Chapter IV: The Tsardom

Among all the odd freaks in the political domain, comparable, say, to the leaning tower of Pisa in the architectural sphere, the most amazing was the mighty Tsardom. For it was a synthesis of contradictories. A number of ethnic fragments without inner cohesiveness, with mutually conflicting tendencies, were loosely fastened together and wrought into a vast political organism. Out of a race prone to anarchy and devoid of political sense, an omnipotent bureaucracy was formed which claimed to regulate not only the business of the State, but the acts, the words, and the thoughts of the individual. Assuredly it was no small feat to knead a peasantry that loathes war and abhors discipline into one of the finest armies in Europe. Yet it was achieved by the Russian Tsars who preceded Alexander II. Viewed from without, the strong amalgam as contrasted with the smallness of its parts, suggested the pudding stone that consists of rounded pebbles embedded in flinty matrix. Contemplated from within, it might be likened to a political cord of sand, twisted by some mysterious spell. This rope of three strands, orthodoxy, autocracy, bureaucracy, or, as the Government put it, God, the Tsar, and the fatherland, with their army and bureaucracy, held together the mutually hostile elements of the Empire. And the strongest of the three was the bureaucracy which with its sixteen grades was created by Peter the Great after the Prussian model. Before it became a mere parasite, the bureaucracy democratised the nobility, ennobled individual peasants, and prepared the population for the action of the Church, thus enabling the Empire to attain high place in the hierarchy of nations. So powerful had this political entity grown by the middle of the eighteenth century that Catherine II. said, "If I could but reign two hundred years, all Europe would have to bend its neck {48} under the sceptre of Russia." Yet the bulk of Russians were confirmed pacifists and inarticulate anarchists. After the death of Nicholas I. the autocracy was never more than a name for a regime which, itself free from checks and independent of control, pressed heavily on the population and saddled one man with a-moral responsibility for decisions which he always lacked the data and often the will to take, while reducing him to the status of a figure-head.

The negative side of the Russian bureaucracy should not prevent us from seeing that it had a positive side as well, which was especially apparent when Peter first instituted it, or that the services it rendered to the country--in a clumsy, dilatory way--were real, and to a certain extent, educative. The wrench by which the imperial reformer dragged Russia from the deep rut into which she had fallen on to the highway of cultural progress unleashed powerful forces which might have shattered the State fabric but for the moderating action of the bureaucracy. It was the _Tshin_,[1] too, that brought out the constructive quality of Peter's measures and gave form to the rude ideas of justice and morality which assuredly underlay his fundamental innovation. The Russian bureaucracy, foredestined to become in time a huge vampire, was at first an imitation of the bureaucracy of Prussia which raised that country to the highest place among the military nations of the world by dint of its conscientious service and marvellous organising powers. The difference between these two institutions lay less in the designs of their founders, or in the form of their organisations, than in the nature of their respective materials and of the framework in which they were set. It is the difference between the conscientious, plodding, resourceful Prussian, and the easy-going moral, anarchic Russian. This difference, ever in evidence, has been brought into sharp relief since the bureaucracy vanished and the masses have had their innings. And one can well understand the fierce desire of those who lived through the months of terror of 1917, the details of which are too horrid to be even hinted at, to bring back {49} the old system or a derivative in order to recover the limited tranquillity which they once enjoyed without appreciating.

As for the Church, it was a mere museum of liturgical antiquities. Vladimir Solovieff used to liken it to a casket for an orient pearl whose lustre was dimmed by a thick crust of Byzantine dust. Its function in the State was never much more than that of a police department for the control of the kind of thought that is least open to regulation from without--that which speculates on problems of religion. The clergy, with the exception of a few self-mortifying anchorites and ascetics, were a body of social parasites, poor, squalid, grasping, and ignorant, their lives challenging and receiving alternate pity and contempt from the benighted flock whose shepherds they set up to be.

