Through Russia on a mustang

Front matter

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Preface

IN the following pages the author has endeavored to give an unbiased picture of the Russians and their country^ as seen by him from the saddle, on a horseback ride of more than one thousand miles through the heart of the country, from Moscow to Sevastopol; thence up the Don and the Volga to Nijni Novgorod.

When in Moscow, preparing for the horseback journey, I was fortunate enough to enlist the enthusiasm of Sascha Kritsch, a young Russian who had just completed his studies, and was eager to distinguish himself by a noteworthy achievement in the saddle before joining the cavalry. He could speak English, and both as an interpreter and a companion I found him of much value. He accompanied me as far as Ekaterinoslav, about two thirds of the distance to the Black Sea, when the heat and fatigue of the southern steppes, together with the suspicions and vexatious interference of the police, caused him to dispose of his horse and return to Moscow by rail.

I may say that, in so far as I permitted myself the indulgence of preconceived ideas, my wish was to exploit the better, rather than the more objectionable, features of the government, and the economic and political conditions of the country. Before the ride

vii

VI 11 PREFACE.

was half finished, however, I found myself compelled to admit that matters were very bad, indeed.

The harshest feature of the many harsh sides of life in Russia, to an American, is the utter absence of constitutional rights.

Individuals have no rights in Russia. They exist in peace and breathe the air outside a prison cell solely on the sufferance of the police, whose authority over them is practically that of deputy despots in their capacity as representatives of the Czar.

When I first reached St. Petersburg, I wrote home of the agreeable impression that was made on me by seeing the Czar driving freely about the streets, with scarcely any escort. Before leaving Russia, however, I discovered that, in order to make this sort of thingpossible, the Czar's Chief of Police summarily expels from the capital no less than fifteen thousand persons every year, or an average of over forty a day. Tourists and casual visitors from America and Europe see the Czar driving about in this manner, but they know nothing of the other side of the picture — of the steady streams of " suspects " and others driven from the city, three fourths of Avhom are probably innocent of evil intent, and so they come away with rosy and erroneous impressions, thinking they have seen Russia.

Those who have seen merely St. Petersburg and Moscow, have seen little or nothing of real Russia, nor even if they have made the grand tour across the country by rail, and up or down the Volga. These tourists have glided over the surface of Russia, their path made smooth and agreeable by the imported polish of the West ; but they have not been in it.

PRE FA CE. IX

Russia has within its vast area resources that should make its future as promising as the future of the United States. The development of the country from this time forward offers a field of profound speculation for prophetic statesmen and political seers. That a nation of 120,000,000 people, chiefly Caucasians, are to be kept in bondage forever is out of the question. Hopeless as the outlook seems at present for the masses of the Russian people, all history teaches that the day of their emancipation will, sooner or later, come. The best solution of the situation that could be hoped for, would, perhaps, be a progressive and liberal Czar, who would have sufficient courage and energy to give the country a constitutional government, a free press, and religious liberty. If this be too long delayed, and the autocracy should survive the fall of European militarism, which is inevitable, civilization will develop an "age of humanitarianism " when the American, the Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Teuton, will recognize the Russian as a brother, and see to it that he is relieved of his shackles.

The Author.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. St. Petersburg, i

II. TCHUDOVO AND THE PrISTAV, . . . . 23

Chapter I

ST. PETERSBURG.

