petrovich!" and throwing his arms around Yanishev, kissed him on both cheeks. Then he turned to me. I told him that my name was Albert.

"And your father’s name?" he inquired gravely.

"David," I replied.

"Albert Davidovich (Albert, son of David), welcome to the home of Ivan Ivanov. We are poor, but may God give you his richest blessing."

Ivan Ivanov stood straight as an arrow, long-bearded, clear-eyed, hard-muscled. But it was not his strength of body, nor his warmth of feeling, nor his quaint formality of speech that struck me. It was his quiet dignity. It was the dignity of a natural object, a tree whose roots run deep into the soil. And it was indeed out of the soil of this mir that Ivan Ivanov for sixty years had drawn his sustenance, as had his fathers for generations. His little izba was made of logs, its deep thatched roof now green with weeds, its garden gay with flowers.

Ivan’s wife, Tatyana, and daughter, Avdotia, having saluted us, brought a table from the house. On it they set a samovar, and lifting its top, placed eggs along the steaming sides. Ivan and his household made the sign of the cross and we sat down at the table.

"Of what we are rich in, we gladly give you," said Ivan (Chem bogaty, tyem ee rady).

The women brought in a big bowl of cabbage-soup (. shchee ), and for each person a wooden spoon. Every one was supposed to dip his soup from the common bowl. Seeing this, I stood not upon the order of the dipping, but dipped at once. When the first bowl was empty, they brought a second, full of porridge (kasha). It was followed by a bowl of boiled raisins. Ivan presided at the samovar, dispensing tea, black bread and cucumbers. It was a special feast, for this was a special holiday in Spasskoye.

Even the crows seemed to be aware of it. Great flocks wheeling overhead threw swift cloud-shadows across the ground, or alighted on the church roof and covered it completely. The domes, all green or glistening gold, would in a minute be blackest jet.

I told Ivan that in America, farmers killed crows because they ate the grain. "Yes," said Ivan, "our crows eat the grain. But they eat the field-mice, too. And even if they are crows, they are like us and want to live."

Tatyana held a like attitude toward the flies that swarmed around the table. Descending on a piece of sugar, they would turn it as black as the crow-covered church. "Never mind the flies," said Tatyana. "Poor things, in a month or two they'll be dead, anyhow."

The Village Takes a Holiday

It was the Feast of Transfiguration, and from all the countryside around came the poor, the crippled and the aged. Again and again we heard the tapping of a cane and a plaintive voice asking alms radi Christa (for the Christ’s sake). Yanishev and I dropped a few copecks into the bags they thrust before them. The women followed with large pieces cut from the big black loaves, while Ivan solemnly deposited in each sack a great green cucumber. Cucumbers were scarce this year, so it was truly a gift of love. But whether we gave cucumbers or bread or copecks, back to each of us came the plaintive sing-song blessing of the beggar.

Even the roughest, poorest Russian peasant is moved to profound pity by the spectacle of human misery. His own life teaches him the meaning of pain and privation. But this does not dull his sympathy; it makes him the more sensitive to the sufferings of others.

To Ivan the city workingmen cooped up in their hot dusty streets were “poor fellows” (bedniakee); the criminals locked up in jails were “unfortunates” (neschastnenkie); while a group of war-prisoners in Austrian uniforms cut him deepest of all. They seemed jolly enough as they came rollicking by, and I said so.

“But they are so far away from home,” said Ivan. “How can they be happy?”

“Well,” I said, “here am I, farther from home than they are, and I am happy.”

“Yes,” assented the others, “that is right.”

“No,” said Ivan Ivanov, “that is wrong. Albert Davidovich is here because he wanted to come. The prisoners are here because we made them come.”

Naturally two foreigners sitting at the table of Ivan Ivanov made a sensation among the natives of Spas-skoye. But the elders did not let their curiosity overcome their sense of the proprieties. Only a few children came down, and fixed their gaze upon us. I smiled at the children and they looked thunderstruck. Again I smiled, and three of them almost fell backwards. This seemed a peculiar reaction to my friendly overtures. At the third smile they cried, “Zolotiyeh zooby!” and clasping hands they ran away. Before I could grasp the meaning of this behavior they came rushing back with a score of recruits. In semi-circle they stood around the table with all their wistful eyes converged on me. There was nothing for me to do but smile again.

“Yes, yes!” they cried. “Zolotiyeh zooby! He is the man with golden teeth!” This was why my smile had startled them. And what could be more marvelous than the arrival of a foreigner whose mouth grew golden teeth? Had I arrived in Spas-skoye with a golden crown upon my head I could not have more deeply stirred the community than by wearing a golden crown upon my tooth. But this I learned on the morrow.

Now from the farther end of the village came the strains of music. There was a chorus of young voices accompanied by the thrumming of the balalaika, the clanging of cymbals and the throbbing of a kind of tambourine (bouben). Clearer and nearer came the music, until suddenly around the corner of the church emerged the procession of players and singers. The girls were in the gay rich costumes of the peasants; the boys wore smocks of green and orange and brightest hue, belted by cords with tasseled ends. The boys played the instruments, while the girls sang in response to the precentor, a clean-looking, tousle-haired lad of seventeen, one of the last to be drafted to the front.

Three times they circled the village green. Then gathering on the grass before the church, they sang and danced till morning. The rush and joyous fling of the dancers, the colors of their costumes lit by the pine-torches, the laughter and snatches of song rising out of the dark, the young lovers with their caresses frank and unashamed, the church bell at intervals crashing like a great temple gong and the startled birds, wheeling overhead, all combined to create an impression of primitive energy and beauty. It carried me back across the centuries to the days when the race was young, and men drew life and inspiration directly from the soil.

Yanishev Tells of America

It was a dream world, an idyllic commune, bound together in a fellowship of toil and play and feasting. With its spell upon me I made my way to the izba, opened the door, and came suddenly face to face with the twentieth century again. It was in the person and words of Yanishev, Yanishev the artisan, the Socialist and the Internationalist, To the peasants ringed around him he was describing the America of today. It was not the usual story of the bitter experiences of the Russian in America, the story of slums and strikes and poverty that thousands of returning exiles have spread over Russia. Yanishev, with husky voice but face aglow, was telling the wonders of America. To peasants with houses one story high he pictured the houses of New York, forty, fifty and sixty stories high. To men who had never seen a shop larger than the blacksmith’s, he told of great plants where a hundred trip-hammers pounded night and day. From their serene Muscovite plain he took them to great cities with subway trains tearing up the night, Great White Ways flooded with pleasure-seekers, and clanging factories where millions surged in and out.

The villagers listened attentively. They were not overawed or wonderstruck. Yet we could not complain of any lack of appreciation.

“The Americans do wonderful things,” said one old mujik, shaking our hands.

“Yes,” agreed his companion, “they do things more wonderful than even the leshey (the wood spirit).”

But in their kindly comments we felt a certain reserve, as if they were trying to be polite to strangers. Next morning a conversation overheard by chance gave us their real opinion.

Ivan was speaking. “No wonder Albert and Mikhail are white-faced and tired. Think of being brought up in a country like that.” And Tatyana said, “It’s a hard life we live, but God knows it looks harder over there.”

I glimpsed for the first time a truth that grew clearer as the months went by. The peasant has a mind of his own, which he uses to make judgments of his own. This is startling to the foreigner, to whom the Russian peasant is a shambling creature of the earth, immersed in the night of mediaevalism, chained by superstition, steeped in poverty. It is startling to discover that this peasant, unable to read or write, is able to think.

His thought is primal, elemental, with the stamp of the soil on it. It reflects the centuries of living on the far-stretching plains and steppes under the wide Russian sky and through the long winter. He brings a fresh untutored mind to bear upon all questions in a manner penetrating and often disconcerting. He challenges our long-held convictions. He revises our estimate of western civilization. It is not at all obvious to him that it is worth the price we pay for it. He is not mesmerized by machinery, efficiency, production. He asks, “What is it for? Does it make men happier? Does it make them more friendly?”

His conclusions are not always profound. Sometimes they are only naive and curious. When the mir assembled on Monday morning the village Elder ( starosta ) politely extended to me the greetings of the village. He said apologetically that the children had brought home a report about my golden teeth, but that it did not seem reasonable, and they didn’t know whether to believe it or not. There was nothing to do but demonstrate. I opened my mouth while the Elder peered long and intently into it and then gravely confirmed the report. Thereupon the seventy bearded patriarchs formed in line while I stood with mouth agape. Each gazed his fill and then moved along to give place to the next man until all the members of the mir had filed past my open mouth.

I had to explain that it is the custom of Americans to put cement and gold and silver in their crumbling teeth. One old man of eighty, whose fine clean teeth showed not the slightest need of dentistry, gave his opinion that Americans must eat food very strange and strong to work such havoc. Several said it might be all right for Americans to have golden teeth, but that it would never do for Russians, who were always drinking so much tea and such very hot tea that it would surely melt the gold. At this point Ivan Ivanov, who had been enjoying the prestige of harboring the unusual visitors, spoke up. He insisted that his tea was hot as any in the village, and testified that he had drawn at least ten glasses for me, yet there had been no melting.

Abroad the term “American” is almost synonymous with “man of wealth.” Gold on my eye-glasses and on my fountain pen convinced them that I must be a man of super-wealth. Yet I came to marvel at their lavish display of gold quite as much as they at mine. For this peasant village had gold in abundance, only it was not on the persons of the villagers. It was in their church. As one stepped through the church doors there loomed up a beautiful reredos twenty or thirty feet high, covered with a glistening sheen of gold. At one time the villagers had raised ten thousand rubles to decorate this temple.

While this little village was far removed from the currents of Europe and America, still there were marks of culture and civilization advancing from the West. There were cigarettes and Singer sewing-machines, men whose limbs had been shot off by machine-guns, and two boys from the factory-towns with store-clothes and celluloid collars—ugly contrasts to the smocks and kaftans of the village.

