REVOLUTIONARY NIHILISM AND THE REACTION
The Reform-enthusiasm Becomes Unpractical and Culminates in
Nihilism--Nihilism, the Distorted Reflection of Academic Western
Socialism--Russia Well Prepared for Reception of Ultra-Socialist
Virus--Social Reorganisation According to Latest Results of
Science--Positivist Theory--Leniency of Press-censure--Chief
Representatives of New Movement--Government Becomes Alarmed--Repressive
Measures--Reaction in the Public--The Term Nihilist Invented--The
Nihilist and His Theory--Further Repressive Measures--Attitude of Landed
Proprietors--Foundation of a Liberal Party--Liberalism Checked by Polish
Insurrection--Practical Reform Continued--An Attempt at Regicide Forms
a Turning-point of Government's Policy--Change in Educational
System--Decline of Nihilism.
The rapidly increasing enthusiasm for reform did not confine itself to
practical measures such as the emancipation of the serfs, the creation
of local self-government, and the thorough reorganisation of the
law-courts and legal procedure. In the younger section of the educated
classes, and especially among the students of the universities and
technical colleges, it produced a feverish intellectual excitement and
wild aspirations which culminated in what is commonly known as Nihilism.
In a preceding chapter I pointed out that during the last two centuries
all the important intellectual movements in Western Europe have been
reflected in Russia, and that these reflections have generally been
what may fairly be termed exaggerated and distorted reproductions of
the originals.* Roughly speaking, the Nihilist movement in Russia may
be described as the exaggerated, distorted reflection of the earlier
Socialist movements of the West; but it has local peculiarities and
local colouring which deserve attention.
* See Chapter XXVI.
The Russian educated classes had been well prepared by their past
history for the reception and rapid development of the Socialist virus.
For a century and a half the country had been subjected to a series of
drastic changes, administrative and social, by the energetic action of
the Autocratic Power, with little spontaneous co-operation on the
part of the people. In a nation with such a history, Socialistic ideas
naturally found favour, because all Socialist systems until quite recent
times were founded on the assumption that political and social progress
must be the result not of slow natural development, but rather of
philosophic speculation, legislative wisdom, and administrative energy.
This assumption lay at the bottom of the reform enthusiasm in St.
Petersburg at the commencement of Alexander II.'s reign. Russia might
be radically transformed, it was thought, politically and socially,
according to abstract scientific principles, in the space of a few
years, and be thereby raised to the level of West-European civilisation,
or even higher. The older nations had for centuries groped in darkness,
or stumbled along in the faint light of practical experience, and
consequently their progress had been slow and uncertain. For Russia
there was no necessity to follow such devious, unexplored paths. She
ought to profit by the experience of her elder sisters, and avoid the
errors into which they had fallen. Nor was it difficult to ascertain
what these errors were, because they had been discovered, examined
and explained by the most eminent thinkers of France and England, and
efficient remedies had been prescribed. Russian reformers had merely to
study and apply the conclusions at which these eminent authorities had
arrived, and their task would be greatly facilitated by the fact
that they could operate on virgin soil, untrammelled by the feudal
traditions, religious superstitions, metaphysical conceptions, romantic
illusions, aristocratic prejudices, and similar obstacles to social and
political progress which existed in Western Europe.
Such was the extraordinary intellectual atmosphere in which the Russian
educated classes lived during the early years of the sixties. On the
"men with aspirations," who had longed in vain for more light and
more public activity under the obscurantist, repressive regime of the
preceding reign, it had an intoxicating effect. The more excitable and
sanguine amongst them now believed seriously that they had discovered
a convenient short-cut to national prosperity, and that for Russia a
grandiose social and political millennium was at hand.*
* I was not myself in St. Petersburg at that period, but on
arriving a few years afterwards I became intimately
acquainted with men and women who had lived through it, and
who still retained much of their early enthusiasm.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that one of the most
prominent characteristics of the time was a boundless, child-like faith
in the so-called "latest results of science." Infallible science
was supposed to have found the solution of all political and social
problems. What a reformer had to do--and who was not a would-be reformer
in those days?--was merely to study the best authorities. Their works
had been long rigidly excluded by the Press censure, but now that it was
possible to obtain them, they were read with avidity. Chief among the
new, infallible prophets whose works were profoundly venerated was
Auguste Comte, the inventor of Positivism. In his classification of the
sciences the crowning of the edifice was sociology, which taught how to
organise human society on scientific principles. Russia had merely to
adopt the principles laid down and expounded at great length in the
Cours de Philosophie Positive. There Comte explained that humanity had
to pass through three stages of intellectual development--the religious,
the metaphysical, and the positive--and that the most advanced nations,
after spending centuries in the two first, were entering on the third.