FOR the second time I was bound for the Land of the Czar. But this time I was to enter it by a different door, in a different manner, and for a different purpose. My previous entrance had been incidental ; this was to be special. In 1886, when on my bicycle ride across Asia, Russian suspicion had barred my road through Turkestan, and the Afghans had arrested me and turned me back into Persia, after I had pierced into their forbidden country to within three hundred miles of Quetta. So, in June of that year, when, in order to overcome this hundred-league barrier it became necessary to reach the free roads of India by a roundabout journey of six thousand miles, I saw something of Russia in the Caucasus and on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

My impressions were not favorable to the Russian rule. At the wharves of Baku, I, for the first time in my life, had seen smart, uniformed policemen strike people smashing blows in the face with clenched fist, and kick them most brutally in the stomach, for what in England or America would have called forth a mere gruff order to '* move on," or at most a threatening push. From page 257, vol. 2, ** Around the World on a Bicycle," I quote, writing of my impressions of Baku:

'* Everywhere, everywhere, hovers the shadow of the police. One seems to breathe dark suspicion and mistrust in the very air. The people in the civil walks of life all look like whipped curs. They wear the expression of people brooding over some deep sorrow. The crape of dead liberty seems to hang on every door-knob. Nobody seems capable of smiling; one would think the shadow of some great calamity is hanging gloomily over the city. Nihilism and discontent run riot in the cities of the Caucasus ; government spies and secret police are everywhere, and the people on the streets betray their knowledge of the fact by talking little, and always in guarded tones."

Such was the impression made on the author by his first visit to Russian soil. Was this impression in any degree the result of disgust at having been humbugged by the Russian Minister, at Teheran, about permission to ride through Merve, Samarkand, and Tashkend ? That gentleman had promised me, with Oriental politeness of tongue, that '' all obstacles should be removed from my road through Turkestan." With the innocence of one whose experience of Russian ofificialdom was yet of the future, I had believed that the tongue of a Russian diplomat, like the tongue of any other person, was given him to express his thoughts and intentions, and not to conceal them ; and so, on the strength of the promise, I rode three hundred miles across the Persian deserts, there to find that orders had been telegraphed to stop me at the frontier.

Commenting on this, a reviewer of my book in the

New York Times, himself a distinguished traveler, observed : '"' Possibly this reverse may have been still fuddling the clear spirit of our author when he reached

Baku Mr. Stevens was probably of the same

way of thinking (just then) as that energetic traveler who wished that the last Russian would murder the last Turk, and be hanged for doing it."

Nearly four years, mainly devoted to travel and adventurous undertakings, had mellowed this gloomy reminiscence of the Russians, and had broadened my experience of mankind in general. Perhaps, after all, there might have been something in the book reviewer's suggestions, that I was not then in a sufficiently amiable frame of mind to do Muscovy justice.

However this may have been, such was not the case as the author stepped aboard an Atlantic liner. May I, 1890, bound for Russia, on a special mission for the New York World.

For many years the people of America had taken a friendly interest in Russia. We had been, in trying times, the recipient of courtesies from its government, and our sympathies had gone out to it as a great nation of people groaning under the oppressive rule of an autocracy, which is the extreme antithesis of our own institutions. Our position in regard to its government had been peculiar. From our own point of view the Czar's government cannot appear otherwise than as a monstrous enemy to the very principles that are the life-blood of all that we hold dear and precious in the name of liberty, fraternity, and justice ; yet we have accepted courtesies at its hands as from the hands of a bosom friend. Now and then our sentiments in regard to it have been rudely shocked by revelations of a more or less revolting nature as to its methods of dealing with the people in its power. Our interest in it became painfully intensified as the Siberian revelations of Mr. Kennan were unfolded in the Century Magazine.

So revolting was this picture of barbarity and administrative corruption that many of our people, whose kindly remembrance of Russian courtesies influenced their prejudices and biased their better feelings in its favor, could not but receive them with a spirit of wondering skepticism.

