THE RULE OF THE BUREAU
"My ideas about a change of regime and the kindred proposals that
have been the cause of so much hatred and bloodshed," said
Pobiedonostseff, the Mentor of Alexander III., "are neither new nor
complex"--he was talking to a knot of three or four persons including
Komaroff and myself. "What a government ought to aim at is the
happiness of the people. Now the elements of happiness vary with the
different peoples and with their degrees of culture. What is needed
in a legislator, therefore, besides a knowledge of the nation's
actual requirements, is skill in adjusting his measures to
these--this rather than a spirit of system. The Russian people
differ widely from western nations both to their advantage and their
disadvantage, and because they differ no one formula can be safely
applied to both. Call our peasants unsophisticated or uncivilised in
the European sense, if you will, the fact remains that neither their
spiritual instincts nor their moral restraints are adequate to subdue
the ferocious passions that lie dormant in their breasts without the
aid of physical sanctions. That is the leading fact and it should
receive due weight. To a large extent our Church is answerable for
this backwardness. What any government worth its salt must do, then,
is to see that the Christian spirit is infused into the Church and
keep the revolutionary poison from entering the veins of the nation.
This does not involve stagnation. Progress there certainly must be,
but it will have to be marked by ordered gradation. The triumph of
Liberalism to-day would be the dissolution of the bonds that keep the
community together and would entail decomposition."
These were the maxims that inspired Pobiedonostseff's policy at its
best. But they remained maxims to the end. It was not until the
middle of the next reign that he regretfully {84} admitted the
impossibility of carrying out any coherent policy of regeneration for
lack of qualified instruments. And these he had failed to find in
Russia. What he had also overlooked was the impossibility, under his
own system, of obtaining such agents, and if there had been any, of
setting them feasible tasks. For the autocracy had by this time
become a mere name for government by myriads of petty officials, each
of whom worked separately under hardly any local and no central
control, actuated by sordid motives and devoid alike of loyalty to
the State and of a sense of duty. If the constitutional reform
approved by Alexander II. had been embodied in institutions, and if
the zemstvos, entrusted with fuller powers, had then been allowed to
co-operate organically with each other, effective supervision and
fruitful government would have been at least possible during a brief
period of transition. By Pobiedonostseff's methods they were
eliminated. The innovation inaugurated by this statesman consisted
of a set of artificial checks and counter-checks of which the only
justification was the perpetuation of the autocracy--and the
principal result was to fortify the bureaucracy and render it more of
a parasite than before. It is fair to recognise that the State at
that epoch had no other means of defence at its disposal. The curse
of Russia had from the beginning of her history been the absence of
effective moral restraints and the operation of mechanical
substitutes. And now by way of bettering the plight to which the
nation was thereby reduced it was proposed to increase the mere
mechanical deterrents. Accordingly the individual and the community
were called on to surrender their interests, aims, thoughts to
salaried conscience-keepers, who were bereft of self-respect and
often of moral integrity. General dissatisfaction was the immediate
consequence; the final outcome was the abysmal plunge.
None the less the experiment was protracted throughout the entire
reign of Alexander II. and a great part of that of his successor.
The new Tsar, who had refused to consolidate the State and weaken the
bureaucracy by means of the zemstvos, which he considered dangerous,
appointed a {85} complete set of chiefs for every department of
public life and for every class of the population. Take one
instance. The peasants, when serfs, had had but slight relations
with the State and only indirectly through their masters. From the
autocratic point of view this was a distinct advantage, for it
simplified government by centralisation. But it lasted only as long
as serfdom. Now that the emancipated peasants were being disaffected
by terrorist propagandists and others, the Home Secretary devised a
class of guardians[1] to shield them, whose sole qualification was
nobility of birth, officials who were answerable only to the
minister, and to these power was given over the bodies and souls of
nine-tenths of the population. It was within the discretion of the
new chiefs to rob and flog and persecute their wards; many of them
used the power without ruth, and went so far as deliberately and
arbitrarily to hinder even agricultural development, the spread of
instruction, and liberty of religious thought and creed. This new
order of bureaucrats was in the nature of a final touch to a policy
which drove the country out of its natural course and set it moving
towards the abyss. For the emancipation of the serfs by bringing the
government and the masses into direct communication necessitated a
vast increase in the number of officials, each of whom, more or less
independent of the government, wielded a certain degree of
irresponsible power. So enormous was the mass of reports, edicts,
warnings, and comments which passed between the centre and the
circumference that the former could not possibly exercise supervision
over the latter. The crying injustice and the farcical intermezzos
that resulted would fill volumes.
I remember vaguely the case of a landed proprietor who, having
mortgaged his estate and become insolvent, was unable to pay the
interest to the State Bank. After the usual formalities the land and
manor were to be put up for auction. He appealed to the Emperor for
time to scrape together the amount of his debt, but in vain. One of
his friends then advised him to go to a certain _pissar_[2] in the
department--an {86} amanuensis who received some sixty pounds a
year--and offer him a hundred roubles for his help. He took the
advice, paid the money, and had ample time to collect the requisite
sum. The pissar through whose hands the order passed deliberately
transformed the address on the envelope into a town in eastern
Siberia by the change of two letters. The decree ordering the sale
was despatched to the far east of the Tsardom and several months
elapsed before the "mistake" was discovered and corrected. In this
way the estate was saved.
