When the first edition of this book was brought out at the end of 1899,
it was evident to those who had followed the development of affairs in
Russia that, owing to the obstinacy of its rulers in refusing to make
the necessary concessions in the way of political freedom, the country
was rapidly drifting towards a violent revolution. But everything
seemed to be so calm on the surface, that when a few of us expressed
this idea, we were generally told that we merely took our desires for
realities. At the present moment Russia is in full revolution. The
old system is falling to pieces, and amidst its ruins the new one is
painfully making its way. Meanwhile the defenders of the past are
waging a war of extermination against the country--a war which may
prolong their rule for a few additional months, but which raises at the
same time the passions of the people to a pitch that is full of menaces
and danger.
Looked upon in the light of present events, the early movements for
freedom which are related in this book acquire a new meaning. They
appear as the preparatory phases of the great breakdown of a whole
obsolete world--a breakdown which is sure to give a new life to nearly
one hundred and fifty million people, and to exercise at the same time
a deep and favourable influence upon the march of progress in all
Europe and Asia. It seems necessary, therefore, to complete the record
of events given in this book by a rapid review of those which have
taken place during the last seven years, and were the immediate cause
of the present revolution.
The thirteen years of the reign of Alexander III., 1881-1894, were
perhaps the gloomiest portion in the nineteenth century history of
Russia. Reaction had been growing worse and worse during the last few
years of the reign of his father--with the result that a terrible war
had been waged against autocracy by the Executive Committee, which had
inscribed on its banner political freedom. After the tragic death of
Alexander II., his son considered it his duty to make no concessions
whatever to the general demand of representative government, and a few
weeks after his advent to the throne he solemnly declared his intention
of remaining an autocratic ruler of his Empire. And then began a heavy,
silent, crushing reaction against all the great, inspiring ideas of
Liberty which our generation had lived through at the time of the
liberation of the serfs--a reaction, perhaps the more terrible on
account of its not being accompanied by striking and revolting acts
of violence, but slowly crushing down all the progressive reforms of
Alexander II., and the very spirit that bred these reforms, and turning
everything, including education, into tools of a general reaction.
Sheer despair got hold of the generation of the Russian ‘intellectuals’
who had to live through that period. The few survivors of the
Executive Committee laid down their arms, and there spread in Russian
intellectual society that helpless despair, that loss of faith in the
forces of ‘the intellectual,’ that general invasion of common-place
vulgarity which Tchékhoff has pictured with such a depressing sadness
in his novels.
True, that Alexander III., since his advent to the throne, had vaguely
understood the importance of several economic questions concerning the
welfare of the peasants, and had included them in his programme. But
with the set of reactionary advisers whom he had summoned to his aid,
and whom he retained throughout his reign, he could accomplish nothing
serious; the reactionaries whom he trusted did _not_ at all want to
make those serious improvements in the conditions of the peasants
which he considered it the mission of autocracy to accomplish; and he
would not call in other men, because he knew that they would require
a limitation of the powers of autocracy, which he would not admit.
When he died, a general feeling of relief went through Russia and the
civilized world at large.
Never had a Tsar ascended the throne under more favourable
circumstances than Nicholas II. After these thirteen years of reaction,
the state of mind in Russia was such, that if Nicholas II. had only
mentioned, in his advent manifesto, the intention of taking the advice
of his country upon the great questions of inner policy which required
an immediate solution, he would have been received with open arms.
The smallest concession would have been gladly accepted as an asset. In
fact, the delegates of the Zemstvos, assembled to greet him, asked him
only--and this in the most submissive manner--‘to establish a closer
intercourse between the Emperor and the provincial representation of
the land.’ But instead of accepting this modest invitation, Nicholas
II. read before the Zemstvo representatives the insolent speech of
reprimand, which had been written for him by Pobiedonostseff, and
which expressed his intention of remaining an autocratic ruler of his
subjects.
A golden opportunity was thus lost. Distrust became now the dominating
note in the relations between the nation and the Tsar, and it was
striking to see how this distrust--in one of those indescribable ways
in which popular feelings develop--rapidly spread from the Winter
Palace to the remotest corners of Russia.
The results of that distrust soon became apparent. The great strikes
which broke out at St. Petersburg in 1895, at the time of the
coronation of Nicholas II., gave a measure of the depth of discontent
which was growing in the masses of the people. The seriousness of the
discontent and the unity of action which this revealed were quite
unsuspected. What an immense distance was covered since those times,
of which I speak in this book, when we used to meet small groups of
weavers in the Viborg suburb of St. Petersburg, and asked them with
despair if it really was impossible to induce their comrades to join
in a strike, so as to obtain a reduction of the hours of labour, which
were fourteen and sixteen at that time! Now, the same working-men
combined all over St. Petersburg, and brought out of their ranks such
speakers and such organisers, as if they had been trade-union hands for
ages.
