Chapter VIII: The Man on Horseback

September came. The padlocked doors of Nizhni Novgorod and the quiet waters of the Volga seemed far, far away. Farther still were the hectic days of early June when the recalcitrant machine-guns sputtered up and down the Nevsky. The white nights were gone. The soldier lovers and their sweethearts strolled beside the Neva now only at the invitation of the infrequent moon.

The War Hotel had undergone a transformation. After living for a whole summer each unto himself alone, breakfasting, lunching, teaing, and dining in our own rooms, we suddenly came out of hiding and looked one another over.

The bloodstains of the Revolution had been scoured from the rose-colored carpet in the drawing-room. The boards had come down from the broken windows, and new glass and gorgeous crushed mulberry curtains had taken their place. The dining-room, a few weeks ago the repository of armless chairs and legless tables, dumb victims of the vengeance of an angry mob, now fronted the world arrayed in white napery.

It was a setting for luxury, but there was none. When Feodor served luncheon, the first course was often chopped meat and _kasha_ stuffed into cabbage leaves, and the second the same chopped meat and _kasha_ inadequately hidden by the half of a cucumber. There was no third. We had the best the market offered, and the cook was sorely tested to disguise its limitations.

A new spirit was abroad in the streets. The ghost of Peter walked with firmer tread. Many of the predicted calamities of the foregoing weeks had failed to materialize. Finland had not revolted. Ukraine was still a part of Russia. The railroad strike continued only a threat. The breach between Kerensky and Korniloff, scheduled for the Moscow conference, had been averted.

The reactionaries still clamored for the strong hand of a dictator. The Bolsheviki still cried, “Down with the bourgeoisie.” Kerensky strove desperately to follow a middle course satisfactory to both. He knew his people well enough to realize that the first attempt to use force, even if he had it to use, would result in a reaction that would ultimately mean the downfall of his government.

In the hours I had spent at the Soviet, in the Peasants’ Convention, and talking with soldiers and workmen everywhere, I had become convinced there was no power in Russia that Kerensky or any other man could use; that the masses would regard any attempt to instal a dictator as an attack on their Revolution and would desert the man responsible for it.

I ventured this opinion one night at dinner. Mrs. Pankhurst, the English suffragist, was there, and four or five others. They laughed at the idea; said Russia must have a strong hand; called Kerensky a weakling, and declared that only Korniloff could save the situation. He would rule with an iron hand.

One group of foreigners in Petrograd saw clearly the hopelessness of trying to impose a man on horseback upon the Russian workers. They were the members of the American Red Cross Mission to Russia. They came quietly into town one afternoon in August, with seventy tons of surgical supplies in their kit-bags, a large amount of common sense in their heads, and a wealth of human sympathy in their hearts. I was at the Nicolaievski Station when they arrived, twenty-nine of them, all in uniform of the American Red Cross. I looked at them and said to myself: “I wonder what sort of a dent you will make in Russia.”

In one of the uniforms was the ample girth and the smiling round face of Colonel William B. Thompson, who was financing the mission. To the left of him, towering like an iron-gray mountain above the crowd, was Dr. Frank Billings of Chicago. On the other side, Raymond Robins, dark and determined, with a ready-for-anything look about him. There was something big about this trio, and they went to work on the Russian job in the best American spirit--with their sleeves rolled up.

They met the Russian aristocrat and the Russian bourgeois. Then they met the Russian people. Breshkovskaya and Tchaikovski, grandmother and grandfather of the Russian Revolution, opened for them a door through which they looked down a long vista of hard years at the stupendous struggle of a brave crowd.

They saw that the old altars had been broken to bits, and the one vital, hopeful thing remaining was the devotion of the masses to their Revolution. They had no faith in the altruistic intention of the German, and believed for Russia to stop fighting would be suicidal. Kerensky and Breshkovskaya held the same belief, but they knew also that the war-weary multitudes were possessed of a consuming longing for peace; that German propaganda was working to discredit the Allies and to convince the Russians that the German people sympathized with their Revolution and shared their longing for democratic peace. Almost daily they were supplementing their propaganda by blowing up munition plants and laying whole towns in ruins.

Raymond Robins, who brought to his study of the situation valuable experience in the American labor movement, said to me, in one of the first conversations we had:

“The only binder that will hold New Russia together is the Revolution. The only way to help Russia is to help her make a success of that Revolution.”

The Provisional Government was in power. At its head was Alexander Kerensky, the young man. He and Katherine Breshkovskaya, the old, old woman, in spite of the fact that the forced offensive on the southwest front in July had weakened both, were at this time still the mouth-pieces of the majority. They were the only government there was. The Mission invested its energies in trying to help the government in its difficult problems of administration. Unfortunately, most of the other Allied representatives failed to share their opinion, or the results might have been different.

