Part 17

Of a total trade in Urga estimated at twenty-five million roubles per year, nine tenths is in the hands of Celestials. The remainder is Russian, for the Mongols are entirely without a merchant class. Of the exports, wool is the main item. Some two hundred thousand _puds_ are sent from Urga annually, four fifths of which go to the United States. While cotton cloth, cutlery, kitchen-utensils, and other European goods come down from Russia, the bulk of the imports are brought from China by caravan, through Kalgan. Silks come from Shanghai, and tea from Hankow, passing via Peking. There is trade, too, with Ulasati in western Mongolia. It is the centre of a fur and hide country which is isolated from outlets toward Russia by the high mountains, and must send caravans to Kiahta. Its communication with China is either by Urga and Kalgan, or by the caravan-route further south.

When the holiday-time is over we see more of the Chinese traders. Sitting in the shops, with one of these, and glancing out over the little counter of the sales-room, we converse as the customers come and go.

The Russian in his shop shows all he has of wares, the red and magenta cloths, the enameled kettles, the cutlery and sweetmeats. But the Chinaman wraps his goods in hieroglyphic-covered papers, and all that can be seen are rows of long-stemmed brass-bowled pipes, and an array of silver and bronze teapots on shelves at one side. Very rare things, too, our Chinese host can produce. Shanghai silks of finest texture, ten roubles the _arsheen_; jade mouthpieces for the pipes at a hundred _taels_; Hankow tea culled from the tenderest shoots. Everything is labeled and systematized in the Chinaman’s place, and he goes at once to the packet which he wishes to show.

A dozen Chinese, with bright blue silk jackets over their black surtouts, invade now the home of the merchant. The red knot on their black skull-caps and the length of their queues and finger-nails show them to be men of some importance. They take off the bright-colored ear-tabs as they enter. They are down to buy wool. To-day they visit, next week they will trade. Then all but one will sit in the outer shop, while the spokesman alone will go into the inner room and confer with the merchant. From time to time the spokesman will go back to the party and consult, till in the end the bargain is made. They will all hold to the agreement, too, whichever way the market goes. For in this the Chinese are inflexibly honest. A local Chinaman dispatched a mounted messenger the six versts to Urga, to return to us twenty kopecks which he had overcharged by a slip of his abacus-adder.

Yet the Scotch engineers saw shells in the arsenals loaded with clay when the native troops went against the Japanese. The English miners in the Province of Shan-tung have had their profits cut to nothing by the official “squeezes,” and Chinese have bought in the depreciated stocks.

The ethic code of the squeeze seems to be very nice. It is a point of honor, almost always scrupulously observed, that the first-fruits of official graft go to repaying the one who advanced the money to buy the office. A Chinaman, who could not be trusted to administer honestly a trust fund of a hundred _taels_, will repay this obligation to his backer. Thus must he keep face.

From the tax-appraiser who numbers the sheep to the civil governor who receives the lumps of silver tribute for transmission to Peking, every official gets his squeeze. They say in the _eimuck_ of Ulasati, where sables are part of the tribute, that the officials take out the best furs and put back poor skins to keep the number the same; and in Urga, that the enormously rich administration takes a Tammany third of the tribute. There has never been a viceroy yet, it is reported, who has left Mongolia poor. Yet each official plays straight with his backer, his “belly-band.” Very curious is this race, and there live few Westerners who can at all understand it.

We ride back in the evening from the Chinese city (for none may stay for the night), buried in recurring reveries. How brightly glitters the face, and how barren is the heart in Maimachen! Never the thousand ties of kinship and affection, never the thrill of citizenship, never the love of a home. How little generosity, too, or sympathy for the people of the land! The Mongols are but “tame barbarians,” as of old were stigmatized the tributary Formosans. Now and then one finds a Chinaman out among the nomad Mongols. Perhaps he may be a watcher at a distant temple, perhaps a telegraph-operator on the two lines that go, one to Kalgan and Peking, one to Kiahta and Russia. Always he is something solitary--different. There is an almost sinister splendor in this aloofness--this self-sufficiency of walled cities and compounds where none but Chinese may dwell. What a rebuff of nationhood in the gates that shut out at night all save the alien outlanders! What contempt in the law that no woman of China may come among these Mongol people, as if the very air were contamination! How the natives are silently despised, whose bodies in death go to the dogs, while the Chinaman’s, in a casket, is sent back over the long leagues to his home!

