Chapter XXIX: Appendix (1)

The following miscellaneous notes were written by me in shorthand while a prisoner in Siberia and Russia, but I had no time to decipher them till the foregoing pages were already in the hands of the printer, and till I myself had left England again for the Russian frontier. I hope that, under these circumstances, and in consideration of the fact that nearly all of them were written amid the scenes which I describe, and even jotted down sometimes in the street and in the darkness, their crude form, their want of connection, and their appearance as an appendix will be excused by the reader.

KOLCHAK’S GOLD TRAIN

Gold to the value of £44,000,000 left Omsk in a special train of forty cars which came into collision at Tatarskaya, near Omsk, with another train and caught fire, with the result that boxes full of gold to the value of hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling were thrown out of the train like so many boxes of “bully” beef, were left lying on the track for days, and were finally “lost.” The rest of the gold was captured by the Reds at Nizhniudinsk, near Irkutsk.

BURNING OF A RED CROSS TRAIN

This disaster took place at Kochenovo, forty versts to the west of Novo-Nikolaevsk. I heard of it while still with the Whites, and the Reds afterwards gave me full particulars of it. They said that they rescued some of the patients, and that they found the charred remains of over two hundred typhus patients in the débris of the train. They added that in some of the abandoned trains they found prison vans with barred windows, but that in all cases the prisoners had been butchered by the Whites. Whether this was true or not I do not know, but at Novo-Nikolaevsk and Omsk I found the railway stations adorned with ghastly photographs of mutilated corpses as they had, in Kolchak’s time, been adorned with similar photographs of Red butcheries.

WRITINGS ON STATION WALLS

“DEAR MASHA,—I have gone on by the echelon of the Osvyetverkh,
November 11. I will wait for you and the children in the Dom
Petrov, Bolshoi Prospekt, No. 12.—IVAN.”

Ivan, it will be seen, neglects to give the name of the town where he proposes to wait.

“To DOMINICA IVANOVNA GLYEBOVA,—We cannot get any further,
and are staying here in Bolotnaya in the Square opposite the
Church, Dom Rykachev, No. 8. Vanna is sick of typhus.—SERGIUS
AND NATASHA.”

Sometimes one found rude, pencilled notices from Colonels who had apparently lost their regiments.

“Colonel Butenko is living here in Sadovaya, No. 18.”

Still another specimen, unsigned:

“Will anyone who knows the whereabouts of Olga and Tatiana
Petrova, please tell the commandant at this station?”

Reading long afterwards the copies I had made of those notices, I was touched by the confidence shown by all the writers that there must be a secure haven of refuge somewhere. At Novo-Nikolaevsk, Tomsk was the abiding city, the inviolable sanctuary which Trotsky could never violate; at Taiga it was Marinsk; at Marinsk it was Achinsk; at Achinsk it was Krasnoyarsk. At the time I first read those appeals I had, however, the same illusions myself; but now I see something symbolical in this futile hunt for security. “We have here no abiding city.”

THE PROPAGANDA HALL AT EKATERINBURG

This hall was always crowded with young soldiers and workmen, who listened most attentively to the violin recitals, piano playing, old ballads, and classical music, and seemed to be fascinated by the endless succession of artistes, some of whom were very good. It had, however, two great drawbacks: it contributed to the spread of poisonous doctrine, and it contributed to the spread of typhus. One of my travelling companions visited it once only, and shortly afterwards fell sick of this disease. The entertainments and lectures seemed to go on for ever, but the audience never grew tired. There were all sorts of common people in the crowd—Cossacks, Kirghiz, miners, young peasants with the bodies of giants and the faces of children. Workmen sometimes came in with bags of flour, which they deposited on the ground while they listened to what was going on. It reminded me of workmen and market women I had seen coming into an Italian cathedral in the noonday heat to pray: these Propaganda Halls are the Cathedrals of Bolshevism. Soldiers also came in, the permanently fixed bayonets on the muzzles of their rifles white with hoar-frost.

In one of the cartoons a man with a plough stood on a terrestrial globe, beneath which was the inscription “The World is Thine.” Innumerable other notices vaunted the superiority of Labour and the defeat of Capitalism and Imperialism. “The Rule of the Proletariat,” said one of these notices, “is the Death of the Bourgeois Horde.”

BOLSHEVIK JOURNALISM

Nearly everybody dabbled in journalism; and foreign correspondents always ran the risk of seeing their most casual conversation at Commissars’ tables reproduced in a distorted form next morning by some Communist newspaper. Cabinet ministers in the West are sometimes rather afraid of talking to newspapermen lest their remarks be published without their permission and in an incorrect form. Journalists from the West have, for precisely the same reason, a well-grounded fear of talking to Bolshevik Cabinet Ministers. The average Red leader writes as much as he talks, and he talks as much as the most talkative English M.P. The Russians are, indeed, a very talkative race; they talk with the inexhaustible rapidity of Greeks or women. Not that I despise them for this natural accomplishment: on the contrary I envy them; and I must say that their conversation is sometimes of extraordinary charm and brilliancy. But the conversation of such of them as have got the Bolshevik bee in their bonnets can only be described as devastating, though the Reactionaries who think that England has not helped enough run these Red bores very close. The “loquacity valve” which works so stiffly in some other races does not exist in the Russians at all. Talking is apparently an imperious necessity for them, and they droop and wither if deprived of all possibility of satisfying that necessity. I am told that many of the Russian prisoners of war in Germany went mad: I think it was because they had nobody to talk with.

