THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS
One of the main contentions of the extremists of the Russian revolution concerns the self-governing rights of the states, large and small, which make up the empire. I met no one in Russia who did not agree that each one of the states had a right to local autonomy, but I met many who feared greatly lest the empire should be dismembered and should fall apart into a number of small, weak states. Especially disastrous would this be, both to Russia and to the Allies, if it happened during the war. That Germany is doing everything in her power to bring about this end is proof enough that it would be disastrous to the Allies. Germany’s army and navy and German diplomacy are working overtime to separate the Russian states. The enemy forces are working now to isolate the Baltic states and Finland, and German agents are busy all over the empire spreading the propaganda of secession.
“The right of small peoples to govern themselves” is one of the easiest gospels in the world to preach. As a principle it is not even debatable. In practice, however, it very often is far from expedient or practicable. But the recently liberated Russians, each separate language and racial group smarting from remembered wrongs inflicted by the old government, took fire with the idea of self-government, and in every corner of Russia are found provinces, governments, even cities, repudiating the central government and setting up republics of their own. Provisional governments were created last summer in provinces of Siberia, in the rich province of Ukrania, in the town of Kronstadt, in the Siberian towns of Tomsk and Tsaritsine, and in a number of other localities. Finland very early started an agitation for a separate government, and only the closing of the Diet and the prevention by armed force of the convening of a new Diet stood in the way of a socialist manifesto of separation. The Socialists are the majority party in the Diet, and they counted on the support of enough people in the three “bourgeois” parties—the Swedish, old Finnish and young Finnish parties—to carry their measure through.
Every one of these attempts at secession was marked by riots, murders and excesses of every kind. A report from Kirsanoff, a city that wanted last June to be a republic all by itself, told of a garrison of soldiers who broke loose, fell on the inhabitants of the town, robbed and murdered them, outraged women, burned houses, looted shops and generally behaved like maddened animals. There seemed to be no reason why the soldiers, who had previously behaved like decent men, should have been seized with sudden criminal mania. Liberty simply acted on their systems like a deadly drug.
It was the same thing in Kronstadt, only in Kronstadt they developed a drug habit, so to speak. This fortified town of some 60,000 inhabitants is situated at the mouth of the Neva on the Gulf of Finland. The fortress of Kronstadt, which dominates the town, in normal times constitutes one of the chief defenses of Petrograd, a few miles up the river. The Gulf of Kronstadt, on which the fortress stands, is the chief station of the Baltic fleet. With a strong garrison, a fleet of battleships and a well-organized Bolsheviki, Kronstadt was able for many weeks to defy the Provisional Government, to maintain what it called a government of its own, and to commit more horrible crimes and more stupid excesses than almost any other place in Russia. Murder on a wholesale scale marked the progress of the revolution in the fortress and on the battleships. More than a score of young officers in training were killed in the fortress in one day last spring. They were not even arrested and tried on any charges. They were just butchered. A number of other officers were killed, including the commandant and vice-commandant of the fortress, and other officers were thrown into cells and kept there for months without even the farce of a trial.
Kronstadt set up a republic in late May and by mid-June the orgy was in full swing. The civil population looted and robbed, and the soldiers and marines aided and abetted them heartily. Once a band of looters sacking a warehouse were arrested by the militia police after a lively shooting match and put in jail. Cases where the militia actually arrested thieves were so rare in Russia last summer that this one received considerable newspaper publicity. The papers were obliged to record that, a few hours after the men were arrested, a crowd of armed soldiers and sailors demanded the liberation of the prisoners. Of course their demands were honored.
The provisional government was able to keep Finland in partial check by threatening to withhold cereals and other provisions from her in case of secession. But Kronstadt, being a fortress, had plenty of provisions, as plenty goes in Russia these days. Kronstadt had more food and fuel than Petrograd. That is why her orgy was able to last so long. It lasted until the days of the July revolution, when thousands of loyal troops were recalled from the front to restore order, many of the ringleaders of the mutinous troops were expelled from the army and several regiments were disbanded in disgrace. The orgy still goes on to a certain extent in the fortress, and no one knows yet how far disaffection among the naval forces went.
The Kronstadt Soviet, or Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, covered itself with glory during the existence of the republic. The Soviet, or one of its committees, undertook the solving of the housing problem as follows: The committee went all over the town and inspected houses and apartments. They inquired in each case at the different places the amount of the rent, and then they proceeded to cut down the rent, one-third to one-half. They didn’t say anything about the reduction to the landlord, but they passed the word around to the Tavarishi. A perfect exodus of renters out of their apartments into bigger and better ones ensued. Everybody moved, and when rent day came around and the landlords or their agents called on the new tenants they were calmly told: “Not on your life is my rent thirty rubles a month. It is fifteen rubles, and if you don’t take that you will get nothing.”
The landlords appealed to the Soviet, but all the satisfaction they got there was a threat of confiscation. “You’ve robbed the working class long enough,” said the Soviet. “We ought not to pay you any rent, and perhaps after a while we won’t.”
From one point of view not the least outrage the Soviet perpetrated on the helpless population of Kronstadt was an attempt to talk it to death. There is a fine cathedral in Kronstadt and in front of it, as is customary in Russia, a large open square. In this square the Soviet erected a speaker’s stand and every day the population, or as much of it as could get into the square, assembled and listened for hours to fervid oratory. The people had to come because the Soviet ordered them to, and very likely they enjoyed themselves at first. Even in Russia, however, a continual political meeting, carried on three months at a time, every day at 5 p. m., must be a trial.