Russia must endeavour, therefore, to get into the positive stage
as quickly as possible, and there was reason to believe that, in
consequence of certain ethnographical and historical peculiarities, she
could make the transition more quickly than other nations. After Comte's
works, the book which found, for a time, most favour was Buckle's
"History of Civilisation," which seemed to reduce history and progress
to a matter of statistics, and which laid down the principle that
progress is always in the inverse ratio of the influence of theological
conceptions. This principle was regarded as of great practical
importance, and the conclusion drawn from it was that rapid national
progress was certain if only the influence of religion and theology
could be destroyed. Very popular, too, was John Stuart Mill, because he
was "imbued with enthusiasm for humanity and female emancipation"; and
in his tract on Utilitarianism he showed that morality was simply
the crystallised experience of many generations as to what was most
conducive to the greatest good of the greatest number. The minor
prophets of the time, among whom Buchner occupied a prominent place, are
too numerous to mention.
Strange to say, the newest and most advanced doctrines appeared
regularly, under a very thin and transparent veil, in the St. Petersburg
daily Press, and especially in the thick monthly magazines, which were
as big as, or bigger than, our venerable quarterlies. The art of writing
and reading "between the lines," not altogether unknown under the
Draconian regime of Nicholas I., was now developed to such a marvellous
extent that almost any thing could be written clearly enough to be
understood by the initiated without calling for the thunderbolts of the
Press censors, which was now only intermittently severe. Indeed, the
Press censors themselves were sometimes carried away by the reform
enthusiasm. One of them long afterwards related to me that during
"the mad time," as he called it, in the course of a single year he
had received from his superiors no less than seventeen reprimands for
passing objectionable articles without remark.
The movement found its warmest partisans among the students and young
literary men, but not a few grey-beards were to be found among the
youthful apostles. All who read the periodical literature became more
or less imbued with the new spirit; but it must be presumed that many of
those who discoursed most eloquently had no clear idea of what they were
talking about; for even at a later date, when the novices had had
time to acquaint themselves with the doctrines they professed, I often
encountered the most astounding ignorance. Let me give one instance by
way of illustration:
A young gentleman who was in the habit of talking glibly about the
necessity of scientifically reorganising human society, declared to me
one day that not only sociology, but also biology should be taken into
consideration. Confessing my complete ignorance of the latter science,
I requested him to enlighten me by giving me an instance of a biological
principle which could be applied to social regeneration. He looked
confused, and tried to ride out of the difficulty on vague general
phrases; but I persistently kept him to the point, and maliciously
suggested that as an alternative he might cite to me a biological
principle which could NOT be used for such a purpose. Again he failed,
and it became evident to all present that of biology, about which he
talked so often, he knew absolutely nothing but the name! After this I
frequently employed the same pseudo-Socratic method of discussion,
and very often with a similar result. Not one in fifty, perhaps, ever
attempted to reduce the current hazy conceptions to a concrete form. The
enthusiasm was not the less intense, however, on that account.
At first the partisans of the movement seemed desirous of assisting,
rather than of opposing or undermining the Government, and so long as
they merely talked academically about scientific principles and
similar vague entities, the Government felt no necessity for energetic
interference; but as early as 1861 symptoms of a change in the character
of the movement became apparent. A secret society of officers organised
a small printing-press in the building of the Headquarters Staff and
issued clandestinely three numbers of a periodical called the Velikoruss
(Great Russian), which advocated administrative reform, the convocation
of a constituent assembly, and the emancipation of Poland from Russian
rule. A few months later (April, 1862) a seditious proclamation
appeared, professing to emanate from a central revolutionary committee,
and declaring that the Romanoffs must expiate with their blood the
misery of the people.
These symptoms of an underground revolutionary agitation caused alarm in
the official world, and repressive measures were at once adopted. Sunday
schools for the working classes, reading-rooms, students' clubs, and
similar institutions which might be used for purposes of revolutionary
propaganda were closed; several trials for political offences took
place; the most popular of the monthly periodicals (Sovremennik) was
suspended, and its editor, Tchernishevski, arrested. There was nothing
to show that Tchernishevski was implicated in any treasonable designs,
but he was undoubtedly the leader of a group of youthful writers whose
aspirations went far beyond the intentions of the Government, and it
was thought desirable to counteract his influence by shutting him up
in prison. Here he wrote and published, with the permission of the
authorities and the imprimatur of the Press censure, a novel called
"Shto delat'?" ("What is to be Done?"), which was regarded at first as
a most harmless production, but which is now considered one of the most
influential and baneful works in the whole range of Nihilist literature.
