19529
XHE
MAINSPRINGS OF
RUSSIA
BY
MAURICE BARING
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDfNBTJRGH, OTBLIN,
Aim
BY MAURICE BARING.
WHAT I SAW IN RUSSIA . is. ne
"The experiences and impressions of a most accomplished travel-
writer, journeying to the battlefield of Liao-yang and back."
The Pall Ma.ll Gazette.
t The volume is made up from three of the author's earlier books,
and contains those sections which he regards as of permanent
interest. The reader will find that they give a fascinating: account
of modern life in Russia as viewed from various standpoints."
'"
THOMAS NKLSOK AND SONS.
DEDICATION.
To H. G.
MY DEAR H. G.,
I dedicate this book to you in the hope that
you will read it ; for if you do, I shall feel certain
of having at least one reader who will understand
exactly what I have tried to say, however in-
adequate the expression may have been, and
who, at any rate, will not misunderstand me.
Not long ago I was looking on at a play in
London. The audience was, on the whole, of
'**
that kind which the Americans cfall " high-
browed," with a certain sprinkling of the semi-
intelligent and the wholly elegant. Behind me
were sitting a young man and a young lady,
who were discussing intellectual topics suited to
the rarer atmosphere of that interesting theatre.
iv DEDICATION.
Among other subjects, they talked about Mr.
Stephen Grahame's books and articles on Russia.
I do not know if you have read his books; if
not, I advise you to do so. But you probably
know that they deal with the Russian people;
that Mr. Grahame walked on foot from Moscow
to Archangel ; and travelled, as a pilgrim, with
Russian pilgrims to Jerusalem. It is therefore
obvious that he came into close contact with the
Russian people, and that his knowledge was at
first hand and derived from direct experience.
Well, would you believe it, the highly educated
young gentleman who was sitting behind me,
who had read Mr. Grahame's books and articles,
said I could hardly believe my ears, but he
said it that the trouble about Mr. Grahame
was his blind faith in the Russian Bureaucracy.
I confess, when these words caught my ear, I
thought to myself what is the use of writing
books if intelligent people in reading them de-
rive an impression which is the exact opposite
of that which you think you have expressed
with some clearness ?
The young man in question went on to say
that such was Mr. Grahame's fierce faith in
DEDICATION. v
political reaction that he dared to compare a
half-starved Russian peasant with a free Ameri-
can citizen, and here again he revealed fresh
vistas of misapprehension.
I have often had similar experiences myself
since I began to write about Russian things.
I have at various times been accused of being
a revolutionary, a conservative, a liberal,
a fanatical reactionary. But these accusa-
tions have left me indifferent, since, as they
contradict themselves, they cancel out into
nothingness.
As far as the subject of Russia is concerned, I
have always, and only, had one object in view:
to stimulate in others an interest which I have
myself experienced. I know I cannot explain
why it is but I know that between the Russian
and the English peoples there are curious pos-
sibilities of sympathy, curious analogies, and
still more curious differences which complement
one another. I know the Russians and the
English do get on well when they meet and get
to know each other. I know the sympathy I
myself have felt, and do feel, for the Russians is
a sympathy which would, can, and could be felt
vi DEDICATION.
by many of my countrymen. This has been my
whole and sole object in writing about Russia.
I am engaged on one more very short book on
Russian literature, and then I shall drop the
subject for ever. I have said my say, I leave
it to the newer and better writers to say theirs.
But in the meantime, in regard to this book, I
repeat I wish to secure at least one reader who
will understand and who will not misunderstand.
That is why I dedicate this book to you. At
the same time I hope, even if you do not read
it, that it will remind you of the strenuous days
and the Attic nights which we spent together
in St. Petersburg.
Yours ever,
MAURICE BARING.
ST. PETERSBURG,
February 22-March 7, 1914.
PREFACE.
I HAVE endeavoured in this book to provide some
kind of answer to the questions which I found
by experience are generally put by the traveller
who conies to Russia for the first time, and whose
curiosity is stimulated with regard to the way
in which the people live and to the manner of
their government.
I have endeavoured to convey to the reader a
single idea of the nature of the more important
factors in Russian life. I am only too well aware
that what I have to supply in the way of ex-
planation and elucidation is inadequate, incom-
plete, and superficial. My excuse is that the
questions of the average inquirer are, as a rule,
neither profound nor comprehensive ; and that
profound or comprehensive replies, were I capable
of giving them which I am not would be
received neither with . attention nor interest.
viii PREFACE.
They would be like arrows shot Into empty space.
For the average inquirer has neither time nor
inclination for exhaustive inquiry or minute re-
search. He wishes to be told what he wishes to
know in a manner he can understand, and as
briefly as possible. But my hope is that I may
stimulate the interest of the reader in the subject,
and in a manner which may lead him to seek
for more exhaustive information at the fountain-
head, or at richer sources than mine. This is
every day becoming easier.
Some years ago books on Russia which had any
serious value or substantial interest were few and
far between. Lately the interest in Russian affairs
has been stimulated by many causes : by the
coming of Russian artists, singers, and dancers to
England ; by the appearance in the press of valu-
able articles written by Russian authors ; by the
publication of adequate translations from Russian
authors (Mrs. Garnett's translations of Dos-
toievsky, for instance) ; and by several excel-
lent books written by English authors on Russia,
such as the books of Mr. Stephen Grahame deal-
ing with the Russian people, the admirable and en-
cyclopaedic work of Mr. Harold Williams, and, in a
PREFACE. ix
somewhat lighter vein, Mr. Reynold's " My Rus-
sian Year." All these books reveal a standpoint,
a mastery of the subject, that are far removed
from the fantastic, false, and melodramatic con-
coctions that were abundant some years ago.
In calling this book the " Mainsprings " of
Russia, I am conscious of having omitted
several of the most important mainsprings of
Russian life : chief among them its commerce
and industry. The subject is so large that, had I
dealt with it at all, there would have been no room
for anything else in a book of this size. Also,
as far as the actual facts are concerned they are
to be found clearly stated in Dr. Kennard's
excellent " Russian Year Book."
Nor have I attempted to deal with the Army
and the Navy, which I consider to be factors
which are likely to be dealt with by experts,
since they cannot afford to be altogether neglected
by foreigners. There is another subject I have
omitted it is not, it is true, a mainspring of
Russian life ; but it is a sore spot and a question
of burning vital interest I mean the Jewish
question.
In a book as short as this it would be impos-
la
x PREFACE.
sible to devote sufHcieiit space to the matter
without crowding out other things which concern
the greater majority ; but it is most desirable
that competent observers should deal with the
Jewish question in Russia, which at present, as far
as the rest of Europe is concerned, is almost
entirely handled either by bitter Aiiti- Semites,
or by those who are the actors in the drama it-
self. And there is no question in Modern Russia
which is fraught with more far-reaching effects,
and probably none which is at present more
difficult of solution.
My thanks are due to A. J. Halpern of the
Russian Bar for his valuable help in regard to the
chapter on " Justice," to Mr. Dimitriev-Mamonov,
and to many other Russian friends for their criti-
cism and advice.
CONTENTS.
I. RETROSPECT IS
II. THE RUSSIAN PEASANT 31
III. THE MOBILITY 72
IV. THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE 97
V. CAUSES OF DISCONTENT 129
VI THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN . a , 155
VII. THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS . , 183
VIII. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH . , 16
IX. EDUCATION ...... 246
X. JUSTICE ....... 269
XI. THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA . 299
THE MAINSPRINGS OF
RUSSIA.
CHAPTER I.
RETROSPECT.
I SHOULD like to set the reader's mind at
* rest at once. I am not going to ask him to
read a historical treatise on the origins of the
Russian people, nor am I going to lead him into
the obscure pathways and dim shadows of the
remote past.
Firstly, even if I wished to do so, I have not
the necessary erudition, nor the requisite powers
-of learned exposition. Secondly, the origin of
the Russian people is a debatable question ; the
theories with regard to it are constantly chang-
ing, and vary with the fickle fashion of the day ;
the orthodox views of forty , of thirty, of twenty
years ago are now said to be old-fashioned ; and
18
14 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the orthodox views of to-day will probably be
considered old-fashioned before very long. The
reason being that all such views are highly con-
jectural, and that very little is known about the
shifting tides, eddies, and currents in the im-
measurably far-off floods of races and tribes out
of which the Russian people emerged.
Thirdly, whenever I open a book that begins
with a historical retrospect, I feel that it is the
reader's duty to skip that chapter.
Why, then, write anything o. the kind ? The
answer is that I am writing on the assumption
that the reader is an average reader, and that if
he has bought or borrowed a book about Russia,
he will be sufficiently interested in the subject
to be able to stand a few simple facts to begin
with, even if they are historical. I also assume
that, if he has bought or borrowed this book,
and has not gone to a public library to get a
more learned book, he is not a specialist that
is to say, he knows as much or as little as the
average Englishman knows about Russia who
has received an average English education, who
reads The Times, and takes a moderate but in-
telligent interest in international politics and
RETROSPECT. 15
foreign countries, and who has perhaps read one
or two standard books on Russia, and not only
My Official Wife by Savage, Michael Strogoff by
Jules Verne, and all that picturesque tribe of
books called either Red Russia, Scarlet Russia,
Crimson Russia, Free Russia, the Real Russia,
Russia as she is, or Russia as she isn't.
There is also another class of reader who may
take up the book, also an average reader, with
an average education,, but whose knowledge of
Russia is of a different and wider kind the
reader of translations of Russian novels, the
devotee of Tolstoy and Turgeniev and Gorky;
the man or woman it is generally a Woman who
has seen translations of Chekhov's plays at the
Stage Society, and who is a fervent admirer of the
Russian ballet. He or she is interested in Russia,
but has never been there ; and although familiar
with Russian novels and plays, he or she is more
inclined to form an opinion of the Russian people
on data derived from English novels on Russian
life than from Russian novels on Russian life.
I have often come across cases of this kind
I mean people who do not appear to realize
that the intensely realistic Russian fiction that
16 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
they so much admire probably has some basis
and counterpart in real life, and who, in spite
of this documentary evidence with regard to
Russian life, with which they are familiar, still
continue to form a picture of Russian life based
on English fiction such as is written by English
journalists and novelists.
Such readers, my experience is, if they come
across certain historical facts about Russia in
the past or the present, meet them with a shock
of surprise and often with a smile of incredulity.
It is for the benefit of the average reader of
every kind that I want to try and make a few,
a very few, historical facts clear, which I think
throw light on any attempt to deal with any
aspects of Russian life. If the reader knows
them too well already, he will forgive me and
skip, proud of his superior knowledge ; if he
disbelieves them, he can dispute them, and
prove me wrong.
My first fact is geographical. It is that
Russia is a flat country, without an indented
seacoast, and without sharp mountain ranges.
It is not only flat but uniform. Owing to this,
the expansion of the Russian people took place
RETROSPECT. 17
on land. The Russians were, and are, constantly
emigrating, at first from south to north, and
afterwards from west to east. Russia is there-
fore a country of colonists.
I remember once saying this to a man to whom
the statement evidently came as a shock of sur-
prise, because he replied, " Really, I thought
Russia was an autocracy."
Now, who are these colonists ? Who are the
Russians, in fact? I wonder if one set this
question to all the schoolboys and under-
graduates, what the most prevalent answer
would be. I believe it would be something like
this : that the Russian was a man got up like
a European except in winter, but that if you
scratched him you would find a Tartar,, and
that a Tartar was a man with a yellow skin and
a snub nose. I think you might also often get
the answer that Russians were Slavs ; but that
if you asked what a Slav is, you would be told
he was a kind of Tartar.
In Russia at the present day you will find
representatives of every kind of race and every
kind of creed Buriats who worship Buddha,
and disciples of the late Lord Radstock and
18 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
every kind of language ; but out of all these,
three dominant races played a part in Russian
history the Finns, the Tartars, and the Slavs.
The Slavs got the best of it. They absorbed the
Finns and ousted the Tartars.
So we remain face to face with the question,
What are the Slavs ? As to how, why, whence,
and when the Slavs came to Russia hundreds of
books have been written, and the solution of
the problem is, I believe, like that of many
historical questions, a matter of fashion.
One solid fact, however, rises before our
grateful comprehension. The Slavs are a white
people like the Latins, the Celts, and the Ger-
mans ; they have nothing in common with any-
thing Tartar, Mongol, or Semitic ; and there are
traces of them having been in Southern Europe
on the banks of the Vistula and of the Dnieper
from time immemorial.
Having got to Russia a long time ago, they
overran the country and absorbed it.
They began in the south, the capital being
Kiev, and in the eleventh century Russia was
a part of the political sj^stem of Europe.
Russia, in the days before William the Con-
RETROSPECT. 19
queror in the days of Harold, who was related
to one of the rulers of Kiev, Yaroslav was not
more backward than France or England were
at that time, and would probably have de-
veloped in the same manner as the other European
countries had it not been for an unfortunate
interruption in the shape of a Mongol or Tartar
invasion.
From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century
Russia was under the dominion of the Mongols.
The Slavs, as they gradually expanded and
absorbed Russia, fell into two natural divisions :
the Great Russians and the Little Russians,,
which correspond to the north and the south.
When the Pviongol invasion came about, the
Little Russians were cut off from the Great
Russians.
The Great Russians continued to expand
northward, southward, and eastward. They were
engaged in a perpetual struggle against the East.
They acted as a buffer for Europe against the
East ; and in the sixteenth century they finally
got rid of the Eastern yoke altogether and
drove them out of the country.
This is the big fact I have been leading up
20 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
to : Russia saved Western Europe from being
overrun by hordes of barbarians.
" There is/ 5 writes the late Mr. Stead, in the
introduction to the translation of Labaume's
narrative of Napoleon's campaign, " a strange
and pestilent habit among some Englishmen of
ignoring all the great services which Russia
has rendered to the cause of human progress
and the liberty of nations."
That Russia acted as a buffer against the
barbarian invasion from the East is the first
and not the least of these services.
In the sixteenth century the Great Russia was
a kingdom centralized in Moscow, chiefly engaged
in fighting her neighbours, the most powerful
of which was Poland, and one of the most ener-
getic and singular of her rulers, Ivan the Terrible,
began to negotiate with the West. Ivan, in
fact, wished to marry Queen Elizabeth ; but
Western Europe was not vitally affected by
Russia until the appearance on the stage of the
world of that extraordinary monarch, and still
more extraordinary man, called Peter the Great.
Peter the Great not only conceived and
executed the idea of opening in Russia a window
RETROSPECT. 21
on to the West, but he restored to Russia her
place among European nations the place she had
occupied in the eleventh century, and which she -
had lost owing to the Mongol invasion.
It was no abnormal or unnatural mission
that Peter the Great set out to accomplish,
otherwise his work would have died with him.
He carried Russia along the natural road of her
career. Only, being a man of abnormal genius,
he gave to Russia a violent electric shock ; he
accelerated to an extent, which seems little short
of miraculous, the natural progress of the country.
He accomplished in a few years the work of many
generations. " Pierre I er ," says Montesquieu,
66 donnait les moeurs et les rnanieres de PEurope
a une nation de FEurope." He shifted the
capital of the country, built St. Petersburg
on a swamp, created an army, a fleet, en-
rolled quantities of foreigners into the service of
Russia. He sketched the outlines of a gigantic
plan, which still remains to be filled in to this day.
The violence and fury with which he compelled
a reluctant people to adopt his changes had,
of course, its drawbacks. A nation has to pay
for a man of genius, even when he is working
23 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA,
on the right lines, for what is for the good o!
his country, and for what is, in the long run, in
accordance with its national spirit.
Peter the Great was successful, but the methods
which he had to employ in order to bring about
his swift and gigantic changes were not without
regrettable results, which are still visible in the
machinery of Russian administration and in
the nature of many Russian institutions. He
found Russia a sleepy kingdom encrusted with
Oriental habit and Byzantine tradition ; he
hacked off that crust with an axe, and he left
Russia open to the influences of Europe, and
ready to value the place which was her due
amongst the nations of Europe.
His work was carried on by Catherine II. on
the same lines, and further. She opened edu-
cated Russia to European ideas; she civilized
Russia intellectually ; and Russia, under her
guidance, took a leading part in the European
Concert.
But it was later that Russia was destined to
play a part which vitally affected every nation
of Western Europe. This was in 1812. In
1812 Russia broke up the power of Napoleon.
RETROSPECT. 23
" Leipzig and Waterloo were but the corol-
laries/ 5 writes Mr. Stead, " of a solved problem. 55
" It is an Incontestable fact/' writes M. Ram-
baud, the French historian of Russia, " that of
all the allies, Russia showed herself the least
grasping. It was she who had given the signal
for the struggle against Napoleon, and had
shown most perseverance in pursuit of the
common end. Without her example the states
of Europe would never have dreamed of arming
against him. Her skilful leniency towards France
finished the work begun by the war."
So far, all these facts I have mentioned concern
the relations of Russia to Europe ; they neces-
sarily reacted on the internal conditions of the
country.
The fact that Russia was playing an important
part abroad meant that the means by which this
part could be played had to be furnished at
home, and the finding of such means affected
the administration of the country and the whole
of its population.
In order that Russia should be able to play
a part in Europe, the first thing that was neces-
sary was an army.
24 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
Peter the Great made an army (and a fleet).
How did he do it ? Where did the officers and
men come from ?
When Peter the Great came to the throne,
the organization of the State was patriarchal.
There was practically no standing army except
a kind of corps of janissaries, the streltsy (which
he destroyed). There were two classes : the
nobility and the peasants. The nobility held
the land and the peasants tilled it ; but the
nobility held the land on one condition only,
and that was that they should render military
service in their own person when it was
necessary.
The nobles were at the same time landowners
and servants of the State, but they were
landowners only on condition of being State
servants.
The peasants belonged to the land ; they were
attached to the land and could not be separated
from it. This is what serfdom meant in Russia.
Serfdom was not an immemorial institution in
Russia. It was not a relic of paganism or
barbarism ; it was founded neither on conquest,
nor on the habit of turning the captives made
RETROSPECT. 25
in inter-tribal wars into slaves, nor on a differ-
ence of race or colour ; and unless this be under-
stood, unless the true nature of this serfdom
be realized, it is impossible to understand the
part which the Russian peasantry play in the
Russian nation.
Briefly, serfdom came about thus. The
peasants cultivated the land which the monarch
conceded to the nobles as a salary or means of
subsistence in return for military service. But
up till about the end of the sixteenth century the
peasants could choose and change their masters,
and pass from one estate to another. They
used, in fact, to exercise their right of transfer
once a year, on St. George's Day.
At the end of the sixteenth century labour
was precious and rare, and eagerly sought after
by the nobles. The peasants were naturally in-
clined to emigrate, and the more adventurous
were attracted towards the regions of the Don,
the Kama, the Volga, and Siberia, and they thus
avoided paying taxes. Moreover, the larger
landed proprietors attracted the peasants to
their estates to the detriment of the smaller landed
proprietors. The primitive fiscal system of that
6 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
day suffered from all this, and as a remedy to
this state of things, in order to guarantee and
regularize the financial and military supplies of
the State, the peasant was attached to the soil.
In 1593, in the reign of Feodor, the son of Ivan
the Terrible, and owing to the initiative of
Boris Godonnov, the right of transfer from
one estate to another was first temporarily taken
away from the peasant. The prohibition to
transfer their service on this date was renewed
by several sovereigns, and was finally crystallized
in the law of the country. Once attached to the
soil the peasant gradually lost his civil rights
and became the chattel of the proprietor ; thus
what began by being a simple police measure
ended by becoming organized slavery. Such
was the state of things when Peter the Great
came to the throne- The peasant was attached
to the soil, the nobility were the army, for when
an army was needed they had to fight themselves
and to supply so many men into the bargain.
Peter the Great wanted a standing army ;
and in order to get one, and at the same time
to carry on the administration of the country,
he created, or rather enlarged, the system of
RETROSPECT. 27
universal service. Every single Russian became
a public servant. Henceforward it became obli-
gatory for the noble to serve the State either in
the military or the civil service always, and
not only in times of war. Moreover, in order
to be an officer he had to pass an examination,
and if he failed to pass it he had to serve as a
private soldier. Further, in order to get enough
soldiers, a system of conscription was intro-
duced ; that is to say, in every place, out of so
many thousand men, so many were taken.
Again, the nobility ceased to be a closed caste
depending on hereditary titles ; it became a
class of State servants, and was thrown open to
all. Rank depended on service. Instead of
obtaining a post because you were a noble, you
became a noble for having attained by service to
such and such a post. Rank in service became
the only rank. Thus Peter the Great, in order
to create a standing army, created a standing
civil service ; he destroyed the principle of
hereditary aristocracy ; and both branches of
the universal service he created, military and
civil, were divided into its fourteen grades or
tchins, hence the word tchinnovnik, the ordi-
28 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
nary Russian word for official. Again, as he was
constantly going to war, and constantly needed
men, and the nobility had to supply so many
men from their land, he tightened the bonds
which attached the peasants to the soil. He
strengthened the system of serfdom; and the
rulers who succeeded him carried on the same
policy, because the revenue depended on the
State being administered by the landed gentry,
which gradually ceased to be an aristocratic
caste, and kept on increasing in size, until towards
the end of the reign of Catherine II., when it had
grown to be a vast bureaucracy.
It is clear that, if the great majority of the
landed proprietors were engaged in administra-
ting the country, they would have less and less
time to look after their estates after the old
patriarchal fashion; and it is also clear that as
civilization progressed everything in the machin-
ery of the State necessarily increased in size.
Men were needed to deal with the more com-
plicated machinery; with the administration
of finances, of justice, and of the police. The
men who filled all the new posts created by the
ever-increasing complication of the adminis-
RETBOSPECT. 29
tration of the State were the former landed pro-
prietors, the actual officials. The consequence
was they ceased to be able to look after their
land. This being so, there was no defence left
against the growing moral sentiment which had
risen against serf dom, namely ; the moral prin-
ciple that it was wrong that peasants should
be in the position of cattle and chattels. This
sentiment was expressed more than once by
the peasants themselves in mutinies. It was
expressed from the outside by all that was
enlightened in the country.
The Emperor Alexander I. took the first steps
towards the great reform by liberating the
serfs in the Baltic provinces. It is said that his
brother, the Emperor Nicholas, on his death-
bed left the execution of the reform as a solemn
legacy to his son and successor, Alexander II.
The Crimean War was the actual shock which
brought the reform about. Literature was a
powerful factor in pressing it on. Writers of
genius, such as Gogol and Turgeniev, by their
descriptions; publicists, such as Samarin and
Herzen, by their pleading, played a large part in
accelerating its advent. They gave expression
SO THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
to what was the universal and imperative
opinion of thinking Russia, so that the reform
when it came about, and when the serfs were
liberated in 1861, was the ^ork of the nation
as well as of the Emperor.
This retrospect has brought us to the year
1861. Since then many momentous things have
happened to Russia. A war; the inauguration
of a system of local self-government; another
war; and if not a revolution, a revolutionary
movement, a long and vital crisis, out of which
rose the beginnings of popular representation.
But these events, in so far as they deal with
Russian life as it is to-day, will be dealt with
in the subsequent chapters.
CHAPTER n.
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT.
Russian peasant is the most important
factor in Russian life. He constitutes the
majority of the nation. The peasant not only
tills the arable land, but he owns the greater
part of it. This is a fact which is practically
unknown in England. There was once an an-
archist Russian who gave a lecture to the poor
in the East End of London on the wrongs of the
Russian people. In the course of the lecture
he declared with fervent indignation that no
peasant in Russia could own more than so
many acres of land. Upon which the audience
cried " Shame ! " The irony of this is piercing
when one reflects that not one member of that
audience had ever owned, or could ever in his
wildest dreams look forward to owning, a particle
of arable soil.
32 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
The average reader, who has some vague no-
tions of Russia, probably thinks of the Russian
peasant as a serf, and as such a scarcely civilized
savage a little better than a beast. It has
already been mentioned in the preceding chapter
that serfdom in Russia was not a slavery resulting
from conquest or difference in race and colour,
but the outcome of economic conditions. Serf-
dom was a measure by which the peasant, who
had a tendency to wander, was made fast to
the land, because if he wandered the State was
threatened with economic ruin ; moral slavery,
and the ownership of the peasant by the land-
owner, were the ultimate results of this economic
measure. When the legislation which ultimately
produced serfdom was framed, it was not re-
garded by those who framed it as a permanent
solution of the relations between landowner and
peasant, but only as a temporary makeshift.
The result namely, slavery was unforeseen.
Now, the peasants never, through nearly two
centuries of slavery, lost sight of the fact that
this legislation was only a temporary makeshift,
a stroke of opportunism. Moreover, they kept
fast hold of the idea that the land was theirs;
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 33
that the land belonged to the people who tilled
it ; and that if for a time it was in the hands of
landowners., that was because the emperor was
obliged to lend it to the landowners, in order
to pay them for such military service which
the destinies of the fatherland rendered indis-
pensable.
In 1861 came the emancipation of the serfs,
and this emancipation did not merely mean
the end of the personal and moral slavery of the
peasant, but something far more important also
namely, that a portion of the land which the
peasant considered to be his by right was re-
stored to him. The emancipation of the serfs
was an act of State expropriation. More than
130,000,000 desiatines of land (350,964,187 acres)
passed from the hands of the landowners into
the hands of the peasants for ever. On an aver-
age each peasant received from 8 J to 11 acres ; in
the north he might receive more, in the south less.
The nobility that is to say, the landowners
were paid down by the Government for the land
they had given up ; the peasants had to pay
back the State in instalments, over a period of
more than fifty years. The State acted as
34 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
banker to both parties, and not only paid the
landowners ready money, but advanced the
money to the peasants. The peasant had to
pay back the money advanced to him at an
interest of six per cent, over a period of forty-
nine years, until the year 1910.
In 1907 these payments were cancelled.
The peasants, after the emancipation, were
to continue to own the land in common, as they
had always done before.
In the days of serfdom every landowner pos-
sessed so much land, and the serfs or, as they
were called, " the souls " who belonged to it.
After the emancipation, each batch of serfs
belonging to each separate owner became a
separate and independent community, which
owned land in common. The land which was
thus owned in common could not be redistributed
more than once every twelve years, and even
then only if two-thirds of the village assembly
voted for redistribution. A similar majority
was necessary before any of the common land
could become private property.
All the land which was fit for cultivation was
divided amongst the peasants, according to the
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 35
number of taxed members in each household.
But as the nature of the soil varied with its situa-
tion, and was richer in one place than another,
or was more or less advantageous owing to
other reasons say its proximity or distance
from the village instead of receiving all his share
of the land in one place, each taxed member in
every household received so many strips of land
in different places, so that the division might be
fair.
Supposing the land to be divided amongst
Tom, Dick, and Harry was good in some parts,
bad in another, and indifferent in a third, and
each was to receive an acre : Tom would receive
a third in the good part, a third in the bad part,
and a third in the indifferent part, and Dick
and Harry would fare likewise. When the land
was redistributed, the share received by each
household varied as that household increased
or diminished in numbers.
From 1861, the year of the emancipation,
until 1904, the year of the Russo-Japanese War,
the only change of importance in the peasant
system of l#nd tenure was made in the reign of
Alexander III, A clause was introduced into
36 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the legislation on peasant land tenure which
made it impossible for the peasant to buy himself
out of the Commune. This clause was added in
1890. It was done because the Government at
this period looked on the peasants as a safe
conservative element, and considered that com-
munal ownership of land fostered conservatism.
During all this period agriculture had not im-
proved, but had deteriorated. Half the land-
owners in Russia disappeared, and their place was
taken by the peasants or by the merchants.
The remaining landowners either let their land
to the peasants, or tried (and for the most part
failed) to farm it rationally.
In 1904 came political unrest and universal
political discontent. And amongst the peasants
this discontent was expressed by one formula,
and one formula alone ct Give us more land."
Agrarian riots took place all over Russia, and
landowners' houses were burnt and their cattle
destroyed.
Universal expropriation was brought forward
as a political measure, but economically it was
felt by those who had faced the question prac-
tically to be no remedy., except in regard to the
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 37
land which was let by the landowners to the
peasants.
Nevertheless, something had to be done. All
over Russia every landowner sold a certain
amount of land to the peasants, and a great part
of the land which had been hitherto let to the
peasants, and not farmed by the landowner
himself, became the peasants' property. In. 1905,
roughly speaking, twenty-five per cent, of the
amount of land still belonging to landowners
passed into the hands of the peasants.
In 1910 another great change came about.
Owing to a law, drawn up at the initiative of
P. A. Stolypin, the peasant obtained the right
of leaving the Commune, and of converting
his share of the land into his individual and
permanent property. He could, moreover, ex-
change his separated strips of land for a corre-
sponding amount of land which should be as far
as possible all in one place. And if he wished
to do this, and to start a farm, he could receive
financial assistance from the State.
On paper, nothing could be more satisfactory,
the situation seeming to be this that the peasant
is able to leave the Commune if he wishes and
88 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
become an independent peasant proprietor, but
he is not compelled to do so. The idea was
expressed at the time of the emancipation of the
serfs by the men who drafted the law of reform,
that it was desirable to leave the question of
communal tenure to settle itself. And the same
idea was reasserted by the Russian ministry,
when the Bill on peasant land tenure was intro-
duced into the Duma namely, that it would
be wrong either to bolster up the" Commune
artificially, or to destroy it, and that the right
course was to leave the population itself free to
settle in every individual case whether it wishes
to remain in the Commune or not.
Practically this is not what has happened.
Practically, both owing to certain clauses in the
law itself, and owing to the manner of its appli-
cation, pressure has been put on the peasants
to leave the Commune. The law works ad-
vantageously for those who leave the Commune,
disadvantageously for those who wish to remain
in the Commune. To explain how this happens
would entail going into many technical points.
To those who are interested in this subject, I
would recommend an article in The Russian
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 39
Review of November 1912, by Alexander
Manuilov, a member of the Russian Council of
Empire.
But if it is too lengthy a task to explain how
this is so, it is easy in a few sentences to explain
why this is so.
The law on land tenure was made by the
bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has always
treated the peasant question from a political
point of view. When the communal system
seemed to lead to conservatism, the bureaucracy
backed up the communal system (this was so.,
as I have already said, in the reign of Alexan-
der III., and indeed made it impossible for the
peasant to leave the Commune) ; when after
1904 the communal system seemed to encourage
socialistic ideas, or to be made a basis for social-
istic ideas, the bureaucracy backed up individual
land tenure. Moreover, in the law itself and in
the manner of its application the minority (those
who wish to leave the Commune) are backed
up at the expense of the majority, because by
so doing the Government considered they were
creating good sound conservative voters.
In spite of this pressure, and perhaps because
40 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
of it (although in some parts of Russia they
have displayed eagerness to become the per-
manent owners of their respective strips of
land), up till 1910, only four per cent, of the
peasantry availed themselves of the right to ex-
change their strips for an allotment in one place ;
and up till January 1, 1912, the Communes
who petitioned for deeds numbered only 4,656;
and out of 45,994 Communes, only 174,193
petitions were forthcoming, which shows a
proportion of one in every three or four.
It is, of course, too soon to generalize on the
result of such recent legislation. Comparisons
and analogies with similar legislation in other
countries such as Ireland, for instance would
be misleading, for the existence of the Commune
is peculiar in Russia. At the present moment
the Russian peasant owns land. He either
owns strips in the land belonging to the Com-
mune, shares which are liable to periodical redis-
tribution, or else he has become the permanent
owner of his strips, or else he has exchanged
them for an allotment and started a farm.
At the present moment the peasants own by
far the greater part of the arable land in Russia,
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 41
and every family owns in arable land at least six
acres ; and on an average in the densely popu-
lated districts, at least 10 acres. In the more
thinly populated districts of the north and
south., the average increases.
It is clear then that the peasant is an im-
portant unit, the most important unit in the
nation. It is well then to look into the nature
of this important unit, and to see what kind of
being he is, and what are the mainsprings of his
conduct.
At the outset there probably exists certain
preconceived notions which it is as well to get
rid of at once.
. The first of these is that there is anything ser-
vile about the Russian peasant because during
two centuries he endured serfdom. " In spite
of the period of serfdom through which he has
passed/' writes Sir Charles Eliot in his Turkey
in Europe and Sir Charles Eliot possesses
first-hand knowledge of Russia " the Russian
muzhik is not servile ; he thinks of God and the
Tsar in one category, and of the rest of the world
as more or less equal in another. 5 '
And Dostoievsky, in writing about Pushkin,
2a
42 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
says that one of this poet's chief claims to great-
ness is that he recognized the intrinsic quality
of self-respect in the Russian people, which they
proved by the manly dignity of their behaviour
when they were liberated from serfdom.
The Russian people, in spite of centuries of
serfdom, with the exception of individual in-
stances, were not and never have been slaves.
So much, I think, can be stated without fear
of contradiction or controversy. Before going
any further I want to clear the ground a little.
The reader must be prepared to find, not only in
foreign books about Russia, but in Russian
books about Russia, and to meet with in con-
versation not only from foreigners who have
travelled and lived in Russia, but in conver-
sation with the Russians themselves, widelv
divergent and contradictory ideas and opinions
with regard to the nature of the Russian peasant,
He will hear on one side that he is intelligent,
on the other that he is crassly obtuse. On the
one hand that he is humane, on the other hand
that he is brutal. He will find in Russian
literature that by some writers he is exalted as
the salt of the earth and the solution of life,
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 43
and that by others he is decried as a hopeless,
inert mass of ignorance and prejudices. M.
Leroy Beaulieu in his Empire des Tsars tells a
story of how once, when he was travelling on the
Volga, a " lady said to him, ' How can you
bother yourself about our muzhik ? he is a brute,
out of which nobody will ever be able to make
a man ; ' and how on the same day a landed
proprietor said to him, c I consider the con-
tadino of North Italy to be the most intelligent
peasant in Europe, but our muzhik could give
him points. 3 "
Further, most Russians will tell you that
the peasant will rarely give himself away, and
that to the outside observer of another class he
probably is, and will always remain, a sealed
book. The net result of all this is that readers
may justly say to me, u And what can you
know about the subject ? " And it is to this
very question that I think I owe some sort of
reply before continuing to say anything else
about the nature of the Russian peasant.
My claims to be in a position to say certain
things whicti I have got first hand about the
Russian peasant are not, it is true, great ; but I
44 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
believe them to exist. They do not rest on
what is called erudition. I am no expert in the
difficult problems, economic and others, which
are connected with the life of the Russian peas-
antry ; but it so happens that I have been thrown
together, so to speak, with the Russian peasant
under peculiar circumstances. During the years
I have spent in Russia I have made friends with
peasants in various places, and have often in
travelling had much talk and intercourse with
them. But it is not chiefly on that that I base
my observations it is on this : that being in
Manchuria during the greater part of the Russo-
Japanese War, as I drifted about from one part
of the army to another I was thrown together
with the Russian soldier, who is a peasant,
often on terms of absolute equality ; that is to
say, I was to him no longer a barin (one of the
upper classes), but a kind of camp follower, of
which there were multitudes in Manchuria during
the war a man who, in their eyes, had a barin
himself. On one occasion I was asked where
my barin (master) was, and when I said I was my
own barin, the peasant who was talking to me
said he thought I was just a common man.
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. , 45
Thus on many occasions I met, travelled with,
and bivouacked with soldiers on their own
footing, and shared their food, lodging, and
talk on equal 'terms. And it was this experience
which gave me glimpses into things, and an
insight into certain manners and customs, which
I should otherwise have ignored. The know-
ledge that I thus gleaned was confirmed to me
by my subsequent travel in Russia, especially
by journeys which I sometimes made in third-
class carriages. But all this would not be in
itself sufficient to give me any right to talk about
the Russian peasant. All this would have given
me the material, but not the means of using it.
I base my claim to right of using it on one simple
fact : I like the Russian peasant very much.
In speaking of Pushkin's love of the Russian
peasant, Dostoievsky says : " Do not love me
but love mine (that is to say, love what I love).