Powerful articles are published occasionally in the Moscow papers, but the general tone of the Bolshevik Press is extremely low, for most of the regular Pressmen belong to the type which used to make a precarious living by bringing trifling items of intelligence to the old newspaper offices, though they themselves seldom succeeded in getting beyond the hall-porter. I know one editor who wrote a series of violent articles against a Soviet official, because the latter once occupied the permanent place assigned to this editor in the local theatre. Another paper published a frightful onslaught on a lady, the wife of an educational Commissar, because, on visiting the Opera House once, she complained (and with excellent reason) of the smell which emanated from the Proletariat audience. The attack on Mrs. North, wife of the British chaplain at Moscow, in the official organ of the Soviet Government, was the most vulgar, disgraceful, and unmanly thing that I ever read in print. The non-existence of a Libel Law encourages cowardly scribes to attack in the most brutal manner people whom it is safe to attack, especially women of good family married to technical functionaries of the Soviet, but none of these scribblers would dare to attack Mrs. Lenin or Mrs. Trotsky any more than they would have dared in the old days to attack the Tsarina.

The untruthful nature of the news which appears in the _Pravda_ has become so notorious among the higher Commissars themselves that they have a saying to the effect that “You never find Pravda (Truth) in the _Pravda_.”

THE PEASANTS

If the outer world is nervous about Bolshevism, the Bolsheviks are even more nervous about the outer world and about the permanency of their own régime. They are so nervous that, excepting high officials and fanatical secret agents, none of Lenin’s subjects are ever allowed to leave Russia. Many of the Bolshevik Chinovniks have asked me confidentially if I thought their system of government would last, and were very anxious to know what change will, in my opinion, take place, and whether the change will be brought about by foreign interference, by internal trouble, or by a gradual modification in the Socialist system itself. I have seen with my own eyes that these people, who profess to be so very, very sure, are, in reality, very doubtful of their own success. They are overawed in the first place by the stupendous strength of the world-organization against which they have set out to do battle and are profoundly depressed by the obvious disinclination of the World’s workers to join Jack the Giant-killer in his forlorn campaign against the giant. They are also very much afraid of their own peasants who stand sullenly aside, refuse to bring produce to market, hoard all the money they can lay hands on, and leave the towns to starve. Despite his tone of supreme confidence, Lenin has many sleepless nights on account of the _muzhik_. That dark, enigmatical mass of a hundred millions presses down on him like a nightmare, and he has been forced to recognize the fact that the peasant is anything but an altruist, being extremely selfish and close-fisted, being, in fact, a small capitalist. “I have found,” said he, “that the _muzhik_ has a dual personality. One personality will joyfully take all the Soviet Government gives it. The other refuses the least help to the Soviet Government.”

This Sphinx is cunning, cautious, and evasive. One of the Commissars told me that the class of “poor” peasants—still catalogued as “poor,” though they are now rich—are much more difficult to deal with than the old _kulak_ whom they have plundered and replaced. Meanwhile the attitude of the Bolshevik newspapers towards the peasantry is very interesting and suggestive, for those newspapers faithfully reflect the hopes and fears of the Omnipotent Five. Sometimes they attack the peasants with violence, but, as a rule, they write about him with a hopefulness which they do not feel. They publish many articles on “What to do in the Villages,” proving to their own satisfaction apparently that the peasants’ sons, when they return from the Red Army, will carry the armed doctrine of the revolution into the farmhouses (but omitting to state that they will also carry, in many cases, those diseases which seem to be almost inseparable from the noble profession of arms), and that they will make the villages supply the workmen with bread, since, without bread, the workmen will be unable to deliver the ploughs, clothing, boots, etc., which the villagers need so badly. An energetic agitator, who had (of course) served a sentence of penal servitude under the Tsar, once described to me with great satisfaction how he had corrupted the peasantry in his native village. At first he had to be very cautious, and could not speak against the Tsar, the priests, or the landowners, but little by little he made headway “until now”—and with a bland smile he waved his hand towards the street adorned throughout its entire length with Red flags. As a matter of fact, however, Lenin would be as much out of place in the average Russian village as the Dean of St. Paul’s would be in a Sinn Fein school at Ballinasloe. This was clearly shown during the attempts, which the Bolsheviks made, to establish Communist colonies in Samara Government and elsewhere throughout Russia. Those colonies were established in the confiscated estates of landowners, and were filled with long-haired enthusiasts from Moscow, but there was as great a gulf between them and the peasants as there would have been between the peasants and an American Brook Farm colony dumped down among them. The _muzhiks_ simply said, “These are new landlords come here. Let’s kill them,” and in the riots which ensued several people were killed and wounded on both sides. Finally, the Red Army was sent to restore order. The peasants were flogged, but the long-haired enthusiasts had fled, and all these Communist experiments came to naught.

