XXI The First Snows — Moscow to Warsaw — Fat Farm Lands and Frightful Poverty of the Mujiks Who Own Them and Till Them — I Recover My Passport
Hotel Savoy, Friedichs Strasse,
Berlin, Germany, September 23, 1902.
“Hoch der Kaiser, Hoch der Kaiser! Gott sei Dank! Ich bin in Deutschland angekommen!” have my brain and blood and bones been crying out all the last fifty miles, since we safely crossed the Russian border. Until the moment when the last Russian official waked me up, held a light in my face, and, staring at me, compared my visage with what the passport said it ought to be, and handed me back that document to be mine forever, to be framed and hung up in my Kanawha home, and preserved for my children and children’s children as evidence that I came safe out of Russia; not till that midnight hour did I realize that I belonged to the common Teutonic brotherhood of men, and that Puritan-descended American though I were, I and my German neighbor were yet really kin! But at that moment when we crossed the German boundary, I knew it and felt it in every fibre and tingling nerve. I was a Teuton, I was a German, I was come again among my blood kindred. “Hoch der Kaiser,” “Selig sei Deutschland!” I had come out of mediaevalism, from the shadows of barbarism, I was emerged into the light of the twentieth century’s sun!
We left Moscow late Sunday afternoon, in a blinding snow storm, the first of the year.
In the morning, after attending mass in the cathedral of Saint Savior, we drove about the city enjoying the cloudless blue sky, the pellucid sunshine. We visited the Gentile and Jewish markets, and watched the pressing concourse of eager traders bartering and chaffering their goods and wares; we passed along the high frowning walls of the debtors’ prison, where any man who has incurred a debt of five hundred rubles ($250) may be incarcerated by the creditor, and kept shut up as long as the said creditor puts up for him the very modest sum of about four cents a day for bread. When the creditor quits paying for his debtor’s keep, the debtor comes out, but not till then. The fare at that price is not luxurious, and after a few weeks or months of the meagre diet, the debtor joyfully promises anything to escape and, sometimes, persuades his family or friends to compound with the creditor and get him out. But some there are who spend a lifetime within those walls. And our Orthodox driver declared that a Jew liked nothing better than to thrust and hold a hapless Gentile debtor behind those gates.
The day was lovely and the air had almost the balminess of spring. Men and women and children were going about in summer garments, no overcoats or wraps, and it might as well have been May or June. At the same time, we noticed that the windows of our rooms in the hotel were double-sashed and tight-corked with cotton, and I also observed that similar double windows were fast set on public buildings and dwelling-houses past which we drove. But otherwise, as we looked into the soft blue sky there was no hint of approaching frosts.
It was near noon when we drove out to see the famous convent of Novo Dievitchy, and we spent a delightful hour in viewing its towered church, its cloisters, its nuns’ cells and children’s quarters, and the curious cemetery where are entombed many of Moscow’s most illustrious dead, tombs which are set above the ground amidst choice shrubbery and blooming plants. We had just come out, through the old arched gateway, and had encountered a band of holy beggars who absorbed our attention and our kopeeks. I had put the ladies into the landau, while the driver with great difficulty held back his restive, squealing stallions. My hand was on the carriage door, when I felt something soft and cold upon it. I looked up and behold! the air was full of big flakes of descending snow. The horizon to the north and east was black, the blue sky had grown a leaden gray. Winter had come to Moscow and to us as silently and as suddenly as it once came to Napoleon and his thinclad army, near a century ago. There was no wind; the noises of the city were suddenly hushed; a great silence now brooded over Moscow. The air was thick with big, fluffy, fluttering particles of whiteness which stuck to everything they touched, and never melted when they ceased to fall. We could not see across the road, even the horses were half hid. Our driver gave full rein to the impatient team and we flew homeward, but the snow kept coming down just the same. It never melted anywhere. It grew into piles and mounds and soft feathery masses. It wholly concealed the scarred and rutted unevennesses of the road, it clung to twig and tree and fence, to gable, to window-ledge and lintel. King Winter had breakfasted in Archangel and, speeding across flat and unbarriered Russia, now dined in Moscow and would there permanently remain. And as suddenly all Moscow now bloomed forth into sheepskin overcoats and elaborate furs and winter wraps. The citizens must have had them hanging behind the door upon a handy peg, ready for just such a sudden coming of the snows. By afternoon, sleighs and sledges jingled along the ways and boulevards, and stinking, filthy-streeted Moscow was transformed into a city immaculate and pure. And the snow kept ever falling, falling, falling, steadily, softly, persistently, without let or stop.
It was toward two o’clock that we took our final excursion out beyond the borders of the city to the summer palace of the Czars, the favorite Chateau Petrovsky, where prior to the coronation every Czar goes to repose and meditate and prepare himself with fasting and prayer for the ordeal of the tedious ceremonial in the Cathedral of the Assumption within the Kremlin.