That is what the people says when it wishes to
test the sincerity of your love. Every member
of the gentry, especially if he is humane and
enlightened, can love, that is to say, sympathize
with the people on account of its want, poverty,
and suffering. But what the people needs is
46 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
not that you should love it for its. sufferings,
but for itself ; and what does c love it for itself 3
signify ? If you love what I love, honour
what I honour. That is what it means,, and that
is what the people will answer to in you ; and
if it be otherwise, the man of the people will
never count you as his own, however great your
distress may be on his account."
Well, in saying that I like the Russian peasant
very much, I mean that I honour what he honours,
and his way of looking at life ; his standards of
right and wrong seem to me the sound and true.
It is for this reason that, in afl hu&dSty? "f
claim the right of deducing certain statements
from the experience that I have had amongst the
Russian people, and in laying them before the
English reader.
Now as to the chief characteristics of the
Russian peasant. In the first place, and most
important of all, he is intensely religious, and his
religion is based on common sense.
44 Mysticism," Mr. Chesterton once wrote,
46 was with Carlyle, as with all its genuine pro-
fessors, only a transcendent form of common
sense* Mysticism and common sense alike con-
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 47
sist in a sense of the dominance of certain truths
which cannot be formally demonstrated. 53
In this sense the Russian peasant is a mystic.
His religion does not come to him through books
or study or spiritual sciences, but it is the out-
come of his experience, and of a very hard and
bitter experience. The first and cardinal point
of the peasant's whole outlook on life is that he
believes in God, and that he sees the will of God
in all things, and that he regards a man who
disbelieves in God as something abnormal, and
as something not only abnormal but silly. He
believes in God because it seems to him non-
sensical not to do so.
It would be easy to call as witnesses on this
point a host of the most famous names in Russian
literature. But the objection might be made
(a false objection in my opinion, but still it
might be made) that writers and poets idealize
reality, and see in others what they feel in them-
selves or what they want to see ; so from Rus-
sian literature I will only call one witness, and
that is N. Garin, an engineer, who bought a
property in the country and devoted many
years solely to farming it, and was thus brought
48 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
into daily constant and intimate touch and com-
munication with the peasants.
He begins relating his experiences thus : " By
my conversations and intercourse with the
peasants I could not help becoming acquainted
with their inner life. As I got to know them I
was struck on the one hand by their strength,
patience, endurance, and by an inflexibility which
attained to greatness, which made it easy to under-
stand how the kingdom of Russia had come to
be. On the other hand, I met with obduracy,
routine, and a dull hostility to every innovation,
which made it easy to understand why the Rus-
sian peasant lives so miserably. Two brothers
lived in a village. One was married and the
other was a bachelor. The married brother
has five children and a wife, but is himself the
only bread-winner ; the unmarried brother lives
in the family, and helps in the work with all his
might, but he is old and ill. The married
brother falls sick and dies. The old man is left
with the family on his hands ; he sets about to
support it with the slender strength at his dis-
posal. There are no savings, nothing put by.
In the cottage half-naked children are running
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 49
about, all with colds ; they are crying ; the
cottage is cold, the atmosphere is foul, the calf
squeals, the dead man is lying on the shelf, and
on the face of the old man there is an expres-
sion of calm, as if all that were quite natural
and had to be so.
" ' It will be hard for you to feed eight mouths
all by yourself ? ' I ask,
" f And God ? ' he answered.
" God is all. Starvation is beckoning through
the half-broken little window of the rotting house ;
the last bread-winner dies ; there is a heap of
children ; the sister-in-law (the only woman) is
sick ; there is no money for the funeral ; and he,
being questioned as to his lot, answers, c And
God ? ' And you feel something inexpressibly
strong, unconquerable, and great."
I will supplement this story with a little piece
of first-hand evidence which I gathered myself.
This is only one instance out of a great many
which I have come across in the course of my
various sojourns in Russia.
It was in a small provincial town some years ago,
in the winter. I was walking late in the evening
down one of the larger streets. It had been
50 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
thawing, and the streets and the pavements were
sloshy. It was dark. Just as I was reaching a
street corner which faced a large open place, I
became aware of the sound of muffled, persistent
sobs. I looked round, and I saw sitting on the
pavement, with his back to the wall, a little
boy, a peasant's child, who was softly crying
his eyes out. He was sobbing slowly, not loudly,
but persistently ; not whining, or crying in the
kind of way children cry when they fall down or
quarrel, but he seemed to be sobbing out of the
fullness of his little heart. He was not trying
to attract attention, nor did he pay attention
to me or to any one else. He seemed quite
unconscious of the surrounding world, and
plunged in his own grief. I stopped and asked
him what was the matter. He answered that
his father had sent him to the town to buy
something (I forget what it was), and had given
him the money, and that the money had been
taken away from him. It was quite a small sum.
He was afraid to go home. I at once gave him
the money, and the little boy stood up, dried his
eyes, and crossed himself. Then, without a word,
he went home. He thanked God: it was not
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 51
necessary to thank any one else. And I never
saw anything like the expression of gratitude on
his face as he crossed himself ; but to me he did
not say one word. What was the use ? It was
God who had come to his rescue, not I; you
might just as well thank the violin after a
concert for the beauty of the music.
This is only the story of a child ; but the child
in Russia, just as anywhere else, is father of
the man.
It is difficult to bring home to the average
Englishman the way in which religion enters
into the daily life of the Russians, and especially
into the daily life of the peasants* How often
have I heard it said, how often have I read in
newspapers, of the dark superstition into which
the Russian people is plunged ! If it be super-
stitious to regard religion not as a rather dis-
agreeable episode belonging exclusively to Sunday,
then the Russian peasant is superstitious indeed.
If it be superstitious to cherish no mauvaise
honte with regard to religion, not to be ashamed
of talking about God as a matter of fact, of
saying one's prayers in public, of going to Mass
on Sundays and holidays, of fasting during
52 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
Lent and othei seasons of merrymaking at
Easter, of crossing yourself before meals, of in-
voking the Saints, of revering images and
relics, then the Russian peasant is superstitious
indeed. But you must not put down such super-
stition to ignorance, for it has been shared by men
such as Saint Augustine, Sir Thomas More, Lord
Acton, and Pasteur none of them what you
would call ignorant men.
Sometimes the traveller will note the fact that
the Russian peasant will prostrate himself over
and over again before an image, or cross himself
over and over again mechanically. He will
say the thing is an idle form that has no spiritual
significance. He will be wrong. The Russian
peasant fulfills the form and ritual of his re-
ligion as a matter of course. He is not more
superstitious in the fulfilling of them than an
Englishman is superstitious when he uncovers
his head before the colours of a regiment. In
the case of a Russian peasant his meticulous
observance of ritual and form is just as much a
matter of course to him, it is just as much based
on common sense as that inflexible belief in
God and the working and will of Providence
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 53
which Garin so pointedly illustrates in the
passage I have quoted above.
The Russian peasant sees things in their true
proportion. He believes in God, as a matter of
course, because it is plain to him that God
exists. He goes to church and observes the for-
malities of his religion because it is plain to him
that is the right thing to do, just as it is plain
to the ordinary English citizen that it is right to
stand up when "God save the King" is being sung.
The Russian peasant may be, and can be, and
often is, as superstitious as you like about other
things, but his superstition does not proceed
from his religion. His superstitions are likewise
a matter of tradition ; he believes in the domovoi.
for instance, the spirit that inhabits houses,
well known once to the English peasantry, under
the name of the hobgoblin; Milton calls him
the drudging goblin :
" And lie by Friar's lantern led
Tells how the drudging goblin sweat
To earn the cream bowl duly set,
When in one night, ere glimpse of man,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
That ten day labourers could not end,
Then lies him down, the lubber-fiend,
54 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
And, stretched out all the chimney's length,
Basks at the fire his hairy strength,
And crop-full, out of doors he flings,
Ere the first cock his matin rings."
The domovoi in Russia is merely supposed
to inhabit houses. I do not think he is ever
suspected of working. He is good-natured but
capricious. Each house has its goblin. He sits
in the corner underground. If you move from
one house to another you must give notice to
the goblin and summon him to come with you.
If you forget to do this, the goblin will be offended,
and stay where he is left, and show marked
hostility to the domovoi brought by a new tenant.
The two goblins will fight ; china and furniture
will be broken ; and this will go on until the first
householder comes and invites the goblin to his
new house. Then everything will be all right
once more.
Garin says that he once said to a peasant :
" What, in your opinion, is the domovoi the
devil ? "
The peasant, quite offended, answered : " Why
should he be the devil ? He does no harm."
" Then is he an angel ? "
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 55
" God forbid ! How can he be an angel
seeing that he's hairy ? "
So the peasant agrees with Milton in thinking
that the hobgoblin's hide is covered with hair.
The hobgoblin plays the part of a kind of
moral barometer to the family, foretelling good
or bad fortune. At supper- time he is heard to
move, and then the elder of the family asks
whether good or evil is impending. If it be
bad, the domovoi says, " Hu " (Hudo being the
Russian for bad) ; and if good, he mutters,
" D ... D ... D ... D ..." (Dobro being the
Russian for good).
To sum up the whole matter briefly, the re-
ligion of the Russian peasant is, if you analyze
it (a thing which the peasant would, of course,
never do), a working hypothesis of the world;
or, to take Matthew Arnold's phrase, a criticism
of life ; and it is more, a solution, a philosophy
which he has evolved not from books, not from
professors or teachers, but from life itself. It
is the fruit of his native common sense. In
this observance of the forms of religion he like-
wise follows what has for him the sanction (a)
of common sense ; (fc) of immemorial custom.
56 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA,
Such a point of view one would think at first
sight was not difficult to grasp. Experience has
led me to believe that it is difficult for English
people to grasp it. They go to Russia ; they see
the peasants prostrating themselves in churches,
kissing images, taking off their hats as they pass
churches ; they see crowds feasting on Saint
days ; they see pilgrims asking for and receiving
alms. And they say, " What backward people !
How superstitious ! " Or again (which is much
worse) they say kindly, " What charming people.
How picturesque ! " In the first case they are
being consciously superior, and in the second
case they are being unconsciously condescending.
In the first case they are simply pitying
people for what they consider retrograde and
backward ; in the second case they are expressing
an admiration whose real source is contempt.
They do not know it is contempt, but it is.
Their belief in their own superiority is so sure,
and so sound, that they no more question it than
the Russian peasant questions his belief in God.
It is the same good-natured, easy-going con-
tempt an English workman feels for foreign
workmen when he happens to work abroad.
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 57
' I know of a case of an English gardener who
was employed in a French country-house. An
Englishman who was there asked him how he
liked the French.
" Oh ! the French are all right," he said, " if
you treat them well. They are quite will-
ing. You mustn't bully them. You must
treat them nicely and kindly. Of course you
can't expect them to work like Englishmen" He
talked of them good-naturedly, tolerantly, as
if they were men of another race, and laboured
under some great radical natural disadvantage
through no fault of their own. Had he been
talking of negroes instead of the inhabitants of
Tile de France you would not have been surprised.
This is exactly the attitude of the many
English travellers, and of certain English
residents in Russia, towards the Russian people.
They do not, since they are not taught it at
school neither in board schools nor in private
schools, nor in public schools, nor in grammar
schools, and least of all at the universities
know that once the whole of Europe, and espe-
cially the English, looked on religion as the
Russian peasants do now ; or if they do know
58 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
this, they thank Heaven that some parts of
Europe, and in any case the English, have out-
grown this backward ignorance and this dark
philosophy.
It is true, and it is only fair to state, that this
attitude towards the religion of the Russian
peasant is shared to some extent, but in a quite
different manner, by the Russian educated
classes, and more especially by the semi-edu-
cated. Of this I will write later in greater
detail. But there is this great difference the
Russian educated and semi-educated classes
may sometimes think these religious ideas of the
Russian peasants childish ; but not because
they look on the peasant as a kind of inferior
being, a savage or a " native." They think
the peasant's religion is childish, because they
think all religion is childish (whether the Pope's,
the Patriarch's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's,
Mrs. Eddy's, Mahomet's, or Buddha's), a thing
which they have outgrown. But, as one Russian
writer has pointed out, the Russian intellectuals
are, on an average, not superior but inferior to
the idea of religion, for they have never experi-
enced it; and it is here that their attitude
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 59
resembles that of the average Englishman. The
average Englishman considers himself religiously
almost immeasurably above the Russian peasant
in enlightenment ; it has never struck him that
he may be below him. And until this humble
thought strikes him, he will never be able
to understand the religion of the Russian
peasant.
I was once talking to a lady who had been
to Moscow about Russia. She said Moscow
was very interesting, but she added : "I sup-
pose it's dreadful of me to say it, but all those
mosques " (and by the mosques she meant the
Cathedral and the Christian churches, which in
their rites and customs probably resemble the
early centuries of Christianity more closely
than any in Europe) "were always so full of
poor people, and such dirty people." The
idea of a church being a place where no dis-
tinction was made between rich and poor,
where rich and poor could enter at any time of
the day, where rich and poor jostled each other
and crowded together in dense crowds to hear
Mass on Sunday, was an idea entirely new and
entirely foreign to her. And in expressing
60 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
this, I venture to think she was below and
not above the Russian peasant's standard of
religion.
With regard to superstition, superstition is to
the Russian peasant a thing quite apart from
religion. It fills up a gap for him. In the
region of the inexplicable, all matters that re-
ligion does not deal with, such as omens, the
peasant puts down to other agencies, harmless
agencies as a rule, such as hobgoblins ; and
here again he follows custom.
I have said that the basis of the Russian
peasant's religion is common sense. Common
sense is likewise the backbone or the mainspring
of his material as well as of his spiritual exist-
ence, the key to his methods of work and his
manner of play, his social code, his habits and
customs ; in a word, to his practice as well as
to his theory.
In the past much has been written on his
backwardness, his obduracy, his love of routine,
his persistence in remaining in old grooves, his
hatred of innovation, his hostility towards all
forms of progress. There is, of course, in many
individual cases, a great deal of truth in these
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 61
charges, but there is something else to be said
as well. People are now beginning to say that
often what at first sight appears to be wilful
obduracy and blind and senseless conservatism
is, in nine cases out of ten, merely the choice of
the lesser of two evils, a choice obviously dictated
by common sense.
It is now being largely recognized by practical
experts in agriculture in Russia, that the reason
the peasant obstinately adhered to antiquated
methods and turned a deaf ear to modern im-
provements and innovations, was not always
that he was stupid, and not necessarily that he
was obstinate, but that the improvements and
the innovations suggested to him., although
admirable in themselves, were, given his par-
ticular circumstances, likely to cause him more
harm than good; the main fact being that
he was too poor to take advantage of them;
that the older method was the lesser evil,
the newer method being the cause of a greater
evil.
I will give a few instances of what I
mean.
It is an admitted fact in countries that have
62 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
a continental climate that the earth will only
retain a sufficient quantity of moisture if it is
ploughed early in spring and remains ploughed
throughout the summer. Consequently the fal-
low land should be ploughed early in spring for
the winter-sown crops. The peasant knows this
well, but he does not plough early in spring,
he ploughs late in summer ; but if ,you ask him
why, he puts to you the unanswerable question,
" Where shall I put my cattle, if I plough early
in the spring ? " the only place for his cattle
being the fallow land, since all the remaining
part of his land consists of growing crops. As
soon as the harvest is over he can, of course,
use the stubble for his cattle. This is an instance
of what seems to be at first sight backward
obstinacy, and is in reality expediency the
choice of the lesser evil, dictated by common
sense.
At one time every effort was being made to
persuade the peasant to use a modern improved
plough instead of the primitive instrument he
preferred, which resembled that in use in the
days of Abraham. He often refused to do |so ;
but why ? Not because he had anything against
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 63
the new plough, as an instrument, but because
if he had not enough capital to buy one (its
cost being 50 roubles = 5), and if he borrowed
money from a rich peasant to do so, he risked
losing all his substance; he risked being sold
up in order to pay his debts. So in this case,
the old-fashioned plough (which cost him only
five roubles = 10s.) was a lesser evil than com-
plete ruin.
But, on the other hand, it has now been
proved that as soon as the peasant can get the
necessary capital, as soon as he can obtain credit
from co-operative credit associations, he does not
hesitate to buy iron ploughs, or even Canadian
corn-cutters, or any modern implement you like
to mention.
Scientific agriculture is being widely taught at
the present moment in Russia. Agricultural
colleges are spreading, and the number of agri-
cultural students is every day increasing. But
it is the firm conviction of the most learned
of the scientific agriculturists that all you can
do for the peasant is to open for him doors on
possibilities of teaching him what can be done ;
but that if it comes to teaching him how to do a
64 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
thing, you cannot. Bfe ; knows how to do every-
thing much better than any theorist. Centuries
of close and constant contact with the soil have
taught him more than all the learning and all
the theory in the world. You can bring to his
notice new methods for him to try, new experi-
ments ; you can submit new possibilities to
him; you can enlarge his horizon to any ex-
tent ; you can educate him ; you can provide
him with new instruments ; but in the practical
use and application of knowledge it is he who
will teach you, and not you who will teach
him. He has the experience that only practice
and centuries of practice can give.
Not long ago one of the best known of the
scientific Russian agriculturists spoke in this
sense to some young students. He bade them
remember that their whole task consisted in
suggesting possibilities to the peasants ; but if
they met with opposition, they must never in-
sist, for the peasant probably knew best, his
knowledge being the fruit of the accumulated
experience of countless generations. I believe,
and I know that many Russians agree with me,
that the history, the life, the philosophy, and
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 65
the religion of the Russian peasants illustrate
one immense fact : that the majority is always
right in the long run. Vox populi, vox Dei. He
may have temporary aberrations ; but give him
time, in the long rim his view will be the right
view.
But some one may say, " Surely you do not
wish to advance the dangerous and doctrinaire
view that the land should be entirely in the
hands of the peasant; for you have already
stated that the peasant believes that the land
is his, and that all the land should be in the
hands of those that till it ? Surely you are not
in faf our of the wholesale expropriation of land
of the total abolition of landlords ? "
My answer to this is, " Yes, I think the peas-
ant is right in the long run, and I think he is
right in thinking that in the long run the land
not only should be, but will be, his."
At the present moment there are two kinds
of landowners in Russia :
1. Absentee landowners, who rent their land
to the peasant on short leases (on an average
from one to six years) without sinking any capital
either in buildings or in any other improve-
3
66 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
ments.* A large portion (as I have already
said) of the land thus rented to peasants by
absentee landlords was sold to the peasants
(with the assistance of the State land banks) in
1905 ; and it is generally admitted that the
remainder, all the land still rented to the peas-
ants, should become their permanent property.
This is what is actually happening (slowly and
gradually), with the assistance, again, of land
banks.
With regard to the land farmed by the land-
owners, the question is different. Such farming
is carried on, as a rule, on a very large scale,
at a great expenditure of capital, which is sunk
in the land.
At one time (in 1905) wholesale and immediate
expropriation of all the land owned by the land-
owners was advocated by some political parties
and individuals as the solution of the land ques-
tion in Russia.
* From this will be seen the difference between a Russian absentee
landowner and an English landlord. The English landlord is essen-
tially a partner in the farming, even if he does not farm the land
himself, because he will always sink a certain amount of capital in,
buildings and their upkeep, whereas the Russian absentee land-
owner invests no capital in anything : he merely receives the rent.
In some cases even the lanA favxes are paid by the tenant.
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 67
But a wholesale act of expropriation, if put
into force immediately, would not only bring
about an economic crisis affecting the landowner,
but it would reduce the standard of farming
and diminish the productive capacity of [the land,
and impoverish the peasants themselves.
The peasants, possessing little or no capital,
would not be able to maintain the high standard
of farming carried on by the landowners ; and if
the land hitherto farmed on this high standard
were suddenly to be made over to them, they
would earn less by trying to farm it without
capital than they earn at present by working
on the landowners' land.
If, then, wholesale and immediate expropria-
tion is out of the question as a wise, practical,
and beneficent measure, why and how is the
peasant right in looking forward to the day
when all the land will belong to him ?
Before such a state of things can be brought
about, two things must happen to the peasant.
He must acquire (a) capital, (b) a wider instruc-
tion in agricultural methods and a more exten-
sive general instruction in a word, a better
education.
6S THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
This is actually happening now. The peas-
ant is enabled to acquire capital through the
existence of co-operative credit associations and
land banks. And everywhere now, all over
Russia, agricultural schools are increasing and
instruction in improved agricultural methods is
spreading. The creation of a body of agricul-
tural experts stationed throughout the country
under the supervision of the county councils, in
order to advise the peasants and farmers on
matters of agriculture, and the establishment
of experimental farming stations on a compre-
hensive scale, have done this.
When the peasant will be in possession of suffi-
cient capital and instruction (and there does
not appear to be anything Utopian in this pros-
pect) in order to compete with the landowner
who farms his own land, he will gradually oust
the landowner altogether. Once possessed of
the same means as the landlord, he will not only
be his equal, but his superior ; he will supersede
him ; he will be the master of the situation, and
in the long run he will become ipso facto the
owner of all the arable land in Russia ; and the
change could thus come about without any eco-
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 69
nomic crisis, and without imperilling the inter-
ests of the State.
People may perhaps wonder why, during the
revolutionary ferment of 1905-6, when there was
so much talk of expropriation in the air, when
there was so much agricultural disturbance all
over Russia, the peasants did not simply take
all the land belonging to the landowners. It
is not a sufficient answer to say the soldiery,
remaining loyal, prevented any such thing. The
soldiers are peasants, and there was probably not
one soldier among them who was not convinced
that the land belonged to the tillers of it by
right.
It will perhaps not be thought fantastic if I
here again repeat, as an answer to this question,
the democratic theory, which I know is so dis-
tasteful to many, that the majority are always
right; that the peasants, in a vague and inar-
ticulate fashion, vaguely knew or dimly felt that
if they did such a thing the only immediate
result would be wholesale anarchy ; and that it
was their fundamental common sense which un-
consciously led them to insist on the partial
sale of the land let to them by the landowners,
70 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
and to rest contented for the moment with this
preliminary step. They would, of course, not
be able to explain the matter thus ; but this
was in all probability the explanation of their
conduct.
I repeat here, lest the reader should think I
am foisting on him fantastic stuff and idealistic
theory, that the individual peasant is as often
as not obstinate, lazy, and backward; that all
the peasants are in need not only of wider
instruction in agricultural methods, but also
of general all-round education.
The individual peasant would not come out
with any theory as to the lesser of two evils ;
he would probably defend his backward practice
as being the best, or as being that which had
always been followed.
Nevertheless, in spite of this, those habits of
the peasant which are the result of accumulated
experience have, if you look into them, a funda-
mental basis of common sense, even though the
individual peasant may be unaware of the fact.
The immemorial popular tradition and custom,
the stored and accumulated wisdom of the peas-
antry (to which the immense quantity of popular
THE RUSSIAN PEASANT. 71
proverbs and saws which exist in Russia are as
the leaves are to a tree) according to which they
act as a body, will be found to be sound and right
in the long-run, although the average individual
peasant may be unable to give any reason for ac-
cepting and following the dictates of that wisdom
which is his inheritance ; he may be not only
incapable of defining it, he may be unaware of its
existence. But as a member of the community
to which he belongs he will nevertheless apply
that wisdom, as circumstances call for it, and
express it by the acts of his daily life ; and his
individual voice will be a part of that larger
voice which has sometimes been thought to be
identical with the voice of God.
CHAPTER HI.
THE NOBILITY,
r ~FHE very word nobility in connection with
* Russia is misleading. There is no English
word which is the equivalent of the Russian
word for nobility dvorianstvo. In French, there
are two words, noblesse de cour, which correspond
to the Russian word.
The Russian word dvorianin, which we trans-
late, for want of a better word, noble, means a
man attached to a Court, and courtier would be
the right translation, if courtier did not happen
to mean something else. The Russian noble is
a Court servant, who is entitled by the service he
renders to the State to an hereditary rank.
Nobility accrues by right to the man who has
reached a certain definite step or tchin in the
army or in the civil service.
The service, moreover, is open to everybody
THE NOBILITY. 73
who can pass a certificate examination at the
end of his school time. During the whole of
the eighteenth century, and the first part of the
nineteenth century, from the reign of Peter the
Great to the end of the reign of Alexander L,
every single officer of the nobility army, and
every single civil servant holding an equivalent
rank, became ipso facto a noble.
The lowest rank in the army, that of an en-
sign, conferred the right of nobility.*
Later on, in 1822, in 1845, and in 1855, the
grade which conferred hereditary nobility was
raised.
The net result of all this is that (a) the nobility
as a class is enormous (in European Russia the
hereditary nobility number about 600,000) ; (b)
there can be nothing aristocratic about, such a
nobility.
This does not mean that the descendants of
old families do not exist in Russia. Such fami-
* Besides this hereditary nobility there -was what is called per-
sonal nobility, which was not hereditary. (This fact is without
any great importance ; it simply means that when bureaucracy was
established in Russia it was necessary to distinguish between higher
and lower grades of public servants, and personal nobility simply
conferred rights of independence, at a time when only nobles and
public servants possessed any such recognized rights.)
3 a
74 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
lies exist, and are, perhaps, more ancient than
any in Europe. Moreover, a certain number of
names and families stand out amidst the en-
circling obscurity, some of them illustrious with
an almost fabulous antiquity, like names in a
saga or an epic, and others illustrious from great
services rendered in more modern times, Rus-
sian history is " bright with names that men
remember ; 5? on the one hand names recalling
those of the Knights of the Round Table or the
heroes of the Niebelungenlied, on the other
hand names resembling that, say, of the Duke
of Wellington.
Titles have little to do with the matter: amongst
this little band of the illustrious, some of the
families have titles of recent origin; others,
again, almost incredibly remote both in lineage
and fame, have no titles at all.
The great mass of the nobility have neither
title nor any outward sign to distinguish them
from the herd of nobles, with the exception of
the collateral branches of the royal family.
Russia was originally a conglomeration of small
principalities (all descending from, all collateral
branches of, one prince), grouped at one time
THE NOBILITY. 75
under the leadership of Kiev, and later on ab-
sorbed by the principality of Moscow, which
eventually became first a kingdom, and then the
kingdom. When Moscow absorbed all the minor
principalities, the princes, bereft of their prin-
cipalities, still retained their titles. " Prince " is,
therefore, the only true Russian title that exists
in Russia.
The titles of graf (count) and baron are bor-
rowed from Western Europe. There is no word
either for count or baron in the Russian lan-
guage, and the German terms are used. These
titles are confined to a few families, and are either
titles of recent creation, conferred by the sove-
reign for special services, or they denote families
of foreign extraction and origin.
About two-thirds of the princely families
descend from the ancient sovereigns of Russia,
and about forty of them go as far back as Rurick,
the oldest of all Russian sovereigns. Such are
the families of the Dolgoruky, Bariatinsky,
Obolensky, Gortchakov, Khovansky, Galitsin,
Trubetskoy.
As far as lineage and antiquity are concerned,
these families are as old as any in Europe ; but
76 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
in spite of the existence of these ancient f amilies,
whose ramifications are innumerable (for in-
stance, there are about three or four hundred
Galitsins, male and female), there is no such
thing in Russia as a political aristocracy.
One of the causes of this state of things is
probably the democratic system which prevails
in every Russian family, be it that of a prince
or of a peasant, of dividing property equally
amongst the whole family ; and as the title
is likewise inherited by every member of the
family as the process of subdivision goes on, it
sometimes happens that the sole inheritance of
the descendant of an illustrious family is his
name.
One would have thought this constant process
of subdivision inust have ultimately decimated all
the large estates in Russia. It probably would
have done so had it not been for the size of the
country, the perpetual opening out of new ter-
ritory, the unceasing colonization of such rem-
nants, and the consequent rise in the value of
land.
Moreover, the division of property is made
among the male members of the family only
THE NOBILITY. 77
Tlie female members of a family receive only a
fourteenth share of the patrimony ; they receive
a marriage portion, and sometimes nothing be-
sides.*
There is also in Russia, as everywhere else,
what the French would call " une aristocratie
mondaine." Even here there is less spirit of
caste than in other European countries. It is
impossible to define what constitutes and what
limits this society in Russia, just as it is im-
possible to define what constitutes the limits
of any such society anywhere. It has nothing
necessarily to do with the governing class, and
nothing to do with the great mass of the nobility,
and nothing necessarily to do with illustrious
names or services, and is hall-marked neither by
wealth nor by titles, but by a freemasonry of
manner and culture. It is a society consisting
of many separate groups, which live their own
life and touch each other at certain points.
Thus in St. Petersburg there is an erste Gesett-
* It is perhaps as well to note here that the Russian law counter-
balances this state of affairs by giving the right to women, even during
the lifetime of their husbands, of enjoying and administrating then-
own property. The Russian woman is not a minor in the eyes of the
law as in France.
78 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
schaft, who all talk French as a matter of course,
and very often English as well, and who at one
time talked French better than their own lan-
guage. The younger generation of this class,
however, know Russian well.
Thus it is that in speaking of the Russian
nobility as a whole and as a class and it is a
vast class the English reader must put out of
his head all ideas of aristocracy such as it ex-
isted in England, France, Germany, Spain, and
Italy, and realize the following facts :
1. The noble in Russia is a State servant.
2. Any one can enter the State service if he
passes the requisite examination.
3. The attainment of a certain rank in the
State service carries with it the rights of
hereditary nobility.
4. There is no political aristocracy in Russia.
5. Until 1861 only the nobility had the right
to own land in, Russia.
6. There is no such thing as a territorial aristo-
cracy in Russia.
How is it, then, that if until this year 1861
the nobility alone had the right of owning land
in Russia, there is no such thing as a territorial
THE NOBILITY. 79
aristocracy ? And how is it, if innumerable
descendants of old princely families exist at the
present moment in Russia, there is no such thing
as a political aristocracy ?
The answer to these two questions is to be
found in the history of the past, and, without
going into any elaborate historical disquisition,
the roots of the matter are fairly easy to
trace.
In the earlier times of Russian history, long
before the invasion of the Tartars, before the
Norman Conquest in England, Russia was di-
vided into principalities, which were governed by
princes. Every prince had a body of followers,
who constituted around his person a kind of
armed militia. This militia was called the
druzhina. Its members were free. They could
serve whom they pleased. They could pass from
the service of one prince to another. Out of this
class of armed servants arose the boyars, who
were likewise the voluntary servants of the
princes, and who could serve whichever prince
they pleased. They were naturally inclined to
choose the richest and most powerful prince, and
thus they were attracted to the Court of Moscow,
80 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
and thus the minor principaKties became weaker
in resources and poorer in followers, and were
gradually absorbed one after another by the
Grand Duchy of Moscow. And when Moscow
became the central and predominant kingdom
of Russia, the boyars became the servants of
the Tsar of Moscow. But the boyars did not
serve the monarch for nothing ; in return for
their service they received land. Originally
the servants of the princes were remunerated
for their services by receiving allotments of land,
which passed from father to son, as well as by
money, and the revenues accruing from certain
Government appointments. Had the boyars
continued to possess hereditary allotments, and
nothing but hereditary allotments, they might
have grown into a caste of territorial aristocrats.
As it was, as Russia grew bigger, and when
Northern Russia was annexed to the kingdom
of Moscow, the only new sources of capital were
the immense stretches of new land acquired by
the Tsar of Moscow. Henceforward the Tsar,
instead of giving the boyars hereditary allot-
ments of land in return for their service, gave
them temporary allotments of land in the newly-
THE NOBILITY. , 81
acquired territory. These allotments were in
theory supposed to belong to the Tsar's servant
so long, and so long only, as he served, but in
practice they generally belonged to the owner
during the whole of his lifetime. A grant of
land of this kind was called a pomestie (manor),
and the owner of it a pomeshchilc, which came in
the course of time to be, and is at present, the
ordinary Russian word for a landowner.
Thus the Tsar accomplished at one swoop many
different objects. He distributed the men of
service in the interior and at the frontier of the
country, and by granting them only the tem-
porary lease of the land in distant parts of the
country, he prevented the growth of a strong
landed aristocracy whose existence and rivalry
he feared. He made these newly-created land-
owners into a barrier against foreign invasion, and
into an instrument of national defence ; the land
became a means for the upkeep of the army, since
the landowners constituted the army, and the
armed servant in return for his service received
land, which, in addition to being a wage, made
that service possible by giving him a means of
upkeep.
82 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
The principle was established that the servant
of the State should be rewarded for his services
by the possession of land ; and soon the corollary
followed that the owner of land must serve.
Hereditary holdings still existed ; but gradually
the right of administrating them came to depend
on service. In the sixteenth century, in the
kingdom of Moscow, all owners of hereditary
holdings were State servants. A man who in-
herited a holding was obliged to serve if he
wished to continue to possess the hereditary
ownership of it.
Thus it was that the nobility in Russia acquired
the dual nature of landowner and servant of the
State. The servant of the State became a land-
owner, and only on the condition of being a
servant of the State, as has already been stated.
The result of all this was that the nobility
took no roots in the land. Their interest was at
Court. Their land was merely theix pay. Thus
no landed or territorial aristocracy came into
existence, as in other European countries. In
Russia there are no feudal castles, no families
taking their names from places, no titles derived
from property, no wn and zu, no de, no Lord So-
THE NOBILITY. 83
and-So of So-and-So ; comparatively few stone
houses. The noble generally lives in a wooden
house, which has the nature of a temporary
makeshift residence.
Nevertheless there was an obstinate attempt
on the part of the Russian nobility to form a
political aristocracy.
The boyars, grouping themselves round the
throne of Moscow, attempted to do this. They
organized themselves into a complicated hier-
archy, according to which precedence depended
on the pedigree of their forefathers. The
duties and position of each boyar was written
down in a complicated kind of peerage called
" books of pedigree." His rank had to remain
exactly what that of his forefathers had been.
Organized in this fashion, the boyars became
an hereditary, stationary, and exclusive caste,
perpetually quarrelling over questions of pedigree,
the rights ajid wrongs of which were extremely
difficult to determine.
By the time Ivan the Terrible came to the
throne (1547) the boyars were individually
powerful, but the very nature of such an organi-
zation precluded all idea of solidarity and
84 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
union. Every single noble wished to be primus
inter pares. Every family was at war with its
equals. Ivan the Terrible dealt with the boyars
individually by cutting off their heads. The
books of pedigree were abolished in the reign of
Peter the Great's predecessor, and the name
boyar was abolished by Peter the Great.
Henceforward the service of your forefathers
was no longer of any account. Neither lineage
nor rank counted any longer. Your rank de-
pended henceforth on your tchin that is to say,
the post you held in the service of the State ;
and that, in its turn, depended on your personal
merit, on the nature of your service. The Rus-
sian nobility became a class of State servants
in which the hereditary principle ceased to exist ;
and although some of the privileges which Peter
the Great took away from the hereditary nobility
were restored to them by his successors, the great
fabric of the State service which he created still
exists. So does the tchin, with its fourteen grades,
created by Peter the Great. A boy leaving his
college or gymnasium, and having passed what
the Germans call his abiturienten examen, and
what in some of our public schools is called a
THE NOBILITY. 85
certificate examination, has access to the lowest
rung of the official ladder.
University degrees confer a tcliin on the
student, and with every fresh diploma he re-
ceives he ascends a further rung of the ladder.
For instance, a son of a peasant, if he goes to
school, passes his examinations, and finishes his
course at the university, may serve, say, in
the department of Railway Traffic Organization,
and by ascending one grade of the ladder after
another, he may, partly by luck and partly by
merit, end by being Minister of Finance or Prime
Minister.
The successors of Peter the Great exempted the
nobility from compulsory service; and Catherine II.
not only confirmed this exemption, but increased
and enlarged the privileges of the nobility.
She made the nobility into a privileged class. In
order to prepare the way for local self-govern-
ment, she created intermediate powers between
the throne and the people, and gave the nobility
a part to play in local administration, and roped
in the merchants to co-operate with them, thus
endeavouring to form a bourgeoisie. The nobility
enjoyed the privilege of appointing local justices
86 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
of the peace and local officials. The adminis-
tration of every district had to pass through the
hands of the nobility in the shape of a marshal,
in some respects a kind of lord-lieutenant * ; one
presided over every district, and one over every
province, and both were elected by the Assembly
of Nobles. The theory was that the influence
of the marshals of the nobility would counter-
balance the action of the governor of the prov-
ince, an official appointed directly by the Crown.
