There is also none of the keen sensitiveness to minute social distinctions and to the social proprieties which mark them that is so striking a feature of the life in "democratic" England and to which we have given the name "sn.o.bbery." There are of course social strata in Russia, but they are broadly marked and there is no sense of compet.i.tion between them. A peasant is not ashamed of being a peasant, and when he meets a n.o.bleman he meets him on terms of spiritual equality while acknowledging his superior position in the social scale. A twin-brother of English "sn.o.bbery" is English "hypocrisy." This, as has been well said, is a kind of "social cement," for it is a tribute to a standard of social conduct set up by the dominant cla.s.s in a nation. And since there exists no dominant cla.s.s in Russia, but only a dominant hierarchy drawn from all cla.s.ses, hypocrisy is absent from the Russian character. Mr. Stephen Graham, who was, I believe, at one time a clerk in a London office, found our civilisation so intolerable that one day he flung it off and escaped to Russia, where he has lived as a peasant tramp for many years. To revolutionaries who met him and expressed their astonishment that an Englishman should choose Russia of all places to live in, he replied, "I came to Russia because it is the only free country left in the world." There is, in truth, much to be said for this startling remark. In no country on earth is there such unaffected good-will, such open hospitality, such an instinctive respect for personal liberty--liberty of thought and of manners--such tolerance for the frailties of human nature, such an abundance of what the great Russian novelist Dostoieffsky called "all-humanness" and St. Paul called "charity,"
as in Russia. All this, of course, did not come about as a result of the bureaucratic system; it springs like that system itself from the fundamentally democratic spirit of the Russian people.
--2. _Religion_.--The last paragraph will read strangely to those people whose only ideas about Russia are gleaned from newspaper accounts of the revolution of 1905. We shall come back to the revolution and its significance later; but meanwhile we must notice another very striking fact about Russian life--its all-pervading religious atmosphere. Russia is a land of peasants. In England and Wales 78 per cent of the population live in towns and the remaining 22 per cent in the country; in Russia something like 87 per cent live in the country as against 13 per cent in the towns.
These figures are enough to show where the real centre of gravity of the Russian nation lies. The peasant, or _moujik_, is a primitive and generally an entirely illiterate person, but he possesses qualities which his more sophisticated brothers in the West may well envy and admire, a profound common-sense, a grand simplicity of life and outlook, and an unshakable faith in the unseen world.
The interior of Russia is almost wholly unknown in the West; until a few years back it was as much of a _terra incognita_ as Central Africa. But the revolution led English writers and journalists to explore it, and when the dust and smoke of that upheaval, which had obscured the truth from the eyes of Europe, pa.s.sed away, an astonished world perceived the real Russia for the first time. "Russia," writes Mr. Stephen Graham, who has done more than any other man to bring the truth home to us, "is not a land of bomb-throwers, is not a land of intolerable tyranny and unhappiness, of a languishing and decayed peasantry, of a corrupt and ugly church; the Russians are an agricultural nation, bred to the soil, illiterate as the savages, and having as yet no ambition to live in the towns; they are as strong as giants, simple as children, mystically superst.i.tious by reason of their unexplained mystery." Russia is in fact 145 million peasants--ploughing and praying. And here once again one is reminded of the Middle Ages. Cross the Russian frontier and you enter the mediaeval world.
Miracles are believed in, holy men are revered as saints, thousands of pilgrims journey on foot every year to Jerusalem, which is to every true believer the centre of the universe and therefore becomes at Easter almost a Russian city. Russia is the most Christian country in the world, and her people are the most Christ-like. The turbulence and violence, so contrary to the Christian spirit, which was an inseparable feature of mediaeval feudalism is absent from Russia; and the gospel of non-resistance, of brotherly love, of patience under affliction, of pity and mercy, which Tolstoi preached so eloquently to the world at large, he learnt from two teachers--the peasant of modern Russia and the Peasant of ancient Palestine, who was crucified upon the Cross.
Yet it is a mistake to talk, as some do, of the power of the Russian Church, or of "priestcraft." The Church has little political power or social prestige. It is the power of religion, not that of ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions, which is the arresting fact about modern Russia. It is not so much that Russia has a church, as that she _is_ a church. In England we have narrowed religion down to one day of the week and shut it up in special buildings which we call churches; in Russia it is impossible to avoid religion. As you pa.s.s out of the gangway of the ticket-office at the railway station, you find yourself in front of a sacred picture with a lamp burning continually before it, and you are expected to utter a prayer before beginning your journey. Every room in Russia has its _eikon_--is in fact a chapel, every enterprise is sanctified by prayer and ceremony. All English travellers in Russia have acknowledged this profound national sense of religion, and contrasted it with the religious formalism of the West.
