Chapter XIX: The Downfall of the Tsardom

Tsarism, its own stock of vitality exhausted and with no outer sources to draw upon, languished and decayed rapidly. Time and its changes acted on the predatory State as potent solvents. Every stage in the forward progress of Europe was a new set-back or a fresh danger to the system. The growth of manufactures in neighbouring countries; the incipient industrialisation of Russia; the general rise in the standard of living; the spread of technical instruction; the improvement in educational methods and the corresponding sharpening of commercial and industrial competition; the advance of social and political sciences; the softening of manners; the increase of tolerance; the corresponding religious movements in Russia; and that invisible undercurrent without a name, which is so often alluded to as the spirit of the age, all tended to isolate the Tsarist State, render it obnoxious to the European community, and accentuate the centrifugal tendencies of its component parts. The work of governing the 180,000,000 became more and more difficult, seeing that whatever orientation a minister or a cabinet might now give to his policy, the general result was invariably negative.

If, for instance, a man took office who, like Pobiedonostseff, made a vigorous effort to surround the country with a Chinese wall in order to keep out the destructive tendencies of the west, he was vehemently decried not only by the press and the intelligentsia at home, but by all liberal and radical Europe[1] as well. If a narrow-minded bureaucrat like Count Dmitry Tolstoy strove to hinder the Jews from spreading cosmopolitanism and religious indifferentism among a people whose meagre sociability and slight traces of civic virtue {372} were derived from ancient custom and Christianity, he and his government were furiously attacked and discredited throughout the world. When Alexander III. suddenly curtailed certain religious privileges of the Baltic barons, the champions of advanced thought in Germany and also in England lifted up their voices against the Tsardom and all its works.[2] If on the other hand the sails of the State-ship began to be filled by a liberal wind, as when Prince Sviatopolk Mirsky or Witte was the principal representative of the Tsar, the Jews, the Baltic Germans, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Esthonians, the Letts, the Mohammedans, the Armenians, the Georgians, all, forthwith, raised their hands and started off in the direction of their several eclectic affinities, but invariably away from Tsarism, until the enterprising minister put on the brake. If a spell of religious tolerance meant a further weakening of the autocrat's hold on the people, a spurt of persecution had a like effect. In a word, the rhythms of the multitudinous elements composing the Tsardom had become so jarring that there was no more hope of harmonising them.

Nor was it only the diverse races, but also the social classes of one and the same race, whose fixed tendencies were opposed to those of the political system. Thus turning from the nationalities to the bulk of the Russian people--the agricultural population--one was struck with the circumstance that it was mediæval in its institutions, Asiatic in its strivings, and prehistoric in its conceptions of life. The peasants believed that the Japanese had won the Manchurian campaign by assuming the form of microbes, getting into the boots of the Russian soldiers, biting their legs, and bringing about their death. When there was an epidemic in a district they often killed the doctors "for poisoning the wells and spreading the disease." They still burn witches with delight, disinter the dead to lay a ghost, strip unfaithful {373} wives stark naked, tie them to carts, and whip them through the village. It is fair, therefore, to say that the level of culture of the peasantry, in whose name Russia is now being ruined, is considerably lower than that of Western Europe. And when the only restraints that keep such a multitude in order are suddenly removed the consequences to the community are bound to be catastrophic. The peasantry, like the intelligentsia, is wanting in the social sense that endows a race with cohesiveness, solidity, and political unity. Between the people and anarchism for generations there stood but the frail partition formed by its primitive ideas of God and the Tsar, and since the Manchurian campaign these were rapidly melting away.

Wholly indifferent to politics, of which they understood nothing, but cunning withal and land greedy, the peasants were only a long row of ciphers to which the articulate class, mainly officialdom, lent significance. All that they wanted was land, how it was obtained being a matter of no moment to them. Their view of property was that their own possessions were inviolable, whereas those of the actual owners should be wrested from them without more ado. This simplicist socialism was the crystallisation of ages of ignorance, thraldom, and misguidance. It was manifest that the complete enfranchisement of these elements would necessarily entail the dissolution of the Tsardom.

