CHAPTER IV

THE BEGINNINGS OF REVOLUTION

THE particular period upon which we are now entering would well merit not one or two, but a dozen separate chapters, embracing as it does the final act of that most tragic conflict between autocracy and revolution.  For with the close of the Russo-Japanese War began the swift succession of reverses, both domestic and external, still fresh in our memories, that definitely sealed the doom of the Romanov dynasty and resulted in the disintegration of the Russian Empire.  It will be clear, therefore, that I can but touch briefly on the main events and invite attention to the outstanding personalities in the complex panorama that now unrolled itself with such astonishing rapidity.

If the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War weakened the foundations of autocracy, the humiliating outcome of the Japanese War hastened to a measurable degree the disintegration process.  It was left for the World War to bring the worm-eaten structure crashing to the ground.

The revelations of unpreparedness and incompetency in the conduct of military operations, the confusion arising from the division of authority between General Kuropatkin and Admiral Alexeiev, the surrender of Port Arthur (although there were three months' provisions and plenty of ammunition in the town), the succession of shameful land defeats, ending in the rout at Mukden and the final crushing naval disaster at Tsushima, which buried practically the entire Russian fleet in Japanese waters, all conspired to destroy the confidence of the nation in a bureaucracy that had shown itself inept, piddling, and palsied in all things — except domestic tyranny.  The oppressive rigorism of Plehve, Minister of the Interior, unmodified by any elementary wisdom that should have dictated liberal and conciliatory policies during a foreign war, finally left the Government without a friend in the country and faced by a victorious foe abroad.  To emphasize this complete isolation and demoralization of the bureaucrats, the terrorists assassinated Plehve on July 28, 1904.  Thus, this exponent of the absolutism of Pobyedonostsev went the way of his friend and predecessor, Sipyagin, who had already been assassinated in 1902.  Yet there still remained to take their places such hopeless reactionaries as Durnovo, Stolypin,⁽¹⁾ Stürmer, Protopopov, and the unspeakable Rasputin.  It would seem as if the furious Eumenides that had been tormenting Russia for a century had resolved to scourge and lash her with scorpions to the end of the chapter.

On February 17, 1905, the Grand Duke Serge, uncle of the Emperor, and Governor-General of Moscow, was blown to pieces within the Kremlin walls.  The Governor of Ufa and the Vice Governor of Elizabethpol suffered the same fate at the hands of the terrorists.  Police officials began to be assassinated in alarming numbers.  Riots, strikes, and disorders increased throughout the land, spreading to Poland and the Caucasus.  In January 1905, official statistics showed that 700,000 men were on strike, a phenomenon that emphasized, for the first time, the role of labor as a factor contributing to the progress of the revolutionary movement.

The unprecedented industrial development in Russia during the thirty years prior to the Japanese War testified to the awakening of the national consciousness to an appreciation of the immense economic possibilities of the land.  Russia is a vast reservoir of undeveloped natural resources.  Raw materials abound in the shape of oil, minerals, furs, lumber, water power, ores, flax, hemp, wool, tallow, hides, and the like.  The development of these natural assets was greatly stimulated by the emancipation of the serfs, which threw an unlimited supply of cheap labor on the market and caused an influx of peasants from the countryside to towns and cities.  No man did more at this time to foster native industry in Russia than Count Witte, who was a devout admirer of the great German economist Friedrich List, following ardently that scholar's basic doctrine that " each nation should above all things develop harmoniously its natural resource to the highest possible degree of independence, protecting its own industry and preferring the national aim to the pecuniary advantage of individuals."

The result was the creation of a new class, the industrial proletariat.  Factories and factory settlements sprang up with amazing rapidity, not only in the great centres of population, but throughout the land, while cottage industry began to wane.  Unfortunately, industrial abuses were not far behind industrial developments.  Working time was generally more than twelve hours per day, and as many as sixteen in some occupations.  Wages were unbelievably low, the average wage in the eighties being less than 200 rubles—that is, approximately $105—a year.  In 1910 it was 244 rubles, or $125, per year, scarcely $2.50 a week.  Strikes were criminal acts.  Sanitary conditions were such as to recall the Black Hole of Calcutta.  In many factories no living accommodations were provided for the workers, who slept in the workroom, on benches, or on the floors.  The novels of Gorky, Andreev, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky reproduced these conditions with the stark and harrowing reality that ordinarily characterized the Russian masters.  "I shall laugh my bitter laugh," was the inscription placed on Gogol's grave as his farewell comment on life in Russia.

