THE FALL OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
BY EDMUND A. WALSH
FOREWORD
This is not a formal history of Russia ; it is the story of the triumph of folly in Russia and the penalty she paid for that historic madness. Neither is this narrative an apotheosis of the Russian Revolution after the manner of Thomas Carlyle. Least of all should it be interpreted as a smug indictment of Bolshevist theory and practice ; the patent excesses in both, though not intelligent, are intelligible. In such a tempestuous riot of unchained passions, the worst that human nature can produce rose to the surface — “red scum, white scum.” But this retrospect does seek to portray, without retouching, certain outstanding personalities and major events in the hope of supplying the perspective and understanding which becomes indispensable if one hopes to avoid the common errors fostered by propagandists, paid or unpaid, and correct the fallacies of loose thinking and still looser talking indulged in by the pamphleteers.
For the man in the street, the basic and intensely human issues, as well as the serious international problems arising out of that tremendous upheaval, have been systematically obscured or hidden entirely from view. On these momentous times, men, and events, later ages alone can pronounce the final verdict. But contemporary observers can contribute something useful to their day and generation by recording faithfully what they saw, heard, and learned.
The author is aware that no man who sets his name to opinions on Russia can expect to escape the censure which Madelin foresaw for himself in the preface to his study of the French Revolution — to be flayed by every hand, a Ghibelline to the Guelphs, a Guelph to the Ghibellines. But no man can reasonably expect to escape that fate who owes allegiance to those two exacting masters, Truth and Justice.
Wherever possible I have let the leading characters tell their story in their own words, in the belief that we shall come thereby to a surer understanding of the secret prejudices, the controlling emotions, and predominant passions that so often displace pure reason as mainsprings of action. The last Czar of All the Russia's, far from being exempt from the psychological idiosyncrasies that influence men’s judgments, was notoriously subject to them. The shadow of a domestic tragedy lay across his latter years and clouded his reasoning powers. A baby’s fingers had been tugging at his heartstrings for a decade, and the image of the Empres, battling for her boy’s dynastic rights, held first place at every Council of the Empire.
There usually comes a moment in the conscious development of every human soul when some serious choice, or important decision, or difficult renunciation must be made, and made irrevocably. On that decision frequently depend the lives and fortunes of numerous other human beings — as happens in the case of the engineer of a fast express who discerns, dimly, but not surely, some danger signal set against him ; or in the case of the navigator of an ocean liner adrift in a dangerous sea with a broken rudder. Such a moment came to Russia’s supreme ruler in the Spring of 1917. His decision affected 180,000,000 people.
Now, the instinctive, instantaneous reaction of the alert engineer as he reaches for the emergency brake, or the motions of a seasoned pilot as he endeavors to head his ship into the teeth of the storm instead of exposing his craft broadside to the fury of the waves, are not isolated, unrelated facts bearing no reference to previous training and habitual modes of action. Such coordination of sense perception, judgment, and manual execution is not the child of chance nor the unfailing perquisite of genius. It is the hard-won achievement of mental discipline. Men wise in the ways of human nature tell us, too, that there are few real accidents in the moral order, though there are many tragedies.
It was no stern necessity of war, nor gigantic despair, nor sudden conjunction of overpowering circumstances that drove Nicholas II into the course of action that wrecked his Empire and provoked the Revolution. His every decision and blunder was a palpable, traceable resultant of previous habits acquired with fatal facility. He lived in the grip of a hidden fear which, because it met him every morning at breakfast, dogged him through his hours of domestic privacy, and slept nearby in the nursery at night, had become inescapable and tyrannous. The elimination of Romanov rule, though inevitable in the long run and a political necessity if the Russian people were to survive, was measurably hastened by a little prince’s inherited weakness of physique and his tendency to bleed at the nose or fall into painful convulsions at the slightest bruising of his sensitive skin. Had her son not been a chronic hæmophilic, had she not been an abnormal hypochondriac, the Empress Alexandra might not have been the innocent tool for Rasputin’s machinations, Russia might have been spared the scourges that came upon her, and the world might not have known the challenge of Bolshevism — at least not so soon. What men too frequently overlook in chronicling the causes of stirring historic events is the essential humanity of kings and queens and the influence exerted by relatively petty factors on the destiny of states and peoples. Had Anne Boleyn been less comely, Henry VIII might never have repudiated Katherine of Aragon ; there might have been no Spanish Armada, no schism, nor religious wars in England. A diamond necklace and a woman’s vanity can never be disassociated from the inner history of the French Revolution and the hecatombs of heads that fell into its baskets. Neither can a withered arm be considered irrelevant by investigators of the rôle played by the German Kaiser in modern times.
That physical deformity, giving rise, during boyhood, to an inferiority complex in the last of the Hohenzollerns, stimulated a conscious — and legitimate — passion to overcome the handicap. The paralyzed hand was trained to rest in a natural way on the sword-hilt hanging at the Kaiser’s left side ; the feel and rattle of the ever-present sabre became part of its wearer’s nature and was a necessary adjunct of every photograph depicting Wilhelm in his favorite histrionic attitude. The fixed idea of personal majesty triumphing over physical limitations became a permanent obsession which transformed itself, eventually, into a political nervosity that unsettled Middle Europe from Berlin to Bagdad and would be satisfied with nothing short of a prominent place somewhere in the sun.
The notes, personal experiences, inquiries, and subsequent research upon which this book is based began on the night when the author first crossed the Russian frontier at Sebesh, between, Latvia and Soviet Russia, March 21, 1922. The Russian people, at that moment, were passing through the well-nigh mortal travail of the most appalling famine in their long and stormy history. Twenty-three million human beings were threatened with extermination by inevitable starvation, and their cry for help had been answered generously by Europe and America. Six millions succumbed, — despite the heroic efforts of combined relief agencies, — making the valley of the Volga a huge graveyard, and turning the river itself into a charnel house with thousands upon thousands of skeletonized corpses congealed beneath the ice.
Men spoke of “going in” and “coming out” of that mystery-laden land as they might speak of entering a first line trench or a sick chamber. For three days the train rumbled and lurched eastward from Riga, crawling laboriously onward in the teeth of freezing cold that cut the cheeks like a razor. The engine, through lack of coal, burned only wood, showering weird geysers of sparks and flaming splinters on to the snow fields that stretched like visible, tangible desolation on all sides. There were no lights in the compartments, save the sputtering flicker of tallow candles, carefully husbanded. As no food was available on board, each man brought his own rations and water, which he prepared over an alcohol flame or on a miniature gasoline stove. Primus inter pares was what we called that valuable instrument known to every traveler in Russia. Stops were long and frequent, at one place for exactly twenty-four hours, until a Soviet engine arrived from Moscow to replace the Latvian locomotive. In those days the Lettish Government risked no rolling stock on Soviet territory.
Evening of March 24 found us at the Windau station, in Moscow. There, for the first time, we looked upon the emaciated face of Russia and caught the first reflection of her soul mirrored in the tired eyes of the ragged, jostling, milling mob that thronged this, as every other, railway station. Suffering, self-laceration, and the immemorial sadness which Dostoievsky and her poets have exalted into a religious destiny ! Podvig is what the Russians name it — meaning, generically, some great act of self-abnegation, expiation, or sacrifice. Nesterov made it the subject of the famous war poster that thrilled Russia during the dark days of 1916. That is why the bread we brought them was often salted from their own eyes.
One year and eight months later, in the company of a diplomatic courier and a Reuter correspondent who was quitting Russia forever because his wife had recently been burned to death, the writer of these lines crossed the Polish border, at Stolpce. It was late November 1923. Like every other man who saw the result of that revolutionary upheaval and the ghastly fruits of civil war and famine, he left Russia with a fuller understanding of the unbelievable capacity for suffering inherent in the human frame as it responds to the indomitable will of man battling to continue in existence.
The intervening period was passed, not in Moscow and Petrograd alone, but off the beaten path — in the Crimea and the Ukraine, in the Caucasus and Black Sea districts, along the Volga and the Sea of Azov, in the Don Cossack country and among the Tatars, in peasant huts and ruined palaces, as well as under the shadow of the Kremlin. The territory covered stretched from the Gulf of Finland to the Kuban, and from the Carpathians to the foothills of the Ural Mountains.
During the course of the succeeding years, from 1924 to 1928, visits were made to practically all the Western countries bordering on Soviet Russia or affected by the Revolution, especially to those crowded European centres where Russians of the dispersion most do congregate — Poland, East Prussia, Danzig, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Vienna, London, Rome, Paris, Brussels, Louvain, Namur, Lyons, Geneva, Constantinople, and Berlin.
As the Russian Revolution marked the fall of an empire vaster far than Troy, so its human flotsam and jetsam have been cast up on every shore of the known world. The Russian émigré — that tragic and, be it truthfully said, that most amiable personage — can fairly claim kinship with Virgil’s Æneas when he says : “ Quae regio in terra nostri non plena laboris ?” And the victorious Russian Communist, preacher of a new Utopia in politics and economics, followed close on the heels of his dispossessed countryman, circling the globe from Chicago to Cathay.
Twenty months, consequently, I spent in Russia during the period of transition and beheld her people
Wandering between two worlds—one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
And for four years more I sought the opinions of many men in many lands, always asking, “What think ye of Russia ?” But the historian who would track the Russian Revolution to its last ramification must embark on an Odyssean search which will lead to many a hidden byway, as well as to legislative chambers, academic halls, and altar rails — wherever, in a word, men fore gather to discuss the age-old problems of the race.
One man’s life will not suffice to see the end.
E. A. WALSH
Washington, D.C.
