THE BEGINNINGS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT OF 1905
The men who first undertook the spade work and cleared the ground for
the great upheaval were humane, moderate workers, mostly from the
provinces, whose strivings were free from all taint of crime and
whose ideals did not go beyond a constitutional monarchy. Even
parliamentary government was more than they asked for at first. But
like most Russian politicians they knew not what they were doing.
Plehve was no more. The Japanese war was taking an unfavourable turn
and the head of the government was anxious to hit upon some _modus
vivendi_ with the intelligentsia. I remember the historic Saturday
afternoon[1] when ninety-eight country gentlemen, without a mandate
from the people or permission from the government, met together in a
private flat on one of the quays of St. Petersburg to discuss the
best way of rearranging the relations between the rulers and the
ruled. Their meeting the authorities had promised to connive at on
condition that they should eliminate all political discussions from
their programme, but to this they refused to agree. I knew many of
them for mild and loyal citizens who were quite ready to pull out the
keystone, but innocently believed that they could still maintain the
arch. In particular, Prince Lvoff and my friend Count Heyden were
paragons of reasonableness. I was not surprised, therefore, to learn
that when the resolution calling for constitutional government was
put to the ninety-eight members present, twenty-seven considered the
demand too radical and voted against it, while the remainder gave it
their support. The congress was a success. From all parts of the
Empire came telegrams from town councils and zemstvos endorsing the
resolution. The Russian people were on fire. All sections of
society, all classes of the {140} population, drawn from their
moorings by the new current, hastened to avail themselves of the
slightest pretext to come together and demand the abolition of
one-man power. The lawyers of St. Petersburg signed a petition
praying for constitutional government. The working men organised a
vast manifestation in favour of representative institutions. Authors
took to propagating liberal doctrines throughout the Empire.
Journalists vied with authors. Municipalities, guilds, benevolent
associations, seconded the demands of the zemstvos. A section of
students published a manifesto in which they proclaimed that
autocracy must cease to be, the "infamous war must be stopped, and a
Constitutional Assembly immediately convoked." At first all that the
leaders wanted was practical recognition of the principle that the
time had come for progressive and systematic adaptations of the State
and its institutions to the new exigencies, as though mere political
reforms could now save Tsarism and the bureaucracy.
All the older parties took higher ground, clamoured for more radical
changes, and looked to the war and its vicissitudes for some
precipitating event that should give them the opportunity for which
they had so long waited in vain. Symptoms of a change in the mood of
labour struck attentive observers and heightened the gravity of the
crisis. Timid men waxed bold and made public confession of their
faith, regardless of consequences to themselves; princes stepped
forward as champions of the peasants; wealthy landowners subscribed
to the funds for agitating against the regime; Prince Viazemsky
publicly protested against an attack by the Cossacks on a crowd in
front of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg and was sent in
disgrace to his estate by the Tsar. Bureaucrats who had theretofore
stood by the government now announced that, come what might, they
would throw in their lot with the people. And of the temper, the
ideals, and the mental workings of the people they had not even an
approximate notion. For instance, an official of my acquaintance,
who was about to be appointed to the governorship of a certain
province, signed a petition {141} for a legislative assembly and
thereby ruined his career. The unanimous council of the St.
Petersburg Polytechnic Institute--a model educational establishment
founded by Witte--forwarded a memorial to the Minister of Finances,
recording their firm conviction that technical education was
impossible so long as the political and social conditions inseparable
from autocracy remained unchanged. The municipality of Yalta
telegraphed to Prince Mirsky its certitude that the high bill of
mortality in the towns and cities of Russia was one of the direct
effects of the autocracy, and could not be bettered until the cause
was removed. The legal bar of St. Petersburg and Moscow sent a
deputation to the capital to petition for representative government.
In a word the reformers--and practically all the intellectuals were
now reformers--made arrows out of every wood that came handy.
On 12th December the provincial Zemsky Congress of Kaluga forwarded
an address to the Emperor, which created a stir throughout the length
and breadth of Russia. The members archly volunteered to rally round
his Majesty and support him "against the enemies of law and order,"
_i.e._, the bureaucracy. They ended their address with a hope that
the Tsar would summon elected representatives of the land to
contribute to its peaceful development and prosperity.
