tyranny of his Government, of the slavish spirit of his subjects; others
assert, on the contrary, that the Imperialism of Petersburg has nothing
in common with the people, that this people, crushed under the twofold
despotism of the Government and the landowners, bears the yoke, but is
not resigned to it, that it is not crushed, but only unfortunate, and
at the same time declare that it is this very people which gives unity
and power to the colossal Tsardom that crushes it. Some add that the
Russian people is a _contemptible rabble of drunkards and knaves_; others
maintain that Russia is inhabited by a competent and richly gifted race.
It seems to me that there is something tragic in the senile heedlessness
with which the old world mixes up the different accounts it hears of its
antagonist. In this confusion of contradictory opinions there is apparent
so much senseless repetition, such distressing superficiality, such
petrified prejudice, that we are involuntarily moved to a comparison with
the days of the fall of Rome.
Then, too, on the eve of catastrophe, on the eve of the victory of the
barbarians, men loudly proclaimed the eternity of Rome, the impotent
madness of the Nazarenes, and the insignificance of the movement that was
arising in the barbarian world.
You have performed a great service: you first in France have spoken of
the Russian people, you have, unawares, touched on the very heart, the
very source of life. The truth would have been revealed to your eyes at
once, if you had not, in a moment of anger, pulled back your outstretched
hand, if you had not turned away from the source because its waters were
not clear.
I read your bitter words with deep distress, with melancholy, with
anguish in my heart. I confess I looked in vain in them for the
historian, the philosopher, and, above all, the tender-hearted man whom
we all know and love. I hasten to explain, I fully understood the cause
of your indignation; sympathy for unhappy Poland prompted your words. We,
too, deeply cherish this feeling for our Polish brothers, and in us the
feeling is not merely one of pity, but of shame, and pangs of conscience.
Love for Poland! We all love her, but is it necessary to combine with
that feeling hatred for another people as unhappy, a people forced to
aid with its fettered hands the misdeeds of its savage Government? Let
us be magnanimous, let us not forget that before our eyes the nation
decked with all the trophies of recent revolution has consented to the
establishment of _order_ in Rome like that in Warsaw. And to-day ... look
yourself what is going on about you ... yet we do not say that the French
_have ceased to be men_.
It is time to forget this unhappy conflict between brothers. Among us
there is no conqueror. Poland and Russia are crushed by a common foe.
Even the victims and the martyrs turn their backs upon the past, which is
equally sorrowful for them and for us. I, like you, appeal to your friend
the great poet, Mickiewicz.
Do not say of the Polish bard’s opinions that they are ‘due to
mercifulness, a sacred delusion.’ No; they are the fruits of long and
conscientious thought and a profound understanding of the destinies of
the Slav world. The forgiveness of enemies is a glorious achievement,
but there is an achievement still more glorious, more humane; that is,
the understanding of enemies, for understanding is at once forgiveness,
justification, reconciliation.
The Slav world is striving towards unity; that tendency became apparent
immediately after the Napoleonic period. The idea of a Slavonic
federation had already taken shape in the revolutionary plans of Pestel
and Muravyov. Many Poles had a hand in the Russian conspiracy of December
1825.
When the Revolution of 1830 broke out in Warsaw, the Russian people
displayed not the slightest animosity against the disobedient subjects
of their Tsar. The young were in complete sympathy with the Poles. I
remember with what impatience we awaited tidings from Warsaw; we cried
like children at the news of the memorial services held in the capital of
Poland for our Petersburg martyrs. Sympathy for the Poles exposed us to
the risk of cruel punishments, we were forced to conceal it in our hearts
and to be silent.
It may well be that during the war of 1830 a feeling of exclusive
nationalism and quite intelligible hostility prevailed in Poland.
But since those days the influence of Mickiewicz, the historical and
philological works of many Slav scholars, a closer knowledge of other
European nations, purchased at the bitter price of exile, has given a
very different turn to Polish thought. The Poles have come to feel that
the battle is not between the Russian people and themselves; they have
learned that for the future the only way they can fight is _for their and
our freedom_, the words inscribed on their revolutionary banner.