The Chateau is a large and rambling building of wood and brick, with extensive suites of big, bare rooms. Behind it there lies a garden, laid out as though it were in France, with many graveled walks, and beds of flowers and edges of close-clipped box. Here the Czarina loves to wander, and here she passes many a quiet hour when escaped from the pomp and pressure of life in the Kremlin’s gaudy palace. Here one bed of roses was pointed out to us as her especial joy. The old French gardener looked pathetic as he stood beside it and watched the big white flakes alighting upon each leaf and petal. “The snows are come,” he said, “the garden dies, there will be no flowers more till another year!” And then, as if to save his cherished pets, he hastily gathered the finest of the blooms and presented them to H and begged her to accept and keep them, saying, “The snows are come, the Czarina, the Empress, will not now object; to-morrow these will surely all be dead.”
In the morning of the day before, we were told that, “To-morrow, or next day, or in a week, or a fortnight, will come the snows, we do not know how soon. But when they come, then we know that winter is begun, the long seven months of winter which will not leave us till May or June. It is then you should come to see us. Then are these ill-paved and reeking streets white and hard and clean; the summer’s dusts and heats are then forgot, and we quicken with the invigoration of the cold; then does the city gladden with the gay life of those returned from the summer’s toil upon the wide estates, or from foreign lands, for winter is the season when all Russians best love to be at home.”
We settled our hotel bills only after much argument with our host. We would not pay for candles we had not burned; our room was lighted with electric lights. We would not pay for steaks we had not eaten, nor chickens yet alive, nor for sweets we never tasted. No! For these and the like of these we flatly refused to pay. “De Vaiter’s meeshtakes, Mein Herr, sie shall kom oudt.” One hundred rubles for three days! Moscow was as costly as London!
Through the falling snows, thick falling snows, we drove to the Smolensk railway station, whence start the trains going west, for Moscow has not yet arrived at the convenience of a union depot. Although all railroads are owned and run by the government, yet each train starts from that side of the city nearest to the direction it will travel. We entered a long, low brick and wooden building, and passing through a wide dark waiting room, came out upon a wooden platform and were beside our train. We were ready to go. We had our tickets and our passports. Three days before, almost as soon as we arrived, we gave the forty-eight hours’ notice of our intention to leave Russia, and the twenty-four hours’ notice that we should also leave Moscow. We were permitted to take our passports to the main ticket office up within the city, the Kitai Gorod, and presenting them, secured the tickets. We then returned the passports to the police department to be given back to us just before we left, by the big uniformed official at our hotel. But he did not return them until we first bestowed upon him another ten rubles, as we had done when leaving St. Petersburg! Now we were once more to surrender our passports to a new uniformed government official, the train conductor, who would also examine them, visé them, and hand them to another when we came to Warsaw, to be yet again scrutinized and stamped and only returned to us when we at last crossed the German border. Nor even then until we should be finally inspected and compared by yet other officials so as to make dead certain that we were indeed the very self same travelers who now declared they wanted to get out of Russia.
The train was a long one. It was the through express carrying the Imperial Mails to Vienna, Berlin and Paris. It would pass Smolensk, Minsk, “Brzesc” (Brest) and Warsaw. It was one of the important trains of the empire. There were many passengers, and we were able to secure only a single stateroom with two berths in the first-class car for the ladies, while Mr. C and I obtained two berths in the second class car adjoining. We might sit together during the day, but for the night we would be in different coaches. The berths in our sleeper were provided each with a mattress, and an extra ruble gave us a pair of blankets, a sheet and a pillow. The cars were warm and double-windowed against the cold.
We went about twenty miles an hour over a straight-tracked road, and our sleep was undisturbed. When I awoke in the morning and made my way toward the toilet, though early, I yet found a queue of men and women ahead of me, and had to fall in line and take my turn. A big bearded Jew was just coming out of the little toilet room and a slim young woman was just going in, a young woman comely and with hair tangled and fallen down. This was bad enough, but between the tangled hair and myself stood another dame with locks quite as disheveled and unkempt. But I dared not quit my place, since an increasing number of men and women pressed uneasily behind me. My only chance was to stick it out until those coiffures should be restored to immaculate condition for the day. Within the toilet there was no soap, nor towel, nor comb, nor brush, nor else but ice-cold water, and a wide open channel down into the bitter stinging air. But I had now journeyed somewhat in Russia and had come fitly prepared.
