Chapter I: English Liberals in Russia

“While you were away,” said Dimitri Nikolaievitch A----, “I had several long conversations with a young Englishman who had come over here to have a glimpse of the Revolution and to express his sympathy with the oppressed. He was an ardent Liberal, and he had a fine _doctrinaire_ spirit, so that although he was considerably disappointed with what he saw, or, rather, with what he did not see, his theories on Russian politics were unshaken by the facts he observed. And he remained entrenched within them as in the walls of a strong fortress. He interested me greatly, first, because he proved to me that a pet theory of mine was wrong, that no Englishman is a Liberal, and, secondly, he showed me how difficult it must be for people living in England, and unacquainted with Russian life, to form a correct estimate of what is going on here.

“He talked with burning indignation of the Bureaucrats and with hope of the dawn of liberty in Russia, and the awakening giant and the ferociousness of Ministers, and when I said that the only difference between the Kadet reformers and the Bureaucrats was that the Bureaucrats formed part of the Civil Service and the Kadet reformers did not, although some of them have done so in the past, he did not understand what I meant. And yet the matter is one which any Englishman who can understand Bernard Shaw’s play, _John Bull’s Other Island_, ought to be able to grasp. In _John Bull’s Other Island_, Bernard Shaw has shown exactly how an English Liberal fails to understand the Irish question. Now, an English Liberal misunderstands the Russian question in exactly the same way as he misunderstands the Irish question. He comes to Russia bursting with indignation, and burning with enthusiasm for the cause of liberty, and he meets with polite sympathy from the Russians who, while they respect the trend and the violence of his opinions, inwardly smile at his misapprehension, his complete inability to comprehend the nature of the case. The Liberal then goes back to England and writes a book in which in lurid colours he paints the distress of the distressful country, and in which he confuses utterly the evils arising from a complicated, antiquated, and incompetent system of administration with those due to original sin.

“I mean that in his book he is capable of saying, ‘Russia is such a terrible country that if a convict fells a warder he is flogged.’ He talks of the bloodthirsty Bureaucrats and the iron-fisted Governors, and then of the Russian Liberals as if they belonged to an entirely different race of people, as if, for instance, they possessed the qualities, and those only, which are special to the admirable British middle-class. Now, just think of this question of Bureaucracy for a moment. To talk of the bloodthirsty race of Bureaucrats is absurd. Nine-tenths of educated Russians are Bureaucrats, and the majority of these Bureaucrats are probably Liberals and would vote for the Kadets unless it were too inconvenient. Some of the higher officials among these same Bureaucrats have often admittedly been excellent men; in any case there is no difference of kind between the Russian who is a high official or a small public servant and the Russian who is a doctor, a lawyer, a political agitator, a novelist, an actor, or an anarchist.

“Where, then, is the mischief? The mischief is in the system, and the misunderstanding arises from a misuse of words, which in its turn is caused by a disinclination to think clearly. When people say Bureaucracy they mean Autocracy. Russia is governed by the autocratic system, and an Autocracy, unless, as happens every now and then in the course of centuries, the autocrat is a man of genius like Peter the Great, Cromwell, or Napoleon, means this, that the country governed by an autocrat is governed in reality by a mass of officials, who claim that they are directly responsible to the monarch, and who are at the same time considered to be responsible to the monarch’s Ministers. They end by being responsible to nobody, since the people who are set beneath them can complain of them to those who are in authority over them, and therefore not one of them, from the lowest telegraph clerk to the Prime Minister, is sure of his position, because the Prime Minister can be sent away at a moment’s notice, according to the Sovereign’s whim. The result of this is that the individual counts for nothing, and the better the Bureaucrat the more hopeless his position, since there is no guarantee for the laws being enforced, and when a people sees that sometimes the laws are enforced, and at others they are not, according to circumstances, and according to the nature and rank of the persons they affect, they become less inclined to obey the laws. Therefore, what Russia is suffering from is not want of liberty, but want of law. In Russia we have the licence of the Press, and the power of suppressing newspapers. What we want is order. Now, lots of Russians argue that the autocratic system and its attendant lawlessness are simply the inevitable result of the Russian character, out of which it has grown. I should be more inclined to believe this if exactly the same system had not existed in France and been subsequently destroyed, and if the autocratic system in Russia were a very ancient instead of a comparatively modern institution borrowed from Germany by an eccentric man of genius who forced it on a backward and ignorant people. I mean Peter the Great.

“Again, many Russians argue thus: ‘In England, in spite of all their Habeas Corpus, Bills of Right, etc., officials do lawless things in Egypt, and innocent people are put in prison for mutilating horses.’ This argument seems to me fallacious. The point being not that the Habeas Corpus is an infallible guarantee against lawlessness in England, but that were there no Habeas Corpus in England things would be much worse than they are at present. There was once a French priest who, when he heard the Republic abused for all its vices and faults, answered: ‘Tout de même si les institutions libérales disparaissaient, nous les regrettrions.’ And I consider that if by any chance Liberal Institutions were established in Russia we should not groan beneath them. So you see I am not a Liberal but a radical. I am in favour of radical change. In spite of that, the sympathy of Liberals in other countries, even that of the Bishop of Hereford, fails either to move, to console, or to encourage me.

“At the beginning of the French Revolution the English Liberals felt much sympathy with the French Reformers, and a sword of honour was sent by the French tribunes to the ‘citoyens’ who were then Ministers in England; but when the French Revolution moved onwards towards its logical close, the disgust of the English Liberals knew no bounds, and Burke made his disapprobation immortal in burning prose. Therefore, when the revolutionaries here begin to get the upper hand I shall advise them to pause before sending a sword of honour to ‘Citoyen’ Hereford, ‘Citoyen’ Jaurès, and ‘Citoyen’ Keir Hardy, lest when all Russia is in flames and the rentes have sunk to nothing and the red flag flies from the Winter Palace, the Bishop from the pulpit, M. Jaurès in the Chamber of Deputies, and Mr. Keir Hardy in the House of Commons, rise to point out--safeguarding themselves with conjunctions as is the habit of political speakers--that although nobody sympathises more than they do with Liberal ideas, nevertheless, to repudiate foreign loans, and to cut off Professor Milioukov’s head, and to throw all the Kadets and the moderate Liberals and even the more moderate Socialists into the Neva, is going too far, and for such actions they cannot overstate their deprecation.”