LACK OF RUSSIAN UNITY
It is well to remember that the anarchist bias inherent in the
Russian race has never been uprooted nor even systematically
countered. The bulk of the people are hardly any better equipped for
the life-struggle than they were in the days when the Mongols of the
Golden Horde held sway among them and compelled their princes to lick
horses' slaver.
One of the most powerful engines for preparing, maturing, and
consummating the politico-social cataclysm was the university,
together with the numerous tag-rag and bobtail of loosely-thinking,
wildly-speaking humanity that centred around it. I had the honour to
be a member of one of the foremost Russian universities and observed
this puissant influence at close quarters. The university is
essentially a western institution specially adapted to the
requirements of western youth reared according to certain traditions
and indoctrinated with certain beliefs. Transplanted to Russian soil
the university brought forth unfamiliar--Dead Sea--fruit. And it
could not well be otherwise. The Russian student was at bottom one
of those peasants whose qualities and defects I have just been
endeavouring to outline. Endowed with marvellous receptivity, a
hypercritical cast of mind, impatience to learn everything, combined
with insuperable sloth and infirmity of purpose, he was filled with
awe for science, took for granted western theories, principles, and
ideas, and applied them as standards of comparison to the
institutions and doctrines of his own country. Capable of a passion
for the abstract he worshipped western science, or rather
pseudo-science which he understood more easily, as a tribesman on the
shores of Lake Baikal worships his fetish. For synthesis, for
constructive work, he lacked the materials, the training, and the
capacity.
{27}
These young men, most of whom never completed the high-school
curriculum, were turned loose upon the country to sow seeds of
discontent and rebellion whithersoever they went. Looking around him
the student perceived the vast contrast between the western
principles which he revered as dogmas and those that underlay the
odious ordering of things in the Tsardom. And his soul revolted. In
economics no law was respected. There was no consideration for the
peasantry on whom the dead weight of the Empire pressed. The masses
were kept not only without political rights but in utter ignorance of
the circumstance that they had any claim to them. And the embargo
was issued with wanton cynicism. The peasantry was no more than a
wealth-creating machine for the behoof of the ruling class, and the
rulers took so little thought even of their own less pressing
interests that they failed to keep the machine properly lubricated or
in smoothly working condition. And everywhere the same piratical
instincts of the autocracy and its instruments met the eye. When the
student, who was himself a peasant and whose father and uncles and
brothers were still on the land, had assimilated the doctrines of the
west and transmuted them into a religious creed, his feelings towards
the men and the institutions that had systematically violated them
for centuries and had ground his own class in the dust were those of
the religious fanatic who would fain condemn heresiarchs even on
earth to the unimaginable tortures of eternal damnation. Nothing
that the autocracy or its confederate, the bureaucracy, did was in
his eyes other than a heinous sin. The administration was
constitutionally incapable of a noble, a praiseworthy, or even a
morally indifferent act.
That combination of the eastern political system with the scientific
ideas and progressive principles of the west, working upon the
Russian mind with its peculiar bent, produced the revolutionary
spirit as inevitably as the mixing in certain proportions of
charcoal, sulphur, and saltpetre produces gunpowder.
The intelligentsia had no roots in the people. Its members {28} were
severed and sundered from it, but they resembled one of those
preaching orders which were founded in the Middle Ages whose energy
and success largely depended on their complete detachment from every
class and concrete interest. The scraps of western theories and
systems which they scattered broadcast over Russia about "the rights
of man," the origins of autocracy, the only true basis of human
society, the necessity of liberty of conscience as a correlate of
personal responsibility, and other matters were totally ignored by
the peasant and the merchant classes, but became a source of
inspiration to individuals among them and served with frequent
modifications as the revolutionary creed. The intelligentsia was the
order from which two mutually hostile bodies were recruited, the
apostles of revolution and the leavening elements of the bureaucracy.
It was the intelligentsia who sowed the revolutionary seed and
watered it. It was from their midst that schoolmasters and
professors, physicians, men of letters, publicists, lawyers, were
taken, most of whom contributed something to the general ferment. It
was especially the publicists, journalists, and literary men who did
most of the spade work and sowed the seed which at last sprang up in
the shape of armed men. They dealt in abstractions, operated with
western theories, transplanted fragments of Hegel, Marx, Kautsky,
Mill, Buckle, to Russian soil and pushed each proposition to the
Ultima Thule of its consequences. Although they belonged to
different schools of thought they united for purposes of destruction.
