CHAPTER IX.

RUSSIAN NIHILISM.

Haxthausen pronounced a confident opinion in 1847, when most of the

continental nations were agitated with rumours of revolution, that

Russia at any rate was safe from the danger, inasmuch as she enjoyed an

absolute protection against all such revolutionary agitation in her

communistic rural institutions. There was no proletariat in Russia,

every man in the country being born to a share in the land of the

township he belonged to; and without a proletariat, concluded the

learned professor, there was neither motive nor material for social

revolt. This belief became generally accepted, and passed, indeed, for

years as a political commonplace; but perhaps never has a political

prognostication so entirely reasonable proved on experience so utterly

fallacious. Instead of sparing or avoiding Russia, revolutionary

agitation has grown positively endemic in that country; it is more

virulent in its type, and apparently more deepseated than elsewhere;

and, stranger still, not the least of its exciting causes has been that

very communistic agrarian system which was thought to be the surest

preservation against it.

In its earlier period, before the emancipation of the serfs, the Russian

revolutionary movement was largely inspired by an extravagant

idealization of the perfections of the rural commune, and now since the

emancipation it is fed far more formidably by an actual experience of

the commune's defects. The truth is that the communistic land system of

Russia, so far from preventing the birth of a proletariat, is now of

itself begetting the most numerous and the most helpless proletariat in

the world. The emancipation dues would have been a serious burden under

any social arrangements, but they have proved so much heavier under the

communistic system of Russia than they would have been elsewhere that

the system itself is beginning to give way. With an unlimited stock of

good land, all is plain sailing under any social institutions; but when

land is limited in extent and every new-comer has the right to cut in

and get an equal share with those already in possession, excessive

subdivision is inevitable, and the point is soon reached where any fresh

impost or outgoing destroys the profitableness of cultivation, and

converts the right to the land from an asset into a liability. This is

what is now happening in Russia. It appears there are already more

paupers in St. Petersburg proportionally to population than in any other

European capital, and as many as a third of the inhabitants of the

provinces are either entirely landless, or, more unhappy still, find

their land, instead of a benefit, to be only a grievous burden of which

they cannot shake themselves clear. I shall have occasion later on to

recur to this new economic development in rural Russia, which is very

interesting to the student of socialism on its own account, but which

will concern us in the present chapter more particularly in its bearing

on the operations and prospects of the revolutionary party in that

country.

The revolutionary or nihilist movement in Russia has passed through

several successive phases; but there is no good reason for denying its

continuity, nor any impropriety, as is sometimes alleged, in the

retention of the name of Nihilism, which it bore when it first engaged

the attention of Western Europe, although it may be quite true that the

word is more descriptive of the earlier developments of the movement

than of the later. In its first stage, before the Emancipation Act, it

was scarce more than an intellectual fermentation--an intellectual

revolt all round, if you will--shaping more and more in its political

ideas towards democratic socialism, but as yet entirely unorganized, and

content to expend its force in violent opinions without recourse to

action. Then, second, the Emancipation Act gave it organization,

purpose, malignity, and made it, in short, the nihilism we know,

converting it into the engine of the bitter discontent of the landed

classes, who were seriously straitened and many of them ruined by the

operation of that great reform. Third, while the impoverishment of

thousands of landed families was the first result of the Emancipation

Act, its slower but more serious result has been the impoverishment of

the peasantry, and nihilism is now assuming a more agrarian character,

and promoting the social revolution under the old Russian cry for "the

black division."

For the origin of nihilism we must go back half a century to a little

company of gifted young men, most of whom rose to great distinction, who

used at that time to meet together at the house of a rich merchant in

Moscow, for the discussion of philosophy and politics and religion. They

were of the most various views. Some of them became Liberal leaders, and

wanted Russia to follow the constitutional development of the Western

nations; others became founders of the new Slavophil party, contending

that Russia should be no imitator, but develop her own native

institutions in her own way; and there were at least two among

them--Alexander Herzen and Michael Bakunin--who were to be prominent

exponents of revolutionary socialism. But they all owned at this period

one common master--Hegel. Their host was an ardent Hegelian, and his

young friends threw themselves into the study of Hegel with the greatest

zeal. Herzen himself tells us in his autobiography how assiduously they

read everything that came from his pen, how they devoted nights and

weeks to clearing up the meaning of single passages in his writings, and

how greedily they devoured every new pamphlet that issued from the

German press on any part of his system. From Hegel, Herzen and Bakunin

were led, exactly like Marx and the German Young Hegelians, to

Feuerbach, and from Feuerbach to socialism. Bakunin, when he retired

from the army, rather than be the instrument of oppressing the Poles

among whom he was stationed, went for some years to Germany, where he

lived among the Young Hegelians and wrote for their organ, the

_Hallische Jahrbuecher_; but before either he or Herzen ever had any

personal intercommunication with the members of that school of thought,

they had passed through precisely the same development. Herzen speaks of

socialism almost in the very phrases of the Young Hegelians, as being

the new "terrestrial religion," in which there was to be neither God nor

heaven; as a new system of society which would dispense with an

authoritative government, human or Divine, and which should be at once

the completion of Christianity and the realization of the Revolution.

"Christianity," he said, "made the slave a son of man; the Revolution

has emancipated him into a citizen. Socialism would make him a _man_."

This tendency of thought was strongly supported in the Russian mind by

Haxthausen's discovery and laudation of the rural commune of Russia. The

Russian State was the most arbitrary, oppressive, and corrupt in Europe,

and the Russian Church was the most ignorant and superstitious; but here

at last was a Russian institution which was regarded with envy even by

wise men of the west, and was really a practical anticipation of that

very social system which was the last work of European philosophy. It

was with no small pride, therefore, that Alexander Herzen declared that

the Muscovite peasant in his dirty sheepskin had solved the social

problem of the nineteenth century, and that for Russia, with this great

problem already solved, the Revolution was obviously a comparatively

simple operation. You had but to remove the Czardom, the services, and

the priesthood, and the great mass of the people would still remain

organized in fifty thousand complete little self-governing communities

living on their common land and ruling their common affairs as they had

been doing long before the Czardom came into being. And what, after all,

was the latest dream of philosophical socialism but a world of

communities like these? The new formula of civilization had merely come

back to the old Russian _mir_.

All Russian writers draw a kindly and charming picture of the _mir_, the

rude village council, in which the heads of families have for ages

managed their common land, distributed their taxes, and settled all the

burning problems of the hamlet with remarkable freedom, fairness, and

mutual respect. They meet together on some open space--perhaps in front

of the tavern, which is itself one of their common possessions; they

beat out their question there till they are unanimous; for the _mir_

will know nothing of decision by majorities--the will of the _mir_ is

believed to be the will of God Himself, and it must be no divided

counsel. They argue sometimes long and keenly, and, as their interest

waxes, they will raise many voices at once, or perhaps break up into

separate groups, each discussing the subject apart; but presently, out

of all the apparent disorder, the acceptable decision is somehow found,

and peace reigns again in the village street. In these meetings they

have the deepest feeling and habit of freedom; and even when a political

question arises affecting their interests--a question of taxes or of

administration--they make no scruple to speak in the plainest terms of

the Government and the officials, and they are never interfered with.

"Nobody but God," they say, "dare judge the _mir_," and the Czar, at any

rate, respects the tradition. That rude assembly is the only free

institution in Russia. Even revolutionary manifestoes have been publicly

read at its meetings, and socialist addresses publicly delivered. And

this instinctive spirit of freedom is attended there with the

instinctive spirit of equality. A recent Russian writer observes that a

Russian peasant would be quite unable to understand the sort of respect

the English labourer shows to a gentleman. With its freedom, its

equality, its strong family sentiment, its common property, its

self-government, the _mir_ is really the social democratic republic

political philosophers have projected, and a Russian who dislikes the

State and loves the _mir_ is, without more ado, a social revolutionist

of the anarchist type. The favourite ideal among Russian revolutionists

for the last fifty years has accordingly all along been the anarchist

ideal of a free federation of local industrial communities without any

separate political organization; for the anarchist ideal is natural to

the Russian situation.

