Russian occupation of northern Asia, not an exploiting colonial
enterprise, but a race-movement akin to the European invasion of our
Aryan ancestors. The upward struggle of a people striving to find
itself is embodied in imperial rescripts and armed revolts, in dumas
and dynamite, where rival titans grapple for the throw. There is now
therefore in the world a more earnest watching of this metamorphosing
Russian people. What are the types of civilization, the beliefs, the
manners of thought, the institutions that are to hold mastery over the
largest area on the globe occupied by a single nation?
To comprehend a people and the course of its evolution one must pierce
below the surface of ephemeral and contemporary incident, and probe
the primitive racial elements. Russia is to-day iceberg-like. The
crumbling, upper ice, honeycombed by eating waves, is exposed; but
submerged and unseen is the massive blue block beneath. Because rotten
surface-structures are obvious, many fail to appreciate what lies in
the depths. There comes understanding for much when one sounds the
ancient sources in race-history.
From the earliest times Russia lay across the path of incessant
invasion from Asia. In 1224 the Mongols swept down upon the old
Scythian plains. There were no mountain fastnesses in which the sparse
population could defend itself. The followers of Genghis Khan, through
the years that followed, destroyed town after town,--Bolgari, Suzdal,
Yaroslavl, Tver,--devastated Volkynia, and Galicia, until all Russia,
save Novgorod, was brought under Tatar rule. Their devastations cut
off the population of whole provinces, and changed old Russian cities,
such as Kiev, to hybrid towns of Asiatics. At Sarai on the Volga, for
two centuries Tatar sovereigns ruled; and here from being pagan they
became adherents of Islam. Russia’s foreign master was confirmed in a
religion as antagonistic as was his race. To these aliens Russia gave
humiliating homage and paid tribute, and from their khans her czar
received permit to rule. Thus in her infancy she had a foreign race,
not as servile members of the humble labor class, but in the wild,
fierce scourge of conquerors.
Throughout this period many Russian princes married into noble Mongol
families, and Mongol officers formed alliances with the Russian
boyars. The Muscovite aristocracy had already grown into strong
Oriental proclivities from contact with its southern neighbor, the
Byzantine, and these became confirmed under the Tatar. One czar, at
least, Boris Godunov, was of Mongol birth. Incessant war harassed
the people. Alexander Nevski, of Novgorod, beat back the Swedes;
but, abasing himself, he went to the Tatar khan with the tribute of
a country too feeble still to resist him. By and by Russia began to
rally and to strengthen her centres, Novgorod, Kiev, and Vladimir.
Moscow arose--that small destiny-city where Simon the Proud, even
in vassalage, dared to dream of unity and nationality, and took the
title of “Prince of all the Russias.” His grandson made the first
great stand against the Mongols and won in the field of Tula, which,
with the fights of Alexander Nevski, gives to chroniclers and bards
their early Russian ballads, or _bilinî_. Moscow, punished cruelly,
was razed almost to the ground. But the Bear was aroused and goaded
into desperation. Russia reeled to her feet, and for nearly a hundred
years she fought, she lost, she fell; but she rose again and fought
on, until at last the power of the Tatar terror was broken and the
tyrant was driven over her border. Still, for a hundred years more, she
was forcing back his inroads, and rescuing the winding trains of her
children, toiling over the southern steppes to be sold as slaves at
Kaffa. This was Russia in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.
That Europe was spared this, she owes to the Russian. Through those
crucial centuries when the Slav, weak, torn, anguished, beset with
foes around and foes within, was standing grimly at the perilous
portal of civilization, Europe, within the temple, safe by his grace,
was privileged to work up into light, to cement her nationalities, to
effect the liberation of her masses, and to develop her intellect into
the magnificent promise of a printing-press, a people’s Bible, and a
Shakespeare.