The Russians were keenly sensitive to the criticisms of the people of America concerning them, more so than to the opinions of any other nation. A rebuke from us seemed to them like a rebuke from a friend. They are thicker-skinned in regard to England. Abuse and bias from the press and people of England, many Russians have come to regard as a foregone conclusion. They think the great dailies of England will publish eagerly anything and everything of a disreputable and abusive nature about Russia, and refuse, like the Jews in regard to Nazareth, to believe that anything gQod can come out of it. This is the inevitable consequence of the political tension between the two empires. But they expected from us, at least, an impartial judgment equally as to their good qualities and their imperfections. It was because they regarded America as a country with which they have ever been on the friendliest terms, that made the Russians feel apprehensive lest the Kennan articles should cause them to be wholly misunderstood, and blind us to the better side of their nature. One cannot, of course, say anything in this connection of the 119,- 900,000, out of Russia's 120,000,000, who never heard of the Century nor Mr. Kennan, and who have as vague ideas of the world beyond the limited horizon of their village communes (mirs) as the Persian ryot in Khorassan, who once asked me if America was in London.

There was little to be learned of the true Russia in St. Petersburg. In Russia the investigator very soon discovers that he is sojourning in what may fairly be termed a dual country. There is the Russia of St. Petersburg, Moscow, the Czar, the army, politics, exiles, Siberia, — of which we read and hear from day to day, — and there is the Russia of the peasants, the villages, the country-side, " domestic Russia," of which we hear, and many of us know, next to nothing. By writing too confidently at the beginning, one may easily lay himself open to the sort of criticism bestowed on the English tourist, who rides in a parlor-car from New York to San Francisco and then goes home and writes a book about America.

Though St. Petersburg is deceptive as a glimpse of Russia, it is an Imperial city, magnificent as to churches and public edifices, statuary and monuments, and interesting in the life that ebbs and flows in its streets. St. Petersburg is the rouge and enamel that the sallow, ill-looking tragedienne of the mediaeval part that Russia is playing in the drama of nations, wears, beautifying herself, and coquetting successfully with many who see her and fancy she is Russia. St. Petersburg itself is charming.

I sat for an hour one day in the window of a caf6 on the famous Nevski Prospekt. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and a fine, sunny day. All the Russian world and his wife seemed to be driving, walking, hurrying, idling past the window on this Broadway of the Russian capital.

The most numerous passers-by, and to the new-comer the most Russian and interesting, were the drosky-drivers, the isvoshchics and their " fares." Like Washington, St. Petersburg is a city of magnificent distances. Everybody rides ; fares are cheap ; and there are twenty-five thousand public drosky-drivers in the city plying for hire.

The isvoshchic and his costume are peculiarly Russian. The latter has not changed for ages, and apart from youth and age, whiskers and no whiskers, there is not the splitting of a hair between any of the five-and-twenty thousand public " kebbies " in the Czar's capital. There are isvoshchics at fourteen, young in face but old in iniquity, and isvoshchics of seventy-five, bearded like pards and supremely artful, in bargaining with the foreigner about the price of a drive.

The summer costume of the isvoshchic is an ideal garb for winter from the point of view of anybody but a Russian. He is enveloped in an enormous overcoat of heavy dark-blue cloth that descends to his heels and is gathered about his waist by a gay-colored band. Top boots, heavy and prodigal of leather, incase his feet and legs ; and even on this warm June day a disarrangement of the big blue over-garment revealed a sheepskin coat, of similar dimensions, underneath.

But the crowning glory of the drosky-driver is his hat. Imagine a " stove-pipe " hat, six inches tall, with a very rakish brim and a very expansive crown, something like the hats of the ancient and honorable beef-eaters at the Tower of London, and you see any one of the 30,000 coachmen's hats of St. Petersburg. I say 30,000, because there are, beside the public isvoshchics, about five thousand private coachies, similarly dressed.

The only difference between the public and private isvoshchics is that the latter look about three times larger than the former. All the private isvoshchics are men of Falstafifian girth. Some are of a truly startling circumference ; their stomachs bulging out like barrels, and the breadth of their figure more than fills the seat of the drosky. The thinness of the face often contrasts ludicrously with the vast proportions of the body, for the amplitude of the latter is not flesh but padding. The impression that the private coachman desires to make upon the world at large is that he is the '* well-fed servant of a generous man." To this end, huge pads, like pillows, are fastened about the body, and over them is wrapped the all-concealing overcoat. To complete the deception, the colored waistband pinches into the padding, as if the chief concern of the owner of this vast wealth of fat were to reduce his girth, if such an impossible thing were possible.

