Read Ebook: A Little Mother to the Others by Meade L T

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He forms, in the first place, a very large part of the population of all the great cities and smaller towns of Central Europe and Russia. He is, generally speaking, the best-educated part of the population where educational facilities have been open to him. The boycott of ages and the cruelties of centuries have sharpened his wits, developed his cunning, forced his energies into less desirable channels, and caused him to regard the men outside his race as his enemies against whom he must take care continuously to defend and protect himself. The Jewish mind is hard, logical and dogmatic. The Jew's temperament is artistic but his training is utilitarian. He is passionately interested in theory and will try to carry out his favourite one at all costs, given the power. Having no country of his own, where he does not love the country of his adoption he is more than usually international in his viewpoint and regards race before nation, and both, less than his theory of mankind. He has great powers of organisation. I speak of him as I have known him and admired him in half the countries of Europe and the United States of America.

Over a plastic, passive people like the typical indolent Russian he was bound to have enormous power and influence. Said one of the best-known Jewish leaders in Russia to me when I had gently complained of too much discipline and too little freedom:

"But the Russian people are like children. They are not educated. They know nothing. They have been accustomed for centuries to slavery and dictation. Would you have us allow them to destroy themselves by their own incapacity and inexperience? Would you give a vote to each of those millions of ignorant peasants? It would be like putting a knife into the hands of a baby."

How familiar it all sounded to me, as reminiscences of the Woman Suffrage fight in England came to my mind, and I recalled the fact that this baby and carving-knife argument was one of the pet excuses for denying women their freedom.

None the less is it true that the Russian people in the main are unaccustomed to freedom, and by their nature and temperament are proper material for the exercise of power by the educated, dominating Jew. It would not be fair, however, to neglect to say that of those persons who spoke to me privately in condemnation of the Bolsheviki, a very considerable number, if not the majority, were also Jews. One is driven to the conclusion that it is the activity and strength of his mind, and not necessarily a proclivity for Bolshevist theory which is chiefly responsible for the commanding position of the Jew in the political affairs of Europe in general and of Russia in particular.

Another Jew, a fair-haired, blue-eyed Jew from the United States, met us on the Russian frontier, and offered us greetings in the name of the Soviet Republic. He was an interesting personality, whose history as a leader of strikes in America he unfolded to us on the journey from the frontier to Petrograd. He had a special train waiting for us, gaily decorated with red bunting, fervent mottoes, and the green branches of trees. The train was attended by a number of Red Guards and Bashkir cavalrymen in gorgeous purple uniforms, with wonderful cloaks and long swords. From Reval to Narwa we had been just a plain, ordinary Cook's Tourist Party. From the Russian frontier to the end of our visit we were the Royal Family!

Perhaps the most thrilling and dramatic note was struck by the fixture of a big red flag on the frontier. The sight of it was altogether too much for some of our more ardent spirits. They burst rapturously into song, first "The International?" and then "The Red Flag," the favourite song of Socialists in Great Britain.

The people's flag is deepest red, It shrouded oft our martyred dead. And ere the lips grew stiff and cold, Their heart's blood dyed its every fold.

Then raise the scarlet standard high. Within its shade we'll live or die; Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We'll keep the Red Flag flying here.

At last we were about to enter the country where the Red Flag had become the national emblem, and was flying over every public building in the cities of Russia. The thought thrilled like new wine.

Half-way to Petrograd deputations from Trade Unions and Soviets came into the train and made complimentary speeches in a half-bashful manner, to which suitable responses were made. What a pleasant modest set of fellows they were, with big, blue innocent eyes and reluctant unobtrusive manner. We liked them immensely. We liked the plain people of Russia wherever we met them. At Petrograd itself a large company met us although it was three o'clock in the morning, and we were told that gigantic crowds had loitered about the station all the day in expectation of our coming and in the hope of getting a glimpse at the English strangers. We were at once motored to the quarters which had been prepared for us, the palace of a Russian princess, and there, at four o'clock in the morning, we sat down to a simple but sufficient meal and received our welcome from the Trade Union officials who were to be our hosts during our stay.

We were behind the "iron curtain" at last!

Ghosts

When I was a little child I had a lively and delicious contact with fairies. We used to laugh and sing and dance together through many happy hours like the good comrades we were. But I cannot say that I have ever seen a ghost; that is, I had never seen one until I went to Russia. During the whole of the time I was in Russia I was haunted.

