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Russia of the Russians
f
COUNTRIES AND PEOPLES SERIES
Each in imperial 16mo, cloth gilt, gilt top. With about 30 full-page plate illustrations.
Italy of the Italians.
By Helen Zimmern. France of the French.
By E. Harrison Barker. Switzerland of the Swiss.
By Frank Webb. Spain of the Spanish.
By Mrs. J. Villiers-Wardell. Germany of the Germans.
By Robert M. Berry. Turkey of the Ottomans.
By Lucy M. J. Garnett. Belgium of the Belgians.
By Demetrius C. Boulger. Holland of the Dutch.
By Demetrius C. Boulger. Japan of the Japanese.
By Prof. J. H. Longford. Servia of the Servians.
By Chedo Mijatovich. Austria of the Austrians and Hungary of the Hungarians. By L. Kellner, Paula Arnold, and A. L. Delisle. Greece of the Hellenes.
By Lucy M. J. Garnett.
Other Volumes in preparation
\ \
\
Russia of the Russians
By
Harold vWhitmore) Williams, Ph.D.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
597-599 Fifth Avenue
'9*5
0>K
3X •W75 1315
/ZL-f-Zsr
The slow way wanders to the distant sky,
The pale sun sinks to his grey dreams of rest ;
The shadows fall, and faint the hope that 1 May win the goal beyond the fading west.
But from the greyness light rose, and sweet sound Called me to linger on the endless plain ;
Summoned swift powers from unseen heights around, Breathed forth a home, made lone ways live again.
Sighs mount to song, light in the shadow lies, And the wild plain is mated with the skies.
0
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE GROWTH OF RUSSIA . . . . 1
II. THE BUREAUCRACY AND THE CONSTITUTION . 52
III. THE PRESS 99
IV. THE INTELLIGENTSIA 127
V. CHURCH AND PEOPLE . . ' . . .138
VI. LITERATURE 178
VII. MUSIC 228
VIII. THE THEATRE 268
IX. PAINTING 291
X. ARCHITECTURE 324
XI. PEASANTS AND PROPRIETORS .... 332
XII. TRADE AND INDUSTRY 373
XIII. IN THE CHIEF CITY 389
INDEX 425
274746
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
HAULAGE ON THE VOLGA .
H.I.M. NICHOLAS II .
MOSCOW — THE KREMLIN .
THE EMPRESS AND THE TSAREVICH
THE IMPERIAL DUMA
M. STOLYPIN ....
A. I. GUCHKOV
M. VLADIMIR KOKOVSTEV .
A FIFTEENTH CENTURY VILLAGE CHURCH, PAPERTNO
THE METROPOLITAN VLADIMIR OF ST. PETERSBURG
ST. JOHN BAPTIST CHURCH, UGLICH
ANTON CHEHOV
MAXIM GORKY ....
ALEXANDER BLOK
ALEKSEI REMIZOV
VILLAGERS DANCING
MODEST MUSORGSKY .
ALEXANDER SKRIABIN
M. SOBINOV ....
M. V. DAVYDOV
VERA KOMMISSARZHEVSKAIA
K. STANISLAVSKY
MICHAEL VRUBEL
ADMIRALTY ARCH, ST. PETERSBURG
PEASANTS IN THE HOME .
THE CHILDREN OF THE VILLAGE
A NORTH RUSSIAN VILLAGE
ZEMSTVO STATISTICIANS AMONG THE PEASANTRY
A RUSSIAN COUNTRY GENTLEMAN (OLD TYPE)
WOODFELLING IN A FOREST IN VOLOGDA GOVERNMENT
THE ENGLISH QUAY, ST. PETERSBURG
ST. PETERSBURG — THE NEVSKY PROSPECT
Frontispiece
6
24
48
72
76
84
96
144
154
160
186
192
212
216
230
246
260
266
270
278
286
310
330
336
338
346
352
364
374
404
418
IX
RUSSIA OF THE RUSSIANS
CHAPTER I
THE GROWTH OF RUSSIA
The* fundamental difference between Russian and English history is the difference between the great plain and the
island. English history tells of the upbuild-
tt^Makinff1 *nS ^y an ^an^ people of the greatest maritime
empire in the world. Russian history tells how a people whose original home lay between the slopes of the Carpathians and the Dnieper gradually, with toil, pain and effort, secured possession of the greatest plain in the world and so created the broadest of land empires. There are curious analogies, striking points of resemblance in the process of empire-building in both countries. But the funda- mental difference between the island and the plain, between a sea and a land empire makes itself constantly felt, and largely accounts for striking differences between the two nations in character, social structure and political development.
The island constitutes a secure physical basis for national effort. It guarantees seclusion and privacy. It renders intercourse with the outside world dependent far less on the will of outsiders than on the islanders themselves. The island nation is largely protected against outside interference. It is in a much better position than continental nations to con- centrate its energies on questions of internal development. Its social structure is compact and highly organised. Imperial expansion beyond the seas does not alter the essential charac- teristics of the structure, it only throws them into greater relief. In thinking of the British Empire one thinks primarily and mainly of England. In considering the Russian Empire
1
2 Russia of the Russians
one's thoughts range over a wide geographical area, and do not readily concentrate on a given point. British expansion is a radiation, while Russian expansion is a gradual diffusion, And while the position of England on an island base has made it possible to maintain a fairly constant equilibrium between social development and internal expansion, Russian social development has been perpetually subordinated, most frequently sacrificed, to the inexorable necessity of extending the political frontier further and further until the natural barriers of sea and mountain were reached. Thus, though the history of Russian political evolution runs almost parallel with that of the British Empire, England has enjoyed a large measure of political liberty for centuries, while Russia is only now making her first experiments in constitutional govern- ment, and Russian backwardness in the matter of political institutions and social initiative is largely to be accounted for by the position of the Russian people on the great plain.
The plain that constitutes the arena of Russian historical effort extends from the Baltic and the Prussian and Austrian frontiers across Eastern Europe and Western Asia in one vast sweep, broken only by the low range of the Urals. It is bounded on the North by the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean, on the South by the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Kopet Dagh range on the Persian frontier, and on the East reaches a limit in the Pamirs, the Tian-Shan and Altai ranges and the mountainous region beyond the Yenisei. The plain is not absolutely level. There are hills, undulations, stretches of broken country. A map indicating altitude above sea- level displays in different regions of Russia various shades, but these shades will all be of the same colour. No point in the plain has an altitude of more than 1,400 feet. The Russian landscape gives the impression of boundless space ; it constantly beckons, as the sea does, to far horizons, only that the soil again and again tempts to linger, to settle and to build. The spirit that sent Vikings and Englishmen roving across the green expanse of the sea has caused scores of peoples
The Growth of Russia 3
to go wandering over the plain. But in the end they turned their tents into huts ; they naturally inclined to settle along the great avenues of communication, on the banks of the rivers that thread their way through swamp, forest and steppe to the limiting seas.
There are in European Russia three great highway-rivers, the Volga, the Dnieper and the Western Dvina. They take
their rise in the marshy region of Central
THiehwa7r Russia to the North-West of Moscow, and
flow long slow versts across the plain, the first to the Caspian, the second to the Black Sea, and the third to the Baltic. The course of these rivers indicates the chief lines of human intercourse, those great trade routes that give the principal stimulus to social development and to the organisation and growth of political communities on the plain. The limitless expanse is a constant appeal to go on somewhither, it awakens a spirit of restless adventure. But it is the rivers that tell whither to go and why, and the rivers that take their winding course across European Russia constitute a highway between North-Western Europe and the Caspian and the Middle East, and again between North- Western Europe and the Black Sea basin and Constantinople, that is to say, the Near East. There are no high watersheds between the rivers. Frequently two basins are -separated by only a few miles of gently undulating country, and boats can easily be conveyed from one to the other overland. These great waterways are thus open roads across the »Continent, and those who live along the banks of the rivers necessarily become intermediaries between East and West.
In winter the rivers are frozen hard, and the plain in all its vast extent from Odessa to Archangel, and from the Pamirs to the Baltic, is covered with a sheet ofr snow. Winter does not paralyse human effort on the plain, but circumscribes it, concentrates it within definite limits. Summer is the time for roving, for active intercourse with the wide world, in the form of trading or military expeditions. Winter encourages
4 Russia of the Russians
settlement, the accumulation of the products of the summer's toil, indoor life, home industries, communal organisation, the growth of villages and towns. Winter is the period of repose for nature and men, and it is the repose of winter that makes the activity of the summer possible. Then the long winter has a profound effect on character. It causes a relaxa- tion of effort, leads to apathy and inertness, and in any case necessitates a complete change of occupation. To till the soil is out of the question while the snow lies on the ground. The place of agriculture is taken by forestry, by hunting, or by home industries. The melting in spring of the snows that cover the greater part of two continents fertilises the soil, fills the rivers to overflowing with water, and provokes a sudden exuberant uprush of vegetation. Agriculture and commerce on the plain are dependent on the sharp contrast between winter and summer.
It is this natural environment — so different from the snug compactness of an island with an even temperate climate — that determines the main lines of Russian historical develop- ment. The thousand odd years of Russian history show how a people living on the South-West corner of the plain learned the plain's secret, discovered its rhythm, its steady alternation between relaxation and effort, between movement and repose, gradually secured possession of the overland trade-routes and, step by step, transforming commercial advantage into political power, finally subdued all its rivals and created an Empire whose limits are nearly everywhere coterminous with those of the plain, while in the Caucasus and Siberia they overpass them.
For several centuries before the beginnings of Russian history, the Southern Steppes of Russia were occupied by
Scythians and Sarmatians, of the life and
Early History, habits of the former of whom Herodotus
has left a vivid account. Greek colonies occupied various points along the shores of the Black Sea, and excavations on the sites of these colonies have yielded
The Growth of Russia 5
rich treasure, a large proportion of which now adorns Russian museums, and serves to show how strongly beat the pulse of Greek civilisation even in the Euxine region on the confines of the kingdoms of the barbarians. The Sarmatians were probably of Iranian stock, and a remnant of their descendants is to be found in the Ossetines in the Northern Caucasus. Who the Scythians were is not very clear. Perhaps they were in the main Iranian, and perhaps there were Slav tribes among those whom the Greek writers included under the general designation. That Slavs and Iranians were at one time in close contact is clear from linguistic evidence. The centre of the original home of the Slavs was in the marshy basin of the Pripet in the south of the present Government of Minsk, and probably the White Russians who inhabit Minsk and the neighbouring Govern- ments more nearly represent the original Slavonic type than any other people. To the north of the Scythians in the forest region bordering on the steppe were Finnish tribes — the Western Finns, whose modern representatives are the natives of Finland and Esthonia, being gradually driven northward by the movements of Germanic and Slavonic peoples. The Goths came down from the north before the Christian era, occupied for a time the basin of the Vistula, moved southward to the Danube and in the third century a.d. held sway in the West of the steppes.
Russian history begins with the creation in the ninth century of the State of Kiev. Up till then the Slav tribes,
settled along the upper reaches of the Dnieper Kiev. and its tributaries and along the banks of
other rivers as far north as Lake Ilmen, had not reached the stage of organised political life, although here and there they seem to have erected forts and even towns. Their position on the trade route between the Baltic and the Black Sea gave them certain advantages as intermediaries, but also exposed them to attack. In the ninth century about the time when King Alfred was engaged in his struggle with
6 Russia of the Russians
the Danes, Germanic freebooters known as Variags or Var- engers captured the Slav town of Kiev. It is not absolutely certain who these Variags were. They may possibly have been Gothic pirates from settlements on the Black Sea coast — remnants of the Gothic State in the Southern steppes which had been broken up by the Hunns. But it is more probable that the invaders were Northmen who had penetrated into the interior from the Baltic by way of the Neva, Lake Ladoga, the river Volkhovo, Novgorod, Lake Ilmen and the rivers leading thence to the tributaries of the Dnieper. These bands of adventurers led, as the annals say, by a chief named Rurik, subjugated the dwellers along the river banks, and seizing Kiev, which, owing to its position at the confluence of several rivers, was an important trading and political centre, made the first attempt to weld these scattered Slav tribes into a political whole. The Variags, or as they were also called, Rus or Russians, made plundering excursions across the Eastern steppes by way of the kingdom of the Khazars — a Turkish people whose rulers had adopted Judaism — to the Caspian and to Northern Persia, and also down the Dnieper and across the Black Sea to the very walls of Constantinople. The rule of the Variags was hard, but it benefited the Slavs. It established order, promoted trade, and provided protection against the attacks of the nomad hordes who were constantly making their way from Asia into the rich pastures of the steppes. And the Variags very soon ceased to be foreigners and became Slavs in speech and habits. The early rulers of the Kiev state, Rurik's successors, the Princes Oleg, Igor and Sviatoslav and the Princess Olga, made the neigh- bouring Slav tribes groan by their forcible extortion of tribute, but at the same time Olga, for instance, defended Kiev against the Khazars and Sviatoslav and his successors against another Turkish people called the Pechenegs, known in Byzantine history as Patzinaks, while during the eleventh and twelfth centuries the energies of the princes of Kiev were engaged in warding off the attacks of the Torks and Polovians, also
H.I.M. NICHOLAS II
i the uniform ol an English Admiral)
(^)
The Growth of Russia 7
Turkish peoples, a section of whom finally settled in central Hungary.
Christianity was adopted in 988 as the State religion by Prince Vladimir, the son of Sviatoslav. The missionaries
came from Constantinople, with which the C^o*tSty Russians had for a considerable time pre- viously maintained commercial and political relations. Russian marauders had more than once ravaged the precincts of the Great City. Uncouth Russian envoys had frequently stood side by side with the envoys of other barbarian peoples of the steppes, with Khazars and Pechenegs, shy and overawed amidst the dazzling splendours of the Imperial Court. Princess Olga had visited the city during the reign of Constantine Porphyrogenitos, and had concluded with the Greeks commercial treaties. Sviatoslav, Vladimir's father, had, at the instigation of the Greeks, invaded Bulgaria at the head of an army of 60,000 men, and had crossed the Balkans into Thrace. But the Greeks turned against him, and he was in the end defeated by the Emperor John Tzimiskes on the Danube. The city constantly attracted the Russians ; they coveted it, and the Balkan question, the question of the watch and ward over the straits on which Constantinople stands, the straits that lead out into the Mediterranean and the wide world beyond, has been vital for Russia from the very earliest period of her history.
The step taken by VlacLimir in adopting Christianity as the State religion had consequences of immense importance. Byzantine culture had a powerful rival in that Perso-Arabic civilisation, which had its centre at Bagdad, and held sway over Mesopotamia and the Middle East. The Arabs took a considerable share in the trade of the great plain, and in this way maintained intercourse with the Russians. It is not improbable that, as a legend indicates, Vladimir may have weighed in his mind the possibility of adopting Islam as a symbol of civilisation and political progress, just as the rulers of the Khazars from similar motives had adopted Judaism.
2 — (2400)
8 Russia of the Russians
But Vladimir chose Christianity, and so set his face westward and linked the fortunes of the Russian State with those great forces and tendencies which have produced modern civilisation.
The adoption of Christianity was of great immediate importance for the Russian State. It strengthened the monarchical principle and led to the introduction of Byzantine book-learning and Byzantine administrative methods. Vladimir was an ardent promoter of learning and the arts, he succeeded in throwing a poetical glamour over the con- ception of the state, and in the hold he gained on the popular imagination — the folk-songs are full of the praise of Vladimir, the " Bright Sun " — he may very well be compared with Alfred.
But the new social and political ideas introduced from Byzantium were subjected to severe stress and strain, were scattered by violent winds of misfortune across the plain, and took centuries to mature and to become embodied in a powerful State. The territory inhabited by those Slav tribes, who acknowledged more or less effectively the sovereign rights of Vladimir and his descendants, extended over the northern fringe of the steppe region as far as the Western Bug and the Dnieper on the West ; and on the East as far as the upper reaches of the Don. To the north, in the forest region, it extended beyond Lake Ladoga, and here again on the west it was bounded by an irregular line running from about where Dorpat now stands to the neighbourhood of Vilna, and on the east it extended as far as Nizhni-Novgorod at the junction of the Oka and the Volga. But nominal extent of territory was by no means coincident with extent of power. Rivalries between various regions and princes weakened the central authority, and the practice of dividing up territory among members of the princely house of Rurik led to constant bickering and feuds. Custom had established that the senior member of the family should occupy the throne of Kiev, the other principalities going to the other
The Growth of Russia 9
members of the house of Rurik in order of age. But the senior might be passed over in favour of the ablest, and, in an age when firmness of will and strength of arm were the first requisites in a ruler, might very easily have supplanted complicated and cumbrous right and made confusion worse confounded. The various appanages of the descendants of Vladimir became small and practically independent princi- palities, and the strength of the " Russian Land " was frittered away in petty dynastic conflicts. It became increasingly difficult to offer an effective resistance to the incursions of the nomads who occupied the Southern and Eastern steppes. The political power of Kiev steadily declined. Novgorod and Pskov in the north were practically independent merchant republics. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Galicio-Volhynian principality in the west displayed a tendency to assume the power that Kiev was letting fall from her hands. The constant pressure of the nomads on the fringe of the steppe region stimulated a colonising movement to the North-East, to the region between the Volga and the Oka, where the Slavs mingled with the Finns, forming a new type known as the Great Russian. The princes of this region grew more powerful in proportion as the prestige of Kiev declined, and when Kiev fell the strongest ruler of the North-East, the Grand Prince of Vladimir on the Kliazma, became the overlord of the Russian princes. The Kiev period, which lasted from the end of the ninth to the beginning of the thirteenth century, may be regarded as a preliminary survey of the field of Russian historical effort, a kind of feeling of the ground, the drafting of a rough sketch or plan. It was a period of happy guesses, of brilliant suggestions. The spirit of the plain was in it, the spirit of expansion and' heroic adventure. For the Russian of the Kiev period the world was wide and full of wonder, and the tasks it presented were of fascinating variety. The political and social system was ill organised and loosely developed. In the towns the merchant class was dominant, the Prince
10 Russia of the Russians
and his personal followers, his band or druzhina, maintained order, and only gradually transformed their military energy into political power. The clan system prevailed, the blood- feud was common, slavery existed but in a comparatively mild form. Popular assemblies, in which the heads of the clans took part, largely controlled the administration.
But within this loose and primitive social and political organisation the elements of a higher order were actively present. Christianity not only reformed manners and pro- moted learning, it brought with it from Byzantium legislative and administrative conceptions which became powerful motive forces in Russian history. By asserting the principle of the sanctity of monarchical authority it greatly increased the prestige and the power of the princes. And by marking off the Russians from their neighbours as a distinctly Christian people it strengthened and deepened national feeling. The Orthodox Christianity of Byzantium assumed under Yaroslav, the son of Vladimir, a specifically Russian character. Christian doctrine, Christian tradition, were not merely translated from Greek into Slavonic, they became the predominant, the vital and the distinctive elements in a rich world of popular belief. But they were modified in the process, they became Russian. Christian sentiment reinforced national sentiment. To be a Russian meant to be a Christian, and the struggle for national existence against pagan or Mohammedan neighbours received a religious sanction. Christianity was an important element in that conception of the fundamental unity of the different sections of the Russian people, which steadily grew and developed in spite of fierce attacks from without, and even more dangerous internecine strife. This sense of national unity, powerful as it was in the Kiev Period, did not then avail to establish an effective and unitary political organisation. It bore its fruits only in the Moscow Period.
In the Kiev Period, too, the Russians realised something of the extent of the world in which they were to play their part. They maintained constant intercourse with Byzantium,
The Growth of Russia 11
which was a meeting-place for representatives of all parts of the civilised world. The most westerly of the Russian principalities of this period, Galich, at one time extended as far as the mouth of the Danube, and its chief connections were with a semi-barbarous Hungary and with the Slav states of Bohemia and Poland on the north and north-west. Yaroslav the Great, the son of Vladimir, in whose reign the Kiev state reached the zenith of its power, married a Swedish princess and Scandinavians were prominent at his court. His sister was married to Casimir, King of Poland, one of his daughters to Henry I of France, and another to King Andrew of Hungary, and there is also mention of a connection by marriage between Yaroslav and English princes. On the west the Russians had to deal with Lithuanians, on the north and north-east with Finnish tribes, and in the south and south-east with nomads of Turkish race. From the latter the Russians borrowed many customs and shared with them certain traits such as a passionate love of the steppes. Vladimir is frequently spoken of in song and story as a Kogan or Khagan, which is the distinctive title of Turkish ruling princes from the Black Sea to the Mongolian frontier of China. The roving warriors or bogatyrs of the Russian epos bear in many respects a striking resemblance to the typical nomad warrior, and the name itself comes from the Persian bahadur through Turkish. Farther to the east, beyond the steppes and the Caspian, there was the wealthy and prosperous sphere of Persian civilisation, with which the Russians maintained trading relations through the Bulgarians of the Volga and the peoples of the steppes. The unknown author of the great heroic poem, " The Story of Igor's Band," a moving account of the expedition of a Russian prince against the Polovians — the only fragment of secular literature that has been handed down from the Kiev Period, — was probably the contemporary of such Persian poets as Khakani and Nizami. In the Caucasus there was the picturesque kingdom of Georgia, which in the twelfth century
12 Russia of the Russians
attained brilliance and power. Towards the close of the Kiev Period Byzantium still retained its hold on the southern coast of the Black Sea, but Turkish nomads wandered across the uplands of Asia Minor, and the Seljuks had founded, in the eleventh century, that state of Konia or Ikonium which was later to serve as a base for the Ottoman advance. In the north-west of the Russian territory Novgorod and Pskov maintained active intercourse with the rising cities of Northern Germany. It was indeed a rich and varied world with which the Russians of the Kiev Period were at various points brought into contact, the wofld of the early middle ages with a flourish- ing Islam, a slowly expiring Byzantium, and a Europe just coming into being.