To all the frantic appeals of the Reds to co-operate with them in the creation of a great Socialistic Russia, the peasant opposes an inscrutable passivity. As a matter of fact, he dislikes to be worried by any form of government, and no more desires to build up a great Socialist Russia than he ever desired to build up a great Imperialist Russia. His objection to military service is as great as was the objection of the Bolsheviks when they came into power, but, as the Reds now conscribe the peasants as readily as the Tsarists, the peasants feel vaguely that they have been swindled. On one point only do the Marxists and the _muzhiks_ feel alike. Neither of them care in the least whether chunks as large as France and Germany put together are bit off the Empire, for the Marxists have no fatherland, and the _muzhik’s_ Empire is confined to the limits of his native village.

I once saw a list of instructions to Bolshevik agitators, which laid down the rule: “Keep things moving all the time. When one cry has become stale, get up another and cry it out at the top of your voice. The next cry will be ‘Electrification of the Villages.’ Always have something new. Don’t let the pace flag. Keep the people so busy that they won’t have time to think.”

And, sure enough, in a week or two afterwards the cry “Electrification of the Villages” resounded all over Russia. It is, in truth, rather a silly cry considering how many of the Russian peasants are nearer the Stone Age than the Age of Electricity, and the slight effect that it has had on the _muzhiks_ shows that Lenin does not understand them at all; but, after all, politicians in every country act very often on the same great principle. What about “Three Acres and a Cow,” “Land for the Soldiers,” “Hang the Kaiser,” “Make Germany Pay,” and a number of similar slogans in our own country? The principle of keeping everybody busy is important, and leads to Lenin making all women, even married women, work all day in Government offices, so that they will have no time at night to worry themselves and their husbands about politics. The inertia which is such a marked characteristic of the Muscovite mind makes the Russian difficult to rouse, but it also makes him continue working at high pressure once he has been thoroughly warmed up, and the Bolsheviks are cleverly utilizing this psychological trait in the national character in order to keep things “humming,” and to prevent people from falling back into their old state of sluggishness.

In order to “keep things humming,” the Bolsheviks not only insist on the Proletariat working: they also insist on their playing. Life among the Reds is not only therefore a constant round of work, it is also a round of amusements, lectures, Red picnics, Red athletic exhibitions, Red swimming shows, and Red skating competitions. Certain days are devoted, by Government decree, to certain “stunts.” There is a “Children’s Day,” a “Woman’s Day,” a “Red Soldier’s Day,” a “Red Hospital Day,” a “House Cleaning Week,” and many other fixtures of the same kind, which replace the ancient religious holidays.

In order to give greater interest and a better organization to these movements, newspapers are published temporarily in connection with each of them. I have already spoken of how such newspapers are published by the G.H.Q. of the Labour Army.

MOSCOW

The first night I ventured out into the streets of Moscow was one of almost unbelievable gloom and depression. I was not met by brass bands and Soviet motor-cars, as most of the English investigators have been met; nevertheless, I venture to think that I saw as much of the real Russia as they did. The first thing that struck me early in the night was the great number of people, including feeble old men and delicate young women, who were engaged in dragging along the street little sleighs laden with firewood; and in some pitiful cases this work was rendered impossible of accomplishment owing to the physical weakness of those engaged in it, and to the fact that in many places the snow had all melted, with the result that the sleighs got hopelessly embedded in the mud or wedged immovably among the loose cobble-stones. Some of the young ladies were in a state of utter exhaustion; apparently they had been engaged all day in collecting fuel; their whole time was taken up in attending to the most primitive necessities of themselves and those dependent on them. Subsequent investigation showed me that this theory of mine was correct, and that the Communist system tends inevitably to crush all expression of genius, as it has never before been crushed even under the most barbarous of the Ottoman Sultans. If a Shakespeare or a Shelley arises in Red Russia, and refuses to make himself the mouthpiece for the coarse, semi-educated leaders of the Reds, he will have to spend all his time in getting himself bread, water, fuel, and clothing, and will have no leisure left for any higher work.

When the night advanced and the darkness increased, there was not a gleam of light in the streets, for there were no street lamps and no shop-windows. There were also no trams for passengers, but, once an hour or so, a solitary tramcar rushed madly uptown, flashing fire from the electric wires overhead as it tore onwards. I was nearly run over once or twice by these insane chariots, for the only possible place for a pedestrian was right in the middle of the tramway track, and on each side of the track there rose to the height of at least four feet a solid rampart of frozen and excessively slippery snow and mud, which was quite invisible in the darkness. I had some bad falls in consequence, and on one occasion smashed my only pair of spectacles, with the result that the chaos around me became more of a Dante’s inferno than ever. It only needed those furious tramcars to give the last touch of unreality and insanity to the whole incredible tableau. The desertion of the streets, the disorder, the gloom charged with menace, the terrifying and inexplicable sounds that smote the ear, combined to create the best impression of the lower regions that it is possible to imagine. I have often been at night, during the Great War, in deserted and shattered villages of No Man’s Land, with corpses lying in the streets and enemies hidden in the cellars, but none of them ever filled me with such fear as did this Bolshevik Garden of Eden.

The night was bitterly cold, yet all the glass in the single crazy tramcar had been broken, and the driver, who was the sole occupant, was muffled up as if for an Arctic expedition. These cars carried, I believe, the mails, or had some other sane reason for their insane speed; but the enigma remained why, if they could run, other cars could not run with passengers. Making all allowances, they seemed to be symbolical of Bolshevism.