"Italy," wrote Mr. H.G. Wells, on his recent visit to Russia, "abounds in n.o.ble churches because the Italians are artists and architects, and a church is an essential part of the old English social system, but Moscow glitters with two thousand crosses because the people are organically Christian. I feel in Russia that for the first time in my life I am in a country where Christianity is alive. The people I saw crossing themselves whenever they pa.s.sed a church, the bearded men who kissed the relics in the Church of the a.s.sumption, the unkempt grave-eyed pilgrim, with his ragged bundle on his back and his little tea-kettle slung in front of him, who was standing quite still beside a pillar in the same church, have no parallels in England." Mr. Rothay Reynolds, in his interesting and sympathetic book _My Russian Year_, writes in much the same strain: "In Russia G.o.d and His Mother, saints and angels, seem near; men rejoice or stand ashamed beneath their gaze. The people of the land have made it a vast sanctuary, perfumed with prayer and filled with the memories of heroes of the faith. Saints and sinners, believers and infidels, are affected by its atmosphere; and so it has come about that Russia is the land of lofty ideals." And Mr. Stephen Graham, again, in his _Undiscovered Russia_, speaks with glowing admiration of the Russian Church. "The Holy Church," he says, "is wonderful. It is the only fervid living church in Europe. It lives by virtue of the people who compose it. If the priests were wood, it would still be great. The worshippers are always there with one accord. There are always strangers in the churches, always pilgrims. G.o.d is the Word that writes all men brothers in Russia and all women sisters. The fact behind that word is the fountain of hospitality and friendship."
The religious aspect of Russian life has been dwelt upon at some length, because it is the key to everything in Russia and has a direct bearing upon the present war. "Religion in Russia," writes Mr. Maurice Baring, "is a part of patriotism. The Russian considers that a man who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. He divides humanity, roughly, into two categories--the Orthodox and the heathen--just as the Greeks divided humanity into Greeks and Barbarians. Not only is the Church of Russia a national church, owing to the large part which the State, the Emperor, and the civil authority play in it, but in Russia religion itself becomes a question of nationality, nationalism, and patriotism." Russian Christianity, like Russian Tsardom, is derived from the old Roman empire of Constantinople.
The Russian Church is a branch, and far the most important branch, of the Greek Orthodox Church, which drifted apart from the Catholic Church, which had its centre at Rome, and finally separated from it in the eleventh century. As the greatest Orthodox Christian power in the world, Russia naturally regards herself as the rightful protector of all Orthodox Christians. Her mortal enemy, with whom so long as he remains in Europe any lasting peace is impossible, is the Turk; and her eyes are ever directed towards Constantinople, as the ancient capital of her faith. The spirit of the Crusades is far from dead in the Russian people; the Crimean War, for example, was fought in that spirit.
It will be at once apparent that Russia takes and must continue to take a profound interest in the Christian peoples of the Balkans. Greeks, Roumanians, Servians, Bulgarians and Montenegrins all belong to the Orthodox Church; all have been engaged throughout the nineteenth century in a struggle for existence against the common foe, Islam. Moreover, all except the two first-mentioned peoples are allied to Russia by ties of race as well as by religion, since they are members of the Slavonic stock. To the average Russian, therefore, the bulk of the Balkan peninsula is as much Russia Irredenta, as the north-east coast of the Adriatic is Italia Irredenta to the average Italian; and as a matter of fact there is a good deal more to be said for Russia"s case than for Italy"s. There is, however, another great power which possesses interests in the Balkans and which is viewed by Russia with a suspicion and dislike hardly inferior to that entertained towards Turkey--I mean the empire of Austria-Hungary. A Catholic state, controlled by Germans and Magyars, Austria-Hungary contains in its southern portion a population of over seven million Slavs, some three millions of whom are of the Orthodox faith. The Dual Monarchy has constantly outraged national and religious feeling in Russia by her treatment of this Slavonic population, and her annexation in 1908 of Bosnia and Herzegovina, both of them Slavonic countries, was regarded as an open challenge to Russia.
It is not therefore surprising that the Tsar has intervened in the present crisis. Had it refused to come to the a.s.sistance of Servia when Austria attacked her, the Russian Government would have been unable to face public opinion. Even those who know Russia best are amazed at the complete unanimity of the country in the matter of this war; and proof that it is not merely a war of aggression inspired by Pan-Slavist sentiment may be found in the fact that all political parties, revolutionaries, const.i.tutionalists and reactionaries, have enthusiastically approved it.
How far Germany misunderstood (or affected to misunderstand) the real state of feeling in Russia may be seen in the despatch of July 26 by the British Amba.s.sador in Vienna, who, in talking the crisis over with the German Amba.s.sador and asking "whether the Russian Government might not be compelled by public opinion to intervene on behalf of a kindred nationality," was told that "everything depended on the personality of the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, who could resist easily, if he chose, _the pressure of a few newspapers._" England drew her sword in this struggle on behalf of Belgium and in the name of civilisation and treaty rights; Russia has done the same on behalf of Serbia and in the name of common blood and a common altar. I, for one, firmly believe that her hands are as clean as ours.