Konarski, who was tortured and shot by Nicholas at Vilna, called upon
Russians and Poles without distinction of race to rise in revolt. Russia
showed her gratitude by one of those almost unknown tragedies with which
every heroic action ends amongst us under the military heel of our German
rulers.
Korovazev, an army officer, resolved to save Konarski. The day when he
would be on duty was approaching, everything was in readiness for the
escape, when the treachery of one of the Polish martyr’s comrades brought
his plans to ruin. The young man was arrested and sent to Siberia, and
nothing has been heard of him since.
I spent five years in exile in the remote provinces of the Empire. There
I met many Polish exiles. Almost in every district town there is either a
whole group, or at least one of the luckless champions of independence.
I would gladly appeal to their evidence; certainly they cannot complain
of lack of sympathy on the part of the people around them. Of course,
I am not speaking here of the police or members of the higher military
hierarchy. They are nowhere conspicuous for their love of freedom, and
least of all in Russia. I might appeal to the Polish students exiled
every year to Russian universities to remove them from the influences
of their native land; let them describe how they were received by their
Russian comrades. They used to part from us with tears in their eyes.
You remember that when in 1847 the Polish emigrants in Paris celebrated
the anniversary of their revolution, a Russian mounted their platform
to beg for their friendship, and forgiveness for the past. That was our
unhappy friend Bakunin.... But not to quote my fellow-countrymen, I will
pick out one of those who are reckoned our enemies, a man whom you have
yourself mentioned in your legend of Kosciuszko. For evidence on this
subject I will refer you to one of the veterans of the Polish democracy,
Bernacki, one of the ministers of revolutionary Poland. I boldly appeal
to him, though long years of grief might well have embittered him against
everything Russian. I am convinced that he will confirm all that I have
said.
The solidarity binding Russia and Poland to each other and to the whole
Slav world cannot be denied; it is obvious. What is more, there is no
future for the Slav world apart from Russia; without Russia it will
not develop, it will fall to pieces and be swallowed up by the German
element; it will become Austrian and lose its independence. But in our
opinion that is not its fate, not the end for which it is destined.
Following the gradual development of your idea, I must confess that I
cannot agree with your view of Europe as a single individual in which
every nationality plays the part of an essential organ.
It seems to me that all the German-Latin nationalities are necessary in
the European world, because they exist in it, in consequence of some
necessity. Aristotle long ago drew a distinction between pre-existent
necessity and the necessity involved in the sequence of events. Nature
is subject to the necessity of the accomplished fact, but her hesitation
between various possibilities is very marked. On the same principle the
Slav world can claim its right to unity, especially as it is made up of
one race.
Centralisation is alien to the Slav spirit—federation is far more natural
to it. Only when grouped in a league of free and independent peoples
will the Slav world at last enter upon its genuine historical existence.
Its past can only be regarded as a period of growth, of preparation, of
purification. The political forms in which the Slavs have lived in the
past have not been in harmony with their national tendency, a tendency
vague and instinctive if you like, but by that very fact betraying an
extraordinary vitality and promising much in the future. The Slavs
have until now displayed in every phase of their history a strange
unconcern—indeed, a marvellous receptivity. Thus Russia passed from
paganism to Christianity without a shock, without a revolt, simply in
obedience to the Grand Duke Vladimir, and in imitation of Kiev. Without
regret they flung their old idols into the Volhov and accepted the new
god as a new idol.
Eight hundred years later, part of Russia in precisely the same way
accepted a civilisation imported from abroad.
The Slav world is like a woman who has never loved, and for that very
reason apparently takes no interest in what is going on about her. She
is a stranger to all, unwanted everywhere, but there is no answering for
the future; she is still young, and already a strange yearning has taken
possession of her heart and sets it beating faster.
As for the richness of the national spirit, we need only point to the
Poles, the one Slavonic people which has been at once free and powerful.