Three kinds of noise broke the midnight stillness of Moscow: first, the rushing sound of these rickety tramcars lurching unsteadily over the worn and uneven rails, with wildly clanging bells, and amid a continuous shower of electric sparks which illuminated with a sickly and unnatural light the dilapidated houses and the emaciated faces of the few passers-by; secondly, a curious hooting of railway or other engines which went on all night, and which, to me at least, remained mysterious and inexplicable; thirdly, and most ominous of all, occasional stray shots in the distance. I have compared the scene to a scene at the Front, but I could almost imagine myself at times to be lost in the dark recesses of an equatorial forest, listening to the nocturnal cries of wild animals.

BOLSHEVIK MODERNISM

The Communists claim to be ultra-modern, to be the last word in scientific progress; and, in proof of this, they point to their extraordinarily wide use of Wireless for newspaper purposes; and to their vast schemes for the electrification of agriculture—schemes which will introduce electric ploughing in one part of an Empire, where the peasants in other parts are still ploughing with boughs of trees dragged by bullocks. They point also to the extensive use they are making, for Governmental and propaganda purposes, of that remarkable system of advertisement by suggestion which is one of the most striking developments of the twentieth century. They are utilizing the cinema for educational work, and they speak with enthusiasm of the widespread use they will make of other modern inventions, when the opening up of trade relations with foreign countries enables them to import the necessary apparatus. They will teach geography and history by the cinema, as well as by the older methods. They will teach foreign languages and the correct pronunciation of their own language by the aid of the gramophone and the dictaphone. They will restore the theatre to its ancient position as an educational instrument. In their schools they have already replaced the Bible by Karl Marx, and substituted Esperanto for Latin and Greek, and their next step will probably be to make Trotsky take the place of Demosthenes. Not only have they adopted the Julian Calendar which, owing to religious scruples, Old Russia boggled at for two hundred years, and which even Peter the Great was not brave enough to carry through, but they have also adopted the Daylight Saving Bill—though that measure is of doubtful utility in Russia owing to the length of the days in summertime and to their shortness in winter, as well as to the fact that the country is mainly agricultural—and have even improved on it by putting on the clock not once but three times a year.

The Omnipotent Five—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, and Kristinsky—propose, in short, to cut themselves adrift altogether from the past, and to turn their faces entirely towards the future. They will harness modern science to the Socialist chariot, as Wilhelm harnessed it to the Militarist; and, indeed, Russian Communism bears in some respects a close resemblance to Prussian Militarism. The idea of doing what Lenin is doing is not, of course, new. Russian professors toyed with that idea before the Great War; Professor Struve, Wrangel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, was the first to translate Karl Marx into Russian (an achievement for which he is now very sorry); and the Russian Intelligentsia themselves are largely to blame for the general weakening of faith in Christianity, and the general strengthening of belief in the infallibility of science that has taken place in Russia during the last twenty years. But, though apparently so up to date, this Bolshevik system of education is thoroughly wrong, as the whole Bolshevik theory is wrong. That theory, as it is now seen working in practice, has all the hardness of the early Egyptian priestcraft; and, if it lasts for any length of time, it will inevitably become a fossilized and intensely materialistic religion of empty symbols, of barren rites and ceremonies. Though young, it has already acquired all the jargon, mummery, hair-splitting, futile and involved controversy and rotatory argument of an old and debased superstition. The pundits of the Reds are more addicted to red tape than the most retrograde Chinovniks of the Empire ever were. They quote decrees, rescripts, and precedents with all the verbose obscurity of Old Régime lawyers quoting ukazes and legal enactments; and, owing to the many barbarous contractions they have invented, it is sometimes difficult even for one knowing Russian to follow them. These Bolshevik decrees are innumerable, and most of them are silly, but respect for them is imposed by terror. Mr. Thomas, the acting British consul in Ekaterinburg, told me once of a clown in a circus who, for joking somewhat coarsely about the amazing legislative fecundity of the Soviet Government, was immediately taken from the stage and shot.

Hypocrisy and insincerity permeate Bolshevism through and through. Even now, while professing to be merely servants of the people, most of the Bolshevik leaders live in comparative luxury. They wear on public occasions the humble dress and high boots of the Russian working-man. Trotsky, the most autocratic War Minister in the world, dresses as a private soldier, shovels snow, and runs about the Kremlin with his own messages. The big-wigs at the F.O. act as their own office-boys, and carry on diplomatic conversations while repairing the handle of a door or nailing up pictures on the wall. A time may come when the successor of Tsar Lenin will appear on ceremonial occasions leaning on a symbolical spade, and wearing on his bowler hat the republican crest of a crossed hammer and scythe, as Wilhelm used to lean on a sword which he never used, and to wear on his Imperial crown a Cross which taught him nothing. But it will all be idle show. Lenin the Thirteenth, or whatever his name and number is, will be none the less an autocrat because of his wearing emblems, whose significance will have become lost in the mists of antiquity.

Bolshevism, as I saw it, made the same impression on me as was made by a carnivorous plant which I once saw trapping flies in the Kew Gardens. Attracted by the bright red colour of the fatal plant, the giddy fly alights unsuspectingly on the pitcher, crawls in, is stupefied by the juice and the faint perfume, and, in the end, is slowly dissolved and absorbed. I have seen the Red flag of Bolshevism have the same effect on many young and ardent natures. I have seen living men swallowed by an organism which is itself dead. Their initiative, their creative energy, their immortal souls, are sucked out of them, and nothing is left but mere husks of themselves, “hard, indigestible remains,” like that part of the fly which is rejected by the insectivorous Nepenthes and Sarracenias after the process of digestion has been completed.