This was the theory, and a theory it more or less
remained owing to the apathy of the nobility,
who failed to take full advantage of their privi-
leged situation. Nevertheless the nobility did
play a considerable part in local administration ;
and consequently, in proportion as they tended
to become bureaucrats, they ceased being land-
owners. They had less and less time to look after
their property. They ceased, for the greater
part, to be practical and practising landowners,
and they left the management of their estates
in the hands of their stewards, and often used
their estates as a means of raising money, so that
in 1859, on the eve of the emancipation, two-thirds
* See page 114.
THE NOBILITY. 87
of the estates and the nobility were in pawn,
and the remaining third was often mortgaged
to individuals.
The privileges granted to the nobility by the
successors of Peter the Great could not fail to
affect the peasantry. The peasants were at this
time tethered to the soil. Peter the Great had
tightened the bonds which attached them to
the soil, and Catherine II. had done nothing to
loosen their bonds. In fact, the situation of the
peasants, instead of improving, had grown worse.
The rights of the master over the serf had been
extended. The master had the power of deal-
ing administratively with the serf; he could
banish him to Siberia, sentence him to penal
servitude, and could sell him apart from the
land. The situation of the serf was not only
crying out for reform, but the peasants knew
and complained that the whole logical principle
of the case for serfdom had been violated.
The peasantry rightly considered that serfdom
was a temporary measure coinciding with the
compulsory service of the nobility. If the no-
bility ceased to serve the Tsar, logically they
should cease to serve the nobility, because the
88 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
nobility were only given the land on condition
of serving the Tsar, and on that condition alone,
and the peasants belonged to the land.
The discontent of the peasants expressed itself
in risings, which were sometimes serious, and
the moral feeling against the existence of serf-
dom became stronger and stronger. And since
the nobles were too much occupied with other
affairs to look after their estates in person, and
their serfs in a patriarchal fashion, there was, as
has already been said in Chapter L, no possible
argument left in favour of serfdom.
Nevertheless, as Catherine II. saw clearly, the
emancipation of the serfs could only be carried
out with the co-operation of the nobility. In
her reign the time had not come for this, be-
cause the nobility were opposed to the reform.
The reform came about in 1861, and by it the
nobility lost the unique privilege of being the
only class in Russia able to own land, and the
access to landed proprietorship in Russia was
thrown open to all classes.
When the immense act of expropriation which
the emancipation of the serfs entailed took place,
about half the landowners in Russia disappeared.
THE NOBILITY. 89
Quite a new and mixed class of landowners came
into existence : merchants and absentee land-
owners who leased their land to the peasants, and
finally those who sunk their capital in the land and
tried to carry on agriculture on rational principles.
I have already spoken of the result of absentee
landownership in Russia, and the further sales
of land which were made to the peasants in
1905., and of the exemption of the peasantry
from compulsory communal land tenure. Look-
ing back on the situation now, one is aware
that the landed nobility in Russia is being slowly
and gradually oozed out of existence ; it is being
subjected to a slow process of expropriation in
favour of the peasants, the merchants, and the
new capitalists ; and in the course of time, as
soon as the peasantry has the means, the capital,
and the knowledge to compete with it on equal
terms, the nobility as a caste of landowners will
disappear altogether.
The two questions which I put towards the
beginning of this chapter : How is it there exists
no political aristocracy in Russia ? and, How is
it that there exists no territorial aristocracy, in
spite of the fact that until 1861 the nobility had
90 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the exclusive right of owning the land ? can per-
haps be answered thus :
There is no political aristocracy in Russia,
because as far back as we can see in Russian
history we find no traces of that spirit of caste
and solidarity which creates a compact body,
sharing a common outlook, and pursuing a defi-
nite political and social aim* As far back as we
can see in Russian history the nobles were State
servants, and when they were given privileges
which were not dependent on service, they were
powerless to make themselves into anything
else. They had neither the instinct nor the
desire to do so.
There have in Russian history been aristo-^
crats, but no aristocracy ; and when those aristo-
crats were powerful, they were bound together by
no esprit de corps, and by no common object : thus
it was easy for the Crown to disintegrate them.
There has been no territorial aristocracy, be-
cause the land was a temporary loan made to
the nobility in return for service. When the
service ceased to be compulsory, the land was
at once reclaimed by its original owners, the
men who tilled it. A hundred years after service
THE NOBILITY. 91
ceased to be compulsory for the nobles the
peasants were given back a great part of the
land, and ever since then they have been gradu-
ally getting back more and more of it, and in
the course of time there is no doubt that they
will end by getting back all of it.
The Russian nobility is a thing apart. An
aristocracy on the Western European pattern no
more exists in Russia than do feudal castles on
the European pattern. There is an analogy
between the flat uniform surface of the land-
scape in Russia, the absence of sharp mountain
ranges and deep valleys, of variety and varie-
gated features, and the nature of Russian insti-
tutions. The Russian nobility is, like the Rus-
sian landscape, devoid of sharp features all one
level. It is democratic, and averse to the pro-
minence of individual personalities. All the
features that are characteristic of aristocratic
tendencies, such as primogeniture, spirit of caste,
class exclusiveness, do not exist. The Russian
nobility is democratic, and it lacks the salient
features and the sharp and defined character
which has distinguished in the past the nobility
in the other countries of Europe.
92 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
It may very likely now occur to the reader to
ask if there is not and never has been such a
thing as a political aristocracy in Russia ; and if
the Russian nobility is so democratic, why was
there ever any discontent in Russia ? Why was
there such a thing as Nihilism and a revolutionary
movement ?
It would seem at first sight that a system in
which rank was entirely dependent on merit, and
in which the service was open to everybody, left
nothing to be desired, as far as democracy is con-
cerned. In certain respects it is obviously demo-
cratic, in others it is fatal to all free democracy.
The principle, of course, is as democratic as
possible ; but what happens in practice ? In
practice you have a gigantic machine worked by
a governing class of officials which is absolutely
uncontrolled by public opinion.
Any one can get into the governing class, that
is true ; but nobody who is not in it can check
its action, and at one period nobody could even
criticize it. The result is the triumph of bureau-
cracy at the expense of any kind of democracy
or of any kind of aristocracy ; while the only
tiling that profits by it is arbitrary despotism.
THE NOBILITY. 93
And though the system is theoretically favour-
able to the advancement of merit, it is a thousand
times more favourable to mediocrity, routine,
office-hunting, officialdom, red-tape, to the
stifling of all individual initiative, and the
shirking of all moral responsibility. The chief
evil result of the system was the uncontrolled
arbitrary character of the central government
and the local administration as carried on by
the provincial governors and other officials of
the Government; and it was against this arbi-
trariness that public opinion in Russia revolted,
and expressed itself either by militant acts of
revolt, assassinations, or explosions, or peace-
ably in a demand for political reform. And in
this peaceable demand the nobility played an
important part.
I have already said that Catherine II. gave
privileges to the nobility with the idea of pre-
paring the way for local self-government. She
knew that in her time such institutions could only
be elementary, and that real local self-govern-
ment was impossible, since besides the nobility
and the merchants, the rest of the population
were serfs ; but she determined to lay the foun-
94 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
dations of self-government, and to prepare the
way for the future. She gave the nobility privi-
leges which in other countries must certainly have
led to a conflict with the Crown ; but in her
time nothing of the kind happened, since the
nobility took no advantage of their situation.
But the situation which she created did ulti-
mately lead to a conflict with the Crown, because
it was the organs of the local self-government
which voiced the demand for representative in-
stitutions in Russia, and headed the movement
which obtained them. The first step towards
local self-government was made by Catherine II.,
the second step was made by Alexander II. In
1864, in addition to the Assemblies of Nobles,
Zemstvos (county councils) were created, con-
taining representatives of every class ; later, the
nobility and the peasants elected their repre-
sentatives. Every district of every government
or province was given a Zemstvo, or county
council; and above this (and formed from the
district councils) each government or province
was given a county council. Both the district
and the provincial county councils were presided
over by the marshals of the nobility.
THE NOBILITY. 95
Here were the means and the instrument at
least of checking the uncontrolled action of the
bureaucratic machine ; but the natural corollary
of local self-government namely, central political
representation was for the time lacking. More-
over, from time to time the officials appointed
by the Government were given powers to check
the action of the county councils.
Ten years passed. The enthusiasm which
greeted the era of reform in the 'sixties died
out in a smoke of disillusion, and a revolutionary
movement sprang up, and a Nihilist fever, cul-
minating in the assassination of the Emperor
Alexander II. in 1881, when he was on the eve
of granting a constitution to Russia. This
shelved all question of reform for another twenty-
five years ; a period of sheer reaction followed ;
and it was not until the Russo-Japanese War in
1904 that the public discontent found expression
in a manner which had to be reckoned with.
It was now that the Zemstvos played a
supremely important part. They headed the
constitutional demand for reform, which had
developed side by side with a revolutionary move-
ment. And they obtained first the promise of
96 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
a consultative House of Representatives, and
finally, on October 17, 1905, a charter promising
to the people the foundations of civic liberty,
the convocation of a Duma, and the promise
that no laws should in future be passed without
receiving the sanction of the representatives of
the nation. The rank and file of the army which
brought this to pass were the whole of the edu-
cated middle class of Russia, but its leaders
and spokesmen were the members of the nobility
in the county councils. It was not the nobility
as a class which acted and brought this about,
but the instruments of local government, the
county councils; and every single organ of
local government, each county council, had at the
head of it a member of the nobility. So far,
then, from acting as a separate caste, the Russian
nobility, in the movement and demand for
reform and emancipation, simply expressed the
opinion of the man in the street ; and this was
all the easier, for the simplest definition of the
Russian noble, and one which sums up the whole
matter, is that in Russia the noble is almost/
every tenth man in the street.
CHAPTER IV.
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE.
UP till October 30, 1905 (O.S., October 7),
Russia was an unlimited autocracy. The
Emperor bore the title of Unlimited Autocrat of
all the Russias. But Russia possessed, never-
theless, certain administrative and legislative
institutions. There was a consultative assembly
called the Council of Empire, founded by Alex-
ander I. ? whose business it was to make laws ;
and a Senate, founded by Peter the Great, an
administrative institution, whose business it was
to see that the laws and the Emperor's ukases
were carried out. The Emperor could always
issue special ukases, and he could suggest any
laws to the Ministers whom he appointed.
The initiative of legislation was in the hands
of the Emperor's Ministers. They presented laws
to the Council of Empire, which discussed and
98 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
amended them, and presented them, together
with the findings of the majority and the minority,
and sometimes the finding of an individual mem-
ber, which were the outcome of their delibera-
tions, to the Emperor for his sanction. In this
manner the fundamental laws of the empire
were drawn up.
On October 30, 1905, this state of things was
profoundly modified by the publication of an
imperial manifesto which laid down certain new
principles of government.
If these principles were carried out in practice,
Russia would no longer be an unlimited auto-
cracy. What it would exactly be is a little diffi-
cult to define. In the old days the Government
of Russia was defined as . being an autocracy
tempered by assassination. It would be diffi-
cult to define it exactly as it is at the present
moment. It is a limited autocracy ; an auto-
cracy limited indirectly by the existence of legis-
lative institutions.
At the same time, it was technically a mistake
to call the manifesto a constitution, because the
Sovereign did not categorically divest himself of
bis autocratic rights ; he took no oath to any
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 99
constitution ; all he did was to grant his subjects
certain privileges, which, if carried out, would
limit the purely autocratic character of his power.
He himself remained an autocrat. He could, if
he saw fit to do so in the future, take back the
privileges he had granted. The manifesto was a
charter rather than a constitution. It promised
to the people the foundations of civic liberty
based on the liberty of the person, liberty of con-
science, liberty of speech, and the right of form-
ing unions, societies, and associations. It an-
nounced that a National Assembly (the Duma)
would be convoked, elected by the people, who
would henceforward be called upon to co-
operate in the government of the country. It
laid down the principle that in future no law
should come into force without previously re-
ceiving the sanction of the Parliament.
A National Assembly elected by the people was
not a new phenomenon for Russia. Ever since
1550 National Assemblies appear from time to time
in the course of Russian history. They failed to
become a permanent feature and factor in Russian
life owing to the strife of classes. The population
split up into classes, and this was due to the
100 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
birth of economic problems and the manner in
which they were solved ; the peasants became
slaves in the hands of the landowners, and the
National Assembly ceased to be national, and
became representative of an upper class which
was divided against itself, owing to the con-
flicting personal interests it fostered.
The Emperor Nicholas II. in convoking a
National Council was not creating a new prece-
dent, but resuscitating an old one. The word
Duma means Council, and the Tsars of Moscow
in olden times had governed with the aid of an
assembly of nobles called the Council of Boyars.
When the manifesto was issued in 1905, it
was clear that the fundamental laws of the
empire made no provision for a Duma, and
that if a Duma were to assemble on the
basis of the manifesto, its situation in the
State and its relation to the Sovereign would
be undefined. For this reason a revised ver-
sion of the fundamental laws of the empire
was confirmed and published on April 23,
1906.
This revised edition of the fundamental laws
defined the position of the Sovereign with
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 101
regard to the Duma. According to its provi-
sions, the supreme autocratic power was vested
in the person of the Emperor; but according
to another section it was laid down that the
Sovereign exercises legislative power in conjunc-
tion with the Council of Empire and the
Duma.
The principle of the manifesto that no law
should come into force without previously re-
ceiving the sanction of the legislative institution
was confirmed.
The Emperor retained the title of Autocrat,
and concentrated in his person the legislative,
executive, and judicial powers ; but the substan-
tive " Autocrat " was no longer preceded by the
adjective " Unlimited."
The executive powers of the Sovereign entitled
him to convene, adjourn, and prorogue the
Council of Empire and the Duma; to dissolve
the Duma ; and to dismiss the elected members
of the Council of Empire before the term of their
mandates, but not without fixing tike date of
fresh selections and of the session of a new
Duma.
The Emperor retained the right of appointing
102 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the president, the vice-president, and half the
members of the Council of Empire; the right
of veto, and the sanction of laws ; the sole initi-
ative of any changes in the fundamental laws;
and, as has already been said, he shared the
initiative in all branches of legislation with both
the Houses.
The Emperor also retained the right of issuing
special ukases, sanctioning unforeseen expendi-
ture not provided for in the Estimates, for emer-
gencies in case of war, and loans for expenditure
in war.
The fundamental laws also contained an emer-
gency clause of another kind, according to
which the Emperor, by special ukase, can pro-
mulgate laws in cases of emergency when the
Houses are not in session, subject to their being
subsequently submitted to them for approval.
But no change may be made in the fundamental
laws in virtue of this clause, nor may it modify
the legislative institutions and the electoral laws
for the two Houses. Moreover, any regulation
made in this way ceases to be in force if, in two
months after the beginning of the session of the
Duma, no Bill is introduced by the Duma
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 103
confirming it, or if a Bill is introduced and
rejected.*
The executive powers of the Emperor consist
in the appointment and dismissal of the Prime
Minister and the Ministers, the direction of for-
eign affairs, the proclamation of martial law
and any modified kind of martial law, and the
command of the military and naval forces.
The Emperor has also certain judicial powers,
such as the confirmation of the verdicts of crim-
inal courts.
At this moment, then, the legislative institu-
tions of Russia consist of the Council of Empire
and the Duma. The Council of Empire is the
Upper House ; half of its members are elected,
and they receive their mandates in certain
proportions from the synod, the nobility, the
universities, the corporation of merchants, and
from Poland. They are elected for a term of
nine years. The remaining members (including
the president and the vice-president) are ap-
pointed by the Emperor.
* Contrary to this last provision, the clause was taken advantage
of by the Government in 1907 to make a new electoral law which
changed the nature of the franchise. This was illegal, and according
to the fundamental laws, a coup d'etat.
104 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA,
The Upper House shares with the Lower House
the right of initiative in legislation, as well as
that of voting supplies and of making inter-
pellations.
The Lower House, as has just been said, has
also the right of initiative legislation ; but certain
subjects, according to the fundamental laws, are
outside its competence namely, the institutions
of the imperial court ; the imperial family ;
war and naval departments ; the jurisdiction
of military and naval courts.
On the other hand, the imperial budget and the
budgets of individual Ministries, and the authori-
zation of loans, are within its competency. It
has also the right of making interpellations.
There is not, as in the English House of Commons,
a certain time put aside every day for questions.
Notice is given of interpellation, and the question
of whether it shall be regarded as pressing or not
is put to the vote. If expedition is voted for, the
interpellation must be answered by the Ministers
within a month ; if extreme expedition is voted
for, within three days; if expedition is not
voted for, the answer is given within an indefinite
period.
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 105
The right of interpellation, and the larger fact
that an assembly exists where discussion of public
affairs is public, are, as is the case with most
Parliaments, the chief assets in the influence of
the Duma. As far as actual legislation is con-
cerned, the Upper House can throw out any of
the Bills which the Lower House passes.
The electoral law is exceedingly complicated.
The degree of suffrage it confers is very far from
being universal. In the first place, elections are
indirect ; in every government voters elect a cer-
tain number of electors, who in their turn elect
members to represent the government in the
Duma. Only males who have reached the age
of twenty-five have the right to vote; and all
those who are in any branch of military service
are excluded.
The voters are (a) those who vote by property
qualification that is tb say, persons residing
in the various districts who can satisfy a property
qualification, the amount and classification of
which depends upon their occupation. For in-
stance, landowners are classified according to the
amount of land they possess, and merchants or all
persons engaged in commercial pursuits, accord-
4 a
106 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
ing to their trade licence. This class of voter must
either own immovable property, hold a trade
licence., be in the receipt of a pension and salary
arising from his employment in the Govern-
ment, municipal, or railway service, or be the
occupant of a lodging hired in his name.
For such voters one year's residence in the
polling district is required.
As the qualification is high, the number of
voters is necessarily limited.
(6) A second class of voter consists of peas-
ants whose names are on the rolls of the rural
communities that is to say, heads of house-
holds. One year's residence. in the polling dis-
trict is necessary for them also.
(c) A third class, consisting of town voters,
artisans, and employees in factories, works, and
railway shops. Six months' residence in polling
district is required.
An election is carried on thus :
All the voters are divided into five groups :
Landowners ; peasants ; town voters (two groups
according to their property qualification) ; arti-
sans, etc.
Each of these groups elects separately, by a sys-
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 107
tern of two degrees, a certain number of electors
who shall represent them at a general meeting of
the government or province. This large Provin-
cial Assembly, consisting of landowners, peasants,
and town dwellers, meets together, and elects a cer-
tain number of members to represent the govern-
ment or province in the Duma. In this assembly
the landed class interest and the richer merchants
and town dwellers have the advantage in numbers,
and are consequently in the majority. In order
therefore to safeguard to a certain extent the
interests of the other classes, the Government
Assembly must first of all elect one member to
represent each of the following classes :
(a) The peasants ;
(b) Landowners ;
(c) The town electors (only in certain govern-
ments) ;
(d) The artisans (only in six governments).
And as each government is entitled to return
a certain number of members fixed by the law,*
the requisite number is completed by electing
members from the remaining total of electors.
There are two exceptions to the general pro-
* The number varies from three to twelve.
108 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
cedure : the largest cities, and Siberia, Poland,
and the Caucasus (where the procedure is some-
what different). The larger cities St. Petersburg,
Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Riga vote according
to property qualification, and elect members
directly to the Duma.
The result of this complicated system of suffrage
is that the landed interest and the wealthier
classes are predominant in the Duma, and conse-
quently the Conservative element is the strongest.
The Radical, Social Democratic, and Labour
element which exists in the Duma is furnished
by the big towns, with their direct elective
system, and the election of members representing
the peasant class, which is always guaranteed
and the artisan class, which is to some extent
guaranteed by the elective assemblies of every
government.
All that I have written so fax concerns the in-
struments of legislation. The administration of
the country, the actual business of government,
is carried out by the Senate, the Council of Min-
isters, the governors of the provinces, the
Zemstvos (county councils), and, as far as re-
ligious affairs are concerned, by the Holy Synod.
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 109
The highest administrative institution of the State
is the Senate. The Ruling Senate was founded
by Peter the Great in 1711, with the object of
representing him and acting on his behalf during
his frequent absences. Its functions, which are
essentially the same to-day as they were then,
only on a larger scale, consist in supervising all
branches of administration and in seeing that the
laws are carried out throughout the country.
The Ruling Senate, at the same time, is the high
court of justice for the empire, the highest
court of appeal in administrative matters, and
exercises supreme control ; it promulgates all
laws, and supervises the courts of law.
The Senate has several sub-departments, which
have various functions, the most important of
which is that of checking the executive power,
and seeing that it is exercised in accordance with
the law. The department to which this function
belongs is also charged with the promulgation
of a law, and may refuse to promulgate it if
the law is contrary to the fundamental laws. A
procurator, representing the Crown, is attached
to every department of the Senate, who is sub-
ordinate to the Minister of Justice. The latter,
110 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
in this connection, is called the Procurator-
General.
The Senate also examines complaints brought
against Ministers, governors, or provincial and
district officials. The senators are appointed by
the Emperor.
The Council of Ministers consists of the Min-
isters and heads of administration.
There are twelve Ministries : Foreign Affairs,
War, Admiralty, Finance, Education, Ways and
Communications, Agriculture, Justice, Commerce
and Industry, the Imperial Court, the Interior,
and the Department of Government Control.
Each individual Minister is bound to bring
before the Council all Bills that are destined to
come before the Duma and the Council of Em-
pire; all proposals concerning changes in the
staff in the chief offices of higher and local ad-
ministration ; and all reports which have been
drawn up for presentation to the Sovereign.*
Russia is divided for purposes of administration
into provinces called governments. Peter the
* Besides the Council of Ministers, there are various other de-
liberative institutions, such as a Military Council, an Admiralty
Council, an Imperial Defence Council, a Financial Committee, and
a Court of Chancery.
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. Ill
Great was the first Russian ruler to make such a
division. He divided the country into eight gov-
ernments. Catherine II. increased the number
to 40. At the present day there are 78 govern-
ments 49 in European Russia, 10 in Poland,
8 in Finland, 7 in the Caucasus, 4 in Siheria.
There are besides these governments, twenty-
three provinces which are called territories
(oblasti), which are either incompletely organ-
ized or retain special institutions. They are
for the greater part situated at the extremes
of the empire. The average size of a govern-
ment is greater than Belgium, Holland, or
Switzerland. The divisions were made arti-
ficially and arbitrarily, and the governments
in this respect resemble the French depart-
ments.
The governments are divided into districts,
which correspond to the French arrondissements.
Each province has from eight to fifteen dis-
tricts, and is parcelled out for administrative
and judicial purposes, according to its size,
between a certain number of officials called
zemskie nachalniJci, called by some English
writers land captains. These zemskie nachal-
112 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA,
nihi were created in 1889 * to replace the local
justices of peace, who were abolished in that
year. They were a kind of official squire. The
office could in principle only be held by a member
of the hereditary nobility. They exercise execu-
tive and judicial authority over the villages in
their area of jurisdiction. I will discuss their
judicial authority later in the chapter on justice.
They have the character of police officers in
that they make bye-laws, and that of magistrates
in that they decide on their infringement. They
are nominated by the governor, and appointed
by the Minister of the Interior. They have
the control of the peasants' communal institu-
tions. All resolutions of the village assemblies
and landings of the canton courts are submitted
to them. All the officials of the peasants'
administration are subordinate to them. They
have now become, more or less, officials of the
Ministry, and are no longer men of weight or
position among the nobility. The total number
of these zemsJcie nachalniki in every district
* By a recent law which came into force in January 1914 the
zemskie nackalniki are being abolished in certain portions of Russia
and replaced by elective Justices of Peace.
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 113
form a Board which sits in the district town
once or more every month, as necessity arises.
This board is presided over by the marshal of
the nobility of the district, and with the co-opera-
tion of a police ofiicial called the Ispravnik, who
has charge of the police duties of every district,
and of other officials, constitutes an administrative
unit which corresponds to a French sous-prefet.
At the head of every province is a governor,
who is proposed by the Minister of the Interior,
and appointed by the emperor. He is respon-
sible for the administration of the government.
His office is not unlike that of the intendant
of the old regime in France, and the prefet of
modern France. Formerly the governor con-
centrated all the administrative powers in him-
self, and every province was a miniature au-
tocracy. The governor is assisted by a board
of Administration, over which he presides, and
which consists of a vice-governor, councillors,
the government medical officer, the government
engineer, the architect, the land surveyor,
and their deputies.
The governor can issue special regulations for
safeguarding public order ; he exercises control
114 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
over all the administrative offices and institu-
tions, all officials and public servants, and the
institutions of local government. All regula-
tions passed by the county or district councils, or
the town corporations, must be confirmed by him;
and likewise the election of all officials elected
and appointed by the local self-governing bodies.
The principal check on the apparently unlimited
powers of the central administration, personi-
fied in the various governors, lies in the rights
exercised by the Assembly of Nobles.
The nobility in every district meet once every
three years and elect a president for their district,
who is called the marshal of the nobility of the
district.
After this is done, all the nobility of all the
districts in the province unite to elect a president
for the province. He is called the marshal of
the nobility of the province. The election of
the marshal of the district must be confirmed
by the governor; that of the marshal of the
province is confirmed by the Emperor in person,
and by the Emperor alone.
In order to belong to the Assembly of Nobles,
it is necessary, besides being a noble by birth,
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 115
to own land in the district or the province; to
possess either a military or civil tchin; or in
default of this sign of rank, certificates testify-
ing that you have passed certain examinations.
The right to assemble and elect marshals for
the districts and the province (and a board of
trustees for the orphans of nobles) is all that
remains now of the larger privileges conferred
on the nobility by Catherine II. Those privileges
consisted in the right of appointing the local
judges and the chief local officials that is to say,
the county police. This prerogative lasted until
the epoch of the great reforms in the 'sixties.
But in spite of the loss of their former privileges,
the nobility, as represented in the marshals of
the districts, still discharges manifold duties of
an intricate character, and by so doing forms the
corner-stone of local administration, and con-
sequently constitutes a certain check on the
otherwise uncontrolled action of the governor
of the province.
As far as administration is concerned, the
marshal of the province is less important than
the marshal of the district. He is an ex officio
member of the governor's board of administra-
116 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
tion, and as such, both by tradition and by right,
he exercises considerable influence, since an
independent influential personality is certain to
be elected to the post.
On the other hand, the duties and powers of
the marshal of the district are more numerous, and
stand in closer touch with the machinery of
provincial administration. He is the president
of all the executive committees in the district :
all committees that deal with the settlement of
questions relating to the peasants' land, military
conscription, and the supervision of local schools.
He is the president of the district tribunal (the
court of petty sessions), and as such the chief
justice of peace, of the district. He is, more-
over, the ex officio president of the Zemstvo
Assembly.
The marshal of the district has duties and
capacities of a dual nature. On the one hand
he performs representative duties resembling
those of a lord-lieutenant of an English county ;
and on the other hand, in conjunction with
the board of zemsJcie nachalni'k.i I mentioned
just now, he fills the place of a French sous-
prefet. But the important fact about his
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 117
position is that he is outside and not inside the
central official administration. His position is in-
violable because once he is elected he is irremov-
able, save by imperial ukase, except in the case
of his falling under sentence for breaking the law.
The strength of his position lies less in his
executive power than in the fact that he is an
independent unit, acting in the machinery of
administration, but outside bureaucratic control,
and consequently a check on the local central
administration. He receives no salary, and is
necessarily a man of social position.
Lately, owing to the reactionary tendency
towards centralization which followed the revolu-
tionary movement in Russia, and which has not
yet abated, the influence of the district marshal
has been, to a certain extent, impaired, owing to
the greater influence exercised by the police, who
make capital, and lead the central administration
to make capital, out of the fear of revolution.
Besides the Assembly of Nobles there is a
further check on the action of the provincial
governor in the office of the procurator. This
office is attached to the divisional courts of
justice. And the procurator, besides acting
118 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
as public prosecutor and exercising general
control over law courts, has to see that the law
is executed* If a governor acts illegally, the
procurator has the right to appeal to the Senate,
which we have already seen fulfils the special
duty of examining such complaints.
Side by side with the Assemblies of the Nobles
there exist assemblies of representatives of
different classes.
For the purpose of local self-government
European Russia is divided into village com-
munes, and into groups of communes which
form an administrative unit, called the Canton
(Volost). The Canton varies in size, and can
include as many as thirty villages. Both the
Commune and the Canton are self-governing.
The village is governed by the Commune that
is to say, the village assembly which manages
the property of the village and divides it among
its members, exercises disciplinary rights, and
has the control of leases of land made to out-
siders. But both as regards the affairs of the
Commune and the Canton, the peasants are, as
a class, isolated. The Commune and the Canton
can only levy taxes on their own members.
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 119
The Canton has an assembly also. Each
Commune sends one man from every ten house-
holds to the Assembly of the Canton, which elects
a president called the Elder, and five judges
chosen from the peasants to serve on the court of
the Canton.
The provincial administration is, to some
extent, entrusted to elective District and Pro-
vincial Assemblies called Zemstvos.
The Zemstvo was created in 1864 The word
Zemstvo means territorial assembly ; the institu-
tion corresponds to our county council. There are
two kinds of Zemstvo, the smaller being elected
to deal with the affairs of a single district ; the
larger is selected by the Zemstvos of all the
districts, and forms a county council for the
whole province to deal with the affairs common
to all the districts in that province.
Both the assemblies must be summoned at least
once a year. (They sit for about a fortnight.)
The District Zemstvo Assembly is elected
indirectly, and consists on an average of about
forty members. The elections of the District
Zemstvo are organized according to class division,
or rather civic status. Each class elects so
120 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
many representatives the peasants so many,
the nobility so many, the town dwellers so
many. The number of the representatives of
each class is fixed by law in such way as to give
the representatives of the nobility the prepon-
derance. Thus about half (or more than half)
the members consists of members of the nobility ;
the remainder are peasants, and include three or
four merchants from the towns. All members
are elected for a term of three years.*
The Provincial Zemstvo consists chiefly of
members of the nobility, elected from the District
Assemblies.^
* The peasants of each. Canton elect a candidate, and the. elected .
candidates in their turn elect from amongst themselves the number
of members required. The nobility, the merchants, and any pjpas-
ants who are outside the Commune that is to say, private Hud-
owners are elected by property qualification ; they have to possess
so* many acres, or so much immovable property, or a commercial
or industrial establishment of a certain assessed value. People who
own not IOBS than one-tenth of the necessary property qualification,
also persons who are less than twenty-five years of age, and women,
may take part in the election by proxy.
t The Government or Provincial Zemstvo Assembly is composed
of a certain number of members, fixed by the law, elected by the
District Assemblies :
Of all the marshals of the nobility ;
Of all the presidents of the districts ;
Of the chairman and members of the government council ;
Of representatives of the clergy ;
Of the heads of the local branches of the Department of Agri
culture*
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 121
Both the assemblies elect from amongst them-
selves a standing committee (zemskaya uprava]
of four or five paid officials, which is appointed
for three or four years. These standing com-
mittees do practically all the current work of
the district.
The governor of the province has the right to
confirm or to refuse to confirm the election of the
presidents and members of the Zemstvo Assem-
blies ; to institute legal proceedings against
them; to exercise a veto on all resolutions of
both bodies. The assemblies have the right of
appeal to the Senate.
The nature of self-government in the towns,
and the control exercised over it is practically
the same as that of the Zemstvo institutions.
(The property qualification for the elector is high.)
The importance of the Zemstvo institutions
lies in the fact that they minister to the practical
needs of the community. Within their scope are
the ways and communications, the roads, and
the Zemstvo post, all medical and charitable
institutions, mutual insurance, prevention of
cattle disease, fire brigades, primary education,
and the development of agriculture and trade.
THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
The practical weakness of the Zemstvo as an
institution is that it possesses no lower elective
unit corresponding to a vestry or a parish ; no
boards below those of the district, which
execute its decisions.
The resources of the Zemstvo consist in taxes,
which are levied by the District and Provincial
Zemstvo on land, whether owned by the peasants,
the nobility, or the Crown.
The main characteristic of the Provincial
Zemstvo (since it was remodelled in 1890, before
which date it was more democratic) is that it is
extremely reactionary. But the Zemstvo consists,
as I have already said, chiefly of the nobility
that is to say, of members of the more cultivated
classes and the result of this is, that in spite of
its members being reactionary in views and
sentiment, the work done by assemblies of these
reactionary members is, except in times of
violent reaction, such as the period immediately
following after the revolutionary movement, of
a progressive nature.
In looking back on the work that the Zemstvo
has accomplished during the last fifty years, one
sees clearly that the action of the Zemstvo has
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 123
been purely progressive, and the work done has
outstripped in liberalism the views and the
opinions of the nobility taken as a class, which
constitute its most important ingredient. This
explains the mistrust which the central adminis-
tration entertains towards the Zemstvo even
towards its reactionary members. The repre-
sentatives of the central administration, by
exercising their right of confirming or cancel-
ling elections and resolutions, are for ever trying
to hinder and hamper the work of the Zemstvo,
and to acquire greater control over it.
In a matter such as the Zemstvo it must by no
means be assumed that the various Ministries in St.
Petersburg are necessarily at one. On the contrary,
they may be, and they often are, at sixes and
sevens. For instance, the Ministry of Agriculture
is really (and ever since it has existed edways has
been) progressive ; and since it wishes to get things
done, works with the Zemstvo ; and so does the
Ministry of Finance, as far as it is concerned with
the Zemstvo. This guarantees a certain counter
influence to that of the Ministry of the Interior,
which carries on the traditional policy of its de-
partment, of regarding the Zemstvo as an enemy.
124 THE MAINSPRINGS OP RUSSIA.
If we look now at the work which, is being
accomplished by the Zemstvo in the various
branches which come under its scope, we see a
considerable improvement in medical institu-
tions and in all that regards public health; a
vast improvement in primary education, the
progress being lately so great that there has
been a demand for supplementary funds for
education ; and quite lately agriculture has
taken a sharp bound forward, and in so doing
has received considerable assistance from the
State.
Taking the Zemstvo and its work as a whole,
as a factor in Russian life and administration,
it is clear that it is the one real and vital political
force in Russia, in spite of the reactionary
tendencies of the majority of its members, and
in spite of an important organic weakness in
its constitution, which I have already mentioned
namely, the absence of a link between the
Zemstvo and the people it represents.
It is near to practical life, and it is nearer to
the population than any other institution or
body, and since it possesses, in its limited way,
wider facilities for the public discussion of vital
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 125
interests than any other institutions, it has
during the last fifty years proved the real organ
of public opinion, and the real lever in the matter
of progress, for it was the Zemstvo which voiced
the universal desire for reform in 1905, and
contributed in no small way to the changes
which were then made.
All that is here set down, when you read it
through, sounds, as far as the Zemstvo is con-
cerned, as if all were for the best in the best of
all possible worlds; but in practice the work
of the Zemstvo is hampered by the power of the
officials appointed by the Central Government,
and the power of these officials is not only
used arbitrarily, but sometimes in a manner
definitely contrary to the law. For the governor
of the province, if he cannot absolutely put a
stop to the work of the Zemstvo, can hamper
it in every possible way, and put effectual
spokes in its wheels. It is not only that the
possibility of his so doing exists, but the fact
is being actually and not seldom experienced at
the present time, owing to the low administrative
standard of the governors who are appointed.
It is worth mentioning also that in the im-
126 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
portant outlying districts of Russia in Poland,
the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus there is
no Zemstvo, and all the duties of the Zemstvo
are carried out by a committee of officials,, and the
majority of these do their work extremely badly.
Also, in these regions the nobility have no rights.
If you review the Government machine which
administrates Russia as a whole, the same
criticism applies. On paper the fundamental
laws of the empire, the rights of the two Houses
and of the Senate, and of the instruments of
local self-government, together with the numer-
ous checks and safeguards against official law-
lessness, seem to provide a very fine working
constitution- In practice the rights are often
over-ruled, and the checks disregarded.