Two years later, in 1897, there were serious disturbances in all
the Russian universities; but when a second series of student
disturbances began in 1901, they suddenly assumed a quite unexpected
political significance. The students protested this time against a
law, passed by Nicholas II., who had ordered--again on the advice of
Pobiedonostseff--that students implicated in academical disorders
should be sent to Port Arthur as soldiers. Hundreds of them were
treated accordingly. Formerly, such a movement would have remained a
university matter; now it assumed a serious political character and
stirred various classes of society. At Moscow the working-men supported
the students in their street demonstrations, and fought at their side
against the police. At St. Petersburg all sorts of people, including
the workmen’s organizations, joined in the street demonstrations, and
serious fighting took place in the streets. When the manifestations
were dispersed by the lead-weighted horsewhips of the Cossacks, who cut
open the faces of men and women assembled in the streets, there was a
strikingly unanimous outburst of public indignation.
I have mentioned in this book how tragical was the position of our
youth in the seventies and eighties, on account of ‘the fathers’ having
abandoned entirely to their sons the terrible task of struggling
against a powerful government. Now, ‘the fathers’ joined hands with
‘the sons.’ The ‘respectable’ Society of Authors issued a strongly
worded protest. A venerated old member of the Council of the State,
Prince Vyazemsky, did the same. Even the officers of the Cossacks of
the Bodyguard notified their unwillingness to carry on such police
duties. In short, discontent was so general and so openly expressed,
that the Committee of Ministers, assuming for the first time since
its foundation the _rôle_ of a ‘Ministry,’ discussed the Imperial
order concerning the students, and insisted upon, and obtained, its
withdrawal.
Something quite unexpected had thus happened. A rash and ill-tempered
measure of the young autocrat had thus set all the country on fire. It
resulted in two ministers being killed; in bloodshed in the streets
of Kharkoff, Moscow and St. Petersburg; and it would have become the
cause of further disasters if Nicholas II. had not been prevented from
declaring the state of siege in his capital, which surely would have
led to still more bloodshed.
All this was pointing to such a deep change in the mind of the nation,
that already in the early spring of 1901--long before the declaration
of war with Japan--it became evident that the days of autocracy were
already counted: ‘Speaking plainly,’ I wrote in the ‘North American
Review,’ ‘the fact is that Russia has outgrown the autocratic form
of government; and it may be said confidently that if external
complications do not disturb the peaceful development of Russia,
Nicholas II. will soon be brought to realize that he is bound to take
steps for meeting the wishes of the country. Let us hope that he will
understand the proper sense of the lesson which he has received during
the past two months’ (May 1901, p. 723).
Unfortunately, Nicholas II. understood nothing. He did, on the
contrary, everything to bring about the revolution. He contributed to
spread discontent everywhere: in Finland, in Poland, in Armenia (by
confiscating the property of the Armenian Church), and in Russia itself
amongst the peasants, the students, the working-men, the dissenters,
and so on. More than that. Efforts were made, on different sides, to
induce Nicholas II. to adopt a better policy; but always he himself--so
weak for good--found the force to resist these influences. At a
decisive moment he always would find enough energy to turn the scales
in favour of reaction, by his personal interference. It has been said
of him that obstinacy was a distinctive feature of his character,
and this seems to be true enough; but he displays it exclusively to
oppose those progressive measures which the necessities of the moment
render imperative. Even if he occasionally yields to progressive
influences, he always manages very soon to counteract them in secrecy.
He displays, in fact, precisely those features which necessarily lead
to a revolution.
In 1901 it was evident that the old order of things would soon have to
be abandoned. The then Minister of Finances, Witte, must have realized
it, and he took a step which certainly meant that he was preparing
a transition from autocracy to some sort of a half-constitutional
_régime_. The ‘Commissions on the Impoverishment of Agriculture
in Central Russia,’ which he convoked in thirty-four provinces,
undoubtedly meant to supply that intermediary step, and the country
answered to his call in the proper way. Landlords and peasants alike
said and maintained quite openly in these Commissions that Russia could
not remain any longer under the system of police rule established by
Alexander III. Equal rights for all subjects, political liberties, and
constitutional guarantees were declared to be an urgent necessity.
