Part 10

It was long past noon when we swung round a bold rocky point, and saw before us Finland's capital, Helsingfors. The city surrounds the harbor much like a crescent. On either horn, granite promontories jut out into the sea, where are fortifications, one of them the formidable fortress of Sveaborg, where we could see brown-coated Cossacks gathered in large numbers watching our entrance to the port. A great garrison there seemed to be, and everywhere floated the Russian flag,--parallel stripes of white, blue and red. Russian troops not merely man all these fortifications, but there are also soldiers within the city itself, and more are quartered in every village of consequence in Finland. The ancient Senate and House of Chevaliers are no longer permitted to enact the laws. A Russian Governor-General issues his Ukases, which the Russian bayonets are here savagely to enforce. All this you already know, but it comes vividly upon one when you see the Cossack, clad in his long kaftan-like military coat, everywhere about you visible evidence of how harshly Finland has been stripped of her rights and liberties.

Helsingfors astonished us. Lying upon a rising slope, it presents an imposing outline from the sea. It is a city of ninety-six thousand people. We were not prepared for so large and substantial a city. It has well-kept parks, well-paved streets, frequently asphalted as in Stockholm, and blocks of big granite buildings five and six stories high; the city is clean, and the streets are alive with well-dressed, rosy-cheeked, vigorous people. Everywhere there are electric tram-cars and electric lights, and on the broad thoroughfares are large and handsome shops. It is evident that in the Finnish hinterlands there is an extensive and well-to-do population.

Our ship was to lie at her pier for several hours, and the passengers were told that they might safely visit the town; if arrested for not having passports, we might refer to the Captain of the ship. So we wandered up along the quays, following a wide boulevard. Everywhere on the sidewalks and driving through the streets were Russian officials in their long gray coats and flat black caps; there were also many soldiers upon the streets.

Finland was once a province of Sweden, and the Teutonic Swedish language is yet that of the educated classes, who are chiefly of Swedish descent. In the country, however, and among the working classes, there remains the original population of primitive Finnish race, "The old Finns," cousins to the Hungarians, and these have a Turanian language of their own. They have accepted for centuries the Swedish rule and fraternized with the Swedish leaders, but have held to their ancient tongue. Now is also the Slavonic Russian speech, by Ukase, commanded to be the language of the schools, of the courts and of the government. Thus the Finlander must be acquainted with three fundamentally different tongues, and all of the streets of Helsingfors are named in the three languages on the same placard. The Russian name is in Greek text, then in Latin text the Swedish name, and under that the native Finnish name; thus there is much babel of tongues in Helsingfors, while all the Finlanders bitterly resent the brutal attempt to substitute the Russian for their own.

Finland has, also, heretofore been privileged to coin her own money,--but now the Russian _ruble_ is supreme. We had boarded a tram-car, as modern and comfortable as those of New York, and were whirling along the boulevard, when we tendered the conductor our fare in Russian coin (we had provided ourselves with "_kopeeks_" and _rubles_ before leaving Stockholm), but he declined to take the money. He was about to stop the car and put us off, when a courtly-mannered Finn, addressing the passengers as well as the conductor, explained that, under the present laws, Russian money must be taken when tendered, and that we were entitled to ride,--so H tells me, who understood his speech, so much is it like the Danish. But the conductor, patriot that he was, refused to touch the _ruble_ I offered him, preferring to let us ride without making charge. If I had been able to do so, I would have explained to our fellow-passengers that I intended no insult, and would thus probably have restored myself to their confidence. As it was they glowered at me as a friend of hated Russia.

We visited the splendid Parliament buildings, where the Finnish Senate and House of Chevaliers have been wont to meet,--now closed forever by the Ukase of the Czar. I understand, also, that the Finnish judges have recently been deposed from the courts, and Russians appointed in their stead; and we were told by a friendly Finn that so completely are the people terrorized, that no patriot dare give open evidence of opposition to the Russian rule. One may only detect it by the sullen, disquieted faces of the people one meets upon the streets. In the dour glances cast at the Russian officials I saw everywhere expression of hatred and revenge.[1]

[Footnote 1: The reverses of the Japanese War, the assassination of Governor Bobrikoff and threat of revolution have at last frightened the Russian Autocracy into partially restoring to Finland her pillaged liberties.]