The Kadets, who deserved their reputation of being the best organised
party in the Empire, had no firm hold on the nation because they were
not of it; they could not place themselves at its angle of vision,
were incapable of appreciating its world philosophy, were not rooted
in the people. Hence they did not enlist the peasant or the working
man in their party and stood only for themselves. When the tillers
of the soil and the factory hands had each formed its own
organisation, then the Kadets took them as allies. But an alliance
may be abandoned at any moment, especially in Russia.
{29}
The dissolution of the Russian Empire may unmistakably be traced back
to the shape definitely given to the Tsardom by its two eminent
founders, Ivan and Peter. Its character, internal and external, was
incompatible with its survival into a democratic era of European
development. For internally it was a growing realm with serfdom for
its groundwork, and even after the emancipation of the serfs it still
remained in spirit what it so long had been in fact. The bulk of the
population toiled and moiled for the privileged few and was treated
as an inferior race, and was hindered systematically from rising as a
class to the level of its rulers in any sphere. Externally it was a
predatory society which looked for its present well-being and future
prosperity to the triumph of force, and bent all its energies to the
transformation of its resources into instruments of offence and
defence. In a word the development of the Tsardom postulated a state
of warfare with its neighbours and a condition of chronic artificial
inequality among its own peoples, and all its arrangements,
financial, economic, military, and political, were carefully
accommodated to those two aspects. This was nothing new to the
people who between the years 1228 and 1462 had waged ninety civil
wars and a hundred and fifty-eight foreign campaigns.
Roughly speaking there are two main types of States which one may
distinguish by the names European and Asiatic. The former may be
said to concentrate its energies upon the ordering of domestic
affairs for the behoof of the community. It creates efficient
machinery for the purpose of maintaining order and insuring the
safety of the person and of property, translates the customs formed
by necessity, expediency, or taste into laws and institutions, and
has for its real, as well as its ostensible, aim the general progress
of the whole people. The Asiatic State on the other hand, solicitous
chiefly about foreign wars and international relations, takes little
thought about the internal arrangements of the nation, the training
of upright administrators, the adjustment of institutions to the
temper of the people and to the permanent conditions that govern
their development, {30} and scorns to economise labour by
distributing rôles and setting up appropriate organs to harmonise
order and progress. Assuming that the international community lives
and will continue to live in a state of latent or open war, one of
its main objects is to conquer foreign territory and to exploit
foreign peoples and countries. In essence this is the idea of
Hohenzollern rule, but without its redeeming features of just
administration, national education, and State encouragement to
commerce, industry, literature, and art. It was in accordance with
this simplicist conception that the Mongols of the Golden Horde,
having subjected Russia, left things there just as it had found them,
spending no thought on assimilation or denationalisation, contented
with imposing a tribute on the defeated people and making the native
prince their chief collector of that annual impost. The Turks in
like manner when they annexed the territory they now occupy made no
systematic endeavour to denationalise the natives or exercise
permanent control over domestic affairs. In all such matters the
people enjoyed a large measure of liberty and their conquerors
exploited them economically. And the Russian State was modelled on
the Asiatic.[1]
This had not always been the case. The first beginnings of the
political community in Russia--during the eleventh and twelfth
centuries when the tribes were homogeneous and purely Slavs--took
place on European lines, and the Grand Dukes of Kieff were admitted
into the family of the eastern emperors and the western kings. But
in time Kieff[2] having been captured and destroyed the inhabitants
of the Dnieper valley migrated to the north-east, intermarried with
the Finnish nomads of the country between the Upper Volga and the
Oka, and the resultant of the blend was the hybrid Great Russian
race. To this day their characteristics are still imperfectly
understood. It is not sufficiently borne {31} in mind that the Finns
whom these Slavs from the south assimilated were nomads and what I
should like to term a-political, that is, they evinced no desire or
ability to form themselves into compact communities viable and
self-defensive. At any rate one hears nothing of any states formed
by them on the Volga. Personal interests, family feuds, fighting,
hunting, trekking, and singing the legendary feats of great warriors
and magicians would appear to have called forth and absorbed their
energies. This impression is not materially altered by what we know
of the development of the Finns in the one political society to which
they have given their name. It is true that the principality of
Finland was governed first by the Swedes and then by the Russians,
and is only now become independent, and this condition of subjection
may partly account for the fact that they left to the Swedes the task
of carrying social and political progress a stage further. This
spiritual leadership of the Scandinavian continued unbroken
throughout the Russian domination.
