I spent all the winter of 1905-6 at Moscow with occasional visits to St. Petersburg and to the country. The strikes were over, but it was in a seething, restless state. Count Witte was Prime Minister. When he took office after making peace with the Japanese he was idolised as a hero, but he soon lost his popularity and his prestige. He satisfied neither the revolutionaries nor the reactionaries, and he was neither King Log nor King Stork. Elections were held in the spring for the convening of the Duma, the first Russian Parliament, but they were not looked upon with confidence and they were boycotted by the more extreme parties. Russia was swarming with political parties, but of all these divisions and subdivisions, each with its programme and its watchword, there were only two which had any importance: the Constitutional Democrats called Kadets,[11] which represented the Intelligentsia, and the Labour Party, which represented the artisans and out of which the Bolsheviks were ultimately to grow. The peasants stood aloof, and remained separate.

None of these parties produced either a statesman or remarkable man. There were any amount of clever men and fine orators in their ranks, but no man of action.

A man of action did ultimately appear, but in the ranks of the Government—P. A. Stolypin—and he governed Russia for several years, till he was murdered.

At Moscow I had two little rooms in the Mwilnikov pereulok on the ground floor. I was now a regular correspondent to the Morning Post, and used to send them a letter once a week. Their St. Petersburg correspondent was Harold Monro, who wrote fiction under the pseudonym of “Saki.”

The stories that Monro wrote under the name of “Saki” in[333] the Westminster Gazette and the Morning Post attracted when they came out in these newspapers, and afterwards when they were republished, a considerable amount of attention; but because they were witty, light, and ironical, and sometimes flippant, few people took “Saki” seriously as an artist. I venture to think he was an artist of a high order, and had his stories reached the public from Vienna or Paris, there would have been an artistic boom round his work of a deafening nature.

As it is, people dismissed him as a funny writer. Funny he was, both in his books and in his conversation; irresistibly witty and droll sometimes, sometimes ecstatically silly, so that he made you almost cry for laughter, but he was more than that—he was a thoughtful and powerful satirist, an astonishing observer of human nature, with the power of delineating the pathos and the irony underlying the relations of human beings in everyday life, with exquisite delicacy and a strong sureness of touch. A good example of his wit is his answer when a lady asked him how his book could be got: “Not at an ironmonger’s.” His satire is seen at its strongest in the fantasy, When William Came, in which he describes England under German domination, but the book in which his many gifts and his intuition for human things are mingled in the finest blend is perhaps The Unbearable Bassington, which is a masterpiece of character-drawing, irony, and pathos. And yet in literary circles in London, or at dinner-parties where you would hear people rave over some turgid piece of fiction, that because it was sordid was thought to be profound, and would probably be forgotten in a year’s time, you would never have heard “Saki” mentioned as an artist to be taken seriously.

“No one will buy,” as the seller of gold-fish remarked at the fair—“no one will buy the little gold-fish, for men do not recognise the gifts of Heaven, the magical gifts, when they meet them.”

Nobody sought the suffrages of the literary and artistic circle less than “Saki.” I think he would have been pleased with genuine serious recognition, as every artist would be, but the false réclame and the chatter of coteries bored him to extinction.

In 1914 he showed what he was really made of by enlisting in the army, and he was killed in the war as a corporal after he had several times refused a commission.

[334]

I spent Easter in Moscow, and this was one of the most impressive experiences I ever had.

I have spent Easter in various cities—in Rome, Florence, Athens, and Hildesheim—and although in each of these places the feast has its own peculiar aspect, yet by far the most impressive and the most interesting celebration of the Easter festival I have ever witnessed was that of Moscow. This is not to be wondered at, for Easter is the most important feast of the year in Russia, the season of festivity and holiday-making in a greater degree than Christmas or New Year’s Day. Secondly, Easter, which is kept with equal solemnity all over Russia, was especially interesting in Moscow, because Moscow is the stronghold of old traditions and the city of churches. Even more than Cologne, it is
“Die Stadt die viele hundert
Kapellen und Kirchen hat.”

