Chapter IX: The Beginnings of the Revolutionary Movement of 1905

The men who first undertook the spade work and cleared the ground for the great upheaval were humane, moderate workers, mostly from the provinces, whose strivings were free from all taint of crime and whose ideals did not go beyond a constitutional monarchy. Even parliamentary government was more than they asked for at first. But like most Russian politicians they knew not what they were doing. Plehve was no more. The Japanese war was taking an unfavourable turn and the head of the government was anxious to hit upon some _modus vivendi_ with the intelligentsia. I remember the historic Saturday afternoon[1] when ninety-eight country gentlemen, without a mandate from the people or permission from the government, met together in a private flat on one of the quays of St. Petersburg to discuss the best way of rearranging the relations between the rulers and the ruled. Their meeting the authorities had promised to connive at on condition that they should eliminate all political discussions from their programme, but to this they refused to agree. I knew many of them for mild and loyal citizens who were quite ready to pull out the keystone, but innocently believed that they could still maintain the arch. In particular, Prince Lvoff and my friend Count Heyden were paragons of reasonableness. I was not surprised, therefore, to learn that when the resolution calling for constitutional government was put to the ninety-eight members present, twenty-seven considered the demand too radical and voted against it, while the remainder gave it their support. The congress was a success. From all parts of the Empire came telegrams from town councils and zemstvos endorsing the resolution. The Russian people were on fire. All sections of society, all classes of the {140} population, drawn from their moorings by the new current, hastened to avail themselves of the slightest pretext to come together and demand the abolition of one-man power. The lawyers of St. Petersburg signed a petition praying for constitutional government. The working men organised a vast manifestation in favour of representative institutions. Authors took to propagating liberal doctrines throughout the Empire. Journalists vied with authors. Municipalities, guilds, benevolent associations, seconded the demands of the zemstvos. A section of students published a manifesto in which they proclaimed that autocracy must cease to be, the "infamous war must be stopped, and a Constitutional Assembly immediately convoked." At first all that the leaders wanted was practical recognition of the principle that the time had come for progressive and systematic adaptations of the State and its institutions to the new exigencies, as though mere political reforms could now save Tsarism and the bureaucracy.

All the older parties took higher ground, clamoured for more radical changes, and looked to the war and its vicissitudes for some precipitating event that should give them the opportunity for which they had so long waited in vain. Symptoms of a change in the mood of labour struck attentive observers and heightened the gravity of the crisis. Timid men waxed bold and made public confession of their faith, regardless of consequences to themselves; princes stepped forward as champions of the peasants; wealthy landowners subscribed to the funds for agitating against the regime; Prince Viazemsky publicly protested against an attack by the Cossacks on a crowd in front of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg and was sent in disgrace to his estate by the Tsar. Bureaucrats who had theretofore stood by the government now announced that, come what might, they would throw in their lot with the people. And of the temper, the ideals, and the mental workings of the people they had not even an approximate notion. For instance, an official of my acquaintance, who was about to be appointed to the governorship of a certain province, signed a petition {141} for a legislative assembly and thereby ruined his career. The unanimous council of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute--a model educational establishment founded by Witte--forwarded a memorial to the Minister of Finances, recording their firm conviction that technical education was impossible so long as the political and social conditions inseparable from autocracy remained unchanged. The municipality of Yalta telegraphed to Prince Mirsky its certitude that the high bill of mortality in the towns and cities of Russia was one of the direct effects of the autocracy, and could not be bettered until the cause was removed. The legal bar of St. Petersburg and Moscow sent a deputation to the capital to petition for representative government. In a word the reformers--and practically all the intellectuals were now reformers--made arrows out of every wood that came handy.

On 12th December the provincial Zemsky Congress of Kaluga forwarded an address to the Emperor, which created a stir throughout the length and breadth of Russia. The members archly volunteered to rally round his Majesty and support him "against the enemies of law and order," _i.e._, the bureaucracy. They ended their address with a hope that the Tsar would summon elected representatives of the land to contribute to its peaceful development and prosperity.