But to the brave warden of that portal there was not the sweetness and
the light. For him were the seams and the scars, the mutinous passions
of the strife. Long after the clouds of the Dark Ages had cleared from
the face of western Europe, they hung over Russia. The Slav was back
in his Dark Ages yet, heir only to a barbaric experience. Here he
must start, where Europe had started nearly a thousand years before,
where America, in the favor of Providence, was never to be called
upon to start. For him were the memories of subjection and the blood
of contention; but also, in relief, to him were the stolid patience
and endurance which were to serve him so well. He groped along in the
shadow until the coming of the great Peter.
But now arose a man. He, too, had dreamed the dream of empire,--vast,
masterful. He set about making his dream real. He found Russia a small
inland state, torn by faction, barbarian, and Oriental. Though himself
the descendant of a long line of Byzantine kings, half monk, half
emperor, he saw with the insight of genius, and he knew that that way
did not lie greatness. Therefore fully and fiercely he broke with the
past and set himself to the future.
Between him and that future stood the Strelitz. The walls of
the Kremlin, and the Red Square told the doom of their barring
conservatism. He warred with the Turk, he fought the Cossack, he
routed the Swedes, again and again, taking whole provinces on his
Baltic outlet and securing the coveted Neva. He embroiled himself with
Persia, and through Baku opened a way to the Caspian. Then, with a high
hand, he swept out the customs that made for Orientalism. He broke the
seclusion of women, the prostrations, banished the caftan, the beard,
and the flowing robes. He lifted his people bodily and violently out of
their past, and set them down face-front to a new order. The Russia he
had received a province, he left an empire. The Russia he had received
Asiatic, he left European, and already a force in Europe. And when
arose one of his own blood--a reversal--who would undo the herculean
labor of this master-builder, who would give back to Sweden those
priceless, wave-washed Baltic provinces, and, restoring the capital to
Moscow, return to an Oriental estate, the patriot was stronger than
the father, and at the price of his son’s life he bought the progress
of Russia. Here in this man, who died in 1725, we can truly say that
Modern Russia begins.
Through this skeleton history can be traced the structure of the modern
state, as in the struggle for survival may be found the root and early
warrant of her governmental system. Every element, physical and ethnic,
was, and still is, a handicap. Russia is not protected by the ramparts
of the sea; she is surrounded on all sides by nations with whom her
history has been that of perennial conflict. In place of a compacted,
well-peopled country, she has an empire extended gradually from frozen
Nova Zembla to Afghanistan, from the Danube mouth to Behring’s arctic
sea. She is a land of many distinct peoples, as foreign to each other
as Lithuanians and wild Kirghis; as alien in religion as Catholic and
Mohammedan. She is divided into one knows not how many tribes, numbers
of them completely barbarous. Her eastern and south-eastern frontiers
call for defense across vast and vacant stretches. Her northern and
western borders are occupied by Finns and Poles, unforgetful forever of
their own days of sovereignty, naturally and rightly jealous for the
memories and the prerogatives that are its legacy.
With the eastern problem living from the first on her immediate border,
with her many tribes wayward, Russia early strove to fuse her empire
into national unity. In old Poland had been seen the fearful price
which feebleness and disunion pay to fate. How much greater was the
menace to polyglot Russia, were her master-grip to relax! That she
should hold a strong hand over the elements that ever threatened her
disruption was the first national necessity. This supreme obligation
to herself in her entirety compelled a firm, commanding, centralized
authority. The mould that was to shape such metal had need of rigidity
and unyielding strength. To meet these race-desires, not as a
purposeless tyranny but as the fruit of a long evolving system, arose
the autocracy.
The system reached its climax in the most absolute administration of
modern times at the period of the American Revolution; the “Government
Statute of 1775” meshed all things and all men into the institutions
of despotism; Russia groaned under the iron rule of a Nicholas, yet
rejoiced in the belief that strength was there, and sure defense from
domestic disunion and foreign aggression; then, in the Crimea, came a
revelation of the inefficiency of the bureaucratic juggernaut. Despite
the stubborn valor of the defenders of Sevastopol, despite the gallant
efforts of the aged autocrat, the glory of Russia went down in the
blaze of her city and her fleet.
The old régime had failed. Even the Czar, before he died, could read
the lesson but could not act. How pathetic the words of the failing
monarch: “My successor may do what he will, I cannot change.”