From the very outset the Russian Church was the repository of petrified forms to which a magic virtue was ascribed. No life-giving spirit ever animated that rigid body, for Byzance was powerless to give what it did not possess. How completely the spiritual energies of which a church is supposed to be the source were superseded by mechanical devices may be gathered from the well-attested fact--one of many--that the second Tsar of the House of Romanoff, Alexis Mikhailovitch, being a "truly religious monarch," was wont to bow down reverently before the holy images, his forehead striking the cold stone floor one thousand five hundred times every morning. Saintly prince!

The religion of the Russian people--indulgence towards the erring and fellow-feeling for the suffering--has always been so much more than the resultant of Christianity that I feel disposed to regard it as wholly independent of that doctrine. Many years ago I had warm discussions on this subject with Count L. Tolstoy, who then held that the common Russian at his best was a living illustration of the transformation miracle which Christianity, rightly understood, could work in the rawest ethnic material. Unable to endorse this thesis, I got together such cultural vestiges of Russia's pre-Christian era as were available, and also {50} certain other data, which in my judgment go to show that the Russians' religion--like that of other peoples--is very largely the outcome of that nethermost permanent soul-current which is the appanage of race. And I may add that, after a series of animated talks, Tolstoy admitted that my theory was quite tenable and offers, perhaps, the best explanation of all the facts.

How completely the soul and mind of the people were confined in the darkness and bereft of spiritual nutrition, especially since Boris Godunoff bound the peasant to the glebe, may be illustrated by a few concrete examples. There is an anecdote told of how Peter the Great, when in Copenhagen, ordered one of his subjects to throw himself from the top of a high tower there just to show his spirit of submission. But it is apocryphal. Another story, historically vouched for, depicts the great Tsar, whose curiosity knew no bounds, as requesting the Elector Frederick III. to give him an opportunity of seeing how a man behaved when broken on the wheel, and by way of simplifying matters he offered one of the members of his own suite for execution. The following is also an attested narrative of a scene enacted during a review of the recruits in Vilna, shortly before Nicholas II. came to the throne. I was in Russia at the time. "What is military discipline?" the commanding general asked one of the new soldiers. "It means, your Excellency, that a soldier has got to do exactly what his superior officer tells him, only nothing against the Tsar." "Right, and now let us work it out. Take your cap, bid farewell to your comrades, and go and drown yourself in the lake there. Look sharp!" Tears glistened in the poor fellow's eyes, he gazed prayerfully at his commander, turned suddenly right about, made a dash for the lake, and was on the very brink when recalled by the sergeant sent to prevent the involuntary suicide.

This blind obedience of the peasant was at the root of the military efficiency of the Russian soldier before universal service was made obligatory. For dash in battle, endurance of hardships and suffering, and contempt of death that old {51} army occupied a foremost place among the forces of the world. This transmutation of individual pacifism and fatalism into warlike virtues is one of the ironies of circumstance. After generations of frightful discipline, the average Russian was no longer conscious that he had any claim to justice or pity. Taking everything for granted he accounted for his own misery by ascribing it to Fate's iron decrees against which it would be vain as well as wicked to murmur. "Why," writes the famous Saltykoff, "why does our peasant go in bast shoes instead of leather boots? Why does such dense and widespread ignorance prevail throughout the land? Why does the mooshik seldom or never eat meat, butter, or even animal fat? How does it come to pass that you rarely meet a peasant who knows what a bed is? Why is it that we discern in all the movements of the Russian mooshik a fatalistic vein, devoid of the impress of conscience? Why, in a word, do the peasants come into the world like insects and die like summer flies?"[2] And again: "The common Russian man not only suffers, but consciousness of his pain is singularly blunted, deadened. He looks upon his misery as a species of original sin to be borne instead of grappled with, as long as his staying powers hold out."[3] He was to be pitied in his misery, and is to be redoubted in his emancipation. Like fire or water, he is a good servant but a bad master.