The Duma, by its very existence, of course,
is an element of progress, however indirect ; but
here again the Government^ owing to the nature
of the electoral law, can exert pressure on the
elections, and have so far succeeded in always
obtaining a reactionary majority, so that the
actual composition of the Duma is not what
it would be if the Government exerted no pres-
sure at all.
THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE. 127
Again, since any form or shade of constitutional
government is a new feature in Russia, in many
cases that arise there is no established precedent
which can be referred to, and the course to be
taken is doubtful, but in such cases the benefit
of this doubt accrues to the Government.
In spite of this there is not the slightest doubt
that in Russia at present the existence and the
action of the Duma are felt, indirectly, very
widely indeed. And as a rule people who are
in the thick of Russian affairs, the Russians
themselves, will not realize this so well as an
outsider.
The existence of the Duma has proved a
factor in national progress. And the outsider,
who has had any experience of Russian life in
the past, will at once see that the progress in
the general state of affairs from what existed
ten years ago to what exists now has been
immense. There is a great gulf between the
period before 1905 and the era which began in
1905. The trouble is that the government
and the administration have not kept step and
time with the national progress. And when
people say in exculpation of the faults of any
i8 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
given government, that every country has the
government which it deserves, it may safely be
said that the actual government of Russia is
less good than what Russia deserves, since it is
impossible to deny that, in some respects,
Russia is comparatively, relatively, and taking
the general state of affairs and of national pro-
gress into consideration, less well governed at
present as is the case probably with England
and most other European countries than it was
not only in the immediate past, but even in the
days of Alexander II. Hence there exists an
increasing political discontent, into the specific
causes of which we will inquire in the next
chapter.
CHAPTER V.
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT.
T HAVE already said in the preceding chapter
A that the principles of central and parliament-
ary government in Russia, and the theory of local
administration and local self-government, if in-
vestigated on paper, produce an excellent im-
pression, so that the casual inquirer, glancing at
the subject for the first time, will be tempted to
exclaim, " What more can the Russian people
want ? "
Moreover, there has perhaps never been a
period when Russia was more materially pros-
perous than at the present moment, or when the
great majority of the people seemed to have
so little obvious cause for discontent ; and yet
it would be futile to deny it unmistakable signs
of discontent exist.
Seeds of discontent have been sown, and are
5
ISO THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
every day being sown broadcast, and unless their
early shoots are uprooted in time, it is difficult
to imagine that they will not bear momentous
fruit in the future, however distant such a future
may be.
Whereupon the casual inquirer would probably
ask a further question : "If the Russian people
are discontented, why are they discontented ?
What are these seeds of discontent ? Whence
do they come ? And are their grievances sub-
stantial or frivolous, real or imaginary ? "
The answer is, I think, simple.
The seeds of discontent, where they exist, are
the result of one simple fact. In 1905 explicit
promises were made to the Russian people,
which, if carried out, would insure their complete
political liberty and the full rights of citizenship.
Those promises have in some cases not been
carried out at all, and in other cases they have
only been carried out partially, or according to
the letter and not according to the spirit.
Practically, political liberty does not yet exist
in Russia, and the rights of political citizenship
are still a vain dream.
Every now and then the spokesmen of the
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 131
Government inform us that the Russian people
are quite indifferent as to legislative reform, and
that all they care for is competent administration.
I think, however, putting aside altogether the
question whether competent administration can
be obtained without legislative reform, that
nobody will deny that some people in Russia
want political liberty. It would be equally
difficult to deny that the absence of political
liberty indirectly hampers and annoys and
exasperates a still greater number of people,
who take no interest in politics and who foster
no political theories of any kind.
Hence discontent arises, which will necessarily
vary and increase in proportion as such annoy-
ance and exasperation is felt by a greater or
lesser number of people.
In the years that followed immediately on the
publishing of the Manifesto in 1905, the policy
of the Government during the administration of
P. A, Stolypin was : " Order first ; Reform
afterwards." To P. A. Stolypin fell the un-
grateful task of restoring order. He accom-
plished his task, successfully if drastically. And
it is only fair to say that it ^oujd have probably
THE MAINSPRINGS, OF RUSSIA.
been impossible to restore order save by drastic
measures. It must also be said in fairness that
P. A. Stolypin initiated certain large measures
which tend towards reform his Land Bill and
his Education Bill, for instance. But the re-
forms initiated during his administration, and
during that of his successor, have as yet only
been partial ; and so far the practical policy of
the Government has consisted in taking away,
curtailing, and limiting with one hand what has
been given with the other.
This is partly due to the constant introduction
of qualifying clauses and amendments in any new
laws that are liberal in spirit amendments which
have the effect of hindering the practical operation
of the laws ; and partly to the quality of the local
administration, whose duty it is to interpret and
to execute the laws. As a general rule, the local
administrative officials, by the manner of their
interpretation, are completely successful in sacri-
ficing the spirit to the letter of the law, and of
depriving the laws of their true meaning, and of
rendering them null and void in practice.
Such a policy must inevitably have an exas-
perating effect on the population.
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 133
Let us look into the matter a little more closely.
The 'Manifesto of October 30 promised, firstly,
the creation of a deliberative and legislative
assembly without whose consent no new laws in
the future should be passed ; and secondly, the
full rights of citizenship namely, the inviola-
bility of the person, freedom of conscience, free-
dom of the Press, the right of organizing public
meetings, and of founding unions and associations.
How far and in what manner have these prom-
ises been fulfilled ? How far are these things a
practical factor in Russian political life to-day ?
Let us take the Duma first.
We have already seen that the Duma possesses
a considerable indirect influence, and that by its
very existence, and quite apart from what it may
effect or fail to effect legislatively, a change has
come about in the government of Russia ; but
in spite of this, the powers, or rather the power, of
the Duma is to a certain extent paralyzed by the
attitude of the Central Government towards it.
The attitude of the Government towards the
Duma is a curious one. Firstly, by its inter-
pretation of the law, by the addition of qualifying
clauses and amendments, the Government tries,
134 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
whenever it can, to diminish the powers that
have been granted to the Duma, and more
especially in so far as they concern the Budget ;
and secondly, the Government floods the Duma
with a great quantity of irrelevant and trivial
legislation with the object of keeping the more
vital and important issues out of its reach.
This is one reason why any prevailing discon-
tent is prevented from subsiding, since by acting
in this manner the Government never ceases
to fan the smouldering ashes of discontent into
flame, and to feed the flame with slender but
continuous supplies of fresh fuel.
So far, then, we have already one cause of
I discontent the attitude of the Government
towards the Duma ; and this attitude consists,
in a word, of doing everything it can to prevent
the Duma from becoming a reality a vital factor
in the State and in trying to convert it into
a passive annex to the Government machine.
The second question now arises. What has
been, and what is, the attitude of the Central
Government towards the remaining promises
made by the Manifesto of October 30th? I
will take the promises separately; but before
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 135
doing so, it will be as well to point out that, at
present, all matters which are affected by the
promises laid down in the Manifesto of 1905 are
being carried out by temporary regulations,
instead of by laws passed through the Duma.
It is clear that temporary regulations lend
themselves easily to amendment, and amend-
ments signify a deviation from the original
intention of such regulations. Moreover, all
temporary regulations are interpreted by the
local officials, whose powers of interpretation
are necessarily arbitrary, and whose powers
of evasion, explanation, and general tergiversa-
tion are incredibly ingenious, and are almost
invariably employed in the interests of reaction.
I will now take the various points in order.
(1.) The Inviolability of the Person. With
regard to this question, practically nothing has
been done. A Bill on the subject was introduced
by the Government during the third session of
the last Duma, but was rejected by the Duma
because it did not affect the root of the ques-
tion. Another Bill was introduced later,
but has not yet emerged into the region of
fact. The laws of the country on this point
136 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
are brief and explicit. They guarantee to the sub-
ject a slightly protracted form of habeas corpus.,
and are summed up in twelve short clauses;
but if you buy the book containing these twelve
short clauses, you find they are followed by a
whole volume of amendments, explanations, and
rules relating to exceptional circumstances.
Practically, these exceptions deal for the greater
part with so-called political offences ; but owing
to the ramifications of these manifold amend-
ments, both the central and the local authorities
can enlarge their conception of what constitutes a
political offence to almost any extent. The inter-
pretation becomes infinitely elastic ; and thus it is
easy for people who have no more to do with poli-
tics than the man in the moon to fall under the
suspicion of a political offence, and the life of
everyday people is reached and touched by the
ramifications of exceptional clauses made to a clear
law, which was originally passed in order to deal
with cases germane to one exceptional matter, and
which could only therefore affect a small minority.
Again, all the ordinary laws of the country
can be suspended and overruled by the putting
into force of temporary regulations, which are
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 137
introduced by the authorities as administrative
measures in districts which are, or are supposed
to be, disturbed.
These temporary measures are in reality minor
forms and shades of martial law. They consist
of what are called the state of " Reinforced
Protection," and the state of " Extraordinary
Protection."
Both these exception " states " may be pro-
claimed by the Ministry of the Interior, after a
resolution of the Cabinet Council, which must be
confirmed by the Emperor.
Under the state of " Reinforced Protection,"
governors-general, governors, and city prefects
have the right of inflicting punishment for the
infringement of any rules they may issue by a
imp, not exceeding 500 roubles (50), or by a
term of imprisonment not exceeding three months,
without trial. They have also, among other things,
the right of prohibiting public or private meetings,
of shutting commercial establishments, of prohibit-
ing the residence of any person in a given district.
Under the state of " Extraordinary Protec-
tion" their powers are enlarged. For instance,
a special police can be created, and certain
5a
138 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
offences can be removed from the jurisdiction of
ordinary courts of law and can be tried by
courts-martial ; newspapers and periodicals can
be suspended, and schools can be closed for a
period not exceeding one month. The state of
" Reinforced Protection " is still in force at this
moment in many parts of Russia, and although
one reads from time to time in the newspaper that
it has been removed from such and such a place 3
it often happens that it is merely the name which
has been abolished. The governor will often con-
tinue to exercise rights which are supposed to
apply solely to exceptional circumstances.
Further, these " States of Protection " are
often left in force in places where there is not,
and has not been for a reasonable time, a shadow
of disturbance.
(2.) Freedom of Conscience. A law whose
sole object was religious tolerance was passed a
few years ago. Theoretically freedom of con-
science is supposed to exist. Practically, it
exists only very partially. If there are fifty
members of any religious denomination in any
place in Russia, they are supposed to be allowed
to build a church, where they can worship as they
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT.
please. But there is a clause in this law forbid-
ding propaganda ; and lately the interpretation
of this clause has become more and more elastic,
and in virtue of it technical objections are raised
showing that Catholic or Uniate, or other unor-
thodox societies, are not in order, and their
churches are consequently closed. Sometimes
technical objections of another nature are
found to meet the case. A case in point
is that of the Catholic Uniates who were
allowed by P. A. Stolypin to have a church in
St. Petersburg. That church has now been
closed by the Minister of the Interior, Maklakov,
on the grounds that the church building does
not fulfil the technical conditions obligatory
to buildings where public meetings are held.
Nothing could be more typical. The tendency
during the last three years has been to take away
by means of technical objections, or under the
pretence of having discovered traces of propa-
ganda, the larger liberties that were given. And
this again irritates all those whom it may con-
cern. As soon as any religious sect is suspected
of opening rivalry to the Orthodox Church,
some means or other ip immediately found for
140 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
prohibiting it. The Salvation Army are not
allowed in Russia. Such things being the case,
it would be absurd to say that liberty of con-
science exists in Russia ; on the other hand, it
exists in larger measure than it used to.
(3.) Freedom of tlie Press. Broadly speaking,
the Press is free in Russia at present, and this is
perhaps the greatest asset which resulted from
the revolutionary movement. Before 1905, there
existed what in practice, although not in theory,
was called " Previous Censure " that is to say,
representatives of the censorship used to visit
the newspaper offices and censor the newspapers
at their own sweet will. At present people can
write what they choose in the newspapers, but
the administration has the right to inflict a fine
not exceeding 500 roubles (50) on a newspaper
(a) for publishing false news concerning the
Government; and (6) for inciting the populace
to rise against the Government ; and in the case
of " Extraordinary Protection," newspapers, as
we have seen, can be stopped altogether.
The effect of this regulation is felt far more in
the provinces than in the large cities, for it
stands to reason that a small newspaper with a
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 1451
narrow circulation will be more sensitive to such
a fine than a large newspaper with an enormous
circulation, to which it will be no more than a
flea-bite. Moreover, the regulation is applied
more often and more indiscriminately in the
provinces than in the large cities.
For instance, the Moscow newspaper, the
RussJcoe Slovo, which I believe has the largest
circulation of any Russian newspaper, published
on November 7, 1913, the following schedule
of the fines imposed on newspapers for comments
on the Beiliss trial up to date :
October 24 (November 7, N.S.).
Pamphlets confiscated . . . . 1
Newspapers fined . . . . . . 1
Total fines, 200 roubles (about 20).
Total for 30 days of the Beiliss Case.
Editors arrested * . . . . . 6
Editors summoned . . . . . . 6
Newspapers confiscated . , , . 27
Pamphlets confiscated , * 6
Newspapers closed . . . . . . 3
Newspapers fined . . . . . . 42
Total of fines (up to date) 12,750 roubles
(about 1,275).
142 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
A similar schedule, with its daily total of fines,
appeared every day during the ritual murder
trial.
It will be seen that the fines, when added up,
do not amount to a very considerable sum, but a
succession of such fines, not large in themselves,
can end by doing damage to a small provincial
paper. In any case they exercise an irritating
effect.
Here again the question of interpretation
plays an important part.
Almost anything can be interpreted as coming
under the head of " false news concerning the
Government/ 9 and it is often easy to catch a
newspaper out of a technical inaccuracy, al-
though the statement made may in its substance
be true.
For instance, if in a schedule such as that I
have quoted it were stated that the editor of
such and such a provincial newspaper had been
arrested, and supposing the fact were true ; but
supposing also he had been subsequently re-
leased, and the news of his release had not
reached the newspaper which published the news
of his arrest, the newspaper would be fined for
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 143
spreading false news with regard to the action
of the Government.
Supposing, again, a regulation in a provincial
district had been infringed by an official, and
the news of the infringement were published in
a newspaper ; if the newspaper made a mistake
with regard to the exact rank of the official in
question, it would be fined for spreading false
news.
Newspapers that copy news from other news-
papers which come under the ban of " false
news " are likewise liable to be fined.
This state of things, although it leaves the
richer newspapers indifferent, exasperates the
great mass of the journalistic world beyond
measure.
(4.) The right of holding Public Meetings.
Public meetings are allowed, theoretically, under
certain conditions. In the first place, in order to
hold a meeting you must apply for permission
to the local governor, and state the object of
the meeting. If the local governor refuses,
you must give up the idea.
Secondly, a member of the police must be
present at any meeting, who shall have the right
THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
of putting a stop to the proceedings if he thinks
the speakers are showing signs of &n anti-govern-
mental tendency.
The police have in the last few years con-
tinually enlarged their conception of what can
be considered anti-governmental., so much so
that they often go to a meeting with the sole
purpose of stopping it, and seize the first pretext
of so doing, especially if it is a meeting of work-
ing men. The net result .of- the policy is that
public meetings are rare, even at election times.
Even the programmes of concerts must be
sanctioned by the police.
(5.) Associations and Societies. These had a
brief and flourishing existence immediately after
the publication of the Manifesto, during the
administration of Count Witte and the session of
the first Duma ; since then they have practically
ceased to exist. They are entirely subject to
Government control, and have been controlled
out of all existence.
These five clauses which I have just analyzed,
if they were carried out in practice, would confer
on the Russian citizen complete rights of citizen-
ship in a word, political liberty. As it is,
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 145
they are either not carried out at all, or in so far
as they are carried out they operate in virtue
of temporary regulations which are (a) liable to
constant amendment ; (b) at the mercy of the
interpretation of local officials.
So, if the attitude of the Government towards
the Duma is one great cause of discontent, the
nature and the tendency of local administration
is another.
The local administration is bad in itself, and
has the effect of exasperating the people.
One of the reasons why this is so, is the neces-
sity which the local officials feel themselves to be
under of keeping up their prestige, and the
prestige of the Central Government. The result
of the policy of " Order first ; Reform afterwards,"
as it filtered through the various branches of
administration throughout the country, is that
the greatest crime in the eyes of the administra-
tion is criticism criticism of any kind because
the slightest breath of criticism is held to
be subversive and detrimental to the prestige
of Government ; and in the eyes of the offi-
cials, the Government must be upheld at all
costs.
146 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
In the country, in the provinces and districts,
at the present day in Russia, the illegality
practised by Government officials is more flagrant
than it was before 1905, because before 1905
illegality came from above, and from above only,
and the local Government officials did not dare
to infringe their obligations, but now the illegality
is decentralized, and disseminated throughout
the complicated network of administration. And
since any kind of criticism is looked upon as a
crime, those who are guilty of it ? or are sus-
pected of being guilty of it, are liable to meet
with every kind of small restriction, check, and
annoyance, and hence the life of the people
is interfered with, and discontent is engen-
dered.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the part played
by the secret police.
We have said that criticism is regarded as a
crime, and as an attack on the prestige of Govern-
ment, but the reason of this is that criticism of
governmental methods or officials is regarded
as being synonymous with sympathy with the
revolutionaries, and the ideas of the extreme
parties, and this wide definition of criticism
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 147
includes religious propaganda, the spreading
of false news, and all anti-governmental speech
or action. All these things are regarded as de-
noting sympathy with revolution, and revolution
in its extreme form.
This is the view of the administration as a
whole, and the view is strongly reflected in the
action of the secret police, which exists all over
the country; and the business of the secret
police is, if not to spread discontent, to make it
appear far more formidable than it is ; to make
it appear active where in reality it is only passive,
otherwise there would be no reason why a large
part of the secret police should exist at all.
In order to check and keep an eye on the
revolutionary movement, whose existence the
administration suspects everywhere, a wholesale
system of espionage, of secret reports, of private
denunciation, exists. The administration em-
ploys a quantity of people who are paid to
" sneak " of what is going on in various quarters.
Now the step from the office of spy to that of
agent provocateur is an easy one. It is obvious
that a spy who wishes for further information
about people who are thought to be revolution-
148 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
aries will obtain that information more easily
if he pretends to be a revolutionary himself.
So the spy easily degenerates into the agent
provocateur, and the people, knowing that spies
and agents provocateurs exist in their midst, feel
they are never safe. And this feeling that you
are never safe, whoever you are, or wherever
you are (for a report may be at any moment
being concocted about you, in the very milieu
where you live), gives a constantly increasing
stimulus to discontent. It is not so much the
things that happen, but the feeling that some-
thing may happen, that nobody is safe, which,
prevents discontent from dying out. Here, as
in other respects, the life of the people is
interfered with, and the people are exasper-
ated.
All that I have written so far applies to Russia
proper, but it is applicable in a higher degree
to the Ukraines, to Poland, the Caucasus, the
Baltic provinces, and to Finland.
In these provinces the arbitrary nature of
local administration and the illegality practised
by Government officials is felt more strongly
still than in Russia. Consequently, in all these
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 149
outlying dominions, there prevails a greater or a
lesser degree of discontent. And this discontent
is further increased by the policy of the Central
Government towards these dominions ; for the
Government vis-a-vis of the Duma makes
capital out of the question of these different
nationalities, and places in the foreground ques-
tions of legislation which concern them. They
are used as a political weapon, as a spring-board
for nationalist theory and practice, and as a
means for shelving measures of reform, which
deal with Russia proper. This not only ex-
asperates these various nationalities to a high
degree, but it also exasperates those Russians
who wish to see the reforms that were prom-
ised realized in their own country.
Finally, the question arises, " Why is this
so ? " What prevents Russia from being quietly
governed according to the comprehensive laws
that already exist in its code, and according to
the admirable and perspicuous principles of its
political constitution ? and further, what pre-
vents the Government from fulfilling those
promises made, which are as yet unfulfilled,
and from putting into practice reforms which
150 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the majority of thinking people in Russia agree
are indispensable ?
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to give a
satisfactory and categorical answer to these
questions.
Political Liberals in Russia would probably
answer that the old regime which was scotched
but not killed in 1905 is gradually recovering
strength, and is simply ^hting^^fiSs^existence :
that it is a case of self-preservation. On the
other hand, there are Independent Conservatives
and Independent Radicals who would tell you
that what is needful in Russia is a strong ex-
ecutive, a drastic and courageous dictator, who
would be strong enough to hew down the im-
pediments, and cart away the rubbish, and govern
Russia according to its ancient traditions ; that
this is the only form of government which has
ever been successful in Russia, but that no such
man of action is forthcoming at present. Others,
more sceptically inclined, would probably remind
you that every country has the government it
deserves ; and that if political liberty in Russia
does not exist, it is owing to the fundamental
tendency of the Russian character towards i
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 151
cipline, and that since every Russian is more or
less undisciplined, it is impossible for them to
expect that their Government will be anything
but arbitrary.
One thing is certain, the drawbacks, the re-
straint, the impediments, the danger of criticism,
the checks on free speech, on free worship, and
other forms of freedom, to which I have alluded,
naturally touch the educated part of the popu-
lation more nearly than they do the great mass
the majority, the peasants who at this moment
are better off economically than they have ever
been before ; and consequently, even if they
are discontented, it stands to reason that in the
present circumstances it would need a powerful
stimulus to increase their discontent to breaking
point.
And what is true about the peasants is true,
to a certain extent, about the remainder of the
population.
The population on the whole are prosperous
at the present moment, and their grievances are
neither sharp nor strong enough, nor sufficiently
abundant, to make the temperature of their
discontent rise to boiling point. When the
152 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
discontent which now exists becomes sufficiently
widely and deeply felt to stir the average man to
sympathy with action, and the abnormal man
to violent action, then there may be an out-
break, unless it be anticipated by timely meas-
ures of reform, and the causes of discontent be
removed.
At present nothing is being done by the
Central Government or the local administration
in this direction. At the present moment the
local administration is making capital out of
the fear of a revolution and a revolutionary
movement, of whose existence there is little or
no evidence, and infecting the central adminis-
tration with this fear. Both the local and the
central administration are constantly taking
steps and issuing minor repressive measures to
counteract a danger which, in the opinion of
most people, exists only in the imagination of
detectives ; but if this policy continues, it is
more than probable that the administrative
powers will in time succeed in transforming the
danger from an imaginary one into a real one, or
rather, they will create the very danger they are
afraid of; and the next revolution in Russia
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. 153
will be the offspring of the fears of the adminis-
tration of a bogey.
The last revolutionary movement in Russia
had a destructive and demoralizing effect on the
population ; it produced a wave of hooliganism
among the lower classes, and a current of an-
archical thought and conduct in the educated
classes. It also had a demoralizing effect on the
minor officials and public servants ; but whereas
in the great majority of the uneducated and
educated public the balance of equilibrium was
automatically restored, owing to the necessities
of everyday life and a natural reaction towards
common sense, this demoralization had a more
lasting effect on the officials, who once having
been used to meet exceptional circumstances
and lawless acts by arbitrary means and illegal
measures, found it difficult to divest themselves
of the habit. And the lower the rung of the
official ladder the more apparent the demoraliza-
tion becomes.
Now, it is the small officials who are more
intimately in touch with the population. Con-
sequently the effect of their action is being con-
tinually felt, and the effect is bad. And until
154 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
something is done from above to remedy this
state of things, the smouldering embers of dis-
content, as I have already said, will never have
a chance of growing cold, and may ultimately
burst out in a fire of alarming proportions.
CHAPTER VI.
THE AVERAGE BTJSSIAST.
HT^HE great danger in studying Russian life is to
-* pay so much importance to the trees that
the wood escapes notice. The temptation to do
so where Russia is concerned is all the greater
owing to the interest of individual trees ; and
by individual trees I mean not only individuals,
but phases, tendencies, currents of thought, par-
ticular types, and political parties. Such types, or
schools of thought, or political groups, although
often of great interest in themselves, are rarely
representative of the average tendency; and
yet by foreigners it is often taken for granted
that they are not only typical of the whole, but
that nothing else beside them exists.
There was a time when Russia was supposed to
consist entirely of Nihilists and policemen ; at a
later period social revolutionaries took the part
156 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
of Nihilists, and the agent provocateur played the
chief part in the opposing camp, in the general
view one obtained from the foreign press.
This general view was, of course, founded on
fact. At one period Nihilists did exist, did
conspire, and did blow up.
As for social revolutionaries, they existed in
great quantities, and the agents provocateurs, too,
became so numerous that it was scarcely worth
while to be a social revolutionary. These groups
are historically and psychologically worthy of
careful study, but they were never representa-
tive of the average Russian, any more than the
Fabians or the militant suffragettes are repre-
sentative of the average Englishman and Eng-
lishwoman.
Then, again, you get the interesting types
created by the masters of literature. You get
Dostoievsky's neurasthenic murderer; Raskolni-
kov, his frigid and calculating political intriguer ;
Vervkhovensky, his undisciplined and centrifugal
Dimitri Karamazov. You get Turgeniev's in-
tellectual and uncompromising Bazarov ; his en-
thusiastic sponger and genie sans portefeuille,
Rudin ; Tolstoi's Levin, Gorki's anarchical pro-
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 157
letarian. And all these characters are each of
them more interesting than the other, and all
of them reveal qualities that are Russian and
nothing but Russian. But none of them is the
average Russian, because the man of genius, when
he creates a type such as Lear or Faust, is not
endeavouring to portray the average man, but
is making a synthesis of the human soul ; so
that every human being can see something of
himself in the mirror of the poet's creation. But
that creation is larger and wider than nature;
and so far from being confined to the character-
istics of the average man, contains within itself
all the possibilities and capabilities and passions
of the human soul all the strings of the instru-
ment, its whole gamut, its complete range of
expression.
And the creations of a Russian novelist such
as Dostoievsky afford us a synthesis of the
Russian soul, in its profoundest depths, in
its sorest spots, at its widest extremes, at its
highest pitch of rapture or despair. The result is
that they are no more portraits of the average
Russian than Lear is a portrait of the average
Englishman; and yet they are profoundly Rus-
158 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
sian, just as Lear is profoundly English, and
Faust is profoundly German although Faust is
hardly a typical portrait of the ordinary German
bourgeois.
One of the results which the genius of Russian
novelists has had on foreign opinion is to create
a general impression that Russia is a country of
" inspissated gloom," because the greater num-
ber of the Russian novelists and poets deal with
tragic themes, and their characters are painted
in sombre colours.
There is nothing very strange about this.
Happy individuals, like happy countries, have no
history; and if you want to write drama, and
especially tragic drama, the domestic affairs of
(Edipus Rex or Othello obviously offer more fruit-
ful material to the dramatist than the domestic
affairs of Darby and Joan or of Philemon and
Baucis. Even if the writer's aim is comedy,
he will probably choose themes and material
which give occasion for merciless satire or ex-
. travagant mirth, and create characters which on
the comic side are as far above or below the
average as those of the poets on the tragic side.
falstaff is just as extraordinary $ Character a
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 159
Hamlet., and Sam Weller is just as exceptional
as Napoleon ; yet Sam Weller, again, is pro-
foundly English.
In Russia, just as in other countries, the
cheerful side of life is reflected in literature, and
the average man plays a part also only that
branch of Russian literature is less well known.
Gogol, for instance, has created innumerable
comic types; and Pushkin has, in his master-
piece, Evgenie Oniegin, drawn a masterly por-
trait of an average type, and more especially
in Tatiana he has given us a lifelike portrait of
the soul of the Russian woman, which is a radiant
soul. But Gogol is less well known abroad than
Turgeniev; and Pushkin's work being written
in verse, suffers badly from inadequacy or,
rather, impossibility of translation.
The net result is that the impression the out-
side reader obtains from such Russian literature
as is available to him is that Russia is a gloomy
country, and that the Russian people are steeped
in a cloud of permanent melancholy. And yet
the first thing that strikes you when you go to
Russia is the cheerfulness* of the people and
* Ciieerf ulness, not gaiety.
160 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the good humour of the average man. Not
long ago, apropos of an article on Dostoievsky's
Idiot, a well-known Russian artist wrote to
The Times, saying that you might just as
well judge the English people by The City oj
Dreadful Night as the Russian people by Dos-
toievsky's characters. The writer of the article
explained, in answer, that he was not judging
the Russian people at all, but only the faith of
Dostoievsky. And although I think the writer's
purpose was plain, and that he achieved it
admirably, nevertheless the Russian artist's
complaint, if it did not appty to the writer of
that article, was a wholesome reminder to the
public in general that the creations of Dostoievsky
are creations of genius, and creations of tragic
genius profoundly Russian, but dealing almost
exclusively with the tragic adventures of the
soul (which is, after all, the business of tragedy),
and leaving out its sunnier experiences. As
the Russian artist pointed out, there is an-
other side to the medal of Russian life, and not
only a bright side, but an unusually bright side
the svietlaya dmcha, the radiant soul of which
the Russian poet speaks, whose radiance, in my
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 161
opinion, is nowhere plainer than in Dostoievsky's
novels, in spite of, and sometimes even because
of, the encircling gloom.
It stands to reason that, if all Russians were
as melancholy as they are depicted as being in
many Russian novels and plays written by men
of genius, the great majority of the Russian
nation would have cut their throats a long time
ago.
It is evident that there must be a great deal of
cheerfulness, humour, at)d joy to counterbalance
the gloom, the anguish, and the melancholy which
is so vividly and so poignantly described by so
many Russian authors, or else life would not
go on.
This is just what is the case. The Russian
goes easily to extremes : he is not, as a rule, fond
of half measures ; so that when he is melan-
choly, his melancholy takes an extreme form.
He is fond of going the whole hog; and if he
is inclined to neurasthenia and hysteria, he will
give full scope to his fancy in that direction:
he will be not uninclined to say with Baudelaire,
"" J'ai cultivt mon TiysUrie avec jouissance et
terreur"
8
162 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
But the average Russian is, perhaps, little
more inclined to neurasthenia than the average
Englishman. The average Russian is well-edu-
cated, cheerful, sociable, intensely gregarious,
hospitable, talkative, expansive, good-humoured,
and good-natured. You hear often in Russia
the phrase shirokaya natura applied to the Rus-
sian temperament a large nature. It means
that the Russian temperament is generous, un-
stinted, democratic, and kind. Good-hearted-
ness, and sometimes great-heartedness, is the
great asset of the average Russian. He is the
most tolerant of human beings. He is pre-
eminently indulgent, and extends to the faults
and failings of his neighbours the same indul-
gence which he knows his own faults and fail-
ings will receive at his neighbour's hands. His
lack of hypocrisy, and the manner in which he
will speak of his own shortcomings and defi-
ciencies, will sometimes strike the foreigner as
being the quintessence of cynicism.
One of the most contented Russians I ever met
was a man who had got the post of assistant
ticket-collector on a small railway line. His
duty was to check the ticket collector. This man
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 163
had once upon a time been enormously rich.
He had possessed estates, where he entertained
his friends on a large scale, and provided them
with every kind of amusement in the way of
sport. Besides this, he had a private theatre of
his own and a private orchestra. He spent all
his money in this way, until there was none left,
and he was obliged to accept what post he could
get. But as an insignificant public servant on
the railway line he was just as cheerful as ever ;
he said that he had just as much fun. " I used
to drink champagne," he explained, " now I
drink vodka ; the result is the same in the long-
run. I used to have a lot of money. IVe spent
it ; money is meant to spend. What is the good
of keeping or hoarding it? One can't take it
with one when one dies."
This man had a shirokaya natura a large and
generous temperament. There was no trace of
neurasthenia observable in his character. Stingi-
ness is a quality which is rare in Russia. Thrift
and economy axe not among those virtues which
are commonest there. On the other hand,
broadness of mind and largeness of heart are
virtues which are among the commonest.
164 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
After Count Tolstoy died a posthumous play
of his was published, called The Living Corpse.
The subject of the play was a story that hap-
pened in real life, taken straight from the news-
paper, with the names and the milieu changed,
and it struck me, when I read it and saw it
acted, as being typical of Russian life a story
which could only happen in Russia. It is per-
haps worth while retelling it here, as it throws
more light on the subject than pages of argu-
ment.
The story is as follows. Liza Protasova leaves
her husband Feodor, whom she had loved, be-
cause he is
" A little slovenly in dress,
A trie prone to drunkenness."
Not a bad man, but weak, extravagant, and
given to periodic outbreaks, when he spends the
night listening to gipsies singing, and drinking
champagne. You must know Russia to under-
stand what listening to gipsies means, and you
must be well inoculated with gipsy music before
vou understand the tyrannical spell of it. It is
in a lesser degree like smoking opium.
Apart from these more or less venial failings,
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 165
Feodor, as I have said, is not a bad man, nor is
he even an unfaithful husband. Nevertheless,
his wife, after one of these periodic outbursts,
leaves him and returns to her mother, who thor-
oughly approves of such a course. But no sooner
has Liza taken this step than she repents her-
self of it, and she sends Feodor a message by one
Karenin asking him to come back to her. Ea-
renin is an honest prig and a bore. He is also
in love with Liza. He executes the commission ;
but Feodor is listening to the gipsies, and espe-
cially to one of them called Masha, and he re-
fuses to go back.
Weeks go by, and then months. Karenin
loves Liza ; Liza loves Karenin. Masha loves
Feodor. Liza's mother wishes her daughter to
be divorced and to marry Karenin. An em-
bassy with this proposal is dispatched to Feodor,
But according to the Russian law in such a case,
in order to get a divorce when a wife has left
her husband because she no longer wishes to be
his wife, the husband must take the guilt on
himself. He must declare himself a guilty, un-
faithful husband; and if he is not one, he must
concoct sham evidence to show that he is, and
166 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
swear to It. This Feodor refuses to do, because
lie is not guilty ; he has not been unfaithful.
He says, " I have been a bad husband, I am a
worthless man ; but there are things which I
cannot do, and one of them is quietly to tell the
necessary lies in order to make this divorce
possible." He seeks another solution. He finds
a simple one suicide. But when the revolver
is at his temple he hesitates, in an agony ; and
at that moment Masha the gipsy intervenes,
sees what is happening, and suggests another
solution that he should let the world think he
had killed himself, and in reality escape with
her into the limbo of the disclassed, leaving his
wife free to marry Karenin. He does this. He
writes a letter to his wife, saying that he is
about to kill himself ; he leaves his clothes by
the river. The plan succeeds ; by chance a
corpse is found. Liza says it is that of her
husband (and it is no use saying that this is
improbable, because it all happened). Feodor
and Masha disappear, and Karenin marries Liza.
All is for the best, for them.
Feodor sinks deeper into the mud; and one
fine day, when he is telling his story to a friend
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 167
in a squalid tavern, he is overheard by a kind
of tramp, who, quick to see the possible profit
arising out of such a situation, suggests to Feodor
a scheme of joint blackmail that they should
blackmail Liza. Feodor tells him to go to what
I see now is prettily called " the underground
world ; " and the tramp, in a rage, calls a police-
man and gives Feodor in charge for bigamy.
But not only is Feodor had up for bigamy,
but his wife and Karenin also : they are
charged with conspiracy if that be the right
term for having been privy to the scheme,
and for having paid Feodor to get out of the
way and to become a " living corpse." The
maximum penalty of the law for bigamy is
exile to Siberia ; the minimum what is -called
" Church contrition." But in any case the second
marriage is cancelled, and if Karenin, Feodor,
and Liza were acquitted of conspiracy, Liza and
Feodor would nevertheless be bound to resume
their interrupted married life. The lawyers do
not believe a word of the true story as it is told
by the witnesses ; and Feodor, to prevent Liza
from being bound to him once more, commits
suicide in the corridor of the law courts during
168 THE MAINSPRINGS OF JfeUSSIA.
the trial That is the story, Mid such are the
facts such as they actually ^happened in real
life. /
In this story Feodor, bojii in his faults and in
his good qualities, is intensely typical of the
Russian character.
