The Fall of the Russian Empire
By Edmund Aloysius Walsh
CHAPTER III
THE DUEL
THE DUEL
IT was to a perilous eminence that Alexander III mounted in March 1881, ascending a throne stained with the blood of his own father. Although the brutal murder on the Catherine Canal, generally speaking, evoked horror and sympathetic demonstrations in favor of the monarch throughout the land, still the underlying conflict between the masses of the people and the ruling autocracy continued unabated. Resentment smoldered in the apathetic souls of the peasants, unsatisfied as they were by the terms of the Emancipation Act; it was fanned by the guarded utterances of the intellectuals and liberals yearning for a constitution; but it flared openly from the secret press of the Revolutionary Party.
I referred, in the previous chapter, to the Imperial Manifesto, published by Alexander III on March 11, 1881, announcing his irrevocable decision to maintain unchanged the autocratic form of government devolving on him after the murder of his father and predecessor. The very same day brought to life a clear-cut rejoinder and declaration of war from the revolutionists in one of the most extraordinary documents I have yet come across in the annals of modern Russia. Naturally this counter-manifesto was never permitted free publication, but was printed and distributed by the underground agencies of the Narodnaia Volia, "The Will of the People." I deem it of sufficient importance to be quoted almost verbatim, as depicting, better than any words of mine can do, this tragic duel between the small band of determined men on one side and the armed might of Imperial Russia on the other.
The Executive Committee to
the Emperor Alexander III
Your Majesty:—The Executive Committee thoroughly understands the mental prostration you must now be experiencing. It does not, however, consider that it should, from a feeling of delicacy, defer the following declaration. There is something higher even than legitimate human feeling; it is the duty toward our country, a duty to which every citizen should sacrifice himself his own feelings, and even those of others. Impelled by this imperious duty, we address ourselves to you without delay, as the course of events which threatens us with terrible convulsions, and rivers of blood in the future, will suffer no delay.
The sanguinary tragedy on the Catherine Canal was no mere chance occurrence, and could have surprised no one. After what has happened during the last ten years, it appeared inevitable and therein lies its profound significance, which should be thoroughly understood by him whom destiny has placed at the head of a State.
The document continues, in the same restrained and coldly analytic style, to examine the social and political provocations that had driven high-minded men to desperation. They went cheerfully to exile, to the gibbet, to torture, if only injustice could thereby be ended. The Czars were equally energetic in applying the full force of organized autocracy; they could be accused of no "want of energy." But their rigor would prove as powerless to save the existing order as was the punishment of the Cross inflicted on the Nazarene to save the decaying ancient world from the triumph of reforming Christianity.
A terrible explosion, a sanguinary revolution, a spasmodic convulsion throughout all Russia, will complete the destruction of the old order of things. Your Majesty, this is a sad and frightful prospect. . . . But why the sad necessity for this sanguinary struggle ? . . . There are two outlets from such a situation: either revolution, which will neither be averted nor prevented by condemnations to death, or the spontaneous surrender of supreme authority to the people to assist in the work of government.
In the interest of the country, and to avoid a useless waste of talent and energy, and those terrible disasters by which Revolution is always accompanied, the Executive Committee addresses itself to Your Majesty and counsels you to select the latter course. Be sure of this, that directly the highest power ceases to be arbitrary, directly it shows itself firmly resolved to carry out only what the will and the conscience of the people prescribes, you will be able to get rid of your spies, who dishonor the Government, dismiss your escorts to their barracks, and burn the gibbets, which demoralize the people. . . .
We hope that personal resentment will not suppress in you either the sentiment of duty or the desire of hearing the truth.
We also might feel resentment. You have lost your father; we lost, not only our fathers, but our brothers, wives, sons, and best friends. Nevertheless, we are ready to forget all personal rancor if the welfare of Russia demands it, and we expect as much from you.
We impose upon you no conditions of any kind. Do not take offense at our proposals. The conditions which are necessary in order that the revolutionary movement should give place to pacific development have not been created by us, but by events. We simply record them. These conditions, according to our view, should be based upon two principal stipulations:—
First a general amnesty for all political offenders, since they have committed no crime, but have simply done their duty a citizens.
Second, the convocation of the representatives of the whole of the people, for the examination of the best forms of social and political life, according to the wants and desires of the people.
We, nevertheless, consider it necessary to point out that the legalization of power by the representation of the people can only arrived at when the elections are perfectly free. The elections should, therefore, take place under the following conditions:—
First, the deputies shall be chosen by all classes without distinction, in proportion to the number of inhabitants.
Second, there shall be no restrictions of any kind upon electors or deputies.
Third, the elections and the electoral agitation shall be perfectly free. The Government will, therefore, grant as provisional regulations, until the convocation of the popular assemblies:—
(a) Complete freedom of the press.
(b) Complete freedom of speech.
(c) Complete freedom of public meeting.
(d) Complete freedom of electoral addresses.
These are the only means by which Russia can enter upon the path of peaceful and regular development. We solemnly declare before the country, and before the whole world, that our party will submit unconditionally to the National Assembly which meets upon the basis of the above conditions, and will offer no opposition to the government which the National Assembly may sanction.
And now, Your Majesty, decide. The choice rests with you. We, on our side, can only express the hope that your judgment and your conscience will suggest to you the only decision which can accord with the welfare of Russia, with your own dignity, and with your duties toward the country.
The Executive Committee (1)
March 10 (23), 1881
Thus far the opposition. The plea for a recognition of inalienable rights could have been written by Thomas Jefferson, Leo XIII, or Henry Cabot Lodge. The Russian Government had its spokesmen, too, and skilled apologists. It is only just, therefore, that we should hear their defense, and from their own lips. Audi alteram partem—always hear the other side. And the other side at this period of Russian history had a most competent mouthpiece in Konstantin Pobyedonostsev, one of the tutors of Alexander III, and later of Nicholas II. With the aid of Dimitry Tolstoy, Katkov, and Pazukhin, this brilliant jurist practically determined the policy of Russia during the eighties; and subsequently, during the reign of Nicholas II, he exercised similar influence as Procurator of the Holy Synod for upward of twenty years. In the words of Sir Bernard Pares, the true friend of Russia, and the present learned director of the School of Slavonic Studies of London University, "Pobyedonostsev was a thorough despiser of human nature who had turned reaction into a system of philosophy."
What is a parliament, a congress, or any other form of government in which the governed participate? Pobyedonostsev answers: "The greatest falsehood of our time. . . One of the falsest political principles is the principle of government by the people, the idea which unfortunately became established after the French Revolution that all power has its origin in the people and is based on the will of the people. . . . Parliament is an institution, serving to satisfy the personal ambition, personal vanity, and personal interests of the representatives."
What is law ? He maintains that it is only an obstacle in the path of a strong executive. "If a person whose duty it is to act meets restricting instructions on every step in the law itself, and in its artificial formulations, if he is always exposed to the danger of overstepping a certain line of demarcation, then the administrator loses himself in doubts and is weakened by the very thing that was intended to furnish him with power."
Liberty and equality? "Mere folly! A failure everywhere." Freedom of thought ? "A humbug." Trial by a jury? "A foreign importation, absurd and dangerous in Russia." Freedom of the press? "One of the false institutions of our time." Education? "Beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic all else is not only superfluous but dangerous. Fear, not love of God, and devotion to the Czar, are to be cultivated as aids to government. False superstitions are not to be eradicated, rather fostered, being of the highest importance insomuch as superstition is the natural power of elemental inertia."
In pursuance of this mad policy, a circular was issued by the Government in 1887, signed by Delyanov, the Minister of Education, announcing that "the children of coachmen servants, cooks, laundresses, small shopkeepers, and suchlike people should not be encouraged to rise above the sphere in which they were born."
The universities, too, were rigidly controlled by a suspicious ministry that regarded all students as incipient evolutionists, with the result that freedom of science and the diffusion of knowledge were subjected to police supervision. The tchinovniki did not seem to know that the history of humankind is mainly the record of a race between education and catastrophe. Catastrophe won easily in Russia. As Macaulay says somewhere, writing of a certain race horse, "Eclipse first, the rest nowhere."