This situation and what it portended were plain to me at the time, and I strove perseveringly and unavailingly to make them equally clear to the nations and governments interested in Russia's well-being. My oft-repeated estimate of the forces that were making for the speedy disruption of the Tsardom has been borne out by events which are even now modifying the course of the world's history. Eleven years ago I wrote: "The agrarian question in Russia is the alpha and omega of the revolution. It furnishes the lever by means of which the ancient regime, despite the support of the army, may be heaved into the limbo of things that were and are not. So important is the land problem that if it could be definitely suppressed or satisfactorily solved the {374} revolution would be a tame affair indeed, hardly as exciting as was that of one of the petty German States in the last century. In this case it still might be possible to a clever statesman, after and despite all that has taken place in Russia since October last,[3] to prop up the bureaucratic system and renew its lease of life for another generation. For it must not be forgotten that fully 80 per cent. of the population are illiterate, and that millions of them are plunged in such benighted ignorance and crass superstition as foreigners can hardly conceive of. Hence they sorely need guidance....[4] The cry, 'the land for the peasants,' intoxicates, nay, maddens them. They are then ready to commit any crime against property and life in the hope of realising their object. The explosive force that may be thus called into being and utilised for the purpose of overthrowing the present social and political order is enormous. _The formidable army of the Tsar dwindles into nothing when compared to it, because itself is the source of the army to which it imparts its own strivings and tendencies_."[5]

The intelligentsia, whose ideas about human society were streaked with opinions borrowed from various countries and left unharmonised, partook of the characteristic traits both of the people and of the progressive nationalities. Composed chiefly of theory-mongers who had no roots in the country and who carried on a continuous anti-monarchist and communistic or nihilist propaganda in schools and elsewhere, it was perhaps the most corrosive solvent of all.

To my thinking, then, there was no sovereign remedy for the malady from which the Tsardom was suffering. It was mortal, and the utmost that could be aimed at was to postpone its effects for a few years. And even this would require higher statesmanship than the Emperor was employing. Already in February, 1905, I wrote of the incipient revolution: 'What the least observant can hardly fail to note is that there is no longer a head shaping and directing the course of events in the Tsardom. Certain forces are felt, certain things happen, the entire people drifts. Old and new {375} ministers resign, governors-general imperceptibly recede from their posts, scientific institutions, learned professions, local councils, members of the nobility, individuals and guilds of the merchant class, the peasant masses, band themselves together to struggle against the autocracy, which, Archimedes-like, is solicitous only for its circles. For Russia such an unwonted condition of things is truly revolutionary and chaotic."[6] And surveying the revolutionary ferment with an eye to its probable duration I gave it as my opinion that "it cannot by its nature be short: but, protean in its shapes and clumsy in its methods, _may last throughout the century_."[7]

But that the autocracy was doomed and would not survive Nicholas II., I felt as certain as one can be of any future event dependent upon a variety of factors with most of which one is conversant. As far back as May, 1905, I wrote of Nicholas II. as the last of the Tsars and added: "Autocracy has heated its palace with sparks, and must now do penance in the ashes."[8]

But Count Witte looked more hopefully on the situation as beseems a man of action wont to wield power, to seize opportunity, and successfully to modify circumstance. He long clung to the belief that under certain conditions, more and more difficult to realise, the problem might yet be solved of welding into one the disparate elements of the Tsardom and modernising the mediæval State by a home and foreign policy of his own devising. His plan was to create common economic interests which would absorb most of the activity, co-ordinate the efforts, and knit together the various races and classes of the population. The differences among these he would have lessened by rendering accessible to all who were ambitious or gifted commercial and industrial training in schools and technological institutes.[9] Parallel with this he would have fostered the inchoate native industries by establishing profitable markets for their output in {376} the Far East. And by way of rendering these endeavours continuous and fruitful, it was his determination to keep Russia out of war--which he always felt would be her undoing--by entering into a continental league which would settle the affairs of the world, not indeed without a backing of military force, but without actually employing it.

But the people whose vital interest it was that Witte's or some similar scheme should be worked out to a successful issue, the Tsar, the dynasty, the Jews, the Liberals, and the entire intelligentsia, turned against him with rare unanimity and persistence and thwarted his every project. After 1906, he had frequent visions of the disastrous convulsions in which the Tsardom would expire.

Long before that he had foretold the anarchist revolution which would, he feared, change not only the regime but the face of Russia. I have a lively recollection of one prophecy of his made to me in the United States shortly after the accord with the Japanese, when in one of his moods of exaltation he said: "When I am at home and watch the flow of political and social events my attention is almost wholly taken up by their bearings on each other and by their nexus with foregoing occurrences, whereas the stream of general tendency which they also reveal often escapes me. But looking back now and from this distance at things Russian, I seem to discern that current more plainly because I can see the whole community as distinguished from groups and coteries and classes and nationalities. Well, let me tell you what strikes me: It is the slow but steady advance of Russia towards a politico-social ordering very different from any evolutionary stage of the present regime, possibly approaching that of America. Are you surprised? Under certain unrealised conditions it might be a blessing. It is largely a question of education and training, but also, to some extent, of inborn capacity.