--3. _The Revolutionary Movement and its Significance._--It is now time to say something of the revolutionary movement of 1905 and of its ruthless suppression which gave Russia so evil a reputation in the eyes of Western Europe. It was my good fortune to be a resident in the dominions of the Tsar during the critical years of 1906-9, to be present at a session of the first Duma and to mingle with the members of that historic a.s.sembly in the lobby of the Parliament House, to catch something of the extraordinary belief in the coming of the millennium which was prevalent among all cla.s.ses in Petrograd in the first charmed months of 1906, and finally to have been acquainted with active revolutionaries and their friends throughout the whole of my period of residence. I can therefore speak with a certain amount of inner knowledge of the revolution; and though I do not wish to claim any particular authority for the opinions stated below, which are after all nothing but the opinions of a single individual who has lived for three years in a corner of the Russian Empire, yet they have at least this advantage over those entertained on the subject by the average Englishmen, viz. that they are based not on newspaper reports but on actual experience, and that they were arrived at gradually and--it may be added--with considerable reluctance, since they had, as it were, to win their way through a number of my own personal sympathies and political prejudices. There is, of course, no room here for any detailed treatment of a movement upon which a big book might be written, and I shall therefore have to limit myself to a few rather bald generalisations which I must ask the reader to accept not as the truth, but as what one man of limited experience and vision conceives to be the truth about the Russian revolution.
The main reason why English people get mistaken ideas about Russia is that they imagine Russians to be nothing but Englishmen picturesquely disguised in furs and top-boots, and because they interpret the political situation in Russia in terms of English history and politics. As I have already tried to show, Russians are built differently from English people, _from the soul outwards_, while the political and social condition of the Russian Empire is totally unlike anything that has ever existed in this country. If therefore the real causes of the movement of 1905 and of its failure are to be rightly understood, we must put away from our minds the desire to find a.n.a.logies in the English revolutions of 1642 and 1688, or the French Revolution of 1789, or the social revolution of which Karl Marx dreamed; Russia can only be interpreted in terms of Russian history and Russian conditions. In one thing, however, the Russian revolution was like all revolutions which have ever been or are ever likely to be, viz. that it was concerned with two distinct issues, one a narrow question of political and const.i.tutional reform, and the other a far wider question involving an attempt to reconstruct not merely the inst.i.tutions of society but also to transform the ideals and conceptions upon which society rested.
Let us first of all consider the narrower political issue. This was simple enough; the outbreak of 1905 had as its primary object the setting up of some form of representative government which would control the bureaucratic machine. It has been already pointed out that the const.i.tution of modern Russia was largely due to the genius of Peter the Great. During the nineteenth century, however, it became apparent to thinking Russians that the const.i.tution, for the sake both of stability and efficiency, needed development in the direction of popular representation. The plea of efficiency was really far the stronger of the two. Had Peter the Great been eternal, he might possibly have continued to exercise an effective control over the administrative system which he created; for he was a man of superhuman energy and will-power. But most Tsars, who are men of ordinary capacity, found it impossible to do so. The consequence was that the bureaucracy acquired what amounted in practice to absolute irresponsibility. Now irresponsibility is demoralising to any administration, however democratic be the principles upon which its officials are selected. A bureaucracy, ruling without proper external control, becomes a prey to the demons of red tape, routine, officialdom and place-hunting; it tends to stifle individual initiative and the sense of moral responsibility, since it forgets the real object of its existence--the good government of the country--in its pa.s.sion for self-preservation and its desire to secure the smooth-working of the machine; it becomes inhuman, intensely conservative and corrupt. Above all it develops a hyper-sensitiveness to lay criticism, which compels it to do all in its power--and in Russia that power is unlimited--to crush freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The problem, however, of devising some popular check upon its action was an extremely difficult one for the simple reason that the ma.s.s of the Russian people never have taken, and even to-day do not take, any interest in political questions. Nevertheless the Tsar, Alexander II., who was one of the most enlightened monarchs that ever sat upon the Russian throne, determined to attempt a solution.
Unfortunately on March 1, 1881, the very day when Alexander had given his approval to a scheme of const.i.tutional reform, involving the establishment of representative inst.i.tutions, he was a.s.sa.s.sinated by revolutionaries.
This fatal act put back the clock for twenty-five years, the court and the nation were thrown into the arms of the bureaucracy as their only protector against terrorism, and reaction reigned supreme. Meanwhile the bureaucracy grew more corrupt, more tyrannical, more inefficient every day, while on the other hand the party of reform, thrust as it were underground and hunted like rats, became more and more bitter in spirit and more and more extreme in theory.
It is important to bear in mind that the struggle has never from beginning to end been one which divided the nation as a whole into two hostile camps.
Public opinion, when it has not been indifferent, has swayed now to one side and now to the other, according as it was stirred by some flagrant act of oppression on the part of the bureaucracy or some outrageous act of terrorism on the part of the revolutionaries. The truth is that the civil war in Russia--for it was nothing less--was confined to quite a narrow section of society. It has been said that there are practically speaking no cla.s.s distinctions in the English sense of the word, in Russia; there is, however, a very real distinction between the _intelligentsia_ and the peasants. The _intelligentsia_ are the few million educated Russians who control, or seek to control, the destinies of the 145 million uneducated tillers of the soil. There is nothing quite like them in this country, though the expression "the professional cla.s.s" describes them in part.