It was the segregation of the bureaucracy and the immense power it
conferred upon irresponsible nobodies that ultimately drove in the
wedge between it and the crown which finally contributed to split the
structure of the State. If instead of devising the class of district
chiefs or local tsarlets who made the confusion much worse than
before, the government had reverted to the scheme of Alexander II.
and set existing public bodies like the zemstvos to discharge the
functions of intermediaries and to co-operate with each other, a step
would have been taken in the right direction, but it is doubtful
whether at that late period Russia's evolution would have progressed
in its historic course. Count N. P. Ignatieff, who became, for a
short time, Minister of the Interior, discerned this possibility and
suggested to Alexander III. the adoption of the political reform
drafted by Loris Melikoff. But the idea was scouted by the Tsar's
reactionary counsellors, Pobiedonostseff and Dmitry Tolstoy,
whereupon Ignatieff had to withdraw into private life for the
remainder of his days. Thus at irregular periods from the reign of
Catherine II. downwards, Russian monarchs manifested velleities of
internal reform, but the piratical spirit of the State stifled all
such beginnings.
Too much stress cannot be laid on the fact that from time immemorial
political Russia has consisted of two classes, the masters and their
workers, between whom yawned an abyss almost as wide as that between
Spartan citizens and helots.
Military force and a certain proportion between the {87} rulers'
striving for territorial expansion and their achievements kept the
arrangement from breaking down. From early days onward to the reign
of Ivan the Terrible the force was directed mainly against internal
enemies, independent principalities, or the Tartars, while the masses
were left largely to their own resources. The ruler invariably
struck up a tacit partnership with the soldiers, his instruments for
the extension and maintenance of his power, and in virtue of this
partnership they became materially interested in his success, being
certain of a large part of the booty. It should be borne well in
mind that this co-operative system, with seasonable modifications,
has been the type of regime in Russia down to the revolution of 1917.
Thus Ivan the Terrible was served by his guards--opritchniki--who
benefited very extensively by his conquests. Peter transformed the
opritchina into an army, and the rude system of civil service into a
bureaucratic hierarchy whose principal function it was to bind
together the conflicting elements of the Empire and keep their
centrifrugal tendencies permanently under control.
This system yielded for a time all the good of which it was capable,
but it was always in danger of degenerating into organised
parasitism. So long, however, as the central authority was able to
survey and direct the doings of its agents the mechanism worked with
passable smoothness. But the bureaucracy was swamped by a deluge of
new officials after the emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II.,
and when his successor aggravated the evil by appointing a host of
intermediaries invested with practically unlimited power the
bureaucracy ceased to be the organ of the autocrat, and rapidly
became a monstrous parasite which preyed on the body of the Russian
nation and lived for itself alone.
In this respect there was a striking contrast between the Tsardom and
the Kaiserdom. For in spite of its kinglets, princes, and grand
dukes, Germany is a federation of twenty-six independent States
governed each one by its own conscientious administration which is
thoroughly acquainted with its needs, capacities, and temper, and is
able to play {88} upon all its chords with the certainty of evoking
the wished-for response. Nowhere do the Saxons, the Bavarians, or
the other independent peoples come into actual contact with the
obnoxious forms of imperial absolutism. These are caught and
transformed by the local government organism which has the welfare of
the people at heart. The Tsardom, on the contrary, lay heavy on each
province, nationality, religion, tribe, and individual, and rendered
progress well-nigh impossible and existence difficult.
It was to free the people from that mighty vampire that the
revolution was conceived by the intellectuals. The fundamental error
committed by its promoters was that they treated the masses as Ivan
the Terrible had treated his opritchniki, and offered them a share in
the booty--the land--whereupon the people contented itself with
reversing the existing system, or rather democratising it, and took
to preying on the classes that possessed land, fortune, culture.
Among the various revolutionary agencies which were at work since I
first went to Russia, the most unpretending, indirect, and effective
were certain religious sectarians. For many years I was the
spokesman in the west of religious communities which were being
ground in the dust by Pobiedonostseff's autocratic steam-roller.[3]
Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Old Believers, Stundists, Dookhobortsy
were all in turn the victims of oppression. But the sects which were
penalised with the utmost ferocity of theological hatred were those
rationalistic creeds which apply unrestricted criticism to revealed
religion, freely draw their own practical conclusions and apply these
to all the problems of life. For the Russian is a born dialectician
who pursues an argument to its uttermost corollary without
qualification or reserve. He recoils from no conclusion. The
circumstance that the upshot is an absurdity is, in his eyes, no test
of the falseness of his premises. Hence the astounding tenets and
brutal practices of many of the most wide-spread religious
communities such as the self-mutilators, the suicidal sects, and the
Khlysty from whom Rasputin took some of his doctrines. {89} Now the
rationalistic denominations made no distinction between politics and
religion in the application of their critical solvents. They applied
the same test to both. Some of them, like the Dookhobortsy,
denounced war as a crime, forbade their adepts to don military
uniform, refused to pay taxes, and generally prescribed limits beyond
which obedience to the State became sinful. Obviously these rivals
to the government could not be tolerated by Pobiedonostseff, engaged
as he then was on a delicate experiment of the highest import. But
he made no distinction between these groups and others whose members
were more law-abiding. Hence the history of the religious movement
of the reign is a chronicle of relentless persecution on the one hand
and of Russian heroism on the other, and in its political aspect a
chapter of the origins of the breakdown of the entire framework of
Tsarism.
