Chapter I: Retrospect

I should like to set the reader’s mind at rest at once. I am not going to ask him to read a historical treatise on the origins of the Russian people, nor am I going to lead him into the obscure pathways and dim shadows of the remote past.

Firstly, even if I wished to do so, I have not the necessary erudition, nor the requisite powers of learned exposition. Secondly, the origin of the Russian people is a debatable question; the theories with regard to it are constantly changing, and vary with the fickle fashion of the day; the orthodox views of forty, of thirty, of twenty years ago are now said to be old-fashioned; and the orthodox views of to-day will probably be considered old-fashioned before very long. The reason being that all such views are highly conjectural, and that very little is known about the shifting tides, eddies, and currents in the immeasurably far-off floods of races and tribes out of which the Russian people emerged.

Thirdly, whenever I open a book that begins with a historical retrospect, I feel that it is the reader’s duty to skip that chapter.

Why, then, write anything of the kind? The answer is that I am writing on the assumption that the reader is an average reader, and that if he has bought or borrowed a book about Russia, he will be sufficiently interested in the subject to be able to stand a few simple facts to begin with, even if they are historical. I also assume that, if he has bought or borrowed this book, and has not gone to a public library to get a more learned book, he is not a specialist—that is to say, he knows as much or as little as the average Englishman knows about Russia who has received an average English education, who reads _The Times_, and takes a moderate but intelligent interest in international politics and foreign countries, and who has perhaps read one or two standard books on Russia, and not only _My Official Wife_ by Savage, _Michael Strogoff_ by Jules Verne, and all that picturesque tribe of books called either Red Russia, Scarlet Russia, Crimson Russia, Free Russia, the Real Russia, Russia as she is, or Russia as she isn’t.

There is also another class of reader who may take up the book, also an average reader, with an average education, but whose knowledge of Russia is of a different and wider kind—the reader of translations of Russian novels, the devotee of Tolstoy and Turgeniev and Gorky; the man or woman—it is generally a woman—who has seen translations of Chekhov’s plays at the Stage Society, and who is a fervent admirer of the Russian ballet. He or she is interested in Russia, but has never been there; and although familiar with Russian novels and plays, he or she is more inclined to form an opinion of the Russian people on data derived from English novels on Russian life than from Russian novels on Russian life.

I have often come across cases of this kind—I mean people who do not appear to realize that the intensely realistic Russian fiction that they so much admire probably has some basis and counterpart in real life, and who, in spite of this documentary evidence with regard to Russian life, with which they are familiar, still continue to form a picture of Russian life based on English fiction such as is written by English journalists and novelists.

Such readers, my experience is, if they come across certain historical facts about Russia in the past or the present, meet them with a shock of surprise and often with a smile of incredulity.

It is for the benefit of the average reader of every kind that I want to try and make a few, a very few, historical facts clear, which I think throw light on any attempt to deal with any aspects of Russian life. If the reader knows them too well already, he will forgive me and skip, proud of his superior knowledge; if he disbelieves them, he can dispute them, and prove me wrong.

My first fact is geographical. It is that Russia is a flat country, without an indented seacoast, and without sharp mountain ranges. It is not only flat but uniform. Owing to this, the expansion of the Russian people took place on land. The Russians were, and are, constantly emigrating, at first from south to north, and afterwards from west to east. Russia is therefore a country of colonists.

I remember once saying this to a man to whom the statement evidently came as a shock of surprise, because he replied, “Really, I thought Russia was an autocracy.”

Now, who are these colonists? Who are the Russians, in fact? I wonder if one set this question to all the schoolboys and undergraduates, what the most prevalent answer would be. I believe it would be something like this: that the Russian was a man got up like a European except in winter, but that if you scratched him you would find a Tartar, and that a Tartar was a man with a yellow skin and a snub nose. I think you might also often get the answer that Russians were Slavs; but that if you asked what a Slav is, you would be told he was a kind of Tartar.

In Russia at the present day you will find representatives of every kind of race and every kind of creed—Buriats who worship Buddha, and disciples of the late Lord Radstock—and every kind of language; but out of all these, three dominant races played a part in Russian history—the Finns, the Tartars, and the Slavs. The Slavs got the best of it. They absorbed the Finns and ousted the Tartars.

So we remain face to face with the question, What are the Slavs? As to how, why, whence, and when the Slavs came to Russia hundreds of books have been written, and the solution of the problem is, I believe, like that of many historical questions, a matter of fashion.

One solid fact, however, rises before our grateful comprehension. The Slavs are a white people like the Latins, the Celts, and the Germans; they have nothing in common with anything Tartar, Mongol, or Semitic; and there are traces of them having been in Southern Europe on the banks of the Vistula and of the Dnieper from time immemorial.

Having got to Russia a long time ago, they overran the country and absorbed it.

They began in the south, the capital being Kiev, and in the eleventh century Russia was a part of the political system of Europe.

