ENTER POBIEDONOSTSEFF
THE romance of the Romanoffs has now passed the phase of comparative
dulness which set in with the conversion of the dynasty from its license
of personal conduct, and has entered upon its final stage of mingled
melodrama and tragedy. The Russian people is awakening to a
consciousness that what some call an autocracy by divine right is a
foreign intrusion into the life of the Slavs, an infringement of the
rights of man. Three ways of meeting the crisis were open to the new
Emperor, Alexander III. He might grant the full constitutional liberty
that had now been won in every civilisation of the world except China;
he might follow the course traced by Melikoff and prolong the life of
the dynasty; he might prefer to extinguish every demand and insist upon
an unadulterated autocracy. Alexander III chose, with such modifications
as his vacillations allowed, the third course.
He was the second son of Alexander II. The eldest son had died in 1865
of consumption, but Alexander was a man of exceptionally strong
constitution. There is a tradition that he could take a horse-shoe in
his mighty hand and bend it until the points touched. Such a youth would
make a fine soldier, and as a soldier he was trained. He was cool,
courageous (as he showed on various occasions), regular in life,
sincerely religious, and very little cultivated. When his brother died,
he had to be prepared for the business of ruling a very unruly Empire.
But he was now twenty years old, dull in intellect, and altogether
indisposed to acquire the varied culture which his future required. One
of his tutors was the famous Pobiedonostseff: who was not at that time a
pronounced reactionary, but his office prepared the way for power in his
reactionary days. It is said that his wife, the Princess Dagmar of
Denmark, induced him to prepare more carefully for the throne; but that
seems to be a legend of the court. All that men knew about him was that
he liked soldiering and music and patronised historical research, and
thought that there were far too many Germans in Russia.
On this last feature some built a faint hope. Germany was now an
Empire, and the “League of the Three Emperors” (Germany, Austria
and Russia) boded no good for democracy. Bismarck encouraged both
the policy of repression in Russia and the policy of aggression
abroad because he did _not_ wish to see Russia develop her mighty
resources. On the other hand, Alexander was a soldier, a man steeped
in the Romanoff tradition of a divine autocracy and entirely out of
sympathy with humanitarian or progressive ideas. The only question
was whether from policy he would follow the lead of Melikoff. When
the oath of allegiance was taken he announced, ambiguously, that he
would walk in the steps of his father. Which set of steps? Melikoff
showed him the draft of a pseudo-constitution initialled by the late
Tsar. “There will be no change,” he said. But men were uncertain.
The fearful end of his father must have embittered him. The rebels
were, of course, drastically punished. Eight hundred more arrests
were made. Sophia Perovskaia, the wonderful woman of those bloody
days, and four others were executed. There is a grounded suspicion
that they were first tortured. Another woman was condemned, but
she was pregnant, and her sentence was changed to exile.
It is thought by many that an injudicious step taken by the
revolutionaries helped to fix the Tsar’s plan. They somehow got into his
hands a long letter or manifesto, in which, while pleading for reform,
they very plainly held a sword over his head; and their demands were not
at all moderate. I doubt if Alexander III ever hesitated. His strong and
narrow mind and soldierly attitude disposed him to “enforce discipline.”
Pobiedonostseff was soon at his side. He was Procurator of the Holy
Synod (since the preceding year). When Melikoff’s scheme was
brought forward for discussion he bitterly opposed it, and predicted
that it would ruin Russia. He was now a Russophile of the narrowest and
most fanatical description. Alexander leaned to that side. The German
Emperor had, he said, warned his father against making any concessions
to constitutionalism. The “Holy League”--a fanatical Russophile society
led by the Grand Duke Vladimir--pressed for coercion.
Out of the struggle there emerged at last (on April 29th) the new Tsar’s
message to his people. It was probably written by Pobiedonostseff. In it
Alexander firmly contended that the autocracy was of divine origin, and
he would protect it against all encroachments. But the reforms granted
by his father would not be withdrawn. Education, popular councils,
municipal institutions, and so on, were to be maintained. The people
were to be admitted to some share in the management of the Empire’s
affairs. That was to be the note of the new reign: something more
moderate than Pobiedonostseff and less “advanced” than Melikoff.