Coercion in religious matters did more to spread political
disaffection than the most enterprising revolutionary propagandists.
It turned the best spirits of the nation against the tripartite
system of God, Tsar, and fatherland, and convinced even average
people not only that there was no life-giving principle in the State,
but that no faculty of the individual or the nation had room left for
unimpeded growth. Whithersoever one turned progress was barred by
artificial obstacles. Schools, universities, the bar, the law
courts, the press, the church and the chapel, the peasants' reunions,
the zemstvo assemblies were so many narrow cages in which thought as
well as action were caught and confined. The bulk of the nation felt
the economic pressure of this gigantic incubus most painfully, for
except in the religious domain it was rare that curiosity of an
intellectual character made itself felt among the peasants, and then
it generally assumed grotesque shapes. The moral and intellectual
condition of the people had not perceptibly changed since their first
appearance in history, and it was clear to the student of national
psychology that its manifestations, whenever the tight bonds of the
bureaucracy should snap, were certain to vie in lawlessness and
savagery with those of the {90} pre-Christian era. This was a
momentous aspect of the problem which was entirely neglected by all
countries of the west. Another was to be found in the unwonted
social conditions which were being created and fostered by Witte's
policy of industrialisation. The need for canalising and regulating
the new forces thus springing into life was fast growing peremptory,
but the only agencies devised by the government to cope with them
were those of the police and the Orthodox Church. By these queer
educators myriads of the Tsar's subjects were being systematically
pinioned and cooped in ways so hateful that vast forces of revolt and
destruction were generated and stored up against the day of reckoning.
It was the regenerated Church that Pobiedonostseff hoped to use as a
compensating counter-force to the defects of the State and the
drawbacks of its new economic policy. But the instrument broke in
his hands. The orthodox Russian Church could not yield the
regenerative virtue which itself did not possess. For it was but an
interesting relic of the past. Even when first brought from
Byzantium to Kieff it was little more than a set of old forms and
ceremonies which the primitive Slavs were forced by their ruler to
adopt. The one spark of vitality that still glowed among its dry
ashes was the spirit of asceticism that dovetailed admirably with the
natural religion of the tribes which Vladimir, their prince, drove
into the Byzantine fold. An intimate friend of mine, one of the most
Christian distinguished members of the Russian Church, whose life was
dedicated to the work[4] of freeing it from the deforming crust of
ages, affirms that it lacks a truly spiritual government. "The
Russian Church," he wrote, "bereft of support and of a centre of
unity outside the State, became of necessity subject to the secular
power ... and unavoidably ended in anti-Christian absolutism." From
the tenth century, when it was transplanted in Slav soil, down to the
present day Russian orthodoxy has been singularly devoid of
intellectual and, indeed, moral {91} life and movement. The gropings
of individual and collective God-seekers among the ignorant people
proceeded--as I maintained against Tolstoy's Christian theory--from
the natural bent of the Slav character towards mysticism and morbid
introspection pushed to its extreme consequences. Hence the
multiplicity of strange barbarous sects that bring one back, not only
to the feats of Simon Stylites, but to the still more awful penances
of the great Indian ascetics who by dint of cruel self-torture
surmounted titanic obstacles and won for themselves the state of
godhead.
The organisation of the Russian Church, but not its dogmas or
practices, has varied with that of the secular governments. Since
the days of Peter, who tolerated no rivals, it has had no visible
head other than the Tsar. By that reformer the patriarchate was
abolished and a synod of bishops instituted in its stead, to each of
whose members an oath was administered by which he acknowledged the
sovereign as the supreme judge of the convocation. And by way of
stifling all tendencies to independence the hierarchy of the clergy
was divided into ranks corresponding to the military grades, so that
a metropolitan archbishop is equal to a "full general," an archbishop
to a lieutenant-general, whereas a secular clergyman, do what he may,
cannot hope to swing himself into a higher rank than that of colonel.