TYPHUS

The mortality from typhus in Siberia ranged from 5 per cent. to 8 per cent. in 1918, but in 1920 it reached 10 per cent. to 11 per cent. In Taiga on February 1 nearly all the large railway stations had been converted into typhus hospitals, and most of the cases lay on the bare floor without blankets. I am told that many buildings in the town were equally full, and that there were over 20,000 cases in Taiga alone. There were two huge piles of unidentified dead bodies, one near the station, the other some distance off; and in one hospital surgeons were busily engaged in amputating gangrened limbs that had been frost-bitten. There was only one doctor for every one hundred typhus cases. In the district between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk practically all the medical men had been attacked by typhus, and 50 per cent. of them had succumbed, among them being the best doctors in Siberia. One doctor told me that he found the mortality to be lowest among young illiterate peasants, and highest among middle-aged people engaged in intellectual work. Not the least horrible feature of the typhus horror in Russia is this fact, that it reduces still lower the percentage of literates, always low in Russia, and brought down to an infinitesimal figure by the murders and the proscriptions of the Reds. The doctor I refer to had served with Kolchak, and left Omsk in a staff train containing eight hundred staff officers who had some chance of changing their linen; nevertheless, at Krasnoyarsk, he had twenty-six corpses on the train. Sanitary conditions on the other trains were frightful, and the percentage of deaths was consequently greater. In the echelon of the Izhevsky Division about 50 per cent. of the passengers died.

It would be difficult for me to exaggerate the horror produced on my mind by what I saw of the great typhus epidemic in Siberia and Russia. My whole journey from Omsk to Krasnoyarsk, and from Krasnoyarsk to Moscow, was overshadowed by this scourge, as well as by the venereal and the other diseases which are fast eating away the vitality of the Russian race, and my fears on the score of typhus were increased by what I saw of the filthy personal habits of the Russians; some of them could not shake the folds of their dress without sprinkling lice on everybody in their immediate vicinity. My worst experience was in Moscow, where a man fell ill of typhus in the compartment which I occupied in a railway carriage. I fled from him in horror, and spent most of my time in the corridor, but I could not keep my eyes off that fatal door inside which my belongings were piled close to his. This patient had accumulated a large supply of rusks, Siberian butter, and rum, but even his starving companions were afraid to touch them. The terror of those awful, voiceless, creeping things, whose bite is sickness, unconsciousness, physical collapse, and sometimes death, protected those stores more effectively than anything else could have done. For weeks afterwards I could not sit on the bunk where the sick man had piled his clothes without being filled with a morbid dread; and never, as long as I live, shall I be able to look a body parasite in the face without a shiver, or to dread its infinitesimal bite any less than I would dread the bite of a mad dog. Going through Russia at the present moment is, owing to typhus alone, as dangerous as going “over the top” was in France. The Soviet Republic is protected, for this winter at least, against outside aggression by a triple shield of hunger, typhus, and cold, but the strongest of these three is the typhus. Instead of making one charitable towards the sick, this epidemic develops in the healthy a deadly hatred of typhus patients, as if they were murderers who meditated an attempt on one’s life, and for this hatred the sick people themselves are sometimes to blame on account of their criminal carelessness, their intense selfishness, and their utter disregard for others. In the present atmosphere of Red Russia all human charity withers away like flowers in Polar snow. Not even on the battlefields of the Great War was death such an overpowering factor in the situation as it is now in Russia. Behind Lenin’s head grins a skeleton, and one can hardly ever converse with any Muscovite about his friends and relations without hearing, sooner or later, the dreadful word “dead.” Sometimes when I spoke to a man about his wife or children, he took out of his pocket a photograph of a beautiful young woman and a group of healthy children, and again I heard the phrase “died of typhus” pronounced in as unconcerned a tone as that in which an Englishman might say, “Gone to Brighton for the week-end.”

If the above remarks seem overstrained and morbid, the explanation lies in the fact that they were all written, not in a clean British home, but in that pestiferous railway carriage at Moscow, and that I transcribe them here without the change of a syllable. Had I not had the writing of these notes to occupy my mind with, I do not know what I should have done during the interminable waits in railway carriages at desolate, typhus-stricken stations on the Trans-Siberian, and especially during the nightmare weeks that I passed side-tracked with a dying man in a dismal swamp of mud and melting snow, outside a deserted halt on the outskirts of Lenin’s Red Capital.