Broadly speaking, they are people who have pa.s.sed through school and university, and can therefore lay claim to a certain amount of culture; their birth is a matter of no moment, they may be the children of peasants or of n.o.blemen. It is from this "cla.s.s," if we can call it so, that both the bureaucracy and the revolutionary movement draw their recruits. The real tragedy of Russia is that neither the party of reform nor the party of reaction shares, or even understands, the outlook and ideals of the people.
Russian culture is still so comparatively recent that it has not yet pa.s.sed out of the imitative stage; and, in spite of the work of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoieffsky, the books that are read and studied in Russia are for the most part translations from foreign authors. The result is that the political and social ideas of the _intelligentsia_ are almost wholly derived from countries whose structure is totally different from their own. We shall presently see that this fact had an important bearing on the development of the outbreak of 1905. It is sufficient here to notice that the struggle was one between two sections of the _intelligentsia_, political idealism against political stagnation, the Red Flag _versus_ Red Tape.
After twenty years of bureaucratic government the country as a whole began to grow once again restless. In this period a proletariate had come into being. It was a mere drop in the bucket of 145 millions of peasants, but its voice was heard in the towns, and it was steeped in the Marxian doctrines of Social Democracy. Moreover the peasants themselves had their grievances. They cared nothing and understood less of the political theories which the revolutionaries a.s.siduously preached among them, but they p.r.i.c.ked up their ears when the agitators began to talk about land and taxation. Up to 1861 the peasants had been serfs, the property, with the land on which they lived, of the landowner. At their emanc.i.p.ation it was necessary to provide them with land of their own; the State, therefore, bought what was considered sufficient for the purpose from the landowners, handed it over to the peasants, and recouped itself by imposing a land-tax on the peasants to expire after a period of forty-nine years. This tax was felt to be exceedingly onerous, and in addition to this by the beginning of the twentieth century it became clear that the land acquired in 1861 was not nearly enough to support a growing population. These factors, together with the disastrous Russo-j.a.panese war, which revealed an appalling state of corruption and incompetency in the government of the country, furnished the revolutionaries with an opportunity which was not to be missed. A rapid series of military and naval mutinies, agrarian disorders, a.s.sa.s.sinations of obnoxious officials, socialist risings in the towns, during the year 1905, culminating in the universal strike of October, brought the Government to its knees, and on the 17th of the same month the Tsar issued his manifesto granting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and a representative a.s.sembly. The revolution had, apparently, won on the const.i.tutional issue.
Yet what looked like the end of bureaucratic absolutism proved to be the destruction of the revolutionary party. Had the reformers of 1905 concentrated their energies upon the task of turning the new legislature into an adequate check upon the bureaucratic system, there is little doubt they would have succeeded. As it was their success in this direction was only partial. It is true that a Duma still sits at the Taurida Palace at Petrograd, but it is elected on a narrow property franchise, and its relations with the bureaucracy are as yet not properly defined; it criticises but it possesses no real control. This failure of the revolution was almost wholly due to the revolutionaries themselves, who, instead of confining their attacks to the Government machine, sought to undermine the entire structure of society and to overthrow the moral and religious ideals of the nation. Moreover, their att.i.tude was entirely negative, and they possessed little or no constructive ability of any kind. Even the first Duma, which contained the ablest politicians among the reformers, did not succeed in pa.s.sing acts of parliament, affirming the most elementary principles of civil liberty; and it damaged itself irreparably in the eyes of the country by refusing to condemn "terrorism" while demanding an amnesty for all political offenders. The unique opportunity which the first Duma afforded was frittered away in futile bickerings and wordy attacks upon the Government.
Meanwhile, though a temporary truce was observed during the Duma"s sessions, its dissolution on July 21, 1906, two and a half months after opening, was the signal for a fresh outburst of outrages on both sides. The country was fast drifting into anarchy; agrarian risings, indiscriminate bomb-throwing, _pogroms_, highway robberies carried out in the name of the "social revolution" and euphemistically ent.i.tled expropriation, outbreaks of a horrible kind of blood-l.u.s.t which delighted in motiveless murder for the sake of murder, were the order of the day. The revolution was strong enough neither to crush the reactionaries nor to control the revolutionaries themselves. The foundations of the social structure seemed to be dissolving in a welter of blood and crime, and public opinion, which in its hatred of bureaucracy had hitherto sided with the revolution, suddenly drew back in horror from the abyss which opened out in front of it. Stolypin, the Strafford of modern Russia, who condemned the extremists of both sides, was called to the helm of the State; his watchword, "Order first, reform afterwards," was backed by the force of public opinion; and, as he stamped out the revolution with a heel of iron, the country shuddered but approved. The peasants were pacified by the remission of the hated tax, and by measures for providing them with more land; and Russia sank once more into her normal condition.