Whilst every private isvoshchic in Russia is thus a living lie in his figure, every public one is likewise a perambulating Ananias in a way that more directly concerns the pockets of the public. Every drive you take in St. Petersburg has to be bargained for in advance. The rates are cheaper than in any other European capital, being only fifty kopecks, or about thirty cents an hour. The St. Petersburg isvoshchic is known as the most reasonable of the fraternity in Russia; he rarely demands more than three times his proper fare, and as a general thing not even twice as much as he is willing to accept.

He is good-natured and remarkably patient about finding an address. He is polite — of the Orient, Oriental. He rarely gives you a decided negative if he doesn't wish to drive where you desire to go, but takes refuge in his horse, telling you that it is weary, lazy, or ailing, and does not want to work.

The isvoshchic is superstitious and fearful. Every little way, as he drives you along, he passes an ikon or shrine, at each of which he removes his abbreviated cylinder and crosses himself at the forehead, mouth and breast. His fear is centered on the Chief of Police of St. Petersburg. The isvoshchic is rarely obstreperous, but if he is, ''I'll tell Gresser " (or whoever happens to be chief), brings matters to a speedy conclusion by immediately reducing him to a humble and apprehensive frame of mind.

His horse is small and his vehicle little larger than the old-fashioned invalid chairs one sometimes meets, with gouty old gentlemen in them, in the parks at home.

A peculiarity of the " fares," if a lady and gentleman, is that the latter usually has his arm about his companion's waist. -The Russian explanation is that without this precaution the lady might tumble out. The levity and penetration of the American mind,

S7\ PETERSBURG. 9

however, refuses to accept this practical view of the matter in all cases. And there certainly passed by the cafe window many a couple who, oblivious of the public eye, betrayed a decidedly sentimental interpretation of the relations between waist and arm. So prevalent is this custom that an exception excites attention.

About five per cent, of the ladies, old or young, who passed by the cafe window were victims of the toothache and had a swollen and bandaged jaw. Toothache is the commonest malady of the St. Petersburg fair sex. The St. Petersburg girl of the period stays up late, lies abed till noon, takes no exercise, and lives on sweets and pickles. Her punishment is the toothache, dentist's bills, a toothless old age, and a very bad complexion. Good teeth are rare with city ladies, and a fresh complexion is seldom seen on the streets.

Half the men who passed were in uniform and, warm as it was, like the isvoshchics, wore big overcoats. The wearing of overcoats in summer is a Russian peculiarity. One of our popular impressions of the Russian is that he can stand more cold than a polar bear. Such, however, is not the case, at all events with the city Russian. An American or European who visits St. Petersburg or Moscow in the winter can stand the cold better than a resident. He can stand it outdoors with thinner clothes on, and is altogether less sensitive to the nose-nipping Russian frost. The Russian becomes a polar bear in winter, not because he can stand the cold, but because he cannot.

All the people in military uniforms who passed b}^, however, were not soldiers. You see little shavers of ten or twelve years old trudging along in military over-

I o THR UGH R US SI A ON A M US TA NG.

coat and trappings. These are young students, who are required to wear uniforms, conspicuous colors and trimmings for the different schools for purposes of identification. The newsboys also wear uniforms.

A troop of Cossacks passed by, all big, fine fellows, belonging to one of the crack regiments, all riding splendid black stallions, sixteen hands high, spirited and glossy.

A private carriage, an English-built brougham, with a magnificent team, and gold-laced lackeys on the box, dashed by. It belonged to one of the legations, and lolling in the seat, in a studiedly negligent attitude, was Madame, the Ambassador's wife, alone in her glory, en route to the Islands — Vasili Ostrof — for her regular evening drive.

