The little grandmother of the Russian Revolution; reminiscences and letters of Catherine Breshkovsky

Preface

THE material in this book is drawn mainly from three sources. Madame Breshkovsky, while in New York, gave Doctor Abraham Cahan an account of her childhood and youth. He wrote out her reminiscences, and published them in his paper, the Jewish Daily Forward, in instalments, running from October 23, 1904, to January 18, 1905.

This account, translated from the Yiddish, and somewhat condensed, is here printed in English for the first time. It brings the narrative down to her first arrest. Through an interpreter, she gave a description of her early prison experiences and an outline of her later life to Ernest Poole, who published it in the Outlook. To the Outlook I am indebted also for her letters written in prison to her son. Her experiences after she was sent to Siberia for the second time are told in her own correspondence.

Her full name, in Russian, is Ekaterina Constantinovna Breshko-Breshkovskaya. I have used the shortened form of it which she herself used in this country.

ALICE STONE BLACKWELL.

3 MONADNOCK STREET, DORCHESTER, MASS.

2037367

THE LITTLE GRANDMOTHER OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Chapter I

THE Russian revolution is one of the great events of modern history. While it seemed to come with surprising suddenness, it was really the fruit of the labors and sacrifices of thousands of Russia's noblest men and women. Preeminent among these stands out the figure of Catherine Breshkovsky, known to millions by the affectionate name of Baboushka, the "Dear Little Grandmother" of the revolution.

She was born in 1844, on an estate in the district of Vitebsk, in Little Russia. She was fortunate in her parents. Whenever she speaks of them, her face lights up. "I had wonderful parents," she says. "If there is anything good in me, I owe it all to them."

Her father, Constantine Mikhailovitch Verigo, was the son of a Polish aristocrat. Her mother, Olga Ivanovna Goremykina, came of a noble family of Great Russia. Catherine is therefore three fourths Russian and one fourth Polish.

Constantine Verigo was a handsome, elegant man, of majestic presence, with a large head, a high forehead, and blue eyes twinkling with good nature.

Even when his brow grew cloudy and his manner stern, the children were never afraid of him.

Neither her father nor her mother ever made an enemy. Her father was frank and open-hearted, with a hot temper that revolted against injustice. He often told the other landowners just what he thought of their pretences and their brutal treatment of their subordinates ; but these outbursts were never laid up against him. He was universally respected and liked. His chief pleasure was to sit alone and read the works of liberal writers.

Her mother was not so handsome as her father, but had an intelligent and amiable face, exquisite manners, and irreproachable tact. She had attended school at the well-known Smolin Convent in Petrograd, and was a woman of culture. She was sincerely religious. She cared little for the pomps and ceremonies of the Greek Church, but brought her children up on the gospels, and on beautiful stories of holy men and women.

The mother was very careful in her behavior towards others, regardful of appearances and of "good form." If a truth were painful, she delicately concealed it. Over and over again she said to her children, "The best thing in life is the golden mean." She constantly admonished them that nothing was so harmful as excess. If a child failed to read her Bible, the mother would reprove her; and if the child then read the Bible too assiduously, the mother would reprove her again, and repeat that excess of any kind was fraught with danger. This was drummed into the children's ears so often that they dreaded to hear it. Nevertheless this polished lady was genuinely tender and warm-hearted. She was always well dressed, and took care that her children too should be neatly clad. On week days and Sundays alike, everybody wore clean clothes; no one needed to make any change when company was expected.

The home life of the family was rarely ruffled by unruly tempers or hasty words. The children were never whipped. If they misbehaved, their mother lectured them for hours, gently inculcating "the golden mean." Not a word of profanity was ever heard. Catherine's elder sister Natalie, when about eighteen, was a guest for a short time in a musician's family. On her return home she reported with much excitement that he had used in his talk such shocking vulgarisms as "Bah!" and "Piff!"

When Catherine was four years old, her father bought a large estate in the district of Tchernigov. There her childhood was passed.

She had a quick temper as a child. At three years old, she once got so angry that she struck her mother in the eye with a stick. In the end her mother's training enabled her to conquer this fault.

In her childhood she was always distressed about her innumerable "sins." "I would sin and straightway repent it," she said. "My heart was continually rent with grief over my misdeeds." What were the four-year-old girl's offenses ? She would speak Russian when ordered to speak French, or she would sulk and pout when told to be "nice" to her brother and sister, or perhaps, later, she might refuse to learn her grammar lesson, which she hated. Her mother would sermonize her till Katya's little heart "softened like butter", and the tears streamed down her cheeks.