I long occupied a favourable post of observation from which to study
the working of the Church mechanism, for I was honoured not only with
the friendship of Vladimir Solovieff, the one great theologian[5] and
moral philosopher Russia has produced, but also with that of Isidore,
the Metropolitan Archbishop of Petersburg and Finland, of the
Metropolitans Plato of Kieff, Ambrose of Kharkoff, Nikanor of
Kherson, Michael of Serbia, and of the clerical laymen Tertius
Philippoff, Professor Cayetan Kossowicz, Athanasius Bytchkoff, and
others. I was the private adviser of the Metropolitan Isidore during
one of the most interesting epochs of his life, heard his criticism
of {92} Pobiedonostseff, who vainly endeavoured to get rid of him by
sending him to a monastery, and his shrewd observations on the Tsar
Alexander III. and the Tsaritsa. A certain amount of his foreign
correspondence passed through my hands. I once composed an
encyclical letter in his name addressed to all orthodox and other
Christian Churches throughout the world, and having had it approved
by him and signed for promulgation, it occurred to me that
Pobiedonostseff would protest against the innovation, which implied a
sort of supremacy of the metropolitan over the Russian Church, and
would force the prelate to resign. Without giving this as my reason
for withholding the letter which I still possess as a curiosity I
wrote a differently worded and less ambitious pastoral over the
archbishop's signature which was duly published.[6]
I also carried on a correspondence, on behalf of that prelate, with
several representative members of the Anglican Church, including
bishops and archbishops, mainly on the subject of the reunion of
their respective communions. In the intervals the archbishop and
myself calmly talked the matter over in its theological and political
aspects. The prelate was a shrewd self-educated peasant whose
acquaintanceship with theology and Church history was superficial,
but whose knowledge of Russia and human nature was thorough. He saw
distinctly that the line of cleavage between the two Churches was not
really theological, and that even if it were, it could not be
obliterated for lack of a central authority to pronounce judgment.
As the problem was largely political he knew that even
Pobiedonostseff himself was powerless to solve it. Finally he
perceived that the Russian Church could not move in the matter
without the support of the other branches of orthodoxy which might
not be obtainable. And he nearly always ended up these discussions
with the words, "We need not insist on these things in our
correspondence. They--the Anglicans--must not be scared. After all
they are well-meaning and also, I am told, generous people, and I
want to appeal to them for help for my orthodox mission in Japan.
Lay stress, therefore, on our {93} desire to work for reunion and
allude to the question of orders which is admittedly a solid
hindrance."
This venerable prelate, who captivated me by his racy language, his
rare shrewdness, and his delightful outspokenness, was wont to say
that no one could understand the Russian people who had not studied
their religious conceptions. A friend of his once suggested that I
should apply for a professorship which had fallen vacant at the
theological academy of Petrograd. Although I had no positive grounds
for believing that it would be given to me, some friends urged me to
present my application in writing, together with my qualifications,
to the President of the Academy, Yanysheff, who was a _persona grata_
at court in spite of his Lutheran leanings in theology. This I
accordingly did. After the lapse of a considerable time he sent for
me and said that a preliminary condition to my admission to compete
for the professorship would be my conversion to the State Church. In
vain my friends pointed out that a Jewish professor was actually
teaching Hebrew there. The answer was that there was no parity
between Hebrew and philosophy. The rule, therefore, was upheld and
my candidature fell to the ground.
Thereupon my friend, the archbishop, strongly urged me to devote part
of my life to the study of religion in Russia and to pay special care
to the origins, growth, and influence of the various sects on the
character and habits of the people. The speculations of Vladimir
Solovieff, combined with the metropolitan's advice, led me to inquire
closely into the history of the orthodox and heretical communions in
the country, to read the epistles, narratives, and discourses of the
early Russian writers, ecclesiastical and lay, to investigate the
curious problems suggested by the countless and grotesque sects, and
to find out from the sectarians themselves what human or peculiarly
Russian needs were satisfied by their respective tenets and
practices. In obtaining materials for these investigations I was
assisted by the metropolitan archbishop and the Home Secretary, Count
Dmitry Tolstoy, an atheist and ex-head of the Russian Church, through
{94} whose intervention a number of important secret reports on
sectarianism in the Empire[7] were communicated to me, bearing mainly
upon what one might term the grotesque in religious aberrations.
It was while I was engaged in these studies that the work of
regenerating the Russian people was undertaken by Pobiedonostseff,
who had, meanwhile, become chief of the Most Holy Synod. This
statesman hugged the delusion that political and social betterment in
the autocratic sense would result from that uprising of religious
sentiment which he was exerting himself to effect. He was an honest,
selfless fanatic who would set his eyes on a goal and move towards it
with steadfast tread without paying heed to the pitfalls in his path.
Pobiedonostseff the layman was one of the few educated clericals in
the Orthodox Church. To this institution he allotted a state mission
for which, in so far as it was compatible with its natural functions,
it could not be fitted in less than two or three generations. I may
say at once that I was favourably impressed by his intentions and
amazed by the warp that vitiated his judgment. He was the victim of
an idea which, after the manner of so many of his countrymen, he
deemed capable of universal application, the fusion of autocracy,
orthodoxy, and nationalism in one trinitarian conception. This it
was that stirred in him a praiseworthy endeavour to infuse religious
ichor into the Church, which would enable it to accomplish its lofty
mission and render the Russian people a sharer in mysterious grace of
which it would have become the repository.
As liberty of conscience would be tantamount to the abandonment of
this object it was withheld. In view of the process of
disintegration going on in the Church and of the weakness of its
spiritual and moral fibre, such freedom would sap its foundations and
those of the autocracy with which it was indissolubly bound up.