Suddenly Riga fell. The news of its actual occupation surprised no one. It had long been conceded in Petrograd that the Germans could take it whenever they chose. From the military standpoint, it had little significance. It was chiefly useful to the German militarists as a scalp to dangle before the war-weary section of their own populace. The Russian advocates of a dictator seized upon it as a weapon with which to attack Kerensky. They blamed the leniency of the Kerensky policy and the breakdown of the army for the fall of Riga. There were charges and counter-charges. The soldiers vehemently denounced their officers, accusing them of betraying the city to the Germans. One regiment of Lettish troops had refused to retreat when ordered, and fought until they were wiped out almost to a man. Most of them were Bolsheviki, and they asserted that their officers were selling Riga to defeat their Revolution.

The Germans were reported marching on Petrograd. Refugees fleeing from Riga poured into the city. There was not a spare room anywhere. Almost as many people were trying to get out of the city as were trying to get in. They stood in queues before the railway offices all day and all night, trying to buy tickets that would take them anywhere beyond the reach of the Germans.

The anniversary of the sixth month of Russian freedom was at hand. Petrograd, ready at all times to expect the worst, believed there would be some tragic celebration of the day. Part of it trembled in its boots for fear of a Bolshevik uprising; more of it predicted a German air raid; some of it longingly scanned the horizon for a Russian Napoleon. Nobody was prepared for what happened, and everybody was still more amazed by what did not happen. When the official announcement was made, “the Korniloff adventure has been liquidated,” the populace was still gasping.

Every man, woman, and child in Petrograd believed the city was about to become the battleground of the bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen. What else was there to believe? Were not the troops of General Korniloff, counted the strongest man in the Russian army, marching on Petrograd to capture the capital and proclaim their leader military dictator? Was not the advancing horde headed by the “savage” division--wildest of the wild Cossacks? Were not the government soldiers, charged with protecting the country against counter-revolution at any cost, marching out to meet them in bloody combat? Korniloff had announced his dictatorship, and offered Kerensky the portfolio of Minister of Justice. Kerensky had declined.

In the War Hotel, storm center of the storm center, we sat and awaited the inevitable. I dined that night with a Polish doctor who talked in low, mysterious tones. All around us were officers with various degrees of political belief, ranging from princes suspected of monarchistic tendencies to the most radical of the radicals. All were talking in low, mysterious tones. We spoke of Korniloff.

“He is a very desperate man; a very courageous man,” he said. “I was in the battle of Mukden with him, and he remained when all the others of the staff had gone. He is very determined. I do not know what will happen, but I know he is a determined man.”

This fact no one questioned. Whatever the political slant of the speaker, it never occurred to any one to suggest that the man whose military exploits are almost legendary might have started something he could not finish.

“He is determined; but Kerensky is also a determined man,” one Russian told me that night. “So it will be a fight to the finish.”

During the evening Arno Dosch Flurot, an American correspondent, came in to advise me to leave the hotel and go somewhere else for the night.

“The hotel may still be here in the morning, but it may not, and there is no use in taking chances,” he said.

Rumor had promised me so many tragic ends--she had cried “Wolf, wolf!” so many times--that I had become skeptical.

The lobby was swarming with excited officers. Messengers from the staff and the various embassies dashed in and out all evening. A few of the officers were loyal to Kerensky, and their faces were grim and troubled. Most of the others were waiting with open arms to welcome the Dictator, and they made no attempt to hide the joy they felt. For them it was all settled. Kerensky would be overthrown--Korniloff would capture the city. The death penalty would be restored; the leaders of the Soviet would be hanged. Russia’s troubles would be over.

I could not see Russia in such simple terms. I did not believe that the Russian Revolution could be understood in the terms of the French Revolution. I felt very small and alone when, at midnight, I left the chattering groups and went up to my little room. I was too engrossed in what was going to happen to Russia to care the least bit about what happened to me. I sat down before my typewriter and wrote until three, and then went to bed.

At five o’clock I was awakened from a sound sleep by a loud knocking. I jumped quickly up and opened the door. I looked out upon a sea of cutlasses. The hall was filled with Russian sailors, perhaps a couple hundred of them, husky chaps with rifles in their hands, and every rifle topped with the most bloodthirsty-looking blade I had ever seen. Life holds no further terrors for the man or woman who has faced two hundred such weapons all gathered in one spot. An Atlantic Ocean submarine would seem like a friendly neighbor come to call.

Still dazed with sleep, I looked at them uncomprehendingly. What had happened? Were they Bolsheviki from Kronstadt who had captured the hotel? Was the city already in the possession of Korniloff? Was the battle going on downstairs at that very moment?

There was no one to answer my questions. I said something in English. A smile passed over the faces of the half dozen sailors nearest me. “Nechevo,” they said in chorus.

It is the most reassuring word in the Russian language--the first I learned, and the last I shall forget. It means “Never mind,” “Don’t worry,” and other things of a kindred nature.

“Kharasho?” I asked.

“Kharasho nechevo,” came back the double reassurance.

I had learned that, so far as I was concerned at least, everything was all right. I closed the door and dressed.

Fifteen minutes later there was a great clatter of guns and marching feet, and when I went out into the hall again our visitors had gone. On all the landings, women, pale and terrified, were huddled in small groups, talking. A thousand sailors had taken possession of the hotel, examined passports, searched rooms, and arrested fourteen officers. They were not from Korniloff or Kerensky, but from the government behind the government--the Soviet. The Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies had decided to take things into their own hands and arrest all officers whom they suspected of counter-revolutionary tendencies.