The story of the emancipation of the serfs, from conception to realisation, brings to light a number of curious illustrations of the temper of the peasants, of their crass ignorance and of their absurd opposition to the measures taken to relieve their distress. Nicholas I. harboured the intention of raising the status of the peasant, tied at that time to the glebe, from bondage to relative liberty, and to make a beginning with the serfs of the imperial domains. But the first obstacle he encountered was raised by the serfs themselves. Some eight thousand of the soil-tillers whom he was about to set free decided to offer passive {52} opposition to the arrangements. And they withstood their imperial emancipator with stoicism. The officer of the gendarmes, Stogoff, appeared on the scene with twelve gendarmes shouldering loaded guns to bring them to reason in approved Russian fashion.

Stogoff first addressed the peasants, about half of whom were Tartars, and asked them whether they would reconsider their decision and knuckle down. "No," was the curt answer given in unison.[4] "'Well, children, you know that I shall have to shoot, congruously with the terms of the law.' 'Shoot then, little father, the bullet will find the guilty ones, as God wills.' 'Now, brethren, listen.' Here I doffed my hat, turned devoutly towards the church, made the sign of the cross, and exclaimed: 'Like you, brethren, I am orthodox. It is never too late to fire. We are all in the hands of God. If an innocent man be shot, I shall be called to a strict account by God. In order, therefore, to make no mistake, I am going to put the question to each of you in turn. And he who will not bow to the law will only have himself to blame.'

"I then turned to the first, 'Will you obey the law?' 'No, I won't.' 'But the Tsar is the anointed of the Lord. You are disobeying God.' 'I won't obey.' Thereupon I delivered the peasant to a gendarme with the words, 'Well, don't blame me now.' The gendarme handed him over to another, and so he was passed on till he got to a covered courtyard where they filled his mouth with tow, bound his hands with straps and his feet with cords, and stretched him on the floor. I had the patience to put the same question to every peasant, and from every one I received the same answer, and each one was duly tied and laid on the floor. This procedure lasted until the evening church service. The last ten, half of them Mordvins, half Russians, submitted and were allowed to go home. That night I neither slept, nor ate, nor drank, for in a business of that nature everything depends on the speed with which you act.

"When I entered the courtyard, it was filled with the {53} mutineers bound hand and foot. 'Rods,' I cried. 'Bring up the first.' And they produced an old man of seventy. 'Will you obey?' 'No, I won't.' 'Flog him then....' The old man raised his head and besought me saying, 'Order him to deal the strokes quicker.' But it was out of my power to help him, because one really could not forgive the first man, as everything would then be lost. At last, however, the old fellow was dead and I ordered them to put the hand-cuffs on the corpse. In this way, after, the other thirteen were beaten until they were dead. The fourteenth moved forward and exclaimed, 'I submit!' 'Ah, you scoundrel, why didn't you submit before? If you had, then the others would have obeyed who have been beaten to death. Here, give him three hundred strokes.' That clinched the matter. All those who lay on the ground cried out, 'We all submit. Forgive us!' 'To forgive you is out of my power for you are guilty in the eyes of God and the Tsar.' 'Well, then, punish us, but be merciful.'

"One should understand the Russian man," adds Stogoff. "He is frank, submissive, and calm when punished for a fault, but without the punishment his promises are worthless, he waxes restless, waits for what may yet turn up, and commits fresh follies. But he who has been chastised is afraid to offend again and he calms down. I ordered the soldiers to break up into groups and to inflict a hundred strokes on each of the mutineers, under the eyes of the superintendent, then I called them all together and said, 'I have done what the law obliged me to do. Only the governor can forgive. He can also shut you all up in prison and leave you there till you rot.'[5] 'Little father,' they cried, 'you are our real father. Intercede for us. Turn wrath into mercy as God does.' I made them fall on their knees, taught them how to beg for mercy, and promised to take their part, but added that the governor was very angry." As a matter of fact the governor was in bed, ill from fear. Stogoff concerted a little farce with him and afterwards, in the presence of the peasants, undertook to vouch for their {54} future good conduct. He then took his leave and started for Petersburg, taking with him the blessings and thanks of the peasants![6]