March 1, 1928
CHAPTER I
THE FACTS IN THE CASE
THE FACTS IN THE CASE
"We are the oldest government in Europe," remarked Chicherin in 1923, during the residence of the present writer in Moscow. This droll comment of the Bolshevist Commissar for Foreign Affairs was historically correct then,—more so today,—if by government that astute diplomat understood a given cabinet or a sovnarkom exercising supreme power and performing the customary administrative functions. The parliamentary system which requires sporadically a vote of confidence in support of the dominant political party, failing which the cabinet is expected to resign, has indeed occasioned a bewildering succession of ministries upon the stage of European politics since November 7, 1917. The Moscow system, on the contrary, provides, antecedently, for the liquidation of any menacing opposition by the simple device of eliminating the opposer's. Those who attempted serious political resistance found themselves either in the execution chamber of the Loubyanka or on their way to freezing exile in the convict camps on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea.
Sverdlov
Volodarsky
To be sure, during the decade just ended, there have been notable losses and substitutions in the higher ranks of the Soviet hierarchy. Sverdlov, Volodarsky, and Uritsky, all active leaders, were assassinated in the early days of the Revolution. Lenin, the flaming torch that fired the Russian masses and sought to fire the world, the creator of the Soviet State and founder of the Third International, died the thousand living deaths of a deranged paralytic before his actual demise in 1924. Vorovsky, able propagandist and first Soviet representative to Italy, was murdered in Switzerland in 1923 and lies buried outside the Kremlin walls, close to the grave of John Reed. On the afternoon of Vorovsky's funeral the author of this work wandered through Red Square and meditated on the significance of the strange fellowship that could so unite in common burial a Russian revolutionist and the brilliant but erratic Harvard graduate.
Dzherzhinsky,
Voikov,
Krassin, easily distinguishable among the other commissars as brains temporizing with victorious passions, recently succumbed to a mortal illness while Soviet Ambassador to France. Dzherzhinsky, chief of the dreaded secret police, the Cheka, executioner of 1,800,000 victims, the man with the eyes of a gazelle and the soul of a Fouquier-Tinville expired suddenly and mysteriously in 1926 after an impassioned speech of protest against certain heterodox tendencies of his colleagues. Voikov, who signed the death warrant of Tzar Nicholas II and the imperial family, was himself murdered in Warsaw on June 7, 1927, falling victim to the vengeance of an exiled Russian youth not twenty years of age. Joffe, veteran revolutionist and pioneer coworker with Karakhan in the Far East, committed suicide in December 1927.
But after each casualty the ranks closed tighter. Internal dissension is met by stern domestic discipline. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev dispute the supremacy of Stalin, Bukharin, and Rykov. They pay the penalty of schism by relegation to obscure posts within the Party; then, when it is safe to do so, they are expelled entirely. Thus the essential dictatorship of ten men, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, persists unchallenged over 146,000,000 Russians. With unshaken confidence, Moscow is celebrating its tenth year in continuous control of approximately one seventh of the habitable surface of the earth.
If history may be conceived as philosophy teaching by example, may it not be time, even as early as the tenth year after the event, to seek a helpful interpretation of the Russian experiment ?
For Russia not only presents a story that will engage the best historians of the world for generations to come; it is an actual, insistent fact of the present, too. Bolshevism is an international reality which only the hopelessly intransigent can ignore. If the World War did not entirely destroy modern organized society, it assuredly did bring civilization to the crossroads. The victors of the second Russian revolution, that of November 1917, frankly and brutally took the road to the extreme left, driving a weakened, demoralized Russia before them, calling on stronger nations to follow. That way madness lies, as they have now learned and reluctantly admitted, taught by the inexorable laws of nature operating through economic pressure. Naturam furca expellas, tamen usque recurret.(1) But it is my deliberate judgment, based on six years' close observation of European and Russian affairs, that no lasting peace is possible in Europe or Asia until the breach between Russia and the West is securely bridged. For that difference, that breach, is not a chasm dug by national hatred, by historic feud or racial antipathy. One or other of such specific motives made Greeks the natural enemies of Turks, made France distrust Germany, and set Celt against Saxon. But the issue created by the second Russian revolution strikes at the very concept of human society as now organized and proposes an entirely new civilization.
It was not merely a revolution in the accepted sense as historically understood,—that is, a re-allocation of sovereignty,—but revolution in the domain of economics, religion, art, literature, science, education, and all other human activities. It sought to create a new archetype of humanity, the "collective man," and a new culture adapted to the impersonal "mass man" who should displace forever "the soul-encumbered individual man." It was meant, and so proclaimed by its protagonists, to be a challenge to the modern State as constituted, not merely in Imperial Russia, but throughout the entire civilized world. It was philosophic materialism in arms, the most radical school of thought that has ever come upon the stage of human affairs.
The leaders of Bolshevism deliberately identified and confused, in the estimation of the masses, all civilization with the particular Russian form detested by the peasants because of their economic serfdom under it and hated by the liberals because of the savage repression of all their efforts for the enlargement of human liberty through constitutional reform interpreting all life, therefore, in terms of their own memories of Siberia, the Bolsheviki generalized savagely, and, of course, erroneously. Lenin registered his bitter oath of universal revenge on the day his brother Alexander Ulianov was exacted by the Czarist Government in 1887 for attempted regicide. Lenin was wrong. But the Czars were equally wrong in obstinately refusing to modify an insupportable autocracy that drove men to such desperation.
Revolution in the land of the Czars swept to inevitable catastrophe with an almost mathematical compulsion. By all the laws of nature and human progress, the disappearance of the Muscovite Empire became a political necessity, and has achieved with a ruination of physical and moral values a scale to challenge the combined creative genius of an Æschylus, a Sophocles, a Euripides, and a Shakespeare adequately to depict. If the individual and, what is more, the imaginary sufferings of an Electra an Œdipus, or an ill-starred Prince of Denmark still move, and probably will continue to stir, the collective heart of humanity because of their universal appeal, what should be the reaction of a properly informed posterity to the recital of the woes through which an entire Christian nation has recently passed? Every conceivable scourge which flesh is heir to came upon them, not singly, but in legions. Few Western nations that I know of could have survived what the Russian people have passed through in the last fourteen years.
For half a century public opinion, like a Greek chorus, waited breathless for the ax to fall, as fall men knew it must; and all the while the press, both within and without Russia, like an unheeded Cassandra, kept uttering prophecy after prophecy.
For the student of political variations, the World War spelled the end of national complacencies based on national isolation and ignorance of international organization. That Russia, like an unheeded Cassandra, kept uttering prophecy after prophecy. That devastating conflict was fought in vain if it has not left men convinced that the nations of the earth constitute a huge, international family whose basic interests are common, and whose members are far more interdependent, acting and reacting on one another far more seriously and directly, than we imagined prior to 1914. No mortal sickness, be it physical, spiritual, of intellectual, that attacks one member of this social organism can ever again be regarded with indifference even by the healthiest member of human society.
Experienced rulers needed no World War to teach them that. The Czar of All the Russia's, Nicholas I, on hearing of the European revolutions of 1848, is reported to have said to his Courtiers:—
"Saddle your horses, gentlemen—a Republic is proclaimed in France."
Russia provides still another caveat to give us pause. Once again has it been demonstrated that nations, like individuals and trees, fall to their ruin on their leaning side.
I know, under penalty of being considered unscientific, that history does not moralize; neither does it prophesy. But the facts of history may do both. I am unscientific enough to believe that facts are largely useless unless they result in something more lasting than mere entertainment. If history be a science,—which modern scholarship would seem to demand,—then it must, by its charter, set forth the ultimate causes of things. And causes are vastly more important than effects, at least among free agents capable of penetrating to the hidden sources of transient phenomena.
I am more interested in finding out why Persia fell and Babylon passed than in possessing the exact date of their exit; more concerned to know why modern Greece is not the Hellas of Aristotle and Socrates and Plato, and why her groves and market place are no longer crowded with eager seekers after wisdom, than to determine the exact hour when the well of Hellenic culture ran dry. Rome, I know, was once the seat of a world empire, and "Civis Romanus sum" was the proudest boast of antiquity. But Rome became "the lone mother of dead empires" and her Forum the playing ground for barbarians because she fell into the dry rot of an effete civilization. The First Empire of the French perished at Waterloo, through ambition; the Third crumbled at Sedan, through inefficiency, to be followed by a new Teutonic Federation proclaimed in the very Hall of Versailles where nearly half a century later the whirligig of time reversed the scenes and reassigned the leading parts. Victor became victim and the vanquished conquered. Why did Imperial Russia, greater than all of these, perish before our very eyes in fire and internecine strife and woeful famine ?
Traveling on Alpine heights in the Austrian Tyrol, I have heard native guides warn careless climbers that the loosening of a single stone may send an avalanche down into the peaceful valley beneath. The reverberations of a pistol shot among those silent peaks have been known to dislodge some stray rock or fragment of ice, which, by accumulating snow and dirt and other debris in its mad rush downward increases in size and speed until it becomes a roaring monster, uprooting trees, sweeping men to destruction, and grinding those artistic Swiss chalets into splinters. Thirteen years ago the gunfire of an irresponsible youth at Sarajevo, directed primarily against the heir to the Austrian throne, unloosened an avalanche that had been brooding over Europe for a generation. As a result of the forces then set in motion, eighteen rulers—kings, princes, and other potentates—were swept from their thrones, some into exile, some, like the last of the Romanov's, to absolute physical annihilation.
And not so long before his death Blasco Ibanez was calling upon the Spanish people to unchain the Four Horsemen, of the Apocalypse and hurl the nineteenth king into the discard !
These effects were appalling; they blasted the ears and seared the eyeballs of humanity—because the causes had not penetrated its brain.
If, on the contrary, history be literature, as I am inclined to believe it is, and hence one of the fine arts, it must, somehow, hold the mirror up to Nature and show mankind his unchanging, recurrent characteristics. Nature is not all rocks and fauna; her chief concern is man. And it is immeasurably more important to know where he is going than where he came from. All the pother about evolution has obscured the only thing that counts—his destiny.