The Moscow Town Council unanimously adopted a resolution declaring
the absolute necessity of such reforms as the legal protection of the
individual against the arbitrary measures of officialdom; the repeal
of those exceptional regulations which invested the local authorities
with power to imprison or banish anybody without assigning a reason;
freedom of creed, of the press, of meeting, and of association; a
popular chamber to watch over these popular rights and to supervise
the government. The St. Petersburg municipality adopted a similar
resolution. Banquets were organised at which fiery speeches were
delivered, like those we read of in Paris on the eve of the great
revolution. At one of these festive gatherings in a public hall the
guests, numbering several thousands, covered the portrait of the
{142} Tsar with a red flag, on which the inscription was painfully
visible in white letters, "Down with the Autocracy." At many others
the two men who killed Plehve were unanimously honoured. The counsel
for Sazonoff--one of the two--said in his speech for the defence,
"The bomb which blew M. Plehve to pieces was filled not with
dynamite, but with the tears of the widows and orphans of those whom
he had sent to the scaffold, to dreary dungeons, and to Siberia." No
such plain speaking had been heard since Russia became an Empire.
The imperial family, in the person of one of the empresses, had been
warned by royalties abroad that it would be greatly to the advantage
of the autocrat, as well as of autocracy, if a sop were thrown to the
popular Cerberus. Good grounds were alleged for this opinion, and
the Tsar was gradually attuned to a conciliatory mood. He professed
his willingness to make concessions and to promise reforms; but he
would not, of course, put sharp weapons into the hands of "his
children," and "still less would he divest himself of any of the
powers with which God Himself had invested him." That was the
monarch's attitude--unforeseen by many of the liberals who had looked
forward either to frank opposition or graceful consent. And his acts
were in harmony with it.[2] He warmly supported the minister, Prince
Mirsky, against whom an intrigue was coarsely spun by a number of
courtiers and by the ubiquitous grand duke. For a while he allowed
the press to have its fling and the zemstvo representatives to speak
their minds; but there he drew the line. There must be no tampering
with the rights and prerogatives of the absolute monarchy. Whatever
else might go they at any rate should remain inviolate and
inviolable. Neither must the war be condemned nor peace with the
Japanese advocated. Russia, and more especially the reigning
dynasty, had need, he said, of a decisive victory over the
yellow-skins. The newspapers were accordingly prohibited from
publishing any of the cries for peace which were being plaintively or
menacingly uttered all over the country.
At last the Emperor showed his hand and announced the {143} measure
to which all those petty concessions formed the prelude. A ukase was
drawn up granting certain reforms. It was to have been promulgated
on 19th December, but almost on the eve considerable changes were
made in the wording and its publication was delayed. In its original
shape it covered the political and agrarian fields, laid down
regulations for the press, defined the rights of religious
non-conformists, introduced State insurance for working men,
theoretically substituted law for caprice, and provided for the
creation of an assembly with a consultative voice in legislation.
Such were the general contents of the nine clauses of Witte's
pristine scheme. The consultative Duma he proposed to convoke was to
be elected, not directly by the people, but by the Zemstvos for the
rural population and by the municipal councils for the cities and
towns. This assembly would have been devoid of initiative and
without control over the public purse. Its function would be to
examine and pronounce upon bills which had been passed by the Council
of the Empire, but had not yet received the imperial sanction. As,
however, the Council of the Empire itself possessed no claim to
legislate, but only to make proposals which the Tsar could accept,
modify, or thrust aside at will, the projected Duma, its critics
argued, would have been the fifth wheel in the State chariot. Still,
as a pledge of something more substantial to come, many would have
welcomed it. This ninth clause, which was the pith of the project,
had the approval of Witte, Prince Mirsky, and three other responsible
officials.
The Tsar when he read the draft angrily struck out the last clause.
"It is wasted effort," he exclaimed, "to ask me to sap or weaken the
autocracy." In vain Prince Mirsky urged that the Duma planned by
Witte would leave all his powers and prerogatives intact. He was
unconvinced and stubborn. And seeing that the Grand Duke Sergius
anathematised the plan as subversive, and had a savage attack on it
published in his own press organ,[3] the ninth clause was expunged.