Naturally the revolutionary agitators, following their traditional practice of fishing in troubled waters, were not slow to abandon the peasant campaign and concentrate on the city workers.  Politics and economics thus became more closely identified than ever.  Workmen's associations, and strikes in industry, were thereafter the obvious tactics.  Times of popular unrest, like those of 1905, caused by legitimate grievances, presented rare opportunities for effective mass movements in the large cities.  This phase culminated in the tragedy of "Bloody Sunday" or "Red Sunday," as it is variously called, on January 22, 1905.

George Gapon, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church was a popular leader of the working classes, among whom he had organized numerous clubs in St. Petersburg, achieving thereby considerable influence with the labor unions and the Social Democrats.  During a strike of 45,000 operatives of the Putilov Ironworkers, he conceived the idea of leading 100,000 workmen to the Winter Palace for the purpose of presenting a petition to the Tzar.  The text of this petition which I have before me, is not revolutionary in tone, but appeals to the Tzar, as to a father, to mitigate the cruel sufferings of his children.

Sire ! I fear the Ministers have not told you the truth about the situation.  The whole people, trusting in you, has resolved to appear at the Winter Palace at two o'clock in the afternoon, in order to inform you of its needs.  If you hesitate and do not appeal before the people, then you sever the moral bonds between you and them.  Trust in you will disappear, because innocent blood will be shed.  Appear to-morrow before your people and receive in a courageous spirit our address of devotion ! I and the representatives of labor, my brave comrades, guarantee the inviolability of your person.

On the appointed day, Nicholas II, ignoring the invitation, remained in the Summer Palace at Tsarskoe Selo.  Tens of thousands of workmen, with their wives and children, paraded in orderly fashion to the Winter Palace, bearing, not red flags, but portraits of the Tzar and the royal family.  There they were met by waiting troops.  With Gapon at their head, the demonstrators, chanting hymns and exhibiting all outward signs of a religious procession, attempted to push their way to the gates of the Palace.  The soldiers, without warning, fired into the thickest part of the crowd.  When the smoke cleared away one of the most repulsive scenes in modern Russian history was revealed.  Five hundred men, women, and children lay dead in the snow, before that long, grim structure, and three thousand more were writhing on the ground under their wounds; the rest were fleeing in panic and dismay! Boys who had climbed up trees and telegraph poles, the better to view the parade, were picked off like birds.

If Hilaire Belloc contends that the French Revolution began on that day and at the moment, at Versailles, when the representatives of the people, prohibited from entering the Palace, retired instead to the tennis court, I should say that the Russian Revolution became inevitable when the first peaceful petitioner fell that Sunday afternoon before the Winter Palace.

The fate of Gapon is of interest, as illustrating the uncertain fate of a man who fastens on duplicity as a profession.  He was among the first to fall, but he evidently only pretended to be killed.  He escaped unhurt to Switzerland, whence he continued his attacks on the Government with great bitterness.  But he evidently made peace with the home authorities and soon returned to St. Petersburg, there to assume the role that has remained to this day something of a mystery.  He acted as a go-between or mediator between the Government and the revolutionists, but soon became suspected by the revolutionists of being simply a police informer.  He departed one day from St. Petersburg for Finland, carrying with him a large sum of money, £2500 in order to bribe a certain terrorist to betray a plot then being concocted against the Emperor.  Eventually his dead body was found in a lonely unoccupied cottage, near Ozerki, a small village in Finland, close to the Russian frontier.  His hands had been tied behind his back and he had been strangled with a rope.  About the same time, an unsigned communication appeared in a St. Petersburg newspaper, stating:—

George Gapon had been tried by a workmen's secret tribunal and had been found guilty of having acted as an agent provocateur of having squandered the money of the workmen, and of having defiled the honor and memory of the comrades who fell on the "Red Sunday." In consequence of these acts, of which he was said to have made a full confession to the tribunal, he was condemned to death, and the sentence had been duly carried out.