The Moscow Town Council unanimously adopted a resolution declaring the absolute necessity of such reforms as the legal protection of the individual against the arbitrary measures of officialdom; the repeal of those exceptional regulations which invested the local authorities with power to imprison or banish anybody without assigning a reason; freedom of creed, of the press, of meeting, and of association; a popular chamber to watch over these popular rights and to supervise the government. The St. Petersburg municipality adopted a similar resolution. Banquets were organised at which fiery speeches were delivered, like those we read of in Paris on the eve of the great revolution. At one of these festive gatherings in a public hall the guests, numbering several thousands, covered the portrait of the {142} Tsar with a red flag, on which the inscription was painfully visible in white letters, "Down with the Autocracy." At many others the two men who killed Plehve were unanimously honoured. The counsel for Sazonoff--one of the two--said in his speech for the defence, "The bomb which blew M. Plehve to pieces was filled not with dynamite, but with the tears of the widows and orphans of those whom he had sent to the scaffold, to dreary dungeons, and to Siberia." No such plain speaking had been heard since Russia became an Empire.

The imperial family, in the person of one of the empresses, had been warned by royalties abroad that it would be greatly to the advantage of the autocrat, as well as of autocracy, if a sop were thrown to the popular Cerberus. Good grounds were alleged for this opinion, and the Tsar was gradually attuned to a conciliatory mood. He professed his willingness to make concessions and to promise reforms; but he would not, of course, put sharp weapons into the hands of "his children," and "still less would he divest himself of any of the powers with which God Himself had invested him." That was the monarch's attitude--unforeseen by many of the liberals who had looked forward either to frank opposition or graceful consent. And his acts were in harmony with it.[2] He warmly supported the minister, Prince Mirsky, against whom an intrigue was coarsely spun by a number of courtiers and by the ubiquitous grand duke. For a while he allowed the press to have its fling and the zemstvo representatives to speak their minds; but there he drew the line. There must be no tampering with the rights and prerogatives of the absolute monarchy. Whatever else might go they at any rate should remain inviolate and inviolable. Neither must the war be condemned nor peace with the Japanese advocated. Russia, and more especially the reigning dynasty, had need, he said, of a decisive victory over the yellow-skins. The newspapers were accordingly prohibited from publishing any of the cries for peace which were being plaintively or menacingly uttered all over the country.

At last the Emperor showed his hand and announced the {143} measure to which all those petty concessions formed the prelude. A ukase was drawn up granting certain reforms. It was to have been promulgated on 19th December, but almost on the eve considerable changes were made in the wording and its publication was delayed. In its original shape it covered the political and agrarian fields, laid down regulations for the press, defined the rights of religious non-conformists, introduced State insurance for working men, theoretically substituted law for caprice, and provided for the creation of an assembly with a consultative voice in legislation. Such were the general contents of the nine clauses of Witte's pristine scheme. The consultative Duma he proposed to convoke was to be elected, not directly by the people, but by the Zemstvos for the rural population and by the municipal councils for the cities and towns. This assembly would have been devoid of initiative and without control over the public purse. Its function would be to examine and pronounce upon bills which had been passed by the Council of the Empire, but had not yet received the imperial sanction. As, however, the Council of the Empire itself possessed no claim to legislate, but only to make proposals which the Tsar could accept, modify, or thrust aside at will, the projected Duma, its critics argued, would have been the fifth wheel in the State chariot. Still, as a pledge of something more substantial to come, many would have welcomed it. This ninth clause, which was the pith of the project, had the approval of Witte, Prince Mirsky, and three other responsible officials.