In 1238, 1239, and 1240 the North-Eastern and Southern Russian principalities were overrun by an army of Tartars
or Turks under Mongol leadership. The
The Tartars, impact of this invasion was far more terrible
than that of the incursions of Turkish nomads — Khazars, Pecheniegs and Polovians — from which the Russians had suffered for centuries. The Tartars formed part of the host organised in Central Asia by Chingiz Khan, who had discovered in carefully planned and rapidly multiplied nomad raids a secret of world-wide conquest. After having devastated the greater part of Russian territory and ravaged Poland, Hungary, Bosnia and Dalmatia, the Tartar armies, known under the general name of the Golden Horde, settled in the South-Eastern steppes, and their leader Baty, the grandson of Chingiz, built a capital at Sarai on the Volga, some distance to the north of the present Astrakhan, whence he exercised rule over the dominions allotted to him, Khiva, the Urals, the Crimea and the Russian principalities. The rule of the Tartar Khans over Russia took the form of the exaction of tribute, which wa§ either collected by special tax-gatherers called baskaks, usually in a very brutal and rough-and-ready fashion, or else brought by the princes in person to the Horde. The Khans skilfully took advantage
The Growth of Russia 13
of dissensions among the Russian princes in order to con- solidate their own power in Russia, and, on the other hand, rival Russian princes constantly sought to secure their ends by intriguing at the Khan's court. Several princes were cruelly murdered in the Horde, and Yaroslav II, who was Grand Prince of Vladimir at the time of the Tartar invasion, was poisoned on his return journey from Karakorum, the capital of the Great Khan in Mongolia. The Khans interfered little, however, in the details of the administration of Russian principalities, and there was a great deal of peaceful intercourse between Tartars and Russians. Sarai was an important commercial centre, owing to its position on the chief caravan route between Russia and India. There was a considerable colony of Russian traders in the city. Christianity was tolerated, and occasionally members of the Khan's family professed Christianity, although the bulk of the Tartars nominally abandoned Shamanism fop^stoh shortly after their settlement in the steppe ^^PKe Tartars passed on to the Russians many elements of Chinese and Persian culture and certain Oriental administrative conceptions. The Russian vocabulary contains a considerable number of words borrowed from the Tartar language, and many of these were borrowed by the Tartars in their turn from Chinese, Persian or Arabic. It was as a result of Tartar influence that the domestic life of the Russian well-to-do classes assumed that predominantly Oriental character which was so marked a feature of the Moscow Period. On the whole, in spite of the brutality and ferocity frequently displayed by the Tartar Khans and their tax-gatherers, and in spite of the fact that the effect of the invasion was to transfer the political centre of Russia to a region remote from the civilisation of the South and the West, Tartar rule did contribute in many ways to the enrichment of Russian civilisation. Negatively the -Tartar yoke provided a most effective stimulus to Russian political development. Just as the raids of the sea-rovers, the Danes, led to the creation
14 Russia of the Russians
of a United England, so the invasion of those land-rovers, the Tartars, set in motion the forces which gradually brought about the political union of the scattered forces of the Russian people.
After the fall of Kiev, in 1240, the greater part of the South Russian territory passed under the direct rule of the Tartars. In the West, the Principality of Galicia and Volhynia served for a time as the rallying ground for the remnants of Southern Russian power, until towards the end of the fourteenth century Galicia was incorporated in Poland, and Volhynia was annexed to Lithuania. Most of the other Eastern and South- Western Russian principalities were absorbed in that Lithuanian State which had grown strong through perpetual conflict with the Teutonic order in East Prussia on the one hand, and, on the other, through the subjection of petty Russian princes, weakened by endless dynastic strife. In the long run the Lithuanian elements in the Lithuanian State were completely overshadowed by the Russian, constituting about nine-tenths of the population and territory, and the union of this predominantly Russian and Orthodox State with Roman Catholic Poland through the marriage of its Grand Prince Jagailo with Jadwiga, the Queen of Poland, in 1386, proved to be a source of constant internal dissension, and a perpetual occasion of conflict with the growing Russian power in the North-East . It was in the North-East, in that region between the Oka and the Volga, where Russian colonists mingling with Finnish natives had founded new homes amidst the forests, that the promise implied in the Kiev State again took its slow and toilsome way towards fulfilment. The practice of constant subdivision into appanages was in force here as it was throughout the whole of the territory reigned over by princes of the House of Rurik, and also — though counter- acted to a greater extent by centralising tendencies — in the neighbouring States of Lithuania and Poland. Among the petty princes of the region, those of Vladimir on the Kliazma, a tributary of the Oka, gained the ascendancy. In 1169
The Growth of Russia 15
Andrei 'Bogoliubski, Prince of Vladimir, assumed the title of Grand Prince, thereby asserting against the rulers of Kiev his claim to the headship over all the Russian land. But the headship of the Vladimir Princes was for a long time merely nominal. Their real authority extended little beyond the principalities in their immediate neighbourhood, Riazan and Murom. Their attempts to control the affairs of the South Russian principalities or those of Novgorod and Pskov were rarely successful. Livonian knights and Lithuanians had much more influence in the West of Russia, and Poles Lithuanians and Hungarians in the enfeebled South, than did the Princes of Vladimir during the twelfth century. Vladimir must have been an important trading centre, lying as it does between the Oka and the Volga. In grave mounds in the region have been found coins pointing to intercourse with the distant East and the distant West, coins of Arab Caliphs and Bukharan. Samanids dating from 772 to 984, and Anglo-Saxon coins and coins of the German Empire dating from 950 to 1090. From the twelfth to the fourteenth cen- tury, Vladimir, with the neighbouring principalities of Rostov and Suzdal, was a home of refuge for that slowly developing Russian culture which, in other parts of the Russian land, was exposed to a constant irruption of alien influences. Some of the best monuments of Russian ecclesiastical architecture are to be found in the Vladimir-Suzdal country, and here the Russian spirit ripened and gathered strength in undistinguished obscurity.
It was after the Tartar invasion, in the course of which Vladimir was sacked like many other Russian towns, that
the title of Grand Prince of Vladimir came Vladimir. to connote a real authority over the whole
of the North and North-East of Russia. But this was because the Grand Prince became the deputy of the Khan, and was responsible before him for the collection of tribute from the other princes. He was the chief vassal, and his power was a derivative power. But it was none
16 Russia of the Russians
the less real, and was much more effective as a means of asserting headship than the earlier attempts of the Vladimir rulers to enforce their shadowy claims. And for this reason the title was an object of perpetual intrigue in the Horde on the part of rival princes. Tartar rule served as a mould for Russian unity. It counteracted the perpetual tendency to dismemberment/ induced by the practice of dividing and subdividing appanages, until the very principle of authority went astray in fragmentary baronies in the forests.
The process of reunion was hastened by the rapid economic growth of the principality of Moscow, an appanage of Vladimir, which was formed in the thirteenth century, and by reason of the fertility of its soil and its advantageous position on the trade routes between the Volga and the Western Dvina and Novgorod and Riazan attracted a large population from the neighbouring principalities. Moscow proved much better adapted than Vladimir to be the economic centre of the North-East, and it was mainly for this reason that the political supremacy gradually passed into its hands. The princes of Moscow gradually increased their territory by carefully calculated purchase and conquest, and a particularly shrewd and enterprising ruler, Ivan Kalita, secured, in 1328, from the Khan by the customary methods of intrigue and the murder of rivals the title of Grand Prince, which thereafter was a permanent attribute of the rulers of Moscow. Ivan Kalita, as his nickname " Moneybags " indicates, was a careful householder, and his will with its precise enumeration of the golden dishes in his possession is more like that of a country squire than a monarch. He built churches in Moscow, transferred the Metropolitan of Vladimir to his capital, established order in his dominions, intrigued right and left, added field to field and town to town, used the troops of the Khan against his neighbours and kinsmen, and altogether prospered ingloriously, but in a way that surely tended to the centralisation of political power in Moscow. His
The Growth of Russia 17
successors followed in his footsteps, and the chief characteristic of the rulers of Moscow down to the time of Ivan the Terrible, and even after his day, was a sober thriftiness, crafty forethought, a minute choice of ways and means and an unwillingness to undertake any risks. They were cautious business men. They increased their territory by purchase, by gradually modifying the laws of inheritance so as to prevent the dissipation of territory in appanages, by setting their neighbours quarrelling amongst themselves, by fomenting civil strife in other principalities, and by going out to conquest when conquest was sure. Very striking is the contrast between this policy and the generous and reckless expansiveness of the Kiev Period, the spirit which later became embodied in the Cossacks. If the Kiev policy was that of the open steppe, the Moscow policy was that of the forest region, where an enemy may be lurking behind every tree. Both tendencies, that of the bogatyr or roving hero, and that of the diak or intriguing and calculating Government clerk, have continually played and still play their part in the development of the Russian nation and the Russian character.
While Moscow grew stronger, the power of the Golden Horde steadily declined. Internal dissensions and conflicts with Central Asian States undermined the authority of the Khans. But the Tartars for a long time remained capable of doing a considerable amount of harm. In the period from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century the Khans made seven destructive raids on Russian territory. One Khan, Mamai, was defeated at Kulikovo, on the Don, in 1380, by Prince Dmitri Donskoi, who displayed a personal courage not usual among the Moscow rulers. Tokhtamysh sacked the Kremlin, the great Tamerlane himself devastated Riazan, and both the Khans Yedigei and Ulu Mahmed fell upon Moscow. But in spite of these marauding expeditions the authority of the Khans became a negligible quantity for the Moscow Princes, and Ivan III found it in 1480 a simple
18 Russia of the Russians
matter to throw off that Tartar yoke to which the Russian people had been subject for 240 years.
Ivan III attained remarkable success in pursuing the aim of his dynasty to reunite the Russian people under the rule
of Moscow. First of all he destroyed the Ivan III. independence of the proud merchant republic of Novgorod. Taking advantage of the fact that the people of Novgorod, dreading the growing power of Moscow, had invited a Lithuanian prince to occupy the traditional position of nominal ruler in the city, Ivan sent a force against the Novgorodians, who were left in the lurch by the Lithuanians to whom they had appealed, and defeated on the river Shelon near Lake Ihnen. Then Ivan gradually reduced the privileges of the republic, and appearing before the city with a strong army enforced from it absolute sub- mission. He abolished the system of government by popular vote, and by wholesale execution of the leading citizens and the transference of a large number of Novgorod families to Moscow territory, he precluded a revival of autonomous tendencies, and so closed one of the most picturesque pages in Russian history. Situated on the river Volkhovo, at the point where it flows out of Lake Ilmen on its way to Lake Ladoga, the Neva and the Baltic, Novgorod held the key of the trade between the interior of Russia and the Germanic countries of the North, it commanded the chief overland route between the Baltic and the Black Sea. It was constantly visited by foreign traders who were subjected to special laws and regulations, and had a quarter of their own in the city known as the German quarter. In the course of time the dominions of Novgorod came to extend as far East as the Urals, and to an indefinite distance northward. A prince of the line of Rurik always resided in the city, but the real power lay in the hands of the popular assembly or vieche, which was summoned at need in the public square by the ringing of a bell, and which elected an executive from among members of the powerful merchant families. Novgorod.
The Growth of Russia 19
on account of its wealth, was an important centre of culture, which had a predominantly ecclesiastical character, and found expression in the building of a large number of churches and monasteries, many of which ^re still standing. But there was a rich, many-coloured and turbulent secular life, echoes of which have been handed down in the epic folk-songs or byline.
The principality of Tver, near Moscow, shared the fate of Novgorod, and Ivan III united the whole of Northern and North-Eastern Russia under his rule. There were other circumstances that conspired to strengthen the monarchical idea in Moscow. The fall of Constantinople, the seizure by Mohammedans of the Second Rome, the centre of Orthodox Christendom, produced a profound impression upon the Russian mind. The marriage of Ivan HI with Zoe Paleologa brought the ruler of Moscow into direct connection with the house of that young Emperor, who had died bravely fighting on the walls of Constantinople, and the idea that Moscow had inherited the mission of Byzantium, — was, in fact, the " Third Rome," — was eagerly adopted by the Moscow court, and developed by Russian ecclesiastics. In 1492 the Lithu- anian Prince Alexander formally recognised Ivan HI as " Monarch of all Russia."
The new State was confronted with grave problems. Its position at the very centre of the great plain made territorial expansion a necessity of existence. There were enemies on every hand, and there was constant need to be armed for defence and attack. The whole organisation of the State — and this is characteristic of Russian policy till the beginning of the nineteenth century — was subordinated to military ends. Moscow had not had time to develop its resources, to attain to any high degree of material prosperity and social well-being before it was plunged into the turmoil of incessant and exhausting wars. Civilisation and manhood suffered terribly, but there was a steady and inexorable growth of power. In the midst of the plain, on the frontiers of Asia,
20 Russia of the Russians
far from the vitalising currents of Western intellectual con- flict and development, State power conceived of as autocracy acquired a dominance over the individual that can hardly be matched in Byzantium. Nowhere is the problem of a conflict between personality and power presented with such force and acuteness as in Russia.
The first task of the Muscovite Princes was to deal with the Tartars in the East and South-East. The Horde had split up into three distinct Khanates, those of Kazan, Astra- khan, and the Crimea, and, by playing of! the Khanates one against the other, Ivan III and his successors sought finally to break the Tartar power. Kazan was easily subdued, but the struggle was complicated by the constant intervention of the Crimean Khan, who now had powerful support in the person of a Turkish overlord in Constantinople. There were eighty years of raids and counter raids. The grandson of Ivan III, Ivan IV, the Terrible, who came to the throne in 1533, and who was the most striking contemporary of Eliza- beth, took Kazan with its territory in 1551 and Astrakhan in 1556. In view of the raids of the Crimean Khan he was compelled to establish fortified outposts on the Steppe, thus preparing the way for the reconquest of the South. The new dominions speedily became an integral part of the Tsardom. Russian colonists settled among the Tartars in the Kazan region. Tartar princes and nobles came to the court of the Tsar and became, like the descendants of once independent Russian princes, members of the Russian aristocracy. The names of many Russian noble families, such as Urusov and Bakhmetiev, point to their Tartar origin. The Crimea stood as a constant reminder of the sovereignty of the Ottoman Turks over the Black Sea basin and the Southern steppe. Ivan's advisers submitted to him a plan for the conquest of the Crimea, but he was compelled to leave its execution to a future generation, just as he was compelled to leave to a later day the realisation of his dream of establishing the Muscovite power on the shores of the Baltic.
The Growth of Russia 21
The Eastern frontier was further extended during the reign of Ivan the Terrible by a band of Cossack adventurers under
Yermak, who defeated the Tartar Khan of Extension Western Siberia, and made the Tsar a present
of the territory in the basin of the Tobol and the Irtish. But the task of extending and strengthening the Eastern frontier was simplicity itself, compared with that of coping with more civilised Western rivals. Poland united with Lithuania had become, under the strong rule of the Jagailo dynasty, a great power. A conflict with Moscow in which Lithuania had become involved during the reign of Ivan III had served as a warning against the danger of separa- tist tendencies, and the union with Poland had become closer in consequence. After the final subjection of the Teutonic Order in Eastern Prussia by Casimir IV in 1466, and the assertion of Polish supremacy at the mouth of the Danube by the same King, the power of the Polish-Lithuanian State extended from the Baltic at the mouth of the Vistula to the Black Sea. The Polish cities were prosperous, the Polish upper classes were sensitive to the influences of European civilisation, the Roman Catholic Church, which was dominant in Poland, helped to maintain constant intercourse with the West, and at one time it seemed possible that this central European State might attain something like permanent greatness. But there were sources of internal weakness which even the prudence and firmness of her ablest rulers could not wholly counteract. The king was dependent on a diet composed of representatives of the nobility and gentry, who cared more for their own class and personal interests than the general interests of the State or the welfare of the common people. The presence in the diet of powerful mag- nates from Lithuania, frequently inheritors of Russian or Lithuanian appanages, introduced a further element of dissen- sion and confusion. The distinction between Lithuania and Poland made itself constantly felt, more especially on religious grounds. Poland was aggressively Roman Catholic,
22 Russia of the Russians
while in Lithuania only the Lithuanians in the north, who formed a small minority of the population, were Catholics, the bulk of the population being Russians and Orthodox. The Reformation, which influenced the upper classes in both Lithuania and Poland, temporarily checked this antagonism, but with the triumph of the counter-reformation in Poland it revived with new vigour. Over the western steppe roved bands of freebooters known as Cossacks, who were mostly Russian in language and Orthodox as to faith, and yielded little more than a nominal submission to Polish' authority.
Poland formed the chief barrier to Muscovite expansion on the West. The Baltic coast was held by the Livonian
knights, and Sweden, a growing power in
W^raWStot^e the north' 0CCUPied FMand. The second
half of the reign of Ivan the Terrible was
mainly absorbed in a conflict with these three powers. The immediate result of a war which Ivan undertook with the Livonian Order and in which Sweden, Denmark, and Poland intervened, was that the Order fell to pieces and its territory was divided, the southern half falling to Poland, and the northern half to Sweden. The Muscovite State became involved in long and exhausting wars with Poland and Sweden, from which it drew no direct profit. Both these Western powers were bent on preventing such intercourse between Moscow and Western Europe as might have a civilising effect on the Russians, and so increase their political power. Ivan died in 1584, embittered by the failure of his western campaigns. But his reign had been in every way one of immense impor- tance for the Muscovite State. He was left an orphan at the age of three, and grew up uncared for, unwatched, while the boyars or great nobles intrigued, fought and robbed around him. He learned to detest the boyars, and when he came to manhood did his utmost to .break their power, invoking against them the support of the populace, and surrounding himself with a terrible guard called the oprichina, who murdered indiscriminately all who were supposed to be his
The Growth of Russia 23
enemies. His chief advisers during the early part of his reign were not boyars, but the priest Sylvester, and an official of humble origin named Adashev. Immediately after his coronation he convened a National Assembly, which con- firmed a revised judicial code, and heard from the young Tsar's own lips his bitter complaints against the boyars and his promise of good government in the future. Certain administrative reforms were, as a matter of fact, undertaken. The task of maintaining order in the provinces was taken from the boyar governors and laid on elders chosen by the population. The practice of collecting taxes by farming out whole districts to governors who " fed " on them, as the expression was, was abandoned in favour of a system of collecting through elected representatives of the people, all the members of which became jointly responsible to the Government. The effect of these measures was not to develop the principle of popular liberty. Rather the reverse. The power of the boyars was limited, but at the same time the masses of the people were attached more directly to the central Government, and the authority of the Tsar was increased. The chief object of these and similar measures was in fact to increase the fiscal resources of the State in view of multiplying military needs. Ivan's own character was fiercely despotic. He was subject to fits of ungovernable passion, under the influence of which he committed acts of cruelty incomprehensible in a sane man. He murdered his eldest son with his own hand. He slaughtered the citizens of Novgorod without cause. He ravaged his own country and murdered his own subjects by the hundred. His fits of passion were succeeded by long periods of remorse, and he ended his life as a monk, varying his monastic exercises with coarse revelry. But he was a statesman of remarkable talent. He clearly foresaw the natural course of Russian political development, and the work of expansion westward begun by him was consistently carried on by his successors until its completion by Peter the Great.
3 — (2400)
24 Russia of the Russians
The personal character of Ivan the Terrible and his admin- istrative reforms strengthened a distinctively Muscovite,
singularly gaunt and merciless conception
MRSTte of the State- The idea of a p°litical unity>
permitting of no diversity, was carried to an extreme. The tillers of the soil, the peasantry, had in the course of centuries sunk into a position of absolute economic dependence on the landowners. Towards the close of the sixteenth century they were finally attached to the soil and became serfs, one of the chief objects of this measure being to ensure a regular payment of taxes. The oppressive character of the Moscow system led to a constant emigration of the more adventurous elements to the thinly-populated regions beyond the frontier. Many of them settled in the steppes on the Don, and others went Eastwards to Siberia. These rovers, like those in the steppes beyond the Dnieper, were called Cossacks, and they were the chief agents of Russian expansion eastwards.