The odious profession of agent provocateur, or police spy and informer, was perhaps nowhere more highly developed than under the Russian Tzars.  To be sure, spies have occupied an admitted place and performed a definite function in all lands and times, both in peace and war.  But the Imperial Russian type has a particularly repulsive role to play.  His was the task of persuading the timid to talk revolution and aiding the daring to execute their plots in order that the police might have specious grounds for ruthless repression.  To murder a police official, in order that the higher state police, the Okhrana, might make the arrests necessary to justify their existence, was an ordinary detail imposed on the agent provocateur.  The most famous of them, or rather in famous, was Evno Azev, whose double activity as secret police agent and terrorist lasted from 1903 to 1909.  During this time, acting in his dual role, he has more than thirty murders, or attempted murders, to his credit.  While in good standing with the Government, he organized the murder of Plehve, of the Grand Duke Serge, Governor of Moscow and he played an active part in the military mutinies of Moscow, Viborg, and Kronstadt.  All these terrorist activities naturally endeared him to the Revolutionary Committee, while the inevitable arrests that followed, the executions and exiling to Siberia, ranked him exceedingly high in the eyes of the police.

The case of Ivan Okladsky was brought anew to the attention of the public in recent times by the following news dispatch:—

[Copyright, 1905, by the New York Times Company.  By wireless to the New York Times.]

Moscow, Jan. 10.—The Russian Revolution placed in the hands of the Bolsheviki the entire archives of the Tzar's Government, but none probably served a greater purpose to the Communists' scheme than the archives of the late Tzar's political police.  This inheritance has permitted them to find out a great number of persons who in pre-revolutionary times acted to destroy them and those who, while acting in their midst served as agents provocateurs in betraying their brother revolutionists.  Since the Revolution many such agents already have suffered the death penalty, while many others are still waiting their turn.

Never, however, was there such great excitement among Communists as is called forth by the approaching trial of Ivan Okladsky who in the early '80s, as a member of the terrorist organization known as "Narodnaya Volia" or national freedom, took a prominent part in all attempts upon the royal family and was concerned in the plot which ended in the assassination of Tzar Alexander II in 1881.

The Narodnaya Volia, which the Bolsheviki regard as the forerunner of their own party, was in that period the strongest revolutionary organization believing in forcing the Government to adopt a constitutional regime by means of terrorist acts and assassination.  Highest state officials, a number of ministers, generals, and other persons of high rank fell victims to their fanatic ideas.  This terrorist organization was broken up after the assassination of Alexander II.

Ivan Okladsky, in his confession at that time, betrayed his accomplices.  Many were put to death, while a great number were imprisoned for life.  Since that period and until 1917 Okladsky served with the Tzar's political police and is credited with exercising the greatest activity in hunting out revolutionaries.  Until his arrest six months ago he was living under an assumed name in Leningrad serving as a clerk in one of the state factories.  He is now sixty-five years old.  He says he was forced to turn traitor by the inhuman torture he was subjected to at the hands of the police at the time of his arrest.

The biggest hall in Moscow has been converted into a courtroom for this trial and several thousand tickets have been issued to workmen and Communists.  Despite the lapse of forty-five years, number of victims and survivors of the early revolutionary movement will appear at the trial as witnesses against Okladsky.  Krylenko, the Soviet's ablest lawyer, who prosecuted Archbishop Zeplak and Savinkov, will conduct the trial for the State, while two prominent lawyers were appointed to defend Okladsky.

It is certain Okladsky will be condemned to death, but it is believed that a commutation of sentence will follow owing to his old age.⁽²⁾

The effect of Red Sunday was profound, and its significance could not be escaped by the monarch.  The Tzar contributed 50,000 rubles for the widows and orphans of the massacre, but the Government did nothing official or in a constructive way.  The Holy Synod issued a proclamation in which the irrepressible Pobyedonostsev announced that the labor movement in Russia was being supported Japanese money.

When, on May 25, the Japanese fleet under Togo swept the Russian Baltic fleet from the high seas and determined the outcome of the war, patriotic indignation flamed forth in Russia proper, in Lithuania, in Poland, and in the Caucasus.  The crew of the battleship Prince Potemkin mutinied at Sevastopol, hoisted the red flag of revolt, and for ten days cruised like pirates about the Black Sea, finally surrendering to the authorities of the Rumanian port, Constanza.