One night standing before a neighbor’s hut we were startled to hear through the curtains a soft and modulated voice asking. “Parlez-vous Fran^ais?” It was a pretty peasant girl raised in the village but with all the airs and graces which belong to a girl raised in a court. She had served in a French household in Petrograd and had come home to give birth to her child.

Thus in varied ways the outside world was filtering into the village stirring it from the slumber of centuries. Stories of big cities and of lands across the seas came by way of prisoners and soldiers, traders and Zemstvo men. It resulted in a strange miscellany of ideas about foreign lands—a curious compound of facts and fancies. One time a grotesque half-fact about America was brought home to me pointedly and in an embarrassing manner.

We were at the supper table and I was explaining that in my note-book I was writing down all the customs and habits of the Russians that struck me as strange and peculiar.

“For example,” I said, “instead of having individual dishes you eat out of one great common bowl. That is a curious custom.” “Yes,” said Ivan. “I suppose we are a curious people.”

“And that big stove! It takes up a third of the room. You bake bread in it. You sleep on top of it. You get inside and take a steam bath in it. You do everything with it and in a most peculiar manner.” “Yes,” nodded Ivan again, “I suppose we are a peculiar people.”

I felt something step on my foot. I thought it was a dog but it proved to be a pig. "There!" I exclaimed. "That is the most peculiar custom of all. You let pigs and chickens walk right into your dining-room."

At this moment, the baby in Avdotia's arms began kicking its feet up and down upon the table in baby fashion. Addressing the child, she said, "Here, baby! Take your feet off the table. Remember you are not in America." And turning to me she added courteously, "What peculiar customs you have there in America."

"We Harvest the Crops"

It was the day after the holiday, and the visitors from neighboring towns still tarried. There were games and dancing on the village green; and a band of children, having come into possession of an accordion, paraded solemnly about, singing the songs of yesterday, quaint little understudies of their elder brothers and sisters. An after-the-holiday lethargy lingered over most of the village. But not over the household of Ivan Ivanov. Everybody was busy there. Avdotia was twisting straw into bands to bind the sheaves. Tatyana was plaiting strips of bark and shaping them into sandals. Olga, Avdotia’s elder child, was forcibly teaching the cat to drink tea. Ivan sharpened the scythes, and we all set out for the fields.

At this move, the young people came out of the izbas. “Please don’t go to the fields. Stay at home,” they teased. As we proceeded they became quite serious. I asked why we should not go. “If one family starts for the fields all the others follow,” they said. “Then our holiday fun will be over. Please don’t go!”

But the ripened harvest was calling. The sun was shining, and there was no telling how soon the rains would fall. So Ivan marched along, and when, fifteen minutes later, we reached a rise of ground, we looked back to see the paths dotted with black figures making for the fields. Like a beehive, the village was sending out its workers to garner its food-stores for the oncoming winter. As we reached the rye-field Yanishev quoted from Nekrasov’s national epic, Who Can be Happy and Free in Russia?

"You full yellow cornfields!

To look at you now

One would never imagine

How sorely God’s people

Had toiled to array you.

'Tis not by warm dewdrops

That you have been moistened;

The sweat of the peasant

Has fallen on you.

The peasants are gladdened

At sight of the oats.

And the rye and the barley.

But not by the wheat.

For it feeds but the chosen.

'We love you not, Wheat!

But the rye and the barley

We love—they are kind.

They feed all men alike.'”

As each one turned to his task I joined in the work, fetching water, tying sheaves, swinging a scythe, watching the light-brown stalks come tumbling down. The scythe demands skill and practice. So the figure I cut and the swathe I cut were not heroic, nor did I add to the prestige of American reapers. Ivan was too polite to criticize my technique but I could see that it was inciting him to suppressed merriment. In his comment to Avdotia I picked up the Russian word for camel. I was indeed hunched over like a camel while Ivan Ivanov stood erect, handling his scythe like a master-craftsman. I turned upon Ivan and accused him of likening me to a camel. He was embarrassed. But when he saw that I was amused, and admitted my likeness to that humped creature, he laughed and laughed.

“Tatyana! Mikhail!” he roared. “Albert Davidovich says that when he cuts the grain he looks like a camel. Ho! ho! ho!” Two or three times after that he broke into sudden laughter. The camel must have helped him through many weary wastes in the long winter.

Writers dwell upon the laziness of the Russian peasant. Watching the mujik lounging around market-places and vodka-shops gives one that impression. But trying to keep up with the mujik in the fields very quickly takes it away. With the sun beating down on their heads and the dust rising from under their feet they mowed and raked and bound and stacked until the last straw had been gleaned from the field. Then they tramped back into the village.

The Peasants Wary of Bolshevism

Since our arrival the villagers had been asking Yanishev to make a speech. In the early evening there arrived a delegation beseeching him.

“Think of it,” said Yanishev. “Ten years ago if these peasants had suspected that I was a Socialist they would have come to kill me. Now, knowing that I am a Bolshevik, they come begging me to talk. Things have gone a long, long way since then.”

Yanishev was not a gifted man unless it be a gift to be deeply sensitive to the sorrows of the world. Tormented by the sufferings of others, he had chosen privation for himself. As an artisan in America he earned six dollars a day. Out of this he took enough for a cheap room and meals. With the rest he bought “literature” and carried it from door to door.

Since his return to Russia he had travelled night and day addressing enormous crowds until his voice failed him. He had come to his home village to recuperate. But even here the Revolution would not let him rest.

“Will Mikhail Petrovich give us a little speech?” the peasants pleaded. “Only a little speech.”

Yanishev could not deny them. The committee drew a wagon out upon the village green and when the throng was thick around it, Yanishev mounted this rostrum and began telling the Bolshevik story of the Revolution, the War, and the Land.

They stood listening while evening darkened into night. Then they brought torches, and Yanishev talked on. His voice grew husky. They brought him water, tea and kvass. His voice failed, and they waited patiently till it came back again.

So much reverence and age-old longings in those eager faces pressing around the speaker. So much hunger in these questions rising out of the dark. Yanishev toiled on until he was utterly exhausted. Only when he could not go on further did they reluctantly disperse. I listened to their comments.

“Mikhail Petrovich is a good man,” they were saying. “We know that he has gone far and seen many things. What he believes may be good for some people, but we do not know whether it is good for us.” Yanishev had poured out his soul, explaining, expounding the creed of Bolshevism—and not a single convert.

“It is all so new, Mikhail Petrovich,” they said. “We are a slow people. We must have time to think it over and talk it over. Only today we reaped the grain in the fields; it was months and months ago that we sowed it in the ground.”

“Never mind,” whispered Yanishev, with the zealot’s confidence in the ultimate triumph of his faith. “Of course, they will believe.”

I doubted. But Yanishev was right. Eight months later he made another speech on the village green. It was on invitation of the Communist Party of the village of Spasskoye. Fedossiev was chairman of the meeting.

Yanishev Talks of the Land

Morning brought many peasants to the door with questions. Above all was the problem of the land. The Bolshevik solution at that time was, "Leave it to the local land committees. Let them take over the great estates and put them into the hands of the people." The peasants pointed out that this did not solve the land problem of Spasskoye, for here there were no crown or church or private domains.

"All the land around here already belongs to us," said the Elder. "It is too little, for God gives us many children. The Bolsheviks may be as good as Mikhail Petrovich says they are, but if they take the government, can they make more land? No. Only God can do that. We want a government with money enough to send us to Siberia or to any place where there is land in plenty. Will the Bolsheviks do that?"

Yanishev explained the colonizing scheme, and then turned to the agricultural commune which the Bolsheviks were projecting for Russia. It was ultimately to change the mir into a co-operative large-scale farming enterprise. He pointed out the wastage of the present system in Spasskoye. Here, as usual, the land was divided into four sections. One was held for common pasturage. To make sure of a fair division of the good, the bad and the medium ground, each peasant was allotted a field in each of these respective sections. Yanishev pointed out the time lost in going from field to field. He showed the gain that would come if the fields, instead of being cut into checkerboards, were worked as a unit on a grand scale.

He pictured the gang-plow and the harvester at work. Two of the peasants had seen their magic performances in another province and testified that for working they were regular "devils" (tcherti).

"And will America send them to us?" the peasants asked.

"For a while," Yanishev replied. "Then we shall build great shops and make them right here in Russia."

Again he took his hearers out of their quiet rural haunts into the roar and clamor of a great modern plant. And again there was that same uneasy reaction to his tale. They were more afraid than enamoured of modern industrialism. They wanted our wonderful machinery. But they thought it would be a dubious blessing if they must pay the price of seeing chimneys belching black smoke-clouds over their land of green and white. The peasants dread the idea of "being cooked in a factory boiler". Necessity goaded some of them into mines and mills, but since the Revolution they have gone flocking back to the land.

Besides their social questions, there were many personal problems that confronted Yanishev. Should he recommend his political creed by compromising his personal convictions? For example, should he who had left the Greek Church, make the sign of the cross before and after meals. Yanishev decided against it and prepared himself for questions from Ivan Ivanov. But though the old peasant looked perplexed and his wife grieved when Yanishev omitted the ceremony, they never asked for explanations.

In Russia the customary salutation to the toiler in the fields is "God’s help to you." (Bog v pomoshch). Yanishev decided to use that greeting instead of the formal "Good morning." He also stood through the long service for Fedossiev’s baby. In Russian villages bells toll often for the death of a child.

"Many children God gives us," said the Elder. "And to keep bread in the mouths of those that live we must not neglect the fields." So the others went to their work while the priest and the parents, Yanishev and I, went to the church. Beside the mother stood her nine children. Each year she had borne a child and, ranged according to age, they formed a flight of steps with here and there a gap. That year the child had died. And now this year’s child was dead. It was a tiny thing, no larger than the lily beside it, so small and fragile in its little blue coffin, with the massive walls and pillars of the church rising around it.

This village of Spasskoye was fortunate in its priest. He was a kind and sympathetic man, liked and trusted by the people. Though called so often to say the children’s mass, he was trying not to make it a thing of routine. Gently he lit the candles on the coffin, laid the cross on the baby’s breast, and began the mass, filling the church with his resonant voice. Priest and deacon chanted the service, while father, mother and children crossed themselves and knelt and touched their foreheads to the floor. Opposite the priest Yanishev stood stolidly with half-bowed head.