But political incompetency is not a reason sufficiently weighty in itself to account for the remarkable revulsion of public feeling against the revolutionary party. Behind the narrow political issue lay the larger philosophical and moral one; and it was the discovery by the country of the real character and ultimate aims of the party which for a few months in 1906 seized the reins of power that will alone provide a sufficient explanation of one of the most astonishing political debacles of modern history. The revolution was nothing less than an attempt by a small minority of theorists and moral anarchists to force Western civilisation upon Russia, and not Western civilisation as it actually is but a sort of abstract "Westernism" derived from books. For the revolutionaries were far more Western than the Westerns. They had not merely swallowed wholesale the latest and most extreme political and social fads, picked up from the literature of England, France, and Germany, but they possessed a courage of their convictions and a will to carry them out to the logical conclusion which many "advanced thinkers" of the West lack. They were not modernists or new theologians but atheists, not Fabians or social reformers but revolutionary socialists armed with bombs, not radicals but republicans, not divorce-law-reformers but "free lovers." A remarkable book was published in 1910 called _Landmarks_. It was written by a number of disillusioned revolutionaries, and gives a vivid picture of the effect which the foregoing principles had upon the lives of those who upheld them.
Here is one extract:
"In general, the whole manner of life of the _intelligentsia_ was terrible; a long abomination of desolation, without any kind or sort of discipline, without the slightest consecutiveness, even on the surface. The day pa.s.ses in doing n.o.body knows what, to-day in one manner, and to-morrow, as a result of a sudden inspiration, entirely contrariwise--everyone lives his life in idleness, slovenliness, and a measureless disorder--chaos and squalor reign in his matrimonial and s.e.xual relations--a nave absence of conscientiousness distinguishes his work; in public affairs he shows an irrepressible inclination towards despotism, and an utter absence of consideration towards his fellow-creatures; and his att.i.tude towards the authorities of the State is marked at times by a proud defiance, and at others (individually and not collectively) by compliance."
As a set-off to this picture of moral chaos, it should be remembered that these people when called upon to die for their revolutionary faith did so with the greatest heroism. Nor is the picture true of all revolutionaries; some of the n.o.blest men it has ever been my good fortune to meet were Russian revolutionaries. But these were the product of an earlier and sterner school, the puritanical "Nihilism" of the "eighties; and it is impossible to deny the substantial truth of the above description as far as the rank and file of the modern revolutionary school are concerned.[1] Such people were divided by a whole universe from the peasants to whom they offered themselves as leaders and saviours; and the schemes of regeneration which they preached were not merely useless, because purely negative, but were exotic plants which could never flourish on Russian soil. Thus the revolution triumphed for about twelve months as a purely destructive force, but when the necessity for construction arose its adherents found that they were entirely ignorant of the elements of the problem before them.
This problem was the peasant, and the revolutionaries, though they had worshipped the People (with a capital P) for years and had done their best to convert them, had never made any attempt to understand them. And when the peasant discovered what the revolutionary was like, he loathed and detested him. "They hate us," a writer in _Landmarks_ confesses, "because they fail to recognise that we are men. We are, in their eyes, monsters in human shape, men without G.o.d in their soul; and they are right."
[Footnote 1: It is confirmed by all impartial observers, see _e.g._ Professor Pares" _Russia and Reform_, chap. ix., ent.i.tled "Lives of the Intelligents."]
There is a characteristic story told by Mr. Maurice Baring about a certain revolutionary who one day arrived at a village to convert the inhabitants to socialism. "He thought he would begin by disproving the existence of G.o.d, because if he proved that there was no G.o.d, it would naturally follow that there should be no Emperor and no policeman. So he took a holy picture and said, "There is no G.o.d, and I will prove it immediately. I will spit upon this _eikon_ and break it in pieces, and if there is a G.o.d He will send fire from heaven and kill me, and if there is no G.o.d nothing will happen to me at all." Then he took the _eikon_ and spat upon it and broke it to bits, and he said to the peasants, "You see, G.o.d has not killed me."
"No," said the peasants, "G.o.d has not killed you, but we will"; and they killed him."
This story, whether true or not, is a parable, in which one may read the whole meaning of the failure of the Russian revolution. It shows how an attack upon what they hold sacred may rouse to acts of fury a people who are admitted by all who know them to be the most tolerant, most tender-hearted, and most humane in Europe. The notion that Russia is a humane country may sound strange in English ears. Yet capital punishment, which is still part of our legal system, was abolished in Russia as long ago as 1753, except for cases of high treason. From 1855 to 1876 only one man was executed in the whole of that vast empire; and from 1876 to 1903 only 114. On the other hand between the years 1905 and 1908 the total of executions reached the appalling figure of 3629. This is but to translate into criminal statistics the story just quoted; for the years 1905-8 were the years when martial law reigned in Russia, the years of revolution.
The Tsar, it is true, wore the black cap, and the hangman"s rope was manipulated by the bureaucracy, but the jury who brought in the verdict was a jury of 145 million peasants.
Such, in broad outline, is the history of the revolutionary movement which is still so greatly misunderstood in England. It was not the uprising of an oppressed nation, which successful for a brief while was finally crushed by the brute force of reaction; it was a civil war between two sections of a small educated cla.s.s, in which the sympathies of the nation after fluctuating for a time eventually came down heavily against the revolutionaries. There is in truth every excuse for misunderstanding amongst English people, especially if they belong to the party of progress in English politics; for the obvious things about Russia are so deceptive.