It is doubtful whether the wild educational efforts of the Bolsheviks will ever compensate for the ravages of typhus among the Russian _literati_, and for the other factors which have militated against the spread of public instruction. For several years past most of the schools in Russia have been used as hospitals and barracks. The old teachers have mostly run away, and those who have taken their places have enthusiasm, but not competence; and, as a result of these two circumstances joined to the decimation of the _literati_, the new generation in Russia will have hardly anything in common with the old. The stage has been swept clear for an entirely new set of actors filled with most poisonous ideas, devoid of any trace of Christianity, and bound to constitute for centuries a centre of infection for the world. If any of the best parts of the old civilization are retained, it will be due to the action of many Russian mothers in teaching their children the great truths which Lenin has set himself to crush. For the moment, however, it would seem as if Lenin will simply drive Russia back into savagery, instead of teaching her anything new. Most people are occupied so much in seeking for food, clothing, and warmth, that they have no time to think of higher things, and are rapidly drifting into barbarism. No books save poisonous ones are published. There is a great scarcity of school-books and of Russian classical writers. Nearly all the young men are either in the field fighting, or else they are hiding in the woods to avoid conscription, so that for some years they have read nothing, and the gentlest of them have become very much roughened. Growing children have become accustomed to the most awful sights of war, so that the new generation is already ruined. The peasant is in a state of panic. Harried, robbed, and flogged, first by one side and then by another, he sees his horses, carts, sleighs, sons, and foodstuffs requisitioned. Many of the workmen are trying to study, but, while their stomachs are empty, their heads are full of wrong ideas, misty notions, and impossible expectations. The interference of the Government with everything cannot be a success, and the whole outlook for Russia is excessively gloomy. But nothing in the present situation makes a more painful impression on one than the dreadful wastage of human life which is going on unchecked.

CONDITIONS IN EKATERINBURG

I might add to the description of conditions in Ekaterinburg, which I have given in Chapter XII., the following remarks, which I wrote in shorthand in a notebook, while wandering about the streets of Ekaterinburg:

“One shop advertised ‘Boots. Quick Repairs. All Kinds of Footwear. Children’s Shoes a Speciality.’ I entered and found not a single boot in the place, and not even a scrap of leather. I went to a dentist’s, dentist fled; to a tailor’s, tailor present and correct, but no cloth, thread, needles, or buttons; to a watchmaker’s, no watches; to a _café_, no coffee; to a grocer’s, no groceries; to a milkman’s, no milk; to a beer-hall, no beer; to a tea-house, no tea; to a carpenter’s, carpenter sick of typhus; to a butcher’s, no meat save possibly the very small quantity which may have covered the bones of a moribund, half-frozen old man, sitting helplessly in an icy shop before an empty pair of scales. What made these disappointments all the more heartrending was the fact that, for the benefit of the illiterate, there were pictorial representations on each shop of the articles supposed to be sold within—fat cows, foaming pails of milk, tankards of beer, firkins of butter, loaves of bread, and so on.”

THE RUSSIAN WHITES

My opinion of the Russian Whites I shall set down frankly, as it is of importance, for our own future guidance, that my own countrymen, who have not had an opportunity to go abroad, should know something of the class they have been asked once, and may be asked again, to reimpose on Russia. They are a class which has forgotten nothing and learnt nothing, and is in every way unfit to rule. As soon as the White officers in Siberia began to recover from the effects of the Red Terror to which they had been subjected, they reverted at once to the courses which had brought about their downfall. They intrigued in the most shameless manner for posts in the rear, so that Kolchak had more officers in his G.H.Q. than Foch had in his at the time of the Armistice. Thousands of those who should have been at the Front spent practically all their time revelling in Omsk. Regimental commanders neglected their soldiers for months, and then treated them with brutal severity. Every British officer who served with Denikin or Kolchak can give dozens of examples of this. I shall confine myself to one. A regiment was sent from Tomsk to the Front in the middle of 1919, but at Omsk the men sent a deputation to their C.O. to say that they had no boots or clothing, and could not go further; and, as a matter of fact, they had been swindled of their pay, rations, and clothing by their own officers. The C.O. had several members of this deputation shot and the remainder brutally flogged, with the result that the whole regiment passed over to the Reds a few months afterwards. This sort of thing made such a bad impression on our British troops, that they became more or less demoralized, and, if a large British Army had been sent into Russia, it would have become utterly corrupted. The Russian Generals whom we supported became almost invariably reactionaries of the worst type; their punitive expeditions into the villages turned all Siberia against them; and, if they had ever reached Moscow, they would have undoubtedly established there a régime in comparison with which the Government of the Tsar would have seemed absurdly democratic.

In 1918 I travelled to Ekaterinburg in a Czech train, into which a Russian General introduced himself without permission. Having done so, he promptly got drunk at the expense of his involuntary hosts, whom he began abusing as “mere prisoners of war, nothing more.” Under the Czech flag he smuggled past his own Customs a large quantity of cigarettes, on which, at Omsk, he made a profit of 20,000 roubles. Some of the Russian officers who joined the British Mission frankly explained that they did so because (1) they were not obliged to go to the Front, and (2) they were paid both by the British and by the Russians.

The Intelligentsia spent half their time criticizing the British troops for not going into the firing-line, and the other half in “wangling” safe jobs for their own officer-sons in the rear. Kolchak’s newspapers in Siberia were not allowed to make the faintest criticism on the utterly inefficient Government of Omsk, but they were not prevented from filling their columns with abuse of the English for not helping them enough. I think they were even encouraged to make these attacks, as it was considered that this display of independence tended to remove the impression that Kolchak was a puppet of Whitehall—which he was.

The Russian _bourgeoisie_ are a kindly, soft, and gentle people, but, brought up as they were under the protecting tyranny of the Tsardom, they reminded me of domesticated animals let loose in a savage jungle. To put it differently, the Russian Intelligentsia seems to be suffering from shell-shock (or what I might call revolution-shock), with the result that they turn all their venom on the Good Samaritans who minister to them, and address no reproaches to the Levites who pass by on the other side of the street and take no notice. In such cases the physician should be firm as well as kind, but unfortunately we have in England many people suffering as badly as the Russians from revolution-shock, who persist in saying that we did not do half enough for Kolchak and Denikin.