The homeless, wifeless, Chinese city, with the quarter of Mongol women without the walls,--it is in many ways typical of all Chinese rule in Mongolia. For, as the Celestial trader defaults in the duty of marrying the Mongol mother of his children, so China defaults in many of the duties that are inherent in suzerainty. One resents the heavy Chinese yoke on the necks of these simple frank-hearted Mongolians. They are a race of great good-humored children, and they are exploited while disdained.

We are thinking of this unfairness as we ride back along the road to Urga. Behind is the distant Chinese city, the Manchu Viceroy’s straggling palace, the picketed prison-stockade. Before is the drooping tricolor banner of the Czar, and the white and green of the Greek Church, with its far-seen golden crucifix. A crowd of brilliantly-clad Mongols, lamas and laymen and girls and youths, are strolling back from Maimachen. They are laughing and chattering, and in uncouth playfulness are pushing one another about across the road.

Half a dozen of the _Zinzin’s_ Chinese foot-guard are likewise coming from Urga, stolid-faced, superior. As they reach the tumultuous band it sinks into silence, and the men crowd to the side of the road that the Chinese may pass.

They tramp by without a glance. Then out from the Russian barrack-gate swings a little Cossack in his great black sheepskin hat, gray tunic, clattering curved sabre, boots and spurs. He is one of the Zabaikalskaia Buriats, whom Russians call Bratskie, the brotherly people. He speaks a tongue so similar to the Mongol that all these people can understand him. They look up to him as a rich relative, fortunate in overflowing measure. For on the pilgrimages of Buddhist Buriats to Urga, their wives have told the wondering Mongol women of the sewing-machines which they have at home to stitch linings, and have allowed the visitors to peep into their mirrors. The Mongol men have admired the Buriats’ breech-loading rifle, worth six horses at current quotations. They have enviously heard tell that in Russia one pays no cow-_alba_, but the young men get a uniform and free food when they ride out to give their Cossack service to the Czar. They have listened to Buriat boasts of the warm houses of Siberia, and stacks of hay, and stored-up harvests. So Mongols smile when the Buriats come to their _girs_. They say, “Rich smooth Buriats! Great lords! Give candle, give sugar, give tobacco, give vodka.”

Has not a little Zabaikalskaia Buriat reason to swagger when he starts from the Russian barrack-gate to see his lady in Urga? And should a Cossack of the Czar step aside for a Chinaman in the shadow of the Eagles? Head erect, with a look to right and then to left, hand on sabre, he swings straight down the centre of the road, and right through the Chinese soldiers. Without dispute they open a way. He chucks a not unwilling girl under the chin as he passes the Mongols, and he is good-naturedly hailed by the rest: “Hello, Cossack! Why so fast? She has gone away with a lama.” And he goes a bit faster toward Urga.

These Cossacks, terrible in war, friends and equals with the conquered in peace, are those who have held the Russian vanguard in this march to China,--the march which began when the two _hatamans_ of Moscow, commanded by Ivan the Terrible, started in 1507 on their long tramp eastward. The Cossacks it was whom Yermak led to the conquest of Sibir. Through them, in storm and stress, despite oppression and convict-gangs, with faults and failings, omissions and commissions, the advance of Russia has been the way of civilization where none could otherwise have come.

“It will mean much when a Russian railway follows our trail from Kiahta,” says Alexsimevich; and André adds: “They will all be glad when the Cossacks come to Kalgan.”