Muscovite rule was hard. But Moscow, the capital, lived a very picturesque and many-sided life, with a great variety of interests of its own. The city was an exceedingly impor- tant trading centre. It traded with Persia and Central Asia by way of the Volga and Astrakhan, and the chief inter- mediaries in the Persian trade were then, as later, Armenians.
The Moscow Tsars tried to open up trade with India, and though the difficulties were not insuperable — an inquiryshowed that it was a matter of only four months' journey from the Caspian to the Moghul capital — Persian opposition effectually barred enterprise in that direction. Greek merchants carried on trade between Constantinople and Moscow. There was a certain amount of trade with Sweden and by way of Livonia and Novgorod, and also by way of Poland commercial rela- tions were maintained with Germany. Direct trading relations with England were opened up in 1555 by way of Archangel, and English visitors were among the first to give detailed accounts of the Tsardom of Moscovy to the Western
The Growth of Russia 25
world. The attempts made by Ivan the Terrible to secure from Western Europe skilled craftsmen and instructors were frustrated by Germany and Poland. Learning was not highly esteemed, as is shown by the fate of Maxim the Greek. This Maxim was an Albanian, who spent several years of study in Italy, where he became acquainted with the Humanists, among others with Aldus Mantius, and was deeply affected by Savonarola's preaching. On account of his great learning he was sent by the Abbot of the monastery of Mount Athos, in whichrhe had taken the vows, to Moscow in response to a request from the Grand Prince Vasili, father of Ivan the Terrible, for a competent ■ translator and adviser in the revision of church books. He soon came into conflict with the dissolute and avaricious clergy and nobles of Moscow, and all his learning and his spotless character did not avail to save him from life-long confinement in a monastery. And yet this man might, under more favourable conditions, have been the pioneer in a Russian renaissance.
Maxim had a few faithful disciples who profited by his lessons, and among these was Prince Kurbski, whose corre- spondence with Ivan the Terrible is one of the most interesting literary and historical documents of the period. Ivan himself was well-read in ecclesiastical literature and, as his letters show, possessed real literary talent. The favourite reading matter of the people was apocryphal literature, which included a number of legends of striking beauty.
Foreign trade gave colour and movement to life in Moscow, but the source of perennial popular interest was the Church with its traditions and ceremonies. The Church had a peculiarly national character, and many features in its teach- ing and ritual filled the stricter Greek ecclesiastics with horror. But whether fighting with Mohammedan Tartars, Roman Catholic Poles and Lithuanians, or Protestant Germans or Swedes, the Muscovites always regarded themselves as upholders of the true faith against sinful error. Political conceptions were set in a framework of ecclesiastical tradition.
26 Russia of the Russians
The centre of Eastern European trade and the capital of the Tsars was a city of churches and cathedrals. Ecclesiastical controversies aroused intense popular interest. There was the conflict with heresies, such as that of the so-called Judaisers and that of a layman named Bashkin, which seems to have been a distant echo of the Protestant Reformation. There was the long controversy over the question of landholding by monas- teries, which possessed altogether about a third of the lands of Muscovy. There was the constant resort for counsel in things spiritual and material to religious recluses, men and women, though many just as frequently resorted to astrologers and fortune-tellers. There • were the important questions of Church government that arose with the assumption of the title Patriarch by the chief prelate of Moscow in the seven- teenth century. All these questions greatly excited the minds of the pious Muscovites in the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries. They were indeed most assiduous in the observance of ecclesiastical as of every other kind of custom, but this did not prevent them from grossly indulging their appetites on occasion. It was a heavy, barbarous, uncritical life that the Muscovites lived, entangled in a network of custom, petty intrigue and stratagem, coarsely material, yet with a rich fund of humour and shrewd popular wisdom, and with an extraordinary capacity for devotion at the heart of it all. This capacity for devotion was displayed in the strange ecclesiastical movement in the middle of the seven- teenth century when the Patriarch Nikon used his immense, almost monarchical authority, to impose on the Church .in spite of the vehement opposition of the masses, new and more correct translations of the service books. Hundreds cheerfully submitted to torture or went to the stake rather than accept innovations that they considered heretical. These schis- matics, the so-called Old Believers, were driven to the confines of Russian territory, and they, too, became agents in the manifold process of Russian expansion. •
After the death of Ivan the Terrible the State of Moscow
The Growth of Russia 27
passed through a period of the severest strain. Ivan's son, Feodor, ruled with the aid of a powerful noble of Tartar descent named Boris Godunov. Feodor left no heir, and with his death that branch of the Rurik line which occupied the Moscow throne came to an end. Boris Godunov had himself elected Tsar, but for all his shrewdness and ability he was unable to maintain his authority effectively over the rival boyars. When Godunov died the throne was seized by a Pretender whom Sigismund of Poland put forward as a son of Ivan named Dimitri. The False Dimitri was murdered, and a boyar named Vasili Shuisky had himself elected by a small clique of his fellows. Vasili was deposed and taken as prisoner to Warsaw. Another Dimitri appeared, and was known as the Robber of Tushino from that village to the North- West of Moscow, where he had his seat and whence he exercised with the help of Cossacks and certain of the boyars a feeble rule. The land was a prey to anarchy. Things were bad enough when there was a real Tsar at the head of affairs. The common people were oppressed beyond all endurance by the Government and nobles, and abject ser- vility, beggary and crime were the inevitable consequences. But now there was no restraining influence whatever. Every man was striving for his own hand, and pillaged where he could. The country was open to foreign invaders. The Swedes seized Novgorod. The Poles occupied Moscow, and mocked at the Orthodox faith. The boyars scattered, seeking to secure their own advantage either by supporting the Robber of Tushino or by acknowledging as Tsar Wladislaw, the son of the Polish king Sigismund. The Polish garrison massacred the inhabitants of Moscow. Finally, at the appeal of a butcher in Nizhni-Novgorod named Minin, the people rose and organised a militia under the leadership of a prince named Pozharski and other obscure nobles and gentry. The militia marched up the Volga to Yaroslav and crossed over to Moscow, where they found a force of the Tushino Cossacks besieging the Poles at leisure. The Cossacks and the militia
28 Russia of the Russians
viewed each other with distrust, but finally co-operated to such an extent that the isolated garrison fell before them, and Sigismund, who was hastening to its relief, was turned back on the way. The last few months of 1612 were occupied in preparations for the election of a new Tsar. A National Assembly was convened, and messengers were sent over the country to test the opinion of the people. Finally, after a long struggle between various factions, the choice of the assembly fell on a sixteen-year-old youth named Michael Romanov, the son of a prominent boyar, who had been made patriarch at Tushino under the name of Philaret. The Romanovs were distantly connected with the house of Rurik through Anastasia Romanova, the first wife of Ivan the Terrible. The election which took place on February 26th, 1613, was approved by the people, and Michael reigned peaceably, yielding the control of affairs for the first few years to his energetic father, Philaret. The fact that at a supremely critical moment, when all the leaders failed with the one exception of the Patriarch Hermogen, the State was saved by the direct efforts of the people is a remarkable proof of the vitality of the nation that had grown up under such difficult conditions in the North-East. The value of popular initiative was recognised during Michael's reign by the convocation of several National Assemblies or Zemskie Sobory, but the purely autocratic principle steadily recovered strength, and the nation again became completely subservient to the State. Michael's reign was a period of recuperation. His son, Alexei or Alexis, was a retiring man, given to pious works, but it fell to his lot to carry on the work of expansion. An insurrection of the Cossacks of the Ukraine or western steppe against Polish rule led to Russian intervention and a long war with Poland, which resulted in Moscow's securing by the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667 the possession of Kiev and the territory on the left bank of the Dnieper. During the war with Poland a war broke out with Sweden. A Russian army entered Livland but was driven back with loss, and peace
The Growth of Russia 29
was concluded in 1661. The submission of the Cossacks west of the Dnieper to the Sultan, led to a war with Turkey (1672-1681), and after the Turks had alarmed Christendom by appearing before the walls of Vienna, Russia accepted the invitation of the Polish king, Jan Sobieski, to join a coalition against the Mohammedan power. The second half of the seventeenth century was thus devoted to irregular warfare with the three powers that prevented the expansion of Russia westward and southward.
The oppressive character of Muscovite administration pro- voked in the course of the century popular risings in Moscow, Novgorod and Pskov, and in 1667 a very serious insurrection of Cossacks and peasants in the Volga region under the leadership of Stenka Razin, who became a hero of folk-song.
Alexis was succeeded by his eldest son Feodor, who reigned only six years (1676-1682), and then after all these " quiet
tsars," these tame and characterless first PGreat.he Romanovs, came Peter the Great like a whirlwind, and with almost superhuman energy transformed the Tsardom of Muscovy into the Russian Empire. The autocracy had been consolidated after the Time of Trouble, not by the Tsars themselves, but chiefly owing to the work of such able advisers as Michael's father, Philaret, and Ordyn-Nashchokin, the leading statesman under Tsar Alexis. Into the autocratic authority thus established Peter put all the rude force of his personal character, and used it as an instrument for dragging the Russian State from the sleepy remoteness of the heart of the plain into the restless and complex world of modern Europe. Peter was strikingly unlike his immediate predecessors, but in Philaret and in Peter's half-sister, the Princess Sophia, there was a turbulent energy that resembled his own. And then Peter's education was the reverse of the typical education of a Moscow Tsar. When he was eleven years old, his sister Sophia organised a mutiny of the Strieltsy, or soldiers of the standing army, and drove Peter's mother and all the members of her family
30 Russia of the Russians
out of the palace on the Kremlin and, still retaining her position as Regent for Peter and his brother the co-tsar Ivan, a wholly incompetent weakling, concentrated all the power in her own hands and those of her favourites. Peter lived with his mother in the village of Preobrazhenskoe, outside the city walls, where he was left very much to his own devices. He played at soldiers and sailors, built toy boats, gathered around him a host of playmates of noble and humble birth whom he organised into a sham army that afterwards formed the nucleus of a real, modern army. His experiences in the Kremlin at the time of the mutiny had filled him with a life- long disgust for the older Muscovite ways, and near Preob- razhenskoe he came into contact with a foreign colony that opened up for him a new world. Here his passion for mechanics was gratified, and from a Dutchman named Timmer- man he learned arithmetic, geometry, fortification, and the use of the astrolobe. A Swiss adventurer named Lefort, with whom Peter made friends, arranged boisterous revels that effaced from the mind of the young Tsar those few lessons in the staid etiquette of the Kremlin that had been given him in his childhood. Peter was personally cut adrift from the old Moscow tradition before he came of age. He, a son of the plain, conceived a passion for the sea. The scent of salt breezes drew him westwards. He sent hundreds of young men abroad to learn the arts and handicrafts/ He built a flotilla on the river Voronezh, and with the aid of this and of his newly-cast artillery, he took Azov from the Turks. Finally, in 1697, he himself went abroad to learn more thoroughly what Europe could teach in the matter of 'ship- building and artillery. He visited Holland where he worked as a carpenter in the shipyards of Saardam and Amsterdam, and spent several months in England. England interested him immensely, but mainly from the mechanical side. He was constantly to be seen at the dockyards at Deptford and at the Woolwich arsenal. He went frequently to the Tower to see the Mint. He once went to the House of Lords
The Growth of Russia 31
where he saw King William on the throne, and heard some of the lords speak. He afterwards remarked to his companions that it was a very good thing to hear subjects freely expressing their views in the presence of their monarch, but he certainly did not dream of anything like constitutionalism for his own country. Peter went to Oxford, but he does not seem to have come into touch with English intellectual life at any point. When he was not looking at guns or ships or museums he spent his time in carousals with his companions, English and Russian. After he left, the owner of the house in which he had lived presented a bill for damages. The interior of the house had been completely ruined, the floor and valuable furniture broken and covered with filth, windows broken, pictures riddled with bullets. William III paid the heavy bill out of his own pocket.
Peter came back to Moscow after a stay of fifteen months abroad, with his mind full of ideas of the purely technical side of Western civilisation, and these he proceeded to apply in practice. But his mechanical reforms were made sub- servient to certain simple but broad ideas. He knew that Russia would be economically and politically stifled unless she secured a seaboard, and he bent his energies to the con- quest of the Baltic coast. In 1700 he renewed the struggle with Sweden and used all his recently gained technical knowledge, strained to the utmost all the resources of Muscovy in money and men in the gigantic effort through unremitting wars and a remodelling of the whole administrative system to lift the State to a new plane of development. The marvel was that he attained his end. One effect of his work was that the State penetrated more deeply into the life of the nation than ever before. He bound all classes to the State with iron bonds, made the whole people follow him panting and bleeding in his restless career. Personally he was a very human man. He was big, burly, passionate, a great drinker and reveller, and a lover of coarse pranks, an excellent mechanic, the best shipbuilder in Russia, extremely simple
32 Russia of the Russians
and economical in most of his personal habits, good-natured, but on occasion ruthlessly cruel, restlessly active, but lacking in reflective capacity. But all these qualities acquired an immense impetus from the position of Peter on the frontier of two ages and of two worlds, and from the extraordinary character of the work he was called upon to do. He loomed up in the popular imagination like some terrible demiurge, and the legend went abroad that he was Antichrist. To this day it is difficult to form an exact estimate of his character. He has set such a wide range of forces in motion that it is difficult not to fall into the error of regarding him as their source. Peter, the man, the shipwright-tsar, with twitching face, in rusty caftan and with shoes down at the heel, is lost in the conception of the empire-builder, the maker of a vast modern Russia. He becomes a symbol, the embodiment of the elemental, forward-rushing forces of the Russian people. (^ Peter was always reforming, always mending. Yet most \ of his reforms were the result of impulse, were set in motion ^on the spur of the moment during a lull in a campaign, or upon a hint from some roaming foreigner. He divided Russia into governments for fiscal purposes, so as more systematically to squeeze out of the population money for the maintenance of his rapidly growing army and fleet. Then the central Government institutions proved but poor makeshifts in such a time of stress and he had to reform them, substituting for the unwieldy Muscovite prikazy or inchoate ministries, Boards or Colleges on the Swedish model, and for the Boyarskaya Duma or Council of Boyars, a Senate which should serve as the interpreter of the Tsar's will. He created a modern army, establishing a principle of military service that embraced all classes. He built the first Russian fleet. He detested the clergy, and instituted a toper's club in the form of a parody on the hierarchy with a buffoon as mock patriarch ; but more serious was his complete abolition of the real patriarchate and his transference of the control of Church affairs to a board or ministry called the Synod
The Growth of Russia 33
with a layman at its head. The war with Sweden, known as the Northern War, which had for Russia such important consequences, lasted off and on for twenty-one years. But Peter drifted into it almost by chance, was defeated during its early stages, and had no plan of campaign long and carefully calculated in advance. He was drawn on by the development of events to the fulfilment of his dream of the conquest of the seaboard. He was beaten at Narva, but in 1703 he beat the Swedes at Nyenschantz on the site of the present St. Petersburg, and again in the first sea fight won by Russians in modern times. But the war dragged on, and it was not until 1709 that a decisive battle was won. The Swedish King, Charles XII, with his magnificent army had crossed the Vistula in 1707, and with the aid of Cossacks of the Ukraine under Mazeppa, hoped finally to break the growing power of the Russian Tsar. But the plain drew on the masters of the sea, and two years afterwards Peter had no difficulty in scattering Charles's worn out army at Poltava in the heart of the steppe.
When peace was concluded in 1721, Russia found herself in permanent possession of the territory on the banks of the Neva and of the provinces of Livland and Esthonia. The command of the Baltic was secure. It was made more secure by an act which has had no parallel since Constantine founded a new Rome on the shores of the Bosphorus. Peter built on the swamps of the Neva a capital, looking out upon the sea and upon Europe. No other spot was so suitable for the great work. Archangel, which had long been the port for trade with the west, was too precarious and too remote an outlet, and Novgorod, the centre of north-western trade from the earliest times, was too far inland. In 1703 Peter built himself, on one of the islands of the delta a cottage, which is shown to this day, and thence directed the construc- tion of fortresses, churches, shipyards, wooden palaces, Government offices, barracks, the draining of swamps, and the cutting through the dense forests on the left bank of the Neva
34 Russia of the Russians
the avenues that became the " prospects," the chief arteries of the new city. He dragged his boyars from their snug homes in old-fashioned Moscow to his bleak and comfortless half- German " Sankt Peterburg " with its Peterhofs and Oranien- baums. He imported artisans from abroad, and populated the city with his new regiments, and with artisans and peasants from the interior. The city was built by forced labour, and thousands perished under the hard toil. But Peter had his way, and the capital on the Neva became a lasting monument to his rude, creative energy. The very Neva is akin to him. Its broad, mighty stream flowing swiftly to the sea is the mirror of his impetuous striving.
Russia survived Peter's knout, and there could be no better proof of the nation's vitality. During his reign one- fifth of the peasantry simply disappeared, either in war or in terror-stricken flight from intolerable imposts and military service. Three-quarters of the whole budget was devoted to military and naval purposes, and little or nothing was done to relieve the wretched plight of the people. Yet in forcing backward Russia into the European family of the nations, Peter did the main thing necessary to ensure her progress. In the century that followed his death the Empire — Peter had assumed the title of Emperor (Imperator) — slowly adapted itself to the new situation.
Peter was succeeded by his second wife Catherine, a former camp-follower, who reigned with firmness and tact for two years, and then came a dreary period of nonentities. During the reigns of Peter's grandson, Peter II, his niece Anna Ioannovna and the short regency of her niece Anna Leopold- ovna, the Germanised Court was plunged in heavy sensuality and in sordid and viscid intrigue. Peter's capable daughter, Elizabeth, drove out Anna Leopoldovna with her son and her Germans in 1741, and reigned with signal ability for twenty years. Elizabeth tried to train as her successor her nephew, Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein Gottorp, but this youth proved hopelessly incompetent, and was murdered
The Growth of Russia 35
immediately after his accession to the throne by the partisans of his wife, by birth a Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, who ascended the throne as Catherine II.
The process of territorial expansion continued throughout the century in spite of all the intrigues in St. Petersburg.
There was a constant succession of wars, ExwLrwion anc^ Russia played various parts in combina- tions in which were concerned the newly established Kingdom of Prussia, the France of the last three Louis, the England of the Georges, the Austria of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, an enfeebled Sweden, an expiring Poland, and a declining, but still menacing Turkey. In the first half of the century Russia supported Austria, in the second half the Prussia of Frederick the Great. There was a moment before Catherine's accession when Russian troops occupied Berlin. Poland was a pawn in the political game of the neighbouring powers, and in the reign of Catherine II was thrice divided, Russia receiving all Lithuania and the Ukraine or Little Russia west of the Dnieper. After long wars with Turkey and the conquest of the Crimea in 1784, Russia finally secured her hold on the Black Sea from the mouth of the Bug to the foot of the Caucasus, and in 1783 the last King of Georgia, Irakli, dreading absorption by Persia, acknowledged the sovereignty of the Russian Empress. From Persia Russia conquered the north-western shore of the Caspian. By the end of the eighteenth century almost the whole of what is known as European Russia, besides a considerable portion of Siberia, acknowledged the rule of the Tsars.
The strain which this expansion involved on the resources of the nation was terrible, and a relaxation of internal tension
was necessary. Catherine realised this, and Catherine of from ^e beginning" of Tier "reign deliberately
set herself to promote the welfare of her subjects. She summoned a commission to draw up a general Scheme of reforms based on the principles of Montesquieu. The plan proved impracticable, but the Empress did not
36 Russia of the Russians
abandon the work of gradual internal reform. She began to loosen the bonds which enslaved the population to the State and promoted education, the arts, and learning. She opened schools, had schoolbooks translated, enlarged the Moscow University, which had been founded in Elizabeth's reign, gathered scholars around her, and with their aid engaged in the scientific study of her Empire. In a comparative vocabulary of the languages of the world undertaken at her instance by a versatile scholar named Pallas many entries were made by her own hand. Catherine corresponded with the French encyclopaedists, toyed with literature after the French manner of the period, and wrote plajrs, satirical essays, and memoirs. It is true that the effect of her civilising influence did not extend beyond the gentry, and that the masses of the people remained ignorant as before. Indeed, owing to the privileges Catherine granted to the gentry, serfdom became even more oppressive than it had been ; peasant risings were frequent in consequence, and a rising of peasants and Cossacks in Eastern Russia under the leader- ship of a young Cossack named Emelian Pugachev, who gave himself out to be the Tsar Peter Feodorovich, gave the Government serious trouble for two years. To conceal the wretchedness of the people from his sovereign's eyes Catherine's favourite, Potemkin, set up sham villages full of well-dressed, smiling peasants along the route of her journey to the Crimea. But Catherine was sincerely desirous of the national welfare and her reign, in spite of a thousand defects, was one of real progress for Russia. Peter raised the new building of Russian statehood, but it was Catherine who first made .it at all habitable. •
Catherine was succeeded in 1795 by her unhappy, half- witted son, Paul, whose childishly irresponsible use of absolute power led to his assassination by a band of Court conspirators in 1801. Paul's uncanny face as depicted in Borovikovski's portrait of him in the Winter Palace, with the staring eyes, snub nose, wide nostrils, gaping mouth, seems as though
The Growth of Russia 37
it had been thrust out mockingly from between the splendours of the preceding and following reigns for the express purpose of reminding the world of the deep-lying tragedy associated with the rise of Russian power.