The Russian novelists have been very faithful to their people. Turgenieff, Dostoievski, Gorky, Tolstoy, and the rest of them take one into the real Russia as one reads. It is a country peopled with human beings who dream dreams and see visions, who have suffered more cruelly and aspired more loftily than the people of most other European countries.

The Narishkin Palace in which we were lodged is a fine house devoted to the mistress of one of the Czars by her lover. It lies on the banks of the Neva and faces, on the other side, the grim fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. I stood on the balcony and looked across the river at the place of horrors where so many of Russia's noblest men and women had gone to their deaths, the poor victims of tyrant princes and their ministers. The abominable cruelties practised upon the martyrs for Russian freedom have been as familiar to one's mind as the alphabet, and for almost as long. One's youngest, purest and best emotion has been given throughout one's life to those who have endured torture, disgrace and death for truth and liberty.

I recalled a meeting with Volkhovsy in England, deaf and crippled by his sufferings in this hideous fortress; of Prince Kropotkin, one of the oldest of the surviving victims of Czarist tyranny; of Madame Breshskovski, the "grandmother of the Revolution"; of Marie Spirodovna, whose special sufferings as a young woman were loathsome and unspeakable. In sad procession these figures of tortured and wounded and dead passed silently before my eyes as I leaned over the stone balcony and gazed into the red light of the sky behind the dark fortress we were sometime soon to visit.

On entering the room after the intense fatigue and excitement of the long journey one felt its beauty comforting and refreshing. The fine linen sheets, the soft silk hangings, the eiderdown bed-covers, the thick velvety carpet, the quaint, carved and gilded furniture spoke of gentle living utterly unlooked-for by us, and, to do ourselves justice, undesired by us in a country full of people slowly dying for lack of the barest necessaries. It was the most exaggerated kindness on the part of our hosts, so anxious to make us comfortable and happy, to give us the very best they possessed.

One would not dispute for a moment the principle that nobody should possess luxuries or even superfluous comforts until the elementary needs of everybody have been amply satisfied and secured; or that a royal palace is put to much better use when it shelters many industrious persons than when it houses a king's mistress and her lackeys. But there is a difference as great as between black and white and right and wrong, between the declared will of the majority of the citizens acting through their National Assembly or Parliament which, in the interest of the community dispossesses an individual but secures the future of his wife and children as well as himself, and the arbitrary action of the minority in power, who roughly confiscate without consideration for the dispossessed.

"Where is the owner of this beautiful house?" I asked several times, but I could get no reply. Nobody knew. I heard the story of a Princess Narishkin who was doing good work for the children under the Soviet, but do not know if it was true. One heard so many contradictory stories. If true, was she happy, I wondered? It might conceivably be so. The old revolutionary movement in Russia was by no means a one-class movement. Many of the old r?gime have willingly consented to the confiscation of their estates and goods and are content to do hard work for the new Republic. In such cases no question of right or wrong arises. These are rare souls.

Before the end of the visit I met an old man who was the millionaire owner of a great line of steamships before the Revolution. The Revolution had completely dispossessed him. I found him quite content and happy about it. He formed part of the secretariat of an important Committee on Communications and travelled regularly as a Government employ? on his own ships. His one grievance was the way in which the inventory of his fortune had been taken. He felt that his revolutionary record might have secured him more considerate treatment in the method of taking over his enterprises; but even on this point he was entirely without bitterness.

In Astrakhan we met the owner of a great fish-curing industry, who had yielded up everything to the Republic without a murmur, and who declared himself happier making nets along with his former workpeople than he had ever been in his life.

I slipped quickly into my bed that first night in Petrograd and tried to sleep and forget the ghost my self-questioning had raised; but sleep refused to come. It was not because no darkness came and the pale light streamed in through the unshaded windows. It was not altogether the lack of privacy, though the fact that one's room was regarded as a public highway through which the men and women of the household tramped indiscriminately whenever they chose was, to say the least of it, disconcerting. I felt like a guilty thing, lying uninvited by its owner in that soft, white bed, whilst the poor creature who once occupied it might be sleeping on straw. I dozed; and inevitably cold, sad eyes in a thin, hungry-looking face would gaze at me with the look of any woman whose house had been entered by intruders she was powerless to put outside.