By foolish resistance like this to every proposal {144} which, by
giving temporary satisfaction to the demands for reform, would have
created a safety valve to carry off dangerous revolutionary energies,
Nicholas II. stored up the vast forces which ultimately swept the
autocracy away. A ruler of a different temperament, one like the
Grand Duke Vladimir, or even the Tsar's weak and plastic brother
Michael, would have bent to the various storms and prolonged the life
of the dynasty. Nicholas II. was incapable of any such compromise,
because he failed to take in the situation, to gauge the national and
international forces that had shaped it, to perceive the bearings of
these on the regime and the dynasty, and also because he was wanting
in moral courage and political suppleness. He never represented
anything adequately, not even the petty interests of his own house.
Unlike Witte, who with all his defects impressed one with the size
and quality of an historic force, and for a while bulked large as the
massive centre round which the hopes and energies of the reforming
State-upholders clung, he stood for himself alone, and had no deep
feeling even for his own cause. Genuine humanity, active
benevolence, social duty received no admission among the motives that
determined his public policy. Of his fellow-men he was hardly
conscious; to their well-being and their sufferings he was callously
indifferent.
It would, however, be rash to conclude that even a statesmanlike
monarch, had there been one in the place of Nicholas II., would have
been able by dint of political tact to do more than prolong the
existence of the autocracy for a few years more. By its very terms
the work of readjustment to radically changed and changing conditions
was no longer feasible, the utmost still possible being the
postponement of the fatal collapse. For, as already remarked, the
Tsarist State was from the outset informed by the spirit of
territorial conquest and its orientation was towards that, while at
home a victorious race ruled over other races and a privileged class
lorded it over the bulk of the nation. As long as these
conditions--which alone gave cohesion to the parts--were upheld,
things would go on as before, until the {145} whole organism was
destroyed, but once change them, desist from territorial expansion,
cultivate friendly relations with neighbouring States, introduce at
home principles of equity in economics, of equality in politics, of
liberty in religion, and the cement which alone held the rebellious
elements together would forthwith crumble away. The State, like a
boy's top that ceases to spin, could not but lose its equilibrium,
wobble, and fall.
That was the cardinal truth which ought to have been grasped by
Russian statesmen working for reform. Witte had lightning-like
flashes of it. He at any rate was eager to substitute in advance
voluntary and economic links for the irksome bonds of union which
radical reform measures suddenly applied would sunder. He snatched
at every opportunity to try the experiment. That was the principle
which underlay his policy towards the Poles, the Finns, the Jews, the
Armenians, and the other non-Russian peoples of the Empire, whenever
he was free to turn his attention to them.
The liberals or intelligentsia started from a different and, as it
seemed to me, entirely false conception of the terms of the problem.
Mere doctrinaires, and moving far apart from the popular currents,
they operated with borrowed theories and assumed that what was true,
say, of France would hold good of Russia. Successors of the men who
had "gone among the people" only to discover that they could not
fathom the nation's depths, they entirely misunderstood the ideals
and strivings of the peasantry. In their own political organisation
they had enlisted neither peasants nor working men as members, and
yet they came forward as the authorised spokesmen of both. And that
group of westernised politicians always stood only for the
intelligentsia or foreign political ideal-mongers who had no vested
interests in the country, and dealt mainly in abstractions, imported
conceptions, and exotic theories. This master fact of the new
situation appears to have been wholly missed by our diplomacy, local
and central. For Britain and France took the liberals, who
subsequently became the Kadets, as their advisers, and made support
of the Kadets the corner-stone of {146} their Russian policy. MM.
Milyukoff, Gutchkoff, Rodzianko, and their friends were the oracles
whose utterances were eagerly sought after and whose counsels were
generally followed--with the deplorable results recorded in recent
history. These were upright, honourable, enlightened men who lacked
political experience and acquaintanceship with the temper of their
own people.
