great crowd of people. Then the noise becomes more differentiated--it
changes into song. It is the student body following the coffin with
songs of mourning over the miles of road. They sing beautifully, in
wonderful polyphonic choirs, do the Russians; even envy must follow the
song. They have a perfect ear. After the long waiting the final
deliverance through its solemn notes affects the heart strangely. And
now a new wave of approaching humanity. The impossible becomes possible,
the students crowd past us and gather about the grave. The coffin is
lifted over our heads and into the noose of the dull gravedigger. A
moment of silence. Then the pope reads a short prayer and gives a short
funeral sermon on the departed brother in Christ. Then only does the
funeral ceremony proper begin. The pope steps aside. A white-haired man,
a university professor, whose name passes from mouth to mouth, extols
the departed champion of freedom. He is followed by a poet speaking in
swinging verse. Then a woman. Then a student. Then a woman again, in
irregular, improvised order. Then my neighbor, the man from Siberia,
calls out to the students. Then begins a song full of fervor and
passion. Then a woman speaks again, and after her a young girl. The
police, hundreds of them, with many officers, are crowded quite into the
background. It is better so. For of all the speeches I distinguished but
one word, spoken in passionate tones, "Svoboda! Svoboda!" (Liberty!
Liberty!). And, as if that word were a signal, it calls forth sighs and
weeping and the gnashing of teeth. It is an indescribable drama, a
terribly exciting scene. I cannot control myself, and cry out to my
neighbor, "Make the poor girl keep still," and I point towards the
police, but I am not understood. They have all been seized by a
religious fanaticism that makes martyrdom bliss. How truly lovable they
are, these educated people that still have an ideal and are strange to
the base satiety that so sadly deforms our Western youth! And how the
heart contracts at the thought that all this beautiful enthusiasm must
vanish without result; that the longing and inspiration are helplessly
shivered against the brutality of the Cossacks and gendarmes!
We left the consecrated ground in a strange intoxication after a tiring
struggle with the densely packed crowd that would move neither forward
nor backward. "It is not the business of the police to maintain order,
but only to keep people under surveillance." I have been astonished to
this very day that no one was trampled to death in the crowd.
I heard a few days later that the statistician Annenski, an old man of
sixty-five, was arrested for having delivered one of those impassioned
speeches at the grave. A number of men of irreproachable character,
among them the historian who was the first speaker there, testified that
Annenski was not one of the speakers. I could have testified to that
myself, for I stood among the speakers, and each one was named to me.
But the police would not give up its victim. Annenski was still in
confinement when I left Russia. Now he is banished to Reval for four
years, because they had found in his house a few numbers of Struve's
periodical.
I, however, carried away with me from Mikhailovski's grave the certainty
that the coming generation is lost to the reaction. Young Russia, in so
far as it possesses an academic education, is liberal, both the men and
the women. And thus that funeral day was for me the most hopeful day
that I had lived in Russia.
XV
THE CHINOVNIK (THE RUSSIAN OFFICIAL)
Czar Nicholas I. is known to have been a great admirer of Gogol's
"Revizor." Yet a more bitter satire on Russian officialdom than this
realistic comedy does not exist. Plenty of utterances of the czars who
have followed Nicholas are quoted to show that none of the supposedly
unlimited monarchs of Russia has been in the least hazy as to the
qualities of his most trustworthy servants. When, nevertheless, fifty
years after the death of Nicholas I., the camorra of officials makes
more havoc than ever, and obstructs all development of the Russian
nation with the close meshes of its organization, as with a net of steel
wire, this strange phenomenon is to be explained only in two ways.
Either the czars who so clearly recognized the evil must have been
unscrupulous cynics, who only laughed at corruption and had no feeling
for the sufferings of their people, or else their power was not
sufficient to break that of their servants. The omnipotence of autocracy
must have found its limits in the omnipotence of the oligarchy of
functionaries. The first of the possible explanations may be set aside
without further consideration. The autocrats, without exception, have
desired the good of their people, and have been personally upright men
and lovers of justice. If they had been strong enough to create a
trustworthy and industrious official service, instead of their idle and
corrupt one, they would certainly have done so. Only the second
explanation, then, is possible. The power of the czardom has had to
capitulate to that of the oligarchy of officials.
