The Red Funeral in Vladivostok
THE RED FUNERAL
IN VLADIVOSTOK.
An Account of the Funeral of the Russian people
killed on July 1st. 1917, when Czecho Slovak
Japanese and British troops seized the Vladivostok
Soviet.
By ALBERT RHYS WILLIAMS.
Price 2d.
PUBLISHED BY THE WORKERS' SOCIALIST
FEDERATION, 400 OLD FORD ROAD, LONDON,
E3, AND 152 FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
THE RED FUNERAL
IN VLADIVOSTOK.
It was the Fourth of July. I was standing on the Kitaiskaya looking down upon the holiday flags on the American battleship in Vladivostok Bay. Suddenly I heard a far away sound. Listening, I caught the strains of the Revolutionary Hymn:—
With hearts heavy and sad we bring our dead
Who shed their blood in the fight for freedom.
Looking up, I saw on the crest of the hill the first lines of the funeral procession of the gruzshchiki.
Four days before, when the Czecho-Slovaks, aided by Japanese and English troops, suddenly seized the Soviet and its officials, throwing confusion and terror into the ranks of the workers, the gruzshchiki (longshoremen), rushed into the Red Staff Building, and, though outnumbered forty to one, refused to surrender until the building was fired by an incendiary bomb.
To-day, the people were burying the defenders of the fallen Soviet. Out of the workmen's quarters they streamed, jamming the street, not from curb to curb, but from wall to wall. They came billowing over the hill-top by thousands until the whole long slope was choked with the dense, slow-moving throng, keeping time to the funeral march of the revolutionists.
Up through the gray and black mass of men and women ran two lines of white-bloused sailors of the Bolshevik fleet. Above their heads tossed a cloud of crimson standards with: silvered cords and tassels. In the vanguard, four men carried a huge red banner with the words: "Long Live the Soviet of Workmen's and Peasants' Deputies! Hail to the International Brotherhood of the Toilers!"
A hundred girls in white, carrying the green wreaths from forty-four unions of the city, formed a guard of honour for the coffins of the gruzshchiki, which, with the red paint still wet upon them, were borne upon the shoulders of their comrades. The music crashed out by the Red Fleet Band was lost in the volume of song that rose from the seventeen thousand singers.
Here was colour and sound and motion—but there was a something else, a something which compelled fear and awe. I have seen a score of the great processions of Petrograd and Moscow, peace and victory and protest and memorial parades, military and civilian. They were all vast and impressive because the Russians have a genius for this kind of thing. But this was different.
From. these defenceless poor, stripped of their arms, and with sorrowing songs bearing off their dead, there came a threat more menacing than that which frowned from the twelve-inch guns of the Allied Fleet, riding in the harbour below. It was impossible not to feel it. It was so simple, so spontaneous and so elemental. It came straight out of the heart of the people. It was the people, leaderless, isolated, beaten to earth, thrown upon its own resources, and yet, out of its grief, rising magnificently to take command of itself.
The dissolution of the Soviet, instead of plunging the people into inactive grief and dissipating their forces, begot a strange, unifying spirit. Seventeen thousand separate souls were welded into one. Seventeen thousand people, singing in unison found themselves thinking in unison. With a common mass will and mass consciousness, they formulated their decisions from their class standpoint—the determined standpoint of the revolutionary proletariat.
The Czecho Slovaks came, offering a guard of honour. "Ne noozhna!" (It is not necessary!) the people replied. "You killed our comrades. Forty to one you fought against them. They died for the Soviet and we are proud of them. We thank you, but we cannot let the guns which shot them down guard them in their death!"
"But there may be danger for you in this city," said the authorities.
"Never mind," they answered, "We, too, are not afraid of death. And what better way to die than beside the bodies of our comrades!"
Some bourgeois societies came, presenting memorial wreaths. (The Cadets officially denied that these wreaths came from them.)
"Ne noozhna, it is not necessary," the people answered. "Our comrades died in a struggle against the bourgeoisie. They died fighting cleanly. We must keep their memory clean. We thank you, but we dare not lay your wreaths upon their coffins."
The procession poured down the Aleutskaiya Hill, filled the large, open space at the bottom, and faced up toward the English Consulate. Near by was a work-car with a tower for repairing electric wires. Whether it was there by design or accident I do not know. Presently it was to serve as a speaker's rostrum.
The band played a solemn dirge. The men bared their heads. The women bowed. The music ceased and there was a silence. The band played a second time. Again there was the bowing and baring of heads and again the long silence. And yet there was no speaker. It was like a huge Quaker meeting in the open air. And just as a sermon has no place in Russian public worship so here a speech was not essential to this act of public devotion. But should someone from the people feel the impulse to speak there was the platform awaiting him. It was as if in the pause the people were generating a voice.
At last out of the crowd one came and climbed upon the high platform. He had not the gift of oratory but his frequent iteration, "They died for us," "They died for us," touched others to utterance.
Most eloquent of all was a lad of seventeen, the secretary of a league of young Socialists. "We were students and artists and such kind of people. We held ourselves aloof from the Soviet," he said. "It seemed to us foolish for workmen to govern without the wisdom of the wise. But now we know that you were right and we were wrong. From now on we shall stand with you. What you do, we will do. We pledge our tongues and pens to make known the wrongs that you have suffered the length and breadth of Russia and throughout the world."
Suddenly the word went through the throng that Constantin Soochanov had been paroled until five o'clock and that he was coming with counsels of peace and moderation. Soochanov was the president of the Soviet, a student twenty-four years of age, son of a high official of the Tsar, and a hero in a revolution that is not given to hero-worship.