From the first it was certain, if not obvious, that the radical
reform of the Russian regime would entail the break-up of the State
by the dissolution of the cement that had theretofore held its
constituent parts together. That was the fundamental, ever-present
danger inherent in every reform movement. And this redoubtable
consequence was modifiable only within narrow time-limits, and
provided that the throne was occupied by a statesman or else by a
monarch who had chosen one as his minister, and that the most
stringent self-control and prudence were exercised by the reformers.
As for a violent rebellion with the aid or the connivance of the
army, it was certain--considering the instincts and the ignorance of
the lower classes--to culminate, not in a glorious revolution, but in
swift disruption and ruin. This was the logical and necessary
outcome of the ethnic, social, cultural, and religious conditions of
the nation. Before the outbreak of November, 1905, I wrote,
"Revolution in Russia will prove to be a very different process from
what it was in France or elsewhere ... it may at certain stages be
marked by a degree of ferocity which the peoples of the United States
and Western Europe can hardly realise."[4] That forecast was
published nearly twelve years before the Bolshevik revolution of
September, 1917, which amply confirmed it.
But the leading spirits of the liberal party were dissatisfied with
the reforms outlined in the ukase and with Witte, to whom the wording
of them was attributed. They {147} complained that the Tsar was
selling dearly and in detail what they had petitioned him to bestow
upon them gratis and wholesale, and, worse still, that he did not
intend to deliver what he had sold. They had sued for the abolition
of classes and class privileges and he promised the disappearance of
certain legal disabilities which weighed upon the peasants. They had
agitated in favour of liberty of conscience and he dangled before
them the revision of the legislation restricting the rights of
certain nonconformist sects and the removal of disabilities which did
not derive from statute law. They had prayed for the repeal of the
coercion ukase, known by the name of Protective Regulations, which
placed the liberty and life of all Russians at the mercy of the local
jacks-in-office, and he merely gave instructions to lessen the number
of the districts thus trodden underfoot. They had besought him to
grant liberty of the press, but all that he undertook was to remove
"the superfluous" restrictions placed upon it, and meanwhile
newspapers were being suspended or suppressed. They had claimed the
right of public meeting and of association, but these claims he
wholly ignored. They had begged that Ukrainians, Poles, Finns, Jews,
Armenians--all the great non-Russian elements, in a word--might be
delivered from the persecution they were enduring, but the ukase
engaged only to strike off those legal fetters which were not
conditioned "by the vital interests of the State and the manifest
advantage of the Russian people." Who was to define these? The
persecuting bureaucracy. And worse than everything else, the
representative assembly, which was to have been, so to say, the
corner-stone of regenerated Russia, was relegated to the limbo of
things that might have been.
To sum up, the measures announced in the manifesto would, it was
urged, be absurdly inadequate even if they were meant to be realised.
And they could never take root because they would always be liable to
be withdrawn, that being the end of all reforms in Russia. People
called to mind that several of the more important concessions made
from the days of Nicholas I. had been either formally repealed or
{148} else cunningly counteracted by the ministers of Alexander III.
or of Nicholas II. The very ukase to which the wretched serfs owed
their emancipation had since then been partially evaded, and the
peasantry were being tied to the soil anew by M. Plehve when his life
was suddenly snuffed out. Yet those concessions had been not merely
promised, but actually realised; they formed part of the law of the
Empire. That did not save them from partial abolition. Were the
reforms just promised likely to be durable, if those which were
actually embodied in legislation were so successfully undermined?
Russia, in the person of her spokesmen, answered, "No."
If the reformers were ordinarily exacting beyond measure, their
demands in this case were moderate and their strictures unanswerable.
The first paragraph of the ukase, they objected, proclaimed the
inauguration of a reign of law and the abolition of caprice. This
loud-sounding improvement was in reality merely a paraphrase of the
47th paragraph of the fundamental laws of the Empire which Prince
Dolgoruki had termed "la plus volumineuse des mauvaises
plaisanteries"--and it had remained a dead letter for generations
because of the greed of arbitrary power displayed by the bureaucracy.
And as it had been in the past, so it would be in the future. If the
Tsar were in earnest about reform he would surely have forbidden the
punishment of any of his subjects otherwise than by sentence of the
law courts. That he did not take this direct, simple, and effective
method was, they held, proof that his intention was only conditional.