If history be a looking-glass, it is intended for seeing men; a mirror is useless to a blind man. It is ruinous conceit and stupid chauvinism to imagine that the perpetuity of any state, be it monarchy or republic can be assured solely by industrial preeminence, superior armament, mastery in the technique of foreign and domestic commerce, or shrewdness in the conduct of international relations. Valuable assets, these, but edged tools and engines of destruction, unless controlled by minds liberalized by habits of self-analysis, comparison, and reflection. Nor have we on the American continent any divine guaranty that these material excellences—too often and too grossly proclaimed as irresistible—will insure indefinitely our institutions against the cycle of regeneration through which sister nations have already passed. Some see signs of that decline already. Oswald Spengler is sure that the process has begun for all Western culture.
It is precisely his attitude toward such considerations that distinguishes the politician from the statesman. A politician is a man who keeps his eyes on the next election; a statesman keeps them fixed on the next generation. Politicians abounded in old Russia. Statesmen were few. That is why the Bolshevik sits grinning in the throne room of the Kremlin, munching sunflower seeds.
It is an easy error to consider the Bolsheviki as simply barbarians and so dismiss their program with a contemptuous gesture. Certainly the rank and file of their followers have been guilty of inhuman excesses and unpardonable bloodshed. But the authorities ruling Russia today are not barbarians. They are the fruits of barbarian practices in government extending through three centuries. Russia survived the barbarians from without, outlived the Mongolian conquerors under Genghis Khan. It was the barbarian within that destroyed her—those imperious autocrats in high places and petty tyrants in low places, more concerned with the perpetuation of dynasties and the conquest of new principalities than with the happiness, the natural rights, and the development of the hordes under their control. Human life and human rights were always cheap in the East and still are in Russia today, a relic, doubtless, and a blending of two influences that cut themselves deep into the character of the ruling classes—Asiatic callousness and Byzantine haughtiness.
The Russian problem derives its hugeness and its complexity from the very soil that gave it birth, inheriting these characteristics as legitimately and historically as the Russian peasant does his wise simplicity and his naive mysticism. To be sure, such of the intelligentsia as escaped the Cheka during the Terror often begged us foreigners to consider Bolshevism, not as Russian in character and origin at all, but as a distinctly foreign invention, imported into Russia by the German High Staff during the war as a purely military manœuvre to destroy the morale of the Russian people and cripple the army. Both objectives were actually achieved with characteristic efficiency, even though the Frankenstein monster thus created almost destroyed its sponsor when Bolshevist revolutionary propaganda nearly triumphed in Germany in 1923.
In substantiation of their protests, it was often pointed out to us by native Russians that the anti-individualistic character of Soviet institutions is as far removed from the dreamy idealism of Slav peasantry as it is from the avowed aspirations of typical revolutionary leaders like Alexander Herzen, Plekhanov, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Chernov, Martov, Spiridonova, Milyukov, Pitirim Sorokin, and Grandmother Breshkovskaya. This reservation must, however, be interpreted as their criticism of Bolshevism's impracticable, unworkable answer to Russia's century-long struggle for political freedom and economic independence. It does not, I think, invalidate my contention that Russia's present fate was clearly Russia's destiny, self-imposed, foreseen through decades, and inescapable, granted the policy pursued by the Russian Government for the thirty-seven years that elapsed between the assassination of Alexander II and the murder of Nicholas II.
Michael Romanov
Time, before whose impartial tribunal all men and institutions pass for judgment, is gradually furnishing the perspective indispensable for an objective and unobstructed view of that sinister record of blunder, Asiatic callousness, reaction, and Byzantine haughtiness. The unfolding panorama of Russian history from 1613—when young Michael Romanov, son of the Patriarch Philaret, mounted the throne—until the last of the Romanov's perished in the hideous massacre of Ekaterinburg reveals a destiny that swept to its finale with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. A thesis common in monarchist and émigré circles labors to prove that the Bolshevist revolution was an unnatural, un-Russian phenomenon artificially created by two foreign influences German militarism and Jewish hatred, and then imposed by treachery on a demoralized and exhausted people. But on the strength of the record, and in view of the testimony of representative Russians supported by documentary evidence now becoming increasingly available, I am obliged to reject that theory. Though the instrumental rôle played both by Jews and by Germany was considerable and active, and though I am familiar with the remarkable work of Mrs. Webster tracing the revolutionary movement, through Lenin and Marx, back to Bakunin, Anacharsis Clootz,—"the personal enemy of Jesus Christ,"—Gracchus Babeuf, and the Illuminati of Weishaupt, I maintain that Bolshevism is a natural phase in the evolution of a strictly historical process originating in the soil, the culture, and the politics of Russia itself. When one disentangles the matted roots of that gnarled and knotted growth, he will discover many domestic causes: one philosophic, another geographic, some political, economic, and racial, one religious, and the final, psychological and emotional.[The author is incorrect Bolshevism is Jewish in origin DC]
The chronicling of the Russian Revolution may safely be left to the scientific historian. The determination of certain practical political consequences, such as the maintenance of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Government, concerns the statesman. Mutual recrimination, hateful charge and counter charge, will occupy politicians and professional propagandists, White and Red. Concessions and commercial opportunities are fascinating traders and merchandisers of credit. But the basic issue belongs to mankind.
In the first place: The impetus and direction given to evolutionary thought by the morbid pessimism of so many Russian intellectuals during the latter half of the nineteenth century only served to tighten the noose around their own necks. Thirty-seven years before the storm broke that destroyed and dispersed such an unbelievably large number of Russian intellectuals, Feodor Dostoievsky, one of Russia's most gifted sons, addressed a notable gathering of fellow authors, publicists, and officials at the unveiling of the Pushkin Memorial in Moscow. This statue stands near the site of the old Tverskaya Gate where the Sadovaya Boulevard crosses the Tverskaya. It is one of the busiest corners in Moscow. I have often paused beneath that huge bronze figure and visualized the brilliant scene on that June day, in the year 1880. Where now congregate innumerable nondescripts, mostly ragged children peddling cigarettes and sunflower seeds to the jostling crowds of young Communists who saunter through this popular boulevard on summer evenings, then stood a distinguished audience composed of the elite of Moscow and old St. Petersburg society. With all the liberty and authority of his literary eminence, and with a vision clarified by his four years of imprisonment in Siberia, Dostoievsky flayed them unmercifully. He pictured the abyss toward which the cynics, lounging luxuriously in gilded salons, were dragging unhappy Russia. Their cosmopolitan education, he said, obtained abroad, had estranged them from their own people; they had formed a little class which despised the common herd for their ignorance, and yet did nothing to remove it, or to develop the sacred ideals that smoulder in the breast of every moujik. He scored the lack of understanding and sympathy shown by the upper classes toward the great peasant masses and accused the Russian intellectuals, as a body, of endeavoring to transform his beloved Russia into a grotesque caricature of Europe. Whereas in Western Europe, he said, he had found that parents strove to evoke patriotism in the hearts of their children and to make them good Englishmen, good Frenchmen, good Italians, Russian parents seemed engaged in awakening in the child a positive hatred of their fatherland as if it were an offense in the nostrils of humanity.
"It is we," writes Dostoievsky's daughter, Aimée, "we, the hapless victims of the Russian Revolution, who now see all his predictions fulfilled and have to expiate the irresponsible chatter of the liberals."
The Viscount de Voguë, in his severe but penetrating analysis of Russian temperament in the "forties," comments on the same blunder:—
The Minister of Education himself sent his own candidates to Berlin or Gottingen. These young men, when properly loaded with moral philosophy and the leaven of Liberalism,—equipped with ideas for which there was no use in their own country,—return to Russia discontented and rebellious. The Minister was eternally bewailing the astonishing sight of a hen hatching ducklings. These suspicious emissaries of the West were recommended to the care of the Police—whilst others continued to be sent the same school.(2)
Griboyedov, in his comedy, Misfortune from Intelligence, satirizes the same superficiality.
Ivan Bunin, perhaps best known for his realistic searching for the roots of evil in The Village (1910), had long before seen the gathering storm cloud. After his escape from Russia he wrote:—
What the Russian Revolution turned into very soon none will comprehend who has not seen it. This spectacle was utterly unbearable to anyone who had not ceased to be a man, in the image and likeness of God, and all who had a chance to flee fled from Russia. Flight was sought by the vast majority of the most prominent Russian writers, primarily, because in Russia there awaited them either senseless death at the hands of the first chance miscreant drunk with licentiousness and impunity, with rapine, with wine, with blood, with cocaine; or an ignominious existence as a slave in the darkness, teeming with lice, in rags, amid epidemic diseases, exposed to cold, to hunger, to the primitive torments of the stomach, and absorbed in that single degrading concern, under the eternal threat of being thrown out of his mendicant's den into the street, of being sent to the barracks to clean up the soldiers' filth, of being, without any reason whatever, arrested, beaten, abused, of seeing one's own mother, sister, or wife violated, and yet having to preserve utter silence....
Some critics have called me bitter and gloomy. I do not think that this definition is fair and accurate. But of course I have derived much honey and still more bitterness from my wanderings throughout the world and my observations of human life. I had felt a vague fear for the fate of Russia when I was depicting her. Is it my fault that reality, the reality in which Russia has been living for over five years now, has justified my apprehensions beyond all measure; that those pictures of mine which had once upon a time appeared black and wide of the truth, even in the eyes of Russian people, have become prophetic, as some call them now?
But nobody—at least among the autocrats—heeded the rumbling of a distant drum. They could not see Birnam Wood for the trees until each tree moved, with its armed man, on Dunsinane, and the witches' curse was fulfilled.
Secondly: The "land hunger" of the peasants, that perennial thirst of primitive agricultural communities, was but poorly satisfied, nay, was aggravated, by the terms of the political Emancipation of 1861, which still left them, to all intents and purposes, economic serfs. In the latter part of the following chapter we shall examine that phase in greater detail.