As early as 1864, and particularly after 1870, a unique, form of popular instruction was going on among the peasants and factory workers in spite of the vigilance of the Ministry of Education. It was known as "going in among the people." Scores of students, writers, academicians, an countless other enthusiasts among the intellectuals, voluntarily abandoned their easy city life, assumed peasant and workmen costume, as the case might be, and went to live and work among the lower classes, in order to indoctrinate them with revolutionary principles. Without passports, or with forged documents, living under assumed names, these zealous missionaries were commonly known as "the illegals." Much of this activity was directed by Bakunin and Lavrov from their exile in Switzerland. Unwilling to submit to the repression of a Russian university, hundreds of students flocked to Zurich. The Government, however, became alarmed at the growth of this hotbed of revolution abroad, and in 1873 summarily recalled something like one hundred students. But, as Macbeth ruefully remarks, " We but teach . . . bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor: this even-handed justice commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice to our own lips." The returning students, fired with fanatic zeal for propaganda, trooped off to the provinces to "go in among the people" and spread the teachings of Bakunin and Lavrov.
The law courts, the last refuge of freemen, lost seriously of their independence during this period and became practically branches of the Administrative Department. The institution of zemski nachalniki, or land captains, by the Minister of the Interior in 1886, to all intents and purposes nullified the courts by creating a centralized guardianship of the peasants which regulated their lives in an oppressive and arbitrary manner, even down to the most intimate details of their family relations. It was based on the theory as Count Witte puts it, "that they are eternally under age, so to speak." In the opinion of that illustrious statesman, it was a profoundly erroneous step fraught with disastrous consequences for the future.
Under these "land captains," supported by an army of policemen, spies, agents provocateurs, and other tchinovniki, Russia was ruled with the iron precision of martial law. Reaction, therefore, and pure absolutism reached their climax during this period, the reign of Alexander III. Through the convenient invention known as "administrative procedure" the Government was enabled to transport to Siberia, without the slightest semblance of trial or juridical procedure, any and all persons deemed "politically undesirable." MacKenzie Wallace, in his classic study of Russia, quotes the saying, current during the reign of Nicholas I, that nearly all the best men in Russia had spent a part of their lives in Siberia. Hence, it was proposed to publish biographical dictionary of remarkable men, a Russian Who's Who, in which every article was to end as follows: "Banished to . . . in 18—." It was to be the hic jacet of popular liberty.(2)
It was a duel to the death between the organized forces of official Russia on the one hand and a guerrilla band of determined volunteers on the other. A roll call of the opposition, if made in the ascending order of their radicalism, would reveal the following categories:—
1. Liberals, who strove by legal means—and guardedly—to enlarge the boundaries of human freedom by opposing the centralization of authority and the arbitrary exercise of absolutism. Followers of the Decembrists of 1825, they did not necessarily oppose the monarchy as a form of government; they advocated, rather, a voluntary limitation of its powers by a constitution, and endeavored, as cool-headed patriots, to open the eyes and ears of the ruling caste to the social injustices rampant under the tyranny of the tchinovniki. If their enthusiasm became too heated, they were first marked as "politically unreliable," "pernicious to public tranquility," and invited to proceed by direct route to Siberia. Milyukov, Vinogradoff, Struve, and Korolenko may be cited as typical leaders. In the days of the Duma they spoke through the Constitutional Democrats, the Cadets.(3)
2. Social Revolutionaries—that is, Liberals of more determined conviction, prepared for drastic measures and openly advocating a fundamental reform of the existing social and political order. They aimed principally to create a political consciousness—which in Russia inevitably led to political disorder—among the peasants, employing means that were illegal as well as legal. But armed insurrection was not yet on their program; they avoided the question of Tzar or no Tzar and based their hopes on the action of duly elected representatives of the Russian people. Ballots, not bullets, were to be the instruments of reform. They had representation in the second Duma.
3. Social Democrats, who cultivated town and factory workers in an effort to stimulate opposition to the prevailing industrial system. Their manifestos instructed workers in the technique of strikes, promulgated demands for an eight-hour day, for freedom of speech, conscience, and assembly. These were the pioneers who laid the foundation for Russian Trade-Unionism. They also had deputies in a Duma when it came.
4. Socialists—the inheritors of the doctrines of Saint Simon, Robespierre, Owen, Lassalle, and Louis Blanc. By appealing to the primitive communal instincts of the Russia peasant, they proposed to establish pure state socialism which would control all instruments of production. Political autocracy was to be displaced by a dictatorship of labor; religion was to be abolished, and individual men were all to be cut on the same pattern, determined by the generic formulæ. "Each for all and all for each"; "From everyone according to his strength, to each according to his needs." They pictured humankind only in a mass, careless of the individual. They, too, won a large number of seats in the Duma.(4)
5. Anarchists. Whereas Socialism—and Communism, its offshoot—demands a highly centralized control of humankind and tends to degenerate into tyrannous bureaucracy, the anarchist adopted a platform that is the diametric opposite.(5) He is the individualist run mad, seeking to emancipate men from all restraint whatsoever, political, economic, or religious. Let humans roam in a state of pure and unfettered nature; there shall be no state, no government, no municipal ordinances or other limitations to physical liberty; every individual man shall be at liberty to live where, how, and as long as he deems necessary in vindication of his personal rights, which are the only rights the anarchist acknowledges. Fathered by Proudhon, who first expounded it in 1848, this deification of jungle ethics is admirably adapted to turn civil society into a menagerie. It was widely disseminated in Russia by Bakunin, Pisarev, and Prince Kropotkin. Obviously it must reject divinity and religion in any form. "God," writes Proudhon, "that is folly and cowardice. God is tyranny and misery. God is evil. To me, then, Lucifer, Satan."
6. Nihilists. This fearsome word first appears in Turgenev's Fathers And Sons as a new name for an old disease. It describes, in one convenient term, a state of mind produced by lack of anchorage during severe intellectual storms occasioned by jaundiced contemplation of social and political inequalities. It would be erroneous to maintain that there ever existed an organized anti-governmental party to which the appellation could be applied. Nihilism, strictly speaking, was a nickname, an opprobrious epithet coined by the conservatives and reactionaries to describe all revolutionary agitators.
"Who is this Bazarov?" asks one of the characters in Turgenev's novel.
"He is a nihilist," replies his son.
"Nihilist?" repeats the old man. "Oh, yes; that comes from the Latin nihil—with us 'nichevo,' nothing, as far as I can judge. That just means a man who admits nothing."
"Say rather, respects nothing," adds another old man.
"One who examines everything from a critical point of view," answers the young man. "That 's the same thing."
"No, it is not the same thing. The nihilist is the man who bows to no authority, who admits of no principle as an article of faith, with whatever respect such principle may be enshrouded."
But how does the nihilist differ from the anarchist? Only, I think, in being one shade more bewildered by undigested, factual knowledge. His negation of life is more sterile than the positivism of the anarchist. "Nihilism," explains De Voguë, "is the Nirvana of the Hindu, the self-abnegation of the discouraged primitive man before the force of matter and the occult moral world." Turgenev himself hints at the difference:—
"Look here, your Bazarov is not my sort, and he is none of yours, either."
"Why is that ?"
"Well, what shall I say? . . . He is a savage brute, and you and I, we are tamed animals."
"This comparison," adds the Viscount, "enables us to perceive, more than would a volume of discussion, the shade of distinction which differentiates Russian Nihilism from the similar mental maladies from which humanity has suffered since the days of Solomon. This Bazarov, a cynical peasant's son, embittered, who sputters brief sentences in a language at times vulgar, at others scientific, who attacks everything, is otherwise an honorable fellow incapable of a vile action. He represses his better instincts out of mere pride, but is at heart a savage, too rapidly educated, who, having stolen our weapons, uses them against us. Turgenev's hero has many points in common with Fenimore Cooper's Red Indian, but a redskin fuddled with the doctrines of Hegel and Büchner, instead of with 'fire water,' and who stalks the world with a lancet instead of rushing about with a tomahawk."
7. Terrorists. By this classification is meant, not a distinct party, but a grouping of individuals who may, philosophically, belong to any one of the previous categories. They differ from their more academic brethren of revolt only in method, not in principle or objective. A terrorist may have been an embittered Liberal who has become drunk on bad ink and decides to fling a bomb, wreck an imperial rain, or stab a policeman. Or he may be a calculating criminal caught red-handed while perpetrating an inhuman crime, but without the resources to convince a jury that he was "momentarily unbalanced" or "mentally sick" in the Clarence Darrow sense. In any case, his proposal is to write in blood what he cannot get before the public by printer's ink.
The Bolshevik or Marxian Communist of the Left does not effectively appear in the ranks of Russian revolutionists until a somewhat later date; we shall devote a later volume to a study of that figure, the reincarnation and synthesis of all previous revolutionary characters.