How superficial was the attention paid by the Tsar to legislative
work may be gathered from the following farcical _quid pro quo_ which
took place when Witte was Minister of Finances. A bill was
introduced in the Council of the Empire to indemnify landed
proprietors in the Baltic provinces for the losses they had incurred
through the government monopoly of alcohol. Witte held that the
payment of a sum of several millions should be spread over a number
of years, the majority maintained that it ought to be effected at
once. The minister first informed the Tsar of this divergence, and
the {149} Tsar promised to ratify the view of the minority. The
minister then wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Council, Plehve,
telling him that the Emperor had promised to acquiesce in the
decision of the minority as soon as the documents were placed before
him. Plehve freely communicated this announcement to all the
members, whereupon many officials, seeing that opposition would be
fruitless, changed their views or their votes, so that the minority
unexpectedly became the majority. In the course of time the
documents were laid before the Tsar, who remembered only that he had
pledged himself to Witte to reject the proposal of the majority.
Accordingly, without reading the papers or taking further thought, he
redeemed his promise, and the wrong bill became law.
In the administration as in legislation he frequently interposed with
like rashness and with untoward consequences. For the motives that
actuated him were generally personal and sometimes irreconcilable
with the principles of justice which, had he allowed things to take
their course, would have been applied. I remember the case of a
journalist with whom I was slightly acquainted. In a twinkling he
was very suddenly whirled away from Petersburg to Siberia, without
being allowed time to take money or warm clothing with him, because
of an article of his, or rather because of the interpretation put
upon it by the Tsar's confessor, Yanisheff. Amphitheatroff, the
journalist, published a moderately interesting article describing the
home circle of a landed proprietor, whom he depicted as firm and
strict with his family, and so scrupulous in his dealings with the
other sex that he boiled with indignation if his wife's chambermaid
flirted with any male relative or stranger. He had a sympathetic
son, with eyes like a gazelle's--a well-meaning youth who wished
everybody to be happy, but was devoid of ideas on practical matters.
The kind-hearted mother sat between father and son, tenderly loving
both. It was an idyllic picture of Russian life at its best--and
nothing more. The censor read it and saw nothing wrong. The
minister, Sipyaghin, glanced at it and passed on cheerfully to his
hot {150} pancakes and cold caviare. The Tsar himself perused it and
liked it: it was "such a pleasing picture of the serene life of a
Russian squire." But the Emperor's chaplain, Yanisheff, descried
high treason between the lines. According to him, and he was
probably right, the landed proprietor, who struck the table with his
fist whenever he heard of a little flirtation on the part of his
wife's maid, was no other than the Emperor Alexander III.; the son
with the sympathetic eyes and vacillating character was Nicholas II.
As the portrait, if intended as such, was not flattering, it needed
courage on the part of the priest even to hint that the ingenuous
youth of limited ideas was obviously his Majesty; and the Tsar must
be credited with considerable modesty to have placed the cap on his
imperial head. He at once summoned and questioned his minister
Sipyaghin. "Yes, I read the feuilleton, your Majesty, but noticed
nothing offensive in it." "Well," replied the Emperor, "you may take
it from me that it is a treasonable skit on my never-to-be-forgotten
father and myself. Send the fellow to Siberia." And to Siberia he
was whisked away, without a chance to buy warm clothing for the
journey or to get money for his needs. It was not much consolation
to M. Amphitheatroff that he was subsequently pardoned for a mere
misdemeanour of which he said he was innocent and then banished to
Vologda.
Witte, whose steady pacifism stamped a profound influence on Russian
politics generally and gained for his imperial master the nowise
merited reputation of a humane, moral, and generous monarch, was
constantly urging upon him the necessity of political reforms in the
interest both of the autocracy and the nation. "The autocracy," he
would remark to me in our long conversations, "is but a mode of
conceiving the relations between the ruling board and the nation.
And with vision, enterprise, and resource it can be made as
productive of good as a parliamentary government, especially in a
backward country like ours. But you must first find a monarch with
wisdom, enterprise, and resource, or with discrimination and modesty
enough to select a {151} statesman who possesses them and to maintain
him in office. Alexander II. was such a monarch and I shall never
cease to lament his death." He perceived with painful clearness that
the elements of the nation were ill-assorted, that most institutions
were disorganised, and that anarchist ideas fitted in with the social
and political conditions. Therefore he strove to get these changed.
