The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 Part 22

Thereupon the central committee of the Nihilists proclaimed war _a outrance_ until the Czar conceded to a popularly elected National a.s.sembly the right to reform the life of Russia.

Here was the strength of the Nihilist party. By violent means it sought to extort what a large proportion of the townsfolk wished for and found no means of demanding in a lawful manner. Loris Melikoff, gifted with the shrewdness of his race, saw that the Government would effect little by terrorism alone. Wholesale arrests, banishment, and hangings only added to the number of the disaffected, especially as the condemned went to their doom with a calm heroism that inspired the desire of imitation or revenge. Repression must clearly be accompanied by reforms that would bridge over the gulf ever widening between the Government and the thinking cla.s.ses of the people. He began by persuading the Emperor to release several hundreds of suspects and to relax the severe measures adopted against the students of the Universities. Lastly, he sought to induce the Czar to establish representative inst.i.tutions, for which even the n.o.bles were beginning to pet.i.tion. Little by little he familiarised him with the plan of extending the system of the Zemstvos, so that there should be elective councils for towns and provinces, as well as delegations from the provincial _n.o.blesse_. He did not propose to democratise the central Government. In his scheme the deputies of n.o.bles and representatives of provinces and towns were to send delegates to the Council of State, a purely consultative body which Alexander I.

had founded in 1802.

Despite the tentative nature of these proposals, and the favourable reception accorded to them by the Council of State, the Czar for several days withheld his a.s.sent. On March 9 he signed the ukase, only to postpone its publication until March 12. Not until the morning of March 13 did he give the final order for its publication in the _Messager Officiel_. It was his last act as lawgiver. On that day (March 1, and Sunday, in the Russian calendar) he went to the usual military parade, despite the earnest warnings of the Czarevitch and Loris Melikoff as to a rumoured Nihilist plot. To their pleadings he returned the answer, "Only Providence can protect me, and when it ceases to do so, these Cossacks cannot possibly help." On his return, alongside of the Catharine Ca.n.a.l, a bomb was thrown under his carriage; the explosion tore the back off the carriage, injuring some of his Cossack escort, but leaving the Emperor unhurt. True to his usual feelings of compa.s.sion, he at once alighted to inquire after the wounded. This act cost him his life. Another Nihilist quickly approached and flung a bomb right at his feet. As soon as the smoke cleared away, Alexander was seen to be frightfully mangled and lying in his blood. He could only murmur, "Quick, home; carry to the Palace; there die." There, surrounded by his dearest ones, Alexander II. breathed his last.

In striking down the liberator of the serfs when on the point of recurring to earlier and better methods of rule, the Nihilists had dealt the death-blow to their own cause. As soon as the details of the outrage were known, the old love for the Czar welled forth: his imperfections in public and private life, the seeming weakness of his foreign policy, and his recent use of terrorism against the party of progress were forgotten; and to the sensitive Russian nature, ever p.r.o.ne to extremes, his figure stood forth as the friend of peace, and the would-be reformer, hindered in his efforts by unwise advisers and an untoward destiny.

His successor was a man cast in a different mould. It is one of the peculiarities of the recent history of Russia that her rulers have broken away from the policy of their immediate predecessors, to recur to that which they had discarded. The vague and generous Liberalism of Alexander I. gave way in 1825 to the stern autocracy of his brother, Nicholas I. This being shattered by the Crimean War, Alexander II.

harked back to the ideals of his uncle, and that, too, in the wavering and unsatisfactory way which had brought woe to that ruler and unrest to the people. Alexander III., raised to the throne by the bombs of the revolutionaries, determined to mould his policy on the principles of autocracy and orthodoxy. To pose as a reformer would have betokened fear of the Nihilists; and the new ruler, gifted with a magnificent physique, a narrow mind, and a stern will, ever based his conduct on elementary notions that appealed to the peasant and the common soldier. In 1825 Nicholas I. had cowed the would-be rebels at his capital by a display of defiant animal courage. Alexander III. resolved to do the like. He had always been noted for a quiet persistence on which arguments fell in vain. The nickname, "bullock," which his father early gave him (shortened by his future subjects to "bull"), sufficiently summed up the supremacy of the material over the mental that characterised the new ruler. Bismarck, who knew him, had a poor idea of his abilities, and summed up his character by saying that he looked at things from the point of view of a Russian peasant[228]. That remark supplies a key to Russian politics during the years 1881-94.