They faced each other with the mystery of life and death between them; the one a priest of the Holy Orthodox church, the other a prophet of the Social Revolution; the one consecrating himself to making children happy and secure in the paradise beyond, the other devoting his life to making the earth secure and happy for living children.

I went with Yanishev upon many of his missionary journeys through the Russian towns and cities. From the skilled artisans in the textile-center of Ivanovo, we ranged through all ranks of the proletarians down to the slum of the thieves in Moscow, immortalized in Maxim Gorky’s The Night Asylum. But always the thoughts of Yanishev were going back to the villages.

Six months later I said good-bye to him at the Fourth Soviet Congress in Moscow. Clinging to his arm was a woman of seventy, very withered and bent. Yanishev introduced her reverently as his "teacher". Beyond the confines of Russia or outside the working classes her name was quite unknown. But to the young rebels among the workers and peasants her name was everything. With them she had shared hardship, pain and prison. The long years of toil and hunger had left her white and feeble, an object inspiring pity until one saw her eyes. In them were still the fires which had kindled the spirits of scores of young men like Yanishev and sent them out as flaming apostles of the Social Revolution. For the Revolution she had given her life, but had hardly dared dream that she would see it.

Now it had come and she was sitting among her own, with hands clasped in the hand of her young disciple. True, industry was in ruin, the Germans were at the gates, and hunger and cold walked through the city, yet as she sat in the ancient Hall of Nobles, listening to Lenin, she was seeing the new day coming, bringing peace to all people and to her a chance to live on the land.

"We both came from the land and we both love it", she whispered to me. "And when the Revolution is complete Mikhail and I are going back to live in the village."

CHAPTER 4: THE MAN ON HORSEBACK

In the summer of 1917, I travelled far and wide through Russia. From all sides rose the lamentation of a stricken people. I heard it in the textile mills of Ivanovo, the Fair grounds of Nijni and the market-squares of Kiev. It came to me from the holds of steamers on the Volga and at night from rafts and barges drifting down the Dnieper. The burden of the people’s sorrow was the war, “The cursed war!”

Everywhere I saw the blight and wreckage of war. In the Ukraine, I drove out over those rolling lands which made Gogol exclaim: “You steppes! O God! How lovely you are!” We stopped at a little village folded in the hills and about three hundred women, forty old men and boys and a score of crippled soldiers gathered round our Zemstvo wagon.

When I stood up to address them I asked: “How many ever heard of Washington?” One lad raised his hand. “How many have heard of Lincoln?” Three hands. “Kerensky?” About ninety. “Lenin?” Ninety again. “Tolstoy?” One hundred and fifty hands.

They enjoyed this, laughing together at the foreigner and his funny accent. Then a foolish blunder. I asked, “Who of you have lost someone in the war?” Nearly every hand went up, and a wail swept through that laughing throng, like a winter wind moaning in the trees. Two old peasants fell against the wagon-wheels sobbing, and shaking my platform. A lad ran out of the crowd, crying: “My brother—they killed my brother!” And the women, drawing their platoks to their eyes, or clasped in each other’s arms, wept and wept, until I wondered where all the tears could come from. Who would have dreamed that behind those placid faces lay so much grief?

This was but one of the thousands of Russian villages which the war had stripped of every able-bodied man. It was one of countless villages to which the wounded came crawling back, crippled, eyeless, or armless. Millions never returned at all. They lay in that great grave, 1,500 miles long stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic—the Russian front against the Germans. There peasants with only clubs in their hands, driven up against the machine-guns of the Germans, were mowed down en masse.

There were plenty of guns in Archangel. They had even been loaded on cars, and started for the front. But merchants who wanted those cars for their wares, slipped a few thousand rubles to the officials; so, ten miles out of Archangel, the munitions were dumped and the cars shunted back to be reloaded with champagnes, automobiles, and Parisian dresses.

Life was gay and dazzling in Petrograd and the big cities—big profits in this war business—but it was cold and bloody business for 10,000,000 soldiers driven into the trenches by order of the Czar.

And now under Kerensky there were still 10,000,000 under arms. They were conscripts, dragged from ploughs and workshops to have guns thrust in their hands. The ruling class used every device to keep those weapons in the soldiers’ hands. It waved the flag and screamed “Victory and glory”. It organized Women’s Battalions of Death crying “Shame on you men to let girls do your fighting”. It placed machine-guns in the rear of rebelling regiments declaring certain death to those who retreated. But all to no avail.

The Soldiers in Revolt

In thousands, the soldiers were throwing down their guns and streaming from the front. Like plagues of locusts they came, clogging railways, highways, and waterways. They swarmed down on trains, packing roofs and platforms, clinging to car-steps like clusters of grapes, sometimes evicting passengers from their berths. A Y.M.C.A. man swears he saw this sign: "Comrade Soldiers: Please do not throw passengers out of the window after the train is in motion." Perhaps an exaggeration. But they did throw our suitcases out of the window.

It happened on a trip I made to Moscow with Alex Gumberg. Our compartment was crowded, and the Russians, having almost hermetically sealed door and window against the night air, went blissfully to sleep. The place, soon steaming like a Turkish bath, became unbearable. To let in a breath of air, I slid the door open, then joined the sleepers. In the morning I woke to a harsh surprise. Our suitcases were gone.

"Some comrade robbers in uniform threw them out of the window and then jumped off the train," explained the old conductor. His consolation for our grief was that they had likewise stolen the baggage of an officer in the next compartment. We grieved not so much for the loss of our clothes as for invaluable passports, notebooks, and letters of introduction our bags contained.

Two weeks later we got another surprise—a summons from the station-master in Moscow. There was one of our suitcases forwarded to us by the robbers. It contained none of our clothes but all our documents and the officer’s papers—not a single one was missing.

After all, considering the plight of the hordes of deserting soldiers that swept across the land, one wonders not at the number of thefts and excesses they committed but at the fewness of them. And if the tales of awful conditions in the trenches were true, the wonder is not that so many soldiers deserted but that so many still remained at the front.

I wanted to see conditions for myself. Many times I tried to get a pass to the front. At last in September, I succeeded. With John Reed and Boris Reinstein, I started for the Riga Sector.

With us was a Russian priest, a big bearded fellow, gentle and amiable, but with a terrible thirst for tea and conversation. On the door of our compartment, the guard slapped up a sign that said: "American Mission." Under this aegis we slept and ate as the train crept through the autumn drizzle and the priest talked endlessly on about his soldiers.

"In the old text of the church prayers," he said, "God is called Czar of Heaven and the Virgin, Czarina. We’ve had to leave that out. The people won’t have God insulted, they say. The priest prays for peace to all nations. Whereupon the soldiers cry out, ‘Add “without annexations and indemnities.” ’ Then we pray for travelers, for the sick and the suffering. And the soldiers cry 'Pray also for the deserters.' The Revolution has made havoc with the Faith, yet the masses of soldiers are religious. Much can still be done in the name of the cross."

But the Imperialists tried to do too much with it. "On with the war!" they cried. "On with the war, until we plant the cross glittering over the dome of Saint Sophia’s in Constantinople." And the soldiers replied: "Yes! But before we plant the cross on Saint Sophia’s, thousands of crosses will be planted on our graves. We don’t want Constantinople. We want to go home. We don’t want other people to take our land away from us. Neither will we fight to take other people’s land away from them."

But even if they had the will to fight, what could they fight with? At Wenden, the old city of the Teutonic Knights, we were set down in the midst of an army in ruins. Out of a grey sky the rain poured down, turning roads into rivers, and the soldiers’ hearts into lead. Out of the trenches gaunt skeletons rose up to stare at us. We saw famine-stricken men falling on fields of turnips to devour them raw. We saw men walking barefoot in the stubbled fields, summer uniforms arriving at the beginning of winter, horses dropping dead in mud up to their bellies. Above the lines brazenly hovered the armored planes of the enemy watching every move. There were no aircraft guns, no food, no clothes. And to crown all, no faith in their superiors.

Because their officers and government would or could do nothing for them the soldiers were doing things for themselves. On all sides, even in trenches and gun-positions, new Soviets were springing up. Here in Wenden there were three—(Is-ko-sol, Is-ko-lat, Is-ko-strel).

We were guests of the last, the Soviet of Lettish Sharpshooters, the most literate, the most valiant, the most revolutionary of all. For protection against the German planes, they convened in a tree-screened valley, ten thousand brown uniforms blending with the autumn-tinted leaves. Even with the threat above them, every mention of Kerensky’s name drew gales of laughter, every mention of peace thunders of applause.

"We are not cowards or traitors," declared the spokesmen. "But we refuse to fight until we know what we are fighting for. We are told this is a war for democracy. We do not believe it. We believe the Allies are land-grabbers like the Germans. Let them show that they are not. Let them publish the secret treaties. Let the Provisional Government show it is not hand in glove with the Imperialists. Then we will lay down our lives in battle to the last man.”

This was the root of the debacle of the great Russian armies. Not primarily that they had nothing to fight with but that they felt they had nothing to fight for.

Backed by the workingmen the soldiers were determined that the war should stop.

Fate of the Man on Horseback

The bourgeoisie, backed by the Allies and the General Staff, were equally determined that the war should go on. Continuing the war would give three things to the bourgeoisie:

1. It would continue to give them enormous profits out of army contracts.
2. In case of victory, it would give them, as their share in the loot, the Straits and Constantinople.
3. It would give them a chance of staving off the ever more insistent demands of the masses for land and factories.

They were following the wisdom of Catherine the Great who said: “The way to save our empire from the encroachment of the people is to engage in war and thus substitute national passions for social aspirations.” Now the social aspirations of the Russian masses were endangering the bourgeois empires of land and capital. But if the war could go on, the day of reckoning with the masses would be postponed. The energies, absorbed in carrying on the war could not be used in carrying on the Revolution. “On with the war to a victorious end!” became the rallying cry of the bourgeoisie.