Moreover, disbelief in Church dogmas, especially when accompanied, as
in the {95} rationalistic sects, by a critical attitude of mind
towards all institutions and traditions, is, it was argued, hardly to
be distinguished from disloyalty to the Tsar. Accordingly
Pobiedonostseff refused to make a distinction. And yet he was not
characterised by hardness of heart, but the problem which he tackled
bristled with difficulties and provoked acts which put him often in
contradiction with his better self. These painful dilemmas were
sometimes reflected in official records. The Ober-Procurator of the
Most Holy Synod, who, unlike his atheistic predecessor,[8] was a
fervent believer, published every year a report on the progress of
orthodoxy, the vicissitudes of its struggle with the revolted
sectarians, and a plan of campaign for the immediate future. In
these annuals he invariably underlined the necessity of "influencing
the erring ones by meekness and mildness, in the spirit of tolerance,
of Christian love and indulgence." On the other hand, however, he
was wont to complain of the indulgence displayed by the secular arm,
of the inaction of the civil administration, and of the apathy of the
tribunals which, he maintained, sometimes connived at and even helped
to spread the false doctrines. Education, religion, toleration,
freedom of the press, co-operation of any kind among citizens,
excepting Church sodalities, were judged to be incompatible with the
good ordering of the realm.
I was much struck with the contradictions between words and deeds in
which this policy involved Pobiedonostseff. In the year 1883 a law
was passed allowing the Stundists--a sort of Baptist sect--to meet in
and possess prayer halls on the same footing as the Old Believers,[9]
and it also implicitly permitted members of the State Church to join
their community. But in reality hard labour, banishment to a deadly
climate, and loss of the custody of their children were among the
penalties inflicted on those who forsook orthodoxy for Evangelical
Christianity. The Stundists were on the blackest books of the Synod.
"Uncommonly pernicious {96} ecclesiastically and politically" was the
label affixed to them by Pobiedonostseff. A Russian press organ of
high standing[10] brandmarked later on the action taken against these
and other religions as disgraceful. These sectarians, we read, "are
not only prosecuted, but are hounded down after the fashion of the
Middle Ages. Banishment to Siberia and Transcaucasia, confinement in
monastery prisons, scourging with Cossack whips, military repressions
like that of the Dookhobortsy in 1895, arbitrary in justice like the
removal of the children of the Molokani from their parents' custody
in 1897, frequent lynchings of sectarians by the artificially incited
masses as in 1901,[11] these are a few of the facts which outline the
legal status, or rather the outlawing of religious dissenters."[12]
One can readily imagine the influence on the impressionable
population of Russia of these fanaticised people when forcibly
dispersed over the Empire. For they were respected by their
fellow-subjects, unlike the Dookhobortsy who refused to serve in the
army, were flighty, and liable at times to fits of religious mania.
The example of the Stundists was bracing. Their farms were well
kept, their houses clean, their word was respected. Yet 200,000 of
them were at one time making ready to emigrate in batches. To my
knowledge many quitted their country. One of the most influential
organs of the press wrote of them: "The Stundists have never refused
to serve in the army or to pay taxes. They were and still are the
most peaceful of our citizens; they are characterised by sobriety and
clean living, by industry and love of order ... and none the less
they were accused of various 'propensities,' political and social,
and the opinion of the Committee of Ministers[13] stigmatised them as
'especially pernicious.' Since then they have been deprived of their
rights of praying together even in private apartments, huts, and
other dwellings. Is such a state of {97} things normal, nay, is it
even bearable?"[14] And yet it was in truth a necessity--if the
Tsarist State was to be preserved.
The immediate consequence of this legislation was systematic
law-breaking which, becoming a meritorious act, had a demoralising
effect upon large sections of the population, and a further result
was utter contempt of the government. Compelled to choose between a
violation of what they believed to be God's precept and of sinful
man's vagaries or malice, these latter-day saints made short work of
the latter. In the sectarian diocese of Nishny Novgorod there were
only twelve Stundist meeting places licensed by the authorities for
about 75,000 persons, whereupon 172 others were opened illegally.
Sixty such prayer halls were secretly established in the province of
Vyatka. In this way millions of dissenters were turned into
political offenders and the country was honeycombed with
disaffection. For the principle of the State was that all Russians
should be gently or roughly pushed into the true fold and get into
contact with the Creator through the conducting medium of His
lieutenant the Tsar.
The Old Believers, with whom I was in close contact, were in numerous
cases forbidden to marry in their own church. Those who disregarded
the prohibition were punished by a decree declaring their children
bastards and their wives concubines. A Russian publicist who for
years evinced an enlightened interest in ecclesiastical matters wrote
of these, "They are devoid of the right of bringing up a family; they
are debarred from the civil service; they are disqualified from
praying.... All this I affirm positively, and without diverging a
hair's breadth from the reality. When I read a letter from the Ural
that the marriages of the Old Believers--whose domestic life is
assuredly more serene, more modest, more pious than ours--are not
recognised; that their wives, their mothers, their grandmothers,
continue to be officially set down as spinsters; that the union of
the husband and wife who have been married in accordance with the old
Russian liturgy is termed fornication, {98} just as are the unchaste
bonds that link the drunkards and the thieves down in Gorky's Depths,
I confess it made my hair stand on end. The Depths of Gorky, indeed!
Here are the real depths. It is not merely that these people are
said to live badly; but the law defines, classifies, and establishes
such rules and regulations for them as though they were dogs, and
denies them civil rights, even such an elementary right of mankind as
that of having a family.