I tried very hard to control my imagination, but it was very difficult. Cruelty is one of the vices which madden one. When we rode in the late Czar's motor-car, I did not feel the presence of my fellow-delegates, but the ghosts of the murdered unhappy little man and his family. The car was a thing of beauty, large and luxurious. Without it one could have seen very little. But the perfect joy of using it was marred by two things--the sight of the sore and undressed feet of many of the weary proletarians of Moscow who had not the means even for a tram-ride, much less a ride in an automobile or a droshky; and by the obvious joy and satisfaction with which those who accompanied us on our investigations regarded the capture of the Czar's car as an emblem of a cruel triumph.

"Whenever you are tempted to feel concerned about the execution of the Czar and his family," said a friendly Communist, "think about the millions of innocent human beings who have recently lost their lives through the policies of that man and his ministers. And call to your mind the vast hosts of martyrs who have fallen victims to the cruelties of his predecessors."

The advice was well-meant but unnecessary. I have already said that it would be impossible to forget the martyrs of the Revolution and the tortures of those grand idealists of Russia. The visit in Petrograd to the graves of some of them is an incident in a wide experience in many countries, the memory of which will stay with me to the end of my days. It was so sincere, yet so dramatic.

A large open space in the heart of the city called the Field of Mars, and devoted in the old times to military reviews and the drilling of troops, is being converted by the Communists into a fine memorial of the heroes of the Revolution who have lost their lives in some prominent fashion in the struggle for freedom. Voluntary labour and the labour of the Red Army is digging up the hard soil and planting beautiful trees in symmetrical designs. In the middle of this large tract a simple stone memorial has been erected. It is not a flaunting column shouting to the sky, but it takes the form of a low, solid, granite wall, enclosing in four sections with rounded corners a burial ground. The spaces between the sections permit people to enter. From all parts of Russia the bodies have been brought and are laid just inside the wall and all the way round. A footpath follows the wall and encloses the graves on the other side. The centre of the square is at present a grass-plot with flowers and shrubs. The whole thing is naturally on a very large scale.

One lovely evening, after a most enthusiastic gathering inside the People's Hall, we were taken in a decorated tramcar to see the Martyrs' Memorial. I have experienced nothing in my life so moving and impressive. A great crowd from the meeting accompanied us, and stood in silent groups outside the wall whilst we walked slowly round. The eyes of the leaders shone with the light of a great pride and a deep passion as they approached one by one the graves of their honoured dead. The pride melted into tears at some of the graves, when we stopped in our walk and sang slowly a verse of the plaintive martyrs' hymn, a sad and haunting melody with just a single note of triumph in it. One after another the heroes were pointed out to us. Here was a man who had been tortured to death. Here was one who was shot by hired Government assassins. Here lay one who was blown to bits by his own bomb; here a tender girl who gave up her life for the cause.

The tears were quickly dried. Russian revolutionaries do not weep easily. Instead of tears a hard glitter filled the eyes of a fierce fellow. "But we will be avenged," he shouted. "For every one of our comrades who has died like this we will send ten of the bourgeois to their graves." I shuddered in the presence of a terrible fanaticism. Poor ghosts! If they could rise from the dead would they not tell us to make no more human sacrifices to their memory? Would they not speak to us of a better way?

I tried hard to get a copy of the mournful song we sang on this and many occasions subsequently. I was several times promised it but it never came. The words I never knew for they were Russian, but the melody I captured and I give it as it printed itself upon my mind. It will be recognised by Russian readers.

This habit of seeing ghosts brought me a good deal of chaff not only from the Communists but from my own friends. One of the Communists made a speech in defence of violent methods and gave a sidelook at me when he reminded the British Delegates that "once on a time the British Government made its king shorter by a head," as did the people of France.

"It is quite true," I said afterwards to a group of Communists who were discussing with us the meeting. "King Charles the First was executed three hundred years ago in England. But it was after a proper trial by the recognised Courts of Justice. He was found guilty of the charges laid against him. And we did not shoot his wife and children. But if the idea of his execution was to get rid of kings it was the wrong way; for kings we have still with us. And they will remain with us so long as the king-idea continues to be acceptable to the human mind. The Allies will never destroy the idea of Communism with their guns. The Communists can never destroy the idea of kingship and capitalism with their scaffolds. Only a good idea can slay a bad one. Only by proving that there is more manliness in democracy than autocracy, and more morality in Communism than in capitalism will the one institution give way to the other."