For the first time, the Emperor bent under the storm and consented to receive a delegation from the zemstvos and town councils on June 19.  The leader, Prince Serge Troubetskoy, had the courage to speak frankly and circumstantially on the vices and negligences of the ruinous bureaucracy:—

"By the criminal negligence and misgovernment of you advisers, Russia has been precipitated into a ruinous war.  Our army has not been able to vanquish the enemy, our fleet is annihilated, and even more threatening than the danger from without is the internal conflagration that is blazing up. . . Your Majesty, while it is not too late, for the salvation of Russia and the establishment of order and peace in the country, command that the representatives of the people . . . be summoned immediately. . . . In your hands are the honor and might of Russia. . . . Do not delay.  In the terrible hour of national trial, great is your responsibility before God and Russia."

The Tzar replied: "Cast aside your doubts.  My will, the will of your Tzar, to call together the elected representatives of the people, is unshaken.  You can tell this to all your friends. . . . I hope that you will coöperate with me."

Two months later, on August 19, 1905, an imperial decree announced and granted what every Russian patriot since the Decembrists had been dreaming of—a Constitution.

But once again hope deferred made their hearts sick.  Autocracy, even in its final gesture of generosity and liberalism, even while proclaiming its will to grant a representative government, could not shake off the dead hand of Peter the Great, of Ivan the Terrible, of Alexander III, and of Paul, the Crowned Madman.  Again the attempt was made to drive round the boulder !

As the emancipation of the serfs was only a half answer to the land hunger of the peasants, so the constitution of 1905 was only a half-answer to the constitution hunger of the entire nation.  It was the work of Bulygin, and fell dead-born on the expectant ears of a long-suffering people.  The decree defined the new Parliament or Duma as follows:—

1.  The Duma is a permanently functioning institution similar to Western parliaments.

2.  All the laws and regulations, both permanent and provisional, as well as the budget, must be brought before the Duma for discussion.

3.  The Duma is an exclusively consultative institution, and it enjoys complete freedom in expressing its opinions on the subjects under discussion.

4.  The electoral law is based chiefly on the peasantry, as the element of the population predominant numerically, and most reliable and conservative from the monarchistic standpoint; the electoral law cannot be modified without the consent of the Duma.

5.  The franchise does not depend on nationality and religion.

In the words of the most consistent defender of popular rights, Count Witte, " It had all the prerogatives of a parliament except the chief one.  It was a parliament, and yet, as a purely consultative institution, it was not a parliament.  The law of August the sixth satisfied no one.  Nor did it in the least stem the tide of revolution which steadily began to arise."

Popular resentment expressed itself at once in organized protests against the miserably insufficient reform which preserved intact the autocratic power and merely created a debating society.  It was toying with the Russian people.  A general strike followed, which, beginning from St. Petersburg, paralyzed the whole country, affecting, as it did, the railways, telephone and telegraph services, water and food supply, electricity, the tramways, and even the small shops.  By October 29, all Russia was practically in a state of siege.  A "soviet" or council of delegates elected from factories was organized by the Socialists, with Khrustalev as president and Leon Trotsky as vice president.  Forerunner of the ultimate triumph of the same body in 1917, this soviet boldly challenged the Government.  Count Witte, who had just returned with enhanced prestige from the peace negotiations with Japan at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was deemed the only official competent to ride the storm.  Though replying to revolution with martial law, he had, nevertheless, the clearness of vision to demand liberal concessions from the Tzar as the only condition of his remaining in power.

In the face of backstairs advisers who were opposed to Witte, the Emperor published, on October 30, a manifest of considerable historical importance, as it contains the first Bill of Rights ever granted in Russia.  It runs as follows:—

Unrest and disturbances in the capital and in many regions of our Empire fill our heart with a great and heavy grief.  The welfare of the Russian Sovereign is inseparable from the welfare of the people and their sorrow is his sorrow.  The unrest now arisen may cause a profound disorder in the masses and become a menace to the integrity and unity of the Russian State.  The great vow of imperial service enjoins us to strive with all the might of our reason and authority to put an and within the shortest possible time to this unrest so perilous to the State.  Having ordered the proper authorities to take measures for the suppression of the direct manifestations of disorder, rioting, and violence, and for the protection of peaceful people who seek to fulfill in peace the duties incumbent upon them, we, in order to carry out more effectively the measure outlined by us, for the pacification of the country, have found it necessary to unify the activities of the higher government agencies.