This explanation, however, requires a further one. What wrecked the
attempts of well-intentioned autocrats at reform? These men did not
understand joking; and open opposition to orders of the Czar is
absolutely unthinkable, when punishments such as exile to Siberia are
given for much slighter offences. Is it possible that the Russian nation
stands morally so much lower than all others that honest and industrious
servants of the state are not to be found at all? That would be hard to
believe. For if men are approximately alike in any one particular it is
in average morality. The Russian is not more immoral or dishonorable
than the German or the Frenchman. Fifty years ago the officials in
Austria and Hungary also were still very corrupt, and Frederick William
I. was obliged, even in morally strict Prussia, to use all his energy in
taking steps against the state officials, who acted on the principle of
the proverb, "Give me the sausage, and I'll quench your thirst" (Gibst
du mich die Wurscht, lösch ich dich den Durscht). Besides, the
experiment of regenerating the official service with foreigners has
also been tried in Russia, especially by Alexander II. In the imperial
library at St. Petersburg I came upon a little French pamphlet in which
a Russian patriot laments in the most passionate terms because Czar
Alexander II. was surrounded by an impenetrable wall of officials from
the Baltic provinces, who let no one but their congeners rise on the
rounds of the official ladder. The complaints made of the dictatorship
of officials were, however, the same, although it was not denied that in
industry and honesty the Germans from the Baltic provinces surpassed the
native Russians. Under Alexander III. unmistakable orthodox opinions and
the purest possible Russian descent were necessary in order to gain the
good-will of the omnipotent Pobydonostzev and of the Slavophils. The
misery, however, remained the same, except that it was in some degree
relieved by the greater corruptibility of the native Russians. For--to
show the utter preposterousness of the whole system--the Russian people
find it much pleasanter to deal with bribe-taking officials than with
honest ones. You may hear it said often enough in Russia, "The Russian
autocracy is alleviated by the ruble; without the ruble life would not
be at all endurable." There must, therefore, exist some fatal cause
which prevents any improvement of conditions. Even evils do not grow old
without some necessary reason for their existence.
In order to explain this it must be clearly understood what the
Russians really complain of in their officials. They thought themselves
no better off under the system of Alexander II., with the infusion into
the service of more honest and industrious elements. Hence it appears
not to be primarily the dishonesty or idleness of the bureaucracy which
provokes the most complaints. This is, indeed, the fact. What drives the
Russians to despair, and what they feel to be the grossest evil of the
country, much more than the domination of the Czar alone, is the tyranny
of the official caste, which forms a state within the state, and has set
up a special code of official morality quite peculiar to itself. As to
how far the possibility of such a class development is consistent with
the autocracy as such will be inquired into below. A ring of officials
is not absolutely excluded even in republics, as is shown by Tammany
Hall in New York. Only in constitutional states it rests with the people
to put an end to evil once recognized, but in an autocracy it does not.
Before going further, however, it is necessary to make clear to the
foreign reader what is meant in general by such a tyranny.
Therefore, let us say, for example, that you have been seen on the
street with a person who, for some reason, and naturally without knowing
it himself, is under police surveillance. Of course you yourself are
from this moment under suspicion, and therewith delivered up to the
official zeal of the whole, widely ramified organization, for the
protection of the holy order. From that time forth letters directed to
you do not reach you, or else bear a mark showing that by a remarkable
accident they were found open in the letter-box and had to be officially
sealed. You are surprised some night by the visit of an officer and of a
dozen sturdy police officials, who rouse your children from their beds
and search through your house from garret to cellar. If there should
happen to be found in your possession a German translation of a novel of
Tolstoï's, or any book or newspaper which stands on the police index,
with which you naturally are not acquainted, off you go to prison with
the agents of the law. Here you remain, well taken care of, pending a
thorough-going investigation of the facts of the case. This lasts from
three days to six months, as the case may be, according to your
popularity or to the influence which your friends are able to bring to
bear. It is not the slightest protection for you that you are a
well-known householder, a busy physician or lawyer, of whom it might be
assumed that even without imprisonment he would not immediately turn his
back on the place of his profession. To prevent the danger of collusion,
so that you may not hide the traces of your crime, you remain to the end
under lock and key, with the invaluable right to maintain yourself
meanwhile at your own expense. You will endure this little inconvenience
calmly, as becomes a man, hoping that your friends will take care of
your wife and children during this time and not let them actually
starve. It is certainly unpleasant if your pretty daughter, who is
studying history or art or philology, attracts the eye of the sacred
"hermandad" and is carried off some night as a political suspect, and
you can find by no pleading in what prison she is kept pending
investigation. It is still more vexatious for you to know that your
young son, a student, is in the hands of the police, since this young
man has not yet learned self-control, and may possibly come to blows
with his tormentors, who drive him so far that, finally, in order to put
an end to his sufferings, he sets himself on fire with his own kerosene
lamp and ends his life. I cite here only facts which came to my
knowledge from the circle of highly respected families which I met
during my stay of barely seven weeks. You yourself are, according to the
degree of your offence, expelled for several years from the place of
your profession or, at the worst, exiled to Archangel or Siberia.
