CHAPTER IX

THE BEGINNING OF THE REACTION

MOSCOW, _January 14th_.

To-day is the Russian New Year’s Day. To-day is also Sunday, so it would seem a fitting occasion to preach a long sermon on Russia. I have been amusing myself by finding suitable texts for such a sermon. They are all from the works of Renan, a man who gave a good deal of thought to the various political movements and phases of the world’s history, and expressed himself with that nice lucidity and divine ease which we call a perfect style.

The first is this: “La Révolution française fut la gageure d’un petit nombre d’énergumènes qui réussirent à faire croire qu’ils avaient entraîné la nation.”

No. 2: “Éternelle puérilité des répressions pénales, appliquées aux choses de l’âme.”

No. 3: “Dans ses accès de vertu, l’homme croit pouvoir se passer entièrement de l’égoisme et de l’intérêt propre; l’égoisme prend sa revanche, en prouvant que l’absolu désintéressement engendre des maux plus graves que ceux qu’on avait cru éviter par la suppression de la propriété.”

These are my texts, and, as is usually the case when the text is good, the sermon is superfluous.

New Year’s Day is, we are so often told, a good occasion to look forward and behind. What, then, is the outlook at present? Life is going on at St. Petersburg and Moscow exactly as usual, and here, save in the smouldering ruins of the factory of the Presnaya and various broken windows and damaged cornices, there is nothing to tell one that anything unusual has occurred. The Government is said to be confident. Foreign loans are in the air. The revolutionaries, it is said, have been crushed and dispersed. Electioneering work is beginning; in fact, all is going as well as can be expected. That is one view—an optimistic view which I do not altogether share. In the first place, when people say that the Revolutionary Party or its leaders are a minority I would reply by quoting text No. 1. “Laws, in a country which is following an idea, are always made by the minority,” says Renan, immediately before the sentence I have quoted.

Secondly, the Moscow episode does not seem to me to have affected the revolutionary movement in the slightest degree. The numbers of the killed among the insurgents were trifling; all the important and real leaders of the Revolution had left Moscow before this affair, which was, in fact, conducted by boys and girls; and if a number of boys and girls can, at the head of a mass of workmen, bring the garrison to distraction, take guns from the troops, and force the authorities to bombard the houses of the inhabitants without raising universal indignation, things must be fairly serious.

To say that they have alienated public sympathy is certainly untrue; for although they started the fighting, as soon as the authorities answered with artillery the common ordinary man in the street began in many cases to say that it was the fault of the Government and the authorities. Sympathy in Russia is always certain to be with the people who are shot, be they right or wrong.

“Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim-gun and they have not.”

That is, they argue, the motto of the authorities, and that is exactly the sentiment which arouses the indignation of the citizen. A cabman asked some one the other day when they were going to punish “him.” Who is “him”? he was asked. “Admiral Dubassov,” was the answer. “Surely the Emperor will punish him for shooting at the houses.” The energetic manner in which the rising was suppressed has, I am told, produced a good effect in Europe; doubtless energetic measures were not only necessary but imperative in the first instance; whether the continuation of them now is a mistake or not only the future can show. One fact, however, is certain, and that is that these measures are being conducted with the same arbitrariness which has characterised the action of the Russian police in the past, and are causing intense exasperation. There is a word in Russian, “Proisvol,” which means acting, like Wordsworth’s river, according to your “own sweet will,” unheedful of, and often in defiance of, the law. It is precisely this manner of acting which has brought about the revolution in Russia. It is against the “Proisvol” that all the educated classes and half the official class rebelled. And it is this very “Proisvol” against which the whole country rose on strike, which the Government promised should henceforth disappear, and which is at the present moment triumphantly installed once more as the ruling system.