Revolutionary opinions were very rife in Russia during the reign of

Nicholas; but under his iron rule they were never suffered to be spoken

above the breath. His ascension to the throne in 1825 had been greeted

by a revolution--a very abortive one, it is true, but unfortunately

sufficient to set every fibre of the young Czar's strong nature

inflexibly against all the liberal tendencies encouraged by his father,

and to stop the political development of the country for a generation. A

handful of constitutional reformers--united three years before in a

secret society to promote peasant emancipation, the common civil

liberties, and stable instead of arbitrary law--gathered a crowd to a

public place in the capital, and shouted for "the Archduke Constantine

and a Constitution." Most part of the crowd had so little idea why they

had come together that they thought Constitution was the name of the

Archduke Constantine's wife; and the most distinguished man among the

conspirators--Pestel, the poet--said, as he was going to execution, "I

wished to reap the harvest before sowing the seed." He had done

worse--he really kept the seed from being sown for thirty years to come.

All freedom of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed; every means of

influencing the public mind was stopped; there was no liberty of

printing, speaking, or meeting; there was no saving grace but ignorance,

for people of reading and intelligence lived under perpetual liability

to most unreasonable suspicion. Alexander Herzen, for example, was

banished to the Asiatic frontier while still a very young man, merely

because he happened to make the casual remark in a private letter to his

father, which was opened in the post, that a policeman had a few days

before killed a man in the streets of St. Petersburg.

But this system of lawless and unrighteous repression nursed a deep

spirit of revolt against constituted authority in the heart of the

people, and among the younger minds a kind of passion for the most

extreme and forbidden doctrines. All the wildest phases of nihilist

opinion in the sixties were already raging in Russia in the forties.

Haxthausen says he was astounded, when he visited the Russian

universities and schools, to find the students at every one of them

given over, as he says, to political and religious notions of the most

all-destructive description. "It is a miasma," he says. And although the

only political outbreak of Nicholas's reign, the Petracheffsky

conspiracy of 1849, was little more than a petty street riot, a storm of

serious revolt against the tyranny of the Czar was long gathering, which

would have burst upon his head after the disasters to his army in the

Crimea, had he survived them. He saw it thickening, however, and on his

death-bed said to his son, the noble and unfortunate Alexander II., "I

fear you will find the burden too heavy." The son found it eventually

heavy enough, but in the meantime he wisely bent before the storm,

relaxed the restraints the father had imposed, and gave pledges of the

most liberal reforms in every department of State--judicial

administration, local government, popular education, serf emancipation.

People believed completely in the young Czar's sincerity, awaited with

great expectations the measures he would propose, and meanwhile indulged

to the top of their bent in the practical liberties they were already

provisionally allowed to enjoy, and gave themselves up to a restless

fervour for liberty and reform.

An independent press was not among the liberties conceded, but Russian

opinion at this period found a most effective voice in a newspaper

started in London by Alexander Herzen, called the _Kolokol_ (Bell),

which for a number of years made a great impression in Russia by the

accuracy of its information on Russian affairs, by the boldness of its

criticisms of the Government, and by the ease with which it got smuggled

into universal circulation. When Herzen was sent to the Urals as a

dangerous person, he was appointed, very anomalously--perhaps it was to

keep him there--to an administrative and judicial post, in which he

would have apparently to sentence others while under sentence himself;

but he grew weary of his banishment, and was permitted to exchange it

for the more complete, but much more agreeable, banishment from Russia

altogether. After visiting Germany and France, and after witnessing,

with deep interest and deeper disappointment, some of the revolutions of

1848, and writing that they had failed because their promoters were not

prepared to follow them up with a positive social programme, as if, he

says, the mere destruction of a Bastile were a revolution, he settled in

England, and learnt there, as his son assures us, that revolution itself

was but a vain expedient, and that gradual reform was the only effectual

method of lasting social amelioration.

It was probably while he was learning this lesson--it was certainly

entirely in this spirit--that he began his political agitation on the

accession of Alexander II. The moment the new Czar ascended the throne,

Herzen addressed to him a famous letter, demanding amends for the ills

his father, Czar Nicholas, had done the people, a complete breach with

the old system, and the introduction of thoroughgoing Liberal reforms,

and more especially the emancipation of the serfs. It was in the same

spirit he conducted his agitation in the _Kolokol_. Without neglecting

to ventilate his socialist and philosophical views, he welcomed the

contemplated reforms as being in themselves true remedies for popular

grievances, and intended in perfect good faith by the Czar to be so; and

his chief care in all his criticisms always was to secure that these

reforms should be real and thorough, that the judicial body should be

independent, the educational arrangements efficient; above all, that the

peasants should not be deprived, in the emancipation arrangements, of a

foot of the land they then possessed, or made to pay terms for their

emancipation which would be too heavy for them to meet. And perhaps the

most popular and stirring part of his paper was always his exposure of

existing abuses, and his criticism of the conduct of officials. The

journal was written with wit, vigour, and accurate knowledge; and, as it

spoke what most men thought, but few would as yet venture to say, it was

greedily read and distributed, and was for some years a remarkable power

in the country. Herzen was the hero of the young. Herzenism, we are

told, became the rage, and Herzenism appears to have meant, before all,

a free handling of everything in Church or State which was previously

thought too sacred to be touched. This iconoclastic spirit grew more and

more characteristic of Russian society at this period, and presently,

under its influence, Herzenism fell into the shade, and nihilism

occupied the scene.

We possess various accounts of the meaning and nature of nihilism, and

they all agree substantially in their description of it. The word was

first employed by Turgenieff in his novel "Fathers and Sons," where

Arcadi Petrovitch surprises his father and uncle by describing his

friend Bazaroff as a nihilist.

"A nihilist," said Nicholas Petrovitch. "This word must come from the

Latin _nihil_, nothing, as far as I can judge, and consequently it

signifies a man who recognises nothing."

"Or rather who respects nothing," said Paul Petrovitch.

"A man who looks at everything from a critical point of view," said

Arcadi.

"Does not that come to the same thing?" asked his uncle.

"No, not at all. A nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who

accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the

principle has."...

"Yes, before we had Hegelians; now we have nihilists. We shall see what

you will do to exist in nothingness, in a vacuum, as if under an air

pump."

Koscheleff, writing in 1874, gives a similar explanation of nihilism.

"Our disease is a disease of character, and the most dangerous possible.

We suffer from a fatal unbelief in everything. We have ceased to believe

in this or in that, not because we have studied the subject thoroughly

and become convinced of the untenability of our views, but only because

some author or another in Germany or England holds this or that doctrine

to be unfounded. Our nihilism is a thing of a quite peculiar character.

It is not, as in the West, the result of long falsely directed

philosophical studies and ways of thinking, nor is it the fruit of an

imperfect social organization. It is an entirely different thing from

that. The wind has blown it to us, and the wind will blow it from us

again. Our nihilists are simply Radicals. Their loud speeches, their

fault-finding, their strong assertions, are grounded on nothing. They

borrow negative views from foreign authors, and repeat them and magnify

them _ad nauseam_, and treat persons of another way of thinking as

absurd and antiquated people who continue to cherish exploded ideas and

customs. The chief cause of the spread of this (I will not say doctrine,

for I cannot honour it with such a name, but) sect is this, that it

imparts its communications in secret conversations, so that, for one

thing, it cannot be publicly criticised and refuted, and, for another,

it charms by the fascination of the forbidden."

The same view precisely is given by Baron Fircks ("Schedo Ferroti") in

his very elaborate and thoughtful account of nihilism in his _L'Avenir

de la Russie_. It was merely, he said, the critical spirit--the spirit

of intellectual revolt--carried to an extreme and running amuck against

all accepted principles in religion, in politics, in domestic and social

life. It was a common infirmity of contemporary society, and was in no

way peculiar to Russia; but while that may be true, it has

undoubtedly--as perhaps the Baron would admit--been carried into more

extravagant manifestations in Russia than elsewhere.

Nor are the reasons of this extravagance far to seek. First, the

Russians are, in national character, singularly impressionable,

volatile, and predisposed to run to extremes. Diderot says they were

rotten before they were ripe. Second, they are mere children in

political experience, and even in intellectual training. Their education

is in general shallow, and they are liable to the vagaries of the half

educated. Third, both Baron Fircks and Koscheleff think nihilism was

largely due to the arbitrary government of the country. The Czar and the

bureaucracy have themselves had much to do with destroying respect for

law and authority by their capricious habits of administration. Laws

were proclaimed to-day and repealed to-morrow, or even broken by the

very officials engaged in administering them. Even in the days of

Nicholas, Herzen complained bitterly of this constant inconstancy of the

law; he said the Russian Government was "infatuated with innovation,"

that "nothing was allowed to remain as it was," that "everything was

always being changed," that "a new ministry invariably began its work by

upsetting that of its predecessors." Russia being a Functionary State,

not a Law State, to employ a useful German distinction, the decrees of

officials take the place elsewhere filled by fixed laws established by

legislative authority; and where these decrees are continually changing,

reverence for the law is impossible.