Thirdly: The "constitution hunger" of the moderate and truly patriotic liberals and constructive intellectual was answered by a stupid policy of savage repression and a reassertion of autocracy that drove the revolutionaries underground, thus creating a multiplicity of secret organizations dedicated to the overthrow of Czardom through ruthless direct action and political assassination. In a succeeding chapter we shall see more of this duel between the government and the secret societies, particularly during the typical reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, when governmental reaction reached its apex of folly.
Fourthly: The rapid growth of industrial and factory life in Russia, notably from 1867 to 1897, without a corresponding improvement in the status of labor gave rise to a bitter class consciousness. And class consciousness is the fertile soil where professional agitators sow the bitter seeds of class hatred. Class hatred is the sure herald of revolution.
Fifthly: The bewildering ethnological composition of the population, which was nothing more than a loose agglomeration of over two hundred unassimilated nationalities, will, I think, bear me out in believing that Russia was probably the only land on the face of the earth that could have produced so swiftly and so completely the chaotic enigma she now presents to the civilized world. Walk with me through the streets of Moscow, that mart where East and West meet, but blend not. Let your gaze range from the fair-haired Slav of Aryan Russia and Siberia to the semibarbaric countenances and Asiatic types discernible among the slant-eyed soldiers, worshipers of Buddha, who thronged the streets in 1922. Scrutinize the brutal physiognomy of the Lettish janizaries that guard the Kremlin, worshipers of no God save Nikolai Lenin, whose corpse now lies embalmed before its walls; read the consciousness of an awakened East in the swarthy Mohammedan peddler from Turkestan, in the emancipated Jew already uneasy for his life because of his swift ascent to power and affluence and in the turbaned rug dealer from Bokhara, squatting idly on his wares and dreaming of the promises of the Prophet.
Then ride southward and eastward to the Cossack villages along the frozen Don, there to study the pitiful remnants of those incomparable horsemen whose wild riding struck terror into the finest troops of Europe; or push farther eastward to the settlements of the Mongoloid Kalmuks, worshipers of Lama; enter the tents of skin that shelter the Kirghiz and the Chuvash; undertake even to catalog those other semi nomadic tribes inhabiting the foothills of the Urals and the mountainous regions between the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Russian ethnologists find in the Caucasus alone, that sieve which caught and deposited so many types from the unceasing migrations surging to and from Europe, something like two hundred distinct races. You will find tribes in the mountains of Daghestan whose speech is absolutely unintelligible to their neighbors in the nearest village! On his return from this region, in March 1923, Dr. Frank Golder, special investigator of famine conditions for the American Relief Administration, regaled us at Moscow headquarters with reports that would have sounded fantastic on the lips of another man. The learned Professor of History at Leland Stanford University described the inquisitive interest shown in this strange American by the primitive mountaineers. Their first curiosity satisfied, they interrogated Professor Golder about America. Was it not on the under side of the earth and so in darkness? Did not men plough the fields with oxen bearing candles on their horns? How did he get to their land, except by a big hole through the earth? They knew the Czar had a ladder for that. But how could men walk upright in America, being, as it were, upside down? They must crawl about like flies on a ceiling!
Or, traveling westward, take your stand among the sturdy Ukrainian peasants in the "Black Earth" region that was once the richest granary in Europe. Pass through the trim, orderly villages of German colonists in the North Crimea and round about Saratov. In a word, visualize the component human elements of the far-flung empire of the Czars and you will begin to appreciate what Kipling mean when he wrote that Russia must be considered, not as the most eastern of Western nations, but as the most westerly nation of the East. And you cannot help but agree that this heterogeneous admixture of races, religions, and antagonistic interests contained within itself the fatal germs of domestic discord, the seeds of fratricidal strife and bloody revolution, to end eventually in complete economic and social disintegration.
Prince Peter Kropotkin,
Russia was an ethnological museum superintended by a vigilant autocrat and policed by the notorious Third Section of Chancery, the Political Police. The origin and activities of this progenitor of the Bolshevist "Cheka" have been minutely described by one who felt its heavy hand, Prince Peter Kropotkin, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Founded by Peter the Great as a Secret Department, it was an omnipotent institution, a true "state within a state"; its agents were found in every populous town and at every railway station, spying on functionaries of the Empire as well as on citizens suspected of liberal thought or action. Ignoring law and law courts, the Third Section arrested whom it chose, kept its victims imprisoned as long as it pleased, and transported thousands to Northeast Russia or Siberia at the whim of its all-powerful camarilla. The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul was its Bastille. There Peter the Great tortured his son Alexis and killed him with his own hand; there Princess Tarakonova was immured in a cell which filled with water during an inundation, the rats climbing upon her shoulders to save themselves from drowning; there the relentless Minich tortured his enemies and Catherine II buried alive those who objected to her having murdered her husband. From the days of Peter I, throughout two hundred years, this forbidding pile of stone rising from the Neva directly in front of the Winter Palace of the Czars received an unending procession of men and women condemned to a living death, or to be murdered outright, or to be driven to insanity in the loneliness of those damp and dismal dungeons below the level of the river.
This central stronghold of the autocracy was plainly visible from the windows of the Winter Palace. When the overseer fell and his policeman was murdered, bedlam broke loose in the Empire. It cannot be too often repeated, therefore, that the Russian fact, as crystallized in Bolshevism, is essentially different from reparations, the evacuation of the Ruhr, immigration, disarmament, the League, or the World Court. Each of these current themes, though of tremendous international importance, is nevertheless a political problem, a military question, or a legal device to promote peace. But the Russian challenge involves all these elements, because it is a human problem, a social challenge directed not only to the 146,000,000 Russians directly involved, but extending its influence to every corner of the globe where men strive for human betterment or gird themselves to die for liberty.
Russia was a pyramid, but an inverted pyramid with a huge, unwieldy, and inert superstructure of discontented, illiterate masses balanced unsteadily on that slender apex furnished by the fraction of the population included in the nobility, the aristocracy, and the bureaucracy. With the crumbling of the demoralized autocracy, upon which practically the whole of organized life was balanced, human society turned turtle. As the area affected was one sixth of the surface of this planet, and as the human element then involved numbered over 180,000,000 people, the resulting chaos was proportionate to the possibilities for disorder and destruction, which were boundless, inherent in such an unstable system, never far from the surface and only outwardly controlled by the Okhrana, the secret police of the Czars. Consequently, when the crash came, it marked the most stupendous single political event, I believe, since the break-up of the Roman Empire. Not only did the ensuing human wreckage cover the plains of Muscovy, but the flotsam and the jetsam have been washed up on every shore of the civilized world.
Russia was the last island fortress of absolutism in the rising tide of democracy, the outstanding anachronism of the twentieth century. Ringed round by the bayonets of the Preobrazhensky and Volinsky regiments, its ukases executed by the knouts of Cossacks and the flashing sabers of the Hussars, it defied the elements for three hundred years—until the deluge came.
Then, too, the influence of sectarianism cannot be overlooked in any complete account of the progress of revolution in Russia. Apart from the twelve million Roman Catholics residing within the confines of the Empire, mainly of Polish origin and consequently treated with hostility as tolerated aliens, and the seven millions or more of Lutherans, there existed a bewildering complexity of dissident sects. Tenacious of their old and new beliefs, fanatically opposed to the state religion, the sectarians were prepared to die, as they frequently did, for their religious practices. If we add to the strictly Orthodox communities of Raskolniks (Separatists) and Starovyeri (Old Believers) the rationalist and chiliastic groups, the Adventists and the New Adventists, the Nemoliakhi and Neplatel'schiki (nonpayers of taxes), the Stranniki (pilgrims), the Medal'shchiki (medalists), the Jehovists (universal brothers), the Sviadodukhovsti (adherents of the Holy Ghost), the Dukhobors and Molokani (Zionists), the Fire Baptists and Morelashchiki (self-immolators), the Khlysty (scourgers), the Skoptsy (self-mutilators), and the Trudnoviki (cloistral communists), a total is reached which embraced probably a third of the population. And since orthodoxy and autocracy were inseparably linked in the Russian idea of the State, non-conformists were penalized and systematically oppressed. The victims were in moral and intellectual rebellion long before the armed revolt of 1917. They constituted a socio-political factor of truly elemental power, smoldering with resentment and ripe for explosion.
You must revise your standards of measurement when you approach things Russian, at least if you would understand her and judge her aright. Russia always suggested to Occidental minds men and events on a huge scale—physical giants bearded and wrapped in skins of animals, imposing grenadiers, boundless plains called "steppes" that tire the eye with their unending monotony, wildernesses of snow and ice, bitter, cruel cold, hunger, famine, bloody peasant revolts like those of Pugachev and Stenka Razin, and other elemental things.
Four words, Czar, Siberia, vodka, pogrom, exhausted the common ideology. And that mythical band of hard-pressed travelers, galloping madly across snow fields and casting a succulent child into the gleaming fangs of yelping wolves, sufficed as a satisfactory epitome of Russian manners and customs.
The literary, the spiritual, the scientific, and the artistic achievements of Russia were, until comparatively recent times, known only to connoisseurs, students, and occasional pioneers. "Very few people born west of Riga," writes Prince Mirsky in his Contemporary Russian Literature, "knew anything at all about the facts that are relevant in this connection." In the United States, particularly, the common judgment was inspired by experience with the streams of Jewish immigrants and husky Slavs making for the Scranton coal fields or Pittsburgh factories; a Mousorgsky, a Tchaikovsky, and a Rimski-Korsakov in music, a Mendeléev in science, and Soloviev, the Newman of Russian philosophy, could with difficulty hope for the popular acclaim accorded to a Mr. Irving Berlin.
