In an address delivered in New York City on the 14th of January, 1908,
Paul Milyukov, historian, statesman, and leader of the Constitutional
Democratic party in the third Russian Duma, after reviewing
dispassionately, from a liberal point of view, the unsuccessful
attempt at revolution in the great empire of the north, summed up, in
the following words, his conclusions with regard to the present
Russian situation:
"The social composition of the future Russia is now at stake; the fate
of future centuries is now being determined"; but, "wherever we turn
or look, we meet only with new trouble to come, nowhere with any hope
for conciliation or social peace. This, I am afraid, is not the
message that you expected from me, and I should be much happier myself
if I could answer your wish for information with words of hope, and
with the glad tidings that quiet and security have returned to Russia;
but I am here to tell you the truth."
Americans who have not followed closely the sequence of events in
Russia since October, 1905, may feel inclined to ask, "Why should Mr.
Milyukov take such a pessimistic view of the future, when his country
has not only a representative assembly, but an imperial guaranty of
political freedom and 'real inviolability of personal rights'?" The
answer is not far to seek. A representative assembly that has no
power, and an imperial guaranty that affords no security, do not
encourage hopeful anticipations. Russia has never had a representative
assembly, in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the words; and as for the
imperial guaranty of political freedom, it was written in water.
Twenty-seven months ago, when Count Witte reported to Nicholas II.
that Russia had "outgrown its governmental framework," and when the
Czar himself, recognizing the necessity of "establishing civil liberty
on unshakable foundations," directed his ministers to give the country
political freedom and allow the Duma to control legislation, there
seemed to be every reason for believing that the crisis had passed and
that the people's fight for self-government had been won; but,
unfortunately, the unstable Czar, who would run into any mold, but
would not keep shape, did not adhere to his avowed purpose for a
single week. In the words of a Russian peasant song:
The Czar promised lightly to go,
And made all his plans for departing;
Then he called for a chair,
And sat down right there,
To rest for a while before starting.
Not even so much as an attempt was made to carry the "freedom
manifesto" into effect, and before the ink with which it was written
had fairly had time to dry, the rejoicing people, who assembled with
flags and mottos in the streets of the principal cities to celebrate
the dawn of civil liberty, were attacked and forcibly dispersed by the
police, and were then cruelly beaten or mercilessly slaughtered by
adherents of a national monarchistic association, hostile to the
manifesto, which called itself the "Union of True Russians."[27]
According to the conservative estimate of Mr. Milyukov, these "true
Russians," with the sympathy and coöperation of the police, killed or
wounded no less than thirteen thousand other Russians, whom they
regarded as not "true," in the very first week after the freedom
manifesto was promulgated. One not familiar with Russian conditions
might have supposed that the Czar would use all the force at his
command to stop these murderous "pogroms" and to punish the police and
the "true Russians" who were responsible for them; but he seems to
have regarded them as convincing proof that all true Russians would
rather have autocracy than freedom, and, instead of insisting upon
obedience to his manifesto and punishing those who resorted to
wholesale murder as a means of protesting against it, he not only
allowed the slaughter to go on, but, a few months later, showed his
sympathy with the "true Russians" by telegraphing to their president
as follows:
"Let the Union of the Russian People serve as a trustworthy support. I
am sure that all true Russians who love their country will unite still
more closely, and, while steadily increasing their number, will help
me to bring about the peaceful regeneration of our great and holy
Russia."[28]
Disappointed at the Czar's failure to stand by his own manifesto, and
exasperated by the murderous attacks of the Black Hundreds upon
defenseless people in the streets, the Social Democrats, the Social
Revolutionists, and the extreme opponents of the government generally
resorted to a series of armed revolts, which finally culminated in the
bloody barricade-fighting in the streets of Moscow in December, 1905.
Taking alarm at these revolutionary outbreaks, and yielding to the
reactionary pressure that was brought to bear upon him by the
ultra-conservative wing of the court party, the Czar abandoned the
reforms which he had declared to be the expression of his "inflexible
will,"[29] and permitted his governors and governors-general to "put
down sedition" in the old arbitrary way, with imprisonment, exile, the
Cossack's whip and the hangman's noose.
Long before the meeting of the first Duma the freedom manifesto had
become a dead letter; and in July, 1906, when Mr. Makarof, the
Associate Minister of the Interior, was called before the Duma to
explain the inconsistency between the "inflexible will" of the Czar,
as expressed in the freedom manifesto, and the policy of the
administration, as shown in a long series of arbitrary and oppressive
acts of violence, he coolly said that while the freedom manifesto
"laid down the fundamental principles of civil liberty in a general
way," it had no real force, because it did not specifically repeal the
laws relating to the subject that were already on the statute-books.
