CHAPTER II

“ WE ARE YOURS, BUT THE LAND IS OURS ”

IT would indeed be a fascinating and a profitable excursion into an almost virgin field of inquiry to trace step by step the origins and colorful vicissitudes of the Russian State from the dim and distant obscurity which enshrouds the first appearance of the Eastern Slavs in historical literature, through the periods of Tatar and Polish domination, down to its final form under the Princes of Moscow. But the limits of this present book do not permit more than a bare recapitulation of the main characteristics. The monumental work of Klyuchevsky, the celebrated historian of the University of Moscow, unfolds a panorama of colossal magnitude and importance. With the entrance of Rurik into Novgorod in the middle of the ninth century (862) began the steady process of expansion and Russification of conquered provinces, notably in the reign of Ivan III, that eventually carried the double-headed eagle from Alexandrovno, on the German border, to Vladivostok on the Pacific, and from the Polar Sea on the north to the "warm waters" of the Black Sea on the south, with Constantinople ever the objective and ultimate goal of Russian foreign policy.

There are two prevailing views regarding the dawn of Russian history. One school of research, represented by Schlözer, Karamzin, Pogodin, and Soloviev, dates Russian chronology from the coming of the Scandinavians, under Rurik, to rule over Novgorod and the neighboring Slavonic tribes in the year 862 of the Christian era. According to this belief, these hardy Vikings, who came in acceptance of an invitation to govern the land extended to them by the natives of North Russia, found the great Russian plain which lay between Novgorod and Kiev, stretching to the right and left of the Dnieper, wholly uncultivated and wild, inhabited by Slavic tribes living in a state of rude, anarchic barbarism. From Novgorod, therefore, as a starting point, the Varangian Princes gravitated southward toward Kiev, and by successive federation and consolidation of scattered trading posts established the nucleus of the future Empire.

Another and later group of Russian scholars, ably represented by the Moscow historian Klyuchevsky, now dead, and Michael Rostovtsev, at present lecturing at an American University, seek their orientation farther south, basing their claims on the archaeological discoveries in South Russia and the Crimea, where distinct traces of a flourishing civilization have been unearthed showing evidence of Greek culture and Hellenic influence. They record the finding of palæolithic and neolithic relics in the southern steppes, and adduce the mention of Russia made by Herodotus as early as the fifth century before Christ, when Ionian and Dorian Greeks had established themselves along the coast line of the Black Sea in the colonies of Olbia, Chersonese, Panficapæum, Tanais, and Phanagoria. The place names still preserved at Eupatoria and Theodosia in the Crimea are reminders of Greek settlers. But the hinterland was occupied by other peoples, under the headship, first of the Cimmerians, and then of the Scythians.

It will suffice, however, for our present purpose to take our stand upon the common ground where all schools meet and say that the Russian State, viewed as a political community, and apart from its racial content, evolved from that confederation of trading posts between Novgorod and Kiev, which were founded and protected by Varangian chieftains under Rurik and the Slavonic Princes Oleg and Igor. Both Scandinavians—who probably were of Norman origin—and Slavs were impelled as much by hopes of gain as by visions of glory. " They were as good business men as they were soldiers.... Adventurous trade, therefore, by all accounts seems to have been responsible for the early settlements on the Russian Plain." And the very name of Russia or "Rus," to recall its earliest form, is said to be Time's modification of "Rurik," the Swedish freebooter.

The first recorded account of the Russian people, that intensely human and picturesque document, The Chronicle of Nestor, does not go farther back than 852 A.D.

Now a word about that Russian plain; not only was it to be the scene of all the events here recorded, but it played a very important part in determining some of them. That climatic conditions and geography do materially influence the development of a people is beyond dispute. In fact, it is an article of faith with one school of historians that climate and geography far outweigh psychic and cultural influences in deciding the direction which a nation's development shall take. This theory is, of course, subject to the same exaggeration and unwarranted application which every materialistic interpretation of history and economic is prone to when investigators minimize the free psychological, social, and spiritual instincts that dominate men in defiance of geography and climate. Climate does encourage certain types of genius and discourages others. Philologists point to the Romance languages, with their open, full-voweled, and musical sounds, as the natural expression of races basking under the limpid skies, the orange groves, and the mellow sunshine of the Mediterranean basin. We expect liquid music from a Tetrazzini, a Calve, and a Caruso, whereas the sterner rigors of Northern Europe tend rather to produce the Wagnerian thunder of Teutonic basses. Laplanders and Eskimos speak a particularly guttural tongue because long experience taught their ancestors to keep the mouth closed as much as possible in those icy igloos, and speak, when they had to, through clenched teeth. And the Ural-Altaic family speaks a throaty and agglutinative language, measuring their words by the least common denominator of vocal effort. But, to confute and confound any theorist who becomes overdogmatic, Jenny Lind comes tripping across the stage, a Swedish nightingale of the North !

