Chapter III: Lack of Russian Unity

It is well to remember that the anarchist bias inherent in the Russian race has never been uprooted nor even systematically countered. The bulk of the people are hardly any better equipped for the life-struggle than they were in the days when the Mongols of the Golden Horde held sway among them and compelled their princes to lick horses' slaver.

One of the most powerful engines for preparing, maturing, and consummating the politico-social cataclysm was the university, together with the numerous tag-rag and bobtail of loosely-thinking, wildly-speaking humanity that centred around it. I had the honour to be a member of one of the foremost Russian universities and observed this puissant influence at close quarters. The university is essentially a western institution specially adapted to the requirements of western youth reared according to certain traditions and indoctrinated with certain beliefs. Transplanted to Russian soil the university brought forth unfamiliar--Dead Sea--fruit. And it could not well be otherwise. The Russian student was at bottom one of those peasants whose qualities and defects I have just been endeavouring to outline. Endowed with marvellous receptivity, a hypercritical cast of mind, impatience to learn everything, combined with insuperable sloth and infirmity of purpose, he was filled with awe for science, took for granted western theories, principles, and ideas, and applied them as standards of comparison to the institutions and doctrines of his own country. Capable of a passion for the abstract he worshipped western science, or rather pseudo-science which he understood more easily, as a tribesman on the shores of Lake Baikal worships his fetish. For synthesis, for constructive work, he lacked the materials, the training, and the capacity.

{27}

These young men, most of whom never completed the high-school curriculum, were turned loose upon the country to sow seeds of discontent and rebellion whithersoever they went. Looking around him the student perceived the vast contrast between the western principles which he revered as dogmas and those that underlay the odious ordering of things in the Tsardom. And his soul revolted. In economics no law was respected. There was no consideration for the peasantry on whom the dead weight of the Empire pressed. The masses were kept not only without political rights but in utter ignorance of the circumstance that they had any claim to them. And the embargo was issued with wanton cynicism. The peasantry was no more than a wealth-creating machine for the behoof of the ruling class, and the rulers took so little thought even of their own less pressing interests that they failed to keep the machine properly lubricated or in smoothly working condition. And everywhere the same piratical instincts of the autocracy and its instruments met the eye. When the student, who was himself a peasant and whose father and uncles and brothers were still on the land, had assimilated the doctrines of the west and transmuted them into a religious creed, his feelings towards the men and the institutions that had systematically violated them for centuries and had ground his own class in the dust were those of the religious fanatic who would fain condemn heresiarchs even on earth to the unimaginable tortures of eternal damnation. Nothing that the autocracy or its confederate, the bureaucracy, did was in his eyes other than a heinous sin. The administration was constitutionally incapable of a noble, a praiseworthy, or even a morally indifferent act.

That combination of the eastern political system with the scientific ideas and progressive principles of the west, working upon the Russian mind with its peculiar bent, produced the revolutionary spirit as inevitably as the mixing in certain proportions of charcoal, sulphur, and saltpetre produces gunpowder.

The intelligentsia had no roots in the people. Its members {28} were severed and sundered from it, but they resembled one of those preaching orders which were founded in the Middle Ages whose energy and success largely depended on their complete detachment from every class and concrete interest. The scraps of western theories and systems which they scattered broadcast over Russia about "the rights of man," the origins of autocracy, the only true basis of human society, the necessity of liberty of conscience as a correlate of personal responsibility, and other matters were totally ignored by the peasant and the merchant classes, but became a source of inspiration to individuals among them and served with frequent modifications as the revolutionary creed. The intelligentsia was the order from which two mutually hostile bodies were recruited, the apostles of revolution and the leavening elements of the bureaucracy. It was the intelligentsia who sowed the revolutionary seed and watered it. It was from their midst that schoolmasters and professors, physicians, men of letters, publicists, lawyers, were taken, most of whom contributed something to the general ferment. It was especially the publicists, journalists, and literary men who did most of the spade work and sowed the seed which at last sprang up in the shape of armed men. They dealt in abstractions, operated with western theories, transplanted fragments of Hegel, Marx, Kautsky, Mill, Buckle, to Russian soil and pushed each proposition to the Ultima Thule of its consequences. Although they belonged to different schools of thought they united for purposes of destruction. The Kadets, who deserved their reputation of being the best organised party in the Empire, had no firm hold on the nation because they were not of it; they could not place themselves at its angle of vision, were incapable of appreciating its world philosophy, were not rooted in the people. Hence they did not enlist the peasant or the working man in their party and stood only for themselves. When the tillers of the soil and the factory hands had each formed its own organisation, then the Kadets took them as allies. But an alliance may be abandoned at any moment, especially in Russia.