"The people of the United States have strengthened my faith in the future of humanity. Their generosity makes me feel that my idea of the reconstruction of Europe will develop, no doubt in other hands than mine, into a project for the {377} reconstruction of the world. From the narrow political angle of vision, the United States government had much to gain by letting us go on fighting Japan to a finish. Both belligerents would have been enormously weakened and America might then have had the satisfaction of settling the problems of the Pacific in her own fashion. That was the selfish, the European way of treating the matter. But instead of that, President Roosevelt and the entire people generously put forth their whole-hearted efforts to get both war-waging peoples to lay down their arms and negotiate peace. That altruism is worthy of the new era which it foreshadows. I shall never forget this noble deed. Leagued with a few such peoples we could safeguard the peace of the world. But at present that is only a pious desire ... and besides, the Americans have no end of grievances against us.

"I am now going back home bound by promises to Jews and Christians here to do my best to modify the repressive legislation that keeps the people of Russia further apart from that of the United States than does the ocean.... How shall I redeem them? You know what it means. The Americans do not. To abolish even the Jewish Pale of Settlement is but a fraction of what is expected of me. Yet that alone would involve a profound modification of the autocracy as at present established. Here in the bracing atmosphere of the great republic such a feat may seem insignificant. But on the other side of Eydtkuhnen[10] it is high treason to think of it. But I will do my best...." He did. But he was alone, and as the Russians put it, "one man in the field is not a soldier."

That is why I wrote a few months later: "Witte's views are immaterial to the issue, for if he were as Liberal as Abraham Lincoln, he would still be almost as powerless as a Sioux chief, unless he had a strong Liberal following and that was denied him chiefly by the Jews."[11] He had no following because of the anarchist or unsocial leanings of the {378} population. "It is clear," I wrote, "that the Slav nation lacks political education and self-control; has no idea of tactics, no habit of discipline, hardly yet a standard by which to separate the secondary from the essential, the final goal from those intermediate aims which differ little from the means. The elements of the population that display an interest in public affairs are animated by a spirit of insubordination which makes it hard for them to combine. They are atoms which would seem to repel rather than attract each other, so that in lieu of a few strong parties a large number of little groups are likely to be formed. Moreover they are more deeply moved by purely personal considerations than by patriotism, discerning friends and enemies where we should expect them to see only Russia and her destinies."

The abortive rising of 1905-6, which I watched at close quarters, convinced me that any democratic revolution, however peacefully effected, would throw open the gates wide to the forces of anarchism and break up the Empire. And a glance at the mere mechanical juxtaposition--it could not be called union--of elements so conflicting among themselves as were the ethnic, social, and religious sections and divisions of the Tsar's subjects would have brought home this obvious truth to the mind of any unbiassed and observant student of politics. The mad spectacle which was unfolded to my gaze by that revolt revealed the further fact that the army, the workmen, and the peasantry were much more likely to fraternise with each other and pull down the pillars of the social fabric than seemed possible to the ministers of the crown. Nay, the bureaucrats themselves appeared to me capable of throwing over the Tsar on the spur of the moment and proclaiming their faith in republicanism or in any other regime that might take the people's fancy. For nothing was impossible to their curious psychology. I had had amazing examples of these sudden conversions before my eyes when I wrote: 'The capers cut by the officials were especially amusing. Prematurely giving up the autocracy as lost, large numbers of them made hot-haste to turn from what they deemed the setting to the rising sun. They {379} announced that they had always been democrats at heart, had always known that the regime was rotten and would fall to pieces. The autocracy, on which they had lived and still were living, they proceeded to scourge with tongues that stung like scorpions until there was not a sound place left in it. 'A man's foes shall be those of his own household.'"[12]

Witte, had he had a free hand, the confidence of the Emperor, and an adequate following from the year 1905 until his death, might at the utmost have prolonged for a little the life of the Tsardom while gradually limiting the power of the Tsar. By the time of Stolypin's violent death things had come to such a pass that there was no longer hope for either.