The Tsar when he read the draft angrily struck out the last clause. "It is wasted effort," he exclaimed, "to ask me to sap or weaken the autocracy." In vain Prince Mirsky urged that the Duma planned by Witte would leave all his powers and prerogatives intact. He was unconvinced and stubborn. And seeing that the Grand Duke Sergius anathematised the plan as subversive, and had a savage attack on it published in his own press organ,[3] the ninth clause was expunged. By foolish resistance like this to every proposal {144} which, by giving temporary satisfaction to the demands for reform, would have created a safety valve to carry off dangerous revolutionary energies, Nicholas II. stored up the vast forces which ultimately swept the autocracy away. A ruler of a different temperament, one like the Grand Duke Vladimir, or even the Tsar's weak and plastic brother Michael, would have bent to the various storms and prolonged the life of the dynasty. Nicholas II. was incapable of any such compromise, because he failed to take in the situation, to gauge the national and international forces that had shaped it, to perceive the bearings of these on the regime and the dynasty, and also because he was wanting in moral courage and political suppleness. He never represented anything adequately, not even the petty interests of his own house. Unlike Witte, who with all his defects impressed one with the size and quality of an historic force, and for a while bulked large as the massive centre round which the hopes and energies of the reforming State-upholders clung, he stood for himself alone, and had no deep feeling even for his own cause. Genuine humanity, active benevolence, social duty received no admission among the motives that determined his public policy. Of his fellow-men he was hardly conscious; to their well-being and their sufferings he was callously indifferent.

It would, however, be rash to conclude that even a statesmanlike monarch, had there been one in the place of Nicholas II., would have been able by dint of political tact to do more than prolong the existence of the autocracy for a few years more. By its very terms the work of readjustment to radically changed and changing conditions was no longer feasible, the utmost still possible being the postponement of the fatal collapse. For, as already remarked, the Tsarist State was from the outset informed by the spirit of territorial conquest and its orientation was towards that, while at home a victorious race ruled over other races and a privileged class lorded it over the bulk of the nation. As long as these conditions--which alone gave cohesion to the parts--were upheld, things would go on as before, until the {145} whole organism was destroyed, but once change them, desist from territorial expansion, cultivate friendly relations with neighbouring States, introduce at home principles of equity in economics, of equality in politics, of liberty in religion, and the cement which alone held the rebellious elements together would forthwith crumble away. The State, like a boy's top that ceases to spin, could not but lose its equilibrium, wobble, and fall.

That was the cardinal truth which ought to have been grasped by Russian statesmen working for reform. Witte had lightning-like flashes of it. He at any rate was eager to substitute in advance voluntary and economic links for the irksome bonds of union which radical reform measures suddenly applied would sunder. He snatched at every opportunity to try the experiment. That was the principle which underlay his policy towards the Poles, the Finns, the Jews, the Armenians, and the other non-Russian peoples of the Empire, whenever he was free to turn his attention to them.

The liberals or intelligentsia started from a different and, as it seemed to me, entirely false conception of the terms of the problem. Mere doctrinaires, and moving far apart from the popular currents, they operated with borrowed theories and assumed that what was true, say, of France would hold good of Russia. Successors of the men who had "gone among the people" only to discover that they could not fathom the nation's depths, they entirely misunderstood the ideals and strivings of the peasantry. In their own political organisation they had enlisted neither peasants nor working men as members, and yet they came forward as the authorised spokesmen of both. And that group of westernised politicians always stood only for the intelligentsia or foreign political ideal-mongers who had no vested interests in the country, and dealt mainly in abstractions, imported conceptions, and exotic theories. This master fact of the new situation appears to have been wholly missed by our diplomacy, local and central. For Britain and France took the liberals, who subsequently became the Kadets, as their advisers, and made support of the Kadets the corner-stone of {146} their Russian policy. MM. Milyukoff, Gutchkoff, Rodzianko, and their friends were the oracles whose utterances were eagerly sought after and whose counsels were generally followed--with the deplorable results recorded in recent history. These were upright, honourable, enlightened men who lacked political experience and acquaintanceship with the temper of their own people.