We impose upon the Government the obligation to execute our inflexible will:—

1.  To grant the population the unshakable foundations of civic freedom on the basis of real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, of speech, of assemblage, and of association.

2.  Without stopping the appointed elections to the Imperial Duma, to admit to participation in the Duma those classes of the population which have hitherto been deprived of the franchise, in so far as this is feasible, in the brief period remaining before the convening of the Duma, leaving the further development of the principle of general suffrage to the new legislative order (i.e., the Duma and Imperial Council established by the law of August 6, 1905).

3.  To establish it as an unshakable rule that no law can become effective without the sanction of the Imperial Duma and that the people's elected representatives should be guaranteed a real participation in the control over the lawfulness of the authorities appointed by us.  We call upon all the faithful sons of Russia to remember their duty to their country, to lend assistance in putting an end to the unprecedented disturbances and, together with us, make every effort to restore quiet and peace in our native land.

By the revolutionaries these concessions were interpreted to mean that autocracy was weakening, that its morale was broken.  By the conservatives and reactionaries the manifesto was the signal for counter-demonstration organized throughout the Empire, with the result that in the frequent clashes that ensued the victims are reported to have reached three thousand killed and ten thousand wounded.

In the words of one particularly acute student of Russian affairs :—

During the last decades preceding the Revolution of 1917 it became constantly more evident to attentive observers that Russian autocracy was doomed.  It was a dying regime, gradually degenerating and decaying from within, whose days were already numbered, like a person with some deadly disease lingering on under the influence of oxygen.

Unfortunately among the Russian ruling classes there were many men who were stubbornly clinging to power, artificially prolonging the régime by making all sorts of compromises; some among them were selfishly arguing that every extra day in power was a gain to themselves.  The most important historical conclusion that one can draw from these last years of autocracy is that, as a political principle, it was not able to save itself by compromise; as soon as concessions to opposite sides were started, autocracy was doomed, its very backbone being broken by such concessions.

These lines were written by the late, ever to-be-lamented Baron Serge Korff, a Russian of the Russians, whose friendship and confidence, up to his untimely death just four years ago, the author had the honor to enjoy.  Descended from a prominent family in Russia, Korff was professor at the Women's University of Petrograd and at the University of Helsingfors in Finland.  His last days, particularly his sudden death, may be taken as a minute but typical cross section of the fate of so many Russian intellectuals driven into exile by the Bolshevist coup d'état.  Under the Provisional Government, Korff was Lieutenant Governor of Finland, a post which he was obliged to vacate on the fall of the Kerensky Government.  On his taking up residence in the United States, he was rapidly forging to the front as an acknowledged authority on international affairs.  His lectures were in constant demand in the United States and abroad.  It was my privilege to offer him a professorship in the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, a chair which he filled with distinction, to the admiration and with the love of his pupils.  While conducting his course in the same lecture room where he had opened it three years previously, Korff dropped to the floor and expired almost immediately.

In his passing the world at large lost a scholar and a gentleman, his fellow members on his faculty a beloved colleague; and the University still mourns in him a distinguished and capable historian.  I feel that those of his former student who may read these lines will gladly join with me in this passing tribute to one of the victims of the Russian Revolution.

Pogroms and similar inhuman treatment of Jews became a frequent occurrence, probably organized by the Black Hundreds (a secret monarchist organization connived at by the imperial police), composed of reactionaries and employing terrorism as a weapon against the terrorists.  The month of November 1905 witnessed a widespread series of political disorders, ranging from the assassination of high officials and the mutiny of soldiers and sailors to the seizure of landed estates by peasants in the provinces.  Courts-martial were established and martial law was proclaimed over a large part of the Empire.