In lieu of Witte's statesmanlike plan, we find a foreign policy which was deeply marked by systematic disloyalty to the principal powers with which the Tsardom had friendly or neighbourly intercourse and a system of home government destructive of the basis of all morality. Towards Britain the duplicity of the Tsardom, several instances of which I have already mentioned,[13] was continued down to the moment when M. Izvolsky exchanged views with King Edward about the Entente scheme which Poklevsky had first submitted to Witte. And then the duplicity ceased, but only in so far as the foreign policy was conducted by the Tsar's ministers; it remained as trothless as before when directed by the Tsar himself. It is noteworthy that even towards Germany, who enjoyed the "traditional friendship of the Tsardom," a tendency to sharp practice now and again startled the politicians of Berlin, as, for instance, during the negotiations about German participation in the Russo-Chinese bank. So untrustworthy was Nicholas II. in all his dealings that it is doubtful whether he could always be true to his own self. Towards China, the Tsardom and its servants deemed every form of wile and treachery {380} permissible. The giving away by Nicholas II. of a Chinese port to the Kaiser; the seizure of another port by the Tsar himself, who a short time before had received the use of Chinese territory for his railway; the infamous plot to kidnap the Emperor and the Empress of China while bound to them by ties of intimate friendship, will rank in political history with the most iniquitous doings of Frederic the Great. But whereas the Prussian king's obliquity was invariably a means, and generally an efficacious means, to an intelligible and patriotic end, the perfidies of the Tsardom served merely as the measure of its own depravity, pettiness, and impotence. The reader will not be surprised to learn that history is unable to acquit the Tsarist State of what may fairly be termed sharp practice towards Austria-Hungary in the matter of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Whithersoever we turn our eyes we are confronted with the same combination of cunning and deception. While professing most friendly feelings and cultivating cordial relations with Turkey, the Tsar, together with Nelidoff and Tshikhatshoff, planned a treacherous attack on the shores of the Upper Bosphorus which was with difficulty thwarted by Witte. While "practising" an intimate alliance with France, Russia in the person of her Tsar concluded a secret alliance with France's covert enemy, Germany, thus undertaking to fight on the side of each against the other. While the negotiations between the Kaiser and Tsar were going on with a view to this accord I wrote: "France's position is unique.... As a nation she is mistrusted for sowing revolutionary ideas broadcast, but tolerated as the keeper of the money bags. As a power she is regarded as a _quantité négligeable_ and is slighted accordingly. Her milliards are so many hostages which she has given to Russia for her good behaviour. Autocracy possessed of the calf takes no further thought of the cow which, however plaintively it may low, is certain not to stray too far away."

In 1910 the Tsar at Potsdam struck up another compact with Wilhelm II. according to which neither of them was to become a member of any combination of powers formed {381} against the other. In that same year most of the Russian troops quartered in Warsaw, Brest-Litovsk, Grodno, which would, in case of war, have endangered Germany's mobilisation, were withdrawn. Lastly, when the Germans in their turn were arranging to take possession of Constantinople, by the despatch of General Liman von Sanders and his military mission, the Tsar and the Kaiser came to a secret agreement approving it. But again the Russian ministers were kept in the dark about it by Nicholas II.

"The most painful impression of all," Entente publicists tell us, was made by the perfidious conduct of Nicholas II. in arranging for a separate peace in the year 1916-17 when his devoted allies were shedding their blood and giving their substance ungrudgingly in his cause. I cannot agree with them. I have made inquiries into this allegation and, although it is uncommonly difficult to prove a negative assertion, the upshot of my investigation comes as near to it as one can reasonably demand. So far as I have been able to ascertain there is not a tittle of evidence to show that Nicholas II. had the intention to make a separate peace. That conditions being what they were his armies could not, with the best will in the world, have continued to fight much longer on the same scale as theretofore may be taken for granted. But it nowise follows that he would have concluded a separate peace. And from what I know of his mentality, of the motives to which he was most impressible, and of the available evidence, I look upon that assumption as most improbable.[14] The fact is that Nicholas II. was waging war on two fronts, one against our common enemies and the other against revolutionary bolshevism in Russia, and this indictment is probably part of the tactics of the bolshevist offensive which had the support of the English and the French. I venture to go further and to assert that from the point of view of the Allies the safest policy consisted in keeping Nicholas II. on the throne while giving him a cabinet {382} of ministers responsible to the Duma. And Great Britain and France, had each had a supple statesman at their head, could have accomplished the two-fold task with an intelligent effort.

The extinction of this gross, widespread, and _a priori_ credible accusation leaves the unflattering portrait which I drew of the Tsar in the year 1904 with all its traits intact: the cunning, the love of secrecy, the self-worship, the pettiness, the instability, and the deficiency of moral sense. To end the feeble, shifty, extravagant dynasty of the Holstein-Gottorps, Fate would appear to have selected its most typical representative.