The Slav world is not in reality made up of nationalities so different in
kind. Under the outer crust of chivalrous Liberal and Catholic Poland,
and of imperial enslaved Byzantine Russia, under the democratic rule
of the Serb Voyevod, under the bureaucratic yoke with which Austria
oppresses Illyria, Dalmatia, and the Banat, under the patriarchal
authority of the Osmanlis and under the blessing of the Archbishop of
Montenegro, live nations physiologically and ethnographically identical.
The greater number of these Slav peoples have never been enslaved by
conquest. The dependence in which they are so often found has for the
most part consisted only in the recognition of a foreign potentate and
the payment of tribute. Such, for instance, was the character of the
Mongol power in Russia. Thus the Slavs have through long centuries
preserved their nationality, their character, their language.
Have we not therefore the right to look upon Russia as the centre of the
crystallisation, the centre towards which the Slav world in its striving
toward unity is gravitating, especially as Russia is so far the only
nation of the great race organised into a powerful and independent state?
The answer to this question would be perfectly clear if the Petersburg
Government had the faintest inkling of its national destiny, if that
dull-witted, deadly despotism could make terms with any humane idea. But
in the present position of affairs, what honest man will bring himself
to suggest to the Western Slavs their union with an empire which is
perpetually in a state of siege, an empire in which the sceptre has been
turned into a bludgeon that beats men to death?
The Imperial Pan-Slavism, eulogised from time to time by men who have
been suborned, or who have lost their bearings, has, of course, nothing
in common with a union resting on the foundations of freedom.
At this point we are inevitably brought by logic to a question of primary
importance. Assuming that the Slav world can hope in the future for a
fuller development, are we not forced to enquire which of the elements
that have found expression in its undeveloped state gives it grounds for
such a hope? If the Slavs believe that their time has come, this element
must be in harmony with the revolutionary idea in Europe.
You indicated that element, you touched upon it, but it escaped you,
because a generous sentiment of sympathy for Poland drew your attention
away from it.
You say that ‘the fundamental basis of the life of the Russian people is
_communism_,’ you maintain that ‘their strength lies in their agrarian
law, in the perpetual re-division of the land.’
What a terrible _Mene Tekel_ has dropped from your lips!... Communism—the
fundamental basis! Strength resting on re-division of the land! And you
were not alarmed at your own words?
Ought we not here to pause, to take thought, to look more deeply into the
question, and not to leave it before making certain whether it is a dream
or truth?
Is there in the nineteenth century an interest of any gravity which does
not involve the question of communism, the question of the re-division of
the land?
Carried away by your indignation you go on: ‘They (the Russians) are
without any true sign of humanity, of moral sensibility, of the sense
of good and evil. Truth and justice have for them no meaning; if you
speak of these things—they are mute, they smile and know not what the
words signify.’ Who may those Russians be to whom you have spoken? What
conceptions of _truth and justice_ appeared beyond their comprehension?
This is not a superfluous question. In our profoundly revolutionary epoch
the words ‘truth and justice’ have lost all absolute meaning identical
for all men.
The _truth and justice_ of old Europe are falsehood and injustice to the
Europe which is being born. Nations are products of Nature, history is
the progressive continuation of animal development. If we apply our moral
standards to Nature, we shall not get very far. She cares nought for our
blame or our praise. Our verdicts and the Montyon prizes[83] for virtue
do not exist for her. The ethical categories created by our individual
caprice are not applicable to her. It seems to me that a nation cannot
be called either bad or good. The life of a people is always true
to its character and cannot be false. Nature produces only what is
practicable under given conditions: all that exists is drawn onwards by
her generative ferment, her insatiable thirst for creation, that thirst
common to all things living.
There are peoples living a prehistoric life, others living a life outside
history; but once they move into the broad stream of history, one and
indivisible, they belong to _humanity_, and, on the other hand, all the
past of humanity belongs to them. In history—that is, in the life of the
active and progressive part of humanity—the aristocracy of facial angle,
of complexion, and other distinctions is gradually effaced. That which
has not become human cannot come into history: so no nation which has
become part of history can be reckoned a herd of beasts, just as there
is no nation which deserves to be called an assembly of the elect.