But the Kerensky government no longer could control the soldiers. They no longer responded to the eloquence of this romantic man of words. The bourgeoisie set out to find a Man of the Sword. “Russia must have a strong man who will tolerate no revolutionary nonsense, but who will rule with an iron hand,” they said. “Let us have a Dictator.”

For their Man on Horseback they picked the Cossack General, Kornilov. At the conference in Moscow he had won the hearts of the bourgeoisie by calling for a policy of blood and iron. On his own initiative he had introduced capital punishment in the army. With machine-guns he had destroyed battalions of refractory soldiers and placed their stiffened corpses in rows along the fences. He declared that only drastic medicine of this kind could cure the ills of Russia.

On September 9, Kornilov issued a proclamation declaring: “Our great country is dying. Under pressure of the Bolshevik majority in the Soviet, the Kerensky government is acting in complete accord with the plans of the German General Staff. Let all who believe in God and the temples pray to the Lord to manifest the miracle of saving our native land.”

He drew 70,000 picked troops from the front. Many of them were Mohammedans—his Turkoman bodyguard, his Tartar horsemen and Circassian mountaineers. On the hilts of their swords the officers swore that when Petrograd was taken, the atheist Socialists would be forced to finish building the great mosque or be shot. With airplanes, British armored cars and the bloodthirsty Savage Division, he advanced on Petrograd in the name of God and Allah.

But he did not take it.

In the name of the Soviets and the Revolution the masses rose as one man to the defense of the capital. Kornilov was declared a traitor and an outlaw. Arsenals were opened and guns put in the hands of the workingmen. Red Guards patrolled the streets, trenches were dug, barricades hastily erected. Moslem Socialists rode into the Savage Division and in the name of Marx and Mohammed exhorted the mountaineers not to advance against the Revolution. Their pleas and arguments prevailed. The forces of Kornilov melted away and the “Dictator” was captured without firing a single shot. The bourgeoisie were depressed as the White Hope of the Counter-Revolution went down so easily before the blows of the Revolution.

The proletarians were correspondingly elated. They saw the strength and unity of their forces. They felt anew the solidarity binding together all sections of the toiling masses. Trench and factory acclaimed one another. Soldiers and workingmen paid special tribute to the sailors for the big part they played in this affair.

CHAPTER 5: COMRADES OF THE SEA

When the news of Kornilov’s advance on Petrograd was flashed to Kronstadt and the Baltic Fleet, it aroused the sailors like a thunderbolt. From their ships and island citadel they came pouring out in tens of thousands and bivouacked on the Field of Mars. They stood guard at all the nerve centers of the city, the railways and the Winter Palace. With the big sailor Dybenko leading, they drove headlong into the midst of Kornilov’s soldiers exhorting them not to advance. They put the fear of the Revolution into the hearts of the Whites and the fire and zest of the Revolution into the blood of their fellow Reds.

In July Trotsky had hailed them as “Pride and Flower of the Revolutionary Forces!” When they had been damned on all sides for some brash deeds at Kronstadt he had said: “Yes, but when a counter-revolutionary general tries to throw a noose around the neck of the Revolution, the Cadets will grease the rope with soap, while the sailors will come to fight and die with us together.”

So it proved in this adventure of Kornilov. And it was always so. All over Russia I had met these blue-bloused men with the roll of the sea in their carriage and the tang of the salt winds in their blood. Everywhere they went expounding the doctrines of Socialism. I had heard them in forum and market-places stirring the sluggish to action.

I had seen them in remote villages starting the flow of food to the cities. Later when the Yunkers rose against the Soviets I was to see these sailors heading the storming party that rushed to the telephone station and dug the Yunkers from their nests. Always they were first to sense danger to the Revolution, always first to hurry to its rescue.

The Revolution was precious to the Russian sailor because it meant deliverance from the past. That past was a nightmare. The old Russian naval officers came exclusively from the privileged caste. The count against them was that they imposed, not a rigid discipline, but one that was arbitrary and personal. The weal of a sailor was at the mercy of the whims, jealousies and insane rage of petty officers whom he despised. He was treated like a dog and humiliated by signs that read: “For Dogs and Sailors.”

Like the soldier’s, the sailor’s replies to his superior were limited to the three phrases: “Quite so” (tak tochno) “No indeed” (nekak niet) “Glad to try my best” (rad staratsa), with the salutation, “Your nobility”. Any added remark might bring him a blow in the face. The most trivial offense met with the most severe penalty. In four years 2,527 men were executed, sent to the penitentiary or to hard labor. All done in the name of the Czar.

Now the Czars were gone; their very names were being blotted out. The ships were being re-christened with names fitting the new republican order.

By this ceremony the Emperor Paul the First became The Republic. The Emperor Alexander II emerged from its baptism of paint as the Dawn of Liberty. Here was revolution enough to make these ancient autocrats turn in their graves. But it was even harder on the living Czar and his son. The Czarevitch was renamed the Citizen, while Nicholas II came forth as the good ship Comrade.

Comrade! This ex-Czar, now living in exile in Tobolsk, knew that the meanest coal-heaver was now a “Comrade”.

The new names appeared in gold on the jaunty ribboned caps of the sailors. And the sailors appeared everywhere as missionaries of Liberty, Comradeship and the Republic.

To make these changes in the names of the ships was very easy. Yet they were not mere surface changes, but symbolized a change in reality. They were the outward and visible signs on an inward and spiritual fact—the democratization of a great fleet.

The Sailors Rule the Navy

In September, I had my first contact with the sailor at home. It was at Helsingfors where the Baltic Fleet stood as a barricade on the water-road to Petrograd. Tied up to the dock was the Polar Star, the yacht of the former Czar. Our guide, an old ex-officer, pointed out a strip of yellow wood that ran around the ship.

"That moulding is of best mahogany," he whispered to us. "It cost twenty-five thousand rubles, but these damned Bolsheviks are too lazy now to keep it polished, so they painted it yellow. In my day a sailor was a sailor; he knew that his job was to scrub and polish, and he tended to his job. If he didn’t we knocked him down. But the devil is loose among them now. Think of it! On this very yacht belonging to the Czar himself, ordinary seamen sit about making laws for managing the ships, the fleet and the country. And they don’t stop there. They talk about managing the world. Internationalism and democracy they call it, but I call it downright treason and insanity.”

There in brief was the issue between the old regime and the new. In the old order, discipline and control were superimposed from above; in the new, they proceeded from the men themselves. The old was a fleet of officers, the new a fleet of sailors. In the change, a new set of values had been created. Now the polishing of the sailor’s wits upon democracy and internationalism had a higher rating than polishing the brass and mahogany.

The second index of the temper of the new fleet came to us as we climbed the gangway of the Polar Star, where Rasputin and his associates once had their fling. Here Bessie Beatty, the American correspondent, was gravely informed that the presence of her sex upon the ships was taboo—it was one of the new rules of the Soviet of Sailors. The captain was polite, much adorned with gold braid, but very helpless.

"I can do nothing at all," he explained dolefully. "Everything is in the hands of the ‘Committee’.”

"But she has come ten thousand versts to see the fleet."

"Well, we can see what the Committee says," he answered.

The messenger came back with a special dispensation from the Committee and we were on our way again. Everywhere members of the crew would challenge the presence of a woman in our party, politely capitulating, however, as the captain explained, "By special permit of the Committee.”

This Central Committee of the Baltic Sea, or as it was familiarly known, the Centrobalt, sat in the great cabin de luxe. It was simply a Soviet of the ships. Each contingent of 1,000 sailors had a representative in the committee, which consisted of 65 members, 45 of whom were Bolsheviks. There were four general departments: Administrative, Political, War and Marine, transacting all the affairs of the fleet. The captain had one of the former princes’ suites, but from the great cabin he was debarred. Happily my credentials were an open sesame to the committee and the cabin.

The Russian democracy in the person of the representatives of the Baltic Fleet sends warm greetings to the proletariat of all countries and hearty thanks for the greetings from our brothers in America.

Comrade Williams is the first swallow come flying across to us on the cold waves of the Baltic Sea, which now for over three years has been dyed by the blood of the sons of one family, the International.

The Russian proletariat will strive, up to its last breath to unite everybody under the red banner of the International. When starting the Revolution, we did not have in view a Political Revolution alone. The task of all true fighters for freedom is the making of a Social Revolution. For this the advance guard of the Revolution, in the person of the sailors of the Russian Fleet, and the workmen, will fight to the end.

The flame of the Russian Revolution, we are sure, will spread over the world and light a fire in the hearts of the workers of all lands, and we shall obtain support in our struggle for a speedy general peace.

The free Baltic Fleet impatiently awaits the moment when it can go to America and relate there all that Russia suffered under the yoke of Czarism, and what it is feeling now when the banner of the struggle for the freedom of peoples is unfurled.

LONG LIFE TO THE AMERICAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY. LONG LIVE THE PROLETARIAT OF ALL LANDS. LONG LIVE THE INTERNATIONAL. LONG LIVE GENERAL PEACE. The Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet, Fourth Convention

This day, however, the men were in festive mood. They were happy over a big fund just raised for their soldier comrades on the Riga front, and now were playing host to their first foreign comrade. The Secretary of the Committee escorted me on the pilot-boat to his battleship, the Republic. The entire crew was on deck cheering our approach across the waters. After an official welcome there were loud demands for a speech. My knowledge of Russian was very meagre then, and my interpreter knew but little English. I had to fall back on the current revolutionary phrases. But the mere reiteration of the new battle cries had power to charm these new disciples of Socialism. The sounding of these slogans in my foreign accent drew an outburst of applause that echoed like a salvo from all the ship’s batteries.

It was in these waters that the historic meeting between the Kaiser and the Czar had been staged. The applause could not have been more thunderous (certainly not so spontaneous) than when, as an American Internationalist, I shook hands with Averishkin, the Russian Internationalist, on the bridge of this battleship off the coast of Finland.