Finally, a crime on your part is not necessary. It is sufficient that
you are not found loyal and respectful to the police.
These evidently are little unpleasantnesses which do not sweeten life
for the citizen or greatly increase his loyal sentiments. They exert,
however, a much more injurious effect on those who are in a position to
inflict such torments on people who are to any extent in their disfavor.
Travellers tell of tropical madness which seizes Europeans in the
torrid zone. Since my experiences in Russia I am no longer inclined to
regard this phenomenon as climatic. There is only one madness, that is
the frenzy of domination to which every morally weak person is exposed
when his lust for power meets with little or no opposition. This
phenomenon is not less well known in our barrack-rooms, where discipline
breaks down all opposition, than in prisons. Non-commissioned officers,
and also many officers and prison officials, are easily seized with this
madness, which is nothing but the spirit of the Prætorian Guard on a
small scale. The German abroad, especially the young German noble, is
most easily susceptible to it. He even likes to make up to himself a
little in the primitive East for the strict provincial training to which
he was subjected among the loyal and more moral ideas of his home. Hence
the preference of Alexander II. for German officials caused no
improvement in this respect.
In addition to the madness of power, which in itself is bad enough,
there is, however, still another thing. The best elements in Russia do
not select the political or police services. The pay is wretched, and
can only be supplemented by illicit revenues. These illicit revenues
arise from prompt releases from formalities, for which the interested
persons show themselves grateful, and from carrying into effect orders
against the Jews, who, for this very reason indeed, cannot be better
established legally, because if they were a great part of the official
service would lose a principal source of revenue from toleration-money.
Men of the better class turn away as a matter of course from a career
which depends upon such revenues. Hence it is not exactly the best who
serve as executives of the power of the state. In official service there
is also another aim--namely, to rise constantly to higher and more
lucrative positions. For this there is only one rule, that of
maintaining absolute good conduct in the eyes of the higher authorities.
The higher authorities, however, consist of chinovniks, who have only
one interest, that of the supremacy of their class and the prevention of
anything that could injure its omnipotence. So it goes on up to the
highest oracle; to the man to whom primarily is intrusted the protection
of the Czar and of the autocracy; to the minister of the interior.
Imagine this office held by a man like Plehve, and you will understand
what spirit rules under the pashas of sleepy villages down to the last
provincial hamlet. Cæsarian madness, aspiration for higher positions,
class interest, all work together to produce entirely conscienceless
libertines and barbarians, against whom there is no protection whatever.
In a land without a parliament or a free press every complaint has only
the effect of a denunciation of the devil to his grandmother. The
complainant can by no means reckon the consequences, even if, indeed,
the culprit is not especially rewarded for his official zeal. It is
much better to stand in with the authorities, not to kick against the
pricks, but to pay.
And the Czar? Either he hears nothing of all these things or they are
represented to him as indispensable for the preservation of order. If it
is hard to make a successful stand even in constitutional states with
parliament and press, in the rare enough cases of despotic justice, it
is immensely harder where the protection of authority is the highest
principle of government, and where no institution whatever exists for
the protection of the subject. It should not be at all surprising, then,
that the reign of terror from above tries to countermine the terror from
below. Indeed, it is only a proof of the patience and gentleness of the
Russian people that attempts upon official criminals are so rare. I was
the more ashamed when, during my stay in Russia, I read that German
statesmen were hurling words of condemnation against Russian patriots
who, careless of their own lives, had declared war against the brutal
officials. However far the desire to preserve a good-neighborly
relationship may go, a German politician does not need to ingratiate
himself with the Russian régime. In doing so he exposes himself to the
condemnation which that régime invariably calls forth when people know
its administrative methods. German authorities ought not to lend their
assistance to a body which a patriot and strong monarchist like Prince
Ukhtomsky, the friend of the Czar, called a Camorra, a band of
anarchists in office. Our sympathies ought rather to go out to those who
strive to gain for Russia also a court where the shackled nation can
bring its cry for help to a hearing--a parliament, however modest; a
press not subjugated by the tyranny of the police. Only by these means
can a nation full of good qualities be freed from the reign of terror of
the chinovniks, from the Camorra of officials.
