THE DESCENT TO AUTOCRACY
IT is sometimes said that the Slav people lost its democratic
institutions because it was too pacific to defend them. It is true that
an agricultural people would tend to be more pacific than hunting tribes
like the Asiatics who surrounded them, but the native peacefulness of
the Slav has probably been exaggerated. The early Russians seem to have
been as much addicted to hunting and fishing as to tilling the soil, and
the long winter, when all agricultural work was suspended for six
months, would encourage the men to hunt the furry animals which
abounded. Certain it is that both the monk Nestor and the Greek Emperor
Maurice represent the primitive Slav as far from meek, and the chronicle
informs us of constant and even deadly quarrelling.
The truth is that the democracy of the Slavs was too little developed.
It was nearer akin to Anarchism than to Socialism, and the mind of the
race was not as yet sufficiently advanced to grasp the political
exigencies of the new situation. There was no national consciousness,
and there could be no national defence and administration, because there
was no nation; and a body of disconnected communities, scattered over a
wide area, was in those days bound to succumb to marauders.
Russian historians of the official school eagerly point out that the
situation plainly called for a monarchic institution, and that the
monarchs rendered great service in welding the scattered communities
into a nation. That they did unite the people and make the great Russia
of to-day is obvious. It is equally obvious that, with rare exceptions,
they did this in their own interest, and that in all cases they exacted
a reward which made serfs of the independent Slavs, sowed corruption
amongst the rising middle class, and laid upon all an intolerable
burden.
The period of the Norse warrior-chiefs and their descendants lasted
about three centuries, and it fully exposes the fallacy of the monarchic
principle. From being military servants the Norsemen rapidly became, as
is customary, princes and parasites. As long as they discharged their
duty, binding the communities and securing for them the necessary peace
against external foes, this departure from the primitive democracy might
be regarded as merely a regrettable necessity. But the sheep soon found
that the protecting dog was first-cousin of the wolf, The principle of
hereditary succession and the practice of providing for all sons and
relatives soon led to a worse confusion than ever, and the distracted
and weakened country was prepared for a foreign invasion. The long and
sanguinary history of the descendants of Rurik may be briefly sketched
before we see how the autocratic Mongols beat a path for the autocratic
Tsars.
Oleg, who had united the Slav tribes under his ill-defined rule, was
murdered in the year 945. To the north of Kieff a tribe known as the
Drevlians (“tree-folk”) wandered in the forests and paid a reluctant and
uncertain tribute in furs. When Oleg tried to enforce his tax upon
these, they captured him and tied him to two young trees in such fashion
that, when the bent trees were released, Oleg’s body was torn asunder.
Oleg’s widow, Olga, was a handsome Valkyrie of the masterful northern
type, and she sent her armies to scatter the thunders of Thor among the
wild foresters. It is said that she afterwards visited the Greek capital
and was won to the Christian religion. She lives as St. Olga in the
calendar of the Russian Church. Her successor involved the Russians in
long and terrible wars with Constantinople, to enforce his ambitious
claim to Bulgaria, and at his death the fierce feuds and murders of his
three sons plunged the country into a condition of bloody anarchy.
From this sordid strife of the shepherds whom the Slavs had hired to
protect them there emerged in 972, over the corpses of his brothers, the
blond beast St. Vladimir, the founder of Christianity in Russia. To what
extent the lusty and lustful Prince Vladimir was, as the priestly
chronicles maintain, transformed into a saint during his life we need
not stay to consider. He seems to have been converted as superficially
as his prototype, the Emperor Constantine. He was married to a beautiful
nun who had been torn from a convent during one of the raids upon the
Greek Empire, and whom he had taken from his murdered brother; and
thousands of concubines relieved the comparative tedium of her
companionship. The monastic chronicle tells us, in trite language, that
he at length wearied of sin and sought more substantial spiritual aid
than the paganism of his fathers could afford. Judaism, Mohammedanism,
and Christianity now offered their rival assurances to such a promising
penitent, and it is said that Vladimir, with the broad-mindedness of a
modern Japanese, sent his servants to inquire into the merits of the
three religions. The rich ritual of the Greek Christians at
Constantinople prevailed over the more sober practices of the
Mohammedans and the less consoling assurances of the religion of the Old
Testament, and Vladimir became a Christian and a saint.