The enormous plateau on which Russia sprawls is described as the largest in the world. But it is landlocked. The only southern egress is blocked by an ancient enemy, the Turk, who makes the Black Sea, to all intents and purposes, an inland sea as long as Islam controls the Dardanelles; of the northern ports, both Petrograd and Archangel are frozen in nearly half the year. Even when open for navigation, the Petrograd outlet leads into the narrow straits dominated by Denmark and Sweden. The only other hope of free exit is by Vladivostok, five thousand miles distant from the heart of the Empire. "Nature has been a stepmother to Russia," wrote Soloviev; "Fate was another stepmother." Hence that historic urge which impelled Russia to press outward in all directions—to break, as it were, the chrysalis of geographic despotism which Nature had imposed on her.

At this point our economic determinist may cry triumph and thank us for having proved his very dearest claim. Not so fast. Human nature is capable of most disconcerting tricks in the very teeth of environment. There are numerous points of similarity between the stages of development that led to the final erection of an autocratic state in Russia and the processes that resulted in the present United States of America. Beginning with relatively small territories, both peoples conquered a vast and virgin continent: the Americans through successive waves of colonization across the Rockies westward to the Pacific, the Russians by similar pioneering eastward across the Urals until they reached the same expanse of water that stopped the Americans at the Golden Gate. Both faced natural obstacles and encountered primitive tribes, yellow and red, who contested every inch of the white man's advance. But no two governments on the face of the earth arrived at more contradictory theories and practices as to the meaning of political freedom.

While freely admitting that the physical configuration of Russia's territory did determine, to a measurable degree, the direction of the stream of events that resulted in autocracy,—just as it directs so many of her rivers northward,—it would be an unjustified conclusion to maintain that this ends the diagnosis. There were subtle human factors at work more powerful than rivers or harbors or steppes; it was the simultaneous concentration of mixed forces that led Russia into the errors that proved the undoing of her political and social unity. To these elements we shall devote a later chapter. The final scene represented a territorial jurisdiction of 8,648,000 square miles, an area more than twice the rest of Europe combined, considerably more than twice the size of the United States. The population in 1914 was something like 180,000,000. But, as I have intimated, it was an artificial structure, the cohesion of whose parts depended, not on any natural affinity, but on the strength of character and resourcefulness of one central figure, the Tzar, in whom resided supreme legislative, administrative, and ecclesiastical power. He was both civil ruler and virtual head of the Orthodox Church. In the words of Peter the Great, he was "the autocratic monarch, who has to give an account of his acts to no man on earth, but has power to rule his states and lands according to his own will and judgment."

The people, his subjects, were divided into clearly defined classes, whose rights and obligations were set forth with legal precision in the Code. Everybody was ticketed and labeled:—

The prikaz, imperial edict of the Tzar, was the incontrovertible law of the land. He alone could initiate legislation, as he alone could initiate a conversation. To be sure there was a Council of State, a Committee of Ministers, a Senate, and a Judiciary. But as these were all either appointees of the Tzar and responsible to him alone, or, if elected, utterly dependent on the administration, they were, in point of fact, nothing but an extension, as it were, of the autocrat's person and an instrumentality for the execution of will. The imperial decree was interpreted and duly executed by an army of governors, vice governors, resident provincial officials, civil assistants, military aids, and scribes and secretaries beyond imagining. Fourteen categories of officials were included in the vast and complicated bureaucratic machine invented by Peter the Great and under which Russia groaned for two centuries. The fourteen progressive stages in the public service embraced all varieties of rank or tchin, and the ruling caste thus created were known as tchinovniki. "Russia is ruled, not by me, but by my forty thousand clerks," said Nicholas I.

Historians like to lay their finger on a definite circumstance, a known date, or some single event to mark the beginning of mighty political movements. Hilaire Belloc has written an essay in support of his belief that the French Revolution began on the day and at the moment when the Commons of France, excluded by Louis XVI from entering the Assembly Hall at Versailles, on June 20, 1789, rushed in indignation to the enclosed tennis court on the palace grounds and there defied King, clergy, and nobles by holding a separate convocation. The Boston Massacre, preceding the Declaration of Independence by six years, made the American Revolution inevitable. But it would be extremely difficult to specify and designate a date or a single event as the starting point of the Russian Revolution. That deluge grew from many rivers of tears and streams of blood.

There were frequent bloody conflicts of the palace type in early days centring about the "false" Dimitri. Peasant uprisings frequently disturbed the growing Empire, such as that of Stenka Razin in 1670 and Pugachev in 1773. But the first of these resembled more the guerrilla warfare of a popular brigand, rallying discontented elements in opposition to the domination of Moscow, than organized domestic rebellion. The latter outburst, though more serious both in duration and in character, was a revolt of Don Cossacks in support of a pseudo-Peter III against Catherine II. Its forces are pictured by historians as a tatterdemalion horde of disreputable adventurers organized into an army for predatory purposes. Of all previous rebellions the Pugachev revolt came nearest to social and economic revolution.

