Table Of Contentassociazione culturale Larici – http://www.larici.it
Albert Rhys Williams
Through the Russian Revolution
Illustrated with photographs and Russian posters in colors
BONI AND LIVERIGHT Publishers
New York
1921
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TO
THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS OF RUSSIA
WHO FELL IN DEFENSE OF THE REVOLUTION
“Against riches, power and knowledge for the few you
began a war, and with glory you died in order that riches,
power and knowledge should become universal.”
***
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I
THE MAKERS OF THE REVOLUTION
WITH THE WORKERS, PEASANTS AND FIGHTERS
I. The Bolsheviks and the City
II. Petrograd Demonstrates
III. A Peasant Interlude
IV. The Man on Horseback
V. Comrades of the Sea
PART II
THE REVOLUTION AND THE DAYS AFTER
AMONG THE WHITES AND THE REDS
VI. “All Power to the Soviets”
VII. November 7 – A New Date in History
VIII. Looting the Winter Palace
IX. Red Guards, White Guards, and Blackguards
X. Mercy or Death to the Whites?
XI. The War of the Classes
XII. Building the New Order
PART III
THE OUTREACH OF THE REVOLUTION
ACROSS SIBERIA ON THE EXPRESS
XIII. The Steppes Rise Up
XIV. The Red Convicts of Cherm
XV. The Vladivostok Soviet
XVI. The Local Soviet at Work
PART IV.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE REVOLUTION
THE SOVIETS AGAINST THE CAPITALIST WORLD
XVII. The Allies Crush the Soviet
XVIII. The Red Funeral
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XIX. Exit
XX. Retrospect
APPENDICES
I. The Death of a Red Regiment
II. The Death Train of Siberia
III. The Burial of Yanishev
IV. A Circular for British Soldiers
V. Yesterday and Today, by Gorky
VI. Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples
VII. Posters and Placards
PHOTOGRAPHS AND POSTERS
Children of Darkness and Light (color) Frontispiece
One of the Ten Thousand Soviets
Lenin Speaks
The Red Horseman (color)
A Cathedral of Communist Faith
“The River of Red”
The Sailors Enter Petrograd
Lying Down to Escape Death
Peasant Paradoxes
The Woodchoppers – The Harvesters
Forward to the Light (color)
Obliterating the Past
The Bronze Czar Beheaded
The Illiterate is a Blind Man (color)
Cossack, with Whom are You? (color)
A Crack Fighting Regiment
Red Guards Before the Winter Palace
The Trojan Horse of the Bolsheviks
The Sentinel
Antonov, Head of the Red Guards
Bolsheviks at Study
Bolsheviks under Arms – At Work
The Sickle and the Book (color)
Palace Passes to the Children
At Play – Bolshevik Milk Maids
Clay Modelling – The Children’s Theatre
Trotzky Salutes
The Czar’s Surprise Party
A Siberian Mother Mourns her Dead
Ivan Finds a True Friend (color)
The Steel Ring of Bayonets
A Defender of Land and Liberty
Intervention Begins
The Red Funeral
Comrades! Fight Typhus (color)
A Communist Pays the Price
On the Death Train
The Kremlin in Moscow (color)
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INTRODUCTION
In Moscow I saw two peasant soldiers gazing at a poster being stuck up
on a kiosk.
“We can’t read a word of it,” they cried, indignant tears in their eyes.
“The Czar only wanted us to plough and fight and pay taxes. He didn’t want
us to read. He put out our eyes.”
“To put out the eyes” of the masses, to put out their minds and
consciences, was the deliberate policy of the Russian autocracy. For
centuries the people were steeped in ignorance, narcotized by the church,
terrorized by the Black Hundreds, dragooned by the Cossacks. The
protesters were thrown into dungeons, exiled to hard labor in Siberian
mines, and hung up on gibbets.
In 1917 the social and economic fabric of the land was shot to pieces. Ten
million peasants dragged from their ploughs were dying in the trenches.