As a novel it had no pretensions to artistic merit, and in ordinary
times it would have attracted little or no attention, but it put into
concrete shape many of the vague Socialist and Communist notions that
were at the moment floating about in the intellectual atmosphere, and
it came to be looked upon by the young enthusiasts as a sort of informal
manifesto of their new-born faith. It was divided into two parts; in
the first was described a group of students living according to the
new ideas in open defiance of traditional conventionalities, and in the
second was depicted a village organised on the communistic principles
recommended by Fourier. The first was supposed to represent the dawn of
the new era; the second, the goal to be ultimately attained. When the
authorities discovered the mistake they had committed in allowing the
book to be published, it was at once confiscated and withdrawn from
circulation, whilst the author, after being tried by the Senate, was
exiled to Northeastern Siberia and kept there for nearly twenty years.*
* Tchernishevski was a man of encyclopaedic knowledge and
specially conversant with political economy. According to
the testimony of those who knew him intimately, he was one
of the ablest and most sympathetic men of his generation.
During his exile a bold attempt was made to rescue him, and
very nearly succeeded. A daring youth, disguised as an
officer of gendarmes and provided with forged official
papers, reached the place where he was confined and procured
his release, but the officer in charge had vague suspicions,
and insisted on the two travellers being escorted to the
next post-station by a couple of Cossacks. The rescuer
tried to get rid of the escort by means of his revolver, but
he failed in the attempt, and the fugitives were arrested.
In 1883 Tchernishevski was transferred to the milder climate
of Astrakhan, and in 1889 he was allowed to return to his
native town, Saratof, where he died a few months afterwards.
With the arrest and exile of Tchernishevski the young would-be reformers
were constrained to recognise that they had no chance of carrying the
Government with them in their endeavours to realise their patriotic
aspirations. Police supervision over the young generation was increased,
and all kinds of association, whether for mutual instruction, mutual
aid, or any other purpose, were discouraged or positively forbidden. And
it was not merely in the mind of the police that suspicion was aroused.
In the opinion of the great majority of moderate, respectable people
the young enthusiasts were becoming discredited. The violently seditious
proclamations with which they were supposed to sympathise, and a series
of destructive fires in St. Petersburg, erroneously attributed to them,
frightened timid Liberals and gave the Reactionaries, who had hitherto
remained silent, an opportunity of preaching their doctrines with
telling effect. The celebrated novelist, Turgeneif, long the idol of the
young generation, had inadvertently in "Fathers and Children" invented
the term Nihilist, and it at once came to be applied as an opprobrious
epithet, notwithstanding the efforts of Pissaref, a popular writer of
remarkable talent, to prove to the public that it ought to be regarded
as a term of honour.
Pissaref's attempt at rehabilitation made no impression outside of his
own small circle. According to popular opinion the Nihilists were a
band of fanatical young men and women, mostly medical students, who had
determined to turn the world upside down and to introduce a new kind of
social order, founded on the most advanced principles of social equality
and Communism. As a first step towards the great transformation they had
reversed the traditional order of things in the matter of coiffure: the
males allowed their hair to grow long, and the female adepts cut their
hair short, adding occasionally the additional badge of blue spectacles.
Their unkempt appearance naturally shocked the aesthetic feelings of
ordinary people, but to this they were indifferent. They had raised
themselves above the level of popular notions, took no account of
so-called public opinion, gloried in Bohemianism, despised Philistine
respectability, and rather liked to scandalise old-fashioned people
imbued with antiquated prejudices.
This was the ridiculous side of the movement, but underneath the
absurdities there was something serious. These young men and women, who
were themselves terribly in earnest, were systematically hostile not
only to accepted conventionalities in the matter of dress, but to all
manner of shams, hypocrisy, and cant in the broad Carlylean sense of
those terms. To the "beautiful souls" of the older generation, who had
habitually, in conversation and literature, shed pathetic tears over the
defects of Russian social and political organisation without ever moving
a finger to correct them--especially the landed proprietors who
talked and wrote about civilisation, culture, and justice while living
comfortably on the revenues provided for them by their unfortunate
serfs--these had the strongest aversion; and this naturally led them to
condemn in strong language the worship of aesthetic culture. But here
again they fell into exaggeration. Professing extreme utilitarianism,
they explained that the humble shoemaker who practises his craft
diligently is, in the true sense, a greater man than a Shakespeare, or
a Goethe, because humanity has more need of shoes than of dramas and
poetry.