Again a splendid opportunity was offered to Nicholas II. for taking
a step towards constitutional rule. The Agricultural Commissions had
indicated how to do it. Similar committees had to be convoked in all
provinces of the Empire, and they would name their representatives
who would meet at Moscow and work out the basis of a national
representation. And once more Nicholas II. refused to accept that
opening. He preferred to follow the counsels of his more intimate
advisers, who better expressed his own will. He disowned Witte and
called at the head of the Ministry of Interior Von Plehwe--the worst
produce of reaction that had been bred by police rule during the reign
of Alexander III.!
Even that man did not undertake to maintain autocracy indefinitely; but
he undertook to maintain it for ten years more--provided full powers
be granted to him, and plenty of money be given--which money he, a
pupil of the school of Ignatieff, freely used, it is now known, for
organizing the ‘pogroms’--the massacres of the Jews. More than that.
Prince Meschersky, the well-known editor of the _Grazhdanin_--an old
man, a Conservative of old standing, and a devotee of the Imperial
family--wrote lately in his paper that Plehwe, in order to give a
further lease to autocracy, had decided to do his utmost to push
Nicholas II. into that terrible war with Japan. Like the Franco-German
conflict, the Japanese war was thus the last trump of a decaying
Imperial power.
I certainly do not mean that Plehwe’s will was the _cause_ of that
war. Its causes lie deeper than that. It became unavoidable the day
that Russia got hold of Port Arthur--and even much earlier than that.
But this move of Plehwe, and the support he found in his master, are
deeply significant for the comprehension of the present events in
Russia.
Plehwe was the trump card of autocracy. He was invested with unlimited
powers, and used them for placing all Russia under police rule. The
State police became the most demoralized and dangerous body in the
State. More than 30,000 persons were deported by the police to remote
corners of the Empire. Fabulous sums of money were spent for his
own protection--but that did not help; he was killed in July 1904,
amidst the disasters of the war that he had been so eager to call
upon his country. And since that date the events took a new and rapid
development. The system of police rule was defeated, and nobody in the
Tsar’s surroundings would attempt to continue it.
For six weeks in succession nobody would agree to become the Tsar’s
Minister of Interior; and when the Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky was
induced at last to accept it, he did so under the condition that
representatives of all the Zemstvos would be convoked at once, to work
out a scheme of national representation.
A great agitation spread thereupon in all Russia, when a Congress of
the Zemstvos was allowed to come together ‘unofficially’ at Moscow in
December 1904. The Zemstvos were quite outspoken in their demands for
constitutional guarantees, and their ‘Memorandum’ to the Tsar, signed
by 102 representatives out of 104, was soon signed also by numbers
of representative persons of different classes in Russia. By-and-by
similarly worded ‘Memoranda’ were addressed to the Tsar by the
barristers and magistrates, the Assemblies of the Nobility in certain
provinces, some municipalities, and so on. The Zemstvo memorandum
became thus a sort of ultimatum of the educated portion of the nation,
which rapidly organized itself into a number of professional unions.
The year 1904 thus ended in a state of great excitement.
Then a new element--the working-men--came to throw the weight of their
intervention in favour of the liberating movement. The working-men of
St. Petersburg--whom that original personality, Father Gapon, had been
most energetically organizing for the preceding twelve months--came to
the idea of an immense manifestation which would claim from the Tsar
political rights for the workers. On January 22, 1905, they went out--a
dense and unarmed crowd of more than 100,000 persons, marching from
all the suburbs towards the Winter Palace. Up to that date they had
retained an unbroken faith in the good intentions of Nicholas II., and
they wanted to tell him themselves of their needs. They trusted him as
if he really was their father. But a massacre of these faithful crowds
had been prepared beforehand by the military commander of the capital,
with all the precautions of modern warfare--local staffs, ambulances,
and so on. For a full week the manifestation was openly prepared by
Gapon and his aids, and nothing was done by the Government to dissuade
the workers from their venture. They marched towards the Palace and
crowded round it--sure that the Tsar would appear before them and
receive their petition--when the firing began. The troops fired into
the dense, absolutely pacific and unarmed crowds, at a range of a few
dozen yards, and more than a thousand--perhaps two thousand--men,
women and children fell that day, the victims of the Tsar’s fears and
obstinacy.
This was how the Russian revolution began, by the extermination of
peaceful, trustworthy crowds, and this double character of passive
endurance from beneath, and of bloodthirsty extermination from above,
it retains up till now. A deep chasm is thus being dug, deeper and
deeper every day, between the people and the present rulers, a chasm
which--I am inclined to think--never will be filled.