Under the passport system a man could neither move from one town to another without governmental permission nor change his living quarters within a given town without registration. Thus the accumulation of visas and registration stamps on a man's passport furnished the police with a full account of his every movement. Neither could he sleep outside his own house, without the porter, or the house janitor, reporting the suspicious circumstances at the nearest police station. A man could as well hope to live without a soul as without a passport in Imperial Russia.(6) The rule of "intensified vigilance," as it was called, permitted the police and the detectives of the Third Department of Chancery to search and arrest individuals, enter homes, and search private residences without warrant. Government control of the press required supervision of all written articles by unsympathetic and, oftentimes, uncultivated censors, who not only suppressed at will news items an articles even faintly criticizing the administration, but even articles in the field of history, literature, or geography, which they might not have liked, or could not understand. The Liberals and revolutionists replied by the secret publications described by Stepniak in his remarkable volume, called Underground Russia. Prince Kropotkin narrates how easily it was done. He was returning from abroad with heavy consignment of radical literature.
I returned to St. Petersburg via Vienna and Warsaw. Thousands of Jews lived by smuggling on the Polish frontier; and I thought that if I could succeed in discovering only one of them, my books would be carried in safety across the border. . . . . .
I explained to the man [a Jew who was lounging at the entrance to the hotel] my desire of smuggling into Russia a rather heavy bundle of books and newspapers.
"Very easily done, sir," he replied. "I will just bring to you the representative of the Universal Company for the International Exchange of (let us say) Rags and Bones. They carry on the largest smuggling business in the world. . . ."
In an hour's time he came back with another young man. This one took the bundle, put it by the side of the door and said, "It's all right. If you leave tomorrow you shall have your books at such a station in Russia."
Next day I left Cracow; and at the designated Russian station a porter approached my compartment and, speaking loudly, so as to be heard by the gendarme who was walking along the platform said to me, "Here is the bag Your Highness left the other day," and handed me my precious parcel.
Perhaps the most important of these secret publication was Kolokol, "The Bell," edited by Alexander Herzen from his exile in London. It was a fortnightly journal that passed the frontier in thousands and exercised a measurable influence on the progress of revolutionary thought in Russia. Its brilliant editor seemed to know everything that was going on in his distant fatherland, so that even the Emperor himself was a regular reader of the forbidden journal, which he found every two weeks on his table, laid there by he knew not what hand. In this regard, the following anecdote is recounted by Wallace.
One number of the Kolokol contained a violent attack on an important personage of the Court, and the accused, or some one of his friends, considered it advisable to have a copy of the paper specially printed for the Emperor without the objectionable article. The Emperor did not at first discover the trick, but shortly afterward he received from London a polite note containing the article which had been omitted, and informing him how he had been deceived.
About this time, in the year 1887, occurred an incident which, like so many other seemingly trivial circumstances in history, probably exerted a tremendous influence on the future destiny of Russia. An attempt was made on the life of Alexander III by a group of terrorists in March 1887. The plot was unsuccessful, the conspirators having been arrested in the streets of Petrograd with the bombs in their possession. Five of the conspirators were hanged, among them a certain Alexander Ulianov. Now, Ulianov had a younger brother who continued the revolutionary work of his elder and spent part of his life in Siberia, from whence he later escaped to Switzerland. His name was Vladimir Ulianov, better known to the entire world under the assumed name of Nicholas Lenin.
There now occurred, in 1889, a change of tactics on the part of the revolutionists. Direct action had been barren of any practical result beyond periodic horror and growing popular impatience at each successive political assassination. The autocratic power seemed impregnable against frontal attack and political propaganda, designed to hasten a process of political evolution, was gradually substituted for the method of open insurrection and revolution. The Nihilism of Pisarev and the Anarchism of Bakunin began to give way to the Socialism of Plekhanov. With this change of revolutionary philosophy began the era of combinations of workmen and strikes in industry. And more and more recourse was had to parliamentary methods of redress.
There was but one legal opposition in Russia, but one body authorized to voice with impunity the aspirations and defend the rights of the common people. It was the zemstvo, that interesting institution created in 1864 for the purpose of answering to a limited degree the insistent demand for some form of representative government. Theoretically, at least, the emancipation of the serfs had allayed the land hunger of the peasants. Actually, as we have seen, it complicated the situation and became the fecund source of new dangers. It was a characteristic half-measure. Likewise, in the zemstvo was found a half-answer to the constitution hunger of the liberal and the intellectual.
The infection of compromise and procrastination had seeped from the very top to the foundations of the social organism until it became part and parcel of the national character. Nichevo (that word of infinite variety, meaning "No matter," "What's the use?" "I don't care"), sichas ("right away"), and zaftra ("to-morrow"), were not merely popular terms of resignation or evasion—they expressed a whole philosophy of life. So does the boulder which Brailsford describes in The Russian Workers' Republic:—
One noticed continually things which were sinking into dilapidation—a railway carriage, for example, or a bathroom—when a few minutes' work with a screwdriver would have sufficed to repair them. I used to watch the drivers on the primitive country roads with a mixture of annoyance and admiration. One saw some big obstacle in the way, usually a large stone which some might call a small rock. Almost any English driver would have got down an rolled it away. The Russian contrived somehow to circumnavigate it. Rather than remove it, he would drive through the ditch or over a ploughed field. With a jolt, at an angle which defied gravitation, with groaning springs and straining horses, we somehow got past it. I arrived, after many experiences, at the conviction that the boulder always had been there. Generations of Russian drivers had gone round it. It had defied Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and the odds are that it will survive Lenin.
The zemstvo was an attempt at local self-government through an assembly which met once a year in each district and in each province, but with no central or national assembly. The deputies were elected by the nobles, by the peasants, and by the communes, the nobles having the right to 57 per cent of the seats, the peasants to 30 per cent, and the various communes to the remainder. Its functions were limited to providing for the material wants of the respective districts—roads and bridges, crops, sanitary affairs, vigilance against famine, improvement of live stock, prevention of fire, primary education, and such local interests. But it was severely prohibited from touching national affairs.
To the zemstvo, naturally, the inarticulate masses looked for political salvation, as it alone had the right of petition. Timidly at first, but with increasing confidence, this right was exercised. In 1880, after the Turkish War, the Zemstvo of Tver petitioned the Emperor as follows:—
The Emperor, in his care for welfare of the Bulgarian people whom he has freed from the yoke of the Turk, has considered necessary to grant them true self-government, inviolability of person, an independent judicial system, and liberty of the press. The Zemstvo of Tver dares to hope that the Russian people, who have borne with such readiness and love of their ruler all the burdens of the war, will enjoy the same blessings.
Again, in 1894, on the accession of Nicholas II, numerous addresses of loyalty were presented by the local zemstvos voicing, in various degrees, their hope for a continuation of the reforms initiated by Alexander II, but discontinued by Alexander III. But the old voice of intransigent autocracy was again heard in the land when the young sovereign shattered all illusions in his reply:—
It has come to my knowledge that of late there have been heard the voices of people lured by senseless dreams of representatives in the zemstvos sharing in the conduct of internal affairs. Let it be known to all that I, devoting all my strength to the pursuit of the good of my people, will maintain the principle of autocracy as firmly and steadfastly as did my late father.
"He howled the words at us," was the way the leader of the delegation described the Tzar's tone. The same gentleman was soon informed that he should never again show his face in Petrograd.(7) Shortly afterward Nicholas II received a letter—one of a long series that continued up to the outbreak of the War from another autocrat, who was sending a wedding present to the new Tzar.
Berlin, 7/ii/95
Dearest Nicky:—
Egloffstein will, I hope, be able to bring over the whole heap of porcelain without any breakage. He is instructed to arrange the table so as it would be if you gave a dinner for fifty; so that you should have the coup d' il of the whole affair. I hope that my manufacturer has done everything to fulfill your wishes and that the present may be useful to you both.
Since the sad weeks you had to go through have passed, much has happened in Europe. You have lost an excellent old servant of your predecessors, old Giers, who was a very good fellow whom I much esteemed. France has changed par surprise her head and government and through the amnesty opened the doors to all the worst malefactors the former people with difficulty had managed to imprison. The influence given to the Democrats and the Revolutionary Party is also to be felt here. My Reichstag behaves as badly as it can, swinging backward and forward between the Socialists, egged on by the Jews and the ultramontane Catholics; both parties being soon fit to be hung — all of them, as far as I can see.
