[27] Otherwise known as the "Black Hundreds." This reactionary and
terroristic organization impudently pretended to represent the "true
Russian people"; but in the election for the third Duma, when it had
all the encouragement and help that the bureaucracy could give, it was
able to send to the electoral colleges only 72 electors out of a total
number of 5,160. It was composed mainly of the worst elements of the
population, and derived all the power that it had from the support
given to it by the bureaucracy and the police. Without such support it
would have been stamped out of existence in a week by the liberals,
revolutionists, and Jews, who were the chief objects of its attacks.
[28] This was the reply of the Czar to a telegram from the Union of
True Russians thanking him for dissolving the second Duma and
arresting fifty-five of its members on a charge of treason. Eight of
these representatives of the people were afterward sentenced to five
years of penal servitude, nine to four years of penal servitude, and
ten to exile in Siberia as forced colonists. (_Russian Thought_, St.
Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 216.)
When Mr. Milyukov returned to St. Petersburg after the delivery of his
temperate and dispassionate address in New York, the handful of "true
Russians" in the third Duma attacked him with violent and insulting
abuse, and Mr. Vladimir Purishkevich, one of their most influential
leaders, said to him in open session: "You are a poltroon and traitor,
in whose face I would willingly spit!" Such is the spirit of the "true
Russians" whom the Czar has asked to help him in bringing about "the
peaceful regeneration of our great and holy Russia."
[29] The freedom manifesto of October 30, 1905, begins with the words:
"We lay upon Our Government the duty of executing Our inflexible will
by giving to the people the foundations of civil liberty in the form
of real inviolability of personal rights, freedom of conscience,
freedom of speech, freedom of public assembly, and freedom of
organized association."
[30] Stenographic report of the proceedings of the first Russian Duma,
St. Petersburg, July 17, 1906. A large part of the Russian Empire has
been under martial law ever since the assassination of Alexander II.
In 1906 it was in force in sixty-four of the eighty-seven Russian
provinces.
[31] Upon the shoulders of the peasants the whole framework of the
Russian state rests. When the latest census was taken, in 1897, the
peasants numbered 97,000,000 in a total population of 126,000,000.
Since that time the population has increased to 141,000,000, and the
relative proportion of peasants to other classes has grown larger
rather than smaller. (Report of the Russian Statistical Department.
St. Petersburg, August, 1905.)
[32] It is this part of the population that begins to suffer from lack
of food when, for any reason, there is complete or partial failure of
the crops. Twenty million people, in twenty-two provinces, were
reduced to absolute starvation by the famine of 1906, and were kept
alive only by governmental relief on a colossal scale. Famine is
predicted again this year in the provinces of Kaluga, Tula, Tambof,
Samara, Saratof, Viatka, Poltava, and Chernigof. In the province last
named the peasants were already mixing weeds with their rye flour in
November, 1907. (_Nasha Zhizn_, St. Petersburg, May 23. 1906; _Russian
Thought_, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 217.)
[33] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the
District of Voronezh, Stuttgart, 1903. This report was published in
pamphlet form abroad, because the censor would not allow it to be
printed in Russia.
[34] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the
District of Voronezh, pp. 33, 34, Stuttgart, 1903.
[35] _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg. June, 1907, p. 169.
[36] _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, June, 1907, p. 124.
[37] Report of the Russian Statistical Department, 1905; and Report to
the Council of Ministers on the state of schools, _Strana_, St.
Petersburg, August 23, 1906.
[38] _Strana_, edited by Professor Maxim Kovalefski, St. Petersburg,
October 7 and 10, 1906.
[39] _Tovarishch_, St. Petersburg, August 26, 1906.
[40] V. Polozof, in _Strana_, St. Petersburg, October 18, 1906.
[Illustration]
"THE HEART KNOWETH"