Читать книгу The Red Reign. The True Story of an Adventurous Year in Russia онлайн

9 страница из 93

In St. Petersburg and Moscow during the session of the first Duma I cultivated the acquaintance of the “intellectuals” who at that time bade fair to be a dominant force in Russia. Men of the type of Professor Paul Miliukoff, Maxime Kovalevsky, Dr. Loris-Melikoff, and other thinkers and scholars who would, if they could, lead Russia through her period of regeneration and reorganization by confining the struggle to the halls of Parliament, dreading as they do, and distrusting bloodshed and civil war. After the dissolution I affiliated almost entirely with the avowedly revolutionary parties. I cultivated members of the military organization and with them visited the barracks at Kronstadt and elsewhere, where I witnessed conspirative revolutionary meetings of soldiers and sailors. Through the courtesy of a local governor I was permitted to visit in prison the most noted terrorist of the year in Russia, Marie Spiradonova; and later, through my revolutionary connections, I established communications with the more active fighting organization known to the world as “The Terrorists.” With their introductions as well as with the introductions given me by the constitutionalists of the Duma, in the late summer and early autumn I traveled eastward through Great Russia, across the tremendous famine belt, passed the Urals and entered Siberia, returning to St. Petersburg across Perm, Vyatka, and Vologda,—provinces of northern Russia. My sole aim during all these journeyings was to acquire as nearly as I could an accurate picture of Russia in revolution. My purpose now is to present as nearly an accurate and truthful a picture of what I saw and of what I learned as possible. When one has witnessed at close quarters the devastations of villages by the army; when one has seen with his own eyes unarmed men, women, and children of tender years shot by soldiers, torn and maimed by swords and bayonets; when one has acquired absolutely an overwhelming proof of official responsibility for massacre; when one has seen homes burned indiscriminately and merely “suspected” revolutionists exiled without even the forms of a trial, one cannot speak with any degree of sympathy for the government which stands behind all of these things. Yet I strive to the uttermost to be fair to that side and to present as cogently as one can the elements of truth to which the government still clings. The point of view throughout is that of an American who is not unmindful of the dramatic elements of the fight nor of the picturesque; and frequently romantic environments of the struggle; at the same time it is of one whose deepest interest lies in the social and economic causes which lie at the bottom of the whole vast movement, and whose previous training has fitted him to watch with a clearer perception perhaps than is usually given to the casual traveler, or newspaper correspondent, the progress of the social and economic development through this period of storm and stress.