THE BEGINNING OF THE REACTION
MOSCOW, _January 14th_.
To-day is the Russian New Year’s Day. To-day is also Sunday, so it would
seem a fitting occasion to preach a long sermon on Russia. I have been
amusing myself by finding suitable texts for such a sermon. They are all
from the works of Renan, a man who gave a good deal of thought to the
various political movements and phases of the world’s history, and
expressed himself with that nice lucidity and divine ease which we call
a perfect style.
The first is this: “La Révolution française fut la gageure d’un petit
nombre d’énergumènes qui réussirent à faire croire qu’ils avaient
entraîné la nation.”
No. 2: “Éternelle puérilité des répressions pénales, appliquées aux
choses de l’âme.”
No. 3: “Dans ses accès de vertu, l’homme croit pouvoir se passer
entièrement de l’égoisme et de l’intérêt propre; l’égoisme prend sa
revanche, en prouvant que l’absolu désintéressement engendre des maux
plus graves que ceux qu’on avait cru éviter par la suppression de la
propriété.”
These are my texts, and, as is usually the case when the text is good,
the sermon is superfluous.
New Year’s Day is, we are so often told, a good occasion to look forward
and behind. What, then, is the outlook at present? Life is going on at
St. Petersburg and Moscow exactly as usual, and here, save in the
smouldering ruins of the factory of the Presnaya and various broken
windows and damaged cornices, there is nothing to tell one that anything
unusual has occurred. The Government is said to be confident. Foreign
loans are in the air. The revolutionaries, it is said, have been crushed
and dispersed. Electioneering work is beginning; in fact, all is going
as well as can be expected. That is one view—an optimistic view which I
do not altogether share. In the first place, when people say that the
Revolutionary Party or its leaders are a minority I would reply by
quoting text No. 1. “Laws, in a country which is following an idea, are
always made by the minority,” says Renan, immediately before the
sentence I have quoted.
Secondly, the Moscow episode does not seem to me to have affected the
revolutionary movement in the slightest degree. The numbers of the
killed among the insurgents were trifling; all the important and real
leaders of the Revolution had left Moscow before this affair, which was,
in fact, conducted by boys and girls; and if a number of boys and girls
can, at the head of a mass of workmen, bring the garrison to
distraction, take guns from the troops, and force the authorities to
bombard the houses of the inhabitants without raising universal
indignation, things must be fairly serious.
To say that they have alienated public sympathy is certainly untrue; for
although they started the fighting, as soon as the authorities answered
with artillery the common ordinary man in the street began in many cases
to say that it was the fault of the Government and the authorities.
Sympathy in Russia is always certain to be with the people who are shot,
be they right or wrong.
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim-gun and they have not.”
That is, they argue, the motto of the authorities, and that is exactly
the sentiment which arouses the indignation of the citizen. A cabman
asked some one the other day when they were going to punish “him.” Who
is “him”? he was asked. “Admiral Dubassov,” was the answer. “Surely the
Emperor will punish him for shooting at the houses.” The energetic
manner in which the rising was suppressed has, I am told, produced a
good effect in Europe; doubtless energetic measures were not only
necessary but imperative in the first instance; whether the continuation
of them now is a mistake or not only the future can show. One fact,
however, is certain, and that is that these measures are being conducted
with the same arbitrariness which has characterised the action of the
Russian police in the past, and are causing intense exasperation. There
is a word in Russian, “Proisvol,” which means acting, like Wordsworth’s
river, according to your “own sweet will,” unheedful of, and often in
defiance of, the law. It is precisely this manner of acting which has
brought about the revolution in Russia. It is against the “Proisvol”
that all the educated classes and half the official class rebelled. And
it is this very “Proisvol” against which the whole country rose on
strike, which the Government promised should henceforth disappear, and
which is at the present moment triumphantly installed once more as the
ruling system.
Of course it may be objected that anarchy and lawless revolution can
only be met by severe repression; but the question is: Must it be met by
arbitrary and lawless repression? Hang the insurgents if you like, but
why shoot a doctor who has got nothing to do with it before you know
anything about him? To stop a newspaper like the _Russkie Viedomosti_,
for instance, is an act of sheer “Proisvol,” the reason given being that
it had subscription lists for workmen’s unions, which it denies, saying
that the money was for the wounded. Here I point to my second text. All
this repression seems to me utterly futile. The future, however, can
show whether this is indeed so.