If these massacres were meant to terrorize the masses, they utterly
failed in their purpose. Five days after the ‘bloody Vladimir Sunday’
a mass-strike began at Warsaw and similar strikes soon spread all over
Poland. All classes of Polish society joined more or less actively in
these strikes, which took a formidable extension in the following May.
In fact, all the fabric of the State was shattered by these strikes,
and the series of massacres which the Russian Government inaugurated in
Poland in January and in May 1905, only led to an uninterrupted series
of retaliations in which all Polish society evidently stands on the
side of the terrorists. The result is, that at the present time Poland
is virtually lost to the Russian autocratic Empire. Unless it obtains
as complete an autonomy as Finland obtained in 1905, it will not resume
its normal life.
Gradually, the revolts began to spread all over Russia. The peasant
uprising now assumed serious proportions in different parts of the
Empire, everywhere the peasants showing moderation in their demands,
together with a great capacity for organized action, but everywhere
also insisting upon the necessity of a move in the sense of land
nationalization. In the western portion of Georgia (in Transcaucasia)
they even organized independent communities, similar to those of the
old cantons of Switzerland. At the same time a race-war began in the
Caucasus; then came a great uprising at Odessa; the mutiny of the
iron-clads of the Black Sea; and a second series of general strikes
in Poland, again followed by massacres. And only then, when all
Russia was set into open revolt, Nicholas II. finally yielded to the
general demands, and announced, in a manifesto issued on the 19th of
August, that some sort of national representation would be given to
Russia in the shape of a State’s Duma. This was the famous ‘Bulyghin
Constitution,’ which granted the right of voting to an infinitesimal
fraction only of the population (one man in each 200, even in such
wealthy cities as St. Petersburg and Moscow), and entirely excluded
4,000,000 working-men from any participation in the political life
of the country. This tardy concession evidently satisfied nobody; it
was met with disdain. Mignet, the author of a well-known history of
the French Revolution, was right when he wrote that in such times
the concessions must come from the Government _before_ any serious
bloodshed has taken place. If they come _after_ it, they are useless;
the Revolution will take no heed of them and pursue its unavoidable,
natural development. So it happened in Russia.
A simple incident--a strike of the bakers at Moscow--was the beginning
of a general strike, which soon spread over all Moscow, including all
its trades, and from Moscow extended all over Russia. The sufferings of
the working-men during that general strike were terrible, but they held
out. All traffic on the railways was stopped, and no provisions, no
fuel reached Moscow. No newspapers appeared, except the proclamations
of the strike committees. Thousands of passengers, tons of letters,
mountains of goods accumulated at the stations. St. Petersburg soon
joined the strike, and there, too, the workers displayed wonderful
powers of organization. No gas, no electric light, no tramways, no
water, no cabs, no post, no telegraphs! The factories were silent, the
city was plunged in darkness. Then, gradually, the enthusiasm of the
poorer classes won the others as well. The shop assistants, the clerks
in the banks, the teachers, the actors, the lawyers, the chemists--even
the judges joined the strike. A whole country struck against its
government, and the strikers kept so strict an order, that they offered
no opportunity for military intervention and massacres. Committees
of Labour Representatives came into existence, and they were obeyed
explicitly by the crowds, 300,000 strong, which filled the streets of
St. Petersburg and Moscow.
The panic in the Tsar’s _entourage_ was at a climax. His usual
Conservative advisers proved to be as unreliable as the _talons rouges_
were in the surroundings of Louis XVI. Then--only then--Nicholas II.
called in Count Witte and agreed on the 30th of October to sign a
constitutional manifesto. He declared in it that it was his ‘inflexible
will’ ‘to grant to the population the immutable foundations of civic
liberty, based on real inviolability of the person, conscience, speech,
union, and association.’ For that purpose he ordered to elect a State’s
Duma, and promised ‘to establish it as an immutable rule that no law
can come into force without the approval of the State Duma,’ and that
the people’s representatives ‘should have a real participation in the
supervision of the legality of the acts of the authorities appointed by
the Crown.’
Two days later, as the crowds which filled the streets of St.
Petersburg were going to storm the two chief prisons, Count Witte
obtained from him also the granting of an almost general amnesty for
political offenders.
These promises produced a tremendous enthusiasm, but, alas, they were
soon broken in many important points.
