XVII
St. Petersburg—The Great Wealth of the Few—The Bitter Poverty of the Many—Conditions Similar to Those Preceding the French Revolution.2
Grand Hotel de l’Europe,
St. Petersburg, Russia,
September 18 (N. S.), 1902.
So much has been jammed into the last two days that my pen is like to burst. Splendor and squalor, the glitter of twentieth century civilization, the sombre shadow of barbarism, are here entwined in inextricable comminglement. The city is filled with stately buildings of gigantic and imposing dimensions; with wide, straight boulevards and streets. The sidewalks and droschkies are gay with the dashing and gaudy uniforms of innumerable soldiery, and the fine dresses of elegant women. Yet many of these great buildings are in ill repair, and what you at first imagine to be magnificent stone, reveals itself to be a stucco of rotting wood and crumbling plaster; the broad thoroughfares are abominably paved, and pitifully cared for by abject wretches wielding dilapidated birch-stick brooms.
The superb horses—stallions, all of them—whirl past, driven by izvostchiks in dirty, truncated plug-hats and blue dressing-gown-like kaftans, whose sodden faces tell of vodka and hopeless haplessness. Beggars swarm (frightful creatures), and the faces of the officers, fine big men in striking uniforms, are dissipated, hard and cruel.
We are in a huge hotel. Big men in uniform open the door; big men in livery fill the halls; the rooms are big, ours is immense, with double windows, It is steam-heated, and also has hearth fires of burning wood. The building is warmed all through, even the halls. There are French waiters in the big dining-rooms; there is delicious food and delightful coffee, whose aroma is very perfume of the Orient; the beefsteaks are juicy, thick and tender. We have had no such meals since leaving America. On each story there is an elaborate bar for serving vodka (a fierce white whisky distilled from wheat) and drinks to the guests of that particular floor, and a single bath room, and a single diminutive toilet for both sexes’ common use.
The moment we set foot within the doorway of the hotel, up stepped an official, in blue and gold, and demanded our passports, and we were requested also to sign a paper like the one enclosed, viz.:
| NOTICE TO THE POLICE. | |
| Family and Christian Name: | WHERE IS YOUR PASSPORT? |
| Signature: | |
| Profession: | Please order your passport two days before leaving Russia. |
| Age: | |
| Confession: | |
| Arrived from.......... | |
This to be at once filed with the police department, and the passport not to be given back until we should notify the same big official,—whose duty it was to stay right there and watch all guests of that hotel, and who must be notified twenty-four hours before we leave the city,—when he will return the passport two hours before the said time set, and give it to me only upon my paying him the government fee of ten rubles (five dollars) in good yellow gold.3 And right outside the door of our apartments, seated at a little table, are two officials, pen and paper in hand, who set down the hour and the minute of the day we enter and come out. They were there when we went to breakfast; they, or others as fox-jowled and lynx-eyed, were also there when we returned from the theater late at night, and they are there all through the day. Our Swedish guide, who does the duties of courier and shows us about the great city, is also registered at the police department, and he has to hand in every night a written report of what he has done with us all through the day, where we have gone, what we have seen, and we suspect even what we may have said. On the streets, big sword-begirded policemen stand at the intersections of the ways, pull out a little book from their pockets and make note of our passing that particular spot at that certain hour; at night these reports also are handed in to the central police office to be checked up against the statements of the guide and the spies at the hotel.
We are in the capital city of the mighty Russian Empire; in the capital created by Peter the Great amidst and upon the marshy delta of the river Neva; a city of more than a million inhabitants; a city spread out over vast distances; a city whose disproportionately wide streets and boulevards are paved with wood, wood that is rotting all the while, leaving big holes into which a horse, a team, may plunge and disappear, because only wood will float upon the marshy mire of the mucky islets, and stone and brick will eventually sink from sight; a city whose top-heavy palaces and public edifices are so treacherously set upon the sands that they must constantly undergo costly repairs; a city builded upon foundations so unstable that the springtime floods of the river Neva ever threaten permanently to wipe out its very existence; a city where the palaces of the always widening circle of the Imperial princes of the blood, and of the upper nobility, and of the great bureaucratic chiefs, are builded with an arrogance of dimension, an elaborateness of design, a lavishness of cost that beats anything an American billionaire has ever tried to do, or dreamed of doing in San Francisco or New York; and yet a city abounding in the mean, small, log and wooden cabins of the very poor; a city where penury and poverty and dire pinch protrude their squalid presence in continual tragic protest against the flaunted and wanton riot of unmeasured wealth, possessed by the very few.
This morning as I walked upon the Nevsky Prospekt, the Broadway of the Imperial capital, and watched the movement of mankind along the way, and beheld the extraordinary contrasts between those who walked and those who rode; as I saw the burly policeman arrest the shabby foot-farer for nearly being run down, while he let the haughty grandee drive freely on; as I beheld poverty and wealth in such flagrant contrast, and realized that a standing army is kept ever armed and girt to protect and uphold the privilege and security of the rich; as I beheld the surly, sour, sombre faces of those who wore no gaudy covering of broadcloth and gold lace, my fancy harked back to the time, somewhat more than a century ago, when the King and Nobles of France drove through the Rues of Paris in all their glittering splendor, trampling down in their pride of power the pedestrian who failed to escape from their sudden approach. How secure they felt in their arrogant enjoyment of prerogative and rank! How contemptuously they disdained the humble claims of the glitter-proletarian, of the peasant on the land! Louis XIV had cried “L’etat c’est moi.” Was that not enough! And yet, I had stood in the Place de la Concorde, almost on the very spot where, inspired by the hatred of the Sansculottes, Mademoiselle La Guillotine had bit off the dull head of Louis XVI, and cut through the fair throat of Marie Antoinette.
