Part 18

Throughout this period many Russian princes married into noble Mongol families, and Mongol officers formed alliances with the Russian boyars. The Muscovite aristocracy had already grown into strong Oriental proclivities from contact with its southern neighbor, the Byzantine, and these became confirmed under the Tatar. One czar, at least, Boris Godunov, was of Mongol birth. Incessant war harassed the people. Alexander Nevski, of Novgorod, beat back the Swedes; but, abasing himself, he went to the Tatar khan with the tribute of a country too feeble still to resist him. By and by Russia began to rally and to strengthen her centres, Novgorod, Kiev, and Vladimir. Moscow arose--that small destiny-city where Simon the Proud, even in vassalage, dared to dream of unity and nationality, and took the title of “Prince of all the Russias.” His grandson made the first great stand against the Mongols and won in the field of Tula, which, with the fights of Alexander Nevski, gives to chroniclers and bards their early Russian ballads, or _bilinî_. Moscow, punished cruelly, was razed almost to the ground. But the Bear was aroused and goaded into desperation. Russia reeled to her feet, and for nearly a hundred years she fought, she lost, she fell; but she rose again and fought on, until at last the power of the Tatar terror was broken and the tyrant was driven over her border. Still, for a hundred years more, she was forcing back his inroads, and rescuing the winding trains of her children, toiling over the southern steppes to be sold as slaves at Kaffa. This was Russia in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.

That Europe was spared this, she owes to the Russian. Through those crucial centuries when the Slav, weak, torn, anguished, beset with foes around and foes within, was standing grimly at the perilous portal of civilization, Europe, within the temple, safe by his grace, was privileged to work up into light, to cement her nationalities, to effect the liberation of her masses, and to develop her intellect into the magnificent promise of a printing-press, a people’s Bible, and a Shakespeare.

But to the brave warden of that portal there was not the sweetness and the light. For him were the seams and the scars, the mutinous passions of the strife. Long after the clouds of the Dark Ages had cleared from the face of western Europe, they hung over Russia. The Slav was back in his Dark Ages yet, heir only to a barbaric experience. Here he must start, where Europe had started nearly a thousand years before, where America, in the favor of Providence, was never to be called upon to start. For him were the memories of subjection and the blood of contention; but also, in relief, to him were the stolid patience and endurance which were to serve him so well. He groped along in the shadow until the coming of the great Peter.

But now arose a man. He, too, had dreamed the dream of empire,--vast, masterful. He set about making his dream real. He found Russia a small inland state, torn by faction, barbarian, and Oriental. Though himself the descendant of a long line of Byzantine kings, half monk, half emperor, he saw with the insight of genius, and he knew that that way did not lie greatness. Therefore fully and fiercely he broke with the past and set himself to the future.

Between him and that future stood the Strelitz. The walls of the Kremlin, and the Red Square told the doom of their barring conservatism. He warred with the Turk, he fought the Cossack, he routed the Swedes, again and again, taking whole provinces on his Baltic outlet and securing the coveted Neva. He embroiled himself with Persia, and through Baku opened a way to the Caspian. Then, with a high hand, he swept out the customs that made for Orientalism. He broke the seclusion of women, the prostrations, banished the caftan, the beard, and the flowing robes. He lifted his people bodily and violently out of their past, and set them down face-front to a new order. The Russia he had received a province, he left an empire. The Russia he had received Asiatic, he left European, and already a force in Europe. And when arose one of his own blood--a reversal--who would undo the herculean labor of this master-builder, who would give back to Sweden those priceless, wave-washed Baltic provinces, and, restoring the capital to Moscow, return to an Oriental estate, the patriot was stronger than the father, and at the price of his son’s life he bought the progress of Russia. Here in this man, who died in 1725, we can truly say that Modern Russia begins.

Through this skeleton history can be traced the structure of the modern state, as in the struggle for survival may be found the root and early warrant of her governmental system. Every element, physical and ethnic, was, and still is, a handicap. Russia is not protected by the ramparts of the sea; she is surrounded on all sides by nations with whom her history has been that of perennial conflict. In place of a compacted, well-peopled country, she has an empire extended gradually from frozen Nova Zembla to Afghanistan, from the Danube mouth to Behring’s arctic sea. She is a land of many distinct peoples, as foreign to each other as Lithuanians and wild Kirghis; as alien in religion as Catholic and Mohammedan. She is divided into one knows not how many tribes, numbers of them completely barbarous. Her eastern and south-eastern frontiers call for defense across vast and vacant stretches. Her northern and western borders are occupied by Finns and Poles, unforgetful forever of their own days of sovereignty, naturally and rightly jealous for the memories and the prerogatives that are its legacy.