{29}

The dissolution of the Russian Empire may unmistakably be traced back to the shape definitely given to the Tsardom by its two eminent founders, Ivan and Peter. Its character, internal and external, was incompatible with its survival into a democratic era of European development. For internally it was a growing realm with serfdom for its groundwork, and even after the emancipation of the serfs it still remained in spirit what it so long had been in fact. The bulk of the population toiled and moiled for the privileged few and was treated as an inferior race, and was hindered systematically from rising as a class to the level of its rulers in any sphere. Externally it was a predatory society which looked for its present well-being and future prosperity to the triumph of force, and bent all its energies to the transformation of its resources into instruments of offence and defence. In a word the development of the Tsardom postulated a state of warfare with its neighbours and a condition of chronic artificial inequality among its own peoples, and all its arrangements, financial, economic, military, and political, were carefully accommodated to those two aspects. This was nothing new to the people who between the years 1228 and 1462 had waged ninety civil wars and a hundred and fifty-eight foreign campaigns.

Roughly speaking there are two main types of States which one may distinguish by the names European and Asiatic. The former may be said to concentrate its energies upon the ordering of domestic affairs for the behoof of the community. It creates efficient machinery for the purpose of maintaining order and insuring the safety of the person and of property, translates the customs formed by necessity, expediency, or taste into laws and institutions, and has for its real, as well as its ostensible, aim the general progress of the whole people. The Asiatic State on the other hand, solicitous chiefly about foreign wars and international relations, takes little thought about the internal arrangements of the nation, the training of upright administrators, the adjustment of institutions to the temper of the people and to the permanent conditions that govern their development, {30} and scorns to economise labour by distributing rôles and setting up appropriate organs to harmonise order and progress. Assuming that the international community lives and will continue to live in a state of latent or open war, one of its main objects is to conquer foreign territory and to exploit foreign peoples and countries. In essence this is the idea of Hohenzollern rule, but without its redeeming features of just administration, national education, and State encouragement to commerce, industry, literature, and art. It was in accordance with this simplicist conception that the Mongols of the Golden Horde, having subjected Russia, left things there just as it had found them, spending no thought on assimilation or denationalisation, contented with imposing a tribute on the defeated people and making the native prince their chief collector of that annual impost. The Turks in like manner when they annexed the territory they now occupy made no systematic endeavour to denationalise the natives or exercise permanent control over domestic affairs. In all such matters the people enjoyed a large measure of liberty and their conquerors exploited them economically. And the Russian State was modelled on the Asiatic.[1]

This had not always been the case. The first beginnings of the political community in Russia--during the eleventh and twelfth centuries when the tribes were homogeneous and purely Slavs--took place on European lines, and the Grand Dukes of Kieff were admitted into the family of the eastern emperors and the western kings. But in time Kieff[2] having been captured and destroyed the inhabitants of the Dnieper valley migrated to the north-east, intermarried with the Finnish nomads of the country between the Upper Volga and the Oka, and the resultant of the blend was the hybrid Great Russian race. To this day their characteristics are still imperfectly understood. It is not sufficiently borne {31} in mind that the Finns whom these Slavs from the south assimilated were nomads and what I should like to term a-political, that is, they evinced no desire or ability to form themselves into compact communities viable and self-defensive. At any rate one hears nothing of any states formed by them on the Volga. Personal interests, family feuds, fighting, hunting, trekking, and singing the legendary feats of great warriors and magicians would appear to have called forth and absorbed their energies. This impression is not materially altered by what we know of the development of the Finns in the one political society to which they have given their name. It is true that the principality of Finland was governed first by the Swedes and then by the Russians, and is only now become independent, and this condition of subjection may partly account for the fact that they left to the Swedes the task of carrying social and political progress a stage further. This spiritual leadership of the Scandinavian continued unbroken throughout the Russian domination.