But the chronicles also recount that Vladimir, whose principality of
Russia was now so important that it could sustain wars with the Greeks,
sought a matrimonial alliance with the royal house of Constantinople,
and the prosy imagination of our time finds here a safer clue to the
development. The Emperors Basil and Constantine replied that the hand of
their sister Anne would be bestowed upon the experienced barbarian if he
would consent to baptism; and Greek priests, who were apt also to be
courtiers, were sent to expound to him the new religion. Vladimir
readily consented to pay so small a price for so great an honour and
advantage. He threw into the river the idols of the Russian
gods--these carven figures had been introduced since the settlement
in Russia--and lent his energy and truculence to the extirpation of
paganism. His people were driven in troops into the rivers, the Greek
priests pronounced over them the sacred formula, and in a very short
time the nature-gods of the old Slavs and Norsemen were turned into
devils and the cross of Christ glittered above gilded domes in the
wooden settlements of the land. Vladimir was so generous to the new
clergy that he died in the odour of sanctity.
But the sins of Vladimir’s pagan manhood lived after him. Seven
sons, by various legitimate mothers, claimed the succession to his
dominions, and there ensued such bloody anarchy as the handsome Teutonic
princes, no matter what gods they worshipped, knew how to create. As
usual the fitter to survive in such a world--the more lusty and
less scrupulous--emerged from the struggle, and Prince Iaroslaf,
one of the heroes of early Russian history, reunited the various regions
under his rule.
Iaroslaf has been compared, not quite ineptly, to Charlemagne. From
Novgorod, which his father had left him, he cut his way to Kieff, and
definitely made the southern city the metropolis of the country. Kieff
was enriched and adorned with a splendour which, in the mind of the
Russians, rivalled that of Constantinople. The southern rivers now bore
thousands of Greek artists and architects, musicians and scholars,
priests and courtiers, to the new capital of barbarism. Four hundred
churches soon shone like gilt mushrooms in the summer sun, and the
grateful clergy discovered that a monarchy which rested on a divine
foundation in Constantinople could hardly have an inferior basis in
Kieff. Iaroslaf, it is true, was not a monarch in title, Russia had no
constitution or political organisation. It was still semi-barbaric in
culture and judicial procedure. The duel, the ordeal, and the payment of
blood-money still flourished, and literacy existed only in the form of
feeble lamps here and there in the vast darkness. It must be remembered
that Constantinople itself was, with all its splendour of gold and
mosaics and jewels and silks, half barbaric in its moral complexion. The
most sordid and brutal crimes disgraced its palace-life on the
shores of the Sea of Marmora, and the most revolting penalties of vice
and crime were publicly inflicted. The discovery by modern apologists
that there was a glow-worm here and there does not relieve the terrible
gloom of the Dark Ages.
In such an age, amidst so scattered and helpless a people, Iaroslaf
needed no kingly title to enable him to act as monarch. To sustain the
new splendour of Kieff and his court--his sister and daughters married
into the royal families of Poland, Norway, France, and Hungary--a larger
tribute from the people was needed, and it was not meekly solicited.
Russian historians of the old school have dilated upon the magnificence
with which Iaroslaf invested his capital and the measure of prestige
which Russia gained in the eyes of the world. They do not point out that
this concentration of light at Kieff and the court darkened the life of
the Russian people. For the first time we now encounter the odious name
for a child of the soil _moujik_. Foreigners who lightly repeat that
name to-day are unaware that it is in origin a term of disdain. It means
“mannikin.” The warriors in glittering armour or shining silks who
gathered about the court were the prince’s “men.” The vast mass of the
people, whose labour ultimately paid for this magnificence, were
“mannikins.”
The burden fell most heavily upon the scattered peasantry. Not only were
the “legitimate” taxes wrung from them, but the military
leaders exacted tribute to support their own splendour and pleasure. The
feudal system, which now prevailed over the remainder of Europe, was not
introduced. The land was still the possession of the people, and
military chiefs remained about the court instead of raising, as they did
where stone abounded, massive provincial castles from which they might
enslave the peasantry and even defy the ruler. But in their excursions
the soldiers behaved as wantonly as feudal barons of the west, and the
people sank under the burden. Slavery still flourished in Christendom,
and many a Slav found his way to the distant market at Constantinople.
Moreover, under the degenerate Greek influence there was introduced the
practice of flogging and torture which the rough chivalry of the
northerners had hitherto avoided.
To say that the unity of faith, the protection against invaders, and the
introduction of art and a small amount of mediocre culture compensate
for these evils is an historical mockery. The death of Iaroslaf at once
revealed the insecurity and selfishness of the regime he had
established. It was followed by two hundred years of civil warfare and
murderous confusion. Eighty-three struggles which seem worthy of the
name of wars devastated Russia during those two centuries, and over the
enfeebled frontiers the waiting tribes repeatedly poured while the
guardians of the Russian people slew each other for their petty
principalities. Sons, legitimate and illegitimate, abounded in that
world of blond warriors, and the successful chief provided for each out
of his dominion. Titles were disputed, or the old title of the longer
sword was boldly advanced. A dozen large principalities were carved out
of the princedom of Iaroslaf, and fragments of these were constantly
detached by heredity and restored by war.