But in all this there was no practical political disaffection before the

Emancipation Act. The nihilists had as yet a vague belief in the Czar

and the coming reforms; they felt that the Russian people were at last

to have a chance of showing the rich genius that lay in them, and their

whole anxiety was to have the people adequately trained for this great

destiny. It was the common talk that the future belonged to Russia; and

that she was already beginning to outshine all other nations in

literature, in art, in science, in music. "Some young people among us,"

says Turgenieff, "have discovered even a Russian arithmetic. Two and two

do make four with us as well as elsewhere, but more pompously, it would

seem. All this is nothing but the stammering of men who are just

awaking."

Under these influences the energies of the nihilists took a different

outlet than plotting. Instead of founding secret societies, they

founded Sunday schools. For to their mind the first need of the time,

above even political liberty, was popular education. As to liberty, the

measure they practically enjoyed at the gracious pleasure of the Czar

for the present contented them, inasmuch as it seemed an earnest of the

better securities that were expected to follow; but they could not with

any satisfaction look round them and see the Russian people, for whom

they were prophesying such a great career, still lying in almost

aboriginal ignorance. The stuff was indeed there which should yet

astonish the world, but it must first be made. To "make the people," as

they phrased it, was the task the nihilists now undertook, and they

threw themselves into it with the zeal of apostles. They put on shabby

clothes to avoid any offensive superiority to their poorer neighbours,

and they wore green spectacles to correct the even more intolerable

inequality of personal beauty, for, as they were fond of saying, they

had put off the old man and were now new men created again by Buechner

and Feuerbach in the gospel of humanity; but with all their

extravagances they carried on for some years a most active and no doubt

useful work in the Sunday schools and reading circles which they rapidly

established everywhere.

Although this movement fell eventually under the suspicion of the

Government, as in despotic countries any movement will, it seems to have

had no political, or what the authorities call "ill-intentioned"

purpose. It was pervaded with patriotic and humanitarian feeling, and

though no doubt many of the nihilists who took part in it held as

extreme opinions in politics as they did in everything else, yet these

opinions were mere matters of speculation. It is certain that democratic

and revolutionary socialism was a very popular doctrine among the

nihilists, even at that earliest period of their history, for their most

representative man during that period was Tchernycheffsky, the editor of

the _Contemporary_ magazine, and a political economist of some note in

his day; and Tchernycheffsky was undoubtedly a democratic and

revolutionary socialist. He belonged to a younger generation than Herzen

and Bakunin, but, like them, he had been led to socialism through Hegel

and Feuerbach, and he expounded his ideas in a famous romance entitled,

"What is to be done?" which the Government allowed him to write, and

even to publish, while in prison for sedition in 1862, though they

suppressed the book sternly when they saw it beginning to make a

sensation.

But although revolutionary and socialistic principles may have been very

considerably entertained by the nihilists from the first, there was no

practical revolutionary or socialistic organization before the

emancipation of the serfs. Up till then nihilism may be said to have

been a benignant growth, if I may use a medical expression, and it was

that great historical measure that converted it into the malignant and

deadly trouble which we best know. The Russian Radicals, including the

socialists, were strongly disappointed with that measure from the

outset, because they thought it inflicted serious injustice on the

peasantry. It deprived them, they said, of much of the land they had

hitherto enjoyed as a right, and which was necessary for their

comfortable subsistence, while it imposed on them for what they got

excessive dues which their holdings would never be able to bear; and so

the first Land and Liberty League was founded in 1863. But it was not

the peasants, or the peasants' friends--it was the small landed gentry

who were the first to feel the effects of the Emancipation Act, and to

raise the standard of revolt. The Act made a serious change in their

fortunes. Although the landlords were allowed most liberal terms of

compensation for the enforced emancipation of their serfs, few of them

actually received a kopeck, because they were almost all of them already

deeply indebted to Government, and Government applied the compensation

money to cancel their old debts, and gave up the policy of granting any

more mortgages in the future. Then a great part of the land which was

formerly cultivated by means of the serfs was now found to be too poor

to afford the expense of paid labour; the landlords had neither stock

nor implements to work it, if it were more fertile, the peasantry having

in the old days tilled the field for them with their own horses and

ploughs; nor had they any means of raising the stock on credit, and,

besides, most of them were complete absentees, engaged as Government or

railway officials, or in other professional work, and knew nothing

whatever about the business of agriculture. The smaller landlords have

therefore been compelled to sell their estates to the larger, or to

leave much of their ground entirely uncultivated. In Moscow there were

633 separate estates in 1861, before the emancipation, but only 422 in

1877, and not more than one-fifth of the land that was cultivated in

that province in 1861 continued in cultivation in 1877. Many of the sons

of the smaller proprietors were at the universities studying for one of

the professions, and had either to give up their studies altogether for

want of means, or were put on shorter allowances, which was scarcely

less annoying, and was indeed a great cause of revolutionary opinions at

the universities. Many more of the sons of the gentry were in the army,

and the pay of a Russian officer being extremely small, they had been

accustomed to receive allowances from home, without which, indeed, they

could hardly live; and now in the altered circumstances of the family

these allowances were perforce suddenly stopped. Much of the

revolutionary discontent that exists in the Russian army to such a

serious extent that 200 arrests were made in March, 1885, and Government

appointed a special commission of inquiry into the subject, has come

from the source, and is practically a revolt against insufficient pay.

But what happened at the universities and in the army happened in other

departments of Russian life; the Emancipation Act had left on every

shore some wreckage of the gentry, an upper-class and educated

proletariat, whose distress might be due originally to their own

improvidence or ignorance, but was undoubtedly first driven into an

acute state by an act of Government, and therefore clamoured for

vengeance on the Government that produced it.

The clamour of the victims of the Emancipation Act naturally woke up all

the earlier discontents of the country. The Poles and the dissenting

sects, with all their ancient wrongs, seem to have contributed but a

small contingent to the nihilist ranks; but the Jews, subject to a

barbarous and often very acute persecution, have filled the secret

societies from the beginning with many of their most determined members,

and have supplied a great part of the "Nihilistesses"; and even though

the Revolutionary Executive Committee has latterly issued a proclamation

against the Jews, mainly on the ground of the extortion practised by

Jewish money-lenders on the peasantry, there are still, as appears very

abundantly from the nihilist trials of 1890, many Jews among the

revolutionists.

Then there are thirteen millions of native heretics in Russia, sects of

various sorts springing up like the early Quakers from the bosom of the

people, and filled with a rude spirit of freedom and a tendency towards

socialistic ideas in their condemnation of luxury and accumulation,

their hatred of war and military government, and their belief in

fraternity and mutual assistance. Some writers allege that these sects

are an important factor in the revolutionary movement; but though they

certainly have suffered many wrongs from Government, they do not seem to

have furnished any great quota to the revolutionary ranks. They are the

freethinkers of the unlettered classes, however, and their ideas no

doubt have some influence in preparing these classes for socialist

principles. But there is another class very numerous in Russia, who are

the natural allies of revolution--the "illegal men" who, for various

reasons, go about on false passports, and are thus living in revolt

already. And to all these diverse sources of disaffection must be added

the aggravation arising at the moment from the tyrannical and arbitrary

measures to which the Government resorted on the first outburst of

complaints.

In 1862, perceiving the discontent raised by the Emancipation Act,

Government took alarm, and withdrew or curtailed the liberties it had

for a few years allowed the people to enjoy. It stopped some newspapers

and warned a number more; it prohibited the Sunday schools and reading

clubs altogether; it banished many persons on mere suspicion to remote

provinces; and for a greater example it cast the eminent writer

Tchernycheffsky into prison on a charge of exciting the peasantry to

revolt, and after leaving him there without trial for nearly two years,

brought him out at length to a public square in St. Petersburg, read out

to him a sentence of transportation, broke a sword over his head, and

sent him to the Siberian mines for the rest of his life. There he still

remains, broken now both in mind and body, but probably doing more harm

to the Government by his wrongs than he could ever have done by his pen,

for nihilists have for twenty-seven years been constantly exciting

popular sympathy by descriptions of his martyrdom and demands for his

release.

It was while this alienation against the Government was thickening that

Michael Bakunin escaped from Siberia, and it was by emissaries sent by

Bakunin to Russia that the first successful attempt was made to incite

and organize all these revolutionary materials into a revolutionary

movement. When Bakunin came back in 1862 and joined Herzen in London,

the two old friends found their ideas had parted far asunder during

their long separation. Herzen had, from his twelve years' observation of

affairs, broadened from revolutionist to statesman, and had no patience

now for the extravagance of the young Russian patriots who visited him

in London. "Our black earth," he would say, "needs a deal of draining."