Tomsk was another city where the right of small peoples to govern themselves was demonstrated last summer. In the newspapers of June 8, old style, appeared a telegram from Tomsk to Minister-President Kerensky, the Minister of Justice and the all-Russian Council of Deputies, Workmen and Soldiers, then in session in Petrograd. The telegram was sent by the commanding general of loyal regiments and it read in part thus: “Criminal and mutinous soldiers in company with other criminal elements of the population have organized themselves into bands and have set themselves systematically to pillage and assassination. Under the flag of anarchy they have looted the banks, the shops, business houses of all kinds. They were prepared to murder all heads of public organizations, and declared that they would next move on to other towns and cities and continue their robberies there.”
The telegram went into more particulars of these outrages, and closed by saying that martial law had been established in Tomsk on the 3d of June, 2,300 persons had been arrested and the city, thanks to the presence there of a few brave and loyal troops, was now in order.
Thus the tale could be continued. Finland, usually a peaceful, orderly, law-abiding and intelligent country, by far the most enlightened in Russia, lost its head completely over the right of small peoples’ idea. Helsingfors has seen days of violence in the old years of rule by fire and sword. But Finland has never answered with fire and sword, but by the most intelligent kind of passive resistance. With the revolution passive resistance became violence. Most of this, it is true, came from soldiers and sailors of Sveaborg, the island fortress of Helsingfors. Murder of officers went on there and in the town also. Marines pursued their hapless officers through the streets, cutting them down with swords and knives, shooting them and killing them by torture before the eyes of women and children. The townspeople did no such shocking deeds as that, but there were bloody strikes and many riots, and finally the attempt to open an illegal diet and to force a separation from the empire. Kerensky handled that situation very well, sending the best men in the government to Helsingfors, where some kind of a truce, temporary no doubt, but a truce, was patched up.
Kerensky’s fiercest battle last summer was with Ukrania, where a real government was established. It was real enough at all events to force a kind of recognition from the central Provisional Government. Ukrania is an enormous territory in the south of Russia. It extends into southwestern Siberia and southward to the Black Sea. Odessa is its principal port, and within its borders are many important cities. Kiev is one of the largest of these. About 35,000,000 people inhabit the Ukraine, as it is called in Russia. The people are not Russian, strictly speaking. They are Slavs, but they have a language of their own, a literature, a culture. They have been Russian subjects for nearly 300 years.
The Ukraine is a self-contained country and could be made a very rich one. It is rich already in agricultural resources, the “black earth” of certain regions producing the most splendid crops of wheat and other grains. The fruits of the Ukraine are the best in Russia, and the vineyards furnish grapes for excellent wines. Russia would be poor indeed without this country.
Last June the Ukranian Rada, or local diet, voted to establish a republic, restore the old language and customs, and cut themselves off absolutely from the Russian empire. They actually created a provisional government on the spot. Some of the more moderate members of the Rada favored remaining in the empire as a federated state having complete autonomy, and this was finally accepted, I believe, by the majority. But immediately the Bolsheviki of the south began to clamor for separation, and the Ukranians in the army began to show dangerous signs of unrest. A congress of Ukranian armies was held in Kiev in the middle of June, in which it was decided that the armies of the south and southwest ought to be completely and exclusively made up of Ukranians. If this had been done the Rada would have been in a perfect state to dictate terms of any kind to the Russian Provisional Government.
As it was there was considerable dictating done. The military Rada, meeting in June in Odessa, served notice on the Provisional Government that unless the Ukranian soldiers were prevented from forming their own regiments no more soldiers of their force would be sent to the front. The Ukranian regiments were formed, some of them in Petrograd, and the strains of the national hymn, “Ukrania is not dead,” were heard on the streets, played by military bands or sung by soldiers, almost as often as the classic “Marseillaise.”
Kerensky made a frantic dash to Odessa, to Kiev and other cities of the Ukraine. He took with him Tereshtshenko, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and one or two other ministers, and they met the new provisional government in parley. The result was that Kerensky made a complete surrender, recognized the provisional government—at least informally—and agreed that the Ukraine should be a separate state. There was a perfect tempest of protest when the ministers returned to Petrograd. The rest of the ministry declared that Kerensky had overstepped his authority in committing the entire government to a policy which ought to have been left to the constituent assembly to decide. They said that his act, entered into without the knowledge or consent of the full government, was illegal. Perhaps it was; but it stood, and all the most aggrieved ministers could do about it was to resign.
The greatest task ahead of Russia is federation, and she probably will in the end learn how to give autonomy to her states and establish a central government which will bind all the states together in happy union. But she has years of strife and monumental effort ahead of her before the task is done. The wisest men in Russia—even Prof. Miliukoff, who lived for years in the United States—appear to be in a complete fog on the subject of federation. Half the wise men want an empire like Great Britain or Germany, with practically all the power in one central governing body. The other half see nothing ahead but dismemberment of the empire. Nobody apparently can see Russia as another United States.
I believe that part of our responsibility, after the war—perhaps before that time comes—will be to teach Russia how to establish a peaceful federation on republican lines. Russia perhaps does not need to be taught democracy. When she emerges from this present anarchy she may be trusted to establish a safely democratic civilization.