A string of twelve droskies filed past, each one containing a big Russian greyhound and a keeper in a red shirt. They belonged to some sporting nobleman, and were bound for the railway station to be taken somewhere out in the country to an estate for a day's coursing for hares.

A man in a suit of white coarse canvas, and with a brand on the back, tramped along between two policemen with drawn swords. He was a prisoner. His face was pale, showing that he had been in confinement some time. Otherwise, he looked no different from his keepers, with whom he chatted freely as they walked past.

An aged couple tried to halt a tram, which, like the street car of London, carried passengers both inside and on the roof. The conductor shook them a negative. His car was carrying the number permitted by

ST. PETERSBURG. ii

law, and no such confusion and overcrowding are allowed as in New York. Another one came along. The old couple tried it again and were again refused. Finally they hailed a passing isvoshchic, and, bargaining with him awhile, drove off.

An economical party of four from the country drove past, all piled in one small drosky, two women sitting in two men's laps. Workmen strolled along, nine out often in top boots and red shirts. The red shirts were outside the trousers. A waistcoat was worn, but no coat, and the trousers were slouchily tucked inside the boots. Mingled with the throng were moujiks from the country, visiting '' Pater-boorg," perhaps, for the first time in their lives. They wore dirty sheepskin coats, shockingly bad caps, home-made foot-gear of the rudest pattern and material, and tiieir shock heads seemed to have been trimmed for the visit to the city by placing a bowl on the top, upside down, and clipping around it. They looked like savages — as incongruous and out of place on the Nevski as Indians would on Fifth Avenue, New York.

Nurse-maids from Finland, or from Little Russia, rode by in the family carriage with their charges. Tliey wore a wonderful dress of gorgeous colors and gold embroidery, and a sort of beaded brass, silver or gold crown on the head.

Young lady students passed in little troops or alone, carrying portfolios bearing the word " Musique." Music was the fad of the day in St. Petersburg. All the young ladies were raving over " musique." Next season the craze would be — who can say ? I was told that one of the latest fads with them was the study of midwifery. Everything in the student life, especially the girl student life, is faddy and eccentric. It is the spasmodic attempt of the intellectual Russian youth to find some employment, some scope for their energy and ambition, in a field where there is next to no intellectual employment at all.

A small crowd was gathering on the street corner, as I left my window in the cafe. The Czar was coming in from Peterhoff and would drive this way. I did not wait, for I had seen him and the Empress before. The Emperor and Empress were almost as much in evidence as the President in Washington. When the Czar and the Italian heir-apparent, who was visiting St. Petersburg, drove down the Nevski, it was down a lane through the assembled and applauding populace, on which scarcely a soldier or a policeman was to be seen. The people were under less restraint than a New York crowd is at any popular gathering.

All this impressed me, a new arrival, with a sense of agreeable surprise.*

Yes ; St. Petersburg, consummate actress and gay deceiver that she is, was bewitching, disporting herself, arrayed in the focused glories of an empire, to the admiration of an audience of pleasure-seeking tourists from everywhere. The pageantry of the Czar's capital was ever on the move across the stage. To-day the christening and launching of an ironclad ; to-morrow a priestly procession along the Nevski, a glittering cavalcade of monks in golden vestments, in honor of the Emperor's name-day ; the next day, a military review.

One day I resolved to leave this pomp and Imperial greatness, and experience the contrast of a sudden change from the Elysian glories of Peterhoff to the huts of a typical village seventy miles away. Peterhoff is an Imperial summer residence on the gulf of Finland ; grounds peopled with gilded statuary, amid a magnificent system of fountains.

Mr. Steveni of the London Daily Chronicle^ a resident correspondent, went with me to Tchudovo.