This story illustrates the melancholy side of
Russian life. To convince yourself of the cheer-
ful side of the Russian character, you have only
to look at any regiment of Russian soldiers
marching through a street and singing as they
march. It is the melancholy note of Russian
music that is best known abroad. But cheerful
songs and choruses exist in great abundance, and
if you listen to the people in villages singing
in the summer night, it is nearly always a cheer-
ful song that you will hear to the accompaniment
of the accordion ; and often the songs are not
only cheerful but irresistible in their lilt. The
sense of rhythm of some of the village singers,
and especially of the accompanists, whether
they play the accordion or the three-stringed
guitar, the balalaika, is sure, masterly, and
astounding. The accompanist follows the singer
with an infinite diversity in unity, and while
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 169
varying all the time, and introducing fantastic
changes and daring improvisations., he never
loses hold of the main trend of the subject, of
the fundamental rhythm : he varies with in-
variable law.
Such music is infectious and captivating. It
would inspire the lame to dance and the dead to
walk. It is untiring. It seems to be able to go
on and on for ever without pause or hesitation,
and to reveal a fresh energy and to draw a new
supply of strength with every new verse.
The average Russian is not only fond of music
he likes noise. Formerly in the restaurants
there used to be large barrel organs or orchestrons.
Now in the smarter restaurants there are bands
of stringed instruments, and in the eating-houses
of the poor, gramophones. Indeed, the popu-
larity of gramophones in Russia is extraordinary.
A love of gramophones is surely the sign of a
cheerful temperament.
The amusement which the Russian is fondest
of when he wants to have a really good time is
to go and listen to gipsies. The entertainment
is worth describing, as it is the unique property
of Russia, and is the one thing you can almost
6a
170 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
be sure the average Russian will understand^
just as you will be sure tlie average Englishman
will understand a sporting contest or a music-
hall comic turn.
Looked at from the outside, as you see it, for
instance, on the stage in Tolstoy's play, this is
what you see. A private room in a restaurant.
It is rather dingy. In the corner there is a battered
piano, much the worse for wear. On the walls,
looking-glasses. At one end of the room a plush
sofa. In front of it a table, champagne bottles,
and glasses.
The spectators sit on the sofa. In front of
them, occupying the whole of the other side of
the room, is the chorus of gipsies. The gipsies
are not raggle-taggle people in shabby and gor-
geous clothes. They are a chorus of men and
women in ordinary dress, who, though swarthy
in complexion, look like the audience in the
upper circle at a Queen's Hall concert.
The gipsies show signs of the boredom and
fatigue common to professionals engaged in the
performance of their professional duties. They
yawn. One of them has got a toothache and a
swollen face- They carry on an undercurrent of
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 171
irrelevant conversation amongst themselves, while
they automatically sing. The outsider will notice
the mechanical side of the gaiety and the poetry
they are paid to evoke. The candles on the table
are guttering, and through the windows of the
cheerless private room the cold dawn pierces,
or the bright sun streams, as the case may be.
But those who are of the feast, and in it,
notice none of these things. They are there for
glamour, and they have got it. Oblivious of
every sordid detail, and of all the mechanism,
they are aware only of the poetry, the romance,
and the passion evoked by a wailing concord of
piercing, discordant sounds which play on the
nerves like a bow upon strings.
The chorus sit in a semicircle, a man with a
guitar stands up and leads the chorus, his guitar
and his body swaying to the rhythm. A woman
takes a solo part. The chorus rises into a wail as
loud and as fierce as the howling of a pack of
wolves, and then dies away in an unsatisfied sigh.
The first time you hear this monotonous and
exasperating music you may think it disagree-
able; but the moment you are bitten by the
music and infected with it, the sensation is rather
172 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
like this : first you tremble all over as with a
fever ; then you are aware that the fever is
pleasant. Then you forget all this : you are
far away amid white dawns and sleepless mid-
nights, and when you are brought back to reality,
you demand you insist on one more glimpse
of that sweet and bitter, that discordant and
melodious, fairyland.
The gipsy music certainly has the quality of
growing on you. It intoxicates some people.
They are bitten by it to such an extent that
they crave for it, as for a drug. They cannot
do without it. Others are invincibly bored.
But to the average Russian, to go and listen to
gipsies, when you wish to enjoy yourself especially,
is a common custom, and an expensive custom,
so that, as a rule, people club together when they
wish to treat themselves to this luxury.
The expense is part of the fun. If the average
Russian wants to celebrate a feast of any kind
he wishes to add to the festivity the spice of
recklessness which the feeling that he is spending
more than he can afford will give him. And if
on such occasions he falls into the spending mood,
he will spend recklessly.
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 173
He is generous, and, as a rule, careless about
money. An enormous amount of borrowing is
constantly going on. A asks B to lend him a
hundred roubles. B complies at once, although
he hasn't got it, and borrows it from C. Laxity
in money matters, which is fairly common, is
probably in some degree the result of the wide-
spread administrative venality in the past,
which was in its turn the inevitable fruit of
long years of unchecked bureaucracy in a large
country. At the height of the old regime venality
was in Russia a natural corrective to the narrow-
ness or severity of regulations. Toleration was
obtained by bribery. The schismatics, or the
Jews, or any class which suffered from adminis-
trative disabilities, got round them by bribery.
Again, when you have a bureaucracy on a very
large scale, a great number of the minor public
servants cannot possibly live on their wages:
they will be certain to supplement their insuffi-
cient incomes by exacting and receiving bribes.
Administrative corruption was at one time prac-
tically universal in Russia. It has received
much more than a considerable check since the
creation of the Duma and the increased liberty
174 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
of the Press, since in the Duma questions can
be asked, and transactions can be brought to
the public notice which in the old days were
securely screened from all possible investigation
or inquiry.
The average Russian was probably not more
venal than the average native of any other
country. Some of the causes of his venality
were common to the human race, and were such
as produce venality in any time and in any
country ; and chief amongst these is the one I
have already mentioned the underpayment of
the public servant. Another cause of corruption
was the irresponsibility of officials. Until the
Duma was made, public officials were, as a rule,
immune from the law which in theory laid down
severe penalties against all abuse of authority
and all illegalities committed by officials in the
performance of their public duties. All this has
changed in the last ten years, and is changing
still ; there is infinitely less administrative cor-
ruption than there was. The average middle-
aged Russian of to-day was brought up in an
atmosphere in which the public revenue was re-
garded as a fair game for exploitation, and those
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 175
who cheated the State, or made money by bribery
or any illicit means of any kind, were treated
with the utmost tolerance.
In spite of this, the average Russian is not
one whit more dishonest or immoral than his
fellow- creatures in neighbouring countries. But
if he is dishonest, his failing will be far more
noticeable than that of the dishonest in other
countries : firstly, because he will take infinitely
less pains, or no pains at all, to conceal it; he
will not hide it under a veneer of hypocrisy
he will wear it on his sleeve ; secondly, because
he is fundamentally good-natured, and his good
nature varies from heights of Christian charity
on the one hand, to depths of complete moral
laxity on the other. On the one hand you have
Dostoievsky's utterly disinterested Mwyskin, and
on the other hand Gogol's completely venal
Khlestyakov. The average Russian mU prob-
ably have a dose of both qualities.
The average Russian is, above all things, a
sociable being, who is fond of eating good solid
food and drinking vodka, and who is averse to
strenuous mental or physical exertion. This
does not mean that you will not find any amount
176 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
of hard workers in Russia ; but I am talking of
the average man. And it is just the average
man, Monsieur Tout-le-Monde, the man in the
street, who is left out of the discussion when
people think, talk, or write of Russia. The intel-
lectuals are discussed, the Nihilists, the Socialists,
the revolutionaries, the extreme reactionaries,
the man of genius, the criminal, the martyr,
the hero, the scoundrel, the aesthete. But the
average Russian is, as a rule, neither a hero,
a genius, a scoundrel, nor an aesthete. But he
is in the long run the man who counts. It is
with his sanction and co-operation alone that
any great change has been made in Russian
history. At the beginning of the Russo-Japanese
war, he, the man in the street, was mildly in
favour of it. After the initial reverses he was
angrily in favour of it. After several months
he was angrily against it, and his anger was
directed against the Government. So much so,
that the Government was compelled to take
active steps, and to promise tangible reform.
The climax of the hostility of public opinion
happened when the whole country went on
strike in the autumn of 1905. Then, for one
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 177
moment, the whole of Russia was in agreement,
and public opinion was consequently irresistible.
Later on, when political parties were formed,
public opinion was no longer at one, and weak-
ness began to set in.
Finally, when the constitutional and peaceable
reformers had succeeded in effecting nothing
beyond the creation of the Duma (which was
in itself an immense step), and the militant
reformers had merely achieved a series of spo-
radic acts of terrorism, one result of which was
that the whole of the criminal classes followed
their example and adopted their methods for the
purposes of individual hooliganism the average
Russian, the man in the street, was alienated
from the revolutionary movement, and no longer
gave it his support. Naturally enough, for his
pocket and his person were no longer safe.
The street became no place for a man. He
could no longer go for a walk in it without
the possibility of having his private purse
" expropriated."
Political theory had become a practical fact
with a vengeance so far as the criminal class were
concerned. And the political terrorists had
178 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
taught the impartial burglar the use and con-
venience of the Browning pistol, and had shown
him how easy it was to rob a bank by bluff or
dynamite. And as soon as the man in the street
condemned revolutionary methods in Russia, the
revolutionary movement came to an end. It
could not live without his inarticulate support,
without his active or passive sympathy.
And what is the average man doing or think-
ing now ?
The answer to such a question must neces-
sarily depend on the exact moment at which it
is put. Had it been put in the summer of 1913
in July, say it would have been safe to say in
answer to this question, and in reviewing public
opinion during the last two years, that the average
Russian was consciously or unconsciously feeling
the effects of the increased and ever increasing
prosperity of the country ; that he was manifest-
ing indifference both towards internal and foreign
politics ; that he was making and spending
money, and falling into a lethargy of prosper-
ous materialism. But the autumn of 1913 has
already shown how rash it would have been to
make any such definite statement, without quali-
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 179
fication, and without leaving a door open upon
fresh possibilities.
In spite of the increasing prosperity of the
country in spite of the rapid strides that edu-
cation is making seeds of discontent, which so
far 'from being removed from above have been
watered from above, have lately been making
themselves manifest. And if it is too much and
it is too much to say that the average Russian
is as yet affected, it is at all events true that a
considerable section of the educated, political,
and commercial community, including many
men well known in the political world who had
hitherto supported the Government, are com-
plaining in no uncertain voice of the acts of the
administration.
There exist in Russia a great many antiquated
and useless things in the shape of legislative and
hampering regulations which need sweeping
away. If the local administration of the country
were universally excellent and competent, the
average man would not probably trouble his
head about them. But the local administration
of the country is neither excellent nor com-
petent : its acts are often perilously illegal. And
180 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise,
until the remains of the old regime are swept
away from above, and a new regime is inaugu-
rated. So far from anything being done in this
direction, the old regime is being bolstered up ;
and so far from keeping their promises of re-
form, the central administration has been busy
taking away, or limiting, what had already been
given. The result of this has been that the
Government has succeeded in exasperating a
large part of the educated portion of the com-
munity. Discontent is being expressed. The
Government has succeeded in rousing at least
one section of the population from the lethargy
brought on by prosperity; and as soon as this
discontent has become sufficiently widespread,
and sufficiently strong and universal to cause
the man in the street not only to speak out,
but, if not to act, at least to sympathize with
action, then, unless some timely measures are
taken from above, it is possible that efforts may
be made from below to remove the causes of
discontent,
In the meantime the man in the street is cer-
tainly aware of the prevalence of discontent,
THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN. 181
and in many cases and places he is acutely
discontented himself. It would be idle to specu-
late on what proportions his discontent will
reach, and what its effect will be either in the
immediate or the remote future. The future
will answer this question. But ultimately,
I think, it is safe to say that the achieve-
ment of political liberty in Russia will depend
not on the dynamite and the death of revolu-
tionaries however self-sacrificing and however
ardent, nor on the measures of a statesman
however far-seeing and however wise, but on
the will and desire of the average man. On the
day the average man really desires political
liberty he will get it. So far, the only thing
he has desired and obtained is individual liberty
liberty of thought, HbertS des m&urs. In order
to obtain political liberty, he will no doubt have
to sacrifice a portion of the unbounded power he
now enjoys of doing exactly what he likes in the
sphere of personal conduct, because political
liberty implies personal discipline, or a certain
amount of personal discipline. Will the average
Russian make a sacrifice ? That depends, per-
haps, on what store he will ultimately set on politi-
182 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
cal life and political freedom ; on how far indiffer-
ence will prevail ; and also on the future policy and
quality of the local and central administration.
But in the long run the question as to whether
any efforts towards obtaining political liberty will
be successful or not, depends on the generation
which is growing up, and which is as yet an
unknown quantity. But whatever strange and
new fruits the coming generation may bring
forth, one thing is certain no vital changes will
come about in Russian life without the conscious
or unconscious co-operation of the average man.
CHAPTER VII.
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS.
IN Russia the representatives of the liberal pro-
fessions lawyers, doctors, prof essors, literary
men, agricultural experts, statists, schoolmasters,
journalists are denoted, as a rule, by the generic
term intelligentsia. The term is elastic, and its
use, as I know by experience, can easily lead to
the greatest misunderstandings ; the reason of
this being that the word is sometimes used in a
broad sense, and sometimes in a narrow sense,
and sometimes in a still narrower sense. That
is to say, the word intelligentsia is sometimes
used by Russians to denote anybody who can
read or write, anybody who has received a cer-
tain education. That is the broadest sense of
the word. In this, its largest sense, the word
means the whole of the middle class, from which
nine-tenths of the officials and public servants
are drawn.
184 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
But when Russians use the word intelligentsia,,
they generally mean the members of the liberal
professions, exclusive of officials.
Again, some Russians use the word intelligentsia
in a still narrower sense, in order to denote not a
class but a frame of mind ; they use the word
as we use a phrase such as " Nonconformist con-
science : " and in this sense the member of the
intelligentsia could belong to any class, just as in
England a Liberal, a Nonconformist, or a vege-
tarian could belong to any class. And it is the
use of the word in this narrower sense that leads
to misunderstanding. For if you describe or
speak of the attributes and the characteristics
of the intelligentsia in this narrower sense, you
run the risk of labelling the whole middle class
of Russia with characteristics which do not apply
to them; just as if in England the word Non-
conformist were used not only to denote the
Nonconformist sect, but the whole of the English
middle class*
So, before going further, it is well to make one's
position quite clear. In using the term intelli-
gentsia in this chapter, I mean to denote, firstly,
the representatives of the liberal professions
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 185
lawyers, doctors, literary men, professors, school-
masters, students, journalists, statists, and agri-
cultural experts the educated middle class 3
the intellectuals ; and, secondly, the semi-intel-
lectuals and the half-educated.
The intellectuals form, at the present moment
in Russia, a factor of great interest and of great
importance. They are largely represented by a
political party, called the Constitutional Demo-
crats, the Kadets, which played an important part
in the revolutionary movement. The whole mass
of the newspapers, both in the provinces and in
Moscow and St. Petersburg, with the exception of
some organs of a conservative and reactionary ten-
dency, are edited by the intellectuals among the
intelligentsia; and the ordinary staff of every news-
paper, who make the paper, are recruited from
the semi-intellectuals of the intelligentsia. It was
the intelligentsia which, in the struggle for libera-
tion, supplied the rank and file of the army, of
which the county councils were the spokesmen
and the leaders.
There is, as Mr. Stephen Grahame, one of the
most competent of modern observers of modern
life in Russia, says, an articulate part of the
186 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
intelligentsia, which he calls the higher intelli-
gentsia, containing a great number of cultured
and educated people ; and side by side with
this, there has sprung up lately a bourgeoisie
that calls itself intelligentsia a lower middle
class, which takes to itself fifty per cent, of the
children born in the great towns to-day. Mr.
Grahame calls this the lower intelligentsia, and
stigmatizes this latter class in severe terms as
being materialistic and cynical.
I propose, then, to divide the middle class
into two divisions the educated and the half-
educated.
Ever since the revolutionary movement the
intelligentsia as a whole has come in for a large
measure of abuse, not only from its enemies, but
from members of its own class. It has for the
first time in its comparatively brief history, if
we except occasional indirect criticism, been sub-
jected to a fierce and systematic criticism from
the inside; the reason of this being that many
Russian thinkers are convinced that the course
of the revolutionary movement and the action of
the first two Dumas showed that politically the
Russian intelligentsia was immature, inexperi-
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 187
enced, unfit for political leadership, incapable of
statesmanship, divorced in ideas and feelings
from the people, and incapable of heading a
popular movement* Some of these critics have
gone further, and have dwelt on the religious
indifferentism of the intelligentsia as a class as
the explanation of the inability of the intelli-
gentsia to act on the masses in Russia.
" The fact is," M. Bulgakov writes in the
Russian Review of November 1912, " that edu-
cated or especially half-educated Russian society
in its average representatives is almost without
exception atheistic, or, to put it more correctly,
indifferent to religion. A very superficial reli-
gious indifferentism, expressed most naturally in
atheism, is met with on all sides, and everywhere
in the Russian intelligentsia. The various polit-
ical tendencies and parties among the intelligentsia
carry on violent disputes with regard to various
dogmas of sociological and political catechism,
but do not discuss the existence or non-existence
of God, or this or that religious belief. Here
there are no questions, for it is taken for granted
that there can be no talk of religion for the edu-
cated man, because religion is incompatible with
188 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
enlightenment. 59 He goes on to say that the
dogma that science has once and for all disposed
of religion altogether is assimilated early in life
by the " intelligent/ 9 and in most cases is not
re-examined for the rest of his life. " In reli-
gion the Russian intelligentsia shows a kind of
mental deficiency; on the average it is not
above but below ideas of religion, for it has
never properly experienced them. 5 '
This being so, the critics of the intelligentsia
go on to say " that this lack of religion con-
demns them to remain out of touch with the
people, for if they are divorced from the people
in that which the people hold most sacred, how
can they come close to them at all ? "
There is nothing new in such criticism and
such strictures ; nearly all outside observers of
Russia have said the same thing in the past.
What is new is the quarter whence the criticism
proceeds namely, from the inside, from the
intelligentsia itself; and this signifies that a re-
action, or rather a revolt, is proceeding in some
quarters amidst this prevailing materialism and
this superficial indifierentism.
These are questions which are of great interest
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 189
to the Russian reader. To the English reader,
who probably has not the slightest idea of the
nature of the ordinary member of the intelligentsia^
the question is probably less interesting.
Again> such critics, in writing for a Russian
audience or for an English audience more or less
acquainted with Russia, are not under the obli-
gation of qualifying their statements by point-
ing out the good qualities and the merits of the
intelligentsia., because they know that their readers
are well aware of them, and will take them for
granted.
But as the English reader is unaware of their
qualities, either good or bad, it would be mis-
leading to dwell greatly on defects to those who
are unacquainted with the general atmosphere
and the main characteristics of the people under
discussion.
In the first place, the members of the intelli-
gentsia are Russians. This fact, strangely enough,
seems often to be lost sight of by their opponents,
who talk of them as if they were made of some
totally different substance from the remaining
part of the Russian people. And if this is true
of the intelligentsia, it is still more true of the
190 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
official world. Writers, and especially English
writers, talk of Russian officials as if they too
were made of some different stuff as if they
were a race apart which had nothing in common
with the rest of the Russian people. This is
not so. The intelligentsia and the officials are
Russians ; and being Russians, they have certain
qualities and certain defects which are probably
common to all Russians, which are the natural
result of the Russian temperament. Where
they differ from the classes which are above
them or beneath them is in their education
or rather in the effect which that education
has had upon them. The disease is the same ;
it is the way of taking it which is different.
They are extremely well educated ; infinitely,
incomparably better educated than the average
Englishman. They are sometimes over-edu-
cated. The Russian mind assimilates with ease ;
it apprehends with incredible quickness; it is
sensitive, receptive, plastic, agile. Such quali-
ties in the case of men who are naturally thought-
ful, studious, and serious, lead, of course, to a
wide and deep culture. But in the case of the
half-educated in the case of people who quickly
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 191
assimilate a smattering of the ideas that are in
the air all over Europe the result is a radical
immaturity, something that is immature in its
very over-ripeness, something shallow, thin, and
superficial.
In spite of this, if you take the average Rus-
sian of the educated middle class, he is extremely
well educated so much better educated than the
average educated Englishman that comparison
would be silly. The average Scotsman would
compare favourably with him, and the average
German : only the Russian has a quicker, more
adaptable mind; and he is more inquisitive of
what is going on outside the walls of his country
than the average Frenchman.
If you took an average schoolboy of thirteen,
and put him at an English public school, he
would find the work given to an average Eng-
lish schoolboy of thirteen not only easy, but
childish.
Moreover, the educated Russian is far more
catholic in his culture than the average English-
man. A certain grasp of mathematics, of polit-
ical economy and physical science, a knowledge
of European history, would be looked upon by
192 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
him as a matter of course, whereas the English
public schools and universities turn out not only
undergraduates but dons who have specialized
in one subject and sometimes not well in that
but reveal an astounding ignorance in every
other branch of human knowledge.
I remember once a Russian pointing out to me
some remarks written in a popular book by an
English don, and remarking that a Russian child
could not possibly have written anything so silly.
I, indeed, needed no persuasion. On the other
hand, I remember one of the more radical mem-
bers of the first Duma pointing out to me that
in matters of practical political organization an
English child could give the Russian political
leaders points.
Most educated Russians are familiar with the
works of Herbert Spencer, Huxley, John Morley,
Buckle, and John Stuart Mill. They are at the
same time not only familiar with, but acutely
appreciative of, humorous and serious English
literature of Dickens, Bret Harte, WeUs, Jerome
K. Jerome, Conan Doyle, etc.
One of the stock things you constantly hear said
about Russians is that they are wonderful lin-
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 193
guists. I believe this generalization to be largely
built on the prowess of Russian men and women
who have had foreign nurses and governesses.
It is true that in St. Petersburg and Moscow
society every one talks French, and most people
talk English, and nearly every one knows Ger-
man. It cannot be said that the English of
St. Petersburg is of the purest. It is a dialect
peculiar to St. Petersburg, and full of strange
idioms translated from the French. Such phrases
as, for instance, " One says he is very frightful "
(meaning, " They say he is very frightening "),
or, " I find her a bother " (meaning a bore),
are characteristic of that fluent dialect. How-
ever, if it is not pure, it is at any rate fluent.
But if you take the average representative of
the middle classes in Russia, you will sometimes
meet with a knowledge of French, more often
with a knowledge of German, and seldom with
a conversational knowledge of English ; but not
universally with either of these three. Nor will
you find that the average representative of the
Russian middle class learns these languages with
more than average speed when he is abroad ;
although the Russian is, as a rule, very quick
7
194 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
to appreciate shades of meaning and forms of
humour which are peculiar to other languages
than his own.
Taken as a whole, the middle class in Russia
is cultivated., widely and deeply cultured in its
upper strata, and in its best representatives
more widely cultured than the average French-
man or German. In its lower strata, among the
half-educated, the " little learning " that has
been rapidly assimilated has indeed proved a
dangerous thing, and has produced in the head
of the individual a salad of half-baked philosophy
and superficial Nihilism which remains fixed for
ever like a dogma.
In this sense the half-educated in Russia are
in a state of adolescence. They have cast aside
what they regard as the superstitions of boy-
hood, and they have accepted as incontrovert-
ible dogma the ideas which they believe to be
the most advanced in Western Europe, and
have poured them into a fixed mould, where
they remain stereotyped for the rest of their
lives.
Tliis is what M. Bulgakov means when he
says the half-educated in Russia are not above
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 195
religion, but below it; not superior to it, but
inferior to it.
In using the word half-educated, I am allud-
ing to the larger class of people in Russia who
have just emerged above the surface of the
uneducated: members of the proletariat often,
peasants sometimes who have received half an
education, clerks and minor public servants, and
students who have not passed any of the higher
standards. It is amongst this class that you find
a chaos and welter of half-baked ideas ; it is here
that you find a jumble, a salad of ill-assimilated
and strangely-assorted goods, a flotsam and jetsam
of Western philosophies and theories, crystallized
and hardened into rigid dogma, and clung to
and paraded with a desperate amour propre and
a fierce tenacity* It is, of course, the negative
philosophies which are chosen. When a school-
boy reaches the age of adolescence when he first
makes the discovery in England, say, of Renan
on the one hand, and of Swinburne, Ibsen, and
Nietzsche on the other he is tremendously proud
of what seems to him his bold and rebellious
" views : " he labels himself a " freethinker "
and a pagan. He is filled with iconoclastic zeal.
196 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
He feels like young Siegfried about to storm
Walhalla, and bid its tottering halls crumble
before his sword. If he is at the university, he
\j *
will perhaps refuse to go to chapel from con-
scientious scruples, and he will wear a red tie
on Sunday to show he is a Socialist.
" I read the Gospel as an ordinary book,"
said a young freethinker to the late Dr. Jowett,
the Master of BallioL "Really, Mr. Smith,"
said the master, " you must find it a very
extraordinary book."
Later on he finds the question is not quite so
simple as he imagined, and that the old-fashioned
superstitions are tougher than he imagined ; that
science has not spoken the last word on religion ;
and that certain facts and ideas had perhaps
escaped his plausible philosophy. He makes the
discovery that the higher criticism is not always
infallible, and that disbelief is sometimes qntite
as intolerant as belief ; that freethinkers are not
always free. In fact, he grows up.
But in the case of the Russian half-educated*
they do not, as a rule, grow up intellectually.
They reach the stage of rebellious and destruc-
tive denial, and remain there. Fragments of
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 197
Nietzsche, Marx, and Schopenhauer contribute
to the intellectual salad which constitutes their
negative creed; and once that creed is formed,
it no longer develops because in the atmosphere
in which the half-educated live in in Russia they
will meet with nothing to counterbalance this
negative influence. The} 7 regard this negative
philosophy as a thing which is taken for granted
by all sensible and educated men, a thing about
which there can be no possible doubt. Atheism
is a matter of course, like a pair of trousers.
There can be no other possible creed for an
educated man. If a man is not an atheist he is
not educated. Intellectually he wears his shirt
outside his belt, and not tucked in. Socialism or
Anarchism is the only possible political creed.
If a man is not a Socialist or an Anarchist, he
is obviously a member of the " black-gang " of
reaction. Any educated man who goes to church
or is religious is, in the eyes of the half-educated,
a member of the black-gang a fanatic, an anti-
Semite, an obscurantist.
He will remain stationary in this negative
view, because this view is in the air he breathes
and amongst the people with whom he consorts.
198 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
He will never come across the contrary view ; and
he will consequently take for granted that all
views to the contrary, all religious belief, all dis-
belief in disbelief, are confined to the uneducated,
and that as soon as the uneducated (the peasants)
receive the " light," they will free themselves
from these old-fashioned and cumbrous shackles
of superstition. He will be, moreover, immensely
proud of his negative creed, which he will regard
as the hall-mark of culture and the password
which admits him to the intellectual parlia-
ment of man, the enlightened federation of the
world.
Mr. Belloc, in one of his essays, I think, tells
the story of an educated man who lived alone
and isolated in a village in the Vosges, far re-
moved from towns, railways, and means of com-
munication. Thither Mr. Belloc wandered one
day, and this man, who entertained him., un-
packed with pride the baggage of portable
atheism which was current in the 'fifties.
Mr. Belloc told him atheism was no longer
thought to be an indispensable hall-mark of
education, and no longer regarded as the key
to all philosophies. He was distressed and be-
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 199
wildered. That is exactly what the half-educated
in Russia are now being told by many Russian
writers Berdayev, Bulgakov, Em, Rachinsky,
Florensky, Kozhevnikov, Samarin, Mansurov;
but the news has not yet penetrated into their
inner consciousness.
It had already been proclaimed by greater men
than these by Dostoievsky, Tyutehev, and Solo-
viev ; but the message of these men of genius
has not reached the hearts of the half-educated
in Russia. They are still in the stage of the
Oxford undergraduate who reads the Gospel as
an " ordinary book."
But let us leave the half-educated and go back
to the fully-educated. It is, perhaps, needless to
say that Russia is rich in men of European repu-
tation who have rendered noble service to science
in many branches, and especially in medicine.
What is perhaps less well known to English
readers is that in the medical profession in
Russia not only will you find many names
which enjoy a European reputation, but the
standard of competence, knowledge, and ability
is almost universally high. All over Russia,
no matter how remote the place, you will be
200 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
sure to find a general practitioner who is not
only highly competent, but highly cultivated.
Moreover, these doctors live the hardest and
most self-sacrificing of lives : they drive long
distances in all weathers ; they have to struggle
against the enormous odds imposed on them
by the rigorous climate, the poverty and the
backwardness of the great mass of the people;
and often they have to deal with scourges, such
as epidemics of typhus, cholera, and even
plague.
Socially, the average member of the Russian
middle class is attractive, expansive, and easy
to get on with. He is completely devoid of
hypocrisy, and untainted by snobbishness and
pretension. He is friendly, good-humoured, and
hospitable, and, when not afflicted by hypo-
chondria, a cheerful companion. He is fond of
discussion. An Englishman living with a Russian
family is struck, as a rule, by the long conver-
sations that go on, sometimes far on in the night,
generally about politics or abstract questions.
There is no conventional limit of hours. If these
people want to go on playing cards all night, they
will go on playing cards all night ; they will not
THE LIBERALtPROFESSIONS. 201
stop because they think u it is really time to go
to bed. 55 *
In thinking over the characteristics of the
educated middle class in Russia and the educated
middle class in England, the chief differences are,
of course, the same that differentiate the natural
character of the Russian and the Englishman.
The Russian middle class is, if you take the
average, not only better educated, but more
broad-minded, less provincial, less pretentious,
far less reserved and less self-satisfied, and not
at all hypocritical. It is also, I should say,
less self-disciplined; and it has often struck me
that those members of the intelligentsia who
are most violent and bitter in their denunciation
of the arbitrary behaviour and the irresponsible
despotism of the Government are, if one sees
them on a committee, far more despotic and
arbitrary than the most despotic official. But
that is perhaps the logical law of human
nature.
The average Russian is certainly less self-
satisfied than the average Englishman ; although
he is sometimes self-satisfied in some respects
and in a quite different fashion.
202 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
Self-praise is not a thing you often come across
in the Russian intelligentsia. On the contrary,
you far oftener have its members comparing
themselves unfavourably with their neighbours,
But this note of self-depreciation sometimes
exists side by side with one of pride and vanity,
which is sometimes pardonable and sometimes
not. I came across an instance of this lately in
a large Russian newspaper the Russkoe Slovo.*
A writer in an article on English life and Eng-
lishmen, in which he makes a number of inter-
esting appreciations and criticisms, compares tte
two countries, and after making the debatable
statement that, in his opinion, Russia and Eng-
land are the only two countries which are now
playing a significant part in the historical arena,
says, " Yet what a gulf there is between us.
How far more intelligent, how far more talented,
how far broader-minded, how far more sincere
are we ! " It is difficult for either a Russian
or an Englishman to settle such a question.
They are neither of them the best judges;
yet I should say, personally, that this writer is
* Russkoe Slovo : " At the Music Hall : G. Bayan," September
14 (27}, 1913.
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 203
probably right, if you take the average. On
the other hand, my impression is and it
may very likely be a false one that this
broad-mindedness, talent, cleverness, and sin-
cerity is spread in a certain even proportion
more or less equally and uniformly over a larger
social stratum in Russia, producing a certain
high level and standard of general intelligence ;
whereas in England, where no such high standard
exists, you may encounter gulfs and precipices
of complacent ignorance and narrow-minded
stupidity ; but, on the other hand, you will meet
with high peaks and jagged rocks of originality,
imagination, and sometimes genius. In Eng-
land, while the general standard of intelligence
is immeasurably lower, the exceptions are more
remarkable, and not merely because they are ex-
ceptions, but in themselves. Contemporary liter-
ature affords a good example of what I mean.
In Russia, the average reading public and the
novel-reading public is on a much higher level
than the average English-reading and novel-
reading public, and the average literature food
supplied to it is higher also : the average Russian
jiovel or story never descends to the level o{
204 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
silliness which you find in the great majority of
English magazines. On the other hand, contem-
porary English literature contains more names
that are famous, and whose fame has crossed the
frontiers of their country, than contemporary
Russian literature. For instance, if we put
Gorky with Kipling as belonging to a past genera-
tion, there is in Russia no imaginative writer of
the present generation who can be compared with
H. G. Wells ; no realistic novel as fine as Arnold
Bennett's Old Wives' Tale ; no writer as original
as G. K. Chesterton.
The Russian stage is on a far higher intellectual
level than the English stage, and the Russian
theatre-going public is incomparably more in-
telligent than the English theatre-going public ;
yet the Russians have no dramatist whose plays
(with the exception of one play by Gorky) are
acted all over Europe, such as those of Bernard
Shaw. The ordinary Russian intellectual may
despise Bernard Shaw's philosophy and drama
in fact, the writer of the article I have just quoted
cites as an instance of the low level of the English
stage, the fact that Bernard Shaw who, he says,
is " a back number " in Russia, is considered the
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 205
first of English dramatists. But is it certain the
Russian has realized Shaw's humour to the full ?
This, moreover, does not prevent it being
true that Bernard Shaw's plays are acted all
over Europe, as well as in Russia ; that the French
have called hrm the modern Molifere; and that
contemporary Russia has produced no dramatist
who can claim so large a public, nor so wide an
appreciation in Europe.
The writer of the article I have quoted says
that the Russians and the English are alike in
possessing two faces. In generalizing on the
characteristics of a people, and especially the
Russian and the English people, one must always
bear in mind the element of paradox and con-
tradiction that exists. With regard to the Eng-
lish people, this writer notes the fact of the con-
trasts you meet with in England, and the dual
nature of the English character; but whereas
he notes the naivete of the English public, its
boisterous mirth in contrast to the serious element
in many phases of English life, the imaginative
quality of the English seems to have escaped him.
" I think we are an imaginative people," writes
Mr. Wells about the English in India, " with an
06 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
imagination at once gigantic, heroic, and shy;
and also we are a strangely restrained and disci-
plined people who are yet neither subdued nor
subordinated. . . . These are flat contradictions
to state, and yet how else can one render the para-
dox of the English character and the spectacle of a
handful of mute, snobbish, not obviously clever,
and quite obviously ill-educated men, holding
together kingdoms, tongues, and races, three
hundred millions of them, in a restless, fer-
menting peace ? "
" Yes, it is true," I would answer to this Rus-
sian journalist; " probably true that you are far
more intelligent, far more talented, more broad-
minded, and less hypocritical than we are."
And then I would ask him to read some further
words of Mr. Wells, which concern circles of the
official English in India, " conventional, carefully
* turned out ' people, living gawkily, thinking
gawkily, talking nothing but sport and gossip,
relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and
levity as mean as a banjo tune." Among such,
he says, "a kind of despairful disgust would
engulf me. And then, in some man's work, in
some huge irrigation scheme, some feat of stra-
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 207
tegic foresight, some simple, penetrating realiza-
tion of deep-lying things, I would find an effect,
as if out of a thickly-rusted sheath one had
pulled a sword and found it a flame."
The Russian writer has forgotten, or has never
come across, the flame ; and that is not surprising,
for the flame is not obvious to the casual observer.
But the Russian character has felt its heat,
expressed as it is in the phases and images of
English writers of genius in the present as well
as in the past. The flame has left its marks on
Russian literature.
I can imagine a Russian brooding or reason-
ing over Russia say the Russia of the remoter
provinces much in the same way as Wells
reasons over the British in India. I can
imagine him saying: "Again and again I
would find myself in little circles of minor
official Russians, slovenly, superficial, despotic
in their disregard of other people, lax, casual,
cynical, carefully c educated ' people, living noisily,
thinking noisily, talking nothing but cheap phi-
losophy and gossip, relaxing at frequent intervals
into fits of drunkenness, gambling, and extra-
vagance, as sordid as the tune of a barrel organ,
208 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf
And then in some man's speech, in some sudden
flash of white-hot sincerity, some stripping naked
of the soul, some gesture of human charity, some
evidence of sympathy and understanding, some
simple, penetrating realization of divine things, I
would find an effect, as if in a heap of moulder-
ing refuse, festering weeds, and broken bottles
I had stumbled across a tin box, and forcing it
open, found it filled with precious balm and myrrh
celestial in its fragrance." And then perhaps
he might have added : " I think we are a great-
hearted people with a humanity at once chari-
table, broad, and deep ; and yet we are a tough,
obstinate, arbitrary, and undisciplined people,
who are as yet neither socially independent nor
politically free. These are flat contradictions."