VII

RUSSIA IN EVOLUTION

New times have come to Russia with the events that have halted her armies. The Slav, looking and reaching outward, has been hurled violently back upon himself, and he turns to look inward. The stream of Slavic civilization still flows eastward. But now held back at the frontiers, its tide is rising behind the impounding barriers and is lifting on its wave the level of national life. Its scour is undermining here and there, its laden currents are depositing and filling in the interstices of the social fabric. The struggle is intensified to achieve representative government, to secure administrative reform, to relieve the distress of the peasantry. The people are in evolutionary throes and are sweeping forward in the arts of peace, in the science of government, and in the myriad lines of internal development.

The movements of empire-advance have been noted because they have been conspicuously visualized. But the economic and social growth have been only slightly regarded by our western world, intent upon great events, crises, conflicts lost and won. The seizure of a hamlet in Manchuria has obscured the founding of twenty cities in Siberia.

The continent-cleaving Siberian Railway has now revealed, in the Russian occupation of northern Asia, not an exploiting colonial enterprise, but a race-movement akin to the European invasion of our Aryan ancestors. The upward struggle of a people striving to find itself is embodied in imperial rescripts and armed revolts, in dumas and dynamite, where rival titans grapple for the throw. There is now therefore in the world a more earnest watching of this metamorphosing Russian people. What are the types of civilization, the beliefs, the manners of thought, the institutions that are to hold mastery over the largest area on the globe occupied by a single nation?

To comprehend a people and the course of its evolution one must pierce below the surface of ephemeral and contemporary incident, and probe the primitive racial elements. Russia is to-day iceberg-like. The crumbling, upper ice, honeycombed by eating waves, is exposed; but submerged and unseen is the massive blue block beneath. Because rotten surface-structures are obvious, many fail to appreciate what lies in the depths. There comes understanding for much when one sounds the ancient sources in race-history.

From the earliest times Russia lay across the path of incessant invasion from Asia. In 1224 the Mongols swept down upon the old Scythian plains. There were no mountain fastnesses in which the sparse population could defend itself. The followers of Genghis Khan, through the years that followed, destroyed town after town,--Bolgari, Suzdal, Yaroslavl, Tver,--devastated Volkynia, and Galicia, until all Russia, save Novgorod, was brought under Tatar rule. Their devastations cut off the population of whole provinces, and changed old Russian cities, such as Kiev, to hybrid towns of Asiatics. At Sarai on the Volga, for two centuries Tatar sovereigns ruled; and here from being pagan they became adherents of Islam. Russia’s foreign master was confirmed in a religion as antagonistic as was his race. To these aliens Russia gave humiliating homage and paid tribute, and from their khans her czar received permit to rule. Thus in her infancy she had a foreign race, not as servile members of the humble labor class, but in the wild, fierce scourge of conquerors.

Throughout this period many Russian princes married into noble Mongol families, and Mongol officers formed alliances with the Russian boyars. The Muscovite aristocracy had already grown into strong Oriental proclivities from contact with its southern neighbor, the Byzantine, and these became confirmed under the Tatar. One czar, at least, Boris Godunov, was of Mongol birth. Incessant war harassed the people. Alexander Nevski, of Novgorod, beat back the Swedes; but, abasing himself, he went to the Tatar khan with the tribute of a country too feeble still to resist him. By and by Russia began to rally and to strengthen her centres, Novgorod, Kiev, and Vladimir. Moscow arose--that small destiny-city where Simon the Proud, even in vassalage, dared to dream of unity and nationality, and took the title of “Prince of all the Russias.” His grandson made the first great stand against the Mongols and won in the field of Tula, which, with the fights of Alexander Nevski, gives to chroniclers and bards their early Russian ballads, or _bilinî_. Moscow, punished cruelly, was razed almost to the ground. But the Bear was aroused and goaded into desperation. Russia reeled to her feet, and for nearly a hundred years she fought, she lost, she fell; but she rose again and fought on, until at last the power of the Tatar terror was broken and the tyrant was driven over her border. Still, for a hundred years more, she was forcing back his inroads, and rescuing the winding trains of her children, toiling over the southern steppes to be sold as slaves at Kaffa. This was Russia in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.

