The Tsar's Coronation/Chapter 1

RETURNING to Moscow after a month's absence, on the 30th April 1896 (old style), I found the preparations for the coronation, which had been going on for several months past, much advanced. Erections, something like the grand-stand on a racecourse, were put up wherever space allowed, along the streets and squares which were to be traversed by the Imperial procession. Pillars, towers, and obelisks, put together of boards ingeniously painted, plastered and decorated, were erected on all sides. Gas-pipes, electric and other wires, pots, lamps, and frames were being hung on walls or fastened to roofs, in preparation for the illumination. Many people had let their houses for May and June, at more than a usual year's rent; and many more had spent time and money on ​advertisements and commissioners, in the vain hope of letting theirs at like rates. Windows to view the Emperor's triumphal entry were hired, I am told, for as much as £50 each. Friends of mine paid £20 per window; and a few days later, owing to some fresh public regulations, the price for similar windows fell to about £2, 10s. Factories were busy with special orders for showy goods needed for the approaching festivities; but owing to the exceptional nature of the demand, and to the fact that in the general confusion many orders were placed too late and had to be executed in a hurry, the profits realised by the makers were seldom in proportion to the trouble given or to the high prices charged for the goods. The price of timber rose during the winter on account of the quantity used in these preparations, and during the month of May the price of provisions in Moscow rose to an abnormal height.

The newspapers were crowded with telegrams relating how Prince This, and Count That, and General The Other were leaving this city or arriving at that place, on their way to Moscow. The cost of these embassies alone would have been sufficient to lift thousands of families of Russian peasants from destitution to a state of comparative comfort; add to this the cost of the seventy officially-recognised foreign special correspondents, who were busily engaged in ​Moscow for weeks, telegraphing nonsense all over Europe and to the Republican United States of America; and to these, again, add the expenses of the Russian newspapers, with the incidental type-setting, paper-making, and the value of the time wasted in reading the newspaper accounts of the coronation; think further of the labour needed to equip, to carry, and to feed all the thousands of idle-rich people who came from all ends, not of the empire only, but of the earth, to see the sights and to show off their jewels and fine clothes,—and one feels amazed that mother earth should be so bountiful as to yield not only the necessaries of life in response to the calls of labour, but to provide also all these superfluities for her foolish children, who toiled not except at vanities, and spun nothing but flatteries and falsehoods.

The traffic on the railways was disorganised. Many people wanting to reach Moscow could not get tickets. Trains were late and overcrowded. The convenience of the public was ignored whenever a vuisokopostavlenoe litso, an "important personage," was passing or was expected. To give a couple of instances from my own experience. The post train from Moscow to Petersburg on 6th May was not allowed to start at the usual hour, because it would have had to meet the train in which Nicholas II. was coming to Moscow. It was not his official entry (which only took place on the 9th ​May old style, when he had really been already three days there); his train was on the down line to Moscow, the post train was on the up line to Petersburg, and they would not have hurt each other; but it was quite in keeping with the rest of the coronation proceedings, that a train full of ordinary people should be uselessly kept waiting because the Emperor was expected. The whole line from Moscow to Petersburg was lined with troops to secure his safety, as (a few days later) were also the Yaroslaff line to Troitza and the Brest line to Ilinsk, when he visited the monastery at the former and the palace at the latter place. On the 6th of May the officials seem to have overshot their mark, for on my return journey to Moscow I heard that a passenger train having been unnecessarily shunted on to a side line to let the Imperial express pass, in the general disturbance and excitement the points and signals were not readjusted, and the Imperial train was brought to a dead stop, while investigations were being made as to what had happened.

On the 8th May, returning to Moscow from a station on the Nicholai line, my train was three and a half hours late; the platforms of the stations were crowded with people wishing to go to Moscow, but the train was said to be full, no tickets were sold, and I had difficulty in slipping into a large forty-five-seated second-class carriage, which I found was being kept ​almost empty for the convenience of half a dozen ladies connected with Count S———, who were travelling in it.

To a superficial observer of all these preparations it must have looked as though Russia had gone mad with joy over the approaching festivities; but to anyone at all behind the scenes there was another aspect of the case. Moscow swarmed with spies. Good-for-nothing rascals received £3 a month to turn eaves-droppers, and, wishing to earn their pay, had people arrested on the most frivolous pretences. I heard of a case in which ladies were taken up for jokes carelessly made about ugly decorations.