Of course I spoke to people who could never be convinced in a thousand years of argument. Neither could they understand the distinction one made between the system and the individual. To them all is the same. And individuals must be made responsible for the suffering which is caused by the system, even though they may themselves be tender and pitiful, and innocent of wrong.

It was the great point of difference which separated spiritually my hosts and me. "You can never build a permanent system on hate," I said again and again; but they believe they can. And because of this belief they have no pity to spare for the innocent children of a hated monarch and his foolish, fanatical wife, all shot in the name of Authority for the crime of being themselves.

Their poor ghosts flitted in and out of the compartments in the train which was lent to us in our journey from Saratov to Reval, the train belonging to the Czar's daughters. And following them, in tragic sequence, the endless procession of ghosts tramping their way through the snows to Siberia to the crack of the Cossack whips.

Russia is full of ghosts.

Investigation or Propaganda?

People in Russia appear to be able to live without sleep. At any rate they never go to bed before the small hours of the morning. Very rarely were we allowed to go to our rooms before two o'clock, and it was frequently three o'clock in the morning. On entering Russia we were asked to alter our watches by three hours, making the time so much in advance of English time, and we used to console ourselves that it was "really only midnight" when, almost too weary to stand, we staggered to our rooms at this terribly un-English hour. Soon we became quite used to the sight of little children playing about at eleven and twelve at night, and to the spectacle of a ploughman ploughing his land at an hour when it was difficult to say whether twilight or the dawn lighted his labours. The hour of rising is correspondingly late, and breakfast was seldom served earlier than 9.30 or 10 o'clock.

The first meal at a Russian table was naturally to be a matter of interest to us. At this, the first, and at all subsequent meals, there was an ample supply, though not a riotous abundance, of very simple food. Every nerve had been strained to make the change from profusion to scarcity as easy as possible. It was realised that it takes a long time to get used to black bread after white, thin soup after thick, and imitation tea after the real thing.

Real tea and coffee are well-nigh unprocurable in Russia at present. Yet they procured these for the British guests. These good things came to us, we were informed, because great stores of them had been captured from Judenitch who had received them through the British War Office. For our hosts this fact added a piquancy to their hospitality, which a sufficiently developed sense of humour enabled us to understand.

Our breakfast consisted of a sufficient supply of brown bread, hard but not unpleasant to the taste, butter and thin slices of cheese. On alternate mornings we had smoked fish or slices of ham. There was abundance of tea served in glasses from the samovar, with sugar but no milk. Occasionally there was coffee. We were served by a dignified "tovarisch" who looked as though he were a typical English butler, and who, I was credibly informed, actually was a relic of the old r?gime. His was a stolid, grave face, as became the servant of departed princes. What his thoughts were as he moved quietly about the room I would have given many roubles to know.

At the head of the table, our brilliant little hostess in Petrograd, sat Madame Angelica Balabanov. This lady is one of the most wonderful linguists I have ever met. She seems to have all the languages on the tip of her tongue. She is a speaker of enormous power and eloquence, so eloquent indeed, and so fiery, that I am certain, given the right kind of human material to work upon, she could make a revolution by herself. Small wonder the Soviet Government wished to make her their ambassador to Rome. No wonder at all that the Italians were too frightened to have her. She loves Italy passionately. She looks like an Italian with her dark skin, mysterious glowing eyes and twin plaits of long black hair reaching far below her waist when uncoiled; and with this appearance and her magic tongue, she might soon have won the Italians for Bolshevism. She is one of the kindest of women in all normal relationships. But I could well imagine her destroying her best friend for the glory of Bolshevism, should such a sacrifice appear to be necessary.

After that first breakfast the Delegation met in the bedroom of the chairman to discuss our programme and the plans which we saw had been prepared for us, and the methods of investigation we proposed to adopt. There was a division of opinion about the latter, which hinged upon the propriety or otherwise of delivering ourselves into the hands of our hosts.

In numerous speeches, both public and private, we had been assured not only of the warmth of our welcome, but of the intention of the Bolsheviki to let us see everything--good, bad and indifferent. "We have nothing whatever to hide, so why should you not be free to go where you will and see what you wish." This sounded splendid. We heaved a sigh of relief. We had been in mortal terror of being a conducted party.