For ages the grip of the ruling caste, even on the souls of the people, was everywhere firm except where religious fanaticism loosened it. For there were always some millions made of the stuff of martyrs who clung to their faith through ruthless persecution and cruel torture, even when that faith differed from the State creed only in the most trivial details, such as making the sign of the cross with two fingers instead of three, or repeating Allelujah in the liturgy twice in lieu of thrice. And yet, to my recollection, a community of Old Believers in Kursk once resolved to display their joy at the escape of Alexander III. from an attempt on his life which had killed many of his suite[7] by abandoning their own religious creed and embracing that which had the honour to reckon his Majesty among its members. The number of souls who thus risked their salvation for the Tsar was 1146, and they received the thanks of the sovereign for their loyalty. It is no exaggeration to say that at times the bulk of the orthodox nation were of no stronger fibre than those Old Believers who merited the name of "Jellymen."

The material on which the rulers had to work was uncommonly tough and intractable, but for a long time their endeavours were not altogether fruitless. Even later, if the government had taken its rôle seriously and endeavoured to engraft on the people habits of sobriety, thrift, self-help, and to promote their welfare within certain broad limits, one might wink at some of the practices which had for their object the interests of the autocracy at the expense of the nation. But the system was immoral, infamous. I witnessed its operations at close quarters, having been consecutively a student, a university graduate, a doctor, a professor, a member of the staff of two journals and the editor of a third. When I occupied the chair of Comparative Philology in the Ukrainian University of Kharkoff, the central government, {55} then represented by Count Delyanoff,[8] an Armenian, created the office of moral censors known as "beadles," whose function was to watch over the morality of the students and see that the influence of the professors over them was not politically baleful. In truth they were spies and fomentors of discord. As they were hated alike by the students and by the faculties, I at first disbelieved the sinister stories about them which sounded like wild fabrications. But a colleague of mine, a scholar of insinuating ways, concerted with me to send for the two Catos who had charge of the morality of our University of Kharkoff to win their confidence and have a friendly chat with them on the subject of their past. Having first dealt generously by the needy officials, we cross-questioned them in a friendly way, whereupon they unburdened their souls freely, in Russian fashion. Turning to one of them my colleague asked, "What profession did you follow last year, before you were appointed beadle?" Unabashed, he made answer, "I was fairly well off until my illness. I had a lucrative situation as a waiter in the T. dancing tavern where free-and-easy women of the town drop in of a night to earn a little cash from the loose fellows who have too much of it. And I used to come in for a fair share of money and money's worth myself, you know. But I got into trouble and..." "And you?" inquired my friend, nodding to the other beadle. "I was a--chucker-out in a brothel in X Street, you know the one I mean, it is near Y X Square on the left, you remember? I also had an interest in the concern myself, but unluckily it went smash owing to a misunderstanding with the police and then I lost my daily bread. But God was merciful and He sent me this post, blessed be His name." I repeated this story later to his Excellency, the Curator of the University, with a view to have these two moral mentors appointed to situations better adapted to their special qualifications than {56} that of educators of the young. But he laughed till he nearly fell off the ottoman. "Just the right kind of fellow to drill the blackguard students and teach them the way they should go," he said, and the tears rolled down his venerable cheeks. In truth the mechanism of government had run down and there was no one to wind it up. That was the clue to the situation. One does not need to be told how corrosive the influence of agents of this kind must have been on the youth of the country. Here one finds the line of cleavage between the Russian and the Prussian State.