It was middle afternoon when we set sail again. No other vessel dared leave the port, but our Captain, being anxious to reach St. Petersburg, decided to venture on the voyage. As soon as we emerged from the protecting barriers of the islands at the harbor's mouth, we came into open waters. A furious sea was running and the ship rolled heavily. She plunged and reared and pitched, until most of the passengers were driven to their staterooms,--indeed, so mad was now the sea that we were told there would be no more hot coffee and hot steak, since the cooks in the kitchen could not keep their legs, nor could dishes be set upon the tipping tables. Those who were able to eat might get a snack from the steward, who would hand it out--cold fish and cheese at that. The boat rolled until her gunwales were awash, and frequently the roaring waters swept across the decks. Although it was a wild and dangerous night, yet the clouds were parting and the stars were out. No grander panorama of the sea have I looked upon than these mighty foam-capped billows--greater even than our ship,--between which we hid, and on the summits of which we climbed,--the angry, pitch-black waters, the star-lit firmament, and the serene moon shining with fullest splendor.

At dawn on Tuesday morning, we passed the great naval fortification of Kronstadt, and three hours later, after threading our way among fishing boats, were entering the canal which leads from the gulf of Finland to the river Neva and the city of St. Petersburg.

South and east of us, behind low shores, the land stretched away green and flat as far as the eye could see, an apparently indefinitely extending plain. Only the glint of a gilded oriental dome, the bulbous cupola of a Russian village church, lightened here and there the green monotony. Then far to the east we saw not one but many domes glittering and flashing in the light of the lifting sun--the gilded towers of the cathedrals and churches of the city of St. Petersburg--then we saw a tangle of tall chimneys, then ships and barks and schooners and enormous barges from Lake Ladoga, and immense docks on either side. We were upon the river Neva. We were come to the city of "Petersborg," the splendid capital of the Russian Czars.

Just as we were entering the canal, a steam-tug came up alongside us and a company of government officials in long gray coats climbed on board. They were the customs inspectors and officers of the police department. The two chief officials seated themselves at a long table. An officer of the ship directed the passengers to form in a queue, and one by one we appeared before the official examiner, while the Captain called off our names, reading the list from a little book. When my name was announced a clerk handed one of the officials a passport. It was numbered--my name was upon it--it had been received in St. Petersburg from the messenger who left Hangoe Sunday morning;--it had been filed with the police department; it had been _viséed_; it had been translated into Russian, and the official now read over the description to his assistants;--I was scrutinized,--the passport was found correct--the officials so endorsed it and handed it to me. The passenger immediately behind me, seemingly, did not correspond with his passport, and was directed to stand to one side. There were a number of these, who were to have a difficult time with the authorities. Our baggage was also examined, but not closely. With the Russian official the main thing is the passport, not the baggage.

We were now arrived at the pier and were ready to go ashore. Two sailors carried our small steamer trunk upon the wharf, and we were in St. Petersburg. Instantly we were surrounded by a howling mob of bearded, blond-headed, dressing-gown-coated men, clamoring for our fares. They were _izvostchiks_ in their native _kaftans_. I beckoned to one of them, and pointed to our trunk. He lifted it to his shoulder and led us to his _droschky_,--a diminutive open vehicle, much like a small sledge on wheels. We entered it and in a moment were galloping through the streets of the city, the driver constantly shouting to his horse and yelling to all foot-farers to get out of the way. I gave him the name of our destination, Hotel de l'Europe. He seemed to comprehend my meaning, and never drew rein until we stopped before the imposing entrance of that hostelry.

We were in Russia. We had run the gauntlet of the border,--our passports had been sufficient, and we were at last safely within the dominions of the Czar. Would it be as difficult to get out?

XVII.

St. Petersburg--The Great Wealth of the Few--The Bitter Poverty of the Many--Conditions Similar to Those Preceding the French Revolution.[2]

[Footnote 2: These letters were written in the early autumn of the year, 1902, and present a glimpse of Russia as it then appeared.]

GRAND HOTEL DE L'EUROPE, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA, _September 18 (N. S.), 1902_.

So much has been jammed into the last two days that my pen is like to burst. Splendor and squalor, the glitter of twentieth century civilization, the sombre shadow of barbarism, are here entwined in inextricable comminglement. The city is filled with stately buildings of gigantic and imposing dimensions; with wide, straight boulevards and streets. The sidewalks and _droschkies_ are gay with the dashing and gaudy uniforms of innumerable soldiery, and the fine dresses of elegant women. Yet many of these great buildings are in ill repair, and what you at first imagine to be magnificent stone, reveals itself to be a stucco of rotting wood and crumbling plaster; the broad thoroughfares are abominably paved, and pitifully cared for by abject wretches wielding dilapidated birch-stick brooms.

The superb horses--stallions, all of them--whirl past, driven by _izvostchiks_ in dirty, truncated plug-hats and blue dressing-gown-like _kaftans_, whose sodden faces tell of _vodka_ and hopeless haplessness. Beggars swarm (frightful creatures), and the faces of the officers, fine big men in striking uniforms, are dissipated, hard and cruel.