In England the Ministry is toddling to its fall amidst universal derision ! In short, everywhere the principe de la Monarchie is called upon to show itself strong. That is why I am glad at the capital speech you made the other day to the deputations in response to some addresses for reform. It was very much to the point and made a deep impression everywhere. . . .
With my respects to your Mamy and my compliments to Alix, remain,
Your aff-ate friend,
Willy
Willy
The reply to the Zemstvo of Tver was spoken by Nicholas but the hand that wrote it was the hand of Pobyedonostsev. It meant the revival of terrorism and marked the resumption of the duel that had been interrupted since the eighties. Nicholas II, though possessed of a certain mildness of character and native humanity, early showed himself to be as clay in the hands of energetic potters, molded to eventual destruction by reactionary ministers of the type of Pobyedonostsev, Sipyagin, and Plehve. The Social Democrats, deprecating terrorism, were displaced as leaders by the Social Revolutionaries, who flung aside the pen to seize torch, revolver, dagger, and hand grenade, recognizing in them the only expression of the popular will to which the Russian Tzar would listen.
In February 1897 occurred a typical demonstration of slumbering discontent, scarcely less revealing than the massacre of Bloody Sunday eight years later. A young woman, Marie Feodorovna Vietrov, a student of the Higher School for Women, had been arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul for the crime of secreting illegal literature. Seven weeks after her arrest, she committed suicide in prison by pouring kerosene over herself and setting fire to her clothes. The effect on public opinion was electric; circulars describing the harrowing incident were distributed along the streets— unsigned, of course—and indignation ran high. In spite of repeated warnings by the police, thousands of people knelt in the snow of the Nevsky Prospekt outside the Kazan Cathedral and joined their murmurs and sobbing to the funeral dirge. Such popular manifestations had not occurred since the assassination of Alexander II, and thoughtful Russians detected the undertone of revolt.
In vain enlightened and courageous ministers, like Count Witte and Isvolsky, attempted to heal the widening breach between the throne and the nation at large. Count Witte, in his Memoirs, recalls a memorable attempt made by him in 1898, when he was Minister of Finance, to recall the young Emperor to a consciousness of the realities and dangers of the moment. It was in the form of an energetic protest, of the kind that exiled many a true Russian patriot "to his estates" during the Great War, when the same Nicholas II was so often begged to rid Russia of the curse of Rasputin. Count Witte's protest ran, in part, as follows:—
The Crimean War opened the eyes of those who could see. They perceived that Russia could not be strong under a régime based on slavery. Your grandfather cut the Gordian knot with his autocratic sword. He redeemed the soul and body of his people from their owners. The unprecedented act created the colossus who is now in your autocratic hands. Russia was transformed, she increased her power and her knowledge tenfold. And this in spite of the fact that after the emancipation a liberal movement was aroused which threatened to shatter the autocratic power, which the very basis of the existence of the Russian Empire. . . . The crisis of the eighties was not caused by the emancipation of the serfs. It was brought about by the corrupting influence of the press, the disorganization of the school, the liberal self-governing institutions, and, finally, the fact that the authority of the organs the autocratic power had been undermined as a result of constant attacks upon the bureaucracy on the part of all manner of people . . . Emperor Alexander II freed the serfs, but he did not organize the life on the firm basis of law. Emperor Alexander III, absorbed by the task of restoring Russia's international prestige, strengthening our military power, improving our finances, suppressing the unrest, did not have the time to complete the work begun by his most august father. This task has been bequeathed to You Imperial Majesty. It can be carried out and it must be carried out. Otherwise the growth of Russia's grandeur will be impeded. . . .
The peasant was freed from his landowner. . . . But he is still a slave of his community as represented by the mir meetings and also of the entire hierarchy of petty officials who make up the rural administration. The peasant's rights and obligations are not clearly defined by law. His welfare and his very person are at the mercy of the arbitrary rulings of the local administration. The peasant is still flogged, and that at the decision of such institution as the volost [rural district] courts. . . . The peasant was give land. But his right to it is not clearly defined by law. Wherever the communal form of landownership prevails, he cannot even know which lot is his. The inheritance rights are regulated by vague customs. So that at present the peasant holds his land not by law, but by custom, and often by arbitrary discretion. The family rights of the peasants have remained almost completely outside of the scope of law. . . .
And what of popular education ? It is an open secret that it is in the embryonic stage and that in this respect we are behind not only many European countries, but also many Asian and transatlantic lands. . . .
Thus, the peasantry, while personally free, is still a slave to arbitrariness, lawlessness, and ignorance. Under these circumstances the peasant loses the impulse to seek to improve his condition by lawful means. The vital nerve of progress is paralyzed in him. He becomes passive and spiritless, thus offering a fertile soil for the growth of vices. Single, even though substantial measures will not remedy the situation. Above all, the peasant's spiritual energies must be aroused. He must be granted the plenitude of civil rights which the other legal sons of Your Majesty enjoy. Given the present condition of the peasantry, the State cannot advance and achieve the world importance to which the nature of things and destiny itself entitle it.
This condition of the peasantry is the fundamental cause of those morbid social phenomena which are always present in the life of our country. . . . A great deal of attention is given to the alleged "land crisis." It is a strange crisis, indeed, seeing that prices of land are everywhere on the increase. Widespread discussion also centers around the comparative merits of the individual classes which go to make the nation. An effort is made to ascertain which of them supports the throne. As if the Russian Autocratic Throne could possibly rest on one class and not on the entire Russian people! . . . On that unshakable foundation it will rest forever. . . . The root of the evil is not the land crisis, or unorganized migrations, or the growth of the budget, but rather the confusion and disorder which prevail in the daily life of the peasant masses. . . . In a word Sire, it is my profound conviction that the peasant problem is at present the most vital problem of our existence. It must be dealt with immediately.
This superb letter was never answered, and Witte affirms that the Tzar never referred to it in any shape or form. On the contrary, he almost immediately confirmed the Plehve-Durnovo clique, opposed to the liberal tendencies of Witte, who were thus enabled to thwart Witte's hopes for legislative reform. "Whom Jupiter would destroy he first makes mad."
And the blindness to impending disaster was never more manifest than in the inexplicable indifference manifested by the Russian Government toward the rising menace of Japan. Russia's foreign policy under the cunning stimulus of the German Kaiser had been leading her deeper and deeper into the Far East, nearer and nearer to the growing might of a watchful Japan. Early in January 1904 the Japanese ambassador, Kurino, whispered in Count Witte's ear, during an evening party at the Winter Palace, that the Tokyo Government was at the end of its patience because of the seeming contempt and indifference with which the Russian Government was treating Japan's representations regarding Manchuria and Korea. He warned Witte that if no reply was forthcoming within a few days hostilities were inevitable! Witte conveyed the warning to Count Lamsdorff, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. "I can do nothing," replied Lamsdorff. For Lamsdorff, though Minister of Foreign Affairs, had been deliberately and completely superseded in the Far East negotiations by a group of industrialists interested in the exploitation of certain forests in the Yalu River basin. On Lamsdorff's protesting, long before this, that such negotiations must be left to the diplomats, the impossible Plehve had replied that not diplomats, but bayonets, had made Russia, and that the Far East problem must be solved by bayonets, not by diplomatic pens. It was so solved.
A few weeks after the soirée diplomatique in the Winter Palace, in the gray dawn of a wintry morning, January 26, 1904, a Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo stole into the harbor of Port Arthur and sank a number of Russian warships lying unsuspectingly at anchor. The rising consciousness of the East had thrown down the gauge of battle to the Russian Giant. Once again Russian autocracy had deliberately exposed itself to the dread arbitrament of war. The result shook the Empire to its foundations and marked the beginning of the final catastrophe of 1917.
Plehve had previously remarked that revolution was inevitable in Russia and what was needed to distract public attention was a "small victorious war." So he let Russia drift into the conflict with Japan. His diagnosis was correct but his treatment of the disease was wrong on two counts: the war was neither small nor victorious.
CHAPTER IV
THE BEGINNINGS OF REVOLUTION
THE BEGINNINGS OF REVOLUTION
THE particular period upon which we are now entering would well merit not one or two, but a dozen separate chapters, embracing as it does the final act of that most tragic conflict between autocracy and revolution. For with the close of the Russo-Japanese War began the swift succession of reverses, both domestic and external, still fresh in our memories, that definitely sealed the doom of the Romanov dynasty and resulted in the disintegration of the Russian Empire. It will be clear, therefore, that I can but touch briefly on the main events and invite attention to the outstanding personalities in the complex panorama that now unrolled itself with such astonishing rapidity.