It is not my intention to follow the grisly chronicles over this
prolonged anarchy and select for admiration the heroic butcheries of
some strong-armed soldier. For our purpose it suffices to notice that
the mass of the Russian people were, as a rule, the passive and
suffering spectators of this brutal pandemonium. During the summers
they sowed and gathered their corn and flax, and the long winters
occupied them with the making of clothes and the quest of fur. The Mir
was still the centre of every village. But a tithe of its produce had
now to go to sustain this costly petty monarchy, a tithe to support the
whitened monasteries and gold-domed churches, and a tithe to repair the
damage when the tornado of civil war or some fierce band of Asiatics had
passed over their district. There were, we shall see, provinces of
Russia where the larger intelligence of the townsmen saw that the proper
thing to do was to form a strong republic, armed in its own defence.
These still hated “tyranny” and sustained the old tradition
of the race. But the greater part of the Russian people were not
sufficiently developed to perceive this, or were too scattered to
achieve it, and they sank under the military power they had invited to
serve them.
A few pages borrowed from the story of this dark period of anarchy will
suffice to explain how Russia was prepared for the later schemes of the
Moscovites. Kieff remained “the mother of Russian cities,” and it was
natural that, as its princes founded petty princedoms here and there for
their descendants, the more ambitious of these should invent a title to
the rule of the metropolis itself or found rival cities. One of the
chief of these new principalities was Suzdal, on the Volga and the Oka.
Here, at the extremity of the Russia of the time, a large dominion was
created out of the marshes and forests, and braced by incessant
conflicts with the neighbouring Finns. George Dolgoruki, who, after
failing to get Kieff, had founded this principality, regarded it as in
an especial sense his own creation and possession, and his monarchic
sentiment was strengthened.
But the democratic tradition was not wholly obliterated, and the military
caste itself--the _boyars_, or captains of the troops--formed some check
upon the will of the prince. George’s successor, therefore, Andrew
Bogolyubski, an astute and ambitious man, made a new capital of a small
town or village called Vladimir. Andrew possessed the supposed miraculous
painting of the face of Christ, which had once been the great treasure
of Constantinople, and he professed that this gave him some special
measure of divine guidance. He pitched his camp near the village of
Vladimir, and shortly afterward the people of Suzdal heard with
consternation that he had been divinely directed to convert the little
settlement into his capital. Andrew had the great advantage of being
extremely pious and generous to the clergy, as nearly every great
Russian adventurer has been. The priests warmly supported him, and
Vladimir soon grew into a city.
Kieff still had an immeasurably greater splendour, and was in closer
touch with Constantinople. Andrew raised a large army and led it south
against the metropolis. A three days’ siege was followed by three days
of such pillage that Kieff lost forever its supremacy. Even the churches
and monasteries were looted, and the golden treasures of both palace and
cathedral were carried off to enrich the aspiring city of Vladimir.
Flushed with this and other triumphs Andrew then turned his arms against
the republic of Novgorod, where the old democratic spirit was best
preserved, and, after fierce fighting, compelled it to accept a prince
of his own nomination. He extended his rule in other directions, setting
a conspicuous example of autocracy and ambition to the Princes of Moscow
who would later issue from his blood. But Russia was not yet reduced to
the state of servility which Andrew’s design of supremacy
required. In 1174 his powerful boyars rebelled and assassinated him, and
the oppressed people rose in turn and vented their democratic sentiment
in the pillage and slaughter of the rich.
This is but one outstanding figure amidst the host of brutal soldiers or
scheming princes who fill the chronicle of the time with blood. It is a
wearisome repetition of the same process. A strong or unscrupulous man
unites a large part of Russia under his sway, then a group of less
strong, but not less ambitious, sons and grandsons fight for the spoil
over the helpless bodies of the peasantry. Those who succeed must reward
their boyars and the clergy, and the land of Russia passes more and more
into the hands of large proprietors and is worked by slaves. “If you
want the honey, you must kill the bees,” was the characteristic remark
of one of these descendants of Rurik, as he despatched his victims; and
the little restraint which their new faith imposed upon them may be
gathered from the flippant retort of another princeling, who was accused
of breaking an oath solemnly made over a cross: “It was only a little
cross.”
