Part 1

RUSSIA IN 1916

BY STEPHEN GRAHAM

Author of “The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary,” “Russia and the World,” etc.

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1917

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published, February, 1917.

PREFACE

I RETURNED to Russia last summer, visited as many of my old friends there as I could, arranged for the publication of some of my books in the Russian language, and incidentally travelled a great deal and saw a great many sides of Russian contemporary life, talked also with all manner of Russians.

I travelled to Bergen in Norway, from Bergen obtained a passage round the North Cape to Vardö, the last port of Norway, transhipped there to a Russian boat and sailed for Ekaterina, the first port in Russia in the North, the new Russian harbour which never freezes. From Ekaterina I went on to Archangel, where I stayed a week, and from Archangel went to Moscow. I visited some estates in Central Russia and stayed with various acquaintances and friends, visited Rostof-on-the-Don, the Caucasus, Orel, Petrograd, and finally came back to England on a returning ammunition ship.

In going to Russia I certainly did not intend to publish my impressions in book form, but I have been asked to do so, and I recognise the value of keeping in contact with our Ally from day to day. The requirement of the moment seems to be not so much books on Russia, of which there are now a great many, but diaries or volumes of impressions, keeping the peoples of the two countries in touch during the war. I returned to London at the beginning of October, 1916, and I should be glad to think that some one returning at the beginning of January, 1917, would follow on with another small volume of this type. Again for April, 1917. We need such volumes of personal impressions, and there would not be the need to apologise for them. They are letters between friends both engaged in the same vital task. It is extremely difficult to keep in touch with Russia by reading newspapers only. The newspapers are, on the whole, difficult to follow. They are concerned with the news-aspect of events and the scope for sensational appeals. Good quiet correspondence tends to be lost in them. Hence my little book of the hour.

I was in Russia when the war broke out in 1914. I spent 1915 in Egypt, the Balkans, Russia and England, and again I spent the summer of 1916 in Russia. I have, therefore, been in touch with the Russians all the time of the war. I hope, therefore, that in this time when deeds rather than words are necessary, my report of the conditions prevailing in the land of our ally Russia may be considered serviceable.

STEPHEN GRAHAM.

LONDON, 15 _January_ 1917.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I A JOURNEY TO EKATERINA 1 II THE DARK HAVEN 11 III THE NEW ARCHANGEL 25 IV THE COST OF LIVING 36 V LIFE IN THE COUNTRY 49 VI FATHER YEVGENY 60 VII A RUSSIAN COUNTESS 72 VIII RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN 1916 81 IX RUSSIA IN 1916 101 X RUSSIAN MONEY 110 XI WITHOUT VODKA, BEER, OR WINE 118 XII GAY LIFE 133 XIII OLD FRIENDS 143 XIV RUSSIA’S NEW WAR PICTURE 152 XV IN THE HOSPITAL 157 XVI THE PROSPECTS FOR PEACE 166 XVII HOME 181

RUSSIA IN 1916

I

A JOURNEY TO EKATERINA

I PROPOSED to go from Newcastle to Bergen, to go by Norwegian steamer from Bergen to Vardö or Kirkenaes on the far north-eastern limits of Norway, and then wait for some sort of boat to take me to Ekaterina. In this I was successful, though it was not possible to book any passage beforehand in England.

I left the night the first misleading news of the North Sea battle was received. If that news had been correct it would have meant that the German Fleet had broken through and was at large, and that each war vessel had become a commerce trader. We stood a chance of being revised by Germans and perhaps of all English of age being taken away. A British captain said to me afterwards, “We received that first news as we were leaving a South American port with a cargo of nitre. We realised at once that the chances must now be considered against our arriving safely at a home port.”

Because of the battle the mail boat which had been due in at Newcastle in the morning, arrived only at nightfall, the revising officers were late in coming from the examination of the one to the examination of the other--the _Rhanvald Jarl_, due to go out from Newcastle that night. I did not get to my cabin till half-past-one in the morning, and had spent some hours among drunken sailors, one of whom was sick on the stairs of the Aliens Officer’s room.

The journey to Bergen was not pleasant.

No one to breakfast, no one to lunch, no one to dinner. I doubt if any one felt in the least anxious about German cruisers or stray mines. There was other preoccupation.

At Bergen I stayed three days in a hotel. The news in the Norwegian papers did not flatter the efforts of the Allies. Explanations of the real significance of the North Sea battle began to appear, but they had the suggestion of merely trying to give a better face to what was in reality a very unpleasant happening. For the rest the Germans seemed to be going ahead, and had captured the fort of Vaux. The only set-off against these things was the first intelligence of the Russian advance in Galicia.