No single act during this period of governmental vengeance stands out more senseless than the punitive expeditions of the Semyonovsky Regiment on the Moscow-Kazan railroad line.  Armed with blanket authority to punish the populations of whole districts as a mass, the commanding officer, colonel Rieman, was instructed to take no prisoners and to act mercilessly.  Culpable leaders of the insurrection had time to escape before the arrival of the troops; but the Cossacks struck indiscriminately at groups of peasants who on the average, were as guiltless of political conspiracy as they were of thought.  Executing without trial or provocation, the soldiery left a ghastly trail of burning villages, murdered hostages, and peasants swinging from telegraph poles.  One has but to read the official protests made in the Duma by appalled delegates to understand the extant of the terrorism that prevailed in the Caucasus and the Baltic provinces as well as in the heart of Russia during the period 1905-6.

It was under such disturbed conditions that the first Russian Duma was opened on May 10, 1906.  Its composition is a cross section of contemporaneous Russia.  There were:—

The less important nationalities, such as the Chuvash, the Circassians, the Kalmuks, the Mordva, and the Votiaks had one or two deputies apiece.  The first Duma had a short life of seventy-two days, spent almost exclusively in conflict with the Government.  It was dominated by the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), who devoted their full energy to expounding the indignation and disappointment experienced by the country at large at the inadequate reform and demanding a constitution on the English and the American pattern.  The entire session was nothing but a prolonged conflict with the Cabinet of Ministers.  The Government replied by dissolving the assembly and convoking a new Duma for March 5, 1907.  The Constitutional Democrat retreated to Viborg, in Finland, and there published the famous "Viborg Manifesto," urging the people to passive resistance.

The first Duma has gone down in Russian history with the appellation "The Duma of the National Indignation."

The second became known as "The Duma of the National Ignorance," due to the fact that the newly elected deputies were considered less capable, intellectually, than those of the first Duma.  Perhaps the most significant fact was the appearance of a strong group of Social Democrats, who had refused hitherto to coöperate with the Duma and would send no delegate.  Now they returned a compact group of more than 60, which raised the total Socialist vote from 26 to 83—that is, 17 per cent of the whole house.  From the outset the second Duma assumed a hostile and frankly revolutionary attitude.  It lived one hundred days, without being able to achieve anything in a legislative or parliamentary sense.  When, on July 14, Stolypin entered the Chamber and demanded the arrest and trial of sixteen members of the Social Democrat Party for sedition and conspiracy, Tsereteli, leader of the Social Democrats, admitted with pride the indictment brought against his colleagues, declaring: "We who are accused of having undertaken the political education of the masses, declare that this accusation fills our heart with pride and serves as a proof that we fulfilled honorably the obligations imposed on us."

On the Duma refusing to consent to the arrest and trial of its members, the Government again dissolved the assembly on June 16, 1907.  The Duma then not being in session certain members of the Social Democrat group were arrested tried for treason, and sentenced, some to hard labor and others to exile in Siberia.

For the second time, representative government was threatened, and it was seriously debated by the Tzar's ministers if the whole project should not be definitely abandoned and the Constitution abolished.  Better counsel prevailed, however, and a third Duma was allowed to be elected, which Stolypin, by clever manipulation of the new electoral law of June 3, was practically able to control and direct.  Propertied classes and large landholders were in the predominance and a majority was maintained favourable to the Government.  Witte calls it "a legislative body, not elected by the Russian people, but selected by Stolypin."

Stolypin soon paid the usual penalty of reaction and reckless administration, following so many of his predecessors to a bloody end.  The record of the various attempt made on this man's life reads like some of the most lurid pages of Edgar Allan Poe, rather than the annals of a civilized nation as late as 1911.⁽³⁾

But the end came, on September 14, 1911, during an elaborate theatrical performance at Kiev.  In the royal box sat the Emperor and his daughters, surrounded by influential members of his court, while cabinet members and other high officials were scattered through the audience.  Among the ministers present was Stolypin.  A revolutionary terrorist, a youthful Jew, succeeded in penetrating close enough to Stolypin to shoot him fatally before the very eyes of the horrified Emperor.  Rumor would have it that the assassin was also a secret agent employed by the police department.