From the first it was certain, if not obvious, that the radical reform of the Russian regime would entail the break-up of the State by the dissolution of the cement that had theretofore held its constituent parts together. That was the fundamental, ever-present danger inherent in every reform movement. And this redoubtable consequence was modifiable only within narrow time-limits, and provided that the throne was occupied by a statesman or else by a monarch who had chosen one as his minister, and that the most stringent self-control and prudence were exercised by the reformers. As for a violent rebellion with the aid or the connivance of the army, it was certain--considering the instincts and the ignorance of the lower classes--to culminate, not in a glorious revolution, but in swift disruption and ruin. This was the logical and necessary outcome of the ethnic, social, cultural, and religious conditions of the nation. Before the outbreak of November, 1905, I wrote, "Revolution in Russia will prove to be a very different process from what it was in France or elsewhere ... it may at certain stages be marked by a degree of ferocity which the peoples of the United States and Western Europe can hardly realise."[4] That forecast was published nearly twelve years before the Bolshevik revolution of September, 1917, which amply confirmed it.

But the leading spirits of the liberal party were dissatisfied with the reforms outlined in the ukase and with Witte, to whom the wording of them was attributed. They {147} complained that the Tsar was selling dearly and in detail what they had petitioned him to bestow upon them gratis and wholesale, and, worse still, that he did not intend to deliver what he had sold. They had sued for the abolition of classes and class privileges and he promised the disappearance of certain legal disabilities which weighed upon the peasants. They had agitated in favour of liberty of conscience and he dangled before them the revision of the legislation restricting the rights of certain nonconformist sects and the removal of disabilities which did not derive from statute law. They had prayed for the repeal of the coercion ukase, known by the name of Protective Regulations, which placed the liberty and life of all Russians at the mercy of the local jacks-in-office, and he merely gave instructions to lessen the number of the districts thus trodden underfoot. They had besought him to grant liberty of the press, but all that he undertook was to remove "the superfluous" restrictions placed upon it, and meanwhile newspapers were being suspended or suppressed. They had claimed the right of public meeting and of association, but these claims he wholly ignored. They had begged that Ukrainians, Poles, Finns, Jews, Armenians--all the great non-Russian elements, in a word--might be delivered from the persecution they were enduring, but the ukase engaged only to strike off those legal fetters which were not conditioned "by the vital interests of the State and the manifest advantage of the Russian people." Who was to define these? The persecuting bureaucracy. And worse than everything else, the representative assembly, which was to have been, so to say, the corner-stone of regenerated Russia, was relegated to the limbo of things that might have been.

To sum up, the measures announced in the manifesto would, it was urged, be absurdly inadequate even if they were meant to be realised. And they could never take root because they would always be liable to be withdrawn, that being the end of all reforms in Russia. People called to mind that several of the more important concessions made from the days of Nicholas I. had been either formally repealed or {148} else cunningly counteracted by the ministers of Alexander III. or of Nicholas II. The very ukase to which the wretched serfs owed their emancipation had since then been partially evaded, and the peasantry were being tied to the soil anew by M. Plehve when his life was suddenly snuffed out. Yet those concessions had been not merely promised, but actually realised; they formed part of the law of the Empire. That did not save them from partial abolition. Were the reforms just promised likely to be durable, if those which were actually embodied in legislation were so successfully undermined? Russia, in the person of her spokesmen, answered, "No."

If the reformers were ordinarily exacting beyond measure, their demands in this case were moderate and their strictures unanswerable. The first paragraph of the ukase, they objected, proclaimed the inauguration of a reign of law and the abolition of caprice. This loud-sounding improvement was in reality merely a paraphrase of the 47th paragraph of the fundamental laws of the Empire which Prince Dolgoruki had termed "la plus volumineuse des mauvaises plaisanteries"--and it had remained a dead letter for generations because of the greed of arbitrary power displayed by the bureaucracy. And as it had been in the past, so it would be in the future. If the Tsar were in earnest about reform he would surely have forbidden the punishment of any of his subjects otherwise than by sentence of the law courts. That he did not take this direct, simple, and effective method was, they held, proof that his intention was only conditional.