I sailed northward in the _Vesteraalen_, the Norwegian mail boat going to far Kirkenaes. Boats go four or five times a week the whole distance of the Norwegian coast. They are slow, but, if time is no object, it is a most interesting journey--the placid fiords and jolly channels between mountains, the veritable gates in the rocks which upon occasion you pass through, the many fishing villages and the trawlers weighed down with herrings, the busy women with their knives cleaning the fish and emptying barrelful after barrelful of entrails into the sea, the thousands of gulls ever calling, dipping, screeching, chasing one another, and then the Lofoten Islands with their mighty heights, the increasingly stern more northern aspect of Nature, and the dwellings of man, the passing of the Arctic line, the brilliant nights with the sun still on the shoulder of the sky at midnight.

I fell in with an English Consul, a young man going to Vardö to do special work in connection with the war. He was accompanied by his wife, and she, for her part, had never been out of England before. At every place the steamer stopped we got out and went for a walk--sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for an hour or so, according to the extent of the cargo that had to be discharged or taken on.

At Hammerfest, the most northern town in Europe, dirty snow still lay on the edges of the streets. A wild place this Hammerfest, apparently all men and no women, the roadway thronged with hardy sailors. A whole forest of masts in the harbour, an all-pervading smell of cod liver oil in the town, a grey and ugly port in June, whatever it may be later on.

Many Norwegians spoke English, though with an American accent, and they were very friendly to us. I was interested, too, to observe their love of their own land, a real attachment to the rocks of Norway. It is majestic scenery all the way from Bergen to the North Cape, and it has somewhat of the characteristic melancholy of the North. If Russians lived in this land they would love it for its sadness. But the Norwegians love its ruggedness, and they say that the wild and rugged nature of their land has made them what they are. And I suppose Scots would find there grandeur and the sublimity of Nature.

After the North Cape we entered a region of utter desolation, the coast a line of snow, the sea grey and dead with the occasional black back of a porpoise showing. The wind was cold and wintry. We knew that at Vardö we should find no flowers, no vegetation.

At Vardö I left the boat as I had discovered that boats went to and fro to Russia therefrom. An important place this Vardö, and a sharp look-out on Germans should always be kept here. If a submarine campaign against the shipping of Archangel broke out, there would probably be some connivance on the part of Germans or neutrals resident hereabout, and possible bases on this desolate coast.

A most forlorn region subject to terrific gales, cold and snowy. It has a great number of grey wooden docks with grey fishing-boats; almost all the houses are of wood, and are of the same grey complexion as boats and quays, they are low and squat, and the dirty streets are wide. Innumerable gulls are diving and dipping and fluttering--and shrieking in chorus.

There are two hotels. One is called appropriately “The North Pole,” the other is “Vinnans Hotel.” I stayed at the latter, and this, astonishing to relate, is a first-class hotel with electric light and a telephone in every room, though there is no one in the town with whom you can communicate. There is an electric arrangement on the wall for lighting your cigarette--you press a button and a disc becomes red-hot, and at that you light up. I suppose some Christiania contractor had put this up, faithful to the specification quoted in his tender. My windows had scarlet blinds, and all night long the midnight sun poured crimson light on my white bed, the huge wind howled and bellowed, and innumerable gulls cried up and down, now this side, now that.

In the bleak and lonely cemetery are Russian graves with naïve carvings of the Virgin and Child on the orthodox wooden crosses. Many a Russian sailor and fisherman has perished on this side of his fatherland.

There are amusements in the town, two cinema shows packed every night, a shooting saloon, an Aunt Sallie shy called “Amerikanske Sport.” I hit down one ugly face and received as a reward a postcard picture of a pretty Norwegian girl about to give a kiss to her beau; there are band-of-hope meetings with the most excruciating music, and you see advertised--raffles.

One day fifteen negroes arrived on a boat from Russia. They were the crew of the American ship _R_---- which had brought ammunition to Archangel, but was in such a bad condition that the negroes refused to take it back, got their money and cleared off. At Vardö one of them had quarrelled with the rest and was now said to be mad. No one would take him in, all the girls being frightened, and the children aiming stones at him. He was accommodated in the gaol.

At Vardö there is a most able Russian Consul who is not only most useful to his own Government, but also to ours, affording him all the help he can. And a Russian knows more of this neighbourhood and its phenomena than an Englishman brought from Christiania or London. Through him I learned that a boat would soon be sailing for Alexandrovsk, the harbour of Ekaterina, and after a five-days’ stay at Vardö I got away.

Over the sea once more! In twelve hours I was at the Russian Monastery of Petschenga, and next day in a big snowstorm I came to the new harbour.