[Footnote 228: _Reminiscences of Bismarck_, by S. Whitman, p. 114; _Bismarck: some Secret Pages of his History_, by M. Busch, vol. iii.

p. 150.]

At first, when informed by Melikoff that the late Czar was on the point of making the const.i.tutional experiment described above, Alexander III.

exclaimed, "Change nothing in the orders of my father. This shall count as his will and testament." If he had held to this generous resolve the world's history would perhaps have been very different. Had he published his father's last orders; had he appealed to the people, like another Antony over the corpse of Caear, the enthusiastic Slav temperament would have eagerly responded to this mark of Imperial confidence.

Loyalty to the throne and fury against the Nihilists would have been the dominant feelings of the age, impelling all men to make the wisest use of the thenceforth sacred bequest of const.i.tutional freedom.

The man who is believed to have blighted these hopes was Pobyedonosteff, the Procureur of the highest Ecclesiastical Court of the Empire. To him had been confided the education of the present Czar; and the fervour of his orthodoxy, as well as the clear-cut simplicity of his belief in old Muscovite customs, had gained complete ascendancy over the mind of his pupil. Different estimates have been formed as to the character of Pobyedonosteff. In the eyes of some he is a conscientious zealot who believes in the mission of Holy Russia to vivify an age corrupted by democracy and unbelief; others regard him as the Russian Macchiavelli, straining his beliefs to an extent which his reason rejects, in order to gain power through the mechanism of the autocracy and the Greek Church.

The thin face, pa.s.sionless gaze, and coldly logical utterance bespeak the politician rather than the zealot; yet there seems to be good reason for believing that he is a "fanatic by reflection," not by temperament[229]. A volume of _Reflections_ which he has given to the world contains some entertaining judgments on the civilisation of the West. It may be worth while to select a few, as showing the views of the man who, through his pupil, influenced the fate of Russia and of the world.

[Footnote 229: _Russia under Alexander III._, by H. von Samson-Himmelstierna, Eng. ed. ch. vii.]

Parliament is an inst.i.tution serving for the satisfaction of the personal ambition, vanity, and self-interest of its members. The inst.i.tution of Parliament is indeed one of the greatest ill.u.s.trations of human delusion. . . . On the pediment of this edifice is inscribed, "All for the public good." This is no more than a lying formula: Parliamentarism is the triumph of egoism--its highest expression. . . .

From the day that man first fell, falsehood has ruled the world--ruled it in human speech, in the practical business of life, in all its relations and inst.i.tutions. But never did the Father of Lies spin such webs of falsehood of every kind as in this restless age. . . . The press is one of the falsest inst.i.tutions of our time.

In the chapter "Power and Authority" the author holds up to the gaze of a weary world a refreshing vision of a benevolent despotism which will save men in spite of themselves.

Power is the depository of truth, and needs, above all things, men of truth, of clear intellects, of strong understandings, and of sincere speech, who know the limits of "yes" and "no," and never transcend them, etc[230].

[Footnote 230: _Pobyedonosteff; his Reflections_, Eng. ed.]

To this Muscovite Laud was now entrusted the task of drafting a manifesto in the interests of "power" and "truth."

Meanwhile the Nihilists themselves had helped on the cause of reaction.

Even before the funeral of Alexander II. their executive committee had forwarded to his successor a doc.u.ment beseeching him to give up arbitrary power and to take the people into his confidence. While purporting to impose no conditions, the Nihilist chiefs urged him to remember that two measures were needful preliminaries to any general pacification, namely, a general amnesty of all political offenders, as being merely "executors of a hard civic duty"; and "the convocation of representatives of all the Russian people for a revision and reform of all the private laws of the State, according to the will of the nation."

In order that the election of this a.s.sembly might be a reality, the Czar was pressed to grant freedom of speech and of public meetings[231].

[Footnote 231: The whole doc.u.ment is printed in the Appendix to "Stepniak's" _Underground Russia_.]

It is difficult to say whether the Nihilists meant this doc.u.ment as an appeal, or whether the addition of the demand of a general amnesty was intended to anger the Czar and drive him into the arms of the reactionaries. In either case, to press for the immediate pardon of his father's murderers appeared to Alexander III. an unpardonable insult.

Thenceforth between him and the revolutionaries there could be no truce.

As a sop to quiet the more moderate reformers, he ordered the appointment of a Commission, including a few members of Zemstvos, and even one peasant, to inquire into the condition of public-houses and the excessive consumption of vodka. Beyond this humdrum though useful question the imperial reformer did not deign to move.

