CHAPTER III
THE DUEL
IT was to a perilous eminence that Alexander III mounted in March 1881, ascending a throne stained with the blood of his own father. Although the brutal murder on the Catherine Canal, generally speaking, evoked horror and sympathetic demonstrations in favor of the monarch throughout the land, still the underlying conflict between the masses of the people and the ruling autocracy continued unabated. Resentment smouldered in the apathetic souls of the peasants, unsatisfied as they were by the terms of the Emancipation Act; it was fanned by the guarded utterances of the intellectuals and liberals yearning for a constitution; but it flared openly from the secret press of the Revolutionary Party.
I referred, in the previous chapter, to the Imperial Manifesto, published by Alexander III on March 11, 1881, announcing his irrevocable decision to maintain unchanged the autocratic form of government devolving on him after the murder of his father and predecessor. The very same day brought to life a clear-cut rejoinder and declaration of war from the revolutionists in one of the most extraordinary documents I have yet come across in the annals of modern Russia. Naturally this counter-manifesto was never permitted free publication, but was printed and distributed by the underground agencies of the Narodnaia Volia, "The Will of the People." I deem it of sufficient importance to be quoted almost verbatim, as depicting, better than any words of mine can do, this tragic duel between the small band of determined men on one side and the armed might of Imperial Russia on the other.
The Executive Committee to the Emperor Alexander III
Your Majesty:—The Executive Committee thoroughly understands the mental prostration you must now be experiencing. It does not, however, consider that it should, from a feeling of delicacy, defer the following declaration. There is something higher even than legitimate human feeling; it is the duty toward our country, a duty to which every citizen should sacrifice himself his own feelings, and even those of others. Impelled by this imperious duty, we address ourselves to you without delay, as the course of events which threatens us with terrible convulsions, and rivers of blood in the future, will suffer no delay.
The sanguinary tragedy on the Catherine Canal was no mere chance occurrence, and could have surprised no one. After what has happened during the last ten years, it appeared inevitable and therein lies its profound significance, which should be thoroughly understood by him whom destiny has placed at the head of a State.
The document continues, in the same restrained and coldly analytic style, to examine the social and political provocations that had driven high-minded men to desperation. They went cheerfully to exile, to the gibbet, to torture, if only injustice could thereby be ended. The Tzars were equally energetic in applying the full force of organized autocracy; they could be accused of no "want of energy." But their rigor would prove as powerless to save the existing order as was the punishment of the Cross inflicted on the Nazarene to save the decaying ancient world from the triumph of reforming Christianity.
A terrible explosion, a sanguinary revolution, a spasmodic convulsion throughout all Russia, will complete the destruction of the old order of things. Your Majesty, this is a sad and frightful prospect. . . . But why the sad necessity for this sanguinary struggle ? . . . There are two outlets from such a situation: either revolution, which will neither be averted nor prevented by condemnations to death, or the spontaneous surrender of supreme authority to the people to assist in the work of government.
In the interest of the country, and to avoid a useless waste of talent and energy, and those terrible disasters by which Revolution is always accompanied, the Executive Committee addresses itself to Your Majesty and counsels you to select the latter course. Be sure of this, that directly the highest power ceases to be arbitrary, directly it shows itself firmly resolved to carry out only what the will and the conscience of the people prescribes, you will be able to get rid of your spies, who dishonor the Government, dismiss your escorts to their barracks, and burn the gibbets, which demoralize the people. . . .
We hope that personal resentment will not suppress in you either the sentiment of duty or the desire of hearing the truth.
We also might feel resentment. You have lost your father; we lost, not only our fathers, but our brothers, wives, sons, and best friends. Nevertheless, we are ready to forget all personal rancor if the welfare of Russia demands it, and we expect as much from you.
We impose upon you no conditions of any kind. Do not take offense at our proposals. The conditions which are necessary in order that the revolutionary movement should give place to pacific development have not been created by us, but by events. We simply record them. These conditions, according to our view, should be based upon two principal stipulations:—
First a general amnesty for all political offenders, since they have committed no crime, but have simply done their duty a citizens.
Second, the convocation of the representatives of the whole of the people, for the examination of the best forms of social and political life, according to the wants and desires of the people.
We, nevertheless, consider it necessary to point out that the legalization of power by the representation of the people can only arrived at when the elections are perfectly free. The elections should, therefore, take place under the following conditions:—
First, the deputies shall be chosen by all classes without distinction, in proportion to the number of inhabitants.
