Russian Life To-day

I remember once saying to friends that I supposed when travelling in winter they could make themselves very comfortable by packing themselves in with “hot-water foot-warmers.” “Hot-water foot-warmers!” they exclaimed. “Why, the frost would have them and destroy them completely almost before we had left the door.”

Then the wolves are there also! Siberia has not changed in that respect from the weird land of which we have read as long as we can remember, and is still the haunt of the most fierce and untiring enemies which man and beast alike have to fear when they are the hunters and not the hunted. The fair Siberia of the glorious summer knows no wolves. Then there is food enough and to spare always within reach, and there are homes and family life even for wolves to think of and be happy about. There is no need then, though they are gregarious by nature, for them to join together. Each can fend for himself, and have enough for all his family and to spare. Not a wolf is to be seen except very rarely, and the traveller never even thinks of them with fear as, singly, sleek, and well fed, they slink away immediately as soon as seen. It is altogether different when winter comes, and hunger, even famine, gets a grip upon them because so many other creatures are hibernating. Then the quarry must be of different character, and nothing is too strong or big for a huge pack well led. Once they have been driven by stern necessity to combine together and choose their leader they will stick at nothing and attempt almost anything.

A friend of mine, born in Petrograd, tells us of an old travelling carriage of his father’s, in which he and his brothers and sisters, when children, used to play.

“It was raised very high from the ground,” he says, “only to be reached by a small ladder, so as to be out of the reach of wolves.”

Just the same stories are told after every winter as those of which we have so often read in prose and verse; and, out of the many told me as happening quite recently, I select the following: —

Three winters ago a wedding party went from their village, in the Altai, where the ceremony had taken place in the morning at the home of the bride, to the village where the bridegroom lived, and to which he was now taking back his newly-wedded wife. They were a hundred and twenty in number, and made a large party, with their horses and sledges, and were not afraid; but an unusually large pack of wolves was out that afternoon, and, soon scenting them, gave chase. Party after party were overtaken, pulled down, and, with horses as well, devoured. The bride and bridegroom and best man were in the front sledge with good horses, and kept ahead till they were quite close to the village, when they too were overtaken by a few of the strongest and swiftest of their pursuers. To save themselves the bridegroom and best man threw out the bride, and thus stopped the pursuit for a time sufficiently for them to gain the village. It was a shocking thing to do, but when the villagers began to question and help them out the awful explanation was forthcoming! The two men had gone mad with fright, and had not known what they were really doing. In that terrible hunting down, with the shrieks and despairing cries of their friends, as they were overtaken, ever ringing in their ears as they urged their own terror-stricken horses forward, it is little wonder that their minds gave way.

Let there be no mistake, therefore, about the steppes. The reader may keep the new impression (if it is new) that I have endeavoured to give of a most beautiful, rich, and fertile country; and which I am hoping to be visiting again while this book is being read, finding, I hope, this country of the wolves story rejoicing in all the glow and beauty of summer. But still, for nearly seven months of the year, that Siberia is the old Siberia still, fast bound in the grip of an appalling frost, waging, in its storms, a never-ceasing battle against human enterprise and effort; and the haunt of those insatiable and savage creatures which seem to stand out from all other creatures in being devoid, when in packs, of all fear or dread of man.

The steppes above Turkestan, which I visited last, are milder in climate than those of Akmolinsk. Great parts of them are sand, with a sage-like scrub, dear to the heart of camels; and they have a drier and even more invigorating air than that of the northern plains. Across these I travelled my five hundred miles in a Panhard motor-car, with a wild Russian chauffeur who knew no fear. He dashed across a country which practically had no roads and resembled a rough Scotch moor, with an élan that the most daring French chauffeur might envy. He was a fine fellow, Boroff by name, and carried me on as before, day and night, and again with sunshine for the one and moonlight for the other. “The devil’s wagon” is the name the wondering Kirghiz have given the motor-car from the first, but it is the last description it deserves. My journey of under twenty-four hours from the railhead to the Atbazar Mining Camp, if I had had to go by camel, as I expected might be possible until my actual arrival, would have taken me some twelve days, or even more.

All the transport in these steppes is by camels, and I could not be satisfied until I had made a small expedition upon one, and shall, perhaps, have to do the same again; but modern appliances are not to be despised, and no one can wish for a better experience of the steppes than to make the journey in the middle of summer and in a good modern motor-car.

CHAPTER IX

Russia’s Problem

The Social Problem, as it presents itself to thoughtful people in Russia, really demands a book to itself. No doubt it will come before long, and from some experienced pen. It is only possible for me just to touch upon it in this chapter, which one must write; or else even this very general view of Russia’s life of to-day would be utterly inadequate and incomplete. And, in so doing, I shall have to try and show how different it is in Russia from the same problem as presented in other countries in Europe.