To give one out of innumerable personal experiences, during the retreat from Omsk a number of middle-class Russians, including young ladies and aged people, were placed under the protection of the British party I was with, and but for them none of us would have been captured. Among them, wearing uniform and carrying a sword, was a young Russian who, even in fleeing from the battlefield under a foreign flag, could not restrain himself from criticisms of England for not having given Kolchak sufficient assistance; and when, owing to their own utter helplessness, the whole party was ultimately captured, they overwhelmed us with abuse. Previous to that they had shown themselves to be impossible travelling companions. We had very little water in our carriage, but they used all of it for washing clothes, and then used the water we had obtained with great difficulty for cooking purposes. One of our officers had a batman, Private Smith, who had kindly consented to cook for all the officers, but the Russians wanted us to force him to cook for them too, and could not be made to understand that a British soldier cannot be forced to be a batman at all, much less to cook for a crowd of foreign civilians. Their attitude on this small question was the attitude of Kolchak and Denikin on larger questions. Kolchak and Denikin wanted us to employ the British Army in a way which would certainly have led to wholesale mutiny, and probably have caused revolution at home and the bankruptcy of our Empire. And, because we did not take their advice, they hated us like poison. I speak thus frankly about them, because there is a danger that these things will be overlooked by some British officials and officers anxious for employment in Russia, and not sufficiently alive to the expense and danger to their own country which further intervention in Russia would entail.

WHITE TROOPS WHO JOINED THE REDS

During the first week I spent as a prisoner of war at Krasnoyarsk the number of White officers who registered at the Red Commandant’s office (where, by the way, we found Makarov, one of the British Mission interpreters, acting as a Bolshevik employee, and professing to be a red-hot Bolshevik himself) was: 20 Generals, 175 Staff officers, and 4,380 higher officers. The White soldiers who were drafted like cattle into the Red Army, without having to go through any formality, numbered 24,000. For some weeks the peasants in villages near Krasnoyarsk busied themselves in digging out of the snow guns, Generals, “Brass Hats,” and rifles, which they surrendered, cold but more or less intact, to the conquerors. One village presented to the Reds, as a peace-offering or Christmas-box, one White General (slightly frost-bitten) and a battery of 6-inch howitzers which had been supplied to Kolchak by the British Government. The Staff officers, the Colonels, and even the great Brass Generals were promptly reduced to the ranks, formed into awkward squads, and drilled by a Red corporal in the barrack square. Some of them seemed to have forgotten the very elements of drill, but the corporal was merciful to them, and even prefaced on one occasion the welcome command “Dismiss!” with the respectful Russian phrase for “Messieurs les officiers,” though I am afraid that he spoke in sarcasm. About two hundred White officers refused to serve in the Red Army, and were consequently sent to work as convicts in the Ural mines. For these brave men I was sincerely sorry, but I cannot honestly say that I was moved to tears by the spectacle of the lazy and corrupt old Generals, who had joined the ranks of the Red Army, being made to do an honest stroke of work, probably for the first time in their lives. Many of the White officers not only joined the Reds, but worked enthusiastically for them, and were given positions of trust. A trusted Adjutant of General Sakharov was in the Red force which captured us.

General Dutov’s adjutant, Bogdanov, who was captured by the Reds in September of that year, is now a Red Propagandist who has had great success among the Cossack _stanitzi_, and many of the Russian officers, who were attached to the British Missions in Siberia and elsewhere in Russia, are now working far harder for the Reds than ever they worked against them. Lieutenant Hahn, an ex-Guards officer who was attached to the British Military Mission in Omsk, is now at the head of the Red Extraordinary Commission in Irkutsk, and unfortunately this is only one name out of many. This weakness on the part of the Russian Imperialists themselves had far more to do with the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik effort in 1919 than any weakness on the part of the Entente, yet the Entente is bitterly blamed for that defeat by the Russian reactionaries, who never by any chance think of asking themselves if there was any fault on their side. I have remarked in Chapter XIX. how aptly the words of Burke on the French Terrorists may be applied to the Bolshevik leaders. His indictment of the “Marais” of 1798 is no less applicable to the Russian anti-Bolsheviks, whose flabbiness has disgusted most of the British officers who have had to do with them during the last two years. “They are nothing more nor better than men engaged in desperate designs with feeble minds. They are not honest; they are only ineffectual and unsystematic in their iniquity.” “They can serve no cause,” he says in another place, “because they have no cause at heart.... They have not been guilty of great crimes, but it is only because they have not energy of mind to rise to any height of wickedness.” “They are of a tame, timid, languid, inert temper wherever the welfare of others is concerned.”