That Europe was spared this, she owes to the Russian. Through those crucial centuries when the Slav, weak, torn, anguished, beset with foes around and foes within, was standing grimly at the perilous portal of civilization, Europe, within the temple, safe by his grace, was privileged to work up into light, to cement her nationalities, to effect the liberation of her masses, and to develop her intellect into the magnificent promise of a printing-press, a people’s Bible, and a Shakespeare.

But to the brave warden of that portal there was not the sweetness and the light. For him were the seams and the scars, the mutinous passions of the strife. Long after the clouds of the Dark Ages had cleared from the face of western Europe, they hung over Russia. The Slav was back in his Dark Ages yet, heir only to a barbaric experience. Here he must start, where Europe had started nearly a thousand years before, where America, in the favor of Providence, was never to be called upon to start. For him were the memories of subjection and the blood of contention; but also, in relief, to him were the stolid patience and endurance which were to serve him so well. He groped along in the shadow until the coming of the great Peter.

But now arose a man. He, too, had dreamed the dream of empire,--vast, masterful. He set about making his dream real. He found Russia a small inland state, torn by faction, barbarian, and Oriental. Though himself the descendant of a long line of Byzantine kings, half monk, half emperor, he saw with the insight of genius, and he knew that that way did not lie greatness. Therefore fully and fiercely he broke with the past and set himself to the future.

Between him and that future stood the Strelitz. The walls of the Kremlin, and the Red Square told the doom of their barring conservatism. He warred with the Turk, he fought the Cossack, he routed the Swedes, again and again, taking whole provinces on his Baltic outlet and securing the coveted Neva. He embroiled himself with Persia, and through Baku opened a way to the Caspian. Then, with a high hand, he swept out the customs that made for Orientalism. He broke the seclusion of women, the prostrations, banished the caftan, the beard, and the flowing robes. He lifted his people bodily and violently out of their past, and set them down face-front to a new order. The Russia he had received a province, he left an empire. The Russia he had received Asiatic, he left European, and already a force in Europe. And when arose one of his own blood--a reversal--who would undo the herculean labor of this master-builder, who would give back to Sweden those priceless, wave-washed Baltic provinces, and, restoring the capital to Moscow, return to an Oriental estate, the patriot was stronger than the father, and at the price of his son’s life he bought the progress of Russia. Here in this man, who died in 1725, we can truly say that Modern Russia begins.

Through this skeleton history can be traced the structure of the modern state, as in the struggle for survival may be found the root and early warrant of her governmental system. Every element, physical and ethnic, was, and still is, a handicap. Russia is not protected by the ramparts of the sea; she is surrounded on all sides by nations with whom her history has been that of perennial conflict. In place of a compacted, well-peopled country, she has an empire extended gradually from frozen Nova Zembla to Afghanistan, from the Danube mouth to Behring’s arctic sea. She is a land of many distinct peoples, as foreign to each other as Lithuanians and wild Kirghis; as alien in religion as Catholic and Mohammedan. She is divided into one knows not how many tribes, numbers of them completely barbarous. Her eastern and south-eastern frontiers call for defense across vast and vacant stretches. Her northern and western borders are occupied by Finns and Poles, unforgetful forever of their own days of sovereignty, naturally and rightly jealous for the memories and the prerogatives that are its legacy.

With the eastern problem living from the first on her immediate border, with her many tribes wayward, Russia early strove to fuse her empire into national unity. In old Poland had been seen the fearful price which feebleness and disunion pay to fate. How much greater was the menace to polyglot Russia, were her master-grip to relax! That she should hold a strong hand over the elements that ever threatened her disruption was the first national necessity. This supreme obligation to herself in her entirety compelled a firm, commanding, centralized authority. The mould that was to shape such metal had need of rigidity and unyielding strength. To meet these race-desires, not as a purposeless tyranny but as the fruit of a long evolving system, arose the autocracy.