If the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War weakened the foundations of autocracy, the humiliating outcome of the Japanese War hastened to a measurable degree the disintegration process. It was left for the World War to bring the worm-eaten structure crashing to the ground.
The revelations of unpreparedness and incompetency in the conduct of military operations, the confusion arising from the division of authority between General Kuropatkin and Admiral Alexeiev, the surrender of Port Arthur (although there were three months' provisions and plenty of ammunition in the town), the succession of shameful land defeats, ending in the rout at Mukden and the final crushing naval disaster at Tsushima, which buried practically the entire Russian fleet in Japanese waters, all conspired to destroy the confidence of the nation in a bureaucracy that had shown itself inept, piddling, and palsied in all things — except domestic tyranny. The oppressive rigorism of Plehve, Minister of the Interior, unmodified by any elementary wisdom that should have dictated liberal and conciliatory policies during a foreign war, finally left the Government without a friend in the country and faced by a victorious foe abroad. To emphasize this complete isolation and demoralization of the bureaucrats, the terrorists assassinated Plehve on July 28, 1904. Thus, this exponent of the absolutism of Pobyedonostsev went the way of his friend and predecessor, Sipyagin, who had already been assassinated in 1902. Yet there still remained to take their places such hopeless reactionaries as Durnovo, Stolypin,(1) Stürmer, Protopopov, and the unspeakable Rasputin. It would seem as if the furious Eumenides that had been tormenting Russia for a century had resolved to scourge and lash her with scorpions to the end of the chapter.
On February 17, 1905, the Grand Duke Serge, uncle of the Emperor, and Governor-General of Moscow, was blown to pieces within the Kremlin walls. The Governor of Ufa and the Vice Governor of Elizabethpol suffered the same fate at the hands of the terrorists. Police officials began to be assassinated in alarming numbers. Riots, strikes, and disorders increased throughout the land, spreading to Poland and the Caucasus. In January 1905, official statistics showed that 700,000 men were on strike, a phenomenon that emphasized, for the first time, the role of labor as a factor contributing to the progress of the revolutionary movement.
The unprecedented industrial development in Russia during the thirty years prior to the Japanese War testified to the awakening of the national consciousness to an appreciation of the immense economic possibilities of the land. Russia is a vast reservoir of undeveloped natural resources. Raw materials abound in the shape of oil, minerals, furs, lumber, water power, ores, flax, hemp, wool, tallow, hides, and the like. The development of these natural assets was greatly stimulated by the emancipation of the serfs, which threw an unlimited supply of cheap labor on the market and caused an influx of peasants from the countryside to towns and cities. No man did more at this time to foster native industry in Russia than Count Witte, who was a devout admirer of the great German economist Friedrich List, following ardently that scholar's basic doctrine that " each nation should above all things develop harmoniously its natural resource to the highest possible degree of independence, protecting its own industry and preferring the national aim to the pecuniary advantage of individuals."
The result was the creation of a new class, the industrial proletariat. Factories and factory settlements sprang up with amazing rapidity, not only in the great centres of population, but throughout the land, while cottage industry began to wane. Unfortunately, industrial abuses were not far behind industrial developments. Working time was generally more than twelve hours per day, and as many as sixteen in some occupations. Wages were unbelievably low, the average wage in the eighties being less than 200 rubles—that is, approximately $105—a year. In 1910 it was 244 rubles, or $125, per year, scarcely $2.50 a week. Strikes were criminal acts. Sanitary conditions were such as to recall the Black Hole of Calcutta. In many factories no living accommodations were provided for the workers, who slept in the workroom, on benches, or on the floors. The novels of Gorky, Andreev, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky reproduced these conditions with the stark and harrowing reality that ordinarily characterized the Russian masters. "I shall laugh my bitter laugh," was the inscription placed on Gogol's grave as his farewell comment on life in Russia.
Naturally the revolutionary agitators, following their traditional practice of fishing in troubled waters, were not slow to abandon the peasant campaign and concentrate on the city workers. Politics and economics thus became more closely identified than ever. Workmen's associations, and strikes in industry, were thereafter the obvious tactics. Times of popular unrest, like those of 1905, caused by legitimate grievances, presented rare opportunities for effective mass movements in the large cities. This phase culminated in the tragedy of "Bloody Sunday" or "Red Sunday," as it is variously called, on January 22, 1905.
George Gapon, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church was a popular leader of the working classes, among whom he had organized numerous clubs in St. Petersburg, achieving thereby considerable influence with the labor unions and the Social Democrats. During a strike of 45,000 operatives of the Putilov Ironworkers, he conceived the idea of leading 100,000 workmen to the Winter Palace for the purpose of presenting a petition to the Czar. The text of this petition which I have before me, is not revolutionary in tone, but appeals to the Czar, as to a father, to mitigate the cruel sufferings of his children.
Sire ! I fear the Ministers have not told you the truth about the situation. The whole people, trusting in you, has resolved to appear at the Winter Palace at two o'clock in the afternoon, in order to inform you of its needs. If you hesitate and do not appeal before the people, then you sever the moral bonds between you and them. Trust in you will disappear, because innocent blood will be shed. Appear tomorrow before your people and receive in a courageous spirit our address of devotion ! I and the representatives of labor, my brave comrades, guarantee the inviolability of your person.
On the appointed day, Nicholas II, ignoring the invitation, remained in the Summer Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Tens of thousands of workmen, with their wives and children, paraded in orderly fashion to the Winter Palace, bearing, not red flags, but portraits of the Tzar and the royal family. There they were met by waiting troops. With Gapon at their head, the demonstrators, chanting hymns and exhibiting all outward signs of a religious procession, attempted to push their way to the gates of the Palace. The soldiers, without warning, fired into the thickest part of the crowd. When the smoke cleared away one of the most repulsive scenes in modern Russian history was revealed. Five hundred men, women, and children lay dead in the snow, before that long, grim structure, and three thousand more were writhing on the ground under their wounds; the rest were fleeing in panic and dismay! Boys who had climbed up trees and telegraph poles, the better to view the parade, were picked off like birds.
If Hilaire Belloc contends that the French Revolution began on that day and at the moment, at Versailles, when the representatives of the people, prohibited from entering the Palace, retired instead to the tennis court, I should say that the Russian Revolution became inevitable when the first peaceful petitioner fell that Sunday afternoon before the Winter Palace.
The fate of Gapon is of interest, as illustrating the uncertain fate of a man who fastens on duplicity as a profession. He was among the first to fall, but he evidently only pretended to be killed. He escaped unhurt to Switzerland, whence he continued his attacks on the Government with great bitterness. But he evidently made peace with the home authorities and soon returned to St. Petersburg, there to assume the role that has remained to this day something of a mystery. He acted as a go-between or mediator between the Government and the revolutionists, but soon became suspected by the revolutionists of being simply a police informer. He departed one day from St. Petersburg for Finland, carrying with him a large sum of money, £2500 in order to bribe a certain terrorist to betray a plot then being concocted against the Emperor. Eventually his dead body was found in a lonely unoccupied cottage, near Ozerki, a small village in Finland, close to the Russian frontier. His hands had been tied behind his back and he had been strangled with a rope. About the same time, an unsigned communication appeared in a St. Petersburg newspaper, stating:—
George Gapon had been tried by a workmen's secret tribunal and had been found guilty of having acted as an agent provocateur of having squandered the money of the workmen, and of having defiled the honor and memory of the comrades who fell on the "Red Sunday." In consequence of these acts, of which he was said to have made a full confession to the tribunal, he was condemned to death, and the sentence had been duly carried out.
The odious profession of agent provocateur, or police spy and informer, was perhaps nowhere more highly developed than under the Russian Czars. To be sure, spies have occupied an admitted place and performed a definite function in all lands and times, both in peace and war. But the Imperial Russian type has a particularly repulsive role to play. His was the task of persuading the timid to talk revolution and aiding the daring to execute their plots in order that the police might have specious grounds for ruthless repression. To murder a police official, in order that the higher state police, the Okhrana, might make the arrests necessary to justify their existence, was an ordinary detail imposed on the agent provocateur. The most famous of them, or rather in famous, was Evno Azev, whose double activity as secret police agent and terrorist lasted from 1903 to 1909. During this time, acting in his dual role, he has more than thirty murders, or attempted murders, to his credit. While in good standing with the Government, he organized the murder of Plehve, of the Grand Duke Serge, Governor of Moscow and he played an active part in the military mutinies of Moscow, Viborg, and Kronstadt. All these terrorist activities naturally endeared him to the Revolutionary Committee, while the inevitable arrests that followed, the executions and exiling to Siberia, ranked him exceedingly high in the eyes of the police.