All that one saw on the surface were, on the one hand, an irresponsible bureaucracy using the knout, the secret agent, the _pogrom_, and Siberia for the suppression of anything suspected of threatening existing conditions; and, on the other, a band of devoted reformers and revolutionaries risking all in the cause of political liberty, and dying, the "Ma.r.s.eillaise" on their lips, with the fort.i.tude of Christian martyrs.
But, beneath all this, something immensely bigger was in progress, which can only be described as a conflict of two philosophies of life diametrically opposed or, if you like, a life-and-death struggle between two civilisations, so different that they can hardly understand each other"s language; it is a renewal of the t.i.tanic contest, which was decided in the West by the Renaissance and the Reformation, the contest between the mediaeval and the modern world. To the modern mind no period is so difficult to grasp as the Middle Ages; our dreams are of progress which is another word for process, of success which implies perpetual change, in either case of "getting on" somewhere, somehow, we know not where or how; our very universe, from which we have carefully excluded the supernatural, has become a development machine, a huge spinning-mill, and our religion, if we have one, a matter of "progressive revelation." We look before and after, forwards to some dim utopia, backwards to some ape-like ancestor who links us with the animal world. Our outlook is horizontal, the mediaeval outlook perpendicular. The mediaeval man looked upward and downward, to heaven and h.e.l.l, when he thought of the future, to sun and cloud, land and crops, when he thought of the present. He lived in the presence of perpetual miracle, the daily miracle of sunrise, sunset, and shower; and in the constant faith in resurrection, whether of the corn which he sowed in the furrow or of his body which his friends would reverently sow in that deeper furrow, the grave. And his life was as simple and static as his universe; the seasons determined his labours, the Church his holidays.
Books did not disturb his faith in the unseen world, for he was illiterate; nor the l.u.s.t of gold his contentment with his existence, for commerce was still confined to a few towns. Russia to-day is in spirit what Europe was in the Middle Ages.[1] The revolutionaries offered her Western civilisation and Western philosophy, and she rejected the gift with horror.
[Footnote 1: This, of course, by no means implies that she is _behind_ the West, or that she is of necessity bound to pa.s.s through the same process of development. The problem of modern Russia is not to imitate the West but to discover some way of coming to terms with Western ideals without surrendering her own.]
Will she continue to maintain this att.i.tude? "The Russian peasant," says Mr. Maurice Baring, "as long as he tills the ground will never abandon his religion or the observance of it.... Because the religion of the peasant is the working hypothesis taught him by life; and by his observance of it he follows what he conceives to be the dictates of common sense consecrated by immemorial custom." The crucial point of this pa.s.sage is the conditional clause: "as long as he tills the ground." Of course, Russia, the granary of Europe, must always be predominantly an agricultural country; yet she is at the present moment threatened in many parts with an Industrial Revolution, the ultimate effects of which may prove far more subversive than the attempted revolution of 1905. For beneath her soil lie explosive materials more deadly than any dynamite manufactured by _intelligentsia_. Her mineral wealth, at present almost untouched, is incalculable in quant.i.ty and amazing in variety. When her mines are opened up Russia will become, according to the judgment of Dr. Kennard, editor of _The Russian Year-Book,_ "without a doubt the richest Empire the world has ever seen."
Attracted by her vast mining possibilities, by her enormous virgin forests, by her practically unlimited capacity for grain-production, the capital of Europe is knocking at the doors of Russia. Factories are rising, mines being started all over the country. Russia is about to be exploited by European business enterprise, just as America and Africa have been. The world has need of her raw materials, and is only interested in her people as potential cheap labour. Thus within the last few years something a.n.a.logous to the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Europe has come into existence in Russia. We may catch a glimpse of what these new cla.s.ses are like from a recent book by Mr. Stephen Graham, called _Changing Russia_. He writes:
"The Russian bourgeois is of this sort; he wants to know the price of everything. Of things which are independent of price he knows nothing, or, if he knows of them, he sneers at them and hates them. Talk to him of religion, and show that you believe the mystery of Christ; talk to him of life, and show that you believe in love and happiness; talk to him of woman, and show that you understand anything about her uns.e.xually; talk to him of work, and show that though you are poor you have no regard for money--and the bourgeois is uneasy.... Instead of opera, the gramophone; instead of the theatre, the kinematograph; instead of national literature, the cheap translation; instead of national life, a miserable imitation of modern English life.... It may be thought that there is little harm in the commercialisation of the Russian, the secularising of his life; and that after all the bourgeois population of England, France, and Germany is not so bad as not to be on the way to something better. But that would be a mistake; if once the Russian nation becomes thoroughly perverted, it will be the most treacherous, most vile, most dangerous in Europe. For the perverted Russian all is possible; it is indeed his favourite maxim, borrowed, he thinks, from Nietzsche, that "all is permitted," and by "all"
he means all abomination, all fearful and unheard-of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, all cruelty, all falsity, all debauch.... Selfish as it is possible to be, cra.s.s, heavy, ugly, unfaithful in marriage, unclean, impure, incapable apparently of understanding the good and the true in their neighbours and in life--such is the Russian bourgeois."