There is a church almost in every street, and the Kremlin is a citadel of cathedrals. During Holy Week, towards the end of which the evidences of the fasting season grow more and more obvious by the closing of restaurants and the impossibility of buying any wine and spirits, there were, of course, services every day. During the first three days of Holy Week there was a curious ceremony to be seen in the Kremlin, which was held every two years. This was the preparation of the chrism or holy oil. While it was slowly stirred and churned in great cauldrons, filling the room with hot fragrance, a deacon read the Gospel without ceasing (he was relieved at intervals by others), and this lasted day and night for three days. On Maundy Thursday the chrism was removed in silver vessels to the Cathedral. The supply had to last the whole of Russia for two years. I went to the morning service in the Cathedral of the Assumption on Maundy Thursday. The church was crowded to suffocation. Everybody stood up, as there was no room to kneel. The church was lit with countless small wax tapers. The priests were clothed in white and silver. The singing of the noble plain chant without any accompaniment ebbed and flowed in perfect discipline; the bass voices were unequalled in the world. Every class of the population was represented in the church. There were no seats, no pews, no precedence nor privilege. There was a smell of incense and[335] a still stronger smell of poor people, without which, someone said, a church is not a church. On Good Friday there was the service of the Holy Shroud, and besides this a later service in which the Gospel was read out in fourteen different languages, and finally a service beginning at one o’clock in the morning and ending at four, to commemorate the Burial of Our Lord. How the priests endured the strain of these many and exceedingly long services was a thing to be wondered at; for the fast, which was kept strictly during all this period, precluded butter, eggs, and milk, in addition to all the more solid forms of nourishment, and the services were about six times as long as those of the Catholic or other churches.

The most solemn service of the year took place at midnight on Saturday in Easter week. From eight until ten o’clock the town, which during the day had been crowded with people buying provisions and presents and Easter eggs, seemed to be asleep and dead. At about ten people began to stream towards the Kremlin. At eleven o’clock there was already a dense crowd, many of the people holding lighted tapers, waiting outside in the square, between the Cathedral of the Assumption and that of Ivan Veliki. A little before twelve the cathedrals and palaces on the Kremlin were all lighted up with ribbons of various coloured lights. Twelve o’clock struck, and then the bell of Ivan Veliki began to boom: a beautiful, full-voiced, immense volume of sound—a sound which Clara Schumann said was the most beautiful she had ever heard. It was answered by other bells, and a little later all the bells of all the churches in Moscow were ringing together. Then from the Cathedral came the procession: first, the singers in crimson and gold; the bearers of the gilt banners; the Metropolitan, also in stiff vestments of crimson and gold; and after him the officials in their uniforms. They walked round the Cathedral to look for the Body of Our Lord, and returned to the Cathedral to tell the news that He was risen. The guns went off, rockets were fired, and illuminations were seen across the river, lighting up the distant cupola of the great Church of the Saviour with a cloud of fire.

The crowd began to disperse and to pour into the various churches. I went to the Manège—an enormous riding school, in which the Ekaterinoslav Regiment had its church. Half the building looked like a fair. Long tables, twinkling with hundreds[336] of wax tapers, were loaded with the three articles of food which were eaten at Easter—a huge cake called kulich; a kind of sweet cream made of curds and eggs, cream and sugar, called Paskha (Easter); and Easter eggs, dipped and dyed in many colours. They were waiting to be blessed. The church itself was a tiny little recess on one side of the building. There the priests were officiating, and down below in the centre of the building the whole regiment was drawn up. There were two services—a service which began at midnight and lasted about half an hour; and Mass, which followed immediately after it, lasting till about three in the morning. At the end of the first service, when the words, “Christ is risen,” were sung, the priest kissed the deacon three times, and then the members of the congregation kissed each other, one person saying, “Christ is risen,” and the other answering, “He is risen, indeed.” The colonel kissed the sergeant; the sergeant kissed all the men one after another. While this ceremony was proceeding, I left and went to the Church of the Saviour, where the first service was not yet over. Here the crowd was so dense that it was almost impossible to get into the church, although it was immense. The singing in this church was ineffable. I waited until the end of the first service, and then I was borne by the crowd to one of the narrow entrances and hurled through the doorway outside. The crowd was not rough; they were not jostling one another, but with cheerful carelessness people dived into it as you dive into a scrimmage at football, and propelled the unresisting herd towards the entrance, the result being, of course, that a mass of people got wedged into the doorway, and the process of getting out took longer than it need have done; and had there been a panic, nothing could have prevented people being crushed to death. After this I went to a friend’s house to break the fast and eat kulich, Paskha, and Easter eggs, and finally returned home when the dawn was faintly shining on the dark waters of the Moscow River, whence the ice had only lately disappeared.