In the meantime election programmes are appearing. That of the
Constitutional Democrats has come out, and is moderate in tone, although
its clauses are extensive. It insists, among other things, on universal
suffrage and an eight-hours’ day for the workmen. Here I would point to
text 3. Everybody whom I have seen in Russia in any way connected with
the working man is agreed in saying that an eight-hours’ day is an
absolute impossibility. That a Russian workman’s eight hours means in
reality about six hours. That no factory in Russia could exist on these
terms. The Constitutional Democrats seem in this case to have omitted
the factor of human egoism and interest.
One of the gravest factors of the general situation is that Eastern
Siberia seems to be entirely in the hands of the revolutionaries, who
are apparently managing the railway and everything else with perfect
order, while the troops, anxious only to get home, are taking any
engines they can lay hands on and racing back, one train literally
racing another!
Altogether it cannot be said that the outlook is particularly cheerful.
There is one bright point so far, and that is that all parties seem
anxious to convoke the Duma. The Liberals want it, the Conservatives
want it, the Extreme Radicals sanction the elections. The Radicals say
it will be packed by the Government; but I do not see how this is
possible. They say they will let it meet, and that if it proves “a Black
Hundred Duma” they will destroy it. They call everything which is not
Radical “Black Hundred.” But, as I have said before, and as I cannot
tire of saying, it is useless to blame these extreme parties for talking
nonsense. They have been driven to this nonsense by the still greater
want of sense on the part of the Government of Russia during the last
twenty years, and in wanting to wipe out this system altogether they
are, after all, in the right. Unfair they may be, hysterical, and
absurd. So were the Jacobins; but the absurdity, extravagance, and
violence of the Jacobins were only the logical result of the “Ancien
Régime.” So it is here, although it is misleading to compare the present
movement in Russia with the French Revolution.
And behind all the rumours and conflicts of various parties looms the
agrarian question; the ninety million peasants who till the land in the
same manner in which they tilled it four hundred years ago; whose land
from generation to generation dwindles by partition, while the
population increases. How and when is this question going to be solved?
It can only be solved by the education of the peasants themselves; but
the question is what can be done to gain time and to make this education
possible. My outlook is, perhaps, too pessimistic. I do not know. I only
feel that the whole revolutionary movement is beyond all forces of
control, and that no measures in the world can put it back now; whether
it could by wisdom be led into safe channels is another question. Such a
thing has seldom been seen in the history of the world, and it is, after
all, only out of the past that we make the future.
To get rid of these gloomy ideas I went to the hospital, where New
Year’s Day was celebrated with great gusto; there was a Christmas-tree,
dancing and song, and it was delightful to see a little tiny boy and a
huge soldier dancing opposite each other. The Russian peasants dance to
each other, and separately, of course, like Highlanders when they dance
a reel or a schottische. It was gay and yet rather melancholy; there
were so many cripples, and it reminded me a little of the Christmas
feast described in Dostoievski’s “Letters from a Dead House.”
_January 18th._
To-day I heard a characteristic story. A student told it to me. A
peasant was looking at a rich man’s house in one of the streets of
Moscow. An agitator went up to him and said: “Think of the rich man
living in that great house, and think of your miserable position.”
“Yes,” said the peasant cheerfully, “it’s a big house; he’s a proper
Barine.”
“But,” said the agitator, much irritated, “it’s most unjust that he
should live in such a big house and that you should live in a small
house. You should turn him out of it.”
“How could that be?” answered the peasant. “He is used to being rich.
All his life he has lived in plenty. What would he do in poverty? We are
used to poverty, and we must have pity on those who are not used to it.”
The agitator then gave the peasant up and went away in disgust.