Mr. Graham"s picture of the new proletariat in the Ural mines is an equally horrible one:
"Gold mining is a sort of rape and incest, a crime by which earth and man are made viler. If I had doubted of its influence on man I needed but to go to the Ural goldfields. A more drunken, murderous, brother-hating population than that of this district I have not seen in all Russia. It was a great sorrow to see such a delightful peasantry all in debauchery....
The miner has no culture, no taste, not even a taste for property and squiredom, so that when at a stroke he gains a hundred or a thousand pounds, it is rather difficult to know how to spend it. His ideal of happiness has been vodka, and all the bliss that money can obtain for him lies in that.... Mias is a gold-mining village of twenty-five thousand inhabitants. It has two churches, four electric theatres, fifteen vodka shops, a score of beer-houses, and many dens where cards are played and women bought and sold to the strains of the gramophone. It is situated in a most lovely hollow among the hills, and, seen from the distance, it is one of the most beautiful villages of North Russia; but seen from within, it is a veritable inferno."
Mr. Graham writes as a poet rather than as an economist or a sociologist, but there is no doubt a grave danger to Russia in a sudden adoption of industrial life.
_Intelligentsia_, bourgeoisie, and proletariate are all products of the same forces, all belong to the same family; they are westernised Russians; they have pa.s.sed from the fourteenth to the twentieth century at one stride, and the violent transition has cut them completely adrift from tradition and from all moral and religious standards; books, commerce, and industry, the three boasted instruments of our civilisation, have not civilised such Russians, they have _de-civilised_ them. But, as yet, Russians of this character form only a tiny fraction of the nation; and there are happily signs that the dangers of an exotic culture are being realised even by the _intelligentsia_ themselves. Since the failure of the revolution there has been a remarkable revival of interest among Russian thinkers in the native inst.i.tutions, habits, and even the religion of the country; and it may be that in time there will emerge from this chaos of ideals a culture and a civilisation which will "make the best of both worlds" by adopting Western methods without surrendering an inch of the nation"s spiritual territory, above which floats the standard of religion, simplicity, and brotherly love. The present war, terrible as it is, may do something towards bringing this about, for the Russian people, faced by a common danger and united in a common purpose, are now of one mind and one heart, in a way that they have not been since a century ago Napoleon was thundering at the gates of Moscow.
And let this be said: if Russia should ever cease to be Russia, if she ever loses those grand national characteristics which make her so different from the West, and therefore so difficult for us Westerns to understand, the world as a whole will be infinitely the poorer for that loss. We need Russia even more than Russia needs us; for, while we have grasped the trappings, she possesses the real spirit of democracy. Of the three democratic ideals, proclaimed by France in 1789, the mystical trinity: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, how much has yet been realised by the peoples of the West? And Russia is in the way of realising them all!
Fraternity and equality are, as we have seen, the distinctive features of her national spirit and social structure, and, if her liberty is as yet imperfect on the political side, it is far more complete than ours on the side of moral tolerance and respect for the sanct.i.ty of human personality.
After all, the reason why Russia has not got complete political freedom is because, as a nation, she has. .h.i.therto taken no interest in politics; for the first time in 1905 she discovered the use of political action, and she got out of it a solution of the agrarian distress and a representative a.s.sembly; when she _wants_ more liberty in this direction, she will have no difficulty in securing it.
--4. _The Subject Nationalities_.--It may fairly be objected at this point that while Russia may possess these excellent qualities, she has consistently refused to allow liberty to other peoples, to the Jews, for example, the Poles, and the Finns. It is necessary therefore to say something on the matter of Russia"s subject nationalities before bringing these remarks to a conclusion.
Out of the six or seven million Jews in the world, over five million live within the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Russia is therefore the motherland of the Children of Israel; though, perhaps, the phrase step-motherland would express more truly the actual relationship, both in its origin and its character. Russia has inherited her tremendous responsibilities towards the Hebrew race from Poland, and her vexed "Jewish question" is in part a just punishment for her complicity in the wicked part.i.tions of that country in the eighteenth century. The matter, however, goes back much farther than the eighteenth century. In the Middle Ages Poland was a more powerful state than Russia, and comprised territory stretching from the Gulf of Riga to the Black Sea and from the Oder to the Dnieper. She was also the one country in Europe which offered to the Jews security from persecution and an opportunity of developing the commercial instincts of the race without interference. The result was that Jews settled in large numbers all over the King of Poland"s possessions, and the presence of Jews in any part of modern Russia is almost a sure sign that that particular town or province has been Polish territory in former times.
The Russian Government has never, except for a short period, allowed the Jews to live in Russia proper, and it is very rare to find Jews in north or central Russia. Even in large cities like Petrograd and Moscow their numbers are small, while it is interesting to note that the Finns have copied the rest of Russia in this respect at least that they have always resolutely refused to admit the Hebrew. Where Russia found Jews among the new subjects which she acquired by her gradual encroachments upon Poland, she had of course to let them remain, but she has confined them strictly to these districts. The existence of this Jewish pale is one of the grievances of the Jews of Russia, but it is not the heaviest. The liberal-minded Alexander II. had shown himself lenient to them; but his a.s.sa.s.sination in 1881 at the hands of terrorists and the accession of the reactionary Alexander III. began a period of persecution which has continued until the present day.