The Tsar's rule over the principality was at first Asiatic in type in the sense that it abandoned to the people themselves the work and responsibility of administering their own affairs. But of the two races in the country only the Scandinavians bestirred themselves to some purpose. It was they who acted as cultural seed-bearers from the west to the north-east. When the Finnish nationalist movement started, some of the leading Swedes, in order to get more elbow-room for action, changed their Scandinavian names into Finnish equivalents as the Jews and the Germans do in Hungary, but the ethnic leaven still remained the same. Many years ago I had a long talk on this subject with the one statesman Finland produced, Mechelin, and he listened with interest, and I think I may add with acquiescence, to this view of the matter which I put before him in outline. Once the real Finnish democracy took or received freedom of action, after the fall of the Tsardom, any stirring of sound political sense or of organising capacity that may have been felt among the Finnish elements of the republic were lost {32} in the welter of anarchy that ensued. The great war put the political aptitudes of peoples and regimes to a severe test, and the surprises that have followed the ordeal are, to put it mildly, humiliating. It looks as though certain European peoples are constitutionally averse to social collectivity, and that force alone can keep them together.

It was with these a-political, nomadic Finnish tribes, then, that the Slav wanderers from the south intermarried, and it was from them that the new Russian people, which can hardly since then be regarded as Slav,[3] inherited some of their more striking traits. The invasion of the Tartars, who kept the country in subjection for two centuries, also made a noteworthy contribution to the influences that moulded the Russian people. It is true that the Khans who lived and ruled at a distance never meddled in the home concerns of their vassals, contenting themselves with a yearly tribute. But they left permanent representatives, listened to complaints made by one Russian prince against another, and encouraged secret intrigues. It was during this long servitude that the people became past masters in guile, trickery, intrigue, bribery, and all the tactics of the weak who have to defend themselves against the strong. It was during this period that the Moscow princes familiarised themselves with the Tartar type of State and imbibed its spirit of conquest without, its scorn for a living elastic organisation within to preside over and shape general progress on pacific lines. And Ivan III. embodied these exotic ideas in the simple kind of community which he established. He beheaded all the Boyars who were obnoxious to him, broke the power of the class as a factor in the realm, incited one set of his subjects to decimate another, and confronted the benighted population with an absolute monarch whose behests and whims were carried out by a body of soldiers--_opritchina_--who shed the blood of proscribed individuals at the tyrant's nod.

Bound by oath to carry out all the monarch's commands the _opritchniki_ were an agency apart, whose interests were different from, nay, contrary to, those of the population. {33} That aloofness is expressed by the very name opritchina.[4] And that extra-national force contained the germs of the formidable army established later by Peter the Great, and also of the bureaucracy which this emperor modelled on his army. These are the institutions which imparted to the Russian State that peculiar character which has been unfolding itself to the eyes of a wondering Europe ever since. Even after the triumph of the Bolsheviki, whose doctrine is international pacifism, the relations of the State to the population remained what it had been under the Tsars, and Ivan's opritchniki were represented by Lenin's Red Guards.

Peter was unquestionably a political genius, but the material in which he worked, the mould fashioned by his predecessors, the pressure of foreign wars and internal troubles, and the manner of life he led made it impossible for him to delve deep enough into the political soil to lay the foundation of a new structure. He found the Asiatic type of State ready to his hand as it had been handed down by his predecessors, and he set himself to accommodate it to the changed requirements. That was all. Thus he perceived the necessity of a fleet and of a well-trained army and he provided both. He also grasped the need of a body of public servants who should keep the army and navy provided with necessities and should conduct the general business of the nation. And for his model he chose the most efficient bureaucracy of Europe--that of Prussia. But the predatory nature of Peter's Tsardom cannot be disputed. He equipped it with new and temporarily effective organs, strove to modernise its administration, and brought it formally into line with its neighbours. But he left the essence of the old Asiatic State intact. Peter's way of grafting the new bureaucratic institution on the State resembled that of the Slavs of Novgorod who in the ninth century despatched an embassy to the Varangers inviting them to come and put things in order and rule in Russia. Peter likewise turned to the west, employed foreigners wherever he could, and in {34} particular favoured Germans whose capacity for organisation he appreciated.