While some were affirming his coming and others were denying it, he himself appeared. He was quickly passed along upon the shoulders of the sailors. In a storm of cheers, he climbed the ladder and came out upon the platform-top, smiling. …
As if to avert the flood of tragedy and pathos that beat suddenly upon him from every side, he turned his head away. His eyes fell for the first time upon the red coffins of the men who had been slain in defence of his Soviet and upon the mothers, wives and children of the men who lay within them. That was too much for him. A shudder passed through his frame, he threw up his hands, staggered, and would have fallen headlong into the crowd, but a friend caught him. With both hands pressed to his face, Soochanoy, in the arms of his comrades, sobbed like a child. We could see his breath come and go and the tears raining down his cheeks. The Russians are little given to tears. But that day there were seventeen thousand Russians who sobbed with their young leader on the public square of Vladivostok.
But Soochanov knew that many tears were an indulgence and that he had a big and serious task to perform. Fifty feet behind him was the English Consulate and fifty rods before him were the waters of the Golden Horn with the frowning guns of the Allied Fleet. He wrenched himself away from his grief and. . . .with an ever mounting passion of earnestness he spoke, closing with the words which shall henceforth be the rallying-cry for the workers in Vladivostok and the Far East:—
"Here, before the Red Staff Building where our comrades gruzshchiki were slain, we swear by these red coffins that hold them, by their wives and children that weep for them, by the red banners which float over them, that the Soviet for which they died shall be the thing for which we live—or if need be—like them, die. Henceforth the return of the Soviet shall be the goal of all our sacrifice and devotion. To that end we shall fight with every means. The bayonets have been wrested from our hands, but when the day comes and we have no guns we shall fight with sticks and clubs, and when these are gone then with our bare fists and bodies. Now it is for us to fight only with our minds and spirits. Let us make them hard and strong and unyielding. The Soviet is dead. Long live the Soviet!"
The crowd caught up the closing words in a tremendous demonstration, mingled with the strains of the 'International':—
"Arise ye prisoners of starvation,
Arise ye wretched of the earth,
For Justice thunders condemnation
A better world’s in birth"
The resolution proclaiming the restoration of the Soviet, the objective of all the future struggles of the revolutionary proletariat and peasants of the Far East, was read. At the call for the vote seventeen thousand hands shot into the air. They were the hands which had built the cars and paved the streets, forged the iron, held the plough, and swung the hammer. All kinds of hands they were: the big, rough hand of the old gruzshchiki, the artisans' deft and sinewy, the knotted hands of the peasants, thick with callouses, and thousands of the frailer, whiter hands of the working-women. By these hands the riches of the Far East had been wrought. They were no different from the scarred, stained hands of labour anywhere in all the world. Except in this regard. For a time they had held the power. The Government had been within their grasp. Four days ago it had been wrested from their grasp but the feel of it was still within their hands—these hands raised now in solemn pledge to take that power again. . . .
A sailor striding down from the hilltop, pushed through the crowd and climbed upon the platform. "Comrades!" he cried joyously. "We are not alone. I ask you to look away to the flags flying over there on the American battleship. You cannot see them down there where you stand. But they are there. And with the flags of all the other nations there is the red flag of our Russian Republic. No, comrades, we are not alone to day in our grief. The Americans understand and they are with us!"
It was a mistake of course. Those flags had been hung out in celebration of our Day of Independence. But the crowd did not know that. To them it was like the sudden touch of a friend's hand upon a lonely traveller in a foreign land. With enthusiasm they caught up the cry of the sailor: "The Americans are with us!" And the vast conclave, lifting up their coffins, wreaths and banners were once more in motion. They were going to the cemetery but not directly. Tired as they were from long standing in the sun, they made a wide detour to reach the street that runs up the steep hill to the American Consulate. Then straight up the sharp slope they toiled in a cloud of dust, still singing as they marched, until they came before the Stars and Stripes floating from the flagstaff. And there they stopped and laid the coffins of their dead beneath the flag of the great Western democracy.
They stretched out their hands, crying, "Speak to us a word!" They sent delegates within to implore that word. On the day the great Republic of the West celebrated its independence the poor and disinherited of Russia came asking sympathy and understanding in the struggle for their independence. Afterwards, I heard a Bolshevik leader bitterly resentful at this. "compromise with revolutionary honour and integrity."
"How stupid of them," he said. "How inane of them! Have we not told them that all countries are alike—all imperialists? Was this not repeated to them over and over again by their leaders>"
Truly it had been. But with this demonstration of the Fourth of July the leaders had little to do. They were in prison. The affair was in the hands of the people themselves. And, however cynical many leaders were about the professions of America, the people were not so. In the hour of their affliction, these simple trusting folk, makers of the new democracy of the East, came stretching forth their hands to the great strong democracy of the West.
They knew that President Wilson had given his assurance of help and loyalty to the "people of Russia." They reasoned: "We the workers and peasants, the vast majority here in Vladivostok, are we not the people? To-day in our trouble we come to claim the promised help. Our enemies have taken away our Soviet. They have killed our comrades. We are alone and in distress and you alone of all the nations. of the earth can understand." No finer tribute could they offer than to come thus, bringing their dead, with the faith that out of America would come compassion and understanding. America, their only friend and refuge.
But America did not understand. The American people did not even hear about it. But these Russian folk did not know that the American people never heard about it. All they know is that a few weeks after that appeal came the landing of the American troops.
And now they say to one another: "How stupid we were to stand there in the heat and the dust stretching out our hands like beggars!"
[Reprinted from "The New Republic."
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