A Ship’s Menu, a Club and a College

After our love feast on deck we retired to the quarters of the ship’s committee, I was plied with innumerable questions about the American navy, ranging from “Do American navy officers reflect solely the viewpoint of the upper classes?” to “Are American battleships kept as clean as this one of ours?” As we talked, eggs and steak were brought to me, while each member of the committee was served with a large plate of potatoes. I commented on the difference in the dishes.

“Yours is officer’s fare, ours is sailor’s” they explained.

“Then why did you make a Revolution?” I asked banteringly.

They laughed and said, “The Revolution has given us what we wanted most—freedom. We are masters of our ships. We are masters of our own lives. We have our own courts. We can have shore leave when not on duty. Off duty we have the right to wear civilian clothes. We do not demand everything of the Revolution.”

The world-wide rise of the workers, however, is based on their desire, not solely for the first necessities of life, but for a larger part in its amenities. Driving through Helsingfors one night we missed the usual bands of sailors rolling down the streets. Suddenly we were brought sharply up before a building with fafade and dimensions of a great modern hotel. We entered and were guided by the music to the dining-hall. There, in a room set with palms and glistening with mirrors and silver, sat the diners, listening to Chopin and Tchaikovsky, interspersed with occasional ragtime from the American conductor. It was a hotel of the first class, but instead of the usual clientele of a big hotel—bankers, speculators, politicians, adventurers and ornate ladies—it was crowded with bronzed seamen of the war fleet of the Russian Republic, who had commandeered the entire building. Through its curtained halls now streamed a procession of laughing, jesting, arguing sailors in their suits of blue.

Outside in big letters was the sign “Sailors’ Club ” with its motto, “A welcome to all the sailors of the world.” It opened with ten thousand dues-paying members, ninety per cent of whom were literate. The club boasted a much-used magazine room, the nucleus of a library, and an excellent illustrated weekly, The Seaman (Moryak).

They had founded, too, a “University”, with courses ranging from the most elementary to the most advanced. In the committee on curriculum I blunderingly asked the chairman from what university he came.

“No university, no school,” he replied regretfully. “I come from the dark people, but I am a revolutionist. We did away with the Czar, but a worse enemy is ignorance. We shall do away with that. That is the only way to get a democratic fleet. Now we have a democratic machine, but most of our officers have not the democratic spirit. We must train our officers out of the ranks.” In his courses he had enlisted professors from the university, men from the scientific societies and some officers.

How did all this new discipline and comfort affect the fleet? Opinions differed. Many officers said that in destroying the old discipline the technical efficiency was lowered. Others said that considering its ordeal by war and Revolution the fleet was in good trim. As the test of its moral efficiency, they pointed to the battle of the Monsund Isles. Outnumbered by the Germans, and outdistanced in speed and gun-range, these revolutionary sailors had fought a brilliant engagement with the enemy. All admitted that their fighting morale was superb.

There was no doubt of the enthusiasm of the sailors for their fleet. They had a feeling of communal ownership in it. When the pilot-boat carried me away from the Republic, Averishkin with a gesture that took in all the grey ships riding in the bay, exclaimed, “Our fleet! Our fleet! We shall make it the best fleet in the world. May it always fight for justice!” Then, as if looking through the grey mists which hung above the water and beyond the red mists of the world war, he added, “Until we make the Social Revolution and the end of all wars.”

In Russia this Social Revolution was coming on apace and these men of the fleet were shortly to be in the vortex of it.

Part 2 - THE REVOLUTION AND THE DAYS AFTER

Among the Whites and the Reds

CHAPTER 6: “ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS”

Another winter is bearing down upon hungry, heartsick Russia. The last October leaves are falling from the trees, and the last bit of confidence in the government is falling with them.

Everywhere recklessness and orgies of speculation. Food trains are looted. Floods of paper money pour from the presses. In the newspapers endless columns of hold-ups, murders, and suicides. Night life and gambling halls run full blast with enormous stakes won and lost.

Reaction is open and arrogant. Kornilov, instead of being tried for high treason, is lauded as the Great Patriot by the bourgeoisie. But with them, patriotism is tawdry talk and a sham. They pray for the Germans to come and cut off Petrograd, the Head of the Revolution.

Rodzianko, ex-President of the Duma, brazenly writes: “Let the Germans take the city. Though they destroy the fleet they will throttle the Soviets.” The big insurance companies announce one-third off in rates after the German occupation. “Winter always was Russia’s best friend,” say the bourgeoisie. “It may rid us of this cursed Revolution.”

Despair Foments Rebellion

Winter, sweeping down out of the North, hailed by the privileged, brings terror to the suffering masses. As the mercury drops towards zero, the prices of food and fuel go soaring up. The bread ration grows shorter. The queues of shivering women standing all night in the icy streets grow longer. Lockouts and strikes add to the millions of workless. The rancor in the hearts of the masses flares out in bitter speeches like this from a Viborg workingman:

"Patience, patience, they are always counselling us. But what have they done to make us patient? Has Kerensky given us more to eat than the Czar? More words and promises—yes! But not more food. All night long we wait in the lines for shoes and bread and meat, while, like fools, we write ‘Liberty’ on our banners. The only liberty we have is the same old liberty to slave and starve."

In a mood born of despair and disillusion they are acting now—reckless, violent, iconoclastic, but—acting.

In the cities revolting employees are driving mill-owners out of their offices. Managers try to stop it, and are thrown into wheelbarrows and ridden out of the plant. Machinery is put out of gear, materials spoiled, industry brought to a standstill.

In the army, soldiers are throwing down their guns and deserting the front in hundreds of thousands. Emissaries try to stop them with frantic appeals. They may as well appeal to a landslide. "If no decisive steps for peace are taken by November first," the soldiers say, "all the trenches will be emptied. The entire army will rush to the rear." In the fleet is open insubordination.

In the country, peasants are overrunning the estates.

I ask Baron Nolde, "What is it that the peasants want on your estate?"

"My estate," he answers.

"How are they going to get it?"

"They've got it."

In some places these seizures are accompanied by wanton spoliation. The skies around Tambov are reddened with flames from the burning hay-ricks and manor-houses. Landlords flee for their lives. The infuriated peasants laugh at the orators trying to quiet them. Troops sent down to suppress the outbursts go over to the side of the peasants.

Russia is plunging headlong towards the abyss.

Over this spectacle of misery and ruin presides a handful of talkers called the Provisional Government. It is almost a corpse, treated to hypodermic injections of threats and promises from the Allies. Before tasks calling for the strength of a giant it is weak as a baby. To all demands of the people it has just one reply, "Wait". First, it was "Wait till the end of the war." Now, "Wait till the Constituent Assembly."

But the people will wait no longer. Their last shred of faith in the government is gone. They have faith in themselves; faith that they alone can save Russia from going over the precipice to ruin and night; faith alone in the institutions of their own making. They look now to the new authority created out of their own midst. They look to the Soviets.

'Let the Soviets Be the Government'

Summer and fall have seen the steady growth of the Soviets. They have drawn to themselves the vital forces in each community. They have been schools for the training of the people, giving them confidence. The network of local Soviets has been wrought into a wide firmly built organization, a new structure which has risen within the shell of the old. As the old apparatus was going to pieces, the new one was taking over its functions. The Soviets in many ways were already acting as a government. It was necessary only to proclaim them the government. Then the Soviets would be in name what they were already in reality.

From the depths now lifted up a mighty cry: "All power to the Soviets." The demand of the capital in July became the demand of the country. Like wildfire it swept through the land. Sailors on the Baltic Fleet flung it out to their comrades on the Black and White and Yellow seas, and from them it came echoing back. Farm and factory, barracks and battle front joined in the cry, swelling louder, more insistent every hour.

Petrograd came thundering into the chorus on Sunday, November 5th, in sixty enormous mass meetings. Trotsky having read the Reply of the Baltic Fleet to my Greetings asked me to speak at the People’s House.

Here great waves of human beings dashed against the doors, swirled inside and sluiced along the corridors. They poured into the halls, filling them full, splashing hundreds up on the girders where they hung like garlands of foam. Out of the eddying throngs, a mighty voice rose and fell and broke like surf, thundering on the shore—hundreds of thousands of throats roaring “Down with the Provisional Government.” “All Power to the Soviets.” Hundreds of thousands of hands were raised in a pledge to fight and die for the Soviets.

The patience of the poor at an end; the pawns and cannon-fodder in revolt! The dark masses, long inert, but roused at last, refusing any longer to be browbeaten or hypnotized by the word-juggling of statesmen, scorning their threats, laughing at their promises, take the initiative into their own hands, demanding of their “leaders” to move forward into Revolution or resign. For the first time the slaves and the exploited, consciously choosing the time of their deliverance, vote for insurrection, investing themselves with the government of one-sixth of the world. A big venture for men unschooled in state affairs. Are they equal to these tasks? Can they control the currents now being loosed in the city? At any rate these masses show complete control of themselves. From these blood-stirring revolutionary meetings they pour forth in orderly fashion.

The poor frightened bourgeoisie are reassured. They see no houses looted, no shops wrecked, no white-collared gentry shot down in the streets. To their minds, therefore, all is well; there will be no insurrection. The true import of this restraint quite escapes them. The people indulge in no sporadic outbursts because they have better use for their energies. They have a Revolution to make, not a riot. And a Revolution requires order, plan, labor—much hard intensive labor.

The Masses Conducting Their Revolution

These insurgent masses go home to organize committees, draw up lists, form Red Cross units, collect rifles. Hands lifted in a vote for Revolution now are holding guns. They get ready for the forces of the Counter-Revolution now mobilizing against them. In Smolny sits the Military Revolutionary Committee from which these masses take orders.

There is another committee, the Committee of a Hundred Thousand; that is, the masses themselves. There are no by-streets, no barracks, no buildings where this committee does not penetrate. It reaches into the councils of the Black Hundred, the Kerensky Government, the intelligentsia. With porters, waiters, cabmen, conductors, soldiers and sailors, it covers the city like a net. They see everything, hear everything, report everything to headquarters. Thus, forewarned, they can checkmate every move of the enemy. Every attempt to strangle or sidetrack the Revolution they paralyze at once.