He admitted that governors-general were still arresting without
warrant, exiling without trial, suppressing newspapers without a
hearing, and dispersing public meetings by an arbitrary exercise of
discretionary power; but he maintained that in so doing they were only
obeying imperial ukases which antedated the freedom manifesto and
which that document had not abrogated. In all provinces, he said,
where martial law had been declared, or where it might in future be
declared, governors and governors-general were not bound by the
academic statement of general principles in the October manifesto, but
were free to exercise discretionary power under the provisions of
certain earlier decrees relating to "reinforced and extraordinary
defense." These decrees, until repealed, were the law of the land, and
they authorized and sanctioned every administrative measure to which
the interpellations related, freedom manifestos to the contrary
notwithstanding.[30]
The Czar's abandonment of the principles set forth in the freedom
manifesto of October 30, 1905, put an end to what Mr. Milyukov has
called "the ascending phase" of the Russian liberal movement. Count
Witte, who had persuaded the Czar to sign the manifesto, was forced to
retire from the Cabinet, and the new government, taking courage from
the apparent loyalty of the army and the successful suppression of
sporadic revolutionary outbreaks in various parts of the empire,
returned gradually to the old policy of ruling by means of
"administrative process," under the sanction of "exceptional" or
"temporary" laws.
In July, 1906, when P. A. Stolypin was appointed Prime Minister, and
when the first Duma was dissolved in order to prevent it from issuing
an address to the people, the government abandoned even the pretense
of acting in conformity with the principles laid down in the freedom
manifesto, and boldly entered upon the policy of reaction and
repression that it has ever since pursued. It now finds itself
confronted by social and political problems of extraordinary
difficulty and complexity, which are the natural and logical results
of long-continued misgovernment or neglect. With the sympathetic
coöperation of a loyal and united people, these problems might,
perhaps be solved; but in the face of the almost universal discontent
caused by the Czar's return to the old hateful policy of arbitrary
coercion and restraint, it is almost impossible to solve them, or
even to create the conditions upon which successful solution of them
depends.
Among the most serious and threatening of these problems is that
presented by the steady and progressive impoverishment of the people.
Russian political economists are almost unanimously of opinion that
the condition of the agricultural peasants has been growing steadily
worse ever since the emancipation.[31] As early as 1871, the
well-known political economist Prince Vassilchikof estimated that
Russia had a proletariat which amounted to five per cent. of the whole
peasant population. In 1881, ten years later, the researches of Orlof
and other statisticians from the zemstvos showed that this proletariat
had increased to fifteen per cent., and it is now asserted by
competent authority that there are more than twenty million people in
European Russia who are living from hand to mouth, that is, who
possess no capital and have not land enough to afford them a proper
allowance of daily bread.[32] Four years ago, the Zemstvo Committee on
Agricultural Needs in the "black-soil" province of Voronezh reported
that in that thickly populated and once fertile part of the empire the
net profits of the peasants' lands barely sufficed to pay their direct
taxes. Of the 28,295 families in the district, only 14,328 had land
enough to supply them with the necessary amount of food, while 13,967
were chronically underfed. Seven thousand nine hundred and
ninety-seven families were unable to pay their taxes out of the net
proceeds of their lands, even when they half starved themselves on a
daily allowance of one pound and a third of rye flour per capita.[33]
One might have expected the government to do something for the relief
of a population suffering from such poverty as this, but, instead of
aiding the sufferers, it punished the persons who called attention to
the distress. One member of the Voronezh District Committee, Dr.
Martinof, was exiled to the subarctic province of Archangel; two,
Messrs. Shcherbin and Bunakof, were arrested and put under police
surveillance; and two more, Messrs. Bashkevich and Pereleshin, were
removed from their positions in the zemstvo and forbidden thenceforth
to hold any office of trust in connection with public affairs.[34]
If the janitor of a tenement-house should notify the owner of the
existence of a smoldering fire in the basement, and if the owner,
instead of taking measures to extinguish the fire, should have the
janitor locked up for giving information that might alarm the tenants
and "unsettle their minds," we should regard such owner as an
extremely irrational person, if not an out-and-out lunatic; and yet,
this is the course that the Russian government has been pursuing for
the past quarter of a century. Again and again it has closed
statistical bureaus of the zemstvos, and in some cases has burned
their statistics, simply because the carefully collected material
showed the existence of a smoldering fire of popular distress and
discontent in the basement of the Russian state. Now that the
long-hidden fire has burst into a blaze of agrarian disorder, the
government is trying to smother it with bureaucratic measures of
relief, or to stamp it out with troops, military courts, and punitive
expeditions; but the action comes too late. The economic distress
which a quarter of a century ago was mainly confined to a few
districts or provinces has now become almost universal. Long before
the beginning of the recent agrarian disorders in the central
provinces, a prominent Russian senator, who made an official tour of
inspection and investigation in that part of the empire, described the
condition of the peasants as follows:
"Among the indisputable evidences of progressive impoverishment among
the peasants are the decreasing stocks of grain in the village
storehouses, the deterioration of buildings, the exhaustion of the
soil, the destruction of forests, the arrears of taxes, and the
struggle of the people to migrate. In almost every village the
penniless class is constantly growing, and, at the same time, there is
a frightfully rapid increase in the number of families that are
passing from comparative prosperity to poverty, and from poverty to a
condition in which they have no assured means of support."
Scores if not hundreds of statements like this were made by the
liberal provincial press, or by the district and provincial committees
on agricultural needs; but, when the government paid any attention to
them at all, it merely suspended or suppressed the newspapers for
"manifesting a prejudicial tendency," or punished the committees for
"presenting the condition of the people in too unfavorable a light."
[Illustration: PAUL MILYUKOV