How superficial was the attention paid by the Tsar to legislative work may be gathered from the following farcical _quid pro quo_ which took place when Witte was Minister of Finances. A bill was introduced in the Council of the Empire to indemnify landed proprietors in the Baltic provinces for the losses they had incurred through the government monopoly of alcohol. Witte held that the payment of a sum of several millions should be spread over a number of years, the majority maintained that it ought to be effected at once. The minister first informed the Tsar of this divergence, and the {149} Tsar promised to ratify the view of the minority. The minister then wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Council, Plehve, telling him that the Emperor had promised to acquiesce in the decision of the minority as soon as the documents were placed before him. Plehve freely communicated this announcement to all the members, whereupon many officials, seeing that opposition would be fruitless, changed their views or their votes, so that the minority unexpectedly became the majority. In the course of time the documents were laid before the Tsar, who remembered only that he had pledged himself to Witte to reject the proposal of the majority. Accordingly, without reading the papers or taking further thought, he redeemed his promise, and the wrong bill became law.

In the administration as in legislation he frequently interposed with like rashness and with untoward consequences. For the motives that actuated him were generally personal and sometimes irreconcilable with the principles of justice which, had he allowed things to take their course, would have been applied. I remember the case of a journalist with whom I was slightly acquainted. In a twinkling he was very suddenly whirled away from Petersburg to Siberia, without being allowed time to take money or warm clothing with him, because of an article of his, or rather because of the interpretation put upon it by the Tsar's confessor, Yanisheff. Amphitheatroff, the journalist, published a moderately interesting article describing the home circle of a landed proprietor, whom he depicted as firm and strict with his family, and so scrupulous in his dealings with the other sex that he boiled with indignation if his wife's chambermaid flirted with any male relative or stranger. He had a sympathetic son, with eyes like a gazelle's--a well-meaning youth who wished everybody to be happy, but was devoid of ideas on practical matters. The kind-hearted mother sat between father and son, tenderly loving both. It was an idyllic picture of Russian life at its best--and nothing more. The censor read it and saw nothing wrong. The minister, Sipyaghin, glanced at it and passed on cheerfully to his hot {150} pancakes and cold caviare. The Tsar himself perused it and liked it: it was "such a pleasing picture of the serene life of a Russian squire." But the Emperor's chaplain, Yanisheff, descried high treason between the lines. According to him, and he was probably right, the landed proprietor, who struck the table with his fist whenever he heard of a little flirtation on the part of his wife's maid, was no other than the Emperor Alexander III.; the son with the sympathetic eyes and vacillating character was Nicholas II. As the portrait, if intended as such, was not flattering, it needed courage on the part of the priest even to hint that the ingenuous youth of limited ideas was obviously his Majesty; and the Tsar must be credited with considerable modesty to have placed the cap on his imperial head. He at once summoned and questioned his minister Sipyaghin. "Yes, I read the feuilleton, your Majesty, but noticed nothing offensive in it." "Well," replied the Emperor, "you may take it from me that it is a treasonable skit on my never-to-be-forgotten father and myself. Send the fellow to Siberia." And to Siberia he was whisked away, without a chance to buy warm clothing for the journey or to get money for his needs. It was not much consolation to M. Amphitheatroff that he was subsequently pardoned for a mere misdemeanour of which he said he was innocent and then banished to Vologda.