Attempt is made to break the faith of the masses in their leaders by furious assault upon them. Kerensky cries from the tribunal “Lenin, the state criminal, inciting to pillage ... and the most terrible massacres which will cover with eternal shame the name of free Russia”. Immediately the masses reply by bringing Lenin out of hiding with a tremendous ovation and turning Smolny into an arsenal to guard him.

Attempt is made to drown the Revolution in blood and disorder. The Dark Forces keep calling the people to rise up and slaughter Jews and Socialist leaders. Forthwith the workmen placard the city with posters saying “Citizens! We call upon you to maintain complete quiet and self-possession. The cause of order is in strong hands. At the first instance of robbery and shooting, the criminals will be wiped off the face of the earth.”

Attempts are made to isolate the different sections of the revolutionists. Telephones are cut off between Soviets and barracks; immediately communications are established by setting up telephonograph apparatus. The Yunkers turn the bridges, cutting off the working-class districts; the Kronstadt sailors close them again. The offices of the Communist papers are locked and sealed, cutting off the flow of news; the Red Guards break the seals and set the presses running again.

Attempt is made to suppress the Revolution by force of arms. Kerensky begins calling “dependable” troops into the city; that is, troops that may be depended upon to shoot down the rising workers. Among these are the Zenith Battery and Cyclists’ Battalion. Along the highroads on which these units are advancing into the city the Revolution posts its forces. They attack the enemy, not with guns but with ideas. They subject these troops to a withering fire of arguments and pleas. Result: these troops that are being rushed to the city to crush the Revolution enter instead to aid and abet it.

To these zealots of the Communist faith, all soldiers succumb, even the Cossacks. “Brother Cossacks!” reads the appeal to them, “you are being incited against us by grafters, parasites, landlords and by your own Cossack generals who wish to crush our Revolution. Comrade Cossacks! Do not fall in with this plan of Cain.” And the Cossacks likewise line up under the banner of the Revolution.

CHAPTER 7: NOVEMBER 7th - A NEW DATE IN HISTORY

While Petrograd is in a tumult of clashing patrols and contending voices, men from all over Russia come pouring into the city. They are delegates to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets convening at Smolny. All eyes are turned towards Smolny.

Formerly a school for the daughters of the nobility, Smolny is now the center of the Soviets. It stands on the Neva, a huge, stately structure, cold and grey by day. But by night, glowing with a hundred lamp-lit windows, it looms up like a great temple - a temple of Revolution. The two watch fires before its porticos, tended by long-coated soldiers, flame like altar-fires. Here are centered the hopes and prayers of untold millions of the poor and disinherited. Here they look for release from age-long suffering and tyranny. Here are wrought out for them issues of life and death.

That night I saw a laborer, gaunt, shabbily-clad, plodding down a dark street. Lifting his head suddenly he saw the massive facade of Smolny, glowing golden through the falling snow. Pulling off his cap, he stood a moment with bared head and outstretched arms. Then crying out, “The Commune! The People! The Revolution!” he ran forward and merged with the throng streaming through the gates.

Out of war, exile, dungeons, Siberia, come these delegates to Smolny. For years no news of old comrades. Suddenly, cries of recognition, a rush into one another’s arms, a few words, a moment’s embrace, then a hastening on to conferences, caucuses, endless meetings.

Smolny is now one big forum, roaring like a gigantic smithy with orators calling to arms, audiences whistling or stamping, the gavel pounding for order, the sentries grounding arms, machine-guns rumbling across the cement floors, crashing choruses of revolutionary hymns, thundering ovations for Lenin and Zinoviev as they emerged from underground.

Everything at high speed, tense and growing tenser every minute. The leading workers are dynamos of energy; sleepless, tireless, nerveless miracles of men, facing momentous questions of Revolution.

At ten-forty on this night of November 7th, opens the historic meeting so big with consequences for the future of Russia and the whole world. From their party caucuses, the delegates file into the great assembly hall. Dan, the anti-Bolshevik chairman, is on the platform ringing the bell for order and declares, “The first session of the Second Congress of Soviets is now open.”

First comes the election of the governing body of the congress (the presidium). The Bolsheviks get 14 members. All other parties get 11. The old governing body steps down and the Bolshevik leaders, recently the outcasts and outlaws of Russia, take their places. The Right parties, composed largely of intelligentsia, open with an attack on credentials and orders of the day. Discussion is their forte. They delight in academic issues. They raise fine points of principle and procedure.

Then, suddenly out of the night, a rumbling shock brings the delegates to their feet, wondering. It is the boom of cannon, the cruiser Aurora firing over the Winter Palace. Dull and muffled out of the distance it comes with steady, regular rhythm, a requiem tolling the death of the old order, a salutation to the new. It is the voice of the masses thundering to the delegates the demand for “All Power to the Soviets”. So the question is acutely put to the Congress: “Will you now declare the Soviets the government of Russia, and give legal basis to the new authority?”

The Intelligentsia Desert

Now comes one of the startling paradoxes of history, and one of its colossal tragedies—the refusal of the intelligentsia. Among the delegates were scores of these intellectuals. They had made the “dark people” the object of their devotion. “Going to the people” was a religion. For them they had suffered poverty, prison and exile. They had stirred the quiescent masses with revolutionary ideas, inciting them to revolt. The character and nobility of the masses had been ceaselessly extolled. In short, the intelligentsia had made a god of the people. Now the people were rising with the wrath and thunder of a god, imperious and arbitrary. They were acting like a god.

But the intelligentsia reject a god who will not listen to them and over whom they have lost control. Straight¬way the intelligentsia became atheists. They disavow all faith in their former god, the people. They deny their right to rebellion.

Like Frankenstein before this monster of their own creation, the intelligentsia quail, trembling with fear, trembling with rage. It is a bastard thing, a devil, a terrible calamity, plunging Russia into chaos, “a criminal rebellion against authority”. They hurl themselves against it, storming, cursing, beseeching, raving. As delegates they refuse to recognize this Revolution. They refuse to allow this Congress to declare the Soviets the government of Russia.

So futile! So impotent! They may as well refuse to recognize a tidal wave, or an erupting volcano as to refuse to recognize this Revolution. This Revolution is elemental, inexorable. It is everywhere, in the barracks, in the trenches, in the factories, in the streets. It is here in this Congress, officially, in hundreds of workmen, soldier and peasant delegates. It is here unofficially in the masses crowding every inch of space, climbing up on pillars and window-sills, making the assembly hall white with fog from their close-packed steaming bodies, electric with the intensity of their feelings.

The people are here to see that their revolutionary will is done; that the Congress declares the Soviets the government of Russia. On this point they are inflexible. Every attempt to becloud the issue, every effort to paralyze or evade their will evokes blasts of angry protest.

The parties of the Right have long resolutions to offer. The crowd is impatient. “No more resolutions! No more words! We want deeds! We want the Soviets!”

The intelligentsia, as usual, wish to compromise the issue by a coalition of all parties. “Only one coalition possible,” is the retort. “The coalition of workers, soldiers and peasants.”

Martov calls out for “a peaceful solution of the impending civil war.” “Victory! Victory!—the only possible solution,” is the answering cry.

The officer Kutchin tries to terrify them with the idea that the Soviets are isolated, and that the whole army is against them. “Liar! Staff!” yell the soldiers. “You speak for the staff—not the men in the trenches. We soldiers demand ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ ”

Their will is steel. No entreaties or threats avail to break or bend it. Nothing can deflect them from their goal.

Finally, stung to fury, Abramovich cries out, “We cannot remain here and be responsible for these crimes. We invite all delegates to leave this Congress.” With a dramatic gesture, he steps from the platform and stalks towards the door. About eighty delegates rise from their seats and push their way after him.

“Let them go,” cries Trotsky, “let them go! They are just so much refuse that will be swept into the garbage heap of history.”

In a storm of hoots, jeers and taunts of “Renegades! Traitors!” from the proletarians, the intelligentsia pass out of the hall and out of the Revolution. A supreme tragedy! The intelligentsia rejecting the Revolution they had helped to create, deserting the masses in the crisis of their struggle. Supreme folly, too. They do not isolate the Soviets, they only isolate themselves. Behind the Soviets are rolling up solid battalions of support.

The Soviets Proclaimed the Government

Every minute brings news of fresh conquests of the Revolution—the arrest of ministers, the seizure of the State Bank, telegraph station, telephone station, the staff headquarters. One by one the centers of power are passing into the hands of the people. The spectral authority of the old government is crumbling before the hammer strokes of the insurgents.

A commissar, breathless and mud-spattered from riding, climbs the platform to announce: "The garrison of Tsarskoye Selo for the Soviets. It stands guard at the gates of Petrograd." From another: "The Cyclists’ Battalion for the Soviets. Not a single man found willing to shed the blood of his brothers." Then Krylenko, staggering up, telegram in hand: "Greetings to the Soviet from the Twelfth Army! The Soldiers’ Committee is taking over the command of the Northern Front."

And finally at the end of this tumultuous night, out of this strife of tongues and clash of wills, the simple declaration: "The Provisional Government is deposed. Based upon the will of the great majority of workers, soldiers and peasants, the Congress of Soviets assumes the power. The Soviet authority will at once propose an immediate democratic peace to all nations, an immediate truce on all fronts. It will assure the free transfer of lands ... etc."

Pandemonium! Men weeping in one another’s arms. Couriers jumping up and racing away. Telegraph and telephone buzzing and humming. Autos starting off to the battle front; aeroplanes speeding away across rivers and plains. Wireless flashing across the seas. All messengers of the great news!

The will of the revolutionary masses has triumphed. The Soviets are the government.

This historic session ends at six o'clock in the morning. The delegates, reeling from the toxin of fatigue, hollow-eyed from sleeplessness, but exultant, stumble down the stone stairs and through the gates of Smolny. Outside it is still dark and chill, but a red dawn is breaking in the east.

“From the War-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers Deputies.

To the Citizens of Russia:

The Provisional Government is deposed. The State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.