Of course it may be objected that anarchy and lawless revolution can only be met by severe repression; but the question is: Must it be met by arbitrary and lawless repression? Hang the insurgents if you like, but why shoot a doctor who has got nothing to do with it before you know anything about him? To stop a newspaper like the _Russkie Viedomosti_, for instance, is an act of sheer “Proisvol,” the reason given being that it had subscription lists for workmen’s unions, which it denies, saying that the money was for the wounded. Here I point to my second text. All this repression seems to me utterly futile. The future, however, can show whether this is indeed so.

In the meantime election programmes are appearing. That of the Constitutional Democrats has come out, and is moderate in tone, although its clauses are extensive. It insists, among other things, on universal suffrage and an eight-hours’ day for the workmen. Here I would point to text 3. Everybody whom I have seen in Russia in any way connected with the working man is agreed in saying that an eight-hours’ day is an absolute impossibility. That a Russian workman’s eight hours means in reality about six hours. That no factory in Russia could exist on these terms. The Constitutional Democrats seem in this case to have omitted the factor of human egoism and interest.

One of the gravest factors of the general situation is that Eastern Siberia seems to be entirely in the hands of the revolutionaries, who are apparently managing the railway and everything else with perfect order, while the troops, anxious only to get home, are taking any engines they can lay hands on and racing back, one train literally racing another!

Altogether it cannot be said that the outlook is particularly cheerful. There is one bright point so far, and that is that all parties seem anxious to convoke the Duma. The Liberals want it, the Conservatives want it, the Extreme Radicals sanction the elections. The Radicals say it will be packed by the Government; but I do not see how this is possible. They say they will let it meet, and that if it proves “a Black Hundred Duma” they will destroy it. They call everything which is not Radical “Black Hundred.” But, as I have said before, and as I cannot tire of saying, it is useless to blame these extreme parties for talking nonsense. They have been driven to this nonsense by the still greater want of sense on the part of the Government of Russia during the last twenty years, and in wanting to wipe out this system altogether they are, after all, in the right. Unfair they may be, hysterical, and absurd. So were the Jacobins; but the absurdity, extravagance, and violence of the Jacobins were only the logical result of the “Ancien Régime.” So it is here, although it is misleading to compare the present movement in Russia with the French Revolution.

And behind all the rumours and conflicts of various parties looms the agrarian question; the ninety million peasants who till the land in the same manner in which they tilled it four hundred years ago; whose land from generation to generation dwindles by partition, while the population increases. How and when is this question going to be solved? It can only be solved by the education of the peasants themselves; but the question is what can be done to gain time and to make this education possible. My outlook is, perhaps, too pessimistic. I do not know. I only feel that the whole revolutionary movement is beyond all forces of control, and that no measures in the world can put it back now; whether it could by wisdom be led into safe channels is another question. Such a thing has seldom been seen in the history of the world, and it is, after all, only out of the past that we make the future.

To get rid of these gloomy ideas I went to the hospital, where New Year’s Day was celebrated with great gusto; there was a Christmas-tree, dancing and song, and it was delightful to see a little tiny boy and a huge soldier dancing opposite each other. The Russian peasants dance to each other, and separately, of course, like Highlanders when they dance a reel or a schottische. It was gay and yet rather melancholy; there were so many cripples, and it reminded me a little of the Christmas feast described in Dostoievski’s “Letters from a Dead House.”

_January 18th._

To-day I heard a characteristic story. A student told it to me. A peasant was looking at a rich man’s house in one of the streets of Moscow. An agitator went up to him and said: “Think of the rich man living in that great house, and think of your miserable position.”

“Yes,” said the peasant cheerfully, “it’s a big house; he’s a proper Barine.”

“But,” said the agitator, much irritated, “it’s most unjust that he should live in such a big house and that you should live in a small house. You should turn him out of it.”

“How could that be?” answered the peasant. “He is used to being rich. All his life he has lived in plenty. What would he do in poverty? We are used to poverty, and we must have pity on those who are not used to it.”

The agitator then gave the peasant up and went away in disgust.

