classes has not been one of oppression. True, work-hours are
unrighteously long and certain strikes have been put down arbitrarily.
Still the Russian labor laws and arrangements for the settlement of
labor difficulties are in many features conspicuously statesmanlike and
just. Some years since, a body of Belgian miners, fifty or more, with
their families, were transferred from the collieries of the Meuse to
the Donetz Basin. Recently these miners, at a meeting of the directors’
board, presented a memorial to this purport: “How happy are we who are
no more in Belgium, but who live and work in Russia! No longer must we
support the socialistic committee. On the day of pay we put our hands
in our pockets and have it for our wives and children.”
The other side of the ledger is, however, not without weighty items.
While no system of government can legislate prosperity, the public
welfare is rightfully the first test, as it should be the first
consideration, of an administration. Despite her immense territories,
her vast mineral deposits, her fertile soils, her navigable rivers, her
abundant timber, all the natural sources of national wealth, Russia
is very poor. The peasants have more than doubled in number since the
allotment of communal fields that followed the emancipation, and they
are in general want. Vast stretches, whole provinces, are subject to
periodic famine. Millions of the people are constantly on the brink of
starvation. Manufacturing is, as a rule, desultory, undeveloped, and,
in general, unprofitable.
The per-capita wealth of Russia is estimated at but two hundred and
seventy-five dollars, as compared to Germany’s seven hundred dollars,
France’s eleven hundred and twenty dollars, and England’s twelve
hundred and thirty-five dollars. The savings-bank deposits reported
for all Russia average but $2.75 per man, while in France they average
$20.82, in England $15.00, and in Austria $15.68.
The degree of administrative responsibility for this condition is
of course not to be definitely laid down. Much manifestly is due to
natural conditions, national character, and historic handicaps; and
some of the resultants would be the same under any administrative
policy. Russia in her great area has had a sparse population. She
has not, like her sister nations, and preëminently America, been
able to lay the rest of the world under teeming contribution to her
citizenship. She has had only her natural increase, and no such
record as that of the United States has been possible. The Slav is
not commercial, but agricultural. He has remained poor, and has had
relatively very small resources to devote to what have proved our two
greatest developing forces--internal improvement and education.
It is, however, a matter directly involved in government that, with
this low standard of national living, there is the correlated fact of
extremely high national expenditure. An immense budget of two billion
roubles, ordinary expenditure, is annually met, which the war-loans
raised to a total, for some years, of over three billions.
[Illustration: DRAGOON CONSTABLE RUSSIAN TYPES]
It is the general belief that a large part of the public funds is
frittered away in needless waste, with multitudes of idling clerks
and sinecure officials. Granting the benefit of doubt, assuming
that the Administration’s corruption and inefficiency are exaggerated,
and supposing that the public money is in the main honestly and
productively spent, it is still a very serious question if any public
service rendered by the agents of Government can correspond to or
justify the immense burden of taxation heaped upon a people whose
economic distress is so terrible.
The weight of the tax-levy crushing the peasants, whose improvident
habits aggravate their want, is, for most, unescapable unless they
follow the emigrant’s road to Siberia. The rate-gatherer can take
anything the mujik has, save his last coat, his last horse, his
seed-grain for next year. He is, with fateful frequency, forced to hire
himself out to whoever will use his services, and this during the brief
summer season which is so supremely essential if he is to attend to his
own crops and fields. One landowner relates that he has seen paid an
average of five roubles ($2.50) a month for farm-laborers, including
men, women, and children, during June, July, and August.
Under the old system the method of rate-levy on the “souls” in a family
weighed inequitably. Census revision was delayed in one instance,
personally related, by over twenty-three years. A family taxed,
twenty-three years before, on a father, four brothers, and two adult
sons,--seven souls,--was still assessed for seven males, whether the
family had increased to twenty, or been reduced to one. Each member of
the household was responsible for the total.
It is related that whole families in Samara, reduced by the fearful
cholera epidemic of some years back from scores of men to a dozen or
ten, had to leave their home-country for Siberia to escape the load of
their dead brothers.
Discussing the economic loss of the years of military service, one of
the country nobles related an incident. He told of ordering the dead
leaves and branches cleared out of his lake. Ordinarily, he said, he
did not go near the work or let the peasants come near his château, for
there was a good deal of class-hostility where he lives. But he was
interested in the lake because the branches were killing some specially
cherished fish, so he went down through the woods and was surprised
to see nobody working. All the men were crowded round a peasant whom
he had cited as an example of those who, though unlettered, had great
capacity. This man had served seven years in the navy and could neither
read nor write, a commentary upon what the service training was. He was
declaiming on politics, and the squire stepped behind a tree, for the
peasant spoke musically and well. The man was telling about his naval
service: “Seven years on the boats I have been, brothers, and every
three months I got ninety kopecks to buy a string for the crucifix and
to cut my hair. I had no money for tobacco, none to send home to my
wife in all this time, and I came home without a kopeck. Seven years
of my life I have given to the Czar. What has he given me? What has he
given you?” The landowner stepped from behind the tree and faced the
group of startled peasants. “You have heard, your honor? Well it is
true, it is true!”