Second, there shall be no restrictions of any kind upon electors or deputies.
Third, the elections and the electoral agitation shall be perfectly free. The Government will, therefore, grant as provisional regulations, until the convocation of the popular assemblies:—
(a) Complete freedom of the press.
(b) Complete freedom of speech.
(c) Complete freedom of public meeting.
(d) Complete freedom of electoral addresses.
These are the only means by which Russia can enter upon the path of peaceful and regular development. We solemnly declare before the country, and before the whole world, that our party will submit unconditionally to the National Assembly which meets upon the basis of the above conditions, and will offer no opposition to the government which the National Assembly may sanction.
And now, Your Majesty, decide. The choice rests with you. We, on our side, can only express the hope that your judgment and your conscience will suggest to you the only decision which can accord with the welfare of Russia, with your own dignity, and with your duties toward the country.
The Executive Committee (1)
March 10 (23), 1881
Thus far the opposition. The plea for a recognition of inalienable rights could have been written by Thomas Jefferson, Leo XIII, or Henry Cabot Lodge. The Russian Government had its spokesmen, too, and skilled apologists. It is only just, therefore, that we should hear their defense, and from their own lips. Audi alteram partem—always hear the other side. And the other side at this period of Russian history had a most competent mouthpiece in Konstantin Pobyedonostsev, one of the tutors of Alexander III, and later of Nicholas II. With the aid of Dimitry Tolstoy, Katkov, and Pazukhin, this brilliant jurist practically determined the policy of Russia during the eighties; and subsequently, during the reign of Nicholas II, he exercised similar influence as Procurator of the Holy Synod for upward of twenty years. In the words of Sir Bernard Pares, the true friend of Russia, and the present learned director of the School of Slavonic Studies of London University, "Pobyedonostsev was a thorough despiser of human nature who had turned reaction into a system of philosophy."
What is a parliament, a congress, or any other form of government in which the governed participate? Pobyedonostsev answers: "The greatest falsehood of our time. . . One of the falsest political principles is the principle of government by the people, the idea which unfortunately became established after the French Revolution that all power has its origin in the people and is based on the will of the people. . . . Parliament is an institution, serving to satisfy the personal ambition, personal vanity, and personal interests of the representatives."
What is law ? He maintains that it is only an obstacle in the path of a strong executive. "If a person whose duty it is to act meets restricting instructions on every step in the law itself, and in its artificial formulations, if he is always exposed to the danger of overstepping a certain line of demarcation, then the administrator loses himself in doubts and is weakened by the very thing that was intended to furnish him with power."
Liberty and equality? "Mere folly! A failure everywhere." Freedom of thought ? "A humbug." Trial by a jury? "A foreign importation, absurd and dangerous in Russia." Freedom of the press? "One of the false institutions of our time." Education? "Beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic all else is not only superfluous but dangerous. Fear, not love of God, and devotion to the Tzar, are to be cultivated as aids to government. False superstitions are not to be eradicated, rather fostered, being of the highest importance insomuch as superstition is the natural power of elemental inertia."
In pursuance of this mad policy, a circular was issued by the Government in 1887, signed by Delyanov, the Minister of Education, announcing that "the children of coachmen servants, cooks, laundresses, small shopkeepers, and suchlike people should not be encouraged to rise above the sphere in which they were born."
The universities, too, were rigidly controlled by a suspicious ministry that regarded all students as incipient evolutionists, with the result that freedom of science and the diffusion of knowledge were subjected to police supervision. The tchinovniki did not seem to know that the history of humankind is mainly the record of a race between education and catastrophe. Catastrophe won easily in Russia. As Macaulay says somewhere, writing of a certain race horse, "Eclipse first, the rest nowhere."
As early as 1864, and particularly after 1870, a unique, form of popular instruction was going on among the peasants and factory workers in spite of the vigilance of the Ministry of Education. It was known as "going in among the people." Scores of students, writers, academicians, an countless other enthusiasts among the intellectuals, voluntarily abandoned their easy city life, assumed peasant and workmen costume, as the case might be, and went to live and work among the lower classes, in order to indoctrinate them with revolutionary principles. Without passports, or with forged documents, living under assumed names, these zealous missionaries were commonly known as "the illegals." Much of this activity was directed by Bakunin and Lavrov from their exile in Switzerland. Unwilling to submit to the repression of a Russian university, hundreds of students flocked to Zurich. The Government, however, became alarmed at the growth of this hotbed of revolution abroad, and in 1873 summarily recalled something like one hundred students. But, as Macbeth ruefully remarks, " We but teach . . . bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor: this even-handed justice commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice to our own lips." The returning students, fired with fanatic zeal for propaganda, trooped off to the provinces to "go in among the people" and spread the teachings of Bakunin and Lavrov.