I stopped to talk with some of the women. One of them spoke to me in English--beautiful English. Her husband had been arrested but released immediately.

“This hotel is a terrible place,” she said. “We Russians are mad, quite mad, all of us. Why do you stay here when you do not have to? I would go away--far, far away, to England or your America.”

She was a Russian princess, and from that morning on I saw much of her. She was exquisitely pretty and completely helpless, a typical flower of Russian culture. I told her once that she reminded me of an orchid.

“Ah, _orchidée_,” she said. “I like that; they are so beautiful.” Then, nodding her head with a wise little smile, she said. “But I know what you mean. You mean that I am a parasite.”

Always after that I called her “Orchidée.” The pathos of her helplessness appealed to me, and also a certain loyalty that kept her in Petrograd with her husband, when most of her friends had fled to the Caucasus or the Crimea or gone abroad.

“I love my husband,” she told me. “It is very bourgeois of me, I know, but I can’t help it.”

Her husband was an officer in the Guard, and she lived in hourly terror of his arrest. This day he had escaped, but there were others who were not so fortunate. At lunch-time several familiar figures were absent from the dining-room, and here and there a woman with troubled eyes sat alone.

In the following days we lived as much in the dark as to the actual state of affairs as if we had been in America.

Kerensky declared Korniloff counter-revolutionist and traitor. The Workmen and Soldiers in Petrograd, convinced that their Revolution and their throats were both in danger, worked day and night in the munition plants, and prepared to throw a trench around the great city. Another part of the populace looked upon Korniloff as a deliverer, and waited impatiently for his coming.

All over Russia the people, unable to get the truth, traded in rumor. Down in the Caucasus the newspapers came out with lurid details of battles in the Nevsky and thousands of dead bodies strewing the streets.

While we were still in the dark as to what was happening, I went one morning to the Winter Palace, and climbed the stairs to Katherine Breshkovskaya’s little room. Through all the troubled days of the last six months, she had been the right-hand lieutenant of Kerensky.

I found her, slipping her cloak over her calico wrapper and starting out to rally the soldiers to the support of the government. She was seventy-three years old. I had formed the habit of dropping in on the Babushka, who loved Americans and always had a radiant welcome. I climbed the marble stairs as one would climb a mountain, to get away from the tangle of petty things below, to look out over a distant vista, to see a broad view. Always I came away with the sense of having been on the heights, close to something big and fine, with a grandmotherly kiss upon my cheek and the memory of a friendly hand-clasp. Once, knowing well the burden of her answer, but curious to know how she would phrase it, I asked:

“What do you think of Kerensky?”

She lifted her chin high and, with the ring of sincere faith in her voice, spoke in her quaint English:

“Very well I think of him. He is a square man, and, what is better, he is not selfish. He needs no glory. He works only for the welfare of the people, and not only his people but for all the Allies, too. He is all around a good man. It is not strange to have a good man; but to have a man who is good and brave and clever is unusual. I esteem him from the profound of my soul.”

During the Korniloff rebellion she amply proved her faith; for day and night she went from barracks to barracks, urging the soldiers to stand by Kerensky.

From Babushka I went to Red Cross Headquarters at the Hotel Europe, to find a dismal group. Some suave and kindly gentleman had just confided to Colonel Thompson, quite pleasantly, that the hangings would begin at three o’clock that afternoon.

“If the old crowd comes back to Russia, I’m through. I don’t want to stay,” said the Colonel; and Raymond Robins nodded a gloomy second.

If the weight of Russia and of the world had been upon our shoulders, we could have been no more serious about it. We wept for the Petrograd front. We wept that only a few miles distant Russians were killing Russians, and nothing could be done to stop it. We might have saved our tears. The “savage” forces of General Korniloff and the troops of Kerensky had taken things into their own hands and were settling them in their own way. They were using the new Russian method of liquidation--they were fraternizing. The only shot fired was that with which one of Korniloff’s officers killed himself. The soldiers turned the bloody civil war into a fiasco. The “wild” Cossacks refused to kill their fellows. Korniloff was captured and placed under arrest, and the government announced that the Korniloff adventure had been liquidated.

The serious consequences were of another nature than bloodshed. The workers declared themselves through with all attempts to coöperate with the bourgeoisie. Korniloff’s friends accused Kerensky of double dealing. He was unable to explain himself to the satisfaction of his followers, and they began to distrust him. As nearly as I can gather from the investigation of many stories, Kerensky became possessed of knowledge that Korniloff, probably without his own knowledge, was being used by counter-revolutionists to overthrow the government. Kerensky made overtures to trap Korniloff into admissions that would condemn him. By the time he had gained his object, he had involved himself so far that it was impossible to explain. His intentions were unquestionably of the highest, but his methods were not those that a popular hero can use and remain on the high pedestal that his followers demand.

The first attempt to instal a man on horseback resulted in driving the radical forces further and further to the left and creating a mass solidarity that was ultimately to prove fatal to the existing order.

The Korniloff adventure paved the way for the Bolsheviki Revolution.