A simulacrum of reforms was, as we saw, dangled before the eyes of
the nation in March, 1903, a mere promise which would, it was hoped,
produce a sedative effect and then pass into easy oblivion. It was
drafted by Plehve, bore the stamp of his inspiration, and made a
considerable stir in Russia and abroad. Taken in consideration with
the high reputation which had been created for the Tsar it was
believed to portend great and beneficent changes. But stripped of
the tawdry wrappings in which Plehve enveloped it, what it amounted
to was the abolition of the peasants' joint responsibility for
taxation and the removal of some religious restrictions.
Witte, who had a keen eye for religious intolerance and proselytism
by the State, and was never tired of pleading the cause of freedom,
had moved the Emperor to make this sorely needed concession to the
spirit of the time. But beyond the promise he could not get the
bureaucracy or its agents to move. He would sometimes lose patience
utterly and exclaim to me, "How can I hinder a revolution if even
such anodyne measures are deemed too radical to be carried out? I
begin to despair of the autocracy." In the most sanative elements of
his policy Witte was over-ruled by a crowd of puny men without
responsibility before history or even before their contemporaries.
After the manifesto promising religious freedom, the Jews were
hampered and "squeezed" perhaps more systematically than before, and
by no one more intensely than by the Emperor's uncle, the Grand Duke
Sergius, the Governor-General of Moscow. Roman Catholics were also
the objects of continual chicanery, especially in the Polish
provinces, and the law obliging those among them who married persons
of the Orthodox Church to bring up their children in the State creed
was applied with rigour. {152} To belong to the Armenian Church was
to be branded with the mark of Cain, and at times it was worse to be
a Russian nonconformist than to worship idols or to poison one's
neighbour.
The Tsar was smitten with political blindness after the first year of
his reign, and he insisted all the more on moving about among the
institutions of his country, modifying their working congruously with
his whims. On religious matters in particular he was narrow-minded.
At the time of the manifesto the new Russian penal code was being
elaborated, and the section dealing with crimes against faith was
under discussion. Here the Emperor's supposed mild and tolerant
spirit was expected to bring about great and desirable changes. But
the hope was disappointed. One change was made for the better, but
only one, and that he assented to most reluctantly. An Orthodox
believer who desired to leave his denomination might thenceforward go
abroad and there change his religion without fear of punishment,
whereas formerly he was liable to pains and penalties. That was all.
But if such a man, being unable to go abroad, should ask a Russian
Lutheran or Roman Catholic priest to receive him into his Church, the
minister in question must refuse. To comply with the request would
entail severe punishment.
There can be no doubt about the Emperor's personal part in hindering
his subjects from serving God in their own way, for it was vigorous,
personal, and direct. Whenever the existing institutions or the
responsible ministers were inclined to loosen the grip of the law on
the conscience of the individual, the Tsar's veto formed an
insuperable impediment. Here is one instructive example. The edicts
dealing with religious misdemeanours being under discussion a
minority of the Council of the Empire steadily advocated toleration;
but at every turn his Majesty sided with the majority. Once, and
only once, the bulk of the members favoured a clause which was
reasonable and humane; and then the Emperor quashed their decision
without hesitation. The question was, If a Russian who is Orthodox
only in name and something else--say Lutheran--in reality asks {153}
a clergyman of his adopted Church to administer the sacrament to him
on his deathbed, should the minister be punishable if he complies?
The Council of the Empire, by a considerable majority, answered,
"No"; and their arguments were clear and forcible. So plain was the
case that even the grand dukes took the side of the majority. But
the Tsar, putting down his foot, said, "A clergyman who shall
administer the sacrament of his Church to such a man shall be treated
as a law-breaker; it is a crime"; and his decision received the force
of law. As this declaration of the imperial will was made after the
manifesto, we know what to think of the Emperor's tolerant views as
mirrored in that document.