I am certain of one thing. Any generalizations
on the characteristics of any people must include
flat contradictions, and especially any generaliza-
tions on the Russians of any class ; for the
whole of Russian history is based like a fairy tale
on a huge paradox namely, the survival of the
weakest, and the triumph of the fool of the
family; the strength of the fool being that he
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 209
has something divine in his folly which outwits
the wisdom of the wise.
In speaking of the prevailing dead level of a
high standard in things intellectual in Russia, I
gave literature as an example. Perhaps I ought
to cite some of the sister arts as exceptions ; but
with the exception of music, perhaps, the same
rule applies here too. In the decorative arts
Bakst has attained a European reputation, and
in stage design and stage decoration Russia stands
perhaps higher than any other European country
at present. But here it should be noted that
one of the great pioneers in advanced stage
decoration in Russia was Gordon Craig, also a
case in point of the startling exception, startling
in himself as well as an exception to the encircling
mediocrity. The Russian stage has felt not only
his influence, but his direct inspiration ; and
Aubrey Beardsley is responsible in Russia for a
whole chaos of decadent illustrators* Then there
is music, in which Russia is collectively and
individually far superior to England at present.
These are questions which need separate and
more detailed treatment ; but it is worth while
mentioning here that the greatest exception to
210 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the rule if it is a rule that in Russia you will
find a high standard and few towering excep-
tions, is to be found in the operatic stage in the
person of Shalyapin, who by common consent
is, besides being a magnificent singer, the greatest
living actor and artist on the operatic stage, and
perhaps on any other stage either. On the other
hand, the first theatre in Moscow, the Art Theatre,
furnishes an example of the original rule
nowhere in Europe is the ensemble so perfect,
the troupe so well disciplined, the production so
harmonious ; yet the company contains no single
actor or actress of genius.
It is, of course, the intelligentsia who suffered
most in the past, since the epoch of the great
reforms of the 'sixties, from the want of political
liberty in Russia, and it is from the ranks of the
intelligentsia that the revolutionary movement
started. They had, until the creation of the
first Duma, no means at all of taking p'art in
public life unless they became officials and en-
tered the Government service.
Those who did not play an active part in poli-
tics were not, it is true, or were only indirectly,
hampered by this state of things. They were
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 211
hampered, that is to say, by the censorship
on certain books and on certain ideas, by the
caution of the press and the absence of public
debate, by the liability of falling under the
suspicion of political heterodoxy ; whereas those
who took a part in the revolutionary movement,
either directly or indirectly, were liable at any mo-
ment to suffer in person for their opinions, and
they did suffer. In their action as active revolu-
tionaries, in the manner in which they were
ready to undergo any sacrifices, however
great and however tedious, the Russian revolu-
tionaries belong to the great and authentic
martyrs of the world. They sacrificed them-
selves without any fuss or ostentation. They
were willing to endure years and years of im-
prisonment or exile if they thought that would
benefit their cause. They went on hunger-
strike when the rules of their imprisonment
were not being properly carried out, if the
quality of the food supplied to them was not
up to the standard, or if the prison regulations
were not being properly fulfilled ; but not because
they were put in prison. That they accepted
as a rule of the game. Nothing broke their
212 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
indomitable and patient purpose. They were
ready to abandon everything which makes life
worth living, and they claimed neither the hero's
laurel wreath nor the martyr's crown. They were
content to be anonymous ; they gladly gave
their bodies to be crushed, if, they thought,
they could thus make stepping-stones over which
future generations could walk. The Russian
revolutionaries did not go out of their way to
seek to lose their lives; but they were ready,
if the occasion demanded it, to give their lives.
But as far as their main policy was concerned,
they took the offensive against the Government ;
and not being allowed to express their opinions
in print or in public, they expressed them with
dynamite.
In looking back at the whole movement, one
is struck by the absence of cant in the
methods, the writings, and the behaviour of
the active revolutionaries. They were as simple
and as natural in their assassinations and their
martyrdom as they were in the rest of their
behaviour. They showed the same absence of
hypocrisy. Some people call this the Russian
simplicity; others call it (Mr. Conrad, for in-
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 213
stance) Russian cynicism. It is, if you like, a
kind of inverted cynicism; a reckless way of
looking facts in the face, and of stripping the soul
of all its decent trappings. And yet there is
nothing Mephistophelian about it no mockery,
no irony, but an inverted and inflexible logic
which leads people to disregard all barriers and
to carry out in practice what they preach in
theory, though they should cause the pillars of
the world to fall crashing to the ground.
I have been speaking, of course, about the active
and militant members among the revolutionaries,
not of its platonic and passive sympathizers.
Amongst those you may find the political cant
which is common to that species of mankind, of
all races and in all countries.
But if you take the Russian middle class as a
whole, absence of cant and hypocrisy is certainly
one of their chief characteristics. Uniformity of
education is certainly another. " Culture " is
made into a fetish (and this is true of all edu-
cated people in Russia). A certain stereotyped
form of culture, including a certain number of
subjects, is looked upon as being as indispens-
able as clothes. A man who is lacking in the
214 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
visible label and hall-mark of this so-called
" culture " is looked upon as if he were morally
naked.
The worst of it is, the possession of this culture
does not necessarily mean that its possessor is
cultivated. It is often skin-deep and a random
assortment of superficial ideas, confined some-
times to the knowledge of certain names and
catchwords, and to a second-hand acquaintance
with certain books, theories, and currents of
thought.
The idea that this kind of " culture " is indis-
pensable, and that a man who does not possess
it is uneducated, is undoubtedly a bureaucratic
idea, and the fruits of the long-standing exist-
ence of bureaucracy. Such culture is a super-
stition, and has nothing necessarily to do with
real culture, which implies the assimilation and
the thorough digestion of any kind of knowledge.
But, as I have said before, it is more especially
to the half -educated that this applies. The truly
well-educated middle class have revealed their
culture to the world in the shape of the men of
science, the historians, the economists they have
produced, and the books they have written.
LIBERAL PROFESSIONS. 215
But the Russian intellectual middle class is
historically still young. The greatest works of the
Russian genius in the past were written before it
existed, when they were as nothing, and came
from the nohility. The future will show what
the intelligentsia in their turn will produce.
But such as it is at the present moment, it
offers to the student of Russia a field of sur-
passing interest; and the Englishman who
goes to Russia and lives among its members
will come back, as a rule, with the horizon of his
mind widened, and in his heart a soft spot fo
the Russian intelligentsia.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH.
Russian Church, calls itself the Holy
Catholic Apostolic and Orthodox Church.
It is a national Church, and at the same time it is
a branch of a great Christian community which
includes many nations and peoples namely, the
Eastern Orthodox Church.
The Russian Orthodox Church numbers at
present over a hundred million adherents, eighty
millions of which are Russian subjects ; of the
remainder about half are Slavs of old Turkey or
of Austro-Hungary. Greeks, Roumanians, Bul-
garians, and Serbs all belong to the Orthodox
Church, and the Orthodox Church has missions
in China, Japan, and North America.
Until the eleventh century the Eastern and
the Western Churches formed one Church. In
the eleventh century a schism broke this unity
T: IE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 217
and divided a large fragment of the Eastern
Church from the Western Church.
Even after the schism had taken place, even
as late as the beginning of the twelfth cen-
tury, intercommunion existed between the two
Churches, and Russian princes and princesses
of Kiev intermarried with members of the Latin
Church. Efforts were made later to heal the
schism, the most important of which were the
second Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council
of Florence in 1439. At both these Councils
union was proclaimed and accepted by the
Greeks, but neither of them had any permanent
result. The findings of the first of these two
Councils soon became a dead letter ; those of
the second were repudiated as soon as the Greek
delegates reached home, and the delegates
were regarded as apostates. Thus the schism
has lasted practically since 1054. It was fraught
with deep moral and political consequences for
the East, and especially for Russia. The cause
of it was not really doctrinal or dogmatical.
Points of dogma, and trivial points at that,
were used as pretexts after the schism had be-
come a fait accompli. The true cause of tue
218 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
schism was the immemorial rivalry between the
Greeks and the Latins.
The schism between the Eastern and Western
Churches ranks, Sir Charles Eliot says in his
Turkey and Europe, with the foundation of
Constantinople and the coronation of Charle-
magne, as one of the turning-points in the re-
lations of the East and the West. It was disas-
trous to Russia and to the Byzantine Empire.
To the latter, because it crystallized and deepened
an antagonism which prevented the East and
West from combining against the common
enemy, and thus proved one of the main causes
of the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the
establishment of the Turk in Europe. To Russia,
Because, isolated as she was already by her
geographical situation, by this further isolation
and rupture with the West she fell an easy prey
to the hordes of barbarian invaders from Asia,
and her national development was interrupted
for centuries. As far as dogma is concerned, the
differences between the two Churches are to
this day trivial, and in earlier times they were
slighter still. The Orthodox Church has the
same seven Sacraments as the Catholic Church
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 219
namely. Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist,
Penance, Unction, Holy Order, and Matrimony.
There is a certain difference in the adminis-
tration of the Sacraments. The Orthodox baptize
with a threefold immersion. Confirmation is
administered immediately after baptism; and
this was so in the West during all the thirteenth
century. Auricular confession is regarded as
indispensable by the Orthodox, but the Sacrament
of Penance is less precise and more flexible than
in the West. The Orthodox Church holds the
dogma of Transubstantiation. That is to say, the
Orthodox believe that the Holy Eucharist is the
true body and blood of Jesus Christ under the
outward appearances of bread and wine, and
that transubstantiation takes place namely, the
change of the inward imperceptible substance
into another substance ; while all the species and
accidents that is to say, those qualities which
are outwardly perceived by the senses, such as
colour, taste or shape remain unchangec^ They
reject all explanation of a typical or subjective
presence. Holy Communion is given in both
kinds to the laity ; the Sacrament is administered
by means of a golden spoon, in which particles of
220 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the bread of the Eucharist float in the con-
secrated wine. Infants receive Holy Communion
after baptism. The Sacrament of Extreme
Unction, called by the Russians Soborovanie
(that is to say. Unction without the extreme),
is administered by several priests, and is not
reserved for those in extremis ; it is regarded
less as a preparation for death than as a means
of healing the sick.
J^With regard to Holy Order, no priest in
Russia is allowed to marry after he is ordained.
He is married before he is ordained, and marriage
has become a necessary preliminary to Order.
The Orthodox Church proclaims the indissolu-
bility of marriage, but in practice admits that
the infidelity of one of the parties authorizes
separation. Violation of the conjugal oath is
regarded as annulling the sacrament, and only
the injured party is allowed to remarry, np"""
The Orthodox have the same fundamental
cycle of feasts as the Catholics. The Holy
Liturgy is said according to two rites those of
St. John Chrysostom and of St. Basil.*
The Orthodox observe four great iasxs:
* There is also in Lent the Mass of the Presanotified.
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 221
Advent, forty days from November 15 until
Christmas Eve ; Lent, beginning on the Monday
after the sixth Sunday before Easter ; thirdly,
a period from the first Sunday after Pentecost
until June 28 ; fourthly, the fast of the Mother
of God from August 1 to August 15. According
to the Orthodox fast, only one meal is allowed
a day, and abstinence not only from meat,
but from fish, butter, milk, cheese, eggs, and oil
is required. The fasts are carried out by the
poor with great strictness, and even among the
wealthier classes there is more fasting and absti-
nence during Lent than in the West, f Statues of
our Lord or of saints are forbidden, buFpictures
and any images on a flat surface are allowed)
To sum up, the foundations of the Orthodox
faith are : Belief in one God in three Persons,
in the Incarnation of God the Son, the Redemp-
tion of Mankind by the sacrifice of His Life, the
Church founded by Him with her Sacraments,
the Resurrection of the Body, the life Ever-
lasting. They have a hierarchy; they accept
the Deutero-canonical books of Scripture as
equal to the others ; they believe in and use
seven sacraments ; they honour, invoke, and
222 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
pray to saints ; they have a cult of holy
pictures and relics ; they look with infinite
reverence to the Mother of God.
In all these main points, which I have here
enumerated, there is no difference between the
Orthodox Church of the East and the Catholic
Church of the West. The two Churches origi-
nally separated on minor questions of discipline ;
they are at present separated by certain questions
of dogma as well. But the great difference
between the two Churches is the difference of
constitution., which proceeds from the very fact
of the separation. The first difference in dogma
between the two Churches is the procession of
the Holy Ghost. The Eastern Church refuses
to add the word filiogue to the Nicean Creed.
Rut even here, although the Orthodox do not
admit that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the
Son as well as from the Father, they have never
explicitly stated a contrary belief ; and although
they deny that the twofold procession can be
inserted in the Creed, they grant it allows of an
orthodox interpretation. This is a purely theo- 1
logical dispute, and to this day it remains the
chief point of difference between the two Churches.
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 225
The two Churches differ in their conception of
purgatory ; the Orthodox pray for the dead,
and believe in a middle state, where the dead
sleep and wait passively ; XJbut they do not
define the matter any further, and they reject
all idea of the purification by spiritual fire. They
deny that souls which have departed this life
can expiate their faults, or at least the only
expiation they admit are the prayers of the faith-
ful and the Holy Mysteries.
The Orthodox deny the dogma of the Im-
maculate Conception. The Catholic dogma of
the Immaculate Conception is that all mankind
are from their conception tainted with Original
Sin, except the Blessed Virgin, who by a special
privilege and grace of God was preserved im-
maculate that is, free from the stain of Original
Sin from the first moment of her conception.
I repeat this definition because it is not gener-
ally known to Protestant Englishmen, who, as
a rule, confuse the Immaculate Conception with
the Incarnation of our Lord, and I know
of cases where they obstinately maintain this
belief in the face of evidence.
The doctrine, although not accepted in theory
THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
by the Eastern Church, is practically a part of
their belief that is to say, they never cease to
call the Blessed Virgin All Immaculate, or
Very Immaculate.
Finally, the Orthodox Church deny the dogma
of Papal Infallibility. This is in reality the only
difference between the two Churches which has
any real importance, either religious or political,
because it includes any other possible difference,
and from it proceeds the difference in constitu-
tion and in political situation between the two
Churches.
For Catholics the door on dogmatic definition
has been left open indefinitely ; for while holding,
de fide, that the revelation made to the apostles
was final and complete, new definition of the
revelation, as is seen in the creeds, as heresies
arise, or as fuller expansion of doctrine, is ad-
mitted indefinitely.
On the other hand, the Orthodox believe that
the time for definition has been closed, once and
for all, and for ever. They believe that nothing
can be added to the decisions of the first Seven
Great Councils, which took place before the
schism between the two Churches, and which
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH.
contained, according to them, the infallible,
final, complete, and unalterable definition of the
Church and the dogmas of the faith. The Ortho-
dox regard the first Seven Councils to have been
infallible in the definition of dogma, exactly in
the same way as Catholics consider the Pope
to be infallible in his capacity of supreme Pastor
of the Church, when speaking ex cathedra he
defines revealed truth and teaches points of faith
or of morals. The Orthodox deny that the Pope
has authority over the whole Church. The
Russian and the Greek catechisms agree that
the Church has no other head than Jesus Christ,
our Lord so far this agrees with the Catholic
catechism and that He is represented by no vicar
on earth. The Orthodox regard the Pope as
the Patriarch of the West, and legitimate first
Patriarch (primus inter pares), but they reject
his universal claim*
And as the first Seven Councils left some
matters undefined and the Fathers of the Church
did not foresee all possible contingencies, such
matters remain undefined in the Orthodox
Church.
Since the Orthodox Church possesses neither
8
226 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
a spiritual sovereign nor an international capital,
such as Rome, it naturally tends to decentraliz-
ation, and hence the growth of national and
independent Churches, which the Greeks call
autocephalous.
The Russian Church was. the first to establish
its independence, and the example of Russia was
followed by Greece, Servia, and Roumania.
In 1872 Bulgaria, in obedience to its national
interests, seceded from the jurisdiction of the
Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, in order
to be no longer classed with the Greeks ; for,
according to the Turkish system, all those who
submitted to the jurisdiction of Constantinople
were officially classed as " Greeks. 35
Thus the Bulgarians formed an autonomous
Church in the domains of the Ottoman Empire,
alongside of the Greek Church, before Bulgaria
constituted a State, and for so doing they incurred
the anathema of the Orthodox Patriarchate of
Constantinople, and were condemned as hereti-
cal, since the patriarchate maintained that the
delimitation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction should
correspond to political delimitation, and that in
the same political state there could only be one
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH.
Chureiu, Bulgaria's action, therefore, was con-
trary*^ church canon that is, heretical. Never-
theless its independence was recognized by the
Sultan, and the Bulgarian Church was estab-
lished under an Exarch of its own, while Russia,
without making any definite pronouncement,
nevertheless never accepted the anathema of
Constantinople.
A few years later Bulgaria became an inde-
pendent principality, and had the jurisdiction of
the Bulgarian Exarchate been limited to the prin-
cipality of Bulgaria, the (Ecumenical Patriarchate
would have been logically bound to recognize it ;
but according to the finnans of the Sultan, the
jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Exarchate extended
beyond the frontiers of Bulgaria, and included the
dioceses of Thrace and Macedonia, which nomi-
nally belonged to the Sultan and were a bone of
contention between the Greek and the Slav
influence. Thus the Grseco-Bulgarian schism
continued. This question has now once again
sprung into importance. The dioceses of Mace-
donia and some of those in Thrace, which were
under the religious jurisdiction of Bulgaria, and
under the political dominion of the Porte, are
228 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
now, as the result of the latest wars in the Balkans,
and of the Treaty of Bucharest, partly in the
hands of the Servians, and partly in the hands of
the Greeks. Hitherto the Bulgarian Exarchate
was the nucleus around which all the elements
of Bulgarian nationality in Macedonia were
gathered ; but now, owing to the second Balkan
War, the Bulgarians in Macedonia come under
the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Servia,
and are in fear, consequently, of losing their
nationality, since the Bulgars fear that neither
their churches nor their national schools will
succeed in maintaining their existence in the
new Greek and Servian territory. The conse-
quence was, that some of the Bulgars in those
parts of Macedonia talked of secession from the
Orthodox Church, and submission to the Church
of Rome, or of embracing Protestantism, as the
best means of preserving their nationality.*
In spite of these differences, the Russian Church
and the independent Churches of the East form
in reality one, for if they lack unity of organ-
ization, they possess unity of creed, and the unity
of creed is ensured by its immutabilty, which
*It is very improbable that anything of the kind mil occur.
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 229
renders unnecessary all international authority
or periodical congresses. Since matters of dogma
have been discussed once and for all, or have
been left vague and undefined indefinitely, there
is nothing for such an authority to define, and
nothing for such a congress to discuss. And the
panegyrists of the Orthodox Church are proud
of the lack of central authority and the organiz-
ation of the Churches according to States, which
they consider combine unity of creed with
ecclesiastical independence, according to Homa-
yakov's formula, " Unity of freedom in love."
But if the nationalization of the Oriental
Churches is a source of strength, it is at the
same time a source of weakness, for the result
of the national constitution of the Orthodox
Churches, and of their having no spiritual head,
has been that many of its branches have been
secularized, and of this the Russian Church is
a signal example.
The Orthodox Churches, and especially the
Russian Church, were thrown open to the civil
power, the power of the State, and became sub-
ordinate to it.
The Russian Church became subject to the
SJ30 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
State. It is often said that such a circumstance
is a guarantee^of political liberty and of liberty
of thought; but neither the history of Russia
nor that of the Greek empire furnishes us with
examples to the point. Both in the history of
Russia and of Byzantium we are confronted with
two phenomena intellectual stagnation and
political despotism to which the Church seems
to have contributed, since being subject to the
State she had no means of resisting civil author-
ity, and the power of the State was left without
a single check. The civil authority had the sup-
port of ecclesiastic authority, and the temporal
authority was backed up by the spiritual power ;
no obstacle was raised in the path of autocracy.
The alliance of Church and State kept down
the intellectual growth of the nation within,
and prevented the invasion of new ideas from
without. The result of the alliance was stag-
nation and isolation. And in the East there
was no common clerical language, as Latin in
the West, to help civilization, for the Greek
Church did not impose its language on its sister
Churches, but left to each the use of its own
tongue.
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 281
This peculiar constitution of the Russian
Church, as Sir Charles Eliot puts it, " has pro-
duced in Russia an almost Mohammedan con-
fusion of Church and State, or at least of religion
and politics. 55
But this state of things did not come about
all at once.
Christianity reached Russia through Byzan-
tium at a time (988 A.D.) when the Eastern
Church was still in communion with Rome, after
a temporary schism between the East and
West ; a Russian Metropolitan held the see of
Kiev, and was appointed by the Patriarch of
Constantinople. During this period the Russian
Church was a province of the Byzantine Patri-
archate.
Then came the Tartar invasion and the migra-
tion of the Russian princes to the basin of the
Volga, ^iid finally to Moscow. Moscow had a
Metropolitan who was still suffragan of the
Greek patriarch, but elected by his clergy and
chosen by Ms sovereign. This was the second
phase of {the Russian Church during which it
gradually ! acquired its independence. Moscow
became at kingdom, and at the death of Ivan
232 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the Terrible, in 1589, Russia demanded a Patri-
arch, In 1589 Job, the Metropolitan of Moscow,
was consecrated Patriarch. This was brought
about by Boris Godunov, in the reign of Feodor,
the successor of Ivan the Terrible (1589).
Thus began the third phase of the history of the
Russian Church the phase of its independence.
The Russian Church was henceforward inde-
pendent of Constantinople.
There were ten Patriarchs of Moscow in suc-
cession. At first they played a powerful and
important part in Russian history, and helped
to save Russia from foreign dominion.
The culminating point in the history of the
independent Church was reached when in the
reign of Alexis, in 1642, Nikon became Patriarch.
The Partriarchate of Nikon had two great
and far-reaching results firstly, a conflict with
the civil authority which ended in hip- defeat
and deposition from the patriarchal) throne,
and in a consequent loss of prestige to the
patriarchate ; and secondly, a schisih which
tore the Russian Church in two, and which was
the result of a wise reform the revision of the
text of liturgical books, into whose tefxt, owing
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 233
to continuous copying and recopying, inaccu-
racies had crept.
Nikon spoke with great energy against the
supremacy of the State over the Church. Six
years after his consecration, he was brought
before a Council, condemned and deposed, thanks
to the intrigues of the Boyars. His revision of
the texts was accepted by the Council, but not
by a great part of the Russian people, who clung
obstinately to the old unrevised books and
called themselves " Old Believers." Hence
arose the great schism of the Russian Church*
The " Old Believers," were persecuted and
became fanatical. Besides the revision of the
texts, Nikon changed one or two trifling details
of ritual in the liturgy. This was enough to
convulse Russia. Later on, all enemies of foreign
innovations flocked to the camp of the " Old
Believers," endured any persecution, however
severe ; and the net result of this, at the present
moment, is that there are 25,000,000 Russians
who live in schism from the Russian Church.
The fall of Nikon established once and for all the
authority of the State over that of the Church,
and the great schism weakened the authority of
80
234 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the Church., owing to the secession from it
of a great part of the nation. The patriarchate
was shaken and weakened ; but weak as it was,
it appeared too strong to suit the taste of Peter
the Great, who abolished it in 1721.
In its place he established the Holy Directing
Synod. Thus began the fourth phase of the
Russian Church, which has lasted until to-
day.
There is nothing necessarily anti-liberal in
the existence of a synod, and it is not peculiar
to the Russian Church. Greece, Roumania,
and Servia administer their Churches by means
of a synod. Its tendencies depend necessarily
on the manner of its election, the nature of its
guarantees, the laws and customs of the country
in which it exists.
The Holy Synod consists at the present day
of executive members and assistants, of per-
manent and temporary members. Among the
permanent members are the Metropolitans of
Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, and the
Exarch of Georgia. The temporary members
consist of four or five archbishops, bishops or
archimandrites, the emperor's chaplain, and the
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 235
head chaplain of the forces. All the members
are appointed by the Emperor, and in addition
to these ecclesiastics, the Emperor appoints a
delegate who is called the Procurator-General.
The procurator is a layman, and represents the
civil authority* His duty is to see that ecclesi-
astical affairs are carried out in accordance with
the imperial ukases. No act of the synod is
valid unless he confirms it. He has the right
of veto, should its decisions be contrary to the
law. Practically, therefore* but not theoretically,
he controls the synod : and in bis turn he carries
out the will and obeys the orders of the Emperor.
It would be a great mistake, however, what-
ever may be the result of this institution in prac-
tice, to call the Emperor of Russia the head of
the Russian Church. He makes no such claim,
and Russian orthodoxy recognizes only one
Head of the Church, our Lord, and only one
infallible authority speaking in His name, the
Seven First (Ecumenical Councils. The Em-
peror may be the autocratic master of the
Church ; he is not the head of it. His authority
is from the outside only. In questions of dogma
he has no authority at all. He is regarded as
236 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the temporal defender and guardian of the
Church ; his authority, and consequently the au-
thority of the State, concerns the administration
of the Church solely, and even here his power
is limited by tradition, canon law, and the
oecumenical character of the Church.
Dogma is equally outside the domain of the
Holy Synod, and even disciplinary measures
come before the Holy Synod as before a com-
mission of inquiry, the final decision remaining
with the Church.
Such is the teaching of the Russian Church
with regard to relations of Church and State,
and the position of the Emperor with regard to
the Church.
Yet in spite of this, there is no Church where
the influence and the authority of the State is
so deeply felt as in the Russian Church ; for in
practice the Church is governed through the
Holy Synod, and not through the bishops, for the
synod overrules the bishops, and in practice,
and in spite of the theory, the procurator over-
rules the synod, and the procurator is the civil
authority in the flesh. The Russian Church is
consequently, in practice, a State Church, and
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 237
many of its earnest members have never ceased
to deplore the fact.
Russian books dealing with theological ques-
tions in the past are full of this bitter and oft-
reiterated complaint ; but I will quote what
an apologist of the Russian Church wrote as
short time ago as November 1912, showing that
the complaint of the past is if anything more
vital now than ever. In an article on the Rus-
sian public and religion, S. Bulgakov says that
a faithful and powerful ally of the atheism
of the intelligentsia is without doubt the
secular character of the Church, its ruinous de-
pendence on the State under the synod regime,
and owing to the absence of self-government.
He also says that one of the reasons of the alien-
ation from the Church, not only of the intelli-
gentsia but of the people, is the bureaucratic
caste of the Church administration, the access
of officialdom and arbitrary power to the fields
of freedom and love. "It is not," he writes,
" a question of any corruption or distortion o
dogma ; on the contrary, the Russian Church
adheres with devotion to the dogmas of the
Universal Church.
238 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
"The main lever by which the State directs
the Church at present is the episcopacy, which,
contrary to canon, is appointed by, and con-
sequently to a certain extent picked out by,
secular authority. The Holy Synod is likewise
chosen from these bishops, and by secular
authority also. . . . The bishops, who should
remain all their life in their dioceses, have been
commuted into ecclesiastical governors, changing
dioceses more quickly than the governors change
provinces. . . . Theoretically, the Orthodox
Church should be self-governing from top to
bottom, but the painful reality reveals on the
contrary so great a paralysis in the public life
of the Church, as to give the outside observer
the impression that nothing is here but ecclesi-
astical governors, under the direction of the
procurator of the Holy Synod and the secular
authority that is behind him, with a clergy
stripped of all rights."
Such a statement sums up what has been con-
stantly said in the past, and what is being said
with increasing vehemence in the present by
earnest members of the Russian Church, who
recognize with sorrow the almost total alienation
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 239
of the Church from the educated classes, and look
forward with apprehension to the day when the
indifference of the educated and the street-
corner atheism of the half-educated shall spread
to the peasantry. But, on the other hand, the
very fact that such statements are made shows
that side by side with the growth of rationalism
there is a movement in the opposite direction
as well.
Many years ago, in the days of the fathers and
grandfathers of the present generation, educated
Russia was divided into two camps the Slavo-
phils and the Westernisers. The leaders of the
Westemism were Bielinsky and Herzen ; those
of the Slavophils, Homyakov, a poet and the
father of the Ex-President of the Duma; and
others.
The Westernisers saw in rationalism and
atheism the last word of Western culture, and
made a religion out of socialistic Utopias, and
at the same time took part with a fervent en-
thusiasm in the struggle for political freedom.
Orthodoxy and the Church were to them an
expression of despotism and reaction.
The Slavophils, who were, in their most
240 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
flourishing epoch, by no means political reaction-
aries, and being more cultured than their oppo-
nents were saturated with the philosophy, art,
and religion of the West, nevertheless revered the
religious character of the sovereign's authority,
based Utopias on it likewise, and, in contra-
distinction to the cosmopolitan ideal of the
Westernisers, for whom nationality did not exist
except ethnographically, made a cult of national-
ity which for them was inseparable from religion
and orthodoxy. There was the same difference
between their ideals as there is now between
those of Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Blatchford ;
only whereas in England Mr. Chesterton has
but few followers, the Slavophils were expressing
the inarticulate aspirations of the great mass
of the Russian people.
Slavophilism was represented by many men
of genius, such as Dostoievsky the novelist and
Vladimir Soloviev the philosopher.
Its tradition has not died out, and although
the majority of the intelligentsia may be adher-
ents of the opposite school, yet the descendants
of the Slavophils have many notable repre-
sentatives among the minority (whose names I
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 241
have already cited) in philosophy, art, and
literature ; and a universal characteristic of
them is their interest in religion.
The ordinary Russian street-corner atheist
sees in the Church nothing but an instrument
of clerical obscurantism and political reaction.
He looks at the matter from the outside, and,
from his point of view, the opinion is excusable.
But the descendants of Slavophilism look at
the Church from the inside. They know from
experience the blessing of the Sacraments, the
majesty of an immemorial tradition, the glory
of a mystical and liturgical Church whose ritual
and liturgy is one of inexpressible richness,
depth, and beauty. Even to the most in-
different agnostic the Russian Church affords a
spectacle of surpassing aesthetic interest, and if
he is musical an incomparable source of wonder
and delight in the quality of its sacred song.
As far as ritual and ceremony is concerned, the
practice and custom of the first centuries of
Christianity, which were in many cases sim-
plified by Rome, before they were curtailed or
rejected by the Reformation, have been pre-
served intact in the East. Nothing is more false
9A% THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA,
than the idea which often prevails in some
quarters that the rites of the early Church were
simple, and grew more and more complicated
towards the Middle Ages. The rites of the Church
in the fourth and fifth centuries were long and
complicated, and were gradually simplified by the
Latins. The proof is the ceremonial of the Eastern
Churches, which has remained exactly where it
was in the fourth and fifth centuries. Mass,
for instance, in the Coptic Church, lasts five
hours or longer. Low Mass, which was one of
the simplifications introduced by Rome, is un-
known in the Greek and Russian Churches.
Every Mass is a high Mass, intoned and accom-
panied by plain song, in the presence of the
faithful, and generally only on Sundays and holy
days. The same liturgy and rite is observed
by the TJniate Catholics, whether Greeks, Ru-
thenians, Poles, etc. The liturgy is sumptuous,
and at the same time austere. There is only one
altar, which is separated from the congregation
by a large screen called the iconastasis that is
to say, the screen which bears the holy images
which has doors which are opened and shut during
Mass, and beyond which the priest alone, and
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH.
the Emperor when tie receives Communion on
the day oi his coronation, has the right to pene-
trate. Behind these doors, which are shut
before the consecration, the most solemn part
of the Mass is consummated. No organ or any
other instruments are allowed in the Eastern
Churches, and, as in the Sixtine Chapel when
the Pope says Mass, only the human voice is
heard.
As far as liturgical song is concerned, the
Russians have far surpassed the Greeks, from
whom they received it. The liturgical music
consists of plain song, and of original chants
called raspievi, which date from the Middle
Ages. The singing of the Church choirs in Russia
is "without comparison the finest in the world.
The bass voices reach to notes and attain effects
resembling t the 36-foot bourdon stops of a huge
organ, and these, blent with the clear and bold
treble voices of the boys, sing
" An undisturbed song of pure concent* "
The best Russian choirs sing together like one
voice. They attain to tremendous crescendoes,
to a huge volume of thunderous sound, and to
244 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
a celestial softness and delicacy of diminishing
tone. There is no finer chorus singing. The
Russians are extremely particular and appre-
ciative of religious music. Every kind of in-
stitution, including banks, has its private choir;
and I know of a case where a banker chose his
clerks simply and solely according to the quality
of their voices, so as to form a choir who could
sing in church.
The finest choirs in Russia are those of the
Emperor, St. Isaak's Cathedral in St. Peters-
burg, of the Cathedral of the Assumption, and
the Church of St. Saviour, and the Tchudov
Monastery at Moscow ; and the finest religious
ceremonies are those which take place at Mos-
cow during Holy Week and on the eve of Easter.
Religious music in Russia has its roots in the
heart of the people. And whatever in the future
may be the influence of rationalistic tendencies
and materialistic theories, of superficial indifier-
entisrn or ill-digested science, the Russian people
at the present moment love their liturgy and the
ceremony, ritual, and music of their worship.
The Church still plays an overwhelming part
in national life. And for the peasant,, the
THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. 245
Church is not only a place of mystery* sweetness,
and consolation, but Ms window opens on to all
that concerns the spirit it is his opera, his
theatre, his concert, his picture gallery, his
library.
The Russian people still flock to the shrines
of the Saints, and walk hundreds of miles on foot
to visit holy places. A peasant woman once
asked me to lend her two roubles, as she was
going on a journey. I asked her where she was
going to, and she said, " Jerusalem."
A pilgrim in a Russian crowd is as constant
a factor as a soldier, a student, or the member
of any other profession. The churches are still
crowded in Russia, and they have that attribute
without which a Church is not a Church they
smell of the poor.
CHAPTER
EDUCATION.
T^DUCATION, like everything else in Russia,
^ has, in the course of its existence, experi-
enced many starp ups and dovras, which were the
outcome in the past of the vicissitudes of history,
and, in less remote times, of clianges in the policy
of successive governments.
**""" The birthplace of education in Russia was the
Church. Until the Tartar invasion, education was
entirely in the hands of the clergy ; and like
everything else in Russia, it necessarily suffered
an eclipse during the epoch of the Tartar domi-
nation. Peter the Great created secular schools,
sowed the seed of technical education, which was
later to bear such abundant fruit, and planned
an Academy of Sciences which was executed
by his ^yridow Catherine,
EDUCATION. 247
The University of Moscow was founded in
1755, in the reign of the Empress Elisabeth.
Catherine II. encouraged education in many ways;
but it was not until the reign of Alexander I.
that an attempt was made to organize a national
system of education. From that time until the
present day, education has experienced spurts
of progress and relapses into stagnation, accord-
ing as the political pendulum swung from reform
to reaction. From 1812 to 1855 reaction was
predominant. In 1855 education, as everything
else, revived under the influence of the great
reforms. After the assassination of the Em-
peror Alexander II., in 1881 ? another period of
reaction set in, which lasted more or less until
the Russo-Japanese War; then came the
revolutionary movement which broke down
certain barriers, and was succeeded, as fax as
education is concerned, by a Government pol-
icy whose constant tendency has been toward
reaction, and here as elsewhere, and in other
matters, to take back or to curtail and limit
with one hand what it had givea with the other.
But although the Government has constantly
interfered with and hampered tie organization
248 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
of education, it has not only been powerless to
withstand the great movement towards the ex-
tension and progress of education which is at
this moment taking place in Russia, but it
has in some cases taken the initiative in
educational reform, so that if it curtails with
one hand it has none the less given with the
other ; and the gift is more important than the
limitations, because, once made, it opened win-
dows that could never be shut again in spite of
all possible curtailments. In Russia at the
present moment there is a great and ever in-
creasing demand for primary, secondary, tech-
nical, and higher education.