From those days onward, the Germans played a predominant part in the Russian civil administration, in the army and navy, at the court, in schools and universities, in science and letters, in journalism, in trade and industry, everywhere, in a word, except in the Church. They have often been accused of acquiring the defects of the Russians and of contributing to demoralise these. It is true that like the Russians they did not scruple to cheat the treasury when opportunity offered, but justice compels one to add that they had at least a certain sense of measure which the Russian bureaucrat too often lacked. They sometimes appropriated funds, but generally limited the sums to their actual needs instead of making them commensurate with their grandiose opportunities. They served their Russian sovereign loyally, favoured men of their own race and religion, and stamped a Teuton impress on most things in the Tsardom. In the army, in the navy, in the administration of provinces, in the central ministries, in the schools and universities, on the estates of the great landowners, at the head of factories, on the boards of companies and banks, in apothecaries' shops and bakeries--were Germans. Whithersoever you went the majority of the men who transacted Russia's business, public and private, had German manners, spoke the German tongue; one must also confess that on the whole they did not disappoint the expectations of the Tsars who favoured and protected them.

Alexander III. was not of this number. From the line followed by his predecessors he swerved perceptibly. He entertained a dislike for the Teutons and, indeed, for all foreigners. For he was a nationalist and held that orthodoxy, pan-slavism, and autocracy constitute the trinity, belief in which would one day raise the Russian people to the highest pinnacle of glory, and that no foreigner could worship at its shrine. Hence he withdrew many of the privileges theretofore enjoyed by his German and other non-Russian subjects. It has been alleged that his excellent intentions {35} led to disastrous results, that the Russification of the national services was far from being a benefit, was, in fact, a serious disadvantage, not only to the civil administration, but also to the army and the navy. This contention has been so lately put forward that the materials for dealing with it decisively are not yet available.

Thus the builders of the State, famous and obscure, stamped the Tsardom with the impress of Asia, infused into the organism they were forming a predatory soul, and accustomed it to look for honour, glory, and even the satisfaction of growing economic needs to territorial expansion at the cost of its neighbours. They poured around those who thought, spoke, and acted for the community an atmosphere that warped their judgment and obscured all issues alien to the only kind of progress which they were capable of appreciating. The standards by which they gauged international and national situations and crises, and the principles by which they shaped their foreign relations, were adjusted to the ideals set before the community at its origin. This direction, long ago imposed upon the main current of national life, continued down to the reign of Alexander I. when for the first time it was slightly checked by economic forces pressing upon the population at home and cutting the tether which had fastened the peasants to the soil. But the spirit persisted even then, and the Slavophil party with Aksakoff at its head, which gradually drove Alexander's pacific government into war with Turkey, was undoubtedly the true exponent of "Russia's" aspirations. For the political community under the Tsar, like that of Athens or Sparta in the days of Plato or Pausanias, was restricted to the privileged minority of the population, and extended only to a fraction of these. In these circumstances every one of Russia's public men gifted with real vision, whose political energies were suffused with the "national" spirit, took refuge from insoluble internal problems in venturesome foreign enterprises. That was the mainspring of Plehve's eagerness to launch out into a war against Japan, and of Sazonoff's reluctance to allow Austria-Hungary to elbow his {36} country out of the Balkan Peninsula, of Pobiedonostseff's curtailment of religious liberty, of the educational limitations introduced by Tolstoy, of Vyshnegradsky's exploitation of the peasantry, of the financial system based on the inebriety of the people. The policy of all these statesmen, however opposed it might seem to reason, stood rooted in the deepest sentiment of the articulate community and harmonised with the spirit infused into it by its celebrated founders. The almost unflinching persistence of the different governments in this predatory line of action suggested to foreign observers two absurd legends, one respecting the deep and far-reaching vision of Russian statesmanship deliberately concentrating its attention and its energies upon a remote aim, and the other respecting an imaginary testament of Peter the Great enjoining on his successors the steady expansion of the Empire at the cost of its weaker neighbours. In truth the ministers who transacted Russia's foreign business from Peter's death down to the deposition of Nicholas II. were, with the sole exception of Witte, very humdrum bureaucrats who themselves were borne along on the unseen current that moved beneath the surface of events. This a-moral system, which differed considerably for the worse from the Prussian, had one vulnerable point through which the Tsardom was bound to be hit mortally in the course of time and most automatically by the mere progress of European civilisation. The ethnic fragments and the Russian classes and masses instead of being fused were, as we saw, very loosely bound together with military withes by the State. Cut these withes and the seemingly compact bundle falls to pieces. And the adoption of western institutions would necessarily sever these ties and break up the Empire. That was the ever-present danger which waxed more and more imminent and menacing as time went on and the joists and girders of the days of yore showed signs of giving way. Some of the rulers perceived it clearly; others felt it instinctively. A few were for borrowing props and supports from the west; others for fortifying the ancient structure congruously with the style of architecture in which it was {37} built. But the fatal outcome of these alternating expedients was discernible, was in fact perceived by Witte, the one commanding statesman possessed by Russia since the days of Peter.