XVI
THE SUFFERINGS OF THE JEWS
The brutal persecutions of the Jews under Plehve have involved
unspeakable misery; but a beneficial effect also, not to be
underestimated. The entire public sentiment of Russian society has
become friendly to the Jews. In numerous conversations with inhabitants
of the Russian capitals, including people from all strata of society,
only once have I heard a word expressing ill-feeling towards the Jews.
The speaker in this instance was a colonel of Cossacks, on his way to
the front, who assured me in all sincerity that the English are a "vile
Jew-nation"! With this exception, all protested against regarding the
Russians as enemies of the Jews. The Jews are victims of the murderous
Russian politics, like the Poles, the Ruthenians, and the Liberals. This
appeared to be the generally accepted idea. The natural consequence of
this idea is that the Jews have the sympathy of all parties opposed to
the government. While the officials are bringing deliberately false
accusations against the Jews, unofficial Russia sides with the latter.
The situation is similar to that which existed in the West before the
emancipation of the Jews, when Liberal political doctrine was directly
inculcating philo-Semitism; the only difference being that among the
people of Russia no anti-Semitic feeling whatever exists. Therefore,
during any crisis of assimilation consequent upon emancipation, there
would be little fear of an anti-Semitic reaction such as that
experienced in the West.
There is one class which is pleased by the perpetual hunting-down of the
Jews by the _Novoye Vremya_ and its offshoots in anti-Semitism. This is
the class of small tradesmen, notorious for their dishonesty, who are
thankful that they are protected from Jewish competition. For the rest,
all Russia wishes the repeal of the laws enacted in restriction of the
Jews.
The government, of course, endeavors to persuade foreigners that to
permit the Jews to settle beyond the pale would mean the Judaization,
and the consequent ruin, of all Russia. This assertion is made in spite
of their knowledge that the contrary is true. A memorial in regard to
the Jews, written in 1884 by Ivan Blioch, and published by the ministry
of the interior--_The Jewish Question in Russia_--shows by statistics
that the greatest percentage of pauper peasants is found in the Jewless
governments of Moscow, Tula, Orel, and Kursk; that the prosperity of the
peasantry in the governments within the pale is incomparably higher than
in the territory from which the Jews are excluded. The arrears of
revenue in districts in which there are no Jews are three times as great
as in the pale. As a result, the land purchased by peasants by means of
the peasants' banks is much greater in extent in the latter than in the
former districts. The usurers who advance money to the peasants at from
three hundred to two thousand per cent. are without exception
Christians. The assertion that the Jews tempt the people to drunkenness
stands morally upon about the same level as the statement that the Jews
are never found engaged in agriculture. The latter statement is true,
but only because the Jews are not allowed to live in the open country.
The government has now monopolized the retail sale of spirits, thus
driving out of the business thousands of Jewish tavern-keepers. This
measure, however severe, is viewed with satisfaction by intelligent Jews
as tending to improve the morals of the Jewish masses.
All these are only idle excuses in justification of the policy of
extermination of the Jews, which policy has in reality a quite different
cause. Three conditions have already been cited, any one of which is
alone sufficient to place the unhappy Jews of the great prison state in
an especially bad situation, and also to expose the régime in all its
depravity--a depravity almost incomprehensible to western Europeans.
The first is the great influence which the rich Russian usurers possess
with the authorities. If Shylock is angry with the merchant prince of
Venice because the latter lends money without interest, in Russia the
rôles of the contestants are reversed. The Jew also exacts usury where
he can--no one in seriousness pretends to be surprised at this, in view
of the deliberate demoralization of the pale--but in comparison with his
Russian colleague he keeps within modest limits, being indeed compelled
to do so by his circumstances. He necessarily prefers to keep the debtor
solvent rather than to drive him out of house and home, which he, the
Jew, moreover, cannot buy in. The Russian usurer, on the other hand, is
accustomed to show no mercy, because he calmly seizes the land of his
victim, and either leases it or sells it at a profit or adds it to his
own property. For a great part of the Russian usurers belong to the
guild of village usurers. These people influence the under authorities
with bribes, while the great speculators, the millionaire usurers of
Moscow and St. Petersburg, who likewise would have to fear the milder
methods of their Jewish competitors, are powerful enough to influence
senators and ministers according to their wishes. The Russian usurer,
therefore, is the first complainant and enemy of the Jews.