And there is a remarkable letter which he wrote shortly before his

death, and apparently to Bakunin himself, in which he says:--

"I will own that one day, surrounded by dead bodies, by houses destroyed

with balls and bullets, and listening feverishly as prisoners were being

shot down, I called with my whole heart and intelligence upon the savage

force of vengeance to destroy the old criminal world, without thinking

much of what was to come in its place. Since that time twenty years have

gone by; the vengeance has come, but it has come from the other side,

and it is the people who have borne it, because they comprehended

nothing either then or since. A long and painful interval has given time

for passions to calm, for thoughts to deepen; it has given the necessary

time for reflection and observation. Neither you nor I have betrayed our

convictions; but we see the question now from a different point of view.

You rush ahead, as you did before, with a passion of destruction, which

you take for a creative passion; you crush every obstacle; you respect

history only in the future. As for me, on the contrary, I have no faith

in the old revolutionary methods, and I try to comprehend the march of

men in the past and in the present, to know how to advance with them

without falling behind, but without going on so far before as you, for

they would not follow me--they could not follow me!"

Herzen gradually lost hold over the wilder forces in Russia, he was

even openly denounced as a reactionary by the revolutionist Dolgourouki;

and when he alienated the more moderate parties likewise by his support

of the Polish insurrection of 1863, his spell vanished, and during the

remaining seven years of his life his influence was of little account.

Bakunin was more in unison with the troubled spirit of the times. While

Herzen had been ripening in political wisdom under the ampler

intellectual life to which his exile introduced him, Bakunin's twelve

years' confinement had maddened him into a fanatic, and instead of

curing him of revolutionary propensities, only fixed the idea of

revolution in his mind like a mania. When he came to London a huge,

haggard man, always excited, always talking, he used to speak of himself

as a Prometheus unbound, and he was to live henceforth for the undoing

of the powers and systems that were. He was never found without a group

of conspirators and refugees of all shades and nationalities about him.

With some reminiscences of socialistic philosophy remaining in the

background of his mind, his only real interest now was revolution, and

he seemed always thenceforth to look on his socialism as a means of

revolution rather than on revolution as a means to socialism. His

socialism itself had grown less sane--it was no longer the anarchism of

the old days: it was what he called "amorphism"--society not merely

without governmental institutions, but without institutions of any kind;

and he was domineered by the thought of a universal revolution, in which

all States and Churches and all institutions religious, political,

judicial, financial, academical, and social should perish in a common

destruction. "Amorphism" and "Pan-destruction" are not articles of a

rational creed, but they were propagated with almost preternatural

energy by Bakunin. The work of exciting revolution and disorder of any

kind was the main business of his life till he died in 1876. Others

might play a waiting game, but for him the work of the revolutionist was

revolution; and he ought to be incessantly promoting it, not by word

only, but by deed, by an unremitting terrorism, by shooting a policeman

when you can't reach a king, and destroying a Bastile if you cannot

overturn an empire. In his "Revolutionary Catechism," written in

cipher, but read by the public prosecutor at a Russian nihilist trial in

1871, he says (I quote the passage from M. de Laveleye):--

"The revolutionist is a man under a vow. He ought to have no personal

interests, no business, no sentiments, no property. He ought to occupy

himself entirely with one exclusive interest, with one thought and one

passion: the Revolution.... He has only one aim, one science:

destruction. For that and nothing but that he studied mechanics,

physics, chemistry, and medicine. He observes with the same object, the

men, the characters, the positions and all the conditions of the social

order. He despises and hates existing morality. For him everything is

moral that favours the triumph of the Revolution. Everything is immoral

and criminal that hinders it.... Between him and society there is war to

the death, incessant, irreconcilable. He ought to be prepared to die, to

bear torture, and to kill with his own hands all who obstruct the

revolution. So much the worse for him if he has in this world any ties

of parentage, friendship, or love! He is not a true revolutionist if

these attachments stay his arm. In the meantime he ought to live in the

middle of society, feigning to be what he is not. He ought to penetrate

everywhere, among high and low alike; into the merchant's office, into

the church, into the Government bureaux, into the army, into the

literary world, into the secret police, and even into the Imperial

Palace.... He must make a list of those who are condemned to death, and

expedite their sentence according to the order of their relative

iniquities.... A new member can only be received into the association by

a unanimous vote, and after giving proofs of his merit not in word but

in action. Every 'companion' ought to have under his hand several

revolutionists of the second or third degree, not entirely initiated. He

ought to consider them part of the revolutionary capital placed at his

disposal, and he ought to use them economically, and so as to extract

the greatest possible profit out of them.... The most precious element

of all are women, completely initiated, and accepting our entire

programme. Without their help we can do nothing."

Bakunin naturally turned his first attention to his own country, and

the subsequent development of Russian affairs show sufficiently distinct

signs of his ideas and influence.

In 1865 he sent a young medical student named Netchaieff to Moscow, to

work among the students there, and Netchaieff had, by 1869, established

a number of secret societies, which he linked together under the name of

the Russian Branch of the International Working Men's Association. This

organization was not very numerous--no Russian secret society is--but in

1873 as many as eighty-seven persons were brought to trial for

connection with it, and in 1866 one of its members, a working man called

Karakasoff, who was suffering from an incurable disease, made the first

attempt on the life of the Czar--an event which had most important

effects on the course of Russian politics. It rang out the era of

reform, and rang in the era of reaction. The popular concessions which

the Czar had already given he now began to withdraw. The people had

never got, as they expected, an independent judiciary--perhaps in an

autocratic country a judiciary independent of the executive is hardly

possible--but they had enjoyed some pretence of public trial, and now

that pretence was done away, and Karakasoff and his companions were not

brought before the court at all, but tried and condemned by an

extraordinary commission, with a military officer of approved ferocity

at its head. Administrative trial and administrative condemnation became

again the regular rule in Russia; and though these things were borne in

the days of Nicholas as almost matters of course, they were now deeply

resented as fresh invasions of right and direct breaches of imperial

promises. Then the bodies to which a certain amount of the local

government of the country, the management of roads, schools, poor,

health, etc., had been entrusted, were obstructed in the exercise of

their powers, or gradually deprived of their powers altogether, and

forced into complete dependence on the imperial executive. The students

at the universities began to be interfered with in their sick and

benefit societies and their reading circles; their studies in the

class-rooms were restricted to what was thought a safe routine; and even

their private lives and motions were watched with an exasperating

espionage. People felt the hand of the despot pressing back upon them

everywhere, and they felt it with a most natural and righteous recoil.

This reactionary policy, which has continued ever since--this return to

the hated old methods of arbitrary and repressive rule--produced, as was

inevitable, deep and general discontent at the very moment when the

great historical measure of serf emancipation was desolating the

families of the landed gentry, province after province; and when the

execution of the Emancipation Act was completed in 1870, Russian society

was already quivering with dangerous elements of revolt.

From that time evidences of an active revolutionary propaganda

multiplied rapidly every year. In 1871 and 1872 the writings of the

German socialists were translated and ran into great favour. Even of

Marx's far from popular work, "Capital," a large edition was eagerly

bought up, and ladies of position baptized their children in the name of

Lassalle. Secret societies were discovered both north and south. From

1873 to 1877 nihilist arrests, nihilist prosecutions, nihilist conflicts

with the police, were the order of the day, till at length, in 1878, the

young girl, Vera Sassulitch, fired the shot at the head of the Russian

police which began that long vendetta between the revolutionists and the

executive, in which so many officials perished, and eventually, in 1881,

after many unsuccessful attempts, the Czar himself was so cruelly

assassinated.

The ardent youth of Russia, who, in 1861, were still giving themselves

to the work of Sunday schools and reading circles, were, in 1871,

throwing their careers away to go out, like the first apostles, without

scrip or two coats, and propagate among the rude people of the provinces

the doctrines of modern revolutionary socialism, and by 1881 had become

absorbed in sheer terrorism, in avenging the official murder of comrades

without trial by the revolutionary murder of officials, in contriving

infernal plots and explosions, and trying vainly to cast out devils by

the prince of devils.