Perhaps it was because of the complicity of Alexander I in his father's murder that the note of tragedy pervaded his
brilliant reign. Alexander began well. When
Alexander I. he ascended the throne the air was full of
echoes of the French Revolution, and Napoleon was rapidly rising to power. Alexander's tutor, the Swiss Laharpe, had instilled into him broad ideas of liberty, equality, and justice which he made some sincere attempts to put into execution. He gave a pledge to the representatives of the Finnish people on their surrender to him before the close of the Swedish war in 1808, to observe the autonomous rights of the Grand Duchy. When, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the territory now known as the Kingdom of Poland was allotted to him, he gave its inhab- itants a constitution, and seems to have been very eager for a time that it should be a success. He made the German gentry of the Baltic Provinces emancipate their serfs. In all these measures considerations of political expediency were reinforced by a hankering sympathy with Liberal ideas. Moreover, the Napoleonic wars threw Russia into the whirl of European conflicts. Russia became a part of Europe as never before. Napoleon himself was attracted by the vastness of the Russian power, risked all his glory to gain it, and lost, defeated not by Russian generalship, but by the elemental forces of the great plain of which only the dwellers on it know the hard-won secret. The march of the Grande Arm6e to Moscow, the stabling of troopers' horses in the cathedrals of the Kremlin, the burning of the ancient capital, Napoleon's retreat over the snow-clad plain, his flight — these were the events that for the first time united Russia emotionally with Europe, and gave Russian patriotism a modern colouring. Deepened national feeling bore splendid literary fruit in the
38 Russia of the Russians
work _oi Pushkin and his contemporaries. The nineteenth century dawned in glory and in the hope of liberty. A tremor of life and intelligence passed through the inert mass of the Russian nation. The impetus to development given in the reign of Catherine now took effect. Society in the capitals became thoroughly European in character. In the literary circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow there were not a few men who were steeped in the best European culture of the period. The arts were cultivated, and St. Petersburg became from the architectural point of view one of the finest capitals in Europe. In the masses of the people, too, there was a vague groping restlessness born partly of the Old Believers' and other religious movements, partly of the Pugachev insurrection, and partly of the roving of Russian armies over Europe during the great campaigns of Suverov during the reigns of Catherine and Paul, and the Napoleonic wars in the early years of Alexander's reign. The reforms of Catherine's reign had not only liberated the gentry from such humiliating subservience to the State as was involved in the liability to corporal punishment. They had practically given over the management of the new provincial institutions into the gentry's hands. This was one way to train up a governing class, but as the gentry retained unlimited control over their peasants, the lot of the serfs was even harder than before. It was among the nobles and gentry, however, that the idea of the emancipation of the serfs was first clearly expressed. And this idea was connected with that of the limitation of the autocracy. Alexander's friends and advisers at the beginning of his reign, Novosiltsev, Stroganov, who had at one time been librarian of the Jacobin club in Paris, the Polish patriot, Adam Czartoryzski, and Kochubei, who had been educated in England, were all advocates of both constitutionalism and emancipation.
But of these dreams nothing came in Alexander's reign. There was a radical reform of the central administrative institutions. The " colleges " were replaced by ministries,
The Growth of Russia 39
and the Senate was made the highest Court of Appeal in the Empire. With the aid of a remarkable statesman, Speranskiy the son of a village priest, Alexander established the Council of the Empire, a permanent body of high officials for drafting laws and undertook, but did not complete, a far-reaching and much-needed plan of financial reform. After the Congress of Vienna, Alexander's reforming ardour gradually cooled, and from 1820 onwards he became openly reactionary. His chief associates during this period were the fierce martinet and supporter of autocracy, Arakcheiev, and an ignorant and obscurantist cleric named Photii. He sank into a vague kind of mysticism, became gloomy and morose, travelled constantly over Russia as though pursued by an evil conscience, and finally died at Taganrog in 1825. Alexander was a well-meaning man, capable of generous enthusiasm, and the great events of his reign invested him with a halo of romance. But there were in him curious elements of weakness, a strange twist in his character that leaves an impression of inner failure, of rich possibilities blighted.
Liberal and revolutionary ideas had spread very widely among the educated class during Alexander's reign, and
among the army officers a number of secret Nicholas. societies had been formed with the object
of establishing a republican Russia. On the death of Alexander and the accession of his younger brother Nicholas, in place of the next of age, Constantine, who had abandoned his claim to the throne, a number of Guards' officers belonging to these societies raised a mutiny in the Senate Square in St. Petersburg, and demanded the acknow- ledgment of Constantine as Emperor and the promulgation of a constitution. The mutiny was suppressed, five of its ringleaders hung, and thirty-one exiled to Siberia, and Nicholas in person conducted a rigorous inquiry into the work of the secret societies. This event greatly alarmed Nicholas and set its stamp on the whole of his reign. Like his brother, Nicholas began with plans of reform, but very
4— <2400)
40 Russia of the Russians
soon yielded to his despotic instincts, and resolutely opposed all the progressive tendencies that were rapidly making headway among the educated classes in his time. His general attitude is well expressed in a comment he made on a report on education submitted to him by the poet Pushkin. " Morality, diligent service and zeal," he declared, " are to be preferred to crude, immoral and useless education." Nicholas did not aim at suppressing education. He wished to subject it to rigid principles, to eliminate from it all revolutionary tendencies, to make it subservient to his chief aim of training up the people in loyalty to Orthodoxy, Auto- cracy and the Russian Nationality. Indeed, some of the young scholars whom he sent abroad to study afterwards became leaders of light and learning in the universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kazan.
But the general effect of Nicholas* measures was to stifle the free expression of thought, and as during his reign literature developed with rapidly increasing intensity the struggle between harsh police measures and an implacable censorship on the one hand and ardent thought and aspiration on the other, made the life of the educated classes excessively gloomy and depressing. German intellectual influences found their way into Russia, and gradually thrust French influence into the background. The philosophy of Schelling and Hegel was eagerly debated by groups of students and literary men. At this time it became possible sharply to distinguish two main tendencies of thought which strongly influenced subse- quent development, those of the Slavophils and the West- erners. The Slavophils, adapting Hegelian theories, asserted that Russia possessed in her own traditions and her own institutions, the principles necessary for her future develop- ment ; they dreamt of a Russia of free, self-governing com- munities under the shadow of the Autocracy and the Orthodox Church. The Westerners, on the other hand, strongly insisted that Russia could progress only through the adoption of Western institutions and Western culture.
The Growth of Russia 41
All Nicholas' repressive measures failed to check the ferment of ideas : they only gave it an increasingly political, and in the end, a revolutionary character. It was during Nicholas' reign that the stormy anarchist Bakunin, and that most < striking of Russian political thinkers, Herzen, began their long exile in Western Europe, where they worked each in his own way for the political development of Russia.
Nicholas was a manly, soldierly kind of ruler, with a strong sense of responsibility. But he trusted neither his people nor his officials, and tried to concentrate the administration of the Empire in his own hands, the result being only an oppressive development of the police system, and a steady growth of corruption amongst officials of all kinds. His despotic inclinations were intensified by the Polish insurrection in 1831, and by the French Revolution of 1848, and it was because he felt that it was his mission to oppose revolution in all forms that he sent his troops to quell the Hungarian insurrection in 1848. He made some slight additions to the territory of the Empire as the result of a war with Turkey in 1829, but the Crimean war in which he became involved at the close of his reign, brought him only humiliating defeats, and forced him to realise the disastrous effects of his despotic system of government on that very military efficiency that he prized so highly. Deeply mortified by the revelations of corruption in the army, he cried, " My friends the Decem- brists (the leaders of the mutiny in December, 1825) would never have done this." Nicholas died in 1855, before the end of the war, and was succeeded by his son Alexander II.
The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by a fierce conflict between the old order and developing
social forces. The process of expansion fell
Social Unrest into the background. The western frontiers
of the Empire were fixed, and expansion eastward into the territory of decaying Central Asiatic Khanates was almost effortless. The Russian people had
42 Russia of the Russians
at last conquered the plain, and the Government availed itseli of European technical discoveries to strengthen its hold on the plain by purely mechanical means such as railways and telegraphs. Railways and telegraphs, in fact, served the purposes of bureaucratic centralisation, but at the same time hastened the dissemination of new ideas. The Europe of the nineteenth century was elated and turbulent in its pursuit of progress. The world was a modern world. The old Muscovite seclusion was a thing of the far distant past. It was impossible to hold the great plain by Muscovite methods, or even the methods of Peter the Great, ajid the principles and methods of that virile despot Nicholas I had been tried in the Crimean War, and been found wholly wanting even from the standpoint of a merely mechanical grasp on territory. The Russian people had hitherto blindly followed the lead of an unknown destiny. But it could no longer be dragged at the heels of destiny in the form of the State. To hold and administer its immense territory the State was compelled to train a modern army and to educate a bureaucracy. But the training institutions were channels by which European ideas found their way into the minds of the governed. The universities turned out the Government official and the revolutionary, and often enough both in one person. The educated classes were keenly aware of the position of the people, and struggled to secure for it the right of intelligent participation in the great task of nation-building. The Government now yielded to the demand for reform, now retreated to its old positions. The struggle was full of tragedy, of that intricate tragedy that seems implicit in Russian development. It was a struggle between the spirit of the steppe and the spirit of the forest. And the goal of the idealists who fought against the old order was a liberty as vast and as exhilarating as the plain itself. This ideal is still present, deeply troubling, but in the process of struggle it is gradually passing from the region of abstraction to that of real and minute achievement.
The Growth of Russia 43
Alexander II, like his uncle, Alexander I, began with reforms and ended in reaction. But the reforms of Alexander
II were very far-reaching, and marked the
Alexander II. beginning of a new epoch of development.
The new Emperor first of all modified the severity of the police regime, gave a certain amount of liberty to the press, and then with the help of his talented brother, Constantine Nikolaievich, the enlightened Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, who cultivated the friendship of scholars and literary men, and had effected the organisation of medical aid to the wounded during the Crimean War, the broad-minded statesman, Nicholas Miliutin, and many other men of mark, he began the work of reform from the base upwards. The first and most urgent task to be undertaken was that of the emancipation of the serfs. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, Liberals had demanded the abolition of serfdom, the more enlightened landowners had long since begun to realise that it was economically unprofitable, and the disasters of the Crimean War had shown the Emperor himself that the continued existence of serfdom was a danger to the State. Committees were organised in the various governments to study the question, and editorial commissions sifted the materials. The Chief Committee in St. Petersburg finally drafted an elaborate emancipation scheme which, after discussion in the Council of the Empire, was in its main features confirmed by the Emperor, and in a manifesto issued on February 19th (March 4th), 1861, which the landlords were commanded to read to their assembled peasants, the institution of serfdom was abolished in Russia. Alexander's energy in carrying this great reform through in the teeth of the opposi- tion of powerful cliques of reactionary landlords, was the more remarkable seeing that he was not a reformer by instinct or training, but was simply convinced of the political necessity of the measure. Over ten million peasants were liberated and enabled to purchase allotments of land from their former masters through the Government, by means of a system of
4-
44 Russia of the Russians
redemption payments, spread out over a long term of years in the form of an addition to the taxes. In Little Russia the allotments became the property of individual peasants, while amongst the Great Russian peasantry1 the ownership of the land of the freed serfs was vested in the village com- munes. The change effected was a veritable upheaval, and in order to cope with the immense work of reorganisation involved a reform of local government became necessary. Zemstvos or Provincial and District Councils, composed of elected representatives of the gentry, the peasantry and the townspeople, were established in thirty-three governments of European Russia with power to levy rates, to maintain schools, roads and hospitals, and generally to promote the economic welfare of the population. The Zemstvos became strongholds of progress, training schools for public workers, and forerunners of constitutionalism in Russia. Justice was in a deplorable condition, and here, too, reform was urgently necessary. By measures enacted in 1864 a radically new judicial system was established, theoretically more perfect, juster, more humane than any other European system. All these reforms, known as the Great Reforms of the Sixties, aroused an ardour for progress, a passionate humanitarianism, a sense of rich and manifold opportunity such as had never been known in Russia before. Public opinion came into existence in a land till then almost inarticulate, and public opinion was aboundingly optimistic. But the hopes awakened by the reforms fell short of fulfilment, and in 1886 a reaction set in.
The comparative liberty given to the press in the early years of Alexander's reign had stimulated an intellectual movement ; social and political questions were eagerly debated under a thin veil of literary criticism, and public opinion divided itself into three camps — the Slavophils, and a Liberal and a Socialist group of Westerners. The chief organ of the Liberals was Herzen's Kolokol (The Bell), which was published in London, was read by 'influential members
The Growth of Russia 45
of the Government, including the Emperor himself, and greatly influenced the course of the Emancipation Reform. The Slavophils, led by Aksakov and Samarin, had their centre in Moscow, while the Radicals, under the leadership of Chernishevski, were grouped around the monthly Sovremennik. The growth of Radical and Socialist tendencies alarmed the Government, and in 1862 Chernishevski and several of his associates were arrested and deported to the Siberian mines. The insurrection which broke out in Poland in 1863, and which provoked the Government to severe reprisals, including the entire abolition of Polish autonomy, was'at first looked on by the Russian Liberals with a certain sympathy. But the intervention of European powers at the instance of Napoleon III led to a strong revulsion of feeling in favour of the Government, and a prominent Liberal publicist, Katkov, became from this time on the ablest advocate of the Government policy. Herzen, by strongly taking the side of the Poles during the insurrection, lost the enormous prestige he had hitherto enjoyed in Russia, and he became identified with the Radical group. It was about this time that the so-called " Nihilist " tendency made itself manifest. The Nihilists were the Futurists of that period. They were young Radicals who in their passion for science and progress scoffed at aesthetics, defied conventions of every kind, pooh-poohed religion and tradition, and admitted no guide but reason. But Nihilism was only a tendency. There was never a party called Nihilists, and Nihilists were not necessarily terrorists, though terrorists were often Nihilists in their attitude to life. It was from the tumult of conflicting forces that marked the early sixties that the revolutionary movement developed. - Alexander grew weary of reform and alarmed at the complex variety of social forces his reforms had called into action, and when in 1866 a nam named Karakozov, acting entirely on his own responsibility, fired a shot at the Emperor, the policy of the Government was reversed. A new period of reaction began, and during this period the revolutionary movement
46 Russia of the Russians
steadily gained in strength. No further reforms were granted, repressive measures were directed against the press and the Zemstvos, and the police powers of the governors were extended. Amongst the students of the universities arose a movement known as " going into the people," which meant that educated young men and women carried the University Settlement principle to its utmost limit, that is to say, they tried to bring enlightenment to the ignorant peasants by mixing with them, and living and dressing exactly as they did. At first this movement had a purely educative and human- itarian character. It was only later that it became political. The political revolutionary movement was developed abroad by Bakunin and his associates. But the Government, by constantly arresting young men and women who gathered together in conspirative mutual improvement societies where they eagerly studied how they might be useful to the people, promoted the growth of a revolutionary movement at home. Prince Kropotkin brought Bakunin's revolutionary writings into Russia, and hundreds of students went amongst the peasants, this time not to teach them the alphabet, but to incite them to insurrection. About a thousand of these students were arrested. The Government redoubled its repressive measures, and struck at random in its efforts to crush the revolutionary movement. But the revolutionaries organised in 1876 a party under the name of Land and Liberty with the object of bringing about an agrarian revolution. This was the first organisation of any strength that was avowedly terrorist in character. A peaceable demonstration arranged by the party in the Kazan Square in St. Petersburg, led to a large number of arrests and to fresh additions to the long procession eastwards to Siberia. In 1877 a girl named Vera Zasulich fired at and wounded General Trepov the prefect of St. Petersburg, because he had a political prisoner flogged for refusing to lift his hat. The Government, hoping to rally public opinion to its side, had the case tried in open court, but Vera Zasulich defended herself with such effect
The Growth of Russia 47
that she won the sympathy of the public, and the jury acquitted her. This incident greatly stimulated the energies of the terrorists.
But the revolutionaries were at that time a small minority. The reaction weighed heavily on all classes, but it could not stay a powerful intellectual movement, and it was in the sixties and seventies that Turgeniev, Tolstoy and Dcstoievski produced the novels that made Russian literature famous throughout Europe. The Government itself had recourse to the aid of the press, and its efforts to form a strong body of conservative public opinion were vigorously supported by Katkov, who in the Moskovskia Viedomosti (Moscow Gazette), supplied the Government with ideas in the shape of an extreme Nationalism. A wave of genuine national enthusiasm swept over the country when, in 1877, Alexander came to Moscow and solemnly declared war against Turkey in the name of the liberation of the Bulgarians. There was a momentary revival of the ardour of the early sixties, and many disappointed revolutionaries rushed to the front to serve as volunteers or as medical helpers. But the war had no effect on the internal situation, and Liberals complained bitterly that the Emperor, who had given a constitution to liberated Bulgaria, withheld one from his own Empire. Terrorist attacks on governors and gendarme officers became frequent, and two more attempts were made on the life of Alexander. The " Land and Liberty " party split into a purely terrorist group named the Narodnaya Volia,oT" People's Will," and an agrarian group, and the Narodnaya Volia entered on a systematic terrorist campaign. The Government retaliated by multiplying repressive measures and, in 1880, an Armenian, Count Loris-Melikov, was appointed Dictator for the purpose of rooting out sedition. A lull in the terrorist campaign gave Loris-Melikov, who was in friendly intercourse with the Zemstvo Liberals, occasion to induce Alexander to continue the work of reform by preparing the ground for a constitution. But he had hardly begun to put his plans
48 Russia of the Russians
into execution when on March 14th, 1881, Alexander II, when driving in a sleigh along the Catherine Canal in St. Petersburg, was killed by bombs thrown by the terrorists of the Narodnaya Volia. *
The murder of Alexander II threw back the work of reform for years and intensified the reaction. Alexander III, the
new Emperor, believed solely in police methods Alexander III. of government, and the Nationalism of Katkov
and of Alexander's chief adviser, that strange reactionary for conscience' sake, Pobiedcnostsev, formed the staple of the Government policy. The Russian Empire includes a large number of peoples of non-Russian nationality whom the Russians had subdued in the process of their con- quest of the plain. There are Germans, Poles and Esthonians in the Baltic provinces, Poles in the South-West, Little- Russians in the South, Jews in the former territory of the Polish State, Armenians, Georgians, and a host of smaller peoples in the Caucasus, Tartars in the Caucasus, in Eastern Russia and Siberia, and a variety of other peoples in Siberia and Central Asia. The Government aimed at forcibly assim- ilating these peoples to the Russian nationality, but the policy of Russification instead of consolidating the unity of the Empire aroused bitter resentment against the ruling race. The chief sufferers during the reign of Alexander III were the Poles, the Jews, and the Germans of the Baltic provinces. For Russians there was not a glimmering hope of reform. A great extension of territory was effected in Central Asia, and the influence of Russia in European affairs was increased by the conclusion of an alliance with France. Alexander III was a sturdy soldier of limited intelligence, but with a strong sense of his duty as an autocrat and a curious faith in a blend of faded Muscovite romanticism with the virtues of modern artillery and strategical railways.
