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"The Emperor fully realized the nature of the task he had before him. To defend himself in Italy, Germany or even Poland against the Tsar was one thing; to invade the vast empire of Russia, was another task altogether—a task colossal, if not appalling. And arrayed against him were two fearful enemies—the Russian Army and winter."

WATSON'S Napoleon.

II

RUSSIA THE VAST UNKNOWN

Sometimes we are amused by foreign littérateurs and commentators, who come to our great country for a few crowded weeks of teas and symposia, gatherings of the intelligencia in our metropolis, and perhaps a dash into the mushroom dilettantism of Chicago, to set sail and compose screeds and screeds of America, her ways and her people, their manners and their customs.

Superficial vaporings, but far better composed and built by far on firmer ground than the idle opinions of those few Americans who have gone to the vast, far stretching empire of the Slavs, and glibly vouchsafed their ex cathedra views thereon.

The dominions of Great Russia were spread from the Baltic east to the Japan Sea, and from above the Arctic Circle far south to the Caspian and the Black Sea and Lake Baikal in Siberia. They comprised eight million six hundred and fifty thousand square miles of varied territory, nearly three times that of the United States, and were peopled by heterogeneous people, numbering one hundred and eighty million, as estimated, for no census or even approximate count has ever been attempted.

There were the Finns and the Letts, the Lithuanians, the Jews, the Mordvinians, the Estonians, the Siberians, the Great Russians, the Little Russians, the Red Russians, and the White Russians of the Central Provinces, the Cossacks of the south, and the Tartars of the Caucasus; all with no conscious unity, no national identity, not a single common impulse or purpose or interest. In many instances, without a communion of language.

The total length of railways in 1917 was thirty-four thousand miles, or less than one-eighth of that of our country. Of these one hundred and eighty million Russians, nearly eighty per cent are moujiks, docile, patient serfs, liberated scarcely sixty years ago by Alexander II, and still shackled by the shackles of their serfdom, woeful ignorance, cowed spirit and afflicting poverty.

The remaining twenty per cent are survivors of the fading nobility and the bourgeoisie, or middle class, who have acquired wealth and consequent social rank without claim to nobility of birth. These last are hated with an intense, irrational hatred by the Bolsheviki.

The noble class, the Russian of Turgenev, supersensitive, highstrung, supercultivated, almost to the point of degeneration, is fast vanishing with the passing of the last vestige of the Romanoff regime, and soon will be a thing of the past. This intolerant caste for centuries had dwelt in idleness on great landed estates. It was as alien to the poor moujik as if of an entirely distinct race. I met a few of these highborn on the streets of Archangel, whence they had fled from the murderous Reds in the cities of Moscow and Petrograd. Elegant gentlemen they were, in all the glittering panoply of Imperial army officers, and manners the extreme in politesse; very pompous, extremely impressive. They did not conceal their contempt of the crawling moujik; he was a swine, and when the word was hissed in Russian, it sounded very swinish.

The serf and the highborn, the swaggering, objectionable bourgeoisie, the moujik and his animal ignorance, the intelligencia, and his superculture, each separated from the other by an abysmal unspanable gulf; and the various Russian races so dissimilar in thought and living, in customs, even in language, all nevertheless were kept in some semblance of cohesion by the brutal, disciplinary methods of the Tsar and the cooperating spiritual guidance of the Russian State Catholic Church, of which the Tsar was the Little Father.

San Francisco is as acutely conscious of national affairs in Washington, as New York, and more so. But this is because the finest transportation system in the world makes it possible to journey from one city to the other in a few days, and because every American is an ardent disciple of our great public press.

But Vladivostok knows nothing of Petrograd, and Petrograd knows little of Archangel, and in the little villages, where the people live, the world beyond is clothed in impenetrable mystery; for there are no railways to these villages. No news comes in, and if news came, there are few among the moujiks who could read it.

It is well to keep these things in mind when men speak of Russia, as if overnight it could formulate a concerted policy and engage in a purpose backed by preponderant control of the Russian people. Russia is not a nation, it is an immense, unwieldy empire, a giant of tremendous strength, with undreamt-of potentialities, capable of colossal deeds, but without authoritative, united control or direction; entirely unconscious of any national entity.

When Nicholas abdicated in March, 1917, it was an anxious world that viewed the experimental government of Prince Lvoff. Russia was an important ally, but she had made heroic sacrifices and had lost five millions of men; if she faltered now, the world might be lost. And there were rumors of a separate peace.

A few months after the downfall of the Tsar, Kerensky, as Premier, issued a manifesto expressing undying allegiance to the sacred cause of the Allied Nations, and shortly delivered to the army his famous Prikaz, which:

a. Abolished the penalty of death for disobedience of essential military discipline.

b. Abolished soldierly courtesy and the salute. Officers were henceforth to be known as tvarishi, comrades, and all social distinctions between them and the common soldier were abrogated.

c. Meetings of soldiers to discuss the conduct of military affairs were permitted.

