The San Francisco Call September 4, 1904
By Jerome K. Jerome
I ought to like Russia better than I do, if only for the sake of the many good friends I am proud to possess among the Russians. The individual Russian is one of the most charming creatures living. If he likes you he does not hesitate to let you know it, only be every kindly action possible, but, by what perhaps is just as useful in this gray old world, by kindly speech. We Anglo-Saxons are apt to pride ourselves upon being undemonstrative. I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant one day. A man entered and took a seat at a table nearby, and glancing around and meeting my friend’s eye smiled and nodded. “Excuse me a minute,” said my friend, “I must speak to my brother–haven’t seen him for more than five years.” he finished his soup and leisurely wiped his mustache before strolling across and shaking hands. They talked for a while, then my friend returned. “Never thought to see him again; he was one of the garrison at that place in Africa–what’s the name of it?– that the Mahdi attacked. Only three of them escaped. Always a lucky beggar, Jim!”
I thought of this scene one evening while dining with some Russian friends in a St. Petersburg hotel. One of the party had not seen his second cousin for nearly eighteen months. They sat opposite to one another, and a dozen times at least during the course of the dinner one of them would jump up from his chair and run around to embrace the other. They would throw their arms about one another, kissing one another on both cheeks, and then sit down again with moist eyes. The Russian’s anger is just as quick and vehement as his love. I was supping one evening with friends in one of the chief restaurants on the Nevsky. Two gentlemen at an adjoining table, who up till the previous moment had been engaged in amicable conversation, suddenly sprang to their feet and “went for” one another. One man secured the water bottle which he promptly broke over the other’s head. His opponent chose for his weapon a heavy mahogany chair, and, leaping back for the purpose of securing a good swing, lurched against my hostess. “Do please be careful,” said the lady. “A thousand pardons, madame,” returned the stranger, from whom blood and water were streaming in equal copiousness, and, taking the utmost care to avoid interfering with our comfort, he succeeded adroitly in flooring his antagonist by a well directed blow. A policeman appeared upon the scene with marvelous promptitude. He did not attempt to interfere, but, running out into the street, communicated the glad tidings to another policeman. “That’s going to cost them a pretty penny. Some half a dozen policemen were round about before as many minutes had elapsed and each one claimed his bribe. Then they wished both combatants good-night and trooped out, evidently in great good humor; and the two gentlemen, with wet napkins round their heads, sat down again, and laughter and amicable conversation flowed freely as before.
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They strike the stranger as a child-like people, but you are possessed with a haunting sense of ugly traits beneath. The workers–slaves it would be almost more just to call them–allow themselves to be driven with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals. Yet every educated Russian you talk to on the subject knows that revolution is coming. But he talks to you about it with the door shut, for no man in Russia can be sure that his own servants are not police spies. I was discussing the question with a Russian official one evening in his study when his old housekeeper entered the room–a soft-eyed, gray-haired woman who had been in his service more than eight years and whose position in the household was almost that of a friend. He stopped abruptly and changed the conversation. So soon as the door was closed behind her again he explained himself: “It is better to chat upon such matter when one is quite alone,” he laughed. “It is safer to trust no one.” And then he continued from the point where we had been interrupted. “It is gathering,” he said; “there are times when I almost smell the blood in the air. I am an old man and may escape it, but my children will have to suffer–suffer as children must do for the sins of their fathers. We have made brute beasts of the people, and as brute beasts they will come upon us, cruel and undiscriminating; right and wrong indifferently going down before them. But it has to be. It is needed. The future history of Russia will be the history of the French Revolution over again, but with this difference: that the educated classes, the thinker who are pushing forward the dumb masses are doing so with their eyes open. There will be no Mirabeau, no Danton, to be appalled at the people’s ingratitude. The men who today are working for revolution in Russia number among their ranks statesmen, soldiers, delicately-nurtured women, rich landowners, prosperous tradesmen, students familiar with the lessons of history. They have no misconceptions concerning the blind Frankenstein into which they are breathing life. He will crush them: they know it; but with them he will crush the injustice and stupidity they have grown to hate better than they love themselves. The Russian peasant, when he rises, will prove more terrible, more pitiless, than were the men of 1790. He is less intelligent, more brutal. They sing it in chorus on the quays while hauling the cargo, they sing it in the factory, they chant it on the weary, endless steppes, reaping the corn they may not eat. It is about the good time their masters are having–of the feasting and the merry-making. But the last line of every verse is the same. When you ask a Russian to translate it for you he shrugs his shoulders. ‘Oh, it means,’ he says, ‘that their time will come, some day!’ It is a sad, pathetic, haunting refrain. They sing it in the drawing-rooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and somehow the light talk and laughter die away, and a hush, like a chill breath, like the wailing of a tired, wind, and one day it will sweep over the land heralding terror.”