Millions more were perishing of cold and hunger in the cities while the
corrupt ministers intrigued with the Germans and the court held
bacchanalian revels with the notorious monk, Rasputin. Even the Cadet,
Milyukov, was forced to say: “History does not know of another government
so stupid, so dishonest, so cowardly, so treacherous.”
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All governments rest upon the patience of the poor. It seems everlasting,
but there comes an end to it. It came in Russia in March, 1917
The masses felt that more vicious even than the Kaiser in Berlin was their
own Czar in Petrograd. Their cup of bitterness was full. They marched forth
against the palaces to end it all. First, out of the Viborg district, came the
working women crying for bread. Then long lines of workingmen. The police
turned the bridges to prevent them entering the city, but they crossed on
the ice. Looking at the red-flagged throngs from his window, Milyukov
exclaimed: “There goes the Russian Revolution – and it will be crushed in
fifteen minutes!”
But the workingmen came on in spite of Cossack patrols on the Nevsky.
They came on in face of wilting fire from machine gun nests. They came on
until the streets were littered with their bodies. Still they came on, singing
and pleading until soldiers and Cossacks came over to the people’s side, and
on March 12 the Romanov dynasty, which had misruled Russia for 300
years, went crashing to its doom. Russia went mad with joy while the whole
world rose up to applaud the downfall of the Czar.
It was mainly the workers and soldiers who made the Revolution. They
had shed their blood for it. Now it was assumed that they would retire in the
orthodox manner leaving affairs in the hands of their superiors. The people
had taken the power away from the Czarists. Now appeared on the scene
the bankers and lawyers, the professors and politicians, to take the power
away from the people. They said:
“People, you have won a glorious victory. The next duty is the formation
of a new state. It is a most difficult task, but fortunately, we, the educated,
understand this business of governing. We shall set up a Provisional
Government. Our responsibility is heavy, but as true patriots we will
shoulder it. Noble soldiers, go back to the trenches. Brave workingmen, go
back to the machines. And peasants, you go back to the land.”
Now the Russian masses were tractable and reasonable. So they let these
bourgeois gentlemen form their “Provisional Government.” But the Russian
masses were intelligent, even if they were not literate. Most of them could
not read or write. But they could think. So, before they went back to the
trenches, the shops and the land, they set up little organizations of their
own. In each munition factory the workers selected one of their number
whom they trusted. In the shoe and cotton factories the men did likewise.
So in the brickyards, the glass-works and other industries. These
representatives elected directly from their jobs were called a Soviet
(Council) of Workmen Deputies.
In like manner the armies formed Soviets of Soldiers’ Deputies, the
villages Soviets of Peasant Deputies.
These deputies were elected by trades and occupations, not by districts.
The Soviets consequently were filled, not with glibly talking politicians, but
with men who knew their business; miners who understood mining,
machinists who understood machinery, peasants who understood land,
soldiers ,who understood war, teachers who understood children.
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The Soviets sprang up in every city, town, hamlet and regiment
throughout Russia. Within a few weeks after the old state-apparatus of
Czardom went to pieces, one-sixth the surface of the earth was dotted over
with these new social organizations – no more striking phenomenon in all
history.
The commander of the Russian battleship Peresvet told me his story: “My
ship was off the coast of Italy when the news arrived. As I announced the
Czar’s fall some sailors shouted, ‘Long live the Soviet.’ That very day on
board ship a Soviet was formed, in all aspects like the one in Petrograd. I
regard the Soviet as the natural organization of the Russian people, finding
its root in the mir (commune) of the village and the artel (co-operative
syndicate) of the city.”
Others find the Soviet idea in the old New England town-meetings or the
city assemblies of ancient Greece. But the Russian workingman’s contact
with the Soviet was much more direct than that. He had tried out the Soviet
in the abortive Revolution of 1905. He had found it a good instrument then.
He was using it now.