_January 20th._

I arrived in St. Petersburg this morning. Yesterday a Russian friend of mine discussed with me my ideas on the “Intelligenzia” and their revolutionary sympathies which I had embodied in a letter to the _Morning Post_. My friend said that I had committed a gross injustice to the Russian “Intelligenzia,” and that my letter, by reflecting the opinion of Englishmen who had spent but a short time in Russia, and judged everything from the point of view of a country where political liberty had long since been an established fact, gave a wrong impression. There is some truth in this, no doubt. It is difficult here to keep a cool head and not to be swayed by circumambient influence. The danger does not lie in being influenced by those who immediately surround one, but rather in being influenced inversely by their opinions. I mean one has only to talk to a revolutionary or to a conservative long enough, at the present moment, to be convinced that his adversary is right. I still hold, however, to what I wrote about the unfairness and exaggerations of the sympathisers with the revolution among the “Intelligenzia.” I think they are incapable of looking at the matter impartially, and no wonder. Moreover, the Government past and present is responsible for their frame of mind. Again, I still hold to what I said, that the “Intelligenzia” have not produced a great man; but instead of retracting what I said, I will, as I said I would do, after the oriental fashion, having stated all that there was to be said against them, try and set forth all that is to be said in favour of the “Intelligenzia.”

In the first place, what is the “Intelligenzia”? Properly speaking, it is composed of every one who can read or write. But the term is generally used to designate those members of the middle class who belong to the professional classes—doctors, professors, teachers, journalists, and literary men. In its largest sense it is the whole middle class, from which nine-tenths of the officials are drawn. But when Russians speak of it they generally mean the middle class, excluding officials. Such as it is, it contains, as well as the most hot-headed revolutionaries and violent youths, all that is best and most intelligent and cultivated in Russia, all men of science who have done remarkable work in various branches, all doctors, whose life in the country is a life of difficulty and self-sacrifice which it would be difficult to exaggerate, all the professors and the teachers, the actors, the singers, the musicians, the artists, the writers. These people have for years been the absolute prey of the irresponsibility and blundering stupidity of the higher bureaucrats. They have with difficulty been able to obtain foreign books (Matthew Arnold’s “Essays on Criticism” was one of the books on the index two years ago); in teaching, half the facts of history have been forbidden them; and at the slightest suspicion of not being “well-intentioned” they have been placed under police surveillance and often been subjected to gross indignities. Is it to be wondered at that they are bitter now? The average man and woman of the Russian middle class is incomparably better educated than the average English man or woman of the same class. They are saturated with the foreign classics. They often speak two languages besides Russian; and they are conversant with modern thought in the various European countries as far as it is allowed to reach them. When one sees the average Englishman abroad one is aghast at his ignorance and his want of education in comparison with these people. I have constantly, both here and in Manchuria, found to my shame that I knew nothing of English history in comparison with the Russians I met. The reason is very simple: they are taught at school things which will be useful to them. Every one is given a general foundation of knowledge. I do not believe the average Englishman to be more stupid than the average foreigner, but he is not educated. A man may go through a public school and even a university in England and come out at the end ludicrously ignorant of everything except the classical books he was obliged to “get up,” and at our public schools, with a few brilliant exceptions, the education of the average boy amounts to this: that he does not learn Latin and Greek, and he certainly learns nothing else. I never heard English history mentioned at Eton, and all the English history I know I learnt in the nursery. The average Russian boy knows far more about English history than the average English boy, let alone European history; and a cultivated Russian of the middle class is saturated with John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, John Morley, Buckle, and Carlyle; whereas Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley are treated as Russian classics. Only yesterday I travelled with a man who, although he could not speak English, was intimately conversant with our whole literature, and told me that the whole generation to which he belonged had been taught to find their intellectual food in England and not in France and Germany. “How is it,” he asked me, “that we Russians who live on English thought, and admire and respect you as a nation far more than other nations, have been so long at loggerheads with you politically?” I said that I thought the reason was that, although the cultivated and the average educated Russian knows our literature well, the nation as a whole does not know us, and we do not know Russia at all—for most intelligent Englishmen are ludicrously ignorant of Russia. Besides this, the bureaucratic _régime_ has acted like a barrier between the two countries and fostered and fed on the misunderstanding.