"The State is only wielding its right when it disqualifies for its
service alike the hooligan from the depths and the honourable
dissenting merchant, whom in this respect it sets on a level with the
thief. For it may do what it likes with its own. But let the savage
Samoyede from the Arctic circle on the one hand set about marrying
his Samoyed woman, and the Russian nonconformist on the other hand
wed the dissenting girl, and see then what happens. The former, as
is known, prays to a wooden doll, and the latter to St. Nicholas the
Wonder-worker.[15] Yet the State says, 'I recognise the Samoyed
marriage, but I declare that the dissenters are living in forbidden
unchaste intimacy, and this mother of six and that mother of ten
children are but spinsters guilty of fornication.'"[16]
The extent to which the persecution requisite to the success of
Pobiedonostseff's campaign was carried is hardly credible to any but
those who witnessed it. I was asked once to approach that statesman
or one of his colleagues on behalf of an orthodox priest named
Tsvetkoff,[17] whose fixed idea was to emancipate the Church from her
subservience to the lay elements and in particular to the State.
Like so many of his countrymen he was a dialectician. He pointed out
that one of the recent heads of the Most Holy Synod[18] was an
atheist, that simony is a common and anti-Christian practice, that
the Holy Synod is less a channel of divine grace than a department of
the police, and that an œcumenical {99} council should be summoned
without delay. It is not to be wondered at that the Holy Synod
condemned Tsvetkoff to be interned in the monastery prison of
Suzdal.[19] He was met at the threshold by the abbot, an
ex-artillery colonel, who welcomed him with the words, "Hitherto you
have been singing! Eh? Well, henceforth you will have to dance."
The story of this priest's experience is valuable for the light it
sheds on the ecclesiastical spirit that prevailed during the reign of
Alexander III. and the first period of that of Nicholas II. and for
the partial explanation it contributes of the upheaval that followed.
For although it is true that the political and social revolutions of
the year 1917 were at the outset the work of a minority, it may be
laid down as an axiom that in the long run no political movement of
importance could hope for even partial success unless it had the
tacit support of the bulk of the people.
Tsvetkoff wrote down his impressions at the time and they were sent
on to me. Here is the thrilling story in his own words: "A horrible
feeling crept over me when this grave opened to receive me. It
became more awful still when I began to realise where I was: I
occupied a cell between two men who were stark mad. There was a
little aperture in each door, and from time to time one or other of
my neighbours would approach this opening and scream at the top of
his voice. His ravings would be interlarded with horrible curses
wreaked upon my head, the head of an impious heretic, and these
shouts which gave me the shivers were kept up for thirty or forty
minutes and more. Even now I shudder when I call them to mind. The
soldiers on guard outside would gaze at me intently through the
aperture, but none showed any pity. I used to ask them whether they
suspected me or had anything to say to me, but then the eye at the
hole would vanish for a time to appear soon after again. That, too,
was torture.
"The military had it in their power to poison a prisoner's life, and
they utterly poisoned mine. We were left entirely to their charge by
the monks, who scarcely ever meddled. {100} Hence the soldiers could
hinder a man from walking in the corridor, could prevent him from
getting tea, and generally embitter his existence by petty
persecution. But it was quite easy to win their favour by bribing
whenever a prisoner had anything to give. I had nothing. I remember
Podgorny, a member of the mystic sect of the Khlysty, who was
imprisoned there, and as he had wealthy friends outside he often
received cakes and other delicacies.
"At last I discovered from scraps of conversation among the soldiers
that they took me for a madman. That was probably what they had been
told. That discovery nearly unhinged my reason. When living outside
I had often been threatened with imprisonment in Suzdal monastery
prison, but I had never once realised that in that fortress there
were veritable graves for the living. Now I knew it and shuddered.
I was buried alive.
"The casemates of the fortress are dreadful stone cages. When I had
spent a few hours in mine I thought I could not remain another month
there and survive. But weeks passed and many months more. And day
after day I had the feeling that I might break down at any moment,
that I must break down very soon. In this way a twelvemonth lapsed
and then another. I feared my reason was going. I was becoming
desperate, and I took a desperate resolution after I had been about
two and a half years in that miserable den.
"I wrote a declaration to Abbot Seraphim, setting forth that,
although I had never been tried on any charge, yet here I was being
punished as though guilty of infamous crimes. That was unjust, I
said, and I protested against it with vigour. If I had done wrong
let it be shown in what I had offended and I would bear my punishment
as becomes a man. I therefore asked to be tried in public, and if
not found guilty to be set free. But I must refuse to die piecemeal
in a dungeon. Life was bereft of its meaning for me. It was more
than I could bear. I informed the abbot, therefore, that unless I
were shortly tried or set free I would abstain from food and die of
hunger.
"To that letter I received no answer. I waited, but {101} Abbot
Seraphim made no sign. It was as though he were leagues away. Then
I set about fulfilling my resolution. On 13th November, 1903, I
resolved to eat no more. Thenceforth the food which was brought to
my cell remained untasted. My health began to ebb and soon failed.