It was only the occasional traveler or diplomat and trader who came to appreciate the cosmopolitan refinements of the Nevsky Prospekt that made old St. Petersburg another Paris transplanted to northern snows by the Europeanizing policies of Peter the Great, and made the Petrovka and Kuznetsky Most in Moscow rival the Rue de la Paix of Paris. Even the railroads in Russia are built with a wider gauge than those of Western Europe. This peculiarity was as deliberate as it was symbolic, serving as a physical device to isolate Russia. It caused considerable inconvenience to the American Relief Administration during the famine, as all supplies shipped via the Polish route had to be unloaded at Stolpce and reloaded into Russian wagons. But on the through line from Berlin to Riga via Eydtkunen in East Prussia, and Wirballen in Lithuania, the Germans, during heir occupation of the Baltic provinces, had the foresight to Europeanize the tracks. They moved one rail nearer the other and then cut off the superfluous ends of the crossties, so that the Russian gauge could not be restored without rebuilding the entire system.
Geographically, Russia was a Triton among the minnows. Glance at a map of Europe! Politically, Russia was "the bear that walks like a man." Now, the bear is a huge, lumbering animal whose hug means death. Persia, Mongolia, Manchuria, and China experienced that squeeze within our own memory and Constantinople has never been quite out of the shadow of the overstretched paw.
CHAPTER II
“ WE ARE YOURS, BUT
“ WE ARE YOURS, BUT
THE LAND IS OURS ”
IT would indeed be a fascinating and a profitable excursion into an almost virgin field of inquiry to trace step by step the origins and colorful vicissitudes of the Russian State from the dim and distant obscurity which enshrouds the first appearance of the Eastern Slavs in historical literature, through the periods of Tatar and Polish domination, down to its final form under the Princes of Moscow. But the limits of this present book do not permit more than a bare recapitulation of the main characteristics. The monumental work of Klyuchevsky, the celebrated historian of the University of Moscow, unfolds a panorama of colossal magnitude and importance. With the entrance of Rurik into Novgorod in the middle of the ninth century (862) began the steady process of expansion and Russification of conquered provinces, notably in the reign of Ivan III, that eventually carried the double-headed eagle from Alexandrovno, on the German border, to Vladivostok on the Pacific, and from the Polar Sea on the north to the "warm waters" of the Black Sea on the south, with Constantinople ever the objective and ultimate goal of Russian foreign policy.
There are two prevailing views regarding the dawn of Russian history. One school of research, represented by Schlözer, Karamzin, Pogodin, and Soloviev, dates Russian chronology from the coming of the Scandinavians, under Rurik, to rule over Novgorod and the neighboring Slavonic tribes in the year 862 of the Christian era. According to this belief, these hardy Vikings, who came in acceptance of an invitation to govern the land extended to them by the natives of North Russia, found the great Russian plain which lay between Novgorod and Kiev, stretching to the right and left of the Dnieper, wholly uncultivated and wild, inhabited by Slavic tribes living in a state of rude, anarchic barbarism. From Novgorod, therefore, as a starting point, the Varangian Princes gravitated southward toward Kiev, and by successive federation and consolidation of scattered trading posts established the nucleus of the future Empire.
Another and later group of Russian scholars, ably represented by the Moscow historian Klyuchevsky, now dead, and Michael Rostovtsev, at present lecturing at an American University, seek their orientation farther south, basing their claims on the archaeological discoveries in South Russia and the Crimea, where distinct traces of a flourishing civilization have been unearthed showing evidence of Greek culture and Hellenic influence. They record the finding of palæolithic and neolithic relics in the southern steppes, and adduce the mention of Russia made by Herodotus as early as the fifth century before Christ, when Ionian and Dorian Greeks had established themselves along the coast line of the Black Sea in the colonies of Olbia, Chersonese, Panficapæum, Tanais, and Phanagoria. The place names still preserved at Eupatoria and Theodosia in the Crimea are reminders of Greek settlers. But the hinterland was occupied by other peoples, under the headship, first of the Cimmerians, and then of the Scythians.
It will suffice, however, for our present purpose to take our stand upon the common ground where all schools meet and say that the Russian State, viewed as a political community, and apart from its racial content, evolved from that confederation of trading posts between Novgorod and Kiev, which were founded and protected by Varangian chieftains under Rurik and the Slavonic Princes Oleg and Igor. Both Scandinavians—who probably were of Norman origin—and Slavs were impelled as much by hopes of gain as by visions of glory. " They were as good business men as they were soldiers.... Adventurous trade, therefore, by all accounts seems to have been responsible for the early settlements on the Russian Plain." And the very name of Russia or "Rus," to recall its earliest form, is said to be Time's modification of "Rurik," the Swedish freebooter.
The first recorded account of the Russian people, that intensely human and picturesque document, The Chronicle of Nestor, does not go farther back than 852 A.D.
Now a word about that Russian plain; not only was it to be the scene of all the events here recorded, but it played a very important part in determining some of them. That climatic conditions and geography do materially influence the development of a people is beyond dispute. In fact, it is an article of faith with one school of historians that climate and geography far outweigh psychic and cultural influences in deciding the direction which a nation's development shall take. This theory is, of course, subject to the same exaggeration and unwarranted application which every materialistic interpretation of history and economic is prone to when investigators minimize the free psychological, social, and spiritual instincts that dominate men in defiance of geography and climate. Climate does encourage certain types of genius and discourages others. Philologists point to the Romance languages, with their open, full-vowelled, and musical sounds, as the natural expression of races basking under the limpid skies, the orange groves, and the mellow sunshine of the Mediterranean basin. We expect liquid music from a Tetrazzini, a Calve, and a Caruso, whereas the sterner rigors of Northern Europe tend rather to produce the Wagnerian thunder of Teutonic basses. Laplanders and Eskimos speak a particularly guttural tongue because long experience taught their ancestors to keep the mouth closed as much as possible in those icy igloos, and speak, when they had to, through clenched teeth. And the Ural-Altaic family speaks a throaty and agglutinative language, measuring their words by the least common denominator of vocal effort. But, to confute and confound any theorist who becomes overdogmatic, Jenny Lind comes tripping across the stage, a Swedish nightingale of the North !
The enormous plateau on which Russia sprawls is described as the largest in the world. But it is landlocked. The only southern egress is blocked by an ancient enemy, the Turk, who makes the Black Sea, to all intents and purposes, an inland sea as long as Islam controls the Dardanelles; of the northern ports, both Petrograd and Archangel are frozen in nearly half the year. Even when open for navigation, the Petrograd outlet leads into the narrow straits dominated by Denmark and Sweden. The only other hope of free exit is by Vladivostok, five thousand miles distant from the heart of the Empire. "Nature has been a stepmother to Russia," wrote Soloviev; "Fate was another stepmother." Hence that historic urge which impelled Russia to press outward in all directions—to break, as it were, the chrysalis of geographic despotism which Nature had imposed on her.
At this point our economic determinist may cry triumph and thank us for having proved his very dearest claim. Not so fast. Human nature is capable of most disconcerting tricks in the very teeth of environment. There are numerous points of similarity between the stages of development that led to the final erection of an autocratic state in Russia and the processes that resulted in the present United States of America. Beginning with relatively small territories, both peoples conquered a vast and virgin continent: the Americans through successive waves of colonization across the Rockies westward to the Pacific, the Russians by similar pioneering eastward across the Urals until they reached the same expanse of water that stopped the Americans at the Golden Gate. Both faced natural obstacles and encountered primitive tribes, yellow and red, who contested every inch of the white man's advance. But no two governments on the face of the earth arrived at more contradictory theories and practices as to the meaning of political freedom.
While freely admitting that the physical configuration of Russia's territory did determine, to a measurable degree, the direction of the stream of events that resulted in autocracy,—just as it directs so many of her rivers northward,—it would be an unjustified conclusion to maintain that this ends the diagnosis. There were subtle human factors at work more powerful than rivers or harbors or steppes; it was the simultaneous concentration of mixed forces that led Russia into the errors that proved the undoing of her political and social unity. To these elements we shall devote a later chapter. The final scene represented a territorial jurisdiction of 8,648,000 square miles, an area more than twice the rest of Europe combined, considerably more than twice the size of the United States. The population in 1914 was something like 180,000,000. But, as I have intimated, it was an artificial structure, the cohesion of whose parts depended, not on any natural affinity, but on the strength of character and resourcefulness of one central figure, the Czar, in whom resided supreme legislative, administrative, and ecclesiastical power. He was both civil ruler and virtual head of the Orthodox Church. In the words of Peter the Great, he was "the autocratic monarch, who has to give an account of his acts to no man on earth, but has power to rule his states and lands according to his own will and judgment."
The people, his subjects, were divided into clearly defined classes, whose rights and obligations were set forth with legal precision in the Code. Everybody was ticketed and labeled:—
| Peasants Burghers (burgesses), i.e., merchants and artisans Clergy Nobility, landowners and officials | Per Cent 80 18 .5 1.5 |
The prikaz, imperial edict of the Czar, was the incontrovertible law of the land. He alone could initiate legislation, as he alone could initiate a conversation. To be sure there was a Council of State, a Committee of Ministers, a Senate, and a Judiciary. But as these were all either appointees of the Czar and responsible to him alone, or, if elected, utterly dependent on the administration, they were, in point of fact, nothing but an extension, as it were, of the autocrat's person and an instrumentality for the execution of will. The imperial decree was interpreted and duly executed by an army of governors, vice governors, resident provincial officials, civil assistants, military aids, and scribes and secretaries beyond imagining. Fourteen categories of officials were included in the vast and complicated bureaucratic machine invented by Peter the Great and under which Russia groaned for two centuries. The fourteen progressive stages in the public service embraced all varieties of rank or tchin, and the ruling caste thus created were known as tchinovniki. "Russia is ruled, not by me, but by my forty thousand clerks," said Nicholas I.
Historians like to lay their finger on a definite circumstance, a known date, or some single event to mark the beginning of mighty political movements. Hilaire Belloc has written an essay in support of his belief that the French Revolution began on the day and at the moment when the Commons of France, excluded by Louis XVI from entering the Assembly Hall at Versailles, on June 20, 1789, rushed in indignation to the enclosed tennis court on the palace grounds and there defied King, clergy, and nobles by holding a separate convocation. The Boston Massacre, preceding the Declaration of Independence by six years, made the American Revolution inevitable. But it would be extremely difficult to specify and designate a date or a single event as the starting point of the Russian Revolution. That deluge grew from many rivers of tears and streams of blood.