Such silly paradoxes provoked, of course, merely a smile of compassion;
what alarmed the sensible, respectable "Philistine" was the method of
cleansing the Augean stable recommended by these enthusiasts. Having
discovered in the course of their desultory reading that most of
the ills that flesh is heir to proceed directly or indirectly from
uncontrolled sexual passion and the lust of gain, they proposed to seal
hermetically these two great sources of crime and misery by abolishing
the old-fashioned institutions of marriage and private property. When
society, they argued, should be so organised that all the healthy
instincts of human nature could find complete and untrammelled
satisfaction, there would be no motive or inducement for committing
crimes or misdemeanours. For thousands of years humanity had been
sailing on a wrong tack. The great law-givers of the world, religious
and civil, in their ignorance of physical science and positivist
methods, had created institutions, commonly known as law and morality,
which were utterly unfitted to human nature, and then the magistrate
and the moralist had endeavoured to compel or persuade men and women to
conform to them, but their efforts had failed most signally. In vain
the police had threatened and punished and the priests had preached and
admonished. Human nature had systematically and obstinately rebelled,
and still rebels, against the unnatural constraint. It is time,
therefore, to try a new system. Instead of continuing, as has been done
for thousands of years, to force men and women, as it were, into badly
fitting, unelastic clothes which cause intense discomfort and prevent
all healthy muscular action, why not adapt the costume to the anatomy
and physiology of the human frame? Then the clothes will no longer be
rent, and those who wear them will be contented and happy.
Unfortunately for the progress of humanity there are serious obstacles
in the way of this radical change of system. The absurd, antiquated
and pernicious institutions and customs are supported by abstruse
metaphysical reasons and enshrined in mystical romantic sentiment, and
in this way they may still be preserved for generations unless the axe
be laid to the root of the tree. Now is the critical moment. Russia must
be made to rise at once from the metaphysical to the positivist stage of
intellectual development; metaphysical reasoning and romantic sentiment
must be rigorously discarded; and everything must be brought to the
touchstone of naked practical utility.
One might naturally suppose that men holding such opinions must be
materialists of the grossest type--and, indeed, many of them gloried
in the name of materialist and atheist--but such an inference would
be erroneous. While denouncing metaphysics, they were themselves
metaphysicians in so far as they were constantly juggling with abstract
conceptions, and letting themselves be guided in their walk and
conversation by a priori deductions; while ridiculing romanticism, they
had romantic sentiment enough to make them sacrifice their time,
their property, and sometimes even their life, to the attainment of an
unrealisable ideal; and while congratulating themselves on having passed
from the religious to the positivist stage of intellectual development,
they frequently showed themselves animated with the spirit of the early
martyrs! Rarely have the strange inconsistencies of human nature been so
strikingly exemplified as in these unpractical, anti-religious fanatics.
In dealing with them I might easily, without very great exaggeration,
produce a most amusing caricature, but I prefer describing them as they
really were. A few years after the period here referred to I knew some
of them intimately, and I must say that, without at all sharing or
sympathising with their opinions, I could not help respecting them
as honourable, upright, quixotic men and women who had made great
sacrifices for their convictions. One of them whom I have specially
in view at this moment suffered patiently for years from the utter
shipwreck of his generous illusions, and when he could no longer hope to
see the dawn of a brighter day, he ended by committing suicide. Yet that
man believed himself to be a Realist, a Materialist, and a Utilitarian
of the purest water, and habitually professed a scathing contempt for
every form of romantic sentiment! In reality he was one of the best and
most sympathetic men I have ever known.
To return from this digression. So long as the subversive opinions were
veiled in abstract language they raised misgivings in only a comparative
small circle; but when school-teachers put them into a form suited to
the juvenile mind, they were apt to produce startling effects. In a
satirical novel of the time a little girl is represented as coming
to her mother and saying, "Little mamma! Maria Ivan'na (our new
school-mistress) says there is no God and no Tsar, and that it is wrong
to marry!" Whether such incidents actually occurred in real life, as
several friends assured me, I am not prepared to say, but certainly
people believed that they might occur in their own families, and that
was quite sufficient to produce alarm even in the ranks of the Liberals,
to say nothing of the rapidly increasing army of the Reactionaries.
To illustrate the general uneasiness produced in St. Petersburg, I may
quote here a letter written in October, 1861, by a man who occupied one
of the highest positions in the Administration. As he had the reputation
of being an ultra-Liberal who sympathised overmuch with Young Russia,
we may assume that he did not take an exceptionally alarmist view of the
situation.