With the eastern problem living from the first on her immediate border, with her many tribes wayward, Russia early strove to fuse her empire into national unity. In old Poland had been seen the fearful price which feebleness and disunion pay to fate. How much greater was the menace to polyglot Russia, were her master-grip to relax! That she should hold a strong hand over the elements that ever threatened her disruption was the first national necessity. This supreme obligation to herself in her entirety compelled a firm, commanding, centralized authority. The mould that was to shape such metal had need of rigidity and unyielding strength. To meet these race-desires, not as a purposeless tyranny but as the fruit of a long evolving system, arose the autocracy.

The system reached its climax in the most absolute administration of modern times at the period of the American Revolution; the “Government Statute of 1775” meshed all things and all men into the institutions of despotism; Russia groaned under the iron rule of a Nicholas, yet rejoiced in the belief that strength was there, and sure defense from domestic disunion and foreign aggression; then, in the Crimea, came a revelation of the inefficiency of the bureaucratic juggernaut. Despite the stubborn valor of the defenders of Sevastopol, despite the gallant efforts of the aged autocrat, the glory of Russia went down in the blaze of her city and her fleet.

The old régime had failed. Even the Czar, before he died, could read the lesson but could not act. How pathetic the words of the failing monarch: “My successor may do what he will, I cannot change.”

With the accession of Alexander to the throne in 1855, on the sudden death of Nicholas, came the first effective steps toward modern institutions. The young czar, a self-declared friend of progress, raised regally the standard of reform. All Russia rose to the hopes of his idealism. Corruption in office, which had before been rampant, was crushed out by the sheer force of public opinion. Pamphlets circulated freely, uncensored. Meetings were everywhere held to discuss the varied plans of a vivified government. With a whole nation become to a degree transcendental, the Czar began his reign and his reforms.

First of all for righting, as it was first in evil, came serfdom. Summoning commissions of his ablest advisers, seeking counsel of the proprietors and their coöperation in an act of self-abnegation, the Czar proceeded to the execution of his great task. For three years every side and every phase of the problem was studied. Then at length with a fundamental law which forecovered every detail of the situation, Alexander II put his signature, February 19, 1861, to the great Ukase of Liberation.

In Russia’s past there is much to answer for before the judgment-bar, in omission and in commission. Yet, giving but justice to ruler and people, it must be allowed that the measure which freed the serfs ranks, with Magna Charta and the American Constitution, among the mightiest agencies of advance that mankind has ever known. A dependent population of nearly forty-six million souls was given liberty. The great act was accomplished peacefully, and the measures were executed without any trouble worthy of the name, in a spirit equitable to the old owners as well as to the serfs. Not alone were the latter released from bondage, they were provided, one and all, with land and livelihood. They were given, in everything that concerned their local administration, entire freedom from interference by their old masters or by the members of the Administration. The righteous deed that the American Republic achieved nearly three years later liberated but one ninth the number of the Russian bondmen. It did so at the cost of the deadliest fratricidal war of modern times, and the impoverishment of one quarter of its people. All the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau through the Reconstruction period could not insure to a tithe of the Negroes the opportunity for a livelihood,--this that Russia provided inalienably for each of her liberated. To this day the American Negro in many places is under special civic disabilities more galling than those imposed anywhere in the Russian Empire.

The protection of the former serfs was skillfully arranged by grouping them in self-governing village communes, to which land enough was given on a long-term repayment basis. In each, by an assembly composed of all the heads of households, periodic allotments of the common territory were made to the individuals. Compact economic units, whose property could not be sold, were built up against alienation of the land or poverty-induced peonage. The rendering of justice in local disputes was delegated to the peasant courts,--the only tribunals in Russia, save the National Senate, from which there is no appeal.

The Mir, complete within itself, was responsible to the Imperial Government for good order and the taxes, and was secure from molestation provided these duties were fulfilled. Its inhabitants, united and independent, were able to resist any encroachment by their former masters or by neighboring landlords.

[Illustration: THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW]

It is not unworthy of note that up to the present time the liberties in economic matters thus granted have rarely been infringed by the authorities, nor have the village assemblies been exploited as a play in politics or to attain personal ends. While agriculturally and industrially the communal land provisions have become insufficient, cramping, perhaps baneful, and no longer necessary now that society is in equilibrium, nevertheless the germ of free institutions fecundated in the Mir, when dissociated from its communal features, is admirable still, and is capable of becoming the foundation for real self-government.

Plans for provincial assemblies as a further extension of local home rule had been under consideration since 1859. On January 1, 1864, an Imperial Ukase was promulgated instituting Semstvos in thirty-three governments. To this assembly, proprietor and peasant, rich and poor, elected their representatives. Each Semstvo was to appoint its own executive to carry out the laws it decreed.