Stepniak attributes the impetus which the socialist agitation received

in 1871 to the impression produced in Russia by the Paris Commune; but

it would perhaps be more correct simply to ascribe it to the exertions

of two active Russian revolutionists, who were themselves associated

with the Communard movement, and who happened to enjoy at this period

unusual facilities of communication with the younger mind of Russia. One

was Bakunin, who had himself organized an insurrection at Lyons on the

principles of the Commune six months before the outbreak at Paris in

March, 1871; and the other was Peter Lavroff, the present Nestor of

Russian nihilism, who actually took part in the Paris Commune itself.

Lavroff, who had been a colonel in the Russian army, and professor in

the military college of St. Petersburg, was compromised in the attempt

of Karakasoff in 1866 and administratively banished to Archangel; but,

as happens so singularly often in Russia, he escaped in 1869, and lived

to edit a revolutionary journal in Zurich, and play for a time no

inconsiderable part in making trouble in Russia. At present,

communications between the active revolutionists who are at work in

Russia and their predecessors who have withdrawn to Western Europe are

entirely interrupted; but they were still abundant twenty years ago.

Partly in consequence of the reactionary educational policy of the

Government, young Russians flocked at that time to Switzerland for their

education, and were there conveniently indoctrinated into the new gospel

of the International. Bakunin and Lavroff were both in Zurich, and in

the year 1872 there were 239 Russian students, male and female, in

Zurich alone. These young people were, of course, in continual

intercourse with the older refugees. Bakunin and Lavroff both held

stated and formal lectures on socialism and revolution, which were

always succeeded by open and animated discussions of the subject treated

in them. A little later there were, according to Professor Thun, four

distinct groups among the Russian revolutionists in Zurich, some of them

caused by personal quarrels. But from the first there were always two,

one of whom swore by Bakunin, and the other by Lavroff.

Bakunin was an anarchist--an "amorphist" even, as we have seen--and he

believed in the propaganda of deeds. Every little village, he thought,

should make its own revolution; and if it could not make a revolution,

it might always be making a riot, or an explosion, or a fire, or an

assassination of some official, or something else to raise panic or

confusion. All this seemed to Lavroff and his friends to be unmitigated

folly. They too believed in revolution; but in their view revolution, to

be successful, must be organized and simultaneous; it must, above all,

first have the peasantry on its side; and therefore, instead of the mad

and premature propaganda of deed, the true policy for the present was

manifestly "going into the people," as they termed it--that is, an

itinerant mission to indoctrinate the people into the faith of the

coming revolution. Then, again, Lavroff, though, like almost all Russian

revolutionists, an anarchist, was not, like most of them, prepared to

dispense all at once with the State. He thought the new society would

eventually be able to do without any central authority, but not at

first, nor for a considerable time, the length of which could not now be

more precisely determined. In this Lavroff and his party stood much

nearer the Social Democrats of Germany than other Russian nihilists, and

they have come nearer still since then. They have cast off the Russian

commune, of which the early nihilists made so great an idol. They see

that it is an old-world institution doomed to dissolution, and rapidly

undergoing the process.

The two tendencies--diverging both in principle and in tactics--appeared

in Russia as well as Zurich. At first the more peaceful method

prevailed. Lavroff's idea of "going into the people" was the enthusiasm

of the hour, and brought upon the scene the typical nihilist

missionary--the young man of good birth who laid down station and

prospects, learnt a manual trade, browned his hands with tar and his

face by smearing it with butter and lying in the sun, put on the

peasant's sheepskin, and then, with a forged pass, procured at the

secret nihilist pass factory, and a few forbidden books in his wallet,

set off "without road" to be a peasant with peasants, if by any means he

could win them over to the cause; and the still more remarkable young

woman who went through a marriage ceremony to obtain the right of

independent action, and the moment the ceremony was over, left father

and mother and husband and all in order to work among the peasants of

the Volga as a teacher or nurse, and live on milk and groats according

to Tchernycheffsky's prescription in "What is to be Done?". Stepniak

justly remarks that "the type of propagandist of the first lustre of

1870-80 was religious rather than revolutionary. His hope was

socialism, his God the people. Notwithstanding all the evidence to the

contrary, he firmly believed that from one day to the other the

revolution was about to break out, as in the middle ages people believed

at certain periods in the approach of the day of judgment."

("Underground Russia," p. 30.)

For some years these ascetic devotees might be found in every corner of

broad Russia, working as shoemakers or joiners most of them (why these

were the favourite trades does not appear), or as hawkers of images or

tea, or, perhaps, like Prince Krapotkin, as painters. Some of them went

as horse-dealers, from a dreamy idea that the horses might prove useful

in the day of revolution. They all belonged to one or other of the

secret societies which, as we have seen, began to spring up about 1863,

and grew numerous in the next ten or fifteen years. None of these

societies, however, was of any great importance. Professor Thun mentions

four varieties of them. First, the Malikowsy, a handful of apparently

harmless and amiable enthusiasts--a kind of Russian Quakers--who

believed in one Malikov, and called themselves "God-men," because they

held every man had a "divine spark" in him, and was therefore every

other man's equal and brother. Second, the Bakunists, who adopted

Bakunin's programme of "deeds," but did not, till 1875, think of putting

it to practice. Third, the Lavrists, who sent the money to print

Lavroff's newspaper in Zurich, the _En Avant_, and who seem to have

gradually imbibed German socialism to the extent of thinking the Russian

commune a reactionary and decaying institution not worth stirring a

finger to preserve, and who called for the nationalization of land and

capital. And fourth,--much the most important society,--the

Tchaikowskists, founded in 1869 by one Tchaikowski, who is now a teacher

in London, but was then a student at St. Petersburg. Prince Krapotkin

belonged to this society, and so did Sophia Perowskaia. It was at first

a convivial and mutual improvement club, but from discussing forbidden

subjects and circulating among its members forbidden books it grew into

natural antagonism to Government, and became a focus of revolutionary

agitation. Most of the 193 socialists who were tried in 1874-7 belonged

to it, and that protracted trial killed the society and put an end to

the mission "into the people."

Government had marked the new propaganda with great jealousy. In Russia,

no propaganda among the peasants can remain unobserved. When a stranger

arrives at a Russian village, he is immediately the common talk,

whatever he says passes from mouth to mouth, and he may even be invited

to state his views publicly in the _mir_. A mission conducted under

these conditions soon attracted the notice of the authorities, who, in

1874, discovered it in thirty-seven different provinces of Russia, and

arrested as many as 774 of the propagandists. Some of these were at once

banished administratively to Siberia, and of the rest, 193 were, four

years afterwards, brought up for trial and condemned. With these

apprehensions the nihilist movement collapsed for the moment. Thun

states that Lavroff's newspaper during that period adopted a tone of

despair, and the revolutionists who escaped arrest recognised very

clearly that their scheme of "going into the people" was a complete

mistake, and that some safer and more effective system of tactics must

be concocted. They fell upon two different expedients. The first was the

plan of nihilist colonization. To avoid detection by the authorities, a

band of revolutionists settled down in a given district in a body, got

personally acquainted with the peasantry about them, and then, after

acquiring a sufficient knowledge of their characters, proceeded with due

prudence to impart their ideas to those who seemed most trustworthy,

hoping in this way to be able, unobserved, eventually to leaven the

whole lump. The other plan they now resorted to was an approach to the

tactics of Bakunin, and in the very year, 1876, in which that old

revolutionist died, they began a series of socialist demonstrations at

Odessa, Kasan, and elsewhere, which made a little local sensation at the

time. This was the very opposite kind of tactics to the cautious system

of colonization that was pursued simultaneously with it, but there is

always in revolutionary organization only a step between reticence and

rashness. Open demonstrations like those practised at that period were

simply suicidal folly in Russia, where the forces of the Government were

so immeasurably superior to the forces of the demonstrationists.

In 1878 they changed tactics again, inaugurating that system of

terrorism by which they are best known in the West, and which has given

them a name there at which the world turns pale. The determination to

adopt this system of tactics sprang from an accidental circumstance. The

day after the trial of the 193 ended, one of their comrades, the young

woman Vera Sassulitch, called on General Trepoff, the head of the St.