Melikoff resigned, and his place as Minister of the Interior was taken
by General Ignatieff, a man of moderate conservative views, or a man who
at least felt the need of concessions. On the one hand he looked with
criminal toleration upon the massacres of the Jews which now broke out
all over Russia. On the other he advised the Tsar that large reforms
were needed. The peasants were assisted in paying off the crippling
annual interest on their “emancipation.” Popular councils were set up
in Poland, Siberia, and the Baltic provinces, which had not hitherto
had them. Above all he devised, and imposed upon the Tsar, a feeble
pretence of a national parliament. Members of the provincial
councils--“informed men,” as they were diplomatically called--were
gathered into a deliberating assembly at St. Petersburg, and it was
through them that the reforms were gradually drafted. There was an
improvement in the harsh manner of collecting the taxes, and the
burden was shifted a little more on to the shoulders of the wealthy.
Ranks were opened for the peasants.
The conservatives stormed the Tsar with protests against these dangerous
concessions, and in the spring of 1882 General Ignatieff was forced to
retire. His place was taken by Count Dmitri Tolstoi, one of the men of
the last reign whom liberals hated above all others. He had been the
Minister of Education during the late Tsar’s drastic restriction of the
schools and universities. He and Pobiedonostseff and a few other rabid
Slavophiles now closed round Alexander III and dictated the policy of
his reign. That policy was one of, at home, unswerving, unscrupulous,
unmerciful Russification; that is to say, complete obliteration of all
criticism of the autocracy in native Russia and all religious or racial
characters in the subject-provinces of alien race or religion. Abroad,
the policy was naturally Pan-Slav, aggressive, imperialistic; but here
the Emperor and his limited resources curbed the fanatics, so that the
reign passed without a war. Russia was orientated for the final struggle
in the next reign. For the reign of Alexander we need only glance at the
various branches of the machinery of despotism which was created for the
defence of the Romanoffs.
Education was the great source of evil, but in a world where education
was now adopted as an elementary principle of civilisation it was no
longer possible to return to the absolute illiteracy of the Middle Ages.
A compromise was found in the easy distinction between sound and unsound
education. The figures of educational progress during the reign of
Alexander III are at first sight impressive. In 1877 the eight
universities had had 5629 students: in 1886 the number had arisen to
14,000. In the same period the number of high schools rose from 200 to
about a thousand: the number of elementary schools from 25,077 to
35,517. There were now, in all, more than two million pupils in the
elementary schools of the Empire. It should be added that the population
of the Empire was now 113,000,000; that most of the schools were
founded, independently of St. Petersburg, by the zealous
Zemstvos; and that very many of them were mere huts or sheds with
ludicrously incompetent teachers.
Count Tolstoi, having been for sixteen years Minister of Education,
controlled this department in the interest of the Slavophiles and
imperialists. Pobiedonostseff, indeed, wanted to have all the elementary
schools put under the control of the Holy Synod, or under the clergy. I
have said little about the Russian Church during this period for a
reason which will be understood. It was a mere docile instrument of the
dynasty. Its ordinary priests were rough, ignorant men, little superior
to the peasants themselves. Its higher clergy murmured not one single
syllable at the cruelty, just as they had murmured none at the earlier
vices, of the Romanoffs.
The Zemstvos, however, in most cases refused to hand over their schools,
and the secular part of the government had neither the funds to devote
to the work nor the wish to have serious trouble with the Zemstvos. We
shall see that they found it easier to capture the Zemstvos themselves
and control their action. The Holy Synod also began the policy of
creating religious schools in opposition to those of the Zemstvos, and
securing imperial favour for these nurseries of docility. The high
schools were re-modelled, and were now forbidden by law to admit the
children of the poorer types of workers. Some technical improvements
were made in them, but the general effect was to reduce the stimulating
influence of the education. The universities were more drastically
controlled. No students’ societies were permitted, and the
curriculum was carefully purged. Inspectors were attached to them, and
the grant of scholarships was made to depend upon the reports of these
spies of orthodoxy. There were serious riots of the students in 1882 and
1887, but the energy of the reactionary officials gradually drove
professors into silence or exile and pupils into subjection.