It may be possible for Russia and her governing men, her Bureaucratic Autocracy, yet a little while to postpone the fateful hour. By means of foreign wars it may be possible to play the old game of diverting the public mind from its own bitter ills; by promises of fair and liberal dealing it may be possible to calm the public mind—cajole it until the promises are duly broken, as is invariably the case. Whatever fair-speaking and fat-feeding officialdom may to the contrary assert, the impression I gain amidst all this splendor and pomp and glare of supreme, concentered power of the few is that, beneath this opulent exterior, deep down in the hearts and even below the conscious working of their minds, there to-day abides among the masses of the Russian people—who after all hold in their hands the final power—a profound and monstrous discontent: a discontent so deep-rooted and so intense that when the inevitable hour strikes, as strike it must, the world will then behold in Russia a saturnalia of blood and tears, a squaring of ten centuries’ accounts, more fraught with human anguish and human joy than ever dreamed a Marat and a Robespierre, more direful and more glad than yet mankind have known.
We drove about the city like grandees. Our landau was just such as Russian nobles like best to use; our splendid pair of sorrel stallions pranced upon their heels and neighed and ran just as all nobles’ horses should; and our well-distended driver, of enormous and deftly-padded girth, sat belted with a big embroidered band, and guided the horses he never dreamed to hold, and helloed loudly to those who did not fly out of the way, just as would any driver of the Blood! We almost ran over some slow-moving man or woman, foot-weary wretch, at every crossing of a street!
Many palaces and public buildings we visited—enormous edifices, all of them, with innumerable and extensive halls and immense chambers finished in gold and alabaster and gaudy hues, with countless servants and lackeys in livery and lace, gold lace, to care for them, and watch over them, and fatten upon a government graft or easy-gotten fee. Suites of enormous apartments they were, which are never used and never are likely to be used.
The paintings of the great masters collected in the galleries of the Hermitage and Winter Palaces, accumulated by the Czars, are among the most renowned in Europe. The reception halls and audience chambers and ballrooms and dining halls of these palaces are designed and intended to dazzle and impress whosoever are given the chance of beholding them. At the same time, the library and study of the late Czar, Alexander III, is a small and plainly furnished room, with the atmosphere and markings of a man of simple tastes, who laboriously worked, worked as no other official of the Bureaucracy in Russia pretends to work.
We traversed the suites of apartments used by the Imperial family, when sojourning in St. Petersburg during those portions of the winter season when the court there gathers, and we noted the outer guardrooms where night and day stand the faithful watchers with sleepless vigil, and we realized, perhaps for the first time, that this man, so steeped in power, is after all but a prisoner of the system which locks him in and binds him fast and robs him of that independence of action which you and I enjoy. He is become but a creature of the great machine that governs, a slave of the system which Peter the Great set up for the furtherance of his Imperial will, a system of government which has so developed and spread out that to-day the Czar of all the Russias is merely the puppet of its will, the tool of the greedy, grasping, intriguing, governing Bureaucracy.
On approaching the city, our straining eyes first caught sight of the gilded, glittering domes and spires of the great cathedrals and churches with which it is so abundantly supplied. The domes of St. Isaac, of our Lady of Kazan, of Alexander Nevsky, and the spires of St. Peter and St. Paul, each and all told us that whatever else we might discover, we were yet entering a city and a land where the people counted not the cost of the splendid housing of their faith. And so we have found it. The wealth of gold and of silver, of precious stones and of priceless stuffs with which these churches are adorned and crammed, excels anything of which the western brain has ever dreamed. Each great church is famed and honored for its particular beneficence, its peculiar holiness, and to each one comes in procession perpetual an innumerable throng to pray and worship and to receive the blessings flowing from that especial fane. Even in the ancient log cabin, said to be the actual house erected by Peter himself, is established a shrine, where priests continuously intone the beautiful service of the Russian church and where thousands of devoted worshipers swarm in and out all the day long, and the night as well, praying to Imperial Peter’s now sainted ghost.
In the noble chamber of the golden-spired cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul lie the white marble tombs of the Romanoffs, where is also kept up throughout the day and night yet another sumptuous service for the repose of the souls of the illustrious dead. In the great monastery of Alexander Nevsky is each day maintained a simple and splendid choral service which multitudes attend, and where the melancholy Gregorian chanting and intoning of the black-robed long-bearded monks reveal new organ stops in the human voice.
Naturally, an American has great sympathy for the Russian people who have so little, while he has so much. In America we send our girls and boys to school as a matter of course. Here in the ornate center of autocracy, I have seen no building that I recognized as a common school, nor in Russia is there such a system, as we know it.
To the western mind three things stand out above all else in Russia:
(1) The concentrated wealth and privilege of the few—the big grafters who have seized it all.
(2) The opulence and extraordinary power of that ecclesiastical organization, the “Holy Orthodox Church” itself an engine of the autocratic rule,—used to cover atrocious authority with gilded cassock and priestly cope.
(3) The profound poverty and hopeless subserviency of the Russian people—those who are robbed and ruined by the grafters and hoodooed by the Church.
Notes
2 These letters were written in the early autumn of the year, 1902, and present a glimpse of Russia as it then appeared.
3 I have subsequently learned that the legal fee is about three rubles ($1.50), the charge of ten rubles being impudent graft.