Petersburg police, on pretence of business, and while he was reading her

papers, shot him with a revolver, flung her weapon on the ground, and

allowed herself to be quietly arrested; and when she was brought up for

trial, pled justification on the ground that her act was merely

retaliation on the General for having subjected a friend of hers, a

young medical student, to a brutal and causeless flogging while in

prison on a political charge. The court having acquitted her, she was

received by the public with every demonstration of enthusiasm, and it

was this remarkable public sympathy that made the revolutionaries

terrorists. They resolved to take up V. Sassulitch's idea of

retaliation, and apply it on a great scale. The whole public of Russia

was at that time considerably flushed with indignation against the

imperial Government. The war in Turkey had revealed, as wars always do,

a great deal of rottenness in the public administration; it had brought

nothing but humiliation and debt upon the country, and it had exacted

cruel sacrifices from the people merely to confer on the Bulgarians the

political and constitutional liberty which was still denied to the

Russians themselves. For the moment the old cry for a constitution rose

again in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and there was a deep feeling far

beyond the circles of the revolutionists that an end should be put to

the autocratic _regime_. The revolutionists found powerful encouragement

in all this outbreak of displeasure. Stepniak, who was himself one of

the most active of them at that period, says their real strength lay,

not in their numbers--which he admits to have been few--but in the

general sympathy they received from what he calls the revolutionary

nation around them. They had however special wrongs of their own to

avenge; hundreds of their friends had been transported without trial;

and in the case of the 193, whose trial was just over, the few who had

been acquitted were nevertheless denied their liberty by the Czar, and

banished administratively to Siberia after all; so that while Russian

society was clamouring on public grounds for the downfall of the

autocratic system, the revolutionists, for revenge, determined upon the

death of the autocrat himself. The various secret societies had united

into a single body, called first the "Troglodytes," and then "Land and

Liberty," for the better prosecution of the nihilist colonization

scheme; but in 1879 they broke again into two parties, one of which, the

Will of the People party, adopted terrorism as its exclusive business

for the time, issued, through its famous executive committee, sentences

of death on the Czar and the State officials; and after making ten

attempts on high officials, five of them fatal, and four attempts on the

Czar himself, finally succeeded in their fifth on the 13th of March,

1881. With this party the political side of their programme overshadowed

the socialistic, and their first demand from the new Czar was for a

constitution.

The other party--the party of the Black Division--is an agrarian party,

living on the growing discontent of the peasantry, and nursing their cry

for what in Russia is known as the Black Division. It is an old belief

among the Russian people that when the land possessed at any time by the

communes should become too small for the increasing population of the

communes, there would be a new division of all the land of the country,

including, of course, the great estates now owned by the _noblesse_, so

that every inhabitant might be once more accommodated with his proper

share of the soil. This great secular redistribution is the black

division, and it belongs as naturally to the Russian peasants' system of

agrarian ideas as the little local and periodical divisions that take

place within the communes themselves. The Black Division section of the

revolutionists are terrorist in their methods like the other section,

but they care nothing about a constitution, which they say is only a

demand of the _bourgeoisie_, but of no interest or good to the peasant

at all. They have the old aversion to centralized government, which we

have seen to be almost the tradition of Russian revolutionists; they are

all for strengthening the communes, and for a light federal connection;

and of all phases of the Russian revolutionary movement under the reign

of the present Czar theirs is the most important, because it is founding

itself on real and deepening rural discontent, and becoming

substantially a peasants' cry for more land and less rent and taxes.

I have already referred to the astonishing growth of a Russian

proletariat since the Emancipation Act. Professor Janson, an eminent

Russian statistician, calculated that as many as a fourth of the people

of St. Petersburg--229,000 out of 876,000--got public relief in the year

1884. Stepniak, in his recent work on the Russian peasantry, asserts

that a third of the rural population, or 20,000,000 souls in all, are in

the condition of absolute proletarians, and his account of the situation

is entirely supported by the descriptions of a competent and

unprejudiced German economist, Professor Alphonse Thun, who speaks

partly from the results of official inquiries instituted by the Russian

Government into the subject, and partly from his own personal

observation during a continuous residence of two years in the country.

As the subject is of importance to the student of socialistic

institutions as well as of the nihilist movement, I shall make no

apology for devoting some observations to its explanation.

In the first place, though it has never been well understood in Western

Europe, some ten per cent. of the Russian rural population have no legal

claim to a share of the land at all; these are old men who are past

working, widows with children too young to be able to work, and men who

at the time of the Emancipation were personal servants of the great

landowners, and consequently not members of any village commune. Men of

this last class may reside in a village, and may keep a shop or practise

a trade there; but not being born villagers, they possess no right to

participate in the distribution of the village land. They are as much

outside the communistic system as the nobles or the foreign residents.

Russian citizenship alone is not enough to give a right to the land;

local birth in a commune is also an essential pre-requisite, and ability

to work is another. A family gets one share for every able-bodied member

it contains; the share is therefore called a "soul" of land; and

although between one distribution and another the widow may still

retain the "soul" that belonged to her husband, and hire a hand to work

it, yet on the next redistribution she must give it up unless she has a

son who in the meantime has grown to man's estate. The landless widow

and orphan must have been an occasional incident of the Russian village

system from all times; but the incursion of dismissed domestic menials

with no birthright in the commune has arisen only in recent years, when,

in consequence of a conspiracy of causes, so many of the nobility have

been obliged to reduce their establishments.

In the next place, a communistic tenure which gives every new-comer a

right to share in the land of his native village on an equal footing

with those who are already in possession could hardly fail to lead to

excessive subdivision, and in Russia at this moment scarce one family in

a hundred has land enough to furnish its maintenance for half the year.

The usual size of holding is ten acres, of which--cultivated as they are

on the old three-field system--one third is always fallow, and the

remainder, in consequence of the rude method of agriculture that

prevails, yields only two, or at most three, returns of the seed. They

have no pasture, because at the time of the emancipation they preferred

to take out their whole claim in arable; and, having no pasture, they

cannot keep cattle as they formerly did because they cannot get manure.

According to the information of Professor Thun, in 1872 8 per cent. of

the families had no cow, and 4 per cent. no horse; and Stepniak says the

inventory of horses taken for military purposes in 1882 showed that

one-fourth of the peasant families had then no horse. Russia is, in

fact, a vast continent of crofters, practising primitive husbandry on

mere "cat's-plots" of land, and depending for the greater part of their

subsistence on some auxiliary trade. In one respect they have the

advantage over our Scotch crofters; they practise, in many cases,

skilled trades. Of course they work as ploughmen or fishermen when that

sort of work is wanted, or they will hire a piece of waste land from a

neighbouring owner and bring it into rude cultivation; but every variety

of craft is to be found among them. They are weavers, hatters,

cabinet-makers, workers in metals; they make shoes, or images, or

candles, or musical instruments, or grindstones; they dress furs, they

knit lace, they train singing-birds. According to the official inquiry,

most of the goods of some of the best commercial houses of Moscow,

trading in Parisian silk hats and Viennese furniture, are manufactured

by these peasants in their rural villages. A curious and very remarkable

characteristic is mentioned by Thun: not only has every Russian his

bye-industry, but every village has a different bye-industry from its

neighbour. One is a village of coopers--a very thriving trade, it

appears; another a village of tailors--a declining one, in consequence

of the competition of ready-made stuff from the towns; another--and

there are several such--may be a village of beggars, with mendicity for

their second staff; and another a village of seamen, going in a body in

spring to the Baltic or the Volga, and leaving only their women and

children to tend the farm till their return in the autumn. The Russians

always work in artels whether at home or abroad, and to work in artels

they must of course follow the same industry. Their individual earnings

in their auxiliary occupations are comparatively good; they make

three-fourths of their annual income from that source; but it seems

every trade is now overcrowded, and there is some difficulty in

obtaining constant employment.

Then the burdens of the peasantry are very heavy. In Russia the superior

classes enjoy many exemptions from taxation, and the public revenue is

taken mainly from the peasant classes. The annual redemption money they

have to pay to the State for their land is a most serious obligation,

and between one thing and another the burdens on the land in a vast

number of cases exceed its net return very considerably. Professor Thun

states, that in 2,009 cases of letting holdings which had occurred in

the province of Moscow at the time he wrote, the average rent received

was only 3 roubles 56 kopecks per "soul" (land-share), while the average

taxation was 10 roubles 30 kopecks. Stepniak says that in the

thirty-seven provinces of European Russia the class who were formerly

State peasants pay in taxes of every description no less than 92.75 per

cent. of the average net produce of their land; and that the class who

were formerly serfs of private owners pay as much as 192.25 per cent. of

the net produce of theirs. Landowning on these terms is manifestly a

questionable privilege, and the _moujik_ pays his land taxes as the

Scotch crofter has sometimes to pay his rent, not out of the produce of

his holding, but out of the wages of his auxiliary labour; but the

Scotch crofter, under his system of individual tenure, has one great

resource which is wanting to the other: he can always cut the knot of

his troubles by throwing up his holding, if he chooses, and emigrating.