The theory was, therefore, that we were to go where we pleased and see what we chose and speak to whom we desired to speak; in short, to have perfect freedom. But in practice this freedom was every whit as illusory as the raising of the British blockade. As events transpired, we were everywhere accompanied by representatives of the Authorities, who were sent, it was said, partly to act as interpreters and partly to protect us from counter-revolutionaries and Polish spies who might be lurking about with bombs! The number of such persons who accompanied us on most of our visits, whether to inspect a factory or a workshop or to interview a Commissar, was seldom less than half a dozen and generally was ten or even twenty. Sometimes as many as fifty people by actual count accompanied us round a factory. They got fearfully in the way, and often crowded out members of the Delegation eager to get close to charts and maps and anxious to ask questions. But we were all very good-humoured about this, because we realised that this was the first time for five years that these people had been permitted to look upon the face of the foreigner, and that a perfectly natural curiosity was entitled to be satisfied.

It was not so much the number of persons who accompanied us that was the trouble, although this host of followers gave our enterprise a circus-like quality which some of us would have been glad to exchange for a more business-like atmosphere. There is certainly a lack of freedom in the feeling that one is being watched all the time, and one's words and actions and the people with whom one speaks noted by gentlemen who hold positions in Government service, either in connection with the Foreign Office or the Extraordinary Commission, as was the case with several of our closest attendants.

But there were other factors which operated to place a check upon our activities.

In the first place a programme of places to be visited and things to be seen was presented to us which, if carried out only in part, would have absorbed every second of our time and lessened still further the number of hours to be devoted to sleep. The time-tables given to us when we entered Petrograd and Moscow were simply staggering. "Can human beings go through that and live?" we asked one another. We thought we began to see some of the reasons why Russian men and women look ten years older than they are--no sleep, too much tea, and this sort of thing! Needless to say, we edited those programmes with much firmness and vigour. And even so, some of us found it extremely difficult to get as much time to ourselves as was necessary to take a bath or darn a sock.

Another curious fact speedily unfolded itself. The real nature of our mission to Russia appeared not to be understood. It was believed, or the belief was affected, that we had come in the spirit of full agreement with them, whereas we were there to enquire and to inform ourselves. It was frequently suggested, both privately and publicly, that "the representatives of the revolutionary working-class movement in Great Britain had come to bring greetings and assistance to the revolutionary Government of Russia." From this belief, or the affectation of it, sprang the clever notion of using us in every possible way to advance their propaganda. Immense public demonstrations, both indoor and outdoor, at which we were expected to make speeches were already arranged for us when we arrived there. We were never consulted about our desires in the matter. There were enormous military parades and Trade Union marches, which we were made to watch from a high platform, where we became the easy victims of the Government Press photographer and the moving picture operator.

On several occasions members of the Delegation addressed the troops in language eminently satisfying to the Bolshevik Commissars, and those like myself, who declined to do this on the ground that we had not come for such a purpose, became objects of suspicion and of quiet dislike. Dinners and suppers followed each other in quick succession, at which the soon-to-be-familiar revolutionary toasts were made the occasion for more speeches. We were displayed in the box of the late Czar at the Opera to interested spectators numbering several thousands on each occasion both in Petrograd and Moscow. The way in which our clever hosts contrived to place us under a very real and lasting obligation by their generous regard for our physical welfare during the whole period of our visit, and at the same time to extract from us for their own purposes the last ounce of propaganda usefulness excited my warmest admiration.

As propagandists there is surely no race and no class to surpass the Russian Communists. At such work they are simply superb. I am quite convinced from my own observation that they have won their victories on the battlefield far more through their leaflets than their bullets. The propaganda trains they are sending daily to the Polish front are marvels of ingenuity. Inside and outside these trains are covered with vivid pictures portraying side by side the horrors of Capitalism and the glories of Communism in simple intelligible form, the horrid capitalist murdering the poor peasant or standing triumphant over a dying woman and child, whilst Communist fields bursting with grain yield to the sickle of the happy, sun-browned, well-fed harvester. Posters giving simple but effective figures, making glowing promises, or issuing electric appeals to the proletariat to "rise and shake off the hated chains of the bourgeoisie" decorate these railway carriages through the whole of their length. Over the Polish lines burst shrapnel cases filled with leaflets. Or they scatter Russian passports for all the Poles who wish to desert and come over the lines.

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