The law courts, the last refuge of freemen, lost seriously of their independence during this period and became practically branches of the Administrative Department. The institution of zemski nachalniki, or land captains, by the Minister of the Interior in 1886, to all intents and purposes nullified the courts by creating a centralized guardianship of the peasants which regulated their lives in an oppressive and arbitrary manner, even down to the most intimate details of their family relations. It was based on the theory as Count Witte puts it, "that they are eternally under age, so to speak." In the opinion of that illustrious statesman, it was a profoundly erroneous step fraught with disastrous consequences for the future.
Under these "land captains," supported by an army of policemen, spies, agents provocateurs, and other tchinovniki, Russia was ruled with the iron precision of martial law. Reaction, therefore, and pure absolutism reached their climax during this period, the reign of Alexander III. Through the convenient invention known as "administrative procedure" the Government was enabled to transport to Siberia, without the slightest semblance of trial or juridical procedure, any and all persons deemed "politically undesirable." MacKenzie Wallace, in his classic study of Russia, quotes the saying, current during the reign of Nicholas I, that nearly all the best men in Russia had spent a part of their lives in Siberia. Hence, it was proposed to publish biographical dictionary of remarkable men, a Russian Who's Who, in which every article was to end as follows: "Banished to . . . in 18—." It was to be the hic jacet of popular liberty.(2)
It was a duel to the death between the organized forces of official Russia on the one hand and a guerrilla band of determined volunteers on the other. A roll call of the opposition, if made in the ascending order of their radicalism, would reveal the following categories:—
I. Liberals, who strove by legal means—and guardedly—to enlarge the boundaries of human freedom by opposing the centralization of authority and the arbitrary exercise of absolutism. Followers of the Decembrists of 1825, they did not necessarily oppose the monarchy as a form of government; they advocated, rather, a voluntary limitation of its powers by a constitution, and endeavored, as cool-headed patriots, to open the eyes and ears of the ruling caste to the social injustices rampant under the tyranny of the tchinovniki. If their enthusiasm became too heated, they were first marked as "politically unreliable," "pernicious to public tranquillity," and invited to proceed by direct route to Siberia. Milyukov, Vinogradoff, Struve, and Korolenko may be cited as typical leaders. In the days of the Duma they spoke through the Constitutional Democrats, the Cadets.(3)
2. Social Revolutionaries—that is, Liberals of more determined conviction, prepared for drastic measures and openly advocating a fundamental reform of the existing social and political order. They aimed principally to create a political consciousness—which in Russia inevitably led to political disorder—among the peasants, employing means that were illegal as well as legal. But armed insurrection was not yet on their programme; they avoided the question of Tzar or no Tzar and based their hopes on the action of duly elected representatives of the Russian people. Ballots, not bullets, were to be the instruments of reform. They had representation in the second Duma.
3. Social Democrats, who cultivated town and factory workers in an effort to stimulate opposition to the prevailing industrial system. Their manifestoes instructed workers in the technique of strikes, promulgated demands for an eight-hour day, for freedom of speech, conscience, and assembly. These were the pioneers who laid the foundation for Russian Trade-Unionism. They also had deputies in a Duma when it came.
4. Socialists—the inheritors of the doctrines of Saint Simon, Robespierre, Owen, Lassalle, and Louis Blanc. By appealing to the primitive communal instincts of the Russia peasant, they proposed to establish pure state socialism which would control all instruments of production. Political autocracy was to be displaced by a dictatorship of labor; religion was to be abolished, and individual men were all to be cut on the same pattern, determined by the generic formulæ. "Each for all and all for each"; "From everyone according to his strength, to each according to his needs." They pictured humankind only in a mass, careless of the individual. They, too, won a large number of seats in the Duma.(4)
5. Anarchists. Whereas Socialism—and Communism, its offshoot—demands a highly centralized control of humankind and tends to degenerate into tyrannous bureaucracy, the anarchist adopted a platform that is the diametric opposite.(5) He is the individualist run mad, seeking to emancipate men from all restraint whatsoever, political, economic, or religious. Let humans roam in a state of pure and unfettered nature; there shall be no state, no government, no municipal ordinances or other limitations to physical liberty; every individual man shall be at liberty to live where, how, and as long as he deems necessary in vindication of his personal rights, which are the only rights the anarchist acknowledges. Fathered by Proudhon, who first expounded it in 1848, this deification of jungle ethics is admirably adapted to turn civil society into a menagerie. It was widely disseminated in Russia by Bakunin, Pisarev, and Prince Kropotkin. Obviously it must reject divinity and religion in any form. "God," writes Proudhon, "that is folly and cowardice. God is tyranny and misery. God is evil. To me, then, Lucifer, Satan."