II

THE DARK HAVEN

FROM the end of November to the middle of January the sun does not rise in Russia’s new haven. All would be dark even at mid-day were it not for the snow. The stars never set. The lights in the little wooden dwellings are never put out. Great gales blow, rolling up mountainous waves on the Arctic. Or Polar mists swallow up everything. Snowstorms go on indefinitely and the frost may be forty degrees, fifty degrees. Here is no town, no civilisation. Alexandrovsk has no pavement, no high street, no cinema theatre, no hotel, not even a tavern. Its population is hard, gloomy, northern. No one has any intelligence of the great world far away to the south--the gaze is toward the North Pole.

They say it has a great future. ’Twill be a mighty city with roaring traffic and skyscrapers, theatres, cafés, passion, and sin. It will be the Odessa of the North. Valery Brussof anticipates such a city in one of his fantastic stories--Zvezdny, the capital of the Southern Cross Republic, and as we read we ask--“Could it be? Could such a place ever come to be?”

In any case, in the midst of this great destructive war one piece of constructive work is in hand, the fashioning of a new port for Russia far within the Arctic circle. We hear little of the work in England, or we hear laconic accounts, such as: “A branch of railways has been built on from Archangel to an ice-free port farther north, kept open by the Gulf Stream,” which is inaccurate as regards the route of the railway and, moreover, gives the impression that such a railway is easily built, might, in fact, be improvised. But in truth it is not so trivial a matter. The nearer you get to the actual place the more astonished you are to recollect the airy opinions you heard expressed in Fleet Street at home.

The harbour of Ekaterina, on which stand the town of Alexandrovsk and the barracks of Semionova, is a queen of harbours, a marvellous natural refuge, certainly no makeshift place. And then, as a glance at the map will convince, it is not near Archangel, least of all by land. No railway could ever go direct from Alexandrovsk to Archangel, and no railway of any kind could easily or rapidly be built over a thousand miles of _tundra_.

Those Russians who live in the north are in raptures over their new port. Russia shall face north, the whole of North Russia shall be functionised in Alexandrovsk and Archangel. And, indeed, the longer the war lasts the better for this northern region materially. If the war lasts three years longer Russia will certainly finish up in possession of a new port and a valuable railway.

An enormous undertaking this, of trying to plant a railway on the _tundra_. Many have died at work on it; hundreds must inevitably die before it is a _success_. It was difficult to engineer. Russians say now that it was badly surveyed to start with and needs re-planning, but in any case it was extremely difficult to find a way over the mosses and morasses and along the shores of the almost continuous lakes that lie between Kola and Kandalaksha. The map of the railway is now published in Norway and Sweden. It might just as well be made accessible to the English Press. When Lord Kitchener died, maps showing his route were printed in our papers as if he had been going to Alexandrovsk (which was not the case) to travel on a railway which was not in existence to Archangel! This caused much amusement in Russia.

As a matter of fact, the railway runs from Semionova across the Kola peninsula to the White Sea at Kandalaksha, and then becomes practically a coast railway to the little port of Kem. Thence there is a good railway to Petrozavodsk and Petrograd. It does not come near Archangel. Indeed, if the formation of this new harbour and railway should be a practical success, Archangel is almost bound to suffer and to relapse from its present state of prosperity to its former somnolence.

The railway when completed will be a memorable and valuable achievement. It has taken an enormous amount of labour to construct. First, Russian gangs were set to work and then they were called to fight for their country. A Canadian contractor or contracting company was then successful in obtaining the work. But the workmen sent over found themselves confronted by conditions that were necessarily difficult to have realised in advance. They faced the problem in a commercial rather than in a military spirit. And when they had gone there was almost as much work in prospect as when they came.

Their place was largely taken by Austrian prisoners who had volunteered from their internment camps to come out and work for a wage. The estimate of the numbers thus employed ranges from 10,000 to 20,000 men. They were guarded by Cherkesses, troops from the Caucasus who presumably had also volunteered, since military service was not obligatory for them. The Austrians worked well and did some of the best work on the railway. But there was considerable suffering. Now 10,000 Chinamen, Kirghiz, and Mongols of various kinds are at work.

In the summer, except for water under foot and mosquitoes in the air, the conditions are good, but in the winter all the men are working with torches in the darkness. Despite much forethought on the part of the Government many of the men have proved to be yet too thinly clad to withstand the great frosts. The food from a European point of view is coarse. Yet the work must go on, must be done. This year, before the spring, one engine covered the whole of the course of the railway--one only--and then the thaw came and enormous stretches of the track fell away, were washed off, disappeared.

The Austrians were reported to have laid the sleepers purposely on lumps of ice. When the thaw came they floated off. But in truth there was nothing much but ice to lay them on. The Canadians, working with torches in the darkness, were said to have failed to fix the rails with the right balance on the sleepers and the first engine that passed over worked havoc with the embankment. So they say in Alexandrovsk, but, probably, neither Austrians nor Canadians were to blame--but Nature simply had not yet been conquered, though there was a semblance of conquest at the end of the winter.