Russia, in the days before William the Conqueror—in the days of Harold, who was related to one of the rulers of Kiev, Yaroslav—was not more backward than France or England were at that time, and would probably have developed in the same manner as the other European countries had it not been for an unfortunate interruption in the shape of a Mongol or Tartar invasion.

From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century Russia was under the dominion of the Mongols.

The Slavs, as they gradually expanded and absorbed Russia, fell into two natural divisions: the Great Russians and the Little Russians, which correspond to the north and the south. When the Mongol invasion came about, the Little Russians were cut off from the Great Russians.

The Great Russians continued to expand northward, southward, and eastward. They were engaged in a perpetual struggle against the East. They acted as a buffer for Europe against the East; and in the sixteenth century they finally got rid of the Eastern yoke altogether and drove them out of the country.

This is the big fact I have been leading up to: Russia saved Western Europe from being overrun by hordes of barbarians.

“There is,” writes the late Mr. Stead, in the introduction to the translation of Labaume’s narrative of Napoleon’s campaign, “a strange and pestilent habit among some Englishmen of ignoring all the great services which Russia has rendered to the cause of human progress and the liberty of nations.”

That Russia acted as a buffer against the barbarian invasion from the East is the first and not the least of these services.

In the sixteenth century the Great Russia was a kingdom centralized in Moscow, chiefly engaged in fighting her neighbours, the most powerful of which was Poland, and one of the most energetic and singular of her rulers, Ivan the Terrible, began to negotiate with the West. Ivan, in fact, wished to marry Queen Elizabeth; but Western Europe was not vitally affected by Russia until the appearance on the stage of the world of that extraordinary monarch, and still more extraordinary man, called Peter the Great.

Peter the Great not only conceived and executed the idea of opening in Russia a window on to the West, but he restored to Russia her place among European nations—the place she had occupied in the eleventh century, and which she had lost owing to the Mongol invasion.

It was no abnormal or unnatural mission that Peter the Great set out to accomplish, otherwise his work would have died with him. He carried Russia along the natural road of her career. Only, being a man of abnormal genius, he gave to Russia a violent electric shock; he accelerated to an extent, which seems little short of miraculous, the natural progress of the country. He accomplished in a few years the work of many generations. “Pierre I^{er},” says Montesquieu, “donnait les mœurs et les manières de l’Europe à une nation de l’Europe.” He shifted the capital of the country, built St. Petersburg on a swamp, created an army, a fleet, enrolled quantities of foreigners into the service of Russia. He sketched the outlines of a gigantic plan, which still remains to be filled in to this day. The violence and fury with which he compelled a reluctant people to adopt his changes had, of course, its drawbacks. A nation has to pay for a man of genius, even when he is working on the right lines, for what is for the good of his country, and for what is, in the long run, in accordance with its national spirit.

Peter the Great was successful, but the methods which he had to employ in order to bring about his swift and gigantic changes were not without regrettable results, which are still visible in the machinery of Russian administration and in the nature of many Russian institutions. He found Russia a sleepy kingdom encrusted with Oriental habit and Byzantine tradition; he hacked off that crust with an axe, and he left Russia open to the influences of Europe, and ready to value the place which was her due amongst the nations of Europe.

His work was carried on by Catherine II. on the same lines, and further. She opened educated Russia to European ideas; she civilized Russia intellectually; and Russia, under her guidance, took a leading part in the European Concert.

But it was later that Russia was destined to play a part which vitally affected every nation of Western Europe. This was in 1812. In 1812 Russia broke up the power of Napoleon.

“Leipzig and Waterloo were but the corollaries,” writes Mr. Stead, “of a solved problem.”

“It is an incontestable fact,” writes M. Rambaud, the French historian of Russia, “that of all the allies, Russia showed herself the least grasping. It was she who had given the signal for the struggle against Napoleon, and had shown most perseverance in pursuit of the common end. Without her example the states of Europe would never have dreamed of arming against him. Her skilful leniency towards France finished the work begun by the war.”

So far, all these facts I have mentioned concern the relations of Russia to Europe; they necessarily reacted on the internal conditions of the country.

The fact that Russia was playing an important part abroad meant that the means by which this part could be played had to be furnished at home, and the finding of such means affected the administration of the country and the whole of its population.

In order that Russia should be able to play a part in Europe, the first thing that was necessary was an army.

Peter the Great made an army (and a fleet). How did he do it? Where did the officers and men come from?

When Peter the Great came to the throne, the organization of the State was patriarchal. There was practically no standing army except a kind of corps of janissaries, the _streltsy_ (which he destroyed). There were two classes: the nobility and the peasants. The nobility held the land and the peasants tilled it; but the nobility held the land on one condition only, and that was that they should render military service in their own person when it was necessary.

The nobles were at the same time landowners and servants of the State, but they were landowners only on condition of being State servants.