Alexander III died in 1894, and the autocracy outlived him by eleven years. • During the early years of the reign of the present Emperor Nicholas II, there were no outward
THE EMPRESS AND THE TSAREVICII
The Growth of Russia 49
symptoms of the approaching change. The policy of Russifi- cation was continued and was applied with great vigour to
Finland where, under the shelter of the autono- Nicholas II. mous rights, maintained in their integrity by
Alexander I and his successors, a stubborn and capable people had developed an interesting culture of its own. The Minister of Finance, Count Witte, a man with a keen modern business mind, tried to give a new lease of life to the autocratic and bureaucratic system by measures of a purely technical character, such as railway construction, the artificial promotion of industrial enterprises, and a reform of the monetary system by the establishment of the gold standard. But the Russia that made possible an autocracy <. was quietly slipping away. Strategical railways were arousing villages from their sleep, and bringing them to rapidly-growing capitals. Factory chimneys had risen up in clusters at various points on the plain. In the region of the Don there was a Black Country of mines and foundries. During the second half of the century, Poland, the Moscow region, Riga and St. Petersburg, had become important manufacturing centres, and millions of peasants were abandoning their homespun for the cheap cotton goods which all kinds of enterprising middlemen, from the anglicised wholesale dealer to the old-fashioned bearded merchant in a caftan and the Tartar pedlar, hawked over the plain from Reval to Vlad- ivostok. With the increase of population the land allotments of the Emancipation period had grown too small, and the peasantry were restless and discontented. The number of v schools had little by little increased, and new ideas were ' slowly finding their way into the masses. The educated classes were gradually recovering from the apathy into which they had sunk during the eighties. The famine of 1892 was a sharp call to compassion, and eager bands of helpers illus- trious and obscure — Tolstoy, side by side with a village schoolmistress — hastened to relieve the starving peasants of the Volga region. The growth of industry modified the
50 Russia of the Russians
views of the Socialist groups. In the nineties, Social Demo- crats made their appearance, and attacking the older school of Populist Socialists who pinned their faith to the peasantry, concentrated all their efforts on agitation among the factory workmen. v The Zemstvo Liberals groped their way towards organisation, and in 1902 founded in Stuttgart a Liberal organ of the type of the Kolokol under the editorship of Peter Struve. A Social Revolutionary party was founded in 1900, and both Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries formed organisations abroad among the hundreds who had at one time or other escaped from police repression in their native land for political reasons, smuggled their literature into Russia, and carried on conspirative propaganda amongst the workmen and peasantry, and the students in the Univer- sities and technical schools. Terrorist action was renewed in the early years of the present century, and the political police scented revolution everywhere.
But revolutionary activity was very slight considering the vast extent of the Empire, and on the surface things were
quiet. President Faure and President Loubet
AUFrtnceWitl1 came to St* PetersburS> and the Emperor
Nicholas went to France, and the alliance
between France and Russia was firmly cemented. M. Witte tried to swell the exchequer and diminish drinking by estab- lishing a State brandy monopoly. There was a movement to the Far East. The Trans-Siberian railway was completed, Russian troops occupied Manchuria, and a Russian naval base was established at Port Arther. But it was just this movement of expansion when internal conditions were unstable that led to disaster. In January, 1904, Japan declared war on Russia, and in the war that followed Russia suffered an unparalleled series of defeats. The war let loose all the forces of discontent at home. While Russian armies retired step by step before the Japanese in Manchuria, a revolutionary movement rapidly developed in the centre of the Empire. It began with the assassination of the Minister of the Interior
The Growth of Russia 51
Plehve, in July, 1904 ; it received a tremendous impetus from the shooting down of workmen on Red Sunday, June 22nd, 1905, in St. Petersburg, and after the conclusion of peace in August it culminated in a general strike throughout Russia. The strike was brought to an end by the promulgation on October 30th, 1905, of that manifesto by which the Emperor limited his power, affirmed the principles of civil liberty, and declared that thenceforward no law should be valid without the consent of an elective National Assembly. This manifesto marked the end of a historical epoch and the beginning of a new era of development. It was an expression of the formal abolition of the autocracy and the establishment of constitutional government in Russia.
CHAPTER II
THE BUREAUCRACY AND THE CONSTITUTION
During the last few years Russia has been absorbed in a struggle between bureaucracy and constitutionalism. The
struggle is not yet over. Its forms change
Conflict of from year to year. It becomes more complex
^ and more profound. There has been nothing
quite like it in all the world's history. Some of its phases may be illustrated from the history of other European countries, but references to the French Revolution, to the Italian Risorgimento, or to the establishment of repre- sentative institutions in Germany, will not explain the Russian struggle. The Russian constitutional movement was preceded by similar movements on the Continent of Europe, in Germany and in Austria, though it lagged nearly three-quarters of a cetatury behind these. In its turn it gave an impulse to constitutional movements in the East, first in Persia, then in Turkey, and last of all in China. But, as is well known, the promulgation of constitutions in Eastern countries has not been followed by such striking and indubitable progress as was anticipated ; has in fact, in some cases, served only the more clearly to reveal how deeply these countries were sunk in decay. And then again the experience of the last few years has shown that on the European continent, in America, and in England itself, constitutional government, though obviously a tremendous advance on absolutism, is not such a simple and all-sufficing remedy for the ills of the body politic as it seemed fifty years ago. Russia is in the extraordinarily difficult position of having to deal at once with the problems of East and West. She has to make up for lost time in the adoption of European institutions, at a moment when Europe itself is trying to adapt them to more
52
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 53
complex social conditions. And she has to tide over that most painful of all periods when constitutional principles have not acquired energy enough to transform the body politic, but serve simply to lay bare the havoc wrought by centuries of despotic government. It is true that the pro- mulgation of the Constitutional Manifesto in 1905 marked the beginning of a new era for Russia. But the early years of the new era have brought even more acute suffering than did the later years of the old, just as a latent disease becomes more violent when it finds its way into the open. The remedy that began by bringing the disease to the surface will gradually effect a recovery. But the process involves shocks, and constant relapses, and intense pain. And the subject of this \/ process is not a tiny Belgium, or an island in the midst of the sea, or a comfortably-sized Germany, but an immense Empire with a population of 160 millions, and watchful enemies on her Eastern and Western frontiers. Revolution and reaction, liberty and repression, all the words with which we are accus- tomed to express phases of the struggle for representative government have acquired in the vast sweep of the Russian constitutional movement a hundred new connotations and implications. There is nothing simple here, nothing to which justice can be done by familiar and hackneyed phrases.
The main issue, however, is clear. The struggle is being waged between the bureaucracy and constitutionalism. But what is the bureaucracy ? Literally, it is rule by means of bureaux or Government offices. But there are Government offices in every country, and the distinction between a civil service and a bureaucracy is that the former is subject to control while the latter is not. A bureaucrat may be a per- fectly reasonable, capable and hard-working being in so far as he is a civil servant, but in so far as he exercises the power of the State arbitrarily and irresponsibly he can, and human nature being what it is, very likely will do a very great deal of harm. The Russian State has been held together very largely owing to the fact that the highly organised civil service
54 Russia of the Russians
which carries on the business of administration was by no means wholly incompetent, and did a certain amount of useful work every day of the year. What very nearly ruined the State completely was the fact that the total absence of popular control over the bureaucracy set a premium on incompetence and dishonesty, and encouraged the worst y£- forms of exploitation. It would seem quite simple to remedy matters by putting the bureaucracy under popular control and giving the people, through its elected representatives, a voice in legislation. But the very bigness of Russia makes the application of such a remedy difficult, because nowhere in the world has a highly-centralised bureaucracy had at its uncontrolled disposal such a vast territory and such an enormous extent of political power. It is true that the bureaucracy exercised power in the name of the Monarch. But in practice this delegated dominance was hardly dis- tinguishable from original power, and an ispravnik or district Chief of Police in Siberia wrought his will on the population with unchallenged authority. The task of bringing under popular control such an immense and complex organisation with such a tangled variety of personal interests and such a heavy weight of tradition behind it, would have been almost a hopeless one if the bureaucracy had been thoroughly efficient. But a bureaucracy naturally tends to collapse under the burden of its own corruption, and the demonstration of ' bureaucratic incompetence and corruption given in the Russo-Japanese war facilitated the task of the reformers.
It would be quite wrong to say that the Russian Civil Service is wholly composed of bureaucrats pure and simple. There
are bureaucrats, a great many of them, and The Civil there are also a number of Government
Service
.employees who to-day are more or less tinged with the bureaucratic spirit, but to-morrow would do their duty just as well or even better if a Constitutional regime were in full swing. The Russian Government Service, taken as a whole, includes a large number of interesting types,
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 55
from elegant men of the world to that pettifogging Dryasdust familiarly known as a " Chancellery rat," from the rough red-faced police captain to the mild-mannered bespectacled excise clerk, from the dried-up martinet at the head of a St. Petersburg department to the slow-moving, long-haired country postmaster. Governors, senators, clerks of court, tax collectors, school-inspectors, telegraph clerks, customs officials, wardens of the peasantry, heads of consistories, all are engaged in the business of the Empire, all are formally in the service of the Tsar. It is a State in uniform. The very schoolboys wear uniform, and even high-sdiool girls have to wear brown dresses and brown aprons. Ministers wear uniforms, not in the routine of work in St. Petersburg, but on State occasions and when they travel about the country. Judges wear uniforms, and so do Government engineers and land-surveyors, and a host of other people whose salary filters down through many channels from the St. Petersburg Treasury. Brass buttons and peaked caps, peaked caps and brass buttons, uniforms with blue, red, or white facings meet the eye with weari- some monotony from end to end of the Empire, from the Pacific to the Danube. A Russian may wear uniform his whole life long. As a little boy of eight he goes proudly off to a preparatory school in a long grey overcoat, reaching almost to the ground, and in a broad-crowned cap with the peak tilted over his snub nose. When school days are over he dons the uniform of a student, and after a few years at University or Technical College, enters a Ministry and puts on one of the many official uniforms. The years pass, he is gradually promoted, and at fifty he is trudging in uniform with portfolio under his arm to his Ministry, just as with bag on shoulders he tramped to school when he was a little boy of eight.
All the Government officials are Chinovniks, that is to say, each of them stands in a definite chin, or rank. Peter the Great established an order of promotion called the Tabel
5— (2400)
56 Russia of the Russians
Rangov, or Table of Ranks, and this order is in force to the present day. Once a man is drawn into the subtle mech- anism of the Table of Ranks he may go on How the from grade to grade with hardly an effort on
iaWwSd7 k*s P211** by *he mere *ac* °* existing and growing wrinkled and grey-haired. When he enters the Government service he receives a paper called the formtdiarny spisok or Formular Listen which the events of his life are noted down from year to year — his appointment to a particular table in the Ministry of Justice, his marriage, the birth of his children, his leave, his illnesses, his appoint- ment to a commission or committee, his despatch on special service, and then the long series of decorations and promotions, various degrees of the Order of St. Anne, St. Stanislav, St. Vladimir, and it may be high up on the last rungs of the bureaucratic ladder such coveted decorations as the Order of St. Andrew, or even the White Eagle. The orders are a reward for good service. But the chins, or grades, need not necessarily be so. A chinorMik may be promoted from grade to grade simply for " having served the due term of years," as the phrase is, but his promotion may be hastened through favour in high places or in recognition of special diligence or ability. The names of grades have no meaning except as indicating the grade. They are the same throughout the civil service, and give no suggestion of the office held by the possessor. They were originally adapted from German titles, and look imposing when re-translated into German. Thus the grade of nadvorny sovietnik is not a particularly high one, but when it appears in German as Hofrat, or Court Councillor, the impression is given that the possessor is a personage of considerable importance. But the really impor- tant chins are that of Staatsky Sovietnik, which is perhaps not so important as it looks in its German guise of Staatsrath, or Councillor of State, but seems to secure a man against undue caprices on the part of Fortune, and to invest him with an air of respectability ; and then the grades that make
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 57
the man who attains to them a noble if he is not one by birth. There is a chin that conveys personal nobility, and the chin of dieistvitelny staatsky sovietnik, or Real State Councillor, conveys hereditary nobility. In this way the ranks of the gentry are constantly recruited from the bureaucracy, and the traditional connection between rank and Government service is maintained in actual practice. The grade of Real State Councillor also conveys the rank of a general in the Civil Service and the title of Excellency. The average chin- ovnik thinks himself happy if he reaches such an exalted chin as this. Most professors become Real State Councillors by virtue of length of service, and it sounds odd to hear a stooping, frock-coated gentleman who is distinguished as an able lecturer on mediaeval history, spoken of as a general. The grades of Secret Councillor and Real State Councillor are reserved either for very old or for very distinguished members of the Civil Service, for ministers and ambassadors, and the like.
The system of grades is one of the forces that hold the bureaucracy together. It secures a certain uniformity of temper, tendency and aim. Russians are the most demo- / cratic people in the world, but this carefully adjusted system of grades, decorations, money premiums and, to close with, pensions, corresponding to the chin attained, appeals to an ineradicable human instinct for outward symbols of position, security and distinction, and makes of the bureaucracy a world apart, a world in which the interests of all the members are interwoven. It is curious how mortified even a Radical magistrate will be if his name fails to appear among the Real State Councillors in the annual promotion list, and, on the other hand, with what unalloyed pleasure he receives con- gratulations if he has been given the coveted grade after all. But there is another very characteristic feature of the bureaucracy, and that is its extraordinary centralisation. From the big dreary-looking yellow or brown buildings in St. Petersburg, in which the Ministries are housed, currents
58 Russia of the Russians
of authority, of directive energy go forth to all the ends of the great Empire in the form of telegrams or occasional oral messages by special couriers, but above all in the form of endless " papers." Pens scratch, typewriters click, clerks lay blue covers full of papers before the " head of the table " ; the " head of the table " sends them to the " head of the department," to the Assistant Minister, if need be, and in the more important cases, the Assistant Minister to the Minister. Then back go the papers again with signatures appended, down through various grades for despatch to a judge, to another department, to a Governor, to a chinovnik on special service, or to some petitioner from the world without. Incoming and outgoing papers are the systole and diastole of the Chancelleries. All sorts of documents go under the general name of butnaga or " paper," from a warrant for arrest to a report on a projected railway, or a notification of taxes due. There are doklady or reports, and otnoshenia or communications between officials of equal rank, and donesenia or statements made to superiors, predpisania instructions or orders, and proshenia, applications or petitions. These, and a hundred others besides, are all " Papers," and there is a special style for each of them, and a general dry and formal style for all of them known as the " Chancellery Style," which permeates Russian public life, and creeps into private letters and concert programmes, and newspaper articles, and into the very love-making of telegraph clerks waiting for trains on wayside stations. The " papers," their colour, the stamps upon them, their style, create an immense uniformity of mental content, and tend to level down the striking differences that exist between say, the Tartar policemaster in a town on the Caspian Sea, and the son of a Russian priest who serves as a clerk in the financial department in Tver. It is extra- ordinary discipline. The lack of variety in the system increases its hold on all its members. There are hardly any of the curious divergencies and inconsistencies of which the English administrative system is so full, hardly any quaint
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 59
anachronisms left to linger on because of some wise use they have for the affections. There are certain inevitable modi- fications in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, in Bessarabia and in Siberia, Poland and the Baltic Provinces. But, generally speaking, the system as outlined in mathematical order on smooth white paper, is embodied with surprising accuracy in the network of institutions that cover the great plain from limit to limit. Authority is delegated from the big yellow Ministries in St. Petersburg to the dreary white buildings in the head towns of the governments or territories into which the whole Empire is mapped out, and from the government towns to the head towns of the districts into which each government is divided, and then down to the smallest towns and to the Wardens of the Peasantry. The uniformity of it all is both imposing and depressing, and as wearying as the inevitable red- capped stationmaster and brown-coated gendarme on every one of the scores of railway stations between Wirballen and Harbin.
The integrity and uniformity of the bureaucratic system is maintained, the system is held in its framework, so to speak, by means of the army. The army, in its turn, by means of the conscript system, subjects almost the whole male popula- tion to a uniform discipline, levels down, for a time at any rate, the distinctions between various regions and various nationalities, and serves as a most potent means of Russifica- tion. Russification, indeed, is not the word, though it is the Russian language that is used in the process, for it is not the interests of the Russian people that are primarily in question but the interests of the State. It is a moulding of all the human material of the Empire upon one State pattern, a persistent elimination of divergencies, a grandiose attempt to subordinate all the wayward impulses of 160 millions of human beings to one common aim unintelligible to the mass. The army supplies the clamps by which the vast mechanism of the bureaucracy is held in position,
/
60 Russia of the Russians
But it is through the police that the bureaucracy carries out its function of maintaining order. And the police have
of late years assumed an overweening impor- The Police, tance in the State because the bureaucracy
has constantly tended more and more to limit its functions to the maintenance of order. It has subordinated everything to this end. It has become immensely suspicious. The very success, the very efficiency of the bureaucracy has been its ruin. In so far as it governed well, administered justice, prevented crime, promoted education, built roads and railways, and furthered trade, it encouraged individual initiative, fostered the desire for liberty. And at the same time it opened the eyes of many to its own corruption, to the depredations on the national wealth and welfare carried on under the veil of order, strict uniformity and long-armed discipline. On both occasions when the clamps were loosened, when the army was defeated in the Crimea in 1854-5, and in Manchuria fifty years afterwards, the evils of the bureaucracy were vividly revealed, the system almost fell asunder. Almost, but not quite. For after the Crimean War reforms were effected and the system was modernised, and again after the Japanese war reforms were granted and a further attempt was made at modernisation. But on each occasion concessions were followed by a reassertion of bureaucratic authority by means of the police. The nineteenth century was a century of movement, even in Russia. The emancipa- tion of the serfs meant the freeing of an enormous amount of pent-up energy of economic development, it aroused a hum of fresh and vigorous movement all over the Empire. But for that strange complexity of widely extended, exclusive interests for which the bureaucracy stands, and for that rigid external uniformity which is the aim of its efforts, move- ment was dangerous. The bureaucracy took fright at the new, high-spirited movement of the sixties and, instead of steadily promoting economic and educational development, set to work to devise a system of checks, It tried to render
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 61
its own reforms innocuous, set bureaucratic safeguards on its own judicial system, and bound and weakened those Zemstvos, or elective County Councils, which impaired the integrity, of the bureaucratic system by exerting the functions of local government in thirty-four governments of European Russia. And the maintenance of order interpreted as the prevention of movement became the bureaucracy's prime care.
The population increased rapidly, trade grew, factories arose, a labour movement came into being. The connection with Europe became closer and more vital, and through the connecting tissue the swift beating of the pulse of the West was felt in Russia. The progressive movement gathered strength. Checked overground it went underground, and became revolutionary and terrorist. The terrorist movement, and more particularly the assassination of Alexander II, heightened the fears of the bureaucracy. The whole nation became suspect ; sedition was scented everywhere ; the police gained influence and authority, and the application of the term " political crime " to almost all forms of denial of the autocracy afforded an extraordinarily wide field for the exercise of repressive measures. That is why the bureaucracy came to be chiefly impersonated in a modernised and highly organised police system. That is why bureaucratic admin- istration came to be so aggressively prohibitive of progress, and why gendarmes and prefects, and policemasters and ispravniks (heads of district police), and the Okhrana or Political Police, and detectives of various kinds came to occupy such a prominent position in the forefront of Russian public life. It was the rigid centralisation, the exclusiveness of the bureaucracy, the extremely wide interpretation of the term " political crime " and the extraordinary powers given to the police that made the bureaucratic system particularly hard to bear at a time when thought was awakening, and the economic and intellectual energies of the nation were straining for free development.
62 Russia of the Russians
There were alleviating circumstances, of course. If the German conceptions which entered so largely into the bureau- cratic system had been put into practice with truly German industry and rigidity, there would simply have been no breathing-space at all. But sheer native indolence and good nature often made officials wink at breaches of the law, and even corruption had its milder aspects, for while bribery gave frequent occasion for extortion and blackmail, it often protected the feeble against unendurable oppression. Then the fact that the members of the bureaucracy were human beings with kith and kin in the world outside counted for a great deal. Revolutionaries and Constitutionalists often found it possible to secure through relatives " protection " in high places. Influential persons often " begged " or " bustled about," as the saying is, for those in trouble, and this through all grades of the bureaucracy. It might easily happen that the sister or the son of a Governor or Crown Prosecutor was a revolutionary. There was one other fact that for a time tended to keep the bureaucracy in touch with the general life of the nation. Most of the country gentry were employed in the Government Service, and after the sixties there was a liberal and humane movement amongst the gentry, which affected the bureaucracy. But members of the gentry tended to let their land slip out of their possession, and to become entirely dependent on Government service. And for this reason the bureaucracy became more and more a caste apart, suspicious of the rest of the nation, dry and hard,
It was at the beginning of the twentieth century, under the iron rule of the Minister of the Interior, Plehve, that the bureaucracy most distinctly assumed the form of a system of rigid police control. Plehve displayed consummate art and extraordinarily singleness of aim in the application of all the means of repression. He was determined to crush the opposition movement in all its forms — the Constitutional movement which was centred in an organisation composed chiefly of members of the Zemstvos, or County Councils, and
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 63
found expression in the publication of a Liberal organ, called Osvobozhdenie (Liberation) in Stuttgart, the labour movement which led to a number of strikes, chiefly in Southern Russia, and was furthered by the Socialist parties having their centre in Switzerland, and the terrorist movement maintained by the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Plehve strengthened the Political Police, developed the detective system, maintained an extremely strict censorship, and created an atmosphere of oppressive stillness in the country. During his term of office the war with Japan broke out, and although Plehve advocated war in the hope that it would divert the growing forces of internal discontent, the war had the reverse effect of fanning the flame of the constitutional agitation. It was at this time that a series of events began which demand here a brief review, for apart from them the present position is wholly unintelligible.