I ceased to move about. Languor and dreaminess came over me, and
then the burning pangs of thirst. Hunger was terrible, but thirst
was maddening. My tongue dried up, my lips were parched, and I
thought I could see madness as a spectre. It was agonising torture.
Then I pulled myself together, got up, and walked as well as I could
to the end of the ceil and reached up to the window where owing to
the cold and dampness icicles were hanging down. I managed to break
off some and melting them in my palms quenched my thirst. I knew a
day would come when exhaustion would keep me lying down and I should
have no icicles to quench the fire in my vitals. It was a horrible
thought; altogether it was a painful process to die thus inch by
inch, to lose hope after hope, without human sympathy or spiritual
consolation, abandoned by heaven and earth. That is how it seemed at
times when the outlook was most dismal."
Meanwhile Abbot Seraphim grew alarmed. A prisoner under his care was
slowly starving himself to death in order to obtain justice. A word
in time might hinder the tragedy. And it was his duty to get this
word pronounced. He accordingly despatched a telegram to the Most
Holy Synod, unfolding the facts and asking for instructions. Father
Tsvetkoff was refusing food--would die of hunger in a few days unless
he were removed from the fortress. Was it the will of the exalted
body, which stands _in loco Christi_, that this man should be saved
from death by an act of common justice, or that he should die? Those
were certainly not the exact terms of his message, but they give the
tenor of it. The answer, as he probably anticipated it, was not
doubtful. Christian charity enjoined mercy as a duty and worldly
prudence suggested it as a policy. Seraphim took the answer for
granted, and removed his prisoner from the fortress to a monk's cell.
And it was not a moment too soon.
{102}
Eighteen days of fasting and abstinence[20] had worn the priest to a
skeleton. Pithless, bloodless, pinched, and powerless, he lay on the
hard couch in his new abode. "I knew I should die if I ate much," he
remarked, "so I took a little gruel that day and a little more on the
day following. I meant to go back very gradually to normal diet."
Meanwhile the reply from the Most Holy Synod was hourly expected.
The Abbot Seraphim had telegraphed on the 2nd December, but strange
to say the 4th December brought no answer before sundown. In the
evening, however, a telegram was received from the Most Holy Synod.
The abbot opened it, read it, and grew very agitated. It was
impersonal, and these were the words of it: "The priest, Tsvetkoff,
is to be again put back in the prisoners' section, and if he dies of
hunger the Most Holy Synod is to be immediately informed, so that
measures may be taken on its behalf relating to the funeral."
These instructions came like a thunderbolt from an azure sky. Even
the shifty abbot, who thought he knew the world and the Most Holy
Synod, was taken aback. The priest ... merely steeled his will to
die. He announced his determination to refuse food once more. Abbot
Seraphim had no choice but to obey instructions, but he expressed his
sympathy for his prisoner and assured him that he would at once write
to St. Petersburg and leave nothing undone to have the cruel order
rescinded. The danger was that success might come too late.
Tsvetkoff continues: "I read that telegram as though it were my death
warrant. Hopelessness mingled with the gloom and damp of my cell,
but before abandoning myself to my fate I wrote my last will,
requesting that no requiem service[21] be held for the repose of my
soul. Then I settled down to the process of dying by hunger. One
day[22] I was roused from my torpor and unexpectedly set free.
Seraphim's advocacy had triumphed. I was released from the hateful
fortress, but was compelled to {103} occupy a cell in the monastery
where I am still. I can take no step, say no word, cast no glance,
but it is noticed and recorded. My health? It is broken up, I fear,
for ever."
It should not be forgotten that these revolting iniquities were
literally beyond count, nor that they were perpetrated with the
approbation and for the behoof of the Church and the autocracy, the
two sources of authority in the Empire. And yet Pobiedonostseff was
not naturally a harsh man, he was only a Russian dialectician, a man
who, when pressed into a tight place, confronted with a logical but
absurd conclusion from his premises, and asked whether he will admit
that, exclaims, "Well, and why not?" To me his answer when I
approached him on the subject of the sectarians was exactly the same
that I received several years later from the men who afterwards
became Duma leaders when I adjured them to support Witte's
administration and promised them on his behalf the power within a
twelvemonth, "It is impossible." "But if you persist," I argued,
"you will ruin your own cause, you will bring about results that must
destroy it." "Well, Dr. Dillon, I really thought that you at least
understood the character of our people. But now I see that I was
mistaken."
Pobiedonostseff's instincts were on the side of organised authority,
religious, moral, and political, and he honestly believed that its
most effective organ is a single person. Unlike many other reformers
he was not personally ambitious, in fact he merged his personality in
the cause. He might have had the pick and choice of offices in the
administration, but he contented himself with the least and kept as
far in the background as was compatible with the exercise of his
functions. He aspired to place the Russian State on a solid
foundation, derived from its historic past, and to raise it to the
highest place among the nations of Europe. This, too, was the
principal object on which his colleague, Count Dmitry Tolstoy, as
Home Secretary, exercised his ingenuity and concentrated his energy.