The press was in 1882 controlled by “temporary rules,” which proved to
have a long duration. If a journal had, after three warnings, incurred
suspension, it must, at the expiration of the term, henceforward submit
a copy of the next day’s issue to the censors before eleven at night.
This effectively silenced the majority of the liberal periodicals, and
eviscerated the others. When some tried to evade the gag by using
language of a veiled or ambiguous character, a junta of four Ministers
was empowered to suppress any periodical which seemed to them to have a
mischievous tendency. By these and other means progressive literature
was extinguished. The few revolutionaries continued, of course, to
establish private presses, which were constantly detected and the
workers sent to Siberia or the mines, but the work of political
education was generally suspended.
The political scheme which had been set up was similarly “revised.” The
Zemstvos were, as I said, stubborn. Even the nobles were jealous of
their local powers, and at first antagonistic to the new regime. Large
numbers of them were won by stories of dangerous tendencies amongst the
peasantry. It is said that in their attacks upon the Jews the people had
said: “We will make our breakfast of the Jews, our dinner of the
landowners, and our supper of the priests.” Priests and nobles fell into
line with the ministers. In 1889 and 1890 the nobles were given a
preponderating influence over the other representatives in the Zemstvos.
They became little more than assemblies of loyal land-owners, open to
the direct influence of the government. The Mir was similarly enfeebled,
and lost its popular representative value.
The judicial system was correspondingly modified. Public executions were
abandoned, in the spirit of the age, and some other improvements were
introduced. But the general scheme set up by Alexander II had been too
grossly ignored in the later years of that monarch, and it was now
modified by decree. The jury-system was reduced; the justices of the
peace abolished. Petty cases fell back to the reorganised Zemstvos.
The financial system, on the other hand, remained for many years under
the control of an enlightened minister, Bunge, and was greatly improved.
Finance was in any case a department into which it was profitable to
admit modern science. The coinage was improved, and more banks were
established. Home-industry was fostered, and the great extension of the
Empire in Asia opened new markets. Railways were multiplied, and in 1891
the Grand Duke Nicholas opened the terminal station of the proposed
Trans-Siberian railway at Vladivostock. Russia had already made
commercial treaties with Korea and Japan. We will return presently to
this dangerous extension of Russian ambition.
Most important and characteristic of all was the process of
Russification in which all these engines of reaction were combined. One
can understand the fascination of the Slavophile dream as it was formed
in the mind of honest conservatives. Every concession made in the
western democracies and limited monarchies had led to further demands.
Napoleon III had lost his throne. The Papacy had lost its temporal
power. William I and Bismarck were struggling against a portentous
growth of Socialism. France was rapidly shedding its religion. Even in
England the republican movement was at that time (the eighties) strong,
and lower depths of radicalism were disclosed every decade. Liberalism,
either in religion or politics, was evidently a slope; you could not
remain long elsewhere than at the top or the bottom. So Russia
must be made thoroughly, homogeneously autocratic and religious. In
spite of the well-known facts of Russian history the Church agreed
warmly with the Romanoffs that the autocracy was divinely appointed. If
all could be made docile to the Church, the autocracy would have an
easier task.
So began the process of Russification which passed with the brutality of
a steam-roller over every sect or fragment of the nation that was not
Russian in creed and dynastic in politics. The Jews formed the gravest
problem. Long experience had shown that no power on earth could erase
the religious and racial peculiarities of the Jew, yet there were nearly
five million Jews in the Russian Empire. Their intelligence and skill in
trade were but additional grievances. There were, even then, parts of
Russia in which the Jews showed that, under proper treatment, they were
as capable as any of settling upon the soil, but as a rule they avoided
agriculture. The slightest relaxation of pressure allowed them to pour
into a city or even a district, and as traders and money-lenders they
soon had the poor and thriftless Russians in their power. Hence, in
great measure, the readiness of the people to rise against them, which
was gradually exploited rather than checked from St. Petersburg.
The first procedure of the reactionary ministers was to overlook the
massacres which took place from the beginning of the rule of Alexander
III. Presently, a series of “temporary rules” were issued
against them. Even in the Pale of Settlement they were compelled to live
in the towns and were forbidden to purchase real estate in the country.