Witte, whose steady pacifism stamped a profound influence on Russian politics generally and gained for his imperial master the nowise merited reputation of a humane, moral, and generous monarch, was constantly urging upon him the necessity of political reforms in the interest both of the autocracy and the nation. "The autocracy," he would remark to me in our long conversations, "is but a mode of conceiving the relations between the ruling board and the nation. And with vision, enterprise, and resource it can be made as productive of good as a parliamentary government, especially in a backward country like ours. But you must first find a monarch with wisdom, enterprise, and resource, or with discrimination and modesty enough to select a {151} statesman who possesses them and to maintain him in office. Alexander II. was such a monarch and I shall never cease to lament his death." He perceived with painful clearness that the elements of the nation were ill-assorted, that most institutions were disorganised, and that anarchist ideas fitted in with the social and political conditions. Therefore he strove to get these changed. A simulacrum of reforms was, as we saw, dangled before the eyes of the nation in March, 1903, a mere promise which would, it was hoped, produce a sedative effect and then pass into easy oblivion. It was drafted by Plehve, bore the stamp of his inspiration, and made a considerable stir in Russia and abroad. Taken in consideration with the high reputation which had been created for the Tsar it was believed to portend great and beneficent changes. But stripped of the tawdry wrappings in which Plehve enveloped it, what it amounted to was the abolition of the peasants' joint responsibility for taxation and the removal of some religious restrictions.

Witte, who had a keen eye for religious intolerance and proselytism by the State, and was never tired of pleading the cause of freedom, had moved the Emperor to make this sorely needed concession to the spirit of the time. But beyond the promise he could not get the bureaucracy or its agents to move. He would sometimes lose patience utterly and exclaim to me, "How can I hinder a revolution if even such anodyne measures are deemed too radical to be carried out? I begin to despair of the autocracy." In the most sanative elements of his policy Witte was over-ruled by a crowd of puny men without responsibility before history or even before their contemporaries. After the manifesto promising religious freedom, the Jews were hampered and "squeezed" perhaps more systematically than before, and by no one more intensely than by the Emperor's uncle, the Grand Duke Sergius, the Governor-General of Moscow. Roman Catholics were also the objects of continual chicanery, especially in the Polish provinces, and the law obliging those among them who married persons of the Orthodox Church to bring up their children in the State creed was applied with rigour. {152} To belong to the Armenian Church was to be branded with the mark of Cain, and at times it was worse to be a Russian nonconformist than to worship idols or to poison one's neighbour.

The Tsar was smitten with political blindness after the first year of his reign, and he insisted all the more on moving about among the institutions of his country, modifying their working congruously with his whims. On religious matters in particular he was narrow-minded. At the time of the manifesto the new Russian penal code was being elaborated, and the section dealing with crimes against faith was under discussion. Here the Emperor's supposed mild and tolerant spirit was expected to bring about great and desirable changes. But the hope was disappointed. One change was made for the better, but only one, and that he assented to most reluctantly. An Orthodox believer who desired to leave his denomination might thenceforward go abroad and there change his religion without fear of punishment, whereas formerly he was liable to pains and penalties. That was all. But if such a man, being unable to go abroad, should ask a Russian Lutheran or Roman Catholic priest to receive him into his Church, the minister in question must refuse. To comply with the request would entail severe punishment.

There can be no doubt about the Emperor's personal part in hindering his subjects from serving God in their own way, for it was vigorous, personal, and direct. Whenever the existing institutions or the responsible ministers were inclined to loosen the grip of the law on the conscience of the individual, the Tsar's veto formed an insuperable impediment. Here is one instructive example. The edicts dealing with religious misdemeanours being under discussion a minority of the Council of the Empire steadily advocated toleration; but at every turn his Majesty sided with the majority. Once, and only once, the bulk of the members favoured a clause which was reasonable and humane; and then the Emperor quashed their decision without hesitation. The question was, If a Russian who is Orthodox only in name and something else--say Lutheran--in reality asks {153} a clergyman of his adopted Church to administer the sacrament to him on his deathbed, should the minister be punishable if he complies? The Council of the Empire, by a considerable majority, answered, "No"; and their arguments were clear and forcible. So plain was the case that even the grand dukes took the side of the majority. But the Tsar, putting down his foot, said, "A clergyman who shall administer the sacrament of his Church to such a man shall be treated as a law-breaker; it is a crime"; and his decision received the force of law. As this declaration of the imperial will was made after the manifesto, we know what to think of the Emperor's tolerant views as mirrored in that document.