The peasants belonged to the land; they were attached to the land and could not be separated from it. This is what serfdom meant in Russia. Serfdom was not an immemorial institution in Russia. It was not a relic of paganism or barbarism; it was founded neither on conquest, nor on the habit of turning the captives made in inter-tribal wars into slaves, nor on a difference of race or colour; and unless this be understood, unless the true nature of this serfdom be realized, it is impossible to understand the part which the Russian peasantry play in the Russian nation.

Briefly, serfdom came about thus. The peasants cultivated the land which the monarch conceded to the nobles as a salary or means of subsistence in return for military service. But up till about the end of the sixteenth century the peasants could choose and change their masters, and pass from one estate to another. They used, in fact, to exercise their right of transfer once a year, on St. George’s Day.

At the end of the sixteenth century labour was precious and rare, and eagerly sought after by the nobles. The peasants were naturally inclined to emigrate, and the more adventurous were attracted towards the regions of the Don, the Kama, the Volga, and Siberia, and they thus avoided paying taxes. Moreover, the larger landed proprietors attracted the peasants to their estates to the detriment of the smaller landed proprietors. The primitive fiscal system of that day suffered from all this, and as a remedy to this state of things, in order to guarantee and regularize the financial and military supplies of the State, the peasant was attached to the soil. In 1593, in the reign of Feodor, the son of Ivan the Terrible, and owing to the initiative of Boris Godonnov, the right of transfer from one estate to another was first temporarily taken away from the peasant. The prohibition to transfer their service on this date was renewed by several sovereigns, and was finally crystallized in the law of the country. Once attached to the soil the peasant gradually lost his civil rights and became the chattel of the proprietor; thus what began by being a simple police measure ended by becoming organized slavery. Such was the state of things when Peter the Great came to the throne. The peasant was attached to the soil, the nobility were the army, for when an army was needed they had to fight themselves and to supply so many men into the bargain.

Peter the Great wanted a standing army; and in order to get one, and at the same time to carry on the administration of the country, he created, or rather enlarged, the system of universal service. Every single Russian became a public servant. Henceforward it became obligatory for the noble to serve the State either in the military or the civil service—always, and not only in times of war. Moreover, in order to be an officer he had to pass an examination, and if he failed to pass it he had to serve as a private soldier. Further, in order to get enough soldiers, a system of conscription was introduced; that is to say, in every place, out of so many thousand men, so many were taken.

Again, the nobility ceased to be a closed caste depending on hereditary titles; it became a class of State servants, and was thrown open to all. Rank depended on service. Instead of obtaining a post because you were a noble, you became a noble for having attained by service to such and such a post. Rank in service became the only rank. Thus Peter the Great, in order to create a standing army, created a standing civil service; he destroyed the principle of hereditary aristocracy; and both branches of the universal service he created, military and civil, were divided into its fourteen grades or _tchins_, hence the word _tchinnovnik_, the ordinary Russian word for official. Again, as he was constantly going to war, and constantly needed men, and the nobility had to supply so many men from their land, he tightened the bonds which attached the peasants to the soil. He strengthened the system of serfdom; and the rulers who succeeded him carried on the same policy, because the revenue depended on the State being administered by the landed gentry, which gradually ceased to be an aristocratic caste, and kept on increasing in size, until towards the end of the reign of Catherine II., when it had grown to be a vast bureaucracy.

It is clear that, if the great majority of the landed proprietors were engaged in administrating the country, they would have less and less time to look after their estates after the old patriarchal fashion; and it is also clear that as civilization progressed everything in the machinery of the State necessarily increased in size. Men were needed to deal with the more complicated machinery; with the administration of finances, of justice, and of the police. The men who filled all the new posts created by the ever increasing complication of the administration of the State were the former landed proprietors, the actual officials. The consequence was they ceased to be able to look after their land. This being so, there was no defence left against the growing moral sentiment which had risen against serfdom, namely: the moral principle that it was wrong that peasants should be in the position of cattle and chattels. This sentiment was expressed more than once by the peasants themselves in mutinies. It was expressed from the outside by all that was enlightened in the country.

The Emperor Alexander I. took the first steps towards the great reform by liberating the serfs in the Baltic provinces. It is said that his brother, the Emperor Nicholas, on his deathbed left the execution of the reform as a solemn legacy to his son and successor, Alexander II. The Crimean War was the actual shock which brought the reform about. Literature was a powerful factor in pressing it on. Writers of genius, such as Gogol and Turgeniev, by their descriptions; publicists, such as Samarin and Herzen, by their pleading, played a large part in accelerating its advent. They gave expression to what was the universal and imperative opinion of thinking Russia, so that the reform when it came about, and when the serfs were liberated in 1861, was the work of the nation as well as of the Emperor.

This retrospect has brought us to the year 1861. Since then many momentous things have happened to Russia. A war; the inauguration of a system of local self-government; another war; and if not a revolution, a revolutionary movement, a long and vital crisis, out of which rose the beginnings of popular representation. But these events, in so far as they deal with Russian life as it is to-day, will be dealt with in the subsequent chapters.