In 1888 they were ordered to go back to the place in which they had
lived before the year 1882. About a million and a half of the Jews were
affected by this rule, and the chaotic abandonment of their several
businesses and properties cast large numbers of them into deep and
undeserved poverty. Vast aggregations of them, growing at a prodigious
rate on account of their high fertility, huddled together in the towns
of the Pale, and lived in great privation. In 1891 a new application of
the rules exiled and ruined seventeen thousand Jewish artisans of
Moscow.
[IMAGE: img348.jpg Tauride Palace/Session Chamber of the Duma]
Still more stupid, and hardly less cruel, was the restriction upon the
development of their ability. The civil service and the professions were
closed against them. They might not, without special license, have a
Christian servant, and notaries were forbidden to have Jewish clerks.
Their zeal for education was similarly repressed. In the universities
which were situated in the Pale Jewish students must not number more
than a tenth of the whole. At other provincial universities they must
not number more than five per cent.; at the metropolitan universities
not more than two per cent. By these contemptuous repressive measures
the ignorant people were prepared for the pogroms which would disgrace
the reign of the last of the Romanoffs.
The Poles were the next most conspicuous victims of the Slavophile
policy. We saw that Alexander II had ordered the extinction of their
nationality, but a people with an acute memory of having been a great
civilisation at a time when the Russians were a disorderly mass of
semi-barbarians could not easily resign itself to obliteration. The
religious tradition here coincided with the national, as in Ireland (the
Poland of the west), and the priests generally fostered insurgence.
Alexander’s ruthless ministers had but to apply more stringently the
laws already in force against the Poles. From the University of Warsaw
to the smallest elementary school the teaching was entirely Russianised.
Even the Bank of Warsaw was suppressed, and Polish trade forced into a
branch of the Russian bank. There was a futile rising in 1885, but four
executions and two hundred arrests completed the work of “pacifying” the
country, or eliminating from it every man of spirit and courage. Even
Finland, which was still autonomous, had to complain to the Tsar of
encroachments upon the liberties which his father had sworn to respect.
In the other Baltic provinces the Russian roller was used as in Poland.
The dissenters and heretics of every kind in Russia itself were
similarly treated. To the tenacious dissenters of the last century or
two were now added sects like the Doukhobors and the followers of
Tolstoi, and upon these the Tsar’s ministers fell with particular
malevolence. Alexander was ignorant enough to believe quite sincerely in
the doctrines of the Orthodox Church, but he knew that these new sects
had more than a religious significance. Prayer-meetings were prohibited.
Even children were separated in some cases from their parents and forced
into the rigid Slavophile mould.
It will be understood, after this description of the machinery that was
set up by Tolstoi and Pobiedonostseff, that the chronicle of revolt in
the reign of Alexander II is comparatively slender. It is computed that
by the end of the reign there were about a hundred thousand rebels in
the jails, the mines, and the Siberian colonies, and to these one must
add the graves of the bolder spirits and the large numbers of Russians
who sought abroad the liberty that had died in Russia. Men still risked
their lives in printing and disseminating the new ideas, but as the long
reign wore on, and tyranny was still enthroned, the open spurts of
defiance grew less in number. The revolutionaries and liberals felt
that, if their race was not to be extinguished, as the reactionaries
desired, the work must proceed in different form. We shall see in the
next and final chapter how it proceeded until, after further bloody
revolts against the intolerable tyranny, it succeeded in awakening the
people and shaking the Romanoffs from their throne.
It remains to see how the Pan-Slav movement, the twin-brother of the
Slavophile philosophy, also prepared the way for the next reign. We have
seen how every expansion of Russia, every enlargement of its stupendous
population and therefore ultimate resources, alarmed some other European
Power. Russia now made new advances and opened the way for fresh
conflicts. It had reached the eastern coast of Asia. Now it began its
interference in Korea and attracted the attention of Japan. It spread
south toward India and still further alarmed England. Journals of the
imperialist school at St. Petersburg openly boasted that their armies
were beating a path to the Indian Ocean, and it may be said in
justification of England’s long distrust of Russia that the Romanoffs
wholly encouraged this dream until an Asiatic Power proved to them that
Asia was not the helpless world they had imagined. When the southern
limit of Asiatic Russia was extended until it came, at certain points,
within a hundred and forty miles of India, when Russian agents swarmed
in Afghanistan, it was not unnatural that London should be nervous.