It is well known, for instance, that the great question for ourselves waiting for solution at some early date is the social question. What was called for us the “Triple Alliance” in the world of labour, the Union of the Railway, Transport, and Mining Workers was completed just before war broke out; and, though with a patriotism beyond praise all needs and desires of their own are put aside for the present, our workers will give expression to their wishes at no distant day after peace comes. Even before this book is in print the masses in Germany, grimly silent so long except for the ever-increasing votes for their socialistic representatives, silent even during the disillusionment which has come to them these last six months, may have at last spoken out. We are told that their leader, Herr Bebel, who is said to have known the German character through and through, declared that the first serious defeat experienced by Germany “would produce a miracle.” Social unrest is still universal.

We find it, therefore, as we should expect to do, in Russia; and more general, perhaps, and more acute than at any other previous time, just before the war was declared. This, it may be remembered, is stated to have been one of the reasons why the curt and hurried ultimatum was presented at Petrograd, where it was thought that social troubles and dangers were so serious that it would be impossible for the government even to think of going to war. We have been told,12 though it was probably not known outside Russia at that time, what a good turn Germany really did to the Russian government and the Russian people by turning their thoughts from their own grave difficulties to the dangers which threatened them from without. At that time, we are assured, not only Petrograd, but every big manufacturing district of Russia, was shaking with revolt of a peculiar kind, and civil war on the point of breaking out. In Petrograd there were barricades already erected, at least 120,000 were on strike, tramcars had been broken up, attacks upon the police had taken place, factories were garrisoned in expectation of attack, the Cossacks were everywhere – openly in the streets, hidden away in places most threatened. The police arrested those who were supposed to be leaders, but it made no difference, for the people needed no leading. They were all so thoroughly in the movement. Indeed, we are told, “things seemed to the Russian government to be as bad as they could very well be; and orders were actually given for the severest possible repressive measures, which would, perhaps, have involved a large-scale battle, probably a massacre, and certainly a state of war in the capital.” It would have been “Red Sunday” over again, only this time infinitely and more ominously worse. A great calamity was narrowly escaped.

Now there is this to be noticed about this Russian upheaval, and this social bitterness and discontent expressing itself in the way with which we are only too sadly familiar, and which claims our attention as being so entirely different from similar movements of our own. The Russian workers made no demands, had no special grievances nor complaints which they wished to make known. In all strikes one has previously heard of there has been some hardship or injustice to bring forward, some claim or request to urge. Here there was nothing of the kind. “They were not on strike,” we are told, “for higher wages. In no single case did the men make a demand from their masters. In no single case had a man gone on strike because of a grievance which his master could put right. No concessions by the masters could have brought the men back to work. The only answer they returned when asked why there was a strike was that they were dissatisfied with their lives, and that they intended to disorganize the State until these things were altered.” It is clear, therefore, that the social unrest, and the activity which has so long resulted from it, have not a very definite aim as yet. Hence the Nihilist. He is dissatisfied, embittered, smarting under a sense of wrong; and while he does not see how he can put things right, feels that he must do something, and so destroys. “That at least will be something,” he feels, “then we can begin again.”

This, we can further see, will be the youthful student’s view if dissatisfied and discontented, and without either experience or constructive and practical knowledge to suggest how the wrong may be put right. Some of us, therefore, think that Russia’s greatest social danger arises from the student part of her population, and that her great problem – a vital one for her to solve, and soon – is how to deal fairly and wisely with them, and, caring for them as paternally as she does for her peasant population, incorporate them fully and intimately into her national life.

It is from the educated classes that social unrest and discontent have proceeded in Russia, and from them that those agents have come who have spread wild and daring dreams of change and revolution amongst the working classes of the towns, and, although that has not been so successful, amongst the peasantry also.

To some extent their socialistic ideas have been echoes from Western Europe. I remember being told, when I first went to Petrograd, “We usually have your bad weather here about eight or ten days after you, only we have it worse.” It would seem that the rule holds good in other ways also, for Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace tells us, in one of his three deeply interesting chapters on social difficulties in Russia, that during the last two centuries all the important intellectual movements in Western Europe have been reflected in Russia, and that these reflections have generally been what may fairly be called exaggerated and distorted reflections of the earlier socialistic movements of the West, but with local peculiarities and local colouring which deserve attention.