As for the railway material lost by the Whites in Siberia, the Reds told me that they captured 20,000 railway waggons between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk, and over 3,000 locomotives, 600 of which were taken at Novo-Nikolaevsk alone. Nearly all these engines were derelicts that had cumbered the line for years, or machines that had “gone cold” or been damaged during the retreat, so that the Siberian line is in an extremely bad condition as regards engines. The captured trucks are useless, for the Reds have already more waggons than they can make use of. The enlightened policy of Sverdlov, the Bolshevik Minister of Railways, in employing ex-railway officials of the Omsk Government, is giving rise to much opposition on the part of the workmen, who threatened at Omsk to take from the train in which I travelled seven of these “Kolchakovsky officers,” as they called them. These officials, being at the mercy of every workman, find it hard to get any work done. One of them told me that he would much prefer to be a workman. The Executive Committee of the Communists in Moscow has come to the assistance of the “_bourgeois_ specialists,” however, both by direct decrees and by explanatory articles in the Bolshevik Press, to the effect that, being at present indispensable to the State, they must be retained and even paid high salaries, until the workmen produce thoroughly Bolshevik engineers of equal competence to take their places. Lenin cannot see that the professional self-respect of these new experts must necessarily make them as much a class apart from the ignorant workmen, as did the professional pride of the old experts.

TRADE WITH CAPITALIST COUNTRIES

As for trade with capitalist countries, there are two schools of thought among the Bolsheviks. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and several other leaders think that, even if it be a danger, it is absolutely necessary at present, as otherwise they will never be able to overcome their transport difficulties, or to get their factories going. But they contend that it will be an even greater danger to outer Powers than to themselves, owing to the facilities it will give their propaganda in foreign countries. They admit that trade between a Government on one side and private firms on the other will be very difficult, but are convinced that all difficulties will be eventually overcome by the whole outside world becoming Bolshevik. They confess that the Soviet Government does not stand much chance of surviving unless all the other Governments in Europe become Bolshevik too. Hence their nervousness and the extreme importance they attach to foreign propaganda.

The second school of thought is represented by Bukharin, Radek, and the Cheka, which is fearful of the effect of foreign trade on the Bolshevik movement in Russia. Radek has expressed that misgiving in the _Izvestia_, where he declared that the Entente, having failed to conquer them by force of arms, now intends to conquer them by a much more dangerous weapon—namely, the opening up of trade relations—which will involve the flooding of Russia with agents of capitalism. This second school thinks that the Soviet system must be given time to harden, as the Shogunate system in Japan required a century to harden before it had cemented the Japanese race, and rendered totally impossible the conquest of Daï-Nippon either by Christian ideas or by Christian arms.

One Bolshevik said to me quite confidently: “The re-establishment of commercial relations between Russia and the outside world will ultimately lead to the overthrow first of the financial system, and secondly of the political system of the European States. The gold value has ceased to exist in Russia: we mean to abolish all money; and a new value, based perhaps on the price of bread, will have to be created. The change is bound to affect, sooner or later, the financial and political system of the rest of Europe. Trade cannot be carried on between a Socialist Government which has no currency, and a number of private firms in capitalistic Governments which have a currency, without new and far-reaching changes resulting in the capitalistic countries.”

THE IMPERIAL FAMILY

The birth of each of the Tsar’s daughters had, in turn, been a bitter disappointment to the parents, so that the girls grew up neglected Cinderellas, who, perhaps, for this very reason, became all the more beautiful in mind and body. The Imperial couple were morbidly anxious to have a boy. Every Saint in the Russian calendar was appealed to, while the intercession of living “Saints,” like Father John of Kronstadt, was continually implored, and God only knows how many pilgrimages were undertaken, and how many prayers and Masses were offered up in monasteries and convents, for the same end. The Empress became morbidly obsessed by the idea of bringing a man-child into the world, and there is no knowing how many night-long petitions she offered up to God in her oratory for that purpose, or how much money she bestowed on pious quacks of the Rasputin type. She even pressed science into her service, as well as religion, and the Austrian doctor Schenk was brought at great expense to Tsarskoe Selo, in order to put into practice there his theory for pre-determining the sex of infants. He failed, and the Tsarina turned again to Heaven with a fervour that seems to have permanently affected her mind. When, finally, God granted her a son, her joy was soon alloyed by the discovery that he was tainted with the hereditary disease of her family, and she addressed herself once more to religious quacks with results which finally cost her both her throne and her life. It has been pointed out to me since this book was placed in the hands of the publisher that, owing to his illness, the lad’s education was certainly neglected; and it is at all events certain that this young Prince never lived to attain his sixteenth year. On the other hand, the comparative neglect in which the girls were allowed to grow up counterbalanced the pride natural to their high position, with the result that they had, at the time of their murder, developed into unaffected, charming, and highly accomplished young women. Had the Tsaritsa not been born, or had his father, on seeing the sickly condition of his son, proclaimed the eldest daughter his successor, the nation might have rallied around this young woman, with the result perhaps that there would have been no revolution, and that Olga would have proved herself as great as Catherine without Catherine’s vices.

The Grand Duchesses were, at the time of their death, in the full glory of young womanhood, but the face of their mother bore those tragic signs of middle age which she could no longer conceal by elaborate coiffures, perfect dress, and a dazzling display of pearls calculated to withdraw the spectator’s eye from the faded face. The Empress had a passion for jewelry, which was carried so far in 1906, when I lived in Petrograd, that it was thought to indicate monomania. This helps to explain why she brought so much jewelry with her into exile.

Yurovsky’s drowning of the Tsar’s last words reminds us of how Santerre cried out with uplifted hand “Tambours!” at the execution of Louis the Sixteenth, in order to drown the voice of the condemned King.

LENIN