With the accession of Alexander to the throne in 1855, on the sudden
death of Nicholas, came the first effective steps toward modern
institutions. The young czar, a self-declared friend of progress,
raised regally the standard of reform. All Russia rose to the hopes of
his idealism. Corruption in office, which had before been rampant, was
crushed out by the sheer force of public opinion. Pamphlets circulated
freely, uncensored. Meetings were everywhere held to discuss the varied
plans of a vivified government. With a whole nation become to a degree
transcendental, the Czar began his reign and his reforms.
First of all for righting, as it was first in evil, came serfdom.
Summoning commissions of his ablest advisers, seeking counsel of the
proprietors and their coöperation in an act of self-abnegation, the
Czar proceeded to the execution of his great task. For three years
every side and every phase of the problem was studied. Then at length
with a fundamental law which forecovered every detail of the situation,
Alexander II put his signature, February 19, 1861, to the great Ukase
of Liberation.
In Russia’s past there is much to answer for before the judgment-bar,
in omission and in commission. Yet, giving but justice to ruler and
people, it must be allowed that the measure which freed the serfs
ranks, with Magna Charta and the American Constitution, among the
mightiest agencies of advance that mankind has ever known. A dependent
population of nearly forty-six million souls was given liberty. The
great act was accomplished peacefully, and the measures were executed
without any trouble worthy of the name, in a spirit equitable to
the old owners as well as to the serfs. Not alone were the latter
released from bondage, they were provided, one and all, with land and
livelihood. They were given, in everything that concerned their local
administration, entire freedom from interference by their old masters
or by the members of the Administration. The righteous deed that the
American Republic achieved nearly three years later liberated but one
ninth the number of the Russian bondmen. It did so at the cost of the
deadliest fratricidal war of modern times, and the impoverishment
of one quarter of its people. All the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau
through the Reconstruction period could not insure to a tithe of the
Negroes the opportunity for a livelihood,--this that Russia provided
inalienably for each of her liberated. To this day the American Negro
in many places is under special civic disabilities more galling than
those imposed anywhere in the Russian Empire.
The protection of the former serfs was skillfully arranged by grouping
them in self-governing village communes, to which land enough was given
on a long-term repayment basis. In each, by an assembly composed of all
the heads of households, periodic allotments of the common territory
were made to the individuals. Compact economic units, whose property
could not be sold, were built up against alienation of the land or
poverty-induced peonage. The rendering of justice in local disputes was
delegated to the peasant courts,--the only tribunals in Russia, save
the National Senate, from which there is no appeal.
The Mir, complete within itself, was responsible to the Imperial
Government for good order and the taxes, and was secure from
molestation provided these duties were fulfilled. Its inhabitants,
united and independent, were able to resist any encroachment by
their former masters or by neighboring landlords.
[Illustration: THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW]
It is not unworthy of note that up to the present time the liberties
in economic matters thus granted have rarely been infringed by the
authorities, nor have the village assemblies been exploited as a play
in politics or to attain personal ends. While agriculturally and
industrially the communal land provisions have become insufficient,
cramping, perhaps baneful, and no longer necessary now that society
is in equilibrium, nevertheless the germ of free institutions
fecundated in the Mir, when dissociated from its communal features, is
admirable still, and is capable of becoming the foundation for real
self-government.
Plans for provincial assemblies as a further extension of local home
rule had been under consideration since 1859. On January 1, 1864, an
Imperial Ukase was promulgated instituting Semstvos in thirty-three
governments. To this assembly, proprietor and peasant, rich and poor,
elected their representatives. Each Semstvo was to appoint its own
executive to carry out the laws it decreed.
The jurisdiction of this assembly, though confined to local and
non-political matters, was wide. Rates, streets, convocations, posts,
sanitary measures, famine-relief, fire-insurance, schools, agricultural
improvement, all land, house, and factory taxes (those upon imperial
as well as those upon private domains), were given into the Semstvo
control. It was granted partial powers over various other minor
matters. It exercised practically all the economic and social functions
of local governmental activity save what fell to the Mirs. It was
welcomed as an epoch-making institution. The liberal press of the
period hailed it as a living guidon of the upward way, as the blessed
daylight of a constitutional government.