The jurisdiction of this assembly, though confined to local and non-political matters, was wide. Rates, streets, convocations, posts, sanitary measures, famine-relief, fire-insurance, schools, agricultural improvement, all land, house, and factory taxes (those upon imperial as well as those upon private domains), were given into the Semstvo control. It was granted partial powers over various other minor matters. It exercised practically all the economic and social functions of local governmental activity save what fell to the Mirs. It was welcomed as an epoch-making institution. The liberal press of the period hailed it as a living guidon of the upward way, as the blessed daylight of a constitutional government.

So indeed it might have become. In the new Emperor’s mind there germinated a whole peaceful revolution. He had plans for new courts of justice, reorganization of the army, reform of the civil administration, and popular representative government, with an elected national chamber.

But in the midst of his reforms broke out the Polish insurrection. The Czar had granted to the Poles elective councils in each district of government and in the chief cities; he had appointed a Pole his Minister of Public Instruction, and had made many concessions to their old language. Iron and blood crushed out the insurrection, but it had brought to the great Czar Liberator the conviction that liberty spelled disunion for Russia, and this belief was never to be dispelled.

Upon the Semstvo assemblies, no longer uplifted by the old generous enthusiasm of the sovereign, pressed little by little the dead weight of executive officialdom. One by one their functions were lopped away. More and more the selection of delegates was transferred to the administrative officials. The marshals of noblesse became chairmen, the governors vetoing overlords. Before the death of Alexander II, his once-cherished creations had lapsed from independent state legislatures into anomalous, semi-advisory councils, discussing roads, land-taxes, agriculture, and schools, and controlled by the land-owning nobles and the governors. Semstvo and Mir and Assemblies of the Noblesse became ornamental trimmings to the colossal edifice of the bureaucracy.

The assembling of all the functions of government into the hands of the executive became again the guiding principle of this system. “The Council of State,” whose office was that of discussing the budget and law-making proposals, was the simulacrum of a parliament. The Senate, which gave decision on special points appealed from the lower courts, and whose promulgation of all enactments was the hall-mark of their legality, was a form of supreme court. But both hung from above rather than rested on a substructure. They were substantially cut off from popular influences, their function was secondary action following origin in the executive bureaus. The Imperial Autocrat, deriving his right from Divinity alone, exercised, in addition to his executive functions and his duties as supreme commander of the armed forces of the State, those powers which by a segregation of functions would have fallen to the legislative bodies and the judiciary. In this, the ten ministries were his main agencies.

Under this system, legislation was inaugurated through the presentation of a project to the Czar by one of his ministers, or by outside petition, or perhaps by the imperial wish.

The proposed enactment, if the Czar ordered it to be further examined, was referred usually to an Imperial Commission of Study. Debates followed in the Advisory Council of State, and the completed bill, as framed by this body, was signed by the Emperor and became a ukase, to be formally promulgated by the Senate and enrolled as part of the law of the land. Interpretations of law were made by the Ministers, which none might gainsay. Thus was the legislative function absolute.

In the provinces the three functions of government were equally centralized. A governor (almost invariably a general or an admiral) through his subordinate executive officers duplicated in microcosm the system of the capital. The dependent Semstvo was his Council of State, the dependent judges composed his Senate, the dependent Semski Natschalniki, his executive ministers. Into his bureaus came the details of provincial government save such matters as the villagers settled in their own Mirs. The troops of the district were at his call, the gendarmerie under his orders carried out the judicial arrests and the drumhead condemnations that sent so many thousands along the road to Siberia.

In the placing of these proconsuls and their sustaining soldiery was applied the Roman rule, “Divide et impera.” The head officials of the provinces were from distant parts,--the Governor of Warsaw from Tiflis, the Governor of Odessa from Samara, the Governor of the Amur from the Baltic. The Orthodox Cossacks of the Don were in force among the troubled Poles and Jews of the western governments; the drafts from the peasantry of Little Russia garrisoned Tiflis and Turkestan, and Siberian regiments watched the Austrian frontier. Even the popes sent to petty village congregations were generally of far-off origin.

Though power was thus alienated from the people, the bureaucracy, by other agencies rooted deep in human nature, had twined itself around the daily life of society.

Every ambitious man in his profession, as he succeeded, was marked for promotion. Not only to office-holders and soldiers, but to everybody, throughout the whole social fabric, were “chins” or graded ranks given. Here for example is a selection from one of the lists of the Czar’s Christmas announcements:--

Appointed members of the Council of State: Privy Councilor Kabylinski, and Von Kaufman, Senator, Minister of Public Instruction, President of the Supreme Court.

Decorated with the St. Stanislaus Order, First Class: Major-General Hippolyt Grigerasch, Director of the Department of Physics and Electro-technology at the Nicholas Engineer Academy and School.

Decorated with the St. Vladimir Order of the Third Class: Major-General Michael Hahnenfeldt, on the staff of his Imperial Highness the Supreme Commander of Guards in the St. Petersburg Military District.