Autocracy was as much a religion as a political system. Rooted in theocracy it claimed to regulate life as a whole, taking in every one of its needs and faculties. Therefore, it held together and could not be divided into political, economic, and religious parts. To swerve from it in one particular was to break with all. This master fact was at the root of Pobiedonostseff's policy. None the less Alexander I. was at one time prepared to introduce liberal institutions on the advice of his minister Speransky. But later on more logical spirits like Pobiedonostseff and his fellow workers would fain have it fenced in by coercive legislation. To them it was evident that so long as the bureaucracy ruled there was no room in the country for any other influential institution. Moreover, any liberal institutions accorded to the nation would constitute an irresistible lever in the hands of the non-Russian nationalities, such as the Poles, the Germans, the Lithuanians, the Finns, whose culture was superior to that of the ruling race. On the other hand pressure of all kinds was rendering a modernisation of the State a necessity. Between Scylla and Charybdis a middle course, proposed years before by the eminent Moscow journalist Katkoff, was struck out and certain western institutions were accorded to the population of central Russia but refused to the more advanced inhabitants of the borders. Nay more, many of the rights which these had theretofore enjoyed were withdrawn from them. This sorry pettifogging merely served to disclose the straits to which the autocracy was reduced.

The first Alexander's innovations were symptomatic rather than real, and their visible sign was the Council of the Empire--a legislative body appointed by the Tsar to study, recommend, and draft bills which the monarch vetoed or ratified at will. It was the substitute devised at the eleventh hour for a legislative chamber which the Tsar had {38} contemplated introducing. His successor, Nicholas I., felt the urge of economic needs and might, had he lived, been forced to set the serfs at liberty as a mere matter of material interest, but the reform was reserved for Alexander II. As soon as this potentate had emancipated the serfs, as the first of a series of reform measures, the inevitable happened: autocracy as represented by the central authorities lost its grasp of the reins of power which fell into the hands of a myriad of obscure and irresponsible individuals throughout the Empire, and the framework of the State became top-heavy.

That courageous act let loose a number of ethnic forces by which in time a new Russia or rather several new Russias were imperceptibly fashioned. The nuclei of the new entities were formed by the freed peasants, their ecstatic worshippers among the "intellectuals," and by the non-Russian nationalities who eagerly joined in the subdued agitation against an obsolete and oppressive regime. In the ensuing semi-articulate demand for the abolition of the autocracy--though not perhaps for all that it connoted--progressive Russians were at one with Poles, Jews, Armenians, and Moslems. The German element alone continued to do battle for Tsarism.

The relief accorded to the serfs made one far-reaching change in the administrative machinery: it removed the great landed proprietors, the nobility, from the position they had occupied theretofore in their collective capacities as intermediaries between the central government and the masses. That displacement called for a corrective, as otherwise the power once vested in the head departments would be scattered all over Russia and dissociated from responsibility. In the minds of Alexander II. and his principal advisers the correlate of his great reform was the extension of the powers of the newly created zemstvos, the forging of an organic link between them and the ancient institutions, and the creation of political representation. My former colleague and friend, Professor Maxim Kovalevsky, held that if those intentions had been carried out the Russian {39} mediæval State "would have been transformed" into one that harmonised with the requirements of modern civilisation. Perhaps it would, but only, I venture to hold, as a preliminary to the break-up of Russia. Kovalevsky himself admitted that the people of Russia were not ripe for such reforms as direct, equal, and universal suffrage. If then it had been established the State would have been dismembered by the centrifugal force of its nationalities which constituted 52 per cent. of the total population, whereas if it were withheld the effort to wrest it from the Government would have provoked coercion and revolution. Moreover, the bureaucracy was the backbone of the Russian State, and it brooked the creation of no institutions that could impair its influence or diminish its prestige. No one who saw deeply into the spirit of the Tsardom at any epoch of its existence could fail to perceive how difficult and dangerous it would have been to tackle the work of transforming it congruously with modern requirements. Witte might possibly have succeeded if he had been given a free hand, ample time, and especially if he had been allowed to begin under the reign of Alexander III.

