LIBERALISM--EMANCIPATION OF SERFS
When his life and the hard-earned conquests of centuries were together
slipping away, the dying Emperor said to his son: "All my care has been
to leave Russia safe without and prosperous within. But you see how it
is. I am dying, and I leave you a burden which will be hard to bear."
Alexander II., the young man upon whom fell these responsibilities, was
thirty-seven years old. His mother was Princess Charlotte of Prussia,
sister of the late Emperor William, who succeeded to the throne of
Prussia, left vacant by his brother in 1861.
His first words to his people were a passionate justification of his
father,--"of blessed memory,"--his aims and purposes, and a solemn
declaration that he should remain true to his line of conduct, which
"God and history would vindicate." It was a man of ordinary flesh and
blood promising to act like a man of steel. His own nature and the
circumstances of his realm both forbade it. The man on the throne
could not help listening attentively to the voice of the people. There
must be peace. The country was drained of men and of money. There
were not enough peasants left to till the fields. The landed
proprietors with their serfs in the ranks were ruined, and had not
money with which to pay the taxes, upon which the prosecution of a
hopeless war depended. Victor Emmanuel had joined the allies with a
Sardinian army; and the French, by a tremendous onslaught, had captured
Malakof, the key to the situation in the Crimea. Prince Gortchakof,
who had replaced Prince Menschikof, was only able to cover a retreat
with a mantle of glory. The end had come.
A treaty of peace was signed March 30, 1856. Russia renounced the
claim of an exclusive protectorate over the Turkish provinces, yielded
the free navigation of the Danube, left Turkey the Roumanian
principalities, and, hardest of all, she lost the control of the Black
Sea. Its waters were forbidden to men-of-war of all nations; no
arsenals, military or maritime, to exist upon its shores. The fruits
of Russian policy since Peter the Great were annihilated, and the work
of two centuries of progress was canceled.
Who and what was to blame for these calamities? Why was it that the
Russian army could successfully compete with Turks and Asiatics, and
not with Europeans? The reason began to be obvious, even to stubborn
Russian Conservatives. A nation, in order to compete in war in this
age, must have a grasp upon the arts of peace. An army drawn from a
civilized nation is a more effective instrument than one drawn from a
barbarous one. The time had passed when there might be a few highly
educated and subtle intelligences thinking for millions of people in
brutish ignorance. The time had arrived when it must be recognized
that Russia was not made for a few great and powerful people, for whom
the rest, an undistinguishable mass, must toil and suffer. In other
words, it must be a nation--and not a dynasty nourished by misery and
supported by military force.
Men high in rank no longer flaunted their titles and insignia of
office. They shrank from drawing attention to their share of
responsibility in the great calamity, and listened almost humbly to the
suggestions of liberal leaders, suggestions which, a few months ago,
none dared whisper except behind closed doors. A new literature sprang
into life, unrebuked, dealing with questions of state policy with a
fearless freedom never before dreamed of. Conservative Russia had
suddenly vanished under a universal conviction that the hope of their
nation was in Liberalism.
The Emperor recalled from Siberia the exiles of the conspiracy of 1825,
and also the Polish exiles of 1831. There was an honest effort made to
reform the wretched judicial system and to adopt the methods which
Western experience had found were the best. The obstructions to
European influences were removed, and all joined hands in an effort to
devise means of bringing the whole people up to a higher standard of
intelligence and well-being. Russia was going to be regenerated. Men,
in a rapture of enthusiasm and with tears, embraced each other on the
streets. One wrote: "The heart trembles with joy. Russia is like a
stranded ship which the captain and the crew are powerless to move; now
there is to be a rising tide of national life which will raise and
float it."