In those and later days when occupation of some kind had to be found for the educated youth of the country, the authorities, from the ministers in the capital down to the beadles in the provincial universities, encouraged the rising generation to expend their superfluous or even vital energy in drinking, profligacy, and kindred vice, that being the easiest way to stifle the revolutionary impulse. Every species of delinquency found forgiveness or connivance barring disaffection to the autocracy. The political dissident critic and grumbler were unprincipled mischief-makers for whom no punishment was too severe. When after the Crimean war the Russian press received relative freedom of political opinion it was restricted to foreign politics. Publicists were permitted to describe, analyse, and appreciate the forms and defects of the government of Naples, Spain, Britain, or France, but the Tsardom was a sacred domain into which it would have been sacrilege to penetrate. This perpetual restriction was one of the sources of the mischievous influence which internal questions came at last to have on Russia's international relations, which in turn contributed to shape the government's home policy. The formula of the latter nexus would seem to have been this: every shock and concussion from without, such as an unsuccessful war, had as its inevitable correlate a loosening of the grip of the bureaucracy on the nation. And in effect political concessions of various kinds and degrees followed almost at once upon each unsuccessful military expedition, and every pretext was utilised that subsequently offered to withdraw or whittle down the {57} reforms thus conceded. In this systole and diastole of autocracy Russia's history since the beginning of the nineteenth century is epitomised.

By the time when the struggle between the old spirit and the new was growing deadly, the bureaucracy already regarded the backwardness of the people as an indispensable condition of its own existence. In home affairs, the nation was an adjective which had no other use than that of qualifying the substantive which was the State. Hence, economically, the Russian people was treated as a wealth-creating mechanism whose worth was measurable by the value of its labour after taking off the cost of production. From the peasantry on whose shoulders rested the weight of Empire the authorities extracted everything they could, giving back little or nothing in return, and the peasant dealt in a like manner with the soil he tilled; putting nothing into it, he took out all it could be made to yield. Abhorring intensive culture, he thus plundered the land, exhausted its fertility, and then clamoured for more. That was one source of the outcry for more land, the truth being that, during the second half of the reign of Nicholas II., the average amount of land possessed by the peasant ought to have sufficed, had it been tilled as in Prussia or Belgium. The government for the service of its public debt was accustomed to export large quantities of corn to its foreign creditors, thus leaving the native producer face to face with a food deficit that rendered famines periodical as the snows, or rather perennial like the Siberian plague. Hunger-stricken peasants thus furnishing foreign peoples with abundant and cheap food-stuffs was another bit of that irony that so often, in Russia, aggravated suffering and intensified resentment. How could the simple-minded peasants, accustomed to see such iniquities perpetrated in the names of God and the Tsar, be expected to obey divine or human law? Direct taxes were gathered with the lash, and indirect contributions to the Treasury extracted through the tavern. For the duty of drinking vodka was sedulously inculcated upon the tillers of the soil, and temptation was set before them by guile and by force at the {58} behest or with the connivance of the authorities who professed to be bringing them up by hand. "It is a matter of surprise," exclaimed a well-known writer, "that a people should continue even to exist which is thus ground down on all sides and ruined."[9] And yet minister after minister managed to solve the puzzling problem of extracting out of these lack-alls the money which they did not possess. "These men," wrote another publicist,[10] "can scarcely be called human beings. They are more like machines for the payment of taxes, half-conscious creatures who fancy themselves created for the purpose of working on in hopeless toil." Utterances like these remind one of Arthur Young's remarks about France on the eve of the great Revolution, and the facts they comment upon partly explain how insensible Russian peasants proved, on the outbreak of the revolution, to the œstrum of moral responsibility.

For a long while it seemed to the Russians themselves that there was no hope of betterment. I remember talking the matter over with the zealous Archbishop of Kherson and Odessa, Nikanor, many years ago. He shook his head mournfully and reminded me of what he had said publicly on a very solemn occasion a few weeks before: "Altogether the state of things in Russia is superlatively sad. The people's minds are terribly dark and there is no sign of the coming dawn." Mental darkness and moral obliquity were the postulates of the Tsarist State. Remove them and the fabric was bound to fall. In an article which I wrote in the reign of Alexander III. on the obscurantist policy of Pobiedonostseff, I put forward the view which subsequent events have borne out, that that statesman took the most efficacious means to achieve his end.