6. Nihilists. This fearsome word first appears in Turgenev's Fathers And Sons as a new name for an old disease. It describes, in one convenient term, a state of mind produced by lack of anchorage during severe intellectual storms occasioned by jaundiced contemplation of social and political inequalities. It would be erroneous to maintain that there ever existed an organized anti-governmental party to which the appellation could be applied. Nihilism, strictly speaking, was a nickname, an opprobrious epithet coined by the conservatives and reactionaries to describe all revolutionary agitators.
"Who is this Bazarov?" asks one of the characters in Turgenev's novel.
"He is a nihilist," replies his son.
"Nihilist?" repeats the old man. "Oh, yes; that comes from the Latin nihil—with us 'nichevo,' nothing, as far as I can judge. That just means a man who admits nothing."
"Say rather, respects nothing," adds another old man.
"One who examines everything from a critical point of view," answers the young man. "That 's the same thing."
"No, it is not the same thing. The nihilist is the man who bows to no authority, who admits of no principle as an article of faith, with whatever respect such principle may be enshrouded."
But how does the nihilist differ from the anarchist? Only, I think, in being one shade more bewildered by undigested, factual knowledge. His negation of life is mor sterile than the positivism of the anarchist. "Nihilism," explains De Voguë, "is the Nirvana of the Hindu, the self-abnegation of the discouraged primitive man before the force of matter and the occult moral world." Turgenev himself hints at the difference:—
"Look here, your Bazarov is not my sort, and he is none of yours, either."
"Why is that ?"
"Well, what shall I say? . . . He is a savage brute, and you and I, we are tamed animals."
"This comparison," adds the Viscount, "enables us to perceive, more than would a volume of discussion, the shade of distinction which differentiates Russian Nihilism from the similar mental maladies from which humanity has suffered since the days of Solomon. This Bazarov, a cynical peasant's son, embittered, who sputters brief sentences in a language at times vulgar, at others scientific, who attacks everything, is otherwise an honorable fellow incapable of a vile action. He represses his better instincts out of mere pride, but is at heart a savage, too rapidly educated, who, having stolen our weapons, uses them against us. Turgenev's hero has many points in common with Fenimore Cooper's Red Indian, but a redskin fuddled with the doctrines of Hegel and Büchner, instead of with 'fire water,' and who stalks the world with a lancet instead of rushing about with a tomahawk."
7. Terrorists. By this classification is meant, not a distinct party, but a grouping of individuals who may, philosophically, belong to any one of the previous categories. They differ from their more academic brethren of revolt only in method, not in principle or objective. A terrorist may have been an embittered Liberal who has become drunk on bad ink and decides to fling a bomb, wreck an imperial rain, or stab a policeman. Or he may be a calculating criminal caught red-handed while perpetrating an inhuman crime, but without the resources to convince a jury that he was "momentarily unbalanced" or "mentally sick" in the Clarence Darrow sense. In any case, his proposal is to write in blood what he cannot get before the public by printer's ink.
The Bolshevik or Marxian Communist of the Left does not effectively appear in the ranks of Russian revolutionists until a somewhat later date; we shall devote a later volume to a study of that figure, the reincarnation and synthesis of all previous revolutionary characters.