In July, 1904, shortly after the Japanese war began, Plehve was murdered by the bomb of an assassin. The Government
for a time relaxed its severity, and the Con- C^ita^nal stitutional agitation among the educated
classes had greater scope. In November, with the tacit permission of the Government, a conference of leading Zemstvo, or County Council workers, was held in St. Petersburg, and passed resolutions affirming the necessity of civil liberty and the establishment of representative institu- tions. Then a strange movement began among the working men of St. Petersburg. A priest named Gapon organised Working-men's Clubs on behalf of the Government, with the object of combating the conspirative Socialist organisations. But he made use of the influence he had gained and of the unrest caused by the war, and by the echoes of the con- stitutional agitation to place himself at the head of a workmen's movement, the aim of which was directly to petition the Tsar to grant his people liberty. On the morning of January 22nd, 1905, the workmen in the various districts in the outskirts of St. Petersburg formed in procession to march to the Winter
64 Russia of the Russians
Palace and present their petition to the Emperor. But the Emperor did not appear.
It was a beautiful winter morning, with a sharp frost and a sun brilliantly shining from a pale-blue sky upon the white expanse of the Neva and the snow-covered roofs and streets of the city. Down the Nevsky Prospect walked unceasingly with set, firm faces, working men, young and old, in black winter overcoats and black lambskin caps. There wassome- thing uncanny in their intentness. In the great white square before the Winter Palace a bivouac fire was burning, and around it soldiers were boxing to keep themselves warm. The throng from the Nevsky was held back from the Square by a line of dragoons, who from time to time charged down the sidewalks and sent the throng scattering. On the North side of the Neva, near the Finland Station, rifles were stacked and soldiers stood waiting. Near the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, before the oldest of the St. Petersburg churches, a score of mounted dragoons were drawn up in line, com- manding the square. Past the People's Palace, a procession came marching, workmen in black, intent and solemn, a stu- dent or two, and two or three women. They sang a little and then moved silently. They entered the square near the fortress. There was a bugle-call from the opposite side, but they marched on. There was a warning volley, and then three volleys of loaded cartridge. With shouts and cries the procession scattered, and the dead and wounded lay upon the snow. So all the processions were met and scattered, that led by Gapon among the rest.
Near the Winter Palace the throng grew and pressed on and on. Then the troops fired, bringing down little boys
perched on the trees in a neighbouring public Sunda°k garden and killing and wounding many men and women. A little further up the Nevsky Prospect, near the Police Bridge, the troops again fired. Again killed and wounded, again groans and cries, and a terror- stricken scattering crowd spreading indignation throughout
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 65
the city. A sleigh drove swiftly up the Nevsky followed by half-a-dozen workmen running with bare heads and crossing themselves, some weeping. In the sleigh sat a youth holding in his arms a student, dead, his face one gaping wound. Three or four Cossacks came galloping up on horse- back, pulled rein, looked at the sleigh, then rode on with a jeering laugh. The sun set in a roseate sky, the evening fell, crowds wandered about the streets with helpless imprecations, the wounded were brought to the hospitals or cared for in private houses. Cossacks and dragoons guarded the Govern- ment buildings, and from time to time charged down the Nevsky, driving loiterers before them like chaff before the wind. It is not known to a certainty to this day how many hundreds were killed on that terrible Sunday when the workmen set out to petition the Tsar for liberty.
That day turned trust into bitterness, and the longing for justice into a desperate endeavour. A revolutionary
movement leapt from city to city, from town
TtRebSmSn °£ t0 toWn' til1 a11 the t0WT1S °f the EmPire
were in a ferment, and unrest spread even to
remote villages. Workmen went out on strike, police raids and arrests became the order of the day. Streets were patrolled by Cossacks. In Warsaw the troops charged and fired on% a procession of working-men. Here and there bombs were thrown at police officials and other representatives of the Government. Manufacturers, members of municipal councils, doctors, lawyers and professors held meetings, conferences and congresses to devise a remedy for the situation. A Congress of lawyers, and later a Congress of literary men, held secretly in St. Petersburg, formulated demands for the estab- lishment of a democratic system of government. In April an important Congress of Zemstvo Representatives, held in Moscow in various private houses in defiance of the pro- hibition of the police, set to work to give point and detail to the demand of the Liberal gentry for a Constitution. It became a custom to hold Liberal meetings in secret with the
66 Russia of the Russians
knowledge that Cossacks were waiting around the corner. And somehow people of a sudden found their tongues, lost that fear of open speech which had become habitual under the Plehve regime, and when they spoke openly in trains and public places they spoke much of the Constitution and little of the war that was bringing defeat after defeat. Only the shock of the Tsusima disaster deepened a growing sense of imminent danger to the State, and caused the Zemstvo men to assemble hastily again in July, and to send a deputation to the Emperor, to implore him to put an end to the bureau- catic system and establish representative government. Up till then there had been on the part of the Government only a few faint signs of reluctant yielding, vague promises, the appointment of Commissions to draft reforms. In reply to the Zemstvo deputation (June 19th) the Tsar said definitely : " My will, the will of the Emperor to convene a National Assembly, is unshakable. I am daily watching over this. My will shall be carried out."
Ten days afterwards Odessa was the scene of a naval mutiny. Workmen struck, crowds of wharf-labourers burned down goods-sheds, stores and country houses. There were san- guinary conflicts with the troops. The space around the harbour was covered with a smoking heap of ruins. Then up over the blue sunlit expanse of waters, across which argonauts had once sailed in search of the Golden Fleece, a battleship came swiftly steaming. The battleship, the Prince Polemkin, was in charge of a mutinous crew. They cast anchor before the city and warned the authorities to refrain from interfering with the burial of their comrade who had been killed by an officer. Their comrade was buried, and thousands of the inhabitants of Odessa attended the funeral. Three or four of the sailors were arrested. The Potemkin fired shots into the city and the sailors were released. The mutiny spread to two other vessels. The mutineers held the authorities paralysed. The Admiral commanding the Black Sea fleet came up with the rest of the squadron, but
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 67
did not venture to take strong measures. The Potemkin, after taking provisions, left Odessa and put in at Constanza in Roumania. Here she was disarmed, and most of the mutineers, after aimless wanderings in foreign lands, one by one returned to Russia, drawn by invincible home-sickness, and were seized and punished, some by death, and some by exile.
There were mutinies in Libau and Kronstadt and political strikes ; bomb-throwing and demonstrations did not cease throughout the land. On August 9th an Imperial Decree was promulgated constituting a National Representative Assembly with Consultative Powers. But this concession did not check the growing agitation. The war came to an end. The Peace of Portsmouth was concluded in August. When M. Witte after signing it returned to Russia he was the man of the hour. He received the title of Count, and united all the Ministers in a Cabinet of which be became the first Premier. The unrest grew, and toward the end of October culminated in a general strike of a character un- paralleled. The final impetus was given by the St. Petersburg railway-men, who struck by mistake in consequence of the receipt of false information from Moscow. The strike spread to all the railways of the Empire. On all that network of lines which maintains communication between the ends of the great plain traffic came to a standstill. Trains stopped at wayside stations. Passengers bivouacked or pursued their journey in hired carriages. The busy hum and thunder- ous rattle of the great city stations, their pride in the conquest of distance yielded suddenly to a chilly, faint-hearted silence. One by one porters, newsboys, book-keepers, ticket-clerks crept away. Cab-drivers deserted their ranks before the stations, disconsolate, to seek chance fares at street corners. At such a moment it was a simple and natural thing that the factory employees should strike once more. Agitation and persuasion were hardly needed. And the strange impulse spread, the impulse to cease from all action, to refrain even
68 Russia of the Russians
from such support of the old system as was involved in the earning of one's bread, till the word of change should come. Shop assistants put on their coats and went wandering aim- lessly up and down the streets in search of liberty. The clerks in city offices laid aside their pens and waited. Teachers ceased to teach, and school children had unexpected holidays. Lawyers ceased to plead, and even unemotional city magis- trates were infected by the strange unrest and ceased to judge between landlords and tenants, or to pass sentence on the drunk and disorderly until the word of a new time had been spoken. The provision shops remained open and the people ate and drank. But all the myriad currents of effort and emotion which constitute the daily life of a great city had been suddenly simplified, reduced to one single emotion of silent expectancy, menacing because of its vastness, because of its amazing spontaneity. Organisation played only the most trifling part in the strike. It was the spontaneous expression of a general desire, perhaps possible in such a form only in a country where industry and the business of living generally are loosely organised. There was something awe-inspiring in this strange negative assertion of the general will.
Cossacks uneasily patrolled the streets of St. Petersburg. No one knew how long the strange silence would last or what it portended. The University building was crowded night after night with people eager to hear fitting words for the strange emotions that were oppressing them. The floors of the University groaned under the weight of the packed masses ; the students joined hands and formed living barriers to guide the surging stream up staircases and along corridors. Revolutionary songs were sung, but they left perplexity and fear hanging in the air. The police were helpless. Arrests were of no avail. Who could arrest this vast emotion ?
On the third evening of the strike, that is, on October 30th, news came from Tsarskoe Selo and was telegraphed abroad. The Tsar had granted a Constitution. He had signed a
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 69
manifesto declaring that no law should be valid without the consent of the Duma, and affirming the principles of liberty
of speech, of the Press, of assembly and
A toantedf °n associati°n» an(* also the principle of personal
immunity. The news was known abroad before it was generally known in St. Petersburg. In the evening a few copies of the Manifesto were distributed. Towards midnight a faint sound of singing broke the brooding silence of the Nevsky. The Cossack patrols reined up their horses in vague alarm. A little procession of students came marching down the Prospect, doubting and wondering wayfarers joined them, Cossack patrols formed a cautious and puzzled escort. The procession crossed the bridge and approached the dimly looming mass of the University buildings. Out of the darkness of the University square Cossacks came galloping and checked the march. A police officer appeared and forbade entrance to the University. A student handed him a copy of the Manifesto. In the glimmering light of a street-lamp, vaguely revealing the Cossacks leaning down from their saddles and the thin pale faces of students, both men and women, the police officer read in a hard, dry voice the Manifesto. " Liberty of speech " was one of the phrases he read, and then he opened the door of the University Courtyard, the students entered, somebody made a speech, there was cheering, and the little company dispersed.
Next day the city gave itself over to rejoicing, a strange morbid kind of rejoicing that was full of bitterness and fore- boding. There were endless processions with red flags, and the interminable singing of the Russian revolutionary Marseillaise, open-air meetings, fierce ejaculations, speeches bitter and resentful, never simply joyful, sighs of relief that the immediate tension was over, but no powerful controlling voice, no leader to gather up all the vague, diffuse popular emotion of the troubled time, to illuminate it, to direct it, and make it the motive force of the new era just proclaimed in the Imperial Manifesto. In default of a popular leader
70 Russia of the Russians
there was a disposition on the part of many to look to Count Witte for guidance. But^the Zemstvo men, the recognised "Heads of the Constitutional movement, did not trust him. \ He had to form a Cabinet of Government officials, he was caught in the toils of bureaucratic tradition, and before he had time to give effect to the principles of the Manifesto found himself plunged into a systematic policy of repression, the agent of which was the Minister of the Interior, Durnovo. There was a period of irresolution, of halting between liberty and oppression. In Kiev, Odessa, and other towns mobs, aided by the soldiery, carried out terrible massacres of Jesfis and intelligentsia. But in the Capitals, the Press was free, and a Council of Workmen's Deputies, which sat in St. Petersburg, wielded for a time an extraordinary authority. Then the members of this Council were arrested and the Press was checked. In the Baltic Provinces Lettish worl^men and peasants killed German landlords, and again and again lit up a whole country-side with the lurid light of burning mansions, bringing down at the end of the year terrible retribution in the form of punitive expeditions. In Moscow revolutionary groups threw up barricades in the streets, and for several days lived in enjoyment of the virtual command over half the city. At midday daily heavy guns were labori- ously dragged up to demolish the barricades, and to make ugly holes in houses where revolutionaries were supposed to be lodged. The revolt was quelled by a regiment sent from St. Petersburg, and punitive expeditions did their merciless work along the railway lines in the neighbourhood of Moscow. There were other revolts here and there, provisional so-called republics were established in various towns, to be quickly followed by the terrors of punitive expeditions, improvised from among the troops returning from the war. The winter dragged on wearily and heavily, but preparations were made for the elections to the Duma. Parties were organised. An electoral law giving the peasantry the preponderance of voting powers was issued in March, and on the eve of the
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 71
assembling of the Duma, the principles of the October Mani- festo were embodied in revised Fundamental Laws. The elections returned a majority of Constitutional Democrats / or Cadets (so-called from the first letters of their title K D), members of a party formed by a fusion of the leading group of the Zemstvo Congress with groups of professional men in the towns. There were also a large number of peasants, most of whom joined a Labour Party which was organised in the Duma. The Conservative and the Reactionary elements in the country were almost unrepresented.
On a sunny May morning the Emperor received the members of the first Russian Parliament in the great white hall of
the Winter Palace. On one side of the hall
P&riiament. were ran8e(^ ^he deputies, stern and sober,
a few in frock-coats, many in jackets, and the great majority of the peasants in simple peasant costume. Opposite them were ranged courtiers, generals and admirals, ministers, members of the Senate and the Council of State, all gleaming in scarlet uniforms and gold lace. The Emperor read an address in which he called the deputies " the best men " of the country. The courtiers and dignitaries cheered lustily, and a band played the National Anthem. But the deputies looked on gloomily, and the peasants calculated how much of the people's money had been spent in the purchase of all the splendid uniforms. The first hostile note of the session was struck there in the Winter Palace. The attempt to reconcile the new institution with the traditional order failed from the outset.
The deputies went by steamer up the sunlit river to the Taurida Palace. A cheering crowd' welcomed them at the gates. In the hall of session, arranged in the form of an amphitheatre, peasants, professors, landowners, and lawyers noisily and exultingly took their seats, and in the afternoon light, reflected through great windows from a garden jubilant in its spring garment of green, they elected as their Speaker a dignified professor from Moscow named Muromtsev, and
6— (2400)
72 Russia of the Russians
listened to a short speech in which the veteran Zemstvo leader Petrunkevich demanded as the pledge of complete recon- ciliation between the Government and the nation a full amnesty for all political offenders.
} For seventy-two days the First Duma sat and debated in the Taurida Palace. This period was one of open and declared hostility between the Government and the Representative Assembly. There was no moderating element on either side. The Witte Cabinet had retired just before the opening of the Duma, giving place to a Cabinet under the premiership of an elderly and inactive dignitary named Goremykin, who represented bureaucratic tradition pure and simple. In the Parliament the Cadets, who in themselves represented liberal and democratic constructive tendencies, were continually overborne, and if not out-voted, were outvoiced by the more demonstrative violent and aggressive left wing of the Duma, the Labour and Socialist groups. The appearance of Ministers in the Duma was the signal for fierce attacks on the Government. The peasantry, the nationalities, clamoured for immediate satisfaction of their demands. The fine promenade hall of the Taurida Palace, once a ballroom, now a parlia- mentary lobby, was continually ahum with disputes between peasants, workmen, journalists and lawyers on land nation- alisation, women's franchise, or the claims of the proletariat. And apart from disputes there was a burning desire for mere intercourse, an eagerness to compare notes, exchange experi- ences, to revel in a new sense of kinship, brotherhood, unity, to interpret the political and geographical unity of the Empire in a passionate expression of national unity in the task of liberation. But there was no real unity after all. The party spirit grew apace, the deputies vented their passion on each other, and the resounding echoes of the Duma's attacks on the bureaucracy confusedly mingled with the sharp tones of bitter party strife. The people looked to the Duma for relief. Wild-looking peasants from remote governments came up to the Duma with fantastic schemes for saving the
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 73
Empire. But the Duma was helpless. It did not succeed in affirming in Acts of Parliament even the most elementary principles of civil liberty. And yet scores of Socialist organs all over the country violently attacked it for failing at once to bring the millenium. In the end the Government simply dissolved the Duma. The majority of the deputies went to Viborg in Finland, and thence issued an appeal to the people to defend their rights by refusing to pay taxes or give recruits to the army. This act proved to be a deplorable political blunder, from which the Cadets in particular reaped bitter consequences. No response was made by the country to the Viborg appeal, and the new head of the Government, Stolypin, who, having ven- tured as Minister of the Interior to recommend the dissolution of the Duma, had been appointed Premier with the injunction to carry the dissolution into effect, engaged in a policy of repression even more energetic than that conducted by M. Durnovo.
The name of Stolypin stands for a very distinctly marked and characteristic period of recent Russian history. This
period, lasting from July 21st, 1906, when M. Stolypin. Stolypin became Premier till September, 1911,
when he was assassinated in Kiev, may be described as the period of the reassertion of the bureaucratic will. M. Stolypin probably did not aim definitely at the complete restoration of the bureaucracy. He was not a thorough bureaucrat by training or conviction. He was a country gentleman and a provincial governor, and had had no experience of the intricate ways of the St. Petersburg Chancelleries until he was summoned from Saratov to be Minister of the Interior in the Goremykin Cabinet. He was not a man of theory ; there is no reason to believe that he was an anti-constitutionalist in principle, and he was certainly not a devotee of bureaucratic tradition. His main object was to hold the Empire together under particularly trying circumstances. He refused to see perplexities, and tried to cut a Gordian knot. He took a simple view of the strange, confused emotion that was agitating the country. He summed
>
74 Russia of the Russians
it all up as revolutionary, and proceeded to put it down. Agrarian disturbances, terrorism, those forms of highway robbery or expropriation into which the extreme forms of revolutionary activity had degenerated, he suppressed by the ruthless methods of the Field Court-Martial. Executions became a normal feature of public life in a country in which capital punishment has no place in the Criminal Code.
Stolypin had a second Duma elected, but the Second Duma proved to be as uncompromising as the First, and far less capable. The Premier brought about its dissolution, and in spite of the provisions of the Constitution that no law should be valid without the consent of the Duma, the electoral law was changed by Imperial decree, so as to transfer the prepon- derance of voting power from the peasantry to the landed gentry. In the Third Duma, elected on the basis of the new law, the Constitutional Democrats numbered less than three score, the Labour and Socialist parties which had been so prominent in the first two Dumas were represented by a mere handful, while the majority consisted of Conservative and Reactionary groups. The Centre was formed by a party of Conservative Constitutionalists known as Octobrists, who hovered dexterously on the borderline between Constitutionalism and Bureaucracy.
