ALEXANDER II. ASSASSINATED--NIHILISM
The emancipation had been a disappointment to its promoters and to the
serfs themselves. It was an appalling fact that year after year the
death-rate had alarmingly increased, and its cause was--starvation. In
lands the richest in the world, tilled by a people with a passion for
agriculture, there was not enough bread! The reasons for this are too
complex to be stated here, but a few may have brief mention. The
allotment of land bestowed upon each liberated serf was too small to
enable him to live and to pay his taxes, unless the harvests were
always good and he was always employed. He need not live, but his
taxes must be paid. It required three days' work out of each week to
do that; and if he had not the money when the dreaded day arrived, the
tax-collector might sell his corn, his cattle, his farming implements,
and his house. But reducing whole communities to beggary was not wise,
so a better way was discovered, and one which entailed no disastrous
economic results. He was flogged. The time selected for this settling
of accounts was when the busy season was over; and Stepniak tells us it
was not an unusual thing for more than one thousand peasants in the
winter--in a single commune--to be seen awaiting their turn to have
their taxes "flogged out." Of course, before this was endured all
means had been exhausted for raising the required amount. Usury, that
surest road to ruin, and the one offering the least resistance, was the
one ordinarily followed. Thus was created that destructive class
called _Koulaks_, or _Mir-eaters_, who, while they fattened upon the
necessities of the peasantry, also demoralized the state by creating a
wealthy and powerful class whom it would not do to offend, and whose
abominable and nefarious interests must not be interfered with.
Then another sort of bondage was discovered, one very nearly
approaching to serfdom. Wealthy proprietors would make loans to
distressed communes or to individuals, the interest of the money to be
paid by the peasants in a stipulated number of days' work every week
until the original amount was returned. Sometimes, by a clause in the
contract increasing the amount in case of failure to pay at a certain
time, the original debt, together with the accruing interest, would be
four or five times doubled. And if, as was probable, the principal
never was returned, the peasant worked on year after year gratuitously,
in the helpless, hopeless bondage of debt. Nor were these the worst of
their miseries, for there were the _Tchinovniks_--or government
officials--who could mete out any punishment they pleased, could order
a whole community to be flogged, or at any moment invoke the aid of a
military force or even lend it to private individuals for the
subjugation of refractory peasants.
And this was what they had been waiting and hoping for, for two
centuries and a half! But with touching loyalty not one of them
thought of blaming the Tsar. Their "Little Father," if he only knew
about it, would make everything right. It was the nobility, the wicked
nobility, that had brought all this misery upon them and cheated them
out of their happiness! They hated the nobility for stealing from them
their freedom and their land; and the nobility hated them for not being
prosperous and happy, and for bringing famine and misery into the
state, which had been so kind and had emancipated them.
As these conditions became year after year more aggravated acute minds
in Russia were employed in trying to solve the great social problems
they presented. In a land in which the associative principle was
indigenous, _Socialism_ was a natural and inevitable growth. Then,
exasperated by the increasing miseries of the peasantry, maddened by
the sufferings of political exiles in Siberia, there came into
existence that word of dire significance in Russia--_Nihilism_, and
following quickly upon that, its logical sequence--_Anarchism_, which,
if it could, would destroy all the fruits of civilization.
It was Turguenief who first applied the ancient term "Nihilist" to a
certain class of radical thinkers in Russia, whose theory of society,
like that of the eighteenth-century philosophers in France, was based
upon a negation of the principle of authority. All institutions,
social and political, however disguised, were tyrannies, and must go.
In the newly awakened Russian mind, this first assumed the mild form of
a demand for the removal of _legislative_ tyranny, by a system of
gradual reforms. This had failed--now the demand had become a mandate.
The people _must_ have relief. The Tsar was the one person who could
bestow it, and if he would not do so voluntarily, he must be compelled
to grant it. No one man had the right to wreck the happiness of
millions of human beings. If the authority was centralized, so was the
responsibility. Alexander's entire reign had been a curse--and
emancipation was a delusion and a lie. He must yield or perish. This
vicious and degenerate organization had its center in a highly educated
middle class, where men with nineteenth-century intelligence and
aspirations were in frenzied revolt against methods suited to the time
of the Khans. The inspiring motive was not love of the people, but
hatred of their oppressors. Appeals to the peasantry brought small
response, but the movement was eagerly joined by men and women from the
highest ranks in Russia.
Secret societies and organizations were everywhere at work, recruited
by misguided enthusiasts, and by human suffering from all classes.
Wherever there were hearts bruised and bleeding from official cruelty,
in whatever ranks, there the terrible propaganda found sympathizers, if
not a home; men--and still more, women--from the highest families in
the nobility secretly pledging themselves to the movement, until
Russian society was honeycombed with conspiracy extending even to the
household of the Tsar. Proclamations were secretly issued calling upon
the peasantry to arise. In spite of the vigilance of the police,
similar invitations to all the Russian people were posted in
conspicuous places--"We are tired of famine, tired of having our sons
perish upon the gallows, in the mines, or in exile. Russia demands
liberty; and if she cannot have liberty--she will have vengeance!"