The measure which under existing land-conditions would most directly
raise the standard of life is the improvement of the mediæval
agricultural system, and this depends upon the intelligence of the
people at large. Scientific farming needs technical knowledge, yet of
the great sums collected, a very small portion goes to education. The
Nation spends for it but forty-three million roubles, the Semstvos but
twenty million roubles, or together one eighth of the military budget.
A tedious, inefficient course in Slavonic, with the prayer-books as
text, a smattering of modern Russian, sometimes mathematics as far
as multiplication and division,--this is the state education of the
privileged few of the peasants’ children. Whatever small amount of real
knowledge is gained is quickly submerged in the ocean of ignorance at
home. The percentage of illiteracy is very great. The record gives
Switzerland five, Germany seven, Great Britain ten, France fifteen,
Russia eighty-four.
It is argued that for the bulk of the population, under existing
material conditions, schools are of small use. The lack, in the
general poverty, of the very primary materials,--paper, pencils,
books; of proper shoes and clothes; the unsuitableness of the houses
of the peasants as places for the children to prepare their lessons
in, with no spot to put their books or to do their tasks and with no
available light--all these things strike at the very root of education.
The population must be raised economically to the point where the
elementals of existence are assured, before the incidental costs of
schools can be met by the peasantry. However, there has been coming
to Russia during the last generation, in a great wave, the kind of
education that made the American West--the education of expansion, of
the founding of towns, the planting of new industries, the building of
new railroads, the opening of better navigation-routes, the enlistment
of foreign capital; all the intelligence and enlightenment that attends
a real industrial, commercial, and material quickening.
Beyond these social and economic factors a large count is set against
the bureaucratic system for the conduct of administration. The
suppression of personal liberty, of freedom of speech, the abuse of
power by arbitrary officials, remorseless repression, ruthlessly
carried out, racial oppression, frightful cruelty in the prisons and
exile stations;--it is a terrible indictment that has been drawn. The
close of the Japanese War opened a new “Smutnoe Vremya,” or time of
trouble. Industrial wars, riots in Baku, uprisings in the Caucasus,
seizure of cities by Social Democrats,--so went the disturbances
throughout Russia, the white terror above grappling with the red terror
beneath.
The situation which the forces of order were required to meet was
extraordinary. The balance-wheel of the human mind, and all sense of
proportion among classes of the people, seemed at times to be lost.
Barbaric as the administration condemnations undoubtedly were, the
individuals were not infrequently innocent only by curious standards.
In a broad view one must confess that on both sides were rights and
wrongs. The system, far more than individuals, was at fault. But
while a system so linked to violence and oppression could not longer
be suffered, the way out could not come through yielding to men in
insurrection.
Salvation lay along the path that the Emperor opened. His rescript of
October 17, 1905, proclaimed a National Duma.
The pregnant clauses in the summons to a national legislature were
these:--
We direct the Government to carry out our inflexible will in the
following manner:--
1. To grant the population the immutable foundation of civic liberty
based on real inviolability of the person and freedom of conscience,
speech, union, and association.
2. To call to participation in the Duma those classes of the
population now completely deprived of electoral rights.
3. To establish it as an immutable rule that no law can come into
force without the approval of the State Duma.
The ebullition of sentiment that followed these decrees was
extraordinary. All the bitterness and discontent that had weltered
through the years of distress were metamorphosed into a glowing hope.
Ambition and aspiration became a fervor. The delirium went electrically
through all classes during the few following weeks of uncensored press
and unfettered meetings. The educated were fed with every sort of essay
upon what would be the result of the new order, and exhortation to keep
spread the young wings for national ascension. Among the unlettered
peasants, pictures circulated showing glorified cartoons of the risen
Russia. One of the most widely distributed of these celebrated the
Imperial Svoboda Manifesto. The genius of the Slav stood forth: one
hand rested on a tablet marked “Zakon” (Law), the other unfurled a
banner inscribed in blazing red letters, “Svoboda” (Liberty), below
which followed freedom of speech, of forming associations, of holding
meetings, of religion, the inviolability of the home, and amnesty for
political prisoners. Peasants and workmen were grouped around, and
above them stood an heroic figure representing the Duma which was to
halo all national activity with law. The rising sun, illumining the
Tauride Palace, cast its glow and glamour over the prophecy.