There is no man bold enough, or ungrateful enough, to deny the importance
of France in the destinies of the European world; but you must allow me
the frank confession that I cannot share your view that the sympathetic
interest of France is the _sine qua non_ of historical progress in the
future.
Nature never stakes all her fortune on one card. Rome, the Eternal City,
which had no less right to the hegemony of the world, tottered, fell into
ruins, vanished, and pitiless humanity strode forward over its grave.
On the other hand, unless one looks on Nature as madness incarnate, it
would be hard to see nothing but an outcast race, nothing but a vast
deception, nothing but a casual rabble, human only through their vices,
in a people that has grown and multiplied during ten centuries, that has
obstinately preserved its nationality, that has formed itself into an
immense empire, and has intervened in history far more perhaps than it
should have done.
And such a view is the more difficult to accept since this people, even
judging from the words of its enemies, is far from being in a stagnant
condition. It is not a race that has attained social forms approximately
corresponding to its desires and has sunk into slumber in them, like
the Chinese; still less, a people that has outlived its prime and is
withering in senile impotence, like the people of India. On the contrary,
Russia is a quite new State—an unfinished building in which everything
smells of fresh plaster, in which everything is at work and being worked
out, in which nothing has yet attained its object, in which everything is
changing, often for the worse, but anyway changing. In brief, this is the
people whose fundamental principle, to quote your opinion, is communism,
and whose strength lies in the re-division of land....
With what crime, after all, do you reproach the Russian people? What is
the essential point of your accusation?
‘The Russian,’ you say, ‘is a liar and a thief; he is perpetually
stealing, he is perpetually lying, and quite innocently—it is in his
nature.’
I will not stop to call attention to the sweeping character of your
verdict, but will ask you a simple question: who is it that the Russian
deceives, from whom does he steal? Who—if not the landowner, the
Government official, the steward, the police officer, in fact the sworn
foes of the peasant, whom he looks upon as heathens, as traitors, as half
Germans? Deprived of every possible means of defence, the peasant resorts
to cunning in dealing with his torturers, he deceives them, and he is
perfectly right in doing so.
Cunning, my dear sir, is, in the words of the great thinker,[84] the
irony of brute force.
Through his aversion for private property in land, so correctly noted
by you, through his heedless and indolent temperament, the Russian
peasant has gradually and imperceptibly been caught in the snares of
the German bureaucracy and of the landowners’ power. He has submitted
to this humiliating disaster with the resignation of a martyr, but he
has not believed in the rights of the landowner, nor the justice of the
law-courts, nor the legality of the acts of the authorities. For nearly
two hundred years the peasant’s existence has been a dumb, passive
opposition to the existing order of things. He submits to coercion,
he endures, but he takes no part in anything that goes on outside the
village commune.
The name of the Tsar still stirs a superstitious sentiment in the people;
it is not to the Tsar Nicholas that the peasant does homage, but to the
abstract idea, the myth; in the popular imagination the Tsar stands for a
menacing avenger, an incarnation of Justice, an earthly providence.
Besides the Tsar, only the clergy could possibly have an influence on
orthodox Russia. They alone represent old Russia in governing spheres;
the clergy do not shave their beards, and by that fact have remained
on the side of the people. The peasantry listen with confidence to the
monks. But the monks and the higher clergy, occupied exclusively with
life beyond the grave, care little for the people. The village priests
have lost all influence through their greed, their drunkenness, and their
intimate relations with the police. In their case, too, the peasants
respect the idea but not the person.
As for the dissenters, they hate both person and idea, both priest and
Tsar.