We are in a huge hotel. Big men in uniform open the door; big men in livery fill the halls; the rooms are big, ours is immense, with double windows, It is steam-heated, and also has hearth fires of burning wood. The building is warmed all through, even the halls. There are French waiters in the big dining-rooms; there is delicious food and delightful coffee, whose aroma is very perfume of the Orient; the beefsteaks are juicy, thick and tender. We have had no such meals since leaving America. On each story there is an elaborate bar for serving _vodka_ (a fierce white whisky distilled from wheat) and drinks to the guests of that particular floor, and a single bath room, and a single diminutive toilet for both sexes' common use.

The moment we set foot within the doorway of the hotel, up stepped an official, in blue and gold, and demanded our passports, and we were requested also to sign a paper like the one enclosed, viz.:

NOTICE TO THE POLICE.

Family and Christian WHERE IS YOUR PASSPORT? Name: Signature: Profession: Please order your passport Age: two days before leaving Confession: Russia. Arrived from ..........

This to be at once filed with the police department, and the passport not to be given back until we should notify the same big official,--whose duty it was to stay right there and watch all guests of that hotel, and who must be notified twenty-four hours before we leave the city,--when he will return the passport two hours before the said time set, and give it to me only upon my paying him the government fee of ten _rubles_ (five dollars) in good yellow gold.[3] And right outside the door of our apartments, seated at a little table, are two officials, pen and paper in hand, who set down the hour and the minute of the day we enter and come out. They were there when we went to breakfast; they, or others as fox-jowled and lynx-eyed, were also there when we returned from the theater late at night, and they are there all through the day. Our Swedish guide, who does the duties of courier and shows us about the great city, is also registered at the police department, and he has to hand in every night a written report of what he has done with us all through the day, where we have gone, what we have seen, and we suspect even what we may have said. On the streets, big sword-begirded policemen stand at the intersections of the ways, pull out a little book from their pockets and make note of our passing that particular spot at that certain hour; at night these reports also are handed in to the central police office to be checked up against the statements of the guide and the spies at the hotel.

[Footnote 3: I have subsequently learned that the legal fee is about three _rubles_ ($1.50), the charge of ten _rubles_ being impudent graft.]

We are in the capital city of the mighty Russian Empire; in the capital created by Peter the Great amidst and upon the marshy delta of the river Neva; a city of more than a million inhabitants; a city spread out over vast distances; a city whose disproportionately wide streets and boulevards are paved with wood, wood that is rotting all the while, leaving big holes into which a horse, a team, may plunge and disappear, because only wood will float upon the marshy mire of the mucky islets, and stone and brick will eventually sink from sight; a city whose top-heavy palaces and public edifices are so treacherously set upon the sands that they must constantly undergo costly repairs; a city builded upon foundations so unstable that the springtime floods of the river Neva ever threaten permanently to wipe out its very existence; a city where the palaces of the always widening circle of the Imperial princes of the blood, and of the upper nobility, and of the great bureaucratic chiefs, are builded with an arrogance of dimension, an elaborateness of design, a lavishness of cost that beats anything an American billionaire has ever tried to do, or dreamed of doing in San Francisco or New York; and yet a city abounding in the mean, small, log and wooden cabins of the very poor; a city where penury and poverty and dire pinch protrude their squalid presence in continual tragic protest against the flaunted and wanton riot of unmeasured wealth, possessed by the very few.

This morning as I walked upon the Nevsky Prospekt, the Broadway of the Imperial capital, and watched the movement of mankind along the way, and beheld the extraordinary contrasts between those who walked and those who rode; as I saw the burly policeman arrest the shabby foot-farer for nearly being run down, while he let the haughty grandee drive freely on; as I beheld poverty and wealth in such flagrant contrast, and realized that a standing army is kept ever armed and girt to protect and uphold the privilege and security of the rich; as I beheld the surly, sour, sombre faces of those who wore no gaudy covering of broadcloth and gold lace, my fancy harked back to the time, somewhat more than a century ago, when the King and Nobles of France drove through the Rues of Paris in all their glittering splendor, trampling down in their pride of power the pedestrian who failed to escape from their sudden approach. How secure they felt in their arrogant enjoyment of prerogative and rank! How contemptuously they disdained the humble claims of the glitter-proletarian, of the peasant on the land! Louis XIV had cried "_L'etat c'est moi._" Was that not enough! And yet, I had stood in the Place de la Concorde, almost on the very spot where, inspired by the hatred of the Sansculottes, Mademoiselle La Guillotine had bit off the dull head of Louis XVI, and cut through the fair throat of Marie Antoinette.