For five years the Third Duma contrived to maintain a shadowy existence in virtue of a curious policy of hide-and- seek which the Octobrists, as represented by their leader, the Moscow deputy, Guchkov, amicably played with the Government, as represented by Stolypin. Both Stolypin and Guchkov were men of spirit, but the effect of their co- operation was to make the Duma a byword in the country for spiritless compliance. It was characteristic of the Third Duma that whenever it ventured clearly to assert a con- stitutional principle it always surrendered it the moment the assertion seemed to involve the danger of serious conflict with the Government. But the cringing of the Third Duma had a certain advantage. By bowing before the vehement
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 75
reassertion of bureaucratic and reactionary principle, it prevented that total abolition of representative institutions which again and again seemed inevitable. It established for the representative assembly a certain tradition, a certain customary right of existence. And that meant a great deal at a moment when the nation, ill-organised, divided against itself and yet eager to abolish the old system, was unable to give effect to its desire. Perhaps the Third Duma was the measure of the nation's actual strength. But while the Duma examined the budget and passed various bills of secondary importance — whatever progressive principles they contained being afterwards almost invariably eliminated by the Upper House, the Council of the Empire — the greater part of the Empire remained under martial law, all the acts of the administration were an ostentatious denial of the principles of civil liberty, the evils of the bureaucratic system made themselves felt with redoubled intensity — in fact the Bureaucracy assumed a new aggressive character largely owing to the force of Stolypin's personality, the strength of his will. It was a strange position. Stolypin placed himself, his energy, his decision of character, his freedom from hampering bureaucratic routine at the service of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy acquired in him what it most needed, a will. He tried to suppress the popular movement, and at the same time to reinvigorate the bureaucracy by cleansing it of some of its worst abuses, such as the wholesale taking of bribes. He needed the Duma, in fact the Duma was indispensable to him. His prestige was largely based on the fact that in the Representative Assembly he appeared before the public eye. He was a fine, vigorous-looking man, with black beard, square shoulders and a determined glance. And he was an excellent public speaker. He needed the Duma. Yet he constantly discouraged the Duma's constitutional aspirations. And as the years passed he tended to identify himself more and more closely with the bureaucratic tradition, and in so doing he lost his vigour, his initiative, that very energy of
V
76 Russia of the Russians
volition which made him so valuable to the supporters of the older system. Ha was defeated again and again on questions of primary importance by the extreme reactionary elements, but he remained at his post. He had in fact lost his real power before he was assassinated by Bogrov in September, 191 1 . And the very manner of his death revealed in a striking and tragical form an abuse which had assumed far-reaching dimensions during the period of Stolypin's premiership. The assassin, Bogrov, was an agent of the Secret Police, whose duty it was to protect exalted personages against terrorist attacks. In combating the revolutionary movement the Secret Police had been in the habit of employing agents provocateurs, who associated with the revolutionaries, learned their secrets, helped them to organise their plots, and at the same time kept the police informed, so that at the critical moment the conspirators could be arrested. The case of a notorious agent provocateur named Azev, who had for years been a member of the Social Revolutionary Committee and, while serving the Secret Police had aided in the assassination of the Minister of the Interior, Plehve, and the Grand Duke Sergius Alexandrovich, had been the subject of an interpella- tion in the Duma. Stolypin did not put a stop to this practice even after the Azev exposure, and in the end he himself became its victim. It was a tragic end to a strange career, the most striking political career of recent times in Russia. The Third Duma drifted peacefully to its appointed term, and was dissolved in August, 1912. The Fourth Duma, which assembled in October, was in most essentials a mere copy of its predecessor, and for the present it is carrying on a passive policy of marking time and waiting for things to turn up. And in a sense it may be said that the whole country is waiting, that the Government itself is waiting and wondering ; nowhere does there seem to be a clear, definite aim. The revolutionary movement has been long since suppressed, there appears to be no object for the bureaucracy to expend its repressive energy on. There is a constant,
M. 5T0LYPIN
{Late Prtsidtnt of the Couulil of Minis,
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 77
irritating, petty persecution of individuals, groups and institutions, and the inhibition on public initiative has not been relaxed. And, on the other hand, there is an upward movement in commerce and industry. Several years of good harvests have restored the economic balance of the country. Apart from politics, a steady process of Western- isation is going on. A measure introduced by Stolypin, providing for the gradual break-up of the village commune and the acquirement by individual peasants of the proprietory rights over their allotments of the communal land, has led to profound changes in the rural districts, the exact ^ bearing of which it is yet early to determine. Life is going its own ways, changing its forms independently of politics. The years of tumult have affected so far only a slight change in the political system, but they have brought about a tremendous change in the mental attitude of the people. A certain naivete, a patriarchal simplicity of outlook has passed away. The Russian has suffered bitter disappoint- ment and disillusionment, and for better or worse he is becoming a modern man. And yet the Imperial problem is not solved, the period of transition is not yet over. The L immense task of transforming into the highly complex unity of a vigorous modern national organism, the outward and simple political unity that has been attained as the result of the gradual conquest of the great plain, is only half accom- plished. And those who are interested in the welfare of the Russian people can only earnestly hope that the process may be completed without further catastrophe.
The result of the struggles of the last few years is that Russia now has an Imperial Legislative Assembly, existing
side by side with the bureaucracy, but unable
Survey of to exert a thoroughgoing control. The
e?taw<des. present system bears a transitional character.
The Duma is tolerated, but frequently ignored. The menace of dissolution hangs over it constantly, but the Duma has weathered seven extremely difficult years,
78 Russia of the Russians
and threats of its abolition and the complete restoration of the autocracy are less frequently heard than they used to be. It is hard to find a term to describe the present regime. In official documents the word " Autocrat " is retained. Stolypin avoided the word " Constitution," and spoke of the " reformed " or " renovated system," and sometimes of the " representative system." Perhaps the existing state of affairs might be called a bureaucracy slightly tempered by constitutionalism. At any rate, there is a Duma, a Parliament in Russia, and this fact is in itself immensely important as a symbol of achievement and a pledge of progress. The Duma is enveloped in grey mists of disappointment. It can accom- plish little. Its wishes, even its most modest wishes for reform are thwarted. It is deferential, self-effacing. It shrinks from asserting in any pronounced form its privileges and powers. It has cultivated the art of self-protection by mimicry ; it has assumed to a large extent the colour of its bureaucratic environment. But even so the Duma represents a principle of government absolutely distinct from that of the bureaucracy, and its mere existence is a gain, an advance. The Duma means that Russia has finally emerged from her isolation, that she has definitely come into Europe, and that whatever happens there can be no return to the past. When even China has adopted a Constitution, the world has clearly grown too small to permit of Russian bureaucratic exclusiveness.
The Duma is composed of 442 members, elected from all parts of the Empire, with the exception of Central Asia. It
is thus much smaller than the British Parlia-
DescriSed* ment ^^ its 670 members' although it directly represents a population of 150 millions
as compared with the 44 millions represented in the House
of Commons. The great majority of the deputies are Russians.
By the new electoral law, promulgated in 1907, after the
dissolution of the Second Duma, the number of deputies from
non-Russian regions was greatly reduced. The result is that
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 79
while a central, purely Russian government like Kursk, with a population of two and a half millions returns eleven deputies, and Tambov, with a population of three millions returns twelve, Poland, with its eleven millions sends fourteen, of whom two must be Russians, and Transcaucasia, with its six and a quarter millions, sends seven deputies, of whom one must be a Russian. The Duma is elected for five years, and one Duma, the Third, lived out its full term. The electoral system is complex, and in the large cities the electors are divided into two classes according to property qualification. Thus St. Petersburg returns six members, of whom three are elected by the first class, or curia, and three by the second. In the second class the qualification is occupancy of an apart- ment or flat which gives a fairly wide and democratic franchise. The first class includes wealthy property owners, and naturally tends to be far more conservative than the second. Moscow returns four members,. two from the first and two from the second class. Kiev and Odessa return one member from each class, and in Warsaw the dividing factor is not a property but a national line, the small Russian population being in one class, the Poles and Jews in the other. The electoral system in the cities 'is fairly simple, but while in St. Petersburg and Moscow the voting is direct, that is to say, voters simply elect their deputies, in Warsaw it is indirect, that is, voters elect electors who in their turn elect the deputy. Outside the big cities the system of indirect voting is developed to such an extent as to make elections resemble walking through a labyrinth. All sorts of groups first meet at different points in a government or province to elect electors, then some of these electors elect other electors in their turn, and finally, the electors who remain after the ^training process has been completed assemble in the head town of the government and elect the requisite number of deputies. In the final elections "in the government town there are all kinds of rivalries and combinations between the various groups of big land- owners and small landowners, priests and townsmen and
80 Russia of the Russians
peasants, all these group interests being intersected by party and personal interests, and the whole complicated by the administrative pressure which is exercised through all stages of the elections. It is a strange process. The vote of the sturdy peasant, Ivan Ivanov, is reduced to the faintest echo of itself by the time that it has passed through all the stages of its delegated progress, through the cantonal meeting, and right up to the government assembly. After all, the system is so calculated that, in the end, the big landowners are almost certain to secure a majority, and the peasants returned are usually those who seem to the landowners fairly safe. So it happens that while the towns generally return Progressives and the working-class communities Socialists, the provinces return Conservatives of various shades, from the Conservative Constitutionalists, or Octobrists, to the Reactionaries of the Extreme Right. Russia being an agricultural country, with towns few and far between, the Conservatives under such conditions inevitably secure a majority and the Progressives, forming the Opposition, remain in a perpetual minority. ^ The Duma, being a new institution, is naturally formed on foreign models, and there is nothing particularly Russian about it, except that pretty Taurida Palace on the outskirts of St. Petersburg in which it meets. The German arrangement of parties prevails, the Conservatives sitting to the right of the Speaker, and Liberals and Socialists to the left. Right and Left thus connote political ideas, the Extreme Right being Reactionaries and the Extreme Left Socialists, while any tendency in a conservative or progressive direction is described as a movement from left to right, or from right to left, as the case may be. The parties themselves, Cadets or Octobrists, for instance, may be divided into Right and Left Wings ; thus if the Octobrists are Conservative Constitution- alists, a right Octobrist will be more conservative than constitutionalist, and a left Octobrist more constitutionalist than conservative. To say that a deputy is " righting "
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 81
means that he is getting more conservative in his views : to say that he is " lefting " means that he is growing more radical. Left and Right are the political epithets most frequently applied in Russia, and are very conveniently elastic in their application at a moment when parties are many, and normal conditions of party life have not yet been established.
The business of the Duma is conducted by a body called, as in Germany, the Praesidium, and consisting of a President, or Speaker, two deputy Speakers, and a Secretary with his assistants, who are all elected annually from among the deputies. The apportionment of these offices among the various parties causes a great deal of heartburning and strife. The order of business is arranged by the Praesidium in con- junction with the leaders of the parties grouped in an informal body, known for a long time under the German name of Seniorenconvent, but now described by a Russian term meaning " Council of Elders." The President sits aloft in a kind of box or tribune, and the Secretaries in smaller boxes just in front of him. Deputies speak, not from their places, but from a tribune in front of and a little lower than that of the President. The Deputies are seated in an amphitheatre, the various sectors of which from right to left are apportioned to various parties. Parliamentary officials called pristavs, distinguished by chains like those of aldermen, attend to technical details such as the admission of visitors, the counting of votes, and the distribution of papers. Ministers and Assistant Ministers, when they come to Parliament, sit in a box to the Speaker's right. The Press has one box in the hall of sitting and another upstairs ; there is a roomy visitors' gallery, an Imperial Box in which one of the Grand Dukes sometimes sits, and a Diplomatic Box. A splendid promenade hall called the Catherine Hall, now serves the purposes of a lobby, various rooms are reserved for committees and party purposes. In the summer months the deputies relieve the tedium of long sittings by wandering about in that part of
82 Russia of the Russians
the Taurida Park which is fenced off for the Parliament, or row in a little boat on a miniature lake. The Taurida Palace is under the command of a general of gendarmes.
In the appearance of the deputies there is little to strike the eye. The First and Second Dumas, which were more democratic and represented a greater number of national types than their successors, displayed a picturesque variety of costume and feature. Now the monotony of ordinary European frock-coats and jackets is only relieved by the cassocks of the priests, by the kaftans of a few of the peasants, and the skull-caps and long coats of one or two of the Tartar deputies. Most of the faces are of an average Russian cast, but on the left there are Poles and Tartars, and on the extreme left a few swarthy Armenian and Georgian faces, while towards the right there are bulky landowners from the backwoods with thick lips and protruding lower jaw. The deputies receive a salary of 4,000 roubles (£400) a year. Some of the wealthy landowners come down to the House in their own motor-cars or private carriages, but the majority come on foot or in cheap cabs, or in a shabby little horse-car that maintains a limp connection with the centre of the city. Outwardly the Duma is becoming assimilated to bureaucratic St. Peters- burg and has, it must be admitted, grown to be rather a dreary and despondent place.
There are a number of parties in the Duma, so many in fact, and so loosely organised, that majorities are perpetually wobbling, and there are constant surprises and catch votes. The Government refuses to legalise the Opposition parties, so that outside the Duma they have no officially recognised standing, though the existence of a Cadet or Constitutional Democratic Party is to a limited extent tolerated. On the extreme right is the Party of the Right, composed of various representatives of reactionary organisations. This party stands theoretically for the repeal of the Constitution and the complete restoration of the Autocracy, but its members have sat for five years in one Puma, and seem likely to sit
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 83
for five years in another, so that the pleasant habit of being members of parliament seems to be gaining ground on their anti-constitutionalist theories. Their leaders, the Kursk deputies Purishkevich and Markov, have gained imperial notoriety for their use of vituperative language, and the name Purishkevich is used by peasants even in the Northern Caucasus as an extremely offensive epithet. The Right maintain a reactionary agitation throughout the country, are in league with the police, and represent the most obscure and the most obscurantist side of the bureaucracy. It would be hard to find among the Duma Right idealists of reaction, for the most part it is a singularly crude and materialist type of reactionary that is here represented. Their strength lies solely in the prevalence of reaction in the bureaucracy.
Next to the Right come the Nationalists, who represent^ Stolypin's attempt to form a Government Party. While the Right is composed chiefly of peasants, priests and country gentlemen, the Nationalist Party is composed chiefly of country gentlemen and Government officials, with a sprinkling of priests to whom the extreme coarseness of the Right is distasteful. The party was influential during Stolypin's lifetime, but is losing its importance and has split into two groups. What the Nationalists stand for politically it is difficult to say, except that they vehemently assert the necessity of maintaining and increasing restrictions on the non-Russian nationalities. But they are a party of moods, and in the main they simply constitute one of the parliamentary outposts of the bureaucracy. One of the Nationalist deputies, M. Shulgin, from the Kiev government, is the ablest and most logical speaker on the Right side of the House. |
Then come the Octobrists, who constitute the Centre and held the balance of power in the Third Duma. The party takes its name from the October Constitutionalist Manifesto, stands for constitutional government, and has made a long and painful experiment in establishing the foundations of
84 Russia of the Russians
constitutional government by co-operation with the bureau- cracy. The party is composed mainly of country gentlemen of a conservative temperament who are strongly averse from radical and violent measures, but are desirous of seeing constitutional principles put into force. Such a party is clearly unfitted to play a heroic part in a critical epoch ; but in the Third Duma it had a vigorous leader in the person of M. Guchkov, who pursued a very intricate and interesting policy. M. Guchkov comes of a Moscow merchant family of Old Believers, and is a keen sportsman with a love of adventure, of fighting for its own sake. He fought with the Boers in the Transvaal War, and worked with the Red Cross in the Manchurian War and in the Balkans. He was one of the founders of the Octobrist Party, and an open supporter of the Government policy of suppressing the revolutionary movement by summary and violent measures. He was among the public men whom Stolypin consulted after the dissolution of the First Duma with the view to their becoming members of the Cabinet, and who refused on learning the conditions. M. Guchkov's political career actually began when he was elected deputy from Moscow in the Third Duma and became leader of the Octobrist party. The position was an exceedingly difficult one, and M. Guchkov thought that the only hope lay in gradually permeating the govern- ment with a constitutionalist leaven. Stolypin in those days vwas disposed to effect certain obviously necessary reforms, "and he and Guchkov agreed to work together. Guchkov making heavy concessions on the Duma's part on condition that Stolypin would protect the Duma against the restora- tionists and gradually introduce reforms. Theoretically the bargain was a sound one, and one result of it was that the Duma did tide over a very difficult and dangerous period, and evaded premature dissolution. But Stolypin was forced back by the extreme reactionaries from point to point, and was unable to carry out the promised reforms. His repressive measures remained in force, and there was not a glimmer
A. I. GUCHKOV
iOctobrisl Liadei)
(£
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 85
of constitutional liberty. Guchkov, again, was very indiffer- ently backed by the bulk of his own party, which understood the policy of constantly throwing a sop to Cerberus much better than an active policy of permeation and penetration of bureaucratic, strongholds. Guchkov was forced to make very heavy concessions, and openly to identify himself with highly unpopular and unconstitutional measures. Then Stolypin went to the Right, broke with the Octobrists, and in the days when his personal energy and political power were fading formed the party of the Nationalists. For a time Guchkov was President of the Third Duma, and in the position tried to pursue his chosen policy more effectively. He spoke rarely in the Duma, but when he did his speeches were always impressive and his words carefully chosen. " We are waiting," was the closing phrase of one of his best- known speeches, and this phrase was characteristic of his party's attitude. Guchkov's policy kept the Third Duma going, or rather kept it from going into the limbo into which its predecessors had gone. But the injury to the Duma's dignity and value was grave — history never fails to demand ^ a heavy price, moral and material, for every achievement in Russia — and M. Guchkov suffered personally for his close identification with the policy of the Government and it cost him his seat in Moscow. He was not elected to the Fourth Duma, and is at present engaged in municipal politics in St. Petersburg. M. Guchkov represents an unusual combination of the business man and the intelligent, and his interest in affairs is constantly interwoven with his interest in ideas, and reinforced by an unfailing spirit of enterprise.
Other prominent members of the Octobrist Party are M. Rodzianko of Ekaterinoslav, a giant of a man with a resonant bass voice, the owner of immense estates, a Court Chamberlain and a persistent defender of the ceremonial rights and privileges of the Duma on public occasions ; M. Rodzianko was President of the Third Duma during the last year of its existence, and was elected President of the Fourth Duma ;
86 Russia of the Russians
the former President of the Third Duma, M. Nicholas Homiakov, the son of a famous Slavophil poet, a shrewd and witty country gentleman, who might easily occupy a distinguished position if his energy were proportionate to his talent ; and M. Shidlovsky, a Conservative Constitutionalist of a clear-cut and very conscientious type, and a lucid and able speaker. Baron Meyendorff, of Livland, a scrupulous and unbending opponent of all forms of illegality, and one of the ablest and most conspicuous Octobrists in the Third Duma, has left the party owing to disapproval of its support of the Government's Finnish policy.
To the Left of the Octobrists is the Opposition, composed of four parties and the Mohammedan and Polish groups. The Polish group, composed of conservative deputies from Poland and Lithuania, drags out a melancholy and undis- tinguished existence in a Duma in which Russian Nationalism is militant. It once had an aggressive and conspicuous leader in the person of M. Roman Dmowski of Warsaw, but since his retirement the group has rarely attracted attention. A handful of Mohammedan deputies represent the Tartars of the Volga, the Urals and the Caucasus, and bear a heavy burden in defence of their confessional and educational interests.
Between the Octobrists and the next large party, the Cadets, sit the Progressists, pacific Constitutionalists who object to Octobrist tactics on the one hand, and to various points in the Cadet programme on the other. Its most prominent members are M. Nicholas Lvov, a Vice-President of the Fourth Duma, a Zemstvo Constitutionalist, a chivalrous and passionate speaker, and a Hamlet in his incapacity for action ; M. Konovalov, a young and active Moscow merchant ; and the party leader, M. Efremov, an ardent Pacifist.
The Cadets, or Constitutional Democrats, are a fairly large group, numbering from fifty to sixty deputies, and now occupy the position of leaders of the Opposition in the Duma and in the country. This is sorry comfort for the loss of the
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 87
leadership of the first two Dumas, and the conduct of an Opposition policy under the present conditions is the most trying and thankless task that could be imagined. The Cadets represent Constitutionalism in its undiluted and un- modified form, and maintain a clear and strict line of demarca- tion between themselves and the bureaucracy. Their speeches are, as a matter of necessity, mainly devoted to criticisms of Government methods and exposures of administrative abuses, and as the party includes the most powerful speakers in the Duma the attacks and exposures of the Cadets are as thoroughly effective as speeches can be which year after year find the same abuses to attack, unmodified and unmitigated. * The Cadet Party has had a strange history. Formed at the *"" end of 1905, through the fusion of the Zemstvo Constitution- alists with leaders of the professional classes in the towns, it drafted a programme of democratic and constitutional reform which attracted for it wide sympathy. The party was admirably organised, established branches in all parts of the Empire, had its programme translated into all the languages of the Empire, and secured a large majority in the elections to the First Duma. There was a moment when it seemed possible that Cadets would be summoned to form a Cabinet. But a lack of firmness in resisting the pressure of the more headstrong Labour and Socialist Left in the First Duma proved fatal. After the dissolution of the First Duma the Cadets took the leading part in the drafting of the Viborg Manifesto, which cannot now be justified on any political grounds. Many of the ablest members of the Party signed the Manifesto, and in consequence not only did they suffer three months' imprisonment, but what is much more serious, were permanently deprived of the franchise. This was the case with the veteran Zemstvo Constitutionalist, M. Ivan Petrunkevich of Tver, one of the most attractive figures in Russian public life, a man of profound Liberal principle and ripe experience, and a courageous assertor of constitutional principles during the long period of reaction
7— (2400)
88 Russia of the Russians
in the eighties and nineties. This was the case, too, with M. Nabokov, the son of one of Alexander H's ministers, whose eloquence and business capacity as displayed in the First Duma, seemed to give promise of an exceptionally distinguished political career. And this was the case with scores of others who signed the appeal.
The party became the object of unremitting Government hostilities. It was refused official authorisation. Its meetings were declared illegal, its organisation, as far as possible, broken up. It has not held a congress for years. In the Second Duma it again secured a majority, including such able men as MM. Maklakov and Struve, but the change in the Electoral Law in 1907 robbed it of its preponderance of voting power, and it came up to the Third Duma a comparatively small group to face a strong majority which was favourable to the Government. At present the Cadet deputies are returned chiefly by the cities and large towns. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow return Cadets, and there are a few Cadet representatives from the rural districts.