The Tsar's rule over the principality was at first Asiatic in type in
the sense that it abandoned to the people themselves the work and
responsibility of administering their own affairs. But of the two
races in the country only the Scandinavians bestirred themselves to
some purpose. It was they who acted as cultural seed-bearers from
the west to the north-east. When the Finnish nationalist movement
started, some of the leading Swedes, in order to get more elbow-room
for action, changed their Scandinavian names into Finnish equivalents
as the Jews and the Germans do in Hungary, but the ethnic leaven
still remained the same. Many years ago I had a long talk on this
subject with the one statesman Finland produced, Mechelin, and he
listened with interest, and I think I may add with acquiescence, to
this view of the matter which I put before him in outline. Once the
real Finnish democracy took or received freedom of action, after the
fall of the Tsardom, any stirring of sound political sense or of
organising capacity that may have been felt among the Finnish
elements of the republic were lost {32} in the welter of anarchy that
ensued. The great war put the political aptitudes of peoples and
regimes to a severe test, and the surprises that have followed the
ordeal are, to put it mildly, humiliating. It looks as though
certain European peoples are constitutionally averse to social
collectivity, and that force alone can keep them together.
It was with these a-political, nomadic Finnish tribes, then, that the
Slav wanderers from the south intermarried, and it was from them that
the new Russian people, which can hardly since then be regarded as
Slav,[3] inherited some of their more striking traits. The invasion
of the Tartars, who kept the country in subjection for two centuries,
also made a noteworthy contribution to the influences that moulded
the Russian people. It is true that the Khans who lived and ruled at
a distance never meddled in the home concerns of their vassals,
contenting themselves with a yearly tribute. But they left permanent
representatives, listened to complaints made by one Russian prince
against another, and encouraged secret intrigues. It was during this
long servitude that the people became past masters in guile,
trickery, intrigue, bribery, and all the tactics of the weak who have
to defend themselves against the strong. It was during this period
that the Moscow princes familiarised themselves with the Tartar type
of State and imbibed its spirit of conquest without, its scorn for a
living elastic organisation within to preside over and shape general
progress on pacific lines. And Ivan III. embodied these exotic ideas
in the simple kind of community which he established. He beheaded
all the Boyars who were obnoxious to him, broke the power of the
class as a factor in the realm, incited one set of his subjects to
decimate another, and confronted the benighted population with an
absolute monarch whose behests and whims were carried out by a body
of soldiers--_opritchina_--who shed the blood of proscribed
individuals at the tyrant's nod.
Bound by oath to carry out all the monarch's commands the
_opritchniki_ were an agency apart, whose interests were different
from, nay, contrary to, those of the population. {33} That aloofness
is expressed by the very name opritchina.[4] And that extra-national
force contained the germs of the formidable army established later by
Peter the Great, and also of the bureaucracy which this emperor
modelled on his army. These are the institutions which imparted to
the Russian State that peculiar character which has been unfolding
itself to the eyes of a wondering Europe ever since. Even after the
triumph of the Bolsheviki, whose doctrine is international pacifism,
the relations of the State to the population remained what it had
been under the Tsars, and Ivan's opritchniki were represented by
Lenin's Red Guards.
Peter was unquestionably a political genius, but the material in
which he worked, the mould fashioned by his predecessors, the
pressure of foreign wars and internal troubles, and the manner of
life he led made it impossible for him to delve deep enough into the
political soil to lay the foundation of a new structure. He found
the Asiatic type of State ready to his hand as it had been handed
down by his predecessors, and he set himself to accommodate it to the
changed requirements. That was all. Thus he perceived the necessity
of a fleet and of a well-trained army and he provided both. He also
grasped the need of a body of public servants who should keep the
army and navy provided with necessities and should conduct the
general business of the nation. And for his model he chose the most
efficient bureaucracy of Europe--that of Prussia. But the predatory
nature of Peter's Tsardom cannot be disputed. He equipped it with
new and temporarily effective organs, strove to modernise its
administration, and brought it formally into line with its
neighbours. But he left the essence of the old Asiatic State intact.
Peter's way of grafting the new bureaucratic institution on the State
resembled that of the Slavs of Novgorod who in the ninth century
despatched an embassy to the Varangers inviting them to come and put
things in order and rule in Russia. Peter likewise turned to the
west, employed foreigners wherever he could, and in {34} particular
favoured Germans whose capacity for organisation he appreciated.
From those days onward, the Germans played a predominant part in the
Russian civil administration, in the army and navy, at the court, in
schools and universities, in science and letters, in journalism, in
trade and industry, everywhere, in a word, except in the Church.