They both saw clearly that the emancipation of the serfs had effected
two great changes to the detriment of the autocracy. On the one hand
it had {104} increased the numerical strength and extended the
independence and irresponsibility of the bureaucracy so that the
organism that should have supplied progress with motive power
degenerated into a monstrous parasite that sucked the life blood of
the nation. On the other hand it ruined the nobility economically
and therefore politically, and compelled Tsarism either to seek the
support of the masses or to revive the order of nobles, if indeed
that order was still capable of coming back to life.
The two statesmen chose different props for the institution they
wished to safeguard: Tolstoy, the atheist, put his trust in the
nobility and began by bettering their material condition, founding a
bank to minister to their needs, giving them exclusive rights to
occupy posts as district chiefs and bend the peasantry to the
government's aims, and he ended by awakening to the fatal
circumstance that the nobility was politically dead and could not be
resuscitated. Pobiedonostseff came slightly nearer to the correct
formula, but was still so far off that the difference between them
was negligible. Aware that the bulk of the nation was still backward
and raw, he imagined that the Orthodox Church, which was identified
with the principal organs of the national life, could win opinion and
sentiment to the autocratic ordering of political and social
arrangements and enable Tsarism to lean upon the bulk of the Russian
nation. His ideal of the State was a sort of Slav Paraguay directed
by the Orthodox clergy. He, too, was doomed to disappointment and
failure because, for one thing, the Orthodox Church had never been an
organic power in Russia, but a mere State department which invariably
condemned dissent in the political sphere far more severely than
conflicts in the region of belief. The notion that such an
artificial institution should be able to leaven, transform, and
ennoble the befogged anarchist masses and form a pedestal out of them
for Tsarism was the golden dream of a visionary.
One day I expressed all this in courtly phraseology and in the form
of an objection made by his opponents. "They are just as little
acquainted with the Russian masses," he {105} answered, "as
foreigners are. Our people differ from all others, and must be
handled differently. What is meat to the British is poison to the
Russian." The truth is that Pobiedonostseff, like his political
adversaries and indeed like all Russian "intellectuals," misread the
basic character of his own people and--what is still more
extraordinary--of some of its most significant manifestations. He
does not seem to have fully understood the nature of the State or the
instincts of the masses. A lover of forms and a skilful sophist he
was incapable of singling out the central issue of any problem.
I last met him at the close of his life when the grasp of autocracy
on the country was loosening and the twilight of orthodoxy had set
in. Pobiedonostseff, then in delicate health, was gloomy, querulous,
despondent. But although he may have had an inkling of the magnitude
of the calamities that were about to overwhelm his country, it may
well be doubted whether he reckoned his own life-work as one of their
contributory causes. And yet it is patent that his ideas were
dissolvent and that the attempt to realise them by force accelerated
the break-up of a society already profoundly disorganised.
Autocracy, it is true, had long since become incompetent for any
positive function, and the Russian Church had never been fitted for
its spiritual mission. The sectarians, who at first had asked only
to be allowed to pray and were being persecuted in the name of God
and the Tsar, turned to political propaganda in order to obtain
religious freedom, and in doing this tainted the masses with
disaffection.
Politically the Russian people, since their appearance in history,
have oscillated between absolutism and anarchism, and in the
religious domain between sectarian asceticism and rank unbelief.
What Pobiedonostseff did was to compromise orthodoxy and autocracy,
to damage the cause of religion and of the Tsardom, to strengthen the
bureaucracy at the expense of the monarch, to favour its parasitic
instincts, and to undermine the principle of authority at its source.
[1] _Zemskiyé Natshalniki_ or district chiefs.
[2] Scrivener, copyist, amanuensis.
[3] The articles in question appeared in the _Fortnightly_,
_Contemporary_, and _National_ Reviews.
[4] Vladimir Solovieff. I possess two studies of his on theological
questions which he wrote in my note books during the meetings at
which he, A. Pashkoff, and myself were wont to discuss philosophical,
theological, and political questions in St. Petersburg.
[5] Before I met Solovieff, in the reign of Alexander II., I had
studied the theological writings of Khomyakoff. But they are the
work of an amateur who read a number of foreign treatises on Church
history.
[6] At first in the _Daily Telegraph_.
[7] I was allowed to retain some of these reports only after having
taken an oath and signed an undertaking to keep them always under
lock and key. One work in especial, on the Sect of the Skoptsy, with
copious illustrations, contains amazing revelations of the unnatural
lengths to which a warped religious spirit will go.
[8] Count Dmitry Tolstoy.
[9] A section of the Orthodox Church which differs from it only on
trivial points of form.
[10] _Russkia Vedomosti_, 16th December, 1904.
[11] In the provinces of Kieff and Kherson.
[12] _Russkia Vedomosti, loco cit._
[13] The body which legislated for religious sects "in a tolerant
spirit."
[14] _Russkoye Slovo_, 19th February, 1905.
[15] The difference in the intercessors may appear, perhaps, less
important to western peoples than to the eminent Russian writer.
[16] V. V. Rozanoff, _Novoye Vremya_, 17th February, 1905.
[17] Of the province of Tamboff.
[18] Count Dmitry Tolstoy.
[19] In the province of Vladimir.
[20] From 15th November to 3rd December.
[21] Coming from an orthodox priest this was an odd, an heretical,
injunction.
[22] 13th December.
{106}