The case of Ivan Okladsky was brought anew to the attention of the public in recent times by the following news dispatch:—
[Copyright, 1905, by the New York Times Company. By wireless to the New York Times.]
Moscow, Jan. 10.—The Russian Revolution placed in the hands of the Bolsheviki the entire archives of the Czar's Government, but none probably served a greater purpose to the Communists' scheme than the archives of the late Czar's political police. This inheritance has permitted them to find out a great number of persons who in pre-revolutionary times acted to destroy them and those who, while acting in their midst served as agents provocateurs in betraying their brother revolutionists. Since the Revolution many such agents already have suffered the death penalty, while many others are still waiting their turn.
Never, however, was there such great excitement among Communists as is called forth by the approaching trial of Ivan Okladsky who in the early '80s, as a member of the terrorist organization known as "Narodnaya Volia" or national freedom, took a prominent part in all attempts upon the royal family and was concerned in the plot which ended in the assassination of Tzar Alexander II in 1881.
The Narodnaya Volia, which the Bolsheviki regard as the forerunner of their own party, was in that period the strongest revolutionary organization believing in forcing the Government to adopt a constitutional regime by means of terrorist acts and assassination. Highest state officials, a number of ministers, generals, and other persons of high rank fell victims to their fanatic ideas. This terrorist organization was broken up after the assassination of Alexander II.
Ivan Okladsky, in his confession at that time, betrayed his accomplices. Many were put to death, while a great number were imprisoned for life. Since that period and until 1917 Okladsky served with the Czar's political police and is credited with exercising the greatest activity in hunting out revolutionaries. Until his arrest six months ago he was living under an assumed name in Leningrad serving as a clerk in one of the state factories. He is now sixty-five years old. He says he was forced to turn traitor by the inhuman torture he was subjected to at the hands of the police at the time of his arrest.
The biggest hall in Moscow has been converted into a courtroom for this trial and several thousand tickets have been issued to workmen and Communists. Despite the lapse of forty-five years, number of victims and survivors of the early revolutionary movement will appear at the trial as witnesses against Okladsky. Krylenko, the Soviet's ablest lawyer, who prosecuted Archbishop Zeplak and Savinkov, will conduct the trial for the State, while two prominent lawyers were appointed to defend Okladsky.
It is certain Okladsky will be condemned to death, but it is believed that a commutation of sentence will follow owing to his old age.(2)
The effect of Red Sunday was profound, and its significance could not be escaped by the monarch. The Czar contributed 50,000 rubles for the widows and orphans of the massacre, but the Government did nothing official or in a constructive way. The Holy Synod issued a proclamation in which the irrepressible Pobyedonostsev announced that the labor movement in Russia was being supported Japanese money.
When, on May 25, the Japanese fleet under Togo swept the Russian Baltic fleet from the high seas and determined the outcome of the war, patriotic indignation flamed forth in Russia proper, in Lithuania, in Poland, and in the Caucasus. The crew of the battleship Prince Potemkin mutinied at Sevastopol, hoisted the red flag of revolt, and for ten days cruised like pirates about the Black Sea, finally surrendering to the authorities of the Romanian port, Constanza.
For the first time, the Emperor bent under the storm and consented to receive a delegation from the zemstvos and town councils on June 19. The leader, Prince Serge Troubetskoy, had the courage to speak frankly and circumstantially on the vices and negligences of the ruinous bureaucracy:—
"By the criminal negligence and misgovernment of you advisers, Russia has been precipitated into a ruinous war. Our army has not been able to vanquish the enemy, our fleet is annihilated, and even more threatening than the danger from without is the internal conflagration that is blazing up. . . Your Majesty, while it is not too late, for the salvation of Russia and the establishment of order and peace in the country, command that the representatives of the people . . . be summoned immediately. . . . In your hands are the honor and might of Russia. . . . Do not delay. In the terrible hour of national trial, great is your responsibility before God and Russia."
The Czar replied: "Cast aside your doubts. My will, the will of your Czar, to call together the elected representatives of the people, is unshaken. You can tell this to all your friends. . . . I hope that you will cooperate with me."
Two months later, on August 19, 1905, an imperial decree announced and granted what every Russian patriot since the Decembrists had been dreaming of—a Constitution.
But once again hope deferred made their hearts sick. Autocracy, even in its final gesture of generosity and liberalism, even while proclaiming its will to grant a representative government, could not shake off the dead hand of Peter the Great, of Ivan the Terrible, of Alexander III, and of Paul, the Crowned Madman. Again the attempt was made to drive round the boulder !
As the emancipation of the serfs was only a half answer to the land hunger of the peasants, so the constitution of 1905 was only a half-answer to the constitution hunger of the entire nation. It was the work of Bulygin, and fell dead-born on the expectant ears of a long-suffering people. The decree defined the new Parliament or Duma as follows:—
1. The Duma is a permanently functioning institution similar to Western parliaments.
2. All the laws and regulations, both permanent and provisional, as well as the budget, must be brought before the Duma for discussion.
3. The Duma is an exclusively consultative institution, and it enjoys complete freedom in expressing its opinions on the subjects under discussion.
4. The electoral law is based chiefly on the peasantry, as the element of the population predominant numerically, and most reliable and conservative from the monarchistic standpoint; the electoral law cannot be modified without the consent of the Duma.
5. The franchise does not depend on nationality and religion.
In the words of the most consistent defender of popular rights, Count Witte, " It had all the prerogatives of a parliament except the chief one. It was a parliament, and yet, as a purely consultative institution, it was not a parliament. The law of August the sixth satisfied no one. Nor did it in the least stem the tide of revolution which steadily began to arise."
Popular resentment expressed itself at once in organized protests against the miserably insufficient reform which preserved intact the autocratic power and merely created a debating society. It was toying with the Russian people. A general strike followed, which, beginning from St. Petersburg, paralyzed the whole country, affecting, as it did, the railways, telephone and telegraph services, water and food supply, electricity, the tramways, and even the small shops. By October 29, all Russia was practically in a state of siege. A "soviet" or council of delegates elected from factories was organized by the Socialists, with Khrustalev as president and Leon Trotsky as vice president. Forerunner of the ultimate triumph of the same body in 1917, this soviet boldly challenged the Government. Count Witte, who had just returned with enhanced prestige from the peace negotiations with Japan at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was deemed the only official competent to ride the storm. Though replying to revolution with martial law, he had, nevertheless, the clearness of vision to demand liberal concessions from the Czar as the only condition of his remaining in power.
In the face of backstairs advisers who were opposed to Witte, the Emperor published, on October 30, a manifest of considerable historical importance, as it contains the first Bill of Rights ever granted in Russia. It runs as follows:—
Unrest and disturbances in the capital and in many regions of our Empire fill our heart with a great and heavy grief. The welfare of the Russian Sovereign is inseparable from the welfare of the people and their sorrow is his sorrow. The unrest now arisen may cause a profound disorder in the masses and become a menace to the integrity and unity of the Russian State. The great vow of imperial service enjoins us to strive with all the might of our reason and authority to put an and within the shortest possible time to this unrest so perilous to the State. Having ordered the proper authorities to take measures for the suppression of the direct manifestations of disorder, rioting, and violence, and for the protection of peaceful people who seek to fulfill in peace the duties incumbent upon them, we, in order to carry out more effectively the measure outlined by us, for the pacification of the country, have found it necessary to unify the activities of the higher government agencies.
We impose upon the Government the obligation to execute our inflexible will:—
1. To grant the population the unshakable foundations of civic freedom on the basis of real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, of speech, of assemblage, and of association.
2. Without stopping the appointed elections to the Imperial Duma, to admit to participation in the Duma those classes of the population which have hitherto been deprived of the franchise, in so far as this is feasible, in the brief period remaining before the convening of the Duma, leaving the further development of the principle of general suffrage to the new legislative order (i.e., the Duma and Imperial Council established by the law of August 6, 1905).