There were, as I said, northern parts where the democratic evolution
proceeded healthily. Novgorod, a large northern city of a hundred
thousand souls, rising in the centre of a beautiful plain fringed by
forests, had become a republic with wide territory and three hundred
thousand subjects beyond the rude defences of the city. There is a
legend that it had rebelled even against Rurik, the first Scandinavian
adventurer. It accepted, of its own choice, what had come to be called
princes, but it endorsed or rejected them, and curtailed their powers,
with a good deal of civic pride and independence. “Come and rule
us yourself or else we will choose a prince,” the citizens said to
a Grand Prince of Kieff who ordered them to receive his nominee. To
another Grand Prince, who would send his son to govern them, a later
generation of citizens replied: “Send him--if he has a head
to spare.” They had even an independent Church and elected their
archbishop. The old democratic _Véché_, or council of citizens,
was the central institution of the city, and the great bell summoned all
to the market-square whenever some business of importance called for a
decision. The neighbouring republics of Pskoff and Viatka were hardly
less faithful to the democratic tradition. While these territories were
the farthest from Constantinople, they were nearest to Germany and the
Baltic, and they were enriched by the commerce which was then beginning
to civilise the northern cities.
[IMAGE: img028.jpg Tatars of the Mongol Period]
Even Novgorod, we saw, felt the heavy hand of Andrew of Vladimir, and
the remainder of Russia steadily lost its vitality under the drain of
civil war. Upon this distracted and enfeebled population there now fell
an autocratic ruler of the most arbitrary character. The year 1237 is,
in the chronicles, one of calamities and portents. The fires which so
often devoured the timber settlements of the Slavs were more numerous
and destructive than ever. Drought and famine made haggard faces over
large regions, and from the sky a terrifying eclipse and other portents
seemed to mock their prayers for deliverance. As the dreadful year
passed a new evil broke upon them. Into the southern principalities
poured crowds of fugitives from the east, who told that immense hordes
of ferocious and inhuman horsemen were covering the land and completing
its desolation. Toward the close of the year the first wave of the
Tatars shook the southern frontiers of the Slavs.
Asia had, as well as Europe, its adventurers, and the baleful dream of
conquest had lit the imagination of a Tatar chief, Dchingis Khan, amidst
the dreary wastes of Siberia. Gathering about him the rough tribes of
his race, a swarm of hardy shepherds who knew not what a house, much
less a city, was, he led them against the civilisation of the south. His
men lived in the saddle, and each was a master in the use of the bow,
the sabre, and the lance. Camels and buffaloes bore their (at first)
scanty possessions, and they moved with all the speed of devouring
nomads. The villages of Manchuria, the tame and placid cities of China,
and all the wide spaces of central Asia were successively overrun and
forced to pay tribute. From the civilised Chinese the wonderful and
profoundly ignorant barbarian quickly learned the art of gathering taxes
and enjoying luxury, and he moved further west in a vague design of
conquering the earth.
This strange and terrifying horde, a cloud of fiercely yelling centaurs
with troops of animals which no Russian had ever seen, first fell upon
the southern Russians in 1224. Their method was to press the peasantry
into their service and attempt to disarm the towns with hollow
assurances of friendship, but, in whatever way the town was taken, there
followed a merciless slaughter and a thorough pillage. The Russians,
alarmed by the reports of the outlying tribes, sent out a great army to
meet the Mongols on the steppes, and were crushingly defeated. The
Mongols had, however, retired to Asia, where their dominion was not
solidly established, and it was a vaster army, under a new Khan, that
appeared in the south of Russia in 1237.
From 1237 to 1240 the Khan Batu led his army of 600,000 men, with
appalling destruction, across the various principalities of Russia.
Weakened by their feuds, severed by their selfish rivalries, the
various provinces fell one by one under the feet of the merciless
invaders. Rape, murder, fire, and pillage were the invariable sequels of
success. The Russians appealed to the nations of the nearer west to help
them to dam this Asiatic flood, but the Latin Christians were not minded
to stir themselves for semi-barbarians who did not respect the Pope.
When the Khan passed over the prostrate body of Russia and advanced
still further, in his determination to conquer an earth of which he knew
less than a child in a modern infant-school, the Poles and Hungarians at
length spread their barrier of steel across his path. But the check did
not now profit Russia. Batu retired upon Russia, built a city, Sarai, on
the banks of the Volga (beyond the limits of the principalities), and
began a life of organised parasitism upon the unfortunate people. The
comparative unity brought about by their Norse defenders had prepared
the way for the Khan. The Khan was to prepare the way for the Moscovite.