The aims of the people were fighting: immediate proposal of a democratic peace, abolition of landlord property rights in the land, worker control over production, creation of a Soviet Government, these aims have been achieved.

LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION OF WORKMEN, SOLDIERS AND PEASANTS!

Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies.

November 7,1917”

CHAPTER 8: LOOTING THE WINTER PALACE

The Russian poet, Tyutchev, writes:

"Blessed is he who visited this world In moments of its fateful deeds: The highest Gods invited him to come, A guest, with them to sit at feast And be a witness of their mighty spectacle."

Twice blessed were five Americans: Louise Bryant, John Reed, Bessie Beatty, Gumberg and myself. We were spectators of the great drama enacted in the halls of Smolny: we also saw the other big event of the night of November 7th—the taking of the Winter Palace.

We had been sitting in Smolny, gripped by the pleas of the speakers, when out of the night that other voice crashed into the lighted hall—the cannon of the cruiser Aurora, firing at the Winter Palace. Steady, insistent, came the ominous beat of the cannon, breaking the spell of the speakers upon us. We could not resist its call and hurried away.

Outside, a big motor truck with engines throbbing was starting for the city. We climbed aboard and tore through the night, a plunging comet, flying a tail of white posters in our wake. From alleys and doorways dim figures darted out to snatch them up and read the Obligatory Ordinance.

This announcement is a trifle previous. The ministers of the Provisional Government, minus Kerensky, still sit at council in the Winter Palace. That is why the guns of the Aurora are in action. They are thundering into the ears of the ministers the summons to surrender. True, only blank shells are firing now, but they set the air shivering, shaking the building and the nerves of the ministers within.

As we come into the Palace Square the booming of the guns dies away. The rifles no longer crackle through the dark. The Red Guards are crawling out to carry off their dead and dying. Out of the night a voice cries, "The Yunkers surrender." But mindful of their losses, the besieging sailors and soldiers cling to cover.

The Mob Enters the Palace

New throngs gather on the Nevsky. Forming a column, they pour through the Red Arch and creep forward, silent. Near the barricade they emerge into the light blazing from within the Palace. They scale the rampart of logs, and storm through the iron gateway into the open doors of the east wing—the mob swarming in behind them.

From cold and darkness, these proletarians come suddenly into warmth and light. From huts and barracks they pass into glittering salons and gilded chambers. This is indeed Revolution—the builders entering into the Palace they built.

And such a building! Ornate with statues of gold and bronze, and carpeted with Oriental rugs, its rooms hung with tapestries and paintings, and flooded with a million lights from the twinkling crystal chandeliers, its cellars crammed with rare wines and liquors of ancient vintage. Riches beyond their dreams are within their grasp. Why not grasp them?

A terrible lust lays hold of the mob—the lust that ravishing beauty incites in the long starved and long denied—the lust of loot. Even we, as spectators, are not immune to it. It burns up the last vestige of restraint and leaves one passion flaming in the veins—the passion to sack and pillage. Their eyes fall upon this treasure-trove, and their hands follow.

Along the walls of the vaulted chamber we enter there runs a row of huge packing-cases. With the butts of their rifles, the soldiers batter open the boxes, spilling out streams of curtains, linen, clocks, vases and plates.

Scorning such petty booty, the throngs swirl past to richer hunting-grounds. The vanguard presses forward through gorgeous chambers opening into ever more gorgeous ones, lined with cabinets and wardrobes. They fall upon them with shouts of expectant joy. Then cries of anger and chagrin. They find mirrors shattered, panels kicked in, drawers rifled—everywhere the trail of vandals who have gone before. The Yunkers have taken the cream of the plunder.

So much is gone! So much intenser, then, the struggle for what remains. Who shall gainsay them the right to this Palace and its contents? All of it came out of their sweat and the sweat of their fathers. It is theirs by right of creation. It is theirs, too, by right of conquest. By the smoking guns in their hands and the courage in their hearts they have taken it. But how long can they keep it? For a century it was the Czar’s. Yesterday it was Kerensky’s. Today it is theirs. Tomorrow it shall be—whose? No one can tell. This day the Revolution gives. Next day the Counter-Revolution may snatch away. Now while the prize is theirs shall they not make the most of it? Here where courtiers wantoned for a century shall they not revel for a night? Their outraged past, the feverish present, the uncertain future—everything urges them to grasp what they can now.

Pandemonium breaks loose in the Palace. It rolls and echoes with myriad sounds. Tearing of cloth and wood, clatter of glass from splintered windows, clumping heavy boots upon the parquet floor, the crashing of a thousand voices against the ceiling. Voices jubilant, then jangling over division of the spoils. Voices hoarse, high-pitched, muttering, cursing.

Then another voice breaks into this babel—the clear, compelling voice of the Revolution. It speaks through the tongues of its ardent votaries, the Petrograd workingmen. There is just a handful of them, weazened and undersized, but into the ranks of these big peasant soldiers they plunge, crying out—“Take nothing. The Revolution forbids it. No looting. This is the property of the people.”

Children piping against a cyclone, dwarfs attacking an army of giants. So seem these protesters, trying to stem with words the onslaught of soldiers flushed with conquest, pillage-bent. The mob goes on pillaging. Why should it heed the protest of a handful of workmen?

The Restraining Hand of Revolution

But these workmen will be heeded. Back of their words they feel the will of the Revolution. It makes them fearless and aggressive. They turn upon the big soldiers with fury, hurl epithets into their faces, wrest the booty out of their hands. In a short time they have them on the defensive.

A big peasant making off with a heavy woolen blanket is waylaid by a little workingman. He grabs hold of the blanket, tugs away at one end of it, scolding the big fellow like a child.

"Let go the blanket," growls the peasant, his face convulsed with rage. "It's mine."

"No, no," the workingman cries, "it's not yours. It belongs to all the people. Nothing goes out of the Palace tonight."

"Well, this blanket goes out tonight. It's cold in the barracks!"

"I'm sorry you're cold, tovarish. Better for you to suffer cold than the Revolution to suffer disgrace by your looting."

"Devil take you," exclaims the peasant. "What did we make the Revolution for, anyhow? Wasn't it to give clothes and food to the people?"

"Yes, tovarish, the Revolution will give everything you need in due time, but not tonight. If anything goes out of here we will be called hooligans and robbers—not true Socialists. Our enemies will say that we came here not for Revolution, but for loot. So we must take nothing. For this is the property of the people. Let us guard it for the honor of the Revolution."

"Socialism! The Revolution! Property of the People!" With this formula the peasant saw his blanket taken away from him. Always these abstract ideas adorned with capital letters taking things away from him. Once it was done with "Czardom, the Glory of God". Now it was being done with "Socialism, Revolution, Property of the People."

Still there was something in this last concept that the peasant could grasp. It was in line with his communal training. As it took hold of his brain his hold on the blanket relaxed, and with a last tragic look at his precious treasure he shambled away. Later I saw him expounding to another soldier. He was talking about the "Property of the People."

Relentlessly the workingmen press home their advantage, using every tactic, pleading, explaining, threatening. In an alcove is a Bolshevik workingman, furiously shaking one hand at three soldiers, the other hand on his revolver.

"I hold you responsible, if you touch that desk," he cries.

"Hold us responsible!" jeer the soldiers. "Who are you? You broke into the Palace just as we did. We are responsible to no one but ourselves."

"You are responsible to the Revolution," retorts the workingman sternly. So deadly earnest is he that these men feel in him the authority of the Revolution. They hear and obey.

The Revolution loosed the daring and ardor in these masses. It used them to storm the Palace. Now it leashes them in. Out of bedlam it brings forth a controlling power—quieting, imposing order, posting sentries.

"All out! Clear the Palace!" sounds through the corridors, and the throng begins to flow toward the doors. At each exit stands a self-appointed Committee of Search and Inspection. They lay hold of each man as he comes along, exploring his pockets, shirt and even his boots, gathering in a varied line of souvenirs, statuettes, candles, clothes-hangers, damask, vases. The owners plead like children for their trophies, but the committee is adamant repeating constantly, "Nothing goes out of the Palace tonight."

And nothing does go out that night on the persons of the Red Guards, though prowlers and vandals later on make off with many valuables.

The commissars now turn to the Provisional Government and their defenders. They are rounded up and escorted to the exit. First come the ministers, seized in session around the green baize table in the Hall of State. They file down in silence. From the crowd inside not a word or a jeer. But from the mob outside rises a blast of denunciation when a sailor calls for an automobile. "Make them walk, they have ridden long enough," the mob yells, making a lunge at the frightened ministers. The Red Sailors, with fixed bayonets, close around their captives and lead them out across the bridges of the Neva. Towering above all the convoy is Tereschenko, the Ukrainian capitalist, bound now from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Prison of Peter-Paul, reversing the journey of the Bolshevik, Trotsky, from the Prison of Peter-Paul to the office of Foreign Affairs.

The Yunkers were led out to cries of "Provocators! Traitors! Murderers!"—a sorry crestfallen lot. That morning each Yunker had vowed to us that he would fight until just one bullet was left. This last one, he would put through his own brain rather than surrender to the Bolsheviks. Now he was giving up his arms to these Bolsheviks, solemnly promising never to take weapons against them again. (Unhappy fellows! They were to break their promise.)

Last of the captives to leave the Palace were the members of the Women’s Battalion. Most of them were of proletarian birth. "Shame! Shame!" cried the Red Guards, "Workingwomen fighting against workingmen." To drive home the indignation they felt, some grabbed the girls by the arms, shaking and scolding them.

This was about the sum total of the casualties among the soldier girls, though later one of them committed suicide. Next day the hostile press spread tales of gruesome atrocities against the Women’s Battalion, alongside of stories of sack and pillage of the Palace by the Red Guards.

Yet nothing is more alien to the essential nature of the working class than destructiveness. Were it not so, history might have a different story to tell of the morning of November eighth. It might have to record that the magnificent edifice of the Czar was left a heap of crumbling stones and smoking embers by the vengeance of a long-suffering people.