"You have not been long absent--merely a few months; but if you returned
now, you would be astonished by the progress which the Opposition, one
might say the Revolutionary Party, has already made. The disorders in
the university do not concern merely the students. I see in the affair
the beginning of serious dangers for public tranquillity and the
existing order of things. Young people, without distinction of costume,
uniform and origin, take part in the street demonstrations. Besides
the students of the university, there are the students of other
institutions, and a mass of people who are students only in name.
Among these last are certain gentlemen in long beards and a number of
revolutionnaires in crinoline, who are of all the most fanatical. Blue
collars--the distinguishing mark of the students' uniform--have become
the signe de ralliement. Almost all the professors and many officers
take the part of the students. The newspaper critics openly defend
their colleagues. Mikhailof has been convicted of writing, printing and
circulating one of the most violent proclamations that ever existed,
under the heading, 'To the young generation!' Among the students and the
men of letters there is unquestionably an organised conspiracy, which
has perhaps leaders outside the literary circle. . . . The police are
powerless. They arrest any one they can lay hands on. About eighty
people have already been sent to the fortress and examined, but all this
leads to no practical result, because the revolutionary ideas have taken
possession of all classes, all ages, all professions, and are publicly
expressed in the streets, in the barracks, and in the Ministries. I
believe the police itself is carried away by them! What this will lead
to, it is difficult to predict. I am very much afraid of some bloody
catastrophe. Even if it should not go to such a length immediately, the
position of the Government will be extremely difficult. Its authority
is shaken, and all are convinced that it is powerless, stupid and
incapable. On that point there is the most perfect unanimity among
all parties of all colours, even the most opposite. The most desperate
'planter'* agrees in that respect with the most desperate socialist.
Meanwhile those who have the direction of affairs do almost nothing and
have no plan or definite aim in view. At present the Emperor is not in
the Capital, and now, more than at any other time, there is complete
anarchy in the absence of the master of the house. There is a great deal
of bustle and talk, and all blame they know not whom."**
* An epithet commonly applied, at the time of the
Emancipation, to the partisans of serfage and the defenders
of the proprietors' rights.
** I found this interesting letter (which might have been
written today) thirty years ago among the private papers of
Nicholas Milutin, who played a leading part as an official
in the reforms of the time. It was first published in an
article on "Secret Societies in Russia," which I contributed
to the Fortnightly Review of 1st August, 1877.
The expected revolution did not take place, but timid people had no
difficulty in perceiving signs of its approach. The Press continued
to disseminate, under a more or less disguised form, ideas which
were considered dangerous. The Kolokol, a Russian revolutionary
paper published in London by Herzen and strictly prohibited by the
Press-censure, found its way in large quantities into the country, and,
as is recorded in an earlier chapter, was read by thousands, including
the higher officials and the Emperor himself, who found it regularly on
his writing-table, laid there by some unknown hand. In St. Petersburg
the arrest of Tchernishevski and the suspension of his magazine, The
Contemporary, made the writers a little more cautious in their mode of
expression, but the spirit of the articles remained unchanged. These
energetic intolerant leaders of public opinion were novi homines not
personally connected with the social strata in which moderate views and
retrograde tenderness had begun to prevail. Mostly sons of priests or
of petty officials, they belonged to a recently created literary
proletariat composed of young men with boundless aspirations and meagre
national resources, who earned a precarious subsistence by journalism or
by giving lessons in private families. Living habitually in a world of
theories and unrestrained by practical acquaintance with public life,
they were ready, from the purest and most disinterested motives to
destroy ruthlessly the existing order of things in order to realise
their crude notions of social regeneration. Their heated imagination
showed them in the near future a New Russia, composed of independent
federated Communes, without any bureaucracy or any central power--a
happy land in which everybody virtuously and automatically fulfilled
his public and private duties, and in which the policeman and all other
embodiments of material constraint were wholly superfluous.
Governments are not easily converted to Utopian schemes of that idyllic
type, and it is not surprising that even a Government with liberal
humanitarian aspirations like that of Alexander II. should have become
alarmed and should have attempted to stem the current. What is to be
regretted is that the repressive measures adopted were a little too
Oriental in their character. Scores of young students of both sexes--for
the Nihilist army included a strong female contingent--were secretly
arrested and confined for months in unwholesome prisons, and many
of them were finally exiled, without any regular trial, to distant
provinces in European Russia or to Siberia. Their exile, it is true, was
not at all so terrible as is commonly supposed, because political exiles
are not usually confined in prisons or compelled to labour in the
mines, but are obliged merely to reside at a given place under police
supervision. Still, such punishment was severe enough for educated young
men and women, especially when their lot was cast among a population
composed exclusively of peasants and small shop-keepers or of Siberian
aborigines, and when there were no means of satisfying the most
elementary intellectual wants. For those who had no private resources
the punishment was particularly severe, because the Government granted
merely a miserable monthly pittance, hardly sufficient to purchase food
of the coarsest kind, and there was rarely an opportunity of adding to
the meagre official allowance by intellectual or manual labour. In
all cases the treatment accorded to the exiles wounded their sense of
justice and increased the existing discontent among their friends and
acquaintances. Instead of acting as a deterrent, the system produced a
feeling of profound indignation, and ultimately transformed not a few
sentimental dreamers into active conspirators.