_January 20th._
I arrived in St. Petersburg this morning. Yesterday a Russian friend of
mine discussed with me my ideas on the “Intelligenzia” and their
revolutionary sympathies which I had embodied in a letter to the
_Morning Post_. My friend said that I had committed a gross injustice to
the Russian “Intelligenzia,” and that my letter, by reflecting the
opinion of Englishmen who had spent but a short time in Russia, and
judged everything from the point of view of a country where political
liberty had long since been an established fact, gave a wrong
impression. There is some truth in this, no doubt. It is difficult here
to keep a cool head and not to be swayed by circumambient influence. The
danger does not lie in being influenced by those who immediately
surround one, but rather in being influenced inversely by their
opinions. I mean one has only to talk to a revolutionary or to a
conservative long enough, at the present moment, to be convinced that
his adversary is right. I still hold, however, to what I wrote about the
unfairness and exaggerations of the sympathisers with the revolution
among the “Intelligenzia.” I think they are incapable of looking at the
matter impartially, and no wonder. Moreover, the Government past and
present is responsible for their frame of mind. Again, I still hold to
what I said, that the “Intelligenzia” have not produced a great man; but
instead of retracting what I said, I will, as I said I would do, after
the oriental fashion, having stated all that there was to be said
against them, try and set forth all that is to be said in favour of the
“Intelligenzia.”
In the first place, what is the “Intelligenzia”? Properly speaking, it
is composed of every one who can read or write. But the term is
generally used to designate those members of the middle class who belong
to the professional classes—doctors, professors, teachers, journalists,
and literary men. In its largest sense it is the whole middle class,
from which nine-tenths of the officials are drawn. But when Russians
speak of it they generally mean the middle class, excluding officials.
Such as it is, it contains, as well as the most hot-headed
revolutionaries and violent youths, all that is best and most
intelligent and cultivated in Russia, all men of science who have done
remarkable work in various branches, all doctors, whose life in the
country is a life of difficulty and self-sacrifice which it would be
difficult to exaggerate, all the professors and the teachers, the
actors, the singers, the musicians, the artists, the writers. These
people have for years been the absolute prey of the irresponsibility and
blundering stupidity of the higher bureaucrats. They have with
difficulty been able to obtain foreign books (Matthew Arnold’s “Essays
on Criticism” was one of the books on the index two years ago); in
teaching, half the facts of history have been forbidden them; and at the
slightest suspicion of not being “well-intentioned” they have been
placed under police surveillance and often been subjected to gross
indignities. Is it to be wondered at that they are bitter now? The
average man and woman of the Russian middle class is incomparably better
educated than the average English man or woman of the same class. They
are saturated with the foreign classics. They often speak two languages
besides Russian; and they are conversant with modern thought in the
various European countries as far as it is allowed to reach them. When
one sees the average Englishman abroad one is aghast at his ignorance
and his want of education in comparison with these people. I have
constantly, both here and in Manchuria, found to my shame that I knew
nothing of English history in comparison with the Russians I met. The
reason is very simple: they are taught at school things which will be
useful to them. Every one is given a general foundation of knowledge. I
do not believe the average Englishman to be more stupid than the average
foreigner, but he is not educated. A man may go through a public school
and even a university in England and come out at the end ludicrously
ignorant of everything except the classical books he was obliged to “get
up,” and at our public schools, with a few brilliant exceptions, the
education of the average boy amounts to this: that he does not learn
Latin and Greek, and he certainly learns nothing else. I never heard
English history mentioned at Eton, and all the English history I know I
learnt in the nursery. The average Russian boy knows far more about
English history than the average English boy, let alone European
history; and a cultivated Russian of the middle class is saturated with
John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, John Morley, Buckle, and
Carlyle; whereas Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley are treated as
Russian classics. Only yesterday I travelled with a man who, although he
could not speak English, was intimately conversant with our whole
literature, and told me that the whole generation to which he belonged
had been taught to find their intellectual food in England and not in
France and Germany. “How is it,” he asked me, “that we Russians who live
on English thought, and admire and respect you as a nation far more than
other nations, have been so long at loggerheads with you politically?” I
said that I thought the reason was that, although the cultivated and the
average educated Russian knows our literature well, the nation as a
whole does not know us, and we do not know Russia at all—for most
intelligent Englishmen are ludicrously ignorant of Russia. Besides this,
the bureaucratic _régime_ has acted like a barrier between the two
countries and fostered and fed on the misunderstanding.