The fourth and last Duma—this was the assembly dissolved on August 22, 1917—began its sittings in 1912 under the presidency of Michael Rodzianko, who was destined to play an important part in the closing scenes of 1917.  The two following years were essentially replicas of the preceding period.  The Duma and the Government were openly at odds.  Popular discontent was never silent, but grew more and more clamorous and menacing.  On May Day, 1914, 130,000 workmen were on a strike in Petrograd alone, a condition that soon developed into open warfare.  During July, while the clouds of her last war were gathering over doomed Russia, there were armed conflicts in the streets of the capital.  Cossacks were charging barricaded workmen and leaving killed and wounded strewn about, exactly as they had done on Bloody Sunday, in 1905.

Alexander Kerensky, aided by a group of disaffected fellow members of the Duma, was actively organizing revolutionary meetings in Southeastern Russia; they had finished their work at Samara and had boarded a steamer for Saratov, Mr. Kerensky's constituency, when they heard newsboys shouting, "Austria's ultimatum to Serbia !" From the tone of the mass meetings which they had convoked in numerous cities, they were convinced that the Revolution would have come, of itself, not later than the spring of 1915.

Then, with open revolution in her streets, and with class hatred seething in the hearts of so many of her people, Russia was suddenly confronted, on July 24, 1914, with the fatal choice between peace and war, the consequences of which pushed her over the precipice.

1.  Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution

Chapter XXI
Lenin and Stolypin

... A new cry arose for boycott of the Duma.  The Social Revolutionary Party reverted to boycott, while Lenin's faction overwhelmed him once more.  This was a "cardboard, comic-opera Duma," they cried, and the Constitution was now a mere fraud.  What self-respecting revolutionary could so humiliate himself and so deceive the masses as to participate in such undemocratic elections, play a role in such a farce, pretend that anything could be accomplished in such a travesty on the idea of popular representation?

But Lenin knew no finical pride as to the kind of institution in which he would work if he could thereby serve the revolution.  "In a pig-sty if necessary," he told his comrades.  Moreover, he had been studying Stolypin and his maneuvers with increasing respect.  Here was an opponent worthy of his steel, a man who, with opposite intentions, but from similar premises, was doing much what Lenin would have done had he been a champion of the existing order and an enemy of the revolution.

Stolypin's policy as Premier combined measures to diminish the franchise of "unreliable elements" and to repress open revolutionary activity, with a series of bold positive schemes for modernizing Russian life, reforming agriculture, and stabilizing the tsarist régime.  As if he had studied Lenin's Development of Capitalism in Russia and all Lenin's writings on the agrarian question, Stolypin proceeded now to foster capitalism in agriculture, to promote class differentiation in the village, to break down the communal mir, to secrete out a new class of property-minded individual peasant proprietors as a rural support for the existing order.  ("I put my wager not on the needy and the drunken, but on the sturdy and the strong.")

The trouble with the Emancipation of 1861, reasoned Stolypin, was that it actually preserved and fostered the peasant commune instead of setting up a class of individual proprietors.  Each communal village had received the entire area of land allotted to its members as a communal holding under a system of collective responsibility for the redemption payments of all its members.  The commune itself then divided the land for tilling among its members according to the size of the families, fresh subdivision taking place every few years to keep up with population changes.  Hence there was no inducement to improve the land, and no sense of private ownership such as characterized Western farmers and tended to make them socially conservative.  The system conserved communal or corporate ideology.  It preserved the memory of serfdom, and reminded the former serfs that they had gotten on the average only half of the land they had tilled for their lords before emancipation.  Thus it kept alive the idea that the halfway job might be completed by adding the rest of the land of the big landowner to the communal village land fund.

Now Stolypin set about to create in Russia a class of individual small proprietors.  He abolished the zemski nachalnik who kept the village in tutelage; he instituted equal rights for peasants with the rest of the population; he inaugurated a series of land and loan laws which would encourage all the more energetic to withdraw from the communes and become individual owners of their share of the land.  "The natural counterweight to the communal principle," he said, "is individual ownership; the small owner is the nucleus on which rests all stable order in the state." In short, he tried to create the conservative, property-minded class that the Marxists had wrongly imagined the Russian peasant to be.  This was sound reactionary politics, Lenin told himself with ungrudging admiration.