He goes on to explain how the educated classes, absorbing these ideas from abroad, just as ideas, and not as relating to the conditions of life in Russia as closely as in England, France, and Germany, from which they came, have quite naturally been less practical in the conclusions they have drawn from them, if indeed they have pushed their ideas to any conclusion at all. We are shown plainly by this lucid and well-informed writer how natural it has been for Western Socialists to be constructive and definite in their aims, while Russians could only be destructive. Nihilism is made clear, and we understand its origin, while we can equally well understand what we are so reassuringly told about its present decline. This does not imply necessarily that Russian thinkers and workers are becoming less socialistic in sympathy and aims, but more practical; and that they are learning, just as the West has taught them, that the only way in which they can hope to advance their own views is to use all the legal means which their government, as it becomes ever more democratic and constitutional, will increasingly give them.

But amongst all the different classes who may be called educated, the university students of both sexes form the class which most claims our sympathies, and constitutes, I consider, Russia’s gravest problem. There are ten universities in the empire, only one of which contains less than 1,300 students, while the leading ones far exceed this number – Moscow having just under 10,000, and Petrograd about 8,500. We can hardly realize what such numbers mean for the national life, when over 40,000 men and women are receiving university education and being prepared for professional careers. Over 15,000 are studying law, nearly 10,000 are receiving a scientific education before taking up work as chemists, engineers, etc., another 10,000 are studying medicine, comparatively few only being left for the teaching profession. There are only about a hundred divinity students.

In addition to these there are Russian students in all the universities of Europe. I have never been able to ascertain their actual numbers, but at Geneva, Lausanne, Berne, Leipzig, Berlin, and other great centres of education I have always been told, not only that they were there in no small numbers, but that they were the keenest and most attentive of all the students in the class, the first to come, and the last to leave, always in the front seats, and unflagging in their attention. They are evidently most eager to learn, and are turned out from all the universities of Europe and from their own, extremely well equipped and prepared for professional work. Then a vast number of students of this class are pitiably poor, straining every nerve, putting up with privations undreamed of elsewhere, in order to get through the preparation for their life’s work.

Many of them, great numbers of them indeed, must be miserably disappointed. Town and city life, upon which the professional classes must rely chiefly in seeking the means of gaining their livelihood, has not developed as yet in proportion to that of the agricultural population; and certainly at nothing like the rate which would be necessary if all those educated and trained at the universities were to be provided with careers and given an adequate opportunity. The supply is far, far greater than the demand.

Thus we have in Russia a large class of really competent, brainy, well qualified young graduates of both sexes, naturally longing to take their part in the life, work, and affairs of their country, urged on also by their poverty to seek and even demand it; and yet many, it seems to me sometimes that it must be far the greater number, must be unable to find it. Here obviously are all the materials for a real social danger; and students, therefore, always appear in stories of plots and conspiracies, always fill an important place in plays of the same kind, and are always to the fore in tumults and demonstrations. It must be so, for they are the one really embittered class, and to them it must seem sometimes that there can be no hope for them at all in the social order as it is, and that its only possibility for them lies in its being destroyed and reconstructed.

In many of our centres of work abroad we have a foyer where the foreign students can meet, and at Geneva last year with great difficulty we had opened a hostel for Russian students when the war broke out. There one heard the most touching stories of their poverty, and yet of their pride and independence, and also of the special temptations to which their poverty exposed them. Some landlords, for instance, are not slow to tell girls that they would live better and more cheaply if they would temporarily “keep house” with one of the young men students, and occupy one room! Our hostel was hurried on last year as we heard of many instances of this kind, and a generous friend in Petrograd helped me very largely in finding the money. Everything was to be supplied at cost price, and no profits were to be made, the two English ladies in charge giving their services. There was a restaurant also which supplied good food at very moderate rates, and how moderate may be judged from the charge made for afternoon tea of a halfpenny! It consisted of a cup of tea and a small roll of bread without butter.

The first time I saw how cheaply the foreign students at Geneva lived was one festival evening when they invited me to supper, and when we had chicken salad with bread and butter followed by dessert, tea, and coffee, for which the charge was about fivepence each. The year after that I entertained them in return and gave them a Christmas party at which there were fourteen nationalities present, mainly Slav. Nothing could have been more interesting than that gathering, nor could any host have had more grateful guests. Last year the Noel Fest could not be held as there were no students; but I hope next Christmas may possibly see the war over, and that we may have a Slav evening party in Geneva once again.