This other instance took place also after the promulgation of that "Magna Charta" of Russian liberty. Baron Uexkull von Gildenband proposed that certain sections of the population who had been forced several years ago to join the Orthodox Communion, all of them against their will, and some even without their knowledge, should now be permitted to return to their respective Churches if they chose. Some of these people had been Lutherans of the Baltic provinces, others had been Uniates of western Russia, _i.e._, Catholics who, with the liturgy of the Greek Church, hold the beliefs of the Latin and are in communion with Rome. It was an act, not of magnanimity, but of common justice that was here suggested. But, when the general debate was about to begin, the Grand Duke Michael, acting in harmony with his Majesty's known dispositions, withdrew from the baron his right to speak in favour of the proposal, which therefore dropped.

Perhaps the most astounding piece of folly for the maintenance of which the Emperor was personally answerable, at any rate during that part of his reign which ended with the Yalu speculation and the Manchurian campaign, was his persecution of a very important section of his own Church, the Old Believers. The members of this denomination, who were numerous, wealthy, conservative, and monarchical, differ only in the veriest trifles from members {154} of the State orthodoxy. And yet the head of the Orthodox Church and Tsar of all the Russias, who needed for himself, his dynasty, and his Empire all the help he could enlist on the side of autocracy and conservatism, harried those Old Believers as though they were public enemies. I saw a good deal of them at this time, listened to and wrote down their complaints against the Emperor, to whom they remained loyal in spite of his unwise intolerance.

A monastery belonging to this sect[5] was seized by an Orthodox archimandrite who, at the head of fifty Cossacks, drove out the monks and took possession of their dwelling. One of their bishops, Siluan, protested and was thrown into prison. Yet the archimandrite who had won this easy victory, not satisfied with his violence against the living, also wreaked his spite on the dead. Two Old Believers who had departed this life in the odour of sanctity, Bishop Job and the priest Gregory, were reputed to be in heaven; and their bodies were said to be immune from decomposition, a fact which is taken to point to their saintship. But the Old Believers could not be permitted to have miracles or saints. The Orthodox archimandrite, therefore, violated the tombs and dug up the bodies. He found the latter really intact, and breaking their coffins, he saturated the boards with petroleum and then burned the mortal remains of the holy men to ashes.[6] The Tsar had been told of all these grievances, but he made no sign.

A tragic story, the hero of which was Bishop Methodius, one of the pillars of the Old Believers, may help to complete the reader's idea of the cruelty of the system. It, too, was brought to the notice of Tsar Nicholas at the time without eliciting even an expression of regret. Born in Cheliabinsk, Methodius, after having been ordained a priest, zealously discharged the duties of his office for fifteen years before he was raised to the episcopal see of Tomsk. One day as bishop he administered the sacraments to a man who, born in the {155} State Church, had joined the community of Old Believers. This was precisely a case of the type discussed in the Council of the Empire and so harshly provided for by the Emperor himself. Methodius was denounced, arrested, tried, found guilty, and condemned to banishment in Siberia; and the sentence was carried out with needless brutality. With irons on his feet, penned up together with murderers and other criminals of the worst type, he was sent by _étape_ from prison to prison to the government of Yakutsk. Through the intercession of an influential co-religionist, he was allowed to stay in the capital of that province, but soon afterwards, at the instigation of a dignitary of the State Church, he was banished to Vilyuisk, in north-eastern Siberia, a place inhabited by savages. The aged bishop--he was seventy-eight years old--was then set astride a horse, tied down to the animal, and told that he must ride thus to his new place of exile, about seven hundred miles distant. "This sentence is death by torture," said Methodius's flock. And they were not mistaken. The old man gave up the ghost on the road (1898); but when, where, and how he died and was buried has never been made known.