The reform movement that now began was discreet and timorous by compulsion, but aggressive and intolerant wherever it had scope. It claimed the allegiance of every member of the intelligentsia in every walk of life and punished non-conformity wherever it manifested itself, not only in politics, but in literature, science, and art whither politics had to take refuge from persecution. He who was not with the Liberals was against them, and chastised accordingly. Some of the consequences of this absolutism were incongruous. A Congress of Physicians seriously declared in 1905 that medical men could not properly attend to their professional duties so long as the power of the autocrat was not limited. A municipality passed a resolution to the effect that the high mortality in southern Russia was a direct and inevitable result of the antiquated form of government. A congress of elementary school teachers laid it down that to teach reading and writing with success to {40} children was, and would continue to be, impossible until absolute government was abolished. On the other hand some of the men who earnestly desired to prolong the days of the Russian Empire, to revive its waning strength, to keep its ethnic elements and disparate classes together, turned to foreign battlefields in search of territorial expansion and distraction. Aksakoff, Pobiedonostseff, Plehve, Sazonoff, were all true representatives of Holy Russia. That instinct came from the deepest spirit of the men who had built up the Tsardom.

Witte's statesmanship differed widely from theirs. It may be described as a systematic endeavour to conciliate and satisfy the two tendencies, the democratisation of the regime and expansion abroad. Hence it was essentially synthetic. I think I am fairly interpreting my friend's central idea by likening it to that of Frederic when he proceeded to make Prussia thoroughly independent without and well compacted and united within. Witte himself never used any such ambitious comparison even when thinking aloud in my presence, but the likeness disengages itself automatically from much that he did say. In his confidential talks with me he often emphasised the remarkable fact that Russia occupied a place in the hierarchy of nations to which her specific gravity nowise entitled her. And if ever the discovery were made by the Kaiser, he added, its consequences might be calamitous. The Tsardom was weak, disunited, ready to explode into tiny fragments, and a campaign, especially against a power like Germany, would reveal this condition very quickly. Therefore it must be shunned--all wars must be shunned because of that fatal revelation to which they would lead. Russia's economic needs in the East could be provided for by pacific penetration and railway building, and her requirements in the West might best be supplied by a coalition with Germany, Austria, and France. Those being the great land powers, their interests could be made to run fairly parallel with each other, whereas those of Great Britain were often peculiar to herself alone. Still the object of the league would not be {41} war but a stable peace and no territorial changes were contemplated.

In the meantime he would have set about changing the domestic regime as radically as appeared feasible without provoking violent reactions.

Witte's method consisted of a series of economic, social, and political changes gradually adopted. For one thing he would have educated the entire people and endeavoured to qualify the State, or a department of it, to discharge the function of social direction. Why, he asked, were the Germans so much superior to their neighbours in general and technical education? Because of the solicitude of their rulers? Were their rulers distinguished from those of other people by their moral ideals? Nowise. But they had clearer vision, greater initiative, and were possessed of faith in the dogma that the destinies, if not the character, of men are modifiable without end by education, instruction, and social direction. He himself caused technical schools and colleges to be opened and endowed whenever and wherever it was possible.