This other instance took place also after the promulgation of that
"Magna Charta" of Russian liberty. Baron Uexkull von Gildenband
proposed that certain sections of the population who had been forced
several years ago to join the Orthodox Communion, all of them against
their will, and some even without their knowledge, should now be
permitted to return to their respective Churches if they chose. Some
of these people had been Lutherans of the Baltic provinces, others
had been Uniates of western Russia, _i.e._, Catholics who, with the
liturgy of the Greek Church, hold the beliefs of the Latin and are in
communion with Rome. It was an act, not of magnanimity, but of
common justice that was here suggested. But, when the general debate
was about to begin, the Grand Duke Michael, acting in harmony with
his Majesty's known dispositions, withdrew from the baron his right
to speak in favour of the proposal, which therefore dropped.
Perhaps the most astounding piece of folly for the maintenance of
which the Emperor was personally answerable, at any rate during that
part of his reign which ended with the Yalu speculation and the
Manchurian campaign, was his persecution of a very important section
of his own Church, the Old Believers. The members of this
denomination, who were numerous, wealthy, conservative, and
monarchical, differ only in the veriest trifles from members {154} of
the State orthodoxy. And yet the head of the Orthodox Church and
Tsar of all the Russias, who needed for himself, his dynasty, and his
Empire all the help he could enlist on the side of autocracy and
conservatism, harried those Old Believers as though they were public
enemies. I saw a good deal of them at this time, listened to and
wrote down their complaints against the Emperor, to whom they
remained loyal in spite of his unwise intolerance.
A monastery belonging to this sect[5] was seized by an Orthodox
archimandrite who, at the head of fifty Cossacks, drove out the monks
and took possession of their dwelling. One of their bishops, Siluan,
protested and was thrown into prison. Yet the archimandrite who had
won this easy victory, not satisfied with his violence against the
living, also wreaked his spite on the dead. Two Old Believers who
had departed this life in the odour of sanctity, Bishop Job and the
priest Gregory, were reputed to be in heaven; and their bodies were
said to be immune from decomposition, a fact which is taken to point
to their saintship. But the Old Believers could not be permitted to
have miracles or saints. The Orthodox archimandrite, therefore,
violated the tombs and dug up the bodies. He found the latter really
intact, and breaking their coffins, he saturated the boards with
petroleum and then burned the mortal remains of the holy men to
ashes.[6] The Tsar had been told of all these grievances, but he
made no sign.
A tragic story, the hero of which was Bishop Methodius, one of the
pillars of the Old Believers, may help to complete the reader's idea
of the cruelty of the system. It, too, was brought to the notice of
Tsar Nicholas at the time without eliciting even an expression of
regret. Born in Cheliabinsk, Methodius, after having been ordained a
priest, zealously discharged the duties of his office for fifteen
years before he was raised to the episcopal see of Tomsk. One day as
bishop he administered the sacraments to a man who, born in the {155}
State Church, had joined the community of Old Believers. This was
precisely a case of the type discussed in the Council of the Empire
and so harshly provided for by the Emperor himself. Methodius was
denounced, arrested, tried, found guilty, and condemned to banishment
in Siberia; and the sentence was carried out with needless brutality.
With irons on his feet, penned up together with murderers and other
criminals of the worst type, he was sent by _étape_ from prison to
prison to the government of Yakutsk. Through the intercession of an
influential co-religionist, he was allowed to stay in the capital of
that province, but soon afterwards, at the instigation of a dignitary
of the State Church, he was banished to Vilyuisk, in north-eastern
Siberia, a place inhabited by savages. The aged bishop--he was
seventy-eight years old--was then set astride a horse, tied down to
the animal, and told that he must ride thus to his new place of
exile, about seven hundred miles distant. "This sentence is death by
torture," said Methodius's flock. And they were not mistaken. The
old man gave up the ghost on the road (1898); but when, where, and
how he died and was buried has never been made known.