In the morning people came to bring me Easter greetings, and to give me Easter eggs, and to receive gifts. I was writing in my sitting-room and I heard a faint mutter in the next room, a small voice murmuring, Gospodi, Gospodi (“Lord, Lord”). I went to see who it was, and found it was the policeman, sighing for his tip, not wishing to disturb, but at the same time anxious[337] to indicate his presence. He brought me a crimson egg. Then came the doorkeeper and the cook. The policeman must, I think, have been pleased with his tip, because policemen kept on coming all the morning, and there were not more than two who belonged to my street.

In the afternoon I went to a hospital for wounded soldiers to see them keep Easter, which they did by playing blind man’s buff to the sound of a flute played by one poor man who was crippled for life. One of the soldiers gave me as an Easter gift a poem, a curious human document. It is in two parts called “Past and Present.” This one is “Present”:
“PRESENT”
“I lived the quarter of a century
Without knowing happy days;
My life went quickly as a cart
Drawn by swift horses.
I never knew the tenderness of parents
Which God gives to all;
For fifteen years I lived in a shop
Busied in heaping up riches for a rich man.
I was in my twentieth year
When I was taken as a recruit;
I thought that the end had come
To my sorrowful sufferings,
But no! and here misfortune awaited me;
I was destined to serve in that country,
Where I had to fight like a lion with the foe,
For the honour of Russia, for my dear country.
I shall for a long time not forget
That hour, and that date of the 17th,[12]
In which by the river Liao-he
I remained for ever without my legs.
Now I live contented with all,
Where good food and drink are given,
But I would rather be a free bird
And see the dear home where I was born.”

This is the sequel:
“PAST”
“I will tell you, brothers,
How I spent my youth;
I heaped up silver,
I did not know the sight of copper;
[338]
I was merry, young, and nice;
I loved lovely maidens;
I lived in clover, lived in freedom
Like a young ‘barin.’
I slept on straw,
Just like a little pig.
I had a very big house
Where I could rest.
It was a mouldy barn,
There where the women beat the flax.
Every day I bathed
In spring water;
I used for a towel
My scanty leg-cloth.
In the beer-shops, too,
I used to like to go,
To show how proudly
I knew how to drink ‘vodka.’
Now at the age of twenty-six
This liberty no longer is for me.
I remember my mouldy roof,
And I shed a bitter tear.
When I lived at home I was contented
I experienced no bitterness in service.
I have learnt to know something,
Fate has brought me to Moscow;
I live in a house in fright and grief,
Every day and every hour;
And when I think of liberty,
I cannot see for tears.
That is how I lived from my youth;
That is what freedom means.
I drank ‘vodka’ in freedom,
Afterwards I have only to weep.
Such am I, young Vaniousia,
This fellow whom you now see
Was once a splendid merry-maker,
Named Romodin.”

These two poems, seemingly so contradictory, were the sincere expression of the situation of the man, who was a cripple in the hospital. He gave both sides of each situation—that of freedom and that of living in a hospital.

On Saturday afternoon I went to one of the permanent fairs or markets in the town, where there were many booths. Everything was sold here, and here the people bought their clothes. They were then buying their summer yachting caps. One man offered me a stolen gold watch for a small sum.[339] Another begged me to buy him a pair of cheap boots. I did so; upon which he said: “Now that you have made half a man of me, make a whole man of me by buying me a jacket.” I refused, however, to make a whole man of him.

On Easter Monday I went out to luncheon with some friends in the Intelligentsia. We were a large party, and one of the guests was an officer who had been to the war. Towards the end of luncheon, when everybody was convivial, healths were drunk, and one young man, who proclaimed loudly that he was a Social Revolutionary, drank to the health of the Republic. I made great friends with the Social Revolutionary during luncheon. When this health was drunk, I was alarmed as to what the officer might do. But the officer turned out to be this man’s brother. The officer himself made a speech which was, I think, the most brilliant example of compromise I have ever heard; for he expressed his full sympathy with the Liberal movement in Russia, including its representatives in the extreme parties, and at the same time his unalterable loyalty to his Sovereign.

After luncheon, the Social Revolutionary, who had sworn me eternal friendship, was told that I had relations in London who managed a bank. So he came up to me and said: “If you give our Government one penny in the way of a loan I shall shoot you dead.”

After that we danced for the rest of the afternoon. The Social Revolutionary every now and then inveighed against loans and expressed his hope that the Government would be bankrupt.

In May I went to St. Petersburg for the opening of the Duma, and I stayed there till the Duma was dissolved in July.