Such was the prevailing public sentiment in 1861, when Emperor
Alexander affixed his name to the measure which was going to make it
forever glorious--the emancipation of over twenty-three million human
beings from serfdom. It would require another volume to tell even in
outline the wrongs and sufferings of this class, upon whom at last
rested the prosperity and even the life of the nation, who, absolutely
subject to the will of one man, might at his pleasure be conscripted
for military service for a term of from thirty to forty years, or at
his displeasure might be sent to Siberia to work in the mines for life;
and who, in no place or at no time, had protection from any form of
cruelty which the greed of the proprietor imposed upon them. Selling
the peasants without the land, unsanctioned by law, became sanctioned
by custom, until finally its right was recognized by imperial ukases,
so that serfdom, which in theory presented a mild exterior, was in
practice and in fact a terrible and unmitigated form of human slavery.
Patriarchalism has a benignant sound--it is better than something that
is worse! It is a step upward from a darker quagmire of human
condition. When Peter the Great, with his terrible broom, swept all
the free peasants into the same mass with the unfree serfs, and when he
established the empire upon a chain of service to be rendered to the
nobility by the peasantry, and then to the state by the nobility, he
simply applied to the whole state the Slavonic principle existing in
the social unit--the family. And while he was Europeanizing the
surface, he was completing a structure of paternalism, which was
Asiatic and incompatible with its new garment--an incongruity which in
time must bring disorder, and compel radical and difficult reforms.
To remove a foundation stone is a delicate and difficult operation. It
needed courage of no ordinary sort to break up this serfdom encrusted
with tyrannies. It was a gigantic social experiment, the results of
which none could foresee. Alexander's predecessors had thought and
talked of it, but had not dared to try it. Now the time was ripe, and
the man on the throne had the nerve required for its execution.
The means by which this revolution was effected may be briefly
described in a sentence. The Crown purchased from the proprietors the
land--with the peasants attached to it, and then bestowed the land upon
the peasants with the condition that for forty-five years they should
pay to the Crown six per cent. interest upon the amount paid by it for
the land. It was the commune or _mir_ which accepted the land and
assumed the obligation and the duty of seeing that every individual
paid his annual share of rental (or interest money) upon the land
within his inclosure, which was supposed to be sufficient for his own
maintenance and the payment of the government tax.
These simple people, who had been dreaming of emancipation for years,
as a vague promise of relief from sorrow, heard with astonishment that
now they were expected to pay for their land! Had it not always
belonged to them? The Slavonic idea of ownership of land through labor
was the only one of which they could conceive, and it had survived
through all the centuries of serfdom, when they were accustomed to say:
"We are yours, but the land is ours." Instead of twenty-five million
people rejoicing with grateful hearts, there was a ferment of
discontent and in some places uprisings--one peasant leader telling ten
thousand who rose at his call that the Emancipation Law was a forgery,
they were being deceived and not permitted to enjoy what the Tsar,
their "Little Father," had intended for their happiness. But
considering the intricate difficulties attending such a tremendous
change in the social conditions, the emancipation was easily effected
and the Russian peasants, by the survival of their old Patriarchal
institutions, were at once provided with a complete system of local
self-government in which the ancient Slavonic principle was unchanged.
At the head of the commune or _mir_ was the elder, a group of communes
formed a _Volost_, and the head of the _Volost_ was responsible for the
peace and order of the community. To this was later added the
_Zemstvo_ a representative assembly of peasants, for the regulation of
local matters.
Such a new reign of clemency awakened hope in Poland that it too might
share these benefits. First it was a Constitution such as had been
given to Hungary for which they prayed. Then, as Italy was
emancipating herself, they grew bolder, and, incited by societies of
Polish exiles, all over Europe, demanded more: that they be given
independence. Again the hope of a Polo-Lithuanian alliance, and a
recovery of the lost Polish provinces in the Ukraine, and the
reestablishment of an independent kingdom of Poland, dared to assert
itself, and to invite a more complete destruction.
The liberal Russians might have sympathized with the first moderate
demand, but when by the last there was an attempt made upon the
integrity of Russia, there was but one voice in the empire. So cruel
and so vindictive was the punishment of the Poles, by Liberals and
Conservatives alike, that Europe at last in 1863 protested. The Polish
language and even alphabet were prohibited. Every noble in the land
had been involved in this last conspiracy. They were ordered to sell
their lands, and all Poles were forbidden to be its purchasers.
Nothing of Poland was left which could ever rise again.