Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 Read online

  LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

  "The Russian Revolt: its Causes, Condition, and Prospects." By Edmund Noble. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

  The internal condition of Russia, though a matter of more thanspeculative interest to its immediate neighbors, is not likely to becomewhat that of France has so often been,--a European question. Theinstitutions of other states will not be endangered by revolutionaryproceedings in the dominions of the Czar, nor will any oppressionexercised over his subjects be thought to justify foreign intervention.Even Polish insurrections never led to any more active measures on thepart of the Western powers than delusive expressions of sympathy andequally vain remonstrances. In these days, not Warsaw, but St.Petersburg, is the centre of disaffection, and the ramifications extendinland, their action stimulated, it may be, to some extent from externalsources, but incapable of sending back any impulse in return. Nihilism,being based on the absence, real or supposed, of any politicalinstitutions worth preserving in Russia, cannot spread to thediscontented populations of other countries. Even German socialismcannot borrow weapons or resources from a nation which has no largeproletariat and whose industries are still in their infancy. In thenature of its government, the character of its people, and the problemsit is called upon to solve, Russia stands, as she has always stood,alone, neither furnishing examples to other nations nor able,apparently, to copy those which other nations have set. The greatpeculiarity of the revolutionary movement is not simply that it does notproceed from the mass of the people,--which is a common caseenough,--but that it runs counter to their instincts and their needs androuses not their sympathy but their aversion. The peasants, whoconstitute four-fifths of the population, have no motive for seeking tooverturn the government. Their material condition, since the abolitionof serfdom, is superior to that of the Italian peasantry, who enjoy thefullest political rights. As members of the village communities, theyhold possession and will ultimately obtain absolute ownership of morethan half the soil of the country, excluding the domains of the state.In the same capacity they exercise a degree of local autonomy greaterthan that which is vested in the communes of France. They are separatedfrom the other classes by differences of education, of habits, and ofinterests, while the autocracy that rules supreme over all is regardedby them as the protecting power that is to redress their grievances andfulfil all their aspirations. The discontent which has bred so manyconspiracies, and which aims at nothing less than the subversion of themonarchy, is confined to a portion of the educated classes, and proceedsfrom causes that affect only those classes. Among them alone is thereany perception of the wide and ever-increasing difference between theRussian system of government and that of every other European country,any craving for the exercise of political rights and the activity ofpolitical life, any experience of the restrictions imposed on thoughtand speech and the obstacles to the advancement and diffusion ofknowledge and ideas, any consciousness that the corrupt, vexatious, andoppressive bureaucracy by which all affairs are administered is a directoutgrowth of unlimited and irresponsible power. Nor are they united indesiring to destroy, or even to modify, this system. Apart from thosewho find in it the means of satisfying their personal interests andambitions, and the larger number in whom indolence and the love of easestifle all thought and aspiration, there are many who believe, withreason, that the country is not ripe for the adoption of Europeaninstitutions, that the foundations on which to construct them do not yetexist, and that any attempt to introduce them would lead only tocalamitous results; while there is even a large party which contendsthat, far from needing them, Russia is happily situated in being exemptfrom the struggles and the storms, the wars of classes and of factions,that have attended the course of Western civilization, and in being leftfree to work out her own development by original and more peacefulmethods. No doubt the great majority of thinking people feel thenecessity for some large measures of reform and look forward to theestablishment of a constitutional system and the gradual extension ofpolitical freedom to the mass of the nation. But there is no evidencethat the revolutionary spirit has spread or excited sympathy in any suchdegree as its audacity, its resoluteness, and the terror created by itssinister achievements have seemed at times to indicate. The activemembers of the propaganda are almost exclusively young persons, livingapart from their families, of scanty means and without conspicuousability. They belong to the lower ranks of the nobility, the rising_bourgeois_ class, and, above all, that large body of necessitousstudents, including many of the children of the ill-paid clergy, whom M.Leroy-Beaulieu styles the "intellectual proletariat." Classical studies,German metaphysics, and the scientific theories and discoveries ofrecent years have had much to do with the fermentation that has led toso many violent explosions, the universities have been the chief_foci_ of agitation, and in the attempts to suppress it thegovernment has laid itself open to the reproach of making war uponlearning and seeking to stifle intellectual development.