Primary education, which in Russia is always
gratuitous, is in the hands either of
(a) The Zemstvos, in the country.
The Municipalities, in the towns.
(6) The Church.
(c) The Minister of Education, to a small
extent in that part of Russia where
Zemstvos exist, and a large extent
in the ukraines where there are no
Zemstvos.
The course of primary education is planned on
EDUCATION. 249
a basis of from three to six years. In all primary
schools, reading, writing, and arithmetic, and
religion are taught.
The tendency towards a longer and slower
course, because a three years' course, while it
teaches a boy to read once and for all, has been
found not to leave a lasting impression on him
as far as writing is concerned.
The boy after a three years' course will never
forget how to read, but he will entirely forget
how to write.
The primary schools are full to overflowing,
and have to turn back pupils all over the
country.
As far as the teachers are concerned, 60 per
cent, of them are women, 40 per cent, are men.
Only a small proportion are specially trained
teachers ; the rest, especially among the women,
have merely finished their course at a Govern-
ment Gymnasium.
Of the three classes of primary schools, the
best are those which are in the hands of the
Zemstvo ; then next in order of merit come
those which are in the hands of the Minister
of Education; and next the Church parish
250 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
schools,* which are gradually being suspended
and ousted by the others.
All these schools were till quite lately (three
or four years ago) supported either by the respec-
tive authorities in whose control they are, or by
private persons. As the sums of money ren-
dered available by such a system were totally
insufficient to defray the necessary expenses, the
consequence was that the general progress was
slow. A radical change in this situation was
made by an Education Bill, which was intro-
duced into the Duma by the Government, and
passed by the Duma a few years ago. This most
important measure provided that the various
authorities indicated above, which control the
schools, should receive yearly from the Govern-
ment a sum of about 40 in order to pay for the
schooling of fifty children that is to say, for the
salary of one teacher for every fifty children, on
the condition that the Zemstvo, or the other con-
trolling authorities, as the case might be, should
* These are more or less in a state of decay, and in spite of
periodic spurts of activity brought about by various stimuli, such
as Government grants, they always lag behind the Zemstvo schools,
as they are a nuisance to the clergy themselves, who rarely have
time to attend to them.
EDUCATION. 251
undertake to build, in a period of ten years, a
number of schools sufficient to meet the needs
of the whole population of their respective dis-
tricts. The result of this Bill will be that in
about five to six years 9 time Russia will have
enough schools for the whole of its population,
and will be able to contemplate the practical
realization of compulsory education.
As it is now, in European Russia the per-
centage of people who can read or write is only
2*9 in Siberia, and in the Caucasus it is less (12-3
and 12-4) ; but it is higher in Poland (30*5), in the
Baltic provinces (71-80), and in certain govern-
ments, such as Moscow (40) and St. Petersburg
(43-53).*
Before considering the question of secondary
education in Russia, it must be pointed out that
all secondary and higher education in Russia is
of two kinds namely, technical and general.
General secondary education is either directly
in the hands of the Minister of Education, or in
the hands of private persons under the close
supervision of the Minister of Education. There
* I quote these figures from the Russian Year Book, compiled
by Dr. Howard Kennard, for 1913.
THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
are, as in Germany, two classes of general second-
ary education classical, which is taught in the
gymnasia, and non-classical, which is taught in
the Real Schools; the gymnasia are attended
by boys and girls, but the schools are as a rule
not mixed. The Gymnasium's course of in-
struction lasts eight years ; that of the Real
Schools, seven*
The subjects taught in the gymnasia are as
follows : Religion, Latin, Greek, Russian, mathe-
matics (as far as logarithms and the binomial
theorem, and including trigonometry), history,
natural sciences, French or German, English
(optional).
The course of the Real Schools is the same,
except that it excludes Latin and Greek, at-
taches much more importance to mathematics
and natural science, and has two obligatory
foreign languages (French and German), and one
optional foreign language.
The course for girls is the same in kind, but
less in degree. The tendency for girls is to go
to the Real Schools in preference to the gymnasia ;
and besides the gymnasia and the Real Schools,
there are also for girls a certain number of in-
EDUCATION. 253
stitutes and gymnasia founded by the Empress
Marie, open only to the daughters of the nobility,
and to foundlings and orphans. These gymnasia
are more or less the same as the ordinary Govern-
ment gymnasia; the institutes are closed pen-
sions, organized more or less on the lines of a
French convent ; the pupils are boarders, and
the teaching of languages in these institutes is
especially good.
In the ordinary gymnasia the average number
of pupils is 372, and the average number of
pupils in each class is 35. These schools are
open to people of every class ; but this does not
exclude the possibility of nobles or other persons
founding special private schools for members of
their particular class.
In the gymnasia and Real Schools the pupils
are mostly children of town dwellers and guild
artisans; the pupils live at home, and go to
the school only during school hours.
The school terms last from September 1 until
Christmas, and from Christmas until June 1,
leaving a holiday of three months in the summer.
The hours of work in school are from 9 a.m. until
noon, and then, after an hour's interval for lunch,
254 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., making five hours a day.
Preparation is done at home. There are no half-
holidays. On the other hand, there are many
whole holidays, since every saint's day in Russia
is a whole holiday, and besides the saints' days
there are other holidays as well. One point of
interest, in comparing Russian secondary schools
with English secondary schools, is that in Rus-
sian schools there is no such thing as corporal
punishment, and if a Russian schoolboy were
chastised or beaten by a teacher he would be
almost ready to commit suicide from shame.
In the Russian gymnasia and High Schools, the
level and quality of the teaching are high. A
university degree is required from all teachers,
except in some rare cases in the lower classes
of girls' gymnasia. On paper, and theoretically,
nothing could appear better than the system
of Russian secondary education. It seems to
have all the advantages of the German system,
and at the same time to be a little less strenuous.
Nevertheless, almost any Russian, if you ask
him what is the chief characteristic of Russian
secondary education at present, will answer that
the education received is bad and unsatisfactory.
EDUCATION. 255
And if you ask whether this is the result of an
incomplete or faulty programme of instruction, or
of incompetent and inadequate teaching, he will
say, No ; the scheme of instruction is suffi-
ciently extensive and difficult, the teachers are
well trained, competent and conscientious ; it is
in spite of this., they tell you, that the educa-
tion which is the fruit of this laborious course
is unsatisfactory, and the culture obtained com-
paratively low. If you press for the reason, they
will point to the influence of the Government
over the schools. The Government do not exer-
cise an open and direct pressure on the schools,
but they never cease from interfering indirectly
with them. They exercise a kind of censorship
over education ; the teachers are being con-
stantly checked; certain subjects and certain
topics are tabooed ; and the nature of the
censorship varies with the changing ministers.
Thus it is that education tends to be intensive
in one direction and incomplete in another ; and
the net result is that the culture obtained is to
a certain extent superficial, and that the product
of the Russian secondary schools is a youth who
is intellectually half -baked.
256 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
One of the cMef results of the attitude of the
administration towards the schools is that the
pupils look upon their course of education
solely as a means of getting a diploma ; they
cease to be interested in the education itself
which is provided for them, and they throw
themselves with exaggerated vehemence into
any other political or philosophical channel out-
side it into socialism, materialism, theoretical
and practical anarchy.
This is what Russians tell you, and it is no
doubt true from their point of view; neverthe-
less, if you compare the average level of secondary
education in Russia with that which exists in
England, you will notice at once that the aver-
age Russian, as I have said earlier in this book,
is infinitely better instructed. I use the word
" instructed " purposely ; because if you take
education in the larger sense, it is often the case
that the more ignorant Englishman has on the
whole a better balanced education than the over-
instructed Russian. That is to say, the intellectu-
ally immature product of the English schools will
often be saner and nearer to reality and practical
life, and fitter to deal with the emergencies of
EDUCATION. 257
life, than the intellectually overripe Russian, who
is immature in his very overripeness ; and who,
by nature being intellectually plastic, agile, and
assimilative, receives an education of a kind that
starves him where he needs feeding, and over-
feeds him where he needs a low diet, and leads
him to seek for himself just that kind of in-
tellectual food and drink which is likely to in-
ebriate him, and to ruin his intellectual digestion.
With regard to the course of education itself, he
becomes simply and solely a diploma-hunter.
These remarks do not apply to technical second-
ary education. There are in Russia technical
secondary schools of agriculture, engineering,
mining, forestry, and railways (all under the
management of the different ministries). The
general course of education received here is the
same in character as that given in the gymnasia
and the Real Schools ; but it is combined with
a special course, and the technical schools pro-
duce a type of youth who is not only more prac-
tical and nearer to reality, but who is more really
cultivated in spite of the fact that the pupils of
the gymnasia have the advantage of the more
general course of education*
258 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
There are also cadet schools and special schools
for officers under the Ministry of War, which are
sufficiently good ; and commercial schools (similar
to the Real Schools), under the direction of the
Minister of Commerce.
The number^of schools in Russia is still not
really sufficient for the demand; and since the
regulations binding on the institution of schools
by private persons have become less stringent,
the increase in the number of such privately or-
ganized schools has been enormous, and this
testifies to the greatness of the general demand
for education.
Higher education in Russia is also of two kinds,
technical and general.
General higher education is supplied by the
universities. There are universities at Moscow,
St. Petersburg, Kiev, Kharkov, Yurieff, Warsaw,
Kazan* Odessa, Tomsk, and Saratov.
The largest university is that of Moscow,
where there are nearly ten thousand students;
and that of St, Petersburg, where there are
eight thousand. Admission to the university
takes place once a year, and admittance is given
to all students who have passed what the Ger-
EDUCATION. S59
mans call their Abiturienten E$amen, at their
secondary school that is to say, their leaving-
certificate examination. Besides the universities,
there are higher technical schools, which we
will come to presently.
The system of university teaching is the same
as that which exists in the rest of Europe and
in Scotland ; the faculties include jurisprudence,
physics and mathematics, medicine, historical
philology, Oriental languages, and divinity.
But the part played by the universities in
Russian life and the special character of
Russian university education are unique.*
Every Englishman who is at all interested in
Russia will be probably aware of the immense
influence that the universities have had on the
current of modern history in Russia.
* University education is ike education in Russia. It has a tradi-
tional pretension to be superior to al] other (specialized) education,
owing to its encyclopaedic and philosophical character. The Eussian
characteristic of knowing something about everything and having vast
apergus is fostered by it. The university is to the Russian student
what Paris is to the Frenchman, -what Athens was to the ancient world.
The student often misses the lectures of his own course and attends
the lectures of other faculties, and this is encouraged by the pro-
fessors, who did the same when they were young. In Russia, erratic
and sporadic information is preferred to systematic and narrow
knowledge.
260 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
The young, the adolescent in all countries, have
often played a part in politics, whenever the
politics of a country have been in a state of
ferment. Sometimes the expression of their zeal
takes the form of patriotism, as in the War of
Liberation in Germany ; sometimes, if the form
of the Government is reactionary, it leads them
to go and fight at the barricades.
In Russia the students have always taken an
interest in political matters ; but at the begin-
ning of the century the universities were small
and aristocratic* Nevertheless, in 1825, secret
societies existed all over Russia, largely recruited
from the ranks of the young, and these finally
organized an insurrection in St. Petersburg, which
has become famous in Russian history as the
Decembrist Rising ; and which stands in contrast
with all later insurrectionary risings in Russia,
in that it was exclusively the work of the nobility
and the gentry, and was confined to that class.
The society which brought about this insurrec-
tion modelled itself on the German association of
students, the Tugendbund ; and although its prac-
tical results were nil, it left a tradition which the
students on the one hand, and the Government
EDUCATION. 261
on the other hand (although unconsciously),
never permitted to die out.
All through the 'forties and the 'fifties, as
secondary education first became a fact and
subsequently went on increasing, the universities
grew not only large, but democratic, and formed
a democratic nucleus ; and it was here that the
rationalistic movement which started in Western
Europe found the most grateful soil and the
quickest response. Liberal ideas had always
flourished among the students, and this blend of
liberal and rationalistic ideas, as soon as it began
to spread and to increase, met with a counter-
movement of repression from all successive govern-
ments. And it is the glory of the Russian uni-
versities that they never ceased to keep the flag
of their ideal, their demand for political freedom,
flying, and were always the soul of any pro-
gressive political movement.
The universities were originally autonomous,
and though they were deprived of their liberties
for a time in the early part of the century, they
retained them fully in the reign of Alexander II. ;
it was not until then that the universities came
to be an important factor, since up to that
262 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
period they had been, as I have already said,
small and aristocratic ; and it was only in the
'fifties that they became democratic and large
enough to count. The privilege of autonomy
which had been given to the universities meant
that they were administered solely by a board of
professors* at the head of which was a rector.
This state of things lasted until the reign of
Alexander IIL> when the universities were again
deprived of their privileges and their autonomy,
and the Government tried to administer them
directly* with the usual result that trouble en-
sued; only the trouble brought about by the
conflict of the Government with the universities
was more turbulent in character than that pro-
duced by its clash with any other institutions or
classes of society.
A continual state of effervescence and of dis-
turbance on the one hand, and of repression on
the other, lasted until 1908, when autonomy
was again restored to the universities ; and dur-
ing the next five years university life began,
in spite of periodical strikes and closures, more
or less to settle down; but as reaction set in,
a part of its activity was directed against the
EDUCATION. 263
liberties of the university. In 1911, for instance,
all the professors in Moscow were forced to
resign.
At the present moment, if we do not hear of
disturbances in the university, this can be at-
tributed to the reaction among the students
themselves, who are in a natural state of depres-
sion at the result of the revolutionary movement
of 1905, which from their point of view was a
complete failure. It may safely be said that it
is most improbable that such a state of things
will last very long, and even now there are un-
mistakable clouds on the horizon. The policy
of the Government of giving, in educational
matters, with one hand and of hampering and
hindering with the other, was bound and is
bound to result in trouble sooner or later. The
troubles which occurred in the recent past in the
life of the universities, during and subsequent
to the revolutionary movement, without doubt
lowered the general standard of education. The
results obtained at present are worse than they
should be, considering the excellence of the pro-
fessors. Moreover, the constant troubles which
arose in the life of the universities during the
264 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
revolutionary period, caused generally by some
move on the part of the Government, and in-
variably followed by repressive measures (in-
volving temporary closure), drove thousands of
students to seek education abroad.
All that I have said about the universities
applies to the higher technical institutes, only
in a lesser degree. There is a considerable num-
ber of such technical institutes in Russia. St.
Petersburg alone can boast of a Polytechnic, a
Technological Institute, a Mining Institute, an
Institute of Civil Engineers, a Higher Commer-
cial Institute; and in addition to these there
are institutes in other parts of Russia where
higher education can be had in the branches
of mining, railways, ways and communications,
forestry and agronomy, besides an increasing
number of agricultural schools all over the
country. The difference between the character
of higher technical and higher general educa-
tion, between the higher technical schools and
the universities, is the same as the difference
between the character of the technical secondary
schools and the general secondary schools.
As in the case of technical secondary educa-
EDUCATION. 265
tion, higher technical education produces a more
practical type than the universities ; and the
students of the higher technical institutes only
take part in politics when matters have reached
a definite crisis, in which their action can have
practical effect. The great importance of the
universities and of the higher technical insti-
tute in Russia lies in the fact that they supply
the ranks of the whole of the higher intelligentsia.
All lawyers and all doctors come from the uni-
versities, and the life and the fate of the uni-
versities affect the cultured classes vitally. This
works both ways. The universities affect the
cultured classes, and the cultured classes act on
the universities.
For instance, every medical officer in every
county council is a university man, and he will
be vitally interested in the fate and doings of
his alma mater. Any blow at any particular
university will affect a whole class of people all
over the country ; the influence of the univer-
sities spreads like a network over the whole length
and breadth of Russia, and produces an esprit
de corps and a strong spirit of freemasonry among
the former students of the various universities.
9 a
266 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
Games and physical exercise are not a feature
of Russian education certainly not at least in
the English sense; and though outdoor sports,
such as boating and football, have been introduced,
and are popular in some of the universities
Odessa, for instance it is impossible at present
to discern even the dawn of any trend towards
physical sports and exercise such as we have in
France or Spain, for instance.
Lately, however, an organization of gymnas-
tical societies, under the supervision of Czech
instructors, and in some ways resembling the
German Turnvereine, have taken a firm root in
the towns, and enjoy great popularity ; these
societies hold yearly festivals, and organize com-
petitions between various towns. The popu-
larity of these societies is likely to increase in
the future.
Besides the universities and schools I have
mentioned, there are still a great many more
educational institutions : veterinary institutes,
schools of art, archaeology, Oriental languages,
and law; seminaries, ecclesiastical and naval
schools, and private institutions ; and at the
top of the ladder of education there are two
EDUCATION. 267
academies, one of art and one of science, con-
sisting of professors, men of science and letters,
who are chosen by election. Scholarships and
grants to poor students are distributed both by
the universities and the higher technical schools.
If one reviews the question of Russian educa-
tion as a whole, one is forced to the conclusion
that the material both of the teacher and the
pupil is good ; the staff of teachers excellent ;
but that the whole system is continually and
fundamentally vitiated by a policy, not exactly
of repression, but of constant censorship, inter-
ference, checking, nagging, and hindering which
saps the school life of Russia, and deprives it of
all potential interest and vitality for the pupil.
It is reduced to an official machine, which turns
out either a specimen of bureaucratic medio-
crity, or a rebel who reacts against it and is
driven to anarchy and dynamite. If the Gov-
ernment were to leave the whole matter alone,
there is no doubt that the schools would not
only manage their own affairs perfectly peace-
fully and well themselves, but that they would
succeed in turning out a type of youth who would
be more really cultured than the present over-
268 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
ripe and immature, half-baked, yet partially
burned specimen, which is the average product
of a system of education which cannot fail to be
one-sided and unsatisfactory so long as it is
cramped and diverted from larger channels by the
exasperating supervision of a paternal, officious,
and suspicious administration.
CHAPTER X.
JUSTICE.
THE judicial system of to-day in Russia dates
from what is called the Epoch of the
Great Reforms that is, of the reforms made in
1864 by the Emperor Alexander II, His new
judicial system is, next in order to the abolition
of serfdom, the most important of those reforms.
Up till 1864 justice in Russia dwelt behind
closed doors. It was organized on a class basis.
There was a court for the gentry, a court for
the townsman and for such peasants as did not
belong to landowners. Judicial decisions, civil
and criminal, were based solely on documentary
evidence prepared by the police. No oral evi-
dence was admitted. The proceedings were held
in camera. The judges appeared in public only
in order to pass sentence or to deliver a judg-
ment. It is needless to say that a system of
270 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
this kind encouraged venality, partiality, and
injustice.
In reforming the old system, the Imperial
Government borrowed elements from the judi-
cial systems existing in France and in England,
but it by no means confined itself to slavish imi-
tation. The aim of the reformers was to reach
the principles and ideas on which our system and
the French system are based ; and they created
a new system founded on ideas which have been
endorsed both in theory and in practice by modern
civilization. The chief principles at the basis of
the reformed judicial system in Russia are (1)
the separation of administrative and judicial
powers; (2) the independence of the magistrate
and the tribunals ; (3) the equality of all subjects
in the eye of the law (the abolition in the eye of
the law of all class distinctions) ; (4) the publicity
of trials ; (5) the adoption of oral procedure ; (6)
the participation of the people in the system
through (a) the introduction of trial by jury,
(b) originally, although this was altered later,
the election of judges. As a general principle, it
can be laid down that important cases in Russia
axe tried, as they are tried elsewhere in Europe,
JUSTICE. 271
by jury, in public and at the assizes ; with one
notable exception, that of all political offences
and all crimes and misdemeanours committed by
the Press, which are tried without a jury.
Where the Russian system differs from the
English and the French systems is that the judi-
cature is divided into two sections mutually inde-
pendent, and differing in the extent of their
jurisdiction and in the manner in which their
judges are appointed.
As in many other countries, there are two
branches of tribunals firstly, what were actually,
and what now correspond to, justices of the
peace, dealing with petty cases ; and, secondly,
ordinary tribunals dealing with larger matters.
These two branches of justice are quite distinct.
They are parallel to each other. They are sepa-
rate and isolated one from the other, and meet
only on the top of the ladder in their common
right of appealing to the Senate, which is the
highest court of appeal.
Beneath this double system of judicature, local
courts exist in every canton: (Volostnye Sudi),
tribunaux de bailliage, which were established
when the serfs were liberated, dealing ex-
272 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
clusively with the peasants' affairs, and in which
both the judges and judged are peasants.
The Canton Court consists of a tribunal of
three judges elected by the peasants. It deals
with small cases, and deals with them largely
according to established custom and tradition.
It stands to reason that peasants will deal with
matters which concern their own customs, codes,
and idiosyncrasies far better than people of any
other class.*
The judicial system which comes next above
the Canton Courts is dual : Petty and Grave.
The Petty cases are entrusted to local justices of
the peace, town judges, and zemskie nachalniki.
In 1864, when the judicial system was re-
formed, all such cases were dealt with by justices
of the peace, who were elected by the Zemstvo.
In 1889, the elective justices of the peace were
done away with, and they were replaced by
zemsTcie nachalniki, who, as I have already ex-
plained in Chapter IV., are a kind of official
* According to a new law, which, comes into force on January 1, 1914,
a higher -village court has been created for the consideration of
appeals from the Canton Court, consisting of the local justice of
peace as chairman, and the presidents of the Canton Courts of
the district as members.
JUSTICE. 273
squire, exercising executive and judicial authority
over the villages in their district. They are nomi-
nated by the governor of the province and ap-
pointed by the Minister of the Interior. Elective
justices of the peace have survived only in St.
Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and Kharkov, and
some other towns, where they are elected by the
town assemblies for a term of three years on a
property qualification.*
In all other towns, and everywhere else, where
there are justices of the peace, they are now
appointed by the Minister of Justice.
This rather complicated system (under which
the functions of a judge were committed into
the hands of persons (zemslcie nachalniki) who
were in their main attributes representative of
the executive) is now to be abolished by a new
law recently passed by the Duma, which divests
the zemslcie nachalniJci of their judicial functions,
and replaces the elective justices of the peace
all over the country. This new law comes into
force in regard to ten provinces on January 1,
1914, and will be extended over the remaining
* Nishni-Novgorod, Kazan, Saratov, Kishniev, and the district
lyiezd) of St. Petersburg.
274 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
part of the country in the course of the next
year. The jurisdiction of the new justices of the
peace has been increased by the new law. In
civil matters they are now competent to try
cases involving fines amounting to 1,000 roubles,
and criminal offences carrying a sentence of
simple imprisonment without any curtailment
of civil rights. The appeal from the justices
of the peace is made to the general meeting
of the justices of the district ; and from the
decision of this meeting (siezd) an appeal is
allowed, on points of law only, to the Senate.
The Senate, as is shown below, may either
dismiss the appeal or order a new trial. There
is, however, no appeal to the Senate at all
where the sentence carries with it a fine of
less than 100 roubles. The limit is now
30 roubles.
In the hands, then, of the justices of the peace
or of the zemskie nachalniki, as the case mav
~ /
be, are civil claims not exceeding 500 roubles
(50), and criminal cases where the penalty does
not exceed four months' imprisonment or a
fine of 300 roubles (30). Appeals against
the decision of a justice of the peace may be
JUSTICE. 275
made to a bench of justices presided over by
a justice of the peace elected by his colleagues ;
appeals against the verdicts of town judges and
of the zemskie nachalniki are heard by the
District Tribunal (Uiezdny Siezd), a court the
sessions of the district of which the marshal of
the nobility of the district is the ex-officio chair-
man, and which consists of zemskie nachalniki
(with the exception of course of the particular
zemsky nachalnik or town judge against whose
verdict the appeal is being made), town judges,
and the so-called honorary justices of peace.
Appeals against the verdict of the local courts
(Volostnye Sudi) are also heard by this district
tribunal.
An appeal against the verdict of the District
Tribunal (Uiezdny Siezd) is allowed on points of
law only, and goes before a special Board called
the Gubernskoye Prisustvie, consisting of the
governor of the province, as chairman, members
of the Divisional Court, and some higher civil
servants of the province.
Parallel with this branch of justice, which deals
with petty cases* we have quite separate from it
another branch which deals with more serious
276 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
cases, and which consists of two tribunals : the
Divisional Court (Court of Assizes), and the
High Court.
The Divisional Court deals with all civil cases
(with the exception of petty cases), and roughly
speaking, with all criminal cases, with the exception
of those which concern the prosecution of officials
for misdemeanours committed in the performance
of their official duties, and also the great majority
of political offences, which are dealt with by the
High Court. The criminal cases which come be-
fore the Divisional Court can be judged by the
bench only, or by the bench and a jury ; but if
the offence is such that the punishment may limit
the civil rights of the accused, or deprive him
of them altogether, the case must be tried before
a jury. Generally speaking, all criminal cases of
any importance are tried before a jury.
The Divisional Court goes on circuit from place
to place; its jurisdiction usually extends over
five or six districts, and sometimes over a whole
government.
The Russian judicial system is the same as the
French system as regards the nature and com-
position of its tribunals, its tribunals of first in-
JUSTICE. 277
stance, its facilities for appeal, its court of high
appeal (Cassation), its instruments of justice, and
its method of procedure. The justice of the
peace and the zemsky nacJialnik (who at present
fulfils the duties of a justice of the peace), and
the town judge (GorodsJcoi Sudya}* are the only
judges who sit alone. In all other tribunals
there is more than one judge. Every civil or
criminal case in Russia must be heard by three
magistrates, one of whom is the president.
A judge is irremovable unless he should com-
mit a criminal offence. He can be transferred,
but he cannot be removed. Attached to every
Divisional Court and every High Court there is
a magistrate appointed by the Government
called the procurator (who is not irremovable,
and holds office at the pleasure of the Minister
of Justice), who corresponds to the French pro-
cureur ; he is the advocate-general and public
prosecutor. His business is to prosecute crime.
But before the case reaches the procurator, it un-
dergoes a preliminary investigation at the hands
* This officer is to be abolished by the new law. At present
he exercises the same judicial functions as the zemsky nachalnik,
with the difference that his jurisdiction is in the town districts, that
of the zemsky nachalnik in the country districts.
278 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
of an examining magistrate (Sudebny Slyedo-
yatel) who corresponds to the French *3uge (Fin-
struction. He begins his investigation at the
instance either of the police ? or of a private indi-
vidual, or of a plaintiff. Theoretically, the inves-
tigation was supposed to be entirely separate
from the prosecution ; but, in practice, the ex-
amining magistrate has become more or less a
tool in the hands of the procurator. The examin-
ing magistrate has the right either to refer the
result of his investigation to the procurator, or
to let the case drop altogether, should in his
opinion the grounds for further proceedings be
insufficient.
The public prosecutor (Procurator], on receiv-
ing the dossier of the case from the examining
magistrate (Slyedovatel), can either ask the court
to drop the proceedings in view of the failure of
the prosecution to make a case, or else he draws
up a bill of indictment (Obmnitelni Akt] on which
the accused has to take his trial. In the case of
more serious offences, the bill of indictment, before
it goes before the court, has to be confirmed
by the High Court (Sudebnaya Palata), which
acts as the French Chambre de Mise en Accusa-
JUSTICE. 279
tion. Civil cases do not go before the procurator,
and are tried, as in France, without a jury.
The procedure resembles that of a French
court of justice. First of all, the witnesses (in
criminal cases) are called, and each witness tells
his story consecutively. He is then cross-ex-
amined by the procurator, and then by counsel
for the prosecution and counsel for the defence.
Cross-examination is by no means so formidable
as in an English criminal case, because the counsel
for the defence *can at any moment insert a ques-
tion amongst the questions put by the counsel
for the prosecution. When all the witnesses have
been heard, the procurator speaks for the prose-
cution. He is followed by the counsel for the
plaintiff, and then by the counsel for the de-
fence. After this, the procurator replies to the
counsel for the defence, and they in their turn
can reply on given points. The President of
the Court then sums up, and puts to the jury the
questions on which they are to give their verdict.
The jury have the right of putting questions
to any witness, as well as to the counsel for the
prosecution and to the counsel for the defence.
The jury consist of twelve men, c; good men
280 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
and true." They are chosen from all classes of
the population, from the whole of the inhabitants
of the district, subject to certain conditions of
age, property, domicile, and position. In the
first place, there is a property qualification, which
varies according to different localities. All those
who fulfil the conditions of the law as regards
the age and property qualification are entered on
a list (obshchy spisok) and become liable to serve
on a jury. From this larger list, a second nar-
rower list (ocheredny spisok} is drawn up o,!e
the men who seem the more qualified for the
work.
The sifting process, of which this second list is
the result, is carried out in every district by a
Board including several officials, the marshal
of the nobility for its Chairman. The pro-
cess is repeated every year, and after the sifting
about sixty men remain on the second list, out of
which the jury are drawn by lot.
But a property qualification is not in all cases
indispensable for a juryman. Public servants,
unless they are in the army, in the police, or in
the magistrature, and with the exception of offi-
cials of the first four classes, who are exempted,
JUSTICE. 281
can be chosen ; likewise all local elective officers,
especially peasants, such, as the judges of the
Canton Courts, the elders in the commune and
the cantons. The net result is that the jury is
mixed and democratic, and as a rule contains a
leaven of peasants and minor public servants,
and sometimes, indeed, consists almost wholly of
men from the lower classes. Here, for instance,
is a list of the professions followed by the
members of the jury before whom the Beiliss
ritual murder case was heard at Kiev. This
jury was exceptionally below the average of
educational standard.*
1. Peasant, agricultural labourer.
2. Peasant, cab- driver.
3. Minor public servant employed in postal
service.
4. Minor public servant employed in postal
service.
5. Peasant, employed in a wine warehouse.
6. Peasant, agricultural labourer.
7. Townsman, employed at railway station.
8. Peasant, agricultural labourer.
* It has been widely affirmed that there has never been a peasant
jury in Kiev before.
282 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
9. Secretary at governor's office, assistant of
the revisor in the auditor's office.
10. Peasant, agricultural labourer.
11. Peasant, controller in a town tramway.
12. Burgher, small householder.
The above list, whether it is below average or
not and it was said at the time to be startlingly
below the average shows more or less the nature
of a Russian jury in a small town. There is
generally a larger dose of a more educated ele-
ment, but the elements which appear in this list
will probably be present in most juries in vary-
ing quantities. It should be noted, however,
that the composition of the lists from which the
jury is drawn is very much in the hands of the
local authorities. In a big town a jury exclusively
composed of peasants is an exception, and a very
rare one.
Hence the peculiar character of the Russian
jury, about which much has been written and
much is being written.
Its chief characteristic is its leniency, its in-
dulgence, its tendency to acquit. And on this
account there existed, and there still exists in
JUSTICE. 283
some quarters in Russia, a movement against the
jury as an institution, wliicli bases its disap-
proval on the reluctance of the jury to con-
demn. But it is improbable that such a move-
ment will ever have a practical result. The dis-
advantages of tampering in any way with trial by
jury are too obvious. Many characteristic stories
exist in Russian literature, and a still greater
number float about in the flotsam and jetsam
of current talk, illustrating by striking instances
the peculiar psychology of the Russian jury.
It is said that a jury once returned a verdict
of " innocent, with extenuating circumstances."
Garin, the author, tells how his house was once
set on fire by a peasant, and how without much
difficulty he collected overwhelming evidence
against a particular peasant for deliberate arson.
The peasant was tried before a jury of peasants
in the Canton Court. His guilt was clearly
proved. Nobody had any doubt but that the
verdict would be " guilty." The peasants on the
jury did not deny the prisoner's guilt, but were
of the opinion that six years' penal servitude
the sentence the prisoner would have received
for arson was disproportionately heavy.
284 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
" Two years in prison/' they reasoned wrote
the foreman, narrating the case to Garin ;c would
be enough to instil wisdom in him ; but to
send him to penal servitude is too much. In
what are his wife and children guilty ? What
will they do without a bread-winner ? . . .
Their final argument was that it was a fine day,
and the sun was shining spring-like ; how could
they ruin a man on such a fine day ? They
were sorry for the gentleman, but still more sorry
for the orphans and the wife. Nobody was ever
ruined on account of a fire. It was God's will,
and must be accepted as such."
u It was only afterwards," says Garin, the
sufferer in the incident, and the teller of the
story, " that it became clear to me that what
from our point of view may seem the greatest
injustice is from the point of view of the people
the expression of the highest justice in the world."
Immediately after the incident, Garin was obliged
to leave the village where it occurred. He re-
visited the place two years later. " I was at
once met," he writes, " by a deputation of peas-
ants, whose spokesman made me a kind of speech
in which he said that the peasants were very
JUSTICE. 285
glad to see me; and that they were very glad
for my sake that the prisoner had been ac-
quitted ; that the Lord had not allowed me to
be burdened with a sin, in interfering with what
was not my business but God's the hounding of
criminals. 4 The Lord saved thee from sin/
they said to me ; ; all the good which thou didst
us has remained to thee, and has not been in
vain. The Lord punished them.' " And finally
he tells how the peasants narrated the bad end
the criminals had come to, taking it as a matter
of course that such things belonged to the sphere
of Providence, and not to that of man.
The story is characteristic. I could quote
many others of the same kind stories in some
cases which are startling in their unexpect-
edness, and in the difference of the point of
view from that prevailing in other classes and in
other countries. But strange as this point of
view may seem, it will generally be found that
there is in it a basis of common sense and an
element of sound fairness. The Russian peasant
juryman is indifferent to legal subtleties, and
often quite unaffected by forensic evidence,
which he looks on as a thing made to order,
286 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
bought and sold. He will judge by his con-
science, and according to his own code of morals,
which, if indulgent, is none the less definite.
A friend of mine was once serving on a jury
in St. Petersburg. The prisoner was found
guilty of an odious crime, but the jury agreed
to a verdict of " guilty, with extenuating circum-
stances." My friend asked one man, who was
a peasant, how there could be extenuating cir-
cumstances in such a case, to which he answered,
" I am not quite sure he did it," If the principle
be a just one, that it is better that a guilty man
should go free than that an innocent man should
be condemned, then the chief accusation made
against the characteristics of the Russian jury
breaks down. A Russian jury will be almost
certain to give the prisoner the benefit of the
doubt. When the ritual murder case began at
Kiev, it was pointed out with dismay in several
quarters that it was absurd to try such a case
before an uneducated jury that a jury of that
kind could not possibly appreciate complicated
questions of medical expertise, and all the arcana
of folklore and talmudic tradition and interpreta-
tions of Hebrew texts, which played a large part
JUSTICE. 287
in the trial. But when the trial was oveiv those
who interviewed the jurymen said that the jury
had paid no attention to all that ; the visit to
the site where the body was found was the first
thing which affected their opinion ; the eloquence
of the able lawyers engaged on both sides did not
influence them, as they said lawyers were "hired;"
but the conduct of one of the jury, who spent a
large part of his time in prayer, impressed them ;
and finally they gave a verdict of " not guilty/'
which was the result of the workings of their
conscience.
This is all the more remarkable in that they
very probably took the existence of ritual murders
as a matter of course ; but however this may have
been, they realized that they had to find Beili&s
guilty or not guilty^ and they found hi' j^t
guilty. A jury chosen from the most cultivated
classes of Russia could not have shown more
sense, and as this case had raised political ques-
tions and racial passions just as the Dreyfus case
did had such a jury been infected by partisan-
ship or political or religious fanaticism, it is quite
possible that things might not have gone so well
for the accused. For whereas the jury thus con-
288 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
stituted might have been liberal, it might just
as well have been reactionary and anti-Semite.
Of course the Russian jury has its drawbacks it
may, if consisting of the lower classes, very
likely look upon certain forms of fraud as rather
a good joke ; it may be over-indulgent to certain
crimes; but if the principle I mentioned just now
is sound, that it is better for the guilty to escape
than that the innocent should suffer, then these
drawbacks are amply compensated for.
There is another point to remember : by height-
ening the educational average of a Russian jury,
you would probably increase rather than diminish
its leniency ; because this leniency is due to a
great extent to the inborn indulgence, tolerance,
and humaneness of the Russian people.
