Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/109

Rh to hard labor. All done in the name of the Czar.

Now the Czars were gone; their very names were being blotted out. The ships were being re-christened with names fitting the new republican order.

By this ceremony the Emperor Paul the First became The Republic. The Emperor Alexander II emerged from its baptism of paint as the Dawn of Liberty. Here was revolution enough to make these ancient autocrats turn in their graves. But it was even harder on the living Czar and his son. The Czarevitch was renamed the Citizen, while Nicholas II came forth as the good ship Comrade. Comrade! This ex-Czar, now living in exile in Tobolsk, knew that the meanest coal-heaver was now a "Comrade."

The new names appeared in gold on the jaunty ribboned caps of the sailors. And the sailors appeared everywhere as missionaries of Liberty, Comradeship and the Republic.

To make these changes in the names of the ships was very easy. Yet they were not mere surface changes, but symbolized a change in reality. They were the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual fact—the democratization of a great fleet.

In September I had my first contact with the sailor at home. It was at Helsingfors where the Baltic fleet stood as a barricade on the waterroad to Petrograd. Tied up to the dock was the Polar Star, the yacht of the former Czar. Our guide,