She would go to bed full of good resolutions, but when the next day came, again she would speak Russian when bidden to speak French.

When the children went out to walk, Katya used to keep apart from the others. She loved solitude. She had a passion for scrutinizing things and meditating over them, as her father did. This was one of her chief "sins." Governesses found the child quite unmanageable in this particular. She would persistently disappear from the rest of the group, and have to be hunted for with excitement and anxiety, until she was finally discovered and driven back to the fold. One German governess was so vexed by her habit of suddenly vanishing that she exclaimed, " Katya is a spider!"

Her mother could not understand this eccentric child. What added to her concern was that the little girl's neck was slightly crooked. "Malheureuse enfant!" she would sigh, with a mournful shake of the head. And Katya, hearing it, would wonder, "What are they bothering about?" Her crooked neck never troubled her. She was wholly indifferent as to her looks.

She used to run off to the meadows and watch the cows grazing, and then go to the huts of the serfs, and mingle with the peasant children and their mothers, studying their life, and entering into every peasant woman's troubles.

From earliest childhood she was vividly impressed by the sharp contrast between the condition of her father's hundreds of serfs and that of her own family. Sometimes she would seize a little peasant boy by the hand and hurry him into her beautiful home, leading him through the exquisitely furnished rooms till she found her mother sitting in the parlor, reading or knitting. Then she would beg her mother to look at the poor little fellow, whose legs were so skinny, his stomach so big, his face so dirty and hollow, and his clothing nothing but rags. To her mother this seemed natural. The unnatural thing was for a rich little girl to drag a dirty peasant child into her mother's parlor.

Her mother had taught her to be kind and courteous to the servants, and she loved to pass her time with them; but whenever her mother found her among them, she drew her away, saying, "Katya, this is no place for you."

She wrote in after years: "We lived in a large house, richly decorated and handsomely furnished, surrounded by beautiful parks and gardens. It was always open to receive visits from other families of the nobility who were scattered about the district where we lived, and to guests from other parts of the empire, especially during the great f£tes which were given several times a year. Their carriages filled the court-yard, their servants of every degree crowded the corridors and anterooms, and ladies in elegant toilets and men in full dress surrounded the enormous tables, which groaned beneath the weight of the festal meats, prepared by cooks who had served their apprenticeship in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and even Paris. The Russian nobility loved luxury, and they knew how to secure admirable service. Orchestras, troops of actors and singers were found in the homes of the Russian gentry. Yet all these actors and musicians, as well as the cooks, valets and nurses, were Russian peasants, transformed by the will of their masters that they might make a brave show, a little court, in imitation of that of the Czar.

"But the life of the manor-house was not the only one to attract the attention of a child with vivid imagination, warm heart and active mind. Scattered about my father's estate, as about every other landed proprietor's dwelling, were so-called villages, long streets of miserable huts where lived great robust creatures clad in coarse garments, uncombed, almost unwashed, who, if they saw their master or any of his family coming, would hastily pull off their head covering and bow almost to the ground. These were the peasants who tilled the soil. Rising before the sun, they could not go to bed till late at night, for they had to pass all their time at work in the fields, the meadows, the woods, the granaries, the stables, the parks, the pastures. They worked everywhere and always. They were scolded, they were whipped, they were exiled to Siberia, at the whim of their master, for the least fault. Their wives and daughters were taken to serve the master or his sons as mistresses; their children were carried off without their consent to be trained as servants or to serve in the house. The men would come to the master begging bread for which their families were famishing; the women would come weeping, demanding their children of whom they had been robbed. How many times, stupefied and shocked, I have been the witness of such humiliating, degrading, excruciating things ! How many times I have thrown myself at my father's feet to implore pardon for a so-called culprit, whose only fault, perhaps, was to have fallen asleep while herding the sheep ! How many times I have been indignant to see how hundreds of peasants would be kept waiting in the court-yard, bare-headed and shivering with cold, waiting for the master to appear, who, after making them wait all day, would send them off without a word, so taken up was he with gambling at cards with other lords, who in their turn were making their coachmen wait on the carriage box till their hands were frozen !

"These things tormented my childish mind, and pursued me even into my bed, where I would lie awake for hours, unable to sleep for thinking of all the horrors about me.

"I had wide opportunity to observe the life of the peasantry, for they came in groups to discuss every event relating to their communal life with my father, and during such hours I was always at his side, that I might hear what the peasants had to say. There were questions about the fields, the pastures, the woods, the building of cabins, the taxes they must pay, the roads to be built, the marshes to be drained. Then there were questions about recruiting; for in those days it was only the peasants who gave their sons to the Russian army. Child as I was, I could not understand why these honest folk should bear the entire burden of work and of taxes. I saw that my father, good though he was, put much more heart into looking after his own interests than the interests of his serfs, and I was shocked at the inequality between the rich and the poor.