They have often been accused of acquiring the defects of the Russians
and of contributing to demoralise these. It is true that like the
Russians they did not scruple to cheat the treasury when opportunity
offered, but justice compels one to add that they had at least a
certain sense of measure which the Russian bureaucrat too often
lacked. They sometimes appropriated funds, but generally limited the
sums to their actual needs instead of making them commensurate with
their grandiose opportunities. They served their Russian sovereign
loyally, favoured men of their own race and religion, and stamped a
Teuton impress on most things in the Tsardom. In the army, in the
navy, in the administration of provinces, in the central ministries,
in the schools and universities, on the estates of the great
landowners, at the head of factories, on the boards of companies and
banks, in apothecaries' shops and bakeries--were Germans.
Whithersoever you went the majority of the men who transacted
Russia's business, public and private, had German manners, spoke the
German tongue; one must also confess that on the whole they did not
disappoint the expectations of the Tsars who favoured and protected
them.
Alexander III. was not of this number. From the line followed by his
predecessors he swerved perceptibly. He entertained a dislike for
the Teutons and, indeed, for all foreigners. For he was a
nationalist and held that orthodoxy, pan-slavism, and autocracy
constitute the trinity, belief in which would one day raise the
Russian people to the highest pinnacle of glory, and that no
foreigner could worship at its shrine. Hence he withdrew many of the
privileges theretofore enjoyed by his German and other non-Russian
subjects. It has been alleged that his excellent intentions {35} led
to disastrous results, that the Russification of the national
services was far from being a benefit, was, in fact, a serious
disadvantage, not only to the civil administration, but also to the
army and the navy. This contention has been so lately put forward
that the materials for dealing with it decisively are not yet
available.
Thus the builders of the State, famous and obscure, stamped the
Tsardom with the impress of Asia, infused into the organism they were
forming a predatory soul, and accustomed it to look for honour,
glory, and even the satisfaction of growing economic needs to
territorial expansion at the cost of its neighbours. They poured
around those who thought, spoke, and acted for the community an
atmosphere that warped their judgment and obscured all issues alien
to the only kind of progress which they were capable of appreciating.
The standards by which they gauged international and national
situations and crises, and the principles by which they shaped their
foreign relations, were adjusted to the ideals set before the
community at its origin. This direction, long ago imposed upon the
main current of national life, continued down to the reign of
Alexander I. when for the first time it was slightly checked by
economic forces pressing upon the population at home and cutting the
tether which had fastened the peasants to the soil. But the spirit
persisted even then, and the Slavophil party with Aksakoff at its
head, which gradually drove Alexander's pacific government into war
with Turkey, was undoubtedly the true exponent of "Russia's"
aspirations. For the political community under the Tsar, like that
of Athens or Sparta in the days of Plato or Pausanias, was restricted
to the privileged minority of the population, and extended only to a
fraction of these. In these circumstances every one of Russia's
public men gifted with real vision, whose political energies were
suffused with the "national" spirit, took refuge from insoluble
internal problems in venturesome foreign enterprises. That was the
mainspring of Plehve's eagerness to launch out into a war against
Japan, and of Sazonoff's reluctance to allow Austria-Hungary to elbow
his {36} country out of the Balkan Peninsula, of Pobiedonostseff's
curtailment of religious liberty, of the educational limitations
introduced by Tolstoy, of Vyshnegradsky's exploitation of the
peasantry, of the financial system based on the inebriety of the
people. The policy of all these statesmen, however opposed it might
seem to reason, stood rooted in the deepest sentiment of the
articulate community and harmonised with the spirit infused into it
by its celebrated founders. The almost unflinching persistence of
the different governments in this predatory line of action suggested
to foreign observers two absurd legends, one respecting the deep and
far-reaching vision of Russian statesmanship deliberately
concentrating its attention and its energies upon a remote aim, and
the other respecting an imaginary testament of Peter the Great
enjoining on his successors the steady expansion of the Empire at the
cost of its weaker neighbours. In truth the ministers who transacted
Russia's foreign business from Peter's death down to the deposition
of Nicholas II. were, with the sole exception of Witte, very humdrum
bureaucrats who themselves were borne along on the unseen current
that moved beneath the surface of events. This a-moral system, which
differed considerably for the worse from the Prussian, had one
vulnerable point through which the Tsardom was bound to be hit
mortally in the course of time and most automatically by the mere
progress of European civilisation. The ethnic fragments and the
Russian classes and masses instead of being fused were, as we saw,
very loosely bound together with military withes by the State. Cut
these withes and the seemingly compact bundle falls to pieces. And
the adoption of western institutions would necessarily sever these
ties and break up the Empire. That was the ever-present danger which
waxed more and more imminent and menacing as time went on and the
joists and girders of the days of yore showed signs of giving way.