After a short truce, the revolutionaries speedily renewed their efforts against the chief officials who were told off to crush them; but it soon became clear that they had lost the good-will of the middle cla.s.s. The Liberals looked on them, not merely as the murderers of the liberating Czar, but as the destroyers of the nascent const.i.tution; and the ma.s.ses looked on unmoved while five of the accomplices in the outrage of March 13 were slowly done to death. In the next year twenty-two more suspects were arrested on the same count; ten were hanged and the rest exiled to Siberia. Despite these inroads into the little band of desperadoes, the survivors compa.s.sed the murder of the Public Prosecutor as he sat in a cafe at Odessa (March 30, 1882). On the other hand, the official police were helped for a time by zealous loyalists, who formed a "Holy Band"

for secretly countermining the Nihilist organisation. These amateur detectives, however, did little except appropriate large donations, arrest a few harmless travellers and no small number of the secret police force. The professionals thereupon complained to the Czar, who suppressed the "Holy Band."

The events of the years 1883 and 1884 showed that even the army, on which the Czar was bestowing every care, was permeated with Nihilism, women having by their arts won over many officers to the revolutionary cause. Poland, also, writhing with discontent under the Czar's stern despotism, was worked on with success by their emissaries; and the ardour of the Poles made the recruits especially dangerous to the authorities, ever fearful of another revolt in that unhappy land.

Finally, the Czar was fain to shut himself up in nearly complete seclusion in his palace at Gatchina, near St. Petersburg, or in his winter retreat at Livadia, on the southern sh.o.r.es of the Crimea.

These facts are of more than personal and local importance. They powerfully affected the European polity. These were the years which saw the Bulgarian Question come to a climax; and the impotence of Russia enabled that people and their later champions to press on to a solution which would have been impossible had the Czar been free to strike as he undoubtedly willed. For the present he favoured the cause of peace upheld by his chancellor, de Giers; and in the autumn of the year 1884, as will be shown in the following chapter, he entered into a compact at Skiernewice, which virtually allotted to Bismarck the arbitration on all urgent questions in the Balkans. As late as November 1885, we find Sir Robert Morier, British amba.s.sador at the Russian Court, writing privately and in very homely phrase to his colleague at Constantinople, Sir William White: "I am convinced Russia does not want a general war in Europe about Turkey now, and that she is really suffering from a gigantic _Katzenjammer_ (surfeit) caused by the last war[232]." It is safe to say that Bulgaria largely owes her freedom from Russian control to the Nihilists.

[Footnote 232: _Memoirs and Correspondence of Sir William White_, edited by H.S. Edwards, ch. xviii.]

For the Czar the strain of prolonged warfare against unseen and desperate foes was terrible. Surrounded by sentries, shadowed by secret police, the lonely man yet persisted in governing with the a.s.siduity and thoroughness of the great Napoleon. He tried to pry into all the affairs of his vast empire; and, as he held aloof even from his chief Ministers, he insisted that they should send to him detailed reports on all the affairs of State, foreign and domestic, military and naval, religious and agrarian. What wonder that the Nihilists persisted in their efforts, in the hope that even his giant strength must break down under the crushing burdens of toil and isolation. That he held up so long shows him to have been one of the strongest men and most persistent workers known to history. He had but one source of inspiration, religious zeal, and but one form of relaxation, the love of his devoted Empress.

It is needless to refer to the later phases of the revolutionary movement. Despite their well-laid plans, the revolutionaries gradually lost ground; and in 1892 even Stepniak confessed that they alone could not hope to overthrow the autocracy. About that time, too, their party began to split in twain, a younger group claiming that the old terrorist methods must be replaced by economic propaganda of an advanced socialistic type among the workers of the towns. For this new departure and its results we must refer our readers to the new materials brought to light by Sir D. Mackenzie Wallace in the new edition of his work _Russia_ (1905).

Here we can point out only a few of the more general causes that contributed to the triumph of the Czar. In the first place, the difficulties in the way of common action among the proletariat of Russia are very great. Millions of peasants, scattered over vast plains, where the great struggle is ever against the forces of nature, cannot effectively combine. Students of history will observe that even where the grievances are mainly agrarian, as in the France of 1789, the first definite outbreak is wont to occur in great towns. Russia has no Paris, eager to voice the needs of the many.