Again we may ignore the crowded details, the rise and fall and eternal
feuds of petty princes, of the Russian chronicle. What matters is that
the entire country which was then known as Russia was overspread by a
network of tax-gatherers, and the people learned to tremble at the
commands of a distant autocrat. At Sarai the Mongols established a court
of barbaric magnificence, and this in time declared itself independent
of the Tatar Empire in Asia and sought the nourishment of its luxury in
Russia. The western sovereignty came to be known throughout Europe as
the Golden Horde, and the western nations heard with indifference the
cynical extravagance and the occasional brutality with which it treated
schismatic Slavs.
No prince could now don his tattered dignity in Russia without the
august permission of the semi-civilised ruler on the Volga, and a system
was soon evolved which enabled the courtiers and concubines of the Khan
to share the good fortune of their lord. In the constant disputes about
succession claimants to the various Slav principalities made the
perilous journey to Sarai, and the richness of the presents they brought
sufficed to illumine the obscurity of their titles. Occasionally a
prince whose loyalty to the Mongols was suspected was summoned to Sarai,
and not a few who could not pass the humiliating tests left their bones
among the Mohammedan Tatars. To those who bent their backs or tendered
the cup with servile respect the Khan was gracious. They returned with
power to extort the taxes for the Tatars and a large additional sum for
themselves. If their people or rival princes were restive, a troop of
the dreaded Tatar horse was put at their disposal, and the lash and the
sabre cowed every attempt at revolt. The spying and flogging with which
the servants of the Khan protected their master’s interests were
copied by the Slav-Norse princes. The Byzantine civilisation had itself
introduced many devices of autocratic barbarism, for the jails of
Constantinople, especially the dungeons of the superb imperial palace,
witnessed ghastly tortures and mutilations. The cruelty of the Asiatic
completed this machinery of the later Tsars; and the Princes of Moscow
were the readiest of all to be the tax-gatherers of the Khan and the
pupils of his unscrupulous ministers.
The scattered Slavs had, after the three or four years of terror,
returned from the forests to their burned villages and their plundered
towns. The gold and silver had gone from their churches: the inmates of
their nunneries were the playthings of the Asiatic officers: their
democracy was a mockery. Their industry soon healed the torn face of the
country, but lands and lives now belonged to the foreign master.
One-tenth of all their produce must be paid in taxes, and they might at
any time be summoned to do military service. Kieff was in large part a
ruin; Suzdal, Moscow, Riazan, and other cities were despoiled. Even
Novgorod and Pskoff had, after a bloody resistance, to present their
fleece to the shearer.
The miserable condition of the Slavs was further darkened by the
behaviour of their Christian neighbours on the west. The Swedes,
pleading that the men of Novgorod hindered the conversion to the
true faith of the remaining pagans of the north, induced the Pope to
declare a holy crusade, with the customary spiritual and temporal
advantages, against Russia, and a zealous army advanced against
Novgorod. It was shattered, but the Catholic zeal of the west was not
extinguished. The Knights of the Sword, the German order which enforced
baptism as truculently as the early Mohammedans had enforced the Koran,
next appeared on the Russian frontier, and took Pskoff. The Teutonic
adventurers were not less formidable in white mantle and red cross than
they had been in the dress of the pagan Norsemen, and were hardly less
ferocious, but they had to retreat before the stalwart Novgorodians. In
the fourteenth century, however, the united Lithuanians and Poles
crossed into Russia and added to the miseries of the people. Only half a
dozen of the Russian principalities could hold out against the invaders.
The Tatars were now in decay, and the red spears of the Lithuanian
knights were even seen as far south as the Black Sea.
It is to this demoralisation of the Russians rather than to any direct
Tatar influence that we must turn our attention. There was little
mingling of Mongol and Slav blood, beyond the occasional marriage of a
Tatar princess by some sycophantic prince, and the enslavement of
Russian women in the spacious harems of the Asiatics. “Scratch a
Russian and you will find a Tatar” is an untruth. Few races in the
civilised world are purer in blood than the Russian Slavs. Nor did the
Khans modify the Russian culture more than the levying of tribute
demanded. With the clergy they were on friendly terms, knowing their
power over the ignorant peasants, and they suppressed neither the
_Mir_ of the village nor the _Véché_ of the town, as long as
it furnished the collective tribute. On the other hand, they entirely
broke the original spirit of independence; they organised the country
for purposes of extortion, and disorganised it for purposes of
self-defence; they helped to convert the brutal and masterful Norseman
into a calculating and coldly selfish prince; and they encouraged the
subjection of women which the teaching of the Byzantian priests and
monks had begun.