Alexander III, however, took a keen personal interest in foreign
affairs, and he succeeded in averting serious trouble with England.
Still more dangerous to the peace of the world was the ambition of the
Pan-Slavs to overrun the Balkans. Our generation is familiar enough with
the philosophy in the form of Pan-Germanism, and from this the mood of
Russia in the days of Alexander III will be understood. The creed of the
Pan-Slavs was a mixture of commercial greed, imperialistic ambition, the
impulses of soldiers to use their weapons, and the desire of priests to
enlarge their Church. As the little peoples of the Balkans were largely
Slav--though the Bulgars are as much Asiatic as Slav, and the Rumans
take more pride in their remote descent from the Romans--it was
inevitable that, in spite of the jealous watchfulness of all the Great
Powers of Europe, the new imperialists of St. Petersburg should push
their work in the Balkans.
There is this almost single advantage in the reign of Alexander III that
he distrusted Germany and did not allow his ambitious ministers to
embroil the country in war. Bismarck would like to see Russia weakened,
as it periodically was, by war, and there seemed to be every prospect of
war over the Balkan peoples. Behind the specious plea of liberating
Christians from the brutality of the Turk and conveying civilisation to
the backward peoples of the Balkans there was at that time, as in our
own days, a dual rivalry. Austria and the Papacy had an ambition which
was directly opposed to the ambition of the statesmen and priests of St.
Petersburg. The path to the Mediterranean and the commercial advantage
of exploiting the Balkan peoples were not more eagerly sought by
politicians and merchants than the religious allegiance of the
independent Balkan Churches was sought by the Vatican and the Holy
Synod.
Russia pushed its ambition in Bulgaria--Austria in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, which had been entrusted to its “protection.” But the
little Balkan peoples were now almost entirely awake to the designs of
the ministers of Alexander III. The Tsar said on one occasion that the
King of Montenegro was the only friend he had in Europe. The Serbs and
Rumans drew nearer to Austria, the Bulgars began to resent the presence
amongst them of so many officers of the Russian army and agents of the
Russian Government. After the Bulgar revolution of 1885 there seemed to
be grave prospect of a war between Austria and Russia. But Alexander was
made sensible of the disgusting duplicity with which Bismarck tried to
draw Russia into dangerous waters in the south, and he withdrew his
officers from Bulgaria. He complained to the German Emperor of the
procedure of the Chancellor, but he maintained the commercial alliance
with Germany and the ostensibly friendly relations.
Out of this rivalry of interests and clash of intrigue, in which
Alexander III acted with caution and shrewdness, there gradually emerged
the set of alliances which would one day deluge Europe with blood.
Germany and Austria made a common lot of their interests and drew
together. Italy, jealous of the French support of the Papacy and won by
the deceitful promises of Germany, joined them and formed the Triple
Alliance. Russia could no longer remain isolated and Alexander III
slowly and reluctantly overcame his imperial dislike of the French
Republic. Little acts of mutual courtesy led up to the floating of a
large loan in France in 1887. The financial link with Germany was almost
severed. In the following year a Russian representative was appointed to
the Vatican. In 1890 a large French fleet appeared at Cronstadt, and was
boisterously welcomed. In 1893, the year before the death of Alexander,
a commercial treaty with France was signed.
Thus in both domestic and foreign policy the reign of Alexander III was
one of preparation for the final chapter of the romance of the
Romanoffs. It created at home a machinery of despotism which would prove
so heavy that it roused the very people whom it was designed to
suppress. Abroad it entered upon imperialistic ventures which would lead
to wars that would expose the disgusting growth of corruption under the
shelter of the universal censorship. Alexander III died in 1894
(November 1st), and left to the last of his line a country which he had
apparently pacified. He was honest in his creed of orthodoxy and
autocracy, though we will not suppose that he was insensible of its
profit to himself and his family; but he had not the intelligence to see
that such an anachronism as his mediæval suppression of a
people’s sentiments could not live in the atmosphere of the end of
the nineteenth century.