WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD?
Will the German army get to Petrograd and Moscow? The answer to this question is, they probably can if they want to, but it is hardly possible that they do. If they have that object, and if they succeed in taking Moscow it will simply add one more to the psychological blunders committed by the German government since the war began. The disorganized Russian army might not pull itself together and fight for Petrograd, but the army and the people would fight to the death for Moscow. It is their holy city, their crown of glory, their dream. Moscow is Russia, and one who has never seen it knows not the Russian people.
Petrograd is a modern European city, built by Peter the Great in the early part of the eighteenth century and by Catherine II, also called “the Great,” in the latter half of the same century. Peter, who would have been a master man in any century and in any country, whether born in a palace or a farmhouse, was all the more a marvel because he was a Russian, born at a time when the Russian people were still medieval and still oriental. Peter didn’t allow the fact that he was heir to an oriental autocracy to interfere with his ambitions or his activities. He left the golden palace in the Kremlin, left Moscow, the capital, and sacred heart of the empire, left Russia altogether, and went off to become a day laborer in the shipyards of England and Holland. Peter learned what he could in a short time and went back to establish western civilization in Russia. He chose the site of his new capital much as the United States Steel Company chose the site of Gary, Ind., for its nearness to a good harbor, its easy access to trade routes and its fine front view of the best commercial centers. Peter called his city “a window toward Europe.”
Petersburg, as it was styled by the half German Peter, was a more stupendous piece of engineering than Gary, Ind., although the steel town is one of the greatest triumphs of engineering this country can boast. It was built on a marsh which nowhere rose above the muddy waters of the Neva more than two or three feet, and in most places was partially or wholly submerged. That marsh never has been completely drained. When, in 1765, St. Isaac’s Cathedral was built to replace a small wooden church of Peter’s time, they first had to drive over twelve hundred huge piles into the soft ground. Of the 40,000 workmen who toiled under Peter’s direction to create the first Petrograd a majority died from exposure and cold, and of fevers bred in the miasmas of the bogs.
Catherine, who became czarina a little more than half a century later, vastly improved the city. She enlarged it, erecting many splendid palaces and public buildings, and bringing in a vast amount of western culture in the way of libraries, art galleries and theatres. The monuments of Peter and Catherine are the most conspicuous objects in the capital. The ghosts of Catherine and Peter may be said to walk in every street in Petrograd. But the Russians, for all their admiration for their greatest monarchs, have little real love for the city they built.
The ghost of Ivan the Terrible walks through the streets of Moscow; nevertheless, the Russians love the place as the Mohammedans love Mecca. It is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and one of the strangest. It has hundreds of churches, so gorged with art treasures and with gold, silver and jewels that it dizzies the mind to contemplate them. It has the ancient wall, foliage-hung, that enclosed the Moscow of the thirteenth century, and it has the Kremlin, or fortress, which antedates the town. Inside the Kremlin is the old palace of the rulers of Russia built, in part, centuries before they became czars. The first Kremlin palaces were built by the dukes of Moscow in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Some of the most beautiful of the treasure churches of the Kremlin were built by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. One of these, just outside the walls, the Cathedral of St. Basil, is a gem of such radiance supreme that the half-mad Ivan determined that it should never be surpassed. When it was finished he called the architect to him and asked him if he thought he could ever design a better church. The architect, in the pride and joy of his achievement, modestly said that he thought he might. “You never will,” said the terrible Ivan, and he had the man’s eyes burned out with red-hot irons.
In the great square in front of the Kremlin still stands the high place of execution where Ivan and the other almost as terrible czars tortured and slew their victims. In a side street still stands the wonderful golden house which was the home and seat of the Romanoff boyars, and where the first (or second) czar of Russia was born. Moscow is the very symbol of czardom; nevertheless the Russians love it as their heart. Germany might send her armies there, but they could no more take it, or hold it, than they could take and hold Washington. Inside the Kremlin walls lie heaped thousands of bronze cannons, bright and beautiful as snakes, all decorated with eagles and N’s and ambitious mottoes. Napoleon Bonaparte left them there when he fled, defeated and routed by the Russians, only to be still more soundly defeated by snow and storm and bitter cold. Those cannon are evidence indeed of the invincibility of Moscow.
Germany ought to know that a march on Moscow, however easy, would result in unifying the Russian army against the foe. Perhaps Germany does not know this, for she seems not to know anything about the hearts and minds of any people. The mechanics of nationality she knows and understands. The psychology of it she never understands. However, I do not believe that Germany’s recent attack and partial conquest of the islands before Riga are a prelude to a march on the capital or on Moscow. What Germany probably wants is the splendid loot to be found in Courland and Esthonia. Riga, which is a city of 400,000 inhabitants, is, next to Petrograd, the most important port on the Baltic Sea. Out from Riga go immense exports of timber, flax and hemp, linseed and many cereals. The country east and south of Riga produces these things in great quantity, and Germany needs them in her business just now, and needs them badly enough to risk a few of her ships and men to get them.
