Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/17



Moscow I saw two peasant soldiers gazing at a poster being stuck up on a kiosk.

"We can't read a word of it," they cried, indignant tears in their eyes. "The Czar only wanted us to plough and fight and pay taxes. He didn't want us to read. He put out our eyes."

"To put out the eyes" of the masses, to put out their minds and consciences, was the deliberate policy of the Russian autocracy. For centuries the people were steeped in ignorance, narcotized by the church, terrorized by the Black Hundreds, dragooned by the Cossacks. The protesters were thrown into dungeons, exiled to hard labor in Siberian mines, and hung up on gibbets.

In 1917 the social and economic fabric of the land was shot to pieces. Ten million peasants dragged from their ploughs were dying in the trenches. Millions more were perishing of cold and hunger in the cities while the corrupt ministers intrigued with the Germans and the court held bacchanalian revels with the notorious monk, Rasputin. Even the Cadet, Milyukov, was forced to say: "History does not know of another government so stupid, so dishonest, so cowardly, so treacherous."

All governments rest upon the patience of the poor. It seems everlasting, but there comes an end to it. It came in Russia in March, 1917.

The masses felt that more vicious even than the