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A Scotchman I met in Russia told me that when he first came out to act as manager of a large factory just outside St. Petersburg, belonging to his Scottish employers, he unwittingly made a mistake the first week when paying his workpeople. By a miscalculation of the Russian money he paid some three hundred men each one nearly a ruble short. He discovered his error before the following Saturday and then put the matter right. The men accepted his explanation with perfect composure and without any comment whatever. The thing astonished him. “But you must have known I was paying you short,” he said to one of them. “Why didn’t you tell me of it?” “Oh,” answered the man, “we thought you were putting it in your own pocket, and that if we had complained it would only have meant dismissal for us. No one would have taken our word against yours.” Corruption appears to be so general throughout the whole of Russia that all classes have come to accept it as part of the established order of things. A friend gave me a little dog to bring away with me. It was a valuable animal and I wished to keep it with me. It is strictly forbidden to take dogs into railway carriages. The list of the pains and penalties for doing so frightened me considerably. “Oh, that will be all right,” my friend assured me, “have a few rubles loose in your pocket.” I tipped the station-master and I tipped the guard and started, pleased with myself. But I had not anticipated what was in store for me. The news that an Englishman with a dog in a basket and rubles in his pocket was coming must have been telegraphed all down the line. At almost every stopping place some enormous official, generally wearing a sword and a helmet, boarded the train. At first these fellows terrified me. When they saw the dog their astonishment was boundless. Visions of Siberia crossed my mind. Anxious and trembling I gave the first one a gold piece. He shook me warmly by the hand. I thought he was going to kiss me. If I had offered him my cheek I am sure he would have done so. With the next one I felt less apprehensive. For a couple of ruble she blessed me. Before I had reached the German frontier I was giving away the equivalent of English sixpences to men with the bearing and carriage of major generals, and to see their faces brighten up and receive their heartfelt benedictions was well worth the money.
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It is a fascinating subject, Russia. Nature has made life hard there for rick and poor alike. To the banks of the Neva, with its ague and influenza bestowing fogs and mists one imagines that the devil himself must have guided Peter the Great. “Show me in all thy dominions the most hopelessly unattractive site on which to build a city,” Peter must have prayed; and the devil, having discovered the sit eon which St. Petersburg now stands, must have returned to his master in high good feather. “I think, my dear Peter, I have found you something really unique. It is a pestilent swamp to which a mighty river brings bitter blasts and marrow-chilling fogs. In the brief summer time the wind will bring you sand. In this way you will combine the disadvantages of the North Pole with those of the desert of Sahara.” In the winter time the Russians light their great stoves and doubly barricade their doors and windows; and in this atmosphere, like that of a greenhouse, many of their women will pass six months, never venturing out of doors. Even the men only go out at intervals. Every office, every shop, is an oven. Men of forty have white hair and parchment faces, and the women are old at thirty. The farm laborers during the few summer months work almost entirely without sleep. They leave that for the winter, when they shut themselves up like dormice in their hovels, their store of food and vodka buried underneath the floor. For days together they sleep, then wake and dig, then sleep again. So it is even with their betters. The Russian party lasts all night. In an adjoining room are beds and couches; half a dozen guests are always sleeping. An hour contents them, then they rejoin the company and other guests take their places. The Russian eats when he feels so disposed; the table is always spread, the guests come and go. Once a year there is a great feast in Moscow. The Russian merchant and his friends sit down early in the day and a sort of thick sweet pancake is served up hot. The feast continues for many hours, and the ambition of the Russian merchant is to eat more than his neighbor. Fifty or sixty of these hot cakes a man will consume at a sitting, and a dozen funerals in Moscow is often the result. An uncivilized people, we call them in our lordly way, but they are young. They will see us out, I am inclined to think. Their energy, their intelligence–when these show above, the groundwork and their animalism–are monstrous. I have known a Russian to learn Chinese within six months. English! they learn it while you are talking to them. The children play at chess and study the violin for their own amusement. The world will be glad of Russia–when she has put her house in order.
Juxt In Time 
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