Then again, the Russian peasants are rooted in customs and superst.i.tions which cling about the Czar with strange tenacity and are proof against the reasoning of strangers. Their rising could, therefore, be very partial; besides which, the land is for the most part unsuited to the guerilla tactics that so often have favoured the cause of liberty in mountainous lands. The Czar and his officials know that the strength of their system lies in the ignorance of the peasants, in the soldierly instincts of their immense army, and in the spread of railways and telegraphs, which enables the central power to crush the beginnings of revolt. Thus the Czar's authority, resting incongruously on a faith dumb and grovelling as that of the Dark Ages, and on the latest developments of mechanical science, has been able to defy the tendencies of the age and the strivings of Russian reformers.

The aim of this work prescribes a survey of those events alone which have made modern States what they are to-day; but the victory of absolutism in Russia has had so enormous an influence on the modern world--not least in the warping of democracy in France--that it will be well to examine the operation of other forces which contributed to the set back of reform in that Empire, especially as they involved a change in the relations of the central power to alien races in general, and to the Grand Duchy of Finland in particular.

These forces, or ideals, may be summed up in the old Slavophil motto, "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality." These old Muscovite ideals had lent strength to Nicholas I. in his day; and his grandson now determined to appeal to the feeling of Nationality in its narrowest and strongest form. That instinct, which Mazzini looked on as the means of raising in turn all the peoples of the world to the loftier plane of Humanity, was now to be the chief motive in the propulsion of the Juggernaut car of the Russian autocracy.

The first to feel the weight of the governmental machine were the Jews.

Rightly or wrongly, they were thought to be concerned in the peculations that disgraced the campaign of 1877 and in the plot for the murder of Alexander II. In quick succession the officials and the populace found out that outrages on the Jews would not be displeasing at headquarters.

The secret once known, the rabble of several towns took the law into their own hands. In scores of places throughout the years 1881 and 1882, the mob plundered and fired their shops and houses, beat the wretched inmates, and in some cases killed them outright. At Elisabetgrad and Kiev the Jewish quarters were systematically pillaged and then given over to the flames. The fury reached its climax at the small town of Balta; the rabble pillaged 976 Jewish houses, and, not content with seizing all the wealth that came to hand, killed eight of the traders, besides wounding 211 others.

Doubtless these outrages were largely due to race-hatred as well as to spite on the part of the heedless, slovenly natives against the keen and grasping Hebrews. The same feelings have at times swept over Roumania, Austria, Germany, and France. Jew-baiting has appealed even to nominally enlightened peoples as a novel and profitable kind of sport; and few of its votaries have had the hypocritical effrontery to cloak their conduct under the plea of religious zeal. The movement has at bottom everywhere been a hunt after Jewish treasure, embittered by the hatred of the clown for the successful trader, of the individualist native for an alien, clannish, and successful community. In Russia religious motives may possibly have weighed with the Czar and the more ignorant and bigoted of the peasantry; but levelling and communistic ideas certainly accounted for the widespread plundering--witness the words often on the lips of the rioters: "We are breakfasting on the Jews; we shall dine on the landlords, and sup on the priests." In 1890 there appeared a ukase ordering the return of the Jews to those provinces and districts where they had been formerly allowed to settle--that is, chiefly in the South and West; and all foreign Jews were expelled from the Empire. It is believed that as many as 225,000 Jewish families left Russia in the sixteen months following[233].

[Footnote 233: Rambaud, _Histoire de la Russie_, ch. x.x.xviii.; Lowe, _Alexander III. of Russia_, ch. viii.; H. Frederic, _The New Exodus_; Professor Errera, _The Russian Jews_.]

The next onslaught was made against a body of Christian dissenters, the humble community known as Stundists. These G.o.d-fearing peasants had taken a German name because the founder of their sect had been converted at the _Stunden_, or hour-long services, of German Lutherans long settled in the south of Russia; they held a simple evangelical faith; their conduct was admittedly far better than that of the peasants, who held to the ma.s.s of customs and superst.i.tions dignified by the name of the orthodox Greek creed; and their piety and zeal served to spread the evangelical faith, especially among the more emotional people of South Russia, known as Little Russians.

Up to the year 1878, Alexander II. refrained from persecuting them, possibly because he felt some sympathy with men who were fast raising themselves and their fellows above the old level of brutish ignorance.