So indeed it might have become. In the new Emperor’s mind there
germinated a whole peaceful revolution. He had plans for new
courts of justice, reorganization of the army, reform of the civil
administration, and popular representative government, with an elected
national chamber.
But in the midst of his reforms broke out the Polish insurrection.
The Czar had granted to the Poles elective councils in each district
of government and in the chief cities; he had appointed a Pole his
Minister of Public Instruction, and had made many concessions to their
old language. Iron and blood crushed out the insurrection, but it had
brought to the great Czar Liberator the conviction that liberty spelled
disunion for Russia, and this belief was never to be dispelled.
Upon the Semstvo assemblies, no longer uplifted by the old generous
enthusiasm of the sovereign, pressed little by little the dead weight
of executive officialdom. One by one their functions were lopped away.
More and more the selection of delegates was transferred to the
administrative officials. The marshals of noblesse became chairmen,
the governors vetoing overlords. Before the death of Alexander II, his
once-cherished creations had lapsed from independent state legislatures
into anomalous, semi-advisory councils, discussing roads, land-taxes,
agriculture, and schools, and controlled by the land-owning nobles and
the governors. Semstvo and Mir and Assemblies of the Noblesse became
ornamental trimmings to the colossal edifice of the bureaucracy.
The assembling of all the functions of government into the hands of
the executive became again the guiding principle of this system. “The
Council of State,” whose office was that of discussing the budget and
law-making proposals, was the simulacrum of a parliament. The Senate,
which gave decision on special points appealed from the lower courts,
and whose promulgation of all enactments was the hall-mark of their
legality, was a form of supreme court. But both hung from above rather
than rested on a substructure. They were substantially cut off from
popular influences, their function was secondary action following
origin in the executive bureaus. The Imperial Autocrat, deriving his
right from Divinity alone, exercised, in addition to his executive
functions and his duties as supreme commander of the armed forces of
the State, those powers which by a segregation of functions would have
fallen to the legislative bodies and the judiciary. In this, the ten
ministries were his main agencies.
Under this system, legislation was inaugurated through the presentation
of a project to the Czar by one of his ministers, or by outside
petition, or perhaps by the imperial wish.
The proposed enactment, if the Czar ordered it to be further examined,
was referred usually to an Imperial Commission of Study. Debates
followed in the Advisory Council of State, and the completed bill, as
framed by this body, was signed by the Emperor and became a ukase, to
be formally promulgated by the Senate and enrolled as part of the law
of the land. Interpretations of law were made by the Ministers, which
none might gainsay. Thus was the legislative function absolute.
In the provinces the three functions of government were equally
centralized. A governor (almost invariably a general or an admiral)
through his subordinate executive officers duplicated in microcosm
the system of the capital. The dependent Semstvo was his Council of
State, the dependent judges composed his Senate, the dependent Semski
Natschalniki, his executive ministers. Into his bureaus came the
details of provincial government save such matters as the villagers
settled in their own Mirs. The troops of the district were at his call,
the gendarmerie under his orders carried out the judicial arrests and
the drumhead condemnations that sent so many thousands along the road
to Siberia.
In the placing of these proconsuls and their sustaining soldiery was
applied the Roman rule, “Divide et impera.” The head officials of the
provinces were from distant parts,--the Governor of Warsaw from Tiflis,
the Governor of Odessa from Samara, the Governor of the Amur from
the Baltic. The Orthodox Cossacks of the Don were in force among the
troubled Poles and Jews of the western governments; the drafts from
the peasantry of Little Russia garrisoned Tiflis and Turkestan, and
Siberian regiments watched the Austrian frontier. Even the popes sent
to petty village congregations were generally of far-off origin.
Though power was thus alienated from the people, the bureaucracy, by
other agencies rooted deep in human nature, had twined itself around
the daily life of society.