Local military revolts were not wanting, such as that of the freebooting Zaparojian Cossacks, suppressed by Potemkin, under Catherine II. The numerous Polish insurrections were national uprisings against the political rule of Russia. But domestic revolt only becomes successful revolution in the complete sense when it effects radical political, social, and economic changes in the community.

A correspondent of the London Times, in Petrograd during the War, wrote, in March 1917, "An old woman threw a stone at a baker's shop-window and started the Russian Revolution." He means, of course, that the crash of breaking glass in the bread shop rang up the curtain on the last act. As early as December, 1825, a group of ardent revolutionaries, mostly idealistic young officers of the Imperial Army, lately returned from France and Germany, attempted to end the tyranny of Tzardom by open revolt in St. Petersburg. Ill advised, improperly organized, and too weak to be dangerous, it was easily suppressed—in the usual way. Five of the leaders were executed and great numbers of the participants were exiled for life. This pathetic attempt of the "Decembrists" to effect a refined revolution, an affair of cocked hats and gayly caparisoned chargers, forms the theme of Merejkovsky's historical novel, December Fourteenth.

The leaders had imbibed new and electrifying ideas during their campaigning in Western Europe, where they had been employed against Napoleon. They aimed at a complete reformation of the Russian State and even dreamed of a constitutional republic modeled on the United States of America.⁽¹⁾ It failed, through inefficiency, the insurgent troops standing drawn up all day in the Senate Square, their officers debating and arguing as to the next move. By evening the loyal troops had time to bring up cannon and leisurely blew them into the Neva. "The Russian is clever, but always too late," according to their own homely proverb.

The Soviet Government, by its official celebration of the Decembrists' centenary in November 1925, recognized the Decembrists as the first strictly social and political revolutionaries which Russia produced.

But all historians and thoughtful Russians admit that it was the Crimean War of 1853 that finally unloosed elemental social forces that could no longer be denied or restrained. "War searches the joints and harness of every state that challenges its verdict; it appraises, first by a rude and sudden shock, and then by a long, slow, dragging tension (just as we test and appraise the worth of steel), the endurance and the capacity for survival of each political community." The defeat of Russia by the combined forces of England and France was a national humiliation, regarded, however, by patriotic Russians as a blessing in disguise.

"Sevastopol fell," said Ivan Aksakov, "that God might reveal all the rottenness of the system of government."

"We have fallen," said Samarin, "not before the forces of the Western Alliance, but as a result of our own internal weakness."

This weakness had been manifested to a scandalous degree in the absence of adequate transportation facilities for men and supplies. At the outbreak of the Crimean War there were but two railroads operating in Russia, aggregating 419 miles; one ran from Petrograd to Moscow, while the second, a short spur of fifteen miles, connected Petrograd with the Summer Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Obviously, both had been constructed either for the convenience of royalty or for upper class and bourgeois profit. The rest of Russia floundered about in the mud, on foot, on horseback, or in coaches and wagons, as best they might.

During the preliminary planning of the Moscow-Petrograd line,—which is exceptionally well built, straight as the flight of a crow, and running on a firm, level roadbed,—occurred an incident that reconciles one to certain attributes of tyranny. The officials charged by Nicholas I with laying out the route to be followed were neither better nor worse than our modern "logrollers." When Nicholas called for the plans, he observed that a meandering course had been plotted out in deference to certain landowners and interested persons who, if they could not move their property close the tracks, would lay the rails in circles, if need be, to bring new value to their holdings. The Tzar took a ruler; laying one end on Petrograd and one on Moscow, he said, "You will construct the line so." And so it runs to this day, 404 miles without deviating a foot to right or left, following an almost mathematically straight line. As one commentator puts it, the Nicholas Railway remains "to all future ages, like St. Petersburg and the Pyramids, a magnificent monument of autocratic power."

Dangerously discredited by the issue of the war and the revelations of disorganization, incompetency, and official corruption, the Government made haste to be liberal.

As the land hunger of the peasants was the most threatening symptom of basic unrest, the agrarian problem as the natural starting point for the great reform that marked the reign of Alexander II. For upward of three hundred years, since the conquests of Ivan IV, which added Kazan (1552), Astrakhan (1556), and the whole course of the Volga to Russia, the peasant population had been undergoing an insidious process of economic limitation that resulted practically in bondage. The acquisition of new and fertile territories opened up huge tracts of land for cultivation. Scarcity of labor sufficient to till the soil obliged the great landholders to use every device to coax agricultural workers to their respective estates. Once on the ground, the "boyars" — the territorial nobility—held them there sometimes by fraud, more often by force. Obliged to render service to the Tzar in the shape of military aid, taxes, and produce as recompense for his land grants, these feudal lords found it impossible to discharge their obligations unless labor was made available and permanent. Gradually, therefore, the peasant came to be regarded as belonging to the land which he tilled, until, under the regency of Boris Godunov (1597), sentiment crystallized in the form of an imperial decree, an ukaz, prohibiting peasants from migrating from one property to another, and confirming the legal right of landlords to enforce the return of fugitives. It was the Russian Dred Scott decision.

