Frederick Arthur McKenzie (1869–1931) was a Canadian correspondent who contributed to the Daily Mail as traveling correspondent in the Far East, covering the events of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905. After the war he decided to publish a book - "From Tokyo to Tiflis: Uncensored Letters from the War" - based on his war-time reports and spent several weeks in Tiflis gathering his writings and finalizing the manuscript. His stay in Georgia coincided with the Gurian Uprising of 1905, which described in one of his reports.
Trans-caucasia is a land of armed men, of hardy mountaineers, of brigandage and of frequent outrage. In few other places on earth is life held so cheap or taken so readily. Given a hot-blooded Oriental people, passionate and fully armed, and trouble must be frequent. In one or two places, it is true, such as Tiflis, the Government has enforced the non-display of weapons in public, but elsewhere every man carries his gun and daggers and revolver as a matter of course. While Russia rules outwardly, revolutionary committees exercise secret, but great power. Blackmail, thinly disguised under a political veil, is general. Many diverse peoples, hostile by race, religions and habits, maintain perpetual war, none the less keen or bitter or bloody because its outward display is limited by the presence of troops.
To Russia, Trans-Caucasia is of special importance as the road to the south, and as the stepping-off place for the great national schemes of advance against Turkey and Persia. Baku, with its enormous oil fields, is a constant source of wealth to the Government, and Batoum [Batum] is the shipping port for one portion of Asia. The country is a great mine, and even though its mineral treasures are as yet scarcely scratched, thriving ports and cities have sprung up in many parts. With settled government and firm administration, it would quickly become one of the richest provinces of Russia.
At present, however, the Caucasus shares with Finland and Poland the place of greatest anxiety in the near East for the Petersburg authorities. During the weeks I was there in the spring of 1905 the whole province was unsettled; every racial hate had been revived and blown to white heat, and every bitterness against Russia was finding expression. At Batoum and at Poti revolutionary strike committees had paralyzed work for weeks, threatening with death any who dared resist them. Right across the peninsula revolutionary committees exercised their secret powers unflinchingly.
It is difficult at first to understand the extent of the power of these revolutionary committees. They have one weapon to secure their will—murder of those who differ from them—and this weapon they use with the utmost freedom. While I was in Baku, two men were being tried for the murder of an Armenian merchant the previous summer. This was a case very typical of the country. The revolutionary committee had sent a representative to the merchant, demanding a hundred thousand roubles. He bluntly refused. They gave him three days to pay, but he went on with his work as usual and took no more notice of them. At the end of the third day he was shot while walking in the public garden of his city. Two men were arrested and brought to trial, but all Armenians said they were innocent. The committee had seen to it that the real assassin escaped.
The Armenian is largely at the bottom of the trouble in Trans-Caucasia. It is natural for the English Christian to sympathize with the Armenian Christian, who is so often the victim of Mohammedan oppression. But the almost unanimous opinion of Europeans in the Near East is against the Armenian. His very virtues make him disliked. He is clannish and thrifty, and a hard worker. To these qualities he adds others less amiable. He is the Jew of the East. He has the restless irritability of a poetical people, and often he does not lack the meaner qualities which are the inevitable outcome of centuries of oppression.
For some time the Caucasian Armenians were greatly favored by the Russian Government, but two or three years ago the then Governor-General altered his attitude. He became suspicious that they were using their church funds for political conspiracy. Cases of arms were bought with church monies, smuggled in the country by the Armenians, and concealed by church officials.
The arms were intended for service against the Turks. The Government used this as an excuse to take control of the enormous church funds, and it now supervises their expenditure. This has made the Armenians, almost to a man, enemies of Russia. The revolutionary committees, which had for some time been busy fighting the Sultan, now turned their attention to Czardom.
The committees thought that they saw their opportunity in the defeats coming upon the Russian arms in the Far East. "Russia is finished," they said to one another bluntly. Then Russia took the opportunity of striking at them the most deadly of blows.