If the intercourse of the Tsarist State with other nations was characterised by systematic bad faith, its dealings with its own subjects were, as I have shown, destructive of all morality. By the year 1906 it had fallen so low that systematic recourse to crime of a peculiarly dastardly kind had become its mainstay. Conspiracies against the government; against State dignitaries, and even against princes of the reigning house were deliberately hatched by State servants in order to supply them with a pretext for shooting, hanging, or imprisoning men who only asked for a regime like that which existed in Austria or Prussia. And in order to enable the double-dyed miscreants who thus entrapped their unsuspecting fellows to continue their work of treachery, the State connived at the execution of several of those abominable plots against such pillars of the Tsardom as Von Plehve, the Grand Duke Sergius, General von Launitz, and Stolypin.

Although it was known to the government that their agent Azeff had had these and other zealous champions of autocracy done to death in order to maintain his credit with the terrorists, he was still retained in the service of the Tsar. And while monarchists were thus slaying monarchists for the good of Tsarism, Kazantseff and his group of reactionaries were inveigling ignorant revolutionists into assassinating eminent liberal reformers, assuring them that they were executing spies. Life in the Tsardom could not be contemplated as other than the abomination of desolation.

{383}

The main object of these diabolic methods was to perpetuate a system which for iniquity had no parallel in Christendom, and to keep 140,000,000 peasants in a plight which makes one wonder as much at their pre-revolutionary patience as one has wondered since at their anarchist frenzy. I once sketched the state of things roughly as follows: "Too often the Russian peasant dwells in a hovel more filthy than a sty, more noxious than a phosphoric match factory. He goes to bed at six and even five o'clock in the winter, because he cannot afford money to buy petroleum enough for artificial light. He has no meat, no eggs, no butter, no milk, often no cabbage, and lives mainly on black bread and potatoes. Lives? He starves on an insufficient quantity of them. At this moment there are numerous peasants in Bessarabia who for lack of that staple food are dying of hunger. At this moment in White Russia, after the departure of the reserves for the seat of war, there are many households in which not even a pound of rye corn is left for the support of the families who have lost their breadwinners. And yet those starving men, women, and children had raised plenty of corn to live upon--for the Russian tiller of the soil eats chiefly black bread, and is glad when he has enough of that. But they were forced to sell it immediately after the harvest in order to pay the taxes. And they sold it for nominal prices--so cheap that the foreigners could re-sell it to them cheaper than Russian corn merchants!"[15] Such was the material plight of a large section of the Tsar's subjects.

As for the fog that enwrapped the souls of millions of these famished human beings, its denseness may be imagined when I say that many of them had no standard of right and wrong. Imagine the mental state of the followers of Father John of Cronstadt, who, in a village[16] worshipping my late acquaintance as an incarnation of the Supreme Being, sacrificed a woman in his honour--a woman aged forty-one, the mother of a family of five! They declared, when questioned, {384} that this was an offering all the more acceptable to the Almighty that the victim herself was eager thus to suffer death for her faith. And so pleased were these pious people with their weird act of adoration that they were making ready to sacrifice two other women when the police intervened.

It was to perpetuate this hell upon earth that the government abolished human and divine law!

The weight of the crimes perpetrated by the Tsarist State may be said to have dragged it into the abyss. For it fell mechanically, so to say. Neither in 1905 nor in 1917 was the revolution methodically planned.[17] In the former year there were only three thousand socialists and one thousand social revolutionists in the capital, yet even then the upheaval would probably have been successful if there had been one strong man on their side. On the other hand, the outbreak of 1917 might have been repressed if the Tsar had had a man of grit in his service. In 1905 there were a number of secret societies in the army spreading sedition among the soldiers, whereas in 1917 there would appear to have been none. To method, organisation, or leadership, therefore, the success of the movement cannot fairly be ascribed, nor even to the concerted action of the revolutionary parties. Indeed, it is worth noting that neither in preparing the upheaval nor in moderating or shaping it did the so-called revolutionary parties play a prominent or a perceptible part. Nor was it until the upshot of the sudden convulsion was manifest and the Petersburg Council of Working Men and Soldiers was formed that the groups of the extreme Left bestirred themselves and strode into the foreground. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to affirm that the Russian revolution was not the work of the professional revolutionists, but came to pass independently of their exertions.

The army as a whole was loyal to the monarchy. The {385} officers who desired the deposition of the "Colonel," as Nicholas II. was commonly called in military circles, were a very small minority, and, so far as I have ascertained, the army was free from those secret soldiers' organisations which spread disaffection and fostered rebellion in the year 1905.[18] The street tumults which ushered in the troubles, for which the minister Protopopoff had made all requisite preparations, were caused appropriately enough by the deliberate provocation of his secret police and by the artificial scarcity of food which he had of set purpose brought about. Here again we are confronted with that poetic justice of which we have had so many curious instances since the year 1914.