Klyuchevsky⁽²⁾ sums up the process in his famous antinomies:—

I. Up till the middle of the eighteenth century the external territorial extension of the Russian State goes on in inverse proportion to the development of the interior freedom of the people.

2. The political status of the laboring classes establishes itself in inverse proportion to the economic productivity of their labor that is, their labor becomes less free in proportion as it becomes more productive.

From "fixation" to the land, for purely agricultural and economic reasons, to practical slavery was not a far cry. By the middle of the eighteenth century serfdom had become legalized, the serfs being considered as part of the proprietor's irremovable property. A man's wealth was computed, not by his revenue, or his dessiatines (dessiatine = 2.7 acres), or his gold, but by the number of "souls" on his property. Gogol, the Russian Dickens, has a celebrated novel on the subject, called Dead Souls, satirizing in a masterful way one of the abuses of serfdom. There was a periodic census of serfs, say, once every ten or twenty years. This being the case, an owner had to pay a tax on every "soul" registered at the last census, though some of the serfs might have died in the meantime. Nevertheless, the system had its material advantages, inasmuch as an owner might borrow money from the bank on the "dead souls" no less than on the living ones. The plan of Chichikov, Gogol's hero villain, was, therefore, to make a journey through Russia and buy up the "dead souls" at reduced rates, saving their owner the government tax, of course, and acquiring for himself a list of fictitious serfs which he meant to mortgage a bank for a considerable sum. With this money he could buy an estate and some real live serfs and make the beginning of a fortune. Gogol read this manuscript to his friend, the poet Pushkin. At the end Pushkin cried out in anguish: "God! What a sad country Russia is!"

Mackenzie Wallace, in that invaluable record he left of his years of wandering up and down Russia, recounts a story which he read of a similar Chichikov in the reign of Nicholas I.

An officer of rural police, when driving on a country road, finds a dead body by the wayside. Congratulating himself on this bit of good luck, he proceeds to the nearest village and lets the inhabitants know that all manner of legal proceedings will be taken against them so that the supposed murderer may be discovered. The peasants are of course frightened and give him a considerable sum of money in order that he may hush up the affair. An ordinary officer of police would have been quite satisfied with this ransom, but this officer is not an ordinary man and is very much in need of money; he conceives, therefore, the brilliant idea of repeating the experiment. Taking up the dead body, he takes it away in his tarantass and a few hours later declares to the inhabitants of a village some miles off that some of them have been guilty of murder and that he intends to investigate the matter thoroughly. The peasants of course pay liberally to escape the investigation, and the rascally officer, emboldened by success, repeats the trick in several villages until he has gathered a large sum.

On August 22, 1767, a ukaz of Catherine II deprived serfs of all legal status and protection of the laws, providing that "if any serf shall dare to present a petition against his master he shall be punished with the knout and transported for life to the mines of Nerchinsk." An advertisement in the Moscow Gazette of 1801 ran as follows:—

To Be Sold: Three coachmen, well trained and handsome, and two girls, the one eighteen and the other fifteen years of age, both of them good-looking and well acquainted with various kinds handiwork. In the same house there are for sale two hairdressers; the one, twenty-one years of age, can read, write, play on a musical instrument, and act as huntsman; the other can dress ladies' and gentlemen's hair; in the same house are sold pianos and organs.

The same paper also advertised: "a first-rate clerk, a carver, and a lackey are offered for sale." Another announcement read: "In this house one can buy a coachman and a Dutch cow about to calve."

The percentage of the total population which was, in Sir Paul Vinogradoff's phrase, "domesticated animals," or "black people" and "backyard people," as the peasants described themselves, may be seen from the table presented by Sir George Mavor in his thoroughly documented study, the Rise and Fall of Bondage Right.

On the eve of the Emancipation, therefore, 34.39 per cent of the total population were serfs. But in Great Russia itself (i.e., North and Central Russia, with the northeast part of the "Black Earth" region) 53 per cent were bondsmen.

There were many ways through which a man became a serf, particularly during the early stages in the development of bondage rights:—

I. By captivity following war.
2. By voluntary consent.
3. By the act of parents through sale of a free person into slavery.
4. By way of punishment for commission of certain crimes.
5. By birth from a kholop or bondaged man.
6. By insolvency of a merchant through his own fault.
7. By voluntary entrance on the part of a free person into the service of another without a contract guaranteeing the freedom of the servant.
8. By marriage to a rob or bondaged woman, without a similar contract.