Every ambitious man in his profession, as he succeeded, was marked for
promotion. Not only to office-holders and soldiers, but to everybody,
throughout the whole social fabric, were “chins” or graded ranks given.
Here for example is a selection from one of the lists of the Czar’s
Christmas announcements:--
Appointed members of the Council of State: Privy Councilor Kabylinski,
and Von Kaufman, Senator, Minister of Public Instruction, President of
the Supreme Court.
Decorated with the St. Stanislaus Order, First Class: Major-General
Hippolyt Grigerasch, Director of the Department of Physics and
Electro-technology at the Nicholas Engineer Academy and School.
Decorated with the St. Vladimir Order of the Third Class:
Major-General Michael Hahnenfeldt, on the staff of his Imperial
Highness the Supreme Commander of Guards in the St. Petersburg
Military District.
Valentin Magorski, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Chief of the
Veterinary Staff.
Alexander Pomeranzev, Professor of Architecture.
Dimitri Sassiyadke, Governor of Radom.
Michael Mardarjev, Censor of Foreign Papers and Journals.
Advanced to the ranking Chin of actual State Councilor, hereditary
“honorable citizen” Constantine Popov, founder and director of the Tea
Emporiums.
Raised into hereditary “honorable citizenship” of the 3d gild, the
Archangel merchant Emil Brautigam.
Given personal “honorable citizenship,” Vladimir Ritimoun, Proprietor
of the Wollner Typographical Establishment; Karl Volter, Captain of
the steamer _Emperor Nicholas II_, of the Riga Navigation Co.
When a professor from his books was called up before the highest
provincial dignitary to have pinned on his lapel for honorable service
to the Empire the Order of St. Stanislaus, it was hard for him not to
have a warm sentiment for those who had so signally recognized his
talents. When on the document which recorded the promotion of a royal
prince to a colonelcy was enrolled the name of a tradesman; when a
neighboring doctor was raised his step in civil rank, each felt the
touchstone. All who had served well in their respective positions
might hope to be on the honor list, and this was the most effective
tribute to the weakness, the worth, and the ambition of human nature.
In Russia, as in France under Napoleon’s iron yoke, there was a welcome
to every sort of ability, and its elevation to posts of the highest
trust. The aristocracy sought for was one of power, not that of a small
birth-caste. A fundamental democracy ran through society. Save for a
few of the Guards regiments, the army was officered by poor men. The
Cossacks’ officers were chosen from among their own people and were
state-trained. In the knapsack of every soldier was Skobelov’s baton;
in the desk of every chinovnik, Witte’s portfolio.
So stood the bureaucratic edifice, complete in itself. Here and there
a popular embellishment was added, perhaps to strengthen, often to
conceal; but in grim reality it formed no part of the structure. Thus
the Russian Empire finished out the nineteenth century. With the
twentieth the system had come to trial for its stewardship.
In the great reckoning are elements both of good and of evil. The
liberation of the serfs and all that went with the emancipation stand
as a credit. It is a further vast credit that Russia has made, held
together, and civilized an empire of over eight and a half million
square miles, with a population of over one hundred and forty million
souls; that to the internal development of her splendid resources
the Government has vigorously set its hand, seeking for her rivers
unhampered navigation, for her canals larger passage, for her deserts
great irrigation works. Already the Siberian Railway links the Baltic
and Pacific; already on the southeast the tracks creep to the threshold
of Kashmir, where some four hundred miles separate the Russian lines
from those of British India. This gap once crossed, Calcutta becomes
but eleven days distant from London. It is still another credit
that, despite Slavic limitations and financial loss, in the face
of Western invention and competitive leveling, the country of the
cheapest telegraph and the cheapest railway rate was until recently
not America but Russia. It is a credit that the public land has been
put so efficiently and generously at the disposal of the people, that
any emigrant expressing a genuine purpose of settling will be given,
wherever he may select it in Siberia, a liberal homestead, and he will
be conveyed to it over the Trans-Siberian Railway for a sum less than
the cost. He is not only allotted his homestead, but he is supplied
with seed, grain, tools, and advances for his first years of marketing.