All night we had rolled through a dead flat country, passing Smolensk, a large city of fifty thousand inhabitants, and all day we continued to traverse the same wide levels. The sky was blue, the air was cold and keen, there was a slight drifting of snow across the illimitable fields. Peasants in belted sheepskin overcoats, which came down to the heels, were plowing in the fields, each behind a single horse, and women on their knees were planting, or digging out potatoes and turnips and beets. Women were also hoeing everywhere, working like the men—mostly in short skirts, kerchiefs about the head, legs swathed in cotton cloth wrapped around and tied on with strings, feet like the men’s, wrapped up in plaited straw. The houses were miserable wooden huts of only one story and with chimneys made of sticks and mud and built on the inside to save heat, and meaner than any cabins of the most “ornery” mountaineers of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. There were no windows in the hovels, no openings but one single door. For the men and women who tilled the land, it was poverty, bitter poverty everywhere. Yet we were traversing some of the finest, richest, most productive farming lands of Russia; lands on which great and abundant crops are raised, or ought to be raised, and where these men and women ought to be living in ease and comfort by their toil, for these lands are largely owned by those who till and cultivate them, the “free and emancipated” peasantry of Russia! But the great crops are of little avail to the helpless peasant. His industry brings him no cessation of grinding toil. He barely lives, often he starves, sometimes he dies, dies of starvation right on this rich, fat land he himself owns. The government of the Czar knows just what each acre of his land will yield, and knowing this, it takes from the peasant in taxes the product of his sweat and toil, leaving him barely enough to live. There are no schools to teach the peasant. The high Russian officer, the lieutenant colonel who guarded us from St. Petersburg to Moscow, said, “The peasant wants no schools.” Thus, he never learns his rights, the rights God wills to him. He keeps on toiling year in and year out, and the government of the Czar squeezes from him his tears, his blood, his kopeeks, his life! And these men I saw were white men and owned the land, fat, fertile land, rejoicing ever in abundant crops!
A century ago, even thus were also the peasants of France ground down and pillaged by the King, the nobility, the government of the state. As I traveled through the fruitful valley of the Loire two years ago, crossing central France, and beheld the smiling fields and well-planted meadows and perpetual cultivation of every foot of soil, until the whole land bloomed and bore crops like one mighty garden, I could not help wondering, as I looked upon the smiling countenance of the terrain, and upon the contented faces of the sturdy and thrifty peasantry who owned and tilled it, whether this present fecundity and agricultural wealthiness of rural France, does not, after all, repay the world and even France herself, for the terrors and the tears, the blood and the obliteration of the l’ancien régime, whose expungement by the Revolution alone made possible to-day a regenerated and rejoicing France.
We have passed through Minsk, the ancient capital of Lithuania, a city of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants of whom more than half are Jews, and through Brzesc (pronounced “Brest”), another city as big as Smolensk and renowned as a fortress, taken and retaken, lost and relost, through all the weary centuries of Polish-Muskovite wars. We have crossed the river Bug (“Boog”) on a fine steel bridge, and entering pillaged Poland, are now arrived within the borders of her great capital, Warsaw (“Barcoba,” “Varsova”), where we change to a train of German cars, of the narrower German gauge, and go on to Berlin.
Just after leaving Minsk, I fell into conversation with a most intelligent young Jew from Warsaw, who, among other things, spoke of Russia and her ways, saying that, strange as it may seem, the people of Poland prefer her harsh rule to the fairer dealing of the Germans, for the reason that Pole and Russ both talk a Slavic tongue, and race affinity constitutes a bond. Yet said he at the same time, all Poles dream of the day when a Polish King shall again fill a Polish throne, and the glories of their Fatherland shall be restored.
We reached Warsaw only two hours late and pulled into the large stone station close alongside the Berlin train. The porter grabs our bags. Our small steamer trunk is shown to hold no vodka, nor contraband effects. “Nach Berlin,” I shout, and we are transferred to a clean, comfortable German car. Gott sei Dank! we feel a thousand times. We are almost free, almost escaped, almost beyond the Russian pale. For a fortnight, we have been under constant, conscious, persistent surveillance. Our guides have been in the employ of the police; strange men have followed us about upon the streets, have sat beside us in hotels, have scrutinized us with cold eyes upon the trains. We have been under the direct guard of armed soldiers, who have stood outside our stateroom door and slept beside us all the night. We have never, since entering Russia, been free from the weasel-wit and ferret-eye of incessant espionage!
And the dirt! Dirty cars! Dirty hotels! Dirty carriages! Dirty streets! Dirty churches! Dirty palaces! Dirty men! Dirty women! Such is Russia, a land where the world knows not water, except to skate upon when turned to ice.
Now we are in a German car, immaculately clean! Clean, almost, as it would be in Norway! We are in the modern world again. I feel great pressure in my heart to “Hoch der Kaiser”, and this despite the fact that, like every right-minded American, I am bred to abhor the assumptions of Hohenzollern Kaisership even as strenuously as Romanoff Autocracy. Yes! I feel great impulse to Hoch der Kaiser and to cheer for Germany and my German kin.