If it had not been for the mutiny of the reserve battalions of the Guards, Protopopoff could and would have carried out his programme, mown down the discontented citizens with his machine guns, and proceeded to rule Russia with a rod of iron. Nay, even if these contingents had remained inactive, the government would have scored a sanguinary victory. The soldiers mutinied in obedience, not to an order from a superior officer, but to a spontaneous impulse of their own.

These remarks are confirmed by the circumstance that none of the leaders of the revolutionary or extremist parties lost their lives in the street-fighting--a proof of the suddenness and rapidity with which the movement was unchained and developed.

While the riots in the capital were still proceeding, a number of prominent party men foregathered in the Technological Institute and, after the manner of 1905, organised a council of workmen to control the acts of the government. But it was the soldiers, not the workmen, who had just turned the scales against Tsarism, and some one present, who bore the fact in mind, proposed that the name of the organisation should be amended to Council of Workmen and Soldiers.[19] The motion was acclaimed, and this seemingly insignificant addition--"and soldiers"--to the {386} appellation engendered a far-reaching change in the direction of the revolutionary stream, which thenceforward flowed away from the Duma towards the army.

The soldiers whose sudden revolt had defeated the government were astonished next day to find themselves thus classed as revolutionaries and made co-heirs of these in the kingdom of liberty that was about to come. But they had no lively expectation of speedily entering into their inheritance, for after a few days' fighting in the streets they returned to their barracks ready to recommence the old routine anew. The Tsar was still on the throne. The war was raging at the fronts. The military organism had undergone no essential change, and so far as it was concerned the only difference to be anticipated--after the abdication of Nicholas II.--was that its supreme head would have been the military commission of the Duma. That was the goal towards which things military were manifestly wending. It was desired by the parliamentary chiefs, it was demanded by the generals, it was acquiesced in by the soldiers themselves.

But circumstance, stronger than the will of men, impressed a new movement on the stream of events and changed the history of Russia and of Europe. The intelligentsia, which so often in opposition had unwittingly marred opportunity, baulked statesmanlike effort, and clogged the wheels of progress, now invested with power, issued the famous Edict No. 1 "democratising" the army. Elections were ordered for representatives of the soldiers to the Petersburg[20] Council, military discipline was abolished, and the nation's weapon, the army, was shattered.... Thus the Bologna phial of the Tsardom was scratched by the author of that order and all its molecules were scattered in the winds.

What I had foreseen and foretold twelve years before had come to pass. The intelligentsia, finding themselves at the head of affairs, ruined Russia's cause and their own. Word-weavers and theory-importers, they sacrificed the Duma to the army, the army to the anarchists, and their country to the foreign enemy for the sake of the merest claptrap. During {387} the attempts at revolution in 1906 I wrote: 'Speaking of the Russian Empire which Nicholas II. received from his father, Alexander III., one may say with as much certitude as such contingent judgments admit, that it could have been governed at least for another forty or fifty years without a constitution. But on condition that it was _governed_. The Prussians of the days of Frederick the Great were much more intelligent than the Russians of to-day, yet they enjoyed absolutism and throve under it. But then although absolute it was really government, and justice was its basis. The Russians of to-day--the masses of benighted peasantry--are unfitted to govern the Empire, and for that reason a strong autocracy might have long continued in power. But even peasants will not endure starvation by inches, which was what absolutism offered to many of them. Like the worm, the mooshik will turn when trodden on. The Russian people now demand a constitution, not because they are already fitted for it, but because the bureaucracy is no longer capable of carrying on the system of absolutism. The process by which the necessity of a radical change has been impressed upon the consciousness of the people was long and circuitous, but the result is there and cannot be reasoned away. To the will of the nation the government can oppose only the bayonets of the troops, and even the tempered steel of bayonets will not long support a throne devoid of all other props. And that is now the relative position of the autocracy and the army.

"The troops are not yet disaffected as a whole. The great majority of the soldiers are still devoted to the Tsar and obedient to his officers. But the work of disintegration is going on rapidly, and may, nay must, in the end prove thorough.... In five years, three years, or a few months the army may go over to the enemy. And then? _Then the anarchists will have triumphed_.