One spy, masquerading as an isvostchik,^[1] was stationed outside the yard where some friends of mine live. Their son, a gymnasium^[2] student, has friends, university students, who visit the family, and sometimes leave books or papers which would not be approved of by the press-censor. These books are not unclean French novels (a class of literature which is more free in Russia than in England), but may be such works as Karl Marx's Theory of Value or L. Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. A soldier, an acquaintance of this isvostchik spy, recog​nising him, asked, "What are you doing here?" The reply was, "I have to watch some students who visit a house in this yard." The soldier was a relation of my friend's cook, and dropped her a hint. This cook had reasons of her own for discontent with the authorities, her brother having been sent up from his village, much to his disgust, just when the fields needed ploughing, to be one of the okhrana (the special constables, or citizen guards, who were to form a living chain all along both sides of the road ridden by the Emperor on the day of his triumphal entry), and she immediately warned the family of their danger.

Now came the question, How were the books to be got rid of? A student went out and tried to hire the spy in order to drive away with him, but it seemed his horse was lame and he would not budge. Then two bundles similar in shape and size were made- one an innocent dummy bundle, the other containing the forbidden literature. The plan was that two students, accompanied by a friend, should go out of the yard, each carrying one of the bundles. Had the spy followed the dummy bundle, the difficulty would have been over; but a second spy appeared on call, and both bundles were followed. The students took different cabs, and two races began. The dummy bundle was taken to one of the students' lodgings, ​which was searched soon after by the police, when nothing incriminating was found. The other student and his friend, after a long quick drive, failing to dodge their pursuer, made their way to a yard which, besides leading to the house that stood in it, had another exit they knew of. The student remaining in the cab to keep the spy engaged, the friend took the parcel, and, entering the yard as if to go to the house in it, passed through the other exit, left his dangerous burden at the house of an acquaintance, and soon returned, smiling blandly, to rejoin the student in the cab.

The unknown and presumably loyal dwellers in the house in that yard were, we may conjecture, surprised by a police search that night.

Some five hundred students of the Moscow University are said to have been sent away to the provinces before the Emperor's arrival. Some received notice to quit when they were in the middle of th examinations, on their success in passing which their chances of making a livelihood largely depended. Not students only, but any person of the lower or middle classes whom the police chose to suspect was sent away. In one case, the order to expel a doctor turned out on inquiry, after great annoyance had been caused him, to have been signed by mistake. Some doctors, however, were ordered away; and when, ​a few days later, the wounded and dying in Moscow were counted by the hundred, these doctors were far away from their posts, and had no right to return till the Emperor left Moscow. If report lies not, one colonel of gendarmes was among those expelled from Moscow, as a precautionary measure to ensure the safety of the Tsar.

It would need a bulky volume to tell all the special police regulations issued à propos of the coronation. Suffice it to mention that the attics of the houses overlooking the route of the Tsar's triumphal entry were searched and sealed up some days before he reached Moscow, nor might they be reopened till the ceremonies were all over. Another precautionary measure was to cut fourteen and a half pages out of copies entering Moscow of the May number of Mr. Stead's Review of Reviews, which contained a character sketch of the Tsar.

It is curious, with all that has been written about the coronation, how difficult it is to get reliable information on plain matters of fact, such as, How many people were sent out of Moscow? How many spies and gendarmes were employed? How much the whole affair cost the Imperial and Municipal Governments? What it cost the country, if one counts the private expenditure, the disorganisation and stoppage of industry, the balls and illuminations, ​the journeys and thefts, the drunkenness and sickness, and all the reckless extravagance and attendant waste, no mortal man can ever tell. The following figures, which may, I think, be relied upon as approximately correct, are, however, suggestive in this connection. Ninety thousand troops were massed in or round Moscow, of whom more than fifty thousand were brought from a distance. Ninety-two thousand people were enrolled (many of them unwillingly) in the okhrana as special constables to guard the Emperor's entry. Five thousand additional police were sent from Petersburg, Warsaw, etc.,to Moscow, besides the three or four thousand usually stationed there. How many thousand gendarmes there were, and how many informers, I have not been able to ascertain.

If it be, as some people suppose, always a good thing to "provide employment for the common people," then assuredly the coronation was a blessing to the world, for hundreds of thousands of people were called on to expend much labour on many things; both for the coronation itself, and for the feasting and adorning of people who attended it, with the embellishment of the houses they temporarily occupied and the fine coaches in which they travelled by rail or through the streets. It is a pity that most of these things were quite useless, and that the money to pay for them had to be taken from other poor people, who would rather ​their industry had provided wealth for themselves, instead of work for their fellows. But providing goods for the unproductive, and increasing toil for the labourers, goes hand in hand in other countries besides Russia; nor is it confined to coronation time.