"Often I escaped from home and went alone to the neighboring villages to visit the huts of our peasants; and there I would see old men lying on the straw, friendless and famished, while all through the long summer days the entire population strong enough to work was in the fields, where they would have to toil till the night fell. The little children, dirty, emaciated, would be quarreling in the mud or dust, eating from the same dish with the dogs, and even the pigs. Every Sunday I would see the peasants going into our church, praying with fervor, pouring out their tears, and giving then* last kopek in the name of God that there might be a better life in the next world, since that was their only hope of happiness.

" From the age of eight, how to find justice was the question that troubled me."

Yet the Verigos treated their serfs with much more consideration than most Russian landowners. Her father never had a serf flogged. Their serfs appreciated the difference, and constantly boasted of it. "We belong to the Verigos ! " they would say with pride. When Katya, in conversation with the neighbors, referred to the contrast between the condition of her father's serfs and theirs, she would be cut short with the retort, "Well, your estate is a republic!" Yet even among the Verigos there was not a really warm and friendly feeling toward the peasants, except on Katya's part.

The selfish desire to grab everything, which often shows itself in children at one stage of their development, was unknown to Katya. Her tendency was to give away everything that came into her hands. If she were given some crisp delicacy, fresh from the oven, she would immediately present it to one of the servants. If she got a new toy, she passed it on to some peasant child before the day was out. Often she came home without her cloak or without her dress, having given it away to some shivering, half-clad creature. Rebuked by her mother, she answered, "Mamma, you read to us from tne gospel that if any one has two garments he should give one to the poor. Why are you angry if I do just what you read to us?"

Katya cared little for dolls or playthings, but was very fond of living creatures. She longed for a kitten or a calf. At five years old she begged her mother to give her the entire charge of a young calf. At first her mother would not hear of it. Finally she yielded in part. The children were taken to the barnyard and told that each might choose a calf. They were then brought into the house and instructed to work the names of their pets upon cloth collars, and afterwards they were allowed to adorn the calves with the collars. Their mother thought this was quite enough, and forbade the children to go near the calves any more.

Katya was not satisfied. She yearned to have a little calf of her own, that she could take care of and make a companion. One day as she wandered through the fields, she came upon a thick branch broken from a tree, with twigs growing in such a way as to give it a rough resemblance to an animal. Her heart beat with joy. Here at last was her calf! She propped it up against the tree, and hurried to the house for provisions. She set food before it in one dish and milk in another. Three times a day she fed it, visiting it secretly, and weaving around it all sorts of fancies.

But one day when she was with her governess and the other children, she was seized with an irresistible wish to visit her calf. Half unconsciously, she led them towards it. As soon as they caught sight of it, they all exclaimed, "Ah, Katya's calf! It is Katya's calf ! " Katya felt abashed. Her illusion was shattered, and her wooden calf gave her no further pleasure.

She was always dreaming of helping some one. After the loss of her calf, this dream absorbed her whole being.

She was more interested in people than in anything else. When the family made journeys in their coach, she often caught sight of Jews, and she was moved to great curiosity by their singularities. She looked with awe upon these people who spoke a strange language, wore outlandish clothes, and ate food prepared according to peculiar rules.

Once she saw a group of men with shaven heads and bare feet, laden with heavy chains, driven along the street, under guard. She was much impressed by the sorrowful sight, and asked her mother who they were.

" They are unfortunate people — lost people, who have taken the wrong path in life," her mother answered. But the response did not dispel the mystery. She was constantly asking questions to which she got no answer.

Her chief concern, however, was for the great class of peasants. Her dream was to help them and make them happy. She imagined herself the mistress of a vast estate, where all the unfortunate serfs in the world might live, wearing beautiful clothes, having plenty to eat, and passing their days free from care.

On quiet summer afternoons she would lie down with the tall grass all around her, and look up into the sky, with its flocks of fleecy clouds. In the distance there was a hill over which a coach occasionally passed. Every cloud that drifted by seemed to bear the form of some definite object — a tree, a giant, a city, hills and valleys — whatever she had heard or read about. Against these clouds as a background she built her castles in the air.

She had heard of America, and how Columbus and his companions went there in search of gold, and found treasure in abundance; and she planned to go to California, and there heap up fortunes to bring back with her for the serfs. She would buy vast tracts of land — there they were, in the clouds, mostly islands — and there the peasants should live and cultivate the fertile soil. As she gazed into the many-colored clouds, she saw the very world that she hoped to create.