[…]
In [Georgia], the Government meanwhile had to deal with a strike of the peasants. Over two years ago the Gourians [Gurians], a large tribe on the western border of the Caucasus, objected to the terms of land tenure and refused to till the soil. Their land is mostly used for the cultivation of maize, and the rent paid took the form of a certain quantity of grain each year. The peasants claimed, apparently with some justice, that in bad seasons they did not raise enough corn even to pay their rent. They had other causes of dispute also. The Georgian tribes in Trans-Caucasia do not take kindly to government. Their life is patriarchal, and they prefer the home rule of the village elders; particularly they object to outside taxation. For centuries they maintained constant war with the rest of the world, and even to-day, when a railway is run through their country and Russian military roads make the movements of outsiders easy, they are still suspicious of outer peoples.
They adopted the readiest means of protesting against the terms of their tenancy. They simply refused to till the land until they obtained the concessions they wanted. In the end, the landlords gave way and substituted a greatly reduced rent in the form of money for the old corn exactions. But meanwhile the Gourians having discovered their own power, went further. They decided that they would do without Russian government altogether.
"What do the Russians tax us for ?" the people asked. "They say that they build our roads; they do not. They eat our money and give us nothing in return. We will make our own roads."
Accordingly they started to make their own roads and are still doing so. When a public meeting is called now, the ostensible purpose is to repair the roads, affording the people a good excuse if they are come down on by the soldiers when gathered together. The most arbitrary captain dare not shoot a peasant for mending the path near his house.
The people refused to take their cases to the Russian courts; they appointed councils of their own elders, to whom they refer all their quarrels. Some landlords and others, it is true, attempted to appeal to the Russian authorities. To stop trouble, they were shot or stabbed. Some priests were suspected of betraying the plans of the people to the Russians, and even of revealing the secrets of the confessional. They, too, were killed.
One surprising feature of the outbreak has been that the rebel districts have for the time become safer for an ordinary traveller than they ever were before. Roads have been better kept, and even brigandage—usually regarded as a comparatively innocent relaxation—has been sternly punished by the irregular authorities.
Thus recently a Greek merchant was traveling through the disturbed country, when his carriage was held up by two men, who took 1,500 roubles (about £170) from him. The merchant complained to the village elders. They formed a committee of inquiry, and on the following Sunday morning two houses were surrounded by an armed crowd, and their owners dragged out and made, under threat of death, to confess their guilt. A search in the roofs of the houses revealed most of the stolen money.
The Sunday was a feast day, when everyone goes to church. While service was in progress, the robbers were brought to the church porch, stripped, tied to the shafts of the cab they had held up, and had two horses harnessed in front of them. The cabby got on his box-seat, and, as the villagers started emerging from church, crack went the whip over the men's shoulders, and off they had to go, shouting as they went (for this was part of their punishment), "We stole the money. We stole the money.”
They had to tear their hardest to keep up with the horses and save themselves from being dragged along the ground. The slightest sign of slackening brought the cabby's whip on them. Finally they were released, more dead than alive, the money was restored to the merchant, and they were further fined two hundred roubles each for the good of the community. Brigandage is now at a discount in that village.
In another case two men stole a cow. They, too, were brought outside the church on a feast day, and were tied back to back, and then firmly secured to the back of the cow they had stolen. Their punishment was to stand thus, helplessly trussed, and sing in chorus. "We stole the cow."
The people came out of church, firing pistols in the air, as usual, to celebrate the feast, and jeering at the cow thieves. Then the cow, unaccustomed to powder, and startled by the shots, tore off at a mad gallop. Before it could be stopped the men were kicked and knocked almost out of shape.
The Russian authorities are very anxious not to proceed to extremities. A considerable force has been gathered in the rebel district under the command of a general [Alikhanov-Avarskii] famous as a crusher of revolt, but for the time the troops are held back, and commissioners from Tiflis are going among the people, seeking to learn their grievances and to discover methods of conciliation.
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