Witte grasped the master fact that the emancipation of the serfs was the liberation of an elemental force which like fire or water must be kept under control if it is not to become destructive. He knew that it would entail a sequence of fateful innovations which according to the form imparted to them by the legislator might make or mar the Empire. He was eager, therefore, to produce a set of conditions, economic and political, in which the newly qualified elements of the community could grow and equip themselves morally and intellectually for the leading part they would one day be called on to play in Russia and perhaps in Europe. And he desired that the central authorities should be dispensed from the barren task of entering into the details of local needs. To say to the myriads of freed men as did Pobiedonostseff, Dmitry, Tolstoy, and Plehve, "Thus far and no further," smacked of the spells employed by the Boxers in China to prevent bullets from entering their bodies. The State must turn over a new leaf. Education was become a manifest necessity; it had been discouraged, penalised. {42} Political enfranchisement was a corollary of emancipation from serfdom. The press had been forbidden to discuss it. The initiation of the peasants into the duties of citizenship, into collective work carried on under personal responsibility, was a preliminary condition of national progress, but even to moot such an innovation has been punished as treason. At the very least freedom in the choice of means by which the emancipated millions might wish to satisfy their consciences and save their souls was a postulate of healthy, moral development, but not only was it persistently withheld from the _mooshik_, it was not accorded even to the intellectuals. The one was forced to remain in the State church because without compulsion the State church, now hardly more than a police department, might soon be devoid of a congregation, and the other were only permitted to choose between orthodoxy and atheism, and most of them chose atheism.

From this coercive system Witte turned away in angry disgust. With repression he had no sympathy. But his policy was inspired by considerations more respectable and more conducive to social well-being than mere personal likes or dislikes. He saw clearly the thinness of the bonds that held the various nationalities, and the various classes, and the populations of the various territories and climates together in a single community which had no common denominator, no point of convergence but a frail and irresolute monarch. Intuitively he gauged the force of the national bent towards territorial expansion, and by experience he knew that economic pressure would soon compel the rulers to choose between a series of reforms with which foreign conquests and even the perpetuation of the regime would be incompatible, and a system of coercion which would cause Russia to be outlawed by the nations of the world. And his way out of the difficulty, had he been authorised to take it, was to begin to introduce the most urgent reforms without delay, to place them once for all beyond the reach of the reactionary; to substitute law for caprice; to safeguard the liberty and cultivate the dignity of the individual; and parallel {43} with these measures to strengthen by legislation the levelling influence of the economic forces which his financial and industrial policy was rendering operative. Towards the non-Russian races, whose national spirit had been intensified and made aggressive by persecution, and who were now less likely than ever to coalesce voluntarily with the ruling people, he advocated a policy of generosity, a standing appeal to their nobler instincts and solidarity of interests. Thus he would have conciliated the Finns and quickened their advance along the road of civilisation. To the Poles he would have conceded a large measure of real autonomy. From the Jews he would have struck off their degrading fetters. The Armenians and all the other Caucasian peoples he would have left in peace. Lastly he would have striven to still the nation's greed for territorial aggrandisement by introducing intensive culture among the peasantry and thus removing one of its causes--dearth of land--by fostering Russian industries, and by opening vast new markets in the East for Russia's produce through railways and "peaceful penetration." That was the key to his grandiose schemes of railway building and also to his less commendable dealings with China. On those lines Witte's policy was laid. How he applied it to the grouping of powers, European and Asiatic, is another question with which I am not now concerned.

I do not for a moment suggest that Witte ever seriously approached this comprehensive problem of Russia's past in relation to her future as a whole. This would have been wasted effort in the reigns either of Alexander III. or Nicholas II., and he was not a man to throw away his time in unproductive speculation. But I know that some of its aspects were always before him and none of them was wholly missed. He had, however, greater and more numerous obstacles to surmount than any of his predecessors, not only because he was swimming against the main Russian stream, but also because his promotion to the highest position in the Empire drew upon him the opposition, the hatred, the calumnies, and the insidious machinations of a host of enemies to whom the last of the Tsars readily gave ear. {44} Under Alexander III. the great statesman was not permitted to venture even upon a temporary excursion into the domain of political reforms, and any headway he may have made in that direction was indirect. And to my knowledge Nicholas II. assured the chiefs of two States from whose lips I received the statement that he never from the first had the slightest confidence in Witte, never willingly gave him a free hand, nor trusted him as a public servant or a private individual.

I often told Witte that his hopes and aspirations were doomed to disappointment, and his natural sagacity made him aware of the fact. But he never wholly abandoned hope. He used to say that if Alexander III. had lived, or if his son Michael had succeeded him or were yet to come to the throne, much might be changed for the better and Russia's international position strengthened. My objection was that it was much too late. The Tsardom's sands were running down. And he sometimes agreed with me during those fits of dejection which often came over him of late years, especially after an animated talk with the Emperor or the discovery of a fresh intrigue against himself.