  Such is the view presented by recent French and English writers who havemade the condition of Russia a subject of minute investigation. Mr.Noble deals more in generalizations than in details, and sets forth atheory which it is difficult to reconcile with the facts and conclusionsderived from other sources. According to him, Russia is, and has beenfrom the first establishment of the imperial rule, in a state of chronicrevolt. This revolt is "the protest of eighty millions of people againsttheir continued employment as a barrier in the path of peaceful humanprogress and national development." "It is not the educated classesalone, but the masses,--peasant and artisan, land-owner and student,--ofwhose aspirations, at least, it may be said, as it was said of theearliest and freest Russians, '_Neminem ferant imperatorem_.'"Before the rise of the empire "the Russians lived as freemen and happy."They "enjoyed what, in a political sense, we are fairly entitled toregard as the golden age of their national existence." The _veche_,or popular assembly, "was from a picturesque point of view the grandest,from an administrative point of view the simplest, and from a moralpoint of view the most equitable form of government ever devised byman." The autocracy, established by force, has encountered at allperiods a steady, if passive, opposition, as exemplified in the Raskol,or separation of the "Old Believers" from the Orthodox Church, and inthe resistance offered to the innovations of Peter the Great: "in theone as in the other case the popular revolt was against authority andall that it represented." It is admitted that "among the peasants therevolt must long remain in its passive stage.... Yet year by year,partly owing to educational processes, partly owing to propaganda, eventhe peasants are being won over to the growing battalions ofdiscontent." The autocracy is "doomed." "The forces that undermine itare cumulative and relentless." Its "true policy is to spread itsdissolution--after the manner of certain financial operations--over anumber of years." "The method of the change is really not of importance.The vital matter is that the reform shall at once concede andpractically apply the principle of popular self-government, granting atthe same time the fullest rights of free speech and public assembly."Finally, "the Tsar and his advisers" are bidden to "beware," since "thespectacle of this frightfully unequal struggle ... is not lost uponEurope, or even upon America."

  The horrible crudity, as we are fain to call it, of the notions thusrhetorically set forth must be obvious to every reader acquainted withthe history of the rise and growth of states in general, however littleattention he may have given to those of Russia in particular. Theinstitutions of Russia differ fundamentally from those of other Europeanstates. But the difference lies in historical conditions anddevelopment, not in the principles underlying all human society. Nopeople has ever had a permanent government of its own resting solely orchiefly on force. Wherever autocracy has acquired a firm footing, it hasdone so by suppressing anarchy, establishing order and authority, andsecuring national unity and independence. Nowhere has it fulfilled theseconditions more completely than in Russia. It grew up when the countrywas lying prostrate under the Tartar domination, and it supplied theimpulse and t
he means by which that yoke was thrown off. It absorbedpetty principalities, extinguished their conflicting ambitions, andconsolidated their resources; checked the migrations of a nomadpopulation, and brought discordant races under a common rule; repelledinvasions to which, in its earlier disintegrated condition, the nationmust have succumbed, and built up an empire hardly less remarkable forits cohesion and its strength than for the vastness of its territory. Ina word, it performed, more rapidly and thoroughly, the same work whichwas accomplished by monarchy between the eighth and the fifteenthcentury in Western Europe. If its methods were more analogous to thoseof Eastern despotisms than of European sovereignties, if its excesseswere unrestrained and its power uncurbed, this is only saying thatRussia, instead of sharing in the heritage of Roman civilization and inthe mutual intercourse and common discipline through which the Westerncommunities were developed, was cut off from association with its morefortunate kindred and subjected to influences from which they were, forthe most part, exempt. To hold up the crude democracy and turbulentassemblies common in a primitive state of society as evidence that theRussian people possessed at an early period of its history a beautifullyorganized constitutional system; to contend that the most absolutemonarchy in existence has maintained itself for centuries, withoutencountering a single serious insurrection, in a nation whosedistinguishing characteristic is its inability to endure a ruler; totreat the introduction of a totally different and far more complexsystem of government, the product elsewhere of elements that have noexistence in Russia, and of long struggles supplemented by violentrevolutions, as a thing that may be effected without danger ordifficulty, the "method" being "really not of importance,"--all thisstrikes us as evincing a condition of mind that can only be regarded asa survival from the period when the theories and illusions of theeighteenth-century _philosophes_ had not yet been dissipated by theFrench Revolution.