Officers were simply unmanned of any effective authority. They were permitted to administer and instruct their organization, but all disciplinary measures were passed upon by a committee of soldiers, and so obedience to any order was a matter for ultimate ruling by such a soldier committee and not by an officer. This was democracy run riot, individual liberty gone stark mad. A few weeks after Kerensky took command, one million five hundred thousand Russian soldiers, grown weary of the tedium and the hazards of the front, quit the army and returned to their homes.

Thus by one foolhardy, ill-advised measure, an army became a rabble. Discipline, as essential to the military as blood is essential to sustain a physical body, vanished, and the collapse of Russia began with Kerensky.

Archangel, where the East comes abruptly face to face with the West

After the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917, President Wilson was uneasy about Russia and her future course against the common enemy. Emissaries were therefore sent to learn of conditions first hand. Headed by the Honorable Elihu Root, as Ambassador Extraordinary, these reached Petrograd on the 13th June, 1917. Charles P. Crane, Cyrus H. McCormick of Illinois, and General Scott, the American Chief of Staff, accompanied Mr. Root. The emissaries met Kerensky, talked with several military and labor leaders, attended many banquets, made as many good speeches, and reported to the President in Washington on 12th August of the same year.

This report was made in confidence to the President, and even at the late date of the present writing, all requests to examine it have been denied by the State Department, on the grounds that "Divulgence is incompatible with the public interests."

But shortly afterwards, Mr. Root gave out an interview, which purported to express the views of the delegation: that they had come back with faith in Russia; faith in Russian qualities of character that are essential tests of competency and self government; faith in the purpose, the persistence and the power of the Russian people to keep themselves free.

Many American bankers, believing in Mr. Root, manifested kindred faith by the exchange of good American dollars for Russian rubles, despite the fact that the Russian government was hopelessly bankrupt and was showing an operating deficit of milliards of rubles.

General Scott visited the Russian front and witnessed the offensive which resulted in the taking of Kovel and Lemberg. He conferred with Generals Brussiloff, Korniloff, and Erdeli and their staffs, and reported to the American Secretary of War that Russia would stay in the war "if given even a part of the aid she asks."

Three months before the debacle, the Secretary of State, Mr. Lansing, assured the American people that Russia was stronger than she had been for some time, both from the government point of view and the military point of view.

The government point of view? The outstanding feature of the Russian Government "point of view" has always been the venal disposition of the High Command; the shameful, heartless, conscienceless corruption of persons in authority. Everyone knew this who knew Imperial Russia. At the trial of General Sukhomlinov, Minister for War, General Yanushkevitch, former Chief of Russian General Staff, testified that in the retreat from Galicia, during the summer of 1915, there was only one rifle for every ten soldiers. The soldiers in the rear had to wait until their comrades on the firing line were killed so that they might have their rifles. The Russians had no shells, and the Germans knowing this, set their guns two thousand yards off and shot down one helpless regiment after the other.

Many other examples of pitiful defenselessness could be cited at a time when the Allies loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to Russia for arms and military equipment, and Russia had these munitions, but far back of the front lines.

We have viewed Russian affairs as we have viewed Mexico, with American provincial eyes instead of attempting to judge from a Russian angle. Gladstone said that a nation guided by provincial statesmen was doomed for perdition, and, by reason of our provincialism, American statecraft striving to cope with Russia was hopelessly handicapped at the outset. This wholesale scandal and shameless corruption in high circles was typically Russian, an essential premise upon which to form a judgment of the Russian situation, but a premise totally unknown to persons unfamiliar with Russian character and Russian conditions.

Democracy assumes intelligence, but most important of all, self-control. Had we been familiar with the Russian people, is it likely that our State Department would have given such unstinted confidence to the dreamer, Kerensky? For like all countries where ignorance stifles the progress of struggling national life a strong unhesitant hand was needed to guide the nascent Russian democracy, and instead of resolution Kerensky presented oratory and by his Prikaz and vacillating policies rapidly lost his grip upon the army. General Korniloff attempted to rally the demoralized forces, restored the death penalty and strove to bring out of the chaos created by Kerensky, some likeness of coordination, but there was a division in adherence to the Premier and the General, and in the end both Korniloff and Kerensky failed. Probably no man could have succeeded; the seeds of destruction had germinated and struck root. It was too late.

The revolution of the Bolsheviks took place on 7th November, 1917, and in February following was announced the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, whereby the provinces of Russian Poland, Courland, Lithuania, and Estonia came under German control, giving Germany an important Baltic littoral. Turkey, the ally of Germany, was to receive back all territory in Asia Minor occupied since the war, and in addition the districts of Kars and Erivan and Batum. Germany and Turkey controlled the Caucasus, the boundaries of which were to be restored as they existed before the Russian-Turkish War of 1877. During the civil war that followed in the Ukraine, the Germans occupied the port of Sevastopol, and the Austrians took Odessa. Germany got vast stores of guns and war material, thirteen thousand three hundred fifty miles of railway, more than one-third of the entire Russian rail system, a large amount of rolling stock, seventy-three per cent of Russian iron fields and eighty-nine per cent of her coal.

The war in the East was over, one hundred and forty-seven German and Austrian Divisions were released for the Western Front.