Apart from the Tsar and the clergy every element of government and
society is utterly alien, essentially antagonistic to the people. The
peasant finds himself in the literal sense of the word an outlaw. The
law-court is no protector for him, and his share in the existing order
of things is entirely confined to the twofold tribute that lies heavy
upon him and is paid in his toil and his blood. Rejected by all, he
instinctively understands that the whole system is ordered not for his
benefit, but to his detriment, and that the aim of the Government and
the landowners is to wring out of him as much labour, as much money, as
many recruits as possible. As he understands this and is gifted with a
supple and resourceful intelligence, he deceives them on all sides and
in everything. It could not be otherwise; if he spoke the truth he would
by so doing be acknowledging their authority over him; if he did not
rob them (observe that to conceal part of the produce of his own labour
is considered theft in a peasant) he would thereby be recognising the
lawfulness of their demands, the rights of the landowners and the justice
of the law-courts.
To understand the Russian peasant’s position fully, you should see him
in the law-courts; you must see his hopeless face, his frightened
watchful eyes, to understand that he is a prisoner of war before the
court-martial, a traveller facing a gang of brigands. From the first
glance it is clear that the victim has not the slightest trust in the
hostile, pitiless, insatiable robbers who are questioning him, tormenting
him and fleecing him. He knows that if he has money he will be acquitted;
if not, he will be found guilty.
The Russian people speak their own old language, the judges and the
attorneys write in a new bureaucratic language, hideous and barely
intelligible; they fill whole folios with ungrammatical jargon, and
gabble off this mummery to the peasant. He may understand it if he can
and find his way out of the muddle if he knows how. The peasant knows
what this performance means, and maintains a cautious demeanour. He does
not say one word too much, he conceals his uneasiness and stands silent,
pretending to be a fool.
The peasant who has been acquitted by the court trudges home, no more
elated than if he had been condemned. In either case the decision seems
to him the result of capricious tyranny or chance.
In the same way, when he is summoned as a witness he stubbornly professes
to know nothing, even in face of incontestable fact. Being found guilty
by a law-court does not disgrace a man in the eyes of the Russian
peasant. Exiles and convicts go by the name of _unfortunates_ with him.
The life of the Russian peasantry has hitherto been confined to the
commune. It is only in relation to the commune and its members that the
peasant recognises that he has rights and duties. Outside the commune
everything seems to him based upon violence. What is fatal is his
submitting to that violence, and not his refusing in his own way to
recognise it and his trying to protect himself by guile. Lying before a
judge set over him by unlawful authority is far more straightforward
than a hypocritical show of respect for a jury tampered with by a corrupt
prefect. The peasant respects only those institutions which reflect his
innate conception of law and right.
There is a fact which no one who has been in close contact with the
Russian peasantry can doubt. The peasants rarely cheat each other. An
almost boundless good faith prevails among them; they know nothing of
contracts and written agreements.
The problems connected with the measurement of their fields are often
inevitably complicated, owing to the perpetual re-division of land,
in accordance with the number of taxpayers in the family; yet the
difficulties are got over without complaint or resort to the law-courts.
The landowners and the Government eagerly seek an opportunity of
interference, but that opportunity is not given them. Petty disputes
are submitted to the judgment of the elders or of the commune, and the
decision is unconditionally accepted by all. It is just the same thing
in the _artels_. The _artels_ are often made up of several hundred
workmen, who form a union for a definite period—for instance, for a year.
At the expiration of the year the workmen divide their wages by common
agreement, in accordance with the work done by each. The police never
have the satisfaction of meddling in their accounts. Almost always the
_artel_ makes itself responsible for every one of its members.
The bonds between the peasants of the commune are even closer when
they are not orthodox but dissenters. From time to time the Government
organises a savage raid on some dissenting village. Peasants are clapped
into prison and sent into exile, and it is all done with no sort of plan,
no consistency, without rhyme or reason, solely to satisfy the clamour
of the clergy and give the police something to do. The character of the
Russian peasants, the solidarity existing among them, is displayed again
during these hunts after heretics. At such times it is worth seeing
how they succeed in deceiving the police, in saving their comrades and
concealing their holy books and vessels, how they endure the most awful
tortures without uttering a word. I challenge any one to bring forward a
single case in which a dissenting commune has been betrayed by a peasant,
even by an orthodox one.