There were frequent bloody conflicts of the palace type in early days centering about the "false" Dimitri. Peasant uprisings frequently disturbed the growing Empire, such as that of Stenka Razin in 1670 and Pugachev in 1773. But the first of these resembled more the guerrilla warfare of a popular brigand, rallying discontented elements in opposition to the domination of Moscow, than organized domestic rebellion. The latter outburst, though more serious both in duration and in character, was a revolt of Don Cossacks in support of a pseudo-Peter III against Catherine II. Its forces are pictured by historians as a tatterdemalion horde of disreputable adventurers organized into an army for predatory purposes. Of all previous rebellions the Pugachev revolt came nearest to social and economic revolution.
Local military revolts were not wanting, such as that of the freebooting Zaparojian Cossacks, suppressed by Potemkin, under Catherine II. The numerous Polish insurrections were national uprisings against the political rule of Russia. But domestic revolt only becomes successful revolution in the complete sense when it effects radical political, social, and economic changes in the community.
A correspondent of the London Times, in Petrograd during the War, wrote, in March 1917, "An old woman threw a stone at a baker's shop-window and started the Russian Revolution." He means, of course, that the crash of breaking glass in the bread shop rang up the curtain on the last act. As early as December, 1825, a group of ardent revolutionaries, mostly idealistic young officers of the Imperial Army, lately returned from France and Germany, attempted to end the tyranny of Czardom by open revolt in St. Petersburg. Ill advised, improperly organized, and too weak to be dangerous, it was easily suppressed—in the usual way. Five of the leaders were executed and great numbers of the participants were exiled for life. This pathetic attempt of the "Decembrists" to effect a refined revolution, an affair of cocked hats and gayly caparisoned chargers, forms the theme of Merejkovsky's historical novel, December Fourteenth.
The leaders had imbibed new and electrifying ideas during their campaigning in Western Europe, where they had been employed against Napoleon. They aimed at a complete reformation of the Russian State and even dreamed of a constitutional republic modeled on the United States of America.(1) It failed, through inefficiency, the insurgent troops standing drawn up all day in the Senate Square, their officers debating and arguing as to the next move. By evening the loyal troops had time to bring up cannon and leisurely blew them into the Neva. "The Russian is clever, but always too late," according to their own homely proverb.
The Soviet Government, by its official celebration of the Decembrists' centenary in November 1925, recognized the Decembrists as the first strictly social and political revolutionaries which Russia produced.
But all historians and thoughtful Russians admit that it was the Crimean War of 1853 that finally unloosed elemental social forces that could no longer be denied or restrained. "War searches the joints and harness of every state that challenges its verdict; it appraises, first by a rude and sudden shock, and then by a long, slow, dragging tension (just as we test and appraise the worth of steel), the endurance and the capacity for survival of each political community." The defeat of Russia by the combined forces of England and France was a national humiliation, regarded, however, by patriotic Russians as a blessing in disguise.
"Sevastopol fell," said Ivan Aksakov, "that God might reveal all the rottenness of the system of government."
"We have fallen," said Samarin, "not before the forces of the Western Alliance, but as a result of our own internal weakness."
This weakness had been manifested to a scandalous degree in the absence of adequate transportation facilities for men and supplies. At the outbreak of the Crimean War there were but two railroads operating in Russia, aggregating 419 miles; one ran from Petrograd to Moscow, while the second, a short spur of fifteen miles, connected Petrograd with the Summer Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Obviously, both had been constructed either for the convenience of royalty or for upper class and bourgeois profit. The rest of Russia floundered about in the mud, on foot, on horseback, or in coaches and wagons, as best they might.
During the preliminary planning of the Moscow-Petrograd line,—which is exceptionally well built, straight as the flight of a crow, and running on a firm, level roadbed,—occurred an incident that reconciles one to certain attributes of tyranny. The officials charged by Nicholas I with laying out the route to be followed were neither better nor worse than our modern "log rollers." When Nicholas called for the plans, he observed that a meandering course had been plotted out in deference to certain landowners and interested persons who, if they could not move their property close the tracks, would lay the rails in circles, if need be, to bring new value to their holdings. The Czar took a ruler; laying one end on Petrograd and one on Moscow, he said, "You will construct the line so." And so it runs to this day, 404 miles without deviating a foot to right or left, following an almost mathematically straight line. As one commentator puts it, the Nicholas Railway remains "to all future ages, like St. Petersburg and the Pyramids, a magnificent monument of autocratic power."
Dangerously discredited by the issue of the war and the revelations of disorganization, incompetency, and official corruption, the Government made haste to be liberal.
As the land hunger of the peasants was the most threatening symptom of basic unrest, the agrarian problem as the natural starting point for the great reform that marked the reign of Alexander II. For upward of three hundred years, since the conquests of Ivan IV, which added Kazan (1552), Astrakhan (1556), and the whole course of the Volga to Russia, the peasant population had been undergoing an insidious process of economic limitation that resulted practically in bondage. The acquisition of new and fertile territories opened up huge tracts of land for cultivation. Scarcity of labor sufficient to till the soil obliged the great landholders to use every device to coax agricultural workers to their respective estates. Once on the ground, the "boyars" — the territorial nobility—held them there sometimes by fraud, more often by force. Obliged to render service to the Czar in the shape of military aid, taxes, and produce as recompense for his land grants, these feudal lords found it impossible to discharge their obligations unless labor was made available and permanent. Gradually, therefore, the peasant came to be regarded as belonging to the land which he tilled, until, under the regency of Boris Godunov (1597), sentiment crystallized in the form of an imperial decree, an ukaz, prohibiting peasants from migrating from one property to another, and confirming the legal right of landlords to enforce the return of fugitives. It was the Russian Dred Scott decision.
Klyuchevsky(2) sums up the process in his famous antinomies:—
1. Up till the middle of the eighteenth century the external territorial extension of the Russian State goes on in inverse proportion to the development of the interior freedom of the people.
2. The political status of the laboring classes establishes itself in inverse proportion to the economic productivity of their labor that is, their labor becomes less free in proportion as it becomes more productive.
From "fixation" to the land, for purely agricultural and economic reasons, to practical slavery was not a far cry. By the middle of the eighteenth century serfdom had become legalized, the serfs being considered as part of the proprietor's irremovable property. A man's wealth was computed, not by his revenue, or his dessiatines (dessiatine = 2.7 acres), or his gold, but by the number of "souls" on his property. Gogol, the Russian Dickens, has a celebrated novel on the subject, called Dead Souls, satirizing in a masterful way one of the abuses of serfdom. There was a periodic census of serfs, say, once every ten or twenty years. This being the case, an owner had to pay a tax on every "soul" registered at the last census, though some of the serfs might have died in the meantime. Nevertheless, the system had its material advantages, inasmuch as an owner might borrow money from the bank on the "dead souls" no less than on the living ones. The plan of Chichikov, Gogol's hero villain, was, therefore, to make a journey through Russia and buy up the "dead souls" at reduced rates, saving their owner the government tax, of course, and acquiring for himself a list of fictitious serfs which he meant to mortgage a bank for a considerable sum. With this money he could buy an estate and some real live serfs and make the beginning of a fortune. Gogol read this manuscript to his friend, the poet Pushkin. At the end Pushkin cried out in anguish: "God! What a sad country Russia is!"
Mackenzie Wallace, in that invaluable record he left of his years of wandering up and down Russia, recounts a story which he read of a similar Chichikov in the reign of Nicholas I.
An officer of rural police, when driving on a country road, finds a dead body by the wayside. Congratulating himself on this bit of good luck, he proceeds to the nearest village and lets the inhabitants know that all manner of legal proceedings will be taken against them so that the supposed murderer may be discovered. The peasants are of course frightened and give him a considerable sum of money in order that he may hush up the affair. An ordinary officer of police would have been quite satisfied with this ransom, but this officer is not an ordinary man and is very much in need of money; he conceives, therefore, the brilliant idea of repeating the experiment. Taking up the dead body, he takes it away in his tarantass and a few hours later declares to the inhabitants of a village some miles off that some of them have been guilty of murder and that he intends to investigate the matter thoroughly. The peasants of course pay liberally to escape the investigation, and the rascally officer, emboldened by success, repeats the trick in several villages until he has gathered a large sum.
On August 22, 1767, a ukaz of Catherine II deprived serfs of all legal status and protection of the laws, providing that "if any serf shall dare to present a petition against his master he shall be punished with the knout and transported for life to the mines of Nerchinsk." An advertisement in the Moscow Gazette of 1801 ran as follows:—
To Be Sold: Three coachmen, well trained and handsome, and two girls, the one eighteen and the other fifteen years of age, both of them good-looking and well acquainted with various kinds handiwork. In the same house there are for sale two hairdressers; the one, twenty-one years of age, can read, write, play on a musical instrument, and act as huntsman; the other can dress ladies' and gentlemen's hair; in the same house are sold pianos and organs.
The same paper also advertised: "a first-rate clerk, a carver, and a lackey are offered for sale." Another announcement read: "In this house one can buy a coachman and a Dutch cow about to calve."