The Cossacks—the "free people"—of the Southern steppes alone escaped these encroachments and maintained their local autonomy. Whereas their moujik brothers of the North succumbed to serfdom, these hard-drinking, hard riding, and hard-fighting clansmen boasted of an independence which the Tzars deemed it prudent to respect and tolerate. In return for political privileges and free land tenure the Cossack settlements furnished military service in the shape of a volunteer mobile militia, each adult Cossack standing ready with his own horse and equipment to answer the call of the Tzar. Democratic feudalism best describes their status in the Empire. A bulwark of the autocracy in its prime, the Cossacks were among the first to declare for the Revolution in 1917.

This pernicious institution of serfdom, one of those periodic manifestations of man's inhumanity to man, became untenable in the fierce light that beat upon Russia and its throne during and after the Crimean War. On the morrow of the peace, in 1856, Alexander announced the beginnings of Emancipation in an address to the Marshals of the Nobility in Moscow:—

For the removal of certain unfounded reports, I consider it necessary to declare to you that I have not at present the intention of annihilating serfage; but certainly, as you yourselves know, the existing manner of possessing serfs cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfage from above than to await the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below. I request you, gentlemen, to consider how this can be put into execution and to submit my words to the Noblesse for their consideration.

But it took the Imperial Commission six years to overcome the opposition of powerful landowners who clung obstinately to their vested interests. This history of the negotiations is a tedious story, and in the final compromise may be seen the same fatal tenacity and unwillingness to surrender caste privileges that later practically wrecked the constitutional reform granting a Duma (parliament) in 1906.

The Tzar Liberator, Alexander II, was faced with a problem very different from that which confronted Abraham Lincoln. The emancipator of the American slaves was able, by a single proclamation, to free from bondage the persons of the blacks without conceding that it violated the immovable property rights of the plantation owner. Slavery, which postulates actual ownership of another human being as a chattel, is indefensible under the Christian dispensation which cannot regard human personality as an object included among the various categories of "property." It was Christian morality that first challenged the pagan concept of the intrinsic dignity of the human soul and raised men above the beasts and the plough and the field, which may be owned in the strictest sense. In freeing slaves, therefore, Abraham Lincoln could maintain that he was but righting the ancient wrong that had reduced a large group of rational human beings to the level of irrational animals. He could afford to hew close to the line and let the chips fall where they would.

But the Russian landholders, and, curiously enough, many educated Russians, who have not seriously investigated the development of serfdom, would indignantly deny that legalized slavery of any kind ever existed on their states. The serfs. they maintained, belonged to the land, and it was the land that belonged to the proprietor. The peasants, on their part, had a different and franker conception of their relations to the master, expressed in the celebrated proverb: "We are yours, but the land is ours."

The landowners' explanation was a disingenuous evasion, and insistence on it led to an unsatisfactory compromise quite characteristic of Russian autocracy. The long-awaited Law of Emancipation, the cherished dream of every Russian peasant, was signed on March 3, 1861, liberating, all told something over 23,000,000 serfs. The signing of the law was followed by the "Great Manifesto," which was read in all the churches. But disappointment soon displaced the first jubilation, and distrust began to creep into the heart of the liberated as they gradually learned to comprehend the terms of the law. Abstract conceptions of civic right and legalistic assurances of independence left the peasant cold and unmoved, if not reduced to concrete, tangible facts. Land, to the Russian peasant, meant just one thing—it meant the soil so vividly described by Uspensky, the talented portrayer of Russian peasant life:—
 

It is the same soil which you bring home on your rubbers in the form of mud, it is the earth you see in your flower pots, black, wet earth; it is, in a word, the most ordinary, natural earth.

By the provisions of the law all peasants acquired the civil rights common to free rural classes, but, for the most part they still found themselves without land. Land was actually assigned to each peasant household, but it did not become their property. They held it in "perpetual possession," but were required to pay yearly dues for the use of it. Where land was held in common, under the mir system,⁽³⁾ it was the village commune that distributed the lots and determined in what way they could be cultivated. If a peasant was awarded, let us say, ten dessiatines, in a commune of a thousand dessiatines, he usually found that he received his portion, not as a single unit, but probably in ten narrow strips of land, some situated in the fertile fields in the immediate vicinity of the village, others farther off by the river bank, the rest perhaps half a day's journey away on a barren hillside. That is why travelers in Russia, even in recent times, often marveled at seeing the arable land of a Russian village divided up into ribbonlike strips, sometimes less than two yards wide, separated from each other by dilapidated fences or other crude markings to indicate that the strips were owned by different persons. The results were disheartening. Ivan Ivanovich, with laborious industry, cultivated his strip of land and planted wheat. But Grigor Grigorevich, his neighbor, the village ne'er-do-well, allowed his strip to run to weeds, or let animals loose in it. With infinite difficulty Ivan Ivanovich slaved to wring a bare existence from his strip of land and to meet the taxes imposed upon him by the Government as "redemption fees" to be paid to the previous landholder in compensation for his expropriated property. Then, to confound the confusion, the majority of the 109,000 communes in Russia redistributed the holdings every ten or twelve years, and Grigor Grigorevich, the loafer, moved over on to the improved land of Ivan Ivanovich, the frugal.