Under the passport system a man could neither move from one town to another without governmental permission nor change his living quarters within a given town without registration. Thus the accumulation of visas and registration stamps on a man's passport furnished the police with a full account of his every movement. Neither could he sleep outside his own house, without the porter, or the house janitor, reporting the suspicious circumstances at the nearest police station. A man could as well hope to live without a soul as without a passport in Imperial Russia.(6) The rule of "intensified vigilance," as it was called, permitted the police and the detectives of the Third Department of Chancery to search and arrest individuals, enter homes, and search private residences without warrant. Government control of the press required supervision of all written articles by unsympathetic and, oftentimes, uncultivated censors, who not only suppressed at will news items an articles even faintly criticizing the administration, but even articles in the field of history, literature, or geography, which they might not have liked, or could not understand. The Liberals and revolutionists replied by the secret publications described by Stepniak in his remarkable volume, called Underground Russia. Prince Kropotkin narrates how easily it was done. He was returning from abroad with heavy consignment of radical literature.
I returned to St. Petersburg via Vienna and Warsaw. Thousands of Jews lived by smuggling on the Polish frontier; and I thought that if I could succeed in discovering only one of them, my books would be carried in safety across the border. . . . . .
I explained to the man [a Jew who was lounging at the entrance to the hotel] my desire of smuggling into Russia a rather heavy bundle of books and newspapers.
"Very easily done, sir," he replied. "I will just bring to you the representative of the Universal Company for the International Exchange of (let us say) Rags and Bones. They carry on the largest smuggling business in the world. . . ."
In an hour's time he came back with another young man. This one took the bundle, put it by the side of the door and said, "It's all right. If you leave to-morrow you shall have your books at such a station in Russia."
Next day I left Cracow; and at the designated Russian station a porter approached my compartment and, speaking loudly, so as to be heard by the gendarme who was walking along the platform said to me, "Here is the bag Your Highness left the other day," and handed me my precious parcel.
Perhaps the most important of these secret publication was Kolokol, "The Bell," edited by Alexander Herzen from his exile in London. It was a fortnightly journal that passed the frontier in thousands and exercised a measurable influence on the progress of revolutionary thought in Russia. Its brilliant editor seemed to know everything that was going on in his distant fatherland, so that even the Emperor himself was a regular reader of the forbidden journal, which he found every two weeks on his table, laid there by he knew not what hand. In this regard, the following anecdote is recounted by Wallace.
One number of the Kolokol contained a violent attack on an important personage of the Court, and the accused, or some one of his friends, considered it advisable to have a copy of the paper specially printed for the Emperor without the objectionable article. The Emperor did not at first discover the trick, but shortly afterward he received from London a polite note containing the article which had been omitted, and informing him how he had been deceived.
About this time, in the year 1887, occurred an incident which, like so many other seemingly trivial circumstances in history, probably exerted a tremendous influence on the future destiny of Russia. An attempt was made on the life of Alexander III by a group of terrorists in March 1887. The plot was unsuccessful, the conspirators having been arrested in the streets of Petrograd with the bombs in their possession. Five of the conspirators were hanged, among them a certain Alexander Ulianov. Now, Ulianov had a younger brother who continued the revolutionary work of his elder and spent part of his life in Siberia, from whence he later escaped to Switzerland. His name was Vladimir Ulianov, better known to the entire world under the assumed name of Nicholas Lenin.
There now occurred, in I 889, a change of tactics on the part of the revolutionists. Direct action had been barren of any practical result beyond periodic horror and growing popular impatience at each successive political assassination. The autocratic power seemed impregnable against frontal attack and political propaganda, designed to hasten a process of political evolution, was gradually substituted for the method of open insurrection and revolution. The Nihilism of Pisarev and the Anarchism of Bakunin began to give way to the Socialism of Plekhanov. With this change of revolutionary philosophy began the era of combinations of workmen and strikes in industry. And more and more recourse was had to parliamentary methods of redress.
There was but one legal opposition in Russia, but one body authorized to voice with impunity the aspirations and defend the rights of the common people. It was the zemstvo, that interesting institution created in 1864 for the purpose of answering to a limited degree the insistent demand for some form of representative government. Theoretically, at least, the emancipation of the serfs had allayed the land hunger of the peasants. Actually, as we have seen, it complicated the situation and became the fecund source of new dangers. It was a characteristic half-measure. Likewise, in the zemstvo was found a half-answer to the constitution hunger of the liberal and the intellectual.