After the Czar’s overthrow there was a short season of good will amongst
all classes known as the “honeymoon of the Revolution.” Then the big fight
began – a battle royal between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat for the
mastery of state power in Russia. On the one side the capitalists, landlords
and finally the intelligentsia lining up behind the Provisional Government.
On the other side the workmen, soldiers and peasants rallying to the
Soviets.
I was set down in the midst of this colossal conflict. For fourteen months
I lived in the villages with the peasants, in the trenches with the soldiers,
and in the factories with the workers. I saw the Revolution thru their eyes
and took part in most of the dramatic episodes.
I have used the names Communist and Bolshevik interchangeably, tho
the party did not officially change its name to Communist until 1918.
In the French Revolution the great word was “Citizen.” In the Russian
Revolution the great word is “Comrade!” – tovarishtch. I have written it
more simply tovarish.
For the right to use here some of my articles I am indebted to the editors
of Asia, the Yale Review, the Dial, the Nation, the New Republic, and the
New York Evening Post.
The visitor to Soviet Russia is struck by the multitudes of posters – in
factories and barracks, on walls and railway-cars, on telephone-poles –
everywhere. Whatever the Soviet does, it strives to make the people
understand the reason for it. If there is a new call to arms, if rations must
be cut down, if new schools or courses of instruction are opened, a poster,
promptly appears telling why, and how the people can co-operate. Some of
these posters are crude and hurried, others are works of art. Ten of them
are reproduced in this book in almost the exact colors of the originals. The
cost has been borne by friends of Russia, and the reader is particularly
indebted to Mrs. Jessie Y. Kimball and Mr. Aaron Berkman.
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On the next page is reproduced the first issue of the first revolutionary
newspaper-the official Soviet News (Izvestia). It was published on the day
of the Czar’s fall and every day since then.
[This is a reproduction in English of the Russian
text on the opposite page]
PART I
THE MAKERS OF THE REVOLUTION
WITH THE PEASANTS, WORKERS AND FIGHTERS
Chapter I - The Bolsheviks and the City
On a white night of early June, 1917, I first entered Petrograd, the city
that lies almost within the Arctic Circle. Tho it was midnight, the wide
squares and prospekts bathed in the soft spectral light of this northern night
were all alluring.
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Past blue-domed barbaric churches and the silver rippling Catherine
Canal we drove along the Neva, while across the river the slender spire of
Peter and Paul rose like a golden needle. Then by the Winter Palace, the
burnished dome of Saint Isaac’s and countless shafts and statues to the
memory of Czars who had gone.
But all these were monuments to rulers of the past. They had no hold on
me for I was interested in the rulers of the present. I wanted to hear the
great Kerensky then at the zenith of his spell-binding powers. I wanted to
meet the ministers of the Provisional Government. I met many of them,
heard them and talked with them. They were able, amiable and eloquent.
But I felt they were not real representatives of the masses, that they were
“Caliphs of the passing hour.”
Instinctively I sought out the rulers of the future, the men in the Soviets
elected directly out of the’ trenches, factories and farms. These Soviets had
sprung up in almost every army city and village of Russia, over one-sixth of
the surface of the earth. These local Soviets were now sending their
delegates to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd.
The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets
I found the Soviet in session in the Military Academy. A tablet recording
the fact that “His Imperial Majesty, Nicholas II, made this place happy by
his presence January 28, 1916,” still hung on its walls, the one relic of the
glittering past.
The gold-braided officers, the smiling courtiers, and lackeys had been
swept from the halls. His Imperial Majesty, the Czar, was gone. His
Republican Majesty, the Revolution, ruled here now, acclaimed by hundreds
of black-bloused, khaki-clad delegates.