Small inducement, therefore, to improve one's property or fertilize the soil, while there hovered over it the constant menace that it was destined to pass into other hands, leaving the previous owner to begin again the weary struggle for existence on another narrow strip! Each successive allotment, moreover, was based on the personal needs of the respective families. Households which had increased in number since the last allotment received additional dessiatines, especially if they had increased in male numbers. It was of considerable importance, consequently, that the expected baby should be a boy and that he should arrive before the day for the distribution of communal land. And on the other hand, the declining years of the aged, lonely couple frequently saw their only means of livelihood automatically reduced, with the result that the evening of their life's hard working day became filled with shadows.

To these dark forebodings must be added the disturbing contrast which met the peasant's eye as he gazed toward the rich, unified, and prosperous estate of his former landlord, the pomieschik. In the distribution, the ruling classes saw to it that the gentry did not suffer overmuch. The actual proportion of land expropriated in each case was not large and by no means the best portion of the estate. It is related by one investigator that a certain noble who possessed 106,500 acres retained 100,000 for himself and sacrificed 6500 for his serfs. For the surrendered portion the Government paid him, as it paid all landholders, four fifths of the actual valuation, requiring the peasant — or the mir, as the case might be—to pay the balance in annual installment spread through a number of years. But this "redemption fee" was usually omitted by the peasant himself and ignored by the mir, with the result that the unpaid accumulation became oppressive and enormous. In 1905 Nicholas II was obliged to remit all outstanding redemption dues.

Though politically freed, great masses of the peasants, under the relentless whip of uncontrollable circumstances, drifted back into economic serfdom. In the first place, they were obliged to pay four different taxes: (I)imperial, to the central government; (1) local, to the zemstvos—an institution for limited self-government which we shall treat of in our next chapter; (3) communal, to the mir, for the commune; (4) redemption dues for the land expropriated from the proprietors.

These financial obligations, complicated by the unproductivity and rapidly spreading exhaustion of the soil under unscientific farming methods, inevitably drove the newly liberated serfs back to their masters as tenants, renting sections of the still huge proprietary estates bordering on the peasant communes. A vicious circle was thus inaugurated and soon completed. Within two decades the major portion of a bewildered and disappointed peasant population found themselves in a state of impoverishment not far removed from their former serfdom. Nay, more—it was often worse. Under the old regime they were part and parcel of a great organized estate, lived in comparatively respectable quarters, according to the disposition of the master, picked their firewood freely in his forest, and in time of famine were rationed from his well-stocked granary. But with freedom these things were no longer free; and in their place came a burdensome and a fallacious self-sufficiency, and the cessation of all manorial privileges.

Exploitation of tenants recommenced, and within a generation the rentals extorted from the peasant farmers amounted, in twenty-seven provinces of European Russia, to 81 per cent of the total proceeds from the land.

The dark legend soon gathered force and currency that the Tzar, as well as the peasants, had been cruelly tricked by the nobles. The "little white Father," batiushka tzar, had truly meant to give them the land; it was the landowners who were holding it back and so frustrating the benevolent design of the Emancipator. Agrarian riots were reported with alarming frequency during this period from different quarters of the Empire. Peasant armies swooped dawn on unpopular proprietors, looting the manor, the barns, and the fields, sometimes submitting the owners to brutality—a thing of which a drunken moujik is eminently capable.

This peasant psychology inevitably invited the attention of the professional agitators both at home and abroad. From his exile in Switzerland the anarchist leader, Bakunin, preached armed insurrection to the peasants. Riots broke out among university students in Moscow and Petrograd, fomented and directed by the revolutionary intellectuals who had established themselves in Zurich as a headquarters.

Karakósov fired at the Emperor in 1866, and the repression which followed practically closed the period of enlightened reform initiated by Alexander II. Governmental repression generated new terrorism, and the annals of modern Russia from 1866 onward record an ever-increasing series of plots, assassinations of governors; of cabinet minister and policemen. Siberia began to receive a new quota of political prisoners. Dostoievsky has immortalized prison life there in his novel, The House of the Dead, where he tell us "our life was a constant hell, a perpetual damnation."