And no less sound was Stolypin's ukaz limiting the voting power of elements opposed to the regime while he enlarged the voting power of its supporters.  So Lenin, too, would act in 1918, when he made a worker's vote equal to that of five peasants.

Between 1907 and 1914, under the Stolypin land reform laws, 2,000,000 peasant families seceded from the village mir and became individual proprietors.  All through the war the movement continued, so that by January 1, 1916, 6,200,000 families, out of approximately 10,000,000 eligible, had made application for separation.  Lenin saw the matter as a race with time between Stolypin's reforms, and the next upheaval.  Should an upheaval be postponed for a couple of decades, the new land measures would so transform the countryside that it would no longer be a revolutionary force.  How near Lenin came to losing that race is proved by the fact that in 1917, when he called upon the peasants to "take the land", they already owned more than three-fourths of it.  According to Nicholas S. Timasheff, "the increase in the area tilled by the peasants (after the revolution) did not exceed 8 per cent; for an additional 8 per cent, the peasants no longer had to pay rent.  The rest was not arable land." (The Great Retreat, p. 107.)

... Thus the two men had opposing purposes, but in premises, in analysis of the possibilities, in tactical methods, they understood each other.  It almost seemed as if Premier Peter Arkadyevich were addressing Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich directly when, from the rostrum of the Duma, he made his famous declaration:

"What you want is upheavals, what we want is a great fatherland."

Would a fresh upheaval come before the new régime could complete its self-reform and consolidate its new foundations? "I do not expect to live to see the revolution," said Lenin several times toward the close of the Stolypin period.

But the dark forces which Plehve had created and which Stolypin continued to use to spy upon the revolutionary movement were the very forces which struck him down.  On September 14, 1911, in the presence of the Tsar and Tsarina at a gala performance in the best theater in Kiev, an assassin's bullet put an end to the career of Peter Arkadyevich Stolypin.  The murderer was a Jewish lawyer named Dmitri Bogrov, who seems to have been simultaneously an agent of the police and of the terrorist wing of the Anarchist movement.  The assassination was never fully cleared up.  Circumstances pointed to the possible complicity of the Department of the Interior, whose secret police were guarding the Tsar, or, at the very least, to the guilty negligence of the Kiev police authorities.  The specter of the agents provocateurs Azev and Malinovsky must have haunted Stolypin as he lay dying.  The Tsar and Tsarina did not mourn the loss of the man who had tried so hard to save them.  They never even understood what he was doing.  The great state that he had hoped to reinforce and modernize by the combination of police force, legislative manipulation, and enlightened economic and political measures, was taken over increasingly thenceforward by the dark and backward forces around Rasputin.  Yet so well had Stolypin done his work, that the agrarian reform continued to develop after his death.  It was the sudden coming of war, and not the failure of his plans, which brought the fresh upheaval in time for Lenin.

... The year 1912 saw the enactment of an insurance law against sickness and accident, providing two-thirds to three-quarters pay, covering virtually all industrial workers.  The workingmen themselves elected their delegates to the insurance councils.

The year 1913 saw a general amnesty for political offenders in connection with the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Romanov dynasty.  Martov, Dan, Kamenev returned to Russia to live there openly and legally.  If Lenin did not, it is because he did not choose to.  Trotsky and Stalin were ineligible because they had escaped from Siberia and had unfilled terms to serve.

In short, the Stolypin constitution, as Lenin assured his romantic ultra-Leftist followers was a moderate, but "by no means a cardboard or comic opera constitution," and Stolypin was really bent on reforming and transforming Russia in accordance with his vision of a modern state.  It has become a conventional legend since to pronounce this time a period of unalloyed reaction, but all signs pointed to a peaceful, if leaden-footed, progress.

All signs, that is, except the war clouds over the Balkans and the creeping degeneration at the summit of society: the Court.  There, after Stolypin's assassination, ever more doddering and incompetent advisers were brought in, under the influence of the camarilla around the strong-willed, narrow-visioned Tsarina and her Man of God, Rasputin.  But Lenin could not count on war, though he fearfully hoped he might, nor was he aware of the progressive paresis in the palace.

2.  He was condemned to imprisonment for ten years.

3.  See Appendix V.