To the wholesome chastenings of criticism the Tsar was serenely indifferent. So far as I could learn he never paid heed to any strictures by whomsoever uttered, with the sole exception of those of his imperial consort and of Rasputin. If his repressive measures were conceived without vision and executed without ruth, the occasional attempts he made at constructive work were inspired by vulgar superstition acting upon the intellect of a born dupe. In miracles and marvels he took a childish delight, and was as ready to believe the messages from the invisible world which the spirits sent through M. Philippe in the Crimea as in the wonders wrought by the relics of Orthodox monks whose names he himself added to the bead-roll of Russian saints. His predecessors were more chary of peopling heaven than of colonising Siberia. Nicholas I. assented to the canonisation of Mitrophan of Voronesh (1832), whose body was {156} found intact after it had lain over a century in its coffin, but that was the only beatification made during the reign. Alexander II. allowed the Holy Synod to enrich the Church with one saint--Tikhon, Bishop of Voronesh (1861); his successor did not add even one. But Nicholas II. not only canonised two,[7] but he personally ordered one of the candidates, Seraphim of Saroff, to be proclaimed a saint, in spite of the disconcerting fact that his body, although buried for only seventy years, was decomposed. The Orthodox Bishop Dmitry of Tamboff protested on this ground against the beatification as contrary to Church traditions, but he was deprived of his see and sent to Vyatka for venturing to disagree with the Tsar, who held that the preservation of the bones, the hair, and the teeth is a sufficient qualification for saintship; and he was assured by prophetic monks that God would soon work a miracle and restore Seraphim's dead body in full. The Deity, however, did not redeem this pledge.

In these circumstances the impatience of the liberal leaders waxed aggressive. The action of the war's vicissitudes on the mood of the whole nation was portentous. And so swift was the whirl of events that it became difficult to discern the causal nexus between them. What happened one day looked as though it had little or nothing to do with the occurrence of the eve, and could provide no clue to the eventualities of the morrow. There was no coherence in things, no union among persons, no centre, no guiding brain. The Tsar's ukase was actually forbidden by some governors in the provinces, and Nicholas II. frankly approved the prohibition.[8] This and similar follies indicated his belief that the autocracy would not stand radical reform, but they also incensed the workmen of the capital. Labour in Petersburg had for some time previously been organised and electrified by the Ukrainian priest, George Gapon, who invited its {157} members to follow him in public procession to the Winter Palace on the historic 22nd January, to which I afterwards gave the name of "Bloody Sunday." The alleged object was to lay before the Tsar the needs of the Russian people. Gapon was a hare-brained, ignorant, conceited young priest who, to use a Russian expression, fancied that the ocean was only up to his knees. His ignorance of life was profound and his velleity to learn fitful and feeble, and his vanity had no bounds. But his personal magnetism, especially when addressing a crowd of peasants or artisans, bordered on the marvellous. While this hypnotic power was taken by many to qualify him for the leadership of men, his intellectual shallowness, variations of mood, and utter untrustworthiness condemned him to lead them to perdition. He was possessed of many typical Russian traits, such as a habit of morbid introspection and of plangent reverie, a high-strung emotional temperament, liability to sudden oscillations from the heights of exaltation to the depths of despair, and an absence of all sense of measure. He also laboured under that kind of ethical Daltonism which hinders some defectively equipped human beings from discriminating between right and wrong, so that every movement that promised the delights of leadership carried him for a while along its main current. He was emphatically the creature of impulse, and altogether devoid of those imposing qualities so often found in Russian reformers which go to make a martyr.

[1] 19th November, 1904. Cf. _North American Review_.

[2] Cf. _North American Review_.

[3] Slovo.

[4] Cf. _North American Review_, January, 1905, p. 300. I remembered this and similar forecasts of mine in the following year when reading of the unfortunate men whom the revolutionists set to dance on hot sheets of iron and then slowly burned to death.

[5] The Nikolsky Skeet in the Kuban province.

[6] This procedure was described in the _Grashdanin_, 1896, a newspaper which was read regularly by the Tsar.

[7] Theodosius, Archbishop of Chernigoff, canonised 25th April, 1896; and Seraphim of Saroff, canonised 31st July, 1903.

[8] Cf. my articles in the _North American Review_, the _Contemporary Review_, and the _Daily Telegraph_ at the time.

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