An Eye-witness from Russia
INTRODUCTION
[Reprinted from "The Manchester Guardian."]
[The writer of this and the articles which will follow has been in Russia since the autumn of 1916 engaged in relief work under the Society of Friends' War Victims' Relief Committee. His work has brought him into an intimate contact with the peasants in their villages, and has enabled him to see their life and follow their thoughts from an unusually close range,
After leaving the town of Buzuluk in July, 1918, he travelled across Siberia in close touch with the Czechs during their slow advance, and was able to watch the political events as they might have been seen by newspaper correspondents had they been there, and at the same time, because of his peasant pronunciation of Russian and familiarity with the Russian people, to catch the drift of undercurrents which are less visible from the view-point of those whose dealings led them into high places.]
The relief unit of which 1 am a member went to the Buzuluk department of the Samara government in the summer of 1916, and worked almost all the time in the villages of that district. My contact with the people of Russia in this way was rather unique in that as a country doctor I was brought close to the home life and customs of the peasants, and I obtained an insight into the minds of a people who are slow to reveal themselves to strangers.
During the successive changes in government I watched the developing political consciousness of the peasants and noted their gradual change in attitude towards the Government and their generosity of sentiment with regard to it. I was always treated well in the villages, because my work was one which was considered of social value, and as a physician I was regarded as a workman with special training and therefore a valuable acquisition to the district.
In July, 1918, after the Czechs had captured the province and the railway and a Te Deum had been sung in the Cathedral in Samara by the Archbishop because Siberia was rid of the Bolsheviks, I travelled to Samara on the way to England. In that town I came into contact with the American Y.M.C.A. and the Czech officials, and mixed with consuls and in Russian society for the first time. I was now no longer a workman valuable because of special training, but a foreigner, and as I was in uniform I appeared to be a person of rank or position. I saw the gulf that lay between the upper classes and the peasants. Detached from the land, having interests in the problems of empire, the upper classes seemed hardly of the same people as the moujiks, whose chief concerns were in the social relationships and government of their village communities. I was treated as a "traveller," and told the Russian society people about the life of their own peasants.
The journey through Siberia was eased by the fact that I carried official papers for the Samara branch of the American Consulate General in Moscow and because of the kindness which the Czechs extended to the English and Americans. I received letters of recommendation which gave me the privilege of having reserved coupés when the trains were so crowded that each car had an average of ten people on the roof. At the stations the thousand passengers turned out of the carriages and cattle trucks (there was one of the former to forty of the latter) to stretch themselves or get boiling water for tea. In the rush to get hot water or buy food the sense of equality which the Revolution brought asserted itself, and foreign officer and peasant, Englishman, Russian, Kirghis, stood in line and waited. their turn. Things were different in the old régime.
By means of the letters of recommendation I was able to reach Irkutsk from Samara in the amazingly short period of ten days, changing from passenger trains to hospital trains, to military trains, to peasants' carts as occasion demanded, the line not being continuous owing to bridges being destroyed. There I was delayed two months owing to the Bolsheviks still being in force (and fighting) round Baikal and Chita. In Irkutsk I lived with General Illyashavitch, ex-Chief of Staff of the Third Siberian Army Corps (old régime), with whom I used to talk far into the night on the political situation. From him and from the members of the Consular Corps, from the representatives of the Social Revolutionary Right, and from peasants and workmen with whom I talked I was able to get a variety of new political impressions which led me to suspend judgments which I may have formed with respect to Bolshevism, just as under the influence of the peasants I had learned to suspend judgment on the administration of the old régime.
Travelling through Manchuria and in Vladivostok I came for the first time into contact with the Allies, and so added another political point of view to my collection.
My impression on that journey was that I was travelling in a different direction from that usually taken by foreigners; I was travelling from the village, the life of the village, to the city, and so on to foreign opinions. The experience led me to reflect on the basis on which most opinions on Russia are formed. The village was not to me a curiosity, it was normal Russian life; the opinions of the village were the first Russian opinions I gathered first-hand. As they differed greatly from my usual stock of ideas I began to see the necessity of analysing the sources of all opinions, and so when I talked with consuls, generals, engine-drivers, and moujiks I found myself first trying to see whence they received their ideas, and next what were their ideals in life and in government.