Such was the tenor of the threats which made the life of Emperor
Alexander a miserable one after 1870. He had done what not one of his
predecessors had been willing to do. He had, in the face of the
bitterest opposition, bestowed the gift of freedom upon 23,000,000
human beings. In his heart he believed he deserved the good-will and
the gratitude of his subjects. How gladly would he have ruled over a
happy empire! But what could he do? He had absolute power to make his
people miserable--but none to make them happy. It was not his fault
that he occupied a throne which could only be made secure by a policy
of stern repression. It was not his fault that he ruled through a
system so elementary, so crude, so utterly inadequate, that to
administer justice was an impossibility. Nor was it his fault that he
had inherited autocratic instincts from a long line of ancestors. In
other words, it was not his fault that he was the Tsar of Russia!
The grim shadow of assassination pursued him wherever he went. In 1879
the imperial train was destroyed by mines placed beneath the tracks.
In 1880 the imperial apartments in "the Winterhof" were partially
wrecked by similar means. Seventeen men marched stolidly to the
gallows, regretting nothing except the failure of their crime; and
hundreds more who were implicated in the plot were sent into perpetual
exile in Siberia. The hand never relaxed--nor was the Constitution
demanded by these atrocious means granted.
On the 13th of March, 1881, while the Emperor was driving, a bomb was
thrown beneath his carriage. He stepped out of the wreck unhurt. Then
as he approached the assassin, who had been seized by the police,
another was thrown. Alexander fell to the ground, exclaiming, "Help
me!" Terribly mutilated, but conscious, the dying Emperor was carried
into his palace, and there in a few hours he expired.
In the splendid obsequies of the Tsar, nothing was more touching than
the placing of a wreath upon his bier by a deputation of peasants. It
can be best described in their own words. The Emperor was lying in the
Cathedral wrapped in a robe of ermine, beneath a canopy of gold and
silver cloth lined with ermine. "At last we were inside the church,"
says the narrative. "We all dropped on our knees and sobbed, our tears
flowing like a stream. Oh, what grief! We rose from our knees, again
we knelt, and again we sobbed. This did we three times, our hearts
breaking beside the coffin of our benefactor. There are no words to
express it. And what honor was done us! The General took our wreath,
and placed it straightway upon the breast of our Little Father. Our
peasants' wreath laid on his heart, his martyr breast--as we were in
all his life nearest to his heart! Seeing this we burst again into
tears. Then the General let us kiss his hand--and there he lay, our
Tsar-martyr, with a calm, loving expression on his face--as if he, our
Little Father, had fallen asleep."
If anything had been needed to make the name Nihilism forever odious,
it was this deed. If anything were required to reveal the bald
wickedness of the creed of Nihilism, it was supplied by this aimless
sacrifice of the one sovereign who had bestowed a colossal reform upon
Russia. They had killed him, and had then marched unflinchingly to the
gallows--and that was all--leaving others bound by solemn oaths to
bring the same fate upon his successor. The whole energy of the
organization was centered in secreting dynamite, awaiting a favorable
moment for its explosion, then dying like martyrs, leaving others
pledged to repeat the same horror--and so _ad infinitum_. In their
detestation of one crime they committed a worse one. They conspired
against the life of civilization--as if it were not better to be ruled
by despots than assassins, as if a bad government were not better than
none!
The existence of Nihilism may be explained, though not extenuated. Can
anyone estimate the effect upon a single human being to have known that
a father, brother, son, sister, or wife has perished under the knout?
Could such a person ever again be capable of reasoning calmly or sanely
upon "political reforms"? If there were any slumbering tiger-instincts
in this half-Asiatic people, was not this enough to awaken them? There
were many who had suffered this, and there were thousands more who at
that very time had friends, lovers, relatives, those dearer to them
than life, who were enduring day by day the tortures of exile, subject
to the brutal punishments of irresponsible officials. It was this
which had converted hundreds of the nobility into conspirators--this
which had made Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of one of the highest
officials in the land, give the signal for the murder of the Emperor,
and then, scorning mercy, insist that she should have the privilege of
dying upon the gallows with the rest.
But tiger-instincts, whatever their cause, must be extinguished. They
cannot coexist with civilization. Human society as constituted to-day
can recognize no excuse for them. It forbids them--and the Nihilist is
the Ishmael of the nineteenth century.
The world was not surprised, and perhaps not even displeased, when
Alexander III. showed a dogged determination not to be coerced into
reforms by the assassination of his father nor threats of his own. His
coronation, long deferred by the tragedy which threatened to attend it,
finally took place with great splendor at Moscow in 1883. He then
withdrew to his palace at Gatschina, where he remained practically a
prisoner. Embittered by the recollection of the fate of his father,
who had died in his arms, and haunted by conspiracies for the
destruction of himself and his family, he was probably the least happy
man in his empire. His every act was a protest against the spirit of
reform. The privileges so graciously bestowed upon the Grand Duchy of
Finland by Alexander I. were for the first time invaded. Literature
and the press were placed under rigorous censorship. The _Zemstvo_,
his father's gift of local self-government to the liberated serfs, was
practically withdrawn by placing that body under the control of the
nobility.
[Illustration: The Coronation of the Czar Alexander III., 1883. The
Emperor crowning the Empress at the Church of the Assumption. From a
drawing by Edwin B. Child.]
It was a stern, joyless reign, without one act intended to make glad
the hearts of the people. The depressing conditions in which he lived
gradually undermined the health of the Emperor. He was carried in
dying condition to Livadia, and there, surrounded by his wife and his
children, he expired November 1, 1894.