The infection of compromise and procrastination had seeped from the very top to the foundations of the social organism until it became part and parcel of the national character. Nichevo (that word of infinite variety, meaning "No matter," "What's the use?" "I don't care"), sichas ("right away"), and zaftra ("to-morrow"), were not merely popular terms of resignation or evasion—they expressed a whole philosophy of life. So does the boulder which Brailsford describes in The Russian Workers' Republic:—
One noticed continually things which were sinking into dilapidation—a railway carriage, for example, or a bathroom—when a few minutes' work with a screwdriver would have sufficed to repair them. I used to watch the drivers on the primitive country roads with a mixture of annoyance and admiration. One saw some big obstacle in the way, usually a large stone which some might call a small rock. Almost any English driver would have got down an rolled it away. The Russian contrived somehow to circumnavigate it. Rather than remove it, he would drive through the ditch or over a ploughed field. With a jolt, at an angle which defied gravitation, with groaning springs and straining horses, we somehow got past it. I arrived, after many experiences, at the conviction that the boulder always had been there. Generations of Russian drivers had gone round it. It had defied Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and the odds are that it will survive Lenin.
The zemstvo was an attempt at local self-government through an assembly which met once a year in each district and in each province, but with no central or national assembly. The deputies were elected by the nobles, by the peasants, and by the communes, the nobles having the right to 57 per cent of the seats, the peasants to 30 per cent, and the various communes to the remainder. Its functions were limited to providing for the material wants of the respective districts—roads and bridges, crops, sanitary affairs, vigilance against famine, improvement of live stock, prevention of fire, primary education, and such local interests. But it was severely prohibited from touching national affairs.
To the zemstvo, naturally, the inarticulate masses looked for political salvation, as it alone had the right of petition. Timidly at first, but with increasing confidence, this right was exercised. In 1880, after the Turkish War, the Zemstvo of Tver petitioned the Emperor as follows:—
The Emperor, in his care for welfare of the Bulgarian people whom he has freed from the yoke of the Turk, has considered necessary to grant them true self-government, inviolability of person, an independent judicial system, and liberty of the press. The Zemstvo of Tver dares to hope that the Russian people, who have borne with such readiness and love of their ruler all the burdens of the war, will enjoy the same blessings.
Again, in 1894, on the accession of Nicholas II, numerous addresses of loyalty were presented by the local zemstvos voicing, in various degrees, their hope for a continuation of the reforms initiated by Alexander II, but discontinued by Alexander III. But the old voice of intransigent autocracy was again heard in the land when the young sovereign shattered all illusions in his reply:—
It has come to my knowledge that of late there have been heard the voices of people lured by senseless dreams of representatives in the zemstvos sharing in the conduct of internal affairs. Let it be known to all that I, devoting all my strength to the pursuit of the good of my people, will maintain the principle of autocracy as firmly and steadfastly as did my late father.
"He howled the words at us," was the way the leader of the delegation described the Tzar's tone. The same gentleman was soon informed that he should never again show his face in Petrograd.(7) Shortly afterward Nicholas II received a letter—one of a long series that continued up to the outbreak of the War from another autocrat, who was sending a wedding present to the new Tzar.
Berlin, 7/ii/95
Dearest Nicky:—
Egloffstein will, I hope, be able to bring over the whole heap of porcelain without any breakage. He is instructed to arrange the table so as it would be if you gave a dinner for fifty; so that you should have the coup d' il of the whole affair. I hope that my manufacturer has done everything to fulfill your wishes and that the present may be useful to you both.
Since the sad weeks you had to go through have passed, much has happened in Europe. You have lost an excellent old servant of your predecessors, old Giers, who was a very good fellow whom I much esteemed. France has changed par surprise her head and government and through the amnesty opened the doors to all the worst malefactors the former people with difficulty had managed to imprison. The influence given to the Democrats and the Revolutionary Party is also to be felt here. My Reichstag behaves as badly as it can, swinging backward and forward between the Socialists, egged on by the Jews and the ultramontane Catholics; both parties being soon fit to be hung — all of them, as far as I can see.
In England the Ministry is toddling to its fall amidst universal derision ! In short, everywhere the principe de la Monarchie is called upon to show itself strong. That is why I am glad at the capital speech you made the other day to the deputations in response to some addresses for reform. It was very much to the point and made a deep impression everywhere. . . .
With my respects to your Mamy and my compliments to Alix, remain,
Your aff-ate friend,
Willy
The reply to the Zemstvo of Tver was spoken by Nicholas but the hand that wrote it was the hand of Pobyedonostsev. It meant the revival of terrorism and marked the resumption of the duel that had been interrupted since the eighties. Nicholas II, though possessed of a certain mildness of character and native humanity, early showed himself to be as clay in the hands of energetic potters, molded to eventual destruction by reactionary ministers of the type of Pobyedonostsev, Sipyagin, and Plehve. The Social Democrats, deprecating terrorism, were displaced as leaders by the Social Revolutionaries, who flung aside the pen to seize torch, revolver, dagger, and hand grenade, recognizing in them the only expression of the popular will to which the Russian Tzar would listen.