The thin flickering flame of democracy was fed with solid fuel when the army ceased to be professional. To my knowledge the significance and weight of this innovation as a factor in the destinies of Russia was not discerned at the time or since. Witte never once alluded to it. And yet, to my thinking, it imparted a tremendous impulse to the forces that first weakened and then broke up the Tsarist State, The professional army was a terrible weapon, an enlarged and perfected _opritchina_ whose units were just human enough to take and execute orders, but were machines in every other respect. A soldier served for a quarter of a century. When he donned the uniform he quitted not only his family but the civil community for good. He became a unit in an organism, a function. He was severed from the nation as were Ivan's opritchniki, tempered, trained, attuned to a life apart. Military discipline was as severe as it must have been in the days of Rameses of Egypt or Nabonassar of Babylon. Punishments were ferocious, fiendish. Soldiers {45} thus kneaded and moulded could do great things and did them. For they were soldiers and nothing more. They loved only to fight, and had ceased to be peasants once they joined the ranks. There were no reserve officers then. An officer had as little to do with the people as had the soldier. Neither officer nor private felt any solidarity with the people. But with the change of the system of recruitment, the whole character of the army changed and also its capacity for military achievement. Compare closely the wars of Peter, Catherine, Paul, Alexander I., and Nicholas I. with the Turkish war of 1877 and the Manchurian campaign of 1904-5 and the difference will stand forth in relief. That, however, was the only one and the least momentous consequence of the change.

The democratic method of universal and short service having been established the traits of the peasantry were transplanted to the army and navy: the querulous, critical, satirical vein, the lack of finality in obedience and in everything, the anarchic tendency in a word. And as time went on the efficiency of the Russian soldier diminished perceptibly. Their generals, too, seem to have remained below the former high standard. But what is more to the point, the old army of Nicholas I. would have interposed an impassable barrier to a popular revolution. Under Nicholas II. the March explosion would have been stifled if the army had been opposed to it. But the peasant army which was sent against the German invaders was not steeled like the warriors who had made Russia's name famous in the eighteenth and in the early days of the nineteenth centuries. They hated war, were impatient to return to their fields, and took the first opportunity--when capital punishment was abolished--to fling their rifles in the bushes and go back to their families. And when appealed to by their hungry brethren to turn their rifles against the authorities and to merit the long promised land, they hearkened to the call and exploded the legend of the Little Father.

Those were some of the remoter and deeper causes of the Russian revolution. Their force was enhanced by the {46} impolitic action of the Tsar's ministers in allowing the relations between the central authorities and the masses--now growing more conscious and exacting--to be broken by myriads of irresponsible and unscrupulous petty officials instead of charging the zemstvos and the municipalities with the work of carrying them on. For the scandalous improbity of these unjust stewards embittered the peasants and the workmen, fanned the embers of discontent, and materially aided the professional revolutionists of the intelligentsia. It was this enormous disadvantage of the autocracy and the instinct of self-preservation which it quickened that moved its champions to overstep all bounds and found an order of men for whose iniquity western languages have no adequate name--men who enlisted conspirators, hatched damnable plots, coaxed and paid young lads to execute them, and as opportunity served either seized these tools and sent them to death or looked on while they committed the wanton abominations assigned to them. Reading or hearing about the foul deeds of miscreants like Azeff, Gapon, and Rasputin, and of the torture and horrible deaths of their victims, I am reminded of the lines which the poet Swinburne wrote at my request on an article of mine about Russian prisons:

"Earth is hell, and hell bows down before the Tsar,
All its monstrous, murderous, lecherous births acclaim
Him whose Empire lives to match its fiery fame.
Nay, perchance at sight or sense of deeds here done,
Here where men may lift up eyes to greet the sun,
Hell recoils heart-stricken; horror worse than Hell
Darkens earth and sickens heaven; life knows the spell,
Shudders, quails, and sinks--or, filled with fiercer breath,
Rises red in arms devised of darkling death.
Pity mad with passion, anguish mad with shame,
Call aloud on justice by her darker name..."
_Fortnightly Review_, August, 1890, p. 166.

[1] Shtshedrin's satirical sketches throw a flood of light on the predatory nature of the Tsardom, and in particular one satire entitled _The Tashkentians_.

[2] In the year 1240.

[3] The White Russians are undoubtedly pure Slavs.

[4] Opritchnik means an outsider, an outlaw, one who keeps or is kept aloof.

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