To the Russian peasant emigration brings no relief. He is born a

proprietor, and cannot escape the obligation of his position wherever he

may go. He may try to let his ground--and in many cases he does--but, as

we see, he cannot often get enough rent to meet the dues. He may leave

his village, if he will, but his village liabilities travel with him

wherever he may settle. He cannot obtain work anywhere in Russia without

showing his pass from his own commune; and since, under the principle of

joint liability that rules in the communistic system, the members of the

commune who remain at home would have to pay the emigrant's arrears if

he failed to pay them himself, they are not likely to renew the pass to

a defaulter. The Russian peasants are thus nearly as much _adstricti

glebae_ as they ever were; they are now under the power of the commune as

completely as they were before under the power of their masters; and

their difficulty is still how they can possibly obtain emancipation.

Sometimes they will defy the commune, forego the advantage of a lawful

pass, crowd the ranks of that large body in Russia who are known as the

"illegal men," and sometimes, we are assured by Professor Thun, a whole

village, every man and every family, will secretly disappear in a body

and seek refuge from the tax-collector by settling in the steppes. The

natural right of every man to the land is thus, in the principal country

where any attempt is made to realize it, nothing but a harassing

pecuniary debt.

Now this class of worse than landless emigrants--men who carry their

land as a perpetual burden on their back from which they can get no

respite--is already very numerous in Russia. Thun says there are

millions of them. As far back as 1872, nearly half the town population

of Moscow and more than a fifth of the population of the landward

district were strangers, who were inscribed members of rural communes

elsewhere; and in many purely country districts some 14 per cent. of the

people have no houses because they are not living in the villages they

belong to. Sir Robert Morier says in his report to the Foreign Office in

September, 1887, on Pauperism in Russia (p. 2): "It is officially stated

that in each of the larger provinces, such as Kursk, Tambow, Kostroma,

etc., over 100,000 peasants have abandoned the plot of ground granted to

them (8 acres) on one pretext or another in order to seek means of

subsistence elsewhere. (This probably means flocking to the larger

towns.) The number of beggars in 71 Governments was stated to be

300,000, of which 182,000 were peasant proprietors. This number is,

however, far below the mark." But, as we learn from Stepniak, the bulk

of the landless peasants, _i.e._ those who no longer cultivate their

holdings, do not leave their native villages, but seek employment as

hirelings in the village itself or in its neighbourhood, and wander as

day labourers from one master to another. Their families continue to

live in their old cottage in the village, and the father returns to it

when out of employment.

Their land is generally taken by a class of small usurers (_koulaks_)

who have grown up in every Russian village since the emancipation. These

koulaks are in most cases fellow-peasants who have saved some money, but

they are frequently strangers who have come and opened a store in the

place, and have no right of their own to a share in the land and in the

councils of the village. Stepniak mentions one province where as much as

from 24 to 36 per cent. of the land is concentrated into the hands of

these rich usurers. Even the peasants who still retain their land in

their own hands are often deeply indebted to them, and in some cases

part with bits of their land without parting with all; and the general

tendency of the present economic situation is to divide the peasantry of

every village into a class of comparatively rich peasants, on the one

hand, holding and cultivating most of the land, and a larger class of

rural proletarians, without land and having nothing to live by but their

manual trade. The tendency, in short, is towards the break-up of the

communal tenure, and instead of the Russian Commune invading Europe, as

Cavour once said there was fear it would do, we are likely to see the

individual tenure of Western Europe invading Russia and superseding

primitive rural institutions in that country, as it has already

superseded them in others. "It is quite evident," says Stepniak, "that

Russia is marching in this direction. If nothing happens to check or

hinder the process of interior disintegration in our villages, in

another generation we shall have on one side an agricultural proletariat

of sixty or seventy millions, and on the other a few thousand landlords,

mostly former koulaks and mir-eaters, in possession of all the land." It

is legally permissible at present for a Russian commune, if it so

choose, to abolish its communal system of property and adopt individual

property instead of it; and although this has been very seldom done as

yet, we are told by Thun that the rich peasants and the very poor

peasants are both strongly in favour of the step, because it would give

the one permanent ownership of the land and the other permanent relief

from its burdens. When a commune gets divided in this way into a rich

class of members and a poor class, the old brotherliness and mutual

helpfulness of the Russian village are said by the same authority always

to disappear and a more selfish spirit to take their place; but then it

should be remembered how much easier it is to assist a neighbour out of

a little difficulty of the way than to meet the unremitting claims of a

class that have sunk into permanent poverty. Anyhow, the temptation is

equally strong on both parties to escape from the worries of their

present situation through the rich buying out the poor.

Another tendency working in the same direction is the rapid dissolution

of the old system of large house-communities that prevailed before the

emancipation. The average household has been reduced from seven and a

half to five souls, the married children setting up houses of their own

instead of dwelling under one roof with their father and grandfather.

The house is a mere hut, with no furniture but a table and a wooden

bench used by night for a bed, but still the separate _menage_ has

increased to an embarrassing extent the expenses of the peasant's living

at the very time that other circumstances have reduced his resources.

The reason for the break-up of the house-communities has been the desire

to escape partly from the tyranny of the head of the household, but

chiefly from the incessant quarrels that prevailed between the several

members about the amount they each contributed to the common funds as

compared with the amount they ate and drank out of them. One of the

brothers goes to St. Petersburg during the winter months as a cabman and

brings back a hundred roubles, while another gets work as a forester

near home, and earns no more than twenty-five. Now, according to an

author quoted by Stepniak, who is describing a family among whom he has

lived, the question always is: "Why should he (the forester) consume

with such avidity the tea and sugar dearly purchased with the cabman's

money? And in general, why should this tea be absorbed with such

greediness by all the numerous members of the household--by the elder

brother, for instance, who alone drank something like eighty cups a day

(the whole family consumed about nine hundred cups per diem) whilst he

did not move a finger towards earning all this tea and sugar? Whilst the

cabman was freezing in the cold night air, or busying himself with some

drunken passenger, or was being abused and beaten by a policeman on duty

near some theatre, this elder brother was comfortably stretched upon his

belly, on the warm family oven, pouring out some nonsense about

twenty-seven bears whom he had seen rambling through the country with

their whelps in search of new land for settlement." And so the quarrel

goes round; always the old difficulty of _meum_ and _tuum_, so hard to

reconcile except under a _regime_ of individual property.

In fact, the shifts to which the Russian peasantry, like other

peasantries elsewhere, have been reduced to solve this difficulty in the

management of their common land constitute one main cause of their

agricultural backwardness and their consequent poverty. Elisee Reclus

calculates that if the Russian fields were cultivated like those of

Great Britain, Russia could produce, instead of six hundred and fifty

million hectolitres of corn annually, about five milliards, which would

be sufficient to feed a population of five hundred million souls. A few

lessons in good husbandry will do much more for the comfort of a people

than many changes of social organization; but good husbandry is

virtually impossible under a system of unstable tenure, which turns a

man necessarily out of his holding every few years for the purpose of a

new distribution of the land, and which compels him to take his holding,

when he gets it, in some thirty or forty scattered plots.

Redistributions, it is true, do not occur so very frequently as we might

suppose. As Russian land is all cultivated on a three years' rotation,

one might be apt to look for a new distribution every three years, but

that almost never occurs. Thun states that in the province of Moscow

during the twenty years 1858-1878 the average interval of distribution

was 121/2 years, four rotations; that 49 per cent. of the communes had a

distribution only once in 15 years, and 37 per cent. only once in 20

years. The dislike to frequent distributions is growing, on the obvious

and very reasonable ground that they either discourage a man from doing

well by his land, or they inflict on him the grave injustice of

depriving him of the ground he has himself improved before he has reaped

from it the due reward of his labour. The tendency towards individual

property is therefore strongly at work here, and as this system of

periodical redistribution is established merely to give every man that

natural right by virtue of his birth to a share in the land, which is

now in so many cases such a delusive irony, the resistance to the new

tendency cannot be expected to be very resolute. The _runrig_ system of

cultivation, which prevails in Russia in the same form as it did in the

Highlands of Scotland, does not give any similar appearance of decay.