Valentin Magorski, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Chief of the Veterinary Staff.

Alexander Pomeranzev, Professor of Architecture.

Dimitri Sassiyadke, Governor of Radom.

Michael Mardarjev, Censor of Foreign Papers and Journals.

Advanced to the ranking Chin of actual State Councilor, hereditary “honorable citizen” Constantine Popov, founder and director of the Tea Emporiums.

Raised into hereditary “honorable citizenship” of the 3d gild, the Archangel merchant Emil Brautigam.

Given personal “honorable citizenship,” Vladimir Ritimoun, Proprietor of the Wollner Typographical Establishment; Karl Volter, Captain of the steamer _Emperor Nicholas II_, of the Riga Navigation Co.

When a professor from his books was called up before the highest provincial dignitary to have pinned on his lapel for honorable service to the Empire the Order of St. Stanislaus, it was hard for him not to have a warm sentiment for those who had so signally recognized his talents. When on the document which recorded the promotion of a royal prince to a colonelcy was enrolled the name of a tradesman; when a neighboring doctor was raised his step in civil rank, each felt the touchstone. All who had served well in their respective positions might hope to be on the honor list, and this was the most effective tribute to the weakness, the worth, and the ambition of human nature.

In Russia, as in France under Napoleon’s iron yoke, there was a welcome to every sort of ability, and its elevation to posts of the highest trust. The aristocracy sought for was one of power, not that of a small birth-caste. A fundamental democracy ran through society. Save for a few of the Guards regiments, the army was officered by poor men. The Cossacks’ officers were chosen from among their own people and were state-trained. In the knapsack of every soldier was Skobelov’s baton; in the desk of every chinovnik, Witte’s portfolio.

So stood the bureaucratic edifice, complete in itself. Here and there a popular embellishment was added, perhaps to strengthen, often to conceal; but in grim reality it formed no part of the structure. Thus the Russian Empire finished out the nineteenth century. With the twentieth the system had come to trial for its stewardship.

In the great reckoning are elements both of good and of evil. The liberation of the serfs and all that went with the emancipation stand as a credit. It is a further vast credit that Russia has made, held together, and civilized an empire of over eight and a half million square miles, with a population of over one hundred and forty million souls; that to the internal development of her splendid resources the Government has vigorously set its hand, seeking for her rivers unhampered navigation, for her canals larger passage, for her deserts great irrigation works. Already the Siberian Railway links the Baltic and Pacific; already on the southeast the tracks creep to the threshold of Kashmir, where some four hundred miles separate the Russian lines from those of British India. This gap once crossed, Calcutta becomes but eleven days distant from London. It is still another credit that, despite Slavic limitations and financial loss, in the face of Western invention and competitive leveling, the country of the cheapest telegraph and the cheapest railway rate was until recently not America but Russia. It is a credit that the public land has been put so efficiently and generously at the disposal of the people, that any emigrant expressing a genuine purpose of settling will be given, wherever he may select it in Siberia, a liberal homestead, and he will be conveyed to it over the Trans-Siberian Railway for a sum less than the cost. He is not only allotted his homestead, but he is supplied with seed, grain, tools, and advances for his first years of marketing.

It is again a credit that the governmental attitude to the industrial classes has not been one of oppression. True, work-hours are unrighteously long and certain strikes have been put down arbitrarily. Still the Russian labor laws and arrangements for the settlement of labor difficulties are in many features conspicuously statesmanlike and just. Some years since, a body of Belgian miners, fifty or more, with their families, were transferred from the collieries of the Meuse to the Donetz Basin. Recently these miners, at a meeting of the directors’ board, presented a memorial to this purport: “How happy are we who are no more in Belgium, but who live and work in Russia! No longer must we support the socialistic committee. On the day of pay we put our hands in our pockets and have it for our wives and children.”

The other side of the ledger is, however, not without weighty items. While no system of government can legislate prosperity, the public welfare is rightfully the first test, as it should be the first consideration, of an administration. Despite her immense territories, her vast mineral deposits, her fertile soils, her navigable rivers, her abundant timber, all the natural sources of national wealth, Russia is very poor. The peasants have more than doubled in number since the allotment of communal fields that followed the emancipation, and they are in general want. Vast stretches, whole provinces, are subject to periodic famine. Millions of the people are constantly on the brink of starvation. Manufacturing is, as a rule, desultory, undeveloped, and, in general, unprofitable.

The per-capita wealth of Russia is estimated at but two hundred and seventy-five dollars, as compared to Germany’s seven hundred dollars, France’s eleven hundred and twenty dollars, and England’s twelve hundred and thirty-five dollars. The savings-bank deposits reported for all Russia average but $2.75 per man, while in France they average $20.82, in England $15.00, and in Austria $15.68.