The ukase had gone forth to give the widest representation at the
polls. The command was followed out in a system by which every class
had its own deputies in the nominating colleges that elected the Duma
members. Among the peasantry each _volost_ had two deputies; every
thousand industrials had one, the nobility, the salaried clerks,
the bourgeois in the cities, the Cossack stanitzas, the boards of
trade, the universities, the Holy Synod, the aboriginal Buriat
tribesmen,--each had special representation. Uninterfered with for the
most part by officialdom, all Russia crowded to the polls, every man
believing that his ideal was now, at last, on the eve of realization.
The peasants who called for land, the workmen who wished for higher
wages, the Intellectuals with their slogan of universal education, the
submerged races with dreams of reborn nationalities, the ambitious with
visions of power, the venal with hopes of plunder, each and all thought
their hopes were to spring at once into the actual and the visual.
In such a fever-time the men to whom official service meant the slow
toilsome improvement of conditions by self-sacrificing devotion to the
routine of administration, who could offer as pre-nomination pledges
only earnest study and conscientious action on the legal matters
presented, were passed by in the hot aspiring canvass for delegates.
Those who believed all things and promised all things, whose fervency
of expectation fed the universal hope, whose preaching held that, the
way once cleared, Russia could at a bound reach the plane to which
other countries had so long and toilsomely struggled, those of fiery
faith which would consume every obstacle--these were the men whom the
people ratified and whom the nation sent to St. Petersburg for the
first Duma.
It was a band of hot heads and eager hearts that assembled, echoing
their constituents’ desires, crying for all things and at once. They
were saturated with the history of the French Revolution, they felt
confident that their coming meant the end of the old régime, and belief
in their own power was the pledge of the future. Their first official
act threw down the gauntlet to autocracy. In the reply to the Crown,
passed during their first day’s session, the final paragraphs read:--
The most numerous part of the population, the hard-working peasants,
impatiently await the satisfaction of their acute want of land; and
the first Russian State Duma would be recreant in its duty were it
to fail to establish a law to meet this primary want by resorting to
the use of lands belonging to the State, the Crown, the Royal family,
all monastic and state lands, also private landed property, on the
principles of eminent domain.
The spiritual union of Russia’s different nationalities is possible
only by meeting the needs of each one of them, and by preserving
and developing their national characteristics. The Duma will try to
satisfy these wants.
Sirs, the Duma expects of you full political amnesty, as the first
pledge of mutual understanding and mutual agreement between the Czar
and his people.
It was apparent that if these clauses did not contemplate the
confiscation of private property, which was openly advocated by the
peasant deputies, and the substitution of a “spiritual union” of
Russia’s subsidiary peoples for the real hegemony, there was fair
_prima-facie_ evidence for thinking that they did. While a general
amnesty would render less than justice to a large number of citizens,
it would cover as well the bomb-shell anarchists, whose imprisonment
was as necessary to the protection of society as that of any other
dangerous criminals. The tenor of these demands, the speeches of the
deputies, and the avowed desires of their majority, brought matters
to a crisis. Not alone the autocracy, but national unity, and the
jurisdiction of the courts, were called openly and violently into
question. When such a challenge is offered a government, it must answer
or abdicate.
Unostentatiously, the Imperial Administration poured troops into St.
Petersburg from Kronstadt and the northern garrisons. The governors at
Moscow, Odessa, Warsaw, and the big industrial centres were notified
to concentrate their loyal regiments. The whole country was mapped
out like a checker-board. It was now only a question of when the
authorities would act.
On the night of July 8, the troops in St. Petersburg were called to
arms. They marched with machine-like precision to appointed stations
throughout the city. With the dawn every strategic point was held by
the soldiery, and a battalion ringed about the deserted Duma hall. In
the silence was read the imperial rescript. The first Duma had ceased
to exist.
The dissolution of this national parliament had come as a stroke of
lightning. The venerable representative Petrunkevitch told how he was
awakened at five in the morning with the news that the city was under
martial law and that soldiers with fixed bayonets were at the Duma
doors. Hurried consultations were held with groups of colleagues,
and finally the word was passed to meet at Viborg in Finland. At the
little inn there, the pressing crowd of one hundred and sixty-nine
fugitive deputies signed their manifesto. It called for the cessation
of tax-payments, the refusal of conscription, and reclaimed the freedom
of Russia. But the insurrection, the uprising in their support! Not a
regiment came to assist them, not a city rallied to their call, not a
Mir responded. For a few weeks the signers were free. Then the police
took them, one by one.
Dully unprotesting, the public received the news of the dissolution
of the Duma and the arrest of the deputies. The majority of Russians
did not want disunion, did not want the overthrow of vested rights.
Each wanted some specialty of his own. Yet here was the resultant of
each constituency’s crystallized desires. The people had accepted the
leadership of those who had held out great hopes, impotently. The
Government had crushed the men whose power meant social and economic,
as well as administrative, revolution. In the blow it had perforce
shattered the dreams as well.