Germany is not after conquest, this trip; she is after food and fuel and supplies. A little south of Riga lie the Governments of Kovno, Vilna and Minsk, and a little south and west lies Russian Poland, already partially in German hands. I traveled through part of that country last summer and watched through the train windows vast fields of rye and wheat, and thousands of acres of potatoes. I did not see many sugar-beet fields, but they lie somewhere in that region—hundreds of thousands of acres of them, already harvested or waiting to be harvested. And Germany is hungry for those harvests.
There may be other reasons why Germany is pounding so desperately at the defenses of Riga. Not very far away, to the north, washed by the same Baltic Sea, lies the grand duchy of Finland, the one province of the Russian empire which has shown friendliness to Germany. Finland is also the one province which has already declared its unalterable determination not to belong further to the Russian empire. Finland wishes to set up a separate government and to be an independent state. At least the mass of the people, expressing themselves through a Socialist majority in the local Diet, has declared for this policy.
It would be tremendously to the advantage of Germany to have the big Russian empire split up into separate states, and the German government has worked assiduously to encourage the Finnish people in their secession policy. Finland is such a Mecca for German agents, and so many Finns are in the pay of these agents, that the provisional government last July practically shut the grand duchy off, marooned it, so to speak, from the rest of the empire. A traveler cannot go to Finland from Russia without special permission obtained from the war ministry. A resident of Petrograd could not go down to one of the numerous and charming Finnish seaside towns near the capital, even for a week-end visit, without such a permit. I have spent some time in Finland and know a great many people in Helsingfors, the capital. I tried to get a permit to stop in Helsingfors on my way out of Russia, but the war ministry refused to grant the permit.
When the traveler left Russia for England or the United States, for any country, for that matter, he had to take a certain train leaving Petrograd at 7.30 o’clock in the morning, and he left that train just once before he reached the frontier. That once is at Beli Ostrov, for the customs inspection. After that the traveler was a prisoner in his train until he reached Tornea, where he was finally inspected and convoyed across a narrow stretch of water to Sweden. That was the attitude of the Russian provisional government toward Finland.
The grand duchy is rightly considered one of the greatest menaces to the future integrity of the empire. It is rightly considered by Germany a hope for the future of Germany, and it may very well be that the German navy expects and hopes to follow up the conquest of the Baltic port of Riga with a conquest of the Baltic port of Helsingfors. Finland detests Russia to such an extent that she is apparently blind to the danger of a friendship with Germany. For fifty years she has hated and feared Russia, and she apparently cannot get it into her head that the thing she hated and feared has gone forever. I have observed this state of mind in Poles as well as Finns. They have hated Russia so long that they cannot stop all at once. The Finns have hated Russia so hard that they would not even look at the Russian soldiers quartered on them by the old government. I spent the winter of 1913 in Helsingfors, and it was one of the sights of the place to me to watch the Finns cut the Russians in the street every day. A regiment of Russians marched through the streets, bands playing, swords clanking, feet tramping, a gorgeous sight. But the soldiers might as well have been invisible phantoms for all the notice taken of them by the Finns. They walked quietly along, attending to their business, conversing or chatting with their neighbors, never looking at the Russians. In fact, it was a point of honor with the Finns never to look at a Russian. As for speaking to one, knowing him, inviting him to his house, a Finn who did such a thing would have been ostracized. Even the smallest children knew that.
This being the state of mind of the Finns, it is explainable in a measure why, in order to wring their independence from Russia now, they are willing to run a very great risk of being absorbed or badly exploited by the Germany of after the war. They became part of the Russian empire willingly, having been on very bad terms for a number of years with their old over-lord, Sweden. This was in 1801. Then the Czar made a solemn compact with Finland, both for himself and his heirs, that the country should have almost complete autonomy. It was to maintain its own army, which would never be called upon to serve on Russian soil, but should defend the Finnish coast and border in case Russia was involved in war.
Finland was to have her own coinage, postal systems, schools, courts, language and her own local diet. The Czar retained the right of vetoing legislation, the right to collect foreign customs and other imperial rights. Almost every promise made in that treaty has been broken by the czars of Russia, especially by Nicholas II, now in Siberia. This Nicholas tried to break the treaty altogether, abolish it, but the Finns were too intelligent, too clear-headed and too united to let him do it. Their resistance to his tyrannous treachery is a thrilling story in itself. Finland has never broken any part of her treaty with Russia, but now she wants to abolish the treaty. The contention is that the treaty was made with the czars of Russia, and, now that there are now no more czars, the treaty has ceased to hold good. Finland is full of German agents, and they must have invented this brilliant piece of reasoning and taught it to the Finnish Socialists. At all events, they must have fostered it with might and main, and perhaps the German navy believes that a visit to Helsingfors would convert the whole country to it.
There is even a better reason why the German navy has been pounding away in the Gulf of Finland, and why in the spring it will pound again. Germany seeks to separate still further Russia and her allies. There are only three ways by which Russia can communicate with Europe and America. One of these ways is across Siberia and the Pacific Ocean, a long distance. Another way, through Archangel, is a summer way only. The third and shortest way is through Finland and Sweden. If Germany can partially take Finland and seize the railroad which leads to Sweden, and there is only one main line of railroad, she can cut Russia off from her allies very effectively. Perhaps her next step would be to interfere, by means of submarines, with Russia’s other outlet in the Pacific.