At first there was no conspiracy or regularly organised secret society
and nothing of which the criminal law in Western Europe could have taken
cognisance. Students met in each other's rooms to discuss prohibited
books on political and social science, and occasionally short essays on
the subjects discussed were written in a revolutionary spirit by members
of the coterie. This was called mutual instruction. Between the various
coteries or groups there were private personal relations, not only in
the capital, but also in the provinces, so that manuscripts and printed
papers could be transmitted from one group to another. From time to time
the police captured these academic disquisitions, and made raids on the
meetings of students who had come together merely for conversation and
discussion; and the fresh arrests caused by these incidents increased
the hostility to the Government.
In the letter above quoted it is said that the revolutionary ideas had
taken possession of all classes, all ages, and all professions. This may
have been true with regard to St. Petersburg, but it could not have
been said of the provinces. There the landed proprietors were in a very
different frame of mind. They had to struggle with a multitude of urgent
practical affairs which left them little time for idyllic dreaming about
an imaginary millennium. Their serfs had been emancipated, and what
remained to them of their estates had to be reorganised on the basis
of free labour. Into the semi-chaotic state of things created by such
far-reaching changes, legal and economic, they did not wish to see any
more confusion introduced, and they did not at all feel that they could
dispense with the Central Government and the policeman. On the contrary,
the Central Government was urgently needed in order to obtain a little
ready money wherewith to reorganise the estates in the new conditions,
and the police organisation required to be strengthened in order to
compel the emancipated serfs to fulfil their legal obligations. These
men and their families were, therefore, much more conservative than the
class commonly designated "the young generation," and they naturally
sympathised with the "Philistines" in St. Petersburg, who had been
alarmed by the exaggerations of the Nihilists.
Even the landed proprietors, however, were not so entirely free from
discontent and troublesome political aspirations as the Government would
have desired. They had not forgotten the autocratic and bureaucratic way
in which the Emancipation had been prepared, and their indignation had
been only partially appeased by their being allowed to carry out the
provisions of the law without much bureaucratic interference. So much
for the discontent. As for the reform aspirations, they thought that, as
a compensation for having consented to the liberation of their serfs and
for having been expropriated from about a half of their land, they ought
to receive extensive political rights, and be admitted, like the upper
classes in Western Europe, to a fair share in the government of the
country. Unlike the fiery young Nihilists of St. Petersburg, they did
not want to abolish or paralyse the central power; what they wanted
was to co-operate with it loyally and to give their advice on important
questions by means of representative institutions. They formed a
constitutional group which exists still at the present day, as we shall
see in the sequel, but which has never been allowed to develop into an
organised political party. Its aims were so moderate that its programme
might have been used as a convenient safety-valve for the explosive
forces which were steadily accumulating under the surface of Society,
but it never found favour in the official world. When some of its
leading members ventured to hint in the Press and in loyal addresses to
the Emperor that the Government would do well to consult the country on
important questions, their respectful suggestions were coldly received
or bluntly rejected by the bureaucracy and the Autocratic Power.
The more the revolutionary and constitutional groups sought to
strengthen their position, the more pronounced became the reactionary
tendencies in the official world, and these received in 1863 an immense
impetus from the Polish insurrection, with which the Nihilists and even
some of the Liberals sympathised.* That ill-advised attempt on the
part of the Poles to recover their independence had a curious effect
on Russian public opinion. Alexander II., with the warm approval of
the more Liberal section of the educated classes, was in the course of
creating for Poland almost complete administrative autonomy under
the viceroyalty of a Russian Grand Duke; and the Emperor's brother
Constantine was preparing to carry out the scheme in a generous spirit.