Some of the rulers perceived it clearly; others felt it
instinctively. A few were for borrowing props and supports from the
west; others for fortifying the ancient structure congruously with
the style of architecture in which it was {37} built. But the fatal
outcome of these alternating expedients was discernible, was in fact
perceived by Witte, the one commanding statesman possessed by Russia
since the days of Peter.
Autocracy was as much a religion as a political system. Rooted in
theocracy it claimed to regulate life as a whole, taking in every one
of its needs and faculties. Therefore, it held together and could
not be divided into political, economic, and religious parts. To
swerve from it in one particular was to break with all. This master
fact was at the root of Pobiedonostseff's policy. None the less
Alexander I. was at one time prepared to introduce liberal
institutions on the advice of his minister Speransky. But later on
more logical spirits like Pobiedonostseff and his fellow workers
would fain have it fenced in by coercive legislation. To them it was
evident that so long as the bureaucracy ruled there was no room in
the country for any other influential institution. Moreover, any
liberal institutions accorded to the nation would constitute an
irresistible lever in the hands of the non-Russian nationalities,
such as the Poles, the Germans, the Lithuanians, the Finns, whose
culture was superior to that of the ruling race. On the other hand
pressure of all kinds was rendering a modernisation of the State a
necessity. Between Scylla and Charybdis a middle course, proposed
years before by the eminent Moscow journalist Katkoff, was struck out
and certain western institutions were accorded to the population of
central Russia but refused to the more advanced inhabitants of the
borders. Nay more, many of the rights which these had theretofore
enjoyed were withdrawn from them. This sorry pettifogging merely
served to disclose the straits to which the autocracy was reduced.
The first Alexander's innovations were symptomatic rather than real,
and their visible sign was the Council of the Empire--a legislative
body appointed by the Tsar to study, recommend, and draft bills which
the monarch vetoed or ratified at will. It was the substitute
devised at the eleventh hour for a legislative chamber which the Tsar
had {38} contemplated introducing. His successor, Nicholas I., felt
the urge of economic needs and might, had he lived, been forced to
set the serfs at liberty as a mere matter of material interest, but
the reform was reserved for Alexander II. As soon as this potentate
had emancipated the serfs, as the first of a series of reform
measures, the inevitable happened: autocracy as represented by the
central authorities lost its grasp of the reins of power which fell
into the hands of a myriad of obscure and irresponsible individuals
throughout the Empire, and the framework of the State became
top-heavy.
That courageous act let loose a number of ethnic forces by which in
time a new Russia or rather several new Russias were imperceptibly
fashioned. The nuclei of the new entities were formed by the freed
peasants, their ecstatic worshippers among the "intellectuals," and
by the non-Russian nationalities who eagerly joined in the subdued
agitation against an obsolete and oppressive regime. In the ensuing
semi-articulate demand for the abolition of the autocracy--though not
perhaps for all that it connoted--progressive Russians were at one
with Poles, Jews, Armenians, and Moslems. The German element alone
continued to do battle for Tsarism.
The relief accorded to the serfs made one far-reaching change in the
administrative machinery: it removed the great landed proprietors,
the nobility, from the position they had occupied theretofore in
their collective capacities as intermediaries between the central
government and the masses. That displacement called for a
corrective, as otherwise the power once vested in the head
departments would be scattered all over Russia and dissociated from
responsibility. In the minds of Alexander II. and his principal
advisers the correlate of his great reform was the extension of the
powers of the newly created zemstvos, the forging of an organic link
between them and the ancient institutions, and the creation of
political representation. My former colleague and friend, Professor
Maxim Kovalevsky, held that if those intentions had been carried out
the Russian {39} mediæval State "would have been transformed" into
one that harmonised with the requirements of modern civilisation.