In the autumn of 1915 Archangel froze unexpectedly early, and vessels that could not discharge there went to Alexandrovsk to wait for the railway. Ekaterina was packed with ships--you could almost step from one ship to another and thus get across from one side of the harbour to another. And as there were no rings for the moorings of the ships there was a certain amount of fear that a storm might arise and the ships dash themselves to bits against one another. But, as it proved, no matter how fierce the tempest raged outside, this virginal harbour was always placid.

Towards Christmas (one party on Christmas Eve) arrived our armoured-car men, now fighting so gallantly with the Grand Duke in Transcaucasia, telegraphists who erected the wireless stations, naval airmen, troops. Men-of-war guarded the harbour. In that strange Arctic refuge, what an assembly of British! They remained all the winter and thought this Russia they had come to the most God-forsaken place in the world. Nevertheless, they named the only street of Alexandrovsk “Pall Mall” and at their concerts they sang incessantly some song about “Leicester Square, Leicester Square.” One might think Leicester Square was really an important place in the minds of Englishmen.

One obtains the idea that it is perhaps the Mecca to which the British soldier turns, and some of the Russian soldiers who are fighting “to put the Cross on Sancta Sophia” have a vague idea, hearing our armoured-car men singing, that perhaps we are fighting to get back to Leicester Square. Their marching songs are folk-lore airs with national words. A contrast to our music-hall songs imported from America.

On English Old-Year’s night, which is a fortnight before the same date in Russia, the men on the ships decided to celebrate the coming of the New Year with festivity. The Russians ashore peacefully slept and the great gloomy cliffs that close the harbour in were silent as the grave. Suddenly from all the ships burst forth cries and fireworks and rockets, songs, shoutings. The Russians ashore all wakened up and thought the Germans had come.

This Ekaterina is a great sight, a most beautiful place, though forbidding and austere, a symmetrical, flask-shaped exit from the Arctic. In the storm of driving mist and snow it was difficult enough finding the neck of the flask, the way in; but once in, all was peace, though the storm raged in the heavens and in the air. There were no ships to speak of in the harbour then, but a good deal of life on the shore, especially at Semionova.

A tatterdemalion Russian population, some in sheepskins, some in Caucasian _bourkas_, some in bowler hats, some in old khaki overcoats, and smoking pipes--evidence of English influence. There were engineers in leather jackets and with flannel bashleeks over their heads, workmen in felt boots, many Circassian troops with their rifles and in ragged uniforms, men with pale, severe faces--they make probably the most terrible type of Russian troops, silent, faithful, relentlessly severe and very powerful, speaking little or no Russian, Mohammedan by religion--the guards of the Austrian prisoners.

When the railway is finished its terminus will be at Semionova, and that will probably be the name of the new port. Semionova is all new, unpainted wood. Here are hundreds of shanties and barracks, and an indescribable chaos of workmen, materials, and mud. Engines puff along the shore on the bit of railway which is in working order, and on these engines the various agents and engineers clamber to go to the place of action where the gangs are at work.

I fell in with various queer people; a speculator buying up land, a one-eyed man with smoky glasses seeking a site on which to build a cinema. Eight thousand roubles, would buy a cinema with all fixtures, including an electric piano. It was bound to be a success, he argued, for there would be no other place to go to in the long black winter. Land has been bought up all round the harbour, and by people who have never seen it--just for speculation, the curse of modern life in Russia. And all the time whilst Russian peasants and workmen are slaving and dying, comfortable commercial folk in the south are buying and selling the prospective fruits of their labour and sufferings.

Still, that is the way of the world, and these people pass, whereas the work remains. All the autumn and possibly through the winter the work goes on again in the continuous darkness, with torches, under the supervision of fur-clad engineers and grim Cherkesses. Many will be the sufferings, though not greater than the sufferings on the field of battle. Many have died and will die in the building and consummating of the Murman railway. Still the railway will remain as a peaceful memorial, the great new railway from Petrograd to the dark haven.

III

THE NEW ARCHANGEL

WHEN I last visited Archangel, six years ago, it was a dreamy, lifeless, melancholy port. One felt that, like its sister city, Kholmagora, it had once been great, but its greatness had finally set. You could feel the melancholy of Russia there, the sadness of material failure so characteristic of the Russian soul. But to-day! To-day the vision has fled, the _tempo_ has changed. All the ships of the world find anchorage in her harbour, and motley crowds throng her streets. That the war has brought about. A year before the war fifty vessels entered Archangel port. During the last twelve months something like 5000 have entered. Great liners and transports and weather-beaten tramps and three-deck river boats stand in majestic pride. Their smoke and steam make a dome over the city of Archangel when you approach it from the north.