The leader of the Cadets, M. Paul Miliukov, has set the stamp of his personality very strongly upon the party. Born somewhere over fifty years ago, educated in Moscow, he became a lecturer in history in the Moscow University, and published a number of valuable works on Russian History. He was popular as a lecturer, but was frequently harassed by the police on account of his liberal views, and was compelled to give up his post at the University. In the nineties the young Principality of Bulgaria invited him to organise the State College of Sofia on University lines, and in Sofia M. Miliukov spent several years making that thorough study of the Balkans which afterwards made him the most competent authority on Balkan politics amongst Russian public men. Returning to St. Petersburg he for some years led the life of a litterateur, took part in the Liberal movement, was a prominent member of the Liberation League, the leaders of which were the Zemstvo Constitutionalists, and on returning
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 89
from Chicago, where in 1905 he gave a series of lectures on the Russian crisis, he threw himself into the work of politically organising the professions in the towns and linking up these new professional unions with the Zemstvo Liberal organisa- tions. He was one of the chief initiators of the Constitutional Democratic Party which was founded in Moscow at the moment of the promulgation of the Constitution. He was not a member of the First or Second Dumas, though he was constantly active behind the scenes. In 1907 he was elected member for St. Petersburg by a heavy vote, and retained his position at the elections to the Fourth Duma. The general tactics of the Cadet Party were largely determined by his influence, and for the last few years he has steadily borne the brunt of the parliamentary conflict as Opposition leader in a time of reaction. ' M. Miliukov has a capacity for work and a tenacity of purpose exceptional among Russian public men, and therein lies his strength as a leader. He is an intelligent with no experience in affairs except what he has gained in recent years, and this explains to a considerable extent both his defects and his qualities. He has a wide knowledge of European politics, and is an able and resourceful speaker. The mistakes he makes — serious ones, sometimes at critical moments — are those that academic men do make when they overreach themselves in trying to be practical. But M. Miliukov's most characteristic and admirable feature is a sort of downright doggedness. Guchkov and Miliukov, the chief rival party leaders of the present period, are much less unlike than differences in tactics and in views on current question make them seem. They both have a large share of that hard bedrock sense which may be distinctly Muscovite, and has at any rate meant a great deal in the process of Russian state-building.
Other leading members of the Cadet Party in the Duma are M. Vasili Maklakov, a Moscow lawyer, brother of the present Minister of the Interior, the most talented, logical and forceful speaker in the House, whose speeches are always
90 Russia of the Russians
looked forward to as an event ; M. Rodichev, a Zemstvo worker from Tver, and a fiery and passionate orator upon whose talent the years in the heavy atmosphere of the Third Duma have had a depressing effect ; M. Shingarev, a Zemstvo doctor from Voronezh, who in the course of a few years of hard work in the Duma has gained an expert know- ledge of Imperial finance ; and the Secretary of the Second Duma, M. Chelnokov of Moscow. The Cadet Party is the best disciplined in the House. > The Labour Party, which was so strongly represented in ' the First and Second Dumas, has constituted in the Third and Fourth an insignificant group with no leaders to com- pare with Zhilkin, Aladin and Anikin, who enjoyed such authority in the First Duma.
The Social Democrats number about twenty, of whom several are working men. They deny the legislative value of the Duma as at present constituted, and use its tribune as a medium for protesting against the present regime, but by the mere habit of constantly partaking in its sittings they are imper- ceptibly drawn into legislative work like their enemies the reactionaries at the opposite end of the Chamber. In spite of their small numbers and their lack of good speakers — M. Chheidze, a Georgian from the Caucasus, is the best — they succeed in maintaining a very consistent protest. In doing so they are aided by the Social Democratic organisations outside the Duma, which, in defiance of police restrictions and repression, carries on a persistent agitation amongst the working-men, and keeps two little papers going in spite of daily fines.
Party lines are sharply drawn in the Duma, and members / of different parties rarely associate. The Committees form more or less neutral ground where deputies frequently sink their differences, and where they rub shoulders with the representatives of the bureaucracy who come down to give explanations on budget questions and on various Government bills. In the committees, the deputies study the complex
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 91
technique of administration and learn the workings of the bureaucratic machine. They are frequently enabled in this way effectively to oppose abuses, but often the bureaucratic spirit penetrates the committees and gently subdues those deputies who do not possess great force of character. It is strange to watch the process of the gradual bureaucratisation of the Duma through the committees. With the members of the Right, and even of the Centre, there was no difficulty, because a great many of them were bureaucrats by training and had simply retired from the service to become deputies. And on the left the mere depressing routine of the Duma, the impossibility of maintaining close contact with the coun- try, and the necessity of constantly breathing the atmos- phere of bureaucratic St. Petersburg has a devitalising and assimilative effect.
And yet the Duma is a pledge of progress. Its sittings are public, and are reported daily in all the newspapers of the Empire. The constant discussion of administrative questions has a broadly educative value. Every year the budget is discussed in detail, and the public has grown familiar with its main features and with the chief abuses that need remedying. The Duma has the right of questioning ministers on matters that call for protest. All parties frequently avail themselves of this privilege, and ministers are compelled to come down to the House to give explanations, the verdict of the Duma on which has a certain moral effect. An enormous amount of time is wasted on bills of minor importance, on such matters, for instance, as the employment of an additional postal official in Harbin, matters that might be relegated to the competence of some local body. But the Duma tries to promote reforms, to amend Government bills, to embody in law some of the constitutional principles. Only here its efforts are perpetually thwarted. The Upper House, the Council of the Empire, is a stronghold of the bureaucracy, and effectively blocks any measures that are disagreeable to the Government.
92 Russia of the Russians
The Council of the Empire is an interesting institution, much more interesting in many ways than the Duma. Be- fore the Constitution this Council had existed
aPtL^E***^ *or nearty a hundred years as a kind of con- clave, an advisory assembly of the highest legal authorities of the bureaucracy established for the pur- pose of drafting laws which the Monarch might, or might not, confirm at his pleasure. All the highest dignitaries of the Empire were there, ministers and ex-ministers, retired am- bassadors, generals, admirals, and administrators of various categories. Of the Council of the Empire in its pre-consti- tutional form the artist Riepin has painted a striking and characteristic picture, which now hangs in the Alexander III Museum in St. Petersburg. With the promulgation of the Constitution and the establishment of the Duma, the Council was reformed. Half of the members are appointed by the Emperor as before, and the other half by the clergy and various public institutions, such as provincial assemblies of the gentry, Zemstvos, industrialists' associations, and learned bodies. There are two hundred members in all. The Council meets in the Marie Palace, near St. Isaac's Cathedral, in a lofty, well-like hall, of scarlet and gleaming white, lighted from above. The President is seated high up on a command- ing dais, and, looking down from the visitors' gallery one sees, far below, long rows of bald heads reposing in capacious arm-chairs. The party divisions roughly correspond to those in the Duma. There is a reactionary Right, a Conservative Centre, and a numerically inconsiderable Left composed of Cadet and Progressist professors and Zemstvo men. The Bureaucracy is safe here, for, not to speak of the appointed members, the greater proportion of the elected members are connected with the Bureaucracy by the most intimate ties. There is nothing here of the restlessness and nervousness of the Duma. There is an impressive dignity of deportment, an atmosphere of grave authority, a scrupulousness in the observance of formalities. Noisy declamation is frowned on.
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 93
All these elderly councillors, with years of experience behind them in the chancelleries and in the provinces, have a fine sense of the gradations of rank and authority, and are pre- pared at any moment, at the bidding of authority, to abandon their own carefully considered views. There are many able men in the Council, and their judgment on points of law and administration is often singularly valuable. Some of the speeches in the Council attain a high level of oratory. Original views are presented with exceptional cogency, subtlety of argument, and wealth of illustration. Only the net result of these stately debates is that reforms are simply decorously buried. The Council may waver and, on occasion, indulge in a mild flutter of opposition to the Government, but in the end it nearly always does as the Government wishes it to.
There is no better place than the Council of the Empire for studying the psychology of the Bureaucracy and the lingering Byzantine conceptions of authority. Complicated intrigues are carried on here, intrigues against the Cabinet, or between rival members of the Cabinet, intrigues that are played with great resource and a fine calculation of means and ends, and, above all, of the safety of the players. There is close contact between the Council and the Court. The Ministers are members of the Council and vote there. Official connection with the Duma is maintained by a Commission of Agreement, the object of which is to reconcile the different views of the two Houses on bills under debate. A loose, irregular and unofficial connection with the Lower House is maintained by the members of various parties, but the Council's persistent blocking of reform bills has created an antagonism between the Upper House and the majority of the Duma. The Council of the Empire carries on its business so quietly that the general public is almost oblivious of its existence. Two names in the Council of the Empire are widely known to the outside world. These are Count Sergius Witte and the present Premier, M. Kokovstev.
94 Russia of the Russians
Count Witte, on whose urgent advice the Emperor pub- lished the Constitutional Manifesto, has since the opening of
the First Duma, ceased to take a prominent
Count Witte. part in public life. There was a time when
many were disposed to regard him as a very big man indeed, or, at any rate, as a man born under the bright star of power. The son of an official in Tiflis, educated in Tiflis and Odessa, he grew up on the outskirts of the Empire in a kind of colonial atmosphere, where Russian life was new, little hampered by tradition, rough and ready, devoted frankly to money-making. And if the circumstances of Witte's upbringing imbued him with strong business leanings of a very modern type, his years of service in the South Western Railways added to his taste for figures and the rapid movement of commercial enterprise, a Tceen interest in steel and iron with all their manifold applications, in a word, in modern industry. When he came in the nineties to St. Petersburg, his remarkable business ability attracted attention, and as Minister of Ways and Communications, and afterwards as Minister of Finance, he very energetically, and with little regard for tradition, applied modern business principles to the task of bureaucratic Government. He did his utmost, in fact, to modernise the bureaucracy, to bring it up to date, almost to Americanise it. He did succeed in effecting some very valuable financial reforms. He fixed the gold standard of the currency, and established a gold reserve in the Imperial Bank. He built a number of railways, including the Trans-Siberian, and by forcing on railway con- struction so that the great metallurgical works should never lack Government orders for railway material, and by main- taining in vigour a high protective tariff he tried to promote the development of industry in Russia. Witte was a man of big plans, big schemes, but the very bigness of Russia, the very vastness of the field before him caused him to forget the distinction between political and industrial enter- prise. And when the inflated Manchurian schemes led to
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 95
catastrophe abroad and grave internal disturbances, Witte perceived that the process of modernisation had not gone far enough, and he came home from America, the country of big business enterprise, with the conviction that a constitu- tion was necessary. Then, when all the railways he had built stopped running, he succeeded in inducing the Emperor to promulgate a constitutional manifesto. For a time this big, very Russian-looking man, with the masterful manner, tried to apply business principles in the administration of the Constitution — there was a curious scent of business in the air in those early constitutional days — but he missed his way and somehow lost his footing. Probably the years during which, in spite of all his innovations, he had steadily adapted himself to the bureaucratic system, had made him too much of a bureaucrat after all. The glow of his sudden popularity faded during the winter of repression that followed on"* the constitutional edict, and the First Duma forgot all about him. Witte acted thenceforth quietly as a member of the Council of the Empire, only rarely emerging into prominence. For several years he felt the effects of the revulsion of feeling at Court against the Constitution. The reactionaries for long bitterly attacked him as a traitor to the Monarchical principle on the ground that he had misled the Emperor in inducing him to sign the Constitutional Manifesto. Witte waited, and then, at the first convenient opportunity, subtly affirmed in the Council of the Empire his devotion to the Autocracy, cautiously disavowed Con- stitutionalism, and little by little made good his position amongst the reactionaries. He was suspected of intriguing against Stolypin in 1909 and 1911, and there were vague rumours of a possibility of his being again called to power. In any case he was restored to favour after his professions of devotion to the Autocracy, and during the last few years, he has several times been received at Court. Perhaps as the wheel of fortune turns around he may again at some critical moment be made Premier. For the present he
96 Russia of the Russians
remains a problematical figure in the background, an obscure reminder of great possibilities unfulfilled for lack of sheer consistency of purpose, of firmness of political principle, and of the finer forms of perception. His personal ambition was never absorbed in a glowing ardour of national renewal which might of itself have shown the right way and led Witte to real greatness.
The present Premier and Minister of Finances, M. Kokov- stev, is a man of a very different type. In appearance he
differs strikingly from Witte. Witte's bulky M. Kokovstev. figure would overshadow M. Kokovstev,
who is of less than middle height, and while Witte's whole bearing is suggestive of careless enterprise, M. Kokovstev's trim figure and neatly-clipped beard bespeak the methodical and circumspect mind. M. Kokovstev was born in the government of Novgorod/ which has lost every vestige of its ancient democratic tradition, and has practi- cally become a suburb of St. Petersburg. He has spent his whole life in the St. Petersburg Chancelleries, has steadily climbed rung after rung of the bureaucratic ladder, and acquired a thorough knowledge of the finances of the Empire, and since 1906 has been a shrewd, economical, and invariably optimistic Minister of Finance. He imperturbably negotiates loans in Paris, and with equal imperturbability defends article after article of his Budgets in the Duma. He speaks quietly, in rounded periods, frames his arguments, as he has for years been accustomed to frame them, in innumerable official reports, never hesitates for a word, never displays excessive emotion, rarely appeals to the emotions of his hearers. Once in a Duma speech he unexpectedly let fall a phrase, " Thank God ! we have no Parliament," which aroused great indignation among the deputies, evoked a protest from the speaker, M. Homiakov, and for a time secured for M. Kokovstev the reputation of a reactionary bureaucrat who desired the abolition of Constitutional Govern- ment. The phrase was, however, due to a misunderstanding,
11. VLADIMIR KOKOVSTEV IFrtsident of the Council of Ministers)
©
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 97
and all that M. Kokovstev intended to say was that the parliamentary system under which ministers were respon- sible to the Representative Assembly does not prevail in Russia. On the whole M. Kokovstev is believed to be cau- tiously progressive rather than reactionary in his views. But he is not a strong personality, and secures his ends rather by discreet self-effacement than by vigorous insistence on his own point of view. He certainly does not pursue either the policy of general repression, or the aggressive policy in regard to the non-Russian nationalities with the same energy as his predecessor. Even apart from differences of tempera- ment there is a difference between the position of M. Kokov- stev and that of M. Stolypin which largely accounts for certain divergences in their respective policies. While Stolypin as Premier retained the post of Minister of the Interior, M. Kokovstev retains as Premier the post of Minister of Finances and leaves the Ministry of the Interior to others. Under the pre-constitutional regime the Ministry of the Interior, which has under its control governors, police and gendarmerie, that is, the greater part of the machinery of administration, and practically all the machinery of oppression, was the most powerful of all. In a conflict between M. Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, and M. Witte, the Minister of Finances, Plehve easily defeated his opponent, in spite of the latter's greater positive services. With the union of all the Ministers in a Cabinet or Council of Ministers, the chief power was formally placed in the hands of the President or Premier. But the old rivalry between the Ministries continued, and the Ministry of the Interior gradually recovered its influence and power. M. Durnovo, as Minister of the Interior in M. Witte's Cabinet, by his repressive policy succeeded in putting Witte completely in the shade. Stolypin, by retaining in his hands the Ministry of the Interior after he had become Premier, united with the formal authority implied in the Premiership the real power accruing from direct control over the machinery of the administration and repression. And it
98 Russia of the Russians
was this circumstance that for a time made his position a peculiarly strong one, though in the end it involved him in a network of tragic contradictions. M. Kokovstev as a Pre- mier occupying the post of Minister of Finance is naturally disposed to regard the whole task of Imperial administration from the financial and economic rather than the police point of view, and so to exercise on the whole a moderating and restraining influence. There has been no actual change of policy during his premiership, but perhaps there has been a change of tone.
Outside the Duma and the Council of the Empire there is little political life in the country except at election times. The only parties that had strong political organisations were the Cadets and Social Democrats, but the Social Democratic organisation has been persecuted out of visible existence, while that of the Cadets has been rendered largely ineffective by police repression. Members of the Duma rarely receive police permission to address their constituents, and members of the Centre and the Right hardly ever display a desire to do so. Ministers naturally never dream of stumping the country. It is only through the Press reports of the Duma debates that the country is kept in touch with the political life of the capital.
The political situation created by the curious combination of a bureaucracy with a representative assembly is full of difficulties, but also full of very interesting possibilities. The country is awake, is growing rapidly, has suddenly deter- mined to be modern. The mental awakening and the economic boom have set the Empire definitely in the path of progress. One may hope that the pursuit of this path may be as painless as possible. But the Russian people has learned, during its historical development, deep lessons of patience and suffering. It was not born for facile victories.
CHAPTER III
THE PRESS
The condition of the Russian Press is conspicuously illustra- tive of the transition period through which the Empire is
now passing. The Press is not free. It is The Press. still subjected to a variety of harassing re- strictions. But it is freer than it was eight or nine years ago. Words that in 1904 were rigorously banned by the censor are now in daily use in newspapers of all shades. Opinions that until recently were regarded as seditious have now become mere unexciting commonplaces in the articles of hack journalists. Public criticism of the Administration is now permitted within certain limits. The discussion of home and foreign politics is conducted in the capitals with a lati- tude that renders possible a tolerably adequate statement of the pros and cons. Public opinion does now find expression to a considerable degree in the Press. There are risks, it is true. A responsible journalist must have a very keen per- ception of what is and what is not likely to bring down on his paper severe penalties from the authorities. But it is no longer necessary — in the capitals at least — to resort, as in old days, to innuendo or to quaint paraphrase in order to describe events that are of everyday occurrence in Western Europe. In 1904, for instance, it was considered a very daring feat when a Liberal paper in humorous verse des- cribed the approach of a railway train bringing a lady named " Ko," which, as the readers were supposed to understand, meant " Constitution." The word constitution is now re- iterated a hundred times daily in various Russian organs and arouses no emotion whatever, except one of vague disappointment.
The position of the Russian Press has undergone many changes during the turmoil of the last few years. Until October, 1905, the preventive censorship was in force.
99
100 Russia of the Russians
Every number of a newspaper had to be submitted to a censor before publication, and the number could only be issued after the censor had erased whatever seemed to him objectionable. The opinion of the authorities constantly varies as to the limits of the permissible. A wide range of questions of burning interest might at any moment be declared unsuitable for treatment in the Press. Editors spent the midnight hours in tedious bargaining with censors over words and phrases. Sometimes the dispute would extend to more general topics, and the censors themselves would often un- expectedly express radical views. One night, in 1905, a tired and yawning editor was astonished to hear his censor — who happened to be particularly meticulous in his criticism — declare himself a Tolstoyan.
To evade the censor's red pencil skilful circumlocution was necessary. The phrase " legal order " did duty for " con- stitutional government." The words " socialism " and " socialist " were banned, but " Marxism " and " Marxist " were often allowed to pass. Opinions that could be freely expressed in a book of over 300 pages were sternly prohibited in newspapers. It was difficult for a press opposed to the bureaucracy to exist at all. That certain Liberal organs were allowed to exist was a concession to that modern spirit which the bureaucracy could not wholly ignore. And the appearance of several new Liberal organs in 1904 and 1905 was in itself an indication that the war and the internal unrest of those years had opened the eyes of the Govern- ment to the necessity of making concessions to public opinion. The growth of the Liberal Press, in fact, ran parallel with the steady multiplication of Government promises of reforms.
The Constitutional Manifesto of October 30, 1905, pro- claimed the principle of liberty of the Press. For forty days — -from November 4 till December 15 — the Press did actually enjoy complete liberty. Editors simply ignored the censors, and no one interfered with them. Opinions of every kind were expressed with absolute freedom, and in the strongest
The Press 101
language. A large number of new organs — mostly of a socialistic character — appeared, and views that it had been until then possible to express only in revolutionary organs published abroad and smuggled across the frontier were enunciated with great force and emphasis in organs like the Social Democratic Novaia Zhizn that were sold daily in hundreds by elated newsboys on the Nevsky Prospect. Re- strictive regulations were published on December 7, and again in March, and from the beginning of December on- wards papers were constantly confiscated or suspended. But in spite of this renewal of administrative rigour, the Press continued to display great boldness. Newspapers were widely and eagerly read. New organs sprang up like mushrooms. Hundreds of educated and half-educated men and women flocked into journalism. The period from Octo- ber, 1905, until the dissolution of the first Duma in June, 1906, was the hey-day of the Russian Press. In comparison with the liberty enjoyed then, the present state of the Press seems like a return to bondage. It is liberty only if compared with the pre-constitutional period.
If the position of the Press were determined only by the Provisional Regulations published in December, 1905, and March, 1906, Russian journalists would have comparatively little to complain of. The preventive censorship is abolished, Censors still exist, however, under another name. They are now called Press Inspectors, and Censorship Committees are known as Committees for the