Katya talked freely of her plans about California, and when her family made fun of them, she answered naively, "But many people have brought gold from that land!"

Chapter II

THE estate of the Verigos was an oasis in the desert. Among the families that they visited, Katya saw very different scenes.

A neighbor and relative of the Verigos was Madame Shiria, a widow with an idiot son. She had the disposal of his immense fortune, and squandered it recklessly. Other relatives tried to have a guardian appointed for him. It was the government's custom to let all matters be decided by the nobility rather than by experts. Instead of having a commission of doctors determine whether the young man was mentally deficient, the authorities decreed that the question should be settled by his acquaintances. Then on every side there were disputes, one person crying, "Fedia is an idiot !" and another protesting, "Fedia is not an idiot !" The line of cleavage was between those who expected to inherit something from Fedia's estate and those who hoped to get a handsome present from Fedia's mother. Madame Shiria hired a young man to personate her son, and placed him in a notary's office as proof that he was quite able to manage his own affairs. Meanwhile she continued to squander his property. She lived like a queen. During a single winter in Berlin she -spent two hundred thousand rubles. She was a woman of rare beauty, and captivated the heart of the

German Emperor; but she filled honest little Katya with disgust.

Once during a grand ball at Madame Shiria's, Katya ran from room to room, looking and listening, as was her custom. The band was playing, couples were dancing, and laughter and merrymaking reigned supreme. At last Katya reached the outer room. In the shadow of the doorway stood a sorrowful figure with bowed head. It was a serf waiting to see Madame Shiria. He had been waiting there all day in the same attitude. He was in tatters, and through the rents in his rags his limbs looked like those of a skeleton. At last Madame Shiria's silken train was heard sweeping along the polished floor, and she appeared. The starving peasant trembled, and a faint light of hope flickered in his eyes. She asked in a chilling tone, "What do you want here?" He threw himself at her feet, and broke into a storm of sobs.

"My lady, God bless you ! Have pity on me. My cow is dead. Help me, I beg of you !"

Madame Shiria stepped back with disdain. "How do these things concern me? Go to my steward. Go."

The serf had already been to the steward, who had sent him to the lady. Katya and her sisters pleaded for the unfortunate man, but he was put out of the house, and Madame Shiria went back to her ballroom. Katya's heart felt as if it were weighed down by a heavy stone.

Another neighbor was fat Duke Baratov, whose "god was his belly." Poor himself, he had married a rich countess, and built a luxurious palace with his wife's money. He kept an orchestra, and gave magnificent banquets and balls. On every holiday a fortune was spent on the champagne alone. And all this fountain of squandered wealth flowed from a source buried in muddy huts and squalid poverty — from the meek and oppressed peasants. Their last penny, their last bit of cloth, cheese, butter, and bread went into his storehouse, while they were starving. He plundered not only the peasants but the merchants. If a merchant came to buy wheat, the Duke would exact a large deposit in advance, promising prompt delivery of the wheat in return. Then he would sell the same wheat over and over again to half a dozen other merchants, taking a deposit from each, and, of course, failing to deliver the grain. The merchants had no redress against a nobleman. The Duke was a frequent visitor at Madame Shiria's, where a circle of the more worthless nobility used to gather. Katya knew this group. She often heard their behavior discussed and condemned in her own home.

Another nobleman was a kleptomaniac, to put it delicately. Wherever he went, his friends had to keep an eye on their silver spoons and candlesticks.

There were a few nobles of a better type. Constantine Verigo liked Nicholas Kovalik — the father of that Kovalik who afterwards became a leader in the revolutionary movement of the seventies. Young Kovalik's mother and Katya's mother had been schoolmates. The friendship between the two families was so close that, although their estates lay far apart, visits were frequent; and the simplicity and sincerity of the Kovaliks made a lasting impression on Katya.

When the nobles of the better sort got together, she noticed that they often discussed certain matters in subdued tones and behind closed doors. Sometimes one would read aloud an article not wholly favorable to the Czar, or recite a poem by Pushkin or Chamikon. Those were the days of the terrible Czar Nicholas. Nobody dared to say a word against him in public, but the nobles condemned him in secret. Then came the Crimean War, and the great siege of Sebastopol ; and those same nobles freely offered the Czar regiments of serfs gathered from their estates. Thousands of peasants wearing red girdles and red hatbands were torn from their families, armed with guns and axes, and sent forth to do or die, in the name of God and the Czar. These contradictions between men's thoughts and their actions grated on the young girl's feelings, and made her wonder.