It may be possible for Russia and her governing men, her Bureaucratic Autocracy, yet a little while to postpone the fateful hour. By means of foreign wars it may be possible to play the old game of diverting the public mind from its own bitter ills; by promises of fair and liberal dealing it may be possible to calm the public mind--cajole it until the promises are duly broken, as is invariably the case. Whatever fair-speaking and fat-feeding officialdom may to the contrary assert, the impression I gain amidst all this splendor and pomp and glare of supreme, concentered power of the few is that, beneath this opulent exterior, deep down in the hearts and even below the conscious working of their minds, there to-day abides among the masses of the Russian people--who after all hold in their hands the final power--a profound and monstrous discontent: a discontent so deep-rooted and so intense that when the inevitable hour strikes, as strike it must, the world will then behold in Russia a saturnalia of blood and tears, a squaring of ten centuries' accounts, more fraught with human anguish and human joy than ever dreamed a Marat and a Robespierre, more direful and more glad than yet mankind have known.

We drove about the city like grandees. Our _landau_ was just such as Russian nobles like best to use; our splendid pair of sorrel stallions pranced upon their heels and neighed and ran just as all nobles' horses should; and our well-distended driver, of enormous and deftly-padded girth, sat belted with a big embroidered band, and guided the horses he never dreamed to hold, and helloed loudly to those who did not fly out of the way, just as would any driver of the Blood! We almost ran over some slow-moving man or woman, foot-weary wretch, at every crossing of a street!

Many palaces and public buildings we visited--enormous edifices, all of them, with innumerable and extensive halls and immense chambers finished in gold and alabaster and gaudy hues, with countless servants and lackeys in livery and lace, gold lace, to care for them, and watch over them, and fatten upon a government graft or easy-gotten fee. Suites of enormous apartments they were, which are never used and never are likely to be used.

The paintings of the great masters collected in the galleries of the Hermitage and Winter Palaces, accumulated by the Czars, are among the most renowned in Europe. The reception halls and audience chambers and ballrooms and dining halls of these palaces are designed and intended to dazzle and impress whosoever are given the chance of beholding them. At the same time, the library and study of the late Czar, Alexander III, is a small and plainly furnished room, with the atmosphere and markings of a man of simple tastes, who laboriously worked, worked as no other official of the Bureaucracy in Russia pretends to work.

We traversed the suites of apartments used by the Imperial family, when sojourning in St. Petersburg during those portions of the winter season when the court there gathers, and we noted the outer guardrooms where night and day stand the faithful watchers with sleepless vigil, and we realized, perhaps for the first time, that this man, so steeped in power, is after all but a prisoner of the system which locks him in and binds him fast and robs him of that independence of action which you and I enjoy. He is become but a creature of the great machine that governs, a slave of the system which Peter the Great set up for the furtherance of his Imperial will, a system of government which has so developed and spread out that to-day the Czar of all the Russias is merely the puppet of its will, the tool of the greedy, grasping, intriguing, governing Bureaucracy.

On approaching the city, our straining eyes first caught sight of the gilded, glittering domes and spires of the great cathedrals and churches with which it is so abundantly supplied. The domes of St. Isaac, of our Lady of Kazan, of Alexander Nevsky, and the spires of St. Peter and St. Paul, each and all told us that whatever else we might discover, we were yet entering a city and a land where the people counted not the cost of the splendid housing of their faith. And so we have found it. The wealth of gold and of silver, of precious stones and of priceless stuffs with which these churches are adorned and crammed, excels anything of which the western brain has ever dreamed. Each great church is famed and honored for its particular beneficence, its peculiar holiness, and to each one comes in procession perpetual an innumerable throng to pray and worship and to receive the blessings flowing from that especial fane. Even in the ancient log cabin, said to be the actual house erected by Peter himself, is established a shrine, where priests continuously intone the beautiful service of the Russian church and where thousands of devoted worshipers swarm in and out all the day long, and the night as well, praying to Imperial Peter's now sainted ghost.

In the noble chamber of the golden-spired cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul lie the white marble tombs of the Romanoffs, where is also kept up throughout the day and night yet another sumptuous service for the repose of the souls of the illustrious dead. In the great monastery of Alexander Nevsky is each day maintained a simple and splendid choral service which multitudes attend, and where the melancholy Gregorian chanting and intoning of the black-robed long-bearded monks reveal new organ stops in the human voice.

Naturally, an American has great sympathy for the Russian people who have so little, while he has so much. In America we send our girls and boys to school as a matter of course. Here in the ornate center of autocracy, I have seen no building that I recognized as a common school, nor in Russia is there such a system, as we know it.

To the western mind three things stand out above all else in Russia:

(1) The concentrated wealth and privilege of the few--the big grafters who have seized it all.

(2) The opulence and extraordinary power of that ecclesiastical organization, the "Holy Orthodox Church" itself an engine of the autocratic rule,--used to cover atrocious authority with gilded cassock and priestly cope.