"The tactics of the revolutionists are, perhaps, efficacious from a purely party point of view; from the standpoint of the Empire they are disastrous. They remind one of the fabulous Chinaman who burned down his hut in order to {388} roast a pig. To revolutionise the army is not merely to put a spoke in the wheel of the monarchy, it is to ruin the whole nation. For anarchists this policy is conceivable, but not for any political party, however eager to pull down the prevailing political system. To sow the seed of disaffection among the troops is to deprive the nation of its one weapon of defence, to place the people and all that they possess at the mercy of the foreign foe."[21]

Trite though these axioms may be they were not assimilated, and although the consequences of disregarding them were obviously sinister and manifest, nothing was undertaken to dislodge their cause. The circumstance that among the intelligentsia there was no mind receptive, flexible, and resourceful enough for constructive revolutionary leadership materially contributed to render the downfall of the Tsardom tantamount to the dismemberment of Russia.

Thus the upheaval, which lacked a constructive idea and a statesmanlike leader, was neither organised nor foreseen nor prepared for. It was a spontaneous movement of the Russian Enceladus to ease his suffering, and it shook the politico-social fabric to its nethermost foundations. All Russia was still one and undivided. Nor was it until the autocracy had been pulled down by the shock that various material interests laid hold of the revolutionary forces and began to use them for particular and unhallowed ends. What at the outset was the instinctive effort of a gigantic entity to right and save itself became immediately afterwards a process of gangrenous decomposition. No sooner had the whole nation risen up as one man against Tsarism than a sequence of struggles began of one interest against another, whereby the chaotic flood which had long seethed and hissed below the smooth unified surface maintained by the Tsardom burst into the light of day and overwhelmed the country and its peoples.

In the Bolshevik movement there is not the vestige of a constructive or social idea. Even the Western admirers of Lenin and Trotsky cannot discover any. Genuine socialism {389} means the organic ordering of the social whole, and of this in the Bolshevik process there is no trace. Far from that, a part is treated as the whole and the remainder is no better off than were the serfs under Alexander I. and Nicholas I. For Bolshevism is Tsarism upside down. To capitalists it metes out treatment as bad as that which the Tsars dealt to serfs. It suppresses newspapers, forbids liberty of the press, arrests or banishes the elected of the nation, and connives at or encourages crimes of diabolical ferocity.

It is charitable to assume that the intelligentsia would not have abandoned the Duma and the army if they had understood their own people and foreseen its behaviour in a state of freedom from restraint. One hopes that they knew not what they did. One of their own spiritual chiefs now agrees with what I wrote of them in the days when Alexander II. was Tsar. "Russians," he says, "readily abandon themselves to dreams, illusion, and self-deception. They are easily fascinated by the possibility of speedily bringing down upon earth the definite kingdom of justice, the social paradise, but they lack the sterner, the more masculine and responsible virtues. Deliberate toil has no charms for the Russian people. They rely for everything upon catastrophic leaps and bounds from the realm of necessity into the realm of liberty. The Russians have been demoralised by autocracy and morally crippled by protracted slavery, by the ingrained habit of trusting for everything to the ruling and the predominant classes. And the past has flung its forbidding shadow across our present and our future. As a counterweight to the flattery now in vogue it behoves us to proclaim frankly that in the Russian people there is a fatal lack of honour, and this defect is a consequence of their long continued thraldom. This lack of honour and the utter absence among them of the sense of responsibility and duty are lightly cloaked with social theories permeated with the poison of flattery administered to the popular masses."[22]

In response to the call of the well-meaning intelligentsia, who made their evocations efficacious by adding to them the {390} sacrifice of the Duma and the army, the spirit of anarchy arose from the deep and cannot now be laid. Chaos may, therefore, rage on, spreading ruin in Russia until it reaches the point of self-negation. By that time, however, and congruously with that disastrous void, the configuration of Europe may have definitely changed. That is the danger which I have long apprehended and desired to see warded off. For it obviously meant internal disruption and German domination. That is why I wrote when the breakdown of the autocracy began with the abortive revolution of eleven years ago: "Without claiming to descry things further ahead than the average politician, one might make a heavy wager that _before Russia resumes her lost position among the nations of the earth, Germany will have won for herself at the expense of her neighbours a position of prestige and power unexampled in European history since the Middle Ages_."[23]

[1] I, who was one of Pobiedonostseff's unsparing critics, recognised the man's honesty and the rigorous logic with which he conceived his aspect of the problem.

[2] I was myself one of those who exposed the crying injustice of this coercive measure which compelled a man like Prince Barclay de Tolly to have his children brought up in the Orthodox Russian Church, to which he did not belong, because his wife was a member of it.

[3] 1905.

[4] _Contemporary Review_, August, 1906, p. 283.

[5] _Ibidem._

[6] _Contemporary Review_, February, 1905, p. 285.