Juries drawn exclusively from the intelligentsia
are said to be still more indulgent than peasant
juries. Opinions differ on this point. A Russian
friend of mine tells me he believes the peasant
jury the more tolerant, in spite of what he has
heard, and in spite of his own experience to the
contrary ; but it is probably a question of the
nature of the crime the intelligentsia being more
severe for certain crimes which the peasants would
JUSTICE. 289
condone as quite natural (say, certain forms of
forgery and violence), and the peasants, on the
other hand, dealing severely with a crime towards
which the intelligentsia would be more leniently
disposed. But the main point is that a Russian
jury, whatever its composition, is fundamentally
indulgent. It is far more indulgent than a jury
chosen from any other European country. I
remember being in St. Petersburg just after the
Crippen case, and hearing it discussed among
educated people in reactionary circles. These
people could not understand how it was possible
to hang a man on such slender evidence. Even
if the evidence had been abundant, the punish-
ment seemed to them too severe, but on slender
evidence the sentence seemed to them monstrous.
This leads us to the question of the punish-
ments which the Russian law can inflict.
The death penalty exists only for attempts
on the life of the Emperor or members of the
imperial family, forcible attempts to dethrone
the Emperor, and certain cases of high treason.
The death penalty was abolished by the
Empress Elisabeth in 1753. It fe true that when
this was done it was rather the name than any-
10
290 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
tMng else which, was abolished, since as long
as flogging continued with the Jcnut *, a leather
whip which was as deadly as the cat- of -nine-
tails, a sentence of over thirty blows (thirty-five
blows was the maximum allowed during the
last years of flogging) was enough to prove
fatal.
Flogging with the Jcnut was abolished by the
Emperor Nicholas I. during the first year of his
reign (1825). During the reign of Alexander IL,
from 1855 to 1876, only one man was executed
on the scaffold Karakosov, who made an at-
tempt on the Emperor's life. From 1866 to
1903 only 114 men suffered the penalty of death
throughout the Russian empire. These statistics
were read out and discussed in the Council of
Empire in July 1906 by M. Tagantsev, a cele-
brated Russian legist, who pointed out that, in
contradistinction to this leniency, during 1906,
from January to June, 108 people had been con-
demned to death under martial law, and ninety
had been executed, not counting those who had
been killed without trial.
When the Duma was dissolved in July 1906,
* The word kr^ut is the ordinary word for whip.
JUSTICE. 291
and P. A. Stolypin took the reins of government
in his hands, martial law continued ; drum-head
courts-martial were held all over the country,
and the number of people executed during 1907
and 1908 was very great.
But it must be remembered that during this
period the country was in a state of anarchy.
Acts of terrorism were being committed almost
daily by the social-revolutionary party, and acts
of hooliganism and robbery under arms by the
criminal classes, who imitated and adopted the
methods of the revolutionaries. A vicious circle
of lawless crime and indiscriminate retaliation
seemed to have closed round Russian life, so that
during all this period the executions were to the
crimes in a proportion of about one to three.
It should also be remembered that during cer-
tain phases of this epoch many parts of the
country were virtually in a state of civil war.
In any case, whether Stolypin's policy was
defensible or not and theoretically it was in-
defensible he was successful with the help of
the reaction that came about in public opinion in
putting an end to the anarchy, and after a time
things began to quiet down ; drum-head court-
292 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
martial ceased, martial law gave way to " states
of reinforced protection/' and the country gradu-
ally gained its normal state, and capital punish-
ment has once more become rarer, although it
cannot yet be said to be non-existent, since, in
virtue of states of reinforced protection ( Ysilenaya
Olchrana), and by military courts, during 1912,
335 people were condemned to death, and 124
were executed.
In 1913, 143 were sentenced and 33 were
executed (the large number of persons reprieved
being due during this year to an amnesty given
on the occasion of the tercentenary of the imperial
family). The majority of crimes for which sen-
tences of death were passed are evasion from
prisons, riots in prison, or attacks on prison
authorities.
The criminal penalties meted out by Russian
law are :
(a) Penal servitude for life, or for terms rang-
ing from four years to twenty years.
(b) Imprisonment from four to six years with
consequent loss of civil rights.
(c) Deportation to remote parts of the empire
for settlement
JUSTICE. 293
Formerly all convicts were deported, but now
some of them serve their terms in prisons in the
local Russian provinces.
Besides these criminal penalties, there exist also
what are called corrective penalties, which include
various degrees of punishment, ranging from
reprimands, fines, and imprisonment from three
days to three months, at the bottom of the scale,
to sentences of one to four years with loss of
civil privileges at the top of the scale. Among
these corrective penalties is what is called fortress
imprisonment for one year four months to four
years with loss of rights, and imprisonments for
four weeks to one year four months without loss of
rights. This punishment is usually applied to de-
linquencies of a political or of a literary character.
Certain crimes are far less severely punished
in Russia than they are in England. A murderer,
for instance, as a rule will receive a sentence of
twelve years' penal servitude. In some cases,
if there are extenuating circumstances, if he
acted under provocation, he will probably be
acquitted altogether. Again, there are cases of
murder which have been punished by not more
than two years 5 imprisonment.
294 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
Had Beiliss been found guilty he would not
have been hanged as was stated in some of the
London newspapers but the maximum sentence
he could have received (for murder of a child
accompanied by violence) would have been penal
servitude for life.
We have seen that there are in Russia two
tribunals the Divisional Court and the High
Court, and that the High Court deals chiefly with
political offences, or with the delinquencies of
officials. Cases heard by the High Court are
tried either by the Bench, or by a special tribunal
consisting of judges and what are called " class
representatives." These consist of the marshal
of the nobility of the government, a mayor from
the town, and the elder of the canton (a peasant).
Appeals against verdicts of the Divisional Court
in cases which were tried without a jury can be
made to the High Court, which can modify
the sentence, and a final appeal can be made
to the Senate. In cases which are tried by a
jury no appeal can be made on points of fact ;
but an appeal can be made on points of law to
the Senate, which can either confirm the sentence,
or order the case to be retried either before the
JUSTICE. 295
same tribunal, or before a tribunal exercising a
similar jurisdiction. The verdict in cases tried
by jury cannot therefore be modified, but it can
be cancelled and quashed.
The Senate in these cases corresponds to the
French Cour de Cassation.
The Russian Bar came into existence as
a profession in 1864. Any one of a certain
education and standing is admitted to plead in
a criminal case in Russia, unless the case be
political. As regards civil cases, the privilege is
limited to the right of appearing before a petty
tribunal three times a year. This is an excep-
tion to the rule that in a civil case only sworn
advocates or " private attorneys " * are entitled
to plead. Professional lawyers receive their train-
ing at the university, and when, by passing the
necessary examination, they are in possession of
a certificate or degree, they are obliged to pass
through a preliminary stage of five years' " devil-
ing; " then after a formal examination in legal pro-
cedure, they become full-blown " sworn lawyers "
(prisiazhnye povierenye).
* Private attorneys (chastnye povierenye) plead before a specific
court from which they have received a special licence* They are not
required to take a university degree.
296 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
The Russian Bar has more than justified its
existence. Since it came into being in 1864 it
has produced a number of most remarkable men,
remarkable as lawyers as well as orators. Lately,
since the creation of the Duma, its influence has
made itself felt in politics, since many of the
members of the Duma who have played a leading
part in politics have been lawyers. The lawyers
naturally had the habit of speech, and were
often trained orators/so that as soon as an oppor-
tunity arose for their peculiar gifts to have free
play, they were bound to come to the front on
both sides of the House. Among the members
of the Duma who have attained to prominence
are such men as Plevako, Maklakov, and
that of the late M. Muromtsev, the president
of the first Duma, who was one of the most cele-
brated lawyers of the University of Moscow, and
one of the brightest ornaments of the Russian
Civil Bar.
Generally speaking, of all the reforms carried
out by Alexander II., that of the judicial system
leaving out of account the emancipation of the
serfs, which was the sine qua non of all reform,
and without which all other reforms were use-
JUSTICE. 297
less was the most greatly acclaimed. In the
first place, because the old system of justice
had been so bad ; and in the second place, because
the new system proved to be a real success.
During the period of reaction which set in in
the reign of Alexander III., and during the first
years of the reign of the present Emperor, under
the reactionary administration of Plehve, the
Bar still retained its independence ; and during
this time, it was at the Bar, and at the Bar only,
that independence of thought and speech could
be said to exist.
It must be said that the revolutionary move-
ment had a bad effect on it : firstly, because
many of its Liberal members were suspended ;
and secondly because the Government, after the
revolutionary movement, did everything it could
to diminish the moral independence of the judges,
and to make them as reactionary as possible,
and in some respects this was successful. The
result of this policy is being felt now in political
or semi-political cases. But this is probably
only a transitional and temporary state of re-
action, following on the disturbance of the revo-
lutionary movement, and it will remedy itself
298 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
automatically in the course of time, if the quiet
state of things that now exists continues ; but if
this proves not to be the case, if the sparks of
discontent suddenly burst into flame, then cir-
cumstances of a different kind will restore to the
Bar its ancient independence. Yet as things are
now, and taking all drawbacks, all temporary
embarrassments and hindrances, and all re-
actionary influences into account; with every
disadvantage under which it may be labouring,
the Russian Bar must still be acknowledged
an admirable institution of which any country
should feel justly proud.
CHAPTER XI.
THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA.
GOGOL, the greatest of Russian humorists,
has a passage in one of his books, where
in exile he cries out to his country to reveal the
secret of her fascination.
" What is the mysterious and inscrutable
power which lies hidden in you ? " he exclaims.
" Why does your aching and melancholy song
echo unceasingly in one's ears ? Russia, what
do you want of me ? What is there between
you and me ? " This question has often been
repeated, not only by Russians in exile, but
by foreigners who have lived in Russia.
The country is so devoid of the more obvious
and unmistakable signs of glamour and attrac-
tion. As Gogol says, not here are those astonish-
ing miracles of nature which axe made still
more startling by the triumphs of art.
300 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
In Russia there are no
" Congesta manu proeruptis oppida saxis,
Fluminaque antiques subterlabentia muros " ;
no
" old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers " ;
no " noble wreck in ruinous perfection/ 3 where
" the stars twinkle through the loops of time " ;
no "castle, precipice-encurled in a gash of the
wind-grieved Apennine"; no "rose-red city'
half as old as time."
There are none of those spots were nature, art,
time, and history have combined to catch the
heart with a charm in which beauty, association,
and even decay are indistinguishably mingled;
where art has added the picturesque to the beauty
of nature ; and where time has made magic the
handiwork of art ; and where history has peopled
the spot with countless phantoms, and cast over
everything the strangeness and the glamour of
her spell.
Such places you will find in France and in
England, all over Italy, in Spain, and in Greece,
but not in Russia* Russia is a country of colon-
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 301
ists, where life has been a continual struggle
against the rigour and asperity of the climate, and
whose political history is the record of a long
and desperate struggle against adverse circum-
stances ; whose oldest city was sacked and
burnt just at the moment when it was beginning
to flourish ; whose first capital was destroyed
by fire in 1812 ; whose second capital dates from
the seventeenth century ; whose stone houses
are rare in the country, and whose wooden
houses are perpetually being destroyed by fire.
A country of long winters and fierce summers,
of rolling plains, uninterrupted by mountains and
unvariegated by valleys.
And yet the charm is there. It is a fact which
is felt by quantities of people of different nation-
alities and races ; and it is difficult, if you live in
Russia, to escape it, and once you have felt it
you will never be free from it. The aching, melan-
choly song, which Gogol says wanders from sea
to sea throughout the length and breadth of the
land, will for ever echo in your heart, and haunt
the recesses of your memory.
It is impossible to analyze charm, for if charm
could be analyzed it would cease to exist; and
302 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
it is difficult to define the charm which is attached
to places where there is so little of that start-
lingly obvious beauty of nature or art whose
appeal is instantaneous ; where there is no
playground of romance, and no abodes haunted
by poetic or historical ghosts and echoes.
But to those who have never been to Russia,
and who will perhaps never go there, Turgeniev's
descriptions of the country will give an idea of
this unique and peculiar magic. For instance,
the description of the summer night, when on
the plain the children tell each other bogey
Jr o J
stories ; or the description of that other July even-
ing, when out of the twilight from a long way
off on the plain, a child's voice is heard calling,
" Antropka-a-a," and Antropka answers, " Wha-
a-a-a-a-at ; " and far away out of the immensity
comes the answering voice, " Come ho-ome ;
because daddy wants to whip you."
Turgeniev will afford to those who wish to
travel in their armchair magical glimpses of just
those particular episodes, pictures, incidents,
sayings and doings, touches of human nature,
phases of landscape, shades of atmosphere, which
constitute the charm of Russian life.
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 303
Whereas those who will actually travel in
Russia itself will recognize not only that what he
writes is true to nature, but that incidents such
as those he records and causes to live again by
means of his incomparable art are a frequent and
common experience to those who have eyes to see.
The picturesqueness peculiar to countries rich
in a long tradition of art, and in varied and con-
flicting historical associations, may be absent in
Russia ; but this does not mean that beauty is
absent, and its manifestations are often all the
more striking from their lack of obviousness.
I was favoured with such a glimpse this summer.
I was staying in a small wooden house in Central
Russia, not far from a railway, but isolated from
all other houses, and at a fair distance from a
village. The harvest was nearly done. The
heat was sweltering. Everything was parched
and dry. The walls and ceilings were black with
flies. One had no wish to venture out of doors
until the evening.
The small garden of the house, which was gay
with asters and sweet peas, was surrounded
by birch trees, with here and there a fir tree in
their midst.
304 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
Opposite the little house a broad pathway,
flanked on each side by a row of tall birch trees,
lead to the margin of the garden, which ended in
a rather steep grass slope, and a valley, or rather
a dip, likewise wooded, and on the other side of
the dip, on a level with the garden, there was a
pathway half hidden by trees ; so that from the
house, if you looked straight in front of you, you
saw a broad path, with birch trees on each side
of it, forming as it were a proscenium for a dis-
tant view of trees ; and if anybody walked along
the pathway on the other side of the dip, although
you saw no road, you could see their figures in
outline against the sky, as though they were
walking across the back of a stage.
Just as the cool of the evening began to fall,
out of the distance came a rhythmical song, very
high, and ending on a note that seemed to last for
ever, piercingly clear and clean. Then the music
came a little nearer, and one could distinguish first
a solo chanting a phrase, and then a chorus taking
it up, and finally, solo and chorus became one,
reaching a climax on one high note, which went on
and on, getting purer and stronger, without any
seeming effort, until it eventually died away.
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 305
The tone of the voices was so high, so pure,
and at the same time so peculiar, so strong and
unusual, that it was difficult at first to decide
whether the voices were high tenor men's voices,
womanly sopranos, or boyish trebles. They
were quite unlike, both in range and quality,
the voices of women you usually hear in Russian
villages. The music drew nearer, and it filled
the air with a stateliness and a calm indescrib-
able. And presently, in the distance, beyond the
dip between the trees, and in the centre of the
natural stage made by the garden, I saw against
the sky figures of women walking slowly in the
sunset, and singing as they walked, carrying their
scythes and their wooden rakes with them;
and once again the high, pure phrase began, to
be repeated by the chorus; and once again
chorus and solo melted together in a high and
infinitely long-drawn-out note, which seemed to
swell like the sound of some crystal clarion, to
grow purer and more single, and to go on and
on, until it ended suddenly and sharply, lite a
frieze ends. And this song seemed to proclaim
rest after toil, and satisfaction for labour ac-
complished. It was like a hymn of praise, a
306 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
broad benediction, a grace sung for the end of
the day, the end of the summer, the end of
the harvest. It seemed the very soul and spirit
of the breathless August evening.
Slowly the women walked past and disap-
peared into the trees once more. The glimpse
was but momentary, yet it sufficed to conjure
up a whole train of thoughts and pictures of
rites, ritual, and custom of pagan ceremonies
older than the gods, of rustic worship and rural
festival older than all creeds. And as another
verse of what sounded like a primeval harvest
hymn began, the brief vision of the reapers, erect,
stately, full of dignity, sacerdotal and majestic in
the dress and with the attributes of toil, added
to the impression made by the high quality and
pure concent of the singing, and one felt as if
one had had a vision of another phase of time,
a glimpse into an older and remoter world older
than Virgil, older than Romulus, older than De-
meter a world where the spring, the summer, and
the autumn, harvest time and sowing, the gath-
ering of fruits, and the vintage, were the gods ; a
gleam from the golden age, a breath from the
morning and the springtide of the world.
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 307
The place seemed to become a temple in the
quiet light of the evening august, sacred, and
calm and the procession of those stately
figures, diminutive in the distance, was like
the design on an archaic vase or frieze; and
the music seemed to seal a sacrament, to be
the initiation into some immemorial secret, into
some far-off mystery who knows, perhaps the
Mystery of Eleusis ? or older mysteries, of which
Eleusis was but the far-distant offspring ? The
music passed, the singing died away in the
distance, and one felt inclined to say,
" Is it a vision or a waking dream ?
Fled is tnat music do I wake or sleep ? "
When I say that the singing evoked thoughts
of Greece, the thing is less fantastic than it seems.
In the first place, in the songs of the Russian
peasants the Greek modes are still in use the
Dorian, the Hypo-dorian, the Lydian, the
Hypo-phrygian. " La musique, telle qu?elle &tait
pratiqutfe en Russie au moyen age" (writes
M. Soubier in his History of Russian Music],
" tenait a la tradition des religions et des mceurs
paiennes*" And in the secular as well as in the
SOS THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
ecclesiastical music of Russia there is an element
of influence which is purely Hellenic.
It turned out that the particular singers I
heard on that evening were not local singers, but
a guild of women reapers who had come from the
government of Tula to work during the harvest.
Their singing, although the form and kind of song
was familiar to me, was quite different in quality
from any that I had heard before ; and the im-
pression made by it is unforgettable*
If the aspect of nature in Russia is, broadly
speaking, monotonous and uniform, this does
not mean that beauty manifests itself infre-
quently. Not only magic moments occur in the
most unpromising surroundings, but beauty is
to be found in Russian nature and landscape at
all times and all seasons in a multitude of shapes.
Personally I know nothing more striking than
a long drive in the evening twilight at harvest
time over the immense hedgeless rolling fields in
Russia, through stretches of golden wheat and
rye variegated with millet, still green and not
yet turned to the bronze colour it takes later;
when you drive for miles over monotonous and yet
ever- varying rolling fields, and when you see the
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 309
cranes, settling for a moment, and then flying off
into space.
Later in the twilight, great continents of dove-
like lilac clouds float in the east, and the west
is suffused with the dusty and golden afterglow
of the sunset, and the half-reaped corn and the
spaces of stubble are burnished and glow in the
heat, and smouldering fires of weeds burn here
and there ; and as you reach a homestead you
will perhaps see by the threshing machine a
crowd of dark men and women still at their
work, and in the glow from the flame of a wooden
fire and the shadow of the dusk, in the smoke of
the engine and the dust of the chaff, they have
a Rembrandt-like power; and the feeling of
space, breadth, and air and immensity grows
upon one ; and the earth seems to grow larger,
and the sky to grow deeper, and the spirit is
lifted, stretched, and magnified.
The Russian poets have celebrated more
frequently the spring and winter the brief
spring with the intense green of the birch trees,
the uncrumpling fern, the woods carpeted with
lilies of the valley, the lilac bushes, and the
nightingale, which in Russia is the bird of spring,
310 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
later the briar, which flowers in great profusion ;
and the winter with its fields of snow scintillating
in the sunshine, when the transparent woods are
black against the whiteness, or, when covered
with snow and frozen, they form an enchanted
fabric, a fantastic tracery of powdered shapes,
gleaming against the stainless blue, or when,
after a night of thaw, the brown branches emerge
once more covered with airy threads and drops
of sparkling dew.
Wonderful, too, is the sunset and twilight
of the winter evening after the first snow has
fallen in December, when the new moon rises
above and is poised, like a silver sail, or a
gem, in a sea of azure that is suffused, as it
grows nearer the earth, with a rosy blush.
The white rays of the new moon looking
down from the sky flood the sheets of snow
with radiance, and lend them an intenser
purity ; and lastly, with a tinge of cold blue in
their whiteness, they show up in bold relief
the wooden houses, the red roofs, and all
the furniture of toil; and these practical and
prosaic household things these objects and
attributes of everyday life assume a strange
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA, 311
largeness and darkness as they loom between
the snow and the faintly blushing and lustrous
sky, as unreal and portentous as the conjured
visions of a magician.
The beauty and exhilaration of winter has
been well sung by the Russian poets, and the
long drives in sledges under a leaden sky, to
the monotonous tinkle of the sledge bell, and
the whistling blizzard with its demons that
lead the horses astray in the night ; and as for
the spring, whose invasion after the melting
of the snows is so sudden, whose green robes
are so startling in their intensity, and whose
conquest of nature is so sudden and so swift,
it has evoked some of the finest pages of Russian
literature, in prose as well as in verse.
But there will be some who will enjoy more
than anything in Russia the summer afternoons
on some river, where the flat banks are covered
with oak trees, ash, and willow, and thick under-
growth, and where every now and then perch
rise to the surface to catch flies, and the king-
fishers skim over the surface from reach to
reach. Perhaps you will take a boat and row
past islands of rushes, and a network of water-
312 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
lilies, to where the river broadens, and you
reach a great sheet of water flanked by a weir
and a mill. The trees are reflected in the glassy
surface, and nothing breaks the stillness but
the grumbling of the mill and the cries of the
children bathing.
And then, if you are near a village, all through
the summer night you will hear song answering
song, and the brisk rhythm of the accordion;
or to the interminable humming, buzzing burden
of the three- stringed balalaika, verse will succeed
to verse of an apparently tireless song, and the
end of each verse will seem to beget another and
give a keener zest to the next ; and the song
will go on and on, as if the singer were intoxi-
cated by the sound of his own music.
But the peculiar manifestations of the beauty
of nature in a flat and uniform country are not
enough to account for the overwhelming fascin-
ation of Russia. That is a part of it, but that is
not all. And against that in the other scale
you must put dirt, squalor, misery, slovenliness,
disorder, and uninspiring wooden provincial
towns, the dusty or sodden roads, the frequent
gray skies, the long and heavy sameness.
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 313
The advocatus diaboli has a strong case. He
could, and often does, draw up an indictment
proving to you that Russia is a country with
a disagreeable climate an arid summer pro-
ducing uncertain harvests which sometimes result
in starvation, an intolerably long winter, a damp
and unhealthy spring, and a still more unhealthy
autumn : a country whose capital is built on a
swamp, where there are next to no decent roads,
where the provincial towns are overgrown villages,
squalid, squatting, dismal, devoid of natural
beauty, and unredeemed by art : a country where
internal commxinications off the big railway lines
are complicated and bad ; where on the best lines
accidents happen owing to sleepers being rotten ;
where the cost of living is high, and the expense
of life out of all proportion to the quality of the
goods supplied ; where labour is dear, bad, and
slow ; where the sanitary conditions in which
the great mass of the population live are deplor-
able; where every kind of disease, including
plague, is rampant; where medical aid and
appliances are inadequate ; where the poor
people are backward and ignorant, and the
middle class slack and slovenly ; and where
314 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
progress is deliberately checked and impeded in
every possible way : a country governed by
chance, where all forms of administration are
arbitrary, uncertain, and dilatory; where all forms
of business are cumbersome and burdened with
red tape ; and where bribery is an indispensable
factor in business and administrative life : a
country burdened by a vast official population,
which is on the whole lazy, venal, and incompe-
tent : a country where political liberty and the ele-
mentary rights of citizenship do not exist ; where
even the programmes of concerts, and all foreign
newspapers and literature, are censored; where the
freedom of the Press is hampered by petty annoy-
ances, and editors are constantly fined and some-
times imprisoned ; where freedom of conscience
is hampered : a country where the only political
argument which can be used by a private person
is dynamite, and where political assassination is
the only form of civic courage : a country of mis-
rule : a country where there is every licence
and no law ; where everybody acts regardless
of his neighbour ; where you can do everything
and criticize nothing ; and where the only way
to show you have the courage of your convic-
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 315
tions is to spend years in prison: a country
of extremes,, of moral laxity, and extravagant
self -indulgence ; a people without self-control
and without discipline, always firming fault,
always criticizing, but never acting; jealous
of anything or anybody who emerges from the
ranks and rises superior to the average;
looking upon all individual originality and dis-
tinction with suspicion ; a people slavish to
the dead level of mediocrity and the stereotyped
bureaucratic pattern; a people which has all
the faults of the Orient and none of its austerer
virtues, and none of its dignity and self-control ;
a nation of ineffectual rebels under the direction
of a band of time-serving officials : a country
where those in power are in perpetual fear, and
where influence may come from any quarter
where nothing is too absurd to happen: a
country, as was said in the Duma, of unlimited
possibilities. I do not think the advocatus
diaboli can put the case stronger than that.
He would call as his witnesses the greatest Rus-
sian writers of the past, and the most prominent
Russians of the present in political life, art,
literature, and science* He would call countless
316 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
moralists and satirists, and prove that the Rus-
sian God is the God of all that is topsy-turvy,
and of everything which is in its wrong place
and as it should not be. And he would laugh
at all the reformers, and tell them to reform
themselves; and he would end his indictment
with a smile, and murmur, " Doux pays ! "
Of course the case of the advocatus diaboli is
as unfair as possible, otherwise it would not be
the case of the advocatus diaboli. And the
defence could make a strong counter-case refut-
ing some of these statements, qualifying all of
them.
But the defence can do better than that. It
can point out that the very strength of the case
of the advocatus diaboli constitutes its weakness ;
because if you say to him : "I know all that,
and you can make your case still stronger, if
you choose. I admit all that ; and in spite of
all, and in some cases even because of it, Russia
has for me an indescribable fascination ; in
spite of all that, I love the country, and admire
and respect its people."
What can he answer to that ? Nothing, 1
think. If you admit the faults, and add that
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 317
they seem to you the negative results of positive
qualities so valuable as to outweigh them alto-
gether, the case of the advocatus diaboli breaks
down altogether. That is my point of view
about Russia. I perceive countless faults and
drawbacks, some which may be the fortuitous
result of bad government, and only temporary,
and which will disappear, as other worse things
have already disappeared, with the march of
time ; and others which may be innate and
radical the result of original sin, and the way
in which the Russian character expresses its
indispensable dose of original sin, and inseparable
from it and ineradicable. There may be many
more which I do not even perceive. But this
does not affect me, because I have realized and
experienced the result of other qualities and
virtues which seem to me greater and more
important than all the possible faults put to-
gether, and magnified to any extent ; and the
net result of this is that the country has for me
an overpowering charm, and the people an
indescribable attraction.
And the charm exercised by the country as a
whole is partly due to the country itself, and
318 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
partly to the mode of life lived there, and to
the nature of the people. The qualities that
do exist, and whose benefit I have experienced,
seem to me the most precious of all qualities ;
and the virtues the most important of all virtues ;
and the glimpses of beauty the rarest in kind ;
the songs and the music the most haunting and
most heart-searching ; the poetry nearest to
nature and man; the human charity nearest
to God.
This is perhaps the secret of the whole matter,
that the Russian soul is filled with a human
Christian charity which is warmer in kind and
intenser in degree, and expressed with a greater
simplicity and sincerity, than I have met with
in any other people anywhere else; and it is
this quality being behind everything else which
gives charm to Russian life, however squalid
the circumstances of it may be, which gives
poignancy to its music, sincerity and simplicity
to its religion, manners, intercourse, music,
singing, verse, art, acting in a word, to its art,
its life, and its faith.
Never did I realize this so much as once when
I was driving on a cold and damp December
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 219
evening in St. Petersburg in a cab. It was dark,
and I was driving along the quays from one end
of the town to the other. For a long time I
drove in silence, but after a while I happened to
make some remark to the cabman about the
weather. He answered gloomily that the weather
was bad and everything else too. For some
time we drove on again in silence, and then
some other stray remark or question of mine
elicited from him the fact that he had had bad
luck that day in the matter of a fine. The
matter was a trivial one, but somehow or other
my interest was half aroused, and I got him to
tell me the story, which was a case of ordinary
bad luck and nothing very serious ; but when
he had told it, he gave such a profound sigh
that I asked whether it was that which was still
weighing upon him. Then he said " No," and
slowly began to tell me a story of a great catas-
trophe which had just befallen him. He possessed
a little land and a cottage in the country not far
from St. Petersburg. His house had been burnt.
It was true he had insured, but the insurance
was not sufficient to make any sensible differ-
ence. He had two sons, one of whom went to
320 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
school, and one who had some employment
somewhere in the provinces. The catastrophe
of the fire had simply upset everything. All
his belongings had perished. He could no
longer send his boy to school. His other son,
who was in the country, had written to say he
was engaged to be married, and had asked his
consent, advice, and approval. " He has written
twice," said the cabman, " and I keep silence
(i ya molchu). What can I answer ? " I cannot
give any idea of the strength, simplicity, and
poignancy of the tale as it came, hammered out
slowly, with pauses between each sentence, and
a kind of biblical and dignified simplicity of
utterance and purity of idiom which is the
precious privilege of the poor in Russia. The
words seemed to be torn out from the bottom
of his heart. He made no complaint; there
was no grievance, no whine in the story. He
just stated the bald facts with a simplicity
which was overwhelming. And in spite of
all, his faith in God, and his consent to the
will of Providence, was unshaken, certain, and
sublime. This was three years ago. I have
forgotten the details of the story, which were
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA.
many; but the impression remains of having
been face to face with a human soul, stripped and
naked, and a human soul in the grip of a tragedy,
as dignified as that of Prometheus, as touching
as that of King Lear, and as full of faith as that
of Job. And this experience, which brought
one in touch with the divine, is one which, I
submit, could only in such circumstances occur
in Russia.
When I say that for me Russia has a unique
and overwhelming charm, I mean that for me this
charm arises from my love of the Russian people ;
and this love is not a predilection for the curious,
the picturesque, the remote, and the unusual,
but the expression, the homage, the acknow-
ledgment, the admiration of those qualities
which I believe to be the " captain jewels " in
the crown of human nature.
" Those foreigners," wrote a Russian journalist
not long ago, " who come to Russia and rave
about the people, nevertheless in their hearts
despise us. They admire in us qualities which
they regard as primeval and barbarian ; they
look upon us as good-natured and pleasant
savages." I should like to assure that writer ?
11
322 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
or any other Russian who chances to read these
pages, that, whatever people may think, what
I love and admire in the Russian people is noth-
ing barbaric, picturesque, or exotic, but some-
thing eternal, universal, and great namely, their
love of man and their faith in God. And this
seems to me of a kind and of a degree that makes
all dissection of vices and enumeration of failings,
all carping criticism and captious analysis, an
idle business. It may be a profitable employ-
ment for the Russians to blame and to criticize
themselves, and it is one in which they are
constantly occupied. It is less important in the
case of a foreigner writing for foreigners, and on
a country about which much prejudice has ex-
isted in the past and many falsehoods have been
written ; for him it is important to recognize
and to point out the sunshine of which his coun-
trymen are ignorant, and not to analyze the
spots on the sun. For it is the people who
admire whose observation is profitable, and it
is those who see and feel the sunshine who feel
and see the truth ; for the sunshine and not
the sun-spots is the important fact about the
sun.
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 323
Nevertheless, the expression of an admiration
for certain qualities in a foreign people is always
a delicate task. And often foreigners are justly
irritated for being praised for the qualities which
they least want to be praised for. Nothing is
more irritating than the condescending tone which
some people adopt in praising certain elements
which meet with their approval in foreign
countries. When, for instance, Anglo-Saxons say
to the Latin races : " Keep to your past ; keep to
your superstitions, your relics, your ruins, and your
associations ; remain artistic and picturesque ;
but keep your hands off battleships, aeroplanes,
telephones, tramcars, and steam ploughs ; leave
those practical things to us. You cannot deal
with them. You are charming as you are.
Do not try to be modern, you spoil the whole
effect by doing so." This is often the attitude
of people to the Spaniards and the Italians,
and it is a maddening attitude. Or to the Irish
they say : " You are amusing, why should
you be competent ? Why should you try and
deal with the serious business of politics ? " And
such talk to an Irishman is more than madden-
ing. Or supposing foreigners were to say to
THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
the English, to the countrymen of Shakespeare,
Milton, Shelley, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gains-
borough, and Constable : " Don't bother about
writing poetry or painting pictures, stick to your
counters and your cotton-mills, you people of
shopkeepers ; leave art to us," we should resent
it. This attitude of mind arises from what a
French writer calls " un optimisme bat " a
sort of open-mouthed, weak-chinned satisfaction
with oneself and all things, which is hopeless
and infuriating. And when this attitude is
blent with a tincture of rancid unction or a
dose of gushing and indulgent sentimentalism
when, for instance, people condescend to patron-
isingly rave about the ritual of such an institu-
tion as the Catholic Church it is more intolerable
still.
It is for this reason I wish to make myself
quite clear on this point. If, as I hope, I have
escaped the pitfall of giving the impression
that Russians are interesting as exotic and bar-
baric specimens, as thinly-civilized savages, I
none the less wish not to incur the suspicion that,
in admiring in them the qualities of the heart,
I am overlooking in them the qualities of the
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 325
head, or assuming the absence of sterner stuff,
and of the tougher and more practical virtues.
I do not wish it to be thought that I am saying
to them, " Be good, sweet child ; let those who
will be clever." It is not necessary to point out
their cleverness and all it stands ior. We all
know they are clever. I wish to point out that
I think they are good as well ; and that their
goodness is more important than their cleverness,
because in general goodness is a rarer as well as
a greater thing than cleverness. This may be
a truism, but modern life has given to most
truisms the appearance of startling paradoxes.
Take, on the one hand, the most striking
examples among examples of energy and practical
achievements of men, deeds, and facts which
the Latin and Anglo-Saxon races can show, and
Russia need not fear to hold her own.
Take any one of the faults which Russian
critics hold up as the curse of the country, and it is
easy- to show that though the accusation may be
true, it is not the whole truth; that the con-
trary is true also, and the exceptions startling.
Russians, for instance, often single out laziness
and the want of practical energy as a national
326 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
failing. Well and good; but the defence of
Sevastopol, the creation of the Trans-Siberian
Railway, and the transport of troops over a single
line during war time, are examples of abnormal
energy in the domain of achievement; and in
the persons of Peter the Great, Suvorov, and
Skobeliev, Russia has given to the world examples
of terrific and explosive energy. Stern stuff
must exist somewhere in the Russian characte^,
or else the Russian empire would not be there
to testify to the fact. The Russian empire is
the result of something, and it is there.
On the other hand, take those crying faults
which Russian critics single out and deplore as
being the sorest plague-spots and the weakest
points in the national life and character, and you
will find it easy to match them in the other
countries of Europe and in America. And
you will often find that what is attributed to
the evils of a particular form of government is
very often really the result of original sin, and
common to all countries under different forms
and names.
But my point is that while, as far as the general
category of faults and qualities, virtues and
FASCINATION OF RUSSIA. 327
vices is concerned, the Russians are on a par with
other countries, and no worse if no better, they
have, ceteris paribus, a peculiar and unique gift
of goodness and faith in the nature of their
people which is difficult to match in any other
country, although you will find something like
it in America.
That is why I have dwelt less on that stern
stuff and those tough and stubborn qualities
which must be common to all great nations,
and whose existence naturally and inevitably
follows from the very fact of a nation being a
great nation. Such qualities must be taken
for granted. Did they not exist, there would be
no such thing as the Russian empire.
That is why I disregard them here, and have
chosen to dwell more on those qualities which I
believe to be peculiar to Russia, and which I
believe to be also a source of greatness. I happen
also to think these latter qualities to be more
important in themselves.
I hope now that I have made it plain that it
is on account of a humble admiration for these
special qualities, which by no means excludes a
serious recognition and respect for all other
328 THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA.
general qualities, and not on account of any
fantastic whim, condescending self-complacency,
or hypocritical sense of superiority, that with
regard to Russia I -echo the words which R. L.
Stevenson once addressed to the deaf ear of a
French novelist : " J'ai beau admirer les autres
de toute ma force, c'est avec vous que je me
complais & vivre"
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