3. To establish it as an unshakable rule that no law can become effective without the sanction of the Imperial Duma and that the people's elected representatives should be guaranteed a real participation in the control over the lawfulness of the authorities appointed by us. We call upon all the faithful sons of Russia to remember their duty to their country, to lend assistance in putting an end to the unprecedented disturbances and, together with us, make every effort to restore quiet and peace in our native land.
By the revolutionaries these concessions were interpreted to mean that autocracy was weakening, that its morale was broken. By the conservatives and reactionaries the manifesto was the signal for counter-demonstration organized throughout the Empire, with the result that in the frequent clashes that ensued the victims are reported to have reached three thousand killed and ten thousand wounded.
In the words of one particularly acute student of Russian affairs :—
During the last decades preceding the Revolution of 1917 it became constantly more evident to attentive observers that Russian autocracy was doomed. It was a dying regime, gradually degenerating and decaying from within, whose days were already numbered, like a person with some deadly disease lingering on under the influence of oxygen.
Unfortunately among the Russian ruling classes there were many men who were stubbornly clinging to power, artificially prolonging the régime by making all sorts of compromises; some among them were selfishly arguing that every extra day in power was a gain to themselves. The most important historical conclusion that one can draw from these last years of autocracy is that, as a political principle, it was not able to save itself by compromise; as soon as concessions to opposite sides were started, autocracy was doomed, its very backbone being broken by such concessions.
These lines were written by the late, ever to-be-lamented Baron Serge Korff, a Russian of the Russians, whose friendship and confidence, up to his untimely death just four years ago, the author had the honor to enjoy. Descended from a prominent family in Russia, Korff was professor at the Women's University of Petrograd and at the University of Helsingfors in Finland. His last days, particularly his sudden death, may be taken as a minute but typical cross section of the fate of so many Russian intellectuals driven into exile by the Bolshevist coup d'état. Under the Provisional Government, Korff was Lieutenant Governor of Finland, a post which he was obliged to vacate on the fall of the Kerensky Government. On his taking up residence in the United States, he was rapidly forging to the front as an acknowledged authority on international affairs. His lectures were in constant demand in the United States and abroad. It was my privilege to offer him a professorship in the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, a chair which he filled with distinction, to the admiration and with the love of his pupils. While conducting his course in the same lecture room where he had opened it three years previously, Korff dropped to the floor and expired almost immediately.
In his passing the world at large lost a scholar and a gentleman, his fellow members on his faculty a beloved colleague; and the University still mourns in him a distinguished and capable historian. I feel that those of his former student who may read these lines will gladly join with me in this passing tribute to one of the victims of the Russian Revolution.
Pogroms and similar inhuman treatment of Jews became a frequent occurrence, probably organized by the Black Hundreds (a secret monarchist organization connived at by the imperial police), composed of reactionaries and employing terrorism as a weapon against the terrorists. The month of November 1905 witnessed a widespread series of political disorders, ranging from the assassination of high officials and the mutiny of soldiers and sailors to the seizure of landed estates by peasants in the provinces. Courts-martial were established and martial law was proclaimed over a large part of the Empire.
No single act during this period of governmental vengeance stands out more senseless than the punitive expeditions of the Semyonovsky Regiment on the Moscow-Kazan railroad line. Armed with blanket authority to punish the populations of whole districts as a mass, the commanding officer, colonel Rieman, was instructed to take no prisoners and to act mercilessly. Culpable leaders of the insurrection had time to escape before the arrival of the troops; but the Cossacks struck indiscriminately at groups of peasants who on the average, were as guiltless of political conspiracy as they were of thought. Executing without trial or provocation, the soldiery left a ghastly trail of burning villages, murdered hostages, and peasants swinging from telegraph poles. One has but to read the official protests made in the Duma by appalled delegates to understand the extant of the terrorism that prevailed in the Caucasus and the Baltic provinces as well as in the heart of Russia during the period 1905-6.
It was under such disturbed conditions that the first Russian Duma was opened on May 10, 1906. Its composition is a cross section of contemporaneous Russia. There were:—
| Great Russians Little Russians White Russians Poles Lithuanians Bashkirs | . . .265 . . . 62 . . . 12 . . . 51 . . . 10 . . . .4 | Letts Esthonians Germans Jews Tatars | . . . 6 . . . 4 . . . 4 . . .13 . . . 8 |
The less important nationalities, such as the Chuvash, the Circassians, the Kalmuks, the Mordva, and the Votiaks had one or two deputies apiece. The first Duma had a short life of seventy-two days, spent almost exclusively in conflict with the Government. It was dominated by the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), who devoted their full energy to expounding the indignation and disappointment experienced by the country at large at the inadequate reform and demanding a constitution on the English and the American pattern. The entire session was nothing but a prolonged conflict with the Cabinet of Ministers. The Government replied by dissolving the assembly and convoking a new Duma for March 5, 1907. The Constitutional Democrat retreated to Viborg, in Finland, and there published the famous "Viborg Manifesto," urging the people to passive resistance.
The first Duma has gone down in Russian history with the appellation "The Duma of the National Indignation."
The second became known as "The Duma of the National Ignorance," due to the fact that the newly elected deputies were considered less capable, intellectually, than those of the first Duma. Perhaps the most significant fact was the appearance of a strong group of Social Democrats, who had refused hitherto to cooperate with the Duma and would send no delegate. Now they returned a compact group of more than 60, which raised the total Socialist vote from 26 to 83—that is, 17 per cent of the whole house. From the outset the second Duma assumed a hostile and frankly revolutionary attitude. It lived one hundred days, without being able to achieve anything in a legislative or parliamentary sense. When, on July 14, Stolypin entered the Chamber and demanded the arrest and trial of sixteen members of the Social Democrat Party for sedition and conspiracy, Tsereteli, leader of the Social Democrats, admitted with pride the indictment brought against his colleagues, declaring: "We who are accused of having undertaken the political education of the masses, declare that this accusation fills our heart with pride and serves as a proof that we fulfilled honorably the obligations imposed on us."
On the Duma refusing to consent to the arrest and trial of its members, the Government again dissolved the assembly on June 16, 1907. The Duma then not being in session certain members of the Social Democrat group were arrested tried for treason, and sentenced, some to hard labor and others to exile in Siberia.
For the second time, representative government was threatened, and it was seriously debated by the Czar's ministers if the whole project should not be definitely abandoned and the Constitution abolished. Better counsel prevailed, however, and a third Duma was allowed to be elected, which Stolypin, by clever manipulation of the new electoral law of June 3, was practically able to control and direct. Propertied classes and large landholders were in the predominance and a majority was maintained favorable to the Government. Witte calls it "a legislative body, not elected by the Russian people, but selected by Stolypin."
Stolypin soon paid the usual penalty of reaction and reckless administration, following so many of his predecessors to a bloody end. The record of the various attempt made on this man's life reads like some of the most lurid pages of Edgar Allan Poe, rather than the annals of a civilized nation as late as 1911.(3)
But the end came, on September 14, 1911, during an elaborate theatrical performance at Kiev. In the royal box sat the Emperor and his daughters, surrounded by influential members of his court, while cabinet members and other high officials were scattered through the audience. Among the ministers present was Stolypin. A revolutionary terrorist, a youthful Jew, succeeded in penetrating close enough to Stolypin to shoot him fatally before the very eyes of the horrified Emperor. Rumor would have it that the assassin was also a secret agent employed by the police department.
The fourth and last Duma—this was the assembly dissolved on August 22, 1917—began its sittings in 1912 under the presidency of Michael Rodzianko, who was destined to play an important part in the closing scenes of 1917. The two following years were essentially replicas of the preceding period. The Duma and the Government were openly at odds. Popular discontent was never silent, but grew more and more clamorous and menacing. On May Day, 1914, 130,000 workmen were on a strike in Petrograd alone, a condition that soon developed into open warfare. During July, while the clouds of her last war were gathering over doomed Russia, there were armed conflicts in the streets of the capital. Cossacks were charging barricaded workmen and leaving killed and wounded strewn about, exactly as they had done on Bloody Sunday, in 1905.
Alexander Kerensky, aided by a group of disaffected fellow members of the Duma, was actively organizing revolutionary meetings in Southeastern Russia; they had finished their work at Samara and had boarded a steamer for Saratov, Mr. Kerensky's constituency, when they heard newsboys shouting, "Austria's ultimatum to Serbia !" From the tone of the mass meetings which they had convoked in numerous cities, they were convinced that the Revolution would have come, of itself, not later than the spring of 1915.