Some people spoke of the gain to Russia which they said would proceed from the expenditure of the foreign embassies which came to Moscow and spent money there: something may be in that; and when Russia sends return embassies to live luxuriously in France or Germany, the French and Germans will be able to enjoy the same excuse for any waste of labour they may indulge in. All the countries of Europe may thus be enriched by mutually wasting money on each other, and the coronation will thus have served to disprove the inconvenient fact that it is not waste, but production, which increases the wealth of nations.

I AM living in a datcha^[3] near the Moscow-Brest railway line, along which Nicholas II. was expected to travel to-day to Odintzovo, on his way to the palace at Ilinsk. Having finished the Part I. of this account, I went to visit some friends living on the other side of the railway line, promising to be home again in time for an eight o'clock supper. On my return journey, between seven and eight o'clock, I turned from the main road on to the short cross road, which leads past the station and across the line, to my datcha just beyond. But no sooner had I turned on to this cross road than I was stopped by two men armed with large sticks. No one was to be allowed to approach the station or to cross the line! "Why not?" "We don't know. Those are the ​orders. Probably the Emperor will pass." "Then how am I to get home to supper? I live just the other side of the line." "We know that; but it is not said when one will be allowed to pass. Not before ten o'clock." I turned back. Even if I had passed these men I should have been stopped by the sentinels, stationed at about fifty paces apart from each other, who now guarded both sides of the line. I had, however, no inclination to kick my heels waiting for an indefinite number of hours within a quarter of a mile of home; so I put up my bicycle at a peasant's house near by, and, walking down the main road a bit, crossed near a gravel pit and through a small wood, till I came to a lonely part of the line where the sentinels were not expecting anyone. A wooden fence sheltering me, I got near the line without being seen, and, choosing a place midway between two sentinels, I slipped through the fence and ran for it. The sentinels from left and right on both sides of the line challenged me and warned me back, but, shouting the only pass-word I had, namely, that I wanted my supper, I got across the railway line, and plunged safely into the wood on the home side. I do not know whether anyone pointed a gun at me or followed me—in fact I did not stop to investigate; but the occurrence was reported to the police, and I had a call later on from the ouriadnik (a police officer), to whom ​I pleaded guilty of coming home to supper. He was polite enough, and I am beginning to hope I shall not hear anything more about the matter. That, however, remains to be seen.

This ouriadnik is a pleasant man, slightly uncomfortable about his "duties." When he searched our lodgings, a few days ago, he did it in a polite and even shame-faced way, explaining that it was "only a formality." The most suspicious thing he found to inquire about was a cask in the cellar. It contained kvass, a non- intoxicating beverage. He did not do what the ouriadnik at Perlovka (on the Yaroslaff line) did to some people I know, namely, made them sign a pledge to keep all their windows shut the whole of the day on which the Emperor was expected to pass! On that day (it was last Wednesday) no passenger train was allowed to enter or leave Moscow by the Yaroslaff Railway, so that the whole line might be at the disposal of the Imperial trains.

To return to the occurrences of to-day; from 7 P. M. till after 11 a slowly-increasing group of people, chiefly peasants and visitors from town wanting to get to their homes, has been stopped on each side of the line, unable to cross or even to reach the station. Their numbers are swelled by some people who have collected in hope of seeing the Emperor's train pass. As I sit on the balcony and write this, I hear the loud ​voices of policemen driving the people farther back from the line. No one is to be within a hundred paces of the track. Some of the peasants speak out their minds pretty freely as to the inconvenience caused them.

People who have come over from the Petersburg high road, a few miles to the north of us (which also leads from Moscow to the palace at Ilinsk), report that that road is being guarded by okhrana and continually watered all day, out as far as and two miles beyond Ilinsk, as the Emperor may pass that way instead of going by rail. No one will know which way he is to travel till he actually starts. The amount of expense and of inconvenience caused to the public, as usual, appears to count for nothing.

At 10.30 a splendid train, brilliantly lighted up, dashed past; but as no orders were received to move the sentinels, it remained doubtful whether the Emperor was in it, or whether it was only one of the dummy Imperial trains which are sent out to draw the fire of possible conspirators. Soon after 11 P. M., however, people were again allowed to cross the line to get to the station. Either the Emperor had passed in that train or he had gone by road.