As far as politics are concerned things have moved on. Some weeks ago it
was possible to believe that the Government had been wantonly hampered
in its well-intentioned efforts, now it is only too plain that by their
acts they are doing their best to justify the violence of the
revolutionaries. The “Proisvol” (arbitrariness) continues on an
extensive scale. People in Moscow are arrested every day and without
discrimination. Influential people do not dare to inscribe their names
on the lists of the Constitutional Democratic Party for fear of being
arrested. The police have unlimited powers, and all the methods of the
old _régime_ are flourishing once more. I do not believe, as is sure to
be objected, that the action of the revolutionaries has rendered this
necessary. I do not believe that the best way to fight revolution is by
lawless and arbitrary repression. Lastly, and most important, it is not
the immorality or the illegality of the methods that I find
reprehensible, but their stupidity and ineffectiveness. If all this
repression were the iron working of one great central mind, which
ruthlessly imposed its will on the nation, breaking down all obstacles
and restoring order, it would be excusable. But it is not. I do not
believe the Government is responsible for what happens in Moscow; and in
Moscow itself the various authorities shift the responsibility on to
each other. It is the old story of the bureaucratic system—no
responsibility and no individual efficiency, but a happy-go-lucky,
drifting, and blind incompetence, striking where it should not strike,
being lenient too late, and never foreseeing what is under its very
nose. When one comes to think, it is not surprising, considering that
the instruments with which Count Witte has to deal are of the old
regulation bureaucratic pattern. How, for instance, can the Minister of
the Interior, M. Durnovo, be expected to adopt any other methods than
those which are ingrained in him? It is as if the Liberals persuaded Mr.
Chamberlain to speak at a public meeting and then expressed surprise at
finding that he was in favour of Tariff Reform. When some of the
revolutionaries were summarily executed after the recent troubles in
Moscow, a sentence of Tacitus came back to me which is peculiarly
applicable to the old Russian bureaucratic methods: “Interfectis Varrone
consule designate et Petronio Turpiliano consulari ... inauditi atque
indefensi tamquam innocentes perierunt” (Varro and Turpilianus were
executed without trial and defence, so that they might just as well have
been innocent).
The whole system of arresting doctors and professors, prohibiting
newspapers and plays, censoring books and songs, is now, whatever may
have been its effect in the past, childishly futile. Moreover, even this
is blunderingly done. The harmless newspapers are suppressed and more
violent ones appear. But the point is the futility of it all; as soon as
a serious newspaper is stopped it reappears on the next day under
another name. Each repressed satirical newspaper (and these journals are
often exceedingly scurrilous) finds a successor. It is not as if the
revolutionaries were the result of the newspapers; it is the newspapers
which are the reflection of the revolutionaries; and until you can
repress every revolutionary the spirit which finds its vent in these
organs will exist. To repress the Liberal spirit altogether it will be
necessary to suppress nearly all the thinking population of Russia. The
only hope is that all this is, after all, only temporary, and that the
meeting of the Duma will put an end to this riot of lawlessness and
inefficiency. One competent man like Count Witte is not enough to deal
with things which are happening all over the country in so large a place
as Russia, and he is bound to trust himself to minor authorities—and
these in many cases prove themselves unfit for their task. “Why are they
chosen?” it may be asked. The answer is: “Who else is there to choose
until the whole pack of cards is thoroughly reshuffled or rather
destroyed, and a new pack, men chosen by the Duma, is adopted?”
“But,” it is objected, “however much you reshuffle the cards, the pack
will be the same.” This is true; but one radical change would make all
the difference in the world, and that would be the introduction of the
system of responsibility. Whenever there has been in a Russian town a
governor who had declared his firm intention of holding his subordinates
responsible for their acts, and has put such a declaration into
practice, things have always gone well. There was for years a chief of
the police at Moscow, who was just such a man. The trouble is now, that
however good a subordinate official may be, there is no guarantee that
he may not be removed at any minute owing to the passing whim of those
who are above.