[Illustration: THE TVERSKAIA GATE LOUBIANSKAIA PLACE STREET SCENES IN
MOSCOW]
Humiliated by the contemptuous condemnation of their chosen
representatives, bitterly disillusioned, the people at large stolidly
acquiesced in the extinction.
The voting for the second Duma, which followed some months later,
was almost perfunctory. Those who had chronically wished to agitate,
and those put forward by the Administration in an effort to pack the
membership, composed the bulk of the deputies. Moderates, hopeful of
progress with order, stayed at home, disgusted with both sides. The
result was a second violent, wrangling Duma, offending like the first,
and in its turn ignominiously snuffed out.
The year 1907 saw universal disappointment, cynicism, and skepticism.
In the literature, the lassitude of the nation was shown, and morbid
despair reflected the thwarted hopes, the agonies, the confusion of the
people. The bitterness in the _Lazarus_ of Andreyev, the decadence in
the _Sanin_ of Artzybashev, mirrored the people’s mood, and the shadow
of a dark destiny brooded over all. To fill the cup, the reaction,
coldly triumphant, was able to bring the members of the first national
parliament before the bar for high treason in signing the Viborg
Manifesto.
In the stifling Hall of Justice in St. Petersburg, like a resurrection
of the first Duma, sat the hundred and sixty-nine signers, grouped
as of old by party affiliations. Each man was called upon to justify
his actions. Many had signed the Viborg document in the belief that
the people would rise in bloody rebellion, and they issued what was,
to their fevered view, advice of moderation. One deputy after another
stood erect to answer for his deeds. If the men had been carried
from liberty into license, at least they had been fired by intense
belief in themselves and in their mission. Impressive were the solemn
declarations of those who expected nothing less than long imprisonment
for speaking out, now, a defiance to the ruling power. It was currently
rumored that should the former President of the Duma, Dolgoroukov,
justify his action, his penalty was to be three years’ imprisonment;
the others would serve one; while liberty was reported to be the bribe
for any who would confess a fault. Yet almost to a man these old
deputies rose to declare that they still stood by all that they had
done.
“I did not care, and do not care if our action was unconstitutional. We
found that we must rely,” said Nabokov, “on the highest law, the will
of the people.”
Kakoshtin, of the Cadet Party, and a professor in Moscow University,
declared: “Whatever fate awaits us, it will be nothing compared to
the sufferings of our predecessors who have fallen in the fight for
liberty.”
Three members of the “Group of Toil” declared that the first Duma would
be an encouragement to the people to overthrow the present system.
Mourontzev, and Prince Dolgoroukov were there, leading members of the
first Duma. Petrunkevitch ended his speech: “If you open for us the
doors of the prison, we will quietly enter with the knowledge that we
have fulfilled a duty to the Fatherland.”
Burning words these, but they waked not an echo. The Administration
was in complete control of the situation. Repression was the order
of the day, repression as widespread and efficient as in the days of
Nicholas I; the autocracy, buttressed by an army which, however lacking
in discipline and supposedly honeycombed by disaffection, nevertheless
rallied still to the command and service of the master.
At this time there was issued the call for a third Duma. As Prime
Minister sat cold Stolypin, whose reputation as a governor-general was
the reverse of liberal. He had risen by virtue of rigid efficiency. His
best friends did not know his beliefs. He had dissolved both the first
and second assemblies, and had done his best to pack the third. “I want
a Duma that will work, not talk,” he declared.
The murmurers said that the Russian Parliament had become a farce; that
the administrative officers were following to the best of their ability
instructions from St. Petersburg to deliver a roster of safe men; that
those who had agitated unwisely were being removed from the likelihood
of candidature; that the Senate, with its membership of retired
officials, had so construed each provision of the election law that
the unquiet classes were as far as possible disfranchised; that every
influence was being used to make the third a “dummy Duma,” hopelessly
manipulated into the reactionary camp.
Throughout this time of shattered ideals and discouragement, a very
small band of real believers still held high the torch of faith. Most
prominent among them was Alexander Goutchkov, he who among the Moscow
Constitutional Democrats (the “Cadets” of the earlier times) had in a
critical Polish debate of the party spoken and voted alone for a united
Russia.
When at length the third Duma had assembled, the so-called Octobrists
or Moderates, who had a small plurality, prepared a reply to the Speech
from the Throne. Very respectful it was, with no demand for general
amnesty or suggestions of confiscation or national devolution. It read
in part:--
We wish to devote all our ability, knowledge, and experience to
strengthening the form of government which was given new life by the
Imperial will; to pacify the Fatherland, to assure respect for the
laws, to be a buttress for the greatness and power of indivisible
Russia.