CHAPTER XX

CURRENT IDEAS ON THE DUMA

ST. PETERSBURG, _June 3rd_.

“The Duma is impossible,” said the Frenchman.

“In what country of the world are people who commit murder amnestied? And the land question—violent measures such as the Cadets propose will ruin the country. Agrarian reforms can only be gradual.”

A young man who had lately joined the Cadet party started to his feet. “You forget,” he said, “that we are in the midst of a Revolution; that it is not a question of what other countries do in times of peace and prosperity. What is called amnesty here is called justice in other countries, and as for doing things gradually, it is too late. The Ministers come to the Duma and speak of gradual reform. It is like telling a person who has got appendicitis to go to the Riviera and enjoy the sunshine. Matters have been brought to such a pass that a drastic remedy is imperative. The very people who preach to us now that prevention is better than cure are those who during fifty years refused to prevent.”

“As for the amnesty question,” said the man who belonged to no Party, “I refuse to discuss it. Both sides tire me with it. You,” he said, turning to the Cadet, “with your hysterical bomb-throwers, and you,” turning to the mild Conservative landlord, “with your bungling police. The question of amnesty is absurd, because very few criminals are in prison at all. The bomb-throwers nearly always either get killed or escape altogether. The mass of people who are in prison are there by chance. They might be in the Duma; it is a mere fluke. At Tambov the other day a clerk whom I know of went to take steps about the raising of his wages. He was arrested, together with the man who drove him, and the son of that man. They have been in prison ever since. No sort of accusation has been brought against them.”

“And don’t you call that a disgraceful state of things?” said the young Cadet.

“I was thinking of the amnesty as it affects the Government,” answered the man who belonged to no Party, “and I repeat that as far as danger goes it makes no difference one way or the other.”

“But as a question of principle it is impossible,” said the Frenchman.

“Yes, impossible not to give it,” said the Cadet.

“What do you think of the Cadets?” said the man who belonged to no Party to the ex-official who belonged to the landed gentry. “I could not vote for them or against them,” he answered. “I feel with regard to them exactly as I feel with regard to the Japanese; the same combination of admiration and disgust. I feel humiliated at recognising myself to be their inferior, and proud at being in some respects their superior. I believe that there is the same difference between myself and a Cadet as there is between a Mandarin and a Japanese. Perhaps the social value of Chinese philosophy in not incomparable to the French Eighteenth Century strain, which is still so strong in us. At any rate, going back to the Cadets and the Japanese, don’t you see a likeness between the faculty of organisation that both of them possess, the grasp of technical means, the near-sighted enthusiasm? Parallels between the _ci-devant_ Russian and the Chinese have been worn threadbare. But now we are face to face with the extraordinary situation of having, as it were, Japanese and Chinamen in the same country struggling for prevalence. This is why I could neither vote for the Cadets nor against them. I feel that they are a superior and at the same time an inferior race, to whom one must leave the dirty business of governing the country just as the Merovingian Kings did with the Mayors of the Palace, reserving to themselves the faculty of healing scrofula and the divine right of remaining Kings.”

“I don’t feel that,” said the man who belonged to no Party; “the difference between us and all Europeans and the Japanese seems to me to be a difference of kind; they are as different from us as bees are different from men. The difference between you and the Cadets is merely a difference of class and of education.”

“I could get on perfectly well with the Cadets,” said the ex-official, “just as I could get on with the clerks who used to be in my office. If I were the Emperor I would prefer a Cadet Government to a Conservative one. But, for their weal or woe, Russia is not Cadet. The Cadets can reform Russia if they choose just as the Japanese can reform China. But just as the Japanese will never make the Chinaman Japanese in character, so the Cadets will never make Russia Cadet.”

“I don’t agree with you,” said the Cadet. “The same argument might have been used by an _Intendant_ at the beginning of the French Revolution with regard to the Tiers État. They no doubt said then that the Tiers État represented nothing, because it had not been allowed to represent anything up to that moment. The same thing is true here. The Tiers État has been suppressed politically, and owing to this suppression it has burst out. It is far bigger than you think, because all your minor mandarins and some of your major mandarins belong to it and form part of it. Only yesterday I heard a reactionary complaining bitterly that all the officials in St. Petersburg sympathised with the Cadets, which was scandalous considering that they received Government wages. Besides this, the Cadets include all the intellect of the country and all the most intelligent men. They have partisans drawn from every class.”

“I disagree with you,” said the man who belonged to no Party to the ex-official, “on different grounds. I believe the Cadets to be just as Russian as you are, in the sense of being different from mere Westerners. The other day a charming old Cadet gentleman whom I know had some friends to dinner. They began playing _windt_ at nine o’clock in the evening and they went on playing until eleven o’clock the next morning without stopping. In what other country would that happen? Certainly not in England or in France.”

“Grattez le Cadet et vous trouverez le Russe,” answered the ex-official. “Perhaps if you scratch the Japanese you will get at the Chinaman.”