The brief life of the first Duma was an extraordinarily interesting spectacle to watch. The Duma met in the beautiful Taurid palace that Catherine the Second built for Potemkin. In the lobby, which was a large Louis XV. ballroom, members and visitors used to flock in crowds, smoke cigarettes, and throw away the ashes and the ends on to the parquet floor. There were peasant members in their long black coats, some of them wearing crosses and medals; Popes, Tartars, Poles, men in every kind of dress except uniform.

There was an air of intimacy, ease, and familiarity about the whole proceedings. The speeches were eloquent, but no[340] signs of political experience or statesmanlike action were to be discerned.

I got to know a great many of the members: Aladin, who was looked upon as a violent firebrand, and the star of the Left; Milioukov, the leader of the Kadets, who was well known as a journalist and a professor; Kovolievsky, also a well-known writer and professor, a large, genial, comfortable man with an embracing manner and a great warmth of welcome, and a rich, flowing vocabulary.

The peasants liked him and he was the only politician whom they trusted. They sent him a deputation to inform him that whenever he stood up to vote they intended to stand up in a body, and whenever he remained seated they would remain seated too. I also knew many peasant members.

The proceedings of the Duma resulted in a deadlock between it and the Government from the very first moment it met. It soon became obvious that the Government must either dissolve the Duma or form a Ministry taken from the Duma, that is to say, from the opposition. The question was, if they did not wish to do that, would the country stand a dissolution or would there be a revolution? The crucial question of the hour was, should the Government appoint a Kadet Ministry, consisting of Liberals belonging to the Constitutional Democratic party who formed the great majority of the Duma, or should they dissolve the Duma? There was no third course possible. I thought at the time that events would move more quickly than they did. I thought if the Duma were dissolved, not only disorder but immediate, open, and universal revolution would follow.

The army was shaky. Non-commissioned officers of the Guards regiments were in touch with the Labour members of the Duma, and their conversations, at which I sometimes assisted, were not reassuring. My impression from these conversations and from all the talks I had with the peasants and Labour members was that revolution, if and when it did come, would be a terrible thing, and I thought it might quite likely come at once. Mutinies had occurred in more than sixty regiments; a regiment of Guards, the Emperor’s own regiment, had revolted in St. Petersburg. I thought the dissolution would be the signal for an immediate outbreak of some kind. I knew nothing decisive could happen till the army turned. I[341] thought the army might turn, or turn sufficiently to give the Liberal leaders the upper hand. I was mistaken.

At the end of July 1906 the Government was vacillating; they were on the verge of capitulation, and within an ace of forming a Kadet Ministry. I think they were only prevented from doing so by the appearance on the scene of P. A. Stolypin. As soon as Stolypin made his first speech in the Duma, two things were clear: he was not afraid of opposition; he was determined not to give in. He was going to fight the Duma; and if necessary he would not shrink from dissolving it, and risking the consequences. At the end of July, Stolypin strongly urged dissolution. He argued that if the Kadets came into power they would not remain in office a week, but would be at the mercy of the Extremists, and at once replaced by the Extreme Left, and swept away by an inrush of unripe and inexperienced Social Democrats who hated the Liberals more bitterly than they hated the Government. There would then, he thought, be no possibility of building a dam or barrier against the tide of revolution, and the country would be plunged in anarchy. Judging from what occurred in 1917, Stolypin’s forecast was correct. For this is precisely what happened then. The Liberals were at once turned out of office, and replaced first by Kerensky and then by Lenin. The pendulum swung as far to the left as it could go, and this is just what Stolypin anticipated and feared in 1906.

But many people in responsible positions (including General Trepov) were advocating the formation of a Kadet Ministry; and had the Kadets had any leaders of character, experience, and strength of purpose, the counsel would perhaps have been a sound one.

At the time I thought the only means of avoiding a civil war would be to create and support a strong Liberal Ministry. The objection to this was, there was no such thing available. What happened was that Stolypin’s advice was listened to. The Duma was dissolved and no revolution followed. The army did not turn; the moderate Liberals capitulated without a fight. They took the dissolution lying down; all they did was to go to Finland and sign a protest, which had no effect on the situation. It merely gave the Government a pretext for disenfranchising certain of their leading members.

It may seem strange that the Duma, which was composed[342] of the flower of intellectual Russia, and certainly had a large section of public opinion behind it, as well as prestige at home and abroad, should have capitulated so tamely.