Tchudovo is about one hundred versts (seventy miles) from St. Petersburg, in the direction of Moscow, a village in the district government of Novgorod. A Russian village is in appearance the counterpart of many small towns in the Western States. The first impression of the writer, who knows the West very well, was that he had stumbled into one of those slowly decaying backwood villages in Missouri or Illinois that have fallen out of joint and behind the times because the railway didn't come through their section of the country. Tchudovo is situated in a country as level and dreary as the dreariest part of any of the prairie States. The land belonging to the village was a big clearing in a level forest country that presented to the eye no single point of interest beyond the people and their mode of life. The village was like all Russian villages, except that many of the houses were two-storied. It consisted of two rows of houses, between which ran Peter the Great's broad military road to Novgorod. A few of the houses were of brick, but most were of wood. Here as everywhere, though the uniformity of architecture was striking, evidences of wealth and poverty came within the orbit of a glance. Some of the houses were fairly toppling about their occupant's heads, and in no country of the world (and I had been in twenty-four), had I seen people so wretchedly lodged as part of the population of Tchudovo. Many, however, were good, comfortable board or log houses, comparable to the houses of eighty-acre farmers in the West. Half the houses might, perhaps, come under this description ; one fourth of them would be considered by us as wholly unfit for human habitation, and the remainder were superior dwellings, from the American farmer's standpoint, including one which might fairly be termed a mansion.

There was a bakery, in front of which, on a rude bench, a row of huge rye loaves were exposed for sale. There were three or four general stores, the counterparts of the American corner grocery, and as many vodka and mead and kwass shops. There was the inevitable village smithy and a school ; towering over all was a large white church, surmounted by four blue domes and a blue spire. Both church and mansion were of Graeco-Corinthian architecture, a fact that led one to suspect that the founder of the church and the former occupant of the mansion, before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, was the nobleman who owned the land and peasantry of the district.

We made our way to the blacksmith shop, here, as in the West, often the gossiping place of the village, and entered into conversation with the blacksmith, a man of fifty, his son and assistant, a young man of twenty-five, and a ragged moujik, all of whom took off their hats as we entered and sat down. As many of my readers already know, the Russian villages are communes of peasants who own their land in common. Except for the disturbing influences of insolvent peasants who have recklessly got over their heads in debt, or from other causes, have become landless, the Russian village commune or mir is a collection of families and kinsfolk who own the right of tillage each to a certain portion of their common land. This is the ideal mir. But with the mir as with everything else, in Russia as elsewhere, the real and the ideal seldom agree.

The mir of Tchudovo, the blacksmith said, contained 2000 people, of which something over 500 were '' souls," that is to say, sharers in the land. The rest were the children, small shopkeepers and vodka-sellers, the "pope" or priest, the grain merchant who lived in the mansion of the former nobleman, and landless '' batraks," who worked for wages at anything they could find to do. The blacksmith's son was the most intelligent of the three. We asked him about the mir and the various things that make up the sum and substance of the Russian peasant's life. The people of Tchudovo, he said, had been wiser than many of their neighbors. The mirs had a right to borrow money from the banks or from private capitalists, giving the land as security. Many had done this, and by pledging themselves to ruinous terms were in sorry straits, having hard work to keep their heads above water and pay their taxes.

"We have had better sense, though," said he, smiling with the peculiar grin of a simple rustic soul who is not to be easily taken in, " and have never borrowed money, and so our mir is very well off."

" If your mir is well off, why, then, are there so many batraks (men without land who work for wages) here ? "

" Men and mirs are very much alike," he returned ; **some are wise and some foolish. Most men become batraks because they have foolishly borrowed money, and, being unable to repay, their horses and cows have been sold, and they have lost their power to cultivate any of the mir's land. Every member of the mir has the right to work a share of the land for the support of his family and the payment of his taxes, a large or small portion according to the number of persons capable of field-work and tax-payment in the family ; but with the loss of his horses and the means of working land he is no longer a moujik, but a batrak, a man who would starve but for charity or work given him by others."