For a century it had stood there upon the Neva, a cold and heartless thing. The people had looked to it for light, and it had brought forth darkness. They had cried to it for compassion, and it had answered with the lash, the knout, the burning of villages, exile in Siberia. One winter morning in 1905 thousands of them had come here, defenseless, petitioning the Little Father for redress of wrongs. The Palace had answered with rifle and cannon, reddening the snow with their blood. To the masses the building was a monument of cruelty and oppression. Had they razed it to the ground, it would have been but one more instance of the wrath of an outraged people, removing from their eyes forever the hated symbol of their suffering.

Instead they proceeded to remove the historic landmark from all likelihood of damage.

Kerensky had done the opposite. He had recklessly put the Winter Palace in the arena of conflict by making it the center of his cabinet and his own sleeping quarters. But the representatives of these storming masses who had captured the Palace, declared that it was not theirs nor the Soviets’, but the heritage of all. By Soviet decree it was made the Museum of the People. The custody of it was formally placed in the hands of a committee of artists.

A New Attitude Towards Property

So events gave the lie to another dire prophecy. Kerensky, Dan and others of the intelligentsia had shrieked against the Revolution, predicting a hideous orgy of crime and plunder, the loosing of the basest passions of the mob. Once the hungry and embittered masses got in motion, they said, like a maddened herd they would go trampling down, wrecking, and destroying everything. “Even Gorky was prophesying the end of the world” (Trotsky).

And now the Revolution has come. There are, indeed, isolated acts of vandalism; rich-clad bourgeois still return home minus their great fur coats; mobs work havoc before the Revolution can rein them in.

But there is one outstanding fact. The first fruits of the Revolution are law and order. Never was Petrograd safer than after passing into the hands of the masses. Unprecedented quiet reigns in the streets. Hold-ups and robberies drop almost to zero. Robbers and thugs quail before the iron hand of the proletariat.

It is not merely negative restraint—order rising out of fear. The Revolution begets a singular respect for the rights of property. In the shattered windows of the shops, within hands’ reach of passing men in desperate need, are foodstuffs and clothing. They remain untouched. There is something pathetic in the sight of hungry men having food within their grasp and not grasping it, something awesome in the constraint engendered by the Revolution. It exerts its subtle influence everywhere. Into the far-off villages it reaches. No longer are the peasants burning the great estates.

Yet it is the upper classes who assert that in them lies true respect of the sanctity of property. A curious claim at the end of the World War for which the governing classes are responsible. By their fiat, cities were given to the torch, the face of the land covered with ashes, the bottom of the sea strewn with ships, the structure of civilization shot to pieces, and even now still more terrible instruments of destruction are being prepared.

What basis is there for true respect of property in the bourgeoisie? Actually they produce little or nothing. To the privileged, property is something that comes by cleverness, by chance inheritance, by stroke of fortune. With them it is largely a matter of titles, deeds and papers.

But to the working classes, property is a thing of tears and blood. It is an exhausting act of creation. They know its cost in aching muscles and breaking backs.

“With shoulders back and breast astrain, and bathed in sweat that falls like rain, through midday heat with grasping song, he drags the heavy barge along.” goes the song of the Volga boatmen.

What men have brought forth in pain and labor they cannot wantonly annihilate, any more than a mother can destroy her child. They, out of whose thews and muscles the thing has issued, will best guard and cherish it. Knowing its cost, they feel its sacredness. Even before works of art the rude, untaught masses stand with reverence. Only vaguely do they glimpse their meaning. But they see in them the incarnation of effort. And all labor is holy.

The Social Revolution is in truth the apotheosis of the rights of property. It invests it with a new sanctity. By transferring property into the hands of the producers it gives the keeping of wealth into the hands of its natural and zealous guardians—the makers of it. The creators are the best conservators.

CHAPTER 9: RED GUARDS, WHITE GUARDS AND BLACKGUARDS

The Soviets declared themselves the government on November 7. But it was one thing to take power; another thing to keep it. It was one thing to write out decrees; another to back them with bayonets.

The Soviets soon found a big fight on their hands. They found, too, a crippled military apparatus to fight with. It was all out of gear, sabotaged by officers. The Revolutionary General Staff could not straighten out the tangle from above. It appealed directly to the workers.

They uncovered stores of benzine and motors, whipping the transport into shape. They assembled guns, gun-carriages, and horses, to form artillery units. They requisitioned provisions, forage, and Red Cross supplies, rushing them to the front. They seized 10,000 rifles being shipped to Kaledin and distributed them among the factories.

The stamp of hammers in the factories gives way to the tramp of marching feet. The foreman’s orders give way to the commands of sailors drilling awkward squads. Through the streets hurry the motor-cars spreading this call to arms:

"The Kornilov bands of Kerensky are threatening the outskirts of our capital. All necessary orders have been given to crush mercilessly every counter-revolutionary attempt against the people and its conquests. The army and the Red Guard of the Revolution are in need of immediate support of the workers. The district Soviets and shop-factory committees are ordered:

1. To bring forward the largest possible number of workers to dig trenches, erect barricades and set up wire defenses;
2. Wherever necessary for this purpose to suspend work in shops and factories, it must be done immediately;
3. To collect all available plain and barbed wire, as well as all tools for digging trenches and erecting barricades;
4. All available arms to be carried on persons;
5. Strictest discipline must be preserved and all must be ready to support the army of the Revolution to the utmost."

In answer, everywhere appear workmen with cartridge belts outside of overcoats, blankets strapped on their backs, spades, tea-kettles and revolvers tied on with strings. Long, irregular lines of slanting bayonets winding through the dark.

Red Petrograd rises in arms to repel the Counter-Revolutionary forces marching up out of the south. Over the roofs, now hoarse, now shrill, comes the sound of factory-whistles blowing the tocsin to war.

On all roads leading out of the city pours a torrent of men, women and boys, carrying kit-bags, picks, rifles and bombs. A drab and motley throng. No banners, no drums to cheer them on. Plunging trucks splash them with mud, freezing slush oozes through their shoes, winds from the Baltic chill to the bone. But they push on to the front, unresting, as the grey day turns to sullen night. Behind them the city flings its lights into the sky, and still they press forward into the dark. Fields and forests are swarming now with dim shapes, pitching tents, building campfires, cutting trenches, stretching wire. One brief day, and tens of thousands have moved out twenty miles from Petrograd, and stand, a bulwark of living flesh against the forces of the Counter-Revolution.

To military experts it is a ragtag army, a rabble. But in this “rabble” there is a drive and power not reckoned with in the books of strategy. These dark masses are exalted with visions of a new world. Their veins burn with a crusading fire. They fight with reckless abandon, often with skill. They plunge forward into the black copse against hidden foes. They stand up to the charging Cossacks and tear them from their horses. They lie flat before the machine-gun fire. Bursting shells send them fleeing but they rally again. They carry back the stricken, binding their wounds. Into the ears of their dying comrades they whisper, “The Revolution! The People!” They die, gasping out “Long live the Soviet! Peace is coming!”

Disorder, confusion, panic, of course, in these raw levies of the shops and slums. But the ardor of these hungry, work-scarred men and women, fighting for their faith, is more effective than the organized battalions of their foes. It destroys these battalions. It shatters their morale. Hardened Cossacks come, see and are conquered by it. “Loyal” divisions, ordered to the front, flatly refuse to shoot down these workmen-soldiers. The whole opposition crumples up or melts away. Kerensky flees from the front in disguise. The commander of the grand armies that were to crush the Bolsheviks cannot find a corporal’s guard to fly with him. The proletarians are victors all along the line.

"The Whites Take the Telephone Station"

While the Soviet masses are battling on the plains outside Petrograd, the Counter-Revolution rises suddenly in the rear. It sets out to paralyze the Soviet power at its base in the city.

The Yunkers, who were paroled after their capture at the Winter Palace, break their parole to join this White Guard uprising. They are detailed to seize the telephone station.

The telephone station is one of the vital centers of the city; from it run a million wires, which like a million nerves, help make the city a unit. In Petrograd the telephone station is housed in a massive stone citadel on the Morskaya. Here some Soviet sentries are posted. Through the tedium of the day they have one thing to look forward to—the change of sentries at night.

Night comes and with it twenty men marching down the street. The sentries think it is the relief-squad bringing them liberty. But it is not. It is a squad of officers and Yunkers disguised as Reds. Their guns are slung slantwise in orthodox Red Guard fashion. They give the Red Guard pass-word to the sentries. In good faith the sentries stack guns and turn to go. In a flash twenty revolvers are pointed at their heads.

"Tovarishe!" (Comrades!) exclaim the astounded Reds.

"You damned swine!" shout the officers. "Get into that hall there, and keep your mouths shut or we will blow your heads open."

The doors slam behind the bewildered sentries, who find, not release and freedom, but imprisonment at the hands of the Whites. The telephone station is in the hands of the Counter-Revolution.

In the morning the new masters finished fortifying the place under the supervision of a French officer. Suddenly the officer turned on me with a stern, "What are you doing here?"

"Correspondent—American," I replied. "Dropped in to see what was up."

"Your passport," he demanded. I produced it. He was impressed and apologized. "Of course, this is none of my business. Like you, I just glanced in to see what was happening." But he went on directing the work.

On both sides of the archway the Yunkers ran out barricades of boxes, automobiles and piles of logs. They levied toll on passing autos, bringing in supplies and weapons, and corralled all passers-by who might possibly serve as soldiers of the Soviet.

A great prize came their way in the person of Antonov, the Soviet Commissar of War. Driving by in his auto, he was suddenly yanked from the seat; and before he could recover from the shock, he was behind barred doors. With the fate of the Revolution hanging in the balance, he found himself a prisoner of the Counter-Revolutionists. His anguish at being jailed was only exceeded by their joy at jailing him. They were jubilant. For among the unorganized masses of revolutionary Petrograd, leaders were as yet desperately few. They knew—according to all the laws of military science—that the masses, leaderless, could not move effectively against their citadel; and the master military brain of the Reds was now in their hands.

RESUME WORK ON PAGE 153