In spite of the listlessness and resignation of the peasantry, their land hunger gradually placed them in opposition to the State whose greed of agricultural produce made its rule arbitrary and ruthless. But the authorities shifted the odium from themselves to the landowners. The masses hung their {59} faith and their resignation on the fiction which they firmly believed that the Tsar was desirous of bestowing all the land on them, but was temporarily thwarted, partly by maleficent officials and very largely by the landed proprietors. Against these an angry feeling was engendered among the Tsar-fearing people, which, on occasion, spurted up in the form of riots and necessitated occasional sops in the shape of shadowy reform measures.

But in the long run the demoralising influence of a system of governance which took no thought of the people's interest was sure to produce its own antidote. It first provoked a number of partial explosions which the bureaucracy refused to construe as warnings, and then produced the volcanic outburst of fire and flame and liquid lava which has reduced the state organism to a heap of ghastly ruins. Out of these it is now hoped that the nation will arise one day radiant and with strength of wing for a long and lofty flight.

The catastrophe would have occurred last century had it not been for the circumstance that the Russian people remained moveless and cataleptic in their mediæval groove in consequence of their isolation from western Europe. Although they received from abroad most of what they prized and had nothing cultural to offer in return, they were long beyond the reach of the fertilising currents that flowed through the continent from the French side of the Pyrenees to the mountains of Transylvania and even to the basin of the Vistula and the plains of Poland. The Byzantine Church, with no international centre, cut off from communion with other Christian denominations and devoid of its own springs of learning and culture, bulked large as a barrier between East and West and kneaded its adepts until they became amenable to the stupefying sedative of numbing doctrines. Everything that tended to break down that barrier, to burst the dam and let the stream of western culture into the Tsardom, was welcomed by the intelligentsia and repressed by the authorities as a force on the side of the people against the prevailing system of masked servitude. One of the oldest and most elusive of these was religious sectarianism. {60} In time these forces waxed numerous and formidable. The introduction of foreign capital into the Empire by Count Witte and together with it of western conceptions of living and working incompatible with the traditional ordering of the community; the spread of industries; the formation of a floating class of workers who spent the winter in factories and the remainder of the year on the land, a new body of skilled artisans wholly cut off from the land, freed from the fetters that hampered the peasant and initiated into the system of organised self-help by co-operation and self-defence by strikes--generated new material conditions to which the others tended to conform. The progress of education, technical and general, and the influence of literature and journalism which flashed powerful searchlights on revolting episodes of the people's life, radiated new ideas about the relations between rulers and subjects, employers and labourers, and filled men with resentment against the class that had theretofore governed the Empire. Further, the religious spirit, quickened with a solvent critical quality, gave rise to new sects of a rationalistic and therefore iconoclastic character that sapped the awe which the man of the people had long entertained of his masters, and loosened the conception of authority generally to a degree unimagined in the West. Military service, too, which abounded in splendid opportunities for revolutionary propaganda, furnished a suitable body for the new spirit of rebellion that was gradually taking possession of the generation contemporary with Nicholas II.

[1] A Russian name for the bureaucracy or for one of its grades.

[2] Signs of the Times, by M. Saltykoff.

[3] _Letters about the Provinces_, by M. Saltykoff, p. 260.

[4] What follows is related in the words of Stogoff himself.

[5] The time was the year 1838, the place the province of Simbirsk.

[6] Cf. _Russian Heads_, by Dr. T. Schiemann.

[7] At Borki.

[8] Minister of Public Institution. An amiable man in social life, but a semi-educated snob, who looked upon education as a means of enlisting the intelligent classes on the side opposed to the people, and even this view he borrowed from Count Dmitry Tolstoy.

[9] _The Messenger of Europe_, pp. 781-782, October, 1890.

[10] In _The Messenger of Europe_, 1890.

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