The system reached its climax in the most absolute administration of modern times at the period of the American Revolution; the “Government Statute of 1775” meshed all things and all men into the institutions of despotism; Russia groaned under the iron rule of a Nicholas, yet rejoiced in the belief that strength was there, and sure defense from domestic disunion and foreign aggression; then, in the Crimea, came a revelation of the inefficiency of the bureaucratic juggernaut. Despite the stubborn valor of the defenders of Sevastopol, despite the gallant efforts of the aged autocrat, the glory of Russia went down in the blaze of her city and her fleet.

The old régime had failed. Even the Czar, before he died, could read the lesson but could not act. How pathetic the words of the failing monarch: “My successor may do what he will, I cannot change.”

With the accession of Alexander to the throne in 1855, on the sudden death of Nicholas, came the first effective steps toward modern institutions. The young czar, a self-declared friend of progress, raised regally the standard of reform. All Russia rose to the hopes of his idealism. Corruption in office, which had before been rampant, was crushed out by the sheer force of public opinion. Pamphlets circulated freely, uncensored. Meetings were everywhere held to discuss the varied plans of a vivified government. With a whole nation become to a degree transcendental, the Czar began his reign and his reforms.

First of all for righting, as it was first in evil, came serfdom. Summoning commissions of his ablest advisers, seeking counsel of the proprietors and their coöperation in an act of self-abnegation, the Czar proceeded to the execution of his great task. For three years every side and every phase of the problem was studied. Then at length with a fundamental law which forecovered every detail of the situation, Alexander II put his signature, February 19, 1861, to the great Ukase of Liberation.

In Russia’s past there is much to answer for before the judgment-bar, in omission and in commission. Yet, giving but justice to ruler and people, it must be allowed that the measure which freed the serfs ranks, with Magna Charta and the American Constitution, among the mightiest agencies of advance that mankind has ever known. A dependent population of nearly forty-six million souls was given liberty. The great act was accomplished peacefully, and the measures were executed without any trouble worthy of the name, in a spirit equitable to the old owners as well as to the serfs. Not alone were the latter released from bondage, they were provided, one and all, with land and livelihood. They were given, in everything that concerned their local administration, entire freedom from interference by their old masters or by the members of the Administration. The righteous deed that the American Republic achieved nearly three years later liberated but one ninth the number of the Russian bondmen. It did so at the cost of the deadliest fratricidal war of modern times, and the impoverishment of one quarter of its people. All the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau through the Reconstruction period could not insure to a tithe of the Negroes the opportunity for a livelihood,--this that Russia provided inalienably for each of her liberated. To this day the American Negro in many places is under special civic disabilities more galling than those imposed anywhere in the Russian Empire.

The protection of the former serfs was skillfully arranged by grouping them in self-governing village communes, to which land enough was given on a long-term repayment basis. In each, by an assembly composed of all the heads of households, periodic allotments of the common territory were made to the individuals. Compact economic units, whose property could not be sold, were built up against alienation of the land or poverty-induced peonage. The rendering of justice in local disputes was delegated to the peasant courts,--the only tribunals in Russia, save the National Senate, from which there is no appeal.

The Mir, complete within itself, was responsible to the Imperial Government for good order and the taxes, and was secure from molestation provided these duties were fulfilled. Its inhabitants, united and independent, were able to resist any encroachment by their former masters or by neighboring landlords.

It is not unworthy of note that up to the present time the liberties in economic matters thus granted have rarely been infringed by the authorities, nor have the village assemblies been exploited as a play in politics or to attain personal ends. While agriculturally and industrially the communal land provisions have become insufficient, cramping, perhaps baneful, and no longer necessary now that society is in equilibrium, nevertheless the germ of free institutions fecundated in the Mir, when dissociated from its communal features, is admirable still, and is capable of becoming the foundation for real self-government.