As far as politics are concerned things have moved on. Some weeks ago it was possible to believe that the Government had been wantonly hampered in its well-intentioned efforts, now it is only too plain that by their acts they are doing their best to justify the violence of the revolutionaries. The “Proisvol” (arbitrariness) continues on an extensive scale. People in Moscow are arrested every day and without discrimination. Influential people do not dare to inscribe their names on the lists of the Constitutional Democratic Party for fear of being arrested. The police have unlimited powers, and all the methods of the old _régime_ are flourishing once more. I do not believe, as is sure to be objected, that the action of the revolutionaries has rendered this necessary. I do not believe that the best way to fight revolution is by lawless and arbitrary repression. Lastly, and most important, it is not the immorality or the illegality of the methods that I find reprehensible, but their stupidity and ineffectiveness. If all this repression were the iron working of one great central mind, which ruthlessly imposed its will on the nation, breaking down all obstacles and restoring order, it would be excusable. But it is not. I do not believe the Government is responsible for what happens in Moscow; and in Moscow itself the various authorities shift the responsibility on to each other. It is the old story of the bureaucratic system—no responsibility and no individual efficiency, but a happy-go-lucky, drifting, and blind incompetence, striking where it should not strike, being lenient too late, and never foreseeing what is under its very nose. When one comes to think, it is not surprising, considering that the instruments with which Count Witte has to deal are of the old regulation bureaucratic pattern. How, for instance, can the Minister of the Interior, M. Durnovo, be expected to adopt any other methods than those which are ingrained in him? It is as if the Liberals persuaded Mr. Chamberlain to speak at a public meeting and then expressed surprise at finding that he was in favour of Tariff Reform. When some of the revolutionaries were summarily executed after the recent troubles in Moscow, a sentence of Tacitus came back to me which is peculiarly applicable to the old Russian bureaucratic methods: “Interfectis Varrone consule designate et Petronio Turpiliano consulari ... inauditi atque indefensi tamquam innocentes perierunt” (Varro and Turpilianus were executed without trial and defence, so that they might just as well have been innocent).

The whole system of arresting doctors and professors, prohibiting newspapers and plays, censoring books and songs, is now, whatever may have been its effect in the past, childishly futile. Moreover, even this is blunderingly done. The harmless newspapers are suppressed and more violent ones appear. But the point is the futility of it all; as soon as a serious newspaper is stopped it reappears on the next day under another name. Each repressed satirical newspaper (and these journals are often exceedingly scurrilous) finds a successor. It is not as if the revolutionaries were the result of the newspapers; it is the newspapers which are the reflection of the revolutionaries; and until you can repress every revolutionary the spirit which finds its vent in these organs will exist. To repress the Liberal spirit altogether it will be necessary to suppress nearly all the thinking population of Russia. The only hope is that all this is, after all, only temporary, and that the meeting of the Duma will put an end to this riot of lawlessness and inefficiency. One competent man like Count Witte is not enough to deal with things which are happening all over the country in so large a place as Russia, and he is bound to trust himself to minor authorities—and these in many cases prove themselves unfit for their task. “Why are they chosen?” it may be asked. The answer is: “Who else is there to choose until the whole pack of cards is thoroughly reshuffled or rather destroyed, and a new pack, men chosen by the Duma, is adopted?”

“But,” it is objected, “however much you reshuffle the cards, the pack will be the same.” This is true; but one radical change would make all the difference in the world, and that would be the introduction of the system of responsibility. Whenever there has been in a Russian town a governor who had declared his firm intention of holding his subordinates responsible for their acts, and has put such a declaration into practice, things have always gone well. There was for years a chief of the police at Moscow, who was just such a man. The trouble is now, that however good a subordinate official may be, there is no guarantee that he may not be removed at any minute owing to the passing whim of those who are above.

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