It appears now from an official document, just published--the report of
the Head of the Police Department, Lopukhin, to the Premier Minister
Stolypin--that at the very moment when the crowds were jubilating
in the streets, the Monarchist party organized hired bands for the
slaughter of the jubilating crowds. The gendarme officers hurriedly
printed with their own hands appeals calling for the massacre ‘of the
intellectuals and the Jews,’ and saying that they were the hirelings of
the Japanese and the English. Two bishops, Nikon and Nikander, in their
pastoral letters, called upon all the ‘true Russians’ ‘to put down the
intellectuals by force’; while from the footsteps of the Chapel of the
Virgin of Iberia, at Moscow, improvised orators tried to induce the
crowds to kill all the students.
More than that. The same Prince Meschersky confessed in his
paper--‘with horror’ as he said--that it was a settled plan, hatched
among some of the rulers of St. Petersburg, to provoke a serious
insurrection, to drown it in blood, and thus ‘to let the Duma die
before it was born, so as to return to the old _régime_.’ ‘Several high
functionaries have confessed this to me,’ he adds in his paper.
I have endeavoured in this book to be fair towards Alexander II., and
I certainly should like to be equally fair towards Nicholas II., the
more as he, besides his own faults, pays for those of his father and
grandfather. But I must say that the cordial reception which he gave
at that time in his palace to the representatives of the above party,
and his protection which they have enjoyed since, were certainly an
encouragement to continue on these lines of breeding massacres of
innocent people--even if the encouragement be unconscious.
But then came the insurrection at Moscow, in January 1906, provoked to
a great extent by the Governor-General, Admiral Dubassoff; the uprising
of the peasants in the Baltic provinces against the tyranny of their
German landlords; the general strike along the Siberian railway; and a
great number (over 1,600) of peasant uprisings in Russia itself; and
in all these cases the military repression was accomplished in such
terrible forms, including flogging to death, and with such a cruelty,
that one could really come to totally despair of civilization, if
there were not by the side of these cruelties acts of sublime heroism
on behalf of the lovers of freedom.
It was under such conditions that the Duma met in May 1905, to be
dissolved after an existence of only seventy days. Its fate evidently
had been settled at Peterhof, before it met. A powerful league of all
the reactionary elements, lead by Trépoff, who found strong support
with Nicholas II. himself, was formed with the firm intention of not
allowing the Duma, under any pretext, to exercise a real control upon
the actions of the Ministers nominated by the Tsar. And as the Duma
strove to obtain this right above all others, it was dissolved.
And now, the condition of Russia is simply beyond description. The
items which we have for the first year of ‘Constitutional rule,’
since October 30, 1905, till the same date in 1906, are as follows:
Killed in the massacres, shot in the riots, etc., 22,721; condemned
to penal servitude, 851 (to an aggregate of 7,138 years); executed,
mostly without any semblance of judgment, men, women and youths, 1,518;
deported without judgment, mostly to Siberia, 30,000. And the list
increases still at the rate of from ten to eighteen every day.
These facts speak for themselves. They talk at Peterhof of maintaining
‘autocracy,’ but there is none left, except that of the eighty
governors of the provinces, each of whom is, like an African king,
an autocrat in his own domain, so long as his orders please his
subordinates. Bloodshed, drumhead military courts, and rapine are
flourishing everywhere. Famine is menacing thirty different provinces.
And Russia has to go through all that, merely to maintain for a few
additional months the irresponsible rule of a camarilla standing round
the throne of the Tsar.
How long this state of affairs will last, nobody can foretell. During
both the English and the French Revolutions reaction also took for a
time the upper hand; in France this lasted nearly two years. But the
experience of the last few months has also shown that Russia possesses
such a reserve of sound, solid forces in those classes of society upon
whom depends the wealth of the country, that the present orgy of White
Terror certainly will not last long. The army, which has hitherto been
a support of reaction, shows already signs of a better comprehension
of its duties towards its mother country; and the crimes of the joined
reactionists become too evident not to be understood by the soldiers.
As to the revolutionists, after having first minimized the forces of
the old _régime_, they realize them now and prepare for a struggle
on a more solid and a broader basis; while the devotion of thousands
upon thousands of young men and women is such, that virtually it
seems to be inexhaustible. In such conditions, the ultimate victory
of those elements which work for the birth of a regenerated, free
Russia, is not to be doubted for a moment, especially if they find,
as I hope they will, the sympathy and the support of the lovers of
Freedom all over the world. Regenerated Russia means a body of some
150,000,000 persons--one-eighth part of the population of the globe,
occupying one-sixth part of its continental parts--permitted at last to
develop peacefully--a population which, owing to its very composition,
is bound to become, not an Empire in the Roman sense of the word,
but a Federation of nations combined for the peaceful purposes of
civilization and progress.
BROMLEY, KENT,
_November, 1906_.