Perhaps it would, but only, I venture to hold, as a preliminary to
the break-up of Russia. Kovalevsky himself admitted that the people
of Russia were not ripe for such reforms as direct, equal, and
universal suffrage. If then it had been established the State would
have been dismembered by the centrifugal force of its nationalities
which constituted 52 per cent. of the total population, whereas if it
were withheld the effort to wrest it from the Government would have
provoked coercion and revolution. Moreover, the bureaucracy was the
backbone of the Russian State, and it brooked the creation of no
institutions that could impair its influence or diminish its
prestige. No one who saw deeply into the spirit of the Tsardom at
any epoch of its existence could fail to perceive how difficult and
dangerous it would have been to tackle the work of transforming it
congruously with modern requirements. Witte might possibly have
succeeded if he had been given a free hand, ample time, and
especially if he had been allowed to begin under the reign of
Alexander III.
The reform movement that now began was discreet and timorous by
compulsion, but aggressive and intolerant wherever it had scope. It
claimed the allegiance of every member of the intelligentsia in every
walk of life and punished non-conformity wherever it manifested
itself, not only in politics, but in literature, science, and art
whither politics had to take refuge from persecution. He who was not
with the Liberals was against them, and chastised accordingly. Some
of the consequences of this absolutism were incongruous. A Congress
of Physicians seriously declared in 1905 that medical men could not
properly attend to their professional duties so long as the power of
the autocrat was not limited. A municipality passed a resolution to
the effect that the high mortality in southern Russia was a direct
and inevitable result of the antiquated form of government. A
congress of elementary school teachers laid it down that to teach
reading and writing with success to {40} children was, and would
continue to be, impossible until absolute government was abolished.
On the other hand some of the men who earnestly desired to prolong
the days of the Russian Empire, to revive its waning strength, to
keep its ethnic elements and disparate classes together, turned to
foreign battlefields in search of territorial expansion and
distraction. Aksakoff, Pobiedonostseff, Plehve, Sazonoff, were all
true representatives of Holy Russia. That instinct came from the
deepest spirit of the men who had built up the Tsardom.
Witte's statesmanship differed widely from theirs. It may be
described as a systematic endeavour to conciliate and satisfy the two
tendencies, the democratisation of the regime and expansion abroad.
Hence it was essentially synthetic. I think I am fairly interpreting
my friend's central idea by likening it to that of Frederic when he
proceeded to make Prussia thoroughly independent without and well
compacted and united within. Witte himself never used any such
ambitious comparison even when thinking aloud in my presence, but the
likeness disengages itself automatically from much that he did say.
In his confidential talks with me he often emphasised the remarkable
fact that Russia occupied a place in the hierarchy of nations to
which her specific gravity nowise entitled her. And if ever the
discovery were made by the Kaiser, he added, its consequences might
be calamitous. The Tsardom was weak, disunited, ready to explode
into tiny fragments, and a campaign, especially against a power like
Germany, would reveal this condition very quickly. Therefore it must
be shunned--all wars must be shunned because of that fatal revelation
to which they would lead. Russia's economic needs in the East could
be provided for by pacific penetration and railway building, and her
requirements in the West might best be supplied by a coalition with
Germany, Austria, and France. Those being the great land powers,
their interests could be made to run fairly parallel with each other,
whereas those of Great Britain were often peculiar to herself alone.
Still the object of the league would not be {41} war but a stable
peace and no territorial changes were contemplated.
In the meantime he would have set about changing the domestic regime
as radically as appeared feasible without provoking violent reactions.
Witte's method consisted of a series of economic, social, and
political changes gradually adopted. For one thing he would have
educated the entire people and endeavoured to qualify the State, or a
department of it, to discharge the function of social direction.
Why, he asked, were the Germans so much superior to their neighbours
in general and technical education? Because of the solicitude of
their rulers? Were their rulers distinguished from those of other
people by their moral ideals? Nowise. But they had clearer vision,
greater initiative, and were possessed of faith in the dogma that the
destinies, if not the character, of men are modifiable without end by
education, instruction, and social direction. He himself caused
technical schools and colleges to be opened and endowed whenever and
wherever it was possible.