Soon it became evident that what the Poles wanted was not administrative
autonomy, but political independence, with the frontiers which existed
before the first partition! Trusting to the expected assistance of the
Western Powers and the secret connivance of Austria, they raised the
standard of insurrection, and some trifling successes were magnified by
the pro-Polish Press into important victories. As the news of the rising
spread over Russia, there was a moment of hesitation. Those who had been
for some years habitually extolling liberty and self-government as the
normal conditions of progress, who had been sympathising warmly with
every Liberal movement, whether at home or abroad, and who had put
forward a voluntary federation of independent Communes as the ideal
State organism, could not well frown on the political aspirations of
the Polish patriots. The Liberal sentiment of that time was so extremely
philosophical and cosmopolitan that it hardly distinguished between
Poles and Russians, and liberty was supposed to be the birthright of
every man and woman to whatever nationality they might happen to belong.
But underneath these beautiful artificial clouds of cosmopolitan Liberal
sentiment lay the volcano of national patriotism, dormant for the
moment, but by no means extinct. Though the Russians are in some
respects the most cosmopolitan of European nations, they are at the same
time capable of indulging in violent outbursts of patriotic
fanaticism; and events in Warsaw brought into hostile contact these two
contradictory elements in the national character. The struggle was only
momentary. Ere long the patriotic feelings gained the upper hand and
crushed all cosmopolitan sympathy with political freedom. The Moscow
Gazette, the first of the papers to recover its mental equilibrium,
thundered against the pseudo-Liberal sentimentalism, which would, if
unchecked, necessarily lead to the dismemberment of the Empire, and
its editor, Katkoff, became for a time the most influential private
individual in the country. A few, indeed, remained true to their
convictions. Herzen, for instance, wrote in the Kolokol a glowing
panegyric on two Russian officers who had refused to fire on the
insurgents; and here and there a good Orthodox Russian might be found
who confessed that he was ashamed of Muravieff's extreme severity
in Lithuania. But such men were few, and were commonly regarded as
traitors, especially after the ill-advised diplomatic intervention of
the Western Powers. Even Herzen, by his publicly expressed sympathy with
the insurgents, lost entirely his popularity and influence among his
fellow-countrymen. The great majority of the public thoroughly approved
of the severe energetic measures adopted by the Government, and when the
insurrection was suppressed, men who had a few months previously spoken
and written in magniloquent terms about humanitarian Liberalism joined
in the ovations offered to Muravieff! At a great dinner given in his
honour, that ruthless administrator of the old Muscovite type, who
had systematically opposed the emancipation of the serfs and had
never concealed his contempt for the Liberal ideas in fashion, could
ironically express his satisfaction at seeing around him so many "new
friends"!** This revulsion of public feeling gave the Moscow Slavophils
an opportunity of again preaching their doctrine that the safety
and prosperity of Russia were to be found, not in the Liberalism and
Constitutionalism of Western Europe, but in patriarchal autocracy,
Eastern Orthodoxy, and other peculiarities of Russian nationality.
Thus the reactionary tendencies gained ground; but Alexander II., while
causing all political agitation to be repressed, did not at once abandon
his policy of introducing radical reforms by means of the Autocratic
Power. On the contrary, he gave orders that the preparatory work for
creating local self-government and reorganising the Law Courts should be
pushed on energetically. The important laws for the establishment of the
Zemstvo and for the great judicial reforms, which I have described in
previous chapters, both date from the year 1864.
* The students of the St. Petersburg University scandalised
their more patriotic fellow-countrymen by making a
pro-Polish demonstration.
** In fairness to Count Muravieff I must say that he was not
quite so black as he was painted in the Polish and
West-European Press. He left an interesting autobiographical
fragment relating to the history of this time, but it is not
likely to be printed for some years. As an historical
document it is valuable, but must be used with caution by
the future historian. A copy of it was for some time in my
possession, but I was bound by a promise not to make
extracts.
These and other reforms of a less important kind made no impression on
the young irreconcilables. A small group of them, under the leadership
of a certain Ishutin, formed in Moscow a small secret society, and
conceived the design of assassinating the Emperor, in the hope that
his son and successor, who was erroneously supposed to be imbued with
ultra-Liberal ideas, might continue the work which his father had begun
and had not the courage to complete. In April, 1866, the attempt on the
life of the Emperor was made by a youth called Karakozof as his Majesty
was leaving a public garden in St. Petersburg, but the bullet happily
missed its mark, and the culprit was executed.
This incident formed a turning-point in the policy of the Government.
Alexander II. began to fear that he had gone too far, or, at least, too
quickly, in his policy of radical reform. An Imperial rescript announced
that law, property, and religion were in danger, and that the Government
would lean on the Noblesse and other conservative elements of Society.
The two periodicals which advocated the most advanced views (Sovremennik
and Russkoye Slovo) were suppressed permanently, and precautions were
taken to prevent the annual assemblies of the Zemstvo from giving public
expression to the aspirations of the moderate Liberals.