But in that year the Greek Church pressed him to take action. If he chastised them with whips, his son lashed them with scorpions. He saw that they were sapping the base of one of the three pillars that supported the imperial fabric--Orthodoxy, in the Russian sense. Orders went forth to stamp out the heretic pest. At once all the strength of the governmental machine was brought to bear on these non-resisting peasants. Imprisonment, exile, execution--such was their lot. Their communities, perhaps the happiest then to be found in rural Russia, were broken up, to be flung into remote corners of Transcaucasia or Siberia, and there doomed to the regime of the knout or the darkness of the mines[234]. According to present appearances the persecutors have succeeded. The evangelical faith seems to have been almost stamped out even in South Russia; and the Greek Church has regained its hold on the allegiance, if not on the beliefs and affections, of the ma.s.ses.

[Footnote 234: See an article by Count Leo Tolstoy in the _Contemporary Review_ for November 1895; also a pamphlet on "The Stundists," with Preface by Rev. J. Brown, D.D.]

To account for this fact, we must remember the immense force of tradition and custom among a simple rural folk, also that very many Russians sincerely believe that their inst.i.tutions and their national creed were destined to regenerate Europe. See, they said in effect, Western Europe oscillates between papal control and free thought; its industries, with their _laissez faire_ methods, raise the few to enormous wealth and crush the many into a new serfdom worse than the old. For all these evils Russia has a cure; her autocracy saves her from the profitless wrangling of Parliaments; her national Church sums up the beliefs and traditions of n.o.bles and peasants; and at the base of her social system she possesses in the "Mir" a patriarchal communism against which the forces of the West will beat in vain. Looking on the Greek Church as a necessary part of the national life, they sought to wield its powers for nationalising all the races of that motley Empire.

"Russia for the Russians," cried the Slavophils. "Let us be one people, with one creed. Let us reverence the Czar as head of the Church and of the State. In this unity lies our strength." However defective the argument logically, yet in the realm of sentiment, in which the Slavs live, move, and have their being, the plea pa.s.sed muster. National pride was pressed into the service of the persecutors; and all dissenters, whether Roman Catholics of Poland, Lutherans of the Baltic Provinces, or Stundists of the Ukraine, felt the remorseless grinding of the State machine, while the Greek Church exalted its horn as it had not done for a century past.

Other sides of this narrowly nationalising policy were seen in the determined repression of Polish feelings, of the Germans in the Baltic provinces, and of the Armenians of Transcaucasia. Finally, remorseless pressure was brought to bear on that interesting people, the Finns. We can here refer only to the last of these topics. The Germans in the Provinces of Livonia, Courland, and Esthonia formed the majority only among the land-holding and merchant cla.s.ses; and the curbing of their semi-feudal privileges wore the look of a democratic reform.

The case was far different with the Finns. They are a non-Aryan people, and therefore differ widely from the Swedes and Russians. For centuries they formed part of the Swedish monarchy, deriving thence in large measure their literature, civilisation, and inst.i.tutions. To this day the Swedish tongue is used by about one-half of their gentry and burghers. On the annexation of Finland by Alexander I., in consequence of the Franco-Russian compact framed at Tilsit in 1807, he made to their Estates a solemn promise to respect their const.i.tution and laws. Similar engagements have been made by his successors. Despite some attempts by Nicholas I. to shelve the const.i.tution of the Grand Duchy, local liberties remained almost intact up to a comparatively recent time. In the year 1869 the Finns gained further guarantees of their rights.

Alexander II. then ratified the laws of Finland, and caused a statement of the relations between Finland and Russia to be drawn up.

In view of the recent struggle between the Czar and the Finnish people, it may be well to give a sketch of their const.i.tution. The sovereign governs, not as Emperor of Russia, but as Grand Duke of Finland. He delegates his administrative powers to a Senate, which is presided over by a Governor-General. This important official, as a matter of fact, has always been a Russian; his powers are, or rather were[235], shared by two sections of the Finnish Senate, each composed of ten members nominated by the Grand Duke. The Senate prepares laws and ordinances which the Grand Duke then submits to the Diet. This body consists of four Orders--n.o.bles, clergy, burghers, and peasants. Since 1886 it has enjoyed to a limited extent the right of initiating laws. The Orders sit and vote separately. In most cases a resolution that is pa.s.sed by three of them becomes law, when it has received the a.s.sent of the Grand Duke.

But the a.s.sent of a majority in each of the four Orders is needed in the case of a proposal that affects the const.i.tution of the Grand Duchy and the privileges of the Orders. In case a Bill is accepted by two Orders and is rejected by the other two, a deadlock is averted by each of the Orders appointing fifteen delegates; these sixty delegates, meeting without discussion, vote by ballot, and a bare majority carries the day.

Measures are then referred to the Grand Duke, who, after consulting the Senate, gives or witholds his a.s.sent[236].