Alexander III. was much influenced by his tutor, Pobiedonostsev, who for the next thirty years was the most prominent exponent of the philosophy of Slavophilism. This, which in its modern form may be traced back to 1835, was in fact nothing else than a perverted glorification of the Russian national characteristics which have been dwelt upon above. The Slavophils declared not only that the Russians were a great and admirable nation, which few who really know them will be disposed to deny, but that their inst.i.tutions--and in particular, of course, autocracy and bureaucracy--were a perfect expression of the national genius which could hardly be improved upon. Furthermore, it was maintained that, since all other countries but Russia had taken a wrong turn and fallen into decadence and libertinism, it was Russia"s mission to bring the world back into the paths of rect.i.tude and virtue by extending the influence of her peculiar culture--and in particular again, of course, its special manifestations, autocracy and bureaucracy--as widely as possible. A variant of Slavophilism is Panslavism, which works for the day when all members of one great Slav race will be united in one nation, presumably under the Russian crown. Both these movements are examples of that nationalism run mad to which reference has been made in the second chapter.[1] But the Slavophils, who are of course ardent supporters of the Orthodox Church, were faced at the outset with a great difficulty; the western provinces of Russia, from the Arctic to the Black Sea, contained ma.s.ses of population which were neither Russian nor Orthodox. The Finns in the north were Lutherans; the Poles in the centre, though Slavs, were Roman Catholic in religion and anti-Russian in sentiment; and the Jews in the centre and south were--Jews. The first step, therefore, towards the Slavophil goal was the "Russification" of the subject peoples of Russia. In theory "Russification" means conferring the benefits of Russian customs, speech, and culture upon those who do not already possess them; in practice it amounts to the suppression of local liberties and traditions.
[Footnote 1: See p. 57.]
It is obvious that it is no easier to make a Jew into a Russian by force than to change the skin of the proverbial Ethiopian; nor is it likely that the Russian Government ever entertained the idea of making such an attempt. If it had any definite plan at all, it was to render things so uncomfortable to the unfortunate Hebrews that they would gradually leave the country. Real persecution began at the accession of Alexander III. in 1881, when it spread into Russia, significantly enough, from Germany, where a violent anti-Semite agitation had sprung up at the beginning of the year.
Riots directed against the Jews, and winked at if not encouraged by the authorities, broke out in the towns of Southern Russia. Edicts followed which excluded the Jews from all direct share in local government, refused to allow more than a small percentage of Jews to attend the schools and universities, forbade them to acquire property outside the towns, laid special taxes upon their backs, and so on. This att.i.tude of the Government encouraged the populace of the towns to believe that they might attack the Jews with impunity. The Jews are regarded in modern Russia in much the same light as they were regarded by our forefathers in the Middle Ages. They are hated, that is to say, on two counts: as unbelievers and as usurers. The condition of affairs in a township where the population is half-Jewish, half-Christian, and where the Christians are financially and commercially in the hands of the Jews, and the Jews are politically and administratively in the hands of the Christians, is obviously an extremely dangerous one.
Add to this the presence of a large hooligan section which is found in almost every Russian town of any size, the open disfavour shown towards the Jews by the Government, and the secret intrigues and incitement of the police, and you get a train of circ.u.mstances which lead inevitably to those violent anti-Semitic explosions, known as _pogroms_, which have stained the pages of modern Russian history. The revolutionary movement has complicated matters still further; for Jews are naturally to be found in the revolutionary ranks, and the bureaucracy and its hooligan supporters have tended to identify the Jewish race with the Revolutionary Party. Nothing can excuse the treatment of the Jews in Russia during the last thirty-five years, and the guilt lies almost entirely upon the Government, which, instead of leading the people and educating them by initiating an enlightened policy towards the Jews, a policy which might in fact have done more than anything else to "Russify" the latter, has persistently aided and abetted the worst elements of the population in their acts of violence.
It has reaped its reward in the rise of one of the most formidable of the revolutionary parties in modern Russia, the so-called Jewish "Bund." The Governor of Vilna, in a confidential report written in 1903, declared that "this political movement is undoubtedly a result of the abnormal position of the Jews, legal and economic, which has been created by our legislation.
A revision of the laws concerning the Jews is absolutely urgent, and every postponement of it is pregnant with the most dangerous consequences."
Yet when we condemn Russia for her _pogroms_ and her Jew-baitings, we must not forget two facts: first, that these occurrences are the work, not of the real Russian people, the peasantry which has been described above, but of the dregs of the population which are to be found at the base of the social structure in the towns of Russia as in towns nearer home; second, that Russia is not the only country in the world that has these racial problems to face. I once heard a Russian and an American discussing the comparative demerits of their respective lands, and I am bound to say that the former held his own very well. When, for example, the American said, "What about the Jews?" the other answered, "Well, what about the negroes?"