“Surely not,” said the man who belonged to no Party; “but apart from this the antagonism between officialdom and the Tiers État is not a thing exclusively Russian. It has happened in every country. The end of the struggle is that officialdom or lawlessness is put under control. That is what is happening here. Peter the Great was the first Cadet, only he was self-sufficient and had need of no Party.”

ST. PETERSBURG, _June 9th_.

There is a current of opinion which is hostile to the Duma, and I have lately had the opportunity of seeing manifestations of it. The views of the Ministry have now been made plain to us and need no comment; but one of the ideas which form the basis of their attitude and their action is suggestive, namely, that Count Witte is entirely responsible for the present state of things, in not having introduced universal suffrage, which, if it had been applied during the elections, say the Ministers, would have produced a majority in the Duma infinitely less Radical than the present one. I cannot help feeling slightly amused when I hear this catchword solemnly repeated, because when I was here before the elections at Christmas time, the same people who repeat it used equally solemnly to explain to me then the utter impossibility and the terrible danger of universal suffrage. Personally, I am convinced that whatever the system of suffrage had been, the majority would have been Radical, because the majority of the country is Radical. That is to say, there is in the country a large majority of discontented people. Nobody, I think, can refute this proposition. It was confirmed to me the other day by an intelligent Conservative. When I say Conservative, I mean that he belongs to none of the Liberal parties. He explained his point of view to me thus: “I dislike the Cadets,” he said; “they inspire me with a profound antipathy; I think they have played a double game in their dealings with the Left; I think they drew a line to the Right, and none to the Left; that they promised more than they could give. They said more in their propaganda than they now say in the Duma. On the other hand, we have nothing better than them. Besides them we have only the Government, which is not worth mentioning, and the Extreme Left, which is demented. Again, I think they really do contain the most intelligent men we have got in Russia now—the best brains, the best workers, and the best organisers—and I could only hope for a peaceful issue if the Emperor were to support them. I consider them the sole bulwark against Anarchy.”

I asked him what he thought of their attitude towards the land question.

“I don’t think the land question can be settled by any one project,” he answered, “because the conditions are so different in various parts of Russia. The Cadets talk of local committees and of the necessity of expropriation in principle. I think what the peasants want is capital, not land. When the agitation began my peasants came to me and asked for five thousand dessiatines. I offered them one thousand, and then they found that five hundred was all they could manage to cultivate. I think, of course, that all the land which is rented should be expropriated, and I think the folly of the Government in ignoring the question of the land rented to the peasants was supreme. The Government thinks it can remedy the present evils by drastic means, but they leave the cause of the evils untouched, which is this: there is a mass of discontented people in Russia, and as long as they remain discontented the disorder will continue. There are some things which could be done at once to render the peasants less discontented. They can be given rights if they cannot be given land. They are now at the mercy of the local magistrate.”

The net result of this man’s opinion was that it is a choice of evils, and the Cadets are the lesser evil. Yesterday I had a talk with a man who bitterly attacked the Cadets and all their ways. He was a member of the Duma and belongs to the Left. He spoke in this strain: “The Cadets insist on acting legally. It is sheer cowardice. In times of revolution the only effective action is illegal action. The Cadets have no right to call themselves the Party of the freedom of the people. They are nothing but Moderate Liberals.”

“But what do you think they ought to have done?” I asked. “When the Government refuses to consider our Bills,” he answered, “except according to a process and after a space of time which they determine, we ought to pass them in defiance of the Ministry and let them dissolve us.”

“But, supposing they don’t dissolve you?” I asked. I don’t know what his answer was, because this conversation took place in the lobby of the Duma, and the spokesman, who was a Cossack member (not a man with a shock of hair and golden sequins or silver braid on his coat, but a pale, thin, short man, with large bright eyes and no collar), had such a fiery and emphatic delivery that a large crowd collected round us, and one of the crowd entered with him into a heated argument, of which I heard fragments. “We have done nothing,” he said. “We have been here a month and talked.” “What else could we do?” said his interlocutor; “the Government take no notice of us.” “We ought to declare ourselves a Constituent Assembly. The people of St. Petersburg are like ducks who have been fired at. They are afraid of the sight of blood. But the Government needn’t think they have got the best of us, not those silly little gramophones (this to his interlocutor) who repeat what the Cadets say, but us, the representatives of the people; we shall have a nice surprise for them. We have got terrible means at our disposal without even appealing to the people. That’s the worst of us Russians: we know how to talk, how to write; they translate our books into foreign languages; but we don’t know how to act. I mean the educated Russians, the Cadets; but we are going to show that we do know how to act. Every day for the last month I have acted in a certain direction.”

The rest of the philippic was lost to me. One of the arguers, who had just joined the Cadet Party, and being a young official was frightfully proud of the fact, seemed somewhat mortified at being called a “little gramophone.” The temper of the Duma, although its outward behaviour is decorous, seems to be rising in temperature. The majority is in favour of moderation, and at present the majority is powerful. The Government has been treating the Duma like a spoilt child which needs humouring.

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