To the wholesome chastenings of criticism the Tsar was serenely
indifferent. So far as I could learn he never paid heed to any
strictures by whomsoever uttered, with the sole exception of those of
his imperial consort and of Rasputin. If his repressive measures
were conceived without vision and executed without ruth, the
occasional attempts he made at constructive work were inspired by
vulgar superstition acting upon the intellect of a born dupe. In
miracles and marvels he took a childish delight, and was as ready to
believe the messages from the invisible world which the spirits sent
through M. Philippe in the Crimea as in the wonders wrought by the
relics of Orthodox monks whose names he himself added to the
bead-roll of Russian saints. His predecessors were more chary of
peopling heaven than of colonising Siberia. Nicholas I. assented to
the canonisation of Mitrophan of Voronesh (1832), whose body was
{156} found intact after it had lain over a century in its coffin,
but that was the only beatification made during the reign. Alexander
II. allowed the Holy Synod to enrich the Church with one
saint--Tikhon, Bishop of Voronesh (1861); his successor did not add
even one. But Nicholas II. not only canonised two,[7] but he
personally ordered one of the candidates, Seraphim of Saroff, to be
proclaimed a saint, in spite of the disconcerting fact that his body,
although buried for only seventy years, was decomposed. The Orthodox
Bishop Dmitry of Tamboff protested on this ground against the
beatification as contrary to Church traditions, but he was deprived
of his see and sent to Vyatka for venturing to disagree with the
Tsar, who held that the preservation of the bones, the hair, and the
teeth is a sufficient qualification for saintship; and he was assured
by prophetic monks that God would soon work a miracle and restore
Seraphim's dead body in full. The Deity, however, did not redeem
this pledge.
In these circumstances the impatience of the liberal leaders waxed
aggressive. The action of the war's vicissitudes on the mood of the
whole nation was portentous. And so swift was the whirl of events
that it became difficult to discern the causal nexus between them.
What happened one day looked as though it had little or nothing to do
with the occurrence of the eve, and could provide no clue to the
eventualities of the morrow. There was no coherence in things, no
union among persons, no centre, no guiding brain. The Tsar's ukase
was actually forbidden by some governors in the provinces, and
Nicholas II. frankly approved the prohibition.[8] This and similar
follies indicated his belief that the autocracy would not stand
radical reform, but they also incensed the workmen of the capital.
Labour in Petersburg had for some time previously been organised and
electrified by the Ukrainian priest, George Gapon, who invited its
{157} members to follow him in public procession to the Winter Palace
on the historic 22nd January, to which I afterwards gave the name of
"Bloody Sunday." The alleged object was to lay before the Tsar the
needs of the Russian people. Gapon was a hare-brained, ignorant,
conceited young priest who, to use a Russian expression, fancied that
the ocean was only up to his knees. His ignorance of life was
profound and his velleity to learn fitful and feeble, and his vanity
had no bounds. But his personal magnetism, especially when
addressing a crowd of peasants or artisans, bordered on the
marvellous. While this hypnotic power was taken by many to qualify
him for the leadership of men, his intellectual shallowness,
variations of mood, and utter untrustworthiness condemned him to lead
them to perdition. He was possessed of many typical Russian traits,
such as a habit of morbid introspection and of plangent reverie, a
high-strung emotional temperament, liability to sudden oscillations
from the heights of exaltation to the depths of despair, and an
absence of all sense of measure. He also laboured under that kind of
ethical Daltonism which hinders some defectively equipped human
beings from discriminating between right and wrong, so that every
movement that promised the delights of leadership carried him for a
while along its main current. He was emphatically the creature of
impulse, and altogether devoid of those imposing qualities so often
found in Russian reformers which go to make a martyr.
[1] 19th November, 1904. Cf. _North American Review_.
[2] Cf. _North American Review_.
[3] Slovo.
[4] Cf. _North American Review_, January, 1905, p. 300. I remembered
this and similar forecasts of mine in the following year when reading
of the unfortunate men whom the revolutionists set to dance on hot
sheets of iron and then slowly burned to death.
[5] The Nikolsky Skeet in the Kuban province.
[6] This procedure was described in the _Grashdanin_, 1896, a
newspaper which was read regularly by the Tsar.
[7] Theodosius, Archbishop of Chernigoff, canonised 25th April, 1896;
and Seraphim of Saroff, canonised 31st July, 1903.
[8] Cf. my articles in the _North American Review_, the _Contemporary
Review_, and the _Daily Telegraph_ at the time.
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