The truth was that neither in the ranks of the moderate Liberals, nor in those of the Extremists, although they were in some cases men of exceptional talents, was there one man sufficiently strong to be a leader. The man of strong character was on the other side. He was Stolypin; and no one on the side of the Liberals was a match for him. The Liberals were journalists, men of letters, professors, and able lawyers, but there was not one man of action in their ranks.

As soon as the Duma was dissolved and no open revolution came about, I did not think there would be another act in the revolutionary drama for another ten years. I put this on public record at the time, and as it turned out, I was only a year out, as the revolution took place eleven years after the dissolution of the first Duma.

All through those summer months I saw many interesting sights, and made many interesting acquaintances.

One Sunday I spent the afternoon at Peterhof, a suburb of St. Petersburg, where the Emperor used to live. There in the park, amidst the trees, the plashing waterfalls, and the tall fountains, “les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres,” the lilac bushes, and the song of many nightingales, the middle classes were enjoying their Sunday afternoon and the music of a band. Suddenly, in this beautiful and not inappropriate setting, the Empress of Russia passed in an open carriage, without any escort, looking as beautiful as a flower. I could not help thinking of Marie Antoinette at the Trianon, and I wondered whether ten thousand swords would leap from their scabbards on her behalf.

The most interesting of my acquaintances in the Duma was Nazarenko, the peasant deputy for Karkoff. Professor Kovolievsky introduced me to him. Nazarenko was far the most remarkable of the peasant deputies. He was a tall, striking figure, with black hair, a pale face, with prominent clearly cut features, such as Velasquez would have taken to paint a militant apostle. He had been through a course of primary education, and by subsequently educating himself he had assimilated a certain amount of culture. Besides this, he was an eloquent speaker, and a most original character.

[343]

“I want to go to London,” he said, “so that the English may see a real peasant and not a sham one, and so that I can tell the English what we, the real people, think and feel about them.” I said I was glad he was going. “I shan’t go unless I am chosen by the others,” he answered. “I have written my name down and asked, but I shan’t ask twice. I never ask twice for anything. When I say my prayers I only ask God once for a thing; and if it is not granted, I never ask again. And so it’s not likely I would ask my fellow-men twice for anything. I am like that; I leave out that passage in the prayers about being a miserable slave. I am not a miserable slave, neither of man nor of Heaven.” “That is what the Church calls spiritual pride,” I answered. “I don’t believe in all that,” he answered. “My religion is the same as that of Tolstoy.” He then pointed to the ikon which is in the lobby of the Duma. “I pay no attention to that,” he said. “It is a board covered with gilt; but a lot of people think that the ikon is God.”

I asked him if he liked Tolstoy’s books. “Yes,” he answered. “His books are great, but his philosophy is weak. It may be all right for mankind thousands of years hence, but it is of no use now. I have no friends,” he continued. “Books are my friends. But lately my house was burnt, and all my books with it. I have read a lot, but I never had anybody to tell me what to read, so I read without any system. I did not go to school till I was thirteen.”

“Do you like Dostoievsky’s books?” “Yes; he knows all about the human soul. When I see a man going downhill, I know exactly how it will happen, and what he is going through, and I could stop him because I have read Dostoievsky.” “Have you read translations of any foreign books?” “Very few; some of Zola’s books, but I don’t like them, because he does not really know the life he is describing. Some of Guy de Maupassant’s stories I have read, but I do not like them either because I don’t want to know more about that kind of people than I know already.” “Have you read Shakespeare?” “Yes. There is nobody like him. When you read a conversation of Shakespeare’s, when one person is speaking you think he is right, and when the next person answers him you think he is right. He understands everybody. But I want to read Spencer—Herbert Spencer. I have never been able to get his works.” I promised to procure him Herbert Spencer’s works.

[344]

One evening I went to see Nazarenko in his house. He was not at home, but a friend of his was there. He told me to wait. He was a peasant; thirty-nine years old, rather bald, with a nice intelligent face. At first he took no notice of me, and read aloud to himself out of a book. Then he suddenly turned to me and asked me who I was. I said I was an English correspondent. He got up, shut the door, and begged me to stay. “Do the English know the condition of the Russian peasantry?” he asked. “They think we are wolves and bears. Do I look like a wolf? Please say I am not a wolf.” Then he ordered some tea, and got a bottle of beer. He asked me to tell him how labourers lived in England, what their houses were made of, what wages a labourer received, what was the price of meat, whether they ate meat? Then he suddenly, to my intense astonishment, put the following question to me: “In England do they think that Jesus Christ was a God or only a great man?” I asked him what he thought. He said he thought He was a great man. He said th............