Another acquaintance of the Verigos was a Duchess Galitzin, living on a grand estate near Lugovetz in the Starodubov district, in a palace that an emperor might have envied. She was a member of the highest aristocracy, as intimate with the Czar's family as with her own. When Katya was still very young, the Duchess invited Constantine Verigo to take charge of her vast estate as her steward, and Verigo, having but little to do, consented.

He rode to Lugovetz, taking his family with him. Katya now had a chance to see what was considered the highest society ; and when they afterwards went to Petrograd, she found herself among the very flower of the aristocracy. The old Duchess had ladies in waiting of various degrees, and innumerable servants and attendants, all graded and classified. Before any one entered her august presence, it was necessary to go through a long series of scrutinies and cross-examinations. The only rebel against these ceremonies was little Katya. She objected to bowing before the Duchess as before a goddess. Her mother told her that the Duchess was her elder in years, and demanded reverence; but Katya felt that the old lady preferred submission to reverence, and fear to love.

The mother had brought the children up on the Bible and religious stories ; but in the Duchess's library they found material of every kind. There were pictures of foreign countries, landscapes and love scenes, romances and books of history and travel. At nine years old Katya had read the whole of Karanzin's "History of Russia", in several volumes. She read books of travel with eagerness, and remembered the details so well that once, years after, when she talked about foreign countries with the captain of a ship, he felt sure that she must have actually visited the places she described. Her practical mind led her also to devour discussions of the market price of wheat, of land, etc., and to study her father's business records and letters. She did not care for fiction. What interested her was real life.

As she learned more, she grew more and more heartsick over the way the peasants were treated. When she was but ten years old, her indignation against the flogging of the serfs broke out in such hot words that her old peasant nurse begged her to speak low.

"My father helped me to think," she says. "He was a man of broad, liberal ideas. We read together many books of science and travel. Social science absorbed me. By sixteen I had read much of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, and I knew the French Revolution by heart. I spoke French from babyhood, and my German governess had taught me German; and at that time the world's best thought was not garbled by the Russian censorship.

"Fired by such ideas, I saw the poor, degraded slaves around me, and longed to set them free. At first I believed that freedom could be reached without a radical change of government. No revolutionary spirit had yet been kindled. It was the first great era of the Liberals. The emancipation of the serfs was soon to take place ; so too the introduction of trial by jury ; and these promised reforms sent a social impulse sweeping through Russia. I was thrilled by the glad news. Filled with young enthusiasm, I opened a little school near our estate.

"I found the peasant an abject, ignorant creature, who did not understand even the meagre rights he already had. He could think only of his mud hut and his plot of ground. As for the government, he knew only that in peace he must pay money ; in war, lives. The new rumors had kindled his old heart-deep hope of freedom. The twenty peasants in my school, like the millions in Russia, suspected that the proclamation had been hidden, and often went to the landowners demanding their freedom. At last the manifesto emancipating the serfs arrived."

This was in 1861, when Catherine was seventeen. It was an era of hope and enthusiasm among the Russian Liberals. But in some respects emancipation made the lot of the peasants worse instead of better. Under the old regime, each serf, besides cultivating his master's estates, had had a plot of ground on which he raised food for his own family. He had supposed that this plot of ground would still belong to him. He soon found his mistake.

"The peasant was free. No longer bound to the land, his landlord ordered him off. He was shown a little strip of the poorest soil, there to be free and starve. He was bewildered; he could not imagine himself without his old plot of land. For centuries past, an estate had always been described as containing so many 'souls.' It was sold for so much per 'soul.' The ' soul ' and the plot had always gone together. So the peasant had thought that his soul and his plot would be freed together. In dull but growing rage, he refused to leave his plot of land for the wretched strip. 'Masters,' he cried, 'how can I nourish my little ones through a Russian winter? Such land means death.' This cry rose all over Russia.

"The government appointed in every district an 'arbiter' to persuade the peasants. The arbiter failed. Then troops were quartered in their huts, families were starved, old people were beaten by drunkards, daughters were raped. The peasants grew more wild, and then began the flogging. In a village near ours, where they refused to leave their plots, they were driven into line on the village street; every tenth man was called out and flogged with the knout ; some died. Two weeks later, as they still held out, every fifth man was flogged. The poor ignorant creatures still held desperately to what they thought their rights ; again the line, and now every man was dragged forward to the flogging. This process went on for five years all over Russia, until at last, bleeding and exhausted, the peasants gave in.