Witte grasped the master fact that the emancipation of the serfs was
the liberation of an elemental force which like fire or water must be
kept under control if it is not to become destructive. He knew that
it would entail a sequence of fateful innovations which according to
the form imparted to them by the legislator might make or mar the
Empire. He was eager, therefore, to produce a set of conditions,
economic and political, in which the newly qualified elements of the
community could grow and equip themselves morally and intellectually
for the leading part they would one day be called on to play in
Russia and perhaps in Europe. And he desired that the central
authorities should be dispensed from the barren task of entering into
the details of local needs. To say to the myriads of freed men as
did Pobiedonostseff, Dmitry, Tolstoy, and Plehve, "Thus far and no
further," smacked of the spells employed by the Boxers in China to
prevent bullets from entering their bodies. The State must turn over
a new leaf. Education was become a manifest necessity; it had been
discouraged, penalised. {42} Political enfranchisement was a
corollary of emancipation from serfdom. The press had been forbidden
to discuss it. The initiation of the peasants into the duties of
citizenship, into collective work carried on under personal
responsibility, was a preliminary condition of national progress, but
even to moot such an innovation has been punished as treason. At the
very least freedom in the choice of means by which the emancipated
millions might wish to satisfy their consciences and save their souls
was a postulate of healthy, moral development, but not only was it
persistently withheld from the _mooshik_, it was not accorded even to
the intellectuals. The one was forced to remain in the State church
because without compulsion the State church, now hardly more than a
police department, might soon be devoid of a congregation, and the
other were only permitted to choose between orthodoxy and atheism,
and most of them chose atheism.
From this coercive system Witte turned away in angry disgust. With
repression he had no sympathy. But his policy was inspired by
considerations more respectable and more conducive to social
well-being than mere personal likes or dislikes. He saw clearly the
thinness of the bonds that held the various nationalities, and the
various classes, and the populations of the various territories and
climates together in a single community which had no common
denominator, no point of convergence but a frail and irresolute
monarch. Intuitively he gauged the force of the national bent
towards territorial expansion, and by experience he knew that
economic pressure would soon compel the rulers to choose between a
series of reforms with which foreign conquests and even the
perpetuation of the regime would be incompatible, and a system of
coercion which would cause Russia to be outlawed by the nations of
the world. And his way out of the difficulty, had he been authorised
to take it, was to begin to introduce the most urgent reforms without
delay, to place them once for all beyond the reach of the
reactionary; to substitute law for caprice; to safeguard the liberty
and cultivate the dignity of the individual; and parallel {43} with
these measures to strengthen by legislation the levelling influence
of the economic forces which his financial and industrial policy was
rendering operative. Towards the non-Russian races, whose national
spirit had been intensified and made aggressive by persecution, and
who were now less likely than ever to coalesce voluntarily with the
ruling people, he advocated a policy of generosity, a standing appeal
to their nobler instincts and solidarity of interests. Thus he would
have conciliated the Finns and quickened their advance along the road
of civilisation. To the Poles he would have conceded a large measure
of real autonomy. From the Jews he would have struck off their
degrading fetters. The Armenians and all the other Caucasian peoples
he would have left in peace. Lastly he would have striven to still
the nation's greed for territorial aggrandisement by introducing
intensive culture among the peasantry and thus removing one of its
causes--dearth of land--by fostering Russian industries, and by
opening vast new markets in the East for Russia's produce through
railways and "peaceful penetration." That was the key to his
grandiose schemes of railway building and also to his less
commendable dealings with China. On those lines Witte's policy was
laid. How he applied it to the grouping of powers, European and
Asiatic, is another question with which I am not now concerned.
I do not for a moment suggest that Witte ever seriously approached
this comprehensive problem of Russia's past in relation to her future
as a whole. This would have been wasted effort in the reigns either
of Alexander III. or Nicholas II., and he was not a man to throw away
his time in unproductive speculation. But I know that some of its
aspects were always before him and none of them was wholly missed.
He had, however, greater and more numerous obstacles to surmount than
any of his predecessors, not only because he was swimming against the
main Russian stream, but also because his promotion to the highest
position in the Empire drew upon him the opposition, the hatred, the
calumnies, and the insidious machinations of a host of enemies to
whom the last of the Tsars readily gave ear. {44} Under Alexander
III. the great statesman was not permitted to venture even upon a
temporary excursion into the domain of political reforms, and any
headway he may have made in that direction was indirect. And to my
knowledge Nicholas II. assured the chiefs of two States from whose
lips I received the statement that he never from the first had the
slightest confidence in Witte, never willingly gave him a free hand,
nor trusted him as a public servant or a private individual.
I often told Witte that his hopes and aspirations were doomed to
disappointment, and his natural sagacity made him aware of the fact.
But he never wholly abandoned hope. He used to say that if Alexander
III. had lived, or if his son Michael had succeeded him or were yet
to come to the throne, much might be changed for the better and
Russia's international position strengthened. My objection was that
it was much too late. The Tsardom's sands were running down. And he
sometimes agreed with me during those fits of dejection which often
came over him of late years, especially after an animated talk with
the Emperor or the discovery of a fresh intrigue against himself.