The percentage of the total population which was, in Sir Paul Vinogradoff's phrase, "domesticated animals," or "black people" and "backyard people," as the peasants described themselves, may be seen from the table presented by Sir George Mavor in his thoroughly documented study, the Rise and Fall of Bondage Right.
| YEAR OF CENSUS 1722 1796 1812 1835 1851 1859 | NUMBER OF BONDED PEASANTS ON PRIVATE ESTATES 3,200,000 9,789,680 10,416,813 10,872,229 10,708,856 10,696,136 | NUMBER OF BONDED PEASANTS ON LAND OF THE STATE, ORTHODOX CHURCH, AND PRIVATE PROPERTIES OF TZAR 2,200,000 7,276,270 7,550,814 10,550,000 12,000,000 12,800,000 | TOTAL POPULATION OF RUSSIA 14,000,000 36,000,000 41,000,000 60,000,000 69,000,000 74,000,000 |
On the eve of the Emancipation, therefore, 34.39 per cent of the total population were serfs. But in Great Russia itself (i.e., North and Central Russia, with the northeast part of the "Black Earth" region) 53 per cent were bondsmen.
There were many ways through which a man became a serf, particularly during the early stages in the development of bondage rights:—
1. By captivity following war.
2. By voluntary consent.
3. By the act of parents through sale of a free person into slavery.
4. By way of punishment for commission of certain crimes.
5. By birth from a kholop or bondaged man.
6. By insolvency of a merchant through his own fault.
7. By voluntary entrance on the part of a free person into the service of another without a contract guaranteeing the freedom of the servant.
8. By marriage to a rob or bondaged woman, without a similar contract.
The Cossacks—the "free people"—of the Southern steppes alone escaped these encroachments and maintained their local autonomy. Whereas their moujik brothers of the North succumbed to serfdom, these hard-drinking, hard riding, and hard-fighting clansmen boasted of an independence which the Czars deemed it prudent to respect and tolerate. In return for political privileges and free land tenure the Cossack settlements furnished military service in the shape of a volunteer mobile militia, each adult Cossack standing ready with his own horse and equipment to answer the call of the Czar. Democratic feudalism best describes their status in the Empire. A bulwark of the autocracy in its prime, the Cossacks were among the first to declare for the Revolution in 1917.
This pernicious institution of serfdom, one of those periodic manifestations of man's inhumanity to man, became untenable in the fierce light that beat upon Russia and its throne during and after the Crimean War. On the morrow of the peace, in 1856, Alexander announced the beginnings of Emancipation in an address to the Marshals of the Nobility in Moscow:—
For the removal of certain unfounded reports, I consider it necessary to declare to you that I have not at present the intention of annihilating serfage; but certainly, as you yourselves know, the existing manner of possessing serfs cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfage from above than to await the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below. I request you, gentlemen, to consider how this can be put into execution and to submit my words to the Noblesse for their consideration.
But it took the Imperial Commission six years to overcome the opposition of powerful landowners who clung obstinately to their vested interests. This history of the negotiations is a tedious story, and in the final compromise may be seen the same fatal tenacity and unwillingness to surrender caste privileges that later practically wrecked the constitutional reform granting a Duma (parliament) in 1906.
The Czar Liberator, Alexander II, was faced with a problem very different from that which confronted Abraham Lincoln. The emancipator of the American slaves was able, by a single proclamation, to free from bondage the persons of the blacks without conceding that it violated the immovable property rights of the plantation owner. Slavery, which postulates actual ownership of another human being as a chattel, is indefensible under the Christian dispensation which cannot regard human personality as an object included among the various categories of "property." It was Christian morality that first challenged the pagan concept of the intrinsic dignity of the human soul and raised men above the beasts and the plough and the field, which may be owned in the strictest sense. In freeing slaves, therefore, Abraham Lincoln could maintain that he was but righting the ancient wrong that had reduced a large group of rational human beings to the level of irrational animals. He could afford to hew close to the line and let the chips fall where they would.
But the Russian landholders, and, curiously enough, many educated Russians, who have not seriously investigated the development of serfdom, would indignantly deny that legalized slavery of any kind ever existed on their states. The serfs. they maintained, belonged to the land, and it was the land that belonged to the proprietor. The peasants, on their part, had a different and franker conception of their relations to the master, expressed in the celebrated proverb: "We are yours, but the land is ours."
The landowners' explanation was a disingenuous evasion, and insistence on it led to an unsatisfactory compromise quite characteristic of Russian autocracy. The long-awaited Law of Emancipation, the cherished dream of every Russian peasant, was signed on March 3, 1861, liberating, all told something over 23,000,000 serfs. The signing of the law was followed by the "Great Manifesto," which was read in all the churches. But disappointment soon displaced the first jubilation, and distrust began to creep into the heart of the liberated as they gradually learned to comprehend the terms of the law. Abstract conceptions of civic right and legalistic assurances of independence left the peasant cold and unmoved, if not reduced to concrete, tangible facts. Land, to the Russian peasant, meant just one thing—it meant the soil so vividly described by Uspensky, the talented portrayer of Russian peasant life:—
It is the same soil which you bring home on your rubbers in the form of mud, it is the earth you see in your flower pots, black, wet earth; it is, in a word, the most ordinary, natural earth.
By the provisions of the law all peasants acquired the civil rights common to free rural classes, but, for the most part they still found themselves without land. Land was actually assigned to each peasant household, but it did not become their property. They held it in "perpetual possession," but were required to pay yearly dues for the use of it. Where land was held in common, under the mir system,(3) it was the village commune that distributed the lots and determined in what way they could be cultivated. If a peasant was awarded, let us say, ten dessiatines, in a commune of a thousand dessiatines, he usually found that he received his portion, not as a single unit, but probably in ten narrow strips of land, some situated in the fertile fields in the immediate vicinity of the village, others farther off by the river bank, the rest perhaps half a day's journey away on a barren hillside. That is why travelers in Russia, even in recent times, often marveled at seeing the arable land of a Russian village divided up into ribbonlike strips, sometimes less than two yards wide, separated from each other by dilapidated fences or other crude markings to indicate that the strips were owned by different persons. The results were disheartening. Ivan Ivanovich, with laborious industry, cultivated his strip of land and planted wheat. But Grigor Grigorevich, his neighbor, the village ne'er-do-well, allowed his strip to run to weeds, or let animals loose in it. With infinite difficulty Ivan Ivanovich slaved to wring a bare existence from his strip of land and to meet the taxes imposed upon him by the Government as "redemption fees" to be paid to the previous landholder in compensation for his expropriated property. Then, to confound the confusion, the majority of the 109,000 communes in Russia redistributed the holdings every ten or twelve years, and Grigor Grigorevich, the loafer, moved over on to the improved land of Ivan Ivanovich, the frugal.
Small inducement, therefore, to improve one's property or fertilize the soil, while there hovered over it the constant menace that it was destined to pass into other hands, leaving the previous owner to begin again the weary struggle for existence on another narrow strip! Each successive allotment, moreover, was based on the personal needs of the respective families. Households which had increased in number since the last allotment received additional dessiatines, especially if they had increased in male numbers. It was of considerable importance, consequently, that the expected baby should be a boy and that he should arrive before the day for the distribution of communal land. And on the other hand, the declining years of the aged, lonely couple frequently saw their only means of livelihood automatically reduced, with the result that the evening of their life's hard working day became filled with shadows.
To these dark forebodings must be added the disturbing contrast which met the peasant's eye as he gazed toward the rich, unified, and prosperous estate of his former landlord, the pomieschik. In the distribution, the ruling classes saw to it that the gentry did not suffer overmuch. The actual proportion of land expropriated in each case was not large and by no means the best portion of the estate. It is related by one investigator that a certain noble who possessed 106,500 acres retained 100,000 for himself and sacrificed 6500 for his serfs. For the surrendered portion the Government paid him, as it paid all landholders, four fifths of the actual valuation, requiring the peasant — or the mir, as the case might be—to pay the balance in annual installment spread through a number of years. But this "redemption fee" was usually omitted by the peasant himself and ignored by the mir, with the result that the unpaid accumulation became oppressive and enormous. In 1905 Nicholas II was obliged to remit all outstanding redemption dues.
Though politically freed, great masses of the peasants, under the relentless whip of uncontrollable circumstances, drifted back into economic serfdom. In the first place, they were obliged to pay four different taxes: (I)imperial, to the central government; (1) local, to the zemstvos—an institution for limited self-government which we shall treat of in our next chapter; (3) communal, to the mir, for the commune; (4) redemption dues for the land expropriated from the proprietors.
These financial obligations, complicated by the unproductivity and rapidly spreading exhaustion of the soil under unscientific farming methods, inevitably drove the newly liberated serfs back to their masters as tenants, renting sections of the still huge proprietary estates bordering on the peasant communes. A vicious circle was thus inaugurated and soon completed. Within two decades the major portion of a bewildered and disappointed peasant population found themselves in a state of impoverishment not far removed from their former serfdom. Nay, more—it was often worse. Under the old regime they were part and parcel of a great organized estate, lived in comparatively respectable quarters, according to the disposition of the master, picked their firewood freely in his forest, and in time of famine were rationed from his well-stocked granary. But with freedom these things were no longer free; and in their place came a burdensome and a fallacious self-sufficiency, and the cessation of all manorial privileges.
Exploitation of tenants recommenced, and within a generation the rentals extorted from the peasant farmers amounted, in twenty-seven provinces of European Russia, to 81 per cent of the total proceeds from the land.
The dark legend soon gathered force and currency that the Czar, as well as the peasants, had been cruelly tricked by the nobles. The "little white Father," batiushka tzar, had truly meant to give them the land; it was the landowners who were holding it back and so frustrating the benevolent design of the Emancipator. Agrarian riots were reported with alarming frequency during this period from different quarters of the Empire. Peasant armies swooped down on unpopular proprietors, looting the manor, the barns, and the fields, sometimes submitting the owners to brutality—a thing of which a drunken moujik is eminently capable.
This peasant psychology inevitably invited the attention of the professional agitators both at home and abroad. From his exile in Switzerland the anarchist leader, Bakunin, preached armed insurrection to the peasants. Riots broke out among university students in Moscow and Petrograd, fomented and directed by the revolutionary intellectuals who had established themselves in Zurich as a headquarters.