[7] _Ibidem_, p. 284.

[8] _National Review_, May, 1905, p. 446.

[9] While Finance Minister he accomplished much in this line.

[10] The German frontier station on the journey to St. Petersburg.

[11] _North American Review_, February, 1906, p. 469.

[12] _North American Review_, February, 1906, p. 462.

[13] The Persian loan episode, the seizure of Port Arthur, the secret letter to the Emir of Afghanistan, and the readiness to combine with Germany against us during the Boer war are instances.

[14] Certain ignoble charges launched against the Tsaritsa, whose meddling in politics was disastrous to the Tsardom, are equally groundless and even more characteristic of those who first launched them.

[15] _Contemporary Review_, March, 1905, p. 313.

[16] The village of Upper Yelshanka.

[17] I received from some of the principal Bolsheviks letters to the effect that it would break out at the end of March or the beginning of April, and taking these intimations together with other symptoms I felt pretty sure that the date was correct. But a wide-awake government could have adjourned it until the end of the war.

[18] Cf. _Rasskaya Svoboda_, No. 4, p. 21.

[19] _Op. cit._, p. 23.

[20] The capital is still called Petersburg by the Bolshevik government.

[21] _Contemporary Review_, August, 1906, pp. 286 and 287.

[22] Cf. N. Berdyayeff, _Russkaya Svoboda_, Nos. 12-13, pp. 5 and 6.

[23] _Contemporary Review_, August, 1906, p. 271.

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POSTSCRIPT

I made that forecast in the year 1906 and everything that has happened since tended to confirm it.

But what of the future? the reader may ask. Have Russia's sands indeed run down? Will her dissolution not be followed by a glorious resurrection? In answer to these and kindred questions it may be pointed out that the province of the historian and that of his less ambitious auxiliaries is to supply the public with relevant and well-sifted facts, not with forecasts that cannot be verified.

From the partial sketch outlined in the foregoing pages it may seem to follow that the Russian people has been not merely knocked out of the lists as a belligerent, but also permanently incapacitated as a nation for a prominent part in the politico-social progress of the world. And one may ask why I have refrained from drawing this conclusion? For if it be true that the bulk of the population is intellectually benighted, morally obtuse, politically indifferent, and socially incohesive, it follows that it is also insensible to the only motives strong enough to determine such an effort as would make regeneration possible. Not even an army can be raised until these conditions are remedied. And an army is but the first of a long series of conditions requisite for a new birth. When Russia has national forces again, she will be in possession of a most important element of renewed vitality, but only of one. And as yet she is still far removed even from that.

Those who reason thus are assuming that the future development of mankind will run on the lines of its past progress. And the grounds for this assumption are inadequate. Yet oddly enough, many of these critics are also zealous champions of the supremacy of right over force and of arbitration as a substitute for war, and these doctrines, warped it may be and discoloured, are to be discerned at the roots of Russia's great renunciation. It must therefore be {392} acknowledged that the Russian people are in a more fitting mood to listen to President Wilson's scheme of future reconstruction than any of their neighbours. That the various parts of the Tsardom will be put together again and the breath of life poured into the reintegrated and rejuvenated organism is to my thinking improbable. The principle of national self-determination for which the Allies profess to be fighting is apparently an effectual barrier to this were there no other. The utmost that one can hope is that the Russian race will unite and come into its own.

The majority of the nation is still hardly more than raw material for the State-builder. It lacks almost all the advantages which religion, education, instruction, political training, economic development, and intercourse with progressive peoples have bestowed on its competitors, and it is hampered with the vices which a grinding and ruthless tyranny working unhindered for centuries succeeded in grafting on its impressionable soul. That so much of what is humane still survives in the Russian--his natural religion of pity, his pitiless self-criticism, his enthusiasm for noble causes, his detachment from the grosser sides of life, and the cheerful alacrity with which he will die for an idea or a friend--bespeaks an equipment, intellectual and moral, which if properly cultivated may reasonably be expected to bring forth excellent fruits.

One cannot fully understand the first act of the Russian revolution until the curtain has fallen on the last, nor before one has seen the channels traced by circumstance for the civilising currents of the future is it possible to divine the part in the making of history which the nation will be qualified to play. Ages of ignorance and serfdom may have suspended but have not wholly crushed the freedom of spirit, the fellow-feeling for suffering, and the embryonic humanities characteristic of the race. These qualities, freed from the many and noxious weeds with which they are still entangled, may yet make of Russia a potent social force capable of being directed to a high ethical purpose.

E. J. DILLON.

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