It may be well to mention here how there comes to be a foyer or club for Russians and other students at Geneva. It is a part of the organization connected with the World Student Christian Federation, which had its beginning in the eighties in the United States of America, as a movement to promote an interest in missionary work amongst students. In 1887 a deputation came over to this country to tell the student world what was going on across the Atlantic, and the student foreign missionary union was the result. Next the Christian Student Movement extended itself into all our European countries, and finally the World’s Federation was accomplished at Wadstena Castle in Sweden in 1895. It is directed by a committee consisting of two representatives from each national movement, with Mr. John R. Mott, so well known, as its general secretary. Its operations now extend into all the leading countries of the world. There is a biennial conference, and it is admitted that one of the most interesting of any yet held was the one at Constantinople in 1911, which was attended by patriarchs representing all the Orthodox Churches of the East. It is not an undenominational movement, but exactly the opposite – a call rather to all the Churches of the world to be consistent in their Christian profession and “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith they are called.” It is not a society nor a religious body, but a movement or union, and its basis, to be accepted by all its voluntary members and officers, is the declaration, “I desire, in joining this Union, to declare my faith in Jesus Christ as my Saviour, my Lord, and my God.” There is no reason why any Christian in the world should not join it. Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and members of other Churches the world over can have no possible difficulty in making such a simple declaration if there is any reality at all in their sense of membership in Christ’s Church; and there is every reason why a Christian student should join a movement which is the only one of its kind to aim at work for Christ in those places where it is most urgently and sorely needed, and where it is most likely to be truly fruitful – the universities and colleges of the world.

There we have to-day those who have to lead and guide and guard the course of the whole world to-morrow. It is in the universities of the world that some of those influences which are most hostile and inimical to true social well-being are first set in motion, and it is there most certainly that we must begin if we wish to see the world made better and won for God. The war has made us long, I hope, for better things in a way the world has never dreamt of before, because there has never been anything in all history which has so focussed attention for the watching world upon a simple and direct question of right and wrong. The issue is even more momentous and significant than that. This great question of righteousness and unrighteousness must be answered by every one in the world according to his belief or unbelief. It is just a question for us all to settle whether our own interests, individual or national, or our duty to God comes first. The issue has never been more simply stated, and the Church of Christ has never in all her history had such a magnificent opportunity of giving her message, and proclaiming her mission. I hope, therefore, that all my readers will take an early opportunity of learning all they can about the Christian Student Movement, and satisfy themselves as to its fitness for helping the whole Church of Christ to avail herself to the full of this God-given opportunity and possibility.

A foyer is a necessary centre for students wherever a branch of the movement has been formed, and it would be difficult to speak too warmly of its value for its members. I have mentioned this movement here, briefly enough, I fear, of necessity, because I should think there is no place where it is more needed, nor, as far as I can judge, more likely to continue to succeed, than in Russia. In Petrograd there are already a number of influential and wealthy Russians deeply interested in its work amongst the men students. They include a near relation of the Emperor, and the work is directed by a number of extremely competent and earnest Americans. I had an opportunity of meeting and addressing them when in Petrograd a year ago.

The work amongst the girl and women students is being carried forward very quietly by our own country-women, who are full of hope. But up to the present a great deal of caution and wisdom has had to be exercised, both because the authorities have so long been accustomed to look suspiciously at anything which seemed to promote associations amongst students, and because students themselves, for reasons already given, have naturally looked askance at anything which was obviously working in the direction of law and order. The movement, more and more, it will be seen, is one of the soundest of modern efforts in the direction of real social improvement, because it begins at the right end, with those who are thinking and pondering life’s problems before launching out to try their best to solve them. Nowhere has it been more needed, as I have said, than in Russia, and nowhere has it made a better start. The hopeful thing about Russia just now is that every one is most keenly and profoundly interested in the social well-being of the people – on the one hand anxious to obtain it more fully for themselves, and on the other really wishful to give and promote it, even if watchful and cautious lest they should make mistakes and have to draw back.

And surely caution is very necessary in Russia. It is only a little over fifty years since the emancipation of the serfs. Let any one think of Russia with a servile population so short a time ago, and then think of what she is to-day, and they will form some idea of the extraordinary social improvement and transformation which has taken place. Yet with all this caution the desire to see improvement is general, and no one is satisfied with the lives of the working-classes in the large towns as they are. It is well known indeed, as I have already said, that Russia has been absorbed in plans for social improvement for the last few years, and was meaning to launch out into great undertakings this very year. Those plans are only deferred, we hope, and will be taken up with greater zest and confidence than ever when peace comes. Perhaps the delay will prove to have been an inestimable gain, if it has made it clearer than before that there are certain examples it might be well to avoid. A great deal has been said and written of late years of the vast superiority of German municipal government and organization, and certainly no cities in Europe approach those of Germany for attractiveness and excellence of arrangements as to streets, parks, public buildings, and imposing blocks of flats for private families of all classes. Germans have been for many years now animated by the very best spirit of municipal initiative and responsibility, and have shown a really worthy civic pride. Railway stations, post offices, walks, and squares in Germany are beyond comparison with those of any other country. And yet I am assured that much is sacrificed for effect and appearance; and I was astonished to hear, a little while ago, how miserably inadequate was the accommodation that even a skilled artisan in Berlin could afford to have.