In February 1897 occurred a typical demonstration of slumbering discontent, scarcely less revealing than the massacre of Bloody Sunday eight years later. A young woman, Marie Feodorovna Vietrov, a student of the Higher School for Women, had been arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul for the crime of secreting illegal literature. Seven weeks after her arrest, she committed suicide in prison by pouring kerosene over herself and setting fire to her clothes. The effect on public opinion was electric; circulars describing the harrowing incident were distributed along the streets— unsigned, of course—and indignation ran high. In spite of repeated warnings by the police, thousands of people knelt in the snow of the Nevsky Prospekt outside the Kazan Cathedral and joined their murmurs and sobbing to the funeral dirge. Such popular manifestations had not occurred since the assassination of Alexander II, and thoughtful Russians detected the undertone of revolt.
In vain enlightened and courageous ministers, like Count Witte and Isvolsky, attempted to heal the widening breach between the throne and the nation at large. Count Witte, in his Memoirs, recalls a memorable attempt made by him in 1898, when he was Minister of Finance, to recall the young Emperor to a consciousness of the realities and dangers of the moment. It was in the form of an energetic protest, of the kind that exiled many a true Russian patriot "to his estates" during the Great War, when the same Nicholas II was so often begged to rid Russia of the curse of Rasputin. Count Witte's protest ran, in part, as follows:—
The Crimean War opened the eyes of those who could see. They perceived that Russia could not be strong under a régime based on slavery. Your grandfather cut the Gordian knot with his autocratic sword. He redeemed the soul and body of his people from their owners. The unprecedented act created the colossus who is now in your autocratic hands. Russia was transformed, she increased her power and her knowledge tenfold. And this in spite of the fact that after the emancipation a liberal movement was aroused which threatened to shatter the autocratic power, which the very basis of the existence of the Russian Empire. . . . The crisis of the eighties was not caused by the emancipation of the serfs. It was brought about by the corrupting influence of the press, the disorganization of the school, the liberal self-governing institutions, and, finally, the fact that the authority of the organs the autocratic power had been undermined as a result of constant attacks upon the bureaucracy on the part of all manner of people . . . Emperor Alexander II freed the serfs, but he did not organize the life on the firm basis of law. Emperor Alexander III, absorbed by the task of restoring Russia's international prestige, strengthening our military power, improving our finances, suppressing the unrest, did not have the time to complete the work begun by his most august father. This task has been bequeathed to You Imperial Majesty. It can be carried out and it must be carried out. Otherwise the growth of Russia's grandeur will be impeded. . . .
The peasant was freed from his landowner. . . . But he is still a slave of his community as represented by the mir meetings and also of the entire hierarchy of petty officials who make up the rural administration. The peasant's rights and obligations are not clearly defined by law. His welfare and his very person are at the mercy of the arbitrary rulings of the local administration. The peasant is still flogged, and that at the decision of such institution as the volost [rural district] courts. . . . The peasant was give land. But his right to it is not clearly defined by law. Wherever the communal form of landownership prevails, he cannot even know which lot is his. The inheritance rights are regulated by vague customs. So that at present the peasant holds his land not by law, but by custom, and often by arbitrary discretion. The family rights of the peasants have remained almost completely outside of the scope of law. . . .
And what of popular education ? It is an open secret that it is in the embryonic stage and that in this respect we are behind not only many European countries, but also many Asian and transatlantic lands. . . .
Thus, the peasantry, while personally free, is still a slave to arbitrariness, lawlessness, and ignorance. Under these circumstances the peasant loses the impulse to seek to improve his condition by lawful means. The vital nerve of progress is paralyzed in him. He becomes passive and spiritless, thus offering a fertile soil for the growth of vices. Single, even though substantial measures will not remedy the situation. Above all, the peasant's spiritual energies must be aroused. He must be granted the plenitude of civil rights which the other legal sons of Your Majesty enjoy. Given the present condition of the peasantry, the State cannot advance and achieve the world importance to which the nature of things and destiny itself entitle it.