Stepniak says the peasants still prefer that arrangement because it

allows room for perfect fairness--perfect reconciliation of the _meum_

and _tuum_--in the distribution of their most precious commodity, the

land, which always presents great variety as to quality of soil and

situation with respect to roads, water, the village, etc. Under a

communal system with many members this method of arrangement is almost

indispensable to avoid quarrels and prevent the indolent from shirking

their proper share of the work, but its agricultural disadvantages are

so great that it never long resists an improving husbandry. Although an

owner, the Russian peasant, in consequence of the shifting nature of his

subject, is said by Stepniak to have none of that passionate feeling of

ownership and that profound delight in his land which are characteristic

of the peasant proprietors of the West, but he has--what is really the

same thing--a deep sense of personal dignity from its possession, and he

feels himself to have lost caste if he is forced to give up his holding

and become a mere _batrak_, or wage labourer. All the pride of ownership

is already there, and in the changes of the immediate future it will

have plenty of opportunity for asserting its place.

Under the pressure of this singular economic movement, the nihilist

agitation is now developing largely into a peasants' cry for more land

and less rent and taxes. As I have said, the Russian peasantry look for

the great black division once in an age. The "Old Believers" mix this

idea up with their dreams of a great millennial reign, and keep on

thinking that the day after to-morrow is to bring in the happy period

before the end of the world, when truth is to prevail and the land is to

be equally divided among all; and a feeling easily gets about among the

peasantry generally that the "black division" is at last coming. Such a

feeling was very widespread during the reign of the late Czar, and,

indeed, is still so. Rumours fly every now and then from hamlet to

hamlet like wildfire, no one knows whence or how, that the division is

to be made in a month, or a week, or a year; that the Czar has decreed

it, and when it does not come, that the Czar's wishes have for the time

been thwarted, as they had so often been thwarted before, by the selfish

machinations of the nobility. For the peasant has a profound and

touching belief in his Czar. There may be agrarian socialism in his

creed, but it is not the agrarian socialism of the schools. The first

article of his faith--and it would appear to be the natural faith of the

peasant all the world over--is that the earth is the Lord's and not the

nobility's; but his second is that the Czar is the Lord's steward, sent

for the very purpose of dividing the land justly among his people. If

the peasant hopes for the black division, he hopes for it from the Czar.

The Emancipation Act has been far from giving him the land or the

liberty he looked for, but he believes--and nothing will shake him out

of the belief--that the Emancipation Law which the Czar actually

decreed was a righteous law that would have met all the people's wishes

and claims, but that this law has been altered seriously to their

disadvantage, under the influence of the nobility, in the process of

carrying it into execution. But his confidence always is that the Czar

will still interfere and put everything to rights. And when, only a few

years ago, the revolutionist Stephanovitch stirred up some disturbances

in Southern Russia, which were commonly dignified at the time with the

name of a peasants' insurrection, he was only able to succeed in doing

what he did by first going to St. Petersburg with a petition from the

peasants of the district to the Czar, and then issuing on his return a

false proclamation in the Czar's name, commanding the people to rise

against the nobility, who were declared to be persistently obstructing

and defeating his Majesty's good and just intentions for his loyal

people's welfare. If an imperial proclamation were issued to the

contrary effect--a proclamation condemning or repudiating the operations

of the peasants--the latter would refuse to believe it to be genuine.

That occurs again and again about this very idea of the black division,

which has obtained possession of the brains of the rural population. It

often happens that in a season of excitement, like the time of the

Russo-Turkish war, or of famine, like the winter of 1880-81, the rumours

and expectations of the black division become especially definite and

lively, and lead to meetings and discussions and disturbances which the

Government think it prudent to stop. In 1879 the Minister of the

Interior, with this object in view, issued a circular contradicting the

rumours that were spread abroad, which was read in all the villages and

affixed to the public buildings. It stated, as plainly as it was

possible to state anything, that there would be no redistribution, and

that the landlords would retain their property; but it produced no

effect. Professor Engelhardt wrote one of his published "Letters from a

Village" at that very moment, and states that the _moujiks_ would not

understand the circular to mean anything more than a request that they

would for a time abstain from gossiping at random about the coming

redistribution. One of their reasons for making this odd

misinterpretation is curious. The circular warned the people against

"evil-intentioned" persons who disseminated false reports, and gave

instructions to the authorities to apprehend them. These

evil-intentioned persons were, of course, the nihilist agitators, who

were making use of these reports to foment an agrarian insurrection; but

the peasants took these enemies of the Government to be the landlords

and others who had, they believed, set themselves against the

redistribution movement and prevented the benevolence and righteous

purposes of the Czar from descending upon his people. In some parts of

Russia there has sprung up since 1870 a group of peasantry known as "the

medalmen," who have persuaded themselves that the Czar not only wants to

give them more land, but has long since decreed their exemption from all

taxation except the poll tax. They say, moreover, that he struck a medal

to commemorate this gracious design of his, which has been, as usual, so

wickedly frustrated by his subordinates; and that even, as things are,

one has but to get hold of one of these medals and show it to the

collector, and the collector is bound to give the holder the exemption

he wants. The medals to which so much virtue is ascribed are merely the

medals struck to commemorate the Emancipation of the Serfs; but the

"medalmen," who are generally men that have parted with their land, sold

their houses, and settled at the mines, pay very high prices for one of

these medals, wear it constantly about their necks, and think it will

secure them a genuine respite from the burden of taxation they have to

bear.

The nihilist propagandists think--and the idea seems very

remarkable--that this childish and ignorant confidence in the Czar will

not be able to stand much longer the strain of the increasing

difficulties of the rural situation. The propagandists make it their

business to keep alive the idea of the black division in the hearts of

the _moujiks_, and make use of every successive disappointment at its

continued delay as an instrument of alienating the affections of the

people from the throne. A peasantry are very slow to throw over old

sentiments, and will suffer long before breaking with the past, but they

take a sure grip of their own interest, and they will turn sometimes

very decisively and very gregariously to new deliverers. The Russian

peasants see themselves settled on plots of ground too small to work

with profit, and overburdened with taxes; they have to pay sixty per

cent. of all their earnings in dues of all kinds on their land; and they

cast their eyes abroad and see two-thirds of the country still

unpossessed by the people, one-half still owned by the State, and

one-sixth by the greater landowners; and with the communistic ideas in

which they have been nursed, they feel that it is time for a new

division of the greater order to take place. A gigantic crofter question

is impending, and this agrarian agitation for more land is likely enough

to make nihilism a more formidable thing in the future than it has been

in the past. Hitherto it has taken little hold of the peasantry. At

first it was a movement of educated young Russia merely, and might be

counted with the ordinary intellectual excesses of youth. It only became

a serious political force after the Emancipation Act; but it was still a

movement of the upper classes, and in spite of immense exertions it has

remained so. The situation, however, is rapidly changing, and with the

rise--so remarkable in many ways--of a numerous rural proletariat in the

country that was supposed to enjoy special protection against it, with

the growing distress and discontent of the peasantry, with the louder

and more persistent cries for the black division, which their hereditary

conception of agrarian justice suggests to them as the only solution of

their troubles, who will say what to-morrow may bring forth?

Meanwhile the Will of the People party has continued its activity. We

still hear occasionally of murders, and demonstrations, and arrests, and

discoveries of nihilist plots on the life of the Czar or of high

servants of the Crown, and of alarming discoveries of the hold the

movement was taking in the army. But, according to one of the most

recent writers on the subject, the author of "Socialismus und

Anarchismus, 1883-1886," who admits, however, that it is very difficult

to obtain authentic information about it under the rigorous system of

repression at present practised by the Russian authorities, a small

section of this party, whom he calls the followers of Peter Lavroff,

have been developing more in line with German Social Democracy, and have

organized themselves into a society called the Labour Emancipation

League, which prefers peaceful means of agitation, and in March, 1885,

published its programme, demanding (1) a constitution, (2) the

nationalization of land, (3) the handing over of factories to the

possession of societies of productive labourers, (4) free education, (5)

abolition of a standing army, and (6) full liberty of association and

meeting. The same writer states, however, that this socialist group are

not numerous, and that the various robberies, murders, plots against the

Czar's life, incitements of peasant disturbances, seizures of weapons

and printing presses that keep on occurring, show that the nihilists, as

the others still appear to be called, are much the most active and the

most important section of the revolutionary party. He mentions also that

in 1884 considerable sensation was produced by the discovery of an

anarchist secret society in Warsaw, with several magistrates at its

head, which aimed at creating a revolution in Poland,--Prussian and

Austrian Poland, as well as Russian,--and rebuilding the Polish nation

on a socialist basis. On the apprehension of its leaders it dissolved,

but sprang to life again almost immediately in two separate

organizations--one directly allied with the Russian Terrorists, and the

other, under the influence of a Jew named Mendelssohn, suppressing its

Polish nationalism for the present, and linking itself with the Russian

socialists--presumably the followers of Lavroff just mentioned.