The thin flickering flame of democracy was fed with solid fuel when
the army ceased to be professional. To my knowledge the significance
and weight of this innovation as a factor in the destinies of Russia
was not discerned at the time or since. Witte never once alluded to
it. And yet, to my thinking, it imparted a tremendous impulse to the
forces that first weakened and then broke up the Tsarist State, The
professional army was a terrible weapon, an enlarged and perfected
_opritchina_ whose units were just human enough to take and execute
orders, but were machines in every other respect. A soldier served
for a quarter of a century. When he donned the uniform he quitted
not only his family but the civil community for good. He became a
unit in an organism, a function. He was severed from the nation as
were Ivan's opritchniki, tempered, trained, attuned to a life apart.
Military discipline was as severe as it must have been in the days of
Rameses of Egypt or Nabonassar of Babylon. Punishments were
ferocious, fiendish. Soldiers {45} thus kneaded and moulded could do
great things and did them. For they were soldiers and nothing more.
They loved only to fight, and had ceased to be peasants once they
joined the ranks. There were no reserve officers then. An officer
had as little to do with the people as had the soldier. Neither
officer nor private felt any solidarity with the people. But with
the change of the system of recruitment, the whole character of the
army changed and also its capacity for military achievement. Compare
closely the wars of Peter, Catherine, Paul, Alexander I., and
Nicholas I. with the Turkish war of 1877 and the Manchurian campaign
of 1904-5 and the difference will stand forth in relief. That,
however, was the only one and the least momentous consequence of the
change.
The democratic method of universal and short service having been
established the traits of the peasantry were transplanted to the army
and navy: the querulous, critical, satirical vein, the lack of
finality in obedience and in everything, the anarchic tendency in a
word. And as time went on the efficiency of the Russian soldier
diminished perceptibly. Their generals, too, seem to have remained
below the former high standard. But what is more to the point, the
old army of Nicholas I. would have interposed an impassable barrier
to a popular revolution. Under Nicholas II. the March explosion
would have been stifled if the army had been opposed to it. But the
peasant army which was sent against the German invaders was not
steeled like the warriors who had made Russia's name famous in the
eighteenth and in the early days of the nineteenth centuries. They
hated war, were impatient to return to their fields, and took the
first opportunity--when capital punishment was abolished--to fling
their rifles in the bushes and go back to their families. And when
appealed to by their hungry brethren to turn their rifles against the
authorities and to merit the long promised land, they hearkened to
the call and exploded the legend of the Little Father.
Those were some of the remoter and deeper causes of the Russian
revolution. Their force was enhanced by the {46} impolitic action of
the Tsar's ministers in allowing the relations between the central
authorities and the masses--now growing more conscious and
exacting--to be broken by myriads of irresponsible and unscrupulous
petty officials instead of charging the zemstvos and the
municipalities with the work of carrying them on. For the scandalous
improbity of these unjust stewards embittered the peasants and the
workmen, fanned the embers of discontent, and materially aided the
professional revolutionists of the intelligentsia. It was this
enormous disadvantage of the autocracy and the instinct of
self-preservation which it quickened that moved its champions to
overstep all bounds and found an order of men for whose iniquity
western languages have no adequate name--men who enlisted
conspirators, hatched damnable plots, coaxed and paid young lads to
execute them, and as opportunity served either seized these tools and
sent them to death or looked on while they committed the wanton
abominations assigned to them. Reading or hearing about the foul
deeds of miscreants like Azeff, Gapon, and Rasputin, and of the
torture and horrible deaths of their victims, I am reminded of the
lines which the poet Swinburne wrote at my request on an article of
mine about Russian prisons:
"Earth is hell, and hell bows down before the Tsar,
All its monstrous, murderous, lecherous births acclaim
Him whose Empire lives to match its fiery fame.
Nay, perchance at sight or sense of deeds here done,
Here where men may lift up eyes to greet the sun,
Hell recoils heart-stricken; horror worse than Hell
Darkens earth and sickens heaven; life knows the spell,
Shudders, quails, and sinks--or, filled with fiercer breath,
Rises red in arms devised of darkling death.
Pity mad with passion, anguish mad with shame,
Call aloud on justice by her darker name..."
_Fortnightly Review_, August, 1890, p. 166.
[1] Shtshedrin's satirical sketches throw a flood of light on the
predatory nature of the Tsardom, and in particular one satire
entitled _The Tashkentians_.
[2] In the year 1240.
[3] The White Russians are undoubtedly pure Slavs.
[4] Opritchnik means an outsider, an outlaw, one who keeps or is kept
aloof.
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