This condition of the peasantry is the fundamental cause of those morbid social phenomena which are always present in the life of our country. . . . A great deal of attention is given to the alleged "land crisis." It is a strange crisis, indeed, seeing that prices of land are everywhere on the increase. Widespread discussion also centers around the comparative merits of the individual classes which go to make the nation. An effort is made to ascertain which of them supports the throne. As if the Russian Autocratic Throne could possibly rest on one class and not on the entire Russian people! . . . On that unshakable foundation it will rest forever. . . . The root of the evil is not the land crisis, or unorganized migrations, or the growth of the budget, but rather the confusion and disorder which prevail in the daily life of the peasant masses. . . . In a word Sire, it is my profound conviction that the peasant problem is at present the most vital problem of our existence. It must be dealt with immediately.
This superb letter was never answered, and Witte affirms that the Tzar never referred to it in any shape or form. On the contrary, he almost immediately confirmed the Plehve-Durnovo clique, opposed to the liberal tendencies of Witte, who were thus enabled to thwart Witte's hopes for legislative reform. "Whom Jupiter would destroy he first makes mad."
And the blindness to impending disaster was never more manifest than in the inexplicable indifference manifested by the Russian Government toward the rising menace of Japan. Russia's foreign policy under the cunning stimulus of the German Kaiser had been leading her deeper and deeper into the Far East, nearer and nearer to the growing might of a watchful Japan. Early in January 1904 the Japanese ambassador, Kurino, whispered in Count Witte's ear, during an evening party at the Winter Palace, that the Tokio Government was at the end of its patience because of the seeming contempt and indifference with which the Russian Government was treating Japan's representations regarding Manchuria and Korea. He warned Witte that if no reply was forthcoming within a few days hostilities were inevitable! Witte conveyed the warning to Count Lamsdorff, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. "I can do nothing," replied Lamsdorff. For Lamsdorff, though Minister of Foreign Affairs, had been deliberately and completely superseded in the Far East negotiations by a group of industrialists interested in the exploitation of certain forests in the Yalu River basin. On Lamsdorff's protesting, long before this, that such negotiations must be left to the diplomats, the impossible Plehve had replied that not diplomats, but bayonets, had made Russia, and that the Far East problem must be solved by bayonets, not by diplomatic pens. It was so solved.
A few weeks after the soirée diplomatique in the Winter Palace, in the grey dawn of a wintry morning, January 26, 1904, a Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo stole into the harbor of Port Arthur and sank a number of Russian warships lying unsuspectingly at anchor. The rising consciousness of the East had thrown down the gauge of battle to the Russian Giant. Once again Russian autocracy had deliberately exposed itself to the dread arbitrament of war. The result shook the Empire to its foundations and marked the beginning of the final catastrophe of 1917.
Plehve had previously remarked that revolution was inevitable in Russia and what was needed to distract public attention was a "small victorious war." So he let Russia drift into the conflict with Japan. His diagnosis was correct but his treatment of the disease was wrong on two counts: the war was neither small nor victorious.
1. This same Executive Committee addressed a note of sympathy to the Government of the United States when President Garfield was assassinated. It condemned the use of political assassination in America, pointing out the difference between the autocracy they were fighting in Russia and the satisfying liberty in America. See Appendix I.
3. Etymologically, the term " liberal " has obvious relation to freedom of some sort. Up to the close of the eighteenth century it had no political significance, being applied to cultural freedom, "a liberal education," "the liberal arts," and so forth. In the nineteenth century it acquired wide political and social connotation in consequence of the theories of Rousseau, Diderot, and Madame Staël. In the twentieth century it denotes a curious variety of claimants who range from sincere crusaders and unprejudiced thinkers to illiberal bigots, cranks, and intellectual dilettantes. For the latter category it frequently serves as a convenient cloak to mask a mental or moral incapacity to face and take a positive stand on serious issues. These are the straddlers, the dabblers, and the poseurs, who applaud the most contradictory theories, however ridiculous, rather than strain their nerves by too close application of logic or endanger their reputation for broadness and tolerance by a public exhibition of their thought processes.
5. For that reason he is detested and feared by the Bolsheviki. Not far from the house where the author lived in Moscow stood the ruins of the headquarters of the anarchists, where they made their last stand against the Bolsheviki in the November Revolution. No house in Moscow was more riddled with bullets and artillery fire.
6. All these devices for complete control of the individual still exist in Soviet Russia.