Then, with open revolution in her streets, and with class hatred seething in the hearts of so many of her people, Russia was suddenly confronted, on July 24, 1914, with the fatal choice between peace and war, the consequences of which pushed her over the precipice.
Notes Chapter 3
1. This same Executive Committee addressed a note of sympathy to the Government of the United States when President Garfield was assassinated. It condemned the use of political assassination in America, pointing out the difference between the autocracy they were fighting in Russia and the satisfying liberty in America. See Appendix I.
3. Etymologically, the term " liberal " has obvious relation to freedom of some sort. Up to the close of the eighteenth century it had no political significance, being applied to cultural freedom, "a liberal education," "the liberal arts," and so forth. In the nineteenth century it acquired wide political and social connotation in consequence of the theories of Rousseau, Diderot, and Madame Staël. In the twentieth century it denotes a curious variety of claimants who range from sincere crusaders and unprejudiced thinkers to illiberal bigots, cranks, and intellectual dilettantes. For the latter category it frequently serves as a convenient cloak to mask a mental or moral incapacity to face and take a positive stand on serious issues. These are the straddlers, the dabblers, and the poseurs, who applaud the most contradictory theories, however ridiculous, rather than strain their nerves by too close application of logic or endanger their reputation for broadness and tolerance by a public exhibition of their thought processes.
5. For that reason he is detested and feared by the Bolsheviki. Not far from the house where the author lived in Moscow stood the ruins of the headquarters of the anarchists, where they made their last stand against the Bolsheviki in the November Revolution. No house in Moscow was more riddled with bullets and artillery fire.
Notes Chapter 4
... A new cry arose for boycott of the Duma. The Social Revolutionary Party reverted to boycott, while Lenin's faction overwhelmed him once more. This was a "cardboard, comic-opera Duma," they cried, and the Constitution was now a mere fraud. What self-respecting revolutionary could so humiliate himself and so deceive the masses as to participate in such undemocratic elections, play a role in such a farce, pretend that anything could be accomplished in such a travesty on the idea of popular representation?
But Lenin knew no finical pride as to the kind of institution in which he would work if he could thereby serve the revolution. "In a pig-sty if necessary," he told his comrades. Moreover, he had been studying Stolypin and his maneuvers with increasing respect. Here was an opponent worthy of his steel, a man who, with opposite intentions, but from similar premises, was doing much what Lenin would have done had he been a champion of the existing order and an enemy of the revolution.
Stolypin's policy as Premier combined measures to diminish the franchise of "unreliable elements" and to repress open revolutionary activity, with a series of bold positive schemes for modernizing Russian life, reforming agriculture, and stabilizing the tsarist régime. As if he had studied Lenin's Development of Capitalism in Russia and all Lenin's writings on the agrarian question, Stolypin proceeded now to foster capitalism in agriculture, to promote class differentiation in the village, to break down the communal mir, to secrete out a new class of property-minded individual peasant proprietors as a rural support for the existing order. ("I put my wager not on the needy and the drunken, but on the sturdy and the strong.")
The trouble with the Emancipation of 1861, reasoned Stolypin, was that it actually preserved and fostered the peasant commune instead of setting up a class of individual proprietors. Each communal village had received the entire area of land allotted to its members as a communal holding under a system of collective responsibility for the redemption payments of all its members. The commune itself then divided the land for tilling among its members according to the size of the families, fresh subdivision taking place every few years to keep up with population changes. Hence there was no inducement to improve the land, and no sense of private ownership such as characterized Western farmers and tended to make them socially conservative. The system conserved communal or corporate ideology. It preserved the memory of serfdom, and reminded the former serfs that they had gotten on the average only half of the land they had tilled for their lords before emancipation. Thus it kept alive the idea that the halfway job might be completed by adding the rest of the land of the big landowner to the communal village land fund.
Now Stolypin set about to create in Russia a class of individual small proprietors. He abolished the zemski nachalnik who kept the village in tutelage; he instituted equal rights for peasants with the rest of the population; he inaugurated a series of land and loan laws which would encourage all the more energetic to withdraw from the communes and become individual owners of their share of the land. "The natural counterweight to the communal principle," he said, "is individual ownership; the small owner is the nucleus on which rests all stable order in the state." In short, he tried to create the conservative, property-minded class that the Marxists had wrongly imagined the Russian peasant to be. This was sound reactionary politics, Lenin told himself with ungrudging admiration.
And no less sound was Stolypin's ukaz limiting the voting power of elements opposed to the regime while he enlarged the voting power of its supporters. So Lenin, too, would act in 1918, when he made a worker's vote equal to that of five peasants.
Between 1907 and 1914, under the Stolypin land reform laws, 2,000,000 peasant families seceded from the village mir and became individual proprietors. All through the war the movement continued, so that by January 1, 1916, 6,200,000 families, out of approximately 10,000,000 eligible, had made application for separation. Lenin saw the matter as a race with time between Stolypin's reforms, and the next upheaval. Should an upheaval be postponed for a couple of decades, the new land measures would so transform the countryside that it would no longer be a revolutionary force. How near Lenin came to losing that race is proved by the fact that in 1917, when he called upon the peasants to "take the land", they already owned more than three-fourths of it. According to Nicholas S. Timasheff, "the increase in the area tilled by the peasants (after the revolution) did not exceed 8 per cent; for an additional 8 per cent, the peasants no longer had to pay rent. The rest was not arable land." (The Great Retreat, p. 107.)
... Thus the two men had opposing purposes, but in premises, in analysis of the possibilities, in tactical methods, they understood each other. It almost seemed as if Premier Peter Arkadyevich were addressing Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich directly when, from the rostrum of the Duma, he made his famous declaration:
"What you want is upheavals, what we want is a great fatherland."
Would a fresh upheaval come before the new régime could complete its self-reform and consolidate its new foundations? "I do not expect to live to see the revolution," said Lenin several times toward the close of the Stolypin period.
But the dark forces which Plehve had created and which Stolypin continued to use to spy upon the revolutionary movement were the very forces which struck him down. On September 14, 1911, in the presence of the Tsar and Tsarina at a gala performance in the best theater in Kiev, an assassin's bullet put an end to the career of Peter Arkadyevich Stolypin. The murderer was a Jewish lawyer named Dmitri Bogrov, who seems to have been simultaneously an agent of the police and of the terrorist wing of the Anarchist movement. The assassination was never fully cleared up. Circumstances pointed to the possible complicity of the Department of the Interior, whose secret police were guarding the Tsar, or, at the very least, to the guilty negligence of the Kiev police authorities. The specter of the agents provocateurs Azev and Malinovsky must have haunted Stolypin as he lay dying. The Tsar and Tsarina did not mourn the loss of the man who had tried so hard to save them. They never even understood what he was doing. The great state that he had hoped to reinforce and modernize by the combination of police force, legislative manipulation, and enlightened economic and political measures, was taken over increasingly thenceforward by the dark and backward forces around Rasputin. Yet so well had Stolypin done his work, that the agrarian reform continued to develop after his death. It was the sudden coming of war, and not the failure of his plans, which brought the fresh upheaval in time for Lenin.
... The year 1912 saw the enactment of an insurance law against sickness and accident, providing two-thirds to three-quarters pay, covering virtually all industrial workers. The workingmen themselves elected their delegates to the insurance councils.
The year 1913 saw a general amnesty for political offenders in connection with the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Romanov dynasty. Martov, Dan, Kamenev returned to Russia to live there openly and legally. If Lenin did not, it is because he did not choose to. Trotsky and Stalin were ineligible because they had escaped from Siberia and had unfilled terms to serve.
In short, the Stolypin constitution, as Lenin assured his romantic ultra-Leftist followers was a moderate, but "by no means a cardboard or comic opera constitution," and Stolypin was really bent on reforming and transforming Russia in accordance with his vision of a modern state. It has become a conventional legend since to pronounce this time a period of unalloyed reaction, but all signs pointed to a peaceful, if leaden-footed, progress.
All signs, that is, except the war clouds over the Balkans and the creeping degeneration at the summit of society: the Court. There, after Stolypin's assassination, ever more doddering and incompetent advisers were brought in, under the influence of the camarilla around the strong-willed, narrow-visioned Tsarina and her Man of God, Rasputin. But Lenin could not count on war, though he fearfully hoped he might, nor was he aware of the progressive paresis in the palace.
2. He was condemned to imprisonment for ten years.
3. See Appendix V
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