A secret official inquiry showed that the revolutionary agitation
proceeded in all cases from young men who were studying, or had recently
studied, in the universities, the seminaries, or the technical schools,
such as the Medical Academy and the Agricultural Institute. Plainly,
therefore, the system of education was at fault. The semi-military
system of the time of Nicholas had been supplanted by one in which
discipline was reduced to a minimum and the study of natural science
formed a prominent element. Here it was thought, lay the chief root of
the evil. Englishmen may have some difficulty in imagining a possible
connection between natural science and revolutionary agitation. To them
the two things must seem wide as the poles asunder. Surely mathematics,
chemistry, physiology, and similar subjects have nothing to do with
politics. When a young Englishman takes to studying any branch of
natural science he gets up his subject by means of lectures, text-books,
and museums or laboratories, and when he has mastered it he probably
puts his knowledge to some practical use. In Russia it is otherwise. Few
students confine themselves to their speciality. The majority of them
dislike the laborious work of mastering dry details, and, with the
presumption which is often found in conjunction with youth and a
smattering of knowledge, they aspire to become social reformers and
imagine themselves specially qualified for such activity.
But what, it may be asked, has social reform to do with natural science?
I have already indicated the connection in the Russian mind. Though very
few of the students of that time had ever read the voluminous works of
Auguste Comte, they were all more or less imbued with the spirit of
the Positive Philosophy, in which all the sciences are subsidiary
to sociology, and social reorganisation is the ultimate object of
scientific research. The imaginative Positivist can see with prophetic
eye humanity reorganised on strictly scientific principles. Cool-headed
people who have had a little experience of the world, if they ever
indulge in such delightful dreams, recognise clearly that this ultimate
goal of human intellectual activity, if it is ever to be reached,
is still a long way off in the misty distance of the future; but the
would-be social reformers among the Russian students of the sixties were
too young, too inexperienced, and too presumptuously self-confident to
recognise this plain, simple truth. They felt that too much valuable
time had been already lost, and they were madly impatient to begin
the great work without further delay. As soon as they had acquired
a smattering of chemistry, physiology, and biology they imagined
themselves capable of reorganising human society from top to bottom, and
when they had acquired this conviction they were of course unfitted for
the patient, plodding study of details.
To remedy these evils, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, who was regarded as a
pillar of Conservatism, was appointed Minister of Public Instruction,
with the mission of protecting the young generation against pernicious
ideas, and eradicating from the schools, colleges, and universities all
revolutionary tendencies. He determined to introduce more discipline
into all the educational establishments and to supplant to a certain
extent the superficial study of natural science by the thorough study of
the classics--that is to say, Latin and Greek. This scheme, which became
known before it was actually put into execution, produced a storm of
discontent in the young generation. Discipline at that time was regarded
as an antiquated and useless remnant of patriarchal tyranny, and young
men who were impatient to take part in social reorganisation resented
being treated as naughty schoolboys. To them it seemed that the
Latin grammar was an ingenious instrument for stultifying youthful
intelligence, destroying intellectual development, and checking
political progress. Ingenious speculations about the possible
organisation of the working classes and grandiose views of the future
of humanity are so much more interesting and agreeable than the rules of
Latin syntax and the Greek irregular verbs!
Count Tolstoy could congratulate himself on the efficacy of his
administration, for from the time of his appointment there was a lull in
the political excitement. During three or four years there was only one
political trial, and that an insignificant one; whereas there had been
twenty between 1861 and 1864, and all more or less important. I am not
at all sure, however, that the educational reform which created
much momentary irritation and discontent had anything to do with the
improvement in the situation. In any case, there were other and more
potent causes at work. The excitement was too intense to be long-lived,
and the fashionable theories too fanciful to stand the wear and tear of
everyday life. They evaporated, therefore, with amazing rapidity when
the leaders of the movement had disappeared--Tchernishevski and others
by exile, and Dobrolubof and Pissaref by death--and when among the less
prominent representatives of the younger generation many succumbed to
the sobering influences of time and experience or drifted into lucrative
professions. Besides this, the reactionary currents were making
themselves felt, especially since the attempt on the life of the
Emperor. So long as these had been confined to the official world they
had not much affected the literature, except externally through
the Press-censure, but when they permeated the reading public their
influence was much stronger. Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that,
in the last years of the sixties, there was a subsidence of excitement
and enthusiasm and the peculiar intellectual phenomenon which had been
nicknamed Nihilism was supposed to be a thing of the past. In reality
the movement of which Nihilism was a prominent manifestation had merely
lost something of its academic character and was entering on a new stage
of development.