Here were men coming up from the ends of the earth. From the frozen
Arctic and burning Turkestan they hailed, slant-eyed Tartars and fair-haired
Cossacks, Russians, Big and Little, Poles, Letts and Lithuanians – all tribes
and tongues and costumes. Here were toil-scarred delegates from the
mines, the forge and the farm, battle-scarred soldiers from the trenches
and sea-bronzed sailors from the five fleets of Russia. Here were the
“March” revolutionists, colorless and quiet before the March storm blew the
Czar from his throne, but now daubed with red revolutionary paint and
calling themselves Socialists. Here were veterans of the Revolution, loyal to
the cause thru long years of hunger, exile and Siberia, tried and tested by
suffering.
Cheidze, the President of the Soviet Congress, asked me why I came to
Russia. “Ostensibly as a journalist,” I told him. “But the real reason is the
Revolution. It was irresistible. It drew me here like a magnet. I am here
because I could not stay away.”
He asked me to address the Congress. The “Soviet News” (Izvestia) of
July 9, reports my words thus:
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Comrades: I bring you greetings from the Socialists of America. We do not venture to tell
you here how to run a Revolution. Rather we come here to learn its lesson and to express
our appreciation for your great achievements.
A dark cloud of despair and violence was hanging over mankind threatening to extinguish
the torch of civilization in streams of blood. But you arose, comrades, and the torch flamed
up anew. You have resurrected in all hearts everywhere a new faith in freedom.
Equality, Brotherhood, Democracy, are great and beautiful words. But to the unemployed
millions they are merely words. To the 160,000 hungry children of New York they are hollow
words. To the exploited classes of France and England they are mocking words. Your duty is
to change these words into reality.
You have made the Political Revolution. Freed from the threat of German militarism your
next task is the Social Revolution. Then the workers of the world will no longer look to the
West, but to the East – toward great Russia, to the Field of Mars here, in Petrograd, where lie
the first martyrs of your Revolution.
“Long live free Russia!” “Long live the Revolution!” “Long live Peace to the World!”
In his reply Cheidze made a plea for the workers of all nations to bring
pressure to bear on their governments to stop “the horrible butchery which
is disgracing humanity and beclouding the great days of the birth of Russian
freedom.”
A storm of cheers, and the Congress took up the order of the day – the
Ukraine, Education, War Widows and Orphans, Provisioning the Front,
Repairing the Railways, etc. This should have been the business of the
Provisional Government. But that Government was flimsy and incompetent.
Its ministers were orating, wrangling, scheming against one another and
entertaining diplomats. But somebody must do the hard work. By default it
was already passing into the hands of these Soviets of the people.
Enter the Bolsheviks
This First Congress of Soviets was dominated by the intelligentsia –
doctors, engineers, journalists. They belonged to political parties known as
Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary. At the extreme left sat 107
delegates of a decided proletarian cast – plain soldiers and workingmen.
They were aggressive, united and spoke with great earnestness. They were
often laughed and hooted down – always voted down.
“Those are the Bolsheviks,” my bourgeois guide informed me,
venomously. “Mostly fools, fanatics and German agents.” That was all. And
no more than that could one learn in hotel lobbies, salons, or diplomatic
circles.
Happily, I went elsewhere for information. I went into the factory
districts. In Nijni I met Sartov, a mechanic who invited me to his home. A
long rifle stood in the corner of the main room.
“Every workingman has a gun now,” Sartov explained. “Once we used it
to fight for the Czar – now we fight for ourselves.”
In another corner hung an ikon of Saint Nicholas, a tiny flame burning
before it.
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One of the 10,000 city and village Soviets in which, as a peasant said, “we are teaching ourselves
how to rule ourselves.” This is the Petrograd Soviet to which 20,000 workers have been elected in four
years.
The masses hearing Lenin express their demands. “Under the pitiless pelting of facts I have been
driven to the conclusion that if Lenin and 18 other Bolshevik (leaders) had perished, events in Russia
would have taken much the same course. The robbed and oppressed masses – a hundred millions of
men and women – moved toward the goal of their long unfulfilled desires like a flow of molten lava that
no human force can dam. or turn aside.” – PROFESSOR E. A. Ross.
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