Karakósov fired at the Emperor in 1866, and the repression which followed practically closed the period of enlightened reform initiated by Alexander II. Governmental repression generated new terrorism, and the annals of modern Russia from 1866 onward record an ever-increasing series of plots, assassinations of governors; of cabinet minister and policemen. Siberia began to receive a new quota of political prisoners. Dostoievsky has immortalized prison life there in his novel, The House of the Dead, where he tell us "our life was a constant hell, a perpetual damnation."
The long, long trail to Siberia was worn deep with ruts cut by marching parties of condemned prisoners clad in gray exile costume, three hundred to seven hundred at a time clanking chains fixed to both legs and caught up at the waist. Thus shackled, they sometimes tramped three thousand miles before reaching their destination. And these convoys were not composed merely of criminals, but of "politicals' and "suspects" condemned to "administrative exile" as a result of their "political unreliability."
An American journalist, George Kennan, studied the exile system in Siberia during the year 1885 and issued his report in two rare volumes. He is discussing police methods and the elasticity of the term "punishment" in the vocabulary of a Russian Government official:—
An official copy of this paper, which I brought back with me from Siberia, lies before me as I write. It is entitled: " Rules Relating to Police Surveillance" (Polozhnie o Politseiskom Nadzóre). The first thing that strikes the reader in a perusal of this document is the fact that it declares exile and police surveillance to be, not punishments for crimes already committed, but measures of precaution to prevent the commission of crimes that evil-minded men may contemplate. The first section reads as follows: "Police surveillance (which includes administrative exile) is a means of preventing crimes against the existing imperial order (the present form of government); and it is applicable to all persons who are prejudicial to public tranquility." The power to decide when a man is "prejudicial to public tranquillity," and when exile and surveillance shall be resorted to as a means of "preventing crime," is vested in the governors-general, the governors, and the police; and in the exercise of that power they pay quite as much attention to the opinions that a man holds as to the acts that he commits. They can hardly do otherwise. If they should wait in all cases for the commission of criminal acts, they would not be "preventing crime," but merely watching and waiting for it, while the the object of administrative exile is to prevent crime by anticipation. Clearly, then, the only thing to be done is to nip crime in the bud by putting under restraint, or sending to Siberia, every man whose political opinions are such as to raise a presumption that he will commit a crime "against the existing imperial order" if he sees a favorable opportunity for so doing. Administrative exile, therefore, is directed against ideas and opinions from which criminal acts may come, rather than against the criminal acts themselves. It is designed to anticipate and prevent the acts by suppressing or discouraging the opinions; and, such being the case, the document which lies before me should be called, not "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance," but "Rules for the Better Regulation of Private Opinion." In the spirit of this latter title the "Rules" are interpreted by most of the Russian police.
The pretense that administrative exile is not a punishment, but only a precaution, is a mere juggle with words. The Government says, "We do not exile a man and put him under police surveillance as a punishment for holding certain opinions, but only as a means of preventing him from giving such opinions outward expression in criminal acts." If the banishment of a man to the province of Yakutsk for five years is not a "punishment," then the word "punishment" must have in Russian jurisprudence a very peculiar and restricted signification. In the case of women and young girls a sentence of banishment to Eastern Siberia is almost equivalent to a sentence of death, on account of the terrible hardships of the journey and the bad sanitary conditions of the étapes—and yet the Government says that exile by administrative process is not a punishment !
The terrorist society, "Land and Liberty," openly directed the revolutionary movement. In August 1878, Genera Mezentsev, head of the notorious Third Section (the progenitor of the Cheka), was murdered in broad daylight in a public square in Petrograd. The murderer Stepniak escaped and justified his deed in printed circulars widely distributed. Prince Kropotkin, Governor of the Province, was murdered at the door of his residence in Kharkov.
No group contributed more to awakening and steering of the popular imagination into disturbed channels than the famous Tchaikovsky Circles. Organized primarily as a Petrograd club for self-education and self-improvement, its members at first confined themselves to academic discussion and the dissemination of harmless books, approved by the censors of the bureaucracy. But the flaming utterances of Bakunin speedily transformed its meetings into a center of intellectual revolt, then into a G.H.Q. of the revolutionary underworld. Within a few years it had spread fan like through the thirty-eight provinces of the Empire, serving as an intermediary between the intelligentsia and the peasant masses. In 1872 contact was established with labor, and thus all revolutionary elements were united in a common front.
Five shots were fired at the Emperor himself in 1879 by a young man named Soloviev, but none reached the royal mark. A new revolutionary organization of inner-circle leaders called "The Will of the People" openly proclaimed its intention to remove the Czar, as the first step in the destruction of the throne. They mined the railway over which the Czar passed in coming from the Crimea, but it was another train that was blown up, killing numerous innocent victims. A carpenter named Halturin succeeded in secreting a charge of dynamite in the Winter Palace, intending to explode it as the imperial family sat down to dinner. The Emperor was late; the dynamite was exploded at the appointed hour and ten soldiers were killed and fifty-three injured. Swinburne, in his ode on "Russia," names the next step:—
. . . Life takes death for guide,
Night hath but one red star—Tyrannicide.
Beside the Catherine Canal in Petrograd stands an imposing structure, the Church of the Resurrection, richly adorned with mosaics, more than St. Mark's in Venice, gleaming with precious Ural stones and malachite and polished jasper. It shelters some cobblestones in their original setting and a few bloodstained flagstones which mark a turning point in Russian history. On that spot was immolated another despot whose brutal taking-off ushered in the final period of retaliation by the government that eventually ruined the Romanov dynasty—and Russia.
Six previous attempts had been made on his life; twenty-six executions had resulted. But the seventh attempt had been prepared with more diligence.
One of the conspirators, Vera Figner, has left an animated account of the months of meticulous preparation for the deed. The Revolutionary Committee rented a vacant place on Malaya Sadovaya Street and opened a cheese shop. One of the comrades, Bogdanovich, with his broad, round face the color of a burnished samovar and with a spade shaped beard, was installed as shopkeeper, and three hundred rubles were expended for the purchase of their harmless, necessary stock in trade. Under cover of this occupation, technicians of the Committee excavated a tunnel and undermined the street in two places where the Czar was expected to pass, emptying the dirt into empty cheese barrels.
"What is the cause of that dampness?" asked a suspicious constable one day, attracted by moisture that oozed through one of the barrels. Bogdanovich was quick-witted—as revolutionists had to be when plying their perilous profession. "During the Carnival weeks we spilled some sour cream there," he answered glibly.
"If the constable had looked into the barrel he would have seen the kind of sour cream it contained," adds Vera Figner in her Memoirs.
But the cheese shop was to be cheated of its prey. Alexander II chose an alternative route. So did the Executive Committee, and stationed four bomb throwers on the quay of the Ekaterinskaya Canal—Grinevitsky, Rysakov, Mikhailov, and Emelyanov. To make assurance doubly sure, Zhelyabov was hovering near, armed with a dagger, should the bombs fail. Shortly after two o'clock the royal victim passed. Sofia Perovskaya waved her handkerchief and Rysakov hurled his bomb; he missed the Emperor but wounded some members of his equipage. Alexander stopped his sleigh and, in spite of the protests of his driver, hurried back on foot to stoop over his wounded Cossacks, whose lifeblood was slowly turning the snow into a horrid crimson slush. As he bent over their bleeding bodies in a generous outburst of compassion, an attendant inquired, anxiously, "Are you hurt, sire?" "No, thank God," replied the Czar. "Too soon to thank God yet," shouted Grinevitsky, hurling his reserve bomb, which struck its mark and blew both the Emperor and Grinevitsky to pieces.
That very afternoon, before leaving for his drive, Alexander had remarked to the Empress: "I have just signed a paper which will, I hope, make a good impression and show Russia that I grant all that is possible."
Princess Radziwill relates that a few hours later the Princess Catherine Mikhailovna attempted to secure possession of the Imperial Manifesto; it might, she thought be of great use. She was about to open the drawer where it lay when the huge form of the Grand Duke Vladimir, eldest brother of the new monarch, Alexander III, appeared on the threshold; he required his stepmother to hand over to him the key with which she was on the point of opening the drawer of the Czar's writing table. That night, while the assembled body of the most enlightened and best-meaning despot Russia ever had was being prepared for burial behind the drawn curtains of the darkened Winter Palace, the new sovereign held a conference with his councilors. Standing beside the remains of his father, Alexander opened the private drawer and took out the bulky paper to read it aloud. But one of his advisers, the most trusted and confidential, snatched the document from the Czar's hands and tore it to shreds. "Now, Your Majesty," said he, "you can punish me, but at least it cannot be said that you stepped upon the throne of Russia with tied hands."
The scattered fragments of paper, lying like snowflakes on the carpet, contained the Constitution drawn up by Loris Mélikov, which Russians had fought and died for and dreamed of through three centuries. If the councilors walked over the fragments as they left the room,—which they very well might have done,—the answer was complete.
Whether this traditional account of the physical destruction of a signed constitution be accurate or not in all its details, the fact remains that it perished with its signer. Ten days later an Imperial Manifesto of another sort, drafted by that evil genius of two emperors, Konstantine Pobyedonostsev, was promulgated to an expectant nation; it reasserted categorically the principle of unlimited autocratic power and hurled defiance at Revolution.
The pendulum swung far under the reaction of the two succeeding Tzars.
1. The device used by the conspirators to gain the support of the troops is a classic instance of the Russian soldier's naive credulity. The candidate whom the Decembrists pretended to support was the Grand Duke Constantine; their followers were encouraged to shout for "Constantine and Constitution," the simple troopers imagining that they were defending the right of Constantine and his wife "Constitutia."
3. Mir: A unique Russian institution, a primitive communal system of landholding (in contradistinction to "homestead-holding") under which title to the fields, meadows, and timber land remained vested in the village commune, which distributed the lots and regulated the tenure. It was presided over by village elders elected for the specific purpose of dividing up the holdings among qualified peasants according to their capacity for cultivating the land and the size of their families.
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