The long, long trail to Siberia was worn deep with ruts cut by marching parties of condemned prisoners clad in gray exile costume, three hundred to seven hundred at a time clanking chains fixed to both legs and caught up at the waist. Thus shackled, they sometimes tramped three thousand miles before reaching their destination. And these convoys were not composed merely of criminals, but of "politicals' and "suspects" condemned to "administrative exile" as a result of their "political unreliability."

An American journalist, George Kennan, studied the exile system in Siberia during the year 1885 and issued his report in two rare volumes. He is discussing police methods and the elasticity of the term "punishment" in the vocabulary of a Russian Government official:—

An official copy of this paper, which I brought back with me from Siberia, lies before me as I write. It is entitled: " Rules Relating to Police Surveillance" (Polozhnie o Politseiskom Nadzóre). The first thing that strikes the reader in a perusal of this document is the fact that it declares exile and police surveillance to be, not punishments for crimes already committed, but measures of precaution to prevent the commission of crimes that evil-minded men may contemplate. The first section reads as follows: "Police surveillance (which includes administrative exile) is a means of preventing crimes against the existing imperial order (the present form of government); and it is applicable to all persons who are prejudicial to public tranquility." The power to decide when a man is "prejudicial to public tranquillity," and when exile and surveillance shall be resorted to as a means of "preventing crime," is vested in the governors-general, the governors, and the police; and in the exercise of that power they pay quite as much attention to the opinions that a man holds as to the acts that he commits. They can hardly do otherwise. If they should wait in all cases for the commission of criminal acts, they would not be "preventing crime," but merely watching and waiting for it, while the the object of administrative exile is to prevent crime by anticipation. Clearly, then, the only thing to be done is to nip crime in the bud by putting under restraint, or sending to Siberia, every man whose political opinions are such as to raise a presumption that he will commit a crime "against the existing imperial order" if he sees a favorable opportunity for so doing. Administrative exile, therefore, is directed against ideas and opinions from which criminal acts may come, rather than against the criminal acts themselves. It is designed to anticipate and prevent the acts by suppressing or discouraging the opinions; and, such being the case, the document which lies before me should be called, not "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance," but "Rules for the Better Regulation of Private Opinion." In the spirit of this latter title the "Rules" are interpreted by most of the Russian police.

The pretense that administrative exile is not a punishment, but only a precaution, is a mere juggle with words. The Government says, "We do not exile a man and put him under police surveillance as a punishment for holding certain opinions, but only as a means of preventing him from giving such opinions outward expression in criminal acts." If the banishment of a man to the province of Yakutsk for five years is not a "punishment," then the word "punishment" must have in Russian jurisprudence a very peculiar and restricted signification. In the case of women and young girls a sentence of banishment to Eastern Siberia is almost equivalent to a sentence of death, on account of the terrible hardships of the journey and the bad sanitary conditions of the étapes—and yet the Government says that exile by administrative process is not a punishment !

The terrorist society, "Land and Liberty," openly directed the revolutionary movement. In August 1878, Genera Mezentsev, head of the notorious Third Section (the progenitor of the Cheka), was murdered in broad daylight in a public square in Petrograd. The murderer Stepniak escaped and justified his deed in printed circulars widely distributed. Prince Kropotkin, Governor of the Province, was murdered at the door of his residence in Kharkov.

No group contributed more to awakening and steering of the popular imagination into disturbed channels than the famous Tchaikovsky Circles. Organized primarily as a Petrograd club for self-education and self-improvement, its members at first confined themselves to academic discussion and the dissemination of harmless books, approved by the censors of the bureaucracy. But the flaming utterances of Bakunin speedily transformed its meetings into a center of intellectual revolt, then into a G.H.Q. of the revolutionary underworld. Within a few years a it had spread fanlike through the thirty-eight provinces of the Empire, serving as an intermediary between the intelligentsia and the peasant masses. In 1872 contact was established with labor, and thus all revolutionary elements were united in a common front.

Five shots were fired at the Emperor himself in 1879 by a young man named Soloviev, but none reached the royal mark. A new revolutionary organization of inner-circle leaders called "The Will of the People" openly proclaimed its intention to remove the Tzar, as the first step in the destruction of the throne. They mined the railway over which the Tzar passed in coming from the Crimea, but it was another train that was blown up, killing numerous innocent victims. A carpenter named Halturin succeeded in secreting a charge of dynamite in the Winter Palace, intending to explode it as the imperial family sat down to dinner. The Emperor was late; the dynamite was exploded at the appointed hour and ten soldiers were killed and fifty-three injured. Swinburne, in his ode on "Russia," names the next step:—

. . . Life takes death for guide,
Night hath but one red star—Tyrannicide.

Beside the Catherine Canal in Petrograd stands an imposing structure, the Church of the Resurrection, richly adorned with mosaics, more than St. Mark's in Venice, gleaming with precious Ural stones and malachite and polished jasper. It shelters some cobblestones in their original setting and a few bloodstained flagstones which mark a turning point in Russian history. On that spot was immolated another despot whose brutal taking-off ushered in the final period of retaliation by the government that eventually ruined the Romanov dynasty—and Russia.

Six previous attempts had been made on his life; twenty-six executions had resulted. But the seventh attempt had been prepared with more diligence.

One of the conspirators, Vera Figner, has left an animated account of the months of meticulous preparation for the deed. The Revolutionary Committee rented a vacant place on Malaya Sadovaya Street and opened a cheese shop. One of the comrades, Bogdanovich, with his broad, round face the color of a burnished samovar and with a spadeshaped beard, was installed as shopkeeper, and three hundred rubles were expended for the purchase of their harmless, necessary stock in trade. Under cover of this occupation, technicians of the Committee excavated a tunnel and undermined the street in two places where the Tzar was expected to pass, emptying the dirt into empty cheese barrels.

"What is the cause of that dampness?" asked a suspicious constable one day, attracted by moisture that oozed through one of the barrels. Bogdanovich was quick-witted—as revolutionists had to be when plying their perilous profession. "During the Carnival weeks we spilled some sour cream there," he answered glibly.

"If the constable had looked into the barrel he would have seen the kind of sour cream it contained," adds Vera Figner in her Memoirs.

But the cheese shop was to be cheated of its prey. Alexander II chose an alternative route. So did the Executive Committee, and stationed four bomb throwers on the quay of the Ekaterinskaya Canal—Grinevitsky, Rysakov, Mikhailov, and Emelyanov. To make assurance doubly sure, Zhelyabov was hovering near, armed with a dagger, should the bombs fail. Shortly after two o'clock the royal victim passed. Sofia Perovskaya waved her handkerchief and Rysakov hurled his bomb; he missed the Emperor but wounded some members of his equipage. Alexander stopped his sleigh and, in spite of the protests of his driver, hurried back on foot to stoop over his wounded Cossacks, whose lifeblood was slowly turning the snow into a horrid crimson slush. As he bent over their bleeding bodies in a generous outburst of compassion, an attendant inquired, anxiously, "Are you hurt, sire?" "No, thank God," replied the Tzar. "Too soon to thank God yet," shouted Grinevitsky, hurling his reserve bomb, which struck its mark and blew both the Emperor and Grinevitsky to pieces.

That very afternoon, before leaving for his drive, Alexander had remarked to the Empress: "I have just signed a paper which will, I hope, make a good impression and show Russia that I grant all that is possible."

Princess Radziwill relates that a few hours later the Princess Catherine Mikhailovna attempted to secure possession of the Imperial Manifesto; it might, she thought be of great use. She was about to open the drawer where it lay when the huge form of the Grand Duke Vladimir, eldest brother of the new monarch, Alexander III, appeared on the threshold; he required his stepmother to hand over to him the key with which she was on the point of opening the drawer of the Tzar's writing table. That night, while the assembled body of the most enlightened and best-meaning despot Russia ever had was being prepared for burial behind the drawn curtains of the darkened Winter Palace, the new sovereign held a conference with his councilors. Standing beside the remains of his father, Alexander opened the private drawer and took out the bulky paper to read it aloud. But one of his advisers, the most trusted and confidential, snatched the document from the Tzar's hands and tore it to shreds. "Now, Your Majesty," said he, "you can punish me, but at least it cannot be said that you stepped upon the throne of Russia with tied hands."

The scattered fragments of paper, lying like snowflakes on the carpet, contained the Constitution drawn up by Loris Mélikov, which Russians had fought and died for and dreamed of through three centuries. If the councilors walked over the fragments as they left the room,—which they very well might have done,—the answer was complete.

Whether this traditional account of the physical destruction of a signed constitution be accurate or not in all its details, the fact remains that it perished with its signer. Ten days later an Imperial Manifesto of another sort, drafted by that evil genius of two emperors, Konstantine Pobyedonostsev, was promulgated to an expectant nation; it reasserted categorically the principle of unlimited autocratic power and hurled defiance at Revolution.

The pendulum swung far under the reaction of the two succeeding Tzars.

1. The device used by the conspirators to gain the support of the troops is a classic instance of the Russian soldier's naive credulity. The candidate whom the Decembrists pretended to support was the Grand Duke Constantine; their followers were encouraged to shout for "Constantine and Constitution," the simple troopers imagining that they were defending the right of Constantine and his wife "Constitutia."

2. Vol. III, p. 4.

3. Mir: A unique Russian institution, a primitive communal system of landholding (in contradistinction to "homestead-holding") under which title to the fields, meadows, and timber land remained vested in the village commune, which distributed the lots and regulated the tenure. It